Alex Karpovsky from 'Girls' makes book trailer appearance

Book trailers are still having a hard time finding their way into the culture. There isn't yet a standard way to see them -- they don't play to captive audiences before movies start, or appear regularly with television or online advertising.

Usually, a book trailer is created and then left on its own, for overworked marketing departments or individual authors to try to push out onto the Internet, with a faint hope that it might go viral.

Could casting real actors be one way to jump-start the process and bring new eyes to book trailers? Greywolf Press is trying that tactic: Alex Karpovsky stars in the a trailer for the book "Four New Messages" by Joshua Cohen (Caveat: There is drug use and strong language in the trailer). Karpovsky is one of the young stars of the hit HBO series "Girls," in which he plays Ray, a friend of Lena Dunham's main character, Hannah.

Seems like using an actor from "Girls" might well reach a desired demographic -- young, hip cultural consumers -- more than simply using catalog-model types and overheated voiceovers. That's what can be found in some book trailers produced in Hollywood, where one company spends about $50,000 a pop to make book trailers for major publishing houses like St. Martin's and Random House.

Greywolf, an independent based in Minnesota, seems to be coming at things from a different direction, more Sundance than blockbuster. The book trailer above is called "Emission," and it's described as a short film based on a section of "Four New Messages" by Cohen.

In the trailer, Karpovsky plays a drug dealer whose actions are told by a girl at a laptop, smoking. We hear her voiceover reading what she types, and the secondhandness of the storytelling creates an uneasy sense that the narrator is not to be trusted. Or maybe that's the mood of the trailer, with music mixed with talk radio rants, and dark backgrounds filling with smoke.

Joshua Cohen is the author of the 800-plus page novel "Witz," published by Dalkey Archive Press. "Four New Messages" will be his first book since it landed, with a thump, in 2010.

ALSO:

A book trailer worth watching: Ben Marcus' 'Flame Alphabet' [video]

How to make a book trailer for $50,000

The good, the bad and the other bad: The Moby book trailer awards

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Alex Karpovsky in a screenshot from the trailer for the book "Four New Messages" by Joshua Cohen.

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."

ALSO:

Paul and Storm to George R.R. Martin: Write like the wind [video]

Dolly Parton to publish new book, 'Dream More'

What should Cee Lo Green's memoir be titled? [poll]

— Carolyn Kellogg

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

A book written in disappearing ink [video]

In Buenos Aires, small bookshop and publisher Eterna Cadencia has been wrestling with the question of the role of books in a digital age. These days, e-books seem more important, more interesting, than their print counterparts. How can print books take on a measure of urgency?

Eterna Cadencia's answer seems, at first, counterintuitive: It printed a book with disappearing ink.

The book, "El Libro que No Puede Esperar" (The Book That Can't Wait), comes sealed in a plastic wrapper. Once the wrapper is removed and the book is cracked, the ink begins to age; it's got a lifespan of less than two months. Just months after being opened, The Book That Can't Wait is filled with nothing but blank pages.

That makes the book unputdownable in an entirely new way.

Who wants a book that will self-destruct in 60 days? Turns out, Argentine readers do. Eterna Cadencia sold out of its entire first disappearing-ink printing in a single day.

One of the reasons the publisher wanted to give the book urgency was that it wants readers to leap in and try reading works from new authors. The thinking goes, if new authors don't get read, they can't continue -- but if they do get read, they can find footing on a career path of writing.

"This time we had the guarantee that our new authors were read," Eterna Cadencia explains in the video above.

The publisher plans to use The Book That Can't Wait's disappearing ink platform for other books in the future. Until then, curious readers will have to wait for the next Book That Can't Wait.

RELATED:

Seen it? The Elements of Style rap [video]

The origins of '50 Shades of Grey' go missing

Paul and Storm to George R.R. Martin: Write like the wind [video]

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Paul and Storm to George R.R. Martin: Write like the wind [video]

Comedy duo Paul and Storm have a "Game of Thrones" obsession. In a new video of their song "Write Like the Wind (George R.R. Martin)," they implore the author to pen the next book in the series. "George R.R. Martin, please write and write faster," they sing. "We need our allotment of incest and intrigue and six-page descriptions of every last meal."

George R.R. Martin's rich, complex "A Song of Ice" and "Fire" fantasy series began with the novel "A Game of Thrones" in 1996. Since then there have been four sequels: "A Clash of Kings," "A Storm of Swords," "A Feast for Crows," and "A Dance with Dragons." Together, the five massive fantasy novels total more than 4,200 pages.

That's in hardcover. It'll be even more in paperback, once a paperback edition of "A Dance With Dragons" is released.

