Readerville

Like Mother, Like Daughter

Flashback | Readerville.com, March 2001
The Odd Shelf #5
By Sarah Rocklin

A group of mothers of fourth grade girls in my neighborhood got together and created a Mother-Daughter Book Club; three years later, it's still going strong. My daughter and I dropped out for a time, but found we missed the camaraderie and rejoined. Choosing a book that the girls and moms will enjoy but that is meaty or problematic enough to stimulate interesting discussion can be tricky, but we're getting better at it. Here are some of the hits. ... continue reading

Mark Twain: Reinvented in Paradise

By Douglas Cruickshank

"You go away for a long time and return a different person — you never come all the way back."
—Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari

In 1866, Mark Twain spent four months in Hawaii, then known as the Sandwich Islands, on assignment for California's Sacramento Union newspaper. He'd agreed to write a series of letters during the trip, which was his first outside the United States. The Union published 25 of them.

Twain had not yet written a book in 1866, but just four months before his trip to the islands he'd placed himself in the national consciousness with the appearance of Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog in New York's Saturday Press, The piece was reprinted widely in U.S. newspapers. ... continue reading

Evolution by Jean-Baptiste De Panafieu, Patrick Gries

Most Coveted Covers #159
By Douglas Cruickshank

For those of us who love bones and big beautiful books, the cover of Evolution is the doorway to heaven. Indeed, it wouldn't be a bad design for just such a portal. Most of the cover — nearly a foot square and tar black — is filled with a vivid photograph of a rattlesnake skeleton arranged in a spiral resembling the DNA helix. Stretched above the rattler, letter spaced, in type as slender and white as snake ribs, are the nine letters of the title. When has a single word and a bunch of bones said so much, with such visual forcefulness and social coding, and in such elegant fashion? It was the serpent, after all, that coaxed Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Trust me, you will not be able to resist the temptation to open this massive volume and slowly, pleasurably make your way through its hundreds of pages of extraordinary black and white photographs, by Patrick Gries, of the skeletons of mandrills, anteaters, horned lizards, swans, sea lions, aardvarks, Homo sapiens, red-necked wallabies, sloths and dozens and dozens more of this planet's creatures. The crisply written text, by Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu, moves from "Architecture," "The Birth of Species" and "Seduction and Selection" to "Evolutionary Tinkering," "The Power of the Environment" and, finally, "Evolution and Time." Darwin would have approved.

Talk about it: Judging a Book

—Douglas Cruickshank is the features editor of The Readerville Journal. Last night he started reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

Ode to a Lesser-Known Genius: Barbara Pym

Illustration by DG Strong

By James Klise

I was looking for the book equivalent of comfort food when I began reading Barbara Pym's novels six years ago. "Which threat color is it today?" I wondered each morning, packing my briefcase with bottled water, flashlight, and cell phone. I live in Chicago, and there was a long period when the news reports kept hinting we might face a terrifying subway emergency en route to work. Pym's books helped me to forget about all that. Her London novels remind us that, even in a big city, life is broken down into neighborhoods, parishes, business offices; each of these, seen through Pym's honest and benevolent gaze, takes on the spirit of a country village, where effortless humor can be found at church bazaars and dull anthropology lectures, and a thrill can be felt upon the arrival of an attractive new neighbor.

For aspiring writers, Pym's body of work offers an added gift: The story of her roller-coaster ride career gives us all hope for some success (just one published book, who would begrudge a person this?) before death summons us from our laptops. ... continue reading

Changing the Mind of War

Flashback | The Readerville Journal, March/April 2003
By Kate Maloy

Illustration by Katherine Streeter

"The great god Mars tries to blind us when we enter his realm, and when we leave he gives us a generous cup of the waters of Lethe to drink."
—J. Glenn Gray

Will Durant once calculated that in all of recorded history only twenty-nine years have been free of any war in any country. Human beings are in the habit of war. It is so deeply a part of our collective consciousness — our worldview — that we cannot envision a world without it. We say war is inevitable; we say it arises from an ungovernable, unchangeable part of human nature.

