Snooki Gets A Book Deal

From the fine, fine folks over there at BuzzFeed, here we have a Venn diagram showing "The thing no one considered when they decided to give Snooki a book deal." Couldn't have drawn it better myself. But, then again, I can't draw. So, well done!

Events from July, Part 3 (Harlem Book Fair)

Artist signing his work


Women being interviewed


"Black Nobel" at the Harlem Book Fair


Author Freddie Simmons


Bookstalls


Women checking out the music at the Sexy Soul Oldies booth


A patron checking out books


New York Black Librarian Caucus's booth, Harlem Book Fair

Memorial Day + Anne Carson's Nox + My First Literary Agent, the Crack Addict + Gordimer on Books & Libraries

A listing of all the young women and men soldiers who've lost their lives in the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (CNN.com: US and Coalition Casualties)

A op-chart graphic on the dead and unknown dead in the US's wars, from today's New York Times, by Robert M. Poole and Rumors presents the country's military history in a metaphorically arresting, unforgettable way. (Cf. above, at right, and click on the link for the larger view.)

Finally, here's a Memorial Day post written by veteran and progressive Todd Theise, who's running against Democorporatist Scott Garrett in New Jersey's Fifth Congressional District.  (H/t Digby!)

* * *

Memorial Day concerns remembering, memorializing and, to some extent, grieving, which brings me to the lone book not associated with any aspect of my teaching, writing, committee work, or university visitors that I've managed to read over the last 3 months, and it took just an evening: poet and classical scholar Anne Carson's extraordinary new work, which I will not call a book of poetry, though it is a highly poetic book, Nox (New Directions, 2010). The book has been covered extensively around the Net, so I'll describe it in a few words: in the way that only Carson can, the book combines an elegy to her deceased brother (the dedication, to "Michael," is "Nox Frater Nox" (or Night Brother Night), and a record of her translation of a particularly difficult Catullus elegy, Poem 101, "Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus." She translates the opening line as "Many the peoples many the oceans I crossed," and the rest of this short poem, a little beyond halfway through the book, surrounding it with a variety of other texts. There's a method that's quickly discernible: on the left pages, she usually (but not always) places lexical entries for each word in the Catullus poem, and on the right side, she features journal entries, snippets of notes to herself, very brief poems, visual images by and of herself, and sometimes of her brother, her own artworks, or any of these elements in collaged combination.

In and of themselves, these aspects of the book, especially by a writer of genius like Carson, would make for a worthwhile read, but the real showstopper is the book's physical form. The designer Robert Currie assisted Carson in creating the sort of affordable book-as-art you rarely see today (and sadly, especially at a time when physical books are facing possible disappearance as digital technologies increasingly dominate). The pages are full color, at times nearly convincing you that you're looking at Carson's journals instead of photographs of them, and the entire book is printed in accordion fashion, as the photos below show, and then placed in a gray oystershell box, which serves as a perfect bed for the reader to flip through it and enjoy it. You can lift it out of its box, of course, like an oyster, and it expands like a bellows, but having handled it a bit, it works fine either way.  For weeks, as the pressure to get through mounds of fiction kept growing, I found myself stopping and examining this work every time I was in the bookstore (always a refuge for me), and eventually, as I was dawdling amid a stack of stories, I picked up a copy. Despite its format, the book falls within the current price range for hardcover books, at $29.95. It reminds me of another remarkable, widely available work, British postmodernist B. S. Johnson's (1933-1973) 1969 novel The Untouchables, which consists of 27 sections held together by a removable wrapper and placed in a similar clamshell box. In the UK Secker and Warburg originally published this work, and Picador published the British reissue in 2008, while New Directions published the US version.



This is not, however, a book of poetry in any conventional sense, and to me represents the most experimental text Carson has produced. Even placing this alongside her very avant-garde work Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (Knopf, 2005), the radical quality of this text stands out. It reminds me both of an assemblage in the plastic art sense (cf. Duchamp, Man Ray, von Freytag-Loringhoven, Rauschenberg) and of one perhaps in the philosophical sense (Deleuze and Guattari), with the elements determined by the author, put in play by her, gesturing towards but defying a set genre (poetry), but really to be assembled and reassembled by the reader. To put it another way, Nox comprises texts to be made into a text, that must be made into them, to be transformed not into narrative, as Johnson had done earlier, or Julio Cortázar with his great novel Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963), but into poetry, into a poem, an elegy.  In a sense, it embodies the root idea of translation, which involves the ritual carrying over of the remains of the dead (trans-latus, carrying across), and also the very idea of remembering, which is to say, re-membering, or putting together the pieces again and a being mindful of the deceased, of the past, of their shared history, yet here, the remembering isn't just the author's, for her brother, but a collaborative effort, requiring the reader's involvement.

