An Exciting Opportunity to Sit One Thin Cube Wall Away From Me!

Marketing managers with experience in finance preferred required.

Here's the Skinny

Today for ComicMix, I reviewed Carol Lay's new diet book/graphic novel The Big Skinny.

One Way to Do an Interview

Pat's Fantasy Hotlist interviews Glen Cook, and they fail to communicate nearly the entire way through. The interesting thing to me is how utterly different Pat's and Glen's views of the literary world are.

Pat's questions also at times seem to be exceptionally generic, though he obviously has read some of Cook's work -- which is better than many interviewers.

(I've never done interviews myself in large part because I'm afraid they'd end up like this.)

Quote of the Week

"Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin -- it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring."
- S.J. Perelman

This is the first of a series of quotes on the same subject -- appearing the last Friday of the month -- that will run nearly all year. I got them all from The Big Book of Sex "Quotes", edited by Julian L'Estrange and published by Cassell in the UK in 2004. I'll chuck in the obligatory Amazon thingy below, but I bought it cheaply from Edward R. Hamilton, and -- if you're interested in it -- I suggest you check his stock first.

I read The Big Book of Sex "Quotes" just as a book like this was meant to be read -- in fits and starts, as I had a spare moment, generally lying in bed before going to sleep. I'm not going to "review" it, because it's a book of quotes about sex, and that would be just silly. It's just fine as what it intends to be, and would be a more than adequate diversion in the smallest room or elsewhere.

Quote of the Day

"Because nothing says hope like half-naked people fighting."
- Heidi MacDonald, The Beat, today

Andrew Wheeler Watch: Week 3,754

I am not the Andrew Wheeler urging you to reconsider your 2009 Marketing Budget, even if it sounds like the kind of thing I might say.

If I had any concerns about your marketing budget, I'd tell you directly -- that's the kind of guy I am.

Further updates from the world of Andrew Wheelers will follow as necessary.

What World?

I reviewed the new fancy-schmancy Ghost World: Special Edition -- a collection of the Dan Clowes graphic novel, the screenplay by Clowes and Terry Zwigoff for the movie of the same name, and various other related materials -- today for ComicMix.

My Green Man Music of 2008

For the third and last time, a post full of links related to my "best of the year" selection for Green Man Review. This one will be slightly more useful, since I'm using the MAGIC OF WIDGETS! to embed snippets of the songs I chose. That way, you can tell if I have good or bad taste immediately.

This list is in three parts; first comes my favorite albums of 2008, with links:

• The Airborne Toxic Event, The Airborne Toxic Event
  
• Camphor, Drawn to Dust
  
• The Charlatans, You Cross My Path
  
• KaiserCartel, March Forth
  
• Jenny Lewis, Acid Tongue
  
• Aimee Mann, @#%&*! Smilers
  
• Shannon McArdle, Summer of the Whore
  
• Mono in VCF, Mono In VCF
  
• Mr. Gnome, Deliver This Creature
  
• New Frontiers, Mending
  
• Rupa & the April Fishes, Extraordinary Rendition
  
• Anna Ternheim, Halfway to Fivepoints
  

Next is the first of my two widgets for today, with the songs I called "Quiet":


(Missing from the widget are: “Ghosts” by Caroline Keating, “Song for the Winter Sun” by Loom, and “C’mon Baby Say Bang Bang” by Jane Vain & the Dark Matter.)

And last is widget #2, with the songs I called "Rocking":

(Again, several songs aren't available for the widget -- "Brigitte Bardot” by Creature, “Fairy Tales” by Hypernova, and “Growing Old” by Terrordactyls.)

Movie Log: Brideshead Revisted

I've never seen the miniseries version of Brideshead Revisited, but I've recently seen the very Emma Thompson-heavy movie version from last year. And it's a perfectly respectable classy movie of a certain sort -- a period movie, set in England, about how it's beastly awful that all of those repressed people (often religious, as well) are so repressed.

(The Wife is quite fond of any period movie with plummy accents, so I see more than my fair share of the type.)

I haven't read the book in a decade, but I do remember it being somewhat more nuanced than the movie is -- although Charles Ryder's lust for the house comes across pretty clearly. (And, speaking of things coming across clearly, a minor character spells out the point of the movie about five minutes before the end, nudging all of us in the ribs who haven't managed to fall asleep.)

The story is familiar to readers of Evelyn Waugh's novel and those who remember the miniseries: Ryder (Matthew Goode) is a poor-but-honest student in the '20s at Oxbridge -- I think the movie specifies which, but I didn't bother remembering -- where he falls in with the rich, dissolute, and flaming Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw). Flyte takes Ryder home to the ancestral pile, Brideshead, and Ryder immediately wants to become part of Flyte's world. (Flyte wants to fuck Ryder -- that and drink heavily -- but little else.)

Everyone moans about how oppressive and unpleasant Catholicism is, particularly the type epitomized by Flyte's mummy, Lady Marchmain (Thompson). Thompson plays the role as rigid and upright, but she's no nastier than a thousand similar upright Victorians in a thousand similar movies -- she'd be an utter wimp as an aunt of Bertie Wooster's. So the hysteria surrounding her -- she's supposedly "destroyed" her estranged husband and her children with her piety -- doesn't make much sense.

And, of course, Brideshead Revisited the movie does its best to reverse the moral of Brideshead Revisited the book, since this kind of period movie is always in favor of freedom and license, which Waugh most definitely was not. It's not a bad movie, all in all, but it's barely a cartoon of Waugh's story. And it's too true to that story to provide the cathartic running-away-to-Italy ending that movies of this sort always want to have.

So Brideshead Revisited is really only for those, like my wife, who really really like this kind of movie, and will see it as many times as they can. The rest of us can take a pass.

My Green Man Movies of 2008

These are the movies I listed for Green Man Review's big "Best of 2008" special issue. Here they have links, in case there's anyone so foolhardy as to buy a movie just because I liked it. But you'll have to go to GMR to know why I liked any of these. (And to read my lame excuse for why my list of the best of 2008 includes several movies from 2007.)

• Dan in Real Life
  
• The Dark Knight
  
• Eagle vs. Shark
  
• Get Smart
  
• Hamlet 2
  
• The Savages
  
• Son of Rambow
  
• Wall-E
  
• You Kill Me

My Green Man Books of 2008

Here are the books I listed for Green Man Review as my favorites of 2008, in the categories of SFF and comics. Nitpicky readers might note that these do not precisely line up with my "Favorites of the Year" post from this blog on the first of the year.

If you call it a contradiction, I'll only start quoting Whitman, and nobody wants that. So let's move on hastily to the list itself...

SFF:

• Iain M. Banks, Matter
  
• Toby Barlow, Sharp Teeth
  
• Terry Pratchett, Nation
  
• Matthew Stover, Caine Black Knife
  
• Charles Stross, Saturn's Children
  
• Michael Swanwick, The Dragons of Babel
  
• Walter Jon Williams, Implied Spaces
  

Comics:

• Lynda Barry, editor, The Best American Comics 2008
  
• Holly Black & Ted Naifeh, The Good Neighbors, Book 1: Kin
  
• Joshua W. Cotter, Skyscrapers Of The Midwest
  
• Rick Geary, Treasury of XXth Century Murder: The Lindbergh Child
  
• Gilbert Hernandez, Speak of the Devil
  
• Scott McCloud, Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991
  
• Cyril Pedrosa, The Three Shadows
  
• Nate Powell, Swallow Me Whole
  
• Dash Shaw, Bottomless Belly Button
  
• Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Good-Bye
  

More Publishing Bad News

Reed Business Information, the publisher of Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and School Library Journal, has restructured their staff, laying off about 7% of employees.

The highest-profile job loss is Sara Nelson, the occasionally-too-perky editor-in-chief of PW.

[via New York Times ArtsBeat]

Update:

The e-mail newsletter Shelf Awareness has further details of the Reed cuts: the Spanish-language magazine Criticas will be folded and its senior editor, Aida Bardales, laid off.

Also let go by PW are executive editor Daisy Maryles, bookselling editor Kevin Howell, children's reviews editor Elizabeth Devereaux and director of business development Rachel Dicker.

The remnants of the group -- PW, Library Journal, and School Library Journal -- will be overseen by SLJ editor-in-chief Brian Kenney, who becomes editorial director.

Best wishes for a speedy and successful job search to all of those let go, especially Bardales, who was a book-club colleague some years back.

Some People Have Painted Marriages, While Others...

Today for ComicMix I reviewed a new collection of cartoons by Liza Donnelly and Michael Maslin entitled Cartoon Marriage. I liked it, too.

Green Men Declare Best of 2008

Green Man Review just posted its annual special issue, devoted to the best of the year just ended. And this year they not only asked me to join in, they even led off with my choices -- I think entirely because I wrote far too much, but I'll take it.

Others who participated -- choosing music, movies, books, chocolate, and other things -- were Lou Anders, Kage Baker, Tobias Buckell, James Hetley, Elizabeth Hand, Josepha Sherman, Peter Beagle, and Tim Pratt. (And many more.)

I'm going to turn my various lists into link-filled posts here -- because linking is one of the core joys of blogging -- but you'll have to go to Green Man to read what I said about everything.

Gaiman's Graveyard Book Wins the Newbery!

And, yes, I do think that deserves an exclamation point.

The John Newbery Medal is awarded annually by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children. It's the Hugo or Booker of children's books, and -- if you grew up in America -- is probably the first book award you ever knew existed.

This years Newbery Medal was awarded to Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book.

And, just for good measure, here is my review of Graveyard Book.

Reviewing the Mail, Week of 1/24: Comics & Manga

This is the second part of my usual Monday morning post; see the first part for the usual potted explanation. This post lists and comments on the comics, manga, graphic novels, illustrated narratives -- or any other terms that mean "words and pictures telling stories together" -- that I saw last week, and that I may review in the fullness of time.

Jeffrey Brown, whose work is growing on me the more I see it -- maybe growing like kudzu, but definitely growing -- has launched a new series called "Sulk" from Top Shelf. In front of me are the first two issues: Sulk Volume 1: Bighead & Friends, which came out in October, and Sulk Volume 2: Deadly Awesome, from December. The first one is some kind of superhero story, with a protagonist called Bighead. And the second one is a long fight scene, between two fighters in a fictional version of one of those "ultimate" martial-arts leagues.

And then I get into the books Yen Press -- the manga-publishing arm of Hachette in the US -- will release in February. These next seven books are all from Yen in February, all in the usual paperback format -- though some read "forwards" and some "backwards," depending on the creators.

Zombie-Loan, Vol. 5 is from the Peach-Pit collective, continuing the story of a small group of resurrectees working as loan enforcers/bounty hunters to pay off their own debts. (My reviews of earlier volumes: two, three, four.)

Black God, Vol. 5 was written by Dall-Young Lim and drawn by Sung-Woo Park, and is yet another one of those stories in which a regular guy is connected magically to a super-powered something-or-other. A cute girl, in this case -- which is also not that uncommon. (My reviews of earlier volumes: two, three, four. Those links may cause deja vu in some clickers.)

And then there's Higurashi, When They Cry: Abducted by Demons Arc, Vol. 2, with a story by Ryukishi07 and art by Karin Suzuragi. This one started out like a harem manga, but there are building horror undertones, particularly as more is revealed about this creepy little town. (And the "abducted by demons" in the subtitle may also be a clue.) I covered the stories that became the first volume of this as they appeared in Yen+ magazine in this review. (And I imagine Higurashi, When They Cry has already spawned a thousand "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" jokes, so take those as read.)

Speaking of Yen+, another series has spun out from there into its own collection: Maximum Ride, Vol. 1, credited to James Patterson and NaRae Lee. Patterson is the author of the "Maximum Ride" series of novels, published by another division of Yen'a parent company, and this series is set in the same world -- though it's not clear (to me, since I haven't read the books) whether this manga adapts any of the novels or if it's a separate story. I also only just learned, from the back cover, that "Maximum Ride" is the full name of the young woman called "Max" in this story. Um, really? Her name is Maximum Ride? Sounds like the jokey name for a biker's "old lady" to me.

And then there's Moon Boy, Vol. 6, by Lee YoungYou. I really don't know what is going on in this story, but there are "foxes" and "rabbits" -- all human, as far as I can tell -- who are fighting. I think.

I also have here Goong: The Royal Palace, Vol. 4, by Park SoHee, a slightly alternate world story in which a young woman has married the heir to the (no longer extant in our world) King of Korea, and then had to learn to live with the spoiled teenage brat. I reviewed the second volume for ComicMix.

As far as I know, Comic, Vol. 5 is the latest volume of a soap opera series by Ha SiHyun, for girls, from Korea, about a wanna be comics creator (or manwha-ga, to be all Korean about it). The back cover of this volume seems to bear that out, talking about the feelings -- mostly wounded -- of a number of people. But, if all that's the case, why does it have Sexy Nazi Boy on the cover? A confused world wants to know.

And that was it for Yen; we'll now turn to other publishing companies once again.

