Your attention, please: Just in case you're wondering, Amazon's Kindle is now a place where you can find a friendly, electronic version of the Times. Our tech colleagues posted the news on the tech blog today, and you can read more about the paper's arrangements there. Hopefully this will become, as it has for books, yet another way to kindle your interest in our pages (I know, I know, I should know better than use a pun like that).
Nick Owchar
Credit: AFP/Getty Images
On Monday evening, my daughter Sophie and I went to a screening of Prince Caspian, the new Chronicles of Narnia movie that opens tomorrow. Sophie is nine, and she had just read the book a couple of weeks ago; no sooner had the film started than she turned to me and whispered, "They left a lot of stuff out."
I was willing to take her word for it because, if truth be told, I don't remember many of the details; I read the Narnia books a long time ago, when I was Sophie's age. But the film was pretty good, I thought -- fast-paced, nicely constructed ... until, that is, the last 20 minutes when Aslan saves the day.
This has always been my problem with the Chronicles of Narnia, the way Aslan is so often absent, until, after 1,000 years or so of suffering, he decides to step in and make everything right. I understand the metaphor, understand C. S. Lewis' notion of faith and Christian humility, but (without getting into theology), I think it's a poor narrative device. What kind of beneficent force is Aslan, when he's so often negligent? And what does it do to the human agency of the characters that they get bailed out by this external power, rather than having to work things out (or not) themselves?
Sophie had a different issue. Although she liked the movie, she found its at-times-relentless violence off-putting; it's more fun to read, she told me, because you imagine what's going on in the story for yourself.
Yes, I thought, that's it exactly. No external agency.
David L. Ulin
Photo credit: Disney/Walden
It's possible you haven't heard that Iron Man is opening this weekend -- maybe.
The first superhero movie of the season has been advertised and promoted everywhere. Although based on a comic book character, the film aspires to a certain level of seriousness: All four leads -- Robert Downey Jr, Jeff Bridges, Terrence Howard and Gwyneth Paltrow -- have been nominated for Academy Awards. (Paltrow, of course, has one.)
Yet it is also a superhero movie -- a CGI-filled extravaganza in which a louche but brilliant billionaire, when held in miserable circumstances, builds a really cool suit, blows stuff up and then battles bad guys. Spectacularly.
The comic book character was created by the master, Stan Lee, and first appeared in 1963. One of the Marvel Avengers crew, Iron Man has gone through many trials and tribulations in the last 35 years. But will a reworking of his history -- updating it from Vietnam to Afghanistan, for starters -- be accepted by comic fans? How would a Hollywood version of Iron Man play with people who've been following him faithfully for years?
At the comic website Newsarama, it seems Iron Man really does fly. It's run not one but three glowing reviews (1 - 2 - 3). There's a behind the scenes look and a poll in which 43% of readers predict the movie will make $50 million to $100 million this weekend and 31% think it'll take even more, $100-$125 million. Readers are logging in with such comments as "pure awesome," "effing awesome," "best superhero movie ever."
I haven't read the Iron Man comics, but I found the movie to be pretty awesome, too.
Carolyn Kellogg
Frustration was palpable Sunday among participants in the lone L.A. Times Festival of Books panel discussion specifically aimed at the Middle East. The occupation of Iraq, the now 60-year-old conflict between Israel and dispossessed Palestinians, as well as the vilification of Islam and Muslims in the West -- all have made the region more combustible than ever and our own U.S. democracy that much more tenuous.
"We are one or two terrorist attacks away from a police state in this country," journalist and writer Chris Hedges told more than 200 people in a packed UCLA auditorium Sunday for the panel, "Contentious Ground: The Middle East."
Hedges, a former New York Times correspondent who has covered the wars in Iraq, Kosovo, Bosnia and El Salvador, decried the "gross mischaracterization of Islam as a religion of violence," which has skewed the U.S. public's perceptions about Muslims, the Arab world and the real sources of instability in the Middle East. Citing his experiences while covering the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s as just one example, he said, "Bosnian Muslims were the only peaceful ones in the conflict."
But what does that have to do with sewage, or a refrigerator?
Read on »
This evening, we'll be toasting the winners of the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes at UCLA (yes, you can still get tickets to attend).
