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| "We have an optimistic message at a time of pessimism. As writers, we got tired of the doom and gloom. The future is not something you can acquiesce to, it's something you create." Andy Hunter, co-founder of Electric Literature available on paper, Kindle, e-books, IPhone, audiobook...
"Some publishers say this kind of multimedia hybrid (the Vook) is necessary to lure
modern readers who crave something different. But reading experts question
whether fiddling with the parameters of books ultimately degrades the act of
reading." October, 2009, New York Times
Fall 2009 The Future of the Book
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Dear Newsletter Readers,
Every day, there is another article about the end of the book. It ain't a happy picture, or is it? Once you have faced the fact that the publishing BUSINESS has changed forever, than you can start envisioning the future, and maybe it's awful, interesting or even exciting. But there is no doubt we are in a major transition. LETS HEAR FROM YOU. VENT HERE.
We know you have strong feelings and interesting opinions. For example: are books doomed and how do you like the e-readers? Email us your thoughts and we will post them blog style, next month. To get you thinking, here are some articles (below with links) on the discourse.
Keep writing,
Tish & Patrick
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Wild Things
by Patrick McCord
I found Where The Wild Things Are sui
generis: unlike any movie, I know. I've never
read the book, so I went in with few preconceptions except a grumpy
review from David "Mr. Cheerful" Denby in The New Yorker
and a few hearsays. I was prepared to like it kinda and kinda hate it.
Instead, it was a bit consternating: I didn't know what to think. At
first. But then, after it crept into many dreams last night...
(continued below with spoilers)
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In this Issue
The Future of the Book:
An Open Forum
Reviews:
Wild Things
Crumb's Genesis
Readallday.org
Press
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The Future of the Book: An Open Forum
Can the Kindle really improve on the book? asks Nicholson Baker in The New Yorker.
Is faster better? Tina Brown brags that writers will spend one to three months writing and her new e-publishing venture will spend just one more month bringing it to market. (Books are to be no longer than 150 pages.) Simon & Schuster hopes to "lure modern readers" into reading more with the Vook, which intersperses videos throughout electronic text that can be viewed online or on an iPhone or iPod Touch. Walmart, Target and Amazon are locked in a price war, willing to lose money on their e-book offerings in order to capture market dominance. "Publishers, booksellers, agents and authors, meanwhile fretted that the battle
was taking prices for certain hardcover
titles so low that it could fundamentally damage the industry and the ability
of future authors to write or publish new works," writes Motoko Rich in The New York Times.
And yet many people love the new electronic formats. Amazon claims that Kindle readers buy 3.1 times as many books as they did before owning the device. Read more.
Will this trend continue?
What's going on? Lets hear from you. (And you can respond to the reviews.)
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COMMENT
Walter Mosley. "Reading is one of the few experiences we have outside of relationships in
which our cognitive abilities grow," Mr. Mosley said. "And our cognitive
abilities actually go backwards when we're watching television or doing stuff
on computers."Read more
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COMMENT
 The founders of Electric Literature, a new quarterly literary magazine, seek
nothing less than to revitalize the short story in the age of the short attention span. To do so, they allow readers
to enjoy the magazine any way they like: on paper, Kindle, e-book, iPhone
and, starting next month, as an audiobook. YouTube videos feature
collaborations among their writers and visual artists and musicians. Starting
next month, Rick Moody
will tweet a story over three days...
...
The brains behind Electric Literature are Andy
Hunter, 38, and Scott Lindenbaum, 26, writers who met in 2006 at Brooklyn
College's M.F.A. program in fiction writing. From an office
of roughly 300 square feet in an industrial building between the Dumbo and Fort
Greene neighborhoods, they added an iPhone application in July, a month after
their first issue.
"Everyone is reading short-form text," said Mr. Hunter, the editor in chief.
"Literature has not made that jump." Mr. Lindenbaum, the fiction editor, added,
"The short form could work increasingly well in a hectic age." Read more
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COMMENT
In a joint venture with Perseus Books Group, The Daily Beast is forming a
new imprint, Beast Books, that will focus on publishing timely titles by Daily
Beast writers - first as e-books, and then as paperbacks on a much shorter
schedule than traditional books. On a typical publishing schedule, a writer may take a year or more to
deliver a manuscript, after which the publisher takes another nine months to a
year to put finished books in stores. At Beast Books, writers would be expected
to spend one to three months writing a book, and the publisher would take
another month to produce an e-book edition. In an interview in her office at The Daily Beast, which is owned by Barry Diller's InterActive Corporation,
Ms. Brown said she believed books often missed opportunities to attract readers
because the titles took too long to come to market.
