The celebrated novelist died in Oxford, where he’d directed the creative writing program for many years. He was 67. More at the Times.

And you should refrain from saying stupid things about ebook consumers, like “if you can afford an ebook device, you can pay more for ebooks.” Bollocks. Consumerist lays down some pointers you may want to check out:

On a more basic level, what consumers are willing to pay for a device and what they’re willing to pay for an ebook are two different matters and can’t be compared. But since [this publisher] is doing so, let’s take a look at them.

Maybe a customer can pay more for a digital book, but why should he? Currently, nearly all the value of the ebook format comes from the device, not the publisher. Portability, frictionless purchasing experience, syncing across multiple registered devices–all of that is provided by the device and the retailer’s back-end.

By contrast, here’s what the publisher currently provides in an ebook edition: typos, no additional content over the print version, no cover art, perhaps no photographs or illustrations, and no custom formatting. Saddle that with DRM that deliberately interferes with the consumer’s ability to preserve or make full use of his library, and you’ve got one pretty low-value digital offering from a publisher.

[…]

So you’re right, publisher; maybe I can afford to buy an ereader device. That doesn’t mean you can jack up the price on your crappy digital copy that currently offers less usefulness than a physical copy, and then hide behind the device’s potential and cry, “I want to be treated like I make expensive baubles too!” Because you don’t. You currently make poorly proofread digital files stripped of most of the qualities that make digital content awesome.

So here’s some other advice for publishers who want to win the cooperation of customers while also pricing ebooks in a way that’s fair to both sides:

Stop acting like consumers are being cheap. What consumers actually want are ebooks that are fairly priced. You’re trying to frame the other side as being irrational and greedy, but in reality consumers–despite the more histrionic posts on Amazon’s forums–are still not convinced that publishers have done anything to add value to the ebook.

Stop hiding behind your industry’s inefficiencies. You should try to improve them, not use them as a shield to protect you from criticism. The first thing that comes to mind is the waste inherent in how printed copies are sold to bookstores. In addition, acquiring, preparing for publication, and marketing books are all areas where publishers seem unable to innovate, despite the cost savings that digital distribution should convey over long periods of time.

Stop saying “trust us.” Smart consumers know that no self-respecting company is innately trustworthy, no matter how many years it’s spent trying to integrate that idea into its brand […]. Demonstrate. Prove your intentions through behavior. By that measure, publishers have so far only indicated that they want ebooks to be priced in the realm of hardcovers. […]

Stop the emotional appeals. Saying digital publishing will starve authors and kill first born sons makes it seem like you’re basing your business decisions on irrational fears, which helps no one. Just admit that you want to price your ebooks as high as the market will bear. There’s no shame in admitting that, and the sooner you do the sooner ebook consumers can demand that you step up and start providing real value in exchange for higher prices.

Some time ago, it appears an audio/video integrator made a bit of a mess of a certain customer’s system.

Unfortunately, that customer was Hunter Stockton Thompson.

Audio, predictably, NSFW.

Bunch of Phonies Mourn J. D. Salinger:

CORNISH, NH—In this big dramatic production that didn’t do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author J.D. Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud. “He had a real impact on the literary world and on millions of readers,” said hot-shot English professor David Clarke, who is just like the rest of them, and even works at one of those crumby schools that rich people send their kids to so they don’t have to look at them for four years. “There will never be another voice like his.” Which is exactly the lousy kind of goddamn thing that people say, because really it could mean lots of things, or nothing at all even, and it’s just a perfect example of why you should never tell anybody anything.

Wow.

Mystery-writing juggernaut Robert B. Parker, creator of the wisecracking and absurdly well-read sleuth Spenser, died yesterday at his desk, as befits the author of more than 60 books, 38 of them about his most famous character. He was 77.

The Times pre-obit does not say so, but I strongly suspect that in addition to his wife and sons, he’s also survived by a dog named Pearl.

Infinite Summer is a collaborative, distributed book club dedicated to sharing and discussing David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus — as I type that, I wonder if the term should perhaps be retired, given how magnum the opus in question is.

John Moe did not participate, but you should read why he didn’t.

