Paper Pills

Social Media Week

February 8, 2011 in the literary conversation

Social Media Week, as most of you don’t know, is a multi-city week of panels and events bringing together people from different industries to talk about all things social media. I hadn’t heard of SMW before three weeks ago, and therefore held it in fairly dismissive regard…until my colleague and I were asked to speak on an SMW panel, at which point I held the conference in even lower regard. Any club that would have me as a member, etc.

That said, I’ve attended three Social Media Week panels so far (yes, that includes my own) and have two more on the horizon. I’ll go ahead and eat crow now: these panels have been helpful in prodding me to think further about the intersection of “social” and the act of reading. Some takeaway thoughts and many questions:
- In a panel called The Big Shift, Ann Shoket, editor-in-chief of Seventeen, talks about how her brand expanded from a tangible magazine to the intangible concept of seventeen. This makes me wonder: can book publishers move on from the tangibility of books to become proprietors of intangible content? Seems like they’ll have to—or perish.
- Shoket also encourages publishers to meet readers wherever they are—and, if possible, getting to that place before the readers even arrive. So where are book readers headed now? I’m trying to think of my own reading patterns, and I shamefully admit that I’m spending more and more time on Google Reader. Yikes. What does that imply about where books should go? Into an RSS feed?
- The social book / the social reading experience: what would that entail? I know Amazon tried to make reading social by sharing passages underlined in Kindle books, and GoodReads is a haven for message-board based book clubs, but is there some service out there that more closely approximates the feeling of reading along with other people? I’m not talking about interrupting the reading experience, but enhancing it—and obviously, this isn’t for everyone. Sometimes I read to be alone, too.
It’s so stimulating to think about the way publishing can evolve with reading behaviors, but it’s hard to know how much (not to mention when) these changes will take place.

To be continued…

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Richard McGuire’s “Here”

February 6, 2011 in comics

Thank you Google Reader for bringing this great work by Richard McGuire to me (click soon—not sure how much longer this scan will be up).

I don’t recall ever having seen this kind of temporal palimpsest in comics before. “Here” is an excellent example of how inventive the graphic narrative form can be. And is this the same Richard McGuire as was featured in the McSweeney’s Comics issue (sample page) a few years back? His contribution was easily my favorite of the lot.

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Zadie Smith + Harper’s =

February 4, 2011 in the literary conversation

This past Wednesday, I had the distinct pleasure of attending Harper’s celebration of Zadie Smith as their new books columnist. This happy event is a mighty merger in my reading life. For a long while, Harper’s was my favorite magazine, but sometime in the past couple of years (perhaps with the passing of John Leonard), there was a palpable feeling of slippage, and I strayed…towards The New York Review of Books, where Zadie Smith and Orhan Pamuk were known to dabble in a few essays.

Now that Zadie Smith has decamped for more portable pages (honestly, NYRB is a pain in the ass to read anywhere except on the toilet), Harper’s is certain to reign supreme. Smith has come a long way from pissing off James Wood with her hysterical realist novels; I’d argue that she is now a public intellectual. That she’s done so as a young, earnest woman of mixed race is nothing short of remarkable. Having Zadie Smith up on stages talking about the craft and appreciation of novel-writing galvanizes one into reading more…and reading generously.

This last thought warrants elaboration: Smith talked about wanting to read with the grain rather than against it, giving authors the benefit of the doubt when she reads their novels. How uncommon in book criticism! Or maybe I’m reading the wrong reviews? Surely I’m not the only one who brings a lot of baggage to everything I read. In some respects, this baggage is what makes one an increasingly nuanced reader. But these extra changes of clothes can also make one reluctant to immerse oneself completely in the writer’s environment. To extend this metaphor further (when have I ever resisted!), if you don’t take off your coat, how can you get comfortable in the writer’s home?

Smith’s empathy for the writer’s work is going to play out beautifully in her reviews, I just know it. As a parting note, I leave you with “The Novelist” by Auden, which Zadie Smith quoted entirely (albeit haltingly) from memory. That she cares enough to recite this defense speaks volumes about her kindness, her ultimate optimism in literature.
```
Encased in talent like a uniform,
The rank of every poet is well known;
They can amaze us like a thunderstorm,
Or die so young, or live for years alone.
They can dash forward like hussars: but he
Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn
How to be plain and awkward, how to be
One after whom none think it worth to turn.

For, to achieve his lightest wish, he must
Become the whole of boredom, subject to
Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just

Be just, among the Filthy filthy too,
And in his own weak person, if he can,
Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.
```
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Airing out the Blog

February 3, 2011 in gewgaws

Ahh.

Hello again, friends. It’s good to be back. I went on a blogging strike last spring to protest my husband’s negligence in updating this blog’s back-end, and nine months later, I’ve emerged victorious. There’s still some housekeeping to be done (the About Me section is busted, sorry), but I’m re-dedicating myself to the task of commenting speciously on the things I’ve been reading.

Until I get the first post up and running, here’s a sampling of what I’ve been up to in the past year:
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Absorbancy

March 19, 2010 in the literary conversation

Sorry for the vast, numbing silence here.

I came across a post this post by David Bordwell about the merits and feasibility of film criticism (via Andrew Seal on Google Reader), and this quote leapt out at me:

Forget about becoming a film critic. Become an intellectual, a person to whom ideas matter. Read in history, science, politics, and the arts generally. Develop your own ideas, and see what sparks they strike in relation to films.

The same certainly applies to the best book critics. I admire The New York Review of Book‘s much-delayed book reviews because they’re always written with a wide lens, one that scoops relevant comparisons in art, film, history, and modern politics.

