[Tells some story of this girl in a bar who totally loves him, like, so much, but doesn't know about the movie]. I mean, when someone who identifies themselves as a huge fan, who has read the book and passed it to their friends and self-identifies as this type of person, when the movie is IN THEATERS and they don't even know there is a movie at all…that is a complete failure in the publicity and marketing of the movie...
I don't want to go through it, because it'll just be depressing, but the failures in marketing were just…big. Unrecoverable.

I would have guessed "Because it was awful." But I'm no Tucker Max.
[Pic: Flickr]

All your knick-knacks with deep personal meaning and your special desk and your crazy exercise habits and your office location in gentrifying urban wasteland? Fine, fine. Until it gets cataloged in a newspaper, which kills its magic and makes you look like a twee, stereotypically unbearable Brooklyn Literary Person.

A treadmill is jammed up against [Lethem's 'talismanic' desk]. He explains the jerry-rigged system: a wireless keyboard and a giant computer-font setting allow him to walk and work simultaneously.

Apparently that's just what it takes to maintain his "youthful nerd-chic vibe belying his age (45)" in his "communal artists' workspace by the Gowanus Canal" while wearing his brown glasses and matching brown corduroys. It all just looks bad in print. Keep your door locked, Lethem. Then treadmill to your heart's content!

Try Super Squats too.

Robertson's book, The Girls in the Balcony, centered on a workplace discrimination suit filed against the NYT in 1974 by several female employees. We knew the paper was bad, but it's always bracing to hear just how bad it was, not so long ago:

In 1955, Ms. Robertson joined The Times, where she was assigned, as women often were then, to the women's news department. Her early articles for the paper - hundreds of them - were about fashion, shopping and interior decorating...
In 1963, Ms. Robertson began a decade as a reporter in the Washington bureau of The Times, where, as she said in an interview many years later, her de facto job description was to cover the "first lady, her children and their dogs." Her years in Washington would furnish her with the title for "The Girls in the Balcony," a reference to the cramped second-story space in the National Press Club to which female journalists were then relegated.

Crazy! Robertson also wrote a book about recovering from alcoholism via AA, and won a Pulitzer for her writing on her own experience with Toxic Shock syndrome, which almost killed her. You can pick up her book at Amazon, for a pittance.
[Pic via]

The Daily Beast interviewed Ron Weinstein about his feelings. They are much milder than maybe the average sentient human's reactions would be!

"Affairs are commonplace and shouldn't be such a big deal," he says. "However, having an affair with the person who is the biggest crook in the world and stole all my assets is another issue entirely."

Who are we to judge?

Another unexpected development: his wife's allegations about Bernie Madoff's penile dimensions. "I thought it was trashy," Ron says, "but I thought it was necessary to get insight into how somebody becomes a sociopath. What happens when they're young that can cause somebody to be this horrible?"

But Ron is getting half that book money so buy buy buy!

The uproar, that is! And the book. But not the weed, as far as I know, because this Crrrrrrazymaking skunk only exists in Cheech & Chong movies and the imaginations of lightweights. (And in England).

Julie Myerson is a British author. She had a teenage son. He started smoking skunk and acting progressively more crazy and unmanageable, until she had to kick him out of the house. In America this is known as "being a teenager."

Then she wrote a book about her son's crazy life-destroying skunk addiction. In America this is known as "capitalizing on your own brand." Reality TV has mastered this domain! So who's to say Julie Myerson cannot tell her son's story, as unlikely as it may seem to your average American weedhead?

The British media, that's who! There was a huge uproar over whether Myerson was exploiting her kid (he said she was) and whether she's a terrible person, etc. Which, hey, helped her sell a lot of books!

Now the book's coming out in America and Myerson fears she may see the same uproar here. Unlikely. She'll see a different uproar here. Americans could not care less about exploiting the foibles of a family member through the media. That's the American dream! Our uproar will just be about where do you get this magic weed that makes you crazy?

Cause I mean in Florida they had that Kryptonite but the worst it ever did was make somebody fall off the couch.

One of the sweetest sounds in the world was Corky making the rounds up here on the executive floor, saying in his laid-back voice, "I feel like boffing some bimbos in the Caribbean. Anybody like to come along?"

It's almost like you're right there on the executive floor. Anyhow the writing's not bad as long as you can forget that this story was almost certainly inspired by Tom Wolfe standing in a long line at the airport.
[Pic via]

Dody was, in the late '50s and '60s, a ghostwriter, primarily to aging but still fiery female stars. He authored Bette Davis' The Lonely Life as well as books "by" silent film star Dagmar Godowsky, Helen Hayes, and John Barrymore's ex-wife Elaine Barrymore.

