Friday October 1, 2010 is International Follow a Library Day on Twitter (http://followalibrary.blogspot.com/p/about.html).
If you love your library tweet mentioning your favourite library (if you don't already have a favourite library to tweet about, may we suggest the Mississauga Library System (http://twitter.com/mississaugalib)?). Don't forget to use the hashtag #followalibrary.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
How to Raise Boys Who Read
Hint: Not with gross-out books and video-game bribes.
by: Thomas Spence
When I was a young boy, America's elite schools and universities were almost entirely reserved for males. That seems incredible now, in an era when headlines suggest that boys are largely unfit for the classroom. In particular, they can't read.
According to a recent report from the Center on Education Policy, for example, substantially more boys than girls score below the proficiency level on the annual National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test. This disparity goes back to 1992, and in some states the percentage of boys proficient in reading is now more than ten points below that of girls. The male-female reading gap is found in every socio-economic and ethnic category, including the children of white, college-educated parents.
The good news is that influential people have noticed this problem. The bad news is that many of them have perfectly awful ideas for solving it.
Everyone agrees that if boys don't read well, it's because they don't read enough. But why don't they read? A considerable number of teachers and librarians believe that boys are simply bored by the "stuffy" literature they encounter in school. According to a revealing Associated Press story in July these experts insist that we must "meet them where they are"—that is, pander to boys' untutored tastes.
For elementary- and middle-school boys, that means "books that exploit [their] love of bodily functions and gross-out humor." AP reported that one school librarian treats her pupils to "grossology" parties. "Just get 'em reading," she counsels cheerily. "Worry about what they're reading later."
There certainly is no shortage of publishers ready to meet boys where they are. Scholastic has profitably catered to the gross-out market for years with its "Goosebumps" and "Captain Underpants" series. Its latest bestsellers are the "Butt Books," a series that began with "The Day My Butt Went Psycho."
The more venerable houses are just as willing to aim low. Penguin, which once used the slogan, "the library of every educated person," has its own "Gross Out" line for boys, including such new classics as "Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger."
Workman Publishing made its name telling women "What to Expect When You're Expecting." How many of them expected they'd be buying "Oh, Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty" a few years later from the same publisher? Even a self-published author like Raymond Bean—nom de plume of the fourth-grade teacher who wrote "SweetFarts"—can make it big in this genre. His flatulence-themed opus hit no. 3 in children's humor on Amazon. The sequel debuts this fall.
Education was once understood as training for freedom. Not merely the transmission of information, education entailed the formation of manners and taste. Aristotle thought we should be raised "so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought; this is the right education."
"Plato before him," writes C. S. Lewis, "had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful."
This kind of training goes against the grain, and who has time for that? How much easier to meet children where they are.
One obvious problem with the SweetFarts philosophy of education is that it is more suited to producing a generation of barbarians and morons than to raising the sort of men who make good husbands, fathers and professionals. If you keep meeting a boy where he is, he doesn't go very far.
The other problem is that pandering doesn't address the real reason boys won't read. My own experience with six sons is that even the squirmiest boy does not require lurid or vulgar material to sustain his interest in a book.
So why won't boys read? The AP story drops a clue when it describes the efforts of one frustrated couple with their 13-year-old unlettered son: "They've tried bribing him with new video games." Good grief.
The appearance of the boy-girl literacy gap happens to coincide with the proliferation of video games and other electronic forms of entertainment over the last decade or two. Boys spend far more time "plugged in" than girls do. Could the reading gap have more to do with competition for boys' attention than with their supposed inability to focus on anything other than outhouse humor?
Dr. Robert Weis, a psychology professor at Denison University, confirmed this suspicion in a randomized controlled trial of the effect of video games on academic ability. Boys with video games at home, he found, spend more time playing them than reading, and their academic performance suffers substantially. Hard to believe, isn't it, but Science has spoken.
The secret to raising boys who read, I submit, is pretty simple—keep electronic media, especially video games and recreational Internet, under control (that is to say, almost completely absent). Then fill your shelves with good books.
People who think that a book—even R.L. Stine's grossest masterpiece—can compete with the powerful stimulation of an electronic screen are kidding themselves. But on the level playing field of a quiet den or bedroom, a good book like "Treasure Island" will hold a boy's attention quite as well as "Zombie Butts from Uranus." Who knows—a boy deprived of electronic stimulation might even become desperate enough to read Jane Austen.
Most importantly, a boy raised on great literature is more likely to grow up to think, to speak, and to write like a civilized man. Whom would you prefer to have shaped the boyhood imagination of your daughter's husband—Raymond Bean or Robert Louis Stevenson?
I offer a final piece of evidence that is perhaps unanswerable: There is no literacy gap between home-schooled boys and girls. How many of these families, do you suppose, have thrown grossology parties?
Mr. Spence is president of Spence Publishing Company in Dallas.
from: Wall Street Journal
by: Thomas Spence
When I was a young boy, America's elite schools and universities were almost entirely reserved for males. That seems incredible now, in an era when headlines suggest that boys are largely unfit for the classroom. In particular, they can't read.
According to a recent report from the Center on Education Policy, for example, substantially more boys than girls score below the proficiency level on the annual National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test. This disparity goes back to 1992, and in some states the percentage of boys proficient in reading is now more than ten points below that of girls. The male-female reading gap is found in every socio-economic and ethnic category, including the children of white, college-educated parents.
The good news is that influential people have noticed this problem. The bad news is that many of them have perfectly awful ideas for solving it.
Everyone agrees that if boys don't read well, it's because they don't read enough. But why don't they read? A considerable number of teachers and librarians believe that boys are simply bored by the "stuffy" literature they encounter in school. According to a revealing Associated Press story in July these experts insist that we must "meet them where they are"—that is, pander to boys' untutored tastes.
For elementary- and middle-school boys, that means "books that exploit [their] love of bodily functions and gross-out humor." AP reported that one school librarian treats her pupils to "grossology" parties. "Just get 'em reading," she counsels cheerily. "Worry about what they're reading later."
There certainly is no shortage of publishers ready to meet boys where they are. Scholastic has profitably catered to the gross-out market for years with its "Goosebumps" and "Captain Underpants" series. Its latest bestsellers are the "Butt Books," a series that began with "The Day My Butt Went Psycho."
The more venerable houses are just as willing to aim low. Penguin, which once used the slogan, "the library of every educated person," has its own "Gross Out" line for boys, including such new classics as "Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger."
Workman Publishing made its name telling women "What to Expect When You're Expecting." How many of them expected they'd be buying "Oh, Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty" a few years later from the same publisher? Even a self-published author like Raymond Bean—nom de plume of the fourth-grade teacher who wrote "SweetFarts"—can make it big in this genre. His flatulence-themed opus hit no. 3 in children's humor on Amazon. The sequel debuts this fall.
Education was once understood as training for freedom. Not merely the transmission of information, education entailed the formation of manners and taste. Aristotle thought we should be raised "so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought; this is the right education."
"Plato before him," writes C. S. Lewis, "had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful."
This kind of training goes against the grain, and who has time for that? How much easier to meet children where they are.
One obvious problem with the SweetFarts philosophy of education is that it is more suited to producing a generation of barbarians and morons than to raising the sort of men who make good husbands, fathers and professionals. If you keep meeting a boy where he is, he doesn't go very far.
The other problem is that pandering doesn't address the real reason boys won't read. My own experience with six sons is that even the squirmiest boy does not require lurid or vulgar material to sustain his interest in a book.
So why won't boys read? The AP story drops a clue when it describes the efforts of one frustrated couple with their 13-year-old unlettered son: "They've tried bribing him with new video games." Good grief.
The appearance of the boy-girl literacy gap happens to coincide with the proliferation of video games and other electronic forms of entertainment over the last decade or two. Boys spend far more time "plugged in" than girls do. Could the reading gap have more to do with competition for boys' attention than with their supposed inability to focus on anything other than outhouse humor?
Dr. Robert Weis, a psychology professor at Denison University, confirmed this suspicion in a randomized controlled trial of the effect of video games on academic ability. Boys with video games at home, he found, spend more time playing them than reading, and their academic performance suffers substantially. Hard to believe, isn't it, but Science has spoken.
The secret to raising boys who read, I submit, is pretty simple—keep electronic media, especially video games and recreational Internet, under control (that is to say, almost completely absent). Then fill your shelves with good books.
People who think that a book—even R.L. Stine's grossest masterpiece—can compete with the powerful stimulation of an electronic screen are kidding themselves. But on the level playing field of a quiet den or bedroom, a good book like "Treasure Island" will hold a boy's attention quite as well as "Zombie Butts from Uranus." Who knows—a boy deprived of electronic stimulation might even become desperate enough to read Jane Austen.
Most importantly, a boy raised on great literature is more likely to grow up to think, to speak, and to write like a civilized man. Whom would you prefer to have shaped the boyhood imagination of your daughter's husband—Raymond Bean or Robert Louis Stevenson?
I offer a final piece of evidence that is perhaps unanswerable: There is no literacy gap between home-schooled boys and girls. How many of these families, do you suppose, have thrown grossology parties?
Mr. Spence is president of Spence Publishing Company in Dallas.
from: Wall Street Journal
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Anger as a Private Company Takes Over Libraries
by: David Streitfeld
SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — A private company in Maryland has taken over public libraries in ailing cities in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas, growing into the country’s fifth-largest library system.
Now the company, Library Systems & Services, has been hired for the first time to run a system in a relatively healthy city, setting off an intense and often acrimonious debate about the role of outsourcing in a ravaged economy.
A $4 million deal to run the three libraries here is a chance for the company to demonstrate that a dose of private management can be good for communities, whatever their financial situation. But in an era when outsourcing is most often an act of budget desperation — with janitors, police forces and even entire city halls farmed out in one town or another — the contract in Santa Clarita has touched a deep nerve and begun a round of second-guessing.
Can a municipal service like a library hold so central a place that it should be entrusted to a profit-driven contractor only as a last resort — and maybe not even then?
“There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization.”
The company, known as L.S.S.I., runs 14 library systems operating 63 locations. Its basic pitch to cities is that it fixes broken libraries — more often than not by cleaning house.
“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”
The members of the Santa Clarita City Council who voted to hire L.S.S.I. acknowledge there was no immediate threat to the libraries. The council members say they want to ensure the libraries’ long-term survival in a state with increasingly shaky finances.
Until now, the three branch locations have been part of the Los Angeles County library system. Under the new contract, the branches will be withdrawn from county control and all operations — including hiring staff and buying books — ceded to L.S.S.I.
“The libraries are still going to be public libraries,” said the mayor pro tem, Marsha McLean. “When people say we’re privatizing libraries, that is just not a true statement, period.”
Library employees are furious about the contract. But the reaction has been mostly led by patrons who say they cannot imagine Santa Clarita with libraries run for profit.
“A library is the heart of the community,” said one opponent, Jane Hanson. “I’m in favor of private enterprise, but I can’t feel comfortable with what the city is doing here.”
Mrs. Hanson and her husband, Tom, go to their local branch every week or two to pick up tapes for the car and books to read after dinner. Mrs. Hanson recently checked out Willa Cather’s classic “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” although she was only mildly in favor of its episodic style; she has higher hopes for her current choice, on the shadowy world of North Korea.
The suggestion that a library is different — and somehow off limits to the outsourcing fever — has been echoed wherever L.S.S.I. has gone. The head of the county library system, Margaret Donnellan Todd, says L.S.S.I. is viewed as an unwelcome outsider.
“There is no local connection,” she said. “People are receiving superb service in Santa Clarita. I challenge that L.S.S.I. will be able to do much better.”
As a recent afternoon shaded into evening, there were more than a hundred patrons at the main Santa Clarita library. Students were doing their homework. Old men paged through newspapers. Children gathered up arm’s loads of picture books. It was a portrait of civic harmony and engagement.
Mrs. Hanson, who is 81 and has been a library patron for nearly 50 years, was so bothered by the outsourcing contract that she became involved in local politics for the first time since 1969, when she worked for a recall movement related to the Vietnam War.
She drew up a petition warning that the L.S.S.I. contract would result in “greater cost, fewer books and less access,” with “no benefit to the citizens.” Using a card table in front of the main library branch, she gathered 1,200 signatures in three weekends.
L.S.S.I. says none of Mrs. Hanson’s fears are warranted, but the anti-outsourcing forces continue to air their suspicions at private meetings and public forums, even wondering whether a recall election is feasible.
“Public libraries invoke images of our freedom to learn, a cornerstone of our democracy,” Deanna Hanashiro, a retired teacher, said at the most recent city council meeting.
Frank Ferry, a Santa Clarita councilman, dismisses the criticism as the work of the Service Employees International Union, which has 87 members in the libraries. The union has been distributing red shirts defending the status quo. “Union members out in red shirts in defense of union jobs,” Mr. Ferry said.
Library employees are often the most resistant to his company, said Mr. Pezzanite, a co-founder of L.S.S.I. — and, he suggested, for reasons that only reinforce the need for a new approach.
“Pensions crushed General Motors, and it is crushing the governments in California,” he said. While the company says it rehires many of the municipal librarians, they must be content with a 401(k) retirement fund and no pension.
L.S.S.I. got its start 30 years ago developing software for government use, then expanded into running libraries for federal agencies. In the mid-1990s, it moved into the municipal library market, and now, when ranked by number of branches, it places immediately after Los Angeles County, New York City, Chicago and the City of Los Angeles.
The company is majority owned by Islington Capital Partners, a private equity firm in Boston, and has about $35 million in annual revenue and 800 employees. Officials would not discuss the company’s profitability.
Some L.S.S.I. customers have ended their contracts, while in other places, opposition has faded with time. In Redding, Calif., Jim Ceragioli, a board member of the Friends of Shasta County Library, said he initially counted himself among the skeptics.
But he has since changed his mind. “I can’t think of anything that’s been lost,” Mr. Ceragioli said.
The library in Redding has expanded its services and hours. And the volunteers are still showing up — even if their assistance is now aiding a private company. “We volunteer more than ever now,” Mr. Ceragioli said.
From: NY Times
SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — A private company in Maryland has taken over public libraries in ailing cities in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas, growing into the country’s fifth-largest library system.
Now the company, Library Systems & Services, has been hired for the first time to run a system in a relatively healthy city, setting off an intense and often acrimonious debate about the role of outsourcing in a ravaged economy.
A $4 million deal to run the three libraries here is a chance for the company to demonstrate that a dose of private management can be good for communities, whatever their financial situation. But in an era when outsourcing is most often an act of budget desperation — with janitors, police forces and even entire city halls farmed out in one town or another — the contract in Santa Clarita has touched a deep nerve and begun a round of second-guessing.
Can a municipal service like a library hold so central a place that it should be entrusted to a profit-driven contractor only as a last resort — and maybe not even then?
“There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization.”
The company, known as L.S.S.I., runs 14 library systems operating 63 locations. Its basic pitch to cities is that it fixes broken libraries — more often than not by cleaning house.
“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”
The members of the Santa Clarita City Council who voted to hire L.S.S.I. acknowledge there was no immediate threat to the libraries. The council members say they want to ensure the libraries’ long-term survival in a state with increasingly shaky finances.
Until now, the three branch locations have been part of the Los Angeles County library system. Under the new contract, the branches will be withdrawn from county control and all operations — including hiring staff and buying books — ceded to L.S.S.I.
“The libraries are still going to be public libraries,” said the mayor pro tem, Marsha McLean. “When people say we’re privatizing libraries, that is just not a true statement, period.”
Library employees are furious about the contract. But the reaction has been mostly led by patrons who say they cannot imagine Santa Clarita with libraries run for profit.
“A library is the heart of the community,” said one opponent, Jane Hanson. “I’m in favor of private enterprise, but I can’t feel comfortable with what the city is doing here.”
Mrs. Hanson and her husband, Tom, go to their local branch every week or two to pick up tapes for the car and books to read after dinner. Mrs. Hanson recently checked out Willa Cather’s classic “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” although she was only mildly in favor of its episodic style; she has higher hopes for her current choice, on the shadowy world of North Korea.
The suggestion that a library is different — and somehow off limits to the outsourcing fever — has been echoed wherever L.S.S.I. has gone. The head of the county library system, Margaret Donnellan Todd, says L.S.S.I. is viewed as an unwelcome outsider.
“There is no local connection,” she said. “People are receiving superb service in Santa Clarita. I challenge that L.S.S.I. will be able to do much better.”
As a recent afternoon shaded into evening, there were more than a hundred patrons at the main Santa Clarita library. Students were doing their homework. Old men paged through newspapers. Children gathered up arm’s loads of picture books. It was a portrait of civic harmony and engagement.
Mrs. Hanson, who is 81 and has been a library patron for nearly 50 years, was so bothered by the outsourcing contract that she became involved in local politics for the first time since 1969, when she worked for a recall movement related to the Vietnam War.
She drew up a petition warning that the L.S.S.I. contract would result in “greater cost, fewer books and less access,” with “no benefit to the citizens.” Using a card table in front of the main library branch, she gathered 1,200 signatures in three weekends.
L.S.S.I. says none of Mrs. Hanson’s fears are warranted, but the anti-outsourcing forces continue to air their suspicions at private meetings and public forums, even wondering whether a recall election is feasible.
