Yeah, I know, old news.
And this is not the first time he’s admitted it in public.
Still, in advance of his new release Chronic City (Doubleday HC 9780385518635 $26.95), due October 13th, Lethem’s further musings on his artistic mentor is a lot of fun to read.
Just a word of warning: this PDF reads better in browsers other than Firefox (Thanks Total Dick-Head for the tip).
(via io9)
Yes, this has been floating around for a few days, but I couldn’t resist posting this piece about LeVar Burton’s relief following the demise of Reading Rainbow.
Do you remember K-Tel record advertisements from the 70’s and 80’s? “Twenty great hits by the original artists…available on LP, 8-Track and cassette”.
Funny to think that in those days, the idea of three competing music formats didn’t phase us in the slightest.
I was reminded of those when I read this New York Times piece on competing e-book formats.
Most books are available in several different formats, but with Amazon gobbling up the companies that created these formats quicker than Homer Simpson in a doughnut shop, choices are narrowing and dissent is brewing.
It’s interesting to see that smaller, independent authors are getting squeezed out of the Kindle format as Amazon increases their charges, possibly ensuring that the vast majority of books available for the format are those put out by publishers whose pockets are deep enough to do so.
Weren’t e-books supposed to bring down the barriers to publishing?
Oh, well, at least this tangent gives me an excuse to post these YouTube videos of an old K-Tel commercial to remind us of those halcyon days. And, you have to admit, having Lou Rawls, Kiss, Paul Anka and Heart on the same album is a slice of fried gold.
I don’t think I’ve heard Alice Cooper’s I’ll Never Cry in at least thirty years.
Oscar-winning screenwriter (and full-time punching bag of unsuccessful scriptwriters everywhere) Diablo Cody is set to write and produce an adaptation of the Sweet Valley High series.
A lot of people get on her case, saying that her dialogue is contrived, and not how real teenagers speak. While I’m not a huge fan, I think she is, much like Quentin Tarantino, is cobbling together her own argot. She may not be writing the stuff kids say, but in pretty short time, kids will be saying what she writes.
(Via SpoutBlog)
1) The brand new McSweeney’s iPhone application, which is a mini-subscription service which features content from their print editions. It’s affordable hipness at $1 a month. (Via Gizmodo)
2)Iain (M.) Banks’ new novel Transition is available, in an abridged version, as a free audio book, with new chapters released twice a week. (via io9)
While I sometimes feel that I’m a little too old to get everything in McSweeney’s, I think the Banks adaptation is a remarkable idea. You can listen to a truncated version of the book for free, and if after a chapter or two you think it’s up your alley, you can go to your local bookseller and buy a copy.
Mother Jones recently explored this question, and the bottom line is go to the library and kill your television.
What it boils down to is that if you read a lot, over its lifecycle, the Kindle’s “carbon savings even out to about 370 pounds of CO2, or the equivalent of about 22.5 books per year”.
As for libraries, if you read twenty books a year, and borrow fifteen of them from the library, you will reduce your carbon footprint to about an eighth of what it would be if you purchased them all new.
But, as the article points out, the carbon savings are meaningless if you like to watch television, as the average 34-37 inch models produce around 474 pounds of carbon a year, blowing both new books and Kindles out of the water.
To compound the dilemma even more, it seems that certain publishers of books in the public domain are having problems selling Kindle editions of their books, according to Slashdot.
Guess you’ll have to go to the bookstore or library to find a cheap (and zombie-free) edition of Pride & Prejudice.
(Via MobyLives)
Venerable science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson seems to think so, and says as much in an article in the New Scientist- Science Fiction: The Stories of Now, claiming that they “… judge in ignorance and give their awards to what usually turn out to be historical novels”.
Robinson goes on to say
Thus it seems to me that three or four of the last 10 Booker prizes should have gone to science fiction novels the juries hadn’t read. Should I name names? Why not: Air by Geoff Ryman should have won in 2005, Life by Gwyneth Jones in 2004, and Signs of Life by M. John Harrison in 1997.
Fair enough, but he conveniently leaves out the year 200, when Margaret Atwood won the prestigious prize for her novel The Blind Assassin., which is set in a dystopian milieu.
Also, couldn’t we also consider That David Mitchell’s Booker-nominated Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten have science fiction elements?
It’s not that Robinson doesn’t have an axe to grind, most genre writers get the fuzzy end of the lollipop when it comes to these sorts of prizes. But I would also take the opinion of the Booker judge who says “perhaps his arrows could be directed even more towards publishers than to judges”.
There can be no doubt that all awards are a matter of politics and activism from the part of publishers, and you can bet that the Random Houses of the world are going to apply more advocacy to a high profile (and high cost) literary acquisition, than they will to somebody who writes about aliens, time travel, and alternative realities (unless you’re Michael Chabon or Jonathan Lethem).
(via The Guardian)
This past weekend, the animated film adaptation of Judi and Rom Barrett’s Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs trounced the competition at the box office clearing almost three times the box office take of its nearest competitor The Informant.
Here’s a fun tidbit about the film I bet you didn’t know: In Isreal, the film was released with the title Geshem shel Falafel, or, Rain of Falafel.
(What War Zone, via io9)
Denise Oswald has made what looks to be her first high-profile acquisition as editor at Soft Skull by purchasing the novel The French Revolution by Matt Stewart.
What makes Stewart’s novel immediately unique is that it was first released entirely as Twitter feeds. So while Dickens would serialize a novel chapter by chapter, Stewart serialized his novel 140 characters at a time.
Yes, this does sound like a novelty, but according to Oswald, the novel is “completely out-sized and wildly entertaining”.
I guess readers will be the judge of that. One thing that is for certain, this purchase, and the profile it has created for the author, has aroused bitterness in certain circles.
You can find out for yourself by reading it, in tweet form, here. Hopefully, the finished product will have actual paragraphs and sentences. It’s a real drag trying to read it from the bottom up.
(Via GalleyCat)
