Rocky Raccoon checked into his room, only to find a Kindle?

When the Beatles released "Rocky Raccoon" in 1968, they sang that Rocky Raccoon "checked into his room / only to find Gideon's Bible." If that same lyrical character were checking into his hotel today, instead of the Bible, he might find an Amazon Kindle.

The Hotel Indigo in Newcastle, England, is replacing the once-ubiquitious Gideon's Bible with Kindles -- in every one of its 148 rooms -- starting July 16. Travelers looking forward to finding the Bible in the hotel's dresser drawer need not worry, however: The Bible is pre-loaded onto the e-readers from Amazon.

Hotel general manager Adam Munday tells the Telegraph:

“In the 18th Century, Newcastle was one of the largest print centres in Britain and we’re in Grainger Town, close to the Literary and Philosophical Society,” he said. “We wanted to reflect this literary history in a very contemporary way, so are offering guests the use of cutting-edge Kindles pre-loaded with The Bible, instead of the more traditional hardcopy Gideon’s Bible that they would expect to find in a hotel.”

During their Hotel Indigo stays, guests can download other religious texts to the Kindle on the house, provided they cost $7.80 or less (in England, that's 5 pounds).

They can also  download commercial books of any type: mystery, history, poetry, classic, science fiction, comedy, biography, memoir, vampire spoof, bondage-laden romance. Not that they'll convey the same lessons as the Bible might. And the cost of those nonreligious books will be added to guests' bills. And they should hope they read fast -- the e-book will stay behind when they check out.

That is, as long as they don't take the Kindles with them. The e-readers are a bit harder to come by than a Gideon Bible. Gizmodo writes, "Currently there's no word on how the devices are secured, though it's a fair bet to assume that the cost would simply be added to the guest's credit card if the Kindle went missing."

If the Kindles stay, they could present an interesting narrative of who stayed in what room, like one person after another leaving books behind on a shelf. And if the experiment works, the chain plans to expand its in-room Kindles to its 44 hotels around the world.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Amazon Kindle. Credit: Chris Ratcliffe / Bloomberg

Hitchhiking for material: Luckily John Waters didn't get shot

Last month John Waters completed an eight-day cross-country trip. The film director and writer,  known for his unique perspective, decided to make the trip an adventure: He hitchhiked.

Along the way, he was picked up by an indie rock band on tour, a pastor's wife, a married couple and a 20-year-old tea party town councilman. Waters is planning to turn the story of his 15-ride trip into a book, "Carsick," for FSG.

“Everyone my age that I know was so horrified by this idea,” he told the New York Times. “Every young person I know said, ‘Can we come?’ ”

Waters made it Baltimore to his San Francisco apartment without incident. But another hopeful writer who undertook a similar hitchhiking adventure for material wasn't so lucky.

Ray Dolin, a 39-year-old West Virginian working on a book he planned to call “The Kindness of America,” was shot on a rural Montana highway while waiting for a ride.

The Associated Press reports:

Ray Dolin, 39, was shot in the arm as he approached a pickup Saturday evening, thinking the driver was offering him a ride, said Valley County Sheriff Glen Meier....

A 52-year-old man from Washington state, Lloyd Christopher Danielson III, was arrested about four hours later near Culbertson. ... They [police] released no motive in the shooting.

Dolin, who told sheriff's officials that he was writing a memoir titled "Kindness in America," is expected to recover from his injuries. He has worked as a freelance photographer; his father told reporters that his son was traveling across the country taking pictures. 

"My two greatest passions in life are travel and photography," Dolin writes on his website. "I believe that travel broadens one's view of the world. Experiencing other cultures, meeting people from other communities, other countries, and seeing the beauty of the world has helped me understand that all lives are connected and individual."

Waters was less idealistic about his travel experiences. "“You think maybe you’re standing by a highway for a long time, it’s a Zen-like experience,” he said. “It isn’t. It is a despairing experience to figure: No one’s ever going to stop. I’m here forever.”

Maybe Dolin and Waters can do some book tour dates together. Hitchhiking. Maybe.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: John Waters at the 2012 CFDA Fashion Awards. Credit: Theo Wargo / Getty Images

TSA finds throwing daggers concealed in book

The Transportation Security Administration on Monday found a book concealing two throwing daggers in the carry-on bag of a passenger traveling from Washington's Ronald Reagan National Airport to Chicago. The daggers -- and the book -- were surrendered to the TSA at a checkpoint.

According to one report, the TSA described the 6-inch throwing knives as "artfully concealed" in a hardcover book. The book's pages were glued together and hollowed out, a method of hiding keepsakes sometimes known as a book safe. The hollowed-out book was also a way of concealing contraband; during Prohibition, a hollowed-out book could conceal a flask or pint of illicit liquor.

