NEW YORK -- The New York Public Library is encouraging bookworms to pass around 25,000 free copies of a new paperback it will distribute in subway stations, on park benches and in other public places.
The book celebrates the library's vast collection – and patrons – by featuring a diverse group of celebrities, including Stephen Colbert, the Harlem Globetrotters and Yoko Ono, posing with or discussing their favorite library treasure. Its distribution is part of the library's centennial celebration.
Starting May 19, the limited-edition paperback, "Know The Past, Find The Future," will be dropped off at park benches and in five subway stations: Grand Central, Times Square, Columbus Circle, Bryant Park and Union Square. Copies will also be distributed in front of the landmark Fifth Avenue library building and all its branches, as well as in some bookstores.
A note inserted in the book will instruct readers to leave it in another part of the city for someone else to enjoy when they're finished.
Colbert selected to highlight a group of J.D. Salinger letters, while Ono chose a book edited and published by composer John Cage.
The Harlem Globetrotters are pictured holding up globes in the library's map room, and the Radio City Rockettes are photographed striking a pose in its ornate reading room.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of 100 luminaries who submitted essays for the book, chose to highlight "Johnny Tremain," a children's story by Esther Forbes about Paul Revere and a daring teenager messenger he said he read a hundred times growing up.
Like the character, Bloomberg writes, it taught him to "stand up for what is right, and make a difference in the world."
Paul LeClerc, the library's president, said the paperback "embodies the thrill of discovery happening every day, in every room at the library."
Poet and essayist Anne Carson is pictured holding up a booklet with a poem by William Wordsworth that fits in the palm of her hands.
"The Little Maid and the Gentleman, or, We are Seven," written in 1798, contains woodcut illustrations of trees, ships and coffins that "are astonishingly simple and beautiful," she says.
Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter focuses on the library's collection of 40,000 menus, many produced during the golden ages of typography and illustration. He highlights a charming children's mid-20th century menu for the New Haven Railroad that is die-cut in the shape of a circus elephant and allows "its small diners to order by jungle animal," he writes.
Singer Rosanne Cash talks about being thrilled to find "in my library, my New York, my home," her mother's ancestors on a passenger list of 18th-century ships and to be able to hold the original copy of Walt Whiteman's "Leaves of Grass."
A voucher valued at $400 for 25 Penguin Classics books will be hidden in eight copies of the book.
An online version will be available in about a month.
The library's official celebration of the 100th year of its Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue begins May 20.
A recent HuffBlog "The Spiritual Lives of Atheist Scientist" by Adelle M. Banks generated a lot of comments, including references to my own 2007 book God: The Failed Hypothesis. The article describes the work of sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund on the so-called "spirituality" of atheist scientists. Let me provide some background that was not mentioned by Banks or any of the hundreds of comments.
In 2007, Ecklund and Christopher Scheitle published a study "Religion Among American Scientists: Distinctions, Disciplines, and Demographics" [Social Problems 54, no. 2(2007): 289-307]. They asked thirty-six questions of 1,646 randomly selected natural and social scientists from twenty-one top research universities and found that 31.2 percent were atheists (do not believe in God); 31.0 percent were agnostics (no way of knowing); 15.5 percent believed but had doubts; 9.7 percent were sure there is a God, 7.2 percent believed in a higher power that is not God; 5.4 percent believed in God "sometimes." Disbelief is greatest among physicists and biologists, each with about 70 percent atheists or agnostics and only 6-7 percent "true" believers.
Ecklund adds, "The institutional infrastructure of the academy has changed to allow more of a place of religion." This is misleading, because she fails to make the important distinction (although she does so later) that is made in these institutions themselves between "religion" and "religious studies." I have visited many religious studies department around the country and find a common story. The majority of religion studies professors in secular universities are nonbelievers, to the great distress of students who enroll in these courses expecting to have their faiths strengthened only to be told what the Bible really says an how it really came to be written. Many atheist scholars, notably philosopher Daniel Dennett, have urged that religion be studied scientifically as an important social phenomenon. As far as I can tell, it already is in these vibrant religious studies departments.
Ecklund's book does not spend any time dissecting the data reported in her paper with Scheitle mentioned above. Rather she is more interested in whatever significance she can glean from her 275 anecdotal personal interviews. She concludes that scientists are more spiritual than we think while admitting that "spirituality" is a difficult term to define.
Ecklund notes, "Religion scholars think that Americans tend to link spirituality to interaction with some form of higher being." She refers to a study reported by sociologist Robert Wuthnow in his 1998 book After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s . Wuthnow asked Americans to define spirituality: they mentioned near-death experiences, unseen spirit guides, belief in angels, meditation, and prayer groups. That is, the general public associates spirituality with the supernatural, as do most dictionaries..
Presenting data from a 1998 General Social Survey (she gives no exact reference), Ecklund reports that nearly 29 percent of Americans say they are "very spiritual," compared to only 9 percent of scientists. On the other hand, 32 percent of scientists consider themselves "slightly spiritual" compared to 21 percent of the general population. Ecklund calls this "thin spirituality."
The thin spirituality of scientists is clearly poles apart from the thick spirituality of the general public. Two out of three scientists are still atheists or agnostics and only 6-7 percent are committed believers. The spirituality Ecklund attributes to some scientists is not supernatural. A biologist's response is typical: "I get my spirituality . . . from being in nature. But I don't really believe there's a God, so I don't consider it's necessary for what I do or how I behave."
I was looking in Ecklund's book for some evidence of the New Age quantum spirituality. Apparently there is little among scientists. The word "quantum" does not even appear in Ecklund's index. Evidently quantum spirituality lives outside the mainstream scientific community and is mainly found on the pseudoscientific fringes under designations such as "parapsychology" or "neuroquantology."
Behavior rather than belief seems to be the defining factor of the spiritual atheist. Those who call themselves spiritual are engaged in helping others, caring for the environment, enjoying the outdoors, and generally spending time meditating on central themes. We can't fault that.
William Shakespeare was the most influential writer who ever lived. Even those who haven’t read his plays know his words, from “to be or not to be†to “let slip the dogs of war.†But his influence goes beyond quotable phrases. Here are five ways he altered our lives.
It's not that getting dumped by his girlfriend soured Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown on the notion of romantic love, exactly. Because to sour on something, one would have to, at some point, feel strongly about it.
There are bigger and busier libraries in America, but none more iconic than the main branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, that stately, marble Beaux-Arts temple of knowledge whose entrance is flanked by two enormous stone lions. May 23 is the 100th anniversary of the edifice (which was renamed the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building in 2008, after the financier donated $100 million toward a major renovation).
Newt Gingrich’s battles against the forces of government spending have been well documented, less so his struggles to comprehend the mysteries of quantum physics.
It dawned on me a few years ago that our rational lives are like a still pond and madness is the jagged rock thrown into it, creating odd ripples everywhere. And the most powerful madness of all, when it comes to the way the world turns, is psychopathy.
There's a consensus amongst psychologists that psychopaths -- with all their glib charm and grandiosity and the power to effortlessly manipulate -- do brilliantly in business and politics. Theirs is the brain anomaly that rules our world. Which is why I've written a book about them: "The Psychopath Test." As part of my research, I spoke to hundreds of people--everyone from the doctors who catalogue mental illness, to those who vehemently oppose them, to a Broadmoor Hospital inmate who says he faked a mental disorder. In the process, I learned that, during the courtship phase, psychopaths come across to the women they're targeting as potentially great husbands. What I'm saying is, you may have married a psychopath. It is really very possible. He might have not yet revealed the full extent of his astonishing malevolence. You might want to pack your bags and run screaming from the marriage before he does. Let me help. What follows are five telltale signs that your husband may be a psychopath.
1. He was very gallant when you first met him, not so gallant now.
Psychopaths can be very superficially charming. It's Item 1 on the 20-point Hare PCL-R psychopathy-spotting Checklist: Glibness/Superficial Charm. I knew a woman, Mary, who met an extremely gallant man while Internet dating. He was so gallant he'd even walk on the road side of the sidewalk. (I am so ungallant I didn't even know that was a thing. I am not a psychopath.) Mary married her man and he turned out to be a pedophile and a bigamist and a fraudster -- a textbook psychopath. Okay, give your husband the benefit of the doubt if the intensity of his gallantry has diminished since the the courtship days. That's normal. We can't keep that level up. But if he's replaced the gallantry with being a remorseless, unempathetic bastard, you may have a problem.