In the Flesh is a collection of ten short comics stories by Israeli cartoonist Koren Shadmi. Some of the stories have previously been published in France, (and, thus, presumably, in French) but Shadmi now lives in New York, so I believe these were all written in English. From a quick look at the pages, these seem to be dark, sometimes surreal stories of love and lust. Villard will publish In the Flesh on February 3rd.

Top Shelf recently published the third collection of James Kochalka's daily "American Elf" diary comics -- available, as always, on the web -- under the obvious title American Elf, Book Three: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka: January 1, 2006 to December 31, 2007. And I'm gonna read it.

And last for this week is Dean Koontz's Dean Koontz's Frankenstein: Prodigal Son, the comics adaptation of the novel of the same name. The novel was credited to Koontz and Kevin J. Anderson -- though, in my experience, if a writer's name is in the title, it generally means he had very little to do with the actual writing of a book -- and the graphic novel was adapted by Chuck Dixon and illustrated by Brett Booth. Once you get to the title page, a "Volume One" floats into view, and a quick flip to the end reveals a "Continues in Prodigal Son Volume Two" burst. And what's it about? Well, the good guys are some cops, and the bad guy is a nasty scientist (I assume) who has created an artificial race of humans. (The lesson of a Frankenstein story is always the same: science is bad.) This part of the story will be published by Ballantine on February 3rd.

An Investigation of Virgin Airlines Food

One customer on a Virgin flight from Mumbai to Heathrow last year was served some unidentifiable objects in lieu of a meal, and wrote a letter to Richard Branson to complain.

Persona Non Data has the very funny result.

Reviewing the Mail, Week of 1/24: SF & Fantasy

It's feast or famine around here -- after two weeks without a whole lot of review-aimed books, my mailbox exploded over the past few days. And so I'm dividing the weekly "Reviewing the Mail" post once again -- this one will cover the science fiction and fantasy, and another one, a little later in the morning, will list the comics and manga.

In case you're wondering: I review books (though I'm pretty far behind on that at the moment). Because of that, publishers send me books to review. And, since I know from my book-marketing day-job that any publicity is valuable and hard to get, I want to at least mention all of these books as they arrive, since I know I won't manage to read and review all of them.

So: this week I saw...

Carrie Vaughan has been very busy lately, and Grand Central is putting out her next two "Kitty" novels as back-to-back paperbacks in February and March: Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand and Kitty Raises Hell. I've liked this urban fantasy series since the beginning, particularly since Vaughn doesn't buy into the pandering "supernatural creatures as aristocrats" mindset that comes up so often in these kinds of fantasy novels. (I was the one who put together a 3-in-1 of the beginning of the series for the SFBC, and I reviewed last year's book, Kitty and the Silver Bullet, as well.) So these get my recommendation even before I read them.

From DAW in mass-market in February is the reprint of S.L. Farrell's A Magic of Twilight, first in the epic fantasy "Nessantico Cycle." The copyright page reveals that Farrell is also Stephen Leigh, which may be of interest to any old-time Leigh fans. From the back-cover copy, I suspect this secondary-world semi-medieval fantasy is ringing changes on Roman history -- the city of Nessantico is "capital of a vast empire and the main seat of the Concenzia Faith," with intrigue swirling around the thrones of both church and state.

Foxfire, third in the "Trickster's Game" trilogy by Barbara Campbell, is also coming in mass-market in February from DAW. It sounds like a meat-and-potatoes epic fantasy: six hundred pages long, with an exiled hero, nasty invaders, and kids with unexpectedly vast magical powers. And if anyone was waiting for the end of this story: here it is.

And another DAW February mass-market is this month's Tekno Books anthology-of-the-month, Crime Spells. This one is edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Loren L. Coleman, and the title tells you precisely what the theme is. (Which is just what a good theme-anthology-title should do.) There are sixteen original stories here, all pretty short, from people I've heard of like Mike Resnick and Jay Lake as well as from people I haven't like Peter Orullian and Ilsa J. Bick. (The latter category could easily be folks from the mystery side, or just newer fantasy short-story folks.)

Monster is the new novel by A. Lee Martinez, who has jumped to Orbit with this low-priced ($19.99) hardcover coming on May 11th. It looks like another of his humorous adventure novels, this one coming down on the fantasy side and set in the modern world. Monster is the main character -- he's a guy who runs a pest control agency for supernatural creatures. He meets supermarket worker Judy over Yeti infestation, and things get hairier (pardon the pun) from there.

Also from Orbit is Kate Griffin's A Madness of Angels: Or The Resurrection of Matthew Swift, coming in hardcover (also at $19.99 -- I smell a marketing strategy, and approve) on April 6th. Griffin, the back cover explains, is the open pseudonym of London-based YA writer Catherine Webb. Swift is a sorcerer who wakes up one day in his London apartment -- which would be completely normal, if he hadn't been murdered two years earlier.

Alexander Irvine -- author of excellent fantasy novels like A Scattering of Jades and The Narrows, which haven't gotten nearly enough attention -- is back with something different: Buyout, a near-future SF novel coming from Del Rey in trade paperback on March 31st. Maintaining jails for criminals has gotten just too expensive, so a new scheme has been enacted into law: criminals in jail for life sentences can be put to death in exchange for a cash buyout paid to their estates. Buyout follows a bureaucrat who organizes buyouts -- and I suspect that he's going to discover that things are not at all the way they're supposed to be. (Because, otherwise, the story of any government bureaucrat -- even one who organizes executions -- wouldn't be terribly exciting.)

Wings of Wrath is the middle book in C.S. Friedman's "Magister Trilogy," and will be published by DAW in hardcover on February 3rd. It's an epic fantasy series that I haven't been reading, about Magisters who rule through magic that drains other people's life-forces.

Lear's Daughters is an updated omnibus edition of Marjorie B. Kellogg's mid-'80s novels The Wave and the Flame and Reign of Fire, written with William B. Rossow. DAW will bring it out in hardcover on February 3rd. I believe a certain mail-order operation published an omnibus of those novels under an identical title some time back -- though that was, of course, well before my time. I've heard good things about these books, which are set on a environmentally collapsing late 21st century Earth and various extra-solar colony worlds. (Remember when nearly every SF novel assumed FTL leading to shirtsleeve colonies within our lifetimes?)

On Mass-Market Paperbacks

I'm dragging this one out of the rec.arts.sf.written vaults for two reasons: one, it's late on a Sunday and I just spent half the afternoon putting together the "Reviewing the Mail" posts for tomorrow. And, two, my grumbling rant about Pat Holt from last week touched on some similar issues, and this is an easy way to extend those remarks.

So, stripping out some specifics that aren't germane here, below are snippets from a number of posts in a rec.arts.sf.written thread that got into publishing details in late July of 2008. I reserve the right to declare that the six-months-younger me was dumb, impetuous, and misinformed, just in case someone better informed than I comes along. Also, italics are my explanations and interpolations now:

1: I enter the fray.
I've said this before: a mass-market book really needs about ten thousand buyers to be successful, but trade paperbacks and hardcovers can be successful at a thousand or two. So books for smaller audiences (and most of SFF is falling into that bucket these days) just aren't going to come out in mass-market.

(The ten thousand figure might have industry folks gagging; it's a very low estimate, and I meant it as a rock-bottom figure.)

Books that sell poorly in their first edition often don't get a second edition; books that sell poorly in general often lead to their author not getting further contracts from that publisher (or, sometimes, from anyone). If you really like an author, you should buy his books, to help ensure that they will continue.

It is no longer 1975. It will never be 1975 again.

2: A trade-paperback hater moaned that they were easier to make a profit on, while his beloved mass-markets languished.
The distribution world has been through some upheavals (which is one of the reasons for the rise of the TPB), but, in general, book sales have become more concentrated in book-specific outlets over the last decade and a half.

Mass-markets are a format designed to sell in places other than bookstores -- they're in supermarkets, drug stores, PXes, and so forth. So that format has been under stress for a while; some people in the industry think it might go away eventually. (Though I don't agree.)

It used to be cheaper to publish an author in mass-market -- I don't think it is anymore, since the numbers for a new writer are almost the same regardless of format -- so that's where you saw new writers.

Nowadays -- outside of a genre like romance, which is still strong in mass-market -- you're as likely to see new writers, and writers who aren't proven huge-sellers, published in hardcover or TPB. And they probably won't hit mass-market unless the sales in the first format are good.

3: An author makes the old argument that publishers used to be willing to make small profits, because they loved books, but now they're all owned by conglomerates.
A lot of agents say things like that, particularly to their clients -- and editors have been known to ply the same line when letting authors down easily -- but I don't believe it myself.

The real answer is that midlist mass-markets used to sell much better than they do now. Lawrence [Watt-Evans, another rasfw regular] can probably give examples; he was active in the '80s when the mass-market was at its peak of distribution. But SF publishers used to be able to routinely sell fifty or a hundred thousand of anything in mass market. There were returns, yes, but the books were cheap to produce and they went out in a vast stream and came back
in a modest trickle.

The explanation you give above makes it sound like mass-markets were always unprofitable, but they weren't -- they were quite profitable. Now, a few mega-sellers are massively profitable, and publishing midlist in mass-market is much trickier.

Corporations started buying up publishers in the '60s and '70s; the era of small family publishing firms ended when Cerf and Klopfer sold out Random House to RCA in 1966. People in the business have been saying things like your last paragraph for more than forty years now; the need to make a profit is not a new development.

4: But why aren't mass-market originals as common?
I think I wrote this in a previous reply, but the sales expectation is quite similar for a first-time author in trade paperback and in mass-market. Plus, mass-markets tend not to get reviewed, so they have less publicity to start out with. And they have a shorter shelf-life, so they get returned faster -- mass-markets are optimized for a high-volume short-term sale, so they only make sense in that situation.

5: Any chance for rack-size "trade" paperbacks?
There have been a number of attempts, over the past decade or so, to have rack-sized trade paperbacks. It never seems to take, which implies (to me, at least) that the two audiences are different and want different things.

6: Someone points out examples of rack-sized tpbs
Once you start getting into very specific cases, it's hard to make sweeping judgments anymore. There are plenty of trade paperbacks -- i.e., books with paper covers that are only returnable as whole copies -- that are rack-sized. I believe most classics lines -- Penguin, Oxford, Cambridge, etc. -- are like that, since they don't get mass distribution. And Wizards of the Coast's rack-sized books are, I believe, also whole-copy return only. (As were White Wolf's books, when they were around.)

So plenty of books are printed about that size, for various reasons -- many travel guides are pocket-sized, for example. (Though those are often taller than rack-sized paperbacks.) Those are all generally books that are distributed through bookstores (or sometimes odder outlets, like religious stores or museum shops) rather than via the mass-market racks.

Mass-market is really a distribution category rather than a book size -- yes, most of the books you think of as "mass-market" are rack-sized paperbacks on cheap paper, but they're not the only things in that channel these days. (Which is another part of the problem; once supermarkets realized that they could sell hardcover books, their interest in dealing with a lot of fiddly ISBNs for the much cheaper mass-markets went way down.)

If you want to have widely available books of fiction published at rack-size, they'll need to be widely popular. Currently, the bar for "widely" is set very high -- only bestsellers and big romances (since they sell very well anyway, and the supermarket audience skews strongly female) reach it. That may change, someday, but I don't see an easy way to get there from here.

7: Why not publish in mass-market first?
That is exceptionally unlikely to happen, since then even the people who prefer the hardcover (and would thus pay more money) would then buy the paperback. Publishing is a low-enough profit game as it is without leaving that kind of money on the table.

Amazonian Authors and Blogs

1) I've already mentioned Amazon's new Author Stores -- they have several hundred up already and intend to have a page for every identifiable author of a US-published book before long -- but did I give you a link that came bundled with a kickback?

I didn't think so.

By clicking here, and then going and buying something by somebody, you would be diverting my way approximately one and a half cents, for which I would be eternally, and possibly even obsequiously, grateful.

2) Amazon also has a new widget, which sucks in content from any or all of their various blogs. I enjoy playing with widgets -- get your mind out of the gutter! -- so let me try to embed this one here, which should have recent posts from their books blog, Omnivoracious. I'm not making it part of the overall template of Antick Musings because I don't want to be that Amazon-centric. But, hey, let me post a widget once and I probably will.

Another Person Ignorant of Gresham's Law

In the midst of another one of the tedious "just stop publishing hardcovers, OK?" essays that people halfway connected with the literary world seem required to commit, Pat Holt writes this:

Publishers could print enough sheets to cover a small hardcover printing for the institutional (library, etc.) sale.

No, they couldn't. If there's a cheaper edition, the institutions -- libraries, in particular -- will buy the cheaper edition. (I believe many libraries have rules requiring them to buy the cheaper of two simultaneous editions.) This is what killed the experiments in this direction during the mid-'90s.

You can't go half-and-half. You either publish a hardcover or a paperback. And, if you choose to go to paperback, you're not -- except in a very few extraordinary cases -- going to be able to go back and do a hardcover later.

