Graphic love

My friend, who does not even specifically know that I love old book covers (or know that I blog about book covers sometimes, or that I blog) just happened to bring me these three gems from Slovenia.  He might not know some things about me, but he knows my aesthetic tendencies, and I’m happy he does.

(1981)

(1971)

(1971)

Pretty sweet.  He always gets me good gifts.

Speaking of gifts, anyone want to get me one of Simon Page’s posters for The International Year of Astronomy?

Amazing, right? Simon Page actually went into my brain and created a series of posters based off of everything that I love.  Thanks!

PS:

The International Year of Astronomy 2009 is a global effort initiated by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and UNESCO to help the citizens of the world rediscover their place in the Universe through the day and night-time sky, and thereby engage a personal sense of wonder and discovery.

How books can changes the towns in them

So that’s an awkward title.  How does a book – fiction or non-fiction – change the real place where it’s set?  Here are two examples.

The first is Forks, Washington, where Twilight (I haven’t read it) is set .  This is from a Details piece, “So the Woman You Love Has the Hots for a Vampire. What  Does That Say About You?.”

If the Twilight saga taps into a vein of female fantasy and male failure, then Forks—smack-dab in the part of the country that gave us Kurt Cobain and Twin Peaks—truly is the perfect setting for it. Forks is, in a way, an emasculated town. It used to be a timber hub; right on Main Street there’s a commemorative slab of Sitka spruce nearly 12 feet in diameter and marked by a sign that says: WELCOME TO FORKS: LOGGING CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. You can’t miss the phallic symbolism. In the 1970s, thousands of local loggers lost their jobs after environmentalists used the Endangered Species Act to protect the habitat of the spotted owl. In the years that followed, Forks disintegrated into something of a ghost town; if men were lucky, they got jobs as guards at the local prison. With Twilight, though, Stephenie Meyer has miraculously revitalized the place. The motels are full, the restaurants are packed until late at night, and nearly every shop on Main Street makes a killing from Twilight souvenirs. David Cook, 20, who spent last summer working at the town’s chamber of commerce, estimates that the guest book in the tourism center racked up 60,000 signatures during the past year alone. The entire local economy hinges on what you might call Edsploitation.

Galleycat asked Jeff Gordinier, the author of the article, how the residents of Forks felt about their sudden fame and all the crazy people who make the pilgramige to be closer to the story (which, of course, did not happen).  He replied,

“In the course of three full days there, I didn’t encounter a single resident who snickered at the ravenous squealing Twihards. Everyone was thrilled about it! Believe me, the people who live in Forks are grateful,” he replied via email, sharing two photographs of the trip. ”Meyer has saved their town. Before the Twilight craze, Forks truly was trapped in the realm of the undead–the logging business had cratered. The vampire phenomenon has turned Forks into a magnet for Twilight pilgrims, which means that the local motels and souvenir shops are perpetually packed, and revenue is pouring in. Nobody in Forks (nor at the Quileute reservation out at La Push beach) seemed even the tiniest bit jaded about that. They’re welcoming the fanatics with open arms.”

In more worthy news, it’s the 50th anniversary of In Cold Blood , and The Guardian considers how Holcomb, Kansas was effected not just by the murders, but by Capote and his book.

In Holcomb, there is River Valley farm that still looks on the exterior largely as he described it. It now belongs to its third set of owners since the Clutters, the Maders; they used to give tours of the property but grew so bothered by the endless stream of In Cold Blood pilgrims that they posted the “stop” sign.

In Garden City, the Wheat Lands motel where Capote and Harper Lee stayed, is still there, though a photo of Capote posing in front of the building has been stolen from the foyer. The courthouse where Smith and Hickock were put on trial still stands as imposing as it was then. In the cemetery there are three neat tombstones, all bearing the date 1959: Herb and Bonnie together in the centre, Kenyon on the right and Nancy to the left. Someone has left a vase of blue cloth flowers; it has tumbled over.

Those signs apart, the local community is barely recognisable 50 years on. The family farm as the prime social unit, of which the Clutters’ was the epitome, has declined and given way to huge mechanised operations producing animal feed. Holcomb, population 270 in 1959, has grown tenfold and is now dominated by one of the world’s largest meat-packing factories. It is the last sad irony of Herb Clutter that just a few years after his own violent death, his way of life died too.

In Holcomb and Garden City, some of the residents welcomed his book. Alvin Dewey, the chief police investigator, championed it to the end. The Hopes too remain fans, cherishing the first-edition copy that Capote autographed for them. But many in the town continue to resent its intrusion, and refuse to talk about it or any of the subsequent films. Cliff Hope puts the ongoing hostility down to Capote’s unblinking portrayal of the killers. “Many people thought he should have written about the Clutter family, rather than the murderers.”

Delores’s theory is that some local people have closed minds. “There will always be people who think it’s none of anybody’s business to come out here and write about their affairs. You will never change their opinions.”

Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole (by Lydia Millet, at least)

Lydia Millet provides this week’s Book Notes on Largehearted Boy.  The song that goes with the “Sexing the Pheasant,” the first story in her new collection Love in Infant Monkeys is “Pablo Picasso,” which I love.  However, she “maybe” goes with the John Cale version. I can’t really get behind that. Here’s her explanation, of the story, at least.

“Sexing the Pheasant,” the first story, is about Madonna, when she shot a pheasant on her English estate and then decided to give up hunting. It’s an internal monologue as she watched the bird die, her thoughts on her marriage and religion and the thorny issue of whether she would still be able to wear tailored hunting clothes if she wasn’t actually hunting anymore. I’d pick “Pablo Picasso,” maybe the John Cale version.

 

Kirk Cameron (YES) and other creationists to distribute free copies of Origin of the Species

For Christ’s sake. According to Jacket Copy, “Evangelical Christians plan to distribute more than 100,000 free copies of Charles Darwin’s seminal work on the theory of evolution, “On the Origin of Species,” on college campuses…” Tomorrow!!!

These particular copies of the book come with a special, 50-page introduction by the leader of the evangelical group Living Waters that presents the “correct view” on evolution intelligent design before readers can cringe through the seminal work of science the devil.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to this extra-special edition:

Keeping in mind that the most intelligent of human beings can’t create even a grain of sand from nothing, do you believe that the “something” that made everything was intelligent? It must have been, in order to make the flowers, the birds, the trees, the human eye, and the sun, the moon and the stars. If you believe that, then you believe there was an intelligent designer. You have just become an unscientific “knuckle-dragger” in the eyes of our learning institutions that embrace Darwinism. But you are not alone if you believe in God.

Please, someone, get me a copy!!!

“Musty, slightly acidic, even grassy”

That’s the delicious, comforting smell of an old book, according to a recent article from Analytical Chemistry (or the NYT), and of course, that wonderful smell means something bad. Dr. Matija Strlic researched what was behind this wonderful smell out of an interest of book preservation and set about y analyzing the volatile organic compounds they emit to see what they might reveal about the state old books were in.

Dr. Strlic said he got the idea one day at a library when he saw a conservator sniffing an old piece of paper, trying to determine what it was made of. “I thought, certainly a technique could be developed to do that more accurately,” he said. The approach is similar to breath analysis used to diagnose illness, he added.

He and his colleagues analyzed the volatiles produced by 72 samples of old paper of different types and in varying condition from the 19th and 20th centuries, using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. They found that some compounds were reliable markers for paper with certain characteristics — high concentrations of lignin or rosin, for example, which make paper degrade relatively quickly.

Portable devices that can detect volatile compounds already exist, Dr. Strlic noted. So with further research, he said, it may be possible to develop one for use in libraries and other places. Such an electronic nose would sniff the air around old books to find those that are so fragile they should not be lent out, for example, or are otherwise in need of preservation.

Malcom Gladwell just can’t get a break (not like it matters)

Here’s Steven Pinker’s review of Malcom Gladwell’s collection of essays What the Dog Saw:

An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

The banalities come from a gimmick that can be called the Straw We. First Gladwell disarmingly includes himself and the reader in a dubious consensus — for example, that “we” believe that jailing an executive will end corporate malfeasance, or that geniuses are invariably self-made prodigies or that eliminating a risk can make a system 100 percent safe. He then knocks it down with an ambiguous observation, such as that “risks are not easily manageable, accidents are not easily preventable.” As a generic statement, this is true but trite: of course many things can go wrong in a complex system, and of course people sometimes trade off safety for cost and convenience (we don’t drive to work wearing crash helmets in Mack trucks at 10 miles per hour). But as a more substantive claim that accident investigations are meaningless “rituals of reassurance” with no effect on safety, or that people have a “fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another,” it is demonstrably false.

Here’s an excerpt from Moe Tkacik’s “Gladwell for Dummies from The Nation:

And so once again we find Gladwell muckraking in the trenches of banal cliché and thereby reinforcing said cliché–and, more insidiously, banality itself. In Outliers, as in Blink, he appears to assume that the unexamined life is the only sort his readers could be living, though lessons with titles like “Demographic Luck” and “The Importance of Being Jewish” suggest that he may have downgraded his expectation of who his readers are from the less savvy to the truly oblivious. Outliers contains a few new terms and morsels of trivia: the 10,000-Hour Rule describes the number of practice hours one must put in to attain true genius; we also learn that fourteen of the seventy-five individuals on Gladwell’s list of the “richest people in human history” were Americans born between 1831 and 1840. (Cleopatra is No. 21.) But for the most part, the book’s first section, “Opportunity,” contains nothing that will enlighten anyone who has given even a small fraction of 10,000 hours of thought to the word’s meaning.

Any theory behind this disenchantment, Mr. Gladwell?