“Public libraries invoke images of our freedom to learn, a cornerstone of our democracy,” Deanna Hanashiro, a retired teacher, said at the most recent city council meeting.
Frank Ferry, a Santa Clarita councilman, dismisses the criticism as the work of the Service Employees International Union, which has 87 members in the libraries. The union has been distributing red shirts defending the status quo. “Union members out in red shirts in defense of union jobs,” Mr. Ferry said.
Library employees are often the most resistant to his company, said Mr. Pezzanite, a co-founder of L.S.S.I. — and, he suggested, for reasons that only reinforce the need for a new approach.
“Pensions crushed General Motors, and it is crushing the governments in California,” he said. While the company says it rehires many of the municipal librarians, they must be content with a 401(k) retirement fund and no pension.
L.S.S.I. got its start 30 years ago developing software for government use, then expanded into running libraries for federal agencies. In the mid-1990s, it moved into the municipal library market, and now, when ranked by number of branches, it places immediately after Los Angeles County, New York City, Chicago and the City of Los Angeles.
The company is majority owned by Islington Capital Partners, a private equity firm in Boston, and has about $35 million in annual revenue and 800 employees. Officials would not discuss the company’s profitability.
Some L.S.S.I. customers have ended their contracts, while in other places, opposition has faded with time. In Redding, Calif., Jim Ceragioli, a board member of the Friends of Shasta County Library, said he initially counted himself among the skeptics.
But he has since changed his mind. “I can’t think of anything that’s been lost,” Mr. Ceragioli said.
The library in Redding has expanded its services and hours. And the volunteers are still showing up — even if their assistance is now aiding a private company. “We volunteer more than ever now,” Mr. Ceragioli said.
From: NY Times
Monday, September 27, 2010
Target Revitalizes 32 School Libraries This Fall
by: Phil
As part of an ongoing commitment to early childhood reading with a specific focus on K-3, this fall, Target and The Heart of America Foundation will renovate school libraries through the annual Target School Library Makeovers program.
The program includes the unveiling of 32 extreme library makeovers for schools in-need in 30 cities, as well as $500 Book Awards to schools across the country. The majority of libraries will be unveiled this fall. Two of the 32 libraries were unveiled earlier in 2010.
Through this program, Target is donating more than $7 million to school libraries nationwide and providing students with a new outlook on learning. Each makeover features light construction and new furniture, shelves, carpet and technology, as well as 2,000 new books for each school library. In addition, each student and their sibling/s will receive seven new books to take home.
“Studies show that reading proficiently by the end of third grade is one of the most important academic milestones on the path to graduation,” said Laysha Ward, president of community relations, Target. “Through the revitalization of these libraries, Target is putting more books into the hands of more students across the country, helping them reach their full potential and inspiring a lifelong love of reading.”
The Target School Library Makeovers program was launched in 2007 and features a combination of extreme school library makeovers, which include a complete renovation, and $500 Book Awards to schools across the country. Since the program’s inception, Target has impacted more than 2,000 school libraries, distributed more than one million new books and donated tens of thousands of volunteer hours.
“Our partnership with Target allows us to elevate the level of our giving and reach thousands of additional students and volunteers across the nation,” said Angie Halamandaris, president and co-founder of The Heart of America Foundation. “Reading is the key to success. And, to ensure students develop a strong foundation for continued learning, it is essential for every school library to be the heart of the school: inspiring and inviting. With the help of Target, we are able to give that wonderful space to even more schools.”
Target School Library Makeovers utilize the world-class design and construction expertise of Target team members. One way Target incorporates its expertise is with eco-friendly designs and construction practices into each library makeover, including the use of green-certified furniture in partnership with Paragon and Smith Systems and the use of recycled materials and low VOC paint in all locations. Hours of design and sourcing, along with volunteer hours from Target team members, bring these libraries to life.
In support of this effort, Target and The Heart of America Foundation also have teamed up with a number of additional vendor partners nationwide. All partners helped make the project possible through donations and/or discounted pricing of services and supplies.
Schools receiving a library makeover are chosen based on a number of factors, including the students’ reading proficiency, the percentage of students from low-income families and the overall need for library improvement. To learn more about specific schools benefiting from Target School Library Makeovers or to view a time-lapse video of a makeover in action, visit Target.com/libraries.
In addition to awarding complete library makeovers to 32 schools, Target is teaming up with First Book, a national non-profit organization, to provide new books to schools serving in-need students across the country. Each of the more than 1,700 Target stores and distribution centers nationwide will grant a $500 Book Award to a local, in-need school of their choice. The Book Awards will provide each school with new books and reading supplies from First Book, just in time to kick-off the new school year.
Target’s commitment to the communities it serves involves funding education programs that nurture a love of learning and promote literacy among children. The Target School Library Makeovers program is one of the many ways Target supports education by acting locally to help kids learn and schools teach.
from: PNN
As part of an ongoing commitment to early childhood reading with a specific focus on K-3, this fall, Target and The Heart of America Foundation will renovate school libraries through the annual Target School Library Makeovers program.
The program includes the unveiling of 32 extreme library makeovers for schools in-need in 30 cities, as well as $500 Book Awards to schools across the country. The majority of libraries will be unveiled this fall. Two of the 32 libraries were unveiled earlier in 2010.
Through this program, Target is donating more than $7 million to school libraries nationwide and providing students with a new outlook on learning. Each makeover features light construction and new furniture, shelves, carpet and technology, as well as 2,000 new books for each school library. In addition, each student and their sibling/s will receive seven new books to take home.
“Studies show that reading proficiently by the end of third grade is one of the most important academic milestones on the path to graduation,” said Laysha Ward, president of community relations, Target. “Through the revitalization of these libraries, Target is putting more books into the hands of more students across the country, helping them reach their full potential and inspiring a lifelong love of reading.”
The Target School Library Makeovers program was launched in 2007 and features a combination of extreme school library makeovers, which include a complete renovation, and $500 Book Awards to schools across the country. Since the program’s inception, Target has impacted more than 2,000 school libraries, distributed more than one million new books and donated tens of thousands of volunteer hours.
“Our partnership with Target allows us to elevate the level of our giving and reach thousands of additional students and volunteers across the nation,” said Angie Halamandaris, president and co-founder of The Heart of America Foundation. “Reading is the key to success. And, to ensure students develop a strong foundation for continued learning, it is essential for every school library to be the heart of the school: inspiring and inviting. With the help of Target, we are able to give that wonderful space to even more schools.”
Target School Library Makeovers utilize the world-class design and construction expertise of Target team members. One way Target incorporates its expertise is with eco-friendly designs and construction practices into each library makeover, including the use of green-certified furniture in partnership with Paragon and Smith Systems and the use of recycled materials and low VOC paint in all locations. Hours of design and sourcing, along with volunteer hours from Target team members, bring these libraries to life.
In support of this effort, Target and The Heart of America Foundation also have teamed up with a number of additional vendor partners nationwide. All partners helped make the project possible through donations and/or discounted pricing of services and supplies.
Schools receiving a library makeover are chosen based on a number of factors, including the students’ reading proficiency, the percentage of students from low-income families and the overall need for library improvement. To learn more about specific schools benefiting from Target School Library Makeovers or to view a time-lapse video of a makeover in action, visit Target.com/libraries.
In addition to awarding complete library makeovers to 32 schools, Target is teaming up with First Book, a national non-profit organization, to provide new books to schools serving in-need students across the country. Each of the more than 1,700 Target stores and distribution centers nationwide will grant a $500 Book Award to a local, in-need school of their choice. The Book Awards will provide each school with new books and reading supplies from First Book, just in time to kick-off the new school year.
Target’s commitment to the communities it serves involves funding education programs that nurture a love of learning and promote literacy among children. The Target School Library Makeovers program is one of the many ways Target supports education by acting locally to help kids learn and schools teach.
from: PNN
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Is interactive fiction the future of books?
Global design agency IDEO thinks merging the digital novel with playful interactions might lead to a new era of writing...
by: Keith Stuart
The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.
What impact will digital books have on the experience of the written word – apart from the form factor, and the ability to store hundreds of works on a single ebook reader? Will the rise of gadgets like Kindle and tablet computers like iPad actually contribute to the medium in a creative way?
This is a question that design consultancy IDEO has grappled with, producing a Vimeo clip to show three possible book-reading applications for tablet computers and ebook readers: Nelson, Coupland and Alice. It's the third (from 3:03 onwards) that interests us. Alice, the narrative informs us, is "an interactive reading experience that invites the reader to engage with the story-telling process [...] Stories unfold and develop through the reader's active participation."
For example, clues could be unlocked by shaking the screen so that most of the words 'fall off' revealing hidden codes. Other narrative elements could be unveiled by opening the book while in a specific geographic location. The video also mentions the possibility of receiving text messages and emails from characters in the book. I guess Silence of the Lambs would be a bit more scary if you started getting texts from Buffalo Bill asking what your dress size is.
But these are more like reading enhancements than truly interactive narrative features. Later, the narrator talks about the reader adding to the narrative, co-developing the story, thereby gaining access to secret events, character backstories and new chapters. "In time a non-linear narrative emerges, allowing the reader to immerse themselves in the story from multiple angles."
Of course, interactive fiction is far from a new idea. 'Choose your own adventure books' were massive in the eighties, and the adventure gaming genre has been a mainstay of the computer games industry since the likes of The Hobbit and Zork. There's also been a thriving interactive fiction scene on the web for a decade, with independent developers creating interesting experimental examples to download.
But can 'traditional' novels really be enhanced in this way? I can sort of see the value in an ebook app that will hyperlink from any real-life location, item or person mentioned in a story, to further information online. I spent much of my time while reading James Ellroy's American Tabloid, looking up information on the Kennedy presidency, Cuba and the Bay of Pigs. But then, this is something of a distraction while you're trying to become engrossed in a novel, and could easily be commercially exploited – the last thing most readers will want is an electronic novel stuffed with contextual advertising so that every place name or brand comes with a link to the relevant manufacturer or tourist board.
There's also the question of longevity. It's all very well setting up lots of nice little augmented reality stunts for a book's launch, but how long will the publisher support geo-tagging and 'secret events' for a single work? We don't all read the same books at the same time. And also this concept of a non-linear, multi-perspective narrative – well, that might be fine for, say, Bret Easton Ellis, but the core of most novels is their very subjectivity.
I think there are definite possibilities, though, for a new breed of novels, and a coming generation of writers, to play with the ebook format and develop lots of new interactive ideas. There's already a growing mass of writers who are simultaneously contributing to games, films, comics and novels, combining narrative methods as entertainment evolves. Readers of crime fiction enjoy sorting the clues from the red herrings, so why not make that process more visual and haptic?
I'm not sure this concept should be applied to the canon of printed literature already available. I don't want to have to hang around in Clerkenwell to unlock some extra info on Bill Sykes, or play a balloon piloting game to ruin the beginning of Enduring Love. We all know that imagination is the ultimate form of narrative interactivity. But I quite like the idea of fresh novels that allow us to use the functionality of the technology to open up new elements. It's not sacrilege, is it? It's just... new.
by: Keith Stuart
The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.
What impact will digital books have on the experience of the written word – apart from the form factor, and the ability to store hundreds of works on a single ebook reader? Will the rise of gadgets like Kindle and tablet computers like iPad actually contribute to the medium in a creative way?
This is a question that design consultancy IDEO has grappled with, producing a Vimeo clip to show three possible book-reading applications for tablet computers and ebook readers: Nelson, Coupland and Alice. It's the third (from 3:03 onwards) that interests us. Alice, the narrative informs us, is "an interactive reading experience that invites the reader to engage with the story-telling process [...] Stories unfold and develop through the reader's active participation."
For example, clues could be unlocked by shaking the screen so that most of the words 'fall off' revealing hidden codes. Other narrative elements could be unveiled by opening the book while in a specific geographic location. The video also mentions the possibility of receiving text messages and emails from characters in the book. I guess Silence of the Lambs would be a bit more scary if you started getting texts from Buffalo Bill asking what your dress size is.
But these are more like reading enhancements than truly interactive narrative features. Later, the narrator talks about the reader adding to the narrative, co-developing the story, thereby gaining access to secret events, character backstories and new chapters. "In time a non-linear narrative emerges, allowing the reader to immerse themselves in the story from multiple angles."
Of course, interactive fiction is far from a new idea. 'Choose your own adventure books' were massive in the eighties, and the adventure gaming genre has been a mainstay of the computer games industry since the likes of The Hobbit and Zork. There's also been a thriving interactive fiction scene on the web for a decade, with independent developers creating interesting experimental examples to download.
But can 'traditional' novels really be enhanced in this way? I can sort of see the value in an ebook app that will hyperlink from any real-life location, item or person mentioned in a story, to further information online. I spent much of my time while reading James Ellroy's American Tabloid, looking up information on the Kennedy presidency, Cuba and the Bay of Pigs. But then, this is something of a distraction while you're trying to become engrossed in a novel, and could easily be commercially exploited – the last thing most readers will want is an electronic novel stuffed with contextual advertising so that every place name or brand comes with a link to the relevant manufacturer or tourist board.
There's also the question of longevity. It's all very well setting up lots of nice little augmented reality stunts for a book's launch, but how long will the publisher support geo-tagging and 'secret events' for a single work? We don't all read the same books at the same time. And also this concept of a non-linear, multi-perspective narrative – well, that might be fine for, say, Bret Easton Ellis, but the core of most novels is their very subjectivity.
I think there are definite possibilities, though, for a new breed of novels, and a coming generation of writers, to play with the ebook format and develop lots of new interactive ideas. There's already a growing mass of writers who are simultaneously contributing to games, films, comics and novels, combining narrative methods as entertainment evolves. Readers of crime fiction enjoy sorting the clues from the red herrings, so why not make that process more visual and haptic?
I'm not sure this concept should be applied to the canon of printed literature already available. I don't want to have to hang around in Clerkenwell to unlock some extra info on Bill Sykes, or play a balloon piloting game to ruin the beginning of Enduring Love. We all know that imagination is the ultimate form of narrative interactivity. But I quite like the idea of fresh novels that allow us to use the functionality of the technology to open up new elements. It's not sacrilege, is it? It's just... new.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Watch and Learn
How music videos are triggering a literacy boom.
by: Riddhi Shah
Tiny, sun-soaked Khodi on the western coast of India’s Gujarat state is the kind of village where cattle still plough the fields and women fill clay pots with water from the village well. In the past few years, however, the town has been changing: Thatched mud huts are slowly giving way to sturdy, single-story concrete blocks; farmers conduct their business on cellphones. The state buses, which until a decade ago were only filled with men, are now crammed with women. Enrollment in the local school has soared.
These changes can be attributed partly to India’s recent economic liberalization, which has raised incomes and brought unprecedented growth across the country. But in Khodi, there’s another, more unlikely contributor: the soaring local literacy rate, courtesy of music videos.
Every Sunday in villages across India, groups of people — an assortment of turbaned men, sari-clad women, and gap-toothed children — gather around old television sets to watch their favorite Bollywood film stars sing and dance in song videos culled from movies. These song shows, a popular component of mainstream television programming, are often the only way rural populations can see the stars or access the latest films.
Nine years ago, India’s national television network decided to introduce karaoke-style subtitles to these programs — not in a foreign language, but in Hindi, the language the stars were singing in. The first state to broadcast the subtitles was Gujarat. People in Khodi, and in the rest of the state, saw the captions as an opportunity to sing along with the songs. They began paying attention to the moving strip of lyrics at the bottom of the screen. Often, they would copy the words on paper, going back to them after the show was over. And as they did, the reading level in Khodi slowly improved.
According to Hema Jadvani, a researcher who has been studying the effects of the subtitles on Khodi, newspaper reading in the village has gone up by more than 50 percent in the last decade. Her research also shows that the village’s women, who can now read bus schedules themselves, are more mobile, and more children are opting to stay in school.
India’s public karaoke-for-literacy experiment is the only one of its kind in the world. Technically known as same-language subtitling, or SLS, it manages to reach 200 million viewers across 10 states every week. In the last nine years, functional literacy in areas with SLS access has more than doubled. And the subtitles have acted as a catalyst to quadruple the rate at which completely illiterate adults become proficient readers.
In the fight against poverty, this is big news. Development organizations the world over have long been grappling with the challenge of increasing literacy, which is linked not only to economic growth, but to better health, greater gender equality, and a more transparent political process. Against this background, the apparent effectiveness of subtitles — along with their low cost, only 1 cent per person per year — has attracted the attention of academics and educators. Viewers in India have shown reading improvement after watching just eight hours of subtitled programming over six months; conventional literacy teaching methods typically require much more time and far greater resources to achieve the same results.
Same-language subtitling extricates literacy from the tangles of school infrastructure and teacher availability. And since television, more than any other medium, has the power to reach out to billions across the developing world, it holds unique promise for hard-to-access groups like rural women, who are discouraged from venturing outside their villages once they hit puberty.
Perhaps most importantly, though, SLS has the ability to make literacy fun. In Khodi, for example, children watching song shows read the lyrics and write them down so that they can sing the songs with their friends later — an enthusiasm they rarely show for school work. Ultimately, by making reading easy and entertaining, SLS can change the way a child feels about school. “I was always tired and lazy. Then I began reading better, and everything just became easier,” says Rajesh Sodha, a ninth grade student from Khodi, in a phone interview. “School is more fun now.”