"There is a real window of interest when people want to know something," Ms.
Brown said. "And that window slams shut pretty quickly in the media cycle." Read more |
Catching up with Nina Sankovitch
Readallday.org
New York Times Article
In October of 2008, Nina Sankovitch embarked on an ambitious plan
- to read one book a day for an entire year. She set up a website to track her progress
and to encourage literacy. Well, she is almost done. This halloween she will have read one book a day AND written one book review. Nina is a woman of enormous energy but WOW. More news on this remarkable woman soon.
"I want to share my joy in reading and to encourage
others to find in books the pleasures and knowledge and connections and
inspiration that I have found all my life."
click readallday.org
to read her reviews, book suggestions and her thoughts about the experience.
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We finally got a little press
Polishing your writing: a skill for the 21st century
By:Frank Szivos, Contributing Writer, Westport Minuteman
09/24/2009 (text has been modified to correct inaccuracies.)
Perhaps you don't want to be a professional, but just need
to write better - for work or school. How does that happen? Maybe you're a student who needs to write the dreaded biographical essay as
part of a college application. Once you've written it, the piece sounds more
like a resume than an essay that captures you. Of course, there are plenty of books about improving your writing, cramming the
shelves of stores that you can draw on. You have even taken a class at a local college
or adult education program to ramp up your writing with mixed results. Hold onto your laptop, The Editing Company, based in Westport, has opened its
door to help writers of all levels and desires to improve; and maybe even get
your work published. Patrick McCord, a poet and professor and Tish Fried, a writing coach and
editor, have teamed up to help professional and budding writers achieve their
goals. Beyond their business partnership, McCord and Fried, who met through a
mutual writer friend, are also engaged to be married.
"Writing is the skill of the twenty-first century;
everybody has to write," McCord said. "Our seminars are organized
around the premise that everyone can and should write."
McCord and Fried have consulted to area writers and offered free writing
workshops for more than a year before opening an office at 993 Post Road East. In their initial workshops, they've
found writers of all skill levels and aspirations. The Editing Company differs from the ordinary writing class because it has
transcended the routine rule-bound approach. McCord and Fried don't guarantee
to turn you into a hot-shot Elmore Leonard type novelist, but they can improve
your writing and help you approach your writing goals, and maybe get ahead on
the job.
"We offer no tricks. We deal with writers professionally," McCord
said. "We critique writing and find the strengths. In twenty years of
teaching, I've seen it all. The writing gets better and people have a positive
writing experience." read more Westport Minuteman
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COMMENT
From Nicholson Baker's article in The New Yorker
Everybody was saying
that the new Kindle was terribly important -- that it was an alpenhorn blast of
post-Gutenbergian revalorization .... Jacob Weisberg, the editor-in chief of the Slate Group,
confided that for weeks he'd been doing all his recreational reading on the
Kindle 2, and he claimed that it offered a "fundamentally better experience"
than inked paper did. "Jeff Bezos" -- Amazon's founder and C.E.O.-- "has built a
machine that marks a cultural revolution," Weisberg said. "Printed books, the
most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers
and magazines on the road to obsolescence."
On newspapers: "The Kindle DX doesn't save newspapers; it diminishes and undercuts them -- it kills their joy. It turns them into earnest but dispensable blogs."
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Crumb's Genesis by Patrick McCord
Just a matter of doctrine, repenting at any time---deathbed, last
breath--- is good with any number of sects across a range of religious
beliefs. Monotheistic faiths almost universally give dispensations to
walk-off homers, even if you've played the game with numerous errors,
strike-outs looking, and bonehead base running (if I may labor a fun metaphor);
it's the big finish that is what the game is played to get to.
But I don't think that's what Crumb is up to. I think he's
just a really thoughtful guy: as usual, he has refused interviews, but he
thinks how ideas relate to the world. He even suggested a musical
accompaniment to go with a reading of Eve and the Serpent .
So, I don't see this as an act of repentance,
but imagination. I think Crumb's imagination has grown, fed on what has, at
various ages, delighted him. And as an illustrator/artist, he's in a
lineage of iconoclasts who sought to re-create the icons they clasted: in just
the J/Christian trad, you start with the prophets and their visions of
destruction and creation, their endless deals with God; then there are the
Apostles (who each remade Jesus in his own image), the Gnostics, the early
church revising the Apostles and editing the Bible, the Council of Ghent et al
schisms, Luther, Henry VIII, that nutty collaboration of Ollie Cromwell and J.