Categorically transforming a worldview, especially one that is held by virtually all the world, takes either a cataclysm or a very long time. We can afford neither, for a cataclysm could spell the end of the world, and, given the possibility that the war we face right now could run quickly out of control, the time we have left in which to avert a cataclysm may be very short.

It is easy, but dangerous, to feel powerless and afraid in times like these, when war comes without serious Congressional debate, amid the erosion of civil rights, in defiance of international law and despite the opposition of millions. The best antidote to powerlessness is action, and often the way to ignite action, odd as it may sound, is first to read about the very thing we fear. Reading can calm and clear the mind. ... continue reading

Ex Libris: Diane Wood Middlebrook

Flashback | The Readerville Journal, May/June 2003

Photos by Lori Eanes

Editor's note: We're looking forward to new installments of Ex Libris, one of the best-loved features of the print magazine, wherein we quiz individuals (famous or otherwise) about their personal libraries. To kick it off, though, we're republishing this installment from the May/June '03 issue as a way of paying tribute to its subject, biographer Diane Middlebrook, a truly lovely, talented person who died last month at age 68. I had the pleasure of attending a couple of Diane's famous parties at her San Francisco apartment in recent years, and also conducted this interview, but I only got to see her study — what she referred to as "the room that counts" — in the pages of the magazine. Here's another look.
—Karen Templer

Approximately how many books do you currently own?
I don't even have a clue. I have a roomful of books that are constantly around me and then books distributed throughout the house in every room. Including the kitchen. I've never thought to count them.

What kind of shelves do you have?
I have Euro-design shelves that were made for my study (the room that counts). The outlying shelves are all also custom-built into various nooks. We did a remodel in 1991 and built all the shelves in ... and then of course found that there weren't enough. ... continue reading

Selections | from "The Paris Review Interviews"

Excerpts from Q&As with Dorothy Parker, Saul Bellow, Eudora Welty, Kurt Vonnegut, Elizabeth Bishop, John Gardner, Rebecca West, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Joan Didion — just a few of the magnificent interviews republished as The Paris Review Interviews Volume 1 and Volume 2

DOROTHY PARKER // 1956 (volume 1)

INTERVIEWER
And during this time you were writing poems?

PARKER
My verses. I cannot say poems. Like everybody was then, I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers. My verses are no damn good. Let's face it, honey, my verse is terribly dated — as anything once fashionable is dreadful now. I gave it up, knowing it wasn't getting any better, but nobody seemed to notice my magnificent gesture.

. . .

SAUL BELLOW // 1966 (volume 1)

INTERVIEWER
You have on occasion divided recent American fiction into what you call the "cleans" and the "dirties." The former, I gather, tend to be conservative and easily optimistic, the latter the eternal naysayers, rebels, iconoclasts. Do you feel this is still pretty much the picture of American fiction today? ... continue reading

Channeling Doug

Illustration by DG Strong

By Sue Russell

Yesterday I completed my review of the two Ethel Merman biographies and sent it to the editor in California. Actually, the review had written itself. This assignment was one I didn't choose. It had belonged to my friend Doug, who died suddenly in December of a cerebral hemorrhage. Because Doug and I were working on a writing project together, his family gave me access to his laptop. I found the Merman assignment in his email correspondence with the editor, and I didn't want anyone to think he was missing a deadline. ... continue reading

A Practical Guide to Racism by C.H. Dalton

Most Coveted Covers #158
By Karen Templer

I honestly don't know what the hell this is. It's a piece of satire so thoroughly disguised as a mid-century handbook that it's a little like Sacha Baron Cohen doing interviews in full Borat mode. And in fact, Borat's not a bad comparison, as far as I can tell. The book is A Practical Guide to Racism — "for both racists and non-racists alike" — by "C.H. Dalton." ("This book collects the 2005 Lothrop Stoddard lectures, delivered by C.H. Dalton near Harvard University.") It's not at all rare to see a new book designed to look like an old one. It is, however, rarely so well done. This one contains back-of-the-book ads for such books as "Hill on Pain" and "Gottheil on Syphilis," a list of other handbooks by the author, an extensive index, seven appendices — including a 64-page Glossary of Racial Epithets ("with suggestions for additional slurs") — and copious illustrations by named illustrators (Andy Friedman, Nicholas Gurewitch et al.) ... but no cover design credit. Whether they actually had the bookbinder set the type for the foil stamp — which would be a stroke of true genius — or whether the designer chose not to be named, I cannot know. But in case any of this has made you nervous, let me note that the book ends with this quote from Kurt Vonnegut: "There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too."