But across town at USC, elementary school students at the 32nd Street/USC Performing Arts Magnet school (perhaps winners in waiting?) will gather to read some of their original poetry.
OK, so they had some help from writers Cecilia Woloch and Aimee Bender; it's still a great opportunity to hear what's on the minds of L.A.'s fourth-graders.
Mary Forgione
 In its latest issue, the feminist magazine Bitch takes the New York Times Book Review to task: "It has become the place where serious feminist books come to die."
Author Sarah Seltzer writes in the article (titled, in part, "All the Misogyny Is Fit to Print") that "catfights" flare in the pages when younger women review books by older feminists. She points to Wonkette founding editor Ana Marie Cox's dismissiveness of bra-burning in her 2006 review of Katha Pollitt's essay collection, "Virginity or Death!," as a typical example:
“[Y]oung, educated, and otherwise liberal women who might, in another era, have found themselves burning bras and raising their consciousness would rather be fitted for the right bra ... and raising their credit limit. Katha Pollitt is the skunk at this 'Desperate Housewives' watching party.”
Older female reviewers also draw criticism. Seltzer cites "Arts section doyenne Michiko Kakutani’s" 2007 put-down of Susan Faludi’s book, "The Terror Dream": "This, sadly, is the sort of tendentious, self-important, sloppily reasoned book that gives feminism a bad name."
Seltzer finds the opening line of Kakutani’s review "particularly perplexing because it reveals her belief that feminism has a bad name to begin with (it certainly seems to around the Times offices) and that feminists themselves, rather than sexism, are responsible for said bad name."
That's certainly well-reasoned, and Seltzer's article, if a little snarky, is definitely worth a read. It includes some sobering figures: The ratio of male-to-female-authors in the NYT's Book Review is about 2 to 1. Reviewers? Same thing.
Of course I wondered how the L.A. Times Book Review's gender balance stacks up. I did an incredibly unscientific survey of three Sunday Book Review sections from early 2008. There were a total of 28 books by male authors reviewed compared with 11 by female authors (a ratio of about 2.5 to 1). When it comes to the reviewers, the majority flips: 16 women to 14 men.
These figures don't really tell the story. How do you tally a book by a man who has a female editor? (I count it as both a male and a female author.) How about the book written by a man and translated by a husband-and-wife team? (Answer: two men, one woman.) As I said, it's an unscientific tally.
For hard numbers about gender balance in book reviews across the country, Sisters in Crime keeps careful track, but just of the number of mystery novels by men and women.
Counting is fun, but how useful is it? Such summaries don't track which books get cover treatment and considerable length versus those given capsule reviews. Nor do the numbers address the tone of reviews, which really is at the heart of the complaint in Bitch.
Carolyn Kellogg
Author Tayari Jones was moved by the vicious attacks last year on a Haitian mother and son in Dunbar Village, a housing project in West Palm Beach, Fla. To help the victims, she has organized a very literary online auction, which is now live on EBay.
There are books, of course, many of which are signed by the authors. But most exciting -- especially for aspiring writers -- are the critiques. Want to hear what George Saunders thinks of your story? You can, for just (at this writing) about $180.
Laila Lalami and Martha Southgate also will do story critiques. Joy Castro will read and review a personal essay. Poets D. Nurkse and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers offer critiques of poetry. Carleen Brice will give feedback on a nonfiction book proposal. And two other author/professors -- Sarah Schulman and Tayari Jones herself -- will read and comment on entire novel manuscripts (up to 300 pages -- sorry, "Harry Potter"-esque hopefuls).
Getting quality feedback on your writing is invaluable. And in this case, you'll be giving, too.
Carolyn Kellogg
Photo by Mo Riza via flickr
"Birds of Paradise" is a collaborative novel-in-progress appearing daily in the Los Angeles Times. Chapter 1 -- written by LAT columnist Steve Lopez -- threw a bunch of balls in the air and asked readers to step in and juggle. Lopez gave them a balding TV producer and his gold-digger wife, who is an ex-reality TV celebrity; a stupid congressman and a tough guy named Ernesto; a glass house in Malibu; a bribe; a trip to Cabo -- oh, and a stripper from Jumbo's Clown Room.
