Category: Notebook

It's that time of year again, when surveys are collected to determine which city has the greatest number of readers per capita. And just like last year, the top-ranked city is Seattle, according to an annual ranking called America's Most Literate Cities. The rankings, now in their fourth year, aim to rate the 70 largest U.S. cities not on whether their residents can read, but whether they do and how they do so, whether by reading periodicals, going to libraries, frequenting bookstores and using the Internet. And in what ought to become the most existential quote of the month, John Miller, the president of Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, who developed the ranking system, said "the top stayed at the top and the bottom stayed at the bottom."

Merle Rubin, a book critic who was a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times as well as the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times and Christian Science Monitor, died of cancer at Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center in Hollywood on November 30. She was 57. The LA Times obituary notes that Rubin had been a full-time freelance reviewer - a tough gig that's notorious for low pay. "It is a way of making a literary life," Times Book Editor David Ulin said of Rubin's career. "The intellectual benefits are there." Nick Owchar, Times deputy book editor added that Rubin "thought of the reader" and "she wanted to be sure they had an experience of the book by reading her review, whether they read the book or not."

She is survived by her husband, Martin and her mother and sister. A memorial celebration is planned after the New Year.

Yu Zhang, the Director of Chinese Independent PEN Centre's Writers in Prison Committee, has formally complained Yahoo for its alleged part in the conviction of Chinese journalist and poet Shi Tao, the Guardian reports.

The complaint "alleges that Yahoo Hong Kong provided information about the email account used to send the memo without Shi's consent. This information was crucial to the Chinese government's case against Shi."

Hong Kong legislator Albert Ho told the Associated Press that it was "very clear from the judgment that Yahoo Hong Kong provided the details", while Yu adds that "the key to establishing Yahoo's involvement is found in article four, which refers to 'account holder information furnished by Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd', and gives details of the telephone number and address associated with the account holder."

Though Yahoo's counter-argument is that they were complying with local law, Yu disputes this. "They're a Hong Kong company. Why do they have to comply with Chinese requests?"

If you've spent more than a day reading science fiction, you've come across a reference to the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop at some point, because chances are at least one of your favorite writers has taught or studied there at some point. For years, the program was run by Michigan State University, but now some of the genre's biggest stars have come together to form the board of directors for The Clarion Foundation, a charitable organization that will help keep the workshop up and running. Among their fundraising techniques: an eBay auction to be held in March. So far, the only offering I've heard about is short story writing genius Howard Waldrop creating an outgoing message for your answering machine using his Peter Lorre imitation, but with people like Kate Wilhelm, Karen Joy Fowler, Walter Jon Williams, Kelly Link, and Cory Doctorow on board, they're bound to get a ton of other great donations in the next month.

According to Tom Kealey's recently published The Creative Writing MFA Handbook, the Iowa Writers Workshop might be coasting on its reputation. In an excerpt from the book posted online, Kealey acknowledges the program's public reputation, especially due to its accomplished alumni and faculty, but still suggests "Iowa is no longer the best program in the country, and because of the competitive atmosphere it should not be considered a top ten program either."

Well, that got one current Iowa student's blood boiling, prompting a defensive letter to Maud Newton, which declares that "there's not a 'competitive' feeling among the students because we know there's nothing we can really do but submit our best work and hope the professors respond."

• Lawrence Van Gelder (NYT) catches up to that story about the old novels spurned by today's publishing industry, allowing the spurned writers to express the snottiest aspects of their nature in responding to their rejection by just about every publisher and literary agency worth knowing in England. "People don't seem to know what a good novel is nowadays," sneered Thomas Middleton, while Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul blames the modern publishing industry for hiring people with stupid, stupid minds: "To see something is well written and appetizingly written takes a lot of talent, and there is not a great deal of that around. With all the other forms of entertainment today, there are very few people around who would understand what a good paragraph is." I dunno; I'm still willing to consider the fact that it could be the books that fell short here, not the readers: Would anybody be surprised if this same experiment were conducted in 2035 with Vernon God Little and the exact same outcome resulted?

• Meanwhile, Indian author Chetan Bhagat seems to carving out a successful career for himself reinventing Microserfs. Bhagat's latest bestseller, One Night at the Call Centre, follows six characters during "one eventful night at a call centre handling customer queries for a US-based computer and appliances company," with the existential self-loathing matched only by the ethnic self-loathing inspired by addressing themselves to stupid Americans with their stupid technical problems. The story's clearly resonating with somebody, as it's sold 100,000 in only a month, well outpacing just about any competitor in the Indian publishing scene.

For those of you who never thought you'd see John Lithgow share the stage with Ned Rorem, well, okay, technically, you're right: their appearances at Symphony Space in tomorrow's 12-hour "The Book That Changed My Life" event are several hours apart. But it still sounds like a pretty nifty way to celebrate National Read-Aloud Day, the National Book Foundation's bid to "help people rediscover the joy of reading aloud and sharing a great book with people you love."