2. He's grandiose.
That's Item 2 on the Checklist: Grandiose Sense of Self Worth. In my book "The Psychopath Test," I meet an enormously wealthy former Fortune 500-type CEO, Al Dunlap, to ask him which of the 20 Hare psychopathic traits he felt most applied to him. He instantly confessed to Grandiose Sense of Self Worth, which would have been a hard one for him to deny as he was at the time standing underneath a giant oil painting of himself. Does your husband have giant portraits of himself? Is he an overly-snappy dresser? Does he tell a lot of stories about himself in which he's always the hero? Does he bulldoze his way through conversations to talk about himself in this grandiose way?
3. He Had Early Behavioral Problems.
Recently I was chatting to a guy and I happened to ask him about his childhood. Had he been a bully or bullied?
"Oh," he said quite cheerfully. "I was a bully. I used to hide behind a tree and jump out and hit my enemies with lumps of wood." He paused and added wistfully: "I'd hurt them quite badly!"
"How did it make you feel?" I asked.
"Good!" he said. "I enjoyed that feeling of power. I still enjoy thinking about it, all these years later."
Psychopaths are very good at hiding their psychopathy beneath a veneer of normalcy. You don't have to be Hercule Poirot to spot someone bipolar, say, or in the grips of an OCD attack, but you do have to be Hercule Poirot sometimes to spot a psychopath. Which is why Early Behavioral Problems is such a handy item on the Checklist. It's harder to hide a hoodlum childhood -- there'll be your husband's school record to sneakily read. Was your husband a terrible bully as a child, pulling the wings off flies, etc? If he says yes, or if he school record confirms it, run. Don't look back. Run!
4. He Engages In Promiscuous Sexual Behavior.
As much as your husband will definitely be wanting to have an affair, he probably won't be. This is because doing so would make him feel incredibly guilty and remorseful. It's those creeping feelings of anxiety that kind of stop us from hurting other people. We want to empathize. We want to be good people. The consensus amongst neurologists is that the part of the brain that shoots the signals of remorse and fear and distress back and forward from the amygdala to the central nervous system under-performs in psychopaths, which frees them up to behave in remorseless, amoral promiscuous ways. They just don't care. So they do it.
5. He Spends too Much Time Learning How To Spot Psychopaths By Using the Hare Checklist
I'm a big fan of the Hare Checklist. I think it's scientifically correct. I think a bizarre facet of human nature is when our brains go wrong, they go wrong in uncannily similar ways. The Hare Checklist is brilliant at anatomizing the barely noticeable character traits evident in psychopaths. However, once you become a trained psychopath spotter, you kind of go drunk with power. So if you see your husband reading this and looking too interested, run. Don't look back. He's a menace.
Books on our radar: what's just come out or about to come out that we think you should know about. Some have buzz, some will fly too low, but we wanted to bring them to your attention.
Let us know what books are on your radar in the comments section below.
Amazon.com today announced that Charlaine Harris is the fourth author to sell over 1 million Kindle books, becoming the latest member of the "Kindle Million Club."
After handshakes and photographs with his lingering admirers, Albert Brooks followed his publicist into a closet-size room deep within the Barnes & Noble bookstore on 86th Street and Lexington Avenue, where two neat stacks of books waited for his signature.
Brooks, the comedian and movie star, is the author of the novel “2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America.†This week he was on a promotional swing through New York, including spots on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and the "Late Show with David Letterman;" he kissed the latter's host in an attempt to boost book sales through viral marketing.
These and other obligations had kept Brooks from traveling to France, where his latest movie, “Drive,†in which he plays a gangster, is in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. “The only time I was invited to Cannes, and I can’t go,†he said in an interview. “But this,†he said, nodding at the stacks of hardcovers bearing his name, “this is more important to me.â€
Brooks, who was born Albert Einstein and changed his name when he began working as a stand-up comedian in the late 1960s, is best known as the writer, director and actor in such movies as “Defending Your Life,†“Broadcast News,†and “Looking For Comedy in the Muslim World.†He also provided the voice for Marlin, the protective father fish in “Finding Nemo.†He will play the father of Paul Rudd's character in a forthcoming movie directed by Judd Apatow, which Brooks described as a continuation of 2007’s “Knocked Up.â€
Yet Brooks, for all his movie credentials, is relishing his hiatus from Hollywood. In “2030,†published this week by St. Martin’s Press, he imagines the state of America in that not-too-distant year: a country besieged by economic woes, rattled by a devastating earthquake in Los Angeles, and grappling with the dark side of medical advances. Cancer has been cured, by a doctor who is “no geniusâ€: “like all of the greatest discoveries, from Newton to Einstein,†Brooks writes, “Dr. Sam Mueller’s cure was so exquisitely simple.†As life expectancy increases, so do generational tensions, as young Americans come to resent “the olds†who monopolize resources and benefits.
Brooks sat down every weekday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. to write. By his own admission, it took some time to fully exorcise the nagging, budget-obsessed Hollywood execs he delights in excoriating. Brooks often found himself looking over his shoulder, he said, expecting the “writing police†to tell him his ideas for the book were too expensive.
On Wednesday, Brooks (whose wife, Kimberly Brooks, is editor of The Huffington Post's arts section) took questions from his Barnes & Noble audience, laughing aloud when asked to share his own opinions on the future and the fate of mankind.
These included: complications from overpopulation; “a Black Plague-like situationâ€; and the prediction that the human race will roam the earth for many years to come, though not necessarily the human race as we know it today. In support of this prediction, he observed, “Our asses are already getting bigger.â€
In the America of “2030,†a man named Matthew Bernstein has been elected the country’s first half-Jewish president, having triumphed over a female rival who utters an anti-Semitic gaffe during a debate.
In an interview, Brooks said he had once considered Eliot Spitzer a viable Jewish American president, until the former New York governor was disgraced by a prostitution scandal. Asked if a half-Jewish president could get elected in America by the year 2030, Brooks quipped, “As long as the mother isn’t Jewish.â€
On Wednesday night, about 200 guests packed into the bookstore’s event space. “He’s an original comic, a comic about things that matter,†said Annie Kirkwood, an Upper East Side resident who attended the event with her husband David. “And he’s not overexposed.â€
After the crowds had gone, Brooks relaxed in the tiny room adjacent to the event space, musing on the tolls and pleasures of the writing life. With the isolation of the writing process behind him, he was enjoying the social aspects of promoting and touring. He said he’d like to write a memoir. Asked how he would begin his life story, Brooks thought for a moment, laughed, and said, “Probably being born with the name Albert Einstein.â€
Miranda France is well known for two non fiction books, one about Argentina, Bad Times in Buenos Aires (1999) and Don Quixote's Delusions (2002). Now she offers us her first attempt at fiction.
Hill Farm is about English country life in modern Britain. Parts of the novel are humorous and ironic. Other parts are a page-turner of suspense that makes it a two-sit read. Hill Farm describes traditional farming practices and how they collide with urban sensitivities. It is also a story about falling in love for the very first time, even after one has been married long enough to bear three children and raise them into childhood.
Miranda France handles both themes with skill, never permitting either to lapse into polemics or sentimentality. Indeed one of her many strengths as a storyteller is the complexity of her characters. Like real people in life, France's main characters are nuanced personalities, neither all good nor all bad.
The first theme will wreck havoc in the hearts of the politically correct who want to exchange animal protein in our diets for plant foods; who think that grazing cattle is counter-productive to a sustainable economy; who love nature -- make that Nature -- but resent the agricultural habits of those who make a living from farming. This attitude is represented by the author's character, Robin Payne, a vegetarian city guy who now lives in a small English village because he loves the country, especially districts designated as AONB, Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
Farmer Hayes from whom he is renting a cottage cannot understand his tenant whom he calls a "pseudo-intellectual" and is astonished when Payne suffers an emotional breakdown after he witnesses the deliberate destruction of a hedgerow. Hayes himself is an intelligent man and while he resents his tenant's rather precious politics he knows unavoidable changes are coming. "Farming was entering a new age, becoming an enterprise for scientists employed by large agrochemical companies. A future of bureaucracy, of rules, regulations and form filling loomed on the road ahead."
While praising Hill Farm in his review in the Guardian, Alfred Hickling says France "is rather less disciplined when it comes to the subject of romance." Surely this is a gender issue. Hickling has never experienced falling in love from a woman's point of view and one can only guess if he has ever been one half of an illicit affair. But France's descriptions of Isabel's reactions will bring a smile of recognition to any woman who has. "She laughed ruefully, lingering on the doorstep for a few seconds longer than was necessary. She allowed a melancholic cast to shape her lips, conveying -- if he chose to notice it -- how much of a disappointment it was to have run out of reasons to visit. Just as she wonders how to interpret the speed of Jack's response the other night, he must now interpret her delay on his doorstep. When love is at stake, these minute infractions need to be scrutinized with scientific care. Metaphorical lab gloves may be donned... and a range of precision measuring implements come intro play. Of such a mysterious and fragile substance is human attraction made."