With Wallace, it was reading some of those Harper’s essays and experiencing Shea Stadium Beatlemania and a kind of loving fear all at once. Oh, so that’s a writer, I thought, sweating, screaming on the inside. As someone who wanted to be a writer, it was incredibly inspiring and absolutely soul crushing. Being a writer in a world that features Wallace would be like playing basketball in a world that has Michael Jordan, only none of us even know how to play basketball and we’re all injured toddlers with broken lacrosse equipment.

Check out that dude’s library.

It should surprise no one that they’re full of writers and books.

Astute Heathen know of HeathenCentral’s longtime affection for Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels. They’re hyperliterate for genre, well constructed and plotted, and make for excellent diversionary reading; not everything we consume has to be Infinite Jest, after all.

Anyway, there’s been a sort of almost Bondian problem creeping into the Spenser continuum for a while now, namely that the detective in question debuted as a 37-year-old Korean War vet in 1973’s The Godwulf Manuscript, and even at the charitable 2-for-1 aging math suggested by fansite Bullets and Beer would have to be 50 by now. Parker has already subtly retconn’d some aspects of Spenser’s backstory, such as his military history — obviously a 50-year-old in 2009 wasn’t even in Vietnam, let alone Korea — but that’s a band-aid on a problem that’s only getting bigger.

So what’s a guy to do? The novels are still fun, but he’s running out of runway, so to speak. Turns out the answer is the same one Eon Productions found for Bond back in 2005, kinda: Parker has released a “young Spenser” novel called Chasing the Bear set prior to his Bostonian adventures. The Boston PI’s been without a backstory, really, for even longer than Wolverine; “young adult” pitch or not, it’s probably a fun read. (Fortunately, Parker’s not giving up on modern Spenser, either; a new contemporary work comes out in October.)

Idiot America:

This is how Idiot America engages itself. It decides, en masse, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the words of an obscure biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of Christ’s Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an “expert” and therefore, an “elitist.” Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable. He’s brilliant, surely, but no different from the rest of us, poor fool.

The poet Mary Karr was involved for years with David Foster Wallace, and is widely considered the real-world inspiration for the P.G.O.A.T. (“Prettiest Girl Of All Time”) a.k.a. Joelle Van Dyne in Infinite Jest.

The same article that brought me this gem also noted something else utterly fantastic: DFW had footnotes on his tattoos.

Not coincidentally, they’re also the only ones we’ve seen with Hunter Thompson on them.

It seems unreasonable that it takes Butcher like 2 years to write these things, but only takes me a few hours to read them.

My last two:

Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem. More or less “meh.” It’s a sprawling mess of a novel with some nice parts, but virtually none of the charm of his earlier work I’ve read (As She Crawled Across The Table, Gun, with Occasional Music, and the beautiful Motherless Brooklyn). Unlike Lethem’s previous efforts, this one’s a coming-of-age story about a thinly disguised Lethem proxy growing up in Brooklyn in the 60s and 70s, and then facing adulthood (there is, of course, a long German word for the form: Bildungsroman). Our hero, Dylan Ebdus, is one of the only white kids in his school (“Not his grade; his whole school,” his mother brags) in the years well before Park Slope became a fashionable neighborhood. Dylan’s best friend is the improbably named Mingus Rude, son of a once-famous R&B singer, whose life takes a very different turn from Dylan’s (obviously).

My personal literary Mendoza line is whether or not I wish I’d used the time reading a book to read something else, and Fortress passes that test, but just barely. Lethem is writing a combo love letter to the Brooklyn of his childhood, to the Manhattan of the 70s, to music (punk and CBGB figure into it, briefly, and there’s a long arc about Rude’s father and early R&B), and most obviously to comic books (though, amusingly, young Dylan is far more into Marvel than DC). His proximity to the material perhaps made him less able to tell what was working and what wasn’t (and this is a man who made SF blended with noir work in the aforementioned Gun, which featured a gun-toting kangaroo as a mob enforcer), and so his focus wavers by halfway through the book. The earlier chapters are much more well-crafted than the novel’s final segments, and the somewhat halfassed magical realism elements fall kind of flat and never enjoy the verve of his prior genre-bending experiments.

Currently Reading: The Looming Tower, about the roots of Islamic fundamentalism and the rise of Al Qaeda. It’s actually very, very compelling, and reads more like a long-form piece of journalism than a book, if that makes any sense. The author, Lawrence Wright, won a Pulitzer for it; I recommend it without reservation if you’re at all curious how we got here. (Hint: It kinda starts with a dickhead named Qutb.)

