Category Archives: Books

May 7, 2011 · 11:46 am

‘I Wanted A New Life,’ Says Actor, Author Rob Lowe : NPR

Okay…

I’ve fought against it.

I’ve resisted buying or reading this….

But…

I just went to Amazon and bought it…

When even NPR is taking it seriously, I now have acceptable cover…

From NPR:

Well before Rob Lowe made it to Hollywood, he’d gone out of his way to meet Liza Minelli: As a kid in Dayton, Ohio, he’d knocked on her hotel room door, and stayed to share a chat and some chocolates. As he left, Minelli told him, “See you in Hollywood, kid.”

And a few years later, he did make it to Hollywood — as one of its breakout stars.

But for all his success, Lowe is also a child of divorce, a veteran of alcoholism and an actor who has experienced many personal and public highs and lows. He’s chronicled his rocky ascension to stardom in a new memoir, Stories I Only Tell My Friends.

via ‘I Wanted A New Life,’ Says Actor, Author Rob Lowe : NPR.

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May 2, 2011 · 7:59 pm

“Dorian Gray” to Appear as Wilde Actually Wrote It

Fascinating article from Salon.com about Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and the restored edition about to come out…

Altogether, the revised 1891 manuscript that eventually appeared in book form encompassed a whole series of changes and omissions designed to alter and conventionalize the “moral,” such as it is, by heightening the beautiful Dorian’s monstrosity and thus rendering him a far less sympathetic character than he had appeared to be in the original typescript. Looking at the typescript, then, we find more comprehensible Wilde’s oft-quoted statement on the book’s autobiographical elements: “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be — in other ages, perhaps.”

Frankel has done much to place Wilde and his novel within the context of their time — “a heated atmosphere of hysteria and paranoia” about sexual “deviation.” The 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act was extended by Henry Labouchère, a radical member of Parliament, to include the criminalization of acts of “gross indecency” between men. (The Labouchère amendment was not repealed until 1956.) The vagueness of the amendment’s language — just what acts did “gross indecency” encompass, anyway? — caused fear amounting to paranoia among the homosexual community; as Frankel writes, “The conditions had been created for a series of homosexual scandals that would rock London and increase the level of homophobia in British society.”

The so-called Cleveland Street Affair, which broke only months before “Dorian Gray’s” first appearance, was the most spectacular of these, involving the infiltration and arrest of a ring of “rent boys” who worked by day as telegraph messengers and by night as prostitutes out of a brothel in Cleveland Street. A number of aristocrats and prominent military men were implicated; Lord Arthur Somerset, the Prince of Wales’ equerry, fled the country; a shadow was even cast on the name of the prince’s elder son, though that suspicion was subsequently proved groundless. “In the wake of the Cleveland Street Scandal,” Frankel explains, “Wilde’s emphasis on Dorian Gray’s youthfulness, or susceptibility to the ‘corruption’ of an older aristocratic man (Lord Henry), is one of the features of the novel that most outraged reviewers.”

via “Dorian Gray” as Wilde actually wrote it – Fiction – Salon.com.

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April 26, 2011 · 10:12 pm

Levi Johnston’s New Book: Deer in the Headlights: My Life in Sarah Palin’s Crosshairs

You know this had to have been ghost-written….

There’s no way he can read and write….

But it’s still going to piss off Sarah Palin big-time…

Not to mention Bristol Palin, his ex….

And what is it with 20 year-olds writing memoirs?????

They haven’t done enough to even justify an essay, much less a book….

This guy has really stretched his 15 minutes of fame…

From VanityFair.com:

One by one, every single citizen of Alaska is publishing a memoir. (Is this some lingering consequence of the Alaska Purchase? Let’s call the phenomenon “Sarah’s Folly.”) Next up is Levi Johnston, high-school athlete, former Bristol Palin paramour, and Vanity Fair essayist. “I want to tell the truth about my close relationship with the Palins,” he said in a statement. “I’m doing this for me, for my boy Tripp and for the country.”