Hundreds of readers have sent in their own versions of the succeeding chapters (they must be 600 words or fewer and crafted in a tight time frame). The newspaper's judges have found the entries so good that not only is the winning entry posted, but also at least one runner-up and sometimes as many as four, as with today's Chapter 9. (Chapter 10 will be posted by 7 p.m. Pacific time.)
The winning entry for Chapter 2 was very good -- sleeker than Lopez's first and a touch more evil. It also hurled the plot in a new direction.
What you've got is a Southern California noir, of course. Me, I love this stuff, and reading Chapter 2 got me addicted. One hitch: With only the winners building the main plotline, the runner-up entries create a massive snarl of parallel universes. It's not just one collaborative novel -- it's a massive tree-like fiction with dozens of buds and sprouts contradicting one another.
Meanwhile, the message boards are serving as a kind of editorial meeting around the evolving story line. Contributors and readers alike discuss the way the story is moving (and the arcana of the submissions process).
Who is contributing? Everyone from a recent college grad to Kelly Lange, the TV news anchor turned novelist. I even found an old boss -- well, my boss' boss, actually -- among the runners-up. Joseph Fink of Camarillo has scored twice so far, with the winning entries for Chapter 2 and Chapter 8.
The winners will be invited to read their chapter at the 13th annual L.A. Times Festival of Books held at UCLA on April 26 and 27. Any Californian can play. (Here are the rules.)
And if you're stuck on where to begin, think Jumbo's. In noir, you can't go wrong with a stripper.
Carolyn Kellogg
Photo by Glenn E. Wilson via Flickr
In his 1891 novel, "New Grub Street," English writer George Gissing dissects the jaded cynicism of the publishing world as deftly as any novelist ever has. And yet, if you're a writer, to read the book is oddly self-revealing, as if looking at a dusty old mirror and discovering "The Picture of Dorian Gray."
Here's a taste:
"People have got that ancient prejudice so firmly rooted in their heads -- that one mustn't write save at the dictation of the Holy Spirit. I tell you, writing is a business. Get together half a dozen fair specimens of the Sunday-school prize; study them; discover the essential points of such composition; hit upon new attractions; then go to work methodically, so many pages a day. There's no question of the divine afflatus; that belongs to another sphere of life. We talk of literature as a trade, not of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. If I could only get that into poor Reardon's head. He thinks me a gross beast, often enough. What the devil -- I mean what on earth is there in typography to make everything it deals with sacred? I don't advocate the propogation of vicious literature; I only speak of good, coarse, marketable stuff for the world's vulgar. You just give it a thought, Maud; talk it over with Dora."
He resumed presently:
"I maintain that we people of brains are justified in supplying the mob with the food it likes. We are not geniuses, and if we sit down in a spirit of long-eared gravity we shall produce only commonplace stuff. Let us use our wits to earn money, and make the best we can of our lives. If only I had the skill, I would produce novels out-trashing the trashiest that ever sold fifty thousand copies. But it needs skill, mind you; and to deny it is a gross error of the literary pedants. To please the vulgar you must, one way or another, incarnate the genius of vulgarity. For my own part, I shan't be able to address the bulkiest multitude; my talent doesn't lend itself to that form. I shall write for the upper-middle class of intellect, the people who like to feel that what they are reading has some special cleverness, but who can't distinguish between stones and paste. That's why I'm so slow in warming to the work. Every month I feel surer of myself, however. That last thing of mine in 'The West End' distinctly hit the mark; it wasn't too flashy, it wasn't too solid. I heard fellows speak of it in the train."
David L. Ulin
Jhumpa Lahiri's new story collection, "Unaccustomed Earth," was reviewed Sunday in our pages. Reviewer Lisa Fugard calls the book "a howl from the heart of a writer working at the height of her powers."
Lahiri, 40, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction with her debut collection, "Interpreter of Maladies," and followed it up with the bestselling book-turned-movie, "The Namesake." Her new collection includes the story "Hell-Heaven," which ran in the New Yorker in 2004. That same year she appeared at the New Yorker Festival; in this film clip, she reads from her story and answers audience questions.
