December 29, 2006
Word Up had a bit of trouble coming up with a favorites list for 2006. As much as we love us some literature up in this blog piece, it's not as though we're only consuming new, contemporary fiction. There's always new-to-us classics to discover, not to mention long-published tomes that have been on our must-read lists for months. So without getting too self-explanatory, and with thanks to the kind people at the Boston Public Library who deal with my overdue fees each week, here are my picks for the best books I've read this year.
BEST OF 2006:
Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl
TOP 10 (new and old) OF 2006:
1. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
2. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
3. The Keep - Jennifer Egan
4. House of Sand and Fog - Andre Dubus III
5. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
6. Runaway - Alice Munro
7. Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky
8. Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood
9. While I Was Gone - Sue Miller
10. The Brambles - Eliza Minot
December 22, 2006
"Tonight, Tonight..."
Or the previous night, as the story goes. Clement Clarke Moore’s “’TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS” was published in 1823, and it launched the modern Santa Claus myth. Before that, Santa was just St. Nicholas, patron saint of children, not a jolly fat dude with a penchant for monochromatic red outfits and worldwide sleigh travel and a ginormous sack of toys. So you could say that Moore was responsible for kick-starting the mass commercialization of the holidays, but we’d rather not blame it on a writer. Denial is a wonderful thing, and so is being read to: you and yours can listen to the tale of Father Christmas this evening. (Kids should feel free to wear their PJs.) But don’t brush your teeth beforehand — there’ll be candy to spare at the Boston University Barnes & Noble | 660 Beacon St, Boston | 4 pm | free | 617.267.8484.
Holy Fug this is hilarious:
Happy Chrismakwanzukkah from Word Up!
December 21, 2006
It's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. No pub date or cover yet; Rowling's still working on it. The deaths of two major characters TK.
Sigh.
December 20, 2006
Celebrate “A YEAR OF POETRY” at Brookline Booksmith with famous local scribe and BU Creative Writing prof ROBERT PINSKY, the Phoenix’s own LLOYD SCHWARTZ, 11 other local poets, plus Alhambra’s Poetry Calendar 2007 editor SHAFIQ NAZ. What would the next 365 days of your life be without some free verse and iambic pentameter? The gang will read and sign their own works and read from those of the masters at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St, Brookline | 7 pm | free | 617.566.6660.
And now, for a fun game we're stealing from our super-special OTD friends. We'll call this one Odd Couples Part III: Separated-At-Birth Poet Laureates:
Just ignore the haircut because obvs if you Google the Pinsky you'll find a ton of pics of him with a floppy mop. However:
1. Smoldering "Come hither, I'm an artist of sorts and I can caress your soul" eyes. Check.
2. A chin so square you could bounce a penny off it. Check.
3. Same schnoz. Check.
4. On the brink of an "I know it all" smirk.
5. Holy hotmess eyebrows. Check.
Yup. When we're right, we're right.
December 19, 2006
"YUM-O!!!"
There are two distinct types of people in this fine world: those who loathe Food Network host and next-gen Martha Stewart superwoman RACHAEL RAY for her precious catch-phrase cooking and those who think her ever-present giggly abbreviations of extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO, y’all) are totally adorable. We fall somewhere in between: we’re not members of the infamous LiveJournal community that sips on major Rachael haterade, but we do sometimes want to slap her across the mouth when she asks “How good is THAT?!” for the thousandth time in a half-hour show. Cripes, we get it, Rach! It tastes nice! That aside, we’ve found her 30-Minute Meal cookbooks (even though they really take longer than 30) to be useful once we figured out how a stovetop works. Her latest, 2, 4, 6, 8: 30-Minute Meals for Couples and Crowds, is exactly what it sounds like: easy directions on whipping up a Strawberry Balsamic Vinaigrette Salad for your honey or enough Boozy Berries with Biscuits to feed a small army. Judge her, if you must, when she signs at the Barnes & Noble at the Prudential Center, 800 Boylston St, Boston | noon | free | 617.247.6959.
December 19, 2006
"YUM-O!!!"