Johnston’s forthcoming book will be called, alarmingly, Deer in the Headlights: My Life in Sarah Palin’s Crosshairs. That Johnston himself is an avid hunter is an irony we can only imagine did not come across the author’s crosshairs.

via Guess the Sentences in Levi Johnston’s New Book, Deer in the Headlights: My Life in Sarah Palin’s Crosshairs | VF Daily | Vanity Fair.

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April 24, 2011 · 11:13 am

Does anyone want to be “well-read?” – Roger Ebert’s Journal

Another great article on Reading and Readers from Roger Ebert…

It’s especially sad that, given digital books and the physical accessibility of “books” in so many formats today, that more people aren’t reading these authors.

I read a lot and I’m going to make a commitment to myself to read some of these “old friends” so at least I can say I read them.  And quote them….

“Consider: who at this hour (apart from some professorial specialist currying his “field”) is reading Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, John Berryman, Allan Bloom, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Anne Sexton, Alice Adams, Robert Lowell, Grace Paley, Owen Barfield, Stanley Elkin, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Leslie Fiedler, R.P. Blackmur, Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag, Lillian Hellman, John Crowe Ransom, Stephen Spender, Daniel Fuchs, Hugh Kenner, Seymour Krim, J.F. Powers, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Rahv, Jack Richardson, John Auerbach, Harvey Swados–or Trilling himself?”

I read through this list with dismay. I have read all but two of those writers, love some, and met five. Yet I know with a sinking feeling that Ozick asks the correct question. Who at this hour is reading them? Paul Goodman, whose books so deeply influenced and formed me? Edmund Wilson, a role model? James Farrell, whose naturalistic Studs Lonigan evoked a decade of Chicago life? Mailer, who boasted he had beaten all of his contemporaries?

How many of them have you read? Some, I suspect, but they belong to your past. Most of you will have read Ginsberg’s “Howl,” but how much more of his poetry? I have his collected poems on my shelf, but don’t care to take them down. Whitman’s poems, on the other hand, are at the side of my chair and I read one every morning. I have every one of Edmund Wilson’s books, in the sublimely uniform Farrar Strauss & Giroux editions. Who cites him? Susan Sontag? Remembered for defining Camp.

via Does anyone want to be “well-read?” – Roger Ebert’s Journal.

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April 24, 2011 · 11:06 am

The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything -NPR

Great article for we bibliophiles and other Culture Vultures from NPR:

The vast majority of the world’s books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It’s just numbers.

Consider books alone. Let’s say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That’s quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let’s say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you’re 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you’re 80. That’s 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot.

Let’s do you another favor: Let’s further assume you limit yourself to books from the last, say, 250 years. Nothing before 1761. This cuts out giant, enormous swaths of literature, of course, but we’ll assume you’re willing to write off thousands of years of writing in an effort to be reasonably well-read.

Of course, by the time you’re 80, there will be 65 more years of new books, so by then, you’re dealing with 315 years of books, which allows you to read about 20 books from each year. You’ll have to break down your 20 books each year between fiction and nonfiction – you have to cover history, philosophy, essays, diaries, science, religion, science fiction, westerns, political theory … I hope you weren’t planning to go out very much.

via The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything : Monkey See : NPR.

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April 20, 2011 · 11:06 pm

“The Help”: First Movie Trailer is here….

And it looks like it’s going to be good…

I’m so glad because I loved this book….

Here it is:

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April 6, 2011 · 8:05 pm

“From Here to Eternity” Censored Gay Passages Restored for New Edition

Fascinating- at least to me- story of how the publishers suppressed the gay elements of “From Here to Eternity” back in the 1950’s and the new restored version coming out soon…

From the Guardian in the UK:

The novel prompted one of the most famous heterosexual sex scenes in film history, with Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr clasping each other passionately on a beach amid the foaming waves. But an uncensored text of James Jones’s 1951 novel From Here to Eternity has revealed that the author originally intended to include frank references to homosexuality considered too scandalous to be published at the time.

