A Different Stripe

Catch-all for 12.22.06

• This Tuesday, The Washington Post published an article about the Children's Collection.

• The Boston Phoenix chose English, August as one of its top 10 books of the year.

• Megan of Harvard Book Store and Bookdwarf is doing her best to convince everyone to read Eileen Chang's Love in a Fallen City. She recommended it to Booksense,  named as her "Underrated Writer" of 2006," and suggested that readers would "devour the...stories as if they were their last meal"—my favorite quote about the book.

• Georges Simenon is the forum Vintage Crime's author of the week. The proprietor of the site asks, "Do you have a favourite Georges Simenon novel? What do you particularly like, or particularly dislike, about Simenon’s writing? Was he stronger at plotting, characterisation or atmosphere? Do you like his writing style? And what are your favourite TV and movie adaptations of his work?" Good questions all.

Call for visits (to the MLA)

Next week we're off to Philadelphia for the Modern Language Association conference. NYRB will have a booth (part of the huge Random House display) at the exhibit hall. Look for #607. Please stop by for a chat, a free copy of The New York Review of Books (an excellent subscription offer for impoverished grad students and academics), and some good deals on classics.

Breathe it does

“London, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and termini into the mighty congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, in the evening, exhaled violently through the same channels.
    The men and women imagine they are going into London and coming out again more or less of their own free will, but the crouching monster see all and knows better.”

Patrick Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude

Catch-all for 12.18.06

• In a year-end roundup in Australia's The Age, John Banville praises Georges Simenon's The Strangers in the House, calling it, "One of the best pieces of fiction I have read this year...A typically dark, atmospheric and alarming work from this master existentialist."

• D.T. Max writes about the Classics series in the LA Times. He focuses on five rather different books from the list: Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts; Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August; Dorothy Baker's Cassandra at the Wedding; John Williams's Stoner, and Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock.

• Marina Warner calls War and the Iliad her "Book of the Year" in the TLS.

• The blog Entertaining Research lists some harder-to-find links about Arun Kolatkar's Jejuri and points us to a post by Hurree at Kitabkhana that serves as a roundup of links about the work. But of more interest is Hurree's desription of his own, cherished edition of the poem: "For years, like most of my generation, I'd been reading Kolatkar's classic poem-cycle in samizdat form—some of us had copies that had been xeroxed so often that Kolatkar's words assumed ghostly form on the page, some had painstakingly typed (yes, typed, as in on a manual typewriter) copies of the book with corrections made in violet ink."

• Last weekend's On the Media broadcast a story about the efforts of the music industry in England to extend copyright on sound recordings from 50 to 95 years. This means, for instance, that early Sun studio recording will soon be in the public domain in Europe. Though the story is about copyright of music, not writing, many of the issues raised parallel those we encounter here: including problems in discrepancies between US and European copyright terms and large publishers who don't have any idea of the worth of their intellectual property but who will nonetheless withhold rights that they don't intend to use.
  

Cat as Critic

"The [cat's] hostile claws are invisible, and are not shown when they are not wanted, yet are ever sharp and ready. The eye has a narrow pupil in broad daylight, receiving no more sunshine than is agreeable, but it will gradually expand as twilight falls, and clear vision needs a larger and larger surface. Some of these cat-qualities are very desirable in criticism. The claws of a critic ought to be very sharp, but not perpetually prominent, and the eye ought to see far into rather obscure objects without being dazzled by plain daylight"

Philip Gilbert Hamerton, Chapters on Animals; quoted in Carl Van Vechten's The Tiger in the House

Taschen opens new store in New York City

Taschen, publisher of art books high, medium, and low, has opened a store in SoHo. Like some of the other Taschen stores, this one's designed by Philippe Starck.

Publishers Weekly has an informative article about the store. And, on a different note, LA Weekly published a profile of the founder of the publishing house, the self-effacing Benedikt Taschen, in 2002. To give you a sense of the man, the interview was conducted while the publisher dried off in a sauna.