The idea of SLS was born in 1996 at Cornell University. Brij Kothari, an Indian PhD student at Cornell, was learning Spanish for a research project. He’d been watching a lot of Spanish cinema but found that the English subtitles made it harder for him to “hear” the original dialogue. Kothari realized that if the films were subtitled in Spanish itself, he’d learn the language more easily. “Then it occurred to me that if all Indian television programming in Hindi was subtitled in Hindi, India would become literate faster,” says Kothari, who is now a professor at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad and founder of PlanetRead, an educational nonprofit.
Five years later, Kothari managed to persuade the Indian state channel to subtitle its first batch of song shows, and since then he has campaigned tirelessly to popularize subtitling as a literacy tool.
But even as far back as the early 1990s, there was some research support for the idea that television subtitles can improve reading skills. Finland, for example, a country that has repeatedly placed first on education rankings created by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, has attributed much of its educational success to captions. For several decades now, Finland has chosen to subtitle its foreign language television programs (in Finnish) instead of dubbing over them. As a result, Finnish high school students read better than students from European countries that dub their TV programs. They are also more proficient at English.
Belgian psychologist named Gery d’Ydewalle looked at the effects of subtitling in a 1991 study. He found that reading of subtitles on a screen is almost involuntary. In other words, viewers find it nearly impossible to ignore subtitles, regardless of whether they can hear the sounds or understand the language. We’ve all experienced this — the inescapable pull of closed captioning when we’re watching a film, or find ourselves near a TV in a loud bar or an airport.
Following d’Ydewalle’s findings, academics began researching the link between foreign-language subtitles and the ability to learn that language. What they found matched Finland’s experience with English shows — children and adults who watched television subtitled in a foreign language were likely to be able to pick up that language easily. As for same-language subtitles, research by Kothari and others has shown that viewers with low-level reading skills show considerable literacy and vocabulary improvement after watching subtitled television.
Importantly, researchers found that the best results come from subtitling music. “Songs build phonemic awareness — the ability to break a word into syllables — more than dialogue,” says Clara Schmidt, an American educator who has independently evaluated the effect of Kothari’s system in India. Songs repeat lyrics, which gives viewers more time to make the sound-letter association. Viewers also often want to memorize the lyrics to a song, which motivates them to make an effort to read the subtitles — a factor that’s missing with ordinary dialogue.
As helpful as subtitling appears to be, it isn’t a cure-all for literacy problems. One important shortcoming is that it can’t teach people to read from scratch: Viewers who can’t recognize letters aren’t likely to benefit from seeing subtitles scroll by. The method works best with what educators call early-literates: children and adults who have basic familiarity with the alphabet, but can’t read fluently enough to make productive use of their skill. Primary schools or basic reading classes are still needed to teach students that the letter “a” makes an “ah” sound.
As its results suggest, however, SLS may hold promise in other arenas where readers are struggling to move beyond basic skills. Greg McCall, a special education teacher in Hawaii, created his own same-language subtitles to help his students, including learning-disabled students. McCall says he stumbled upon SLS while looking for ways to engage ninth-graders with difficult texts like “Les Miserables.” Instead of asking them to read the book, he showed them the musical and found that students were instantly more involved. Soon, he began adding subtitles and saw a marked improvement in reading ability. With traditional literacy software, says McCall, reading among his students improved by the equivalent of 0.7 classroom years in a year of teaching. Using SLS he saw a jump of two classroom years.
McCall has been campaigning for his research to be discussed at a national level and suggests that it has applications across a wide spectrum of people: from children who are just beginning to learn how to read to teen dropouts to adults who never learned how to read fluidly. “America is not being honest about its literacy problem,” he says. Three out of five Americans in jail can’t read. Fifty million adult Americans can’t read beyond a fifth-grade level, leaving them at a semi-literate level that is often ignored in mainstream literacy campaigns.
The solution, say educators like Schmidt and McCall, is to make closed-captioning compulsory for all children’s programming. “The government should also subtitle all MTV programs,” recommends Schmidt.
But academics do warn against a potential pitfall: If subtitles become part of mainstream education, students may start to see them as “learning” rather than entertainment. For SLS to work, they argue, it must be seen primarily as fun, and it must stay out of schools. “My fear is that once it enters the classroom, it will become boring and turn people off,” says Stephen Krashen, an education researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Southern California.
The problem of semi-literacy, of course, is a worldwide one — in India, for example, out of the 650 million officially literate people, only 300 million can read fluently. The low cost of SLS makes it easily replicable even in the poorest parts of the world. Gradually, says Kothari, governments and private organizations have begun to show interest in the idea. South Africa and Rwanda are considering implementing SLS on their state television channels. In Pakistan, a private television channel is talking about using same-language subtitles in Urdu on film song programs watched in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In the international educational landscape, where every small victory means spending hours negotiating with inefficient bureaucracies and a constant battle for funds, SLS is a rare bright spot. Using nothing more than a television set and a few songs, the method brings real literacy improvement and reading practice to people right in their living rooms. The simple system can inherently change the way we look at reading; it promises to exchange the tedium of the classroom for the entertainment of an hour of MTV.
In the words of Khodi’s local school principal, Bachchubhai Lakhabhai: “SLS manages to achieve in a few hours what we haven’t been able to do for years.”
Riddhi Shah is completing her master’s degree in cultural reporting and criticism at the Arthur Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. She has written for Salon, Saveur, India Today, and the Hindustan Times.
from: Boston Globe
by: Riddhi Shah
 |
| A group of people watch television at a slum in Gulbai Tekra, an area in the city of Ahmedabad in India |
These changes can be attributed partly to India’s recent economic liberalization, which has raised incomes and brought unprecedented growth across the country. But in Khodi, there’s another, more unlikely contributor: the soaring local literacy rate, courtesy of music videos.
Every Sunday in villages across India, groups of people — an assortment of turbaned men, sari-clad women, and gap-toothed children — gather around old television sets to watch their favorite Bollywood film stars sing and dance in song videos culled from movies. These song shows, a popular component of mainstream television programming, are often the only way rural populations can see the stars or access the latest films.
Nine years ago, India’s national television network decided to introduce karaoke-style subtitles to these programs — not in a foreign language, but in Hindi, the language the stars were singing in. The first state to broadcast the subtitles was Gujarat. People in Khodi, and in the rest of the state, saw the captions as an opportunity to sing along with the songs. They began paying attention to the moving strip of lyrics at the bottom of the screen. Often, they would copy the words on paper, going back to them after the show was over. And as they did, the reading level in Khodi slowly improved.
According to Hema Jadvani, a researcher who has been studying the effects of the subtitles on Khodi, newspaper reading in the village has gone up by more than 50 percent in the last decade. Her research also shows that the village’s women, who can now read bus schedules themselves, are more mobile, and more children are opting to stay in school.
India’s public karaoke-for-literacy experiment is the only one of its kind in the world. Technically known as same-language subtitling, or SLS, it manages to reach 200 million viewers across 10 states every week. In the last nine years, functional literacy in areas with SLS access has more than doubled. And the subtitles have acted as a catalyst to quadruple the rate at which completely illiterate adults become proficient readers.
In the fight against poverty, this is big news. Development organizations the world over have long been grappling with the challenge of increasing literacy, which is linked not only to economic growth, but to better health, greater gender equality, and a more transparent political process. Against this background, the apparent effectiveness of subtitles — along with their low cost, only 1 cent per person per year — has attracted the attention of academics and educators. Viewers in India have shown reading improvement after watching just eight hours of subtitled programming over six months; conventional literacy teaching methods typically require much more time and far greater resources to achieve the same results.
Same-language subtitling extricates literacy from the tangles of school infrastructure and teacher availability. And since television, more than any other medium, has the power to reach out to billions across the developing world, it holds unique promise for hard-to-access groups like rural women, who are discouraged from venturing outside their villages once they hit puberty.
Perhaps most importantly, though, SLS has the ability to make literacy fun. In Khodi, for example, children watching song shows read the lyrics and write them down so that they can sing the songs with their friends later — an enthusiasm they rarely show for school work. Ultimately, by making reading easy and entertaining, SLS can change the way a child feels about school. “I was always tired and lazy. Then I began reading better, and everything just became easier,” says Rajesh Sodha, a ninth grade student from Khodi, in a phone interview. “School is more fun now.”
The idea of SLS was born in 1996 at Cornell University. Brij Kothari, an Indian PhD student at Cornell, was learning Spanish for a research project. He’d been watching a lot of Spanish cinema but found that the English subtitles made it harder for him to “hear” the original dialogue. Kothari realized that if the films were subtitled in Spanish itself, he’d learn the language more easily. “Then it occurred to me that if all Indian television programming in Hindi was subtitled in Hindi, India would become literate faster,” says Kothari, who is now a professor at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad and founder of PlanetRead, an educational nonprofit.
Five years later, Kothari managed to persuade the Indian state channel to subtitle its first batch of song shows, and since then he has campaigned tirelessly to popularize subtitling as a literacy tool.
But even as far back as the early 1990s, there was some research support for the idea that television subtitles can improve reading skills. Finland, for example, a country that has repeatedly placed first on education rankings created by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, has attributed much of its educational success to captions. For several decades now, Finland has chosen to subtitle its foreign language television programs (in Finnish) instead of dubbing over them. As a result, Finnish high school students read better than students from European countries that dub their TV programs. They are also more proficient at English.
Belgian psychologist named Gery d’Ydewalle looked at the effects of subtitling in a 1991 study. He found that reading of subtitles on a screen is almost involuntary. In other words, viewers find it nearly impossible to ignore subtitles, regardless of whether they can hear the sounds or understand the language. We’ve all experienced this — the inescapable pull of closed captioning when we’re watching a film, or find ourselves near a TV in a loud bar or an airport.
Following d’Ydewalle’s findings, academics began researching the link between foreign-language subtitles and the ability to learn that language. What they found matched Finland’s experience with English shows — children and adults who watched television subtitled in a foreign language were likely to be able to pick up that language easily. As for same-language subtitles, research by Kothari and others has shown that viewers with low-level reading skills show considerable literacy and vocabulary improvement after watching subtitled television.
Importantly, researchers found that the best results come from subtitling music. “Songs build phonemic awareness — the ability to break a word into syllables — more than dialogue,” says Clara Schmidt, an American educator who has independently evaluated the effect of Kothari’s system in India. Songs repeat lyrics, which gives viewers more time to make the sound-letter association. Viewers also often want to memorize the lyrics to a song, which motivates them to make an effort to read the subtitles — a factor that’s missing with ordinary dialogue.
As helpful as subtitling appears to be, it isn’t a cure-all for literacy problems. One important shortcoming is that it can’t teach people to read from scratch: Viewers who can’t recognize letters aren’t likely to benefit from seeing subtitles scroll by. The method works best with what educators call early-literates: children and adults who have basic familiarity with the alphabet, but can’t read fluently enough to make productive use of their skill. Primary schools or basic reading classes are still needed to teach students that the letter “a” makes an “ah” sound.
As its results suggest, however, SLS may hold promise in other arenas where readers are struggling to move beyond basic skills. Greg McCall, a special education teacher in Hawaii, created his own same-language subtitles to help his students, including learning-disabled students. McCall says he stumbled upon SLS while looking for ways to engage ninth-graders with difficult texts like “Les Miserables.” Instead of asking them to read the book, he showed them the musical and found that students were instantly more involved. Soon, he began adding subtitles and saw a marked improvement in reading ability. With traditional literacy software, says McCall, reading among his students improved by the equivalent of 0.7 classroom years in a year of teaching. Using SLS he saw a jump of two classroom years.
McCall has been campaigning for his research to be discussed at a national level and suggests that it has applications across a wide spectrum of people: from children who are just beginning to learn how to read to teen dropouts to adults who never learned how to read fluidly. “America is not being honest about its literacy problem,” he says. Three out of five Americans in jail can’t read. Fifty million adult Americans can’t read beyond a fifth-grade level, leaving them at a semi-literate level that is often ignored in mainstream literacy campaigns.
The solution, say educators like Schmidt and McCall, is to make closed-captioning compulsory for all children’s programming. “The government should also subtitle all MTV programs,” recommends Schmidt.
But academics do warn against a potential pitfall: If subtitles become part of mainstream education, students may start to see them as “learning” rather than entertainment. For SLS to work, they argue, it must be seen primarily as fun, and it must stay out of schools. “My fear is that once it enters the classroom, it will become boring and turn people off,” says Stephen Krashen, an education researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Southern California.
The problem of semi-literacy, of course, is a worldwide one — in India, for example, out of the 650 million officially literate people, only 300 million can read fluently. The low cost of SLS makes it easily replicable even in the poorest parts of the world. Gradually, says Kothari, governments and private organizations have begun to show interest in the idea. South Africa and Rwanda are considering implementing SLS on their state television channels. In Pakistan, a private television channel is talking about using same-language subtitles in Urdu on film song programs watched in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In the international educational landscape, where every small victory means spending hours negotiating with inefficient bureaucracies and a constant battle for funds, SLS is a rare bright spot. Using nothing more than a television set and a few songs, the method brings real literacy improvement and reading practice to people right in their living rooms. The simple system can inherently change the way we look at reading; it promises to exchange the tedium of the classroom for the entertainment of an hour of MTV.
In the words of Khodi’s local school principal, Bachchubhai Lakhabhai: “SLS manages to achieve in a few hours what we haven’t been able to do for years.”
Riddhi Shah is completing her master’s degree in cultural reporting and criticism at the Arthur Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. She has written for Salon, Saveur, India Today, and the Hindustan Times.
from: Boston Globe
Friday, September 24, 2010
10 Ways to Celebrate Banned Books Week
by: Amanda Christy Brown and Holly Epstein Ojalvo
Held annually during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of intellectual freedom and draws attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted banning of books across the United States, including books commonly taught in secondary schools.
Here are ideas for celebrating Banned Books Week –- with your students, your children and anyone who believes in having “the freedom to read.”
1. Classic Challenges: Books commonly taught in secondary schools show up again and again on the American Library Association’s most frequently challenged list. Why are some books challenged year after year? Find out why and then “adopt” a banned book like “The Catcher in the Rye” or “To Kill a Mockingbird” by investigating its history of challenges. (For example, a site search for “Huckleberry Finn” on nytimes.com reveals the 1885 editorial “Trashy and Vicious,” republished from The Springfield Republican, on the Concord Library’s ban of the book. You’ll also find a 1902 letter from Mark Twain on the Omaha Public Library’s ban.) Then promote a “read-in” of one or more challenged or banned books in your school library.
2. Don’t Read This!: Scan this list. What do these books have in common? Are you surprised to see that they are the Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books for 2000-2009? Use Anna Quindlen’s Op-Ed from 1994 as the model for an essay about personal experiences reading banned books and thoughts about book banning in general. We also invite you to answer our Student Opinion question, “Are There Books That Should Be Banned From Your School Library?”
3. Big Name Bans: Did you know that “Harry Potter” topped the library association’s list of most challenged books in the year 2000? Other recent frequently challenged books include the “Twilight” series and “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” Learn more about recent challenges and then create posters to promote intellectual freedom using some of the titles. One idea: Create a collage of book jackets of some of the most famous banned books. Another: Create a map of challenges, to demonstrate that book bans and challenges are not isolated phenomena, even in the United States. Ask to hang the posters in the school or local library.
4. Join the Club: Create book clubs around banned books. To investigate titles for your club to read, you might use the Books section, including the drop-down menus for finding book reviews and coverage of featured authors. Then hold book “pitches” and form club reading schedules. As you read, respond to the texts, and then execute a final project, either individually or as a group.
5. Blog All About It: Read this article featuring a New Jersey family that blogs together about books and encourages support of Banned Books Week. Choose a banned title to read as a family. Discuss it over dinner and/or online together. Include far-flung extended family by blogging or writing literary letters.
6. ‘Speak’ or Not?: This week, a university professor, Wesley Scroggins, attacked Laurie Halse Anderson’s “Speak” as “soft pornography” in The Springfield News-Leader of Missouri. Ms. Halse Anderson responded on her blog, as did the teacher and blogger Donalyn Miller on The Book Whisperer Blog. Read the blog posts and discuss both positions. What is “soft pornography”? Should teenagers, as novelist and Harvard student Isabel Kaplan argues in her Huffington Post post, read books with such content? Adapt this 2006 lesson on a book ban in the Miami-Dade school system to study the controversy and write letters to The News-Leader expressing your opinion about the issues raised in the debate. Decide whether or not you want to read “Speak” yourself.
7. Librarians for Liberty: Have you ever been caught reading under the covers? So was the late Judith Krug, the librarian who created Banned Books Week –- and her mother’s reaction to what she was reading taught her a lesson about having the freedom to read that later translated into her passion for the First Amendment and intellectual freedom. Learn more about Ms. Krug and consider the role of libraries in our democracy. What are the implications of book banning? What role do librarians and libraries play – even in the digital age –- in protecting intellectual freedom? Work with school or local librarians to plan a Banned Books Week event -– perhaps a read-a-thon or book festival, featuring banned books, with proceeds to benefit the library. Be sure to thank your librarians for the important work they do.
