Jacket Copy URL and feeds to change Tuesday, July 17

In the ongoing evolution of the L.A. Times' new media presence, Jacket Copy will shift Web addresses Tuesday, July 17. It's a change that really doesn't mean much to you, the reader, except that you'll have to find us at a new Web address.

Tuesday at 2 p.m. (that's 5 o'clock for you New Yorkers), Jacket Copy is changing its URL to http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/. Rolls right off the tongue, right?

If you've been kind enough to subscribe to the RSS feed of Jacket Copy, you'll have to update your reader to get our headlines in the future. The new RSS feed link is http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/rss2.0.xml.

The blog formatting will look a little different, but we're still going to bring you book news and the literary latest. So please come along to our new Web home. Did you miss it? I hope not. It'll be http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/. See you there!

-- Carolyn Kellogg

6 Twitter rules for authors, from Twitter (beginner edition)

I admit, I'm a chronic early adopter. When my friend Gwenda Bond (@Gwenda) insisted I try Twitter, I signed up. That was back in 2008. I didn't get it at first -- it seemed like so much chatter -- but now I truly enjoy the bookish conversation that can be found there.

But not everyone is like me (be glad: that means you don't sleep with your iPhone next to the bed). And so for those writers who are just girding themselves to jump in, Twitter has posted a list of six Twitter rules for authors. Who could be more authoritative about how to use Twitter than Twitter? Here's an abridged edition of their list:

1. Be authentic, be yourself. Twitter offers a direct, instant connection between you and your readers — they want to know what you’re up to.

2. Share your process. Twitter is a place where fans get a deeper connection to artists, performers, scholars ... and authors. Your readers are interested in your process. Tweet a bit about how your work. Invite your followers to a local book signing.

3. Engage with your readers. Twitter is also a place where your fans can directly engage with you, however much you want (it doesn’t have to take up a lot of your time). You can see messages from other users in the “Connect” tab on your Twitter homepage. Is there a question in there for you? Answer it.

4. Find influencers. Twitter allows you to send a public message (via the @reply) to anyone else using Twitter. Just use the Search section on Twitter’s homepage to find other users. An idea: Who is your favorite living author? See if they’re on Twitter and tweet a "hello" to them.

5. Search Twitter. Just type what you’re looking for into the search tab to see what people are tweeting about right now. An idea: Is anyone tweeting about a book you wrote? Type the title into Search and find out.

6. Above all, have fun. Twitter is an exceptionally flexible platform that is ripe for creative use. Play around with it. You can live-tweet an event as it happens, or live-tweet a fictional world. You can interview another author or create a completely fictional account based on a character you dream up.

It's true, Twitter can be fun. It's the kind of place where on a lazy summer weekend, people all over might just start altering book titles so they read like drinks. Yesterday #bookdrink titles were so popular that they were a trending topic across the network; some popular fake book titles were "James and the Giant Peach Schnapps," "Tequila Mockingbird" and "Beer and Loathing In Las Vegas."

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

The man who punched Glenn Danzig has written a book about it

Do you want to read a book about what it's like to punch Glenn Danzig? Maybe it's something you've been pining for. But don't worry, the wait is over. That book is finally on its way.

The author/pugilist is Danny Marianino from the band the North Side Kings. The punchee is the notoriously buff Glenn Danzig, the hard-rocking musician who got his start as lead singer of the Misfits. The encounter, which happened in 2004, was captured on video. It has had a long Internet shelf life.

It's the Internet attention that prompted Marianino to write about his experience in a book he's titled "Don't Ever Punch a Rock Star: A Collection of Hate Mail and Other Crazy Rumors." Marianino has set up a Facebook page for it (via Spin). There, Marianino writes:

I have had this book sitting dormant for a while. I enjoy writing and wrote it more or less for fun, but after the LA Weekly interview where he yet again almost eight years later said he allowed me to hit him cause he didn't want to get sued, I finally decided to put the book in motion. Just cause interviewers ask the question doesn't mean you have to answer it, with nonsense of course....

I'm not mad, I'm not bitter, actually I find it amusing. This book is not about a ten second fight. This book is about pokes fun of all of the internet bullying that came my way, and continues to come my way every time he is in the news acting crazy at festivals or saying something completely false about what happened between him and I.