There are two distinct types of people in this fine world: those who loathe Food Network host and next-gen Martha Stewart superwoman RACHAEL RAY for her precious catch-phrase cooking and those who think her ever-present giggly abbreviations of extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO, y’all) are totally adorable. We fall somewhere in between: we’re not members of the infamous LiveJournal community that sips on major Rachael haterade, but we do sometimes want to slap her across the mouth when she asks “How good is THAT?!” for the thousandth time in a half-hour show. Cripes, we get it, Rach! It tastes nice! That aside, we’ve found her 30-Minute Meal cookbooks (even though they really take longer than 30) to be useful once we figured out how a stovetop works. Her latest, 2, 4, 6, 8: 30-Minute Meals for Couples and Crowds, is exactly what it sounds like: easy directions on whipping up a Strawberry Balsamic Vinaigrette Salad for your honey or enough Boozy Berries with Biscuits to feed a small army. Judge her, if you must, when she signs at the Barnes & Noble at the Prudential Center, 800 Boylston St, Boston | noon | free | 617.247.6959.
December 18, 2006
BUH BYE: So totally fired
The big news in the publishing world today is Rupert Murdoch's firing ReganBooks publisher Judith Regan for some nasty comments she made about Jewish people. And probably for just being an all-around nutcase. Nice work, Judy! We're rivited by your psychotic literary misadventures. Try not to think too hard about the fact that not even Fox would run your O.J. interview, and yet they still proudly air the fourth season of The O.C.
All she wants for Christmas is a really, really good lawyer. Good luck, doll face! Better get started on those memoirs now.
December 15, 2006
Sam Rosen stumbled across the Paper Cut Zine Library in Harvard Square earlier this fall because he was at a "speed friending" event in a neighboring room. "We were like 'whoa, what's this place about?'" he says. And so began his love for zines. He's a librarian at the Mount Auburn Street spot now ("anyone can be a librarian," he says), and he's organized one of the library's monthly benefits taking place this Sunday at 6 pm.
The Paper Cut has gotten in some trouble in the past for hosting too-loud shows. "Punk shows, mostly," says Sam. "Because it was punk, it got rowdy." Last month's was folk-acoustic, and this weekend, it'll be experimental-electronic music, with Kris Thompson (ethereal theremin), Encanti (seriously out there IDM), Cars and Trains (mandolins, glockenspiels), and Poltergeist Friction (said to give strange dreams). It's a $5 cover. And they'll be keeping it "as loud as a high school biology lab video." Yes.
The librarians are working on alphabetizing the extensive, growing collection of zines. And Sam's working on creating his own. It's called Magical Thinking, and based on his experiences: "everything from drinking 40's in Pete's bathroom to my funniest childhood memories, and this adventure I had with a friend where we found a boat at three in the morning near the Cambridgeside Galleria and hopped on it and went down the Charles. Zines can be anything."
The benefit is meant to raise a little money, but more so, raise awareness that the spot exists. It's at 45 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge. Call 617.492.2606.
December 14, 2006
"I'm immature!"
The almighty Gawker points us to this funny bit about Michael Crichton, a man who makes his living writing techno-thrillers.
When The New Republic's Michael Crowley wrote a not-so-nice feature profile about Crichton for the mag, the author's fifth grader-like response was to "create" a villainous character named Mick Crowley in his newest novel. It's not bad enough for the fictional Crowley to be painted as a child rapist, oh no. He also has a tiny dick.
But note the real Crowley's Cock and Bull reply. Classy!
Shame they didn't explain the small penis rule in j-school. Or were we just asleep in COM 101 that day?
December 11, 2006
SMELL THE GLOVE
An economically depressed small town in New York lobbies to be recognized as a Native American tribe (the Filaquonsett) so it can build a casino to bring in revenue. This pisses off the neighboring Native American tribe and casino, who then build a toxic-waste dump next to the Filaquonsett joint. Hilarity ensues. The rest of HARRY SHEARER’s Not Enough Indians is pretty much as bat-shit crazy as the man himself. Originally scheduled for sometime in September, Shearer will actually read tonight at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard St, Brookline | 6 pm | $2 | 617.734.2501 or www.coolidge.org.