The intimate act of writing a strong personality's life story did not endear his subjects to him: "'The most suitable way to view stars is from a long way off,' he wrote in his own memoir, published in 1980." And: "'Let the next star,' he glowered, 'write her own damned autobiography.'"

After a brief trip to Hollywood, made with the intention of becoming a film star, Dody became a writer instead. In need of money, he wrote Godowsky's memoir. He never seems to have enjoyed the experience much, but he made his subjects sound good:

As a ghostwriter, Mr. Dody was expected to suppress his personality and channel the voice of the credited author. Yet often his own writing style crept in. In "First Person Plural," Ms. Godowsky's 1958 memoir of her life on the silver screen, the opening sentences, supposedly straight from Ms. Godowsky's pen, read: "It is my tragedy that the years have deprived me of my bad reputation. At one time my notoriety assured me of a marvelous evening. Now, Euclid would be fascinated to know, my circle has been squared."

He got along famously with Bette Davis, until she took a hatchet to "his" book (she was, he claimed, embarrassed that she hadn't written it herself). After penning Helen Hayes' memoir, he got out of the business. He spent a good part of his later years walking from his Greenwich Village apartment to the Met, and back.

Responding to the question, "If I were to write to you and say, 'Dave, cheer me up about the future of writing,' what would you say?" Eggers said the following:

Our students at 826 Valencia still have a newspaper class, where we print an actual newspaper, and we do magazine classes and anthologies where they're all printed on paper. That's the main way we get them motivated, that they know it's going to be in print. It's much harder for us to motivate the students when they think it's only going to be on the Web.

The vast majority of students we work with read newspapers and books, more so than I did at their age. And I don't see that dropping off. If anything the lack of faith comes from people our age, where we just assume that it's dead or dying. I think we've given up a little too soon. We [i.e., McSweeney's] have been working every day on a prototype for a new newspaper, and a lot of what we're doing is resurrecting old things, like things from the last century that newspapers used to do, in terms of really using the full luxury of the broadsheet newspaper, with full color and all that space.

I think newspapers shouldn't try to compete directly with the Web, and should do what they can do better, which may be long-form journalism and using photos and art, and making connections with large-form graphics and really enhancing the tactile experience of paper. You know, including a full-color comic section, for example, which of course was standard in newspapers years ago, when you'd have a full broadsheet Winsor McCay comic. So we'll have a big, full-color comic section, and we're also trying to emphasize what younger readers are looking for, what directly appeals to them. It's hard to find papers these days that really do anything to appeal to anyone under 18, and the paper used to do that all the time. I think there will always be — if not the same audience and not as wide an audience — a dedicated audience that can keep print journalism alive.

Now, we like Dave Eggers, a lot, but we have to emphatically disagree with his statements here. Children attending a writing center in San Francisco do not accurately reflect the entirety of the modern American youth. Not even close. Sure, we'd love to see web and print co-exist and thrive and compliment each other, but there is no trend suggesting such a thing is on the horizon. It just isn't happening.

Dave Eggers, we like you, we really do, but your staggering genius has failed you and you are horribly, horribly wrong.

Dave Eggers Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Reality [Salon]

[In response to some vague, inane questions from us]:

Yeah, the book deal is really exciting. I'm not really at liberty to discuss how much the deal was worth (but let's just say I'll finally be able to buy the entire Criterion Collection). "Aggressive" is definitely the right word to describe the negotiations. During our meetings, everyone at St. Martin's Press kept staring at me and telling me to take my shirt off. It was kind of uncomfortable at first, but after a while I caved in. We're together now.

Obviously, I'm pleasantly surprised that this book deal happened. It wasn't my goal when I started the blog a few months ago, but I think it'll be a fun thing to do and I'm sure all the Gawker commenters out there will really like it. Whoops, no they won't.

The book will hopefully be out by Spring 2010. Unless people suddenly stop doing cocaine during the day, in which case it may take a bit longer.

See how graciously he handled your unexpected outpouring of disdain for his blog! Come on now. You know that blog has funny pictures. Come on.

He's Joe Mande, a "comedian/ writer" who graduated from Emerson College, has a show at Upright Citizens Brigade theater, appears on Best Week Ever once in a while, and was named the "Best New Comedian" this year by Time Out New York. He doesn't look like I imagined, which is okay! Max Silvestri interviewed him for us last month.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.There have been many Tumblr-to-book deals, including ones from current or former Gawker employees Doree Shafrir, Richard Blakeley, and Nick Douglas, but as brilliant as those may be, none of them include pictures of people like this, and therefore LATFH The Book (due out next spring!) may well be the awesomest of all.

