Readerville

Literature's Main Event

By Karen Templer

The book world is a largely eventless place, isn't it? Think about it: It takes J.T. Leroy-style shenanigans to get the book world all abuzz. For a book to make mainstream, headline news, it has to have some celebrity scandal attached. (Think O.J. Simpson or Mrs. Seinfeld.) The only thing that gets lived in anticipation of, in any broad sense, is midnight release parties for boy-wizard books. That is, unless you count the five minutes, every few months, when Oprah announces her latest pick. And you must count that — it's what amounts to a literary event in today's culture. In the US, we marvel at the notion (if we're even aware of it) that, in the UK, bookies make odds on literary awards. Can you imagine anyone betting real cash money on the National Book Award outcome? ... continue reading

Escape to Vroman's

By Shelley Silva

When I heard that Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, California, had been named Bookseller of the Year by Publishers Weekly, I felt a little sad. I realized that the bookstore had fallen off my radar a long time ago. I no longer stop in when I return to Southern California, as I did for many years. I began to wonder why we'd parted ways.

In recent years, the store has gone all fancy-schmancy, trying to keep up with the rest of Old Town Pasadena, no doubt. (A place that used to be merely old.) You know the type: wooden shelves, plush carpeting, coffee bar. Every title you can think of; a plethora of genera giving way, somehow, to the merely generic.

The Vroman's I fell in love with in the 1970s wasn't pretty. It was post-war utilitarian, all clean lines and right angles, like a geometry proof. It had thick plate glass windows that looked out onto Colorado Boulevard, glary in the afternoon light. There wasn't any wainscoting. The floor was linoleum. ... continue reading

Real Authors Just Inches from Your Face

By Douglas Cruickshank

Everywhere you turn, with each passing day, (as long as you don't turn away from your computer screen) there are more and more video canapés stuffed with writers and waiting to be nibbled on. Last month Authors@Google was featured here; now, thanks to Readerville contributor Susan Ito (if you haven't read her wonderful The Lost Story, stop reading this and go read that posthaste), we learn of one more website where procrastinating writers, interested readers, garden variety goof-offs and anyone else capable of clicking a mouse can wile away the minutes in the virtual company of authors. It's called BookVideos.tv.

It's a marketing tool for publishers, featuring short videos of authors talking about their books. You won't be surprised to hear that some are better than others — the videos, the authors and the books. There are a number of self-help volumes featured on the site, which I can do without; I'm not into helping myself. But there are also such treats as three minutes with the irrepressible and prolific Mary Roach talking about her new book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. Among the gems she imparts: seems there is a third place on the human body where erectile tissue is found. We know the two that get all the press. You'll have to watch the video to learn what the third is, but here's a hint: Achoo!

Another writer made for video is Alison Larkin, who talks about her new novel, The English American. Larkin, who was adopted, says of her young sons: "It's the most amazing thing to be living with genetic relatives who look like you." Also on the subject of relatives, Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle, tells of coming across a street person who she then recognizes as her mother, and then we hear from her mother. In other videos, John Carter Cash discusses growing up with his parents, Johnny and June (he's written a book about his mother), and Bliss Broyard, author of One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life — A Story of Race and Family Secrets, tells of discovering that her dad was part black.

Most of the videos are two to five minutes long.

A Magazine Named RALPH

By Douglas Cruickshank

RALPH (The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities), the great and cantankerous online literary magazine, has been around since 1994. RALPH's precursor was The Fessenden Review ("The Noisiest Book Review in the Known World"), an equally cranky print magazine that I was involved with from 1985 to 1990. I've been feathering my own nest since then, so I've had little to do with RALPH other than enjoying it for fourteen years. Primarily a book review, RALPH also features essays, poetry and an eclectic selection of excerpts.

A one-page history that describes the intertwining lives of The Fessenden Review and RALPH, explains the Web site's upchuckable acronym: "We are especially taken with this nickname — a fine, tacky phrase out of the '50s. To ralph means, in medical terminology, to toss one's cookies. If we were to say that the magazine should have its readers doing just that, it might be self-serving, if not inaccurate. But we like the hint of vulgarity being brought to the otherwise sententious world of publishing, letters, poetry, literature, literary arts and artistic reviews."

At its best, which it often is, RALPH is brilliant, trenchant, very funny and occasionally heartbreaking. The criticism often cuts with samurai precision and merciless insight, and it can be both infuriating and enlightening, sometimes simultaneously. At the moment, the site is featuring a sampler drawn from its first years: "All-Time Hits from the Early Days ... 21 funny, interesting or groundbreaking reviews, essays, poems and letters to remind our readers (and ourselves) of the original ways of our infant magazine." There couldn't be a better way to start getting acquainted with RALPH.

