Everything is always for sale

Awesome ebay auction that I randomly stumbled upon:

About a decade ago a local public library

switched from the old library card catalog file system of looking up where to find books in the library, to a computer system of doing so. Instead of throwing out all the old cards the head librarian saved a few and sent them to the author who wrote the book listed on it, asking the author to autograph the card and send it back to the library so they could sell the cards as a fundraiser.

Most authors didn't respond.

Kurt Vonnegut did.

I'm not certain that Vonnegut would approve of the price tag, but it's a cool item nonetheless.

The Wientzen Code

I Write Like analyzes your prose and tells you which author you write most like. I plugged in the entirety of an article that I'm writing on Rebecca West and physiology, and this is what I got:

I write like
Dan Brown

I wouldn't take it personally, but I somehow don't think that academic journals are quite looking for Dan Brown-like work. But maybe I'm wrong.

the big bite

Introducing, L. melvillei, a newly described sperm whale named to honor Herman Melville. Even more bellicose than Moby Dick, L. melvillei was a hyper-carnivorous eater of other whales:

Klaas Post, honorary curator of fossil mammals at the Natural History Museum Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and his colleagues were traveling through a stretch of desert about 50 kilometers southwest of Ica, Peru, in 2008 when they spotted what at first looked like elephant tusks. But they turned out to be teeth from an even less-likely animal: a giant sperm whale.

Perhaps the discovery shouldn’t be a complete surprise. Fossils of the great shark, Carcharocles megalodon, have been found in the same region. Both animals would have lived about 12 million to 13 million years ago during the Miocene. And like megalodon (at 20 meters long, thought to be one of the biggest fish to have ever roamed the sea), L. melvillei is breaking a few records of its own. With jaws more than 5 meters wide, it had the biggest bite of any mammal to have ever lived.

But L. melvillei was quite different from modern sperm whales (hence scientists gave it a new genus name). Today, sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) have fairly small lower teeth and almost no teeth on the upper jaw. They primarily eat squid, which they pull in via suction. But L. melvillei had teeth as large as 12 centimeters wide and 36 centimeters long on both its upper and lower jaw, which would have afforded it a much different tactic for hunting: According to the paper published today in Nature, the researchers suspect that the aggressive whale grabbed prey with its teeth, living off of smaller baleen whales (whales with comb-like dental plates instead of teeth, such as the humpback).

Could've been famous

In 1945, Walt Disney signed Aldous Huxley to write a screenplay for "Alice and the Mysterious Mr. Carroll": a combination live-action and animated incorporation of "Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland" with the biography of Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson). Dodgson, a beleaguered Oxford lecturer known as the Dodo, has already written "Alice in Wonderland" under the name Lewis Carroll. He and Alice take refuge in Wonderland from Alice’s cruel governess and Dodgson’s Tory vice-chancellor. These villains, who disapprove of "nonsense books," must never learn that Dodgson and Carroll are the same person, lest Dodgson be barred from a coveted university librarianship. A series of fantastic adventures culminates with the resolution of the Carroll-Dodgson identity through a deus-ex-machina appearance by Queen Victoria. "It was so literary I could understand only every third word," Disney said of Huxley’s script, which he didn’t end up using for his adaptation of "Alice in Wonderland" (1951).

Seven never-produced screenplays by famous intellectuals.

Video Games: A Personal Hell

As someone who played endless hours of video games a kid, I have grown up to be someone who wishes I hadn't. No offense to people who like games, but it's just not my idea of fun anymore, especially in social settings (damn the Wii).

But I did get a little excited during when, during the Super Bowl, I saw an ad for a video game based on Dante's Inferno. Not that I really want to play it, or that I expect it satisfy my literary expectations. But, from my nerdy PhD standpoint, it seems cool nonetheless.

So I was a little disappointed by the NYT review of it:

It should be clear by now that the story in the game has almost nothing to do with the story of the poem. There is no reason this game could not be set in any of the hundreds or thousands of generic hells that have hosted video games over the years. What Electronic Arts has done, quite transparently, is appropriate Dante’s brand to use as a light marketing skin on top of the God of War clone the company so clearly wanted to make.

And so images of Virgil spout lines from the poem at you once in a while, and Dante’s ranged weapon appears as crosses of light, but there is no heavy religious imagery and never any real sense of horror or torment. There are, however, a lot of bare female breasts. There is even a giant Cleopatra demon who spurts knife-wielding unbaptized children out of her nipples.

I can't tell whether to be disappointed that the game takes little more than its name from Dante, or to be excited that it features Cleopatra shooting "knife-wielding unbaptized children out of her nipples."

What a dick

The novelist V S Naipaul has damned the achievements of his literary contemporaries by declaring that there are "no more great writers".

Naipaul, 75, who won the Booker in 1971 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, is said to have called this year's Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival "unimportant and meaningless".

He made his outspoken comments while at a launch of a new magazine at the Wallace Collection, in London. "Publishing has gone down in quality so much in recent years and the problem is that there is no literary life any more because there are quite simply no more great writers," he said.

He added that he had also noticed the people who go to Hay were "incredibly ugly". A spokeswoman from the festival said that Naipaul had not made an appearance at Hay in any official capacity.

From The Independent, Via Harpers

Archival Joyce

BoingBoing links today to the Atlantic Monthly, who has entered the 21st century by making its digital archive available for free.

