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Blog Headline of the Week
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
Bookish Linkage
- Margaret Atwood speaks on censorship in receiving the American PEN Literary Service Award.
- Green Apple Books is using its blog to republish from its email newsletter an occasional series of original essays by writers called “Why I Read.”
- Those wacky Australians. When reports surfaced that a cookbook recipe erroneously told users to add “freshly ground black people,” sales of the book quadrupled.
- When China Miéville won the Arthur C. Clarke award, the UK’s most prestigious science fiction prize, this week he did so for the third time — and it’s even a book I’ve read.
- The LA Times Book Prizes were announced last week. I’d read only the winner of the award for first fiction.
- The shortlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize has been announced. Brodeck is the only one I’ve read that made it from the longlist so, of course, it’s my favorite for the prize, given to fiction by a living author which has been translated into English and published in the UK in the last year.
- Philip K. Dick’s “Exegesis”, a journal he wrote documenting and analyzing “visions” he experienced in 1974, is scheduled to be released in two volumes, with the first coming next year.
Nonbookish Linkage
It’s a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way.
Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop
Why people hate us lawyers: Jennifer Walzer was charged $6,000 for a review of a sublease. The bill included a $60 charge for responding to a courtesy e-mail she sent that she would review the lawyer’s comments when she returned to the office. Billed as taking 12 minutes, the response said, “I hope everything is O.K. Take your time.” (ABA Journal)
I truly couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried: “A restaurant that refused to seat a blind patron because its workers allegedly believed his seeing-eye dog was gay has been fined $1,500 by the Australian Equal Opportunity Tribunal.”
Up to 95,000 descendants of the prophet Muhammad are planning to bring a libel action in Britain over “blasphemous” cartoons of the founder of Islam. (Jonathan Turley)
A federal judge ordered U.S. marshals to bring a 19-year-old college freshman to court in chains to explain why she dodged jury duty. (WSJ Law Blog)
Interesting argument: A federal government expert reportedly will testify that can’t trust Rwandan witnesses because they are “inherently unreliable.”
Lowering the Bar is looking for the longest known sentence in a legal document. If the contest includes some of the pro se pleadings I’ve seen in the past, the winner could go on for a couple pages.
I call my lawyer. He’s the best lawyer in Miami. He’s such a good lawyer, that by tomorrow morning, you gonna be working in Alaska. So dress warm.
Tony Montana (Al Pacino), Scarface
God* comes to you and tells you that, from this day forward, you may only read ONE type of book–one genre–period, but you get to choose what it is. Classics, Science-Fiction, Mystery, Romance, Cookbooks, History, Business … you can choose, but you only get ONE.
What genre do you pick, and why?
*Whether you believe in God or not, pretend for the purposes of this discussion that He is real.
This may be the toughest question of all the book memes I’ve done. I keep bouncing among literary fiction, translated fiction, biography and history. Ultimately, though, despite the problems I mentioned yesterday that some popular historians are having, I have to go with history. It seems to provide the widest range of potential material.
You can read about people, places and things. You can read about politics and religion. You can read about war and peace. You can read about culture and philosophy. In other words, history seems to cover the waterfront. While that can also be said of fiction, I am one of those who believe history is part of the key to the future.
Would I want to survive on one type of book? No. But if I had to, history may come closest to keeping me reading instead of staring at that mind-numbing device called television.
I talked to God and God said
Nothing that we shouldn’t already know
“I Talked to God,” The Uninvited, The Uninvited
April isn’t ending well for a couple of historians.
Orlando Figes, a University of London professor who specializes in Russian history, was identified as the author of some scathing reviews of other historians’ books on Amazon. Figes originally claimed his wife wrote the the reviews but now has ‘fessed up. But that does not appear to have reinforced the dike. There are now reports Figes “could face multiple lawsuits and that his academic position may be in jeopardy, [and there are] second looks into numerous past charges of plagiarism that journalists and historians now say Figes suppressed by constantly threatening expensive lawsuits.”
I read and reviewed Figes’ The Whisperers in late 2007. I enjoyed it and thought it thoroughly researched. It is, though, one of the books his anonymous Amazon reviews suggested readers consider instead of those by two other noted Russian historians.
Meanwhile, the late Stephen Ambrose, who seemed to be America’s favorite historian, is accused of fabricating interviews with President Eisenhower. Ambrose initially built his academic reputation as a chronicler of Eisenhower. Despite the fact he mentions a number of interviews with Eisenhower in his two-volume biography of the president and talked of “hundreds and hundreds of hours” interviewing the former president, The New Yorker reports that, in actuality, he only saw Eisenhower three times, for a total of less than five hours.
In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing another historian’s work in his book The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s over Germany (whose subjects included George McGovern). Ambrose, who died later that year, apologized but after those allegations surfaced he was accused of doing the same in another half dozen books. But fabrication is far more dire than plagiarism. As James Palmer notes, “Everything Ambrose claimed Eisenhower said, including quotes that have often been used by other historians, must now be taken as false.”
It’s bad enough when historians provide support for British humorist Max Beerbohm’s oft-quoted adage, “History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.” Potential fabrication shakes the very foundation of history books, whether popular or academic.
Writing history is a perpetual exercise in judgment.
Cushing Strout, The American Image of the Old World
Whether violence is a functional equivalent of obscenity may be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. Yesterday, the Court agreed to rule on the constitutionality of a California law banning the sale or rental of violent video games to minors, a law predicated in part on the Court’s obscenity jurisprudence.
The California statute defines a violent video game in part as one in which a player can kill, maim, dismember or sexually assault an image of a human being if those acts are depicted in a manner that a reasonable person would find appeals to “a deviant or morbid interest” of minors, is “patently offensive” to prevailing community standards of what is suitable for minors, and causes the game as a whole to lack “serious, artistic, political or scientific value for minors.” The quoted language echoes the Court’s prior definitions of obscenity. Similar language was used in a statute the Supreme Court upheld in 1968 in Ginsberg v. New York, where it said material constitutionally protected for adults could be deemed obscene for minors. Although the Court said it was not ruling on “the totality” of regulating First Amendment values when it comes to minors, California is urging the Court use the case to uphold the video game law.
The law was supposed to go into effect Jan. 1, 2006, but was blocked by a federal court. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year that it would not extend Ginsberg beyond obscenity cases and found the law unconstitutional. Although six other states have adopted similar laws, all have been blocked by the courts after being challenged.
Interestingly, the decision to review the case comes the week after an 8-1 decision holding unconstitutional a federal law banning so-called “crush videos,” videos featuring the intentional torture and killing of helpless animals. That law created an exception for videos with “serious religious, political,scientific, educational, journalistic, historical, or artistic value.” The Court rejected the government’s argument that, like obscenity, such videos should not be entitled to First Amendment protection, akin to what California is arguing in the video game case. It said it has never held that the “serious value” of expression was a precondition to being protected by the First Amendment.
As a result, the California case appears to be asking whether violence is the equivalent of obscenity for First Amendment purposes, at least insofar as minors are concerned. Personally, I’ve long said we’d be far better off if parents were more concerned about the amount of violence their children see than whether they see others display their “private parts.” That does not, however, translate into believing someone else’s freedom of expression should be restricted because some fail in their parental duties.
If you suck on a tit the movie gets an R rating. If you hack the tit off with an axe it will be PG.
Jack Nicholson (attributed)
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