Drew Crunches #s In A Wooden Box
While Andrew whittles wood (and crunches numbers) on his mid-fall sojourn to the North Carolina mountains, we dutifully pick up the slack. But that’s alright, it’s how we do. Literature waits for no man, as Charles Dickens might attest. Dickens, one of fiction’s most formidable and lasting connoisseurs, was a master craftsman and 19th century iconoclast. The Washington Post measures the achievement of his life’s work. In one of our favorite recent media juxtapositions, meat-hater Jonathan Safran Foer is chewed up and spit out by the Cattle Network. Looking outside Brooklyn’s leafy bubble, we tag along with the NY Review of Books to Iraq, where war is still raging and people are still dying. After that, we climb aboard our time machine, which brings us to the future — when eBooks rule and every person on Earth is an author — and to the past, when the year is 1989 and all Hell is about to break loose. Whittle that, Andrew. — Kevin Murphy
– It’s the sheer energy that astonishes. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) began to publish the monthly chapters of what became “The Pickwick Papers” (1836-37) when he was only in his mid-20s. This was immediately followed by “Oliver Twist” (1837-39), which actually started appearing in magazine form while serialization of “Pickwick” was still going on. Thus the young writer was bringing to a close the greatest picaresque comic novel since “Don Quixote” and almost simultaneously creating the piteous Oliver (“Please, sir, I want some more”), the grotesque Fagin and the murderous Bill Sikes. — Charles Dickens in the Washington Post
The War Rages On
– For the occasional visitor such as myself, various methods exist to measure America’s standing in Iraq, Iraqi suspicions and aspirations, and progress in the transfer of power, but none prove as illuminating as the checkpoints into and throughout Baghdad’s Green Zone, that diminishing symbol of the Bush administration’s ambitions. — Iraq in the New York Review of Books
– Believe it or not people were still saying eBooks were never going to make it just a few years ago. Look for a quote in the Wall St. Journal: “Ebooks are never going to make it.” Before that the NY Times: look for: “twitchy” screen. However now that it’s obvious they are moving eBooks on their own, but I can’t tell how serious they are. They may just be following the rule of simple reporting: “Follow The Money.” If eBooks fall flat will they all just move on and pretend there was never any interest? — eBooks in Project Gutenberg News
– In just four years, everyone on earth may be an author. When books were the dominant form of publishing, a small minority of the world’s population had their words published. Now, Twitter, Facebook, and social networking sites are making authors into the majority. From the year 1400 to 2000, according to Denis G. Pelli and Charles Bigelow in Seed, the number of published authors rose by tenfold every century. For the past decade, authorship has grown by tenfold every year. Eventually, the authors predict that everyone on earth will be a published. — Authors in UTNE Reader
– For the past few years, the Russians have been conducting an extraordinary national argument about whether Stalin was bad, a question one would have thought was settled long ago. And now, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of 1989, we have two books, both by eminent historians, both seeking to start an argument about whether there was an anti-Communist opposition in Central Europe. — 1989 in Slate
Hamsun: Good Writer, Bad Man
– Knut Hamsun, known as Norway’s greatest novelist, was a difficult and destructive person. He wreaked havoc with his family and his two wives and no day went by without some outburst or perceived slight. He hated and envied Ibsen and he loved Hitler. As an old man (born in 1859, he died in 1952) he refused to deny his worship of Hitler and his delight at the prospect of Norway becoming part of a greater Germany. After Hitler committed suicide, he sent a telegram of condolence to the German people. — Knut Hamsun in the Economist
– Jonathon Safran Foer is the latest to join the Pollan school of ill-literary research. He is the Brooklyn born vegetarian who first popped up on the Larry King show about ground beef. Supposedly a critically acclaimed author of several books of fiction, he’s been beating the P.R. drums to promote his new book, “Eating Animals,” which will be poorly placed in the non-fiction department of your local Barnes & Nobel. — Safran Foer in the Cattle Network
Video: Annoying Jonathan Safran Foer
