Lit Fic Took Him, SF Wants Him Back: A Tribute To Jonathan Lethem's Science Fiction Roots

This weekend, let's remember Jonathan as he once was; a rising wunderkind in the world of science fiction, ignored by the mainstream media and not my aunt's favorite author. Listed below are links to a few vintage interviews.

1995 Beatrice interview from the release of Amnesia Moon

1996 Hourwolf radio interview transcript from the release of The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye

1997 Locus Magazine interview from the release of As She Climbed Across The Table

Will the prodigal son please return? Transporters are standing by.

Yesterday's News, Today!

via the Associated Press:
"A Canadian author has sued NBC Universal and director Judd Apatow claiming they ripped off the premise of the hit movie 'Knocked Up' from her book of the same name. In an article for Maclean's magazine this month, Calgary-based author Rebecca Eckler details similarities between her book and the film, in which an up-and-coming TV reporter gets drunk at a party and then gets pregnant from a one-night stand."
I'm totally on Eckler's stretch-marked side on this one. Hollywood screwed me over with their uncredited, loose retelling of my life in 'Boogie Nights.'


via Rolling Stone:
This is not a Fugazi t-shirt...er, picture book. For a sneak peak at Glen E. Friedman's upcoming Fugazi photo book, Keep Your Eyes Open, click dis hurr.


via Scotsman.com:
Matt Damon has decided to leave the Bourne franchise after this summer's 'Bourne Ultimatum' film. The Jason Bourne character, considered by many to be the modern-day successor to James Bond, was originally featured in the political thrillers of Robert Ludlum (who is considered by no one to be a successor of any kind to Ian Fleming). If the spy vs. spy comparisons prove true, might this generation's Roger Moore, Hugh Laurie, be called in to take over the part?


via Publishersweekly.com:
The face of Jack Chick, author and artist of the world's creepiest little Christian comic books, has until now, remained a mystery. But today, thanks to a brief slip into the sin of pride (and perhaps lust, depending on how he was paid for posing), a photograph of the man is finally available! Now if we could only track down the zealots sneaking around, slipping his comics under the windshield wipers of stripclub patrons everywhere, Satan's work would at last be complete.


via Publishersnewswire.com:
Author/unlicensed physician Mark Underwood is about to release a new book, The Candy Diet - Taming the Hunger Monster, that details a controversial diet which uses candy as a tool for losing weight. Kate Moss, Lindsay Lohan and the Rolling Stones have been using a similar technique for years now. Only, they called it 'nose candy.'

Summer Reading For Students: What's The Point?

NPR's John Kelly tries to find A Cure for Kids' Summer Reading Doldrums in an archived piece from 2005. He addresses what seems like an obvious question, but one that most parents and kids would be hard pressed to answer themselves: Why are specific, mandatory books a good idea?

"A summer book is a way to engender solidarity among students, to create a shared experience. Too often the media that kids talk about -- deconstruct, analyze, argue over -- aren't books, but TV shows, movies or video games. A required book is one way to focus the spotlight on something more positive, more -- dare we say it? -- educational.

"You've got a frame of reference that's universal within that classroom," says Judy Fickes Shapiro, a children’s author and bookstore owner in Ventura, Calif. "When you're creating community in the classroom, you've got to start with something common."

*One question for the author, though: Did you really think that your seventh grade daughter was actually going to enjoy Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation?!

The Arguments For And Against Summer Reading Lists (Given At The Same Time, By The Same Person)

In the New York Times, Joe Queenan rants about the ridiculousness of some of the books that schools pick for their summer reading lists, while begrudgingly admitting that as boring and outdated as many of the choices may be, in the long run, the system works. An excerpt:
"For as long as anyone can remember, well-meaning pedagogues have been sabotaging summer vacations by forcing high schoolers to read Lord of the Flies, All the King’s Men and A Separate Peace. These books may be the cornerstones of our civilization, but they’re certainly no fun. One reason the average American male reads only one book a year may be the emotional trauma suffered in trying to hack his way through Wuthering Heights at the age of 14.
I’m not saying it is necessarily a bad thing that schools require students to read books during the summer: culture, like vitamins, works best when imposed rather than selected. I am simply recording my amazement that in an age when urban high schools use weapons detectors to check for handguns, educators still make kids read The Red Badge of Courage."