Please laugh. This is a funny book. It pokes fun at me. It pokes fun at the situation. The hate mail and rumors is very amusing. Amusing enough for an entire book. If I am laughing at the whole situation years later, so has anyone that has read this and you should be too. Lighten up people, the world is too messed up to be all angry all the time.

According to the Facebook page, the book "profiles a regular guys journey in music and learning to shrug off one of the most opinionated events in music history. Plus an amazing amount of hate mail." It is not currently available through major book retailers Barnes & Noble and Amazon, but its Facebook page has more than 650 TK "likes."

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— Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Glenn Danzig performing in 1994. Credit: Los Angeles Times

Margaret Atwood jumps into teen writing site Wattpad

Margaret Atwood has always been one step ahead. The recent to-do over the use of the word "vagina" on the Michigan state House floor, for instance, would fit right in with the world she imagined in "The Handmaid's Tale," which was published back in 1985.

So maybe other adult novelists should take note of Atwood's latest move: She's jumped into the frenetic teen writing site Wattpad. "I look forward to exploring the ways Wattpad connects people to reading and writing, and may help give them confidence through feedback from readers," Atwood writes on her author page.

Wattpad is a Toronto-based social reading app and website that's been rapidly adopted by teens. It claims 9 million users, more than 70% of whom engage with the materials on Wattpad through a mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet. Earlier this month, the company announced $17 million in Series B funding; currently, its platform is completely free to use. More than 500,000 new stories and poems -- in 25 languages -- are added each month.

On Monday, Atwood posted two poems on the site, "Thriller Suite" and "Update on Werewolves." The site captures and displays all kinds of metrics about the writing shared there. Atwood's poems have had more than 1,600 reads.

In a release announcing Atwood's participation, Chief Executive Allen Lau said, "Our community of readers and writers are thrilled, especially our poets.... Just imagine what it means for a young aspiring poet to interact with Margaret Atwood!"

So far, just 15 people have ventured to leave comments on Atwood's poems. They may be shy to engage  with the revered 72-year-old author, who has received the Arthur C. Clark Award, has won Canada's Governor General Award twice, and recieved the Man Booker prize in 2000 for "The Blind Assassin."

It may take a little time for the site's users to find the best way to interact with Atwood, who is accustomed to presenting finished, polished work. One of the most fertile uses of Wattpad is as a place for people working on a writing project to post it in serial form. For the popular work "The Bro Code," which has had more than 1.5 million reads, comments show that readers got started and want more. A typical one: "Plzzzzzz plzzzzz upload i luv the book so much! It is soooo hard 4 me to stop reading! Things r so intense i can hardly stand it!"

If that sounds a little, well, teenspeak for the literary Atwood, she seems game. “This is an adventure! I wonder what it will be like to share my writing with a new group of people," she said in the release. "Building new readers and writers is crucial for the writing and reading community: if there are no newer readers, soon there will be no older ones. And, in writing as with everything else, you learn by doing.”

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Margaret Atwood in 2008. Credit: George Whiteside.

Secret codes, the Trystero: A mysterious Thomas Pynchon hunt

Turns out when you show people the tattoo on your wrist and ask if they've seen any stickers nearby with it and a mysterious URL, they might not respond particularly warmly. They might just shake their heads in bafflement, ask halting questions, then look at you as if you're in some sort of a strange cult.

Maybe I am. I have a tattoo of the Trystero symbol from Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" on my wrist. In the book, the symbol -- a muted post horn -- is the sign for an underground mail system known as w.a.s.t.e. And the mysterious symbol might have greater, or lesser, meaning.

Now that symbol adorns 200 stickers planted around the country and can be found in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Denver, Boston and Los Angeles. Each sticker has a url, but you have to find a sticker to see where it leads.

The Google map of the sticker locations took me to my local Trader Joe's -- convenient, because I had some grocery shopping to do -- but nary a sticker was to be found. I searched all the sticker places I know, around the parking lot and light poles, places inside where a sticker might be stuck. Finally, I asked my cashier, who showed no spark of recognition at the words "Pynchon," "geocaching" or even "game." As she was edging away, a fellow staffer who could double as a bouncer at any rock club looked over his massive shoulder at me suspiciously. OK, time to go.

