paperhaus October 30th, 2008
From the front page of the NY Times, right now:
Magazine Preview
The Affluencer
By SUSAN DOMINUS
Lauren Zalaznick, the head of the Bravo network, has taken her own elite, urban, downtown sensibilities and brought it into America’s living rooms.
I guess it’s ok to say that Bravo is an it.
But sensibilities — no matter how elite, urban or downtown they might be — are not it at all.
paperhaus October 11th, 2008
A new study of 18-34 year-old males by Hall and Partners for Break Media shows that while new media is an essential part of young men’s lives, books are still in the running. 69 percent of the 500 men surveyed said they could not live without the Internet. Every week guys spend a lot of time staring at screens — they’re text messaging (66 percent are), visiting social networking sites (63 percent) and playing video games (60 percent). But 46 percent of them turn their attention away from the glare to read a book. 46 percent read books — I agree with Matt Staggs, that sounds pretty good.
Until you revisit the good old NEA reports. “To Read or Not to Read” (2007) and its predecessor, “Reading at Risk” (2004) cited drastic declines in reading culture across many demographics. From 1992 to 2002, the percentage of 18-24 year old Americans (not just guys) who read a book that was not required for work or school dropped 12 percent, more than any other group. 25-34 year olds were not far behind, with an 8 percent drop. The “low” numbers that were reached: for 18-24 year olds, only 52 percent read for leisure; with 25-34 year olds, it was 59 percent.
I know the samples are different, that boys are lumped with girls, that the age groups are broken down in one survey and not in the other, and nobody asked the first group whether they were reading those books just for fun or because they had to. But even with all those mystery factors, 46 percent reading is still a smaller percentage than 52 or 59 percent. In other words, 46 percent isn’t so good after all.
But maybe there is hope. The Hall and Partners report is really focused on the online activities and proclivities of young men, who, when it comes to advertising, apparently like funny videos more than anything else. They make several recommendations for online advertisers, and so I share this here. Publishers, take note.
Brands looking for more frequent exposure are better served by crafting smart, brief pre-roll messaging for placement with online video content men enjoy: humorous/prank/spoof videos, full-length entertainment and videos featuring attractive women.
Sigh. The more things change…
(Photo of random Guitar Hero dude from Flickr).
paperhaus October 8th, 2008
Well-meaning friends ask me why I don’t get a scooter. I don’t want a car, I take the subway and walk. In LA, this is madness, apparently, and yes, it makes some things awkward. To some, the bicycle I want is not real transporation. Real transporation involves an engine that goes vroom. And scooters are cute! Like sixties Italy!
But I think in LA, a scooter is more dangerous than any other vehicle. You’re explosed, with no factory-manufactured exoskeleton. On a similarly vulnerable motorcycle, you’re at least traveling at the same height as people in cars, and you can move faster than they do. On a bike, you can veer away from dangerous traffic onto sidewalks if need be. On a scooter, no matter how cute you are, you still have to travel with big cars that are faster than you, whose drivers can’t see you well, and that can cause tremendous damage.
Or, maybe you smash into a tree.
DeWayne McKinney, who spent nearly two decades in prison for an Orange County murder he insisted he did not commit and went on to start a multi-million dollar business in the Hawaiian islands, was killed this morning in a scooter accident in Honolulu, authorities said today.
McKinney made national news in 2000 after Orange County Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas obtained his release from prison, saying he’d been wrongly convicted of a 1980 robbery-murder at a Burger King in Orange.
The 47-year-old McKinney crashed into a wooden light pole at about 12:30 a.m. and was thrown onto the pavement, said Caroline Sluyter, a spokeswoman for the Honolulu Police Department. McKinney, who was not wearing a helmet, died at a local hospital.McKinney had parlayed a $1-million legal settlement with the Orange Police Department into a multi-million dollar ATM business on the Hawaiian islands and had been in discussions with movie studio executives about turning his life story into a feature film.
In the years after his release from prison, McKinney spoke frequently at anti-death penalty conferences. Prosecutors originally sought the death penalty for McKinney, but instead he was sentenced to life in prison without parole after jurors deadlocked in the penalty portion of his trial.
When he was released from prison in January 2000, McKinney was forced to start his life from scratch. He didn’t have a driver’s license, Social Security number, savings or a place to live. Initially, he settled in Orange County, working at UC Irvine as an audio-visual technician and living for free in an apartment funded by a local businesswoman….
At the time of his death, McKinney owned 42 ATMs on three Hawaiian islands and had a net worth of more than $6 million, said Carl Stein, who owned a company that processed transactions for McKinney.
“To spend 19 years in prison and get out and do what he did, it was amazing,” Stein said. “He had this way with people. They just couldn’t say no to him.”
“He really appreciated life in a way that most people can’t because of all the time he lost,” Rawitz said. “He laughed easily. He made friends easily and he appreciated every day he lived.”
Too bad he also rode a scooter.
paperhaus October 6th, 2008
Let’s see if I can get this right.
My great-grandfather was George Aaron Kellogg (I think — I might be missing a great). Although he was unmarried in 1903, the year that The Kelloggs in the Old World and the New was published — a copy of which shares this room with me in Florida — George Aaron would get married and father my grandfather and his brother Martin. (Either that, or father their father). I knew Martin as great Uncle Mart, who showed up for a few holidays in my childhood as a kind of semi-welcome guest — he was estranged from his son, and everyone seemed to side with the son, who I don’t think I’ve ever met. Anyway, Uncle Mart was kind to me, and my grandmother and aunts and uncles remarked upon this kindness, as he was known as kind of a prick, and a misogynist to boot. Either because I was the only one who didn’t judge him, or because I liked art and he painted portraits, he thought I was OK. He sent me art supplies for years.