Summer Reading Related: A Look-At-Me Blog That Won't Cause You To Look Away

Everyone is supposed to remember the song that was playing when they lost their virginity, but how many of us can claim to recall the book that we were reading the week it happened? David Elzey probably does. Over on his blog, The Excelsior File, he has posted a series of articles detailing the summers of his youth using only the books that he was reading at the time. Fun in both a nostalgic and voyeuristic way, the posts are also a remarkable testament to how literature of all types -- humor, non-fiction, trash, short stories -- reflects and reshapes our lives.

Hollywood Wants The Literary World's Respect, But The Literary World Wants Hollywood's Access To 'Petite Blondes'

New York City's BookExpo took a cue from Hollywood this past week, offering writers a generous three minutes to 'pitch' their work. The publishing world traded in the comfy, leather, Masterpiece Theatre reading chair of old for something closer to the figurative casting couch, turning what was once a thoughtful meeting of literary minds into what one editor described as "a bit like speed dating." So what sort of writer/writing rises to the top in such a scenario?

From the Reuters article:
"One of those attracting the most interest from the agents was (Kiki Freebery), a petite 15-year-old blond schoolgirl pitching what she called 'a survival kit for kids turning into teenagers.' Kiki came along with her mother, a criminal defense attorney who was pitching her own legal thrillers. Kiki hasn't written the book yet, or even a full-length proposal, but she said, 'I met four people, all of them said they want to see my proposal.'"

Totally rad!

Do Novelists Make Good Critics?

Yesterday we posted a link to the NYTimes' article, Read Any Good Books Lately?, which featured a bunch of well-known writers talking about the...well, good books that they'd read lately. In the accompanying post, I poked a bit of fun at the idea that a celebrity's recommendation should be taken any more seriously than a friend's or family member's. The Guardian UK took such teasing one step further, blogging an entire piece questioning the literary criticism of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, while praising the 'playful analysis of all novels' by Milan Kundera in his recently translated, seven-part essay, The Curtain. The barrage of comments that follow are as biting and illuminating as the piece itself, if not more so.

Charles Darwin in the Age of Paris Hilton: Celebrities' Opinons Trump Normal People's Every Time

You've got friends, family and bookstore employees, but when you want a really reliable reading recommendation, isn't always best to ask a famous person? The New York Times asks Stephen King, Dave Eggers, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jonathan Safran Foer and a handful of other literary luminaries, Read Any Good Books Lately?

Want To Know Why Most Kids Hate Mythology? Goya's Painting Of Saturn Provides Somes Clues

The Los Angeles Times recommends Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series to folks hoping to interest their children in Greek mythology. The series, which takes place in the modern day USA, features a 'half-blood' son of Poseidon slowly learning of his heritage and struggling with the ensuing problems that come along with it. It also takes a unique approach in the audience it hopes to reach. Apparently, Riordan's not targeting the typical 'pointy-headed super-students,' but instead, those who have trouble reading. "Percy himself is dyslexic and has ADHD. It turns out that many half-bloods have trouble in school, the explanation being that their brains are hard-wired for ancient Greek skills." The Times then goes on to liken the series to something called 'Harry Potter,' which is apparently a good thing.

(Moms and dads having a tough time turning their young ones onto the gods and goddesses of yore can take some solace in the fact that disobedience to one's parents is a recurring theme in every culture's mythology. That's right, your rebellious little brats truly are gifts from the gods!)

Weekend Links

The BEA -- Book Expo America -- takes place this week in New York City. For those of you not lucky enough to find yourself in the humid confines of the Big Apple hustling your thinly veiled memoirs to uninterested agents, publishers and booksellers, BookExpoCast is posting podcasts (audio interviews) featuring some of the authors and media mavens who will be attending. A few of the folks included are...

Khaled Hosseini, author of the best-selling The Kite Runner as well as the new book A Thousand Splendid Suns. In this podcast, he discusses the pressure to follow-up a successful debut novel, as well as the excitement leading up to his first BEA.

Chris Anderson,the editor-in-chief of WIRED and the author of The Long Tail. In this podcast, Anderson gives a preview of the two sessions he’ll be involved with at BEA. “Giving it Away: Free Lunch or Unrealized Opportunity” addresses the pros and cons of supplementing the sale of a book with free content. During “Upfront & Unscripted: Ken Lombard, President, Starbucks Entertainment,” Anderson and Lombard will discuss how the innovative coffee seller has moved into the realm of book and music retail.

Alice Sebold, best-selling author of Lucky and The Lovely Bones. In this podcast, she discusses her new book, The Almost Moon.