Carolyn Kellogg
The University of Iowa caused a bit of a dust-up recently by changing the terms for graduate theses -- to make them “open access,” available online, for free, to anyone. Students in the writing program, one of the country’s most prestigious, balked.
Seth Abramson, an Iowa MFA student in poetry, blogged that he didn’t intend to turn over "first North American serial rights to any creative work I should produce … [toward] the completion of an MFA thesis." (Yep, he used to be a lawyer.)
Author James Hynes, who has attended the Iowa writer’s workshop and taught there, also protested, noting: "The copy of my thesis in the Iowa Graduate Library … is the final draft of my first published novel, 'The Wild Colonial Boy.' "
Eventually, the issue was resolved: The Chronicle of Higher Education reports (sorry, registration is required for the article) that the university will not publish theses from students in the writing programs as open-access documents.
Not all college students are so lucky. Many top film schools -- including USC's -- hold the rights to their students’ final projects. George Lucas is rumored to have resorted to stealing the negative to his short film “Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB” from the school. That worked out OK for him -– it became the basis for his first feature, “THX 1138,” starring Robert Duvall. But the university now makes sure to keep closer tabs on its students' work.
Carolyn Kellogg
Read on »
It's one of the most famous murders in American history, the killing of 28-year-old Catherine (Kitty) Genovese, in the early hours of March 13, 1964, on Austin Street, in the borough of Queens, New York, around the corner from where she lived. While 38 people watched or listened without calling the police, Genovese was stabbed repeatedly, in three separate attacks over the course of half an hour, then sexually assaulted and left for dead. (She died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.) Two weeks later, the New York Times detailed all this in a Page One piece, and the Kitty Genovese story became a metaphor for contemporary urban apathy.
The Genovese murder forms the center of “Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case” (Melville House: 112 pp., $14.95 paper) by A. M. Rosenthal, who was the paper’s metropolitan editor at the time. But this little book is more a look at our collective guilt for Genovese’s murder, the way we are all complicit when the rules of society start breaking down.
Prior to taking over the metropolitan desk, Rosenthal — who later went on to be the Times’ executive editor and an op-ed columnist — was a foreign correspondent, stationed in India and Poland. There, he saw all sorts of things he looked away from: “Cripples crawling in New Delhi’s Connaught Place, the capital’s shopping center then, wretched mishapen babies held out by filthy mothers in Calcutta — I turned away not in fear but in disgust and annoyance.” Where, then, he wants us to consider, is our moral authority to judge the Genovese witnesses when we all do similar things every day?
It’s a vivid argument, and 44 years later, it has more to tell us than some moralistic tale of apathy. “There are, it seems to me,” Rosenthal ends the book, “only two logical ways to look at the story of the murder of Catherine Genovese. One is the way of the neighbor on Austin Street — ‘Let’s forget the whole thing.’
“The other is to recognize that the bell tolls even on each man’s individual island, to recognize that every man must fear the witness in himself who whispers to close the window.”
David L. Ulin
Yup, amid a steady drumbeat of news about Southland bookstores closing their doors due to rising rents and declining sales comes word that a Los Feliz landmark will nearly double in size.
Come May — give or take a few weeks — Skylight Books will open a second space right next door in the 1934 building at the corner of Vermont and Melbourne avenues, promises general manager and co-owner Kerry Slattery.
"It's all so exciting," Slattery writes in a March newsletter to Skylight's faithful. "It will be at least a few months before all is ready, but we plan to move our art, film, music, theater and a few other sections to the new space, which will allow us to also expand a few sections."
Why now, as Dutton's Brentwood Books prepares to close its doors at the end of the month and Book Soup shutters its Costa Mesa satellite store?
Two reasons, Slattery tells Jacket Copy:
Unlike the development pressures facing Doug Dutton's store and the high-end retail rent at South Coast Plaza, Skylight has "a supportive landlord who is offering us the space for a fair rent," she says. "He could have rented this space for a lot more money to some chain operation. He thinks that the bookstore is an important thing."
The second reason: location, location.
Read on »
Here in this sprawling Turkish city on the Bosphorus Strait is a wide hilltop boulevard full of pedestrians and trams and lined with bright shops, both local and international. Between the fashion and the food found along this street, Istiklal Caddesi, there are also many bookstores. They sell Turkish- and English-language books, and even Turkish translations of literary classics.