Writing all that material takes time. Famously, six years passed between book 4, "A Feast for Crows," and book 5, "A Dance With Dragons," which finally came out in 2011. As promised release dates came and went, devoted readers clamored for the next installment. The agitation reached such a pitch that Neil Gaiman was prompted to write a blog post telling people to calm down:

Some writers need a while to charge their batteries, and then write their books very rapidly. Some writers write a page or so every day, rain or shine. Some writers run out of steam, and need to do whatever it is they happen to do until they're ready to write again. Sometimes writers haven't quite got the next book in a series ready in their heads, but they have something else all ready instead, so they write the thing that's ready to go, prompting cries of outrage from people who want to know why the author could possibly write Book X while the fans were waiting for Book Y....

Wait. Read the original book again. Read something else. Get on with your life. Hope that the author is writing the book you want to read, and not dying, or something equally as dramatic. And if he paints the house, that's fine.

Gaiman used some off-color language in his post, which -- fair warning -- makes its way into the Paul and Storm video. The comedians are clearly fans -- not just because they tromp around in period outfits weilding swords and turkey legs, but because their lyrics are grounded in Martin's books. They even reference the two further, yet-to-be-written books in the series, "The Winds of Winter" and "A Dream of Spring."

Since "A Dance With Dragons" came out, Martin has garnered even more fans, thanks to the HBO series based on the books. It's slated to return for a third season in 2013.

The Paul and Storm video premiered Friday on the Sword and Laser show on the Geeks & Sundry YouTube video channel -- a show that also included an interview with George R.R. Martin himself.

RELATED:

Interview: George R. R. Martin at the Golden Globes

George R.R. Martin has joined Kindle million-seller club

George R.R. Martin calls for "head on a spike" of "A Dance with Dragons" leaker

-- Carolyn Kellogg

What Patti Smith and Neil Young won't be doing at BEA

The nation's biggest publishing conference, Book Expo America, announced Monday that it had scored a rock 'n' roll coup: On its second day, Patti Smith will interview Neil Young on stage. That's far more rock power than the annual conference, taking place June 5-7 in Manhattan, usually has in-house.

Publishers have come to see that Smith, a legendary rocker since the release of her 1975 album "Horses," and longtime poet, is a literary asset. Her recent memoir "Just Kids," in which she wrote of her early years in New York with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe, was a runaway bestseller. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the L.A. Times Book Prize, one of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 books of 2010, and won the National Book Award for nonfiction.

Maybe some of that literary fortune will rub off on Young, who enters the publishing marketplace with his own memoir "Waging Heavy Peace" in October. The book, publisher Blue Rider Press promises, chronicles his youth in Canada, playing in Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and his years with the band Crazy Horse. It will include, among other things, stories of "the LSD-laden boulevards of 1966 Los Angeles."

The conversation at Book Expo between Smith and Young promises to be a highlight of the conference, for 2012 and over its long history. The two will have a lot to talk about, and who knows, maybe they'll even hum a few bars.

But no matter what creative sparks fly between them, nothing can compare to the performance above. Despite the low-quality video, the performance of Neil Young's song "Helpless" is stunning. When Patti Smith comes in, around the 4:29 mark, she is a majestic, commanding force, and her additional lyrics give the song a whole new dimension. Keep watching: she and Neil Young share a mic for the chorus at about 6:40.

The performance was in 1996, at one of Young's annual Bridge School Benefits. Pearl Jam was also on the bill that year. They won't, as far as I know, be joining them at BEA.

RELATED:

2011 LA Times Festival of Books: Patti Smith and Dave Eggers

Patti Smith wins National Book Award

2011: Apple to exhibit at Book Expo

-- Carolyn Kellogg

 

Mike Wallace and Aldous Huxley [video]

Mike Wallace died Saturday at the age of 93. He'd been a contributor to the television show "60 Minutes" for 42 years, and before that he had a long journalism career. That included "The Mike Wallace Interview," a show that broadcast on ABC "discussing the problems of survival and freedom in America," the announcer intones over the credits as Wallace, in "Mad Men" style, puffs a cigarette in the background.

In 1958, he interviewed Aldous Huxley, the author of "Brave New World." When Wallace asks Huxley what the greatest threats to our freedom are, Huxley responds gently but incisively. First, he points to overpopulation, its pressure on resources and, with scarcity, the greater need for state control.

Then he outlines the second force: "As technology becomes more and more complicated, it becomes necessary to have more and more elaborate organizations, more hierarchical organizations. And incidentally, the advance of technology has been accompanied by an advance in the science of organization. It's now possible to make organizations on a larger scale than was ever possible before. So you have more and more people living their lives out as subordinates in these hierarchical systems in  control by bureaucracies, either the bureaucracies of big business or the bureaucracies of big government."