8. Protective Policies: See how librarians at the Brooklyn Public Library handle challenges to books and other creative works in their collection, and read some sample requests for reconsideration and responses. Consider the fact that different people find different books “detestable,” and that in the name of freedom the Brooklyn library stocks books that offend or disturb many people, like “Mein Kampf.” Interview your local or school librarian about the library’s policies and guidelines about what books to stock and how to handle challenges. Then draft a policy that takes into consideration First Amendment freedoms and tolerance for a range of beliefs and values.
9. Spotlight Censorship: Read about a 2008 traveling exhibition called “Censorship in Public Schools and Libraries,” sponsored by the Long Island Coalition Against Censorship. Research issues of censorship in your area or on a certain theme (like journalism) and build an exhibit of artifacts to represent the history you discover. Write exhibition tags explaining each piece, and invite the community to visit. The American Library Association offers additional display ideas to mark Banned Books Week.
10. Go Global: The Times often covers books and other works that have been censored internationally, like in China and Iraq (as well as, occasionally, by the United States). Read about the role of books in other countries and the implications of book banning abroad and explore Web sites commonly blocked in countries like China and Saudi Arabia. Consider why these governments want to block the content in question, and how national history, culture and politics come into play during such episodes. What does a country’s censorship history tell us about what its government and citizens value? Create a timeline or narrative history of one country’s relationship with censorship, including, if possible, interviews with people who have direct experience.
How are you celebrating Banned Books Week? Tell us below.
from: NY Times
 |
| Ruby Washington/The New York Times |
Held annually during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of intellectual freedom and draws attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted banning of books across the United States, including books commonly taught in secondary schools.
Here are ideas for celebrating Banned Books Week –- with your students, your children and anyone who believes in having “the freedom to read.”
1. Classic Challenges: Books commonly taught in secondary schools show up again and again on the American Library Association’s most frequently challenged list. Why are some books challenged year after year? Find out why and then “adopt” a banned book like “The Catcher in the Rye” or “To Kill a Mockingbird” by investigating its history of challenges. (For example, a site search for “Huckleberry Finn” on nytimes.com reveals the 1885 editorial “Trashy and Vicious,” republished from The Springfield Republican, on the Concord Library’s ban of the book. You’ll also find a 1902 letter from Mark Twain on the Omaha Public Library’s ban.) Then promote a “read-in” of one or more challenged or banned books in your school library.
2. Don’t Read This!: Scan this list. What do these books have in common? Are you surprised to see that they are the Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books for 2000-2009? Use Anna Quindlen’s Op-Ed from 1994 as the model for an essay about personal experiences reading banned books and thoughts about book banning in general. We also invite you to answer our Student Opinion question, “Are There Books That Should Be Banned From Your School Library?”
3. Big Name Bans: Did you know that “Harry Potter” topped the library association’s list of most challenged books in the year 2000? Other recent frequently challenged books include the “Twilight” series and “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” Learn more about recent challenges and then create posters to promote intellectual freedom using some of the titles. One idea: Create a collage of book jackets of some of the most famous banned books. Another: Create a map of challenges, to demonstrate that book bans and challenges are not isolated phenomena, even in the United States. Ask to hang the posters in the school or local library.
4. Join the Club: Create book clubs around banned books. To investigate titles for your club to read, you might use the Books section, including the drop-down menus for finding book reviews and coverage of featured authors. Then hold book “pitches” and form club reading schedules. As you read, respond to the texts, and then execute a final project, either individually or as a group.
5. Blog All About It: Read this article featuring a New Jersey family that blogs together about books and encourages support of Banned Books Week. Choose a banned title to read as a family. Discuss it over dinner and/or online together. Include far-flung extended family by blogging or writing literary letters.
6. ‘Speak’ or Not?: This week, a university professor, Wesley Scroggins, attacked Laurie Halse Anderson’s “Speak” as “soft pornography” in The Springfield News-Leader of Missouri. Ms. Halse Anderson responded on her blog, as did the teacher and blogger Donalyn Miller on The Book Whisperer Blog. Read the blog posts and discuss both positions. What is “soft pornography”? Should teenagers, as novelist and Harvard student Isabel Kaplan argues in her Huffington Post post, read books with such content? Adapt this 2006 lesson on a book ban in the Miami-Dade school system to study the controversy and write letters to The News-Leader expressing your opinion about the issues raised in the debate. Decide whether or not you want to read “Speak” yourself.
7. Librarians for Liberty: Have you ever been caught reading under the covers? So was the late Judith Krug, the librarian who created Banned Books Week –- and her mother’s reaction to what she was reading taught her a lesson about having the freedom to read that later translated into her passion for the First Amendment and intellectual freedom. Learn more about Ms. Krug and consider the role of libraries in our democracy. What are the implications of book banning? What role do librarians and libraries play – even in the digital age –- in protecting intellectual freedom? Work with school or local librarians to plan a Banned Books Week event -– perhaps a read-a-thon or book festival, featuring banned books, with proceeds to benefit the library. Be sure to thank your librarians for the important work they do.
8. Protective Policies: See how librarians at the Brooklyn Public Library handle challenges to books and other creative works in their collection, and read some sample requests for reconsideration and responses. Consider the fact that different people find different books “detestable,” and that in the name of freedom the Brooklyn library stocks books that offend or disturb many people, like “Mein Kampf.” Interview your local or school librarian about the library’s policies and guidelines about what books to stock and how to handle challenges. Then draft a policy that takes into consideration First Amendment freedoms and tolerance for a range of beliefs and values.
9. Spotlight Censorship: Read about a 2008 traveling exhibition called “Censorship in Public Schools and Libraries,” sponsored by the Long Island Coalition Against Censorship. Research issues of censorship in your area or on a certain theme (like journalism) and build an exhibit of artifacts to represent the history you discover. Write exhibition tags explaining each piece, and invite the community to visit. The American Library Association offers additional display ideas to mark Banned Books Week.
10. Go Global: The Times often covers books and other works that have been censored internationally, like in China and Iraq (as well as, occasionally, by the United States). Read about the role of books in other countries and the implications of book banning abroad and explore Web sites commonly blocked in countries like China and Saudi Arabia. Consider why these governments want to block the content in question, and how national history, culture and politics come into play during such episodes. What does a country’s censorship history tell us about what its government and citizens value? Create a timeline or narrative history of one country’s relationship with censorship, including, if possible, interviews with people who have direct experience.
How are you celebrating Banned Books Week? Tell us below.
from: NY Times
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Latest Anne Frank book unveils new discoveries
More than 6,000 letters, photographs, and documents said to be found recently in the attic of the Frank family home are being transformed into a new book, Treasures from the Attic, set to be released in November 2010.
The Bookseller (bookseller.com) reports the book will include letters from Anne Frank's father, Otto, when he was held in Auschwitz as well as his descriptions of the search for his family after the Second World War and his discovery of Anne's diaries.
"Treasures from the Attic reads like a novel: it's an epic, fateful, family saga, and tells the full story of Anne's family both before, during and after the war," stated Michael Dover, editor-in-chief of the book's publisher, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. "It contrasts the normality of family life with the horrors of persecution, deportation, and the concentration camps. And through it we gain new insight into Anne and her iconic diary. It's one of those unique documents that portrays innocence and humanity, suffering and survival in the starkest and most moving terms."
The book's author, Mirjam Pressler has published several titles based on Anne Frank's life, including the updated 1997 edition of her famed The Diary of a Young Girl, which spent nine weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
The Frank family, who lived in Amsterdam, went into hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. After two years the family was apprehended in 1944, and Anne was transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died a year later. Her father, who discoverd the diaries, was the family's only survivor.
Anne Frank's diaries were published in English as The Diary of a Young Girl in 1952. The book, since translated into more than 60 languages, has sold more than 530,000 copies over the past 10 years.
from: Independent
The Bookseller (bookseller.com) reports the book will include letters from Anne Frank's father, Otto, when he was held in Auschwitz as well as his descriptions of the search for his family after the Second World War and his discovery of Anne's diaries.
"Treasures from the Attic reads like a novel: it's an epic, fateful, family saga, and tells the full story of Anne's family both before, during and after the war," stated Michael Dover, editor-in-chief of the book's publisher, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. "It contrasts the normality of family life with the horrors of persecution, deportation, and the concentration camps. And through it we gain new insight into Anne and her iconic diary. It's one of those unique documents that portrays innocence and humanity, suffering and survival in the starkest and most moving terms."
The book's author, Mirjam Pressler has published several titles based on Anne Frank's life, including the updated 1997 edition of her famed The Diary of a Young Girl, which spent nine weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
The Frank family, who lived in Amsterdam, went into hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. After two years the family was apprehended in 1944, and Anne was transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died a year later. Her father, who discoverd the diaries, was the family's only survivor.
Anne Frank's diaries were published in English as The Diary of a Young Girl in 1952. The book, since translated into more than 60 languages, has sold more than 530,000 copies over the past 10 years.
from: Independent
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Lost Libraries
The strange afterlife of authors' book collections
by: Craig Fehrman
A few weeks ago, Annecy Liddell was flipping through a used copy of Don DeLillo’s ”White Noise” when she saw that the previous owner had written his name inside the cover: David Markson. Liddell bought the novel anyway and, when she got home, looked the name up on Wikipedia.
Markson, she discovered, was an important novelist himself--an experimental writer with a cult following in the literary world. David Foster Wallace considered Markson’s ”Wittgenstein’s Mistress”--a novel that had been rejected by 54 publishers--”pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country.” When it turned out that Markson had written notes throughout Liddell’s copy of ”White Noise,” she posted a Facebook update about her find. ”i wanted to call him up and tell him his notes are funny, but then i realized he DIED A MONTH AGO. bummer.”
The news of Liddell’s discovery quickly spread through Facebook and Twitter’s literary districts, and Markson’s fans realized that his personal library, about 2,500 books in all, had been sold off and was now anonymously scattered throughout The Strand, the vast Manhattan bookstore where Liddell had bought her book. And that’s when something remarkable happened: Markson’s fans began trying to reassemble his books. They used the Internet to coordinate trips to The Strand, to compile a list of their purchases, to swap scanned images of his notes, and to share tips. (The easiest way to spot a Markson book, they found, was to look for the high-quality hardcovers.) Markson’s fans told stories about watching strangers buy his books without understanding their origin, even after Strand clerks pointed out Markson’s signature. They also started asking questions, each one a variation on this: How could the books of one of this generation’s most interesting novelists end up on a bookstore’s dollar clearance carts?
What Markson’s fans had stumbled on was the strange and disorienting world of authors’ personal libraries. Most people might imagine that authors’ libraries matter--that scholars and readers should care what books authors read, what they thought about them, what they scribbled in the margins. But far more libraries get dispersed than saved. In fact, David Markson can now take his place in a long and distinguished line of writers whose personal libraries were quickly, casually broken down. Herman Melville’s books? One bookstore bought an assortment for $120, then scrapped the theological titles for paper. Stephen Crane’s? His widow died a brothel madam, and her estate (and his books) were auctioned off on the steps of a Florida courthouse. Ernest Hemingway’s? To this day, all 9,000 titles remain trapped in his Cuban villa.
The issues at stake when libraries vanish are bigger than any one author and his books. An author’s library offers unique access to a mind at work, and their treatment provides a look at what exactly the literary world decides to value in an author’s life. John Wronoski, a longtime book dealer in Cambridge, has seen the libraries of many prestigious authors pass through his store without securing a permanent home. ”Most readers would see these names and think, ’My god, shouldn’t they be in a library?’” Wronoski says. ”But most readers have no idea how this system works.”
The literary world is full of treasures and talismans, not all of them especially literary--a lock of Byron’s hair has been sold at auction; Harvard has archived John Updike’s golf score cards.
For private collectors and university libraries, though, the most important targets are manuscripts and letters and research materials--what’s collectively known as an author’s papers--and rare, individually valuable books. In the first category, especially, things can get expensive. The University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center recently bought Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s papers for $5 million and Norman Mailer’s for $2.5 million. Compared to the papers, the author’s own library takes a back seat. ”An author’s books are important,” says Tom Staley, the Ransom Center’s director, ”but they’re no substitute for the manuscripts and the correspondence. The books are gravy.”
Updike would seem to have agreed. After his death in 2009, Harvard’s Houghton Library bought Updike’s archive, more than 125 shelves of material that he assembled himself. Updike chose to include 1,500 books, but that number is inflated by his own work--at least one copy of every edition of every book in every language it was issued. ”He was not so comprehensive in the books that he read,” says Leslie Morris, Harvard’s curator for the Updike archive. In fact, Updike was known to donate old books to church book sales and to hand them out to friends’ wives. Late in life, he made a deal with Mark Stolle, who owns a bookstore in Manchester-by-the-Sea. ”He would call me once his garage was filled,” Stolle remembers, ”and I would go over and buy them.”
While he didn’t seem to value them, Updike’s books begin to show how and why an author’s library does matter. In his copy of Tom Wolfe’s ”A Man in Full,” which was one of Stolle’s garage finds, Updike wrote comments like ”adjectival monotony” and ”semi cliché in every sentence.” A comparison with Updike’s eventual New Yorker review suggests that authors will write things in their books that they won’t say in public.
An author’s library, like anyone else’s, reveals something about its owner. Mark Twain loved to present himself as self-taught and under-read, but his carefully annotated books tell a different story. Books can offer hints about an author’s social and personal life. After David Foster Wallace’s death in 2008, the Ransom Center bought his papers and 200 of his books, including two David Markson novels that Wallace not only annotated, but also had Markson sign when they met in New York in 1990. Most of all, though, authors’ libraries serve as a kind of intellectual biography. Melville’s most heavily annotated book was an edition of John Milton’s poems, and it proves he reread ”Paradise Lost” while struggling with ”Moby-Dick.”
And yet these libraries rarely survive intact. The reasons for this can range from money problems to squabbling heirs to poorly executed auctions. Twain’s library makes for an especially cringe-worthy case study because, unlike a lot of now-classic authors, he saw no ebb in his reputation--and, thus, no excuse in the handling of his books. In 1908, Twain donated 500 books to the library he helped establish in Redding, Conn. After Twain’s death in 1910, his daughter, Clara, gave the library another 1,700 books. The Redding library began circulating Twain’s books, many of which contained his notes, and souvenir hunters began cutting out every page that had Twain’s handwriting. This was bad enough, but in the 1950s the library decided to thin its inventory, unloading the unwanted books on a book dealer who soon realized he now possessed more than 60 titles annotated by Mark Twain. Today, academic libraries across the country own Twain books in which ”REDDING LIBRARY” has been stamped in purple ink.
But the 1950s also marked the start of a shift in the way many scholars and librarians appraised an author’s books. They began trying to reassemble the most famous authors’ libraries--or, in worst-case scenarios like Twain’s, to compile detailed lists of every book a writer had owned. The effort and ingenuity behind these lists can be astounding, as scholars will sift through diaries, receipts, even old library call slips. A good example is Alan Gribben’s ”Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction,” which runs to two volumes and took nine years to complete.
This raises an obvious question: Why not make the list of an author’s books before dispersing them? The answer, usually, is time. Book dealers, Wronoski says, can’t assemble scholarly lists while also moving enough inventory to stay in business. When Wallace’s widow and his literary agent, Bonnie Nadell, sorted through his library, they sent only the books he had annotated to the Ransom Center. The others, more than 30 boxes’ worth, they donated to charity. There was no chance to make a list, Nadell says, because another professor needed to move into Wallace’s office. ”We were just speed skimming for markings of any kind.”
Still, the gap between the labor required on the front end and the back end can make such choices seem baffling and even--a curious charge to make when discussing archives--short-sighted. Libraries, for their part, must also allocate limited resources, and they do so based on a calculus of demand, precedent, and prestige. This means the big winners are historical authors (in the 1980s, Melville’s copy of Milton sold at an auction for $100,000) and those who fit into a library’s targeted specialties. ”We tend to focus on Harvard-educated authors,” Morris says. ”The Houghton Library is pretty much full and has been for the last 10 years.”
In David Markson’s case, the easiest explanation for why his books ended up at The Strand is that he wanted them to. Markson, who lived near the bookstore, would stop by three or four times a week. The Strand, in turn, hosted his book signings and maintained a table of his books, and Markson’s daughter, Johanna, says he frequently told her in his final years to take his books to The Strand. ”He said they’d take good care of us,” she says.
And so, after Johanna and her brother saved some books that were important to them--”I want my children to see what kind of reader their grandfather was,” Johanna says--a truck from The Strand picked up the rest, 63 boxes in all. Fred Bass, The Strand’s owner, says he had to break Markson’s library apart because of the size of his operation. ”We do it with most personal libraries,” Bass says. ”We don’t have room to set up special collections.”
Markson had sold books to The Strand before. In fact, over the years, he sold off his most valuable books and even small batches of his literary correspondence simply to make ends meet. Markson recalled in one interview that, when he asked Jack Kerouac to sign a book for him, Kerouac was so drunk he stabbed the pen through the front page. Bass said he personally looked through Markson’s books hoping to find items like this. ”But David had picked it pretty clean.”
