Was Shakespeare A Fraud? Is Hollywood Officially Out of Ideas? (Video)
Is Hollywood officially out of ideas to tackle the Shakespeare authorship question in film called (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink …) Anonymous?
Banned Books Week 2011
It’s Banned Books Week in America (Sept. 24-Oct. 1). Lest you think that America doesn’t ban books, the American Library Association has a long list of 11,000 challenged titles. At the head of the queue this year:
- And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
Reasons: homosexuality, religious viewpoint, and unsuited to age group - The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
Reasons: offensive language, racism, sex education, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, and violence - Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Reasons: insensitivity, offensive language, racism, and sexually explicit - Crank, by Ellen Hopkins
Reasons: drugs, offensive language, and sexually explicit - The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
Reasons: sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, and violence - Lush, by Natasha Friend
Reasons: drugs, offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group - What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones
Reasons: sexism, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group - Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich
Reasons: drugs, inaccurate, offensive language, political viewpoint, and religious viewpoint - Revolutionary…
Is Less Reading Fiction Making Us Less Empathetic?
The Guardian discusses research on the powerful link between empathy and reading fiction — a novel is a singular experience in terms of being immersed in the interior life of another person, forcing us to undergo events through the protagonist’s eyes and placing us amongst their thoughts. Studies have pointed to a stunting of empathy in young adults over the past few decades — could one reason be the decline of reading of novels for pleasure?
Burying your head in a novel isn’t just a way to escape the world: psychologists are increasingly finding that reading can affect our personalities.
Researchers from the University at Buffalo gave 140 undergraduates passages from either Meyer’s Twilight or JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to read. The study’s authors, Dr. Shira Gabriel and Ariana Young, then applied what they dubbed the Twilight/Harry Potter Narrative Collective Assimilation Scale, which saw the students asked questions designed…
Selling Wikipedia Pages As Kindle eBooks
This article identifies a supposed ebook “author” whose 887 different ebooks were all apparently cut-and-pasted directly from Wikipedia entries!
The “WikiFocus” series targets obscure niches with few competing ebooks, like Hello Kitty, Aquaman, or the comic strip Archie.
“Of the 887 ebooks, all but 10 earned terrible reviews, averaging one star or less,” this article notes, “or received no reviews at all.”
A typical review? “This ‘book’ is just a word for word copy of the Wikipedia page.”
(And a least one other “author” has attempt the same trick, trying to pass off a Wikipedia page about Charlie Sheen as an $18.95 biography!)
Will Bookstores Boycott Amazon-Published Books?
Amazon has begun signing their own authors and then publishing the books themselves, leaving booksellers “wary” as Amazon “tries to have it all,” according to a Boston newspaper. The co-owner of an independent bookstore near Cambridge considered boycotting Amazon’s new line of books, complaining “They are a huge competitor, and they don’t collect sales tax, giving them an unfair advantage.”
A children’s bookstore noted that “the pie is getting cut into fewer pieces. I’d be nervous if I were an adult book publisher.” Borders bookstore has already declared bankruptcy, leaving The Daily Show to joke that bookstores should simply become “digital downloading” stations — or a “living history” museum where future generations can learn what “a magazine rack” was.”
9/11 Fiction
The BBC asks if there is a novel that defines the 9/11 decade. I’m tempted to nominate The 9/11 Commission Report – any other suggestions that the Beeb left out?
Many books have been written about 9/11 but is there one that embodies the era that the attacks inaugurated?
When Changez, the Pakistani hero of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, watches the Twin Towers come crumbling down, he smiles.
Little Oskar Schell, the nine-year-old at the centre of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, grapples with his father’s death by creating a flip-book – 15 blurry stills, arranged in reverse order, of a man falling to his death from the World Trade Center. When he flicks through the pages, the flailing figure is restored to the top of the building – safe.
In Open City, writer Teju Cole describes Colonel Tassin – a (real) 19th Century figure – who kept count of the number of birds killed by flying…
The Infinite Jest Eschaton Game Video
For all the David Foster Wallace fans out there, a preview of what the Infinite Jest movie may look like comes in the form of a music video by The Decemberists. The book’s movie rights have been acquired by Michael Schur, who directed the video for the band’s “Calamity Song,” incorporating the game “Eschaton” described by Foster Wallace:
The Ultimate Harry Potter Fan Maze
Harry Potter mania in the UK is threatened only by the great phone hacking scandal. Check out the maze created by a farmer in the north of England, via the Yorkshire Post:
A Yorkshire farmer has created the world’s largest spot the difference competition as a tribute to Harry Potter.