Turkey doesn't have a tradition of public libraries, so bookstores have a greater social role to fill. A wonderful example of such an oasis of erudition is Homer Kitabevi ("kitabevi" means "bookstore" in Turkish), just off Istiklal on Yeni Çarşi Cadessi, a steep, narrow street often crammed with taxis heading uphill.
Homer's owner, Ayşen Boylu, is a former urban archeologist who opened the bookstore 13 years ago; she was working on her PhD and found a dearth of the kind of books she needed. Today, Homer is packed with smart books on history and criticism, architecture and art, literature and religion. Most popular, Boylu says, are books on archeology, history, philosophy and photography. The store's runaway hit? Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason." You can see Boylu in her store, and pics of more bookstores in Istanbul, after the jump.
Read on »
I'm staying in Istanbul with my American friend Gloria Fisk, a literature professor who is working on a book about the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk and his reception at home and abroad. Last year she explored the ways her college students read the Nobel Prize-winning novelist in an article for n+1 magazine. Here we talk about her perceptions so far:
Q: How has Orhan Pamuk’s work shaped your ideas about Turkey?
Gloria Fisk: I read "The Black Book" years ago, and it created this really vivid image of the city that I always wanted to come visit. I started paying attention to Turkish culture and politics.... [Pamuk's 1994 novel] had these really beautiful images of the city and the characters were really lively. To me it was ... evocative and real. But now I realize that most Turkish readers hate that book and think that that was the beginning of his downfall, and consider readers like me who got sucked into it Orientalist dupes.
Q: In Turkey, Pamuk is not universally adored?
GF: He’s universally hated.
Q: Really?
GF: I’m being a little flip. That’s an exaggeration, but he alienates most Turkish readers, for one reason or another.
Q: Pamuk made people angry by making public comments about the Armenian genocide of 1915-1918, right?
GF: He alienated the ultra-nationalists with that. What didn’t happen was the sort of rallying around him that you might expect from intellectuals and progressives.
Q: Or the secularists?
GF: Definitely not. Many of the most extreme nationalists are also secularists. Because the Turkish republic has secularist foundations, any threat to the nation is perceived as a threat to secularism, too. And any recognition of the Armenian genocide can be understood as a threat to the nation. Pamuk alienated hardline secularists by speaking to a foreign journalist about this shameful event that happened during the formative years of the republic.
Read on »
Mopping up Margaret "Peggy" B Jones Selzer week:
First, check out five takes here at the L.A. Times on Margaret B. Jones' phony memoir, from Rubén Martínez ("Why We Fall For Fakes"), Rita Williams ("Literary Wannabes"),Samantha Dunn ("Why You Should Be Enraged By Literary Liars"), Tim Rutten ("The Lure of Made-Up Memoirs") and Denise Hamilton ("An Antidote to the Margaret B. Joneses").
Second, here's a tidbit from the Q&A that Penguin Books did with Jones (who admitted last week that her real name is Margaret "Peggy" SeltzerÖ ) about a scene that always made her -- and her editor -- cry: Q: What was the scene that affected both of you so much?
A: It was the scene in which my little sisters and I were walking home from the Korean grocery store and Nishia dropped a carton of milk. It burst open and the milk streamed into the gutter. She burst into tears, begging me not to be mad as she stooped down trying to scrape it all back into the broken carton. I told her I wasn’t mad. But I was. That was a half-gallon of milk wasted and two dollars gone. Even now, as an adult, just thinking about that—thinking about the choices you were given as a child that weren’t kid choices—makes me want to cry.
Crying over spilled milk? Did no one noticed that at its heart, this weeper is nothing more than an overworked cliché? Really?
Third, lit blogger Ron Hogan, who has been nobly anti-pile-on, writes that Jones/Seltzer's editor, Sarah McGrath, was doing her job, picking up a story that was apparently so compelling that it also fooled a Pulitzer-grade book critic like the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani, who said on Feb. 28,"Ms. Jones has done an amazing job of conjuring up her old neighborhood," thanks to "a novelist's eye for the psychological detail and an anthropologist's eye for social rituals and routines."
