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Writer Shows Importance of Documents
Written by Stephanie Ryan
Originally published: 08/04/2008
Footnotes.Bibliographies. Scribbles in the margins. How do we show how we know what we know?
Robert Hauptman's new book, "Documentation: A History and Critique of Attribution, Commentary, Glosses, Marginalia, Notes, bibliographies, Works-Cited Lists, and Citation Indexing andAnalysis," attempts to answer thatquestion, through an examination of the history of the art of documentation and a critique of the major systems thereof.
"I've always been interested in the ways scholars document," said Hauptman, a professor emeritus of St. Cloud State University and the editor of the "Journal of Information Ethics." "There's nothing more important than documenting your sources."
Acknowledging that documentation is an esoteric subject,Hauptman, 67, retired, and a resident of West Wardsboro, said, "One day, I decided that no-one has ever done it, so I decided to do it." The result is a 200-plus page volume, illustrated with numerous examples of footnotes, endnotes, commentary and marginalia, describing how various forms of documentation are used, critiquing the various systems, and even tackling errors and misconduct. And the book takes — and demonstrates — a stand for illustrations as a legitimate subset of documentation in their own right. "We'll see what the critics say," Hauptman said, smiling.
"I also criticize, pretty blatantly, indexing — using citations to assess and evaluate" articles," Hauptman said. He described the process of publishing an article and having that article cited repeatedly in other publications as having what the academic world calls an "impact factor," and said the impact factor is often used in an unfair way. In Spain and in China, raises and bonuses can hang on an article's impact factor. Here, frequently cited writers find themselves rewarded with tenure. "People tend to work toward a high impact factor, instead of a cure."
To finish this article, click here.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Blog-Jacking: The Bennington Banner
Book News, In Brief
Anti-Obama books are selling well...on Amazon.com. Three anti-Obama releases were in the top 20 of Amazon.com's best-seller list on Tuesday, despite little critical attention or mainstream media coverage. Does this mean that the online behemoth has a right wing posse, or are buyers simply seeking an anonymous purchase for fear of being labeled racist?
In WI, The Man commands: Stop giving books to our prisoners! Rainbow Books, a co-op bookstore operating a nonprofit charity, Wisconsin Books for Prisoners Project, has been told to stop sending free books to inmates. State prison officials claim that 'contraband can be sealed inside bindings (and) underlining certain words can be a code,' but really, they're just trying to keep the underclass from getting too uppity.
German papers are announcing the creation of an e-book to rival Amazon's Kindle. Will this giant-slaying software be the key to wiping away those negative, Nazi stereotypes once and for all? (Please tell me I'm not the only one who thinks of Dr. Strangelove when I hear a Kraut shout.) From TheBookseller.com: One of Europe’s biggest telecommunications companies, Deutsche Telekom, is developing a portable e-reader, apparently a competitor for Amazon’s Kindle, reports German magazine Der Spiegel...One of the engineers involved in the project is quoted as saying that the Kindle generally points in the right direction but Deutsche Telekom will end up developing a device with a larger (and possibly bendable) display. It’s also supposed to be easier to operate.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Author Du Jour: Kenneth Anger
Biography
(stolen from Wikipedia, but revised to reflect my personal opinions)
Kenneth Anger is an author, magician and filmmaker. He was born in Santa Monica, California as Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer and attended the Maurice Kossloff Dancing School with Shirley Temple. He began making films around age nine, but his early films are now lost. He gained fame and notoriety from the publication of the French version of Hollywood Babylon in Paris in 1959, a tell-all book of the scandals of Hollywood's rich and famous. A pirated (and incomplete) version was first published in the U.S. in 1965. The official U.S. version was not published until 1974.
His first film to see distribution was Fireworks, filmed in Los Angeles in 1947, which gained the attention of Jean Cocteau, who then invited him to go to Paris. In 1949, Anger directed The Love That Whirls which according to the 1972 book Experimental Cinema contained (faked) nudity, and was thus confiscated by the film lab. While most of his films are short subject (ranging from 3.5 minutes to 30 minutes) mood pieces, in 1955 he made a documentary film of the ruins of Crowley's Thelema Abbey in Cefalù, Sicily, which is now considered a lost film.