Talk about it: Literary Periodicals

—Douglas Cruickshank is about to read Carlos Amantea's essay In Praise of the One-Holer in RALPH

Not Another Literary Scandal

Weekend Special | From the Forum
By Tramp Louie

Joshua Ferris won, and was then almost immediately stripped of, the 2008 PEN/Hemingway Award after revelations that broke only minutes later that the novel was actually a memoir.

In Then We Came to the End, a critically acclaimed novel published last year, Ferris wrote about the eccentic and often paranoid life of designers and copywriters in a failing ad agency, brilliantly conveying the collective fear, pettiness, stupidity and yet also the compassion of office drones as anxiety rises to a fever pitch in the American dot-com workplace.

The problem is that all of it is true. ... continue reading

BibliOdyssey's Curator on the Copyright Conundrum

Over at BibliOdyssey, the visually extravagant blog that was celebrated here in TRJ late last month, there's suddenly a lot of text — written by the site's curator, Paul. Fortunately, it's a quite interesting (to those of us interested in such things) disquisition on the nuts and bolts of the copyright issues he deals with when posting material to the site, and how those same issues were dealt with when putting together the recently published book, BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images from the Internet.

As Paul points out in his article, Permission Unpossible I (it's publishing in two installments), most of the images he posts are old enough that copyright is not a concern. As for those that are still under copyright, he believes, "however misguided or contestable in an ethical or legal sense, the majority of entries appearing on this weblog operate on the assumption that by being thorough about identifying and linking to the source material, I am satisfying all, or close to all, concerns of the artist, digital image host, book and copyright owner or their agent(s).... And if there is one overriding truth or ethos that has been born out by the production of the BibliOdyssey book, it's that if you are careful and consistent with naming and linking to the source material online, then libraries, galleries and other repositories will, more often than not, respond favourably when you come knocking on their doors seeking permission to use their images out in the real world. In sport, it’s otherwise known as fair play."

You may agree or disagree with Paul's approach and assumptions. In any case, it's a conundrum that has popped up repeatedly — and will continue to pop up — as the digital and print worlds intersect and cross-pollinate. His detailed assessment of the situation, and the admittedly unusual issues he and the book's publisher had to consider, is worth a look.

Wipe That Smile off Your Face

By Douglas Cruickshank

Stop Smiling makes me smile. It also made me pick it up the first time I saw it. When I spotted its tagline — "The magazine for high-minded lowlifes" — it was true love at the newsstand. Next it became one of the few periodicals I subscribe to. Today, we're married.

Stop Smiling is a thick, perfect-bound, handsomely produced print magazine with a lively website. It's published eight times a year and the site is refreshed regularly with online-only articles, such as book reviews, a media blog and various worthwhile ephemera. The magazine's preoccupations are art and culture — music, movies, publishing. But it's not what Stop Smiling does, it's how well it does it that makes it an exceptional publication. It always features numerous interviews, but calling them interviews is misleading. Reading them is like sitting in on a smart, spirited conversation in which you get far more involved than you think you will. I might believe, say, that I'm not going to read an interview with Jay Z, who, frankly, I'm not that interested in, but I not only read it with fascination, I go back and reread it a day or two later.

Each issue is carefully focused and yet it has just enough quirkiness to make it feel handcrafted and to keep the reader off balance. The current number (34), for example, is a celebration and examination of jazz, including interviews with Ornette Coleman and Ron Carter (of course he played with Miles, but who knew he also recorded with A Tribe Called Quest — once they promised him there would be no swearing?), an article on Tommy Dorsey, and another on Louis Armstrong in Los Angeles, a fine, short rumination on Sun Ra and Moondog ("Costuming the Super Anti-Hero"), and then suddenly — hey, where did this come from? — a conversation with actor Seymour Cassel and producer Al Ruban, talking about the righteous, ragged, early days making low budget movies in the streets of New York with John Cassavetes — the hardest, softest, rawest, most challenging independent American filmmaker of the 20th century.

Stop Smiling's lush blend of content is invariably rich and surprising. What more could one ask for in a marriage ... or a magazine?

Talk about it: The Magazine Stand

—Douglas Cruickshank is the features editor of The Readerville Journal. He agrees with Patricia Barber who, in the current issue of Stop Smiling writes, "Nina Simone is the voice of America: proud, revolutionary, muscular, ecstatic, fun-loving, inventive, lost, angry, and found."

An Entitled Conversation

By Tramp Louie

Have you noticed how many fiction titles are complete sentences lately?