To which I would respond (heck, I am responding) that part of the problem is that Kakutani's feel for the truth of South L.A.'s "social rituals and routines" seems inevitably formed by the same pop culture hand-me-downs from which Jones/Seltzer seems to have crafted her book.
Finally, if you want to get with Madd Ronald, the gang member whose message about Peggy appeared on the now-defunct International Brother/SisterHood website, he's on MySpace.
Carolyn Kellogg
photo by Eduardo Sciammarella via flickr
Faye Bender, Margaret Seltzer's agent, had this to say in a brief phone conversation about her role in registering the website for International Brother/SisterHood, the supposed nonprofit with which Seltzer claimed to be involved.
"Peggy," Bender says, "portrayed Brother/SisterHood as a budding new organization designed to mentor young gang members. She said she didn't have the financial means to host a website, so I did a favor for a client, and registered and hosted it. The information up on the website was information that she provided."
David L. Ulin
(Photo credit: University at Buffalo Office of News Services)
For a vivid overview of poet Robert Creeley's career, Stephen Burt's essay in the London Review of Books is a must. Creeley's work, Burt argues, can be divided into three stages: an early hard-to-handle period ("often drunk or stoned, a skirt-chaser [in the language of the time], with frequent, extreme ups and downs"), a middle phase marked by a minimalism so intense as to occasionally eschew meaning altogether and a final, elegiac stretch that was "solitary, melancholy and surprisingly reminiscent of childhood," in which we are defined less by who we are than what we’ve lost.
For Burt, Creeley is a quintessential New England poet, spare and taciturn, who "often seems to have thought not in lines or sentences so much as in quatrains, which he called 'both a semantic measure and a rhythmic measure.' " But more than anything, he sought to strip away all ornament, all metaphor, and to have words simply stand for themselves.
This was not always an effective strategy. Creeley titled one of his first minimalist poems "A Piece," and said that it was "central to all possibilities of statement." That poem reads: "One and / one, two, / three." "If you like that," Burt writes, "you'll love — well, almost anything."
But in his poem, "The Farm," Creeley also wrote: "Tips of celery / clouds of // grass — one / day I’ll go away." No other contemporary poet I can think of evoked so memorably and so starkly the evanescence of existence, the futility of being alive. The miracle of his writing is that somehow this did not make him hopeless, that in his melancholy he was able to find a measure of connection, even though he knew it couldn't last.
"[T]o listen to Creeley at his best," Burt writes, "is to listen, often uncomfortably, to men and women speaking behind closed doors, to hear what they say to themselves and to each other when they do not know what else to do. . . . Few writers have done more with fewer words."
David L. Ulin
A decision to make Israel the guest of honor at the upcoming Paris book fair has angered Muslim countries around the world. On Saturday, Iranian authorities announced that they would boycott the five-day book fair.
Iran wasn't the first country to opt out of the fair. It may not be the last.
The Salon du Livre is a huge event in France and on the international book publishing circuit. The festival, which begins March 14, draws thousands of authors from around the world. (Full disclosure: My wife will be promoting her book at the fair.) This year, about 39 writers from Israel will be honored on the occasion of the Jewish state's 60th anniversary.
"Iran was a regular participant of Paris book fair each year but this time it has refused to take part in the event protesting at the presence of the Zionist regime," Deputy Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Ali Ali-Pour told the Islamic Republic News Agency.
But vehemently anti-Israeli Iran is merely jumping on the bandwagon as far as boycotting the bookworm fete. Lebanon announced Wednesday that it would stay away from the confab.
"Lebanon will not participate this year in protest at the cultural event's organizers' decision to select Israel as guest of honor," Culture Minister Tarek Mitri announced.
That was a big blow for France, which considers francophilic Lebanon its cultural backyard. On Tuesday, the 50-nation Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization called on all Islamic states to boycott the event.
"The crimes against humanity that Israel is perpetrating in the Palestinian territories ... constitute, in themselves, a strong condemnation of Israel, making it unworthy of being welcomed as a guest of honor at an international book fair," the group said.
Read on »
|
|
Subscribe to this Blog What is RSS?
Book Editor, Los Angeles Times
Deputy Book Editor, Los Angeles Times
Lead blogger, Jacket Copy
Assistant Book Editor
Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times
Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times