Selling his literary past became a way for Markson to sustain his literary future. In ”Wittgenstein’s Mistress” and the four novels that followed, Markson abandoned characters and plots in favor of meticulously ordered allusions and historical anecdotes--a style he called ”seminonfictional semifiction.” That style, along with the skill with which he prosecuted it, explains both the size and the passion of Markson’s audience.
Markson’s late style also explains the special relevance of his library, and it’s a wonderful twist that these elements all came together in the campaign to crowdsource it. Through a Facebook group and an informal collection of blog posts, Markson’s fans have put together a representative sample of his books. The results won’t satisfy the scholarly completist, but they reveal the range of Markson’s reading--not just fiction and poetry, but classical literature, philosophy, literary criticism, and art history. They also illuminate aspects of Markson’s life (one fan got the textbooks Markson used while a graduate student) and his art (another got his copy of ”Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” where Markson had underlined passages that resurface in his later novels). Most of all, they capture Markson’s mind as it plays across the page. In his copy of ”Agape Agape,” the final novel from postmodern wizard William Gaddis, Markson wrote: ”Monotonous. Tedious. Repetitious. One note, all the way through. Theme inordinately stale + old hat. Alas, Willie.”
Markson’s letters to and from Gaddis were one of the things he sold off--they’re now in the Gaddis collection at Washington University--but Johanna Markson says he left some papers behind. ”He always told us, ’When I die, that’s when I’ll be famous,’” she says, and she’s saving eight large bins full of Markson’s edited manuscripts, the note cards he used to write his late novels, and his remaining correspondence. A library like Ohio State’s, which specializes in contemporary fiction, seems like a good match. In fact, Geoffrey Smith, head of Ohio State’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, says he would have liked to look at Markson’s library, in addition to his papers. ”We would have been interested, to say the least,” Smith says.
But if Markson’s library--and a potential scholarly foothold--has been lost, other things have been gained. A dead man’s wishes have been honored. A few fans have been blessed. And an author has found a new reader. ”I’m glad I got that book,” Annecy Liddell says. ”I really wouldn’t know who Markson is if I hadn’t found that. I haven’t finished ‘White Noise’ yet but I’m almost done with ‘Wittgenstein’s Mistress’--it’s weird and great and way more fun to read.”
from: Boston Globe
by: Craig Fehrman
A few weeks ago, Annecy Liddell was flipping through a used copy of Don DeLillo’s ”White Noise” when she saw that the previous owner had written his name inside the cover: David Markson. Liddell bought the novel anyway and, when she got home, looked the name up on Wikipedia.
Markson, she discovered, was an important novelist himself--an experimental writer with a cult following in the literary world. David Foster Wallace considered Markson’s ”Wittgenstein’s Mistress”--a novel that had been rejected by 54 publishers--”pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country.” When it turned out that Markson had written notes throughout Liddell’s copy of ”White Noise,” she posted a Facebook update about her find. ”i wanted to call him up and tell him his notes are funny, but then i realized he DIED A MONTH AGO. bummer.”
The news of Liddell’s discovery quickly spread through Facebook and Twitter’s literary districts, and Markson’s fans realized that his personal library, about 2,500 books in all, had been sold off and was now anonymously scattered throughout The Strand, the vast Manhattan bookstore where Liddell had bought her book. And that’s when something remarkable happened: Markson’s fans began trying to reassemble his books. They used the Internet to coordinate trips to The Strand, to compile a list of their purchases, to swap scanned images of his notes, and to share tips. (The easiest way to spot a Markson book, they found, was to look for the high-quality hardcovers.) Markson’s fans told stories about watching strangers buy his books without understanding their origin, even after Strand clerks pointed out Markson’s signature. They also started asking questions, each one a variation on this: How could the books of one of this generation’s most interesting novelists end up on a bookstore’s dollar clearance carts?
What Markson’s fans had stumbled on was the strange and disorienting world of authors’ personal libraries. Most people might imagine that authors’ libraries matter--that scholars and readers should care what books authors read, what they thought about them, what they scribbled in the margins. But far more libraries get dispersed than saved. In fact, David Markson can now take his place in a long and distinguished line of writers whose personal libraries were quickly, casually broken down. Herman Melville’s books? One bookstore bought an assortment for $120, then scrapped the theological titles for paper. Stephen Crane’s? His widow died a brothel madam, and her estate (and his books) were auctioned off on the steps of a Florida courthouse. Ernest Hemingway’s? To this day, all 9,000 titles remain trapped in his Cuban villa.
The issues at stake when libraries vanish are bigger than any one author and his books. An author’s library offers unique access to a mind at work, and their treatment provides a look at what exactly the literary world decides to value in an author’s life. John Wronoski, a longtime book dealer in Cambridge, has seen the libraries of many prestigious authors pass through his store without securing a permanent home. ”Most readers would see these names and think, ’My god, shouldn’t they be in a library?’” Wronoski says. ”But most readers have no idea how this system works.”
The literary world is full of treasures and talismans, not all of them especially literary--a lock of Byron’s hair has been sold at auction; Harvard has archived John Updike’s golf score cards.
For private collectors and university libraries, though, the most important targets are manuscripts and letters and research materials--what’s collectively known as an author’s papers--and rare, individually valuable books. In the first category, especially, things can get expensive. The University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center recently bought Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s papers for $5 million and Norman Mailer’s for $2.5 million. Compared to the papers, the author’s own library takes a back seat. ”An author’s books are important,” says Tom Staley, the Ransom Center’s director, ”but they’re no substitute for the manuscripts and the correspondence. The books are gravy.”
Updike would seem to have agreed. After his death in 2009, Harvard’s Houghton Library bought Updike’s archive, more than 125 shelves of material that he assembled himself. Updike chose to include 1,500 books, but that number is inflated by his own work--at least one copy of every edition of every book in every language it was issued. ”He was not so comprehensive in the books that he read,” says Leslie Morris, Harvard’s curator for the Updike archive. In fact, Updike was known to donate old books to church book sales and to hand them out to friends’ wives. Late in life, he made a deal with Mark Stolle, who owns a bookstore in Manchester-by-the-Sea. ”He would call me once his garage was filled,” Stolle remembers, ”and I would go over and buy them.”
While he didn’t seem to value them, Updike’s books begin to show how and why an author’s library does matter. In his copy of Tom Wolfe’s ”A Man in Full,” which was one of Stolle’s garage finds, Updike wrote comments like ”adjectival monotony” and ”semi cliché in every sentence.” A comparison with Updike’s eventual New Yorker review suggests that authors will write things in their books that they won’t say in public.
An author’s library, like anyone else’s, reveals something about its owner. Mark Twain loved to present himself as self-taught and under-read, but his carefully annotated books tell a different story. Books can offer hints about an author’s social and personal life. After David Foster Wallace’s death in 2008, the Ransom Center bought his papers and 200 of his books, including two David Markson novels that Wallace not only annotated, but also had Markson sign when they met in New York in 1990. Most of all, though, authors’ libraries serve as a kind of intellectual biography. Melville’s most heavily annotated book was an edition of John Milton’s poems, and it proves he reread ”Paradise Lost” while struggling with ”Moby-Dick.”
And yet these libraries rarely survive intact. The reasons for this can range from money problems to squabbling heirs to poorly executed auctions. Twain’s library makes for an especially cringe-worthy case study because, unlike a lot of now-classic authors, he saw no ebb in his reputation--and, thus, no excuse in the handling of his books. In 1908, Twain donated 500 books to the library he helped establish in Redding, Conn. After Twain’s death in 1910, his daughter, Clara, gave the library another 1,700 books. The Redding library began circulating Twain’s books, many of which contained his notes, and souvenir hunters began cutting out every page that had Twain’s handwriting. This was bad enough, but in the 1950s the library decided to thin its inventory, unloading the unwanted books on a book dealer who soon realized he now possessed more than 60 titles annotated by Mark Twain. Today, academic libraries across the country own Twain books in which ”REDDING LIBRARY” has been stamped in purple ink.
But the 1950s also marked the start of a shift in the way many scholars and librarians appraised an author’s books. They began trying to reassemble the most famous authors’ libraries--or, in worst-case scenarios like Twain’s, to compile detailed lists of every book a writer had owned. The effort and ingenuity behind these lists can be astounding, as scholars will sift through diaries, receipts, even old library call slips. A good example is Alan Gribben’s ”Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction,” which runs to two volumes and took nine years to complete.
This raises an obvious question: Why not make the list of an author’s books before dispersing them? The answer, usually, is time. Book dealers, Wronoski says, can’t assemble scholarly lists while also moving enough inventory to stay in business. When Wallace’s widow and his literary agent, Bonnie Nadell, sorted through his library, they sent only the books he had annotated to the Ransom Center. The others, more than 30 boxes’ worth, they donated to charity. There was no chance to make a list, Nadell says, because another professor needed to move into Wallace’s office. ”We were just speed skimming for markings of any kind.”
Still, the gap between the labor required on the front end and the back end can make such choices seem baffling and even--a curious charge to make when discussing archives--short-sighted. Libraries, for their part, must also allocate limited resources, and they do so based on a calculus of demand, precedent, and prestige. This means the big winners are historical authors (in the 1980s, Melville’s copy of Milton sold at an auction for $100,000) and those who fit into a library’s targeted specialties. ”We tend to focus on Harvard-educated authors,” Morris says. ”The Houghton Library is pretty much full and has been for the last 10 years.”
In David Markson’s case, the easiest explanation for why his books ended up at The Strand is that he wanted them to. Markson, who lived near the bookstore, would stop by three or four times a week. The Strand, in turn, hosted his book signings and maintained a table of his books, and Markson’s daughter, Johanna, says he frequently told her in his final years to take his books to The Strand. ”He said they’d take good care of us,” she says.
And so, after Johanna and her brother saved some books that were important to them--”I want my children to see what kind of reader their grandfather was,” Johanna says--a truck from The Strand picked up the rest, 63 boxes in all. Fred Bass, The Strand’s owner, says he had to break Markson’s library apart because of the size of his operation. ”We do it with most personal libraries,” Bass says. ”We don’t have room to set up special collections.”
Markson had sold books to The Strand before. In fact, over the years, he sold off his most valuable books and even small batches of his literary correspondence simply to make ends meet. Markson recalled in one interview that, when he asked Jack Kerouac to sign a book for him, Kerouac was so drunk he stabbed the pen through the front page. Bass said he personally looked through Markson’s books hoping to find items like this. ”But David had picked it pretty clean.”
Selling his literary past became a way for Markson to sustain his literary future. In ”Wittgenstein’s Mistress” and the four novels that followed, Markson abandoned characters and plots in favor of meticulously ordered allusions and historical anecdotes--a style he called ”seminonfictional semifiction.” That style, along with the skill with which he prosecuted it, explains both the size and the passion of Markson’s audience.
Markson’s late style also explains the special relevance of his library, and it’s a wonderful twist that these elements all came together in the campaign to crowdsource it. Through a Facebook group and an informal collection of blog posts, Markson’s fans have put together a representative sample of his books. The results won’t satisfy the scholarly completist, but they reveal the range of Markson’s reading--not just fiction and poetry, but classical literature, philosophy, literary criticism, and art history. They also illuminate aspects of Markson’s life (one fan got the textbooks Markson used while a graduate student) and his art (another got his copy of ”Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” where Markson had underlined passages that resurface in his later novels). Most of all, they capture Markson’s mind as it plays across the page. In his copy of ”Agape Agape,” the final novel from postmodern wizard William Gaddis, Markson wrote: ”Monotonous. Tedious. Repetitious. One note, all the way through. Theme inordinately stale + old hat. Alas, Willie.”
Markson’s letters to and from Gaddis were one of the things he sold off--they’re now in the Gaddis collection at Washington University--but Johanna Markson says he left some papers behind. ”He always told us, ’When I die, that’s when I’ll be famous,’” she says, and she’s saving eight large bins full of Markson’s edited manuscripts, the note cards he used to write his late novels, and his remaining correspondence. A library like Ohio State’s, which specializes in contemporary fiction, seems like a good match. In fact, Geoffrey Smith, head of Ohio State’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, says he would have liked to look at Markson’s library, in addition to his papers. ”We would have been interested, to say the least,” Smith says.
But if Markson’s library--and a potential scholarly foothold--has been lost, other things have been gained. A dead man’s wishes have been honored. A few fans have been blessed. And an author has found a new reader. ”I’m glad I got that book,” Annecy Liddell says. ”I really wouldn’t know who Markson is if I hadn’t found that. I haven’t finished ‘White Noise’ yet but I’m almost done with ‘Wittgenstein’s Mistress’--it’s weird and great and way more fun to read.”
from: Boston Globe
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
How goes Iraq? View from a bookstore is revealing
by: Hamza Hendawi
BAGHDAD — The Iqraa bookstore on Mutanabi street has more than tripled in size in the last two years. Business is up 50 percent since 2003.
But, say the store's two owners, the future is uncertain as long as they can't count on safe streets, stable government and reliable electricity supplies.
Yet Iqraa's growth reflects a tiny step forward in a nation that centuries ago was a beacon of literature and science, and that has suffered sustained and bloody bouts of turmoil over the past 30 years.
___
EDITOR'S NOTE: Associated Press correspondent Hamza Hendawi reports on his latest visit to a corner of Iraqi cultural life whose fortunes he has tracked since the U.S.-led invasion seven years ago.
___
Iqraa's owners, Atta Zeidan and Mohammed Hanash Abbas, are close friends. In a series of interviews this summer, they talked about the winding down of the U.S. military mission in Iraq, the political deadlock since the March election, the still-fragile security situation and its impact on their business.
"Our dreams are one thing and the reality is another," Zeidan lamented.
The dreams came with Saddam Hussein's overthrow in the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. The reality, on one August morning, was a long power outage during a blistering sandstorm, and the nagging unease about violence which, though dramatically down since 2008, still manifests itself in sporadic, almost daily incidents.
"Our future plans depend on electricity, security and the economy," Zeidan said.
The future also depends on how the Iraqi police and military manage without the Americans, all of whom will be gone by the end of next year. Both men said they had welcomed the Americans as liberators but were now glad to see them leaving.
"No one in Iraq likes the idea of a stranger coming into his house," said Zeidan. "This is our homeland."
"A year ago, I used to say the Americans should stay, but not now," said Abbas. "I think it is best if they leave, but without stopping their support for the government and the army."
Zeidan and Abbas are Shiite Muslims, the majority that was long oppressed by Saddam and had the most to gain from his ouster.
The two men, both college graduates, opened their store in 1995, hoping to ease the poverty inflicted by the U.N. sanctions that had followed Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. They had fewer tomes then and none of the glossy English and French learning exercise books they now import from Iran. Many people who came to the store wanted to sell their book collections, hoping the money would tide them over at a time when families sold furniture, cutlery and china to make ends meet as the sanctions bit hard.
Today, what began as a secondhand bookstore and a lending library for students has become a major supplier of texts and language-skills books for colleges across the country.
Tucked among many other bookstores on a street named for a 10th-century Baghdad poet, it is also one of the best sources of used books — some dating back a century — on Iraq, Islam and the Arab world.
In the past two years, Zeidan and Abbas have leased a store next door to expand, plus a storeroom in the dusty two-story mall where Iqraa (an Arabic command meaning "read") is located.
Abbas is getting a passport so he can travel to neighboring Iran to buy books directly from Iranian presses, rather than pay agents to buy and import them overland.
"Iran is closer than India and cheaper than Syria," he said.
They also are slowly building a stock of audio material for language students and contracting a Baghdad press to print pirated English and French classics.
"The world of books will not make us rich and fat," said Zeidan, 45 and a father of three. "But it's not making us poor and skinny either."
"Business has been good the past year," said Abbas, 47. "People's purchasing power is healthy, but every time there is a security situation, business drops."
In 2007, a year before Iraq turned the page on the post-invasion violence, a bombing on Mutanabi street killed nearly 40 people and wrecked scores of bookstores.
But on the day Abbas and Zeidan spoke, things seemed peaceful. An elderly, sweat-soaked man came looking for a Russian-Arabic dictionary to send to his son who is studying medicine in Moscow. A young student returned a borrowed volume of Byron's verse, and three others searched for textbooks that would help them learn English.
It all stands in stark contrast to what it was like at Iqraa two or more years ago, when the area surrounding the bookstore became deserted by early afternoon. The little business done in the morning was often conducted to the thud of explosions and the ring of gunfire across the Tigris River on Haifa street, for years a bastion of the Sunni insurgency.
Now, many more people frequent the area, and the dozens of men sweating under the summer sun as they push their book-laden carts along Mutanabi street testifies to the revival of business in the Baghdad landmark. On Fridays, the busiest day for booksellers, men and women crowd the bookstores and the street vendors offer books on a wide variety of subjects — literature, medical science, engineering and even old comic books.
Nowadays Iraqis are traveling abroad more and studying for college degrees. They have connected to the outside world through satellite TV, the Internet and cell phones.
"For so long, we were a society governed by a single ruler — an oppressed people," said Zeidan. "We were an isolated society with Saddam's pet issues and slogans nonnegotiable. We have a new life now. Anyone can run for office. Anyone."
But democracy has also turned out to be messy. Six months after the March 7 election, bickering politicians still haven't formed a new government.
Abbas and Zeidan say that despite their store's success, they have yet to reap the full benefits of a world without Saddam. But they manage to see hope even in the fact that the political deadlock is driven by personal rivalries rather than the sectarianism that spilled so much blood during the post-invasion violence.
