Intellectual Curiosities and Provocations

December 2005

The Berenstains: A Goodbye in Bear Country

Comix,
Kid Lit,
News,
Tributes,
Visual Art
Children's author and illustrator Stan Berenstain died Saturday in Pennsylvania. Berenstain and his wife Jan created, authored and illustrated the wildly popular kids' series, The Berenstain Bears. With over 200 books in the series, the Berenstains have helped many young children learn to love to read, while slipping in a few life lessons in at the same time. Although many books now show kids and families much more realistically, at the time, the Berenstain Bears books were unique in that they showed kids with messy rooms, rude manners and families dealing with disagreements and other everyday problems. I definitely remember reading many a Berenstain Bears book back in the day. One thing that I didn't realize about the Berenstain Bears books is that they were first edited and helped into publication by the one and only Dr. Seuss. In addition to the books, the Berenstain Bears also starred in their own animated television series and holiday specials.

Dear Everyone

Being A Writer,
Internet Culture,
News
The annual holiday newsletter is a genre that's too often overlooked in literature, as far as I'm concerned. Marriages, births, deaths, family vacations and wacky anectdotes about the time the ferret ruined the Tupperware party or the latest updates on Aunt Shirley's corns ... these are things that contemporary fiction is just not delivering. Sure, if you're in the Sedaris family or on Dan Brown's mailing list, it is probably something you look forward to every year, but imagine the family of Leo Tolstoy (or Joyce Carol Oates, for that matter) seeing the mailman arrive with that thick envelope straining with hundreds of pages outlining in excruciating detail every minute of the last year. But I digress...

Our fine friends at Minnesota Public Radio tipped us off to a fun contest that begins today -- it might be just the thing to work around that writer's block ... and best of all, there's a great prize for the winner. See below for the details and I hope to see a LitKicks face bring home the victory.

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It is the time of year when we send or receive those end-of-year newsletters filled with funny family news: details about successes, delicate references to life's setbacks, and sometimes dramatically honest sentences that you have to re-read to believe.

Broadway’s Color Purple

African-American,
Drama,
Music
Alice Walker's 1983 novel The Color Purple is now a Broadway musical. The New York Times gave it a respectful but unenthusiastic review this morning, praising the lush pleasures of the production but complaining that the plot was lost in the frenetic pace.

I've heard enough about this production to discern that it is aiming to be a feel-good blockbuster (indeed, the finances of the Broadway musical biz mandates that virtually every new production must spend high and aim for the family/tourist market), and as such I suspect it is not an adaptation of the Alice Walker novel, as it claims to be, but rather an adaptation of Steven Speilberg's warm-hearted but sappy movie version of the Alice Walker novel.

Beverly the Problem

Film,
Kid Lit,
Television
Bookslut reports that Beverly Cleary's Ramona series is going to be turned into a movie. Cleary was probably my #1 favorite writer as a kid, and I still consider Ramona the Pest one of the most compelling and memorable kid's books ever written. My favorite part is the chilling Halloween scene where Ramona puts on a witch's mask and then freaks out because nobody can tell who she is (identity theory for ten year olds). I also love the part where she learns to turn the letter Q into a drawing of a cat.

Reviewing the Review: December 4 2005

Today's issue of the New York Times Book Review calls to mind the quantitative analyses of the editorial composition of a typical Book Review issue performed by Edward Champion last May, and Michael Orthofer of the Literary Saloon a couple of weeks ago.

This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: December 11 2005. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: November 27 2005.

Pride and Prejudice (or Firth Impressions)

British,
Classics,
Film,
Television
I am a major, major Pride and Prejudice dork.

Along with several of my librarian dork friends, I once even had a Pride and Prejudice party with tea sandwiches and a viewing of our favorite parts of the excellent 1995 television version produced by BBC and A&E. My friend Melinda and I can recite passages verbatim from the book at each other. Very sad.

I was looking forward to the new movie version, anxious to see it, but skeptical whether it could ever live up to the classic 1995 mini-series, which starred Colin Firth. It didn't, of course. Melinda and I saw the new movie together, whispering to each other and giggling. Probably having such an intimate acquaintance with the story helped us both -- we only had to see Mr. Collins to start laughing.