Still in a New York state of mind? Don DeLillo's new 9-11 novel, Falling Man, is positively reviewed in the New York Times, as well as the Guardian UK. To read the first chapter yourself, click here.


via Wired:
On the other side of the country, the San Francisco Asian Art Museum opens its exhibit, Tezuka: Marvel of Manga, this weekend. The exhibit "features more than 200 of Tezuka's original drawings, as well as a manga lounge for browsing shelves of cartoons, photos of cosplay events (where participants dress as their favorite characters) and musical performances of popular anime and video game music." This article by Lisa Katayama delves briefly into the genius of Osamu Tezuka, the "quirky intellectual who had a near photographic memory, a medical degree and an obsession with classic Disney movies" who, through the mediums of comics and cartoons, "explored profound themes that were often way ahead of their time -- pacifism, civil rights, man versus machine, artificial intelligence and urban high-rise architecture." All this, and he created Astro Boy, too!

Lies, Damned Lies, and ...

While I was browsing around looking for some statistics on per capita book sales by state, I discovered Para Publishing (click here for all the statistics), which features a fun accumulation of book related statistics.
Here are a few listed below:

Only 32% of the U.S. population has ever been in a bookstore.
--David Godine, Publisher

58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
42% of college graduates never read another book.
80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
57% of new books are not read to completion.
--Jerrold Jenkins

Women buy 68% of all books.
--Lou Aronica

81% of the population feels they have a book inside them
6 million have written a manuscript.
6 million manuscripts are making the rounds.
Out of every 10,000 children's books, 3 get published
--Jerrold Jenkins

On the average, a book store browser spends eight seconds looking at the front cover and 15 seconds looking at the back cover.

Book Purchases by Store Type:
24.6% Large chain stores
17.7% Book Clubs
15.2% Smaller chains and independent stores.
5.4% Internet such as Amazon.com

59% of the customers plan to purchase a specific book when entering a bookstore.
--Book Industry Study Group.

A successful fiction book sells 5,000 copies.
A successful nonfiction book sells 7,500 copies.
--Authors Guild

The Library Thing - You Are What You Read

Karen, a member of my book club, was recently enthusing about The Library Thing. Anyone who loves books, and feels a measure of pride when they look at their own collection of books will immediately adore the usefulness of this online catalog of your personal library.

"LibraryThing appears poised to turn the cataloging of books into a form of communal recreation."
- Christian Science Monitor

What exactly is The Library Thing and how much does it cost?
"Library Thing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. You can access your catalog from anywhere—even on your mobile phone. Because everyone catalogs together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth. A free account allows you to catalog up to 200 books. A paid account allows you to catalog any number of books. Paid personal accounts cost $10 for a year or $25 for a lifetime."

There are additional features to the program. It's cool to use the book suggester/unsuggester. You simply enter a book title, and up pops a screen of how many people also have that book in their library, what other similar titles they own, books with similar tags, and additional reading suggestions. It's addictive!

Choosing the Correct Gang Color for your Writers' Group (and other tips)

Before Inkwell Michelle would let me post on her blog, she, um...strongly suggested...that I join a writers' group in an effort to make my spellin's more better. As a staunch advocate of Groucho Marx's old axiom about 'not wanting to be a part of any group that would have me as a member,' it was, needless to say, the first time I'd ever attended such a soiree. So's not to appear unprepared, I brought an old Smith Corona typewriter, some cigarettes, a green tinted visor and some cheap whiskey. Oh, and a story I'd written the night before about a psycho that joins a writers' group only to then kill each writer one by one in a manner reminiscent of the stories they'd read there (its title: Deadly Dull). Imagine my surprise when the group turned out to hate my ideas, the smoke from my smokes and the fact that the whiskey made me physically sick. It's not like their stories were much better. The young guys were all writing variations of Fight Club, only with more video game references, and the girls were all trying to blend their favorite episodes of Sex & The City with their one unsuccessful suicide attempt from their teens. Only the old people's stories were interesting. I had no idea that they were all so dirty-minded (or was I mentally making unintended metaphors of all of their innocent flowering garden and railroad worker short stories?).
Anyway, the point of today's post is to highlight a few websites that offer suggestions on how to better start and/or run a writers' group. There's another old axiom I'd like to toss out, the one that claims 'you can choose your friends, but not your family.' When running a writers' group, no such excuses are accepted. You are responsible for every choice made: the members, the setting, the style of critique offered, the way the discussion flows, etc, etc, etc. If this is the sort of thankless, profitless power you crave, then explore the links below:

The 6' Ferrets Writers' Group -- A good place to visit for anyone starting from scratch. They've broken their site down into bite sized portions: Starting A Group, Writing Exercises, Special Events and Suggested Reading.