A star has been born. Or found, out in the Australian outback.
Newcomer and recent drama school Elizabeth Debicki has been cast as Jordan Baker, love interest of narrator/protagonist Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), in the upcoming big screen adaptation of "The Great Gatsby." Director Baz Luhrmann explained the unlikely casting of Debicki in a statement to Deadline:
"It was a surprising result, but Elizabeth's grasp of the material and her chemical connectivity to Tobey Maguire, in addition to her striking, athletic appearance, had us in a place where we were fully confident and ready to take the leap of giving the role of Jordan Baker to what, I guess, people would term 'a discovery,'" he said. "We are thrilled."
Speaking to the Australian website PerformersHub.au, Debicki spoke about her stratospheric rise from performing in a 10-years old performance of "CATS" to drama school to major motion picture, staying humble despite her gigantic new role.
"It all seems so outrageous that I will get an agent. I guess the bigger you dream, the further you have to fall if you don't get it, so it can be a bit of a scary thing to be that ambitious. But I was," she said.
As George Bernard Shaw is said to have said, "England and America are two countries separated by the same language." It's easy enough to find books and Web sites that provide evidence to back the old boy up, detailing such transoceanic translations as elevator/lift and critical divergences such as the relative meanings of "knocked up" (British English: "called on," "woke up," or "worn out": American English: "impregnated").
The author of Eat, Pray, Love and last year's follow-up, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage, is back to working on fiction. "I got my start as a fiction writer and haven't written fiction in over a decade," she says.
Gilbert is researching a historical novel about 19th century botanists, set in the United States.
At least 20 unpublished stories by Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange, have been discovered by researchers sorting through his papers at a research centre in Manchester, the city in which he was born.
The short stories, unproduced film and theatre scripts and hundreds of musical compositions have emerged from the contents of three houses in London, Monaco and Italy, bequeathed to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation after the death of his widow, Liana, four years ago. Burgess died in 1993.
I'm not talking about when you work in Hollywood. I'm talking about Motherhood. And somewhere between the endless diaper changes, hours of driving carpool and constant demands for snacks, you can't help but wonder, "Where the heck am I?" and "How the hell did I get here?"
You used to be a chic, vibrant, rational woman able to complete a single thought without having to stop and say "I told you to go before we left!" Motherhood has sapped you of your energy, your joie de vive, and - much to your partner's chagrin - your will to shower. You wonder, what happened to that woman? Maybe I'll look her up on Facebook.
Well, the good news is she still there. That sexy, happy, sane woman you adored. She's your inner MILF! And there is no better time than today to seek her out and throw her a lifeline.
As discussed in Part 1 of my review of Reconsidering Jane Jacobs, the book published by the American Planning Association to mark the 50 year after publication of The Death and Life Great American Cities, the latter three essays in the book analyze, critically, the impact that Jane Jacobs has had on urban planning and development.
The theme that runs through these essays is that Jane Jacobs had an unassailable insight, namely that planning from the "aerial view" had been a disaster, and needed to be replaced with planning based on a view of the street, but that inasmuch as the past 50 years of urban development have been a disaster, somehow Jacobs is to blame.
This theme first becomes apparent in the introduction by co-editor Max Page, who declares that his admiration for Jacobs is tempered by the current price tag for her house in Greenwich Village: $3.5 million. Jacobs "saved the neighborhood," Page says, but she "did not foresee what it would become -- an area nearly uniformly for the wealthy."
Page also expresses regret that when Jacobs celebrated the city as it existed (which Page confuses with nostalgia), what was lost was the dynamism of city building; he writes: "The sense of place of the city emanates not from stability, stasis, repetition, and homogeneity but from convulsive change, which is often destructive but also historically and, potentially, creative."
True, Page says that he is responding more to the construct "Jane Jacobs" than what the real life person wrote, but even so it is hard to fault Jacobs for the scarcity of city neighborhoods as good as Greenwich Village, and thus the real estate prices there, or attribute to her the idea that the city should stand still. It is unlikely that Jacobs thought that a city's "sense of place" emanates from convulsive change -- but one must wonder if anyone, including Page, truly believes that. Convulsive change can create places, but would anyone say that the defining characteristic of convulsive change is "sense of place?"
In the first of the final three critical essays in the book, Jill Grant, a professor of planning at Dalhousie University, considers the relationship between Jacobs and New Urbanism. What becomes apparent is that Grant doesn't like Jacobs, but because of Jacobs' unassailable status, Grant goes after her through that convenient punching bag, New Urbanism.
It's not my purpose here to evaluate New Urbanism, but rather to examine Grant's arguments. Unfortunately, these are convoluted and misleading, particularly about what Jacobs stood for (most notably that by arguing for a mixture of uses, Jacobs was embracing a physical, design-based determinism). Grant then tries to prove simultaneously that New Urbanism is based on Jane Jacobs, but gets her wrong and isn't really based on Jacobs.
To give another example of how strained Grant's arguments are, she begins one paragraph with the sentence, "New urbanism works primarily in the neighborhood scale that Jacobs criticized," and then begins the very next paragraph with the words, "Jacobs reveled in small-scale neighborhoods operating at the street-level." True, Jacobs found neighborhoods important for some purposes and not important for others, but then perhaps New Urbanists have complex ideas about neighborhoods, too.
Grant ends with the assertion that "to the extent" (!) Jacobs' ideas have affected planning they have been "linked to new urbanism principles and methods embedded with smart growth strategies and wedded to ideals of sustainability and livability." While doubtless there are New Urbanists eager to agree with Grant that they carry higher than anyone else the banner of Jane Jacobs thought, or, for that matter, are responsible for smart growth and sustainability, it is unclear where Grant gets this idea that to have an impact on planning Jacobs required New Urbanism.
What the New Urbanists take from Jane Jacobs is what nearly every other planner or urbanist working today takes from Jacobs regardless in what context they work: a set of pro-urban values. Love of the city. What was revolutionary about Jacobs in 1961, 15 years into a half-century of sprawl, was not that she stood up to Robert Moses, urban renewal and Modernism, but that she proclaimed her love for city life.
Everyone else was saying, "Get Out!" and she was saying "Stay!"
(In Part 3 of this review, I'll discuss the remaining two critical essays in Reconsidering Jane Jacobs.)
Reconsidering Jane Jacobs, edited by Max Page and Timothy Mennel, published by American Planning Association/Planners Press.
Frank Gruber writes a weekly column on local politics, which often involve land use issues, for the Santa Monica Lookout News, a news website. His first book, Urban Worrier: Making Politics Personal, was published by City Image Press.
Way back in the summer of 2009, Levi Johnston -- the estranged paramour of Sarah Palin's daughter, Bristol -- was said (by "Tank," his "bodyguard/publicist!") to be "shopping a book" of the tell-all variety, about his days and nights in the company of the Palin family. A Vanity Fair piece later that fall offered a taste of what might be on the way. But by the following summer, Levi was in he midst of a reconciliation attempt with Bristol, and he was walking back his previous bluster, telling People magazine, "Last year, after Bristol and I broke up, I was unhappy and a little angry. Unfortunately, against my better judgment, I publicly said things about the Palins that were not completely true."
Of course we all know how that played out: Bristol and Levi hit the skids again and soon, he was walking back the walk back: "The only thing I wish I wouldn't have done is put out that apology 'cause it kind of makes me sound like a liar."
In preparation for Celebrating 100 Years, the New York Public Library’s centennial exhibition, the curators at the library came upon some unexpected bounty in the stacks, a lock of Frankenstein creator Mary Shelley’s hair. Macabre as it seems, bestowing locks of hair on friends, family members, and lovers was common practice in the 19th century, and locks of hair from many renowned writers accompany the NYPL’s vast collections of manuscripts, notebooks, and letters.
If you have been married for seven years and you have kids, you are a bitch, and it's not your fault.
This is true of everyone I know. Even the most docile, gentle, saintly of girlfriends turn into screaming shrews. Or rather, are turned into them. Our husbands do it to us. They make us that way.
Recently, at a party, I was complaining about this with some friends and a woman overheard us and said, "Really? I'm not a bitch. I have two kids and I've been married for seven years."