Talk about it: Judging a Book

—Karen Templer is Readerville's founder and Editor in Chief. She is finally reading a long-time Forum favorite, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

Men, Hyenas and Pieter Hugo

[click for additional photos]

By Douglas Cruickshank

I look at a lot of photographs, both in galleries and books, but I was stopped in my tracks when I recently came across an image from The Hyena & Other Men, an astonishing and disquieting new book by the gifted South African photographer Pieter Hugo. At a time when we're constantly bombarded by images, many of them cliché and derivative, Hugo's pictures astonish because one simply has not seen anything like them before. They're disturbing because they conjure a place and a time (today, it turns out) in which the line between the wild and the tame is thin at best, and the tension, beauty and sorrow of that precarious relationship is frightening and poignant.

Because I couldn't get Hugo's photo out of my mind and I wanted to see and know more, I went to his website where he tells how he came to travel with the Nigerian performers, their hyenas, baboons and snakes. Then I gave him a call in South Africa, and as the Cape Town wind howled in the background, Hugo answered my questions about his pictures and the men called "Gadawan Kura." ... continue reading

Ode to a Lesser-Known Genius: Thomas McMahon

Flashback | The Readerville Journal, July/August 2003
By Douglas Cruickshank

Photo courtesy of Carol McMahon

I don't know how I forgot the sex, but I did.

I first entered the church of Thomas McMahon about fifteen years ago when I came across his novel Loving Little Egypt (1987), a cabinet of wonders made of words in which a nearly blind phone phreak named Mourly Vold monkey-wrenches the national telephone system in the 1920s. Once I read it, I was like a Jehovah's Witness with "The Watchtower." I stood on street corners and knocked on doors imploring people to read McMahon's genius book. I sat down at strangers' tables in cafes and recited paragraphs. I stormed into friends' living rooms and pressed copies on them (some became converts themselves and took to the boulevards, proselytizing lost souls who in turn became devotees, and so on). And I rampaged through used bookstores looking for McMahon's other two works of fiction: the gawkily titled Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry: A Novel (1971) and McKay's Bees (1979). ... continue reading

Indulging My Inner Bad Girl

The Odd Shelf #63
By Peggy Hailey

Although I try to project a normal, wholesome image to the world, one glance at my bookshelves tells a different story. Behind closed doors, I'm a very bad girl indeed, addicted to the worst kinds of cheap thrills — the more lurid or depraved, the better. Curious? Step a little closer, so I can whisper in your ear: ... continue reading

Ronald Harwood: Adapting "The Diving Bell ..."

By Douglas Cruickshank

Photo by Dave Allocca / StarPix / Courtesy of Miramax Film Corp.

"This would make a terrific movie" is not the first thing one says after reading The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. It's not even the second or third thing. But the story has been made into an acclaimed film, directed by Julian Schnabel, and that's due in large part to Ronald Harwood, who adapted the late Jean-Dominique Bauby's extraordinary memoir for the screen. The book describes Bauby's life after a stroke that left him completely paralyzed, except for the ability to blink his left eye. He died in 1997, two days after his book was published. Last week, Schnabel's film won two Golden Globe Awards (Best Foreign Language Film and Best Director), and Harwood was a Golden Globe nominee for Best Screenplay.

Harwood has been writing scripts (and books and plays) for a long time, and it shows — in a good way. In addition to the Diving Bell screenplay, he adapted Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, won the Oscar for "The Pianist," wrote the script for Polanski's "Oliver Twist," and, over the years, has crafted the screenplays for "Being Julia," "Cry, the Beloved Country," "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," "The Browning Version" and "The Dresser," the last of which was based on his experience in that profession. Most recently, he's written the scripts for "Australia," the new Baz Luhrmann film starring Nicole Kidman, and The Girl in Melanie Klein, based on his own novel and now in development with Peter Yates as director. His new book, Ronald Harwood's Adaptations: From Other Works Into Films, came out in December 2007.