As with all of Carson's work, every return to the text provides and turns up something new, and I am enjoying now slowly making my way through the lexicon entries and thinking about how often the issue of "night" (nux in ancient Greek, nox in Latin) turns up in the examples, and also how each relates to the right-side materials, the Zettel that create this sad, powerful and novel conversational elegy.


Carson's Nox (New Directions, 2010), in its box (yes, that's Daneeyal Mueenuddin's stellar collection at left)

The box open, and the text inside

The 3-dimensional, multicolor quality of the text

Some of Carson's artwork, in the text

An example of a lexicon entry on the left, and one of Carson's texts, her translation of the Catullus poem, on the right

The book displayed in accordion fashion

The back of the book

* * *

When I have related the following story, or my rather reduced sense of it, to people, they listen politely, and I wonder, do they think I'm making this up? Because really, how often do you hear people use the terms "literary agent" and "crack addict" about the same person, in the same sentence? Yet such is the truth: my first (and former) literary agent is now set to become rich (again) and famous (or more so than he was), by giving his own account of his drug-addled career of a few years ago. Let me be clear that when he was my agent, although he wasn't able to sell my work (I did it myself), he was absolutely lovely and kind and encouraging and fun to be around, and I never thought for a minute that anything was amiss, and I gather it wasn't. He represented others quite well (including the author I wrote about above). But only a few years later, after he'd hit the jackpot with star writers and big advances...well, you can read the article.  And I just may have my students do so next winter. I think.

New York Times: "Tale of a Life, Unabridged: A Book Agent's Descent and Ascent from the Ashes"

* * *

Lastly, speaking of books and new technologies, I found this short piece in yesterday's Guardian Online worth noting: at the Guardian Hay-on-Wye Book Festival, Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer was advocating for the printed word over new technologies, and was especially calling for libraries, with print texts, in the shantytowns in South Africa (how many libraries could have been built and stocked with books for the billions spent on those World Cup stadiums?) and in similar places across Africa and the globe. In addition, she lamented the absence of bookstores as well in areas where black people were formerly segregated because of apartheid.  One simple point she made concerns the technological requirements for digital materials; she spoke about the batteries required for digital readers, but we might also press the issue of electricity too: without either, or affordable means to acquire and access them, what good is digital technology? If you can't charge your iPad or laptop, or access dial-up, broadband or wireless broadband, to what end are these technologies? (I did participate in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program a few years back, and while it did have its problems, it still promises a way around some of these issues.) Yet Gordimer's basic point is well-taken: books are one of the more robust technologies for learning that we have, and we should be wary of doing away with them, especially in the physical and material forms we now have, too quickly. She also noted that one of the most influential wriers for her was Marcel Proust and said that she'd read his magnum opus A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913-1927) three times, first, in English as a girl (!), then in French, and then again recently in French. Would that I could find the time and space in this world to do so, even in English!

Spring Cleaning Tips

Books need a good organizing every once in awhile. While you are spring cleaning might be a good time to do it. I tend to have books all over the house. Everywhere I sit, I have books... in the kitchen by the rocking chair, by the bed, in the bathroom, by every chair and sofa in the living room, in the study, etc. If you need a good organizing, then it might be time to round up all your books in one central room. Have some boxes on hand and go through them one by one. If they are dusty, then take a damp rag and wipe them down and let them dry before storing them.

You will have books that you no longer want or need to keep and now is the time to stack them in boxes and sell them at the yard sale or take them to a charity. DO NOT just put them in the garage or attic and forget about them. You've made a decision so follow through!

You may have books that belong to the library or someone else and it's time to put them in your staging area (by the door) to take back to the library or take back to your friend. Even if you haven't had a chance to read them, if you haven't been able to read them in the last month or two, you may never read them so take them back. Always return books you've borrowed unless your friend tells you that you can keep them. If you lose them, then it's only fair to offer to replace the book and DO IT! If you procrastinate you will forget about it and you don't want to damage your friendship over a book.

As you go through the books, sort them in a way that makes sense to you. For instance: all fiction and non-fiction; or, biographies, mysteries, romance and cook books; or, John's interests and Sarah's insterests; or, reference material and reading material; or, "So good I have to keep it" and "To Be Read";... some people even organize by color. Whatever makes sense to you. If you've decided to keep them, then organize them in a way that makes it easy for you and your family to find them.