"I don't care who is the next prime minister," said Abbas. "All that I care about is that we have a man who can run the country."
from: Associated Press
BAGHDAD — The Iqraa bookstore on Mutanabi street has more than tripled in size in the last two years. Business is up 50 percent since 2003.
But, say the store's two owners, the future is uncertain as long as they can't count on safe streets, stable government and reliable electricity supplies.
Yet Iqraa's growth reflects a tiny step forward in a nation that centuries ago was a beacon of literature and science, and that has suffered sustained and bloody bouts of turmoil over the past 30 years.
___
EDITOR'S NOTE: Associated Press correspondent Hamza Hendawi reports on his latest visit to a corner of Iraqi cultural life whose fortunes he has tracked since the U.S.-led invasion seven years ago.
___
Iqraa's owners, Atta Zeidan and Mohammed Hanash Abbas, are close friends. In a series of interviews this summer, they talked about the winding down of the U.S. military mission in Iraq, the political deadlock since the March election, the still-fragile security situation and its impact on their business.
"Our dreams are one thing and the reality is another," Zeidan lamented.
The dreams came with Saddam Hussein's overthrow in the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. The reality, on one August morning, was a long power outage during a blistering sandstorm, and the nagging unease about violence which, though dramatically down since 2008, still manifests itself in sporadic, almost daily incidents.
"Our future plans depend on electricity, security and the economy," Zeidan said.
The future also depends on how the Iraqi police and military manage without the Americans, all of whom will be gone by the end of next year. Both men said they had welcomed the Americans as liberators but were now glad to see them leaving.
"No one in Iraq likes the idea of a stranger coming into his house," said Zeidan. "This is our homeland."
"A year ago, I used to say the Americans should stay, but not now," said Abbas. "I think it is best if they leave, but without stopping their support for the government and the army."
Zeidan and Abbas are Shiite Muslims, the majority that was long oppressed by Saddam and had the most to gain from his ouster.
The two men, both college graduates, opened their store in 1995, hoping to ease the poverty inflicted by the U.N. sanctions that had followed Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. They had fewer tomes then and none of the glossy English and French learning exercise books they now import from Iran. Many people who came to the store wanted to sell their book collections, hoping the money would tide them over at a time when families sold furniture, cutlery and china to make ends meet as the sanctions bit hard.
Today, what began as a secondhand bookstore and a lending library for students has become a major supplier of texts and language-skills books for colleges across the country.
Tucked among many other bookstores on a street named for a 10th-century Baghdad poet, it is also one of the best sources of used books — some dating back a century — on Iraq, Islam and the Arab world.
In the past two years, Zeidan and Abbas have leased a store next door to expand, plus a storeroom in the dusty two-story mall where Iqraa (an Arabic command meaning "read") is located.
Abbas is getting a passport so he can travel to neighboring Iran to buy books directly from Iranian presses, rather than pay agents to buy and import them overland.
"Iran is closer than India and cheaper than Syria," he said.
They also are slowly building a stock of audio material for language students and contracting a Baghdad press to print pirated English and French classics.
"The world of books will not make us rich and fat," said Zeidan, 45 and a father of three. "But it's not making us poor and skinny either."
"Business has been good the past year," said Abbas, 47. "People's purchasing power is healthy, but every time there is a security situation, business drops."
In 2007, a year before Iraq turned the page on the post-invasion violence, a bombing on Mutanabi street killed nearly 40 people and wrecked scores of bookstores.
But on the day Abbas and Zeidan spoke, things seemed peaceful. An elderly, sweat-soaked man came looking for a Russian-Arabic dictionary to send to his son who is studying medicine in Moscow. A young student returned a borrowed volume of Byron's verse, and three others searched for textbooks that would help them learn English.
It all stands in stark contrast to what it was like at Iqraa two or more years ago, when the area surrounding the bookstore became deserted by early afternoon. The little business done in the morning was often conducted to the thud of explosions and the ring of gunfire across the Tigris River on Haifa street, for years a bastion of the Sunni insurgency.
Now, many more people frequent the area, and the dozens of men sweating under the summer sun as they push their book-laden carts along Mutanabi street testifies to the revival of business in the Baghdad landmark. On Fridays, the busiest day for booksellers, men and women crowd the bookstores and the street vendors offer books on a wide variety of subjects — literature, medical science, engineering and even old comic books.
Nowadays Iraqis are traveling abroad more and studying for college degrees. They have connected to the outside world through satellite TV, the Internet and cell phones.
"For so long, we were a society governed by a single ruler — an oppressed people," said Zeidan. "We were an isolated society with Saddam's pet issues and slogans nonnegotiable. We have a new life now. Anyone can run for office. Anyone."
But democracy has also turned out to be messy. Six months after the March 7 election, bickering politicians still haven't formed a new government.
Abbas and Zeidan say that despite their store's success, they have yet to reap the full benefits of a world without Saddam. But they manage to see hope even in the fact that the political deadlock is driven by personal rivalries rather than the sectarianism that spilled so much blood during the post-invasion violence.
"I don't care who is the next prime minister," said Abbas. "All that I care about is that we have a man who can run the country."
from: Associated Press
Monday, September 20, 2010
2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist revealed
by: Mark Medley
Each year, when the longlist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize is revealed, it has become tradition to study the nominees and then develop some type of diagnosis, like a doctor taking the temperature of Canada’s literary firmament. There’s too many men! There are too few short story collections! There list is dominated by the big presses! Where are the poets?
This year, however, the longlist is a fairly balance affair, featuring six men and seven women, a mix of CanLit veterans and newcomers, a couple of short story collections, and a good showing by the small presses. (Alas, no poetry collections have been nominated, perhaps because they are ineligible).
The longlist for the 2010 Giller Prize, the country’s most prestigious literary award, was revealed on Monday morning. It features:
• David Bergen for The Matter With Morris (Phyllis Bruce Books/HarperCollins)
• Douglas Coupland for Player One (House of Anansi Press)
• Michael Helm for Cities of Refuge (McClelland & Stewart)
• Alexander MacLeod for his short story collection Light Lifting (Biblioasis)
• Avner Mandelman for The Debba (Other Press/Random House of Canada)
• Tom Rachman for The Imperfectionists (Dial/Random House of Canada)
• Sarah Selecky for her short story collection This Cake Is For The Party (Thomas Allen Publishers)
• Johanna Skibsrud for The Sentimentalists (Gaspereau Press)
• Cordelia Strube for Lemon (Coach House Books)
• Joan Thomas for Curiosity (McClelland & Stewart)
• Jane Urquhart for Sanctuary Line (McClelland & Stewart)
• Dianne Warren for Cool Water (Phyllis Bruce Books/HarperCollins)
• Kathleen Winter for Annabel (House of Anansi Press)
David Bergen is the only former Giller Prize winner on the longlist; he won the prize in 2005 for The Time In Between and was longlisted in 2008 for The Retreat. Jane Urquhart was shortlisted in 2001 for The Stone Carvers, Michael Helm was shortlisted in 1997 for The Projectionists, while Douglas Coupland was longlisted in 2006 for jPod. Interestingly, Coupland’s novel Player One was written for The Massey Lectures, which he will deliver this fall.
This year’s jury, which includes Canadian journalist Michael Enright, American author Claire Messud, and UK writer Ali Smith, settled on the longlist of 13 books after considering 98 books submitted by 38 publishers from across Canada. Said the jury in a statement:
“This is a vibrant and exciting list. We came very harmoniously to our final decision, which, in the ranging of its featured books between astonishing debuts and brilliant new work by already well-known, major Canadian writers, and between the historical and the contemporary, the traditional and the experimental, the long, the short and the unexpected in both story and form, stands as a showcase in its own right of the vision, the energy, the internationalism and the open-eyed versatility of contemporary Canadian fiction.”
Books passed over by the jury include, Ilustrado by Montreal’s Miguel Syjuco, which won the Man Asian Literary Award before it was even published; Beatrice and Virgil, Yann Martel’s first novel since his breakthrough Life of Pi; and, most notably, Room by Emma Donoghue, which was recently shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
This year’s longlist features 11 novels and two short story collections; smaller publishing houses also made a strong showing, with nominations for the likes of Coach House Books, Biblioasis, and Gaspereau Press. McClelland & Stewart leads all publishers with three nominations.
The shortlist will be announced on Tuesday, October 5. The $50,000 prize will be handed out at a gala ceremony on November 9.
Last year’s winner was Linden MacIntyre for The Bishop’s Man. Previous winners include Joseph Boyden, Mordecai Richler, and Alice Munro.
from: National Post
Each year, when the longlist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize is revealed, it has become tradition to study the nominees and then develop some type of diagnosis, like a doctor taking the temperature of Canada’s literary firmament. There’s too many men! There are too few short story collections! There list is dominated by the big presses! Where are the poets?
This year, however, the longlist is a fairly balance affair, featuring six men and seven women, a mix of CanLit veterans and newcomers, a couple of short story collections, and a good showing by the small presses. (Alas, no poetry collections have been nominated, perhaps because they are ineligible).
The longlist for the 2010 Giller Prize, the country’s most prestigious literary award, was revealed on Monday morning. It features:
• David Bergen for The Matter With Morris (Phyllis Bruce Books/HarperCollins)
• Douglas Coupland for Player One (House of Anansi Press)
• Michael Helm for Cities of Refuge (McClelland & Stewart)
• Alexander MacLeod for his short story collection Light Lifting (Biblioasis)
• Avner Mandelman for The Debba (Other Press/Random House of Canada)
• Tom Rachman for The Imperfectionists (Dial/Random House of Canada)
• Sarah Selecky for her short story collection This Cake Is For The Party (Thomas Allen Publishers)
• Johanna Skibsrud for The Sentimentalists (Gaspereau Press)
• Cordelia Strube for Lemon (Coach House Books)
• Joan Thomas for Curiosity (McClelland & Stewart)
• Jane Urquhart for Sanctuary Line (McClelland & Stewart)
• Dianne Warren for Cool Water (Phyllis Bruce Books/HarperCollins)
• Kathleen Winter for Annabel (House of Anansi Press)
David Bergen is the only former Giller Prize winner on the longlist; he won the prize in 2005 for The Time In Between and was longlisted in 2008 for The Retreat. Jane Urquhart was shortlisted in 2001 for The Stone Carvers, Michael Helm was shortlisted in 1997 for The Projectionists, while Douglas Coupland was longlisted in 2006 for jPod. Interestingly, Coupland’s novel Player One was written for The Massey Lectures, which he will deliver this fall.
This year’s jury, which includes Canadian journalist Michael Enright, American author Claire Messud, and UK writer Ali Smith, settled on the longlist of 13 books after considering 98 books submitted by 38 publishers from across Canada. Said the jury in a statement:
“This is a vibrant and exciting list. We came very harmoniously to our final decision, which, in the ranging of its featured books between astonishing debuts and brilliant new work by already well-known, major Canadian writers, and between the historical and the contemporary, the traditional and the experimental, the long, the short and the unexpected in both story and form, stands as a showcase in its own right of the vision, the energy, the internationalism and the open-eyed versatility of contemporary Canadian fiction.”
Books passed over by the jury include, Ilustrado by Montreal’s Miguel Syjuco, which won the Man Asian Literary Award before it was even published; Beatrice and Virgil, Yann Martel’s first novel since his breakthrough Life of Pi; and, most notably, Room by Emma Donoghue, which was recently shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
This year’s longlist features 11 novels and two short story collections; smaller publishing houses also made a strong showing, with nominations for the likes of Coach House Books, Biblioasis, and Gaspereau Press. McClelland & Stewart leads all publishers with three nominations.
The shortlist will be announced on Tuesday, October 5. The $50,000 prize will be handed out at a gala ceremony on November 9.
Last year’s winner was Linden MacIntyre for The Bishop’s Man. Previous winners include Joseph Boyden, Mordecai Richler, and Alice Munro.
from: National Post
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Trying the iTunes Model for Essays
by: Julie Bosman
If a song on iTunes sells for 99 cents, how about a literary essay?
On Tuesday, Scribner began publishing 69 essays by Chuck Klosterman, the pop culture and sports writer, available individually from retailers like Amazon, Apple and BN.com for 99 cents each.
Nearly all of the essays, which include “Fargo Rock City, for Real” and “All I Know is What I Read in the Papers,” have appeared in print books before. But Scribner is hoping that consumers who have become accustomed to buying songs individually might do the same for stand-alone literary.
Mr. Klosterman, the best-selling author of “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs” and “Eating the Dinosaur,” has written on culture, music, sports and media, and collected a diverse following of readers along the way. The plan to publish his essays individually was hatched more than a year and a half ago, said Susan Moldow, the publisher of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster whose list of writers includes Annie Proulx, Laura Bush and Frank McCourt.
“We thought, it’s a shame not to follow the iTunes model here, because you have all these essays and they’re all on different subjects and we could recast them,” Ms. Moldow said. “It harkens back in a funny way because for Fitzgerald and Hemingway, the best thing that could happen to them would be that a story was published in Life magazine or The Saturday Evening Post or The New Yorker. The idea of stories being sold in individual units is as old as stories.”
Scribner will also publish digital collections of Mr. Klosterman’s essays — “Chuck Klosterman on Rock” and “Chuck Klosterman on Sports,” for instance — for $7.99 each.
Other publishers have recently experimented with selling short stories and essays in bite-sized digital form. Last year, The Atlantic began selling short stories exclusively on Amazon.com for $3.99 each, beginning with works by Edna O’Brien and Christopher Buckley.
One Story, a literary magazine that publishes one short story every three weeks, offers a monthly subscription for $1.49, automatically sending a story to subscribers’ e-reading devices at the same time it is available in print.
The Penguin Group calls its version “eSpecials” and includes both short stories and essays, ranging in price from $2.99 to $6. In August, Random House Children’s Books published “The Death of Joan of Arc,” a short story available only in digital format for 99 cents.
Last year, HarperCollins published individual stories by Oscar Wilde, Willa Cather and Tolstoy, said Ana Maria Allessi, the vice president and publisher of HarperMedia.
“We have to take advantage of the format,” Ms. Alessi said, noting that it would be difficult to sell an individual short story in bookstores. “You really couldn’t do this in print.”
From: NY Times
If a song on iTunes sells for 99 cents, how about a literary essay?
On Tuesday, Scribner began publishing 69 essays by Chuck Klosterman, the pop culture and sports writer, available individually from retailers like Amazon, Apple and BN.com for 99 cents each.
Nearly all of the essays, which include “Fargo Rock City, for Real” and “All I Know is What I Read in the Papers,” have appeared in print books before. But Scribner is hoping that consumers who have become accustomed to buying songs individually might do the same for stand-alone literary.
Mr. Klosterman, the best-selling author of “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs” and “Eating the Dinosaur,” has written on culture, music, sports and media, and collected a diverse following of readers along the way. The plan to publish his essays individually was hatched more than a year and a half ago, said Susan Moldow, the publisher of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster whose list of writers includes Annie Proulx, Laura Bush and Frank McCourt.
“We thought, it’s a shame not to follow the iTunes model here, because you have all these essays and they’re all on different subjects and we could recast them,” Ms. Moldow said. “It harkens back in a funny way because for Fitzgerald and Hemingway, the best thing that could happen to them would be that a story was published in Life magazine or The Saturday Evening Post or The New Yorker. The idea of stories being sold in individual units is as old as stories.”
Scribner will also publish digital collections of Mr. Klosterman’s essays — “Chuck Klosterman on Rock” and “Chuck Klosterman on Sports,” for instance — for $7.99 each.
Other publishers have recently experimented with selling short stories and essays in bite-sized digital form. Last year, The Atlantic began selling short stories exclusively on Amazon.com for $3.99 each, beginning with works by Edna O’Brien and Christopher Buckley.
One Story, a literary magazine that publishes one short story every three weeks, offers a monthly subscription for $1.49, automatically sending a story to subscribers’ e-reading devices at the same time it is available in print.
The Penguin Group calls its version “eSpecials” and includes both short stories and essays, ranging in price from $2.99 to $6. In August, Random House Children’s Books published “The Death of Joan of Arc,” a short story available only in digital format for 99 cents.
Last year, HarperCollins published individual stories by Oscar Wilde, Willa Cather and Tolstoy, said Ana Maria Allessi, the vice president and publisher of HarperMedia.
“We have to take advantage of the format,” Ms. Alessi said, noting that it would be difficult to sell an individual short story in bookstores. “You really couldn’t do this in print.”
From: NY Times
Friday, September 17, 2010
Why We Get Lost in Books
by: Andrea Thompson
Any avid reader knows the power of a book to transport you into another world, be it the wizard realm of "Harry Potter" or the legal intrigue of the latest John Grisham.
Part of the reason we get lost in these imaginary worlds might be because our brains effectively simulate the events of the book in the same way they process events in the real world, a new study suggests.
The new study, detailed in the July 21 issue of the journal Psychological Science, builds on previous work that links the way our brains process images and written words to the way they process actions we perform ourselves.
Examining these links could shed light on why some people enjoy reading more than others and how our reading abilities change with time. Essentially, some people might paint a more vivid mental picture of written prose than others.