One of Harwood's earliest screenwriting projects was "A High Wind in Jamaica" (1965), directed by the late Alexander Mackendrick, whose other pictures include "The Man in the White Suit," "The Ladykillers" and "The Sweet Smell of Success." After Mackendrick, known as Sandy, left directing, he became the dean of the school of film and video at the California Institute of the Arts. Coincidentally, as a film student there 30 years ago, I was Sandy's teaching assistant one year. As Harwood and I began talking, I mentioned that I'd known Mackendrick. ... continue reading

The Alphabet | from "The Diving Bell ..."

Excerpted from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
by Jean-Dominique Bauby

I am fond of my alphabet letters. At night, when it is a little too dark and the only sign of life is the small red spot in the center of the television screen, vowels and consonants dance for me to a Charles Trenet tune: "Dear Venice, sweet Venice, I'll always remember you ..." Hand in hand, the letters cross the room, whirl around the bed, sweep past the window, wriggle across the wall, swoop to the door, and return to begin again. ... continue reading

The Straight-8 Diamond Sutra

By Douglas Cruickshank

It wasn't until I got a close look at a straight-8 Duesenberg (just as it sounds, that designation refers to an engine with eight cylinders straight in a row, rather than the far more common V-8 configuration) that I fully understood how the love affair with the automobile began. First sold in 1921 decades before anyone uttered the phrase "carbon footprint," the long, elegant Duesenberg became the favored vehicle of movie stars, royalty and well-heeled cartoon characters: Daddy Warbucks owned one. They were simply glorious cars — huge, gorgeous, fast, brilliantly engineered and flawless in every detail. I remember standing beside that automobile and trying to imagine what it must have been like for a kid from the 1920s, who'd previously seen only jalopies, tractors and hay wagons, when a gleaming Duesenberg stopped in town. Words like passion, lust and awe came to mind.

What, you're wondering, does this have to do with books or literature? I'm getting there. Today, lavish art books notwithstanding, we revere books for the ideas and emotions they convey, the stories they offer, and the authors' style of writing. The printing and binding of most mass produced books are well done but not artful. But the earliest books were also extraordinary objects — rare, expensive and closely watched over. Many were works of art. The "Luttrell Psalter," for example, is an exquisite illuminated manuscript made by five artists and a single scribe some time in the early 1300s. Another, the "Lindisfarne Gospels," one of the most beautiful, intricately decorated manuscripts ever made, was created by a monk named Eadfrith in the late seventh century. Both are now owned by the British Library. ... continue reading

Whistle Stop by Maritta M. Wolff

Most Coveted Covers #157
By D.G. Strong

As with most books from the 1940s, there's no illustrator credit on the flap of the original printing of Maritta M. Wolff's Whistle Stop. There's a signature I can't quite make out, and it's a damned shame. A perfect integration of illustration and type — this sort of perspective thing can frequently look contrived — it's Exhibit A in the upcoming Supreme Court case of Classic Mid-Century Jacket Design vs. What We Have Now. The novel is largely about stasis, about downtrodden people who never change and who never will, no matter what happens to or around them. The sound of a train whistling and moving through town is a recurring (if maybe obvious) motif, but the unnamed designer, like Wolff herself, knew a powerful symbol when he saw it, obvious or not. The execution is flawless, especially considering that all the title type was hand-drawn back in 1941. I've included the spine in the scan because I love the way the illustration wraps around it. And I'm a little bit amazed at how much is actually crammed onto that spine panel — the title, the author, the publication date, the Random House logo and a fully illustrated rail warning light. It's a lot! And it's perfectly done.

Talk about it: Judging a Book

—D.G. Strong is a regular contributor to Most Coveted Covers and to the Readerville Forum. He is currently working his way through the Maritta Wolff books — in handsome, dust-jacketed first editions only, of course.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

Walking the Great White Way

Illustration by DG Strong

By David Masello

Every day, I walk the block of East 48th Street where E.B. White lived. On the way to my apartment I could take any of several side streets, but this is the one I always choose. Even before I knew the addresses of the two townhouses — 229 and 245 — he had occupied with his family in the 1930s and 1950s, it was enough for me to know that this tree-lined block between Second and Third Avenues was where he once lived and wrote. On my walks there, I often see an elegant elderly woman locking her front door and then closing the iron gate behind her. She lives in a townhouse adjacent to one of White's and I am tempted to ask if she knew him, but it is unwise in New York to approach a stranger leaving her house. Yet, she may be the last neighborly link to him on the block he left more than 40 years ago.

