Huffington Post has launched a database that allows you to track campaign donations by zip code, name, employer, occupation, and more. Nick Antosca is tracking what you get when you search on “novelist” and “author” (via). (The comments are mainly focused on who gave how much to whom, but would-be literary stalkers could also use it to swing by the houses of your favorite writers.)
Author: Mark Athitakis
Glass Half-Full
The New York Times‘ Timothy Egan isn’t listening to the doomsayers about the death of reading. Using Steve Jobs‘ dismissal of the Kindle as a launchpad, Egan points out that there are plenty of avid readers out there:
The more compelling statistic [in a 2007 Associated Press survey] was rarely mentioned in news accounts of the A.P. story: the survey found that another 27 percent of Americans had read 15 or more books a year. That report documents a national celebration.
Most companies would kill for a market like that – more than one-fourth of the world’s biggest consumer market buying 15 or more of its items a year. And half the population bought nearly 6 books a year. If only Apple were so lucky. The latest Harry Potter book sold 9 million copies in its first 24 hours – in English. “The DaVinci Code,” a story of ideas even with its wooden characters and absurd plotting, has sold more than 60 million copies.
Egan dismisses the National Endowment for the Arts’ 2004 literacy survey–which tracked an across-the-board decline in literary reading from 1982 to 2002–as “possibly erroneous,” though he doesn’t explain how. (A 2007 follow-up report found similar declines in all reading.) More problematically, he’s conflating literacy rates with market share–if it’s good news that there’s a solid proportion of Americans who read a lot, that doesn’t make an overall decline in reading any more appealing. Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos may indeed have a new world to conquer, but that’s not to say the country doesn’t have a reading problem.
Gushing
USA Today (“tomorrow the world!” as my favorite piece of newsrack graffiti added) notes that Upton Sinclair‘s 1927 novel, Oil!, is enjoying a nice sales boost as a tie-in to the film There Will Be Blood:
There Will Be Blood is a multiple Oscar nominee, and the movie’s success has rubbed off on the 1927 novel that inspired it, Upton Sinclair’s Oil! Since December, Penguin has gone back to press five times for the movie tie-in paperback with 136,000 copies in print. Anthony Arthur, author of the 2006 Sinclair biography Radical Innocent, has mixed feelings about the movie. “The first 60 minutes were pretty good,” he says, “particularly with the way it shows the technology of bringing in the well.” But then the movie diverges from the novel into “a wild revenge drama.” A socialist, Sinclair wanted his fiction, which included The Jungle, his 1906 novel about Chicago’s slaughterhouses, to influence readers politically. “People who read the book are going to be surprised,” Arthur says.
Project Gutenberg has a large stash of Sinclair’s novels available for free–including his most famous book, The Jungle–but Oil! is not among them.
“Divided We Dream”
Charles Taylor has a beautifully turned review in the Nation of Steve Erickson‘s new novel, Zeroville:
But the feeling of being adrift in vast physical spaces touches something familiar in the back of our minds, and I think it’s what makes Erickson a quintessentially American novelist. The scale of his dreamscapes–water and sand swallowing entire cities; a train journey covering an area so immense that there are literally days between stations–are fantastical versions of American vastness. As with the vistas Edward Hopper painted, Erickson creates spaces that are both empty and haunted, spaces that threaten to swallow their inhabitants. For Erickson’s characters, trying to live in these spaces is a way of both declaring their presence and accepting anonymity. And so they’re constantly prey to an anxious spiritual homelessness, caught by the inchoate mix of both promise and doom in America’s wide open spaces.
Well, Teeth, Anyway
Sam Anderson, the excellent book critic at New York magazine, likes Sharp Teeth, a verse novel about werewolves by adman and George Plimpton enthusiast Toby Barlow. At least I think Anderson likes the book. True, he closes his review with a line that’s destined for the cover of the paperback edition: “the book is a howling, hole-digging, bone-snapping, blood-lapping, intestine-gobbling success,” he writes. But his critique also points out a handful of not-minor flaws with the novel, echoing some of the problems I had with it. The verse form doesn’t seem to be doing much useful work besides giving the story a little gravitas without getting into messy matters of characterization, and its propulsive noise comes at the expense of the plot. (I’m a careful reader, I think, but I confess I lost track of who’s doing what for which pack–it’s all a big puppy pile.) And the ending, as Anderson writes, is, er, a howler:
the plots and counterplots converge in a climactic battle for the soul of Los Angeles, and (although I hesitate to call anything in a werewolf novel “implausible”) the book soars to great heights of bonkers nuttiness. By the time the S-70 Blackhawk helicopter touches down in the middle of a “shrieking, killing symphony of noise,” the book feels like it has morphed prematurely into its own screenplay.
