Category: Other

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."

With a new book (Goodnight Nobody) in stores now and a Cameron Diaz vehicle based on her second novel (In Her Shoes) hitting the multiplexes Friday, Jennifer Weiner* (left) is making the media rounds, from USA Today to Entertainment Tonight. And if all that mileage out of her published material weren't enough, she's just re-upped with Atria for a new three-book deal.

But Weiner probably won't be popping bottles of champagne at all this good fortune--not since she became a celebrity endorser for White Lie, "the first wine for women by women." They supplied the drinks for her New York book signing pre-party, and she's judging a writing contest for them--the grand prize being a meeting in New York with Weiner and her agent. Reactions to the arrangement have been mixed; when the deal was first announced in April, MobyLives.com scribe Dennis Loy Johnson accused Weiner of "shill[ing] for girlie wine," prompting a heated exchange on his letters page.

*Who, to be fully disclosing, has always been very nice to me and my blog, including contributing a guest essay last spring.

It's been Banned Books Week all week, and as always I'm amazed at the books people try to throw out from their local libraries: I know what problems certain groups have with books like Heather Has Two Mommies and The Chocolate War, but My Brother Sam Is Dead? Huh? Anyway, if you take a look at the 100 most challenged books, as complied by the American Library Association, Judy Blume's name comes up a lot. Tonight (6 p.m.), at Manhattan's Donnell Library Center Auditorium (20 E. 53rd St.), she'll be reading from one of her banned books, along with Deborah Hautzig, Robert Lipsyte, Walter Dean Myers, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, Peter Sis, and Rita Williams-Garcia. Each of them has run afoul of various bluenoses over the years, for one reason or another--Sis, for example, seems to have drawn fire simply for writing a children's biography of Charles Darwin. Meanwhile, librarians like Ann Dutton Ewbank continue to fight the good fight.

If you can't make it in person, try to catch the webcast. Either way, it's free.

Today at The Black Table, editor Emily G runs down the many ways silly wittle writers (in the examples below, Mr. Almond & Mr. Klosterman) fuck up their acknowledgments pages:

Rule #1: Don't Thank A Dead Person.

This one is fairly straightforward. Unless you personally knew, say, Spalding Gray (Chuck) or, more improbably, Abraham Lincoln (Steve), it is not appropriate to thank him. I don't care if he inspired every single word on every single page. Thank him in your prayers, in the pages of your diary, in a post on your little-read blog. He does not care about being thanked in your acknowledgments, because he is dead, and to everyone else, it just looks like you are name-dropping a person who you can safely assume will not deny knowing you, and that's just tacky.

Rule #2: Don't Thank A Deity.

Cut and pasted from the Onion:

That's the title -- as well as an effective summary -- of "Iowa mafia" blog Babies are Fireproof's response to Lynn Freed's "Doing Time: My years in the creative-writing gulag," an essay on teaching vs. writing that appears in this month's Harper's. Its "gist," according to Babies, is this: "Ms. Freed hates teaching, doesn't think it's worth her time, makes fun of her students ... and can't wait to get out of the gig altogether." The blog continues: "K and I read it aloud [... and ... ] I nearly puked right there on the kitchen floor." Culture blog Long Sunday posts a similar reaction, made more block-quotable by its lack of vomit(-as-literary-device):

[Freed's essay] is the usual diatribe against creative-writing programs--these [diatribes] are of course entirely justifiable, but it's getting old as a topic--and also participates in a genre I don't like, which is the one where the teacher complains about the stupidity of his or her students. What's remarkable about the essay is that it too languishes in the captivity of the creative-writing gulag [...] It's the product of creative-writing hegemony and sounds like the texts produced by the very students Freed complains about, sixth-generation renderings of Chekhov.

First off: gulag?!? Are you that self-absorbed, are you that oblivious to this and this and this, that you can seriously apply the term "gulag" to your life as a creative-writing instructor? I hate you, Lynn Freed...

My plan was to post the letter I sent to Harper's in response to Lynn Freed's essay on spending, excuse me, "doing time" in the creative writing gulag. But posting that letter is pointless. Writing it was pointless. Lynn Freed's writing is pointless as well. All writing is pointless...

From The Secret Diary of a Prisoner in the Creative Writing Gulag:

September 6, 1983

Beginning of the first week of torture sessions, also known as grading my students' papers. One writes a science fiction fantasy obviously lifted from American television; another a ridiculous romance more suited for a scandalous tabloid, and a third a thinly-veiled tale of his first sexual experiences.

Red liquid runs off the table where I am being tortured. I suppose it was a mistake to actually use red ink in a fountain pen. Note to self: get red pencil.

...