We've emailed Joe Mande and we'll let you know when we hear whatever he has to say about all this.
[PW via NYO]

Vanderbilt is a famous romancer of famous men and generally could be described as "Fabbbbbbulous"—fabbbbbulous enough to write Obsession: An Erotic Tale at age 85, and make the New York Times blush:

But it nevertheless uses vocabulary and describes activities of a sort that readers of The New York Times are usually shielded from. There are scenes involving dildos, whips, silken cords and golden nipple clamps, not to mention an ebony, smooth-backed Mason Pearson hairbrush purchased at Harrods. As the book explains, spanking with a Mason-Pearson is a "serious matter," not the kind of thing that is rewarded with the "luscious afterglow of warm cocoa butter." Mint, cayenne pepper and a fresh garden carrot are deployed in the book in ways never envisioned by "The Joy of Cooking." And there is also a unicorn, though, blessedly, it remains a bystander.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Did you understand the implications of that, New York Times readers? They're saying that the unicorn's horn is not used as a dildo in this Glorida Vanderbilt book. AC seems a little sheepish but supportive, and Vanderbilt herself is incredibly blasé about the whole thing, so we must give her our hearty support and admiration for doing her thing as she wants in the face of the prim opposition of New York Times standards editors. If you know any such editors, be sure to buy them a smooth-backed hairbrush.
[NYT. Pic via]

The judge has put the new book—described as "An Unauthorized Fictional Examination of the Relationship Between J.D. Salinger and his Most Famous Character"—on hold for ten days until she issues a final ruling. But she seems sympathetic to Salinger:

"It does seem to me that Holden Caulfield is quite delineated by words, that is a portrait by words," Judge Batts told the lawyers, adding, "It would seem that Holden Caulfield is copyrighted." But the judge said she would take some time to reflect on whether the new book was sufficiently different from "The Catcher in the Rye" to fall under the protection of the fair use provision.

The knockoff book's author's pen name is "John David California" and it seems likely that his book will be derivative and may indeed suck a big one, but so what? Hard to believe Holden Caufield, of all fictional people, would go pleading for The Man to stop people from writing things. Salinger, stop being so phony.
[City Room, AP]

When you think "Father-Son bonding experiences," you think "spending an evening in the home of Randall Jones, the used-car-salesman-esque founder of Worth magazine, hearing him extol the virtues of each and every one of his '12 Commandments' for becoming the 'Richest Man in Town.'"

Enter to win now! Because your father beat you.

Dear Person Needing Bucking Up,

Hello and thank you so much for writing. I feel honored that you would takethe time to reach out and in many cases tell me your very real struggles with writing and work and the future of the printed word.

I have a few thoughts to share, though unfortuately in this space I can't detail all the reasons I think we have a fighting chance at keeping newspapers and books alive in physical form. But before I do blather for a few paragraphs, I should apologize for sending you a mass email.

As you probably know, a week ago I gave a speech to about 100 people in New York, and I didn't foresee it getting out there on the web. (Shows how much I know.) And I really didn't expect this email address to be given out. Again, though, that was my lack of foresight. And I'm an infrequent emailer, so I'm unable to respond to most of the (plaintive, beautiful, heart-ripping) emails that have been sent to me these past few days. So I apologize for not being able to answer your email personally. Or at least not in any timely manner.

Anyway. I would like to say to you good print-loving people that for every dire bit of news there is out there, there is also some good news, too. The main gist of my (rambling) speech at the Author?s Guild was that because I work with kids in San Francisco, I see every day that their enthusiasm for the printed word is no different from that of kids from any other era. Reports that no one reads anymore, especially young people, are greatly overstated and almost always factually lacking. I've written about youth readership elsewhere, but to reiterate: sales of young adult books are
actually up. Total volume of all book sales is actually up. Kids get the same things out of books that they have before. Reading in elementary schools and middle schools is no different than any other time. We have work to do with keeping high schoolers reading, but then again, I meet every week with 15 high schoolers in San Francisco, and all we do is read (literary magazines, books, journals, websites, everything) in the process of putting together the Best American Nonrequired Reading. And I have to say these students, 14 to 18 years old, are far better read and more astute than I was at their age, and there are a million other kids around the country just like them.

These kids meet every week at McSweeney's, and things at our small publishing company are stable. We?re a hand-to-mouth operation to be sure, but we haven't had to lay anyone off. To some extent, that's because we're small and independent and have always insisted on staying small and independent. We take on very little risk, and we grow very cautiously. It's our humble opinion that the world will support many more publishers of our size and focus. If you can stay small, stay independent, readers will be loyal, and you'll be able to get by publishing work of merit. Publishing
has, for most of its life, been a place of small but somewhat profit margins, and the people involved in publishing were happy to be doing what they loved. It's only recently, when large conglomerates bought so many publishing companies and newspapers, that demands for certain margins squeezed some of the joy out of the business.