Milton, Mark Twain, and that great American visionary, Joe Smith, Jr (and his
pal in polygamy, Brigham Young). I think Crumb compares in an interesting
way with William Blake, who was capable of realistic drafting, but chose a chunkier,
more expressionistic style to represent prophesy, deity, and revelation and
give the whole spiritual enterprise an expressionistic ooomph.
With Crumb, some of his more fascinating panels are the inchoate formings of
the universe---which to me, are almost silly in their attempts to render the
cosmic in a comic, but the silliness is a reductum ad absurdum that is
liberating and makes me think of the some early prophet conjuring with his
notions of creation in a preliterate worldview.
Also, as usual, Crumb's rendering of facial expressions is pretty amazing: it's
the sexy seriousness with which God breathes into Adam, it's the pre-wicked
delight in the way A & E are playing---such sexual savagery in that
"presexual?" stage--- or was there sex in the Garden and it was just
shameless before eating the fruit? Crumb's illustrations have already
raised objections in the soi disant "Christian" press: no
wonder. And that's usually the sign of something quite remarkable.
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Where The Wild Thing Are (continued)
I found it very evocative and quite powerful. While the plot is simple,
it is true to the imagination of a child: a silly picaresque (a bit too subtle
for Denby, the ole formalist crud). But it is gorgeous in the muted
colors of its design, the use of frame for both chaos and order, and Spike
Jonze makes inventive and superb use of live action with discrete
animatronics (it took Spike a year for just the post production).
I strongly recommend it.
The characters are fantastic hybrids that
suggest a Jungian unconscious along with a whole unspoken backstory about
Max---they are so keenly created that their character beings are arguably more
poetry than narrative. For example, Alexander, the scapegoat, turns out
to be, surprisingly, a reverse mirror for the wolf/boy. They make Max
their King, but grudgingly. They all know he is a powerless king (what an
idea for a kid's story), and are merely willing to be ruled until their hungers
(need for order, for love, for control, for judgment) are overwhelmed by other
appetites and they will eat him. And as King, Max rules as Max and has
the chance both to enjoy the pleasure and then to see the utter folly of his
impulses.
One of the things that
really moved me was the melancholia that penetrates the entire film, from
design, to story arc to performances (the mixture of the creatures suit-actors
and their voicings). It was remarkably effective, in part, because in our
postmodern ironic age, we don't have a way of thinking about the humor of
melancholia (sic), associated with black bile, being splenetic, the spirit of
autumn, and a sensation that exceeds and also embraces sadness. When we
positivist Americans (and I mean positivist in both senses: Dale Carnegie
and materialist) think of sadness or gloom or preoccupation-with-decay, we see
that part of the emotional world as treatable pathology: depression, needing
medication or therapy, but we fail to even consider that such a feeling, such a
mixture of the sublime with woe, might be an essential pivot in the emotional
spectrum.
In our
films, we may love satire, physical comedy, sex stories, and ye olde standby,
heroism ad nauseum; we may respect tragedy every autumn when the serious films
are released; we may embrace our antiheroes and their antiheroics, but we just
have no place for the filmic contemplation that reflects on the transitory
nature of life, of happiness, of childhood, and of love. Yet, if this
film had a theme, it might have been: Those we love are imperfect and
inevitably hurt us, and no matter what, we will lose them.
That insight is at the heart of melancholy
and after seeing this film in close order with Jane Campion's most excellent Bright
Star, I went back to Keats, the poet of melancholy. A quick trip,
worth taking. I confess that as a young man, I sneered at "On
Melancholy" and "To a Nightingale" but now, I reconsidered:
She
dwells with Beauty-Beauty that must die;
And
Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding
adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning
to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay,
in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd
Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though
seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can
burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His
soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And
be among her cloudy trophies hung.
and
it really knifes into that
feeling that is simultaneously uncomfortable and delicious, a celebration of
that elusive melancholy. The English language and even the very pantheon
of emotions just doesn't get any edgier than: "turning to poison
where the bee-mouth sips" and the "strenuous tongue" that
"can burst Joy's grape against palate fine."
But if he were alive
today, young Johnny's parents would be feeding Keats selective serotonin
reuptake inhibitors that would obliterate the actions of his strenuous
tongue. And after partaking of the tiny odyssey in Where the
Wild Things Are, I'm not so sure that a gram is better than a damn.
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Please don't forget to VENT! |
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