Quick Hits

News
1. If you're anywhere near New York this Sunday, drop by the Bowery Poetry Club for a David Amram jazz poetry event titled Ode to the Sidewalks of New York. David Amram is, in my opinion, a national treasure. He used to improvise with Jack Kerouac, and it's a telling fact that Amram speaks of Kerouac as his greatest influence and inspiration even though his other musical partners over the years have included the likes of Leonard Bernstein, Dizzy Gillespie and Bob Dylan. But I don't love a David Amram jazz poetry jam just for the awesome sense of history; I love it because Amram still makes the ebony and ivory jump like nobody else. When he's not playing piano, he's likely to be playing a solo duet with two flutes (each somehow producing a different melody from its designated side of his mouth), or banging on exotic drums, or inviting poets from the crowd to jump onstage to jam. Maybe he'll even pull out his french horn.

Harold Pinter: See This Fist?

Awards,
Drama,
Jewish,
News,
Politics


Somebody correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I've read several reactions to Harold Pinter's aggressive Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and I get the feeling I'm the only one here who actually knows Pinter's work.

Harold Pinter has spent his career studying the way human beings lie. It is his obsession, his medium. A play is called "Pinteresque" when the audience cannot trust a single character on stage. His working class Brits deceive, intimidate and overpower each other in tightly packed, oppressive rooms. They speak with great volume and speed, but they never mean anything they say -- their words are either weapons of cruelty or pathetic pleas for help.

By the time a Pinter play ends, at least one character has been completely destroyed, and at least one character has won a petty, hollow victory. The audience shuffles out of the theater feeling both excited by the naked display of power and guiltily complicit in the depraved brutality of human aggression.

Reviewing the Review: December 11 2005

Critic Caroline Alexander examines Canongate's impressive new series of commissioned books about mythology in today's New York Times Book Review. I've now spotted the first three entries in Canongate's series (Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth, Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad and Jeanette Winterson's Weight) arrayed proudly together in a bookstore, three beguiling sirens calling me into mankind's deep past. I am psyched about this series (that's a pun, I think), and I like Caroline Alexander's review, which reminds us that ancient mythology is the earliest extant human response to the same physical, social and existential anxieties that possess and control us today.

This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: December 18 2005. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: December 4 2005.

The Mary Shelley Story

British,
Classics,
Romantic,
Women


Mary Shelley was born Mary Godwin in London, England on August 30, 1797 to remarkable parents. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, a feminist when feminism was almost unheard of, wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792. Her father, William Godwin, a well-known critic of the British government and the founder of modern philosophical anarchism, wrote An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in 1793. Sadly, eleven days after Mary was born, her mother died of puerperal fever, leaving William Godwin to raise Mary and her older half-sister, Fanny.

Mary's father believed in the progressive type of education prescribed by philosophers like Rousseau, which emphasized experience over book-learning. He took Mary and Fanny on trips to different places and often invited writers, philosophers, and scientists to his house. These guests included Charles Lamb, William Wordsworth, Humphry Davy, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. One night Mary got to hear Coleridge recite his poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to a roomful of guests. Mary was writing her own stories by the time she was ten years old.

Clean For Gene

History,
Poetry,
Politics,
Tributes
Who knew that 60's-era Presidential semi-hopeful Eugene McCarthy was a practicing poet? I had no idea. I didn't know much about this maverick Senator from Minnesota, except that he apparently played the "Howard Dean role" in the 1968 Presidential election. He represented Americans who vigorously objected to the Vietnam War, caused a lot of ruckus, didn't even come close to winning the Democratic Party nomination, and watched his party lose the election from the sidelines.

Two New Poetry Books

Being A Writer,
Poetry,
Reviews
Lately, the review copies have been piling up here, which works pretty well for me, because I never have to wonder what I'm going to read. From the small press/indie part of the publishing world (which we at LitKicks love), here are two new poetry picks that have caught my eye.

Shabby Epiphanies by SJ Grady

Shabby Epiphanies takes its title from the eponymous poem that says

Among the secular priesthood
of our sexy new religion

worship must be sensual
(there's nothing else left)

Stakes is High

Fiction,
History,
Politics,
Postmodernism
A courtroom trial is, in semiotic terms, the creation of a literary text. And a text of great import: a human being stands before his or her peers and faces up to society's moral judgement. The entire procedure is carried out as an exchange of words, which are recorded for posterity. It's a fascinating process, and some notable texts are being written right now.

Let's start with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, pounding his fist and complaining that the whole trial process is a theatrical fraud. Well, he's probably right, but then Saddam has his own penchant for theatricality. With Saddam in the hot seat and the cameras rolling, there's more bad acting flying around the Baghdad courtroom than in a Tom Hanks/Robin Williams buddy film directed by Oliver Stone. We yearn for the days of the Nuremberg trials.