Man Bytes Hollywood -- This guy has been running a writers' group for a while, and boils down the secrets to making it successful into three seemingly obvious, but clearly hard won tips.

Argh Ink -- The woman that runs this site had been a part of many disappointing writers' groups before finally starting her own. She opens her piece by discussing the pitfalls that many groups fall into (discussing anything and everything besides writing -- publishing, in particular) before outlining quite a long list of ideas for keeping your group on track without garnering resentment and/or villains crafted in your likeness.

Scientists Agree: Homework Sucks

Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow has posted a positive review of Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish's 2006 book, The Case Against Homework. An excerpt:

"All the credible research on homework suggests that for younger kids, homework has no connection with positive learning outcomes, and for older kids, the benefits of homework level off sharply after the first couple assignments. Not that most teachers would know this -- homework theory and design isn't on the curriculum at most teachers' colleges, and most teachers surveyed report that they have never received any training on designing and assessing homework.

"The book is composed of equal measures of interviews with kids, parents and teachers; hard research numbers from respected institutions; and strategies for convincing your kids' teachers to ease back on homework. One thing the authors keep coming back to is the way that excessive homework eats into kids' playtime and family time, stressing them out, contributing to sedentary obesity, and depriving them of a childhood's measure of doing nothing, daydreaming and thinking. They quote ten-year-olds like Sophia from Brooklyn, saying things like 'I have to rush, rush, rush, rush, rush, rush through my day, actually through my seven days, and that's seven days wasted in my life.'"

While we at the Inkwell Bookstore in no way believe that this applies to summer reading assignments, we do feel such arguments negate the need for most other forms of after-school schooling. Our younger readers may post their letters of praise and thanks in the comments section below.

Your School's Commencement Speech Will Surely Pale In Comparison

To read David Foster Wallace's (Infinite Jest, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again) fond farewell to the kids at Kenyon University click here. Your valedictorian's Robert Frost references will seem rather run-of-the-mill in retrospect.

You've Only Twenty-Four Hours Of Vacation Left. Stay Lazy 'Til The Last.

Today's Inkwell Bookstore blog post is a movie recommendation, but for a film that basks in its love of literature: A Love Song for Bobby Long. Reprinted below is Roger Ebert's original review of the film:

There is a lazy, seductive appeal to the lives of the two boozers in "A Love Song for Bobby Long." The notion of moving to New Orleans and drinking yourself to death is the sort of escape plan only an alcoholic could come up with, involving the principle of surrender to the enemy. If you are a writer and a failed English professor like Bobby Long, you can even wrap yourself in the legend of other literary drunks. It's all wonderfully romantic, especially in the movies, where a little groaning in the morning replaces nausea, headaches, killer hangovers and panic attacks. A realistic portrait of suicidal drinking would contain more terror and confusion, but never mind. "Leaving Las Vegas" did that, and this is a different movie.