Kick in the brain
Previous studies have monitored how the brain processes video, written words, images and other stimuli, and compared them to how it processes first-hand experiences. These studies have shown that the brain processes these two types of stimuli similarly.
For example, reading a simple verb such as "run" or "kick" activates some of the same regions of the brain that would be activated when we actually go running or kick a ball.
But reading a single word isn't quite the same as reading a long, continuous passage. Jeffrey Zacks and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis set out to see whether the same pattern held for continuous reading by monitoring the brain processes of study participants with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans.
The 28 study participants (20 women and 8 men) spent about 10 minutes reading four narratives, each less than 1,500 words, taken from the book "One Boy's Day." The words from the book were flashed onto a screen that the participants could read on a mirror in front of their faces.
The book follows a school-age boy during a typical day, and was created by psychologists as a research tool. The passages were used in this study because they were a simple narrative of everyday activities that participants would easily relate to and process.
The book "avoids some of the novelistic techniques that would make it a little harder for us to generalize back to the understanding of real life," Zacks said, such as skipping around through time or long inner monologues.
Brain activation
The researchers coded the four narratives for six types of changes "that people might be monitoring while they're comprehending" — changes they would notice both in everyday life and possibly in reading, Zacks said. These changes included: spatial changes (when a location changed); object changes (when a character picked up a ball, say); character changes; causal changes (when an activity occurs that wasn't directly caused by the activity in a previous clause); and goal changes (when a character begins an action with a new goal).
Monitoring such changes in the environment is adaptive, because it likely helped our ancestors to predict what might happen next: where prey might dart to next or what a predator might do. Similarly, today it helps us predict what might happen next in a story.
Essentially, Zacks and his team were trying to suss out how a reader parses an ongoing text into meaningful events.
After the participants had read the passages, the researchers would ask them questions to see if they recognized where these changes occurred in the text. They then looked at the fMRI data to see if brain activity in key areas spiked with the changes — it did.
"It turns out that there are focal areas that are selectively involved in each of these kinds of processing," Zacks said.
The data doesn't show quite the same specificity that studies where participants read a single word show. For example, while reading the phrase "raise right arm" might activate the area of the brain that controls that action, reading that phrase in the context of a longer passage only shows activation in the general motor control areas of the brain.
Zacks is optimistic though that the results showing more specific match-ups "are going to generalize to continuous reading;" they will just take more testing and lots of data, he said.
Individual differences
Understanding how our brains process the events and changes while reading could help us understand some of the individual differences in reading, for example, why some people are sucked in by stories more than others.
While some readers can actually picture what they read, others may not.
"There are readers, competent readers, who say 'I have no pictures in my head when I read'," Zacks said.
Further studies could see whether there really is a difference between how the brains of these two types of people process the words and phrases they read.
"It may be the case that some people do this more than others," Zacks said.
With further study, Zacks also hopes to tease out how this brain processing changes across life span, and how it is affected by diseases such as age-related dementia and other neurophysiological changes.
The current study was funded in part by the National Institute of Mental Health and the American Psychological Association (which publishes the journal Psychological Science).
from: LiveScience
Any avid reader knows the power of a book to transport you into another world, be it the wizard realm of "Harry Potter" or the legal intrigue of the latest John Grisham.
Part of the reason we get lost in these imaginary worlds might be because our brains effectively simulate the events of the book in the same way they process events in the real world, a new study suggests.
The new study, detailed in the July 21 issue of the journal Psychological Science, builds on previous work that links the way our brains process images and written words to the way they process actions we perform ourselves.
Examining these links could shed light on why some people enjoy reading more than others and how our reading abilities change with time. Essentially, some people might paint a more vivid mental picture of written prose than others.
Kick in the brain
Previous studies have monitored how the brain processes video, written words, images and other stimuli, and compared them to how it processes first-hand experiences. These studies have shown that the brain processes these two types of stimuli similarly.
For example, reading a simple verb such as "run" or "kick" activates some of the same regions of the brain that would be activated when we actually go running or kick a ball.
But reading a single word isn't quite the same as reading a long, continuous passage. Jeffrey Zacks and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis set out to see whether the same pattern held for continuous reading by monitoring the brain processes of study participants with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans.
The 28 study participants (20 women and 8 men) spent about 10 minutes reading four narratives, each less than 1,500 words, taken from the book "One Boy's Day." The words from the book were flashed onto a screen that the participants could read on a mirror in front of their faces.
The book follows a school-age boy during a typical day, and was created by psychologists as a research tool. The passages were used in this study because they were a simple narrative of everyday activities that participants would easily relate to and process.
The book "avoids some of the novelistic techniques that would make it a little harder for us to generalize back to the understanding of real life," Zacks said, such as skipping around through time or long inner monologues.
Brain activation
The researchers coded the four narratives for six types of changes "that people might be monitoring while they're comprehending" — changes they would notice both in everyday life and possibly in reading, Zacks said. These changes included: spatial changes (when a location changed); object changes (when a character picked up a ball, say); character changes; causal changes (when an activity occurs that wasn't directly caused by the activity in a previous clause); and goal changes (when a character begins an action with a new goal).
Monitoring such changes in the environment is adaptive, because it likely helped our ancestors to predict what might happen next: where prey might dart to next or what a predator might do. Similarly, today it helps us predict what might happen next in a story.
Essentially, Zacks and his team were trying to suss out how a reader parses an ongoing text into meaningful events.
After the participants had read the passages, the researchers would ask them questions to see if they recognized where these changes occurred in the text. They then looked at the fMRI data to see if brain activity in key areas spiked with the changes — it did.
"It turns out that there are focal areas that are selectively involved in each of these kinds of processing," Zacks said.
The data doesn't show quite the same specificity that studies where participants read a single word show. For example, while reading the phrase "raise right arm" might activate the area of the brain that controls that action, reading that phrase in the context of a longer passage only shows activation in the general motor control areas of the brain.
Zacks is optimistic though that the results showing more specific match-ups "are going to generalize to continuous reading;" they will just take more testing and lots of data, he said.
Individual differences
Understanding how our brains process the events and changes while reading could help us understand some of the individual differences in reading, for example, why some people are sucked in by stories more than others.
While some readers can actually picture what they read, others may not.
"There are readers, competent readers, who say 'I have no pictures in my head when I read'," Zacks said.
Further studies could see whether there really is a difference between how the brains of these two types of people process the words and phrases they read.
"It may be the case that some people do this more than others," Zacks said.
With further study, Zacks also hopes to tease out how this brain processing changes across life span, and how it is affected by diseases such as age-related dementia and other neurophysiological changes.
The current study was funded in part by the National Institute of Mental Health and the American Psychological Association (which publishes the journal Psychological Science).
from: LiveScience
Amsterdam opens a library in Schiphol Airport
Princess Laurentien of the Netherlands (right) was on hand August 25 at the official opening of the Airport Library at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, a browsing library of 1,250 Dutch-culture books targeted primarily for international passengers awaiting connecting flights. The library was initiated by library-services provider ProBiblio and the Netherlands Public Library Association in cooperation with the city libraries of Amsterdam, Delft, and Harlemmermeer. But it turns out that Nashville (Tenn.) Public Library had an airport branch 48 years ago....read more
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Twilight & Young Adult Books Altering Teen Brains
by: Clara Moskowitz
It's a potentially sucky situation. The vampire craze in teen literature – exemplified by the "Twilight" book series – could be affecting the dynamic workings of the teenage brain in ways scientists don't yet understand.
"We don't know exactly how literature affects the brain, but we know that it does," said Maria Nikolajeva, a Cambridge University professor of literature. "Some new findings have identified spots in the brain that respond to literature and art."
Scientists, authors and educators met in Cambridge, England, Sept. 3-5 for a conference organized by Nikolajeva to discuss how young-adult books and movies affect teenagers' minds.
"For young people, everything is so strange, and you cannot really say why you react to things – it's a difficult period to be a human being," Nikolajeva told LiveScience. The conference, she said, brought together "people from different disciplines to share what we know about this turbulent period we call adolescence."
Sessions included "What Is It About Good Girls and Vampires?" addressing the huge popularity of Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" series and other vampire-themed books. [The Real Science & History of Vampires]
Brain science
Teenagers' minds are more susceptible than adult minds to influence – from peers and experiences as well as from books, movies and music, researchers say.
"What we have learned over the past decade is that the teenage brain processes information differently than a more mature brain," said conference presenter Karen Coats, a professor of English at Illinois State University who integrates neuroscience into her research. "Brain imaging shows that teens are more likely to respond to situations emotionally, and they are less likely to consider consequences through rational forethought."
That's because the teenage prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for reasoning and risk assessment, goes through a growth spurt before puberty, followed by a period of organizing and pruning of the neural pathways, Coats said.
Linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath of Stanford University, a keynote speaker at the conference, is studying how reading longer novels habituates the brain toward a greater capacity for sustained attention to visual material.
"What neuroscience opens for us is what happens within the brain during specific activities that take place within identifiable emotional or motivational states," Heath said by e-mail. "For example, we know now that in reading about particular activities (especially those known to the readers), motor-neuronal activity is detected."
Is Bella a good role model?
Attendees at the conference included experts in neuroscience, psychology, art, literature and music, as well as writers such as Meg Rosoff, author of "How I Live Now" and other teen titles.
While teens might be turning the pages of "Twilight" for the plot and romance, other takeaways from the books may be having a lasting impact, too.
The series follows Bella, a teenage girl who falls in love with a much older vampire named Edward. Some critics have argued that Bella's passivity, and the story's abstinence-until-marriage message, are anti-feminist.
"If you look very, very clearly at what kind of values the 'Twilight' books propagate, these are very conservative values that do not in any way endorse independent thinking or personal development or a woman's position as an independent creature," Nikolajeva said. "That's quite depressing."
Dark vs. light
Researchers are interested in how such dark works might affect young minds, and why teenagers are especially drawn to stories with vampires, zombies, and post-apocalyptic and dystopian themes.
"We all remember being teenage is a difficult period, full of contradictions – dark feelings one day, joyful feelings the next. The 'Twilight' books are very much about this, about budding sexuality and not really knowing what you are," Nikolajeva said. "Although I'm not at all a fan of 'Twilight,' I do understand the appeal of it."
Nikolajeva argued that authors have a moral responsibility to include some positivity and hope in works aimed at teens.
"If young people read books where there is no hope at all, it's really damaging," she said. "We need to be aware of young people's being influenced by what they read or watch, the games they play. It all plays a very important role."
Another popular teen book series, the "Hunger Games" trilogy by Suzanne Collins, straddles the line between dark and hopeful, Nikolajeva said. Its themes – a dystopian future where teens must battle to the death on reality TV – appeal to teenagers' dark side, yet its ultimately hopeful message is probably having a good influence on young people, she said.
The conference marked the beginning of a critical dialogue about the role of literature on teen minds and behaviors, she said.
"I think the most important thing to bear in mind is that neither a sciences approach nor a humanities approach gives us the entire picture of how teens interact with literature," Coats said.
From: LiveScience
It's a potentially sucky situation. The vampire craze in teen literature – exemplified by the "Twilight" book series – could be affecting the dynamic workings of the teenage brain in ways scientists don't yet understand.
"We don't know exactly how literature affects the brain, but we know that it does," said Maria Nikolajeva, a Cambridge University professor of literature. "Some new findings have identified spots in the brain that respond to literature and art."
Scientists, authors and educators met in Cambridge, England, Sept. 3-5 for a conference organized by Nikolajeva to discuss how young-adult books and movies affect teenagers' minds.
"For young people, everything is so strange, and you cannot really say why you react to things – it's a difficult period to be a human being," Nikolajeva told LiveScience. The conference, she said, brought together "people from different disciplines to share what we know about this turbulent period we call adolescence."
Sessions included "What Is It About Good Girls and Vampires?" addressing the huge popularity of Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" series and other vampire-themed books. [The Real Science & History of Vampires]
Brain science
Teenagers' minds are more susceptible than adult minds to influence – from peers and experiences as well as from books, movies and music, researchers say.
"What we have learned over the past decade is that the teenage brain processes information differently than a more mature brain," said conference presenter Karen Coats, a professor of English at Illinois State University who integrates neuroscience into her research. "Brain imaging shows that teens are more likely to respond to situations emotionally, and they are less likely to consider consequences through rational forethought."
That's because the teenage prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for reasoning and risk assessment, goes through a growth spurt before puberty, followed by a period of organizing and pruning of the neural pathways, Coats said.
Linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath of Stanford University, a keynote speaker at the conference, is studying how reading longer novels habituates the brain toward a greater capacity for sustained attention to visual material.
"What neuroscience opens for us is what happens within the brain during specific activities that take place within identifiable emotional or motivational states," Heath said by e-mail. "For example, we know now that in reading about particular activities (especially those known to the readers), motor-neuronal activity is detected."
Is Bella a good role model?
Attendees at the conference included experts in neuroscience, psychology, art, literature and music, as well as writers such as Meg Rosoff, author of "How I Live Now" and other teen titles.
While teens might be turning the pages of "Twilight" for the plot and romance, other takeaways from the books may be having a lasting impact, too.
The series follows Bella, a teenage girl who falls in love with a much older vampire named Edward. Some critics have argued that Bella's passivity, and the story's abstinence-until-marriage message, are anti-feminist.
"If you look very, very clearly at what kind of values the 'Twilight' books propagate, these are very conservative values that do not in any way endorse independent thinking or personal development or a woman's position as an independent creature," Nikolajeva said. "That's quite depressing."
Dark vs. light
Researchers are interested in how such dark works might affect young minds, and why teenagers are especially drawn to stories with vampires, zombies, and post-apocalyptic and dystopian themes.
"We all remember being teenage is a difficult period, full of contradictions – dark feelings one day, joyful feelings the next. The 'Twilight' books are very much about this, about budding sexuality and not really knowing what you are," Nikolajeva said. "Although I'm not at all a fan of 'Twilight,' I do understand the appeal of it."
Nikolajeva argued that authors have a moral responsibility to include some positivity and hope in works aimed at teens.
"If young people read books where there is no hope at all, it's really damaging," she said. "We need to be aware of young people's being influenced by what they read or watch, the games they play. It all plays a very important role."
Another popular teen book series, the "Hunger Games" trilogy by Suzanne Collins, straddles the line between dark and hopeful, Nikolajeva said. Its themes – a dystopian future where teens must battle to the death on reality TV – appeal to teenagers' dark side, yet its ultimately hopeful message is probably having a good influence on young people, she said.
The conference marked the beginning of a critical dialogue about the role of literature on teen minds and behaviors, she said.
"I think the most important thing to bear in mind is that neither a sciences approach nor a humanities approach gives us the entire picture of how teens interact with literature," Coats said.
From: LiveScience
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Amsterdam Airport Opens New Library
by: Jason Boog
In August, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol and the Dutch Public Libraries teamed up to create an airport library stocked with literature, music, and film.
Touted as "the world's first library opened at an airport," the library features books in 29 different languages. The Jaunted blog reminded readers of a Nashville library built in an airport in 1962. Nevertheless, we wholeheartedly support more libraries in airports--has anybody ever visited an airport library?
Here's more from the Amsterdam Airport the press release: "The Airport Library's content derives from the collection of the Dutch Public Libraries and has a unique offering of Dutch literature ... Schiphol aims to offer a space where millions of passengers can enjoy a pleasant stay, become re-energised and soak up Dutch art, culture and literature on Holland Boulevard. Even the millions of transit passengers not stopping over in the Netherlands will be able to get a taste of Dutch art, culture and literature." (Via Blake Gernstetter)
From: GalleyCat
In August, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol and the Dutch Public Libraries teamed up to create an airport library stocked with literature, music, and film.
Touted as "the world's first library opened at an airport," the library features books in 29 different languages. The Jaunted blog reminded readers of a Nashville library built in an airport in 1962. Nevertheless, we wholeheartedly support more libraries in airports--has anybody ever visited an airport library?
Here's more from the Amsterdam Airport the press release: "The Airport Library's content derives from the collection of the Dutch Public Libraries and has a unique offering of Dutch literature ... Schiphol aims to offer a space where millions of passengers can enjoy a pleasant stay, become re-energised and soak up Dutch art, culture and literature on Holland Boulevard. Even the millions of transit passengers not stopping over in the Netherlands will be able to get a taste of Dutch art, culture and literature." (Via Blake Gernstetter)
From: GalleyCat
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
The curse of swearing in children's books
Squeamishness about exposing young eyes to filthy language has produced some memorably mealy-mouthed evasions.
by: Imogen Russell-Williams
Swearing in children's books, and even in books for teenagers, used to be pure anathema. SE Hinton's 1967 young adult novel The Outsiders, for instance, an emotionally-charged account of youthful gangs clashing in Tulsa, features no language more colourful than "Glory!", "Shoot!" or a very occasional "Hell!" On this side of the pond, Robert Westall's 1975 Carnegie-winner The Machine-Gunners generated a sustained fuss over the inclusion of "bloody", as this 1978 letter from Puffin editor Kaye Webb suggests. Despite being set in second world war-torn England at a time of great fear and freedom for its child protagonists, and featuring a story saturated with exhilaration, danger and distress, the use of even a mild swearword was a step too far into realism for many parents and teachers at the time of its publication.