A similar scene occurred at a local coffee shop that I frequent; today its staff seemed to think I was some kind of imposter dressed as a journalist (it happens). I explained what I was looking for -- Pynchon, sticker, wrist. The barrista huffed, "I don't know what you're talking about," and went back to his business. And ... no sticker.

Apparently, while a Pynchon fan in England has picked up on the idea by creating and posting his own versions of the Trystero symbol and the secret codes, Pynchon stickers in the U.S. are going missing. Could it be the result of simple sticker cleaning? Are Pynchon fans scooping them up? Or are they being torn down because of some conspiracy?

But eventually I found one, in the photo above. It's still in a good spot above the coffee lids at Demitasse, a high-end coffee shop in downtown L.A. I wasn't the first one to discover it -- that honor goes, appropriately, to Trystero Coffee, a micro-roaster that sells its beans to the shop.

So where does the url trystero.me/12pgg take you? To a passage that begins, "Everybody in 24fps had their own ideas about light, and about all they shared was the obsession." That's from Pynchon's novel "Vineland," set in Northern California, which I discovered using the exhaustive and essential fan-run Pynchon Wiki website.

At the bottom of each webpage is a button marked "w.a.s.t.e" Click it and a box pops up in which you can type a message. Where will w.a.s.t.e. deliver it? It’s a mystery -– which will lead some to concerns about privacy, while opening up the freedom of the anonymous Internet to others. There was no Internet in 1966, when “The Crying of Lot 49” was published; then Pynchon imagined real-life post-office boxes set up to move secret messages.

This Pynchon project -- the Google map, the sticker hunt, the URLs, websites and message system -- was cooked up by Pynchon's publisher, Penguin Press. The Press announced last week that Pynchon's entire catalog of books -- eight novels and a collection of short fiction -- will be released for the first time as e-books. In a likelihood, this project has something to do with that.

There must be more to learn about what the Pynchon project points to. For now, it's a very Pynchon mystery.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: The Trystero sticker at Demitasse Coffee in downtown Los Angeles. Credit: Carolyn Kellogg / Los Angeles Times

 

Jonah Lehrer jumps from Wired to the New Yorker

Jonah Lehrer, the author of the popular science books "Proust Was a Scientist," "How We Decide" and 2012's "Imagine," has left his post as a contributing editor at Wired for the New Yorker, where he'll be a staff writer. He's taken his blog Frontal Cortex with him.

Like Lehrer's books, Frontal Cortex focuses on the science of the mind and how it intersects with daily life. In the latest post, Lehrer writes about the neuroscience of choking -- not in the throat, but in the mind, when forced to perform under pressure.

He visits the case laid out by Malcolm Gladwell -- in many ways, Lehrer is a younger, brain-centered version of Gladwell, making him a natural New Yorker fit -- and then looks at new research that illuminates the choking phenomenon (or, if you prefer, curse).

Using the admittedly blunt instrument of an fMRI brain scanner, researchers watched subjects play a game with an increasing financial reward, trying to see where they choked, and what was going on in their heads when they did.

[R]esearchers argue that the subjects were victims of loss aversion, the well-documented psychological phenomenon that losses make us feel bad more than gains make us feel good. (In other words, the pleasure of winning a hundred dollars is less intense than the pain of losing the same amount.)

In other words, choking is about focusing on possible loss when the stakes get higher, rather than on possible rewards. Lehrer takes that idea and suggests applying it to the workplace.

Whether that's because his own workplace has just changed is an open question. Lehrer's doing just fine in the bookselling marketplace: "Imagine: How Creativity Works" has spent 10 weeks on the L.A. Times bestseller list.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Jonah Lehrer in 2008. Credit: Thos Robinson / Getty Images for World Science Festival

Amazon awarded patent for electronic gift-giving

When you get an email announcing you've got a gift you can download -- an e-book, a movie or music -- think of Amazon. It doesn't matter where your gift was purchased: Amazon has patented e-gifting, Geekwire reports, asking, "Did Amazon.com just patent Christmas?"