Here's Harry Levin's 1946 review of Joyce's collected works:

"Joyce renews our apprehension of reality, strengthens our sympathy with our fellow creatures, and leaves us in awe before the mystery of created things."

I had initially thought that I would be able to find HG Well's famous review of Portrait in the archives, but it turns out that that was in the New Republic, not The Atlantic Monthly. That review is now also available on line here. The Wells review is a much more interesting document because it captures the tides of modernism in the moment rather than upon its demise. Wells' comment that "Mr. Joyce has a cloacal obsession," is no doubt one of the pithiest lines in the critical literature on Joyce (as well as somehow prescient of the new academic interest in "excremental postcolonialism" [I swear I didn't make up that tag]). But the most famous part of this review is Wells' characterization of the Irish hatred of the British:

And a second thing of immense significance is the fact that everyone in this Dublin story, every human being, accepts as a matter of course, as a thing in nature like the sky and the sea, that the English are to be hated. There is no discrimination in that hatred, there is no gleam of recognition that a considerable number of Englishmen have displayed a very earnest disposition to put matters right with Ireland, there is an absolute absence of any idea of a discussed settlement, any notion of helping the slow-witted Englishman in his three-cornered puzzle between North and South. It is just hate, a cant cultivated to the pitch of monomania, an ungenerous violent direction of the mind. That is the political atmosphere in which Stephen Dedalus grows up, and in which his essentially responsive mind orients itself. I am afraid it is only too true an account of the atmosphere in which a number of brilliant young Irishmen have grown up. What is the good of pretending that the extreme Irish "patriot" is an equivalent and parallel of the English or American liberal? He is narrower and intenser than any English Tory. He will be the natural ally of the Tory in delaying British social and economic reconstruction after the war. He will play into the hands of the Tories by threatening an outbreak and providing the excuse for a militarist reaction in England. It is time the American observer faced the truth of that. No reason in that why England should not do justice to Ireland, but excellent reason for bearing in mind that these bright-green young people across the Channel are something quite different form the liberal English in training and tradition, and absolutely set against helping them. No single book has ever shown how different they are, as completely as this most memorable novel.

It's Booker Time

The Booker Prize folks have released their short list for this year's prize. And the list looks a lot like it did in the last few years--filled with authors with small reputations and tiny distributions, and one Goliath to lend the crew legitimacy. This reminds me, in fact, of the list two years ago, when John Banville's excellent novel The Sea took the prize, even though only about 3,300 copies of it had been sold.

Here's this year's list:

• Darkmans by Nicola Barker
  
• The Gathering by Anne Enright
  
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
  
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
  
• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
• Animal’s People by Indra Sinha
  

Some people have been angry about the prize's turn away from Big Names, but I welcome it. I can't say I all that happy about seeing Ian McEwan on the list again. It sometimes seems like the giants of English publishing get on the list just because of who they are, as when Rushdie's book Shalimar the Clown made its way onto the long list in 2005. In any event, I look forward to reading one or two of these books in the next year.

Nobody reads old books anymore

For some reason, I didn't get hip to the NYTimes books blog, Paper Cuts, until recently. So you'll pardon me for posting a link with no commentary.

Back in 1943, American soldiers were given copies of a plainspoken book called “Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq During World War II.” Now the University of Chicago press has released a fascimile edition, and it’s both a beautiful object and a fascinating document, one whose lessons seem more valuable than ever.

I'd really like to see a copy of this, or at least take a look at the illustrations.

The Rushdie Affair -- Are We Still Having This Conversation?

Sadly, yes, the conversation goes on. It has been a 18 years since Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on all Muslims to execute those involved in the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. It's been another 9 years since the Iranian government publicly declared that it would not carry out the death sentence against Rushdie. And then, ten days ago, England awarded Rushdie knighthood, and tempers flared again, when Pakistan remonstrated against the act and the Islamabad Traders' Association offered a reward of 10 million Pakistani rupees for Rushdie's beheading.

Now, I've never really understood what all the fuss was about. I chalk this up to two factors: 1) I am not Muslim, 2) I had no context for understanding the fuss when I read the book five years ago. But recently I started to think about the standard Western response to Pakistani anger -- the argument that holds that the book should exist on the grounds of free speech alone. And I am starting to wonder how true that is. Should it exist? I ask this question as a big Rushdie fan and someone who still doesn't quite understand how and why it has garnered the vitriol it has.

I think the only way to make this question meaningful for Westerners is to try to move it into a different domain, one where it might have a more comparable resonance. It does not, in my opinion, have any traction as a parallel to question whether an anti-Judeo Christian novel would provoke such anger. Obviously, it wouldn't, since insults to traditionally Western faiths are not dealt with in the same way as they are in Islam. Perhaps a better parallel, one which would provoke comparable anger in the United States, would be a novel about race. Would a powerfully written, best selling neo-nazi novel--one that wins the highest awards and whose author is publicly congratulated at the highest levels--be a more apt comparison? Is The Satanic Verses hate speech? Is it the rough equivalent of, say, The Turner Diaries?

Readers over at Al Jazeera English are talking about whether England should revoke Rushdie's knighthood. I offer this link not because I think England should necessarily take back the honor, but because the variety of responses offered by readers serves as a powerful insight into what that book actually means, and why, 18 years after the famous fatwa was issued, we're still talking about Rushdie.

books + television

Literary TV Programs Yet to Be Produced, from McSweeny's

My favorites:

Everybody Loves Raymond Carver

Welcome Back, Kafka