Over the coming weeks, you may notice a little less frequency to the updates than normal and you more than likely can expect more absences like the one on Friday. We're down to the last four weeks if all goes according to schedule and there's still much to do before D day. I hope to put up a few minireviews soon. Then again, I hope to get the Pack 'N Play put together soon also.
Like the character in Chris Bachelder's U.S.!, Upton Sinclair seems to be popping up everywhere these days. I'm guessing most of these reincarnation are directly related to the Paul Thomas Anderson movie about him due out next year. For example, Slate's Karen Olsson examines whether or not The Jungle "holds up."
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Here's a collection of interesting stats on everything you ever wanted to know about book publishing, book buyers and readers, and writers, including this rather depressing one:
One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest
of their lives. Many do not even graduate from high school.
58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
42% of college graduates never read another book.
80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
57% of new books are not read to completion.
{via}
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Here's one I've been meaning to link to for a few weeks now. The LA Times' Chris Erskine visits Hannibal, Missouri, boyhood home of Mark Twain:
In his best books, Twain described a town of cracked church bells and down-on-their-luck congregations. Today's Hannibal is that and more. This town of 18,000 features pawn shops and fancy B&Bs. Trains whistle past every 20 minutes. At the river, yellow fin tuna is served in a former bordello called Lula Belle's. I turn down the little street where Twain grew up. At dusk, there is virtually no one at Twain's boyhood home, except for two kids clacking along the brick street on skateboards. The house where Twain's sweetheart lived — the inspiration for Becky Thatcher — sits across the street.
Hannibal has dubbed itself "America's Hometown," and there's nothing here to dispute that. Main Street's great, old red-brick storefronts are mostly intact. This is no burnished, overly manicured historic enclave, however. Like characters in a Twain novel, some of the homes teeter a bit. It all adds to the authenticity and charm, even as the shops hawk all manner of Twain memorabilia.
Now another LA Times article, written by Ben Brazil, focuses on Milledgeville, Georgia, home of Flannery O'Connor:
In her lifetime, though, critics often misunderstood her work. Certainly, it wasn't well received in Milledgeville.
Mary Jones, who once waited on O'Connor and her mother at the Sanford House, told me that she found O'Connor's first novel, "Wise Blood," jammed at the back of a shelf in her parents' closet.
"All the little old ladies in town went out and bought it because they were friends with [O'Connor's mother] Regina, and then it was scandalous," she said. "People didn't understand where she was coming from."
Most Milledgeville residents still don't consider the town's most renowned daughter a major source of civic pride. At a barbecue joint, one local told me he didn't know much about her. As I walked away, he told his friends, "I think she was a writer or something."
When I told my Atlanta housemate, Mark, that I was coming to Milledgeville, I wasn't sure whether he would associate the town with O'Connor, antebellum history or both.
Ironically, it was neither. Like most Georgians, Mark thought first of Central State Hospital. The mental institution, more than 160 years old, has become synonymous with Milledgeville in Georgia lore.
###The Washington Times takes a look at the Reduced Shakespeare Company's "The Complete History of America (abridged)," in which 600 years of the nation's past have been condensed to under two hours:
Those not easily offended will find the RSC's brand of anarchic humor and sight gags a splendid romp through historic milestones. To be this silly and inspired requires a lot of homework, and the Reduced Shakespeare Company's syllabus lists Noam Chomsky, a Jeffrey Dahmer coloring book, Alexis de Tocqueville, Jack Kerouac and Neil Diamond among its sources.
###Pico Iyer believes that the Internet is to blame for the decline of the literary interview:
Then came Google, and a million listings (literally) ordered in terms of which are most important. Except that the ones that come up most readily are the ones that have come up most often before, and (in the absence of a recent scandal), those are the ones that have been posted longest. Since search engines entered the world - and replaced what formerly was known as research or enquiry - interviews have become a circular form in which almost every interviewer asks the same questions as every previous interviewer, so that the previous interview he's found online remains ever more on top of your Google listing, and every future interview is ever more in debt to it. And the interviewee (I write from painful experience) either has to give the same answer as before (which causes his interlocutor to yawn as much as himself), or to come up with a new answer, which is almost inherently false.
Methinks Mr. Iyer needs a healthy dose of Bat Segundo.
On a related note, historians blame e-mail for the slow death of personal letter writing.