December 08, 2006
Cynthia von Buhler has lead many lives: in Boston she fronted the S&M-themed musical review Women of Sodom; ran a gallery out of the Allston home she dubbed Castle von Buhler; and created such unforgettable works as the Cynth-O-Matic, a vending machine that dispensed, among other things, vials of her own pubic hair. An award-winning illustrator for her paintings, which were often done in the style of old masters, she also sent out publicity stills in which her shirt read, “Fuck You, You Fucking Fuck.” But her latest incarnation might be the strangest twist yet: now an established children’s author, she’s released a sweet book called The Cat Who Wouldn’t Come Inside. Still, that didn’t stop her from recording an accompanying song that milks one particular double-entendre for all its worth. In advance of her reading and signing tomorrow at 3 pm at Diskovery in Brighton, we talked with von Buhler as she was installing one of her 3-D sets from the book in the Museum of American Illustration in New York City.
How did you go from the sort of cutting edge art and performance stuff you do to kids’ books? What was the transition like?
People don’t actually realize that I’ve been doing this the whole time. Before I was doing any performance or music, my major was children’s books. So I have been doing illustrations for magazines, and painting, and sculpture, all at the same time that I was going off on this other tangent doing music and performance art. And I still do performance art as well. Even meeting with children serves as performance art in itself.
Is there one method or mode of art and/or performance art that you feel more comfortable with? Or is it good to go back and forth?
To me, it’s all visual art. I would get bored if I was doing one or the other. I’m very comfortable doing children’s books and doing illustrations and working with my hands and creating things. I’m very comfortable with that. I’m not as comfortable with singing.
Is having an audience made up of kids more difficult than having grown-ups watching you?
Or like fetish people? (Laughs). Is it different? I guess so. It’s different, but it is an audience.
Different how?
I think that these are kids you are forming. You meet with these kids in school and you have a big impression on them. I think older people are kind of set in their ways in terms of what they like and what they do.
Someone around here mentioned that you’d been a cat-book convention recently. I’ve gotta be honest and say I picture a lot of old ladies in cat sweatshirts. I’d love to hear how that was, how you fit in.
It was actually very fun. I went out to California to do some book signings and workshops, and there’s something called the Cat Writer’s association, and it’s sort of like . . . have you ever been to a Star Trek convention? Well it’s kind of like the female counterpart to the Star Trek convention. The women, they’re a little bit older — in their 40s, 50s, 60s — and it was really great to hang out with older women and just talk about our love of cats and people who rescue cats. There were a lot of people wearing cat T-shirts and cat paraphernalia and clothing which was a tacky, but yeah, very nice people, just like at the Star Trek conventions, ‘cause I used to like to go to those. You know, it’s people who are really into something in that obsessive kind of way.
Cynthia von Buhler signs The Cat Who Wouldn’t Come Inside with Phoenix contributor and author Clea Simon, Saturday, December 9, from 3 to 6 pm at Diskovery, 569 Washington Street, Brighton, 617.787.2640
December 07, 2006
TURNING TRICKS?: Fishbowl vs. Cutler
It's been awhile since we checked in with the crew at Off the Shelf, the Boston Globe's lit blog. Yesterday, publishing reporter and all-around smarty guy David Mehegan posted a very funny rant about author's acknowledgment pages in fiction novels. He addressed it to the Department of Curmudgeon. Here's an excerpt:
I can't imagine Mark Twain writing, in "Huckleberry Finn," "I'd like to thank the Hannibal, Missouri, public library, which helped me refresh my memory on the technology of Mississippi steamboats," or George Eliot writing, at the end of "Middlemarch," "special thanks to Professor So-and-So, whose assistance was invaluable to me in my researches into the Reform Bill of 1832," or Fyodor Dostoevski writing, at the end of "Crime and Punishment," "my profuse thanks to Superintendent M-- of the St. Petersburg department of police for his generous advice on my treatment of investigatory methods." Or Dante: "I'd like to thank Virgil, for agreeing to be in my poem, and the various Islamic scholars who preserved the ancient writings that we in Europe now enjoy...."
Authors, I beg you to write your books and don't make me listen to your pencil-sharpening and page-turning and the "chunk" of the checkout machine at the library.
Mehegan, you're like the publishing industry's Andy Rooney! So adorable. Somebody should give you your own cable-access show. Which reminds us, that Andy Rooney event at the Brattle, originally scheduled for Dec 12, was canceled until further notice. We'll keep you updated.
For what it's worth: we actually enjoy reading author acknowledgment pages. Writers work HARD on their books -- fiction and non -- and it's their right to give thanks to whomever they please on the one page of their tome that didn't have to go through thirty revisions.