"You're kidding," I said. My husband had just left for a business trip and I was secretly hoping his plane would crash. "I'm actually hoping my husband's plane crashes."
"No, I'm not a bitch at all. My partner and I love each other very much."
That's when I discovered, this one exception to my rule, this one happily married woman who never nagged or yelled and always wanted to make love to her husband, didn't have a husband. She had a wife.
The first time I watched Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, I was horrified. I was eighteen years old, an acting major at NYU, and getting ready to have a decade and a half of what I thought would be very fun dating before choosing my husband and having my children. I would never act like Martha, I thought, chalking her behavior up to having been created by a gay man who must not know anything about real women. Real wives.
But then, at 42, after seven years of marriage, with my two children asleep in their beds, I watched it again and I recognized something in Martha, I had never recognized before. I recognized myself.
Another thing I watched was the royal wedding. A confident, prepped Kate Middleton walked down the same aisle a shaking, inexperienced Diana had walked before her. But no matter how sweet she is now, how patient and understanding she was waiting for a proposal all those years, snooping around the flat they shared hoping to discover a simple engagement ring--say a giant black sapphire surrounded by diamonds--in William's sock drawer, doing all kinds of things to entice him in bed that only a commoner could endure, putting up with the name 'Waity Kaity' because she had no choice, even with all of that, in seven years, she will be such a bitch William will want to bring back beheadings.
My advice to Kate: Don't buy Rogaine and leave it on his bedside table no matter how unfair it is that you do so much for your appearance and he doesn't ever hit the gym.
Don't nag from two feet behind him when you're out strolling in public even if he didn't pick up the kids from school when he said he would, lost one of them in Hyde Park, didn't pick up the medicine from the pediatrician and there's no money left in your joint account.
Don't confess you think his brother's cuter than he is even if he walks through the castle door and doesn't even bother to notice you standing there.
But I know you will. Because even in a palace, with 100 maid servants and royal nannies, your children will find you and climb into bed with you in the middle of the night and you will lose a lot of sleep. You will change wet sheets and give midnight Nebulizers and clean up vomit and love and soothe them while your husband snores next to you completely undisturbed. And the things you found almost endearing about him and worth waiting for when you were single won't be so charming when he does it in front of the kids.
Know, sister-princess, that you are not alone. And know this too: it does get better.
Now, at almost nine years of marriage, my husband and I fight less. I am not completely tamed, but I have mellowed. If he wants me to take my I Love Lucy nightgown off for sex, I might agree to meet him half-way and hike it all the way up around my neck like an Elizabethan collar. If he drives the car over the new $200 stroller, instead of yelling I just laugh and agree it's great our son wasn't in it at the time. And this morning, when my husband left for sunny Napa on business, I looked up from the two lunch boxes I was packing and said, "Have a good flight, Honey." And I really meant it.
ONDON: There were some choice phrases on offer at the World e-Reading Congress, held in London this week. “Apple is a walled garden; Android is an open garden â€" but it has a lot of weeds in it,†was one, from Richard Stephenson, CEO of Yudu Media, the free library of digital content, discussing the relative benefits of the two platforms.
California took another big step towards updating reader privacy today. The State Senate unanimously passed SB602, the Reader Privacy Act, which would bring book privacy law into the digital age. The bill prevents the disclosure of information about readers from booksellers without a warrant in a criminal case or a court order in a civil case, and also requires booksellers to report the number and type of requests that they receive so that we can track government demands for reader information.
Whether he will be portrayed as superhero or supervillain remains to be seen, but Donald "The Donald" Trump is set to take a step into the world of comics in a new graphic biography due out this autumn.
Imagine a world with no bookstores. Personally, I just won't do it, because for me, having visited at least one bookstore almost every day for the last week, this thought kept returning: bookstores are magical places. I feel great sadness when I read the predictions that the future of physical bookstores is doomed. Currently 70% of all books are still purchased from bookstores and 30% purchased online, either as hard copies or e-books, but the forecasts are that these numbers are changing so rapidly that within a few years online book sales will be 75%, leaving bookstores with only 25% of all book sales. How will bookstores survive?
I do admit that I did visit a virtual bookstore this week as well, because the books I wanted weren't stocked in my local Chapters/Indigo store here in Toronto. That virtual visit was just not the same though. Sure, I ordered books, one of which I'd just read cover to cover online. In fact, this is the first book I've ever fully read that way, and, I confess, it just might be the last. Yes, I'd been able to download a free Kindle for my Mac and the book Do The Work by Steven Pressfield, the second release from Seth Godin's new Domino Project, had been delivered as promised, directly to my Kindle on release date, free of charge. It took me almost three weeks to break down and check out the book. Once there, the book fully engaged me and I found it absolutely brilliant, reading it in one sitting. It spoke to me personally so loudly that after I finished reading it online, I decided to order a "real" copy and to recommend it to everyone I know. However, to me, a book is not really a book unless I can hold it and touch it and be with it and sometimes even own it. Virtual books do not feel real to me. Some habits die hard, I guess. Thank goodness.
Inquisitive me decided to question about two dozen people, all from different age groups and backgrounds, about their preferences when it comes to buying books. Categorically everyone I asked still wants real books and the opportunity to find those books in physical bookstores. People will order online if they don't have the time to visit the bookstore or if the book isn't in stock close by, but generally real bookstore experiences are what the people I asked still want.
When I step into a bookstore, I'm transported to as many different worlds as I want to visit. Anything and everything is there within a few steps of where I enter. Turn left, I'm in the worlds of art and photography. Turn right, the worlds of travel or fitness or cooking. Walk straight, the worlds of sports or business. It is all there calling to me to have an experience, an adventure. A researcher at heart, I'm always delighted to make mental notes of the variety of people I see every time I visit a bookstore. It doesn't matter the time of day or even what day it is. People are browsing, having a tea or coffee and wandering or meeting with friends, checking out possibilities and making purchases.
In fact, Heather Reisman, CEO of Chapters/Indigo, Canada's largest bookstore chain with 96 stores, knows that online book sales will erode 40% of her in-store sales within the next five years, and she is taking steps to recreate the bookstore experience for her customers. In her terms she sees her stores as "cultural department stores."
E-book sales topped paperback sales for the first time in February of this year and although they were at a mere $1 billion dollars in 2010 they are expected to explode and triple to almost $3 billion by 2015. Amazon reported in January of this year that it now sells more Kindle books than paperback books -- 115 e-books for every 100 paperbacks in the U.S.
I believe in bookstores, in the experience of being in a bookstore. When I read that one of the possible threats to the future of bookstores is the diminished appetite for books, I believe I gasped in horror. I'm back to being the little four year old girl reading to her kindergarden class and who, at this early age, developed a lifelong love of books. When I step into a bookstore, I'm the kid in the candy store, but it's not candy I'm wanting to eat, but words and ideas I'm devouring, and can never seem to get enough of. The bookshelves are filled with possibilities and everywhere I turn is something new and intriguing and inviting, calling out to me. I simply cannot have this same experience online. So, yes, I will continue to buy books from bookstores and am committed to continue my love affair with physical books, refusing to imagine a future without bookstores to buy them in. I realize bookstores will have to change to meet the times, and I do know that change can be good. I leave you with this question -- how do you envision bookstores of the future?
You are never more alive than when you love, why not Love Again?
I recently released my debut book, daring to express what most men, especially black men feel, but fear to say -- and what every woman longs to hear. Everyone has a "love and loss" story -- we've been hurt or rejected by someone who mattered to us be that via divorce, death, rejection, breakup. The book, Love Again, is a memoir, my memoir, one that has taken the last seven years of my life to write. I know it may be a bit presumptuous to write a memoir at thirty-six years old, seeing that I don't have a father from Kenya or a mother from Kansas, but I employ the literary tool of the memoir as a canvas to paint my ideas about love and loss, more specifically about black love. Most public literary works around these ideas are written by women, whom I respect a great deal. However, often I have read their work and pondered the half truth in them. This was not done intentionally but done by the mere fact that the scope of thought was made imperfect by their personal experiences or the experiences of another woman's life. The missing part of this needed discourse was the emotional presence of a man, a crucial voice in the public discourse that was unheard. It is for this reason alone I find it faithful and just for me to write about love. The first ideas and writings about love come from the most indigenous parts of Africa, my ideas about love fall within sacred thought of black people. I bear witness to love through my writing, I reclaim not black masculinity alone but our rich and collective inheritance of love and relationships deeded to us by our fore-family.