In this case, the hollowed-out book that concealed the throwing knives appears to have been thematically linked. In the photo above, the book is open to the chapter "Ninja Equipment."

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Little books: An airplane reader

Alain de Botton's music for airports

Behind those books -- a secret door!

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: A hollowed-out book containing two throwing daggers. Credit: Transportation Security Administration / Associated Press

World's top 10 literary cities from National Geographic Traveler

If you're an Angeleno hoping to visit one of the world's top 10 literary cities, you'll have to start looking for a plane ticket. Only two American cities made the new list from National Geographic Traveler, and Los Angeles wasn't one of them.

Edinburgh, Scotland, tops the list, which is admittedly a little Eurocentric. That's good news for literary tourists trying to hit every one of the magazine's top 10 cities. Fly to Scotland, then Dublin (No. 2), then to London (No. 3) and then take the Chunnel over to No. 4, Paris. Maybe traveling in order isn't such a great idea -- closer Stockholm is at No. 6, with No. 5, St. Petersburg, Russia, being a bit farther off.

The requirements for what makes a literary city from National Geographic Traveler's perspective are idiosyncratic. Edinburgh "has inspired more than 500 novels," which could easily be said for New York, a city that's not on the list. Edinburgh also has a Writers Museum, though, and a couple of literary pub crawls, which propels it to No. 1.

Number 7 and 8 are the two U.S. cities that made the list: Portland, Ore., and Washington. Portland is, of course, home to the excellent, sprawling Powell's bookstore. It's also a community that likes to read -- as is demonstrated in the "Portlandia" video clip, "Did You Read?" which is after the jump. Washington makes the grade because of the Library of Congress. Right. Hard to argue with that.

Bringing up the end of the list are Melbourne, Australia, at No. 9 (it has a walking tour) and Santiago, Chile (for popular Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda), at No. 10, the only cities included in the Southern Hemisphere. For literary cities in India or Asia, well, we'll have to wait for another list.

Carmageddon reading list: 19 books about the joys and terrors of transportation

Carmageddon is going to be bad. Nobody knows how bad, exactly, but when the 405 Freeway is closed through the Sepulveda Pass this weekend, the cars that rely on it will be spilled onto alternate routes. Which will be jammed. Too many cars, not enough ways for them to get where they're headed.

Carmaggedon: by midnight Friday, all lanes and ramps of the northbound 405 Freeway, along the 10-mile section between Interstate 10 and the 101 Freeway, will be closed. Southbound lanes of the 405 will be closed from the 101 Freeway to Getty Center Drive. They will not open again until Monday at 6 a.m.

Some fear that the closing will bring about a domino effect of gridlock. But maybe not. While freeways were once an essential and distinctive mark of Los Angeles, Christopher Hawthorne writes that now we're churning out train lines instead. Maybe you've found a way around carmageddon that involves trains or buses. Or maybe you'll risk it and get behind the wheel. If that happens, any one of these 19 books on our carmageddon reading list might come in handy in case traffic really is awful. Come to think of it, bring two.

"Car" by Harry Crews. A man eats a car, one piece at a time, for money. Satirical, edgy and smart.

"Crash" by J.G. Ballard. Nobody wants to get in a car crash -- except for the subculture in this novel, full of people who find cars sexualized. Car crashes, mmmmm.

"Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang" by Ian Fleming. The James Bond author's only book for kids, the story of an inventor, his family and their marvelous floating, flying car.

"Christine" by Stephen King. The 1958 Plymouth Fury is beautiful, but she's dangerous. Reading this book will make you understand the terrifying possibilities of automobiles.

"Cosmopolis" by Don DeLillo. A young billionaire tries to cross Manhattan in his stretch limousine as the world begins to come apart.

"Drive" by James Sallis. A movie stunt driver turned getaway man is the hero of this existential noir.

"The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" by Tom Wolfe. The new journalist's first collection, named after his breakthough piece on Southern California custom car culture.

"Let the Dog Drive" by David Bowman. Hallucinatory, post-apocalyptic, Bowman's first book is a road novel gone absurd, as a young man and an older woman hitchhike east from the Mojave.

Two summertime cross-country adventures

This summer, two adventurers will traverse the country on similar paths, for very different reasons.

