Mary Otis, animated [video]

Los Angeles author Mary Otis is the latest to get the animation treatment from the innovative magazine Electric Literature. Electric Literature is released simultaneously in print and e-book formats, and frequently leverages multimedia forms to explore different aspects of storytelling.

For its animations, Electric Literature asks a contributor to select a single sentence from the piece that appears in the magazine. That sentence is handed over to an animator, who gives it an artistic rendering that may or may not have much to do with the story itself. It's one creative work spawning a separate, adjacent creative work in a different form.

Otis' short story "Where We Missed Was Everywhere" appears in Electric Literature No. 6. The sentence, as you'll see above, is "We shake as hard as we can, dancing without moving, as if the lady is coming and she'll save us for free."

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

A bookstore says: Don't be an iPhone-y [video]

Late in 2011, an online-only retailer launched a holiday promotion offering discounts to people who shopped in brick-and-mortar stores and used their smartphones to scan prices and instead buy online. This ruffled the feathers of some who found the practice predatory, particularly fans and supporters of independent bookstores. It didn't matter that the promotion itself didn't apply to books -- the fear that it might, someday, caused a hubbub. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo even penned an op-ed against it in the N.Y. Times.

Apparently, booksellers at Harvard Bookstore (not connected to the university) were compelled to pick up a movie camera and make the sitcom-y vignette above.

While the online retailer's promotion brought attention to the issue, it's not at all new. For quite some time, bookstore staffers have been observing customers coming in, browsing the shelves, asking for help, then departing to buy the book they sought online. Now they can even do it while standing right there in the store. It's almost always cheaper online.

The staffer, his expertise, the building's rent and lights, the cost of getting the books into the store itself -- that's why the bookstore price is higher than the online price. Imagine if you went to an online retailer's site and typed in "big head, cover" -- would you ever find the book these customers want?

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James Franco's Hart Crane biopic, 'The Broken Tower' [video]

One of the first literary properties that James Franco gobbled up was the biography of poet Hart Crane, "The Broken Tower" by Paul Mariani. I admit, I didn't know much about Crane -- I hadn't encountered his poetry, and he'd died long before I was born -- but I was curious.

That curiosity was sparked by the profile of Crane in Evan Hughes' enjoyable history of writers and place, "Literary Brooklyn," published last year. I learned that Crane was a handsome, ambitious and (mostly) gay poet in the 1920s whose involvement with the wife of the editor of "The New Republic" was something of a literary scandal. In 1932, while the two were returning to the U.S. from Mexico on a steamship, Crane threw himself over the rail and was lost at sea.

"The Broken Tower" is the title of both the biography and one of Crane's last poems. It is also the name of Franco's film, which Hughes watched for Slate. He writes:

So step right up for New York in the Jazz Age, epic benders, artistic friendships with boldface names, love affairs, back-alley fights, and, finally, a suicide at sea. OK, so Crane also wrote really difficult poetry — leave that out of the pitch meeting.

Sadly, however, the movie that Franco made from this material is incredibly dull....

Franco has remained faithful to the facts of Crane’s life (the few exceptions are very minor), but most viewers will have a hard time figuring out what those facts are — and why they have any significance. The protagonist jumps from place to place, often without explanation, and the skips forward in time often occur without badly needed allusions to what has happened in the intervening period.

The film is episodic, in black and white, and loosely structured around Crane's poem. When it screened at the L.A. Film Festival in June, Franco said his goal was to film in a way that would “reflect the style of Crane’s writing,” and to let the audience “feel the texture” of his words.

"The Broken Tower" was released this week on demand and for digital download.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Don't miss: A bookstore comes alive [video]

If you had been walking through the streets of Toronto late at night not too long ago, you might have seen sleepy volunteers in a brightly-lighted bookstore. That was Type Books, and the crowd and a camera had been brought there by Sean Ohlenkamp, an artist, creative director and animator. He and his wife Lisa, who helped create the video, appreciate print books.

In the video, the books in the bookstore come alive: they move, turn themselves upside-down, rearrange by color, circulate, stack, even read. And dance.

Could a Kindle, Nook or iPad be so charming?

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

To kick off the publication of Ben Marcus' "The Flame Alphabet" this month, Knopf has posted a video for it that's worth watching.

To be honest, I'm not sure whether it's good. But since it's a book trailer that's trying to do something more interesting that simply be an advertisement, I consider it three minutes well spent.

