If you're one of the three people who hasn't come here from the review of The Invention of Morel in Boldtype, then there's a chance you didn't know that there was a review of The Invention of Morel in Boldtype. It was written by Scott Esposito of Conversational Reading and The Quarterly Conversation. Needless to say it behooves you to subscribe to Boldtype, Conversational Reading, and The Quarterly Conversation.
Finally got a chance to watch the Lost season finale, in which Manservant and Maidservant was set to appear. Maybe it does. After all, the scene appeared as described in the page of script sent to us by the Lost script coordinator—in which Kate hastily grabs her gun out of a box, and in that box is a book. But alas, the book literally flies by as she tosses it aside to get to the gun. Oh well, it gave us a good reason to revel in Ivy Compton-Burnett.
Why don't we have another look at Sawyer immersed in The Invention of Morel—and what the heck, Rory Gilmore reading Monsieur Proust on the beach.
Radiolab's bioengineering episode (So Called) Life mentioned New York Review of Books
contributor and "frog prince of physics" Freeman Dyson numerous times .
. . and in a stern voice reminiscent of action movie trailers, or
perhaps, a headlining heavy metal band (if you download the epsiode,
fast forward to 33:45). Such intonations seem entirely appropriate for
the author of The Scientist as Rebel.
Update: Here is the sound clip . . . Download freeman_dyson.mp3
Update the II: Here is a remix of the sound clip Download freeman_dyson_remix.mp3 . . .
If you missed the cameo appearance of The Invention of Morel on Lost last week, there'll be another chance to the episode tonight.
Elsewhere, the internet is abuzz with discussion about the book:
"Fugitives? Island? Anomalies? I see a pattern here!"
Wondering what else shows up on the character Ben's bookshelf?
"[The plot] sounds a bit familiar, no?"
Ever read a book just because it's appeared on Lost?
An entry on the "Lostpedia" that could use some fleshing out.
The Mother Jones blog is discussing Lost? Isn't there an election to cover?
A reader suggests a story by Bioy Casare's friend and collaborator Borges that might prove fascinating to Lost viewers: "'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,' which is about a decades-old conspiracy to make an imaginary world 'real.'"
and so on...
In researching all of this, I uncovered another NYRB–Lost connection. A while ago, we mentioned that Frigyes Karinthy, whose memoir of surgery, A Journey Round My Skull, we'll soon be publishing, is frequently credited with the now-ubiquitous (and recently disproven?) proposition that all people are connected to each other by only six degrees. Now I see that Karinthy is mentioned in the Season 2 Bonus disk for Lost. On the disk, writer-producer Carlton Cruse, in voice-over, asks:
"Have you ever sat next to someone at a bar and felt that your paths have crossed before? Has the thought ever crossed your mind that the stranger behind you at the store would become a significant part of your life? In 1929, a Hungarian writer (Frigyes Karinthy) put forth the idea that anyone of us could name any one person among the earth's billions of inhabitants and through, at most 5 acquaintances, connect that person back to themselves. He called it 'The Theory of Centrality.'"
Hmmm. Who knows what other connections lurk in the pages of the Lostpedia?
Our resident Lost insider, Chad Post, tipped us off a while ago to the presence of one of our books, The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares in the Lost episode that airs on February 21 ("Eggtown," episode 4, season 4). In fact, Chad's been talking about the similarities between Morel and Lost for some time (conspiracy theory anyone?). Today he sends something even more thrilling, a preview of the episode in which a character (Sawyer) is reading the book, and appears loath to be torn away from it. Is it because it reveals the secrets of the island?
Read a summary of The Invention of Morel and find some links to related pages on an earlier post.
Last weekend, On the Media discussed e-books, and the future of publishing. Daniel J. Kramer's report on the Espresso Book Machine mentioned one of our classics:
"Now, instead of spending years tracking down Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, you just print it out, go home with a copy of it in your back pocket and finally read it."
At 1424 pages, I don't know that it would be all that easy to put this wonderful tome in your pocket! Fortunately Anatomy of Melancholy is still readily available through us, and it's actually on sale for the holiday.