Watchmen was a product of its time — by which I mean full of mid-80s, duck-and-cover era of superpower brinksmanship.

When I read it again in the mid-90s, it seemed dated, and delightfully so. The Wall was gone. The Russians were our friends. Nuclear annihilation wasn’t on the table, everything was rosy, and the pessimism of Moore’s text seemed like a bad dream remembered years later.

I’m reading it again now, in advance of the film. I’m sad to say it doesn’t seem so dated anymore.

Carrie Fisher’s new memoir discloses that, when her parents were concerned that she was abusing LSD, they had a family friend give her a call.

The friend? Cary Grant.

In all seriousness, the excerpt here is more of the same rollicking and hilarious prose people now expect from Fisher; there’s little doubt that “Wishful Drinking” will turn out to be a deserved hit.

XKCD on books with made-up words is so spot-on it hurts. I suspect, but do not know, that it even applies to Anathem.

My college pal Michelle has an honest-to-god bestseller on her hands; note this bit from the NYT trade paperback list:

Note: the description is horrible. It’s a much better book than you’d think based on that blurb.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, giant of science fiction, has died. He was 90. With him passes one of the last of the first wave of SF authors.

One perfect note about his passing: his official time of death is 1:30AM on March 19, 2008. As I write this, it is 5:40PM on March 18. Clarke lived in Sri Lanka, you see, but the upshot is this: Arthur Clarke managed to die in the future.

Well done, Sir Arthur, and Godspeed.

Time Magazine’s top graphic novel of 2007? Achewood.

Norman Mailer is dead. He was 84.

More from his hometown paper here and here.

Robert Jordan is dead, but Wheel of Time remains incomplete.

Sutpen’s blog has a great notice up about the original manuscript for On The Road, which will be on display in New York from November til March. It is, as you may know, on a roll of teletype paper; Kerouac fed the roll of paper into his typewriter and didn’t stop until he’d created one of the most influential novels of his generation.

We think we need to road trip.

No pun intended.

My friend Brad has a pretty ugly episode regarding his book Bear Bryant Funeral Train. We’ve just discovered that our favorite college prof — the recently retired Don Noble — actually reviewed the reissue of his book, and has joined the chorus of Brad’s defenders:

In September of 2005, it seemed Brad Vice had it made. His story collection The Bear Bryant Funeral Train had won the prestigious Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. The book was published and was in bookstores everywhere, waiting to be bought. And then the storm broke. It was noticed that some of the sentences in Vice’s story “Tuscaloosa Knights” (with a K), in fact the first few sentences, were almost exactly the same as some sentences in Carl Carmer’s chapter “Tuscaloosa Nights” (with an N) in Stars Fell on Alabama.

Vice was accused of plagiarism, and within three weeks the prize had been withdrawn and the book recalled and pulped. It has to be the fastest rush to literary judgment in American history.

What Vice’s attackers, in their undue haste, failed to consider was that Vice, born in DCH and raised in Northport, had been educated in the English Department at UA and at the University of Cincinnati in the theories and techniques of postmodernism. This was not plagiarism, this was hommage, collage, playfulness.

Sweet. Our copy of the reissue is on order as we speak. All hail Brad, and all hail Dr. Noble and the rest of those smart enough to realize Brad was getting a raw deal.

The Harry Potter Enlightenment Project really wants to fuck it up for any laggards not yet done with Deathly Hallows.

(Do we really have to tell you not to click if you read slowly?)

Rowling talks a bit with the Today Show, and fills in a few gaps and vague points left open in the book’s epilogue. Apparently, she wrote a great deal more about what ends up happening to her gang of wizards, but not everything fit in the book. Click through for the news.

We just finished the final Harry Potter. We are absolutely staggered that they sold so many of these things so quickly. You thought this was a spoiler, didn’t you?!

Today, we are sleepy, because we stayed up late finishing that Goddamn Harry Potter book, but at least now we’re clear to see the film and have ample time to read Half-Blood Prince before Deathly Hallows drops.

(We’d have finished earlier, but we had to go watch Sam Jackson chain up a nymphomaniacal Christina Ricci for two hours.)