Another one for the Jenny Linsky Gallery

Here, at Lucius Monkey's well-illustrated website is, according to the caption,

"a photo of Lucius doing his favorite dance, the Sailor's Hornpipe. He learned these steps from his dear friend Jenny Linsky."

Jenny and her friends couldn't have done it better themselves.

Lovely Feathers

"Feathers is very tired of this book. She has told me so more than once lately. Sometimes with her eyes, gazing at me with impatience while I write. Sometimes with her paws, scratching scornfully at the sheets of paper as I toss them to the floor. Sometimes on my writing table she insinuates herself between me and my work. When I began this book she was a kitten, a chrysanthemum-like ball of tawny, orange, white, and black fuzzy fur, and now she is about to become a mother. Yes, while I have been writing a book, Feathers has experienced teething, love, and now soon will come maternity. It makes me feel very small, very unimportant. What I have done in fourteen months seems very little when it is compared with what she has done.
    The mystery of life deepens for her. Her eyes are slightly drawn. She is less active and she wishes more repose. She needs the warmth of my knees, where she desires to sleep uninterrupted by the sound of clicking keys. She is pleading with me to come to an end. And I cannot resist her prayer. See, Feathers, I am nearly done. I am writing the last page. You can come to me now and spend the hours of preparation in my lap, and I offer, rather than this poor book, to test myself as a literary man, after Samuel Butler’s method, by naming your yet unborn kittens. I shall call them, if Nature gives you five, and the sexes permit, Aurélie, Golden Feathers, Coq d’Or, Prince Igor, and Jurgen."

March 4, 1920.
New York.

Carl Van Vechten, The Tiger in the House

A Sticker's Worth a Thousand Words

I admit that I fell for Tin House's marketing. The email header read: NEWS FLASH! and I opened it. Seems Tin House Books had to delay release of an upcoming book because they have to sticker over the old title. From the press release:

Our anticipated publication of artist/provocateur Zak Smith’s visual homage to Thomas Pynchon’s seminal novel Gravity’s Rainbow has been slightly delayed.

In an unfortunate turn of events, Pynchon’s publisher, Penguin USA, believing the book’s original title, Gravity’s Rainbow Illustrated: One Picture for Every Page, was misleading, demanded Tin House Books change the title or face a lawsuit.

Smith’s book will now be known as Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow, the title of the original series of artwork showcased at the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

As much as I'd rather not, I agree with Goliath here that the original title is misleading. The whole likelihood of confusion thing, you know. I wonder what the intellectual property law scholars would say, though.  At any rate, here's hoping that the little brouhaha will help sales for Tin House!

Two Cheers for the Upper East Side

New York is a city still blessed with many excellent independent bookstores (although there seem to be fewer and fewer. RIP, Coliseum Bookstore). But I never knew until recently how excellent the two on the Upper East Side were. A couple of weeks ago, I dusted off my passport and headed uptown—way uptown, to the East 90s. It was a gloomy Sunday, but something about walking into The Corner Bookstore on Madison (around 92nd St.) cheered me up. The window display was so pretty, the wood of the shelves so polished, and the light so golden. It was tiny and crowded; there were even children being read to in the children’s nook. The selection of cooking, art, and travel books impressively thorough—given the size limitation. While the fiction area was on the small side, it had the feel of an enlarged staff recommendations area. I hung out for a while, until I was worried that I looked like some strange loiterer, and then paid for my purchase, and took off.
    Sadly, by the time I hit Crawford Doyle Booksellers, some ten blocks south, it was about to close up for the evening. This place was a bit dustier than The Corner Bookstore, but no less cozy and inviting. I was amazed to see how many NYRB Classics they had on display, in their own special area. Talking with the enthusiastic sales staff, it seemed that Christmas sales were not as strong as they’d wished. I hope things have picked up since.
    From what I can tell, neither store has a website. Somehow I’m glad for this lack of accomodation to the twenty-first century. It seems right, and somehow very Upper East Side.