Wallace presses him on the devices he says diminish our freedoms. "We musn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology," Huxley says. Huxley was living, at the time, in Southern California, and would die just five years later. He must have sounded a little alarmist at the time, but now, well, it seems like a very reasonable 28 minutes.

RELATED:

Anne Sexton: 'My husband hates the way I read poems'

Is this the best book trailer of the year or not?

Life everlasting on YouTube

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Book designer Chip Kidd at TED [video]

Book designer Chip Kidd spoke at the main 2012 TED conference; his speech was posted online Wednesday. "Ladies and gentlemen, I have devoted the past 25 years to designing books," he says when he gets to the substance of his talk. Above him a slide reads, "Yes, BOOKS. You know, the bound volumes with ink on paper. You cannot turn them off with a switch. Tell your kids."

He brings that irreverence -- and interactivity -- to his talk, which highlights what a print book can do.

RELATED:

Designing '1Q84': Chip Kidd on Haruki Murakami's latest

TED 2009: Elizabeth Gilbert on creativity and genius

A different kind of cut-up storytelling: Beatrice Coron [Video]

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Ann Patchett talks local bookstores with Stephen Colbert [Video]

"Ooh! Independent bookstores! I should buy one of those on Amazon." That was Stephen Colbert on Monday night. After a couple of days off, he apparently wanted to talk about bookstores. As you do.

He did so with novelist Ann Patchett, whose 2011 novel "State of Wonder" was a Los Angeles Times bestseller. Patchett is co-owner of Nashville's Parnassus Books, which opened after the city's two major bookstores closed. "I see this as a gift to the city," Patchett told the Associated Press last year. "I see this as a charitable contribution ... not as an investment, not as a smart business move, but really as somebody who loves Nashville and somebody who doesn't want to live in a city without a bookstore."

On "The Colbert Report," she makes a case for a bookstore as a place to find community -- book clubs, readings for kids, even Jack Black and Al Gore. Colbert seemed convinced -- maybe he'll head to Parnassus when his next book comes out.

RELATED:

Steve Martin on "The Colbert Report"

Ann Patchett's retro Nashville bookstore

Ann Patchett's lessons on writing, from Byliner

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Seen it? The Elements of Style rap [video]

The classic grammar manual the Elements of Style gets the rap treatment in the video above. It may be the only time you see authors Strunk and White posing with a 40-ounce bottle of Old English 500.

The book was first written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918; he used it with Cornell students. Years later, New Yorker writer E.B. White (the same E.B. White who wrote "Stuart Little" and "Charlotte's Web") came across it and wrote about it in the magazine. The piece caught publisher McMillan's interest and they contracted with White to revise it for a new edition, published in 1959.

That's because Strunk had died in 1946. So he and White never wandered the library stacks, sharing malt liquor.

The rap's lyrics, after the jump.

Monday reads: Virginia Woolf punk'd the Royal Navy and more

In 1910, Virginia Woolf and her friends pretended to be "Abyssinian princes" and their British guides, convincing the Royal Navy to give them access to the battleship Dreadnought, flagship of the home fleet. They were given a tour and feted with a band and salute from the crew. "Even Woolf's cousin, one of the naval officers on board the ship, failed to recognise the author," writes the Guardian. Understandable: She was in face paint and a false beard.

In Sunday's paper, David L. Ulin reviewed Nathan Englander's new collection of stories, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank," finding it "accomplished." It's illustrated, in part, in the video above. The magazine Electric Literature took a single sentence from the story "The Reader" and had it animated by Drew Christie (video above).

Art and story intersect on a new blog announced Monday, the Chimerist. It's by Maud Newton and Salon's Laura Miller, two Internet-veteran readers obsessed with both books and their iPads. They'll be exploring the best of storytelling on the iPad, and are inviting screenshots and app codes. Send 'em if you've got 'em.

You won't need a download code to get "Why American Newspapers Gave Away the Future." The longform article examines the issue of newspapers offering online content for free; it's by Richard Tofel, managing editor of ProPublica, and will be available Feb. 8-15 for free for the iPad (irony included). Afterward, it will be available from most e-tailers for $1.99. It's from Now & Then Reader, the latest content creator to jump in the longform sandbox with the likes of the Atavist, Byliner and Grantland.

Like Barnes & Noble, the bookstore chain Books-A-Million will not stock titles from Amazon Publishing, it has told Publishers Weekly. After the demise of Borders, Books-A-Million became the nation's second-largest brick-and-mortar bookstore chain, with more than 200 stores in 31 states and the District of Columbia.

RELATED:

Mary Otis, animated [video]

America's most literate cities and more book news

Amazon Publishing books won't be found at Barnes & Noble

-- Carolyn Kellogg