It’s terribly difficult to write reviews like that—much easier to simply discuss the book at hand in a hermetic (lol, nearly wrote hermeneutic and had to look it up in the dictionary) analytical bubble.

And here’s where I justify my blog silence by reassuring you that I’m reading too widely to comment on what I’m reading.

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A Valediction

December 16, 2009 in book thoughts

Not only is it the end of 2009, but it’s the end of a decade. All the bloggers around me are coming up with best of the year lists, and the truly ambitious are writing best of the aughts lists.

I really don’t have the stamina for all that.

First off, GoodReads* is telling me that I only rated 9 books with 5 stars in the past year, and I’d say that only a third of those were published in 2009. So I guess I’m gonna talk about those three books.

Secondly, how are people my age writing best of the decade lists?! 10 years ago, I was 15 and reading God-knows-what. Probably textbooks, because I did that kind of thing for fun back then. And Dean Koontz, because I am from the suburbs. So that means I’ve only had about 5-6 years with an awakened literary sensibility, and that simply isn’t enough time to read a decade’s worth of books and make a knowledgeable pronouncement on the Best Books of the Decade.

So you are getting, oh, My Three Favorite Books Published in 2009. Based on a sample pool of Seven Books Read That Were Published in 2009. Enjoy!

The Hakawati
by Rabih Alameddine

How have none of you read this book? I know you haven’t read this book, because there are only 151 ratings on GoodReads. Is it because it’s set in Lebanon? Is it because the jacket, while stunning, looks kinda girly? Is it because you saw it marketed as “a retelling of the Arabian Nights for the modern age” and dismissed it like so much Amy Tan? WHY?

THIS BOOK JUST READS SO WELL.

It’s like…a Lebanese Brothers Grimm, replete with inspired retellings of the Arabian folk tale canon. But it’s also a moving story about leaving home for America. And shedding one’s ethnic skin. And then trying to put it back on. And dying fathers. If you’re home for the holidays without a book (yeah, right—I don’t know anyone who isn’t going home with 10+ books), I urge you to bring home The Hakawati. Reading it is like crawling into a cave made out of paisley velvet. That is the best simile I can come up with.

Never Learn Anything From History
by Kate Beaton

I don’t know how you feel about web comics, but I’m sure you weren’t thinking, “Historical figures in historically accurate situations, but speaking hilariously.”** That’s what Kate Beaton does.

Also, to her credit, this collection of her best comics made me want to read up on my history. This is a big deal. I’ve studiously avoided history class since my sophomore year of high school. How did I get this far in life with absolutely no concept of American or world history? By studiously avoiding any conversation about facts. I mean, take this blog, for example. There is not one fact in the whole of it.

Asterios Polyp
by David Mazzuchelli

I think I’ve written about this graphic novel before. I cannot emphasize to you enough that this graphic novel is the apex of what a graphic novel can achieve. I should have received this book as a prize for completing my senior course in “The Graphic Novel.” The professor should have given it to me and said, “Pam, now you are ready.”

Anyway, that’s it for me. Care to share your top three? Lengthy justifications not required.

*I’m noticing that as I enter my late 20s—horrors!—I’m increasingly relying on external sites to do the mental record-keeping for me. Just like my poor compy, I’m running out of memory.

**Except for Beaton’s wordless depiction of Napoleon eating a cookie. Perhaps not historically accurate. But would that it were so!

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Marie Ponsot

December 1, 2009 in book thoughts

I think I love this lady.

“Bliss and Grief”

No one

is here

right now.

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Tearing Down Our Idols

November 16, 2009 in gewgaws, the literary conversation

Here‘s a great essay by Garth Risk Hallberg at The Millions about the myth of Robert Bolaño, and how everyone—the publisher, the reader, the blogger, and the reviewer—are complicit in its construction. It’s interesting to see such a vivid example of a community turning against its construction—by which I mean the myth, not the man:

If the Bolaño backlash augured by The New Yorker’s “Book Bench” materializes, it will not be because readers have revolted against the novel (though there are readers whom the book leaves cold) but because they have revolted against a particular narrative being told about it.

Tangentially, I’ve been thinking about the ways in which we rebel against our own constructions, especially vis-a-vis (and I say this with a cringe) The Office. I watched the wedding episode the other night, and I can’t stand to watch the saccharine wordplay between Jim and Pam anymore. On the other hand, aren’t I (and my ladypeers) responsible for Jim and Pam’s success? Didn’t we ask for this nerdy-romance plotline? If so, why does it disgust me so?

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83 Slogans to Better Writing

November 16, 2009 in the literary conversation

…as curated by Allan Ginsberg. Here are a few of my favorites:

5. “My writing is a picture of the mind moving.”—Philip Whalen

9. “Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then I contradict myself,
(I am large. I contain multitudes.)”—Walt Whitman

15. Notice what you notice.—Allan Ginsberg

40. Maximum information, minimum number of syllables.—Allan Ginsberg

74. “Speech synchronizes mind & body.”—Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche

From The Huffington Post’s sometimes aggravating, sometimes fascinating, always worth-reading book blog.

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Literary Rock Stars

November 10, 2009 in gewgaws

Upon coming up from the cafeteria, the elevator doors opened on our floor, and a co-worker and I get out. Orhan Pamuk gets on. When the elevator doors had closed, both of us start shrieking:

“AHHHHHHHH!!!!!!”

“WHOOOOAAAAAAA!!!!!”

An editor passes by and sees us in the midst of our hysteria. “Who was that? A rock star?” she asked. “Nope,” we replied. “It was Orhan Pamuk.”

[Edit] It has been been brought to my attention that we did not, in fact, wait until the doors were closed before shrieking. To which I say, “Oops.”

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