First out of the gate is Constantino Diaz-Duran, a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University who came to the U.S. from Guatemala a decade ago. To celebrate becoming a U.S. citizen, Diaz-Duran is walking across the country. Walking! He left New York right after the Fourth of July and will make his way all the way to the West Coast, hoping to reach a walk rate of about 20 miles per day. Diaz-Duran is writing about his experiences for Zocalo Public Square under the moniker Walk Like an American. As he travels, he's talking to the people he encounters about their perceptions of immigrants and immigration. He's on a shoestring (pun intended) budget and is accepting donations, via PayPal, offers of places to crash, and lunch, should you be so inclined. It certainly sounds like the kind of project that could use a book deal, too.

Departing on the inverse trip Aug. 9 -- traveling from Los Angeles to New York -- is Christopher Boucher, the author of "How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive." Published by Melville House, the book looks in part like a manual for a vintage VW Beetle but is actually a novel, in which the protagonist is a reporter living in Massachusetts raising his son, a '71 Beetle. (Yes, a car: This would be the place to note that Boucher has a creative writing MFA from Syracuse University, where he was a student of brilliant surreal humorist George Saunders). "Born of grief and fueled by stories, the Volkswagen is hopeful, smug and fraught with mechanical problems," explains the book's website. The novel was picked as the July Rumpus book club selection, so interested readers can discuss before Boucher launches his (quixotic?) attempt to drive a 1972 Beetle from Los Angeles to New York for his book tour, which he promises to blog. But as anyone who's relied on an old-style Beetle knows, he might want to think like Diaz-Duran and be prepared to take in the country walking.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Beetles on the road in Sri Lanka in June, commemorating the original production order in 1934. Credit: Ishara S. Kodikara / AFP/Getty Images

 

 

William Faulkner's Mississippi

William Faulkner was so displeased with living in Hollywood that when he was told he could work from home, he promptly set out for his desk -- 1,900 miles away at Rowan Oak, his house in Oxford, Miss.

L.A. Times book critic David L. Ulin went to Oxford, discovering the connection between Faulkner's grand ambitions and the small town, home to the University of Mississippi, where he felt most comfortable. Ulin writes:

[B]eginning with his third novel, "Sartoris" (1929), he told the Paris Review in 1956, "I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and by sublimating the actual into apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top."

My own little postage stamp of native soil: Here we have another iconic riff, so much so that it has long since blurred into cliché. It refers to Faulkner's decision, in 15 novels and dozens of short stories, to reframe Oxford as the seat of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, "a cosmos of my own," which he imagined as "a kind of keystone in the universe; that, small as that keystone is, if it were ever taken away the universe itself would collapse."

That's a great description, not just of his ambition but also of his aesthetic: the balance of myth and recollection, the desire to use this landscape as a template against which the human struggle might play out in epic terms. Still, spend a day (or two, as I did last month) or even an hour roaming Oxford and you begin to see how literal Faulkner's vision was.

Read more about Oxford and Faulkner's legacy, and see a gallery of photos of Oxford today.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: William Faulkner at Rowan Oak with his Underwood typewriter, 1950. Credit: Associated Press.

Alain de Botton's music for airports

In August 2009, Alain de Botton — author of “How Proust Can Save Your Life,” “The Consolations of Philosophy,” “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” and other acclaimed works of nonfiction — was hired by BAA, the company that owns London’s Heathrow Airport, to spend a week in the airport as writer-in-residence. His short book about the experience, “A Week at the Airport,” was published the following month; 10,000 copies were distributed free to passengers.

With “A Week at the Airport” just out in the U.S., book critic David L. Ulin e-mailed De Botton to ask about airports, writing and the challenges of an instant book.

Jacket Copy: How did “A Week at the Airport” come about?

Alain de Botton: Heathrow Airport was looking for someone to fill the post [of writer-in-residence]. They asked around the publishers and literary agencies of London, I put my name forward, wrote a strong proposal letter and they chose me. I was desperate for the job as I’ve always loved airports but they are very hard places to write about. They are full of security measures and unhelpful regulations. But for this book, I was allowed to go anywhere and see anything -- it was the fulfillment of a dream for me.

JC: Did this give you pause, to be contracted by a company to write about its holdings?

AdB: I didn’t really feel worried about this because the airport paid me a modest fee to write the book, and the contract lasted for a month. Therefore, I would have been insane to forget my responsibilities to my readers for the sake of the airport. This is looking at the issue purely financially. Artistically, I also had no interest in providing the airport with advertising copy. They in turn had no desire for such a thing. We all knew that the project was only going to work if I was going to stay me -- and everyone respected this from the word go.