November 14, 1983

The grounds are a sea of orange, less from any autumn foliage -- there seems to be no real autumn in this accursed place -- than from supporters of the University's American football team. Football, as it is practiced here, seems not merely an athletic contest, but a collection of crypto-fascist symbols and roles that recall preparations for war. I thought the United States got itself into enough wars without having to re-enact them, but apparently they do it to keep in fighting psychological trim.

Even my cellmates are caught up in the excitement. One of them -- a callow blonde girl who appeared today in an orange-and-white sweater set, orange trousers, and cowgirl boots -- took it upon herself to explain the rivalry between the University of T____ and their arch-enemies, called "Aggies." Later, a marching band trooped past our window, but I could only hear, not see, them. The window is high up to discourage escape attempts.

...

May 20, 1984

Exams are over. I toss them all, ungraded, in the trash outside the Mathematics Building and go back to my cell to compose grades. Long ago I decided these would be strictly based on attendance. Perfect attendance gets a C.

...

August 8, 1984

If the University of T____ was a concentration camp, and Yaddo a minimum security facility, what do I call the Napa Valley Writers Workshop? A sort of temporary jail. Every morning, a two-hour session with the would-be writers: housewives, delivery truck drivers, high school teachers, pesticide salesmen, insurance agents, all under the false impression that they can write.

What do they know of Talent? (I've taken to capitalizing it when speaking of my own gift, the better to distinguish it from other so-called talents such as juggling or putting on makeup -- the latter being something one girl at the University of T____ claimed was her great gift. Perhaps -- if she were about to go on camera to read the weather.) They know how to cook a roast, or how to amortize a mortgage, but they know nothing of writing, literature, and great art.

I know about all those things. But I can't teach them. It's unthinkable.

According to an in-the-know Iowa MFA-er, new Workshop Director Lan Samantha Chang owes her job to faculty member Marilynne Robinson. Students and alumni overwhelmingly preferred finalist Ben Marcus (pictured left), as did the search committee saddled with the task of finding Frank Conroy's replacement. But Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer and the NBCC prize in fiction for last year's Gilead, threatened to quit if Marcus was selected for the job.

Both Robinson and Marcus attended Brown University, where they received their BA and MFA degrees, respectively. But the ideological distance between them couldn't be greater: Robinson, also a biblical scholar, is adamantly anti-theory; Marcus, on the other hand, is the author of such semiotically-minded books as The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women, of which The Onion A.V. wrote, "[it] plies the stony poetics of postmodern figureheads like Donald Barthelme and William H. Gass."

Taking its cue from heated responses to Paul Ruditis's Rainbow Party, the NY Times asks how common rainbow parties really are. The answer: not very.

"This 'phenomenon' has all the classic hallmarks of a moral panic," said Dr. Deborah Tolman ... "One day we have never heard of rainbow parties and then suddenly they are everywhere, feeding on adults' fears that morally bankrupt sexuality among younger teens is rampant, despite any actual evidence, as well as evidence to the contrary."

... "One of the reasons this is so dubious to me," Dr. Tolman said, "is that girls, particularly early adolescents, are still getting labeled as sluts and suffering painful consequences. The double standard is remarkably intact. So what could be girls' motivations for participating in such parties? And I can't quite imagine, even for a moment, teenage boys comparing their lipstick rings."

If the publishers of author J.K. Rowling's books have a challenge beyond how to spend the Harry Potter windfall, it is in trying to keep the series compelling for original readers who were 10 to 12 years old when Harry was introduced in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone but who are now heading off to college, jobs or even the war in Iraq.

Related Reading:
-Interest Lost in Harry Potter? (CanMag)
-New 'Harry' Book Set to Work Magic (NYDN)
-Things You Can Learn About the Plot of the Next Harry Potter Book Just by Looking at the Cover Art (McSweeney's)

Last month, FishBowlNY introduced news of ex-TPR editor Brigid Hughes' involvement with a new 'mystery' publication. Now, a story off the AP shares the details: Hughes will be heading yet another lit journal, this time named A Public Space. Contributing editors will include Richard Powers and Yiyun Li, recent Iowa grad and (controversial) Plimpton prize-winner. Most of the interesting material, however, gets bunched together in a p'graph near the article's end. (This is a p'grah, by the way, which GC finds very hard to read without visualizing Hughes in the process of reeling out the middle finger.)

Hughes says she is receiving financial support from the publishing, business and film communities and that her magazine will be funded through "private donors [ed. - Moody? That you?] , grants, subscription revenue and advertising." She declines to offer a specific goal for her subscriber base, but aims for a higher number than at The Paris Review. An annual subscription will cost $30, for four issues, while individual copies will likely cost $10-12, compared to $40 a year for a subscription at The Paris Review and $12 for a single issue.