On Raymond Smith
Mark Sarvas reports the death of Raymond Smith, husband of Joyce Carol Oates. Oates’ wrote about their relationship often in her diary: here’s the entry for November 24, 1979, taken from her collected diary entries published last year:
Yesterday, the nineteenth anniversary of our engagement. Since we had been seeing each other every day for a month, having meals together, studying together in Ray’s apartment, we came to the conclusion that we might as well get married: which necessitated becoming engaged. It all happened rather quickly, yet not dizzyingly, I had anticipated from the first that we would be married–though perhaps not so quickly–we planned originally for June, when my semester was over and I had my M.A. But it soon came to seem impractical. And so January–January 23–and that was it. (And I went about afterward thinking, and occasionally even saying aloud, how marvelous marriage was–how one couldn’t imagine, beforehand–simply couldn’t imagine. The transition from “I” to “we.” No, one simply can’t imagine…. And I rather doubt that I can imagine the reverse, either.
Red Room–What Is This Thing, Again?
I wrote a few weeks back about the launch of Red Room, a San Francisco-based Web site that intends to be a destination for readers who want to know more about their favorite authors. At the time I voiced some skepticism about the usefulness of the site–why do I need a portal to find an author when I have Google?–but with a new story about the site in the San Jose Mercury News (via), I gave it another look.
The story attempts to make some noise about Barack Obama being a new member on the site, but what’s on his page? His “blog” has one entry, and it’s the transcript of a month-old speech. There’s nothing else there–videos, book links, reviews–that I couldn’t find just as easily elsewhere. Ishmael Reed, the story tells me, with some excitement, has a page at Red Room. His blog? It’s got one entry, three months old, and it’s a quote he gave to a newspaper. The Salman Rushdie page getting the big push on the homepage hasn’t been updated since December. Which author pages have been recently added on the site? At a glance, I can’t tell.
This is silly, and more silliness is encapsulated in this sentence in the story:
“Readers can also join but they do not get pages.”
If this is some new frontier in social networking for book types, it’s flailing. There’s no reason why any self-respecting writer who wants to connect with readers can’t start their own blog or Web site, and while I understand that Red Room has an interest in making it clear who the writers are and who the readers are, I can’t even make pals with other readers. Does T.C. Boyle have fans? You bet he does. Can I connect with them through Boyle’s Red Room page? No, I cannot.
Crossing the Pond
Victoria Best, a lecturer in French literature at Cambridge who runs a lively blog called Tales From the Reading Room, was nice enough to deem me interesting enough to interview about the intersection of journalism and blogging. It’s long, and I’m under no delusion that it’s stuffed with genius insights. But she asked some great questions that touched on a lot of my concerns about where journalism in general, and arts journalism in particular, is going. Please give it a look.
The Southern Thing
The Mobile Press-Register has a profile of publisher MacAdam/Cage, which has used the financial boost it received from Audrey Niffenegger‘s The Time-Traveler’s Wife a few years back to launch a cottage industry supporting Gulf Coast writers. The breadth of the Southern fixation is news to me, though I liked Jack Pendarvis‘ 2007 story collection, Your Body Is Changing, which MacAdam/Cage published. (Before that, I just thought of it as the house that published Stephen Elliott.) From the piece:
“There’s a complete disconnect between literature and corporate culture,” says [publisher David] Poindexter. “Corporations need a short-term payoff. They have to make shareholders happy by increasing profits every quarter. So corporate publishers need books that will make money this quarter.” These books are rarely great works of literature. “Literature takes a long time to develop,” explains Poindexter. “It’s like growing trees instead of corn.” In every way, he has positioned his own company so he can grow those trees. “After all,” he observes, “what props up the New York houses are their backlists of great titles from the past, which were generated by the business model they’ve now discarded.” Poindexter is attempting to put that model back into play.
(Via)
Sunday Miscellany
The Guardian makes an argument for Richard Yates‘ membership in the American canon.
Marcus Sakey‘s second novel, At the City’s Edge, is next on my to-read pile. (I’m probably sublimating some Chicago homesickness in reaching for that before Beautiful Children, but Sakey’s debut was a smart thriller, and I’m curious to see what he’s done the second time around.) The Chicago Tribune has a glowing review; the Toledo Blade has an interview.
More homesickness: Chinua Achebe, living on the campus of Bard College and missing his native Nigeria, discusses Things Fall Apart on its 50th anniversary.
markathitakis.com 