So: if you do a hardcover first, you can have a second chance with a paperback, and along the way recoup some of your costs -- maybe, if you're lucky, you'll even make some money on that edition. If you do a paperback first, it has to be profitable -- there's no second chance.

Is this really that hard for people to understand?

(I'll avoid Holt's implicit assumption that people would magically buy and read more books if they were published in cheaper editions, as if time and desire come bundled with paperbacks.)

Update: As usual when ranting, I excluded the middle entirely, so, now that my head is a bit calmer, let me back up slightly.

I don't mean to say that original paperback publication is a bad idea -- obviously, it works in a large number of cases.

My point was that Holt's prescription was, essentially, to stop publishing consumer fiction and non-fiction in hardcover unless they were guaranteed bestsellers, and that seemed like a thoroughly dumb idea to me. (It still does.)

I'll answer some of the specific points from comments in comments; I've always thought that it's not fair to stomp on commenting dissention with the heavy boot of the amended original post.

Teh Grauniad's Must-Read Skiffy

Noted British fishwrap The Guardian has been adding up the thousand novels you should read before you die, and they've recently published a portion of that list containing SFF books. Neth Space picked up on that list as a meme -- it's not original to him, but it's where I saw it -- and I'll do it, too.

(Though I do have to say: a thousand novels? No poetry, short stories, or nonfiction of any kind? That's awfully limiting for such a whopping great list.)

The rules of the meme are familiar: bold the books one has read, italicize the ones on the pile to be read, and -- this one is my addition -- strikethrough the ones you wouldn't be caught dead with and/or violently disagree with.

1. Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

2. Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)

3. Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951)

4. Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin (2000) -- She doesn't consider it SF, so I don't see why I should.

5. Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things (1987)

6. Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)

7. Iain M Banks: Consider Phlebas (1987)

8. Clive Barker: Weaveworld (1987) -- I had a copy for a long time, but not anymore, I think. I did read the first three Books of Blood, which I'd consider more essential.

9. Nicola Barker: Darkmans (2007) -- A book I'd never even heard of before.

10. Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships (1995) -- Nice, but not essential.

11. Greg Bear: Darwin's Radio (1999) -- I can think of three Bear books off the top of my head that are more important than this.

12. Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (1956)

13. Poppy Z Brite: Lost Souls (1992)

14. Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon (1960)

15. Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966) -- Though not in the recent translation (it's on the pile).

16. Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race (1871)

17. Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1960)

18. Anthony Burgess: The End of the World News (1982)

19. Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars (1912) -- To my sorrow; I found it a dull chore.

20. William Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959) -- I read Junky instead.

21. Octavia Butler: Kindred (1979)

22. Samuel Butler: Erewhon (1872)

23. Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees (1957) -- This is a remarkably idiosyncratic list, he said, shaking his head.

24. Ramsey Campbell: The Influence (1988)

25. Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

26. Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)

27. Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus (1984)

28. Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)

29. Arthur C Clarke: Childhood's End (1953)

30. GK Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)

31. Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)

32. Michael G Coney: Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975)

33. Douglas Coupland: Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)

34. Mark Danielewski: House of Leaves (2000)

35. Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales (1996) -- Another book I've never heard of.

36. Samuel R Delaney: The Einstein Intersection (1967)

37. Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

38. Philip K Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)

39. Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum (1988)

40. Michel Faber: Under the Skin (2000) -- the description on the list fills me with a deep yearning never to read it.

41. John Fowles: The Magus (1966)

42. Neil Gaiman: American Gods (2001)

43. Alan Garner: Red Shift (1973) -- I've had it on my "find to read" list for at least a decade, though. Don't think I've ever seen a copy in person.

44. William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)

45. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland (1915)

46. William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)

47. Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)

48. M John Harrison: Light (2002)

49. Robert A Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

50. Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)

51. Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943) -- I came out of my Hesse phase, age seventeen, just before reaching this book.

52. Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker (1980) -- I don't know how likely it is that I'll read it, but I do own a copy.

53. James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)

54. Michel Houellebecq: Atomised (1998)

55. Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)

56. Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995) -- My faith in The Guardian is partly restored; they chose this great dreamlike novel rather than the turgid and silly Never Let Me Go.

57. Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

58. Henry James: The Turn of the Screw (1898) -- I loathe James. This is better than What Maisie Knew, but that's like saying being castrated with a rusty knife is better than if they used a spoon.

59. PD James: The Children of Men (1992) -- Another writer who indignantly denies writing SF, and so should get no benefit from it.

60. Richard Jefferies: After London; Or, Wild England (1885) -- I was looking for this for a while in college, but I don't think I actually read it.

61. Gwyneth Jones: Bold as Love (2001)

62. Franz Kafka: The Trial (1925)

63. Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon (1966)

64. Stephen King: The Shining (1977)

65. Marghanita Laski: The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953)

66. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)

67. Stanislaw Lem: Solaris (1961)

68. Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)

69. David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) -- Though, now that I come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure I have a copy.

70. Ken MacLeod: The Night Sessions (2008) -- MacLeod is a fine writer, and has done some excellent books. But putting his brand-new novel on a "before you die" list is just silly.

71. Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black (2005)

72. Michael Marshall Smith: Only Forward (1994)

73. Richard Matheson: I Am Legend (1954)

74. Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)

75. Patrick McCabe: The Butcher Boy (1992) -- Another book I had the intention to read for quite a while, so that now I can't quite remember if I ever did or not.

76. Cormac McCarthy: The Road (2006)

77. Jed Mercurio: Ascent (2007) -- More special pleading for the Guardian's particular brand-new favorites.

78. China Miéville: The Scar (2002)

79. Andrew Miller: Ingenious Pain (1997)

80. Walter M Miller Jr: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)

81. David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (2004)

82. Michael Moorcock: Mother London (1988)

83. William Morris: News From Nowhere (1890)

84. Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987) -- For me, life is too short to read Toni Morrison.

85. Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995)

86. Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (1969)

87. Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife (2003) -- It might be wonderful, but I'll never read it.

88. Larry Niven: Ringworld (1970) -- Though I have read two of the sequels.

89. Jeff Noon: Vurt (1993) -- I suspect it's only become more minor and trivial with the passage of time. Nicely written, though.

90. Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman (1967)

91. Ben Okri: The Famished Road (1991)

92. Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club (1996) -- I have less than no interest in Palahniuk's oh-so-trendy outrages.

93. Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey (1818) -- It's the kind of book I might read someday, but I don't think I have a copy.

94. Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan (1946)

95. John Cowper Powys: A Glastonbury Romance (1932)

96. Christopher Priest: The Prestige (1995)

97. François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34)

98. Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) -- I intend to read it someday, but I don't own a copy.

99. Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space (2000) -- Not at all the best choice for Reynolds.

100. Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)

101. JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)

102. Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses (1988) -- I think I still have it; I got it as one of my enrollment books from Book-of-the-Month Club when I was in college twenty years ago.

103. Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry: The Little Prince (1943) -- I don't think a forty-year-old man can read this for the first time. And I don't have much desire to, either.

104. José Saramago: Blindness (1995)

105. Will Self: How the Dead Live (2000)

106. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818) -- I read an abridged version, long ago.

107. Dan Simmons: Hyperion (1989)

108. Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker (1937) -- I've tried to read Last and First Men several times, and, if I ever get through that, Star Maker is right after it.

109. Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992)

110. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) -- I know I own it, and I'm not sure if I've read it.

111. Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)

112. Rupert Thomson: The Insult (1996)

113. Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889)

114. Kurt Vonnegut: Sirens of Titan (1959)

115. Robert Walser: Institute Benjamenta (1909)

116. Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)

117. Sarah Waters: Affinity (1999)

118. HG Wells: The Time Machine (1895)

119. HG Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898)

120. TH White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)

121. Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun (1980-83)

122. John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids (1951)

123. John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)

124. Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (1924)

So I've read fifty-one of them, and intend to read eighteen more. That's not a bad ratio -- I don't intend to die any time soon.

I note the gaping hole where The Lord of the Rings should be. (I suspect the influence of a Mr. Moorcock there.) Other missing books: A Wizard of Earthsea (no Le Guin at all), Fahrenheit 451 (no Bradbury, either), The Caves of Steel, Cities in Flight (despite my loathing for it), Lord of Light, Mission of Gravity, and anything that would indicate that the genre of high fantasy exists.

That's a very particular list, and by "particular" I mean "closely conforming to the prejudices of a small number of very literary and very British newspaper editors."

Update: Well, apparently the sidebar books do count, since they're included in the giant overall list. I think a famous communications outlet like The Guardian could have made that somewhat clearer, but it does mean I can withdraw my complaints about Le Guin and Bradbury. (Though not the other complaints.)

I also note, with bemused puzzlement, that the other categories of this very long list are comedy, crime, family and self, love, state of the nation, and war and travel. Remind me never to try browsing in the Guardian's bookstore...

And here are the SFF books I missed the first time through:

Best Dystopias: (excluding We and Brave New World and A Clockwork Orange)

• George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)
• Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
• Frederik Pohl & CM Kornbluth: The Space Merchants (1953)
• Angus Wilson: The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)
• Thomas M Disch: Camp Concentration (1968)
• Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale (1985) -- See above for my opinion of Atwood.
• Joanna Russ: The Female Man (1975) -- Thought I had it unread, but I actually have And Chaos Died.

Radical Reading: (the gender-bending kind of radical)

• Virginia Woolf: Orlando (1928) -- I probably will read it one day; I've really liked everything of Woolfs I've read.
• Angela Carter: The Passion of New Eve (1977)
• Ursula K Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
• Geoff Ryman: Air (2005)

Imagined Worlds: (unlike 90% of the main list? This is the dumping ground for series.)

• CS Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56)
• JRR Tolkien: The Hobbit (1937)
• JRR Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
• Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials (1995-2000) -- Read the first; have the other two.
• Terry Pratchett: The Discworld series (1983- )
• Ursula K Le Guin: The Earthsea series (1968-1990) -- If it were my list, I'd specify just the first three books, possibly with Tehanu as an optional object lesson.

The Best Gothic Novels: (not including Frankenstein or Udolpho or Nightmare Abbey -- these sidebar sub-lists don't make much sense)

• Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764)
• William Beckford: Vathek (1786)
• MG Lewis: The Monk (1796)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
• Charles Brockden Brown: Wieland (1798)

The Best of J.G. Ballard:

• The Drowned World (1962)
• Crash (1973)
• Millennium People (2003)

And the revised total, with 19 novels and 6 "imagined worlds" (totaling 19 non-Discworld novels and 36 novels and various ancillary Discworld books; I'm counting each as one thing) added to the original total of 124, equals 149.

Of those, I've read 62 1/3, and intend to read another 21 2/3.

Round-Up of This Week's Publishing Job Losses

I've already mentioned OUP (in the US) and CUP (in the UK).

DC Comics was part of a general 10% belt-tightening at parent Warner Brothers yesterday, with an unspecified number of people losing their jobs. The main name mentioned was highly respected editor Bob Schreck.

Diamond Comics Distributors, which has a near-monopoly on the "direct market" of comics shops in North America, also announced cuts yesterday: thirteen jobs were eliminated and an unspecified number of other employees were asked to take a pay cut.

Earlier in the week, Top Cow, one of the semi-independent studios that make up Image Comics, announced their own layoffs: two VPs. (And that's the only announcement I've seen so far that only mentions upper management taking a hit. And I'd bet a large sum of money it will be the only one.)

[DC, Diamond, and Top Cow news via Publishers Weekly]

Cambridge University Press Lays Off 160 in UK

In the wake of competitor Oxford UP's job losses earlier this week, Cambridge UP announced yesterday that they were eliminating a hundred and sixty jobs in various UK businesses.

No Review for ComicMix Tomorrow

I'd been expecting to finish up a review for ComicMix tonight -- especially since I missed Monday already this week -- but...

I got home a bit late from work to begin with, and then suddenly discovered that tonight was Bingo Night for La Ecole du Thing 1 et Thing 2. So I've just spent the last two hours standing up in an Elks hall full of screaming elementary-schoolers. And things like critical distance and measured judgement are not much on my mind.

It'll have to wait for Monday. (And any further posts here tonight are scratched, as well -- it's time to get away from the computer.)

Oxford UP Axes 60

Publishers Weekly reported yesterday that Oxford University Press -- the largest UP in the country -- is eliminating sixty jobs in their locations in New York and Cary, N.C.. They previously employed about 700 in the US.

They don't precisely state that they're going to be stacking work even higher on those left standing, but they did mention that they expect their publishing program to remain the same --so that's implied.

Deciding the Next Decider by Calvin Trillin

This is the fourth time Trillin has published a collection of his "deadline poetry" -- I wouldn't go that far; I'd settle for calling it verse -- with Deadline Poet covering the decade of the '90s and Obliviously On He Sails and A Heckuva Job coming closer and closer together to chronicle the Bush years. Deciding the Next Decider takes an even smaller compass: purely the Presidential race of the last two years.