He developed a close friendship with Dr. Alfred Kinsey of the Institute for Sex Research. Anger would later recall that Kinsey was his first customer after Kinsey purchased a copy of Fireworks when they first met in 1947. Anger eventually helped Kinsey build his film archive. The Anger Collection includes correspondence between the two men, as well as letters to and from former Institute director John Bancroft. Anger would later speak openly of his participation in Kinsey's research, including being filmed masturbating.
During the late 1960s he associated with The Rolling Stones, as well as Bobby Beausoleil (before he gained notoriety as an associate of the Charles Manson family). Beausoleil, a musician who had played with Arthur Lee, was cast as Lucifer in Anger's proposed film, Lucifer Rising. Beausoleil and Anger had a falling out and Beausoleil left, taking most of the completed film with him (Beausoleil is also rumored to have buried the film's negative in the desert at one of Manson's former hangouts.) British singer Marianne Faithfull later appeared in Anger's re-shot version of the film. Some footage from the earlier version of Lucifer Rising (including Beausoleil) ended up in Anger's Invocation of My Demon Brother.
Kenneth Anger had a widely publicized spat with Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page over the Lucifer Rising soundtrack.Anger claimed Page took three years to deliver the music, and the final product was only 25 minutes of droning and was useless. Anger also accused Page of "having an affair with the White Lady" and being too strung out on drugs to complete the project. Page countered claiming he had fulfilled all his obligations, even going so far as to lend Anger his own film editing equipment to help him finish the project. Page's music was dumped eventually and replaced in 1979 by music written and recorded by Bobby Beausoleil - the only movie soundtrack in history recorded inside a prison.
In the mid-1980s, Anger sold a 16mm print of the incomplete Lucifer Rising, containing the Page soundtrack, to Christopher Dietler, who eventually released the soundtrack taken from film on an album titled Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising Jimmy Page Soundtrack. Anger filed a lawsuit and won an injunction against Dietler who turned over the digitally enhanced master and agreed not to press or sell anymore record albums.
Anger's lifelong interest in the occult brought him into contact with a variety of groups and individuals. He was a lifelong friend of Anton Szandor LaVey, both before and after the founding of the Church of Satan in the 1960s, and lived with LaVey and his family during the 1980s. In more recent years Anger accepted initiation into the Ordo Templi Orientis in a semi-honorary fashion. For 20 years from the early eighties, Anger released no new material. In the new millennium he has since returned to filmmaking.
Anger has been threatening to release a third installment of the Hollywood Babylon series, but says that legal threats (most notably from the Church of Scientology) have prevented it. A crappy, un-Anger, Hollywood Babylon 3 was released earlier this year. Avoid it, lest you be cursed.
Bibliography (English Works)
(Again, stolen from the Wikipedia)
Hollywood Babylon Kenneth Anger (1959)
Hollywood Babylon II Kenneth Anger (1986)
The Devil's Notebook Kenneth Anger and Anton Szandor LaVey (1992)
Satan Speaks! Kenneth Anger and Anton Szandor LaVey (1998)
Suicide in the Entertainment Industry Kenneth Anger and David K. Frasier (2001)
For your viewing pleasure: Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
Monday, August 4, 2008
Book News, In Brief
Last week's winners: Breaking Dawn and Watchmen.
This week's losers? Breaking Dawn's readers, apparently.
The Bookseller of Kabul meets The Jetsons. Afghanistan's most successful bookseller, 54 year old Shah Muhammad Rais, is trading in his book bus for a web site.
Remember that upcoming book from Salman Rushdie's former bodyguard? The one that claims Rusdhie was pompous and had no sense of humor? He still is and he still doesn't.
The hype machine for Olympics 2008 is in full swing. Not only can you watch Tank Girl artist/creator Jamie Hewlett's animated Olympics promo online, but the Guardian UK's done a nice piece dissecting sports fiction, including a list of recommendations.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Breaking Dawn, On Sale Tonight At Midnight!