Bobby Long is played by John Travolta like a living demonstration of one of those artist's conceptions of what Elvis would look like at 70. White-haired, unshaven, probably smelly, he lives on Magazine Street with a former student named Lawson Pines (Gabriel Macht), who thinks he is a genius. Years ago, Bobby was a legend on campus, Lawson's charismatic mentor. Then something happened, which we are pretty sure we will find out about, and here he is without wife or family, living on the sofa surrounded by piles of books. He and Lawson spend a lot of time quoting literature to each other. Ben Franklin, Charles Dickens, the usual 20th century gods. This is entertaining all by itself, apart from the good it does for the characters. It reminded me of Alan Bennett's new play "The History Boys," in which memorizing literary quotations is recommended as a means of fertilizing the mind. Bobby and Lawson are well fertilized, but too disorganized to plant anything; an unfinished novel and a would-be memoir languish in the shadows. In "Sideways," when Miles (Paul Giamatti) says he can't commit suicide because he has a responsibility to his unpublished novel, his buddy Jack (Thomas Hayden Church) helpfully points out that the New Orleans legend John Kennedy Toole killed himself before A Confederacy of Dunces was published. So there is a precedent. Bobby and Lawson seem prepared to keep on drinking and quoting and smoking forever, when a sudden change occurs in their lives. Their housemate, a jazz singer named Lorraine, has died. Now her daughter Pursy (Scarlett Johansson) materializes, too late for the funeral. Pursy is a discontented and suspicious 18-year-old, who will soon prove to be the most mature member of the household. The boys tell Pursy her mother left her a third of the house, which is sort of true; actually, her mother left Pursy all of the house, but information like that could only confuse Pursy about the right of Bobby and Lawson to continue living there forever. Pursy moves in, creating a form of family in which she is both the child and the adult, and Bobby and Lawson drift in between. At one point Lawson's halfway girlfriend Georgianna (Deborah Kara Unger) asks, "They know you're not going to school?" Pursy: "Yeah, it ranks right up there with being out of vodka and cigarettes." The revelations in "A Love Song for Bobby Long" are not too hard to spot coming. There are only a few fictional developments that seem possible, and it turns out that they are. The movie is not about plot anyway, but about characters and a way of living. Pursy acts as a catalyst to create moments of truth and revelation, and those in turn help Bobby find a limited kind of peace with his past, and Lawson to find a tentative hope in his own possible future. What can be said is that the three actors inhabit this material with ease and gratitude: It is good to act on a simmer sometimes, instead of at a fast boil. It's unusual to find an American movie that takes its time. It's remarkable to listen to dialogue that assumes the audience is well-read. It is refreshing to hear literate conversation. These are modest pleasures, but real enough. The movie tries for tragedy and reaches only pathos, but then Bobby lost his chance to be a tragic hero by living this long in the first place. Travolta has an innate likability quotient that works with characters like this; you can sense why a student would follow him to New Orleans and join him in foggy melancholy. There doesn't have to be a scene explaining that. You can also sense how Pursy would change things, just by acting as a witness. Alcoholics get uncomfortable when they're surrounded by people with insights. They like to control the times and conditions of their performances, and don't want an audience to wander backstage. Just by seeing them, Pursy forces them to see themselves. Once they do that, something has to give.

One more thing: A Love Song for Bobby Long was filmed almost entirely in the French Quarter and lower precincts of New Orleans less than two years before Hurricane Katrina would sweep through the area, changing it irrevocably. This film serves as a lasting document of the buildings, streets, foliage and, most importantly, the people that once made up the historic (and never to be recreated) area.

Running A Book Club - What To Do When Everyone Hates The Book, And It's Your Fault

I've been running a book club for 9 years. In the early days, I would get nervous and prepare pages of notes, research backround information about the author, and collect book reviews. Now, the group is so comfortable that we just show up and let the conversation roll.

We've had temporary members who show up for a meeting or two, but then disappear. We wonder idly about those drifting souls, where are they now? At the Inkwell, many people express interest in joining one of our book clubs, they even purchase the next book, but then don't show up for the meeting. What isn't factored in is the truth that a book club is a commitment. Reading a book a month shouldn't be so hard, but it's like a homework assignment. You'll find yourself reading everything under the sun, except the book club selection. (A brief apology is due to Cristin who has been running the Uncommon Caliber book club - I've yet to complete the reading for the club meetings!)

When I started our club, of course I found reading material for suggestions and tips on how to run a successful club. The Inkwell has books on how to run a club, analyze literature, lists of good reading choices, and journals for recording your thoughts about the books. I recommend The Book Club Companion by Diany Loevy, The Reading Group Handbook by Rachel Jacobsohn, and How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster.

There is support in the aforementioned books about how to handle the dreaded moment when the entire club revolts against a book. It does happen, and if the blame rests on your shoulders for selecting the book, don't take the abuse personally! Remember, they hate the book, not you. Just make sure that you pick a crowd-pleaser next time!

Weekend Links: The Not For @#%!'n Kids Edition

via boing boing:
SomethingAwful.com holds a weekly Photoshop. This week's theme -- 'Children's book covers made demented.' All of the entries are twisted and obscene, and the best part is, half of these books would actually sell to adults!

via Nelson Guirado.com:
What's the Al Qaeda book club reading this month? American forces reportedly found this illustrated 'how-to torture' manual in a terrorist safehouse in Iraq.

via popmatters.com:
The perfect book for all those moms whose body piercings got in the way of their breastfeeding.