If I recorded an album, the thoughts in Love Again would be the lyrics. I wanted to write in sounds and rhythms, in movements and flows that would be refreshing to the soul, just like our favorite song does for us every time we hear it. I wanted to write what I heard deep inside and what I wasn't hearing on the outside of me. I wanted people to read this book, but I also wanted them to hear my voice saying what is not usually said and sharing what is not easily given by men in literature. Before the book was released, I sat and talked with my former wife. I was practicing being or attempting to make the effort at being an emotionally responsible adult. I told her that I wanted her to read something as I reached in my bag and pulled out a galley copy of the book. I said, "I'm not giving this to you so you can find reasons to disagree with me, I am giving this to you because there were so many things that I never said to you, things that at the time, I didn't have the ability to say to you, things that perhaps if I said them then, things would be different. No matter what has happened between us, I want you to hear how deeply loved you were." I wanted to write this for all my sisters who may have been with a man and things didn't work out between you, I wanted to put in words how a man feels about the woman who he loves but never gave a lot of words to his feelings.
My brothers have written some great books, the New York Times best-sellers list can testify to that. This is a companion work to what they have done. It is not an overly dramatized caricature of men. It is not an enterprising of black love and the subsequent negotiation tactics that must be employed so you can win at the game of love. Neither is it an historical treaty of the socialization of black love in post-diaspora America. Love Again is our collective story as humans. It is a new epistle submitted to the cannon of the work that precedes it bearing witness to the truth that we are bonded in ways that are inescapable, not always obvious, but tangible. We love, we sometimes lose love and then there is innately within every human ever born, no matter how emotionally devastated or the depth of wounding, a wanting to love again, and the more we touch, taste and speak that truth the sooner we are able to bring that love to us.
As men, we all know what it is to love a woman so deeply that we break every rule, would fight any foe and go through any test to have her heart. We also know what it is to lose that love and never talk about it again to anyone. We are peculiar in the way we move on. We don't heal ourselves in the same place we hurt ourselves, so we just shrug and say "on to the next one." But there is one we carry with us always, the one that got away. I understand. I wrote so we all can know that we are not alone. We don't have to talk about it; you may have gotten to the point where you feel it doesn't matter anymore, and I get it. However, as you read Love Again: A Spiritual Memoir, I hope the words can help reconcile unresolved pain for you in ways that brings you into wholeness, to be better whenever love comes again and for whomever you are blessed to share it with.
We may never see another novel about Lisbeth Salander, aka The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. But books about the hacker-heroine's creator, the late Stieg Larsson, are still hurtling through the publishing pipeline.
French publishers Albin Michel, Flammarion and Gallimard are suing Google for having scanned 9,797 books without prior permission for its Google Book Search programme, a publishing source told The Bookseller. Lawyers for the three filed suit on 6th May, and are demanding €1,000 per title in damages, bringing the total to nearly €9.8m.
It was sheaths and champagne as far as the eye could see on Tuesday evening, as a slew of the Upper East Side's finest women gathered at the Michael Kors flagship store to fete Rooftop Gardens: The Terraces, Conservatories, and Balconies of New York, a new book of photography by Roberta Amon and Denise LeFrak highlighting the city's most stunning rooftop gardens.
The authors know a thing or two about New York real estate, especially LeFrak whose father Samuel J. LeFrak was a legendary builder and developer in New York City for decades. "I have real estate in my DNA," said LeFrak, explaining her inspiration for the project. "This is really what I know about and this is my passion. Real estate is very sexy for me."
Finding terraces to photograph turned out to be easy with some simple social networking, Amon noted. "It started with one or two friends that I had that had amazing terraces and then it just snowballed because they would recommend their friends to us and allow us into their homes."
While signing books and greeting friends at the event, LeFrank and Amon were able to celebrate their tome while also giving back. One-hundred percent of book sales and 20% of in-store purchases from the event went directly to the The Breast Cancer Research Foundation, an organization close to Amon's heart not only because she serves on its advisory board but also because she is a self-proclaimed "breast cancer thriver."
And thrive she and LeFrak will, with the success of their new book. When asked how readers might be inspired to enjoy their own rooftops or yards as the warm weather turns, Amon had a few suggestions for summer outdoor fun, including sunbathing, sports, and one indispensable element: "Cocktails, before and after dinner!"
In 1961, the United States and the Soviet Union -- allies together during World War II -- faced off militarily for the first time over the fate of Berlin. The young John F. Kennedy (reeling from the Bay of Pigs) and the peasant turned politician Nikita Kruschev (who kept one eye on opponents in the Politburo and another on China) knew that Berlin was crucial.
If the US couldn't hold fast here, the countries that depended on it for protection from the ever-growing communist empire would lose faith. If the Soviet Union couldn't stop the bleeding (all of the best and brightest in East Germany were fleeing to the more vibrant West Germany literally by the thousands each and every day) then the ability to keep the Eastern bloc stable and secure was threatened. Even the USSR itself might not last if countries like Poland and Germany and Hungary began to peel off one by one.
Literally everything was at stake in Berlin, including the prospect of nuclear war. The US didn't have nearly enough troops to match the boots on the ground that the Russians deployed in East Germany. And now that the Soviets could boast of their own nuclear capability, Kruschev was certain Kennedy would never risk a nuclear winter just to keep Berlin free and open. Kennedy was just as certain he had to convince Kruschev the US would use nuclear weapons or the only way to keep the Soviets at bay would be to literally launch Armageddon.
This tense turning point of the Cold War is captured effectively with Frederick Kempe's page-turning book, a solid work of popular history that should be one of the breakout titles of the year. First and foremost, Kempe dives into his rich narrative that plots the back and forth between the superpowers month to month and day to day. Quick, vivid sketches of the state of the mind of the two world leaders are interspersed with dramatic details of the men and women caught up in history.
Kempe shows us the nervous young student who takes a risk and smuggles a passport into East Germany so a friend can escape; the old woman who dangles from a window towards freedom because her front door opens onto East Germany but her back window looks out to the West; and the tragic people caught on the wrong side when the Berlin Wall is thrown up overnight, the ones who realize they planned to leave one day too late.
We also get the secret backdoor channel that went from a mid-level Soviet spy to Bobby Kennedy and the loose cannon of a US general who knows the commies won't back down until you punch them in the nose and he's just the guy to do it.
Kempe's analysis draws on reams of material and solidly places the decisions of Kennedy and Kruschev in convincing context. Kennedy struggled to prove to Kruschev that he was hard-nosed. But no matter how often Kennedy said Berlin was of vital importance, Kruschev refused to believe it could be that important to them. That meant they edged closer and closer to the brink. Still, from the context of today, Kennedy's take on events seem reasonable and balanced from the start.
He was famously overshadowed by Kruschev at a summit meeting that led into the Berlin crisis. Aides were aghast to hear all the concessions Kennedy blithely offered up. But in fact, everything Kennedy said and the stance he took became the de facto US position throughout the Cold War. Kennedy repeatedly made clear the US wouldn't interfere with whatever the Soviet Union did in East Germany. He acknowledged the facts on the ground of Eastern Europe and accepted it as a fait accompli. Kennedy knew the people of the US weren't remotely ready to go to war over unifying Germany, the country they had just defeated after it launched a world war. And Kennedy was right.
Kempe details the almost miraculous feat of East Germany throwing up a barrier overnight throughout the entire city of Berlin, a barrier that would soon become the Berlin Wall. It's a remarkable moment bursting with tragedy and small moments of grace. As callous as it may seem, Kennedy was relieved by its appearance. He knew the Soviets had to stop the flow of refugees that were soon going to cripple East Germany for good and threatened its entire bloc. If the USSR hadn't allowed the wall, war might very well have come about.
This doomed East Germany and indeed the Eastern bloc to decades of Soviet control. But it also stabilized a dangerous military showdown. Kennedy also knew it symbolized defeat for the totalitarian regime of communism. Any country that must wall in its own citizens and threaten to shoot them if they try to leave is doomed to fail. Thirty years might seem a long time to wait for that to happen, but in historic terms it's a blink of the eye. Kennedy was right.
Kempe captures this dramatic moment with skill and verve, showing how the Berlin crisis arose out of the turmoil of recent months and why it led to the white knuckle events of the Cuban missile crisis soon thereafter. Entertaining and insightful, Berlin 1961 offers all the pleasures of John Le Carre with the added frisson that the dangers were all too real and the stakes never higher.