That's because the electronic gift-giving process described in Amazon's patent sounds like something that is widely used. From the patent description:

Electronic transfer has become a prominent method for distributing media content and other electronically transferrable items. Electronically transferrable items may include, for example, electronically accessible services or digital media content such as songs, ringtones, movies, magazines, books, and other content. The electronically transferrable items can be accessed on computers, as well as on portable media players or home audiovisual systems using set top boxes or other devices. In downloading or streaming the electronically transferrable items from a network, such as the Internet, consumers can select and access desired electronically transferrable items in minutes or seconds. Thus, consumers can enjoy the electronically transferrable items without leaving their homes to purchase or rent physical media storing the electronically transferrable items and without waiting for delivery of physical media, such as via the mail.

The prospect of electronically transferrable items offers an alternative to conventional methods of giving gifts that might include music, movies, television programs, games, or books. For example, instead of giving a gift certificate for a retail store that would allow a recipient to select a gift of the recipient's own choosing, one can give a gift certificate for electronically transferrable items. Using the gift certificate, the recipient can conveniently access the desired electronically transferrable items.

Amazon's patent includes charging the giver only when the electronic gift certificate has been redeemed. Geekwire writes, "Broad patents like these have become a lightning rod in the tech industry, helping to fuel criticism of the U.S. patent system."

Don't be surprised if some post-patent action follows. Speculating that this conflicts with a recent Facebook acquisition, Business Insider writes, "Amazon has aggressively enforced its patent on one-click checkout — even Apple agreed to license it."

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: Screen shot of Amazon.com gift certificate page. Credit: Carolyn Kellogg

Goodbye Mr. Pepys

After faithfully writing almost nightly for nine years, noted diarist Samuel Pepys will end his blogging today. Bloggers come and go, but Pepys is unique in that he died in England more than 300 years ago.

Pepys was a hard-working clerk to the Naval Board who eventually was elected to Parliament and became chief secretary to the Admiralty under two British kings. Starting at age 26, he began keeping a diary.

Pepys was an engaging diarist, taking great joy in describing the good meals he ate, business conundrums, tussles and tangles with his wife, and his extramarital sexual encounters.

He also lived through and chronicled some enormous historic events up close: The Great Plague of London (1664-1666) and the three-day long Great Fire of London in 1666.

It was for those eyewitness accounts that Pepys' diary was first published, in two volumes, in 1825. The sexual escapades were left out of this and later editions until the 20th century. In America, that was in a nine-volume edition that was published by U.C. Press from 1970-1983.

The realization that 17th diary entries were in fact a perfect match for blogging as a form struck Phil Gyford, a British Web designer and developer. He set up PepysDiary.com, where Pepys' diary entries publish every day, coinciding with the days Pepys wrote them. They go online at 11 p.m. London time, an approximation of when Pepys might have been writing at the end of the day, or when a modern-day Pepys would sit down to blog. Pepys concluded many of his entries: "...and so to bed."

Gyford added notes and created a system whereby readers -- some of whom surfaced with deep expertise in Pepys and his period -- were able to annotate freely. It has been an entertaining and marvelously ingenious time warp -- but it's almost over.

After nine years, Pepys' diaries ended, and his online blog version will see its final entry published today. In honor of the occasion, the entry will go up a couple of hours early; it will post while many Americans are still at work.

For those who will miss Samuel Pepys, or those who are ready to first discover him, Gyford has made sure his online voice continues. He's surfaced -- where else?  -- on Twitter.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: 1666 portrait of Samuel Pepys by John Hayls.

The origins of '50 Shades of Grey' go missing

People who know about "50 Shades of Grey" have probably heard that author E.L. James began the story as post-"Twilight" fan fiction. But now the Internet evidence of its start has been deleted, so its origins have been erased.

That's what the website Galleycat discovered when it went to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine allows anyone to look at websites as they appeared on days past, when the Internet Archive's computer systems took a snapshot of the site.

Galleycat had previously visited the site to look at the history of James' website 50Shades.com, where she began posting writing in earnest after a beginning on Fanfiction.net. It found lots there to demonstrate that James' early writings were meant to be a continuation, or detour, of the characters in Twilight, including images of actors Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. That was in James' online serial "Masters of the Universe," which begat "50 Shades of Grey." Now only Galleycat's screenshots of the site remain online -- the Internet Archive no longer has them.

