Archives for January 20, 2004

“Gervas Leat shook his head. ‘I don’t disapprove of avant garde. I can’t, for I know nothing about it. But I confess I’m inclined to resent it.’

“‘Resent it?’

“‘Yes. I suspect it of trying to teach me something–to convert me. And I don’t want to be converted. I listen for relaxation, you know. Perhaps I’m not really a musical man. But I don’t want struggle or significance or purpose. I want to be pleased.’

“Richard Wakeley, looking about the room, could agree. It was a good deal earlier than the Adams and the architect had known better than to debauch it with a spurious blue. The walls were the palest of apple greens, the pilasters’ capitals discreetly gilded. It was a lovely room, calm and assured, a room for leisure and for formal good manners. Outside it men wrestled with eternal problems: evil and beauty, sin and solipsism. Sometimes the greater the problem the smaller the man. Enormous, insoluble problems. And quite possibly meaningless. Yes, in this lovely room almost certainly without meaning.”

William Haggard, Venetian Blind

I was watching an old episode of What’s My Line?, my all-time favorite game show, earlier this evening. (To read an essay about What’s My Line? that I wrote not long after 9/11, go here.) This particular program must have originally aired in 1961 or 1962, because in introducing panelist Bennett Cerf, the president of Random House, Arlene Francis mentioned in passing that two of Cerf’s authors, William Faulkner and John O’Hara, had gotten good reviews in that morning’s papers.

This offhand comment took me by surprise. Bear in mind that What’s My Line? was no ordinary game show: it was so popular that CBS broadcast it in prime time every Sunday night for a quarter-century. This being the case, does it strike you as at all surprising that the president of a publishing house was sufficiently famous in 1961 to have been a regular panelist on a high-rated network series? Or that Arlene Francis took it for granted that the viewers of What’s My Line? might be interested in knowing that two major American novelists had just published new books, much less that they’d been favorably reviewed in the New York papers that day?

I hit the pause button and tried without success to envision some latter-day equivalent of this phenomenon. Can you imagine Paul Shaffer casually mentioning to David Letterman that he’d just been reading about Martin Amis’s latest novel on Maud Newton‘s blog? For that matter, can you imagine Letterman or Leno interviewing any novelist at all? (O.K., maybe Stephen King, but that proves my point.) Or mentioning a piece they’d just read in The New Yorker? Or inviting Donna Murphy on the show to sing a song from Wonderful Town?

I could parse this cultural sea change in a dozen different ways, but it’s past my bedtime, so I’ll simply settle for reporting it.

I’ve been blogging so much that I inadvertently buried the second installment of Our Girl’s two-part posting on Word Wars, so if you missed it, scroll down or click here.

No more from me today: I’ve got to write my review of Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of A Little Night Music for Friday’s Wall Street Journal. Radio silence officially begins now. Over to you, OGIC.

A blogger who published a good book
not long ago wrote to ask me how he could get it reviewed in the print media. Sighing, I hit the appropriate key in my head and spewed out Version 2.59 of a short paragraph I’ve sent to God only knows how many authors of six-month-old books: “Books are only reviewed on date of publication in major magazines/newspapers. I know, it’s a pain in the ass, but that’s the way it works, basically without exception. Your only hope is to get people to write pieces about your blog that mention the book.”

His reply:

Now there is a subject worthy of a post. Please do. I guess that periodicals are devoted to what is “new.”

So thank god for the blogosphere where someone can “review” a book which was published ten years ago.

Well said, and I do have a feeling that blogs are becoming–slowly but, I hope, surely–an increasingly significant force driving the sale of midlist and backlist books. On the other hand, it’s worth remembering that this phenomenon is made possible by two other phenomena. The first is linkage. The reason why people buy books after reading about them on blogs is because they can–i.e., all they have to do is click on the link. And the reason why they can is because of the emergence of on-line bookstores.

Could it be that the interaction of book-oriented blogs and on-line bookstores is starting to have an unforeseen effect on literary criticism? Might the dynamics of what we now think of as “book reviewing” be in the process of evolving away from the books-as-news paradigm that drives the book-review sections of most magazines and newspapers? Ideally, a blog can make an old book news. So can a magazine or newspaper, but do they? Not often. In any case, a blog, at least in theory, is the ideal medium for promoting a book, be it old or new, precisely because linkage facilitates true impulse buying.

Have I mentioned recently, by the way, that you can place an advance order for A Terry Teachout Reader, out in May from Yale University Press, by clicking here? Yes, I just plugged myself–and why not? What’s a blog for? I couldn’t be happier that Yale is publishing my book, but I don’t have any illusions about their ability to promote it. And if by some weird caprice of fate the Teachout Reader had instead been signed by a trade publisher, I wouldn’t have any illusions about their willingness to promote it. It’s a collection of essays, and (repeat after me) Essay Collections Don’t Sell. And while I certainly can’t predict the future of book publishing, I’ll fall down dead if the total amount of space devoted to book reviews in American magazines and newspapers increases in 2004.