And it's easily the least of a series of decidedly minor books. Deadline Poet had a long span of time to play with and Obliviously got to channel the Left's growing anger with Bush in the second half of his first term. Heckuva was the same as the previous book, only more so. And now Deciding is a verse account of the presidential race, with nuggets of shorter poems interpolated.

In fact, the longer verse leads right up to each of the shorter poems, and -- though the book never actually comes right out and says this -- it's pretty clear that the short poems are the ones Trillin wrote for The Nation during the race and the bulk of the book was composed later, with the benefit of hindsight. So -- if I'm right -- Deciding is much less "deadline poetry" than its predecessors, which makes it just a mediocre, vaguely humorous long poem (with interpolations) on the campaign just passed. If you're any less of a Calvin Trillin fan than I am, there's no reason for you to buy or read this book. (And that's sad, since Trillin is usually one of our most thoughtful and funny writers. It might just be time to re-read Travels with Alice, in fact.)

Movie Log: Seven Up!/7 Plus Seven/21 Up/28 Up

I've heard about Michael Apted's "Up" series of British TV documentaries for years, and finally decided to start at the beginning.

So The Wife and I watched Seven Up! and 7 Plus Seven -- each is a bit less than an hour, being originally Granada TV shows in 1964 and 1971 -- very early in the new year. And then we saw 21 Up on the 10th, and then 28 Up on the 18th. (If I keep dawdling about writing up the movies I've seen, I'll make it to the end of the series before publishing a word.)

This is a documentary series, started in 1963 by Granada in the UK. In the original series, a stentorian announcer declaimed "give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man" and other pseudo-profundities as a representative cross-section of British seven-year-olds (fourteen of them) were quizzed about their lives and expectations and dreams. The kids were clearly chosen to represent specific ideas about the British body politic (the Rich Girl, the Poor Girls, the Eastender, the Prep-School Boys, the Orphanage Boys) and in particular to delineate the class system, but the kids all rose above their stereotyping to become real people in front of the cameras. Since then, one of the young researchers on the original show, Michael Apted, has gone back to reinterview as many of the subjects as would talk to him every seven years since then: at age 14 in 1970, 21 in 1977, 28 in 1984, 35 in 1991, 42 in 1998, and 49 in 2005.

Apted is quite present in the documentaries, often annoyingly so -- he's compelled to keep quizzing the subjects on how horrible the class system is until (he hopes) finally they all break down and walk arm and arm with him into the New Socialized World of the Future. But as the subjects get older, they're calling him on it more and more, demanding to know why he keeps asking if they think they've had the same opportunities as other people. (On the other hand, following some references in these films led me to do some reading on the various UK school systems of the past century, which were all impressively tightly tracked and seemingly designed to keep as many people as possible from learning much of anything.)

I've only hit 28 Up so far, so the story is only up to the early '80s, and the subjects still have a lot of living to do. But watching their lives is already an astoundingly intimate and fascinating process -- one of the posh seven-year-old boys looked remarkably like my younger son, and these are movies that very quickly lead viewers to think about their own lives and choices.

And the very fact of the series, the fact that it's been done at all -- let alone done well and carefully -- is immense. Just tracking the same people and interviewing them every seven years -- ordinary people, with lives like our own -- makes this a fascinating series of movies.

On the one hand, I'm sorry that I waited so long to discover these. But, on the other, I still have three more movies to see to bring these people up to the current day -- and then it'll be 2012 until the next one.

A Double Shot of ComicMix Reviewin'

Today, for no apparent reason, I reviewed two books together for ComicMix: The Martian Confederacy by Jason McNamara and Paige Braddock, and jobnik! by Miriam Libicki.

A Shoe-Shopping Opportunity Second To None

Amazon has just nudged me again, asking me to convince some of you folks to buy stuff. This time it's shoes, from their Endless.com site. (I have no idea why the site has that name -- though I tend to doubt it has anything to do with a certain well-known fantasy comics series -- and even less idea why it's not called "Amazon Shoes," like every other sub-category of things you can buy.)

Endless, I'm told, has free overnight shipping to you-the-customer, plus free return shipping (presumably if you have a decent excuse for not wanting the shoes). They also claim "a wide selection of women’s, men’s and kids shoes, a 100% price match guarantee, and an easy shopping experience," which would be hard to beat with a stick if true.

This is January, where retail sales go to die, and this year is worse than most. So Amazon/Endless is trying to generate some traffic -- like every other retailer in the world right now -- and they've asked me to let you know about the following special sales:

• Save $20 on $150 running shoe orders (through 2/23/09)
• Save $15 on $75 Rainboot orders (through 4/15/09)
• Save $20 on $100 orders in brands with extended sizes and widths (through 2/4/09)

Or, if you'd prefer to click on a banner and poke around, here's one:


And finally, if you are at all concerned that these pieces of footwear might be sapient and -- accidentally or on purpose -- eat your feet, you will be relieved to know that Endless also offers a wide range of vegetarian footwear, guaranteed not to chomp on your tootsies. (The Hello Kitty Boots that I used to illustrate this post -- an image not grabbed from Endless, since their page doesn't allow that, the spoilsports -- is itself vegetarian, you'll also be pleased to hear.)

Eliminating Old Writers To Make Room For New Writers

I spent the early evening finishing off a review for ComicMix (which should be posted tomorrow), and didn't manage to post anything during the day. So, since I do want to have something date-stamped every single day on this blog, I dig into the archives again, for things I said other places at other times.

In this case, an entity calling itself "veritas" advocated essentially the title of this post that on rec.arts.sf.written in early March of 2008. As usual, I was violently opposed:

You're assuming that the amount of money spent on books is pre-determined and entirely fungible; that's not even close to being true. The person who will buy Old Wine in New Bottles by Aged Author X is not guaranteed to instead buy I Roxxor Yr Soxxors by Hot Young Thing Y. Actually, they likely have entirely different audiences, and if you were able to force all the Xes to stop publishing, you'd just see a lot of readers staying home to re-read their old books (or watch more TV).

In publishing, there's a word for a year when the big old writers don't publish a book: a slump.

You can certainly say that you don't want your former favorite writers to keep writing works you don't like and tarnish your images of them, but other people do not exist in this world to please you.

Selling lots of books to people who want to read them is a good thing, and it will always be a good thing. New writers can do the same thing...as long as they write books that people want to read.

And then someone asked if that meant that old writers had big printings and new writers had small printings, and I went on further:
More than that: publishing books that are guaranteed successes generates money that can be used to publish riskier books. No guaranteed successes and publishing goes from a moderately profitable business to either penury or a boom-and-bust model.

And it's not as if "old" writers uniformly have big printings and "new" writers have tiny ones -- much more depends on the kind of book it is (big fat fantasy? small literary novel about a professor's adultery? historical romance with Scotsmen in it?) and the expectations the publisher has.

Oh, Damn

I've just realized that if the World Fantasy Convention hadn't moved its weekend back one week this year -- it was originally scheduled for Nov 5-8, and will now be held Oct 31-Nov 1 -- I'd have the perfect excuse to spend a week on the west coast next November.

You see, the 8th is also my brother's birthday, and he'll be living in Portland (Oregon) then. So it would be just a short hop up to visit him when the con ended.

And then I have an expected business trip in San Francisco a week later -- as much as any of us can predict anything about our businesses ten months in advance these days -- which would have been like the universe daring me to stay in the area.

But now there's a solid two-week span between the two events, which is an awful long time to hang out on the wrong side of the country. So, at this point I am still hoping to make it to World Fantasy this year, but it's beginning to look the slightest bit dubious.

Reviewing The Mail: Week of 1/17

And this was another slow week, which I hope doesn't mean that all the publicists who had previously been so nice to me have been forced to pare their review copy lists -- or, even worse for all of us, sent packing by their short-sighted employers. Whatever the reason, I'll cover what I saw and move forward.

(In case this is confusing: I review books, and having some causal relationship to that -- in which direction I'll leave as an open question -- is the fact that I get review copies. Since I never manage to review everything, I do posts like this, every Monday morning, to mention and talk briefly about every book I see for review at least once.)

Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition is edited by Rich Horton and published by Prime Books -- ostensibly almost precisely one year ago in trade paperback form. (Though, from Horton's cover letter to me, I wonder if it wasn't actually published somewhat later in the year. I also note that Amazon doesn't think it's been published yet.) It's got stories from Greg Egan, Bruce Sterling, John Barnes, Ken MacLeod, Robert Reed, Michael Swanwick, and other people, and is Horton's pick of the best short science fiction from the year 2007. If you haven't picked a SF best of for that year -- or if you just want to read more SFnal short fiction -- this would be an excellent choice.

Bone Crossed is the fourth novel and first hardcover in Patricia Briggs's "Mercy Thompson" series. It's coming from Ace on February 3rd. (And I approvingly note that my old employers have the first three paperback books as a 3-in-1 and this new one already listed on the website -- good to know that they're still chugging along and doing things the right way.) And I'm happy to see that Briggs is making the leap to hardcover -- I've haven't met her (or read her books -- I was planning to read the first three of this series for a potential omnibus when The Unpleasantness happened) but I know the Ace folks think the world of her and have been publishing her for a decade now. And it's great to see that kind of loyalty and devotion rewarded, and to see a writer find her audience. This is another one of those urban fantasy series, about a werewolf car mechanic in Washington state.

Chronicles of Some Made, a 2008 Xeric Award-Winning graphic novel by Felix Tannenbaum, who neglected to put his own name on the front cover. It was published by Tannenbaum's own Passenger Pigeon Publishing in October. I expect to review it for ComicMix pretty soon, so I won't say any more about it now. (Not that I know any more than that about it, but I'm trying to maintain an air of mystery here.)

And last for this week is a book sent by a friend not precisely for review purposes, but I'll list it anyway: Batman: Joker's Asylum, a collection of five villain-themed one shots that I think originally tied into some crossover or other. It's from DC, of course, and it was published as a December trade paperback after the one-shots came out earlier in the year. And, as is all too common with corporate comics, there's no editor credited on the cover, and each of the stories is by a different creative team -- so this particular book is "by" no one in particular.

Movie Log: Burn After Reading

I used to consider myself a big Coen Brothers fan, but -- since I've missed so many of their movies -- I guess I can't say that as definitively as I used to. But I did manage to catch up with Burn After Reading, because it was funny. (I missed No Country for Old Men in large part because it looked like a "worthy," serious, depressing film -- Burn looked like a movie.)

Burn Before Reading is a story of some dumb people -- primarily Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) and Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), two health-club employees -- and some not-as-smart-as-they-think-they-are people, starting with John Malkovich as CIA sigint (signals intelligence) analyst Osborne Cox, who has recently found himself without a job, and continuing on through his cold, domineering wife Katie (Tilda Swinton), her lover (Treasury agent Harry Pfarrer [George Clooney]) and various CIA and Russian Embassy personnel.

It's a convoluted plot, set in motion by Cox's angry resignation from the CIA in the opening minutes of the movie and by his wife's subsequent plans to divorce him. Somehow, a CD with parts of Cox's memoir-in-progress and some other information comes into the hands of Litzke and Feldheimer, who think it's valuable "secret CIA shit," and try to cash in on it -- mostly to pay for some extensive plastic surgeries Litzke wants.

Coincidentally, Litzke has, at the same time, met and started dating Pfarrer, one of those Clooney characters who uses his charm and good looks to fuck every woman he possibly can. (And, if you object to my use of the word "fuck," there, don't even consider seeing this movie.) Pfarrer is married to an author of books for children, who is a minor character but has her own secrets (though, sadly, not the one The Wife and I were hoping for).

Everything goes around and around for a while, with some memorable scenes and lines -- most of the latter involving at least a little cursing -- and no one comes out it of well at all. Acting almost as a Greek chorus are Cox's ex-boss at the CIA (David Rasche -- who, as I've just finally remembered, was the inimitable Sledge Hammer twenty years ago) and his boss (J.K. Simmons, who I'm assuming is playing the Director of Central Intelligence, because that amuses me), trying to figure out what's going on, why, and what if anything the CIA did to start it or should do to stop it.

Burn After Reading is a lightweight movie about a bunch of people in way over their heads -- the same story could have been played as tragedy, but, here, it's a farce. It's not a great movie, but I found it to be a lot of fun.

Another Way to Make a Best-of-the-Year List

Someone named Damon at BookSpotCentral -- whose age I will not attempt to estimate -- has chosen three book covers for each month of 2008 on the basis of how attractive the [paintings of] women on those books are.

In his defense, he did manage to avoid calling his list the "Hottest Books of 2008." But he is speaking as if to the women on the covers, as if they were real, which is not typically the sign of a man who is mentally well.

Now: I like book covers, and I like attractive women. I even like attractive women on book covers. But this is rapidly heading into CILF territory, where I will certainly not follow.

[via Neth Space]

Update: BookSpotCentral doesn't have the courage of its convictions; they've pulled the article.

Bad form: the worst thing you can do on the Internet is "un-publish" something because people complain about it. At the very best, you look weak and indecisive. And, at worst...well, you look like those guys.