Tom Pearcy has carefully cut out two portraits of the boy wizard in his crop of maize plants at his field near York. With some subtle differences between the two images it creates the world’s largest spot the difference competition. At over 50m in diameter each head is also believed to be the largest image of Daniel Radcliffe ever created.
The images have been painstakingly carved out of over one million living maize plants. The 10km of pathways form an intricate maze for visitors to explore. The York Maze is the largest maize maze in Europe and one of the largest in the…
Ernest Hemingway’s Final Days and the FBI
Hemingway biographer A. E. Hotchner’s article in the New York Times details the rapid decline of Ernest Hemingway during his final years. Institutionalization, self-doubt and paranoia came to a head on July 1, 1961 when the author took his own life.
Hemingway’s depression and instability has been well-documented, but what is interesting is that the FBI’s monitoring of his phones, correspondence and activities contributed to his sense of fear and paranoia.
This could be the rare case of someone who’s paranoia about “being watched” is actually due to the fact that he/she is actually being monitored. A. E. Hotchner writes:
EARLY one morning, [on July 1st], while his wife, Mary, slept upstairs, Ernest Hemingway went into the vestibule of his Ketchum, Idaho, house, selected his favorite shotgun from the rack, inserted shells into its chambers and ended his life.
There were many differing explanations at the time: that he had terminal cancer or money problems, that…
New Che Guevera Diary Published
Via The Guardian:
A previously unpublished diary kept by Ernesto “Che” Guevara during the guerilla campaign he fought alongside Fidel Castro has been released in Cuba.
Diary of a Combatant covers the period from 1956 until late 1958, beginning with Guevara’s arrival in Cuba aboard the yacht Granma with Fidel and Raúl Castro and going on to cover his march from the east of the island to Havana.
The book was unveiled in the Cuban capital on Tuesday on what would have been the Argentine-born revolutionary’s 83rd birthday. His widow, Aleida March, was on hand with one of his daughters to sign copies and said that the purpose of publishing the diary was “to acknowledge his thoughts, life and work”.
The book was edited by the Che Guevara Studies centre, which is directed by March, and published by Australian firm Ocean Press/Ocean Sur.
One reason why the publication of the diaries had been put off was…
The Most Well-Read U.S. Cities (According to Amazon.com)
Amazon.com just crunched their sales data for 2011, and calculated the 20 Most Well-Read Cities in America. (Click here to see all 20 cities on a map.)
The #1 city on Amazon’s list (and the top purchaser of non-fiction titles) is Cambridge, Massachusetts, while four of the top five cities are college towns. This suggests students may be shopping online for cheaper text books – another bad sign for the future of the bookstore.
But the #2 city was Alexandria, Virginia, one of three cities on the list within 10 miles of Washington D.C. — which surprisingly, was also reported by Amazon as the city which purchased the most children’s picture book.
Jon Ronson on How to Spot A Psychopath (Video)
The Guardian has an excerpt of Jon Ronsom’s new book The Psychopath Test:
It was visiting hour at Broadmoor psychiatric hospital and patients began drifting in to sit with their loved ones at tables and chairs that had been fixed to the ground. They were mostly overweight, wearing loose, comfortable T-shirts and elasticated sweatpants. There probably wasn’t much to do in Broadmoor but eat. I wondered if any of them were famous. Broadmoor was where they sent Ian Brady, the Moors murderer, and Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper.
A man in his late 20s walked towards me. His arm was outstretched. He wasn’t wearing sweatpants. He was wearing a pinstripe jacket and trousers. He looked like a young businessman trying to make his way in the world, someone who wanted to show everyone that he was very, very sane. We shook hands.
“I’m Tony,” he said. He sat down.
“So I hear you faked your way in here,” I said. (Read More in the Guardian)
Ronson also created a video about his new project:
The Hope Of Humanity
[disinfo ed.'s note: The following is an excerpt from Bryan Young's book of short stories, "Man Against the Future."]
The year was 2081 and so many of the social problems humans had faced over the last hundred years were still a pretty big problem. Most people were still poor, corporations still ran the government, and politicians were constantly caught with prostitutes of both sexes, living and dead. When politicians weren’t blowing each other’s personal lives completely out of proportion for political gain, they were starting wars with other countries. Sometimes, they would even start wars with people inside their own country, but those were usually ideological. Perhaps the biggest and worst change was that the polar ice caps had melted and much of the Mojave Desert was now prime beachfront property. That, and the air across the globe tasted like you were sucking on a tailpipe.