Coming very late to the Harry Potter party. We’d seen the movies, of course, but not read any of the books. Fortunately, Mrs. Heathen had nearly a full set, which we’re consuming at something over a book a day. As soon as we post this, we’ll start Order of the Phoenix.

via JWZ: Ghost Map, about the London cholera epidemic. No, really. Click through for a short excerpt. Precis: drinking beer saved humanity.

We present to the Accumulated Heathen the widely-linked story of Latawnya the Naughty Horse, a children’s book about the evils of smoking, drinking, and drugs.

There are no words, people.

(BoingBoing, Joey Devilla, etc.)

Check out their obit for Vonnegut, which is a ridiculous pile of snide remarks from a barely-literate pseudojournalist.

What fucktards.

From the Song of the Sausage Creature:

When the Ducati turned up in my driveway, nobody knew what to do with it. I was in New York, covering a polo tournament, and people had threatened my life. My lawyer said I should give myself up and enroll in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Other people said it had something to do with the polo crowd.

The motorcycle business was the last straw. It had to be the work of my enemies, or people who wanted to hurt me. It was the vilest kind of bait, and they knew I would go for it.

Of course. You want to cripple the bastard? Send him a 130-mph cafe-racer. And include some license plates, he’ll think it’s a streetbike. He’s queer for anything fast.

Which is true. I have been a connoisseur of fast motorcycles all my life. I bought a brand-new 650 BSA Lightning when it was billed as “the fastest motorcycle ever tested by Hot Rod magazine.” I have ridden a 500-pound Vincent through traffic on the Ventura Freeway with burning oil on my legs and run the Kawa 750 Triple through Beverly Hills at night with a head full of acid… I have ridden with Sonny Barger and smoked weed in biker bars with Jack Nicholson, Grace Slick, Ron Zigler and my infamous old friend, Ken Kesey, a legendary Cafe Racer.

Some people will tell you that slow is good – and it may be, on some days – but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I’ve always believed this, in spite of the trouble it’s caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba….

[…]

This bugger digs right in and shoots you straight down the pipe, for good or ill.

On my first take-off, I hit second gear and went through the speed limit on a two-lane blacktop highway full of ranch traffic. By the time I went up to third, I was going 75 and the tach was barely above 4000 rpm….

And that’s when it got its second wind. From 4000 to 6000 in third will take you from 75 mph to 95 in two seconds – and after that, Bubba, you still have fourth, fifth, and sixth. Ho, ho.

I never got to sixth gear, and I didn’t get deep into fifth. This is a shameful admission for a full-bore Cafe Racer, but let me tell you something, old sport: This motorcycle is simply too goddamn fast to ride at speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you’re ready to go straight down the centerline with your nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat.

[…]

The final measure of any rider’s skill is the inverse ratio of his preferred Traveling Speed to the number of bad scars on his body. It is that simple: If you ride fast and crash, you are a bad rider. And if you are a bad rider, you should not ride motorcycles.

The emergence of the superbike has heightened this equation drastically. Motorcycle technology has made such a great leap forward. Take the Ducati. You want optimum cruising speed on this bugger? Try 90mph in fifth at 5500 rpm – and just then, you see a bull moose in the middle of the road. WHACKO. Meet the Sausage Creature.

Or maybe not: The Ducati 900 is so finely engineered and balanced and torqued that you can do 90 mph in fifth through a 35-mph zone and get away with it. The bike is not just fast – it is extremely quick and responsive, and it will do amazing things… It is like riding a Vincent Black Shadow, which would outrun an F-86 jet fighter on the take-off runway, but at the end, the F-86 would go airborne and the Vincent would not, and there was no point in trying to turn it. WHAMO! The Sausage Creature strikes again.

There is a fundamental difference, however, between the old Vincents and the new breed of superbikes. If you rode the Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society. The Vincent was like a bullet that went straight; the Ducati is like the magic bullet in Dallas that went sideways and hit JFK and the Governor of Texas at the same time.

(Via Captain Portland)

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. 1922 – 2007. Damn.

More from BB: Lee’s written a book called Where have all the leaders gone? that appears to be a withering indictment of Bushism:

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

You might think I’m getting senile, that I’ve gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don’t need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we’re fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That’s not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I’ve had enough. How about you?