You'll Think He's Making This Up -- But He Isn't

I'm linking to this review by Chris (of Invincible Super Blog fame) of the uniquely special Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose #53 for two reasons.

One, it's awesome in two entirely separate ways -- the lunacy of the comic reviewed and the critical guns Chris trains on it.

And, second, this particular picture is just insane (on the level of "Fucking her ass. Saving her life.") and thus needs to be spread as widely across the Internets as possible.

Is This the End of Manga Friday?!?

Well, probably not, but it makes a striking headline.

I'm probably going to "Manga Friday" less often in the future, and I explain why in the opening of this week's column, which also reviews The Manzai Comics, Vol. 1, Hitohira, Vol. 2 and Croquis Pop, Vol. 3.

Restructuring a Random House

Publishers Weekly has an article reporting on the new structure at Random House's newly Frankensteined Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, and stuck the memos from Chairman Sonny Mehta and President Tony Chirico at the end. (If you'd like to know the names of the really top editors at that group, and a number of other high-up publishing people, read down to those memos for short potted resumes.)

A Knopf spokesman admitted that there were layoffs, but wouldn't say how many or even specify by department.

And the similar restructuring at Random's Crown Publishing Group is also complete -- PW has that news, and the memo, as well. There were layoffs in that group as well, on top of the 16 jobs lost in December, but they were all unspecified people in unspecified jobs -- not nearly as interesting as a long list of Executive This and President That.

Update:
The third adult group, Random House (aka "Little Random") has done the same -- Galleycat has a report and a download of the actual memo from President/Publisher Gina Centrello. The memo has a whole bunch of boldface names, but, again, the number and location of lost jobs is not made public.

One note: SFF imprints Bantam Spectra and Del Rey now share a publisher, Scott Shannon.

Update II:
According to GalleyCat's Ron Hogan on Twitter, Del Rey SFF editor Liz Scheier was one of those let go in these upheavals. I think that position is cursed. Good luck to Liz in finding a new job quickly -- she was one of the editors instrumental in the urban fantasy boom of the last decade, so some other publisher would be smart to snap her up.

Update III:
The New York Observer lists four editors -- including Scheier -- among those laid off in the Little Random shuffle.

O'Reilly Lays Off 30

Influential technology publisher O'Reilly Media has laid off thirty employees this week -- nearly 14 percent of their workforce.

Analyzing Deck-Chair Patterns

It happens a lot this time of year: various news outlets try to run the numbers and figure out what were the bestselling books of the previous year. And, usually, they do so by using the entirely wrong numbers, and making so many hidden assumptions that the exercise is ludicrous.

Take, for example, this Bookseller article, which purports to determine the "most popular writers globally" during 2008, by counting the number of bestseller slots (on unspecified charts, prepared by unspecified organizations, using unspecified methodologies) in nine countries.

The countries are: France (population: 65 million); Germany (population: 82 million); Italy (population: 60 million); Netherlands (population: 16 million); China (population: 1.335 billion); Spain (population: 45 million); Sweden (population: 9 million); the UK (population: 61 million);and the USA (population: 306 million).

From the commentary, the "rankings" appear to have been determined by the number of times an author's books appeared on bestseller lists -- with no notice taken of placement on those lists or of the actual quantity of books sold.

And, as you can see, the countries are not the same at all -- even leaving aside book-buying habits and patterns, and the average sales level for a "bestseller" in each country. The largest country, China, is 148 times as large as the smallest, Sweden, which one might think would make a big difference in their book-buying habits.

One might think.

But, on the Bookseller's chart, presumably, ranking #10 in Sweden in a particular week is approximately as good as ranking #1 in China. This is some of the worst methodology I have ever seen: it's no better than a cruise-ship purser analyzing the patterns of the deck-chairs that he's just finished arranging.

Any analysis of book sales, and author popularity, must be based on sales figures. Bestseller list placement is only ever at best a proxy for sales, and cannot then be analyzed at a further remove.

Slightly more excusable is the annual Publishers Weekly reading of the bestseller entrails, which also showed up this week. It's primarily devoted to ranking the big US publishers according to their books' positions on PW's own weekly bestseller lists, which may make some suspicious persons frown slightly. Since it's purely about one country, and mostly about books in aggregate rather than discretely, it almost, but not quite, reaches the level of actual facts.

But, all in all, I'm coming to think that there are a whole hell of a lot of reporters who need to be press-ganged into an elementary statistics course.

John Mortimer, 1923-2008

The BBC reports that novelist and screenwriter Sir John Mortimer has died at the age of eighty-five. His best-known work -- for both page and small screen -- were the stories about the disreputable barrister Rumpole, but he wrote many other fine novels (Paradise Postponed) and screenplays (the '80s miniseries of Brideshead Revisited). He was, like Rumpole, a barrister himself, and was additionally known as an advocate for free speech and other citizens' rights.

I read what I guess was his last novel, Rumpole Misbehaves, just less than a year ago. He was still doing fine work, and he will definitely be missed -- particularly as a voice of opposition as Britain slides ever closer to Panopticon status.

Quote of the Week

"Every British animal has its cheerleaders. The country has so many badger-support groups that it was deemed necessary to create an umbrella organization, the National Federation of Badger Groups, now known as the Badger Trust, to coordinate all of the disparate badger-related activity. The National Bat Hotline takes ten thousand calls a year, providing "free information and advice to anyone who needs help with a bat," its Web site says. Every year, during the toad mating season, hundreds of volunteers put on orange fluorescent vests and help amorous toad cross the street in Wales, using the two most popular toad-helping methods: escorting them or transporting them in buckets."
- Sarah Lyall, The Anglo Files, pp.182-183

Huh! Good God! What Is It Good For?

Yesterday for ComicMix, I reviewed Emmanuel Guibert's graphic novel Alan's War, based on the WW II memories of American GI Alan Cope.

And look for the usual Manga Friday sometime tomorrow.

How a Book Is Born

I've seen this three or four times already, so I suppose most of you have as well. But I'm going to embed it anyway, because it's funny and it will be easier for me to find it again someday (should I need to) if it's here.

This is the story of publishing, from Macmillan's Digital Marketing department, and it's not entirely untrue:

Major Overhaul to Nebula Rules

I'm not sure how they managed to swing this -- particularly since it seems to have all been done very quietly -- but the current SFWA Administration is to be commended on a number of very smart changes to the Nebula rules:

1) Eligibility is by calendar year; eliminating the bizarre and counter-intuitive "rolling eligibility" that made the Nebs usually a year behind every other award.

2) There will be no preliminary ballot; the six works with the most nominations get on the one and only ballot.

3) Juries are gone, except for the Norton. (And that last makes sense, since nothing qualified for the Norton based on SFWA nominations this year. Of course, that raises the question of why SFWA gives out an award that its members can't be bothered to nominate for, but we'll leave that aside for now.)

4) My least-favorite category, "Best Script," is gone, to be replaced by what looks like its predecessor, the Ray Bradbury Award.

5) The Norton and Bradbury awards are firmly Not Nebulas, in the same way the Campbell is Not A Hugo.

6) To me, this is the most important one: nominations will be secret, killing -- or at least seriously maiming -- the perception that Nebula nominations were a huge round of team log-rolling.

I'm sure someone will be complaining about this online very quickly, in the name of that poor class of ink-stained wretches whose books are always published on December 31st, but these look to me like great changes which will go a long way towards restoring the respect and importance of the Nebula. Good job, SFWA.

[via Torque Control]

B&N Sheds 100 Corporate Jobs

The Wall Street Journal reports (mostly behind a paywall) that Barnes & Noble has laid off about 100 employees from their corporate offices in New York City, roughly 4% of the total staff there.

The New York Times also has the story -- also behind a paywall, I believe, but I've paid for that particular wall, so I can read the full story.

It's not clear if these cuts affect or include B&N's publishing arm, Sterling, but I'm inferring that they don't, since Sterling is not being mentioned.

Update: Melville House's blog reports that some of the job cuts were at Sterling, including Philip Turner of Union Square Press.

Incoming Books: January 14

Today was a big day for new books at La Casa Hornswoggler, with a package of books arriving from Edward R. Hamilton and my special order arriving at the Montclair Book Center. And, as always, I list these things to keep track for myself, here they are:

E.C. Segar's Popeye Vol. 2: "Well, Blow Me Down!" -- I read the first volume last year, and I already have the third, so now I'll have to find some time to sit down with two of these giant books. Segar's Popeye is one of the great American comic strips, and it's oddly mostly forgotten, even while the character (in enervated form) remains in the public consciousness.

Spy: The Funny Years by Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter, and George Kalogerakis -- an anthology of the great funny magazine of the late '80s and early '90s. I read it most of that time -- from 1990, at least -- and remember it very fondly.

The Dog Dialed 911 -- A book of various odd and interesting documents, put together by the website The Smoking Gun. It was a remainder, and really cheap. The other reason I got it is that I remember poking through it in a bookstore several years ago, and it seemed to have interesting stuff. I expect it will be a bathroom book, one of these days.

Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Vol. 11, mostly by Cary Bates and Mike Grell -- I got the first ten of these when they came out (mostly, I have to admit, for free through various contacts at DC), and somehow missed this and Vol. 12. The stories are from '74-'75, and I must admit there's a completest streak in me that wishes that the series would continue through the great Levitz/Giffen run of the '80s.

Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations -- I love the Library of America, but they keep kicking me out pretty quickly whenever I try to rejoin. (I suspect it's because I already have so many of their books that they can't think of anything else to send me, so they dump me because that's the only other thing to do.) This one's from 2003 -- I could have sworn it was more recent that that -- and I finally gave up on getting them to actually send it to me as part of a regular subscription.

A whole stack of the recent Penguin paperback editions of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels -- Goldfinger, For Your Eyes Only, Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, and The Man With The Golden Gun -- since I am more and more thinking that I want to read them all straight through some time soon.

And then four more P.G. Wodehouse novels -- Psmith, Journalist, Bill the Conqueror, Nothing Serious, and Something Fishy -- from the lovely and wonderful Overlook Press series.

Calvin Trillin's Deciding the Next Decider -- the third collection of his "deadline poetry" on topical (generally political) themes from The Nation. I wish we were getting more substantial books out of Trillin, honestly -- these are very frivolous, essentially doggerel, and I can't entirely agree with all of the implied politics. But even thin Trillin is good to have.

And last is a book I bought from a third-party seller on Amazon, because it shows no sign of actually being published on this side of the pond -- J.G. Ballard's Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography. It came yesterday, but I'll count it in today's list.

Small Press Taxonomy

I've failed to make an actual post today, so I must dig into the archives. Here's something that may be amusing -- Joe Bernstein got hold of a horrible book sometime last year, and told rec.arts.sf.written about it. He asked if mainstream small presses were different from those in the SFF field, and here's what I said:

There are many different kinds of small presses.

SF (however you define it) has a dozen or so established operations that put out at least a book a year and that know the field. Many of those publish a lot of short fiction -- either novellas-as-books or collections -- or do fancy limited editions of popular books at least some of the time.

There are also small presses that know nothing at all about the genre -- or any genre -- and yet publish in it regularly. They used to turn up in my submissions pile at the old job with depressing regularity, and their books were generally about as awful as the one you describe.

And then there are the presses that exist only because Jane Writer can't find anyone willing to bring out her masterpiece, and so she does it herself -- those, generally, you'll want to run screaming from at first sight, to save some of your SAN.

Movie Log: Hamlet 2

Some movies -- and I say this with the deepest admiration and love -- are just nuts: full of things that shouldn't be funny, clearly set in worlds not our own, and full of people who don't really make sense. Hamlet 2 is one of them, and a wonderful, eccentric, bizarre spectacle it makes of itself.

Steve Coogan is Dana Marschz, a bad drama teacher in Tucson, AZ, which the movie thinks of as the worst place possible. Dana used to be a bad actor in commercials, but, like every man, he has found his correct level. As the movie opens, his once tiny class -- the same two students take it every year, but no one else does -- has been overrun by Hispanic ethnic stereotypes, since the regular study hall has been abolished. So he tries to "reach out" to these kids -- badly, of course.

That would be the normal premise for a comedy like this, but Hamlet 2 has several more cliches to throw in: the budget is slashed, and the drama program will be ended. The principal hates Dana. Dana's wife leaves him. And Dana finally decides to finish his magnum opus, a musical in which Jesus and his time machine save Hamlet from death and turn that gloomy play into something much happier.

The movie, of course, builds up to the premiere of the play Hamlet 2, as Dana and the cast -- his students, who now believe in him fairly strongly -- battle through various mishaps and problems. And the last half-hour of this ninety-minute movie takes place during that play.

The play Hamlet 2 is comic genius -- it's an utterly unnecessary sequel to one of the masterpieces of Western culture, but that's only for starters. It's also blasphemous, silly, filled with bizarre unnecessary flourishes, clumsily written, and primarily a vehicle for Dana to work through his conflicted feelings for his own father. And, inevitably, it's a musical -- since "it's a musical!" has been cultural shorthand for "garbage masquerading as treacle" for at least two comedic generations now.