Created by artist Erin Cosgrove, the animation uses text from the book in voiceover and illustrates, in action, some of what happens in the book. Partway through it uses a news broadcast to explain the novel's premise, which is one of my least favorite narrative devices. In this case, however, it's forgivable because the setup is pretty odd: In "The Flame Alphabet," children's language has become toxic to adults.

Even with the explanation, the trailer is a bit puzzling. It left me confused enough to go elsewhere to learn more about Marcus' book.

Maybe that's the task of a book trailer -- to fill the viewer with curiosity about the book. Although I'm not sure whether confusion and curiosity are quite the same thing.

Marcus will be in Los Angeles in February, at the Hammer on Feb. 1 and Skylight Books on Feb. 2. Maybe things will become clear then.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

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.

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

Chip Kidd, one of publishing's best-known designers, created the cover for one of the most anticipated novels of the fall, Haruki Murakami's "1Q84." For those eager to know about the plot, Kidd explains it a little bit -- its setup, at least -- because it directly informed the cover design. A woman moves in two similar but not the same realities; a second moon appears in the sky.

Murakami's book, which publishes next week, posed a physical challenge: it's enormous, 944 pages. In England, it was published in two separate volumes; in Japan, three. Knopf has put it all in one -- with, we hope, very strong binding.

Kidd has been with Knopf for 25 years, but at the beginning of his career he was a prolific freelancer. Rizzoli has published a survey of his design, "Chip Kidd: Book One: Work 1986-2006."

While providing some insights into the novel and its design, Kidd leaves one mystery. There is something about the page numbers that ... well, he doesn't say. And I'm not telling.

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Stephen King's 'Bag of Bones' is coming to TV [video]

Stephen King's "Bag of Bones" is coming to the screen -- the television screen, that is. The adaptation of King's novel will air on A&E for two nights in December.

Pierce Brosnan stars as Mike Noonan, a novelist suffering writer's block after the death of his wife. He retreats to a lake house, where things get creepy. In the video above, Annabeth Gish, getting made up as a rotting corpse, explains she's spent two hours in the chair.

"Bag of Bones" was published in 1998; 13 years seems like an awfully long time to wait for a screen adaptation. But at least it's happening -- earlier this year, the much-anticipated adaptation of King's "The Dark Tower" series was killed by a new studio administration. The A-list project, adapted by screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, would have starred Javier Bardem and been directed by Ron Howard.

Want to see a little more of "Bag of Bones"? Deadline Hollywood has a spooky new trailer.

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David Foster Wallace, via the Decemberists [video]

 

David Foster Wallace's 1,104-page novel "Infinite Jest" may not yet be ready for translation to the big screen, but a portion of it inspired the new video for "Calamity Song" by the Decemberists from "The King is Dead."

Lead singer Colin Meloy had just finished reading "Infinite Jest" when he wrote the song, he tells NPR.

The book didn't so much inspire the song itself, but Wallace's irreverent and brilliant humor definitely wound its way into the thing. And I had this funny idea that a good video for the song would be a re-creation of the Enfield Tennis Academy's round of Eschaton — basically, a global thermonuclear crisis re-created on a tennis court — that's played about a third of the way into the book. Thankfully, after having a good many people balk at the idea, I found a kindred spirit in Michael Schur, a man with an even greater enthusiasm for Wallace's work than my own. With much adoration and respect to this seminal, genius book, this is what we've come up with. I can only hope DFW would be proud.

Wallace, as far as I know, never recorded an indie rock album, but Meloy has ventured into the publishing world. He's the author of the 33 1/3 book "Let it Be," a memoir about listening to the Replacements, and is the author of the upcoming middle-grade book "Wildwood," illustrated by his wife, said to be the first in a trilogy.

Maybe the next Decemberists video will include something else inspired by David Foster Wallace's writing: processing tax forms ("The Pale King") or taking a cruise ("A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again").

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The trouble with reading 'House of Holes' [Video]

The very literary Nicholson Baker's new novel "House of Holes" is subtitled "A book of raunch." It's full of graphic language and sex scenes -- book critic David L. Ulin called it "a bona fide filth-fest," noting that it was hard to quote from it in his review. That's demonstrated in this entirely-safe-for-work video, in which staff from Baker's publisher, Simon & Schuster, read an excerpt.

Baker is also the author of the highly acclaimed novels "The Mezzanine" and "The Anthologist." His 2001 book "Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper" won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. So far, according to Simon & Schuster's website, it looks like he won't be going on book tour to read from "House of Holes." You can see why.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

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-- Carolyn Kellogg