The real problem with airports is that we tend to go there when we need to catch a plane -- and because it’s so difficult to find the way to the gate, we tend not to look around at our surroundings. And yet airports definitely reward a second look -- they are the imaginative centers of the modern world. It’s here you should go to find, in a concrete form, all the themes of modernity that one otherwise finds only in abstract forms in the media. Here you see globalization, environmental destruction, runaway consumerism, family breakdown: the modern sublime in action.

JC: You seem to see the airport as both a physical portal for travelers and also a kind of metaphoric landscape of possibility.

AdB: Airports help to put us in touch with the idea of alternatives -- they relativize us. They make us think that right now, be it at 10 a.m. or 3 p.m., somewhere on the other side of the globe, very different things are happening. They do that very basic task of the places of travel: to jolt us into remembering that the world is stranger, more exciting, more various than we imagine it when we are in familiar surroundings, and in danger of boredom and routine.

JC: Some would argue that the fluidity of modern society is rending the bonds of community.

AdB: The airport really shows how much affection and community there is in the world. Airports always bring us into greater proximity with the possibility of death -- and this unconscious or semi-conscious awareness has the habit of releasing us from inhibitions and therefore making love potentially more possible. We break free of everyday habits and, sensing our mortality, are more open to the unusual encounter. People who have been in loveless marriages for decades will suddenly say unexpectedly romantic things in airports. The prospect of an air crash can do wonders for a sagging relationship.

10/10/10: The 10 best 'Best of' books of 2010

At the end of the calendar year, bookstores are swamped with anthologies proclaiming the "best of" writing of the year. There is, apparently, a lot of really good writing: above is just a sample of the galleys and paperbacks that came to the office. We sorted through the stacks to come up with the definitive list: the 10 Best "Best of" books of 2010.

The Best American Short Stories 2010 (Mariner Books), edited by Richard Russo. Russo writes of the pleasure and pain of his task: “Narrowing the roughly 250 stories I read to the final 20 felt like some sort of literary waterboarding.” The big names -- The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, the Atlantic, Tin House -- supply the writers who make the cut: Charles Baxter, Jennifer Egan, Ron Rash, Kevin Moffett, Steve Almond, Joshua Ferris, Lauren Groff, Wells Tower, Tea Obreht and Jim Shepherd and more.

Best European Fiction 2011 (Dalkey Archive), edited by Aleksander Hemon. Now in its second year, this anthology is a bigger challenge than the others: the pieces, excerpts and complete stories are selected because they’ve never before appeared in America; most have to be translated. “Europe” is defined broadly, to include England -- and Booker-prize winning Hilary Mantel -- and reaches as far as Turkey. There are stories from Poland, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Romania, Serbia, Ireland, Begium (both French and Flemish) Latvia, Serbo-Croatia, Albania, Austria, Belarus and more.

Best Food Writing 2010 (Da Capo Press), edited by Holly Hughes. Includes paeans to sardines, high-end  restaurants in Los Angeles, New York’s Russ & Daughters deli, homemade bread, ramen, pit-barbecued pig, locavorism. There is a short piece from Jonathan Safran Foer’s book about his choice to eat vegetarian after the birth of his son. L.A. foodies should be especially pleased; our city is a bit overrepresented. And, yes, Jonathan Gold, writing about Antojitos Carmen, the delicious East L.A. eatery that inverted the trend and went from foodcart to storefront.

The Best American Comics 2010 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), edited by Neil Gaiman. Gaiman lays bare the difficulties in choosing the best, his troubles with the way the year is defined and his frustration at things that have been left out of previous editions -- and then delivers a tremendous selection of graphic novel excerpts and comics. This anthology includes work by Chris Ware, Theo Ellsworth, Bryan Lee O’Malley, Peter Bagge, R. Crumb, Lilli Carre, David Mazzucchelli and Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel, and comes in a substantial, oversized hardcover.

The Best Technology Writing 2010 (Yale University Press), edited by Julian Dibble. Includes Evan Ratliff’s “Vanish,” his chronicle of trying to go off the grid and travel stay unfindable for Wired; Clay Shirkey on the future (or not) of newspapers;  a New Yorker piece on making cheap, functional, clean-burning stoves for the developing world; Kevin Kelly on technophilia and a tweet from an astronaut orbiting in the space station.

The Best American Poetry 2010 (Scribner Poetry), edited by Amy Gerstler. Gerstler, who has contributed to The Times, writes in her introduction, “I badly want this anthology to be read not only by poetry fans, but also by famished souls who never dreamed they’d admire any text that called itself a poem.” There are poems from U.S. poet laureate W. S. Merwin, Sharon Olds, John Ashberry, Louise Gluck, John Updike, Dennis Cooper, Charles Simic, Derek Walcott, Adrienne Rich, J.E. Wei, Lynn Emanuel, Billy Collins and Terrance Hayes.