Now decide where you want to store them. If you decide to keep your cookbook collection then it makes sense to store them in the kitchen, especially around the area where you keep your shopping list and menu planner. *Note* Keeping a cookbook collection is really a personal choice now. It's no longer necessary if you have a computer. You can look up recipes all day long on the computer so having it in print in a book that you have to store is not necessary. But, if you have a special affinity, like I do, for recipes and cookbooks AND you have a place to keep them in good order, then, by all means, keep your cookbooks.

My current TBR (To Be Read) pile is kept in bookcases in my bedroom. Stan has a TBR pile on a bookcase in his bedroom although some books migrate to the bedside table once we get started reading them.

We have builtin bookshelves in our living room and we keep some of our nicer collections there. But our attic, which is a walkup attic so it's easy to get to, is lined with bookshelves and it's where I keep the books that I don't want to part with. They are really good books or history, biographies, etc that I don't want to lose. I'm silly that way and maybe, one day, I'll break down and clear all the books out. But, as a child, I couldn't get enough books and I always had to rely on the library because we couldn't afford to buy books, especially as voracious a reader as I am and was. So being able to own books has somehow meant a lot to me. I'll never forget when we reached a time in our marriage that I could actually afford to buy books. For awhile I bought all new books through Book-Of-The-Month. But, now, I feel guilty buying brand new books at such outrageous prices so I rack up at book sales, yard sales, thrift stores, etc. But, my books are fairly organized up there. I have a section for Christian non-fiction, History, biographies, mysteries, other fiction.

If you have children, then I guarantee you've probably got a lot of children's books. Sort through them. If the children have outgrown some of their books and you aren't anticipating having another child, it's time to pass them on. If your children have already read some and they don't mean a lot to them, get rid of them. Or, even let the children offer the used books to their friends. I know my Nancy Drew collection was hard come by and I loved it and I still have it. But I read a lot and I don't even remember all the books, so if I'd owned them I would have been able to easily give them up. I literally read every single children's mystery book in my hometown library which was hundreds of books, started with the "A's" and went through the "Z's". Although I enjoyed reading them, I don't remember them and so would not have needed to keep them. I'm sure your children are the same. Maybe they have a love for the Harry Potter books or the Hardy Boys or some science fiction books but the rest could be donated to charity or passed out among their friends.

While you sort your books and clean them up, it might be that those you want to keep need to have your name and address printed in them. You can get "Ex Libris" (From The Books of) rubber stamps or bookplate stickers made:

Ex Libris
John Doe
123 Main St
Anywhere, US

Or you can use address labels or rubber stamps. If the book means something to you because of who gave it to you, make a note of who it was, the occasion, the date. I've even been known to write "book review" in the back pages or you might want to give it your personal rating on a scale of 1-10. *Note* Get rid of the books that don't make it in your top 5 on your scale! In some books, I've found additional information on the Internet and have printed that out and stapled it to the back of the book. For instance, I might read a true crime mystery that is 10 years out of date so I look up the crime and the criminals to see if they are in jail, have been put to death, were they ever found, is there any info on the main characters, pictures of the crime scene, etc. If it was famous enough to have a book written about it, then you can usually find out more info on the Internet with Google searches.

If you loan your books out and you want them back, be sure your books are clearly marked (see above paragraph). You might even do a simple library list that you keep to remind you that Jane Smith has had your book since 12/31/2009 and it's been 5 months so you might want to call her and ask for it back. Yes, Jane Smith should have brought it back to you without a phone call. Yes, it's good manners to return books promptly. But you and I know that most people don't. They honestly forget and it gets lost under a pile somewhere and they didn't mean to, but 5 mos has gone by and they still haven't returned it. Or, they may have lost it or it got damaged and they are afraid to tell you about it. Or, maybe they are ashamed that they haven't had the time to read it yet. They may have forgotten who they got it from and are waiting for you to call and remind them. A call to remind is not out of place. But be courteous, even if they aren't, and don't get bent out of shape if you've lost the book for good. Don't loan out a book that you can't afford to lose! The price of a book is never worth hard feelings, anger, irritation and grudges. If they haven't had a chance to read it, tell them you would like to have it back and maybe they can get their own copy at the library when they have time to read it. Show good manners and kindness whether they have or not.

If you attend church, like we do, you probably have had Sunday School books, workbooks, notebooks, spiritual journals, etc. I do have a plastic box in the attic where I keep these spiritual books. They contain personal stuff because you've filled out parts, answered questions, etc. Once we've completed the class or study, I pop those books in the box clearly marked "Our Spiritual Journey". I have more than one box over the years. Those represent a lot of study, time, personal experiences, spiritual growth and I can't just throw them away. I have a place to keep them and they are easy to get to so I keep them. You may decide not to keep yours because they are too personal or you don't have the room.