David Remnick briefly mentions Ice author Vladimir Sorokin in his article, "The Tsar's Opponent," which details the motives of chess champion Garry Kasparov’s possible bid for the Russian presidency. Remnik describes Sorokin as a writer “with a flair for surreal brutality”.
Ice certainly has a lot of both of these elements, but there's also drugs, sex, and hammers made out of cosmic ice.
Scott McLemee and Peniel E. Joseph discuss Harold Cruse's Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (which was published forty years ago) in Inside Higher Education. Topics touched on: Marxism, pan-Africanism, Stokely Carmichael, Stanley Crouch, Lorraine Hansbury, "The Year of the Panther," cussedness, and middle-age success. Have we left out anything? [Link]
Joseph offers mixed criticism of Crisis, though he allows that
Cruse’ impact on Black Studies was enormous in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was intensely sought out as a university speaker, mentor, and sage by a generation of young militants trying to make their way through the complex and murky haze of the recent past. For Black Studies programs the weightiness, both literally and figuratively, of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual could be used to justify the substantive importance, even existence in some instance, of rich, vibrant, and complex black intellectual production and scholarly achievement. Indeed, the tome’s sheer heft, made it required reading for tens of thousands of students during this era who read it alongside of such classic texts as The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.
McLemee thinks we could use a bit more contentiousness à la Cruse these days:
Well, I’m reluctant to go along with any scenario in which Cruse is just an important but misguided ancestor. Maybe the historians have surpassed him, but the cultural critics haven’t, necessarily.I’m thinking of an academic conference on hip-hop a few years ago that was struck me as incredibly underwhelming at the level of analysis and argument. (It was the Authenticity Olympics, pretty much.) The qualities that make Crisis so readable after all this time — the critical edge, the skepticism, the sense of cultural history as something to fight about rather than just to celebrate – were not much in evidence. If Cruse had been there, he would’ve cleaned everybody’s clock.
The article sparked some debate over at the discussion board of the African American Literature Book Club. If you're up for a battle (of wits) you might get one there.
Frank Wilson at the Philadelphia Inquirer has a blog called Books Inc., and he recently did us the favor of letting his readers know that we're always soliciting suggestions for the series.
I thought I'd greet all the Pennsylvanians now flooding our site with a round-up of state-related books.
We don't have any Philadelphia books that I can think of offhand. But we've got two with Pittsburgh themes, both having to do with the steel industry.
One of the very first classics we published was Alexander Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. Berkman was imprisoned in Pennsylvania's Western State Penitentiary for 14 years for his attempting assassination of Henry Clay Frick—steel magnate and partner of Andrew Carnegie—in his Pittsburgh office. There's evidence that Berkman played down the role of his then-girlfriend Emma Goldman in the assassination attempt. Goldman is charmingly referred to as "the Girl" throughout this memoir. Unsurprisingly, their relationship never quite recovered after Berkman's release.
Next on this short tour of Pittsburgh is Blood on the Forge by William Attaway.
The novel tells of three brothers who, along with many others during the African-American Great Migration, settle in the city to work the steel mills. Ralph Ellison said of the book, "Attaway's characters are caught in the force of a struggle
which, like the steel furnace, roars throughout its pages."
And this fall we'll be publishing Philadelphian Robert Montgomery Bird's strange metaphysical picaresque, Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself, a book that has been out of print for decades.
As promised, here's the link to the coverage of the relaunch of The Book of Ebenezer Le Page in The Guernsey Press. The article gives a good recap of the history of the book, and of how Edward Chaney came to have G.B. Edwards's Book published. Describing the author, Edward says, "He thought himself back in the past and in the present," which also sums up the mindset of the narrator of the novel, and indeed the two-stranded way in which he tells his story.
Maybe the best part of the piece, though, is the interview with Ray Dotrice, the 82-year-old Guern who's portrayed Ebenezer for the BBC and on stage. Dotrice (whom you might recognize from his appearances in such notable TV shows as The A-Team, Beauty and the Beast, and—my favorite—Shelly Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre) is the perfect mash-up of old-time LA character actor and Guernseyman, if you can imagine such a thing—Caw dammee, eh!
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