The Best Music Writing 2010 (Da Capo Press), edited by The Times’ Ann Powers. Includes John Kun on Mexican regional bands and the cellphone economy; Lola Ogunnaike on MC Dizzy Drake for Vibe; Timothy Quirk, from the defunct band Too Much Joy, writing on his website “My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement”; Alex Ross on Marian Anderson; Greg Tate on Michael Jackson; and, ironically, Christopher Weingarten’s brilliant, profane presentation on the death of music criticism.

The Best of the Web 2010 (Dzanc Books), edited by Kathy Fish. “A man with such loneliness repels even the moon’s face in water,” from a story by Terese Svoboda, is a sentence Fish cites to show that beautiful and arresting writing can appear anywhere. This anthology celebrates the fiction and nonfiction which appears online, in smaller, adventurous publications like failbetter, >killauthor, Juked, storySouth, the Rumpus and Everyday Genius, with a healthy helping from the online outlets of literary journals.

The Best American Travel Writing 2010 (Mariner Books), edited by Bill Buford. This is travel writing imbued with a sense of the personal: Henry Alford’s failed pickup in Istanbul; Ted Genoways’ bat-seeking expedition in Surinam with his naturalist father. From National Geographic, the New Yorker, Outside, plus the unexpected (the Believer, Lapham’s Quarterly). Notable contributors include Susan Orlean, David Sedaris, Christopher Hitchens, Tom Bissell, George Packer and Ian Frazier.

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010 (Mariner Press), edited by Dave Eggers with a student committee from the 826 centers. The anthology includes stories from major, often funny writers -- Sherman Alexie, Etgar Keret, George Saunders -- and also lists, which are non-narrative but tell a kind of story. Best American Gun Magazine Headlines, Best American Sentences on Page 50 of Books Published in 2009, Best New Patents, Best Farm Names -- they point to the silliness of best-of list-making while showing how much fun the process can be.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

MORE 10/10/10

Photos: Ten films with '10' in the title

Culture Monster: Ten masterpieces for the decaphilic

Hero Complex: The Top 10 sidekicks of all-time

Photos: Ten stars by the age of 10

24 Frames: The 10 best movies of 2010 (so far) that you might have missed

Show Tracker: TV's top 10 moments of the first 10 months of 2010

Pop & Hiss: Ten great songs about drinking (and five others about sobering up)

Ministry of Gossip: Celebrity scandals from a spicy year so far

 

Photo credit: Carolyn Kellogg

Dorothy Parker and the Marriott circle [updated]

The Algonquin Hotel, famed as the 1920s martini-swilling location of choice for some of the era's great literary figures -- Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and "The New Yorker" founder Harold Ross -- has entered a partnership with the Marriott hotel chain.

Although the New York Daily News reported Tuesday that Marriott International Inc. is taking over the iconic New York hotel, the relationship is less direct; the two have formed a partnership. The Algonquin will retain the its identity. It has already been added to the Marriott Autograph Collection; reservations can be made for the Algonquin through the Marriott Autograph Collection website. The 12 boutique Marriott Autograph Collection hotels are scattered around the country -- in New Mexico, Florida, North Carolina, Michigan and Georgia; the Algonquin is the only one in New York City.

[Updated at 2:40 p.m.: An earlier version of this post said that the Algonquin had "passed into the corporate hands of Marriott" and that there would be "corporate ownership." The Daily News report referred and linked to in the original post was incorrect in its assertion that Marriott is taking over the Algonquin; the relationship is a partnership.]

The Algonquin, which was built in 1902, has a reputation for fostering an artistic environment. Guests may have complained about the racket made by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, but the hotel encouraged their musical work -- which resulted in the musical "My Fair Lady."

Years earlier, Harold Ross and his literary, witty friends began gathering for lunch at the Algonquin. That was 1919, and the group, which started out small, grew until it wound up in a larger room with, of course, a round table. Critic Alexander Woollcott, writer Edna Ferber, playwright George S. Kaufman and comedian Harpo Marx were among the regular attendees. Known for quips like Dorothy Parker's "That woman speaks 18 languages and can’t say ‘no’ in any of them," the group came to be called the Vicious Circle.

Since the 1930s -- around the time the circle was breaking apart for good -- the Algonquin has been home to a cat named Matilda. Well, actually, many cats, all called Matilda, one after the other. Corporate partnership, the New York Observer confirmed today, will have no affect on the kitty tradition: Matilda will stay.

As will the martinis in the lobby, thankfully.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: The Algonquin Hotel lobby in 2008. Credit: The Algonquin Hotel