Do you have an old set of encyclopedias and dictionaries and other reference books? Guess what? You don't need them any more. You can Google everything and use the Internet. I know they represent a lot of money. Someone bought them at one time and probably paid by the month. But they are never used, will never be used and there is no reason for you to store them any more. Unless you have a special sentimental feeling for them, get rid of them. Even if you play Scrabble, you can look up words in the online dictionaries and hear them spoken. You have dictionaries, thesauruses, maps, and encyclopedic knowledge for the taking and it's all on that little screen without having to take up 10' of shelf space. So bye-bye big heavy books! (OK, to be honest, my parents bought us a set of encyclopedias when we were real little. We used them a little until about high school when we needed more info and spent time in the libraries. Mom & Dad really sacrificed to buy those books for us and kept them all those years in their own little bookcase. AND I STILL HAVE THEM! I can't even take my own advice. I have a place for them, the bookshelf fits in the back of my entrance hall closet. One day, I'll get rid of them. I'm just not ready to now. )

For more information on organizing books, read my posts
http://sharonscrapbook.blogspot.com/search/label/books

33 Years And 9 Feet Of Colon

It's finally here! That day when, almost 33 years after the death of Elvis Presley, you can learn new and exciting details about his colon! That's right! His colon! Shall we proceed? How 'bout we do so with caution, OK? OK, then.

According to the folks over there at the NY Daily News, the King's own personal physician, a one Dr. George Nichopoulos (known to many as Dr. Nick and also known as "the guy who would and did prescribe any medication that Elvis ever wanted"), has a new theory about what caused the death of Elvis Presley that fine July morning when he collapsed whilst straining at stool. (You know what? If I'm ever famous and even if I'm not, I'm going to do my damnedest to live a lifestyle that will not ultimately end in my keeling over whilst straining at stool. It's not a very dignified way to go. And it certainly can't be pleasant for the poor soul who happens upon your lifeless carcass in that position.)

Now, if you're wondering why, after 33 years, this guy is suddenly coming out with his new "theory", perhaps it would clear the air a little bit if I mentioned that he has written a book (shocking, I know!) called "The King and Dr. Nick". Catchy. I wonder what it could possibly be about? Oh, that's right. It's all about making money. Isn't that what all of the books like this one are about?

The cause of Elvis's death was said to be influenced by the number of drugs that he was ingesting at the time. (According to Wikipedia (so take it for what it's worth), in regard to what role Dr. Nick had played in Elvis's drug habit, "In the first eight months of 1977 alone, he had [prescribed] more than 10,000 doses of sedatives, amphetamines and narcotics: all in Elvis's name.") Well, the drugs and the massive heart attack that was had whilst the King was on his throne. But if you listen to Dr. Nick, that throne was where Elvis had a lot of problems.

"We weren't sure [of the exact cause of death] so I continued to do some research...I had some doctors call me from different places and different med schools that were doing research on constipation and different problems you can get into with it." Uh-huh. Problems with constipation. OK...so....that is what killed him? Chronic constipation?!

You got it. You want details? Because Dr. Nick will give them to you. He claims that "Elvis' colon was 5 to 6 inches in diameter, nearly twice the size of the average person. It was also 8 to 9 feet long, compared with the normal 4 to 5 feet." Oh, my God. WHAT?!

Five to SIX inches in DIAMETER? Holy crap! (Pun probably intended.) And eight to NINE feet LONG? That hose that comes out of the back of the dryer is only four inches wide and usually about six feet long. You're telling me that Elvis's COLON was wider and longer than a dryer vent hose?! Good Lord, man. That can't be good for anyone! And clearly, it wasn't.

Dr. Nick also says, "We didn't realize until the autopsy that his constipation was as bad...We found stool in his colon which had been there for four or five months because of the poor motility of the bowel." Oh, EWW!! So, he had, like, compacted and fossilized feces going on in there?! How did they know that the stuff was four or five months old?! Is there some sort of carbon dating process for crap?

Look, I'm having a hard time believing any of this. First of all, would it really take 33 years for Dr. Nick to put together this theory? Granted, he doesn't seem like he was the greatest doctor in the world or anything, so that possibility is rather valid, I suppose. But I'm thinking that if Elvis had the equivalent of an elephant intestine growing inside of him, it would have been fairly obvious at the time of the autopsy. I'm guessing that Dr. Nick is pretty darned hard up for cash and needed to come up with something that he thought would sell a lot of books or something in order to make a buck or two. I just wish he could have made up something other than an eight foot colon with four to five months of compacted body waste in it, is all. And seriously, who, exactly, is buying this book to begin with? Who is publishing it? What is wrong with you people?