Ed Champion has a nemesis, Time magazine book reviewer Lev Grossman, as we discover in Grossman’s latest column. Though somewhat tongue in cheek, Grossman is basically asking bloggers to use their power for good. All in all, it’s far more civilized than Steve Almond’s pathetic attempted takedown of Mark Sarvas in Salon from a year ago, which read like a laundry list of Almond’s insecurities. Grossman’s essay and Ed’s response make it clear that Grossman is an altogether more pleasant person than Almond and that the relationship between book bloggers and the literati has matured. As Ed notes in his brief response to Grossman, he (and other book bloggers) are regularly paid to pen book reviews in major newspapers. The lines are blurring. Oh, and I’ve met Ed. He’s not that scary.
Ed Champion: Nemesis
Auslander on Michaels
Shalom Auslander (Beware of God) pens a personal piece about his relationship with Leonard Michael’s book I Would Have Saved Them If I Could for nextbook: “For Michaels, even happy endings aren’t happy. Joy makes you vulnerable. Bad is bad, but good might be worse.”And, while were on the subject of Michaels, I hope his books end up back in print sooner rather than later.
DFW on Federer
Yesterday my friend Yakut emailed me the article “Federer as Religious Experience” by David Foster Wallace, which appeared in the New York Times’ Play Magazine on August 20, 2006 (available here). Wallace penned an immaculate piece on Roger Federer, who also happens to be my favorite tennis player these days. As per his custom, Wallace resorts to 17 footnotes, provides detailed accounts of what he terms “Federer Moments” from the Nadal v. Federer Wimbledon Final of 2006, comments – in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, of course – on the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum and the tournament’s rules. It is a great ode to Federer, and contains a healthy rebuke of Nadal – who happens to be my least favorite pro these days. If you’re a tennis – and DFW – fan, enjoyed his essays in Consider the Lobster, and do not have the guts to restart Infinite Jest just yet, but would like to continue reading some brilliant prose, you should definitely check it out.
A List With A Twist Revisited
In the spring, we reported on an unusual event unfolding in the Books pages of The Globe and Mail. Each week, through 2008, someone – typically a published author or an academic – would write an essay for the Globe championing a book. Fifty books in total. They were not ranked in any order, and in reality they form a jumping-off point into a world of knowledge and literary imagination.About a third of the books championed were novels, from such usual suspects as War and Peace, Don Quixote, and Middlemarch, through Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, and One Hundred Years of Solitude.More interesting were the non-novels on the list. There were collected shorts from Borges, Kafka and Chekhov, and collected poems from Eliot and Yeats. There was Dante’s Divine Comedy, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Decameron, and The Mahabharata, a 2000-year-old verse from India. Lady Murasaki’s 1000-year-old The Tale of Genji pops up. Plays by Becket and Goethe were also championed.The King James Bible is there; as is the Koran. Books of philosophy by Plato and political economy by both Adam Smith and Karl Marx made the list.Darwin’s Origin of Species is there; so is Diderot’s Encyclopedia, Herodotus’ Histories, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Rachel Carson’s proto-environmental Silent Spring. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, her 300-year-old rebel yell, is there, as are St. Augustine’s Confessions, and de Montaigne’s Essays, his 16th-century invention of a genre.Beside each essay are links to all the essays that came before it. So you should go to the 50th essay, championing Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady, to get easy links to the other 49. Thank goodness for that, because there doesn’t seem to be a central web page listing all 50, and I advise against trying to search through the Globe and Mail’s Books section archives unless you want to get a blinding headache.
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The Disappointment Author: Lethem v. Wood
Ian McEwan: How could we have forgotten that this was always going to happen?
Sitting here in Chicago, there’s not much I can write about the terrible events that occurred in London yesterday. But I think Ian McEwan does a good job of capturing both the inevitability and the sadness of yesterday’s bombings in his piece in the Guardian: Those rehearsals for a multiple terrorist attack underground were paying off. In fact, now the disaster was upon us, it had an air of weary inevitability, and it looked familiar, as though it had happened long ago. In the drizzle and dim light, the police lines, the emergency vehicles, the silent passers by appeared as though in an old newsreel film in black and white. The news of the successful Olympic bid was more surprising than this. How could we have forgotten that this was always going to happen?Read it here.
Changing AP Style
When you go to journalism school (or start out at most traditional journalism jobs), you are issued a style guide as a soldier might be issued a weapon. Quite a few places have their own in-house style guides, reflecting the vernacular peculiarities of the publication or its region. For all others, the default tends to be the AP Stylebook, a utilitarian volume compiled by the AP and meant to keep all of its reporters’ language consistent. Its influence, of course, has spread far wider.As an avid AP Stylebook owner, I read with interest last month, Editor & Publisher’s account of the changes in the latest edition of the Stylebook. In a way, the AP’s regular shuffling in and out of new words and disused ones is not unlike the exercise played to great PR effect by dictionaries every year. The sometimes silly neologisms added to dictionaries make for easy news bites. Seeing “e-mail” or “LOL” printed on those thin pages seems to inspire amusement, dread, and maybe a little bit of pride. But ultimately it feels inconsequential as we watch our vocabulary race ahead of dictionaries, and dictionaries seem to have minimal influence on how we actually communicate.An adjustment to the AP Stylebook, on the other hand, is a writ-in-stone change to what millions of people will read in publications around the world, and it will further influence the style guides at publications that use their own style guides. Certainly the AP is forced to, as the dictionaries do, catch up to trends in the spoken and written word – according to E&P, “‘WMD,’ ‘iPhone’ and ‘anti-virus’ are in, while ‘barmaid,’ ‘blue blood’ and ‘malarkey’ are out.” – but the authority of the Stylebook would seem to bury the words that are being removed and give birth to those that are added.
Bat Segundo on the other hand….he's scary.