Norman Mailer made an unorthodox appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, beamed in via video link from his home in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He’s apparently not big on technology, however, calling the video-interview system more suited to a “young chimpanzee.” The Herald’s story on the event includes a number of other classic Mailer quips, including his noting that the many punches he’s thrown in his lifetime were “always well considered.”
The Ever Quotable Norman Mailer
Blind No More
If you spend much time reading the various book blogs, you probably came across this National Book Award blind item at Beatrice. I did and I couldn't stop wondering who this slighted author was. Speculation abounded at Tingle Alley, and I was stumped, too. But after stumbling upon a clue in the comments of a post at Mad Max Perkins, I did some snooping around, and I can now reveal that the slighted author is Jim Shepard. His books, Project X and Love and Hydrogen, were not submitted for consideration for the NBA because, according to Beatrice.com, his publisher did not follow the proper procedures. Now, I'm not so sure that either of Shepard's books would have made the cut. But you never know. And you also have to wonder if everyone would be making such a big fuss if one of our women from New York were a man from Massachusetts.
WTF: Classx 2 Yr Phone
A few weeks back, Reuters reported on a new website called Daily Lit, which blasts short clips of classic literature to subscribers' email addresses every day. Readers can take in Anna Karenina via Blackberry, in five-minute chunks disbursed over fourteen months. "Our audience includes people like us, who spend hours each day on e-mail but can't find the time to read a book," Albert Wenger, a founder of DailyLit, told the press.Now, far be it from me to denigrate any effort to make literature more accessible. I used to be a regular reader of the Samuel Pepys blog, and probably made more of a dent in the digital Diary than I would have in the hard copy. But Daily Lit seems to represent the unexamined costs of the information age's promises of convenience. Is yet another daily email really the solution to too much email? What does it mean to click from Paris of Troy to Paris Hilton. (OMG, Achilles is sooo hot.) Does one find time, or does one make it?Already 50,000 people have enrolled in Daily Lit, which currently offers 370 titles from the public domain, free of charge. Soon the site will expand to charge for daily excerpts of newer work. No doubt certain texts - Lydia Davis stories, poems by Basho - might lend themselves to the DailyLit treatment, providing a short liberation from the drudgeries of the day. But big novels aren't meant to be noshed on like an energy bar, wedged in between breakfast and dinner. At their best, they open up vistas of freedom beyond our daily habits and obligations. Opt for the bite-sized version if you like. But God forbid I come to look forward to Tolstoy with the same dread with which I approach my inbox.And so, book in hand, to bed.
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Adieu, Tommy Hottpants
What do you do when your nemesis (who you secretly sort of love) up and moves away? How do you fight the emptiness? How do you carry on? These are the questions I imagine Gawker has been pondering for the past two weeks. Lost in the to-do over the 9/11 anniversary was the last night of MisShapes. For those not in the loop (for shame, people, for shame), MisShapes are a trio of DJs whose weekly dance parties at Don Hill's were, for a time, a modern day Studio 54. With their motley collection of absurdly hip hipsters, sporting self-styled monikers like Jonny Makeup and Tommy Hottpants, MisShapes created a party so phosphorous-hot hip it attracted a diverse crowd of celebrities, artists, and trust-fund brats. Max Minghella, Cindy Sherman, David Byrne, Leelee Sobieski - they all partied at MisShapes.While MisShapes flourished as a media phenomenon (the trio themselves became darlings of the fashion world), the backlash against them proved more entertaining. Nowhere was the bile better than on Gawker's weekly feature Blue States Lose. Each week, Gawker took the best photos from websites like MisShapes, Last Night's Party, and The Cobrasnake, and lampooned the partygoers pictured within. Dubbing MisShape member Leigh Lezark "Princess Coldstare," and referring to the crowd at Misshapes as "hiptards," Blue States Lose became weekly reading for anyone who ever saw a guy wearing American Apparel stretch pants, aviator sunglasses, and a Cherokee headdress and thought, "Maybe I should just kill myself now, if people like this are going to be free to breathe my air?" But all of that's over now. Blue States Lose will have to soldier on without the MisShapes. They won't have Leotard Fantastic to kick around anymore.To cope with the loss, Gawker is following MisShapes' lead and publishing a book. It's a first for the blogging giant, and it's still unclear exactly what the Gawker book is all about. Is it a chapbook of old posts? Is it new material? Is it really a "guide to conquering all media?" Regardless of its content, the Gawker book should be a litmus test for how well the blog format can translate into print. Gawker, with its of-the-moment focus, its pithy snarkiness, is the epitome of "blogginess," at least from where I stand. It's sort of the Platonic ideal of a blog, so to imagine it in book form is, well, difficult. If it's successfully carried off, readers can expect to find The Millions Guide to Reading on Public Transportation (Forward by Kaye Gibbons) at their local Barnes and Noble sometime in the near future.
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A New Travel Book
Strolling around the bookstore the other day, a book with a startling cover and a wacky title caught my eye. At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig is a humorous travelogue about one of South America's more obscure countries, Paraguay. Pig is the first book by John Gimlett who has written articles for a number of travel magazines over the years. This excerpt is definitely worth a peek.
Remembering My Parents’ Bookshelf
Did I enjoy these books? Though they don’t interest me now, I think I did enjoy them then. I was accumulating my 10,000 hours of reading practice.
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I’m in Amazon
I know it's not too hard to peddle your wares on Amazon, but I have to say, when I stumbled across my name listed as "Editor" for something being sold on Amazon, it was quite a thrill. The book that I helped edit has been out for quite some time, but seeing it in Amazon made me realize that now might be a good time to mention it again. The book is called Two Letters, and I first mentioned it about a year ago when the book came out, but I didn't really get into the details or how I came to be involved with the project; I was busy with school and deep in the depths of my first Chicago winter, but that's no excuse, really.One of the great things about living in Los Angeles was that everyone there has a side project. People have day jobs, but they never talk about them. They're always working on a short film or getting ready to open a gallery. Hollywood aside, it's a very creative place. One such side project was conceived by a couple of friends of mine, Christopher Lepkowski and Mark Dischler. They wanted to create a publication that showcased talented writers and artists and they wanted it to look nice. If it ever got more high concept than that, I wasn't told about it. In order to provide some structure to the book, my colleagues came up with the theme "sneaking in," and decided that all of the work in the book would loosely adhere to that theme. I was brought on in the later stages, to recruit writers and help select work - fiction and non-fiction - for the book. I ended up getting some of my very talented friends involved. My friend Cem wrote about "sneaking in" to Burma and speaking to dissidents when he was living in Thailand. My friend Alexa wrote about unexpectedly assisting her photographer boyfriend on an erotic photo shot. My friend Joseph wrote the sort of boozy, heartbroken stories that he's so good at. I helped my fellow editors get all the writing together, and then life intervened. I got into grad school, left Los Angeles, got married, and sort of forgot about the book. I'd almost given up hope that Two Letters would see the light of day, but then, in January of 2005 a few copies showed up in the mail. There had been delays with the printing, as is so often the case with these sorts of things, and the guys had wanted to get everything just right. I'm glad they took their time, because the book looks great. There's tons of great art and comics, but my favorite part is that for each piece of writing, artist Michael Vecchio created an original illustration. It's hard for young writers to get their work published, but to see it presented with such care was just a thrill. It was a great side project to be a part of, and I hope more side projects like it come my way soon. When I saw it there on Amazon the other day, I thought that I should really try to do better by Two Letters, even though it is coming a little late.A new installment of Two Letters may be on the way shortly. Here's the website.
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