The Los Angeles Times notes that a group of folks organized a boycott of the film version of Michael Chabon‘s first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. The film premiered Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival. [TEV]
Month: January 2008
“Elmer Gantry,” the Opera
The New York Times has an excellent story (with audio) on the difficulties of staging and financing an opera version of Sinclair Lewis‘ novel:
“We wanted to show how evangelism moves from frontier to city by taking on the techniques of American business,” [librettist] Mr. [Herschel] Garfein explained dryly. He might also have said they were showing how ambition enables and then pollutes faith.
Kindle Redux
I don’t mean to pick on Stephen King, who’s written a handful of excellent novels as well as a sincere and useful guide for aspiring writers. But he writes an eh column for Entertainment Weekly, and his latest one, on Amazon’s Kindle, is emblematic of its problems. Yet again, there’s the ladies-and-gentlemen-I’m-just-a-caveman pleas when confronted with anything invented after 1991 (the device has “one of those annoying teeny-tiny keyboards most suited to the fingers of Keebler elves”); the false coziness with the reader (“your Uncle Stevie will now eludicate”); the biting commentary that isn’t particularly biting (“You cannot, for instance, listen to one of the later Patricia Cornwell novels without realizing how little feel she has for language”–everybody agrees that Cornwell’s off the rails now). Idolator says pretty much the same thing, but their take is a lot funnier than mine.
The biggest problem with his Kindle column is that he’s excited about it because…well, why? Because he’s impressed that a device designed to let you read a book lets you read a book, apparently; also, you can make the font size larger. That’s it.
I’ve scribbled some of my concerns with the Kindle shortly after its debut. I don’t own the device and have never used it, but my biggest worry has nothing to do with the usability of the physical product. My question: Do I own a book I’ve purchased for the Kindle, and for how long? I was reminded of this issue last week, when the hard drive of my computer died and I had to install a new one. I backed up all of my crucial docs, and plenty of non-crucial ones, but I didn’t have everything. I didn’t back up a lot of my MP3 files, for instance, and among the missing was my copy of In Rainbows. Do I still own this record, which I paid money for when Radiohead released it online? I’m not sure. The URL I was given when I purchased the album doesn’t appear to be working. And, as I pointed out in the blog post, technology has a way of rendering itself irrelevant in a few years–I had a rough time opening three-year-old e-mails, and my e-mails from 10 years ago are pretty much lost forever. I have no guarantee that the digital books I purchase through Amazon will last any longer.
So, no, Uncle Stevie, my concern isn’t that I’ll miss books because I like them as furniture. My concern is that, in time, it’ll turn out that I don’t own what I think I did.
On Wharton’s “Twilight Sleep”
Writing in the New Atlantis, Cheryl Miller makes a case for Edith Wharton‘s much-maligned 1927 novel, Twilight Sleep, which was one of the inspirations for Brave New World:
Wharton’s critics may have accused her of being detached from modern American life, but she remained a keen, if disapproving, observer of modes and fashions. She stashed away stacks of news clippings and advertisements heralding the newest detergent or latest scientific “breakthrough.” Twilight Sleep is stuffed with these researches, with Pauline sampling every 1920s fad: psychoanalysis, New Age spiritualism, self-help books, consumer science, drugs, plastic surgery, and, of course, eugenics. “America really seemed to have an immediate answer for everything,” Pauline thinks, “from the treatment of the mentally deficient to the elucidation of the profoundest religious mysteries.”
Smith Review in Sun-Times
Trailer Park
I’ve groused before about book trailers, I know, but the one for Stephen King‘s new novel, Duma Key, leads me to ask the same questions. There are two of them floating around on YouTube, and together they haven’t added up to 1,500 views in a week, 1,400 of which come from the one on CBS’s YouTube channel. If these things can’t attract the attention of an author who sells millions, what good does it do for the garden-variety novelist?
Perhaps the subject matters more than the notoriety of the author. Naomi Klein clearly captured the attention of the netroots in the video for her most recent book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which has been viewed more than 450,000 times in four months. A top-shelf director helps too. This one was directed by Alfonso Cuaron, who also made the unsettling dystopian tale Children of Men:
George Scialabba has an assessment of Edmund Wilson, whose essays and criticism are now available in a two–volume Library of America set, up at the Nation’s Web site. Wilson’s statement about the critic’s responsibilities is at once simple as a pile of rocks and intimidating as Everest:
A reviewer should be more or less familiar, or be ready to familiarize himself, with the past work of every important writer he deals with and be able to write about an author’s new book in the light of his general development and intention. He should also be able to see the author in relation to the national literature as a whole and the national literature in relation to other literatures.
Michael Chabon–who grew up in Columbia, Md., not far from where I live now–gives Washington Post op-ed columnist Richard Cohen both barrels in the Huffington Post for suggesting that Barack Obama is somehow in league with Louis Farrakhan because the presidential candidate hasn’t publicly condemned the minister of his church for giving an award to the anti-semitic Nation of Islam leader:
Barack Obama knows that black people and Jews need to come together to fight for all the important issues and values they share. He knows that we need to start talking from the center of our communities, and stop whispering or shouting at the extremes. As a Jew whose heritage comprises the bitter memory of racist demagoguery insufficiently denounced by the powerful, would I welcome a stout denunciation of Farrakhan by Obama? Sure I would. But that same great heritage also boasts of the most staunch and fearless struggle against the forces that seek to divide us, to set us against one another, and it’s that side of my heritage that I choose to honor.
My critic’s pick on Thomas McGuane for this week’s City Paper is here. McGuane is reading at the Folger Shakespeare Library this Friday as part of PEN/Faulkner’s excellent reading series. Should be fun, wintry mix or no.
The London Guardian reports that a series of books designed to look like packs of cigarettes–spawned by the UK smoking ban–is creating some consternation among cigarette-makers. The squabble focuses on the Ernest Hemingway offering:
[N]ow the publishers are having to inhale deeply themselves as British American Tobacco (BAT) claims that one of the packs, containing Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Undefeated, resembles its own Lucky Strike pack. Claiming that such an association could seriously damage the health of the brand, BAT is trying to have the works pulped.
You can get a better glimpse a the books in the series here.
markathitakis.com 