As soon as the sun sets off the Pacific coast this evening, bringing Yom Kippur to a close, Ruth Andrew Ellenson (left) will pick up her reading tour for The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt right where it left off, appearing at the Berkeley Hillel with Ayelet Waldman. Ellenson has been racking up the frequent flyer miles to support this anthology of slices of modern Jewish life from twenty-eight women writers, bouncing back and forth between New York, San Francisco, and her Los Angeles home. Just last week, she rounded up eleven of her contributors for three Manhattan readings in four nights, and I caught up with her at the final event Saturday night in the second-floor performance space at Mo Pitkin's, co-sponsored by Heeb magazine.

Kera Bolonik, whose essay "You Sit in the Dark, I'm Coming Out of the Closet" was excerpted in the Heeb "sex issue" scattered around the room, was a last-minute no-show, jammed up against a deadline, so Laurie Gwen Shapiro stepped up with a story about fighting with her husband over whether she'd allow a Christmas tree in their living room. It set the tone for the evening: funny without pushing too hard, and recognizing the centrality of her Jewish identity without feeling the need for defensiveness or excessive explanation. Cynthia Kaplan spoke movingly of caring for a grandmother with Alzheimer's, while documentary filmmaker Pearl Gluck's began "Shtreimel Envy" by describing her coveting of "those voluptuous fur hats that Hasidic men earn just for getting married, then recounted her first adolescent discoveries of the world outside her Hasidic Brooklyn community, and the rift it created within her family ("Brandeis may as well have been Christ College to my dad"). Finally, Molly Jong-Fast gave a quick tour of her extensive forays into psychotherapy—at just 26, she's seen enough shrinks to field a baseball team and still have a relief pitcher ready in the bullpen, almost all of whom were convinced that being born to the woman who wrote Fear of Flying made her sexually repressed. At the halfway mark, and again at the show's close, Basya Schechter of Pharaoh's Daughter played acoustic versions of her songs, closing the set with, she joked to the audience, "a song in Hebrew about how there's no hope in the world." (At least, I'm pretty sure she was joking...)

If you missed these shows, don't worry: Ellenson will be returning to New York for a large-scale reading (eight guests!) on November 10th at Makor.

Here are some news stories that impressed me over the weekend:

• On his blog, author Paul Collins highlights a Boston Globe feature on Stephen Puleo and his book about the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, Dark Tide. It's an awesome story—how can you not love the tale of a "15-foot-high wave of molasses that spilled from a North End storage tank, leaving death and devastation in its suffocating wake"—but, as Collins points out, it's even more remarkable that the Globe gave it some space. "Books coverage typically has the shelf life of a bottle of milk," Collins observes. "It's rare for a paper to cover a book that has been out for much more than a month—two, at most, if the author's big. Puelo's book has been out for over two years now..."

• Sunday's Washington Post profile of James Yee, the Army chaplain falsely accused of espionage and terrorism during his service at Guantanamo Bay, opens with a forceful account of the day the charges against him drove his wife to the brink of suicide. After two years of silence, Yee finally tells his story in the freshly published For God and Country. He's in the midst of a press tour, presumably hampered somewhat by his inclusion on the government's "no-fly" list.

• We heard about it last Friday, now here it is: Stephen Beachy's proposition that JT Leroy doesn't exist. Well, somebody's been recommending good books to me via email for the last year...UPDATE: As Dana has observed, Leroy (or should that be "Leroy"?) has displayed a slippery connection to reality in the past.)
  

It's not often I get to crib book news from Wonkette, but that's because her item on the possible motivations behind Jeb Bush's selection of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for a Florida literacy program was filed under politics when Palm Beach Post staffer S.V. Dáte broke the story. Here's the gist of the situation: The program includes a contest that will give winners a trip to Orlando where they'll stay at a Disney hotel and get to see an advance screening of the new film version of C.S. Lewis's classic novel. That film's co-produced by Disney and Walden Media, which is owned by Philip Anschutz, a billionaire who's helped raise a bunch of money for Republicans. Walden's already a longtime collaborator with the "Just Read, Florida!" program, having contributed cash and prizes in previous book promotions, so there's some talk about the potential backscratching involved.

It seems like the bigger fight, though, may turn out to be over whether it's appropriate for a state program to promote a novel that is, as the director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State claims, "simply a retelling of the story of Christ." Frankly, that strikes me as more than a little reductive.* But let's leave aside the question of whether The Chronicles of Narnia are proselytizing works, and for that matter the problems many evangelicals have with Lewis--if state programs can't suggest books with Christian themes, does that mean that public institutions can't get kids excited about Charles Dickens? Oh, wait, apparently it does.

*Yep, it's that "simply" that bugs me. As Lewis himself once said, "I did not say to myself 'Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia'; I said 'Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as he became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen'."