Attention all you frustrated housewives, Hot Topic shopping teens, and romantically delusional tweens! The Inkwell Bookstore will be selling copies of Breaking Dawn tonight at midnight -- with a 20% discount to boot. But that's not all. We'll also have food, drinks, costume contests, trivia contests, a special screening of the anime Vampire Knight (not yet released in the US!), and a surly staff unaccustomed to working such late hours! Yes, this is either going to be a raging success (the likes of which has not been seen since that last Harry Potter book was released...a year ago!) or a fall-flat-on-our-faces example of misplaced hopes and hubris for the book industry as a whole.
Please, come join us to find out which!
Note: E-book readers will have to wait an extra day for their digital copies of Breaking Dawn. They ain't coming out 'til 12:01 EST on Sunday, August 3. But seriously (heartless insult alert!), few things are less sexy than an e-book, and you wanna-be vampires are all about the sexy, no?
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Recommended Viewing:
Haruki Murakami's On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl
A while back, we posted YouTube clips of a couple of fan-made adaptations of the work of Haruki Murakami. One the folks whose work-in-progress we'd featured, KrispyMike, recently let us know that he'd finished his animated adaption, so we thought we'd post it here for y'all to see. Enjoy.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Book News, In Brief
From masturbation to making fun of the infirmed: The Onion picks the 22 most unflattering moments in autobiographical comics.
In summation: In lieu of any new Pirates of the Caribbean films, frustrated females are turning to pretty-boy vampires.
At least it's more creative than plagiarism: Armed with Noel Coward's diaries and an English dictionary, a New York author turned out some 150 forged letters from one of England's most flamboyant writers.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
The Power Of Teen-Lit -- Explained!
An excerpt from Full Frontal Snogging and Other Stories
Originally written by Alice Wignall for The Guardian UK, 7/29/08
The truth is that you never love books the way you do as a young reader. My generation consumed with fanatical zeal the works of Judy Blume and Paula Danziger and the far less wholesome American series, Sweet Valley High. And contemporary teenagers are just as likely to be found with their heads stuck in a book. Hannah Rutland, project manager at the reading charity Booktrust, says: "Teenage girls do get obsessed with things, including books." Becky Stradwick, head of children's books at Borders UK, agrees. "It's like bands," she says. "There are crazes. They suddenly fall in love with an author and are consumed by a need to have everything they've ever produced."
Canny authors are on to this and a high number of "young adult" books are series. The fourth in the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer, an American who writes about teenage vampires, is out in August and anticipation is running high. As Blume points out, young readers will read their favourite books again and again. And she knows that the connection forged at that age between book and reader will last for years. "They remember where they where, physically and emotionally, when they first read these books. They have a strong attachment to the characters. And now they want to share these books with their kids."
To read the whole article, click here.
There Be Gold In Them Thar Lecture Halls
From the essay More Bang for the Book, written by Rachel Donadio
Originally published in The New York Times on 7/27/8:
In recent years, a growing number of writers, from the best-selling to the less so, have hit the rubber-chicken circuit, speaking at colleges and businesses, chambers of commerce, trade fairs and medical conventions. While a midlist novelist might ask, though not necessarily get, $2,500 per appearance, a superstar presidential historian might command $40,000. And some best-selling authors charge double that.
The venues can range from the upstanding (libraries, churches) to the downright weird. “Once, back in the ’80s, I spoke at a ‘motion upholstery conference’ in North Carolina,” the author Roy Blount Jr. said in an e-mail message. “Motion upholstery,” he explained, means “chairs that tilt back or vibrate or turn into beds.” He learned something at the conference: “Just as fish can’t see anything funny about water, people in the motion upholstery field don’t respond to jokes, however inspired, about motion upholstery.” Blount said speaking fees helped put his children through college. “Then I drifted away from it,” he said. “Now I’m doing it again; the money is a comfort in my golden years.”