Book Review: Grant Morrison's New X-Men Omnibus

I just finished reading Marvel Comics' enormous hardcover collection of Grant Morrison's Eisner Award winning run on the New X-Men. It was the most refreshing, subversive and inspired comic series I've read since Alan Moore's Promethea. Morrison has long been regarded as a master of new concepts and creative spins on old ideas, and he did not disappoint in either of these regards here. The foundation plots involve (1) a gene found that will wipe out the human race in 3 or 4 generations, leaving only the mutants, (2) the genocidal destruction of the majority of the mutants on Earth (including Magneto), and (3) the students at the X-Men academy's growing dissatisfaction with the two rather black and white choices offered the average mutant when it comes to their assimilation with humans (i.e. Professor X's Martin Luther King stance vs. Magneto's pre-Mecca Malcolm X). Some of the more substantial sub-plots are Cyclops and Jean Grey's re-assessment of their relationship, one-time villain Emma Frost taking up a teaching post at the academy, a second stage of mutation being experienced by select mutants, a zen-master mutant with healing powers and a star for a head, and a growing cult of U-Men (humans who surgically modify themselves with stolen mutant body parts so that they, too, can have superpowers).
Up 'til about the halfway mark, I was enjoying it simply as a much-better-than-average superhero book, but I knew that I still hadn't cracked the underlying lesson, the secret parable, what Morrison has referred to as the "inoculation of ideas" that he is trying to deliver in his comics work. So I went back to the beginning of the mammoth volume and started skipping through the pages, reading random word bubbles here and there, until it finally hit me. This book, like mutation itself, is about evolution. Not just the aforementioned 'second evolution' that changes the appearance of the Beast from a pointy-haired monster into a more feline Beauty & the Beast creature, but the evolution of the X-Men comics themselves -- and superhero comics in general.
If the way I read it was correct, Morrison appears to have devoted his entire 42 issue run on the series to questioning its relevancy, trying to put an end to the artistically repetitive rut it had fallen into, and steering it in a completely new and previously unimagined direction. (This comic book crusade must have seemed all the more gutsy and blasphemous at the time, as the X-Men comics were still the best selling comic books in America week to week!) To spur on the book's own evolution, Morrison re-introduced many of the series' more tired and/or far-fetched tropes (Professor X's intergalactic love affair, Magneto's grandiose plans to rid the Earth of humans, Wolverine's endless quest to find out his past), bringing them to their logical conclusions and thereby creating a clean slate for future writers of the series. He also took many of the one-dimensional characters and, by adding a bit of a dichotomy to their personalities, made them much more complex -- again, giving future writers any number of new themes that they might tackle should they so desire. For example, by having the Cyclops character begin to question his role as leader of the X-Men and his love for Jean Grey, Morrison has created a new cipher for thoughts on personal, romantic and group responsibility. By tossing former nemesis Emma Frost into the X-Men, issues of trust and questions as to a person's ability to truly change can now be more readily played around with. The most direct calls for the comic's continued evolution, though, come in the way that Morrison writes Wolverine's origin, the rise of the U-Men, the '150 years in the future' flashforward, and Xavier's admission that humankind will never feel safe around mutants so long as mutants insist on fighting endlessly with one another. These are used not just as plot points, but also as a subtle 'ahem' to the publishers of the series, its future writers and its current readers. Morrison seems to be saying that if you want your X-Men comics to be about more than just guys in funny costumes with funny names fighting needless battles with one another, you've gotta change your scope of expectations, expand the ideas that you allow into the stories, and update the metaphors at least as often as the costumes. In short, evolve.

(I plan to reread the New X-Men omnibus in a month or so. If anyone has tips as to ideas, themes, etc. that I might want to look out for on my second go-round, please drop me a note in the comments section.)

Update: The Gardner Linn Fanclub has a thorough and amazing analysis of the series. It's well worth neglecting a little more of your 'real' work to take the time to read.

For a nice, long interview with Grant Morrison, click here. You'll be re-routed to Popthought.com.

Definition of the Deckle Edge

Big Bad Book Blog has an interesting post about the uneven, zigzag edges on certain books. She did a little investigating, and "discovered that (the) rough, untrimmed page edges are called deckle edges or just simply rough trimmed."
She also found out this little bit o' history:
"A deckle is a wood frame resting on or hinged to the edges of the mold that defines the edges of the sheet in handmade paper process. According to history.com, the rough edges are created by the fibrous pulp flowing between the frame and the deckle of the mold. When books were predominantly composed of handmade paper, deckle edges were considered a defect and were trimmed off. In the late 1800s, however, rough trimmed pages became fashionable. During this time, many books were left untrimmed on one or three sides for purely aesthetic reasons."
Is it only a matter of time before the E-books try and replicate this, as well?