And yet. Hamlet 2, the play in the movie, is undeniably bad. But it's also undeniably a powerful piece of theatre, from what we see of it -- hokey and silly, to be sure, but the kind of thing that moved audiences to tears when it hits right.

Hamlet 2, the movie, essentially says up front "I'm going to show you something really funny," then builds up that joke for an hour. But what makes the movie is that joke delivers.

Wine, Women, & Song

Today, for ComicMix, I reviewed the recent graphic novel The Alcoholic by Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel.

There's not a whole lot of song in it, though the hero is a writer. And it's mostly not wine that he drinks. But there are plenty of women in it!

The Ascent of Rum Doodle by W.E. Bowman

Once upon a time, in a faraway land -- 1956 in London, to be more specific -- a funny novel about mountaineering was published. It was moderately popular, and the author wrote a sequel soon after, but it was never widely successful, and it fell into an obscurity soon afterward.

For the next thirty years, it was passed along from mountaineer to mountaineer, with only occasional readers outside that strong-calfed fraternity. But then a copy fell into the hands of a then-obscure Times editor named Bill Bryson.

The stars then wheeled and danced in their places, and Bryson found himself, some years later still, rich and famous after a string of humorous books about travel, words, and less likely things. And so Bryson pushed to have one of his favorite books brought back into print in the UK as a Pimlico trade paperback, with his name even larger than the author's, in hopes that it would finally burst forth to a mass audience.

(At about the same time, Bryson, who had moved back to his native USA and become a judge for the ancient and august Book-of-the-Month Club, convinced that body to also reprint this mysterious novel, which was even more obscure to Americans.)

The novel is The Ascent of Rum Doodle. And it's still not famous, but it seems to be in print in the UK and available here, which is more than one can say for most fifty-year-old comic novels.

I worked at a publishing entity that included the BOMC for a number of years, but never managed to remember to get myself a copy of Rum Doodle. But, eventually, I discovered a local library had a copy, and I finally read it over the Christmas holidays.

And...well...I can't say that I found it as funny as Bryson did. Oh, it is funny, in spots, but it's also old-fashioned and somewhat British, and just...mild.

An expedition to the fabled peak of Rum Doodle -- 40,000 and a half feet tall -- is led by our first-person narrator, only known by his expedition nickname Binder. He's surrounded by the usual bunch of colorful characters -- a photographer who fails to get any pictures, a route-finder who consistently gets lost, a linguist/diplomat whose speeches always angers the natives, and so forth. The jokes would have been obvious even in 1956, but a number of them are pretty good jokes.

The party bumbles their way up the mountain, as, even in 1956, the cliche that the native bearers are smarter and vastly more capable than the doughty (or perhaps doughy) Englishmen of the expedition. Binder is an unreliable narrator of the humorous kind, forever reporting but not seeing what's going on right in front of him.

I can't say that Rum Doodle isn't funny -- it is funny, and at times quite funny -- but it doesn't really live up to the rhapsodic blurb from Bryson: "One of the funniest books you will ever read." If you can overlook that -- or if you're enough of a mountaineering buff that you'll find substantially more humor in it than the rest of us -- there's a very good chance that you'll enjoy The Ascent of Rum Doodle. Just don't wait for six years to read it, as I did, and let the anticipation build to unsustainable heights.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/10

The mail was light again, presumably because publishing offices were catching up from the holidays -- I know my office was, in particular the cube-shaped region of that office where I sit.

And, just in case you don't know what this list is: I review books, here and other places, so I get review copies in the mail. I'll never manage to review everything I see, but I want to at least mention them all, so I do posts like this every Monday morning, covering the mail of the week previous. And, last week, what I saw was:

Cartoon Marriage is a new book by the married New Yorker cartoonists Liza Donnelly and Michael Maslin that combines cartoons by both of them (each separately, I mean) with new collaborative pages about their life and work together. Donnelly edited the vaguely similar Sex and Sensibility last year, which collected two hundred cartoons by ten female cartoonists on the subject of the sexes (and which I reviewed). Cartoon Marriage, which I'm greatly looking forward to reading, is coming from Random House as a hardcover January 27th.

I'm not quite as thrilled to see Ben 10 Alien Force: Ben 10 Returns, a fumetti-style retelling of the beginning of the TV series, but I know my two sons will be gaga over it, and I expect many other boys in their age group will be as well. This book is adapted by Elizabeth Hurchalla from the TV show and designed & lettered by Tomas Montalvo-Lagos. Del Rey published it on December 30th, and they also mention that an original graphic novel -- black-and-white and drawn in a manga style by person or persons unspecified -- will be coming along in the fall.

Tom Lloyd's The Twilight Herald is the second in his epic fantasy series "The Twilight Reign." I'm afraid I don't know much about this series -- has anyone out there read The Stormcaller and want to comment on it? Twilight Herald will be published by Pyr in trade paperback in March.

And last for this week is David Marusek's second novel, Mind Over Ship, a sequel to his critically acclaimed Counting Heads. (In a puckish twist, there's a big, very positive quote from The New York Times about Counting Heads, even though the Times's then-new SF reviewer, David Itzkoff, famously compared it to "a biology textbook or a stereo manual.") Tor will publish Mind Over Ship in hardcover this month.

The Anglo Files by Sarah Lyall

Lyall was a young reporter -- covering publishing, actually -- for The New York Times when she met and quickly married Robert McCrum, a very British writer and editor (Faber & Faber, The Observer, a quite good biography called Wodehouse). She moved to London, and quickly discovered that the English may speak a very similar language to Americans, but they think very differently, on a wide variety of topics.

(Lyall is now, and has been for some time, a London correspondent for the New York Times -- it's quite lucky when you get a chance to move across an ocean and still keep your old job.)

Anglo Files is subtitled "A Field Guide to the British," and that's exactly what it is: a book anatomizing British foibles, idiosyncrasies, and oddities, as seen by an educated, urbane, and Anglophilic American. It's a wonderful book to read for any even mildly Britain-tropic readers on this side of the pond, full of thoughtful and funny moments like

British people really are more reserved and repressed than American. They really do say "Sorry," all the time, even when it is not their fault, such as when they trip and fall down, or when someone knocks into them in the street. They really do admire the fact that they have no written constitution. And, yes, they believe that baked beans are a vegetable, that the loathsomeness of the French is exceeded only by the loathsomeness of the Germans, and that it is better to shiver in the dark than to swelter in the light.

Lyall writes about traditional England -- upper-middle class and above, mostly, and ethnically as well as culturally English. This is not a book about yobs, Eastenders, "football," and the kind of people who chant "Eng-a-land!" She's writing about "U" rather than "non-U" England, for Nancy Mitford scholars -- and she gets into that cultural gulf late in the book, as well.

She dives right in with a chapter about sex -- which doesn't exist, of course, since they're British -- and moves on to Parliament (both Commons and Lords, separately), newspapers, drinking, cricket, class, false modesty, odd characters, animal-loving, dental care, apparent love of bad service and consumer goods, self-denial and the change in the British character as seen in the wallowing in grief after Princess Diana's death, and weather. Along the way, she's always exceptionally readable and quite often very funny -- and she also provides an extensive list of Further Reading at the end for those who haven't had enough Britishness in the previous two hundred and sixty pages.

I enjoyed The Anglo Files immensely; Lyall is a clever and sprightly writer with a reporter's eye for the telling detail. If you're an American who enjoys British things -- TV, books, movies, etc. -- I expect you'll be rather fond of it.

Movie Log: The Dark Knight

So many barrels of ink have been spilled about the subject of The Dark Knight -- before and after it opened, about Ledger's acting and his death, about the left- or right-wing politics of the movie, and on and on and on -- that there's nothing new I can say at this point. So, if I end up reiterating what some writer said better four months ago, I hope you'll forgive me.

I was not overly impressed by the first Christopher Nolan Batman-reboot movie, Batman Begins, which felt to me like a stew of elements from classic O'Neil/Adams '70s Batman stories, the Miller/Mazzucchelli Batman: Year One, and some unreconstructed Hollywoodisms. Dark Knight is more unified, and draws from a wider group of influences, but those Hollywoodisms are still there, and they kept the movie from being the masterpiece that some reviewers have called it. (Actually, my one-liner about Batman Begins applies equally to Dark Knight: "overlong and massively enamored of its own melodrama, but undeniably stylish.")

First, the obvious point: Heath Ledger's fearless performance makes Dark Knight just as much as Robert Downer Jr.'s equally fearless acting made Iron Man. Dark Knight has a grittier, real-world feel, and stronger support around that one central performance, which makes it a stronger movie. But, still, I don't see it getting escape velocity from "a really good comic-book/action movie" to the level of "a great movie." (Raiders of the Lost Ark is a great movie, despite being an action film. I remember Superman II being one as well, though I haven't seen it in at least fifteen years.)

Dark Knight doesn't really follow Batman Begins closely, which is no bad thing in this case: over-concern with continuity is the bane of most superhero-themed properties in all media. The joker card at the end of Batman Begins doesn't really lead into the feral Joker of this movie, but it didn't need to. (And using Cillian Murphy's Scarecrow in the cold open does clearly establish the continuity -- though Scarecrow, done well, could be as frightening and disruptive and anarchic as Ledger's Joker. All of the best Batman villains, in fact -- I'm sure many people have said this before -- are forces of anarchy and randomness.)

Anyway, the plot of Dark Knight can be summed up quickly: Batman (Christian Bale, using that annoying I-need-a-cough-drop-badly voice once again) is well along the way to bringing order to Gotham City, with the aid of a crusading D.A., Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), and a tough police detective, James Gordon (Gary Oldman). But then a frighteningly and randomly violent gang leader calling himself the Joker (Ledger) appears out of nowhere, whose aim is apparently just chaos and anarchy. Thing get worse and worse until Batman finally captures the Joker for good. (Though there's no real reason why it should all stop then, except that we've hit the running time of a movie; Ledger's Joker is uncontainable and unstoppable this side of death.)

Those who know the comic-book Batman will already know what must happen to Dent along the way, and Gordon undergoes his own changes as well. Dark Knight does go over the top a few times, but it mostly concentrates on the Batman/Joker dichotomy -- justice and order vs. anarchy and random terror -- which makes it work.

The Joker's claim not to plan things doesn't entirely ring true, particularly after a massive set-piece attack that required the work of dozens, at least. A more focused, less summer-movie-ized version of the story could have stripped out the gigantic explosions and tightened the portrayal of the Joker as a force of anarchic destruction -- but that version of the movie wouldn't have made nearly a billion dollars. Similarly, the movie provides no reason at all from criminals to want to work for the Joker: he casually murders them and their bosses, torches money and other valuables, has no plan for them to get out rich or even alive, and is a scary lunatic. Dark Knight has the henchman problem in spades; the only way to take the Joker-as-ganglord seriously is to resolutely ignore all of those problems.

But Ledger's Joker is mesmerizing; every line reading is perfect and even his body language is disturbing. Ledger inhabits this madman from the core out; while he's on the screen there's no way to disbelieve in his power and potential. Without him, Dark Knight would be a solid entertainment, but probably not anything more. (Much like the first Nolan movie, in fact.) But with Ledger, Dark Knight is a must-see movie for anyone concerned with the fascination of terror and the limits of fear.

My Recent ComicMix Activities

I only had two reviews this week -- and not, I think, because I've been playing too much LEGO Batman. That's what I'm saying at least, and I'll stick to it.

On Monday I reviewed Lucy Knisley's French Milk, a drawn memoir of a month-long trip to Paris.

And on Wednesday I reviewed one of the best, and biggest, original graphic novels of last year, Dash Shaw's amazing Bottomless Belly Button.

Next week I hope to go back to my regular thrice-weekly review schedule, but we all know what happens to best-laid plans....

The Elusive Itzkoff

While poking through the New York Times Book Review this morning -- parenthetically, Josh Beazell's Beat the Reaper looks like a lot of fun; I'll have to read that -- I noticed that Marilyn Stasio, the stalwart mysteries columnist, was back with reviews of another three new books (and three reissues).

And that led me to wonder what happened to Our Man Itzkoff, last seen emitting a review of Neal Stephenson's Anathem in mid-October. So I looked him up: for the year 2008, he appeared in the Book Review six times, twice writing about music and once about Cerwiden Dovey's possibly-fantastic novel Blood Kin.

That left a mere three "Across the Universe" columns -- the aforementioned Anathem review in October, a look at Michael Moorcock's Elric reissues in July, and his famously wrong-footed look at Young Adult novels in February.

I still don't think that NYTBR editor Sam Tanenhaus reads this blog, but, if anyone out there knows him, please whisper in his ear that this Itzkoff fellow is a serious slacker. He's not even managing to get his column in quarterly, when Stasio has had six since Itzkoff's last column. Either make him work harder -- which would be more entertaining for me, at least -- or just admit that he's a decent music writer but not strong on SFF.