“The Internet Archive honors requests from domain and site owners to exclude pages from the Wayback Machine at their request,” the site told Galleycat.

Why take down those pages? Could it be that fan fiction is in the crosshairs?

So far, fan fiction -- in which devoted readers revivify characters from their favorite works in their own writing -- has been left largely to flourish unimpeded. Vibrant online communities have sprung up around some books -- think the "Harry Potter" series -- in which people write and share their own versions of the characters in different places, time periods, and relationships. Sometimes, as in the case of "50 Shades of Grey," those relationships get sexual. But the sex isn't the problem -- it's the copyright.

"Copyright issues are at the core of fan fiction because using the characters and fictional worlds of commercial authors to create fan works is arguably a violation of the law from the outset," explains Steven Hechter in the British magazine Times Higher Education.

James' agent told Deadline, "This did start as 'Twilight' fan fiction, inspired by Stephenie Meyer’s wonderful series of books. Originally it was written as fan fiction, then Erika [E.L. James] decided to take it down after there were some comments about the racy nature of the material. She took it down and thought, I’d always wanted to write. I’ve got a couple unpublished novels here. I will rewrite this thing, and create these iconic characters, Christian and Anna. If you read the books, they are nothing like 'Twilight' now." Her American publisher told the Associated Press that James' "Masters of the Universe" (which was fan fiction) and "50 Shades of Grey" are "two distinctly separate pieces of work."

That point was countered by romance-focused site Dear Author, which compared the two works side by side. In one test, using the plagiarism-checker TurnItIn, the texts had 89% similarity.

I'm not a lawyer, so I certainly can't sort any of that out. It is interesting that the early version has now disappeared.

Or maybe the disappearance has nothing to do with the old connection between "50 Shades of Grey" and "Twilight" -- maybe the reason someone requested those pages be taken down is simply so "50 Shades of Grey" can stand -- firmly on the top of bestseller lists -- on its own.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Linkages: book stories from your weekend

The biopic "Hemingway and Gellhorn," which sought to tell the story of the love affair between Ernest Hemingway and writer Martha Gellhorn, his third (but not final) wife, debuted on HBO on Monday night. Starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, and directed by Philip Kaufman ("The Unbearable Lightness of Being"), it would seem to be an obvious home run. Or not. Television critic Robert Lloyd writes, "it is never quite believable, either as history or drama."

Jerry Stahl, one of the co-writers of "Hemingway and Gellhorn," is writing for the Rumpus about something completely different: He's about to become a dad, again, at 58. His columns are about as far from the miracle-of-birth-style narrative as they are from the war-torn lands of Spain. Here's a sample of his latest: “At this point,” my weary perma-cramped girlfriend tells the doctor, “this baby doesn’t need to be born – she needs to be evicted.”

Scholar and critic Paul Fussell, best known for his 1975 book "The Great War and Modern Memory," died Wednesday at the age of 88. In our Saturday obituary, Elaine Woo describes his thorny criticism. "In 'Class: A Guide Through the American Status System' (1983), he expounded on class distinctions, which he viewed as essentially a matter of taste manifested in one's choice of cars, houses, athletic obsessions and clothes....In 'BAD, or: The Dumbing of America' (1991), Fussell was unremittingly sarcastic, listing alphabetically many aspects of modern life that he found crass."

One critic who is very much alive is Carlin Romano (I sat next to him at our National Book Critics Circle meetings, so I know this for sure.) Romano, who was once book editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer and now is critic at large at the Chronicle of Higher Education, is the author of the new book "America the Philosophical." Sure, it sounds intense, and at 688 pages it's physically heavy, but perhaps it is not an entirely intimidating read. "America the Philosophical?," he writes at the Chronicle, in a piece adapted from his book. "It sounds like Canada the Exhibitionist or France the Unassuming: a mental miscue, a delusional academic tic. Everyone knows that Americans don't take philosophy seriously, don't pay any attention to it, and couldn't name a contemporary academic philosopher if their passports depended on it."

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen in "Hemingway & Gellhorn." Credit: HBO