No, I can't say that I have.

Subject, verb and predicate. And on top of that, the titles often seem to be having a dialogue. That is to say, a conversation, amongst themselves. Telling a story, so to speak, with a narrative arc and a central consciousness, in which the titles may not even be cognizant or willing interlocutors.

Sounds eerie.

It is.

You're going to have to give me some examples.

I been in sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots.

That's a real book?

Susan Straight.

Good grief.

Lolly Winston.

Wait a minute. That's not a complete sentence. ... continue reading

BibliOdyssey

BibliOdyssey, one of the crown jewels of the blogosphere, is an extraordinary showcase of old, beautifully printed books, illustrations, advertisements, maps, illuminated manuscripts and a wealth of other "visual materia obscura," as its curator, Paul, describes his splendid museum. Paul (aka PK), who lives in Sydney, Australia, doesn't use his last name. "I’m not a mysterious persona by intent," he explains. "To me, the content of this site (wonderful things made by other people) far outweighs my own pedestrian talents." Whatever. His talents hardly seem pedestrian. The erudite, informative commentary on the exquisite images he finds and posts, sometimes daily, is engaging, accessible, and clearly the result of hours of research. The images themselves are never less than stunning; his taste is impeccable. ... continue reading

The Irreversible Decline

By Sue Russell

Illustration by D.G. Strong

Eddie Socket is a marginally employed Oberlin graduate with no medical coverage living on the lower East Side of Manhattan with his college friend, Polly Plugg, with whom he shares everything but sex (well, with one experimental exception). He's chosen his own surname as a match for Polly's, so there they are, a hole and something to fill it, complete unto themselves. Eddie is gay and uncloseted but not especially lucky in love. His favorite activities are going to the movies and taking long baths. His favorite question is "Who am I quoting?" He's a human repository of movie scenes, show-tune lyrics (especially Larry Hart), Shakespearean soliloquies and the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. In short, he is a character after my own heart. Last month, while grieving for the loss of another friend with similar attributes, I was drawn again to Eddie. Call me a self-destructive fool, but I've always felt that the only way out is through. ... continue reading

Authors@Google

There's apparently no end to the things that Google has its hot little paws on — literature, for example. Authors@Google is an ongoing series in which prominent writers visit Google and talk about their book or books and answer questions posed by the Googlistas. The event is videotaped and the videos are posted on YouTube along with every other video on planet earth. You can wander through all the Google author presentations by going to YouTube and searching Authors@Google. To get you started, not to say addicted, try Junot Díaz or Aimee Bender or Elizabeth Gilbert or Greil Marcus or even Christopher Hitchens. If you can't stand the thought of leaving Readerville, even for a moment, stay right here and watch Tess Uriza Holthe talk about her first novel, When the Elephants Dance, on the little screen above.

Talk about it: All About Authors

Colors' White Album

By Douglas Cruickshank

Colors, the splendidly eccentric magazine published by Benetton, has done it again. The theme of issue No. 72, now on newsstands with its all-white, Braille-embossed front cover, is blindness (that's the back cover at left). The interior text is not printed in Braille, but a CD with the entire magazine read aloud comes with each copy. The audio can also be downloaded from the Colors website.

Every issue of Colors has a single theme. Past numbers have focused on Lust, Slums, the Amazon, Food, Slavery, Toys, Monoculture, Status, Venice, Time, Water, Frontiers and, well, you get the idea. The odd but commendable thing is that it's taken a clothing company to publish a passionate photojournalism magazine that is unfailingly compelling and usually takes up subjects that mainstream newsmagazines tiptoe around in balanced, clinical fashion if they address them at all. But I repeat myself. Six years ago I wrote a similar rant when Colors devoted an entire issue to Madness.

This time, as with the Madness issue, the stories rely heavily on the words of the individuals featured in the photographs. Here's Hein Wagner, age 35: "I remember running into an empty fireplace in the school and a little sighted girl climbed in with me. 'Why are you in here?' she asked. 'Because I can hide,' I told her, kind of explaining that it allowed me to feel safe. She ran off, and that's when I realized I was different.... It's an uncomfortable memory."

And here's Simone Camargo da Silva, 31: "It's not love at first sight. It's more like love at first conversation.... The images I have of beauty, my references, come from the time I could see. I like colors and I remember them. I remember nature as something beautiful. It is the same with beauty in people."

This issue of Colors is a particularly beautiful one. Find it and have a look. Or a listen.

Talk about it: The Magazine Stand

—Douglas Cruickshank is the features editor of The Readerville Journal. His other favorite magazine these days is Stop Smiling.

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