It is not that I think his ghost occupies this block of the Turtle Bay neighborhood or that I'll have a sighting of him through a parlor window holding his pet dachshund, Fred (described in "Bedfellows," a 1956 New Yorker essay, as "always willing to put up with being hoisted in order to gain the happy heights."). I admit, though, that upon buying a newly reissued copy of One Man's Meat, a collection of monthly essays White wrote for Harper's between 1938 and 1942, I took the book from its bag and held it up to the facades of his houses as I passed them, just in case some part of him was there to see that he is still being read and published. It was his habit, as he wrote in a 1957 essay, "Goodbye to Forty-eighth Street," to gaze out his window at the sidewalks where "one out of every ten passers-by is familiar to me ... a cast of characters I depend on. They are the nameless actors who have a daily walk-on part in my play—the greatest of dramas." Had I been around then, I would have appeared often enough outside his window to assume a starring role.

Nor do I think (though I can't stop hoping) I will be miraculously blessed, Annunciation-like, with an infusion of his talent simply for breathing the air of East 48th Street and observing some of the same sights he saw here. ... continue reading

The NEW Social Life of the Mind

A letter from the editor

Photo © Susan Ragan

In the nearly 8 years since Readerville first appeared online, it has taken many forms. It was first (and has always been foremost) a community — a place where readers and writers and publishing insiders could meet each day to find out what's interesting in the world of books and, even more important, to talk about it. (Hence our long-standing tagline, The social life of the mind.) In 2001 we added a full-fledged online bookstore and also began publishing some small but terrific bits of content, including The Odd Shelf and Most Coveted Covers. In 2002 the bookstore went away and a print magazine was launched, called The Readerville Journal. Though much loved and still lamented, The Readerville Journal ceased publication in 2003, but the website survived and continues to be the wacky and thought-provoking community it started out as. But I still hear regularly from people who miss TRJ and want it back. And I feel the same way.

So here it is. With the illustrious Doug Cruickshank as our Features Editor, Kat Warren on the new releases beat, and many of our original print contributors on board, we're bringing content back to the Readerville mix. Think of it as TRJ 2.0, if you will — the high-tech version. We'll continue to publish Most Coveted Covers and will revive The Odd Shelf. We'll highlight noteworthy developments from around the web and point you to the most interesting new releases (along with Book of the Moment, naturally, which has been part of the Readerville landscape since day one). But we'll also be bringing you all of things you loved about TRJ, including reprints of some of our favorite pieces: bookshelf voyeurism, author interviews, compelling excerpts and essays. In fact, our first piece is an essay about E.B. White, one of my personal favorite writers, that was originally written for TRJ and never had a chance to see print. It pleases me tremendously to be able to bring it to you now, along with all of the other great stuff Doug has lined up. In the coming weeks, you'll find tributes to Barbara Pym and Thomas McMahon; interviews with photographer Pieter Hugo and Oscar-winning screenwriter Ronald Harwood, who most recently scripted the Julian Schnabel adaptation of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; and lots more.

Of course, the Readerville Forum marches on, now with this new fraternal twin of sorts, and is undergoing a minor makeover of its own. In addition to discussions on everything a booklover could possibly want to talk about, we've got one of the best book groups online and we'll be reviving Readerville Events in the coming months, which you won't want to miss. If you've never dipped a toe into the Forum, I hope you'll give it a try. It is a welcoming, challenging, entertaining and endlessly enlightening environment that has proven deeply addictive to avid readers from around the globe.

I'm extremely excited about these new developments with Readerville and hope you will be, too. Welcome to the new Readerville.

—Karen Templer is the founder and Editor in Chief of Readerville. She spent much of 2007 reading the works of W. Somerset Maugham and highly recommends Cakes and Ale.