Understandign typing errors

Here’s an old, interesting blog post from Language Log about the different types of typing errors and what they mean, but sadly no information on how to fix them.  I have to say that knowing there is science devoted to this particular area of human errors makes me feel much better about the fact that I cannot type a typo-free sentence, and often cannot proofread well enough to find my mistakes.  I must not be as alone as I feel.

Yesterday, Stefan Valdimarsson wrote to tell me about an interesting error in one of my recent posts. It was a typing error, but not one of the common slips of the finger that have been catalogued, counted and modeled over the decades, from D.D. Lessenberry’s 1928 “Analysis of Errors” (published by Corona Typewriters, and reprinted in Dvorak et al., Typewriting Behavior, 1936) to the “Glossary of Terms Including a Classification of Typing Errors” by D. Gentner et al., in W.E. Cooper’sCognitive Apects of Skilled Typewriting, 1983.

This wasn’t a keystroke substitution error, nor a transposition of two sequentially adjacent keystrokes, nor an interchange of keystrokes that are not serially adjacent, nor a migration of keystrokes to a position earlier or later than the canonical order, nor a keystroke omission, nor a keystroke insertion, nor an abstract doubling error (like “aad” for “add”) or alternation error (like “threr” for “there”). Such errors are a fascinating subject, as you can learn by reading David Rumelhart and Donald Norman’s seminal paper “Simulating a skilled typist: A study of skilled cognitive-motor performance“, Cognitive Science 6(1) 1-36, 1982.

But this wasn’t really a keystroke error at all.

Instead, it was a case where I started to type one word, and then, as my attention shifted downstream, my fingers continued with a different, and entirely inappropriate, alternative. I was transcribing some experimental instructions from a (.pdf image of) a paper on “Most Comfortable Loudness for Pure Tones, Noise, and Speech” (discussed in the post “Liberman on Sax on Liberman on Sax on hearing“, 5/19/2008)…

So Philip Roth gets on a bus…

I am not a Philip Roth fan, but I am a Philip Roth talent acknowledger and respecter.  Hearing about this made me actually kind of like him.  For, like, a minute.

So I guess there’s like a Philip Roth bus Tour that takes you to all the major “landmarks of his novels” in Newark?  Members of Weequahic High School’s class of ‘59, in town for their 50th reunion, were on that tour, and guess who showed up?  Philip Roth!

“Omigod, are we excited!” said Marsha Weinstein. “If I had known, I would have brought my books for him to sign. I have all his books.” Jill Goff called out to the author: “I have an empty seat!”

That’s awesome and thoughtful and generous no matter what, but especially because Roth comes across as the most self-obsessed person in the world.  Also, I thought he would only get on a bus full of young-woman, so, you know, good for him?

Everyone’s a critic

So I read your new story.

I have some suggestions.  First, I thought you could kill the beginning.

And the end…not really sure that’s working for me either.

Were you trying to be funny here?

Have you ever met anyone who actually talks like this?

Why is this character so disconnected?  Were you abused as a child?  It’s okay, you can tell me.

That’s about it, I guess.

Working on anything else?

Understanding Cheever

I’m currently reading Cheever’s stories (again), so  I was very excited to read this excellent, long article on his recently published journals. (Particularly because it’s written by Geoff Dyer.)

Cheever constantly voiced doubts about his writing. Reading The Naked and the Dead made him despair of his own “confined talents”. He worshipped Bellow, admired and bitched about Updike, fretted that while Roth was “playing stink finger and grabarse I admire the beauty of the evening star”. Not surprisingly, these admissions of literary inadequacy were always tempered by a wounded defensiveness. Firmly rooted in “the genteel tradition”, his “old-fashioned fiction” about “the country-club set” served as a tacit rebuke to the unfettered excesses of “the California poets”. Actually, some of the fiction – the 1962 story “A Vision of the World”, for example – is stranger than one imagines it to be, or remembers it being, and often has the quality of “violet-flavoured nightmare” that Cheever admired in Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

The Journals reveal the germs of much that will eventually be transformed in the fiction. The reflections in “The Death of Justina” (1960) about how the soul might not leave the body but “lingers with it through every degrading stage of decomposition and neglect” is there, almost word for word, in a journal entry from the previous year. After you have read this passage in the starker context of the Journals – Cheever has run out of booze and is thinking of his dead mother while drying dishes – its force in the story is reduced by the knowledge that it has been craftily insinuated into the narrative. Time and again, things we admire in the fiction – the eye for “travelling acres of sunlight”, the telling psychological detail, exuberant lyricism tinged with a residue of the last (or anticipation of the next) hangover – are spilled straight on to the pages of his journal.

The Journals also contain numerous hints of a kind of writer we do not expect Cheever to be. It’s no surprise to find that he can do proto-Carver – “On Sunday afternoon my only brother comes to call. He is told that if he drinks again he will die, and he is drunk” – but we don’t expect him, reflecting on Shea Stadium in 1963, to anticipate the famous opening of Don DeLillo’s Underworld: “I think that the task of the American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony . . . The sense of moral judgements embodied in a migratory vastness.”