Book News, In Brief

I know it's rather late in the season to be foisting yet another summer reading list on y'all, but this one was too good to keep to myself. Via CBR: Comics luminaries share their picks.

Via finance.sympatico: "By opening its channels to a million outside sellers, Amazon has undercut (eBay) and is winning the battle for Internet sales. Next up: A challenge to eBay's PayPal."

Via MSNBC: "The U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that college textbook prices increased at twice the rate of inflation between 1986 and 2004. Is there any way to avoid this crippling expense? Actually, there are several."

Via theregister.co.uk: "Amazon's Kindle e-book reader will sell more than 380,000 in 2008, according to analysts at CitiGroup...Analyst Mark Mahaney reckons a Kindle is going to be the must-have item for this Christmas, pointing out that his predicted sales are roughly the same as those achieved by the iPod in its first year...He also reckons that by 2010 the Kindle will be contributing $1 billion annually to the online-bookseller-turned-everything-emporium - four per cent of their total revenue."

Recommended Reads: Geeks

Spirited Away: BFI Film Classics by Andrew Osmund
From the Anime News Network's article/press release:
In Spirited Away: BFI Film Classics, Osmund details the filmmaking process of Hayao Miyazaki on the 2002 work and how it relates to his previous films and the themes that he expounds. The British Film Institute book includes quotes from Miyazaki and his colleagues and over 60 color images. Osmund also wrote Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist, a book that profiles the acclaimed director of Perfect Blue, Paprika, and Paranoia Agent.

Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw
From the NYMagazine author profile:
Bottomless Belly Button tells the story of a week in the life of the Loony family, whose parents, Maggie and David, are divorcing after 40 years...Shaw’s avoided the path that young writers so often follow, for better or for worse: He’s not really writing about himself. His parents are still married, and he seems to have been drawn to the story of a disintegrating family as a genre exercise. “It was interesting to me how there are differences in family relations”... Bottomless Belly Button, it seems, was created out of a desire to see what would happen if characters from a traditional family drama—“super-dysfunctional and super-dramatic”—were placed alongside characters from a more reserved family story: a narrative game, rather than a dead-serious uncovering of emotional trauma.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
From the NYTimes book review:
Díaz shows impressive high-low dexterity, flashing his geek credentials, his street wisdom and his literary learning with equal panache. A short epigraph from the Fantastic Four is balanced by a longer one from Derek Walcott; allusions to Dune, The Matrix and (especially) The Lord of the Rings rub up against references to Melville and García Márquez. Oscar’s nickname is a Spanglish pronunciation of Oscar Wilde, whom he is said to resemble when dressed up in his Doctor Who costume for Halloween.

Congratulations, Yiddish Policemen's Union! (are you done winning things yet?)

Michael Chabon has been awarded the prestigious Hugo Award for his most recent novel. Where does he find the shelf space?

Book News, In Brief

How true to life (i.e. scandalicious) is Britney Spears' mom's book going to be? Not very, judging from that soft focus book cover. For a more fitting distillation of the book's themes, click the image to the left.

Last week, disappointed readers of Breaking Dawn (are there any other kind?) were calling for a book burning. This week they're rallying behind a new plan: returning the books for full refunds. Ha! Go back to burning 'em, suckers. Caveat emptor, and all that.

Booksellers get labeled as nerds, sure, but we've got it a hell of a lot better than our brethren, the comic bookseller. Their public ridicule knows no bounds. Here's a link to a website dissing a comic book shop owner simply because he gave the new Astonishing X-Men a negative review. Although the comments section seems to side with the dissing, the piece raised a couple of question in my mind: Should negative reviews be nixed from a shopkeeper's spiels? Are they bad for business, or do they help to build a buyer's trust?

(Editor's Note: The fact that we've called our patrons suckers in one news item, only to then ponder customer loyalty in the next was not unintentional. To quote Full Metal Jacket, we're only "trying to suggest something about the duality of man...the Jungian thing.")

Book News, In Brief

McSweeney's asks tweens, teens and their online predators:
Did you see Shakespeare's Facebook pics?
(OMG!!! He's hot!!!)

Kafka and Thomas -- the new Britney and Lindsay?

Dylan Thomas' dirt filled diaries are up for public perusal, while an upstart publishing house has put out a book cataloging Kafka's vast and varied porn collection.

Edjumacated dudes predict Oprah's endorsement is worth a million votes. Considering the staggering quantities of East of Eden that she managed to sell to an otherwise illiterate America, I'd have to agree.

Wal-Mart Hosts A Bus Tour(for authors)(of books!)

I've gotta admit, Wal-Mart hosting a book tour makes about as much sense to me as Target hosting a wine tasting. But hey -- kudos to the big box, blood-sucking corporation for trying to bring a lil' culture to the Nascar crowd.

Related Links:
Here's an article describing one author's extravagant plans for the two state, four day tour. (NSFW!)
Here's a different author's blog about the tour. (SFW, but highly suggestive!)
Here's a different blog, a different author...but the same tour! (SFW...if your bosses are pervy.)
Semi-related links:
Wal-Mart hearts Russian rubles.
Wal-Mart strongly endorses McCain.
Robbers wear Wal-Mart uniforms...to rob rival store.
Man caught walking around Wal-Mart with chicken down his pants.

Blog-Jacking: The Bennington Banner

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

Recommended Viewing: Alan Moore On Everything

There's 10 parts, so settle in.
Part 2: the legendary years, 3: on his upcoming novel, Jerusalem 4: V for Vendetta, 5: on Super Heroes, 6, 7, 8: Moore's favorite superhero, 9: The Simpsons, 10: advice for young cartoonists

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.

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.

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.

Update: For even more information about the project, 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

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.)