C'mon -- there are at least a dozen bloggers that are better SFF reviewers than Itzy. (And I tactfully leave myself out of the running.) Surely the NYTBR can either make him work or send him home?

This Week's Hit List

McGraw-Hill: In a press release dated today, McGraw-Hill announced some "restructuring" of their businesses in the fourth quarter of 2008. As usual, "restructuring" is code for "telling a whole bunch of people to leave and not come back."

In McGraw-Hill's case, that meant 215 people were terminated at McGraw-Hill Education, and an additional 160 in other divisions. (Some of those, in Financial Services and Information & Media, may well be publishing jobs of some kind as well.)

Best wishes to those canned by McGraw-Hill, and good luck for a speedy job search.

Borders: After dismal 4Q results, the top management of Borders -- CEO George Jones, CFO Ed Wilhelm, and Rob Gruen, Executive VP of Merchandising and Marketing -- were asked to pursue other opportunities, or perhaps to spend more time with their families. Unlike the 375 McGraw-Hill jobs, their positions were immediately filled.

I'll wish them good luck as well, but people at that level generally are well beyond the need for luck. So let's just hope that their golden parachutes are nicely soft and widely open.

Update:

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Drenka Willen was unfired after -- and possibly because of -- a letter of complaint sent by her various Nobel Prize-winning authors to HMH head Tony Lucki -- reports The New York Observer. She's not in the office, and she's being made to retire in a few months, but I suppose it's better than being shoved out the door the same day.

Update II:

Random House/Pantheon: The Observer reports that Pantheon publisher Janice Goldklang has been let go after twenty-five years. No other layoffs were announced, but industry insiders expect more job losses at Pantheon and other Random House imprints.

Quote of the Week

"[Samuel] Johnson has no illusion about criticism's ability to fix or cure. Critics are to writers not as doctors are to patients but as bearded ladies are to trapeze artists -- another, sadder act in the same big show."
- Adam Gopnik, "Man of Fetters," 12/8/08 The New Yorker, p.95

RFI: LiveJournal Feeds

Sometime in the recent past -- though probably before they laid off most of the staff -- the feeds of various LiveJournallers that I follow stopped showing up in my reader.

Anyone else having this problem? Anyone have any thoughts about how to fix it?

(I hate having feeds suddenly fail, particularly since it seems to happen all of the time.)

Today's Massive Time-Waster

The reason I'm not posting a "Movie Log" here tonight: TV Tropes. (And it's looking like there won't be a "Manga Friday" tomorrow, either.)

TV Tropes is a Wiki of plot and character tropes -- it says TV in the title, but the examples seem to usually start with Anime/Manga and then spread out uncontrollably from there. It's heavily hyperlinked, and nearly all of the tropes have clever titles, which leads to uncontrolled clicking and reading. I've lost at least an hour and a half there tonight. It's clever and has good examples, usually -- another example that the Internet is best at doing things geeks like.

I started at Exactly What It Says On The Tin; other particularly good bits are the Sorting Algorithm of Deadness, Rape Is The New Dead Parents and one of my favorites, the Suspiciously Specific Denial. (One of my best friends in college used to always insist that he'd never been convicted of a felony in New York state, which, when used correctly, would unnerve people. I've appropriated it myself a couple of times since then.)

If you consume or commit fiction, it's worth a look. But be warned: "a look" may turn into "three hours."

More From Amazon

You know, if I were smart, I'd space these things out so they wouldn't look so cheap and tawdry. But I guess I'm not smart, 'cause here comes another pitch.

It's a new year, so Amazon thinks you need to change everything about yourself. They are willing to help out: they'll sell you stuff to make you better -- or, at least, different.

Amazon thinks you are:

• fat
• fiscally imprudent
• damaging to the ecosphere
• a dirty addict
• desperately out of shape (on top of being fat)
• frenzied
• trapped in a dead-end job
• possessed of old, laughable technology
• horribly disorganized
• and in need of some hobbies to assuage the desperate longings of your miserable life.

If this describes you, click the link.

Amazon Textbooks!

My cold and subtle masters at Amazon have directed me to let you know that they sell textbooks -- which, I gather, are quite in demand in some circles at this time of year -- with convenient delivery and prices that are not quite as high as some sellers of textbooks.

They also said something about assimilation, and resistance being useless, but I'm afraid I didn't catch that bit.

Anyway, here's the appropriate banner. If you need textbooks, why not click it and compare prices?

Movie Log: Pineapple Express

I'd gotten desperately behind in my "Movie Log" posts, which is silly because they're not what anyone comes to this blog for in the first place. But I like doing them, so I wanted to keep them up. So I've been trying to write and post one a day this week, until I get caught up. Today, if I kept going forward, would be The Dark Knight, a slightly popular piece of cinema from mid-2008.

But I was also going to watch a movie tonight, so I figured: why not just liveblog it, and catch up that way? And so I will -- I'm watching the unrated version of Pineapple Express. (How come every comedy these days comes out on video in an "unrated" version immediately, and not the one we saw in the theaters? Are the movie companies really that annoyed with the MPAA? They are the MPAA....)

Anyway, here we go:

First are the previews -- Mall Cop (I'm sure every funny moment is in the trailer) and The Wackness (look! more drug comedy!).

Oh, now I get the version choice...and I'll take Theatrical, please. (Guess that answers my question above -- they just do both.)

We open in classy black and white, since it's 1937. (At this point, all of the stoners wonder if they wandered into the wrong theater.) And...it's a Reefer Madness reference!

And the self-indulgence is pretty high, with a long credits sequence of Seth Rogen driving his '70s car and serving subpoenas. (And then meeting his highschool girlfriend...at school.)

And then we get the obligatory stoner buddy -- thought he was the roommate briefly, but he seems to be the connection instead. My, stoner meandering are dull and tedious when you're not stoned. Blah blah blah -- a long stoner scene that doesn't go anywhere. And...the people stoner buddy buzzes up are not the ones that get the plot moving. We're at 20:00, and the plot is still AWOL.

And then Rogen -- I don't think we've heard his character's name yet, but I haven't been paying a lot of attention -- witnesses a murder, by a guy who might be Bruce Dern but probably isn't, and Rosie Perez as a cop. Wow, action!

And then he runs right over to talk to stoner buddy! So we've got more stoner comedy, this time with added hysteria. We do learn stoner buddy's name is Saul, though.

And then we get another stoner scene, with the two thugs sent to kill Rogen and stoner buddy lightly trashing the apartment and then smoking. But then the plot really gets going -- druglord Ted was the murderer, and he's two levels up from stoner buddy, so his thugs are right on their trail.

And...then we get a long scene of stoner humor in the dark woods. And some goofing around in the woods, too, until our guys get a ride back to the plot. We finally learn that Rogen is Dale Denton, about thirty minutes after we last cared.

And the plot is a long scene of stoner talking around the subject, and then a supposedly funny fight scene in which Saul's connection gets beaten up and his house is trashed. And then the thugs come back.

Ah! Ted is the boss from Office Space, whoever that is. And Rogen's girlfriend's father is Ed Begley, Jr. Too bad for Ed, getting a minor role as the dad in a stoner comedy. And Rogen arrives for the big dinner at the girlfriend's house. More violent humor, the thugs arrive...and things peter out pointlessly.

Oh, look a car chase. A wacky car chase.

Ted's a pretty low-rent drug lord if his big bought-and-paid-for cop is a beat officer, isn't he?

The boys have a fight and separate, in another reggae montage. (I avoided mentioning the first two reggae montages, because they're really not that interesting.)

The plot stops and starts for long stretches -- the rival Asian gang declared war on Red at least twenty minutes ago, and the girlfriend's parents had their one scene and then disappeared.

Saul gets kidnapped by the thugs, and Dale decides to go save him. And Red -- who we thought we saw killed three reels ago -- helps and arms him. They both head out to Ted's farm -- the secret government lab from the pre-credit sequence. Dale gets captured, too. And they're stuck in a cell together, so they can make up their differences and be friends again.

This movie is utterly not worth the time I'm spending typing this. I hope no one's reading at this point.

The boys get themselves free just as the Asians attack...badly. (They dive in, and then shoot, though there are enough of them to each take out one of Ted's men simultaneously if they'd bothered to plan.) In the big gun battle, as usual, characters who have spoken don't get shot.

And there's a big fistfight between Dale and Ted. The Asians are all really lousy shots -- they seem to be almost entirely dead, even though they had superior firepower and surprise on their side. Oh, and Saul fights with the girl cop. Fighting fighting fighting. And then a big firebomb.

Oh no! Are Dale and Saul dead like everyone else? No! And neither is Red!

Why do we get yet another stoners-talking scene after the movie should be over?!

OK, now it's over. It's not as bad as I made it sound, but it is over-long and not all that much fun to watch alone and sober.

Movie Log: Wristcutters

Most movies can be described pretty quickly, in filmic shorthand. Why, even something as odd and individual as Wristcutters: A Love Story could be called an existential afterlife romantic comedy. But, in this case, that wouldn't explain much.

You see, it's set entirely in the next world -- well, one of the next worlds, I guess: the one that you go to when you kill yourself. Everything is a little dingier and a little worse than our world, and no one can ever smile. There's not much sense of the larger world, but that's probably lousy as well -- the movie focuses on a few characters, mostly heading through hot, barren landscapes.

Zia (Patrick Fugit) is a young man who cut his wrists over a bad breakup with his girlfriend Desiree (Leslie Bibb), and found that it didn't make anything better -- he ended up working at Kamikaze Pizza and living with a persnickety roommate. His only friend is Eugene (Shea Wigham), a moody Russian in the unique position of living with his entire family. (Being a moody, suicidal Russian is hereditary -- luckily, or unluckily, take your pick.)

When Zia learns that Desiree is somewhere in this world -- she committed suicide a month after he did -- he immediately wants to go find her and patch things up. Eugene doesn't need much convincing for a road trip -- this is the kind of place where doing anything, no matter how stupid, is preferable to just sticking around. So they drive to the east, vaguely following where Zia thinks Desiree might be, and pick up hitchhiker Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon), who claims that she's there as a mistake, and is determined to find and confront the People In Charge.

And the three of them driving in the car together leads to the romantic comedy part -- except for the minor points that no one can smile (let alone laugh), so it's not all that comedic. And there's not a whole lot of romance in what may be hell, or at least purgatory. Even meeting Kneller (Tom Waits), the leader of a group of relatively happy and well-organized folks, can't stop their searching for long.

Wristcutters was based on a short story, and there's been some controversy about changes to the ending. It's a good ending, but it's definitely a movie ending. And the movie's cosmology doesn't completely come into focus -- devoted followers of religion and dyed-in-the-wool humanists alike will find things to be annoyed about. But it tells an interesting story and has some good characters -- and it's not as bleak as you might think. Can love survive suicide? Maybe, sometimes, it can.

Another Person Who Is Not Me

I am not the Andrew Wheeler who is a Realtor in Arizona and was quoted in recent news reports on the damage done by police raids and vandalism to a home owned by the rapper DMX.

But, as always, I completely agree with the general concept: if you want to know what's going on, ask someone named Andrew Wheeler.

Laura B. Gets $1.6M

The New York Post -- that bastion of journalistic integrity and rectitude -- is reporting that Laura Bush's one-book deal with Scribner's for a memoir is pegged at $1.6 million.

Their source? "One well-placed publishing source." (Though another source, placed either less well or more well or precisely as well -- the Post doesn't specify -- thinks it could be a little more.)

That's about what I would have expected -- you can't offer a first lady less than seven figures, and the "point-six" implies some jockeying for position, or a possible auction. Bush's eventual book still might not earn out -- that's the risk every book runs -- but it'll have a better chance than those overpriced Clinton tomes of earlier this decade.

Movie Log: Bolt

The Thanksgiving animated movie this year -- after Igor but before Madagascar 2 in the eternal parade of cheery pseudo-entertainment for ankle-biters and their captive drivers -- was Bolt, the first post-Pixar Disney CGI film. It didn't look all that horrible, so I took the kids to see it.

(To refresh your memories, Thing 1 is an overgrown and incredibly energetic ten-year-old, all flailing arms, raised voice, and heart of mush. Thing 2 was a few weeks shy of turning eight, a slim quiet #2 who enjoys sneaking around things and doing tumbling. I now won't refer to them again in the course of this review.)

Bolt was going to be a movie called American Dog, until Disney bought Pixar, John Lasseter took over animation, and then -- the stories diverge wildly here -- either saved a doomed, flailing production or massively suckified what would have been the greatest animated movie in the history of everything. (A lot of that backstory is hashed out here; and googling "american dog movie" will find more.) But, for once, I'm going to avoid comparing a work of art to what it could or should have been, and just look at what actually was made.

Bolt is a dog, raised apparently from birth (whelping?) to believe that he has superpowers and that the vaguely sci-fi action TV show he stars in is his real life. The show is a kid on the run in jeopardy story, done in live action with an massive budget, that somehow is an immense hit, which is about as likely as the Bolt-doesn't-know-he's-normal plot. But the movie looks good and speeds through this introductory material quickly, so let's allow it for the sake of argument -- it's the premise, and we have to allow premises.