Mark Twain went on tour to promote “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and some of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s most famous essays, including “The American Scholar,” originated as lectures in Boston. But these days, publishers have become booking agents. HarperCollins established an in-house speakers bureau in 2005, and Knopf and Penguin have followed suit. (Random House has teamed up with the American Program Bureau, and Simon & Schuster just went into the speakers-bureau business with Greater Talent Network.) Beyond making money, keeping authors visible long after their publication dates and making sure copies of books are on hand, the in-house bureaus also reflect a market reality: with fewer bookstores and less coverage of books in newspapers, publishers are scrambling for new ways to connect books and readers without spending too much of their own money.
To read the entire essay, click here.
Monday, July 28, 2008
DC Confirms: Neil Gaiman to Write Batman
From IO9:
Saving the biggest news of the convention until the last few hours, DC Comics' second DC Nation panel confirmed the rumors that Neil Gaiman is going to be taking on the Dark Knight following Batman RIP...The announcement itself came in the form of a thirty-second video at the end of the panel, which showed a Bat-Signal shining on a coffin while the words "Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader?" appeared on screen. The story - written by Gaiman and drawn by Andy Kubert - will begin in January next year, but no details were given on where it will appear or in what form.
For the complete article, click here.
Book News, In Brief
Randy Pausch, author of The Last Lecture, wasn't exaggerating. It was.
Sometimes a headline expresses more than it intends. Via CBC: Queen "fasciniated" by Negroes.
Salman Rushdie is tight-fisted and arrogant, a junk food junkie, and surprisingly smooth with the ladies, says a Special Branch officer who'd been assigned to protect him.
How to get your non-fiction book published -- a deceptively simple list of tips for people who are reading when they should be writing. Oh, and while you're dreaming your life away, here's 10 tips for selling your book online.
A few more lists:
Jackie Collins' 10 favorite "steamy" novels
Tom Shippey's top 10 books on JRR Tolkien
Vermont celebrities' pick their favorite books
Recent books by Hawaiian authors
Top 10 Christian audiobook downloads
Friday, July 25, 2008
Mo' Book News!
Actress/mythical beauty Pam Grier (Jackie Brown, Coffy) is planning to pen a tell-all memoir, due for release in 2010. This is destined to be awesome, and should be formatted in the 'coffee table' size, if only for the sake of the accompanying photos.
Writer/director Kevin Smith is taking another stab at writing comic books -- and this time he promises to finish! Smith announced his three issue Batman mini-series at Comicon, silencing the naysayers when it was announced that he'd already turned in the scripts for all three books.
After successfully adapting The Dark Tower to comics, Stephen King and Marvel are teaming up again, this time on a previously unpublished work by King, N. Unlike The Dark Tower, though, N is not going to done in the traditional ink and paper format (well, not at first, anyway). It's going to be comics via cell phone.
Book News, In Brief
Everybody's having a Breaking Dawn midnight release party (including us), but no one knows how many people are actually gonna show up. Not even the bookstore where Stephenie Meyer does routine signings.
Here's a cool link care of Rare Book News: The 25 Most Modern Libraries. So what makes a library modern? Among other things: cutting edge architecture; open areas; online resources; and, at the Malmo City Library, "the ability to check out a person for a 45-minute chat in an attempt to promote understanding and break down stereotypes." How chic!
Simon & Schuster has filed lawsuits against rappers Lil Kim and Foxy Brown over books that they were supposed to write, but never did. Simon & Schuster gave Lil Kim $40,000 in 2003 for a novel that was to be finished the following year, while Brown was paid $75,000 in 2005 to pen her autobiography. (Wait, Foxy Brown got paid more than Lil Kim? Simon & Schuster might want to glace at the Billboard charts every now and again.)
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Book News, In Brief
Fans of Salman Rushdie's most recent novel, The Enchantress of Florence, might want to head on over to Star-ecentral.com. They've convinced Rushdie to reveal 'the roots' of the people and places found he describes in the book.
Darwyn Cooke's next comics project has been announced. It's a series of comic book adaptations of Donald Westlake's Parker crime novels. As a big fan of Cooke's work on Catwoman (a fantastic crime comic while Ed Brubaker was writing it), this comes as good news to me.