Pretty soon, on the McSweeney's website— www.mcsweeneys.net— we'll be showing some of our work on this upcoming issue, which will be in newspaper form. The hope is that we can demonstrate that if you rework the newspaper
model a bit, it can not only survive, but actually thrive. We're convinced that the best way to ensure the future of journalism is to create a workable model where journalists are paid well for reporting here and abroad. And that starts with paying for the physical paper. And paying for the physical paper begins with creating a physical object that doesn't retreat, but instead luxuriates in the beauties of print. We believe that if you use the hell out of the medium, if you give investigative journalism space, if you give photojournalists space, if you give graphic artists and cartoonists space— if you really truly give readers an experience that can't be duplicated on the web— then they will spend $1 for a copy. And that $1 per copy, plus the revenue from some (but not all that many) ads, will keep the enterprise afloat.

As long as newspapers offer less each day— less news, less great writing, less graphic innovation, fewer photos— then they're giving readers few reasons to pay for the paper itself. With our prototype, we aim to make the physical object so beautiful and luxurious that it will seem a bargain at $1. The web obviously presents all kinds of advantages for breaking news, but the printed newspaper does and will always have a slew of advantages, too. It's our admittedly unorthodox opinion that the two can coexist, and in fact should coexist. But they need to do different things. To survive, the newspaper, and the physical book, needs to set itself apart from the web. Physical forms of the written word need to offer a clear and different experience. And if they do, we believe, they will survive. Again, this is a time to roar back and assert and celebrate the beauty of the printed page. Give people something to fight for, and they will fight for it. Give something to pay for, and they'll pay for it.

We'll keep you posted throughout the summer about our progress with this newspaper prototype, and any other good news we come across.

Thanks for listening for now,
Dave

P.S. The email address you wrote to— deggers@826national.org— was a new one I set up to give to the attendees of the Author's Guild. I won't be able to check it very often, as I'm slow with email to begin with.

[Pic via]

Back in 1983, Dick and his future-cyborg-lesbian wife Lynne collaborated on a book called Kings of the Hill, about famous congressmen. The book was mostly about how famous congressmen all looked really funny, and some of them were cripples. Jonathan Curiel read it.

"Plumer observed that Clay was especially favored by the ladies. It was not because he was particularly handsome. Except for an unusually large mouth (which he joked was so constructed that he could never learn to spit), he was rather plain featured."
[...]
Congressman Samuel Taggart is not just a Federalist but a "corpulent Federalist." Secretary of War Peter Buell Porter is not just a lawyer but "a rotund lawyer." Congressman Sam Rayburn is "a short, bald-headed man (who) . . . didn't look like a person of consequence." Senator John Randolph is "wrinkled and sallow-skinned (and) appeared twice his age." And Congressman Thaddeus Stevens is "a crippled man in a brown wig." Cheney uses the word "cripple" again and again (also "handicapped" and "old") to describe the anti-slavery maverick.

You can buy a copy of book—original printing or its 1996 paperback edition—for one cent! So, extrapolating from that, Dick Cheney will earn back his advance once he sells 200,000,000 copies. Let's hope his book is about teenage vampires fighting the Illuminati!

As you'll recall, the new paperback version of Frey's Bright Shiny Morning has a new section on "SCANDAL," which he read last night at the Union Square Barnes&Noble. So he read all the uninteresting parts about various thinly veiled celebrities and then he read the interesting part about thinly veiled himself. Which includes a part where he says after being reamed out so terribly on Oprah's show, he taped all his calls, including one from the host herself, when she called to check up on him and have a heart-to-heart and in the process revealed some scandalous secret about herself.

Okay fine. When the Q&A section came, I asked him, do you think Oprah apologized to you recently because she fears the secret scandalous info you have on her, on tape? And he said, approximately, "Well, I never unequivocally said I have any tapes," which is patently false because I was sitting right there three minutes earlier when he had read the very detailed section from his book that is clearly about himself having tapes about Oprah. But hey maybe that was fictionalized, no names were named, WHATEVER.

Then he said, no, she apologized because she felt bad, and before anyone even read the section of the book where I talk about all the tapes that I have.

He wasn't about to say what, if anything, is on the tapes. So we'll chalk the whole thing up to a little PR push for his book (And a pretty good one!). Maybe he really has scandalous taped secrets. Maybe he has Oprah saying "Oops, I just farted." Maybe he has nothing. Maybe Nixon really had a secret plan to end the war. But show and prove, JF, or it didn't happen.