The Biblio File

A.O. Scott has an article in the NY Times praising the short story. Using the back-drop of recent biographies of Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, and Donald Barthelme, Scott wonders, intriguingly, if our current culture could mark a return to the form:

The new, post-print literary media are certainly amenable to brevity. The blog post and the tweet may be ephemeral rather than lapidary, but the culture in which they thrive is fed by a craving for more narrative and a demand for pith. And just as the iPod has killed the album, so the Kindle might, in time, spur a revival of the short story. If you can buy a single song for a dollar, why wouldn’t you spend that much on a handy, compact package of character, incident and linguistic invention?

I think that having short stories available for download at a low price are a great idea, and would certainly be something I’d use a Kindle for. (If, you know, I had one). Or, it would even be appealing to be able to download one as a PDF (and DRM restrictions could be built into the PDF to address copyright issues). But, the flaw I see in Scott’s vision is that, with his analogy of the ipod and albums, people were already listening to music. All they had to do was adapt to listening to it in a new format. I don’t know that a new format (e.g., a Kindle) could also raise interest in an unfamiliar genre.

The Tournament of Books has a winner, and it is A Mercy by Toni Morrison. Unfortunately, I had Pittsburgh in this pool too.

There seems to be a trend brewing of publishing companies creating trailers for books. Here’s MacmillanUSA’s trailer for Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower:

Here’s another by HarperCollinsCanada for Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen:

As an advertising mechanism, I like it. Relatively low-cost, gives you a flavor of the book, and can be widely distributed. If, that is, people know to look for them. I just stumbled upon the one for Wells Tower’s book, and then knew to search for others. But seems like publishers will need to integrate these into larger publishing campaigns for people to know they are out there.

The Telegraph is reporting that director He Nian plans to stage an opera version of Karl Marx’s seminal work, Das Kapital:

Mr He, who is best known for a stage adaptation of a martial-arts spoof, plans to open the production in Shanghai next year, and will borrow elements from Broadway musicals and Las Vegas shows. There will, however, be no trivialization of the book’s core messages: an economist from a local university has been asked to ensure that it remains intellectually respectful of Marxist Doctrine.

I’m all for a version that remains “intellectually respectful” to Marx, but let’s not be too quick to dismiss the possibilities of some martial-arts tie-in. Proletariat ninjas would be awesome.

Of course, the best part of this is the Rap Off entry in the Etiquette book. This book needs to be written.

Thanks to @kittenwalker for sending me a link to the best library workshop ever.

The Telegraph is reporting that 2 new novels have been discovered in Roberto Bolano’s papers:

The previously unseen manuscripts were entitled Diorama and The Troubles of the Real Police Officer, according to a report in La Vanguardia.

Very cool if true. Though, how can it have taken five years to find these?

Stephen Pimpare spoke at Fairfield yesterday, outlining the ideas in his new book A People’s History of Poverty in America, part of the Howard Zinn People’s History series from New Press. He framed his argument around a quote by Edith Wharton which, of course, I didn’t write down and which, of course, I now can’t find. But the gist of it was that the only way that the middle and upper classes will ever know the practical aspects of being poor is with an extraordinary imagination. You have to like it when a political scientist starts a conversation about economics with a Wharton quote. He went on to suggest that, historically, the major problem with analyses of poverty in the U.S. have focused on moments of policy intervention, and on the policies themselves, rather than on how the actual condition–the day to day lives–of the poor have changed. Or, rather, how they haven’t. Worth checking out.

I was at the student union today and, on the TV, was a spring training game. Granted, it was the Yankees, but after 4 months, even the Yankees are better than nothing. Almost.

Late in posting this, but too good to pass up. April Winchell has audio files of President Obama reading from his book, Dreams From My Father. He’s quoting a friend of his whose language is, say, less than presidential. But, it does give us a glimpse into what it might be like in a world where Samuel L. Jackson was president, and I have to say–that’s a world I want to live in.