I didn’t know my grandfather so much. He died when I was two.
But anyway, my grandfather’s father, also great-uncle Mart’s father, George — his dad was Aaron Kellogg. Aaron, born 1795 in Connecticut, was the son of Thomas Wright Kellogg of Vernon Connecticut, born 1770.
Thomas Wright, according to The Kelloggs in the Old World and the New:
Resided on the family homstead in Vernon; held various sworn offices; was Justice of the Peace; when he set off for his bride, he rode one horse and led another on which she returned. The journey of forty miles to Glastonbury was made in a single day.
But we aren’t going down yet. Thomas and his wife (Mary Hubbard, with her own horse) will have to wait for another day.
Thomas’ dad was the Reverend Ebenezer Kellogg, born in Norwalk, Connecticut in 1737. He and his wife Hannah had five surviving children, of which Thomas was the fourth, senior only to sister Eunice, which I imagine was a damnable name even in 1773 when she received it.
Thomas’s eldest brother was named for his daddy, Ebenezer (yeah, not much better than Eunice). Ebenezer Junior, born in 1764, would be my great-great-great-great uncle (I think; add greats as needed).
Ebenezer Jr., as we shall call him, had a pretty good life. He had three wives, one of whom was an Olmsted, a Connecticut Olmsted, just like that Central Park guy (give me enough time, and a couple more genealogy books…). Anyway, I figure that Ebenezer was a pretty happy dude, with or without those two terms he served in the state legislature: his first kid was born when he was 25; his last, when he was 48. That was a pretty good run for the 18th century in New England, and seven of his children lived to adulthood. The one I’m most concerned with is Allyn. Deacon Allyn had two sons, each of whom left a pamphlet in his wake, which lapped up on the shores of this room in Florida.
Allyn Stanley Kellogg, the eldest son of Ebenezer Jr., is commemorated in a historical address to the Church of Christ in Vernon, CT. It is an incredibly boring speech about the formation of the church, people wanting to not have to walk clear across town in the dead of winter. One hundred and eight — a significant bloc at the time — petitioned for a new church closer to home, causing a rift that was also an evolution. Location, location.
More interestingly, Martin (a name that would be passed down, and across), was born in 1828. I have lost track but I believe this Martin Kellogg was a second cousin several times removed. I’m not a descendant of Martin — he and his wife Louisa came close, twice, but neither baby survived. But we have something in common — we both moved from New England to California. Martin trained in seminary and at Yale, and wound up, in 1855, being sent to preside over a church in a place called Grass Valley; California had been a state for just five years. By 1860, Martin was teaching Latin and math at the College of California; it merged with the University of California and he became a professor of Latin and Greek from 1869 to 1894, then served in other positions. For three years beginning in 1890, my several-times-removed-second-cousin Martin was the acting president, then for another six years, was the formally appointed president. So let’s just say that clearly: cousin Martin was the president of the University of California, meaning Berkeley, from 1890-1899.
The pamphlet from his 1903 memorial is beside me now. A Professor Rising found an old essay that Martin had contributed, in his youth, to the Overland Monthly. Martin Kellogg wrote:
In a quiet town in New England is a farm that used to be my earthly paradise. My own father’s place was pleasant in its way, but it called for a little too much work from the time when a boy could ride a horse to plow out corn or follow the hay-cart with a rake. My grandfather’s farm, on the contrary, was a place for infinite leisure and sport. The standing invitation he gave was to ‘come down and do up the mischief.’
My cousin Martin was mischievous! Well, it runs in the family. Later on, a fellow named Columbus Barlett eulogized:
The love of the State for its University, not as an ideal sentiment, but as an appreciation of its power for good, of its ennobling influence upon the lives of the men and women who throng its halls as the creation of good citizens, honors the memory of man far more than graven stone or marble mausoleum. And as one who as been chief worker toward this end, the name of Dr. Martin Kellogg will always be held in grateful and loving memory by every Californian.
And so we remember not-all-that-distant-cousin Martin Kellogg, one of the first presidents of Berkeley. Does nepotism count for anything these days?
paperhaus September 24th, 2008
I can’t decide which is more offensive about this ad from Craigslist in Los Angeles: that they want to pay book reviewers a whopping $5 per 350-word review (about 12 cents 1.5 cents per word) or that they “only do recommendations, no negative reviews.”
OnceWritten.com, a website dedicated to promoting the works of new authors is looking for regular, contributing book reviewers for our site. We are passionate about trying to give our readers alternatives to the “best-selling, sounds-the-same-as-the-last-book” authors out there.
Particulars:
We pay $5 per review (which is woefully inadequate, we know, but still better than what most of our competitors are paying) for a 350+ word book review. Because we pay, we do not want material that has already appeared elsewhere, including Amazon.com. We also don’t want a re-hash of the book jacket description, plus a “highly recommend this book.” We expect you to give details about what you really liked about the book.
We only do recommendations, no negative reviews. If a book isn’t worth reviewing, no problem. Don’t lie, just don’t review it. We’re trying to give people an idea of what they SHOULD be reading.
You don’t have to be experienced, but please have a passion for reading and ferreting out exciting new authors.
You can either review books in your own “To Be Read Pile” or we can