The novel, Jones’s debut, tells of a group of soldiers stationed on a barracks in Hawaii in 1941, and was loosely based on the author’s own army experiences on the island in the run-up to the second world war. Jones served as a soldier from 1939 to 1945 and was present at both the attack on Pearl Harbor and the battle for Guadalcanal, at which he was injured, and also decorated for his service. In later books, The Thin Red Line and Soon Came Running, Jones went on to explore the experience of combat and the aftermath of war.

From Here to Eternity is the story of first sergeant Milt Warden, who has an affair with Karen, the wife of his captain. But the original text of the novel included two scenes which never made it to the published edition, let alone the film. In one, private Angelo Maggio – the soldier played by Frank Sinatra in the 1953 film – confesses to having oral sex with a wealthy man for $5 or $10 that “comes in handy the middle of the month”. In the second scene a military investigation into gay activity is mooted.

Jones’s editor at Scribner refused to allow the scenes to be included, and also excised various swear words originally intended to be included in the dialogue. In America at the time the US postal service would not carry material it considered obscene, making it impossible for books the organisation thought offensive to be distributed. Disapproval from the influential Book-of-the-Month Club, a mail order club, also meant the end of a novel’s chances of commercial success. Many authors, including Ernest Hemingway, were therefore forced to tone down their novels’ language and content, on pragmatic rather than moral grounds.

Jones’s daughter, novelist Kaylie Jones, said her father fought “bitterly” to keep the novel’s language the way he’d originally intended it, but eventually acceded to his editor’s insistence. Now, 60 years after it was first published, and more than 30 since Jones’s death in 1977, the original version will be produced as an ebook through digital publisher Open Road.

via Censored gay sex in From Here to Eternity restored for new edition | Books | guardian.co.uk.

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March 28, 2011 · 4:52 pm

Words of Wisdom

I keep finding so many amazing comments from E.M. Forster as I continue to read the fascinating new Wendy Moffat biography and cross read his writings.

His world view and concerns from the early 20th Century are often still scarily relevant to the challenges and issues of the 21st Century.

From E.M. Forster in 1938…

I do not believe in Belief.  But this is an age of faith, and there are so many militant creeds that, in self-defence, one has to formulate a creed of one’s own.

Tolerance, good temper and sympathy are no longer enough in a world which is rent by religious and racial persecution, in a world where ignorance rules, and science, who ought to have ruled, plays the subservient pimp.

And this one, that I published in a blog a week or so ago, bears repeating:

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and bies:  school was the unhappiest time of my life, and the worst trick it played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature.  For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.  From this platform of middle age, this throne of experience, this altar of wisdom, this scaffold of character, this beacon of hope, this threshold of decay, my last words to you are:  “there’s a better time coming.”

In other words:  It gets better.

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March 24, 2011 · 7:59 am

Fran Lebowitz: Public Speaking

Fran Lebowitz is one of my literary and cultural idols.  I’ve loved her since I discovered Metropolitan Life in College.

If you missed this great documentary about her by Martin Scorsese when it ran on HBO, it’s coming out on DVD in May.

I’ve already pre-ordered my copy for my archives…

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March 18, 2011 · 7:54 pm

E.M. Forster: It Gets Better

I’m currently reading the wonderful new biography, A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster by Wendy Moffat.

As you may recall, Forster was the author of the novels Howard’s End, A Passage to India, A Room with a View and, of course the posthumously published Maurice.

The book and his experiences at school as a young man in England at the turn of the 20th Century reminds me how timeless the fears of young people are and how prevalent “bullying” has always been for Gay people or people who are just a little different.

In light of the “It Gets Better” campaign to reassure young gays, lesbians and other victims of bullying, this passage, quoted from Forster’s diaries by Moffat, stood out:

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and bies:  school was the unhappiest time of my life, and the worst trick it played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature.  For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.  From this platform of middle age, this throne of experience, this altar of wisdom, this scaffold of character, this beacon of hope, this threshold of decay, my last words to you are:  “there’s a better time coming.”

In other words:  It gets better.

Amen….

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