I’ll go a step further. You can’t call yourself a patriot if you’re not outraged. This is a fight I’m ready and willing to have.

The secret about the Secret is: if you buy this book, you’re a goddamn sucker.

Pitch ‘n’ Putt with Joyce ‘n’ Beckett:

Or, why the New Yorker remains the coolest magazine in the known world. From EmDashes:

Q. Is it true that at some point in the seventies, Goings On About Town used the listings for The Fantasticks to serialize James Joyce’s Ulysses?

Jon writes: Yes. The New Yorker began serializing Ulysses in the November 3, 1968 listing for The Fantasticks […]. That issue quoted the copyright information from the third printing of the novel (London, Egoist Press). The book’s opening words — “Stately plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed” — appeared in the Dec. 21, 1968, issue. The serialization lasted almost three years, ending in November of 1971, and encompassed the entirety of the book’s first chapter. By the end, Ulysses had spread to the listings for other long-running musicals such as Hello, Dolly!, and Fiddler on the Roof. For about six months prior to serializing Joyce’s novel, the magazine had filled the Fantasticks listing with geometry (“The sum of the squares of the two other sides”), grammar (“‘I’ before ‘e,’ but not after ‘c'”), instructions for doing your taxes (“If payments [line 21] are less than tax [line 16], enter Balance Due”), and other nonsense.

In 1970, New Yorker editor Gardner Botsford explained to Time magazine that he began the serialization of Ulysses because he got bored writing the same straight capsule reviews week after week. Asked about reader response to the serialization, Botsford observed, “Many are delighted they can identify the excerpts, but others think we are trying to communicate with the Russian herring fleet in code.”

It’s true; thanks to the Complete New Yorker, we have a screenshot from the 12/21/68 issue:

Click thru for the original 2-page spread; there’s a lovely surprise on the 2nd page.

See sidebar photo in re: our Christmas present. No. 1283 of 3000.

Crighton, uberwealthy author of crappy potboilers, is also a well-known global warming dissenter. He’s none to fond of his critics, either, as he appears to have gone and put one of them in his latest book as a pedophile. The critic? Michael Crowley, a Washington-based political columnist and Yale graduate (and author of recent TNR cover story critical of Crichton’s environmental pontification). The charcter? “Mick Crowley,” a Washington-based political columnist and Yale graduate.

Classy.

An art gallery in LA is showing an exhibit of Hunter Thompson’s photographs, many of which are pretty darn cool. Apparently, several are available in the new book published by his estate, which is a steal at, well, nearly thee bills. Ouch. Still, cheaper than going to LA, which leaves more money for booze.

Selah.

(Via BoingBoing.)

<img src=”/heathen/yonder.png” alt=”Yonder”

(Hi, Chris.)

Steve Allen interviews Jack Kerouac, 1959.

Dr Thompson’s best work, as read by one of our finer actors:

The bit in question, from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were here and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant . . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere.

There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

William Styron died yesterday in Martha’s Vineyard. He was 81.

We think our favorite of these is Joss Whedon’s:

Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.

Some Bible-thumping jackass out in Conroe is trying to get Fahrenheit 451 banned from his daughter’s high school. The request came during “Banned Books Week,” to add insult to injury.

Update Looks like the Houston Community Newspaper site pulled the story, or at least let the link rot. BoingBoing also covered it, though, and included the money quote:

“It’s just all kinds of filth,” said [complaining father] Alton Verm, adding that he had not read Fahrenheit 451.

The Daily Show’s John Hodgman, interviewed in RadarOnline. In addition to his TDS gig and being the PC guy in the Apple spots, he’s also the author of a hilarious book, a former literary agent, and a writer for the New York Times magazine. On being a purveyor of both “truth and truthiness:”

Of course, comedy always tells the truth. That is why it’s funny. So in this way the missions are the same. Comedy may be an exaggeration of the truth, but it always resonates, sometimes painfully, in the body’s truth-recognizing mechanism (a small chamber-and-membrane structure in the skull) or else it does not produce laughter. Often, it is a truth that we do not wish to hear, or that we have been trained to be embarrassed by-comedy breaks taboos. What is unique about our life today is that The Daily Show is breaking a taboo simply by making plain, truthful, obvious observations about our existing government, its bankruptcy of competence and vision when faced with the basic jobs with which it is tasked.

Word.