The celebrated novelist died in Oxford, where he'd directed the creative writing program for many years. He was 67. More at the Times.
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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.)
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.
When I was in junior high and high school, twenty-odd years ago -- and let me tell you, they were very odd years, yuk yuk yuk -- I read everything Stephen King had written. I started with an "oops" book club edition of Christine my mother had lying around the house, but before long I'd devoured many, many more, from both his by-then back catalog plus every new one to come down the pike until I finished high school or thereabouts, and stopped -- briefly -- until his magnum opus popped up again, in new and improved and expanded form, in 1990. (I'd read the original '78 text before, on the suggestion of a friend from church (no, really), and was blown away.) Here was King working at a fundamentally different level than he'd ever shown before, or since in standalone work. I heard him say once, on a talk show, that "half these things sound like jokes until I get a'hold of 'em," and that's true -- Hello! Haunted Plymouth, anyone? -- but there's nothing at all funny or even particularly abstract (at least in post-9/11 America) about the premise of The Stand. Here was a work head and shoulders over the rest of his output, and King's own commentary about his fans suggests I'm not alone in this assessment. It's an achievement of a novel that has been criminally overlooked outside genre circles these last 30 years. Even a weak TV miniseries conveys at least a minor part of it scope (aided, no doubt, by strong casting -- it featured Gary Sinese, Rob Lowe, Ruby Dee, Miguel Ferrer, and a then-unknown Jamie Sheridan).
For whatever reason, though, I never touched King's next major effort, his Dark Tower cycle. Perhaps this was partly because I didn't think it could be worth my time -- my tastes changed in college, and became less willing to entertain what, by the mid 90s, had become somewhat formulaic output from King. Having written and revisited The Stand, and made many millions besides (who knew Rowling would eventually eclipse him, with a little help from exchange rates?), what motivation did he have to produce more demanding work? Perhaps, too, it was an early manifestation of something I joked about here only last year, when Robert Jordan shuffled off this mortal coil without completing his 12-volume Wheel of Time cycle: don't start reading a series until you know the author will live long enough to finish it. So for whatever reason, I quit reading King, and never touched his own song of Roland. (I was very nearly, and tragically, vindicated; King finished the Tower only after his roadside brush with death).
So I left it alone until two weeks ago. I have a weakness for plot-driven fiction on the road, and God knows I've been on the road this spring. Figuring it'd be worth at least a couple hours -- and knowing that King had, finally, finished the series in 2004 -- I picked up the first volume of the Dark Tower (The Gunslinger)on the Saturday before a 4+ hour flight to Seattle the next day. My flight's arrival into SeaTac was delayed just enough to prevent me from hitting a Barnes & Noble upon my arrival, which vexed me greatly, as I'd consumed the first book whole and was desperate for more. After my first day on site with the client, I drove to the nearest bookstore and picked up the next two (The Drawing of the Three and The Waste Lands). As I write this, I've just finished #3, and will crack #4 before I rest my noggin tonight.
Let me say this, less than halfway through this seven book series: It makes The Stand look like illiterate pulp. King is working on a whole different level, and is clearly maturing and gaining expertise as he goes along. The new, expanded editions include a forward explaining this from King's point of view; the first bits were written very early on (initial stories were published in '78, and written even earlier), but he only came back to the cycle relatively late in his career (book 3 didn't show up until 1991).
It is in this third book that he really hits his stride. Book one sets the stage, and establishes important facts about the Gunslinger (Roland of Gilead) and his world. Book two establishes the relationship, sort of, between Roland's world and ours, and the peril that faces both. Only in book three do we see where King may go, and what parts of our shared literary tradition as well as his own not-inconsequential mythos he incorporates, and in the best possible ways. Consider this passage, from late in book three (I don't think this is spoiler-y; most King fans know what little is revealed here):
"Call me Fannin," the grinning apparition said. "Richard Fannin. That's not exactly right, but I reckon it's close enough for government work." He held out a hand whose palm was utterly devoid of lines. "What do you say, pard? Shake the hand that shook the world?"
Pleased to meet you. Hope you guess my name. The name's not the same, but the initials sort of, oh, I dunno, STAND out, don't you think?
Granted, the reintroduction of a popular (and clearly eternal) villain isn't always a good thing, but the themes King builds on, and the ways he builds them, make the Dark Tower -- at least so far -- the most thrilling work I've read in some time. King is working on levels both literal and postmodern; he transposes elements of traditional fantasy into a modern (or, again, postmodern) setting without becoming contrived or cute, and he does so while maintaining his own inimitable, compelling, and compulsively readable voice. If you thought The Stand hinted that King possessed gears he wasn't using in his more traditional horror output, The Dark Tower is your clearly affirmative answer. A professor of mine, in '90 or '91, suggested the epic was a dead form; a student colleague offered that "Stephen King thinks he's writing one." For my money, he was right.
Granted, it's a daunting idea for some to consider the sheer volume of pages involved here, I admit. Make no mistake; he's working like Tolkein did. The gap from one book to the next is like the gap between chapters in a regular story. It's a seven volume novel, and dwarfs his previous efforts; my paperback of The Waste Lands alone runs to 588 pages. However, if there were ever a story you wished wouldn't end, you'll understand why, not even midway through, Chief Heathen is thrilled with the idea that he's got four books to go.
As St. Webb might say, my friends, pick up on it.