More Quick Ones

Fiction,
Film,
Music,
New York City,
News
1. The Syntax of Things Underrated Writers project is a really generous and useful offering. Personally, I feel terrible because I was invited to participate but chose to procrastinate instead. If I had responded, I think I would have duplicated Rake's nomination for J. Robert Lennon, who I was raving about recently in these pages.

Other useful literary round-ups from around the web: the Elegant Variations's 2005 Notables and Ready Steady Books' Best of the Year 2005. The litcup runneth over.

2. Revered playwright Sam Shepard will be making an unusual musical appearance with his son Walker and 60's urban folkie Peter Stampfel at the Bowery Poetry Club this Friday.

LitKicks Reviews

Fiction,
Postmodernism,
Reviews,
Transgressive
Here are a few new indie publications you might enjoy:

A Voice Above the Din by Steven Holbrook Hill

Steven Holbrook Hill's first novel A Voice Above the Din kicks off like a buddies-travelling-together story, a sort of male Thelma-and-Louise. As in many roadgoing tales, the two main characters have complementary rather than similar personalities. John is the crazed, fast-moving one, and narrator Spencer supplies the caution and introspection John lacks. Anybody who knows On The Road will recognize the setup, but Hill's book is heavier on plot and lighter on tone than Kerouac's. One of the characters is dealing with a serious disease, along with legal problems and attitude problems, and the story takes twists you won't see coming. Hill has created a blog to promote this book ... he also contributes occasional excellent articles to LitKicks as Stevadore. Check his stuff out.

Reviewing the Review: December 18 2005

Today's New York Times Book Review features an amusing endpaper by Pamela Paul about authors who compulsively check what bloggers are saying about them, and a few authors (such as Amy Tan) who refuse to do so. Paul's article is well-written, though she doesn't seem to be aware of the term for this activity: "ego-surfing". It's not just famous writers who do it; bloggers ego-surf each other more than anyone else.

I'm glad the Book Review occasionally salutes the blogosphere, but critic George Johnson takes it too far in his review of novelist David Leavitt's The Man Who Knew Too Much, a biography of the troubled but brilliant computer scientist Alan Turing. Johnson procrastinates reading the book he has been assigned to review. "Maybe I was just in the mood for fiction," he whines. What the hell? A Book Review critic isn't supposed to complain like a petulant child when forced to slog through a difficult book; that's the kind of stuff us bloggers do. What's next -- are they going to start sharing their personal problems and MP3 playlists?

This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: January 8 2006. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: December 11 2005.

Fairness at the Book Review

Lit-Crit,
News
New York Times public editor Byron Calame wrote about accusations of favoritism and personal bias in the New York Times Book Review this Sunday. I thought I read the piece thoroughly this weekend, but it wasn't until I read several emphatic blogger reactions (including separate pieces from both writers at GalleyCat) that I realized I'd missed the article's surprising conclusion: Calame is recommending that the Book Review adopt a new policy of not reviewing books by authors who write for the Times.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

Beat Generation,
News,
Poetry,
Reviews,
Spoken Word
Here at LitKicks we're big fans of spoken word and recordings of poetry readings of all shapes and sizes. When poetry (and prose, from time to time) jumps from the page into the air on voices of poets themselves -- whether they're behind a microphone in a recording studio, on a stage in a club or on the street preaching poetic harmony -- hearing definitely is believing. Here are just a few new audio selections that have captured our attention over the past year:

American Life in Poetry: December Notes

Poetry
U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser is writing a series of columns that highlights poetry and its importance in everyday life. From time to time we'll share the reprinted columns here, and provide you a chance to add your comments. This simple piece by Nancy McCleery seemed like a nice offering to leave as I begin my own holiday vacation. Feel free to share your December notes here as well as your thoughts on this selection.)


American Life in Poetry: Column 039

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

This article is part of the American Life In Poetry series. The next post in the series is American Life in Poetry: Geology. The previous post in the series is American Life in Poetry: In My Mother’s House.

Shortlisted for the Man Blooker

Awards,
Fiction,
Internet Culture,
Litkicks,
News,
Poetry
Okay, so it's not the Man Blooker prize ... it's just the Blooker Prize, a new annual award for blog-based books, and LitKicks' Action Poetry: Literary Tribes for the Internet Age is in the running.

In fact, through the happy accident of alphabetism, our book is at the very top of the list, and we like the way that feels. We believe we should win this award, and in a vain attempt to drum up a huge groundswell of popular support I'd like to talk about what this book is and how it came about.