In 1961, the United States and the Soviet Union -- allies together during World War II -- faced off militarily for the first time over the fate of Berlin. The young John F. Kennedy (reeling from the Bay of Pigs) and the peasant turned politician Nikita Kruschev (who kept one eye on opponents in the Politburo and another on China) knew that Berlin was crucial.
If the US couldn't hold fast here, the countries that depended on it for protection from the ever-growing communist empire would lose faith. If the Soviet Union couldn't stop the bleeding (all of the best and brightest in East Germany were fleeing to the more vibrant West Germany literally by the thousands each and every day) then the ability to keep the Eastern bloc stable and secure was threatened. Even the USSR itself might not last if countries like Poland and Germany and Hungary began to peel off one by one.
Literally everything was at stake in Berlin, including the prospect of nuclear war. The US didn't have nearly enough troops to match the boots on the ground that the Russians deployed in East Germany. And now that the Soviets could boast of their own nuclear capability, Kruschev was certain Kennedy would never risk a nuclear winter just to keep Berlin free and open. Kennedy was just as certain he had to convince Kruschev the US would use nuclear weapons or the only way to keep the Soviets at bay would be to literally launch Armageddon.
This tense turning point of the Cold War is captured effectively with Frederick Kempe's page-turning book, a solid work of popular history that should be one of the breakout titles of the year. First and foremost, Kempe dives into his rich narrative that plots the back and forth between the superpowers month to month and day to day. Quick, vivid sketches of the state of the mind of the two world leaders are interspersed with dramatic details of the men and women caught up in history.
Kempe shows us the nervous young student who takes a risk and smuggles a passport into East Germany so a friend can escape; the old woman who dangles from a window towards freedom because her front door opens onto East Germany but her back window looks out to the West; and the tragic people caught on the wrong side when the Berlin Wall is thrown up overnight, the ones who realize they planned to leave one day too late.
We also get the secret backdoor channel that went from a mid-level Soviet spy to Bobby Kennedy and the loose cannon of a US general who knows the commies won't back down until you punch them in the nose and he's just the guy to do it.
Kempe's analysis draws on reams of material and solidly places the decisions of Kennedy and Kruschev in convincing context. Kennedy struggled to prove to Kruschev that he was hard-nosed. But no matter how often Kennedy said Berlin was of vital importance, Kruschev refused to believe it could be that important to them. That meant they edged closer and closer to the brink. Still, from the context of today, Kennedy's take on events seem reasonable and balanced from the start.
He was famously overshadowed by Kruschev at a summit meeting that led into the Berlin crisis. Aides were aghast to hear all the concessions Kennedy blithely offered up. But in fact, everything Kennedy said and the stance he took became the de facto US position throughout the Cold War. Kennedy repeatedly made clear the US wouldn't interfere with whatever the Soviet Union did in East Germany. He acknowledged the facts on the ground of Eastern Europe and accepted it as a fait accompli. Kennedy knew the people of the US weren't remotely ready to go to war over unifying Germany, the country they had just defeated after it launched a world war. And Kennedy was right.
Kempe details the almost miraculous feat of East Germany throwing up a barrier overnight throughout the entire city of Berlin, a barrier that would soon become the Berlin Wall. It's a remarkable moment bursting with tragedy and small moments of grace. As callous as it may seem, Kennedy was relieved by its appearance. He knew the Soviets had to stop the flow of refugees that were soon going to cripple East Germany for good and threatened its entire bloc. If the USSR hadn't allowed the wall, war might very well have come about.
This doomed East Germany and indeed the Eastern bloc to decades of Soviet control. But it also stabilized a dangerous military showdown. Kennedy also knew it symbolized defeat for the totalitarian regime of communism. Any country that must wall in its own citizens and threaten to shoot them if they try to leave is doomed to fail. Thirty years might seem a long time to wait for that to happen, but in historic terms it's a blink of the eye. Kennedy was right.
Kempe captures this dramatic moment with skill and verve, showing how the Berlin crisis arose out of the turmoil of recent months and why it led to the white knuckle events of the Cuban missile crisis soon thereafter. Entertaining and insightful, Berlin 1961 offers all the pleasures of John Le Carre with the added frisson that the dangers were all too real and the stakes never higher.
Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan isn't just working on reissuing the band's back catalog and recording two new albums, Oceania and Teargarden by Kaleidyscope. He's also writing an autobiography, titled God is Everywhere, from Here to There, that he described as a "spiritual memoir."
In a 1950s conversation with her dear friend Ernest Hemingway, Marlene Dietrich asked his advice about a problem. She had been invited to perform at a Miami nightclub but was not sure she wanted to accept it. It was a lucrative offer, she explained, but her heart was simply not in it. When she thought of turning it down, though, she wondered if she was just "pampering" herself. Her explanation was met with a moment of silence, after which Hemingway said, "Don't do what you sincerely don't want to do." And then he added:
Never confuse movement with action.
Hemingway's words immediately cleared up any doubts that Dietrich was having about the decision. But it was her comment about his advice that has been remembered to history: "In those five words he gave me a whole philosophy."
There are periods in life when we are especially receptive to the influence of others. During these times--often called teachable moments--a handful of words can dramatically impact our lives. And when it comes to words that command attention, nothing can beat those that are phrased according to the figure of speech known as dehortatio, which Willard R. Espy once crisply defined as "dissuasive advice given with authority."
Technically, Hemingway offered Dietrich a dehortation, a rarely used but quite proper English term (compared to an exhortation, which attempts to persuade people to do something, a dehortation is an attempt to dissuade people from a course of action). Here's another example, this one written more than 2,500 years ago by the Greek writer Euripides:
Never dare to to judge till you have heard the other side.
For more than twenty-five years, I've had my own pet term for this kind of cautionary advice, and I have compiled nearly 2,000 examples in my new book Neverisms: A Quotation Lover's Guide to Things You Should Never Do, Never Say, or Never Forget (HarperCollins, 2011). Here are a bunch more, along with a thought or two about each one.
SAN FRANCISCO -- The coming publication of a memoir by the California woman who was kidnapped as a girl and held for 18 years has broadcasters scrambling to become the first to get an interview with her.
Simon & Schuster announced Monday the memoir of Jaycee Dugard will go on sale July 12. Titled "A Stolen Life," it will cover Dugard's abduction and life with Phillip and Nancy Garrido, the couple who have pleaded guilty to kidnapping and rape.
Dugard has not decided yet whether she will do interviews surrounding the book, according to Nancy Seltzer, her spokeswoman.
If she does, it would break the silence she has maintained since releasing a home video to ABC News last year.
"What's conveyed on television is her emotion, the look on her face," Seltzer said of a possible network TV interview. "With great and true respect to the printed word, it's not the same."
Seltzer declined to reveal which networks were making pitches. She is asking the journalists to provide details on what they would ask Dugard.
Dugard was kidnapped from her South Lake Tahoe home at age 11 and resurfaced in August 2009. Now 31, she has maintained her privacy while living in Northern California with her mother and her two daughters fathered by Phillip Garrido.
Seltzer said Dugard wrote "A Stolen Life" on her own, without help from a ghost writer. Along with hardcover and electronic book editions, Simon & Schuster is producing an audio book narrated by Dugard.
If you weren't aware that May is Zombie Awareness Month, you may be part of the problem and not the solution.
This marks the fourth year Zombie Awareness Month has been held, and according to Matt Mogk, the founder and head of the Zombie Research Society, the official sponsor of the campaign, it's needed now more than ever.
"Zombie Awareness Month is designed to make people more aware of the coming zombie plague," Mogk told AOL Weird News. "It's getting bigger each year and this year, the focus is on helping children become aware."
The reason May was chosen instead of, say, Halloween, is that major zombie films like "Night of the Living Dead" and "Dawn of the Dead" are set in spring.
One way that people can show their support is by wearing a gray ribbon, but Mogk is hoping to target the nation's youth via a new children's book, "That's Not Your Mommy Anymore" (Ulysses Press), that he describes as "Dr. Seuss Meets 'Night of the Living Dead.'"
The book explains the implications of the impending Zombie Apocalypse with verses like:
When she's clawing at the kitchen door, that's not your Mommy anymore. When her face looks like an apple core, that's not your Mommy anymore.
Mogk claims he's dead serious about staying alive and insists zombies could take over the world any minute -- or not.
"It's not like the Doomsday Clock that marks how close we are to a global disaster by setting the time between 11:45 and midnight," Mogk said. "I could say it's '11:55,' but we could wake up and see zombies tomorrow.
