Along Publishers Row
By Campbell Geeslin
In a Page 1 article in The New York Times, Motoko Rich wrote, “For more than 500 years the book has been a remarkably stable entity: a coherent string of connected words, printed on paper and bound between covers.
“But in the age of the iPhone, Kindle and YouTube, the notion of the book is becoming increasingly elastic as publishers mash together text, video and Web features in a scramble to keep readers interested in an archaic form of entertainment.”
In October Simon & Schuster released four “vooks,” which combine video and electronic text and can be read and viewed online or on an iPhone or iPod Touch.
Author Walter Mosley told the Times, “As a novelist I would never ever” allow videos to substitute for prose.
“Reading,” he said, “is one of the few experiences we have outside of relationships in which our cognitive abilities grow. And our cognitive abilities actually go backwards when we’re watching television or doing stuff on computers.”
SLANG: Any writer today who is trying to produce dialogue for a contemporary novel is faced with a major problem. For dialogue to seem fresh and authentic, it needs to include slang.
The life span today of a slang word or phrase seems “to shorten with every click of the mouse.” The quote is from an article in The New York Times with the headline: “Dude, You Are So (Not) Obama.” Meanwhile, books still take almost a year from the time your manuscript is delivered to the publisher until it appears in a bookshop.
“What’s a hipster (hepcat?) To Do?” the Times asks. “Keeping up with the latest slang is at once easier and harder than ever. The number of slang dictionaries is growing, both online and off, not to mention social networking media that invent and discard words, phrases and memes at the speed of broadband.”
Slang dictionaries have been around for more than 200 years, but online resources such as slangsite.com are updated hundreds of times daily.
There are now 2,500 words for the word “drunk.” How do you choose one?
Pamela Monroe, a UCLA linguistics professor, said that people who learn slang secondhand tend to use it incorrectly. “I feel that your grandmother would have a real hard time sounding like Lil Wayne,” she said.
REWRITE: Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous memoir, A Moveable Feast, came out in a new edition in August. The editor this time is Seth Hemingway, a grandson of Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer.
The New York Times said that this “restored edition” adds passages from the manuscript “that Sean believes paint his grandmother in a more sympathetic light.”
Hemingway, 42, said, “I think this edition is right to set the record straight.”
The news was followed by an op-ed page essay by Ernest Hemingway’s friend and biographer A. E. Hotchner, who commented: “All publishers, Scribner included, are guardians of books that authors entrust to them. Someone who inherits an author’s copyright is not entitled to amend his work.”
TEARS WANTED: Ring Lardner, famous for his humor, once quipped: “How can you write if you can’t cry?”
GREAT EXPECTATIONS: A TV narrator on NBC’s Today show referred to Dan Brown as “the rock star of fiction writers.” And that was just a fraction of the hysterical hype leading up to the publication of The Lost Symbol on September 16.
The guards at the printing plant were shown keeping potential thieves at bay while the five million advance copies rolled from the presses.
The Lost Symbol was going to save publishers and booksellers, suffering from the economic downturn, everywhere. It was declared “a global financial stimulus.”
Amazon’s chief, Jeffrey P. Bezos, told Web-page viewers the book was “one of the most anticipated publishing events of all time.”
On the big day, Dan Brown himself appeared in “a rare, exclusive interview” on the Today show. It had been filmed in his home in a book-lined room (complete with a secret passage) that looked like a movie set.
Brown told interviewer Matt Lauer that he began his research on Symbol by taking tourist bus tours in Washington, D.C. He then constructed a 200-page outline. He said that he wrote his first book when he was five years old, dictating it to his mother. He did the illustrations for that book himself.
Brown explained that when he finds himself with a plot problem, he hangs upside down in gravity boots to find an answer. And “I spend my life now with a lot of imaginary friends.”
On its first day out, Symbol sold more than one million copies in hardcover and e-books. It was “the best-selling adult fiction title” ever and went straight to the top of the bestseller lists.
QUICK READ: “History’s shortest book would have to be Elbert Hubbard’s Essay on Silence, which has no words.” That gem comes from The Literary Life and Other Curiosities, by Robert Hendrickson.
READER: Novelist Larry McMurtry was interviewed for the Rice University magazine. He said he hopes he doesn’t have to write more fiction. “Eventually all novelists get worse,” McMurtry said. “Writing great fiction involves some combination of energy and imagination that cannot be energized or realized forever.”
FULL PEDAL: Jonathan Lethem’s new novel is Chronic City. In an interview with New York magazine, he said, “I put both pedals to the floor at the same time, which is my signature and maybe my folly.”
Later, he added, “I always think, Do the thing that only I can do. And I don’t mean this in any boastful sense, but as a descriptive word: It’s the most unprecedented work I’ve ever done.”
In the full-page photo, the author has the dark intensity of the young J. D. Salinger.
ATTACK: Alice Hoffman’s latest novel, The Story Sisters, was reviewed in The Boston Globe by a freelance critic, Roberta Silman. Hoffman didn’t like the review and posted her reaction on Twitter, where she called Silman a moron and asked, “How do some people get to review books? And give the plot away.” Hoffman posted Silman’s phone number and e-mail address and asked fans to “Tell her what u think of snarky critics.”
A day later Hoffman deleted her complaint and provided a statement via her publisher that included: “Of course, I was dismayed by Roberta Silman’s review, which gave away the plot of the novel, and in the heat of the moment I responded strongly and I wish I hadn’t. I’m sorry if I offended anyone. Reviewers are entitled to their opinions, and that’s the name of the game in publishing. I hope my readers understand that I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, and I’m truly sorry if I did.”
