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Is blogging hurting literary criticism and therefore literature?
There is not much space any longer for old-fashioned, argued criticism. I think critics are just being submerged, and to a degree newspaper editors and other people in the media are saying they don’t need to give that space to books pages because it’s all online.
F. Scott Fitzgerald and his editor discuss the first draft of The Great Gatsby.
One is that among a set of characters marvelously palpable and vital—I would know Tom Buchanan if I met him on the street and would avoid him—Gatsby is somewhat vague. The reader’s eyes can never quite focus upon him, his outlines are dim. Now everything about Gatsby is more or less a mystery i.e. more or less vague, and this may be somewhat of an artistic intention, but I think it is mistaken.
Defending Fifty Shades of Grey on the grounds that it’s just porn.
“But it’s badly written!”, I hear you cry. Um, hello? It’s PORN. Whilst there is some pornography out there written with a deft stylistic hand – from Anais Nin and Henry Miller to Anne Rice’s luscious, filthy Sleeping Beauty series – that’s hardly the point, even if you don’t buy Oglaf author Trudy Cooper’s adage that “erotica just means porn that works for me.” A dildo painted with an intricate lubricant-insoluble motif may look delightful, but a plain old rubber shocker gets the job done just as well. This book is porn. It is for wanking to.
A cheat’s guide to Ulysses.
Chapter 15
READER
(horrorstruck) Blimey, this looks like heavy going.STEPHEN’S DEAD MOTHER
No kidding! There’s over 100 pages of this stuff, all written in the style of a play script. But all you need to know is that Bloom follows Stephen to a brothel where they have lots of freaky hallucinations.
Jennifer Egan is writing a spy-thriller featuring a character from her Pulitzer-winning novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad. The short story “Black Box” will first appear as a series of tweets from @nyerfiction (starting tonight), then in its entirety in the New Yorker‘s upcoming science fiction issue.
Remember how I linked to the Kindle Single follow-up to Friday Night Lights? Yeah, it’s not on Amazon anymore Why? Because most people doing business on the internet are kind of dumb. (It should be back on Amazon sometime tomorrow.)
Mr. Bissinger wrote the e-book for Byliner.com, one of a number of fledgling companies trying to make a go of it by publishing long-form works — not as long as a traditional book, but longer than most magazine articles — for digital readers. Mr. Bissinger thought the e-book, priced at $2.99, would be a great way to pay tribute to the relationship while also helping Mr. Miles, by giving him a third of the proceeds.
But the plan hit a pothole after Apple, which had been looking to get into shorter works in a digital format, decided to include e-books in a promotion that it does with Starbucks. It selected Mr. Bissinger’s digital sequel as a Pick of the Week, giving customers a code they could redeem online for the book. (Mr. Bissinger said he still received a royalty of $1.50 for each copy sold.)
Amazon interpreted the promotion as a price drop and lowered its price for “After Friday Night Lights” to exactly zero. Byliner withdrew the book from Amazon’s shelves, saying it did so to “protect our authors’ interest.”
Yertle the Turtle: too political for kids. (I’m going to start a blog called “Really Insanely Stupid Shit People Say and Do.”)
The quote in question – “I know up on top you are seeing great sights, but down here on the bottom, we too should have rights” – comes from Yertle the Turtle, the tale of a turtle who climbs on the backs of other turtles to get a better view.
In the midst of a labour dispute between the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation and the province, the quote was deemed unsuitable.
Steve Soboroff’s typewriter collection gives me a book-nerd boner.
There’s the 1932 Royal Model P that Ernest Hemingway used to write letters during his time in Cuba. There’s a tiny Imperial Good Companion Model T on which John Lennon banged out song lyrics years before the Beatles invaded America.
Canada Reads has announced its first ever selection of non-fiction books. It includes Alan Thicke arguing on behalf of Ken Dryden’s The Game. (Has there ever been anything more Canadian then Alan Thicke telling people to read Ken Dryden’s book about hockey on CBC?)
I enter the dining room. There’s a gold cornucopia on the table. I think, what a wonderful seasonal flourish. But I know it’s dangerous. My ten relatives rush towards it, grabbing at the appetizers that are sprinkled around like land mines. I want to do the same, but I waver… early-eating is a deadly mistake.
An oral history of oral histories. That ear-splitting noise you just heard is your mind. Being blown.
MARCUS: I wound up with severe tendinitis from transcribing. I went to sleep with Ace bandages wrapped around my wrists.
E-readers technically get heavier with each book you add.
Using Einstein’s E=mc² formula, which states that energy and mass are directly related, Prof Kubiatowicz calculated that filling a 4GB Kindle to its storage limit would increase its weight by a billionth of a billionth of a gram, or 0.000000000000000001g.
Dave Winer on Steve Jobs:
I also don’t support the author’s belief that Jobs’ life was strictly a net-plus for the human race. I think he stopped a lot of good things from happening. I once heard, second-hand, Jobs say of a developer who wanted to create software for the NeXT box that “We can’t let just anyone develop for this machine.” Even if Jobs didn’t say those exact words, it’s very consistent with the way he expressed himself.
Also, Aaron Sorkin might write the Jobs biopic because of course Aaron Sorkin will write the Jobs biopic.
And Derek Powazek floats the idea that Steve Jobs is our generation’s John Lennon. Which is more than a little reaching and kind of silly.
John Lennon’s gift was opening our minds with music. But Steve Jobs’ was about connecting our minds to technology and each other. He spearheaded the creation and mainstream adoption of tools that, just a few years ago, would have been considered science fiction. Both men were leaders. And, of course, both men did not achieve these things alone. But they both became emblems of their epochs.
Fictional bands in literature quiz. I got the two for the books I actually read and managed to guess one other. [via]
It’s a dense work of analysis, lacking the propulsion we associate with the narrative histories of Antony Beevor or John Keegan, so even when immersed in the book — after a purchase-to-start-it lag of several months — I was unable to concentrate on it for more than an hour at a time. As a result it was lugged around to many places, in various bags, on planes and trains. In the process the corners became curled and the spine wrinkled. Spreading in direct proportion to the amount of the book’s contents that were being loaded into my brain, those creases became the external embodiment of the furrow-browed effort that reading it required. After a while, as these grooves deepened, the book refused to close completely when I laid it down. I love this.
An interview with Maury Sendak (who wrote a new book!!!).
Children can distort, and play with figures and ideas, with a fluidity that strains us — which we grow out of.
Not sure how long this will last, but the Kindle versions of all of Kurt Vonnegut’s books are now on sale for $3.99 each.
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