"This is more like an earthquake. Scientists say that we're due for a major quake, but it could happen tomorrow or in 100 years. We will never know when it will happen until it does. And then we won't have to time to react, it will just be run and scream time."
Mogk and the rest of the Zombie Research Society board, which lists "Night of the Living Dead" director George A. Romero and Dr. Steven Schlozman, Co-Director of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, among its members are trying to use the rest of May to heighten awareness and prepare for the worst.
"New Jersey probably has it the worst," Mogk lamented. "It has the highest population density combined with the lowest percentage of gun ownership -- around 12.9 percent.
"On the other hand, Wyoming has a low population density, a high percentage of gun owners and the topography gives non-zombies a fighting chance."
Mogk says that since 88 percent of the U.S. population lives near cities, a potential zombie outbreak could lead to huge traffic jams of people trying to escape, such as the 100-mile one that occurred when Hurricane Rita hit the shores of Texas in September, 2005.
Mogk realizes that others may use Zombie Awareness Month as an excuse for a celebration. It doesn't thrill him, but he tries to see the other side.
"I don't like zombie walks myself, but they do raise awareness," he said, adding that he hopes to use the next 30 days to dispel the public's misconceptions about the ravenous creatures.
"All research suggests that zombies don't eat brains," he said. "That was only started in 'Return of the Living Dead,' a 1980s parody film.
"Honestly, it doesn't make sense. If zombies ate brains, then their victims wouldn't be able to become zombies and that, of course, is the real threat. Plus, the human jawbone can't bite through a skull."
It looks like Zombie Awareness Week is catching in some circles.
Harcos Labs, a Los Angeles-based company that markets "Zombie Jerky," a novelty product that its makers are quick to declare is made from zombies (or "cows"), not for zombies sold out its first batch right before the month and is rushing to make more to fill the ravenous demand.
In addition, two business reporters, Lisa Desjardins and Rick Emerson are capitalizing on the monthlong event by releasing "Zombie Economics" (Avery), a business book that promises to help the reader "slay your bills, decapitate debt and fight the apocalypse of financial doom."
Despite all the zombie hype, not everyone is aware of Zombie Awareness Month, even a true "zombie expert" like Arnold Blumberg, who teaches a class on zombies in popular culture at the University of Baltimore in Maryland.
"You contacting me was the first I heard about 'Zombie Awareness Month,'" Blumberg told AOL Weird News. "I feel left out of the loop; what's an internationally recognized zombie expert to do?"
"From what I understand it's being sponsored by one particular group, so it may not be very widespread, but it's just another great example of how this topic captures the imagination for so many people," he said.
Although Blumberg enjoys discussing how zombie-themed entertainment reflects society's thoughts and fears, he admits the segment of fandom that wants to treat it as if it's real, even in role-play, is not something he's comfortable with.
"I think it's a far more effective way to explore how zombie storytelling reflects our culture by looking at it for what it is -- fiction -- rather than pretending as if we should be fortifying our homes for the coming apocalypse," he said. "I think it's at least an indication that with the real world becoming more and more chaotic and threatening, people feel a need to play out end-of-the-world scenarios from the safety of a metaphorical structure. Zombies fulfill that for us very well."
Blumberg feels zombies reflect the fears of terrorism, of biological infection, and the sense that our civilized society is one or two steps away from total collapse.
"By playing out 'zombie apocalypse' scenarios, some people can process those feelings and get the catharsis they need, and there's nothing wrong with that," he said.
As for how seriously Mogk takes the zombie threat, it seems that he has his tongue firmly in cheek -- at least until a zombie pulls it out for a snack. Still, Mogk, who claims he learned survival skills while serving in the French Foreign Legion, points out that there is real value preparing for a zombie outbreak.
"All the steps suggested for preparing for a zombie attack -- such as saving water and non-perishable food -- will hold you well for any type of disaster," he said.
When the big news was announced last week that Penguin, Simon & Schuster and Hachette were teaming up to create a new online site to feature and promote books, the reader in me couldn't help but be intrigued: Could this publishing "dream team" put together a much-needed super-site addressing some of the current online needs of publishers, authors and readers?
I'm still excited and hopeful, but early statements from some of the people involved with Bookish have given me pause. As I see it, there are ways to do this right--and a bunch of ways to do it wrong.
So while it may be unfair to judge Bookish by its early coverage, let me suggest a list of 5 things that the creators of this site should strive to avoid--lest they fall into the trap of giving all of us book lovers what we already have or don't really need.
Don't...
1. Make it like a standard book publishing site (times 50). There are more than 50 imprints owned by these three big publishers and a lot of them already have sites. But let's face it, most publisher websites are bland, limited places that no one lingers on or goes back to. Bookish should be a brightly designed, magazine-model site bursting with infotainment. Borrow a leaf from HuffPo, which grabs you by the throat in featuring a dozen great headline links and photos before the fold, just begging people to click and dive deeper. The more fun stuff featured on the home page of Bookish, the more readers will buzz it up and go back to it. Do a daily giveaway (and not always a book). Or "Featured Book Trailer of the Day," where people can vote and comment on it. And live author chats are a must.
2. Make it all about book recommendations (Ã la Pandora). When I read that Bookish founder Paulo Lemgruber said, "The main goal of Bookish is to make recommendations about books that will appeal to a reader's particular taste," my heart sank. Amazon already does this in spades. Why compete with them (and who really finds Amazon's soulless algorithmic recommendations that useful)? Maybe Bookish has something exciting up its sleeve, like Pandora's revolutionary (and labor-intensive) Music Genome filtering system. But even so, this should be a sidebar, not the main feature of the site. If you really want to direct people to specific books, most readers would be happy with genre search boxes with three tabs: Newest Titles; Evergreen Titles; Overlooked Titles.
And speaking of "overlooked titles," another mistake would be to...
3. Allow hot new books and bestsellers to dominate the site. Please don't let Bookish get taken over by a handful of books--i.e., the usual suspects. We've all noted the tendency of book publishers to throw most of their promotion resources behind their A-list titles. Yeah, we know: those big-name sales keep all the other boats afloat. But James Patterson is already ubiquitous; there's no value in showcasing him on Bookish.
The way to make Bookish visitors loyal and engaged would be to give us a stake in books beyond the bestsellers. Tout the other books on the list (and the backlist), all the passion projects and up-and-comers that get lost behind the mass-media klieg lights focused on the same 5 books.
4. Let it get taken over by reader reviews and voting. Amazon, Shelfari, and GoodReads' all specialize in reader reviews; we don't need another place for that. Plus we've all learned how these reader reviews can be skewed by a few super reviewers, readers with an ax to grind, or even authors and their friends pointing people towards their books (and away from their competitors). If we love this kind of compromised, nonprofessional reviewing, we know where to find it.
Book reviews should be part of the mix of the site, though. I would welcome an aggregation of professional book reviews, including those of the best book review bloggers. Just don't turn the site into primarily a review site, even if by some miracle it comes out of the gate as robust as RottenTomatoes.com.
5. Focus on just content curation (easy) rather than creation (hard). Ideally Bookish would be a mix of really cool content that they both curate and create. Great professional reviews, author interviews and Q&As, trend stories, and, yes, book gossip--they're all out there right now in newspapers, magazines, and on NPR but we miss them every day. I hope to see them aggregated and touted on Bookish, with lots of room for our comments.
But I also want to see more than curation. Yes, publishers have lots of great unsung content on their sites (such as Random House's Word and Film subsite) but I hope Bookish brings in real journalists to do a sprucing up of all the material taken from the publishers' sites. Give us more interesting, better written interviews, profiles, news items, and videos.
And give us some "insider" stuff. I, for one, would love to hear directly from an editor why he thinks a certain book's time is right now, or from a bookseller about how a book spoke personally to her. The value of having big publishers backing this Bookish venture really comes into focus if they offer us a chance to peek behind the publishing curtain, get some inside scoops, and feel invested in the story of the book and author.
So that's my 5 ways to screw up an exciting-sounding online book site backed by big publishers. There are probably many others. What comes to your mind?
The chances that Borders may be sold as one business or piecemeal appears to becoming more of a possibility. Last Friday was the deadline for the submission of bids to the company’s investment bankers and financial advisors, Jeffries & Company.
Earlier this month, mayor Michael R. Bloomberg‘s Office of Management and Budget released a “Agency Gap Closing Programs†(PDF link) proposal that would dramatically cut library services in New York City
U.S. researchers say a study of 22 U.S. states and a Canadian province shows when funding support for school libraries rises, reading and testing scores go up.