As pressing and horrible as those issues were, they really didn’t enter into the minds of John and Mildred Bates. They were working class and average in most ways. John worked a standard sixty hour work week and, to help make ends meet, Mildred picked up thirty-nine hours a week, part time, working at the deli counter at the local, national chain grocery emporium.
Lost At The Con
[disinfo ed.'s note: The following is an excerpt from Lost At The Con, new fiction from Big Shiny Robot's Bryan Young.]
A political writer for a second rate, online news magazine, Michael Cobb is assigned by his editor to cover a sci-fi and fantasy convention in a bid to humiliate him.
Since Cobb can’t afford to turn down the job, he heads to Georgia and dives head first into the world of Griffin*Con, renowned the world over as the Mardis Gras of geek conventions. In Atlanta he finds a place that takes geeky debauchery to new heights: science fiction and fantasy, cosplay, booze, sex, comic books, drugs, slash fiction, and more.
This scene takes place on Cobb’s first day at the con:
My heart sank, killing the warmth of the drugs. The urge for locomotion finally returned to my legs and I continued my sojourn to the elevator.
That feeling of flying high without a safety net returned as the elevator doors I’d finally reached opened with a sharp DING.
And there before me was a Darth Vader…
Joscelyn Godwin’s ‘Atlantis and the Cycles of Time’
David Metcalfe provides a thorough look at Joscelyn Godwin’s Atlantis and the Cycles of Time: Prophecies, Traditions, and Occult Revelations:
Existing in the liminal spaces of the cultural narrative Atlantis has been a magnet for alternative theories of history and a tool for those looking for a vision of unity in the evolutionary development of human culture. With the solidification of allegory during the Enlightenment Atlantis provided the perfect mythic capstone for rationalists in a quest for historical accuracy in their explorations of the possibilities of a perennial culture.
From the 17th century inquiries of Athanasius Kircher to the publication of Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in 1882, the empirical search for Atlantis has provided an impetus for archaeological speculation on the unification of cultures across the globe. Where present facts show disunity, the idea of an advanced and far reaching civilization in prehistory gave momentum for theorists to develop complex models of…
Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 Textbook About Flies
New copies are still going for around a grand. Interesting story: Michael Eisen writes on it is NOT Junk:
A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly — a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists — consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).
I sent a screen capture to the author — who was appropriate amused and intrigued. But I doubt even he would argue the book is worth THAT much.
At first I thought it was a joke — a graduate student with too much time on their hands. But there were TWO new copies for sale, each be offered for well over…
James Frey’s Final Testament Of The Holy Bible
VICE invites in Oprah’s favorite author James Frey to talk about his new book (The Final Testament of the Holy Bible). It features a modern-day Messiah who advocates sex with men and women, drugs, and doing whatever makes one happy.
The interview includes cranks calls, ideas on the end of the world, the cowardly publishing industry and how Frey is bypassing it, art, and the last time he prayed:
If It Flies, Floats Or Fornicates, Always Rent It
He may be plugging his new book, but Felix Dennis has some pretty perceptive things to say about rich people, himself included. Robert Frank profiles him for the Wall Street Journal:
Felix Dennis, the shaggy British publishing tycoon, poet and author, always seems to have wise words about getting and being rich.
In his first book, “How to Get Rich,” Dennis posited that anyone with $2 million to $4 million in assets is merely “comfortably poor.” For him, it takes $150 million to be truly rich.
He also delivered some memorable (and very true) one-liners like: “the richer you are and the more financial advisers you employ, the less likelihood there is that you can ever discover what you are really worth.”
Of spending, he wrote: “If it flies, floats or fornicates, always rent it.”
Dennis has a new book, called “The Narrow Road: A Brief Guide to the Getting of Money,” which is more…
Is Myth Dead?
An excerpt from the upcoming Immanence of Myth anthology:
It may seem that the word “myth” has lost its meaning to us as a psychological or spiritual term. No, the situation is more drastic than that. Myth has become the opposite of fact, something that is generally accepted but untrue; “it is a myth that reading by flashlight ruins your eyesight.” The popular television show on the Discovery Channel, Myth Busters, uses this definition, attempting to disprove “myths” with something vaguely resembling science. The myths of antiquity are looked upon as quaint stories, despite the fact that they have shaped our cultural history. It is neatly overlooked that myths remain at the center of the bloody stage of modern religious, national, economic or ideological dynamics, not to mention our personal and everyday lives.
The fact that the word “myth” has become synonymous with untruth belies an underlying shift in the Western epistemological focus over…