And here's another thing that's been amusing us on this utterly delightful Thursday morning. You guys ever heard of Jessica Cutler? Well, she's yet another blogger-turned-author. She writes about sex, and she did a VERY, VERY naughty thing. We LURVE it when the industry throws a tantrum over a scandal as juicy as a lecture cancellation.
The Book Standard reports:
MediaBistro’s catty attack on blogger-turned-author Jessica Cutler -- for backing out of its “From Blogger to Author” event next week (an attack which did garner the site some publicity on the New York Post’s Page Six and Gawker) -- forces us to once again consider the issue of what makes bloggers successful as authors -- or whether, in fact, one can translate into the other. Survey says: yes, sort of.
Cutler's book, The Washingtonienne, isn't breaking any Book Scan sales records (especially considering the hefty advance -- typical). Gawker called her a "smart whore," and Page Six made their usual dirty headline puns.
MediaBistro definitely didn't spare Cutler. They write whine:
Still, we're shocked -- shocked -- that someone known for exchanging sex for money would behave this way.
OUCH. We think you hurt her feelings, Fishbowl.
Perhaps Cutler just forgot to thank MediaBistro in her acknowledgements page and was too ashamed to show her face at the course. Which is still happening without her. Obvs.
December 05, 2006
Brookline Booksmith dedicates an evening to literary zeitgeist with a killer double bill. First up is local academic LEORA LEV, whose Enter at Your Own Risk: The Dangerous Art of Dennis Cooper is the first critical collection of essays on the author of the George Miles novels (Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, Period), which typify his wall-of-assault psychosexual prose. Enter includes a never-before-published piece by William S. Burroughs as well as essays by Michael Cunningham, John Waters, and Pitchfork and Village Voice contributor BRANDON STOSUY, who knows a thing or two about NYC’s erstwhile avant-garde literary community, having compiled photographs, old poems, short stories, and work from journals, ’zines, and magazine covers to chronicle 18 years in Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992, which doubles as a visual and written subculture archive. Accounting for both the recognizable — like Dennis Cooper — and forgotten figures who ran in NYC’s literary bohemia, Up Is Up is part gallery, part cultural map. Get downtown with Lev and Stosuy at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St, Brookline | 7 pm | free | 617.566.6660.
December 04, 2006
SPORTS GUY
How did Tom Brady go from being a sixth-round draft pick to the Patriots’ star quarterback and one of football’s most celebrated players? Ah, the warm-fuzzy story of the underdog. Sports journalist, former Phoenix staffer, and NPR’s “Only A Game” contributor CHARLES P. PIERCE tells the tale of Brady’s rise in Moving the Chains: Tom Brady and the Pursuit of Everything.
Pierce may be a fan boy, but he profiles the Patriot past his team’s third Super Bowl win in 2004 and on into their disappointing 2005 season in order to highlight the athlete’s talent and skill under any circumstances. And did we mention he's a totally funny guy? He'll read as part of the Phoenix's Author Series tonight. Chat with Chuck, eat, drink, buy books, go home, read your face off. That's at Hong Kong (in conjunction with the Harvard Book Store), 1236 Mass Ave, Cambridge | 6:30 pm | Free | 800.542.READ.
December 01, 2006
A few things to note:
1. It's officially December, which means the 2006 National Novel Writing Month bonanza is dunzo. And we'd like to know: did any of you participate? Does anyone get something worthwhile out of this thing? Is it just bullshit pressure to pump out drivel for 30 days? Or is it a magical literary bender of creativity? Discuss. Or just be quiet.
2. Word Up was majorly displeased with the complete disregard for heinous, dismal, gray November weather. How the fug are we supposed to buckle down and brood over Robert Frost poems when it's 66 freaking degrees out? Unacceptable.
3. 24 shopping days to go. What books should we buy people as holiday gifts? Is it appropriate to force-feed our favorites on them? Is buying someone a used book with cool things underlined in it tacky and cheap? Or unique and thoughtful? The thing is, we fucking hate hardcover prices. If we knew how to create one of those swank INTERNET polls, we'd put one up here, but as it is we'll just beg for responses.
4. Best of 2006 book lists. Start thinking about them, because we haven't.