Bottom line: when it comes to serious books, the action is here, not there. So let’s make the most of it.

UPDATE: Andy Kessler has a very interesting and relevant piece in this morning’s Wall Street Journal about how he self-published a book:

I put together dozens of bound galleys and sent them to reviewers, the usual places–Publishers Weekly, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal. I sat back and waited for the glowing reviews to roll in, but was met with the sounds of silence. I checked through back channels and, sure enough, I got stiffed. They just don’t review self-published books. I was on my own.

So like Bill Clinton in his ’92 campaign, I went around the traditional gatekeepers. I sent out copies to friends and old contacts at newspapers, business magazines and TV, like CNBC. I didn’t get any classic book reviews, but probably something better–mentions in articles, short little “hey, I liked this new book” mentions.

I also hit the Web. Nice pieces showed up in a bunch of daily e-mails sent to financial types. Author Michael Lewis said some nice things in a Bloomberg.com column, and the book shot up to No. 26 on Amazon. I did get one real review on Slashdot, whose moniker is “News for Nerds. Stuff That Matters,” and that morning my server got flooded with hits.

And a funny thing happened–the book sold well….

Read the whole thing here.

Courtesy of Supermaud (scroll down), a piece by a Brit who rips up the books he’s reading–for convenience:

I started by buying cheap books, like those Wordsworth editions, when I was off on holiday. To tear the pages out as I read them reduced my baggage burden. After all, these books cost

Again, from Lileks:

I want a DVD compilation of 100 opening credits for forgotten 1960s movies. Is that too much to ask? The other night I found something I’d Tivo’d: “After the Fox,” a caper comedy with Peter Sellers. The credits were just what you’d expect: Maurice Bender animation, a crafty animal to make you hope this would be as good as the Pink Panther, the pop-stars of the moment (the Hollies) singing a Burt Bacharach song with a hook and instrumentation you could only find in the 60s. I couldn’t get the hook out of my mind all day. And it’s played on a harpsichord. Someone should do a study of the role the harpsichord played in the 60s

“Many of these books feature cats or recipes. If they have both, I want to burn that book unless the recipe features a cat.”

Otto Penzler, quoted in today’s Wall Street Journal (on the mild-mannered subgenre of murder mysteries known as “cozies”)

I do so love a nice ripe grassy-knoll theory.

Once Cinetrix catches a whiff of her smelling salts, she’ll be pleased to hear the latest DVD release info, courtesy of DVD Journal. Out today, as regular readers of this blog already know, is The Rules of the Game, the greatest movie ever made, on DVD at last. I’ll be writing about it as soon as my copy arrives.

In the nonce, here’s a snippet of news guaranteed to give Our Girl fits de joie:

Finally, the cult favorite TV series Freaks and Geeks is about to go digital, thanks to new DVD vendor Shout! Factory and DreamWorks Television. The six-disc set of the first (and only) season will include all 18 episodes, including three that never aired, and we are assured that some complicated music-licensing issues have been smoothed out (congrats to fans, by the way, who compiled nearly 40,000 online signatures to make this release a reality). Expect a “director’s cut” of the pilot episode, deleted scenes, outtakes, and — get this — 28 commentary tracks from practically everybody ever associated with the series. Geek out on April 6.

As it happens, I wrote about Freaks and Geeks for the New York Times a few years ago. Here’s the piece.

* * *

Old sitcoms never die–they just move to cable, where they surface at odd intervals forevermore. The nice thing about this two-tiered system of programming is that it occasionally allows those of us who don’t live on the cutting edge of popular culture to catch up with how the hipper half lives. So I paid attention when my friend Laura, a graduate student who specializes in Victorian literature but also keeps close tabs on the doings of people like P.J. Harvey and Conan O’Brian, called to tell me that the Fox Family Channel was rerunning two episodes of “Freaks and Geeks” back to back every Tuesday night at eight and nine, and that I absolutely had to tune in.

“Freaks and Geeks” is an hour-long comedy about life among the less popular students of a Michigan high school circa 1980. Created by Paul Feig and produced by Judd Apatow, it debuted on NBC in the fall of 1999. The critics loved it, the public ignored it, and the show was scuttled midway through its first season, with three episodes still waiting to be broadcast (they have since aired on Fox, and Feig and Apatow have gone on to create “Undeclared,” a new college comedy scheduled to debut on the main Fox network this fall). I never saw it, but Laura assured me that not only was it a great show, it was also eerily true to life. “That was exactly what it was like for me back then,” she said.

I tuned in, fell in love, told all my other friends how good it was, and promptly discovered that just about everyone I know who was going to high school in 1980 loved “Freaks and Geeks,” too, and that their lives had also been exactly like that. Fortunately, you don’t have to be under 40 to appreciate the show’s sharp-eyed social humor. Most of the character types will be perfectly recognizable to viewers who, like me, attended high school in the