In a post a few days ago, I talked about BookRabbit.com — a (fairly new) site which lets readers share the titles of books they own, in hopes of discovering other books they might be interested in. The clever mechanism which BookRabbit have come up with for communicating this information is bookshelf photographs: take a photo of a bookshelf, and go through every (or at least many) of the books displayed thereon, “tagging” them by title, edition, and so on.
I found this impossible to resist.
You know what driver’s-ed classes don’t teach you? They don’t teach you how complicated it is to make your way through a busy intersection of more than two streets, especially when there are no traffic signals.
I thought about this failure today, in connection with the 1972 film of the musical 1776.
Until last night, I’d never seen the movie and never (truth be told) had wanted to. No objection to musicals per se, you understand. But I’ve always had a hard time with light and frothy musical treatments of truly momentous historical subjects.
(Yet I very much like Cabaret, and agree with Pauline Kael’s assessment at the time it was released: “A great movie musical, satirical and diamond-hard.” Satire with an edge: good. But perkiness? Eh, well…)
But last night my resolve was weak. The Missus and I were both wiped out by planning, preparing, and executing a July-4th cookout for […counting…] ten people. While she escaped to her office, collapsing into a fog of online gaming, I just sat, stretched out, on the sofa, TV remote close to hand. And clicked. And clicked. And clicked…
For some reason probably having to do with the previous day’s power failure, when I first turned it on the channel was set at 2: the Home Shopping Network. (click) PBS had David McCullough on Charlie Rose, talking about John Adams. (click) Wonder what’s on Turner Classic Movies…? Hmm. William Daniels in colonial garb. Singing. Singing? Did William Daniels sing? What was this, anyhow?
By the time I realized what it must be, I’d been sucked in.
[Read more…]
Since I started working on Merry-Go-Round last August, I’ve been sticking more or less to the same morning routine: shut off alarm (which goes off between 4 and 5am); stagger into the bathroom — the path illuminated, faintly, by a night light; slip back into the bedroom (carefully, mustn’t awaken The slumbering Missus); grope around on my nightstand for glasses and hearing aid and the stretchy thingum I use to keep my hair out of my eyes; stoop down to pick up the lap desk and current reading material and (usually) Merry-Go-Round excerpt I’m working on at the time; tiptoe out of the bedroom; proceed to kitchen to heat up hot water for tea; etc.
This morning, things didn’t quite work out that way. This morning, just as I returned from the bathroom to the nightstand, the power went off. I couldn’t see a thing. Total blackness. Burgeoning panic.
It’s a cliché that villains are often more interesting — especially more interesting to write about — than heroes. The archetypes, I guess, are Faust’s Mephistopheles and old Screwtape.
(The latter must have been an especially delicious but guilty pleasure for C.S. Lewis to write about; I don’t really take it as gospel, as Wikipedia says, that “Lewis claimed that the book was distasteful to write.” Screwtape is the older, more experienced, wiser demon, offering advice to nephew Wormwood. The uncle has a wonderful voice. Or maybe — since The Screwtape Letters supposedly represent a Christian tract on temptation — maybe the wonderful, alluringly entertaining voice is exactly the point.)
From the ever-reliable whiskey river comes this, a quotation from Stephen Dunn:
Always a little more fun on the Devil’s side. I’ve been his advocate, have opposed what I most believed, testing if what I believed was true. It sometimes almost was; that’s the best I can say. But you can bedevil yourself if you keep playing that game. You don’t want to stand in a torturer’s shoes for long. Still, when it comes to seeking a truth, a certain cruelty can go a long way – right through the heart of a thing to some other side. Doesn’t every far-reaching truth cause a lesser truth to die? Most of us are content to stop at the heart. When I’ve been good’s advocate, playing the less clever role, I’ve gone as far as good can go. Maybe some orthodoxy or some abomination lost ground for a while. Maybe not. The one time I had the Devil down, thinking he’d give, he whispered, “Remember, the punishment for being good is a life of goodness.” I laughed, and he was gone.
“The punishment for being good is a life of goodness”: ha! That pretty much sums up a villain’s motives, eh?
Regarding the entry I just posted, and the references therein to neurotic uncertainty over whether a book is DONE, this quote from William Strunk, Jr. (the original author of the classic Elements of Style
It is worse to be irresolute than to be wrong.
Boy, do I hope so. :)
Funny thing about writing a book — at least if you’re neurotic enough (and I am that neurotic): you never really know if it’s DONE. The best you can hope for is that it’s done enough.
Last week, right around now, I was exulting about having completed the “final” draft of Merry-Go-Round. I certainly didn’t have quotation marks around that word.
What a difference a week makes…
Over there on the right, in the list of links to other sites, you’ll find a category called “Je Ne Sais Quoi.” Per the American Heritage Dictionary online at the Bartleby site, this phrase — literally, in the original French, something like I know not what — means, “A quality or attribute that is difficult to describe or express.”
I came up with that category because every now and then I come upon a site which is so striking — in its writing or conception, not necessarily its look — that I know I’ll want to revisit it from time to time, if not daily, just to see what its proprietor might be up to at the moment. Often, these sites lead me (through their blogrolls, especially) to other such sites, and I come to realize that the site I first found isn’t unique at all. It may not even be the “best” (whatever that means) of its type. But the first one goes into the Je Ne Sais Quoi basket anyway, where I expect it to stay.
The very first site for which I couldn’t figure out a decent other category, and hence came up with this one, was the “Dealing in Subterfuges” blog, written by the pseudonymous “Jordan Baker” — perhaps (but not probably) coincidentally, a character in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
The author with the tongue-rolling moniker Doreen Orion has come up with a trailer for her new giant-bus travelogue Queen of the Road:
As the title of this RAMH post implies, this is why we read certain travelogues rather than writing them ourselves.
Thanks to Conduit (a/k/a Stuart Neville), there’s news of a cool site called BookRabbit (slogan: “Be surprised by books – share, connect, discover”). Here’s how Conduit describes it:
BookRabbit.com is a website at once a social networking site and online store for book lovers. They offer a selection of titles that rivals Amazon in both choice and price, but the shopping experience is wrapped up in a library of ‘bookshelves’ uploaded by the site’s users.
Here’s how it works: You upload a picture of your bookshelf… and then tag your books. The system then finds other users who have the same books, so you can browse what else they have, say hello, comment on the books, or even go and buy them. It’s a very well put together website, with bags of potential.
(Book purchases work for UK members only at this point, but the site is new; I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them open up branches in other countries as well. In the meantime, you can join and share photos and so on regardless of where you happen to live.)
I was a little bemused by the idea of taking a photo of my bookshelf, singular. And I could see at once how an insecure bibliophile (not thinking of anyone in particular, of course) might wish to game the system by, say, emptying the shelf of all the trashy thrillers and beach reads — replacing them with classics (old or latter-day) fetched from the piled-up cardboard boxes in the garage.
But as I said, this is a way cool idea.
On this day in 1997, the first Harry Potter book (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in the UK, …and the Sorcerer’s Stone when it crossed the Atlantic) came to print.
There’s not much to add about the book which upended not just the Young Adult market, but pretty much the whole damned publishing industry. Well, unless you’re interested in acquiring a complete set of 1st editions, signed by JK Rowling. And at an estimated sale price of £15,000-20,000, sorry: no cash please!
Meanwhile, perhaps another chapter in the saga of “Brit books which throw the US young-adult market for a loop” may already be brewing. (This would be on the heels not only of the Potter series, but also of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series — which, likewise, had adults prowling the YA aisles in bookstores, and pages online, and wondering why kids had all the fun.)
