Miller-McCune: Get Your Nose Out of That Book.
“At long last, scientists have developed a ‘sniff test’ to measure the telltale aroma of old books and irreplaceable historical documents. You know the smell — that ‘combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness,’ as the authors put it. Inhale and smell the Industrial Revolution!” A Kindle or iPad will never attractively pong ... unfortunately.
Creative Overflow: The Philosophy of Typography by Steven Acres.
Illinois.EDU: 20th Century American Bestsellers.
By decade. Via Metafilter.
Aspen no. 5+6, item 3: Three Essays.
I take you directly to The Aesthetics of Silence / Susan Sontag. Via wood s lot.
IndieReader: Authors’ Secret Delight.
“But book authors themselves tell a different story about their trade. They readily reveal the special pleasure beyond the pain of creation — the secret delight they experience during the process of doing revisions. This is still work, but satisfying, sometimes even thrilling.”
Miller-McCune: Harlequin Titles Reveal Audience’s Desires.
A crock, IMHO. One must make huge assumptions to have this work.
New Yorker: Head Case.
Bah. Give this a scan, and then go read ”We’ve Had A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy And The World’s Getting Worse.” Prepare to have your head blown off. If it’s the first time you’ve read Hillman, you can thank me later.
The Independent.UK: Here’s to the small print: The past and future of compact literature.
“One of the strange by-products of the digital revolution that we are going through at the moment is that no one seems to know how big anything should be.” I know! Just right, of course.
Vreeland history, online.
Hey, Google Books has digitized The Vreeland Book by Nicholas Garretson Vreeland. He’s something of a blowhard, making up stuff left and right, but the genealogies in the back are modestly accurate. If you’re a Vreeland and know a late 1800’s ancestor, you can trace your genealogy here. The ‘50’s Louis Beach Vreeland ‘update’ is in Google Books, but obviously still under copyright. Only a bare sliver is available. LBV corrects much of the NGV braggadocio.
[I was the individual who woke the Vreeland genealogical community up to the existence of the LBV book in 2000. Folks were blowing NGV smoke over MJV’s nonexistent son Claas. Never been thanked for my effort, nor have I ever been credited with clearing away the inaccuracies. I know a great deal of other tidbits about the Vreeland past, but I’ll be damned if I’ll ever trust amateur genealogians again.]
Project Gutenberg …
NewWest.Net: Why Cody, Wyoming is the New Literary Capital of America.
“Wyoming has the smallest population of any U.S. state, but it maintains a literary output that rivals most other places.”
NY Times: Are There Secular Reasons?
“It is not, Smith tells us, that secular reason can’t do the job (of identifying ultimate meanings and values) we need religion to do; it’s worse; secular reason can’t do its own self-assigned job — of describing the world in ways that allow us to move forward in our projects — without importing, but not acknowledging, the very perspectives it pushes away in disdain.” Time you recommend that you read ”The Closing of the Western Mind” again.
Guardian.UK: Thousands of authors opt out of Google book settlement.
“Authors who did not wish their books to be part of Google’s revised settlement needed to opt out before 28 January, in advance of last week’s ruling from Judge Denny Chin over whether to allow Google to go ahead with its divisive plans to digitise millions of books. The judge ended up delaying his ruling, after receiving more than 500 written submissions, but court documents related to the case show that more than 6,500 authors, publishers and literary agents have opted out of the settlement.” It’s all about control, and who has it.
Chicago Tribune: The challenge of hard-to-finish books.
Why do we feel like we fail, when we give up on a book? Silly. I know from experience that certain books resonate at different ages. A book I read in high school and *hated*, could be a new favorite at 30 ... to be reviled again at 50. One needs the wisdom of patience with books.
The Hollywood Reporter: PBS reinventing Sherlock Holmes.