PHOENIX — Publishing house HarperCollins says Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has agreed to write a memoir to be published this fall.
The 208-page book will be entitled "Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media, and Cynical Politicos to Secure America's Border."
The 66-year-old Republican has criticized the Obama administration over border security concerns and over the Justice Department's lawsuit challenging Arizona's illegal immigration law that she signed last year.
HarperCollins says Brewer will call on President Barack Obama to secure the border and tell about what she has done it defend her state.
The publishing house announced the book on its website and didn't immediately respond to inquiries from The Associated Press.
Brewer's writing of a memoir first was reported by the Arizona Capitol Times.
The White House poetry reading is on May 11. But PoetryLeaks got a hold of the goings-on before the big day! Billy Collins went over very well with the White House crowd, making everyone, especially in the front rows, crack up. Afterwards, the President said, "Billy Collins makes poetry seem easy, joyful and spontaneous, not labored and miserable. That's the kind of gung-ho attitude we need more of in this country, as we put the economy back together." As for Elizabeth Alexander, the President said, "Despite all the pressures of the last two and a half years, I remember well her inaugural poem. Ordinary people going about ordinary tasks. What a wonderful insight! No need to weigh it down with needless complications. Work is its own reward. That's what Elizabeth and I both practiced at the University of Chicago. And look where it got us!" As for the Thomas Sayers Ellis rejection letter PoetryLeaks has in its possession, the President had no comment.
The Hall Monitor
By Billy Collins
Mr. President, I have heard those conspiracies about you. Poetry is the loudest rumor, a frail conspiracy of all the ghost predecessors' autos-da-fe, contained in the friendly confines of the mind's Oval Office, purified of imperial ambition:
for what is a poet but a humble supplicant in the halls of power, hunched along the definitions of amplitude handed down through generations? Dante's grimness, Milton's prophecy, Byron's vigor, an order of fetish and surfeit laid out for inspection, like the spoils of empire.
I pay no heed to gossip about your reality. You are real and fine and wholesome, intact like the workhorse columns holding up this building, as I too, morning after morning, set aside the family resemblances between me and my forerunners, and settle down to the task of honing that one word, the aperture to the light between two worlds, that will reveal myself to myself.
Mr. President, the poet who is angry and sad, bereft of the image of his humble pajama-clad existence, striving to knock the windmills of ideology, is thankfully a beast neither you nor I have to tackle.
I am the least among equals, an ordinary scribe, raising my arms at the passing centuries, a pleasant stationmaster making no grab for glory.
Dream #2,345,667
By Elizabeth Alexander
Some of us have laundry to wash, some of us have hair to bind and cudgel, others will patch the family's hearth, and yet others will hollow sage registries so that past brigandage might be possible again in dream. Dream that I
(regardless of channel-switching Rodney King-unease) plaster on the walls of my New Haven one-woman apartment the death of my youthful no-nonsense partner hunting me in the street, screaming at my unstrapped hair, walking in my blue shadow
like Coltrane's broken mind. Dream that I awaken into Cleopatra's arms, Alexandria and Lagos and Durban, Nelson Mandela's twenty-seven years of prison and my sight-unseen acceptance of the gift of time,
which I hereby revoke. Or rather, I give it to the girl who needs it more, my little sister floating in a bubble, grape-sized, hand-washed, raisin-teethed,
an illustration of endless migration from Chicago to Chicago. Dream that I,
on an ordinary morning like inauguration day, when the world took a walk around the block and found the very walls smiling on reality, can at last bow before collapsing doors,
and find the wandering neighbor at home, not exactly needing me (in her elderly music of dementia) but willing to break bread over noiseless grants of merit.
Letter to Thomas Sayers Ellis.
Dear TSE (as you like to be called, evoking a predecessor of those initials):
We appreciate your nomination for the White House poetry reading, but regret to inform you that you will not be one of the selected poets. This is not a judgment of your poetry by any means, and certainly you should feel free to apply next year. It's not unknown for a poet to be invited on subsequent tries, though at the moment we're hard pressed to think of an example. We had an interesting time puzzling over Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems. It's hard to classify this book. Frankly, we don't know where you're coming from. And that's a problem.
For instance, you title one of your poems "Presidential Blackness [A Race Fearlessness Manifolk Destiny]." The title alone is problematic. We don't want donors to get the wrong idea. As you know, we live in a post-racial society, so the title just brings up wrong associations. You start the poem, "We miracles. We have not known true freedom in / America or in Art, thus our work has struggled in / containers not of our own construction." Speak for yourself, buddy! The President got to where he is not because of miracles. It was hard work, make no mistake about it. In the same poem, you write, "To make an identity repair-kit of all black folk / behavior, to shine or show-off, as nuisance as / nuance, sometimes some-timey and sometimes on- / point, the slanguage of hood ornaments." We have no idea what you're talking about. First of all, who is this "all black folk?" Who are you--or anyone--to judge such an abstraction? Secondly, are you saying that black people are in need of repair? Who's going to undertake this repair? TSE, the current era is a time of healing national differences. The repairs have already been made.
Your long poem, "Mr. Dynamite Splits [ James Joseph Brown, Jr.]"--We have a feeling Michelle would have a problem with these lines: "Your eeeeeeeeeeyow will never rest. / You remain proud, cold bodyheat and sweat, / that muthafucka Black Caesar, / the only one who ever murdered dying." Black Caesar is not terminology we like to use around these precincts. Who is the audience for this poem?
We actually do like your "Race Inauguration Day [A Short Fiction]." Sort of. You write, "So we skinned ourselves, / zipper down the body middle, / right there on the National Mall, / the moment the poet, / cold as her tone, enjambed America with "Love."" So this is on the whole wholesome. But there is too much of a dialectic going on, to use that old-fashioned college jargon. It seems like something has been fought over, something won, something is in balance. Where does that feeling come from? It's not the kind of thing we want to convey even in subtle hints. The past is a foreign country. We've moved on. So should the country.
Finally, we know that neither Michelle nor the President would care for "Wacko Jacko." The poor guy is dead. Can we all move on? You write: "Lips, a tattoo, not a relief but a permanent painting of a kiss. / Predators, like female owls, in both eyes. / Mouth, a sharp snake. Snake, a pale cave. / The wildlife in the songs comes from / the same venom stubble comes from, testosterone, the body's land / of seized porn." Just very, very offensive to Michael Jackson's memory. Why would we want to inflame the passions of those who already hate Michael Jackson by releasing--sorry, reading--this poem at the White House?
In short, we appreciate your work as one of America's finest young African American poets and wish you much success in your future endeavors. Feel free to get in touch with any suggestions, comments, or feedback. We love feedback. Also, the President's reelection campaign is on. If you'd like to contribute, go to the website. We appreciate small contributions from small donors, just like you! And remember, poetry and the arts serve to enlighten and uplift the people, not obfuscate matters by getting into needless complexities. So here's to clarity!
Let me first be clear: I love touring. I love bookstore events. A great many of my favorite memories transpired in independent bookstores and at festivals from New York to Calgary to California.
What do you do after spending a decade as the world's most powerful wizard, earning over $100 million in the most successful film franchise of all time and developing into one of the most beloved celebrities of your time? It may seem like a tough question, Daniel Radcliffe seems confident that he'll be able to work his magic going into the future.
As Movieline reports, Radcliffe did say that, at this point, he feels more comfortable on stage than on film, which hints at future Broadway endeavors. Not that "How To Succeed" was his first go-round on the Great White Way; he previously starred in "Equus," both in London and New York.
While he continues to act in film -- his new paranormal thriller, "The Woman In Black," was just picked up for distribution -- he's also hoping to get behind the camera.
“Films would be my first love I think, just because I grew up there. I would love to one day definitely get behind the camera and direct. I think that’s maybe where I end up,†he said? "I’d certainly like to do something in that direction.â€
But don't expect him to make the next "Potter."
“It wouldn’t be an epic fantasy, I’d like to make small films, I think," he told the crowd.
As he looks toward a future of success, Radcliffe reflected on the obstacles he faced while growing up in public, and said that if he can make the transition, he doesn't want to hear excuses from child stars who go wayward.
“Here’s the thing: if I can do it â€" in the biggest film franchise of all-time in terms of grosses â€" no one else has any excuses," he warned. "I just want the next generation of child actors to not have to answer all those bloody questions in interviews, ‘So, how long do you expect this to last?’ Essentially, that is what we get asked. A lot. I have had that phrased that way. So I just want the next lot of kids who want to act not to have to deal with those questions.â€