While Americans are stuffing their mouths with fake fangs in anticipation of August's release of Before Dawn, the rest of the world is catching up on our old bestsellers. Japan has just gotten their copies of Harry Potter and the Disappointing Flashforward Ending, while Iranians are reading Persian translations of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, the books of motivational speaker Anthony Robbins, and the writings of Rhonda Byrne (author of The Secret). It's a small world (full of needy, gullible people) after all.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Notable Comics Links
PopCultureShock provides a 2008 Midterm Report Card (Or, The Best Manga of the First Half of 2008).
More Watchmen film tid-bits: A photo of the 1940's Minutemen, and a Vargas-style painting of Carla Gugino as the Silk Spectre.
Buy the single issues or wait for the trade? And what about those comics where you can't wait for the trade, but know you're going to end up buying it when it comes out anyway? ComicsComics argues for the floppy, The ADD Blog takes the trade's side. (Shout-outs to Gilbert Hernandez' recently completed Speak of the Devil mini-series, the book that provoked this back-and-forth.)
Comicon 2008 is being this week in San Diego, and for those of us too poor to go, the online updates are a-plenty. Here are just a sampling of links:
Jog
Got Cheeks
Newsarama
Comics Reporter
Drawn & Quarterly
Entertainment Earth Daily
Book News, In Brief
One book club has found a decidedly un-democratic way of choosing their next book: drinking contests.
Best selling 'author'/sex tape star Katie Price admits "I didn't write my books"...at the release party for her third book!
Actor Robert Downey Jr. has returned the advance he was given for his autobiography. With his recent career resurgence, he's hesitant to type the words 'The End.'Bookstores everywhere are gearing up for the release of Breaking Dawn, and The Inkwell is no different. If you're vacationing in Falmouth (or anywhere on Cape Cod, for that matter) Friday, August 1st, stop by our store for the midnight release party that we're having. We'll have food, drink, costume contests, trivia games, and -- most importantly -- plenty of copies of the book.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Book News, In Brief
Everybody knows that reading is a solitary activity. It's just that Amazon knows how to market this fact better than the rest of us. They've come up with yet another way to keep agoraphobic readers indoors and out of our stores: TiVo and Amazon have partnered to provide consumers with the ability to purchase physical products from Amazon.com on their TVs, using their TiVo remote control.
Care to read a candid comics creating tutorial hosted by the master himself? Alan Moore invited website L'Essaim Victorieux Des Mouches D'eau to his Northampton home for an extensive chat about his writing process.
Lists, via The Guardian UK:
The top 10 psychedelic non-fiction
The top 10 books about wine
Blur's Alex James's top 10 books
Dai Smith's top 10 Welsh alternatives to Dylan Thomas
Julia Golding's top 10 characters from children's historical fiction
Rachel Seiffert's top 10 books about troubled families
Wesley Stace's top 10 ventriloquism books
Sally Beauman's top 10 novels with a powerful sense of place
Monday, July 21, 2008
Tank Girl Artist Jamie Hewlett Profiled in da Guardian UK
The intro:
His is the pen behind Eighties comic-strip heroine Tank Girl, virtual band Gorillaz and the opera Monkey - and soon you'll be seeing his animated title sequence for the Olympics on TV. He tells Mark Kermode how a shy boy turned into a great graphic art rebel...
Click here to read the whole shebang.
Click here for their specially prepared In pictures: Jamie Hewlett designs past and present.
Book News, In Brief
Florida man wins Hemingway look-alike contest. Yeah, but did he smell like booze and cat pee?
DC Comics' dumb idea #473548237: They're crappily converting their best comics (Mad Love, Watchmen, etc.) into semi-animated slide shows for viewing on ipods and cellphones. Woo-hoo! They've found yet another way to f**k with the work of their authors and artists!
Publishers Weekly's got the bad news: R.I.P. Lyall Watson and Anatoly I. Pristavkin. I never knew (or heard of) ye, but I'm sure someone misses you...somewhere.
Oh, yeah -- and R.I.P. "deep reading," too. The obituary for this one comes courtesy of the Guardian UK.