“‘Sherlock’ will present a fast-paced 21st century spin on the classic detective stories set in modern-day London and stars Benedict Cumberbatch (’Atonement,’) Holmes and Martin Freeman (’The Office UK,’ ‘Hot Fuzz’ as Dr. Watson.” If anyone other than BBC and PBS were doing it, I’d despair. As it is, I’ll be curious.
NY Times: Macmillan’s DynamicBooks Lets Professors Rewrite E-Textbooks.
This will be a problem in the future, IMHO. Lose physical books, how do you warranty that a text is ‘original’? All code can be hacked.
LA Times: Commercialism sold Huck Finn character down the river, Twain scholar says.
“Go back and look at the text. It’s as relevant today as it was in 1884 when the book was published.” Huckleberry Finn was first published in the USA on this date, 125 years ago.
Times Online: Gérard Depardieu sparks racism row over role as mixed-race Dumas.
Seems a terrible shame to have not used a mixed-race actor. Race was an issue for Dumas in his lifetime. He had some remarkable comebacks for the ignorant: “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.” Side note: Look into one of his last mistresses, Adah Menken. More.
Related: Guardian.UK, Film reignites literary debate over Alexandre Dumas’ ghostwriter. So Dumas ran a ghostwriting factory. This process is still being used today in many fields. For instance, some modern ‘star’ architects hire young industrial designers, pay them garbage, take their best works, do a couple of tweaks to make it ‘original’, sell them and make tidy sums. We all buy the crap everyday at the big box stores. If you don’t like the process, you must at least be consistent in your condemnation. Good as Maquet might have been, the books would never have flown without Dumas’ particular flair.
Esquire: Roger Ebert, The Essential Man.
“I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear, he writes in a journal entry titled ‘Go Gently into That Good Night.’ I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state.”
NY Times: Do E-Readers Cause Eye Strain?
”Doctors and researchers note that in most instances, paper can offer more visual sophistication than a screen. But certain types of paper, including inexpensive newsprint and the paper in softcover books, can actually provide an inferior reading experience for our eyes than the electronic alternatives.” As we get older, more light is always better for reading. The bigger factor is: physical books aren’t crippled by DRM.
NY Times: Baldwin’s Book Barn in Pennsylvania Is to Be Sold.
This must be down in the Brandywine area of PA. Gorgeous landscape. One of my top-ten favorite places in America.
Sequence Magazine: Exclusive: Exploring the World of Percy Jackson and The Olympians.
Might be spoilers here. Pretty predictable, but still looks like fun.
Flickr: Vintage dinosaur books.
I had a few of these. Via Metafilter.
Le Monde diplomatique: Wishing it don’t make it so.
“Ehrenreich has no time for claims (which have gained widespread credence) that a positive attitude can affect the outcome of cancer: ‘I felt very vindicated when studies came out in the last two years really throwing this out, showing there didn’t seem to be any effect of attitude on cancer survival rates’. She likewise believes that claims for other health benefits of going through life as an irrepressible sunbeam, such as greater life expectancy, are highly dubious and often based on methodologically flawed studies.” Psychologist Martin Seligman, if I remember correctly, in the book Learned Optimism, found an optimistic viewpoint allowed you to get through life more happily, but that pessimists were more aligned with reality. There’s a lot of impetus behind positive psychology - yet it’s often mistranslated into inaction. People seem to think even Buddha sat around smiling all day - yet his “eightfold path” talks of effort and action. Ehrenreich’s got a hard slog if she wants to get folks to stop painting flowers on their navels and put in a little effort into making their lives better.
Washington Post: Book review: ‘The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior’ by Paul Strathern.
“Strathern, a novelist and author of other popular histories, does for Machiavelli and da Vinci what he does for Borgia: creates a flesh-and-blood portrait for each that defies historical stereotype. Using his novelist’s eye and a historian’s sweep, Strathern conveys the emotional subtleties that animated their lives. It’s no small feat that he makes you care deeply for these complex figures who lived half a millennium ago.” This goes on my Wish List.
