BY BEN WINTERS
There are a few people out there who still read books, but nobody reads about books anymore. Or so you might gather from your daily paper with the trend in publishing being to scale back dramatically on the space afforded coverage of books and writers. Witness Philadelphia, where the alternative Philadelphia Weekly ran a piece on June 2 called "Author! Author!" noting that the non-alternative daily Philadelphia Inquirer had cut its lit coverage from four weekly pages to one. Blame was laid on Tony Ridder, CEO of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain. "ArtsLine," as a minor symbolic bucking of this trend, is proud to turn this installment over to the latest news about all things literary.
The issue of Newsweek cover dated June 10th had one of those intensely, hilariously negative reviews that are always so damn enjoyable. David Gates’ frank assessment of the first novel from public intellectual Stephen L. Carter of Yale is delightfully nasty from top to finish, particularly when it wonders exactly why Carter got a staggering $4.2 million advance for a book that turned out so God awful.
Gates starts his review by referring to the Jorge Luis Borges story "The Book of Sand," about "an alarming volume with an infinite number of pages and no reachable beginning or end."
"That’s how it feels," Gates suggests, "to read Stephen L. Carter’s 'The Emperor of Ocean Park’." After trashing Carter’s plotting and diction, Gates moves in for the kill: "For a teensy fraction of Knopf’s $4.2 million, they could have given Carter a week at Bread Loaf [the Middlebury College-sponsored summer graduate program] where any competent teacher and a hit of peer pressure could have straightened some of this out. But 'Ocean Park’ has problems that no amount of cutting and editing could have cured."
Gates has been a senior writer at Newsweek since 1993–his own 1991 novel, "Jernigan," was short-listed for the Pulitzer and is considered a modern classic by the 10 or 11 people who’ve read it. And not everyone hated Carter’s 657-page spy thriller nearly as much; trade magazine Publisher’s Weekly went with "a first rate legal thriller," and Fortune called the book a "humdinger." It was also on the cover of the June 9 New York Times book review.
A TREND THAT NEVER WAS
Meanwhile, at Newsweek online (a msnbc.com affiliate), we find a piece about the big book trend that never was–e-books. Did anyone ever actually read an e-book? Yes–this guy: "People say there’s something sensual about books that they love, and I can see that. But you can get that same connection and experience from an e-book." So says Mark Steuben of Boulder, Col. in the lead of Anna Kuchment’s story. After mulling the reasons e-books never fulfilled their early promise–notably clunky technology and an initially niche market that stayed that way–she prophecises the future of the genre:
"A little farther in the future is a concept called 'electronic paper,’ containing tiny capsules that turn light or dark in response to electrical charges, thus forming letters," Kuchment explains. "It has a resolution twice as sharp as that of an LCD screen, uses far less power and can be viewed in direct sunlight."
Sounds like a pretty neat use of electronics to recreate paper. But you know what’s probably a lot cheaper? Paper.
Elsewhere on the Internet, Amazon.com is ready to bring its retail oligarchy up north; by the end of June they plan to have a distribution arm established in Canada. Not surprisingly, some people are not happy about the bookseller’s northern expansion. "Booksellers are calling on Sheila Copps, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, to block the expansion into the Canadian market of Amazon.com, warning their businesses will be devastated if the U.S. online giant sets up a domestic distribution arm," wrote Ian Jack in the National Post on May 28.
Alas, the power and influence of the Minister of Canadian Heritage ain’t what it used to be. Amazon went ahead and found itself a Canadian business partner–still anonymous as of press time–circumventing laws that limit who can set up a book business in there.
THE MYSTERY OF MILLIE
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Mildred
Benson
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Mildred Benson died at the end of May, a very old woman who had done many incredible things. Here’s a paragraph from Jennifer Frey’s lovely piece on Benson in the Washington Post:
"Benson spent her last years writing about the active lives of local senior citizens–though she never considered herself a senior, according to Luann Sharp, assistant managing editor of The Blade. She golfed up until a few years ago. Got a pilot’s license at age 59. She wrote more than 120 books and countless newspaper columns, including one that ran the morning after her death."
Um, OK, but who was she? Mystery fans already know–Benson was the first in the string of ghostwriters who created the inimitable Nancy Drew, the first to wear the sleek pseudonym Carolyn Keene. In her final column, published in her hometown paper, The Blade (based in Toledo, Ohio), Benson waxed nostalgic and philosophical about libraries. "I consider it an honor to have been born near the turn of the 20th century," she wrote, "at about the time when public libraries were first coming into popular use…" Later Benson made it to a (relatively) big town and there, in the library, Drew was born. "Living in Cleveland, I would go downtown to the public library and wander through the many rooms of books. I’d select whatever looked interesting. It was during this period that I stored up many unusual facts which later were included in book plots of my own."
Here’s a bit more from Frey’s Post piece: "'[Benson] was feisty and acerbic, sometimes funny, and basically took no nonsense,’ says Caroline Dyer, a University of Iowa professor of communications who has known Benson through her work for nearly a decade. 'If she had one, she would have worn a fedora with a press pass in the headband.’"
Amen to that, and Godspeed to the first Carolyn Keene.