We all know what has to happen to a delusional main character, right? He gets dropped, hard, into the real world, where he finds some unlikely friends, who travel with him until he gets back to reclaim his place in the world. And that's the plot of Bolt from that point -- he slowly realizes he's not a super-dog, but still wants to get back to his owner/co-star/best friend, Penny.

What makes Bolt work is that it's breezy and entertaining; it's not trying to be profound, just to tell this story. Unlike Disney movies of a decade or so ago, it's not primarily there to deliver a message -- it's just the kind of movie that has a message in its back pocket at all times anyway.

That's one thing that makes it work -- there are two other major factors. First is the look of the movie: it's gorgeously rendered, down to the smallest details, and the 3D process used actually works, even for people with eyes as bad as mine. It's not intrusive 3D, but immersive -- blades of grass at the edge of the screen look close enough to touch, and real enough to stain your clothes. That surface realism goes a long way to getting an audience to settle into the movie.

And the last thing that makes Bolt work are the performances. The name-above-the-title folks -- John Travolta as Bolt, Miley Cyrus as Penny -- are fine, and neither they nor the script calls attention to who they are. (I'd forgotten it was Travolta, and couldn't figure out who it was from the voice until the end credits.) But the real standout, as every review has mentioned, is Disney story artist Mark Walton as Rhino, a delusional hamster in a ball who pretty much runs away with the movie.

Rhino is funny, and makes every scene he's in a joy. More extraordinarily, he's a funny geek, and that didn't turn every one of his lines to a reference to something outside the movie.

So Bolt is deeply, deeply predictable, but it does enough with what it has to make watching it fun. I'm not sure if the kids will want this one on DVD -- the usual test of a movie around here -- but we all certainly liked watching it once, and that's good enough for an animated movie for kids.

The Book Bail-Out

There was a short satirical piece by Julian Gough in the New York Times on Saturday, supposedly from Hank Paulson and concerning the bail-out of the literary industry. (I missed it in the actual paper, and noticed it when Sarah Weinman linked to it.)

Gough's piece feints in the direction of drawing blood -- such as when he writes

The role of the ratings agencies cannot be overlooked in creating this crisis. The Pulitzer, Booker and National Book Foundation committees continued to award top ratings to these novels, even as unread copies piled up all over America.

These unreadable novels are clogging up our literary system, and undermining the strength of our otherwise sound literary institutions.

If he actually followed up on that, and made a strong, cutting parallel between literary awards (given to books that only a few people actually enjoy reading) and complicated financial instruments (which only a very few people understand), he could have gone somewhere. Sadly, he doesn't; the end of the essay dribbles out.

The whole point of a piece like that is to throw out some outlandish solutions as if they were obvious, and Gough completely drops the ball there -- he doesn't actually give any details of his supposed book bail-out. It's as if he had the idea, but didn't bother to expand it beyond "Ha Ha! Wouldn't it be funny if there were a federal bail-out for publishing?!"

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/3

As expected, the mail was light this week -- actually, I was surprised to get anything, with most of publishing taking off for Christmas week and the mails being slow. But I did get a small handful of things, and this is what they were:

Shambling Towards Hiroshima, a short novel -- I believe officially a novella -- by James Morrow, which Tachyon will publish in trade paperback in February. It's one of Morrow's typically odd ideas -- that the Navy, in 1945, had its own doomsday-weapon plan to conquer Japan, using biological means. And those means were mutated, giant, fire-breathing iguanas, which bear more than a little resemblance to a certain movie character from a decade later. The hero of Shambling is a B-movie actor who has to put on a rubber suit and destroy a scale-model Japanese city, to scare the Japanese into surrendering so that releasing the real monsters won't be necessary. Morrow's last novella-as-a-book was the heartbreaking, magnificent City of Truth more than a decade ago; if Shambling is half as good as that, it'll be one of the best books of the year.

Matthew Sturges has a first novel, Midwinter, coming from Pyr as a trade paperback in March, but he's no new writer: he's already been writing comics professionally for several years, including co-writing Jack of Fables with creator Bill Willingham and runs of Blue Beetle, Salvation Run, Shadowpact, and Countdown to Mystery. Midwinter sounds like a dark epic fantasy novel -- not unlike his Pyr stablemate Joe Abercrombie -- set in the land of the Seelie.

And last for this week was a comics collection: The Martian Confederacy by Jason McNamara and Paige Braddock. It's published by Girl Twirl Comics, and came out sometime earlier this year. (Tip of the week to small publishers, or anyone sending out things to media/bloggers -- always include information about your product with the product. It doesn't need to be a long press release, though those are sometimes helpful -- just a slip of paper with the title, ISBN, publication date and other vital information is all you really need.) It's some kind of science fiction story set on Mars in 3535, with anthropomorphic bears as well as humans. (I think Mars has been semi-terraformed, since the characters are shown out on the surface with only a small breathing apparatus.)

Move Log: Seeing Other People

Some movies are big-screen-sized, demanding to be seen the size of a billboard. But many aren't -- and some movies seem to be designed for TV in the first place, using TV people to tell a TV story. Seeing Other People is one of the latter, a small-scale comedy set in LA that feels a little bit like the condensed first season of a hip show from a pay-cable channel.

Ed (Jay Mohr) and Alice (Julianne Nicholson) are living together, and engaged to be married in a few months. One evening, at a party, they accidentally witness a female friend having sex with a man she's just met. This leads Alice to worry that she's not had enough sexual experience in her life, so she decides that she and Ed should "see other people" -- have some random sex -- until the wedding, so they can increase their knowledge. Ed is intrigued, as any man who looks like Jay Mohr would be, but thinks it's a bad idea.

And of course it is a bad idea -- that's the whole point of the movie -- but Alice gets her way. And it doesn't work out the way she wants it to: Ed has a series of flings with bimbos, but she gets stuck in a pseudo-relationship with a needy landscaper. And their outside affairs inevitably deteriorate their relationship.

Along the way, there are some subplots involving their friends and family: such as Alice's stuck-up sister Claire (Lauren Graham) and her British husband Peter (Bryan Cranston), who have a bad marriage made worse by Peter's obsession with Alice; and Ed's obviously dichotomous two best friends, the womanizing Lou (Josh Charles) and Carl (Andy Richter), who finds love with divorcee Penelope (Helen Slater). And there are plenty more characters -- Ed and Alice are at the center, but Seeing Other People has a lot of characters, and their stories are introduced rather than examined.

(It really does feel like the re-edited version of the first season of a relatively classy HBO sitcom; they could have gotten six or eight half-hour episodes out of the material here.)

Seeing Other People is moderately funny when it tries to be, and not overly embarrassing when it tries to be serious. It's a small-scale movie that hasn't quite been focused correctly to be a movie, but it's worth watching, though probably not worth going out of your way for. Everybody in it is professional -- and there are a lot of everybodies in it, so there's a good chance one of your favorite TV actors has a role somewhere.

Movie Log: Hancock

There sure were a lot of big-budget superhero pictures this year, weren't there? And, despite the presence of the always-personable Will Smith (who also occasionally breaks out of his usual "love me" aura to do some decent acting), Hancock is by far the least of those movies.

Hancock, the character, is a superpowered guy living outside LA -- he's drunk and unstable, but the movie doesn't explain him in the early going. He's just there, like smog or traffic jams; part of the LA landscape that must be tolerated, since nothing can be done about it. (And that movie -- a Marvels-style story in which Hancock isn't the main character -- could have been quite good. That's only one of the many possible good movies Hancock nearly turns into, but, sadly, it ends up as a dumb and generic bad one instead.)

We do learn more about him later on -- there's a variation on Ebert's famous "Talking Killer" scene late in the movie, where another character explains Hancock's past and importance to him. By that point, though, the movie would have been better off without it -- Hancock as unknown and unknowable singular superpowered enigma is more intriguing than Hancock the last remaining blah blah blah.

Hancock tries on several movies before it finally settles -- there's the Hancock-as-public -menace movie, which quickly turns into poor-sad-alcoholic-Hancock, which shifts slightly into reforming-Hancock-through-the-power-of-PR movie (which brings in the game Jason Bateman as PR guru Ray Embrey, who's mostly left in the middle as the movie happens around him). And then it finally drops into the most obvious of the movies it could have been: the big-secrets-of-Hancock movie, crossed with a little minor revenge plot and some long-lost love, because the preview audiences always eat that up.

The second half of Hancock is alternately talking itself to death and smashing buildings to no good purpose; the special effects are excellent and the dialogue mostly sounds like real human beings (never to be assumed in a superhero movie), but it all adds up to a big fat nothing.

I found myself wishing that Hancock had been adapted from some comic-book series -- it wasn't was it? -- so that there would be some extensive backstory that I could amuse myself by trying to remember during the least plausible moments. Sadly, Hancock requires the audience to provide its own entertainment.

Movie Log: Priceless

I don't think it's fair to say that I'd see any movie with Audrey Tautou in it -- I'm still avoiding The DaVinci Code, for one -- but I'm quite willing to see any reasonably comedic movie she makes, and so The Wife and I watched Priceless sometime in late November once it hit video.

Priceless starts off in a ritzy hotel in Biarritz, where Jean (Gad Elmaleh) works as a bartender. Late one night, gorgeous Irene (Tatou) comes down to his bar after her much older sugar daddy, Jacques (Vernon Dobtcheff) has fallen asleep. But Jean was dozing in a chair -- against regulations -- so Irene thinks he's another guest. (And so, by implication, also rich.) Jean does nothing to dispossess her of that notion, and beds her in the Royal Suite that night.

A year later, Irene and Jacques return, and Jean tries to pick up where he left off -- but Jacques finds out. And Irene learns that Jean isn't rich, which is a big problem -- she's a woman who wants all of the best things in life, and a poor guy isn't going to be able to provide them. So Jacques turns her out, and Irene then quickly turns Jean out. Then both Jean and Irene scramble to try to get what they each want -- and those things, at that moment, are completely incompatible.

Priceless turns into a romantic comedy along the way, but doesn't get there fully until the end; this isn't a movie that believes in romantic flapdoodle in the least. (Though Jean does.) Jean follows Irene, blows through what little money he has, and then figures out another way to stay close to her -- in more ways than one. There is a more romantic ending than I'd been suspecting, but it all makes sense. And there are a lot of interesting scenes about love, longing, and expectations along the way.

It's quite a French movie -- I was just reading through the IMDB boards about it, which are more literate that usual there, but still tend to miss the big differences in expectations between the Americans and the French. It's not that the French don't believe in love, but they, as a people, are willing to believe that it's not a single, overwhelming, unique thing the way Hollywood does. Priceless is very entertaining, all the more so if you can remember where the people in it came from. I shudder to think of what an American remake would look like; I hope it never happens.


ah blah

The Shadow Factory by James Bamford

Yet another book I read from the library and already took back -- the library has been good for my wallet (and for the inside of my head, I hope), but not so good for blog purposes.

Bamford wrote The Puzzle Palace back in the early '80s -- at that time, and for a long time, it was the authoritative work on the super-secret National Security Agency (NSA). Puzzle is a great book, full of intriguing stories and behind-the-scenes details on the cold war; I read it a decade or so ago, when it was still fairly recent history.

Bamford is apparently the closest thing to an "official" expert on the NSA there is -- he followed up Puzzle twenty years later with Body of Secrets. I missed Body, but it brought the NSA's story up to early 2001 -- just before 9/11. (An afterword in the paperback edition gives some background on the NSA's involvement in the events of 9/11 and the hunt for bin Laden before and after that.)

And now Shadow Factory continues the NSA's history -- as much of it as Bamford can find out about and disseminate. It's a more passionate book than Puzzle was; Bamford is clearly unhappy with the damage to civil liberties over the past decade -- and, worse, he and his sources don't think the US is any safer or more secure because of the increase in surveillance and signals processing.

Shadow Factory bounces around quite a bit; it doesn't follow a chronological progression but moves from topic to topic, and so can be a choppy read. It does have a lot of very detailed information about the NSA's recent growth spurt, and its use of telecommunication companies as spying proxies. Bamford, as always, has extensive and detailed notes, and -- as far as I can tell from my layman's chair -- he's considered authoritative and knowledgeable within the intelligence community, so his accounts of NSA activities are probably as good as we'll get within our lifetimes.

If you've ever heard about "Carnivore" and worried about it, you'll want to read The Shadow Factory, though it won't make you feel any better. If you're just interested in the NSA generally -- or perhaps the role of secret agencies in the US -- it would be better to start with The Puzzle Palace. And if you just don't want to know...there are plenty of other books to read, so I hope you find one to enjoy.

Quote of the Week

"People don't rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways that others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up."
- Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, p.19

Movie Log: Iron Man

If Iron Man is as good as a comic-book movie can get, I'm entertained, but I'm still not impressed. Casting a whole lot of real actors -- starting with Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark/Iron Man -- and then having them take the material basically seriously does help