As swearing on the telly, in films and by grouchy adults who don't watch their tongues becomes steadily normalised, however, our 19th-century notions of profanity and propriety have been quietly eroded. Moments like the one in 2008 when Jacqueline Wilson was obliged by Asda, guardian of literary mores and tastes, to substitute "twit" for "twat" are becoming less and less common. That the Wilson hoo-ha came about as the result of one customer's complaint – that subsequently garnered a very few more in support – is significant: there was no gradually swelling poison-sac of save-the-children, burn-the-books indignation, only a grandmother with an obscenity reflex more sensitive than most who felt she couldn't just take the book back for a refund.
Wilson's case was unusual in leading to action at Random House. Although Westall, in the 70s, repeatedly had to justify his choice of vocabulary, David Almond only became aware of the high-level publishers' meeting at which the use of "bollocks" in Skellig was intently discussed after it had happened – the end result was to leave the offending testicles undisturbed. Publishers are in general more likely now to choose inaction over excision, secure in the knowledge that great querulous waves are unlikely to result from a single rude word, or even a plethora of the same, providing it reads as "appropriate" rather than "gratuitous". It's probably easier to get away with a cuss word in a children's book than it is on the news.
This is, in my view, a very good thing. Bending over backwards, sideways and generally playing Twister to avoid the inclusion of swearwords in earlier, more censorious publishing climes has led many an otherwise assured and exemplary author into literary pitfalls. There are few Diana Wynne Jones novels, for instance, that I don't reread on a regular basis, but Wilkins' Tooth is one of them; trying to convey the highly-spiced language of the local gang of youthful ne'er-do-weels, Wynne Jones literally resorts to colours: "I'll orange well" this, "you purple" that. The effect is to date the book astonishingly. It comes across as mercilessly twee, which is a pity as it portrays Jones as exactly what she isn't – a safe-for-kiddies, sanitised, patronising writer.
Authors publishing right now are not immune either to the pitfalls of invented profanity. Another favourite of mine, Scott Westerfeld, whose ear for invented language is usually sound, grated on me a bit with Leviathan, a steampunk alternate history of events leading into the first world war. "Clart" is a good coinage for "shit" – it sounds appropriately dirty – but "bum-rag" just gets overused by the heroine-posing-as-hero in her attempts to swagger convincingly, and "Barking spiders!" is frankly rubbish. There are loads of better authentic early 20th century swear-words. Even "damn" would do nicely for a bit of variation.
Even in realistic, contemporary teen fiction, however, it's not always necessary to use the words themselves. Children and teenagers often retain a sense of swearing as excitingly taboo – they may know the vocabulary back-to-front but hesitate to use it in front of authority figures until a crisis point is reached. Reflecting this sense of forbidden appeal, sometimes you get more bang for your buck by going at rudeness obliquely, as Louise Rennison does when a drama group collapses into hysteria on hearing that their instructor "trained at Lecoq". Similarly, Grace Dent's heroine Shiraz Bailey Wood reflects guiltily that she was responsible for originating the nickname "Hairy Bunt" which has driven the unfortunately-named Miss Bunt to flee the teaching profession.
In my view, the cardinal sin is asterisks or dashes – they disturb the flow of reading, and so have the opposite effect to that intended, since they focus the reader's disrupted attention on the censored word. What are your views on swearing in books for younger readers? Best invented swear-words? And the most ill-advised self-censorship?
from: Guardian
by: Imogen Russell-Williams
Swearing in children's books, and even in books for teenagers, used to be pure anathema. SE Hinton's 1967 young adult novel The Outsiders, for instance, an emotionally-charged account of youthful gangs clashing in Tulsa, features no language more colourful than "Glory!", "Shoot!" or a very occasional "Hell!" On this side of the pond, Robert Westall's 1975 Carnegie-winner The Machine-Gunners generated a sustained fuss over the inclusion of "bloody", as this 1978 letter from Puffin editor Kaye Webb suggests. Despite being set in second world war-torn England at a time of great fear and freedom for its child protagonists, and featuring a story saturated with exhilaration, danger and distress, the use of even a mild swearword was a step too far into realism for many parents and teachers at the time of its publication.
As swearing on the telly, in films and by grouchy adults who don't watch their tongues becomes steadily normalised, however, our 19th-century notions of profanity and propriety have been quietly eroded. Moments like the one in 2008 when Jacqueline Wilson was obliged by Asda, guardian of literary mores and tastes, to substitute "twit" for "twat" are becoming less and less common. That the Wilson hoo-ha came about as the result of one customer's complaint – that subsequently garnered a very few more in support – is significant: there was no gradually swelling poison-sac of save-the-children, burn-the-books indignation, only a grandmother with an obscenity reflex more sensitive than most who felt she couldn't just take the book back for a refund.
Wilson's case was unusual in leading to action at Random House. Although Westall, in the 70s, repeatedly had to justify his choice of vocabulary, David Almond only became aware of the high-level publishers' meeting at which the use of "bollocks" in Skellig was intently discussed after it had happened – the end result was to leave the offending testicles undisturbed. Publishers are in general more likely now to choose inaction over excision, secure in the knowledge that great querulous waves are unlikely to result from a single rude word, or even a plethora of the same, providing it reads as "appropriate" rather than "gratuitous". It's probably easier to get away with a cuss word in a children's book than it is on the news.
This is, in my view, a very good thing. Bending over backwards, sideways and generally playing Twister to avoid the inclusion of swearwords in earlier, more censorious publishing climes has led many an otherwise assured and exemplary author into literary pitfalls. There are few Diana Wynne Jones novels, for instance, that I don't reread on a regular basis, but Wilkins' Tooth is one of them; trying to convey the highly-spiced language of the local gang of youthful ne'er-do-weels, Wynne Jones literally resorts to colours: "I'll orange well" this, "you purple" that. The effect is to date the book astonishingly. It comes across as mercilessly twee, which is a pity as it portrays Jones as exactly what she isn't – a safe-for-kiddies, sanitised, patronising writer.
Authors publishing right now are not immune either to the pitfalls of invented profanity. Another favourite of mine, Scott Westerfeld, whose ear for invented language is usually sound, grated on me a bit with Leviathan, a steampunk alternate history of events leading into the first world war. "Clart" is a good coinage for "shit" – it sounds appropriately dirty – but "bum-rag" just gets overused by the heroine-posing-as-hero in her attempts to swagger convincingly, and "Barking spiders!" is frankly rubbish. There are loads of better authentic early 20th century swear-words. Even "damn" would do nicely for a bit of variation.
Even in realistic, contemporary teen fiction, however, it's not always necessary to use the words themselves. Children and teenagers often retain a sense of swearing as excitingly taboo – they may know the vocabulary back-to-front but hesitate to use it in front of authority figures until a crisis point is reached. Reflecting this sense of forbidden appeal, sometimes you get more bang for your buck by going at rudeness obliquely, as Louise Rennison does when a drama group collapses into hysteria on hearing that their instructor "trained at Lecoq". Similarly, Grace Dent's heroine Shiraz Bailey Wood reflects guiltily that she was responsible for originating the nickname "Hairy Bunt" which has driven the unfortunately-named Miss Bunt to flee the teaching profession.
In my view, the cardinal sin is asterisks or dashes – they disturb the flow of reading, and so have the opposite effect to that intended, since they focus the reader's disrupted attention on the censored word. What are your views on swearing in books for younger readers? Best invented swear-words? And the most ill-advised self-censorship?
from: Guardian
Monday, September 13, 2010
Interactive mystery story aimed at digitally savvy teens
On September 6, Random House Children's Books and the online community Stardoll launched Mortal Kiss, a paranormal mystery that will be serialized online globally through the end of October. The interactive story will include opportunities for its readers, mainly digitally savvy teen girls, to shape the story as it unfolds.
Mortal Kiss, which began running on September 6, will deliver three to five minutes of reading material daily, ending in a cliffhanger each week. Among interactive opportunities, users can access a map of Winter Hill, the fictional Northeastern US town in which the story is set; craft various personas and virtual environments; dress up the four main characters in outfits based on the storyline; and shop for items from the story. Users will also be able to vote on plot points and ultimately enter writing contests based on themes from the book.
Mortal Kiss is the first interactive story Random House, a leading global publisher, has published on a social networking platform. The Stardoll Network, which includes a series of social networks for seven- to 17-year-olds interested in fashion, celebrity, and entertainment, reportedly has more than 100 million registered users worldwide.
Mortal Kiss is the latest such endeavor in a trend toward online interactive e-books; other recent projects such as this one include the newly re-launched Choose Your Own Adventure series and the interactive fiction site Unknown Tales.
Read and participate in Mortal Kiss: http://www.stardoll.com/en/mortalkiss
from: Independent
Mortal Kiss, which began running on September 6, will deliver three to five minutes of reading material daily, ending in a cliffhanger each week. Among interactive opportunities, users can access a map of Winter Hill, the fictional Northeastern US town in which the story is set; craft various personas and virtual environments; dress up the four main characters in outfits based on the storyline; and shop for items from the story. Users will also be able to vote on plot points and ultimately enter writing contests based on themes from the book.
Mortal Kiss is the first interactive story Random House, a leading global publisher, has published on a social networking platform. The Stardoll Network, which includes a series of social networks for seven- to 17-year-olds interested in fashion, celebrity, and entertainment, reportedly has more than 100 million registered users worldwide.
Mortal Kiss is the latest such endeavor in a trend toward online interactive e-books; other recent projects such as this one include the newly re-launched Choose Your Own Adventure series and the interactive fiction site Unknown Tales.
Read and participate in Mortal Kiss: http://www.stardoll.com/en/mortalkiss
from: Independent
Sunday, September 12, 2010
It Turns Out There Is Accounting for Taste
New research finds people’s taste in entertainment remains remarkably consistent, regardless of whether they’re reading, watching or listening.
by: Tom Jacobs
If I told you my taste in movies, would you be able to tell me what kind of music I listen to? How about my favorite reading material, or taste in television?
Peter Jason Rentfrow can — and it’s no parlor trick. The Cambridge University psychologist is lead author of a new study that finds a person’s entertainment choices tend to share certain basic characteristics, which may or may not be immediately obvious.
“Individuals prefer genres that share similar content, irrespective of the medium through which it is conveyed,” he and his colleagues write in the Journal of Personality. “Entertainment preferences are more a function of substance than style.”
The highbrow/lowbrow split, which has dominated cultural criticism for the past century or so, remains alive and well: The researchers report most people gravitate toward one dimension or the other. But Rentfrow and his colleagues also identified an area of common ground. (Hint: It’s occupied by Oprah).
The researchers drew their data from three separate samples: A group of nearly 2,000 University of Texas undergraduates; 736 residents of the Eugene-Springfield, Ore., area; and 545 people recruited on the Internet. All participants completed a detailed survey that listed their age, gender, education level and taste in entertainment; some also answered questions that measured their intelligence level and personality type.
After analyzing the data, the researchers concluded that people’s aesthetic tastes can be broken down into five “entertainment-preference dimensions.”
They are: Aesthetic (which includes classical music, art films and poetry), cerebral (current events, documentaries), communal (romantic comedies, pop music, daytime talk shows), dark (heavy metal music, horror movies) and thrilling (action-adventure films, thrillers, science fiction). The first two fall under the general heading of highbrow, while the final three are labeled lowbrow.
“I believe most people stay in the high/lowbrow domains, and then communal,” Rentfrow said in a follow-up interview. He noted that, among study participants, “there was a fair amount of crossover,” usually between two of the highbrow or lowbrow categories. Communal — a category that also includes family films and TV reality shows — was the only one that attracted large numbers of devotees from both sides of the divide.
“The different dimensions can serve different functions,” he said. “Someone might really like aesthetic media, but when she’s tired, she might enjoy communal media because it’s less taxing.”
So why is one person drawn to, say, free jazz, while another loves punk rock? Age, gender and education levels are important factors, but Rentfrow and his colleagues found basic personality traits also play a major role.
For instance, “individuals who enjoy the aesthetic entertainment factor, which may be regarded as abstract, dense and demanding, tend to be creative, calm, introspective and in touch with their emotions,” they write. Those who are drawn to dark entertainment genres tended to rate high on intellect and extraversion, but low on conscientiousness and agreeableness; they “may generally see themselves as defiant, reckless and immodest.”
In contrast, “It appears as though the psychological characteristics most central to individuals who prefer the communal entertainment factor are rather similar to the defining characteristics of that factor: pleasant, lighthearted, unadventurous, uncomplicated and relationship-oriented,” the researchers add.
This information may be of great interest to internet retailers, who currently use relatively crude methods to suggest items of interest to individual shoppers. “Although many people would be reluctant to provide information about their personalities to places like Amazon or Google,” Rentfrow said, “such information, paired with purchasing history, could potentially yield more relevant recommendations than the current models being used.”
So where does Rentfrow himself fall on this structure? “I would say that my preferences, in descending order, are cerebral, aesthetic and communal,” he said. “I haven’t tested my friends yet, but it’ll be interesting to see how my predictions compare to their preferences.”
Hmm. My favorite theater piece of recent decades is Sweeney Todd, which can be viewed as communal (that’s where Rentfrow and his colleagues place show tunes), aesthetic (given its sophisticated Stephen Sondheim music and lyrics), cerebral (it serves as a metaphor for the devaluation of human life that accompanied the industrial revolution), thrilling (it is a suspenseful, revenge-driven story) and dark (there are multiple murders and a suspicious proliferation of meat pies). Perhaps the greatest works of art hit every point on the compass.
from: Miller-McCune
by: Tom Jacobs
If I told you my taste in movies, would you be able to tell me what kind of music I listen to? How about my favorite reading material, or taste in television?
Peter Jason Rentfrow can — and it’s no parlor trick. The Cambridge University psychologist is lead author of a new study that finds a person’s entertainment choices tend to share certain basic characteristics, which may or may not be immediately obvious.
“Individuals prefer genres that share similar content, irrespective of the medium through which it is conveyed,” he and his colleagues write in the Journal of Personality. “Entertainment preferences are more a function of substance than style.”
The highbrow/lowbrow split, which has dominated cultural criticism for the past century or so, remains alive and well: The researchers report most people gravitate toward one dimension or the other. But Rentfrow and his colleagues also identified an area of common ground. (Hint: It’s occupied by Oprah).
The researchers drew their data from three separate samples: A group of nearly 2,000 University of Texas undergraduates; 736 residents of the Eugene-Springfield, Ore., area; and 545 people recruited on the Internet. All participants completed a detailed survey that listed their age, gender, education level and taste in entertainment; some also answered questions that measured their intelligence level and personality type.
After analyzing the data, the researchers concluded that people’s aesthetic tastes can be broken down into five “entertainment-preference dimensions.”
They are: Aesthetic (which includes classical music, art films and poetry), cerebral (current events, documentaries), communal (romantic comedies, pop music, daytime talk shows), dark (heavy metal music, horror movies) and thrilling (action-adventure films, thrillers, science fiction). The first two fall under the general heading of highbrow, while the final three are labeled lowbrow.
“I believe most people stay in the high/lowbrow domains, and then communal,” Rentfrow said in a follow-up interview. He noted that, among study participants, “there was a fair amount of crossover,” usually between two of the highbrow or lowbrow categories. Communal — a category that also includes family films and TV reality shows — was the only one that attracted large numbers of devotees from both sides of the divide.
“The different dimensions can serve different functions,” he said. “Someone might really like aesthetic media, but when she’s tired, she might enjoy communal media because it’s less taxing.”
So why is one person drawn to, say, free jazz, while another loves punk rock? Age, gender and education levels are important factors, but Rentfrow and his colleagues found basic personality traits also play a major role.
For instance, “individuals who enjoy the aesthetic entertainment factor, which may be regarded as abstract, dense and demanding, tend to be creative, calm, introspective and in touch with their emotions,” they write. Those who are drawn to dark entertainment genres tended to rate high on intellect and extraversion, but low on conscientiousness and agreeableness; they “may generally see themselves as defiant, reckless and immodest.”
In contrast, “It appears as though the psychological characteristics most central to individuals who prefer the communal entertainment factor are rather similar to the defining characteristics of that factor: pleasant, lighthearted, unadventurous, uncomplicated and relationship-oriented,” the researchers add.
This information may be of great interest to internet retailers, who currently use relatively crude methods to suggest items of interest to individual shoppers. “Although many people would be reluctant to provide information about their personalities to places like Amazon or Google,” Rentfrow said, “such information, paired with purchasing history, could potentially yield more relevant recommendations than the current models being used.”
So where does Rentfrow himself fall on this structure? “I would say that my preferences, in descending order, are cerebral, aesthetic and communal,” he said. “I haven’t tested my friends yet, but it’ll be interesting to see how my predictions compare to their preferences.”
Hmm. My favorite theater piece of recent decades is Sweeney Todd, which can be viewed as communal (that’s where Rentfrow and his colleagues place show tunes), aesthetic (given its sophisticated Stephen Sondheim music and lyrics), cerebral (it serves as a metaphor for the devaluation of human life that accompanied the industrial revolution), thrilling (it is a suspenseful, revenge-driven story) and dark (there are multiple murders and a suspicious proliferation of meat pies). Perhaps the greatest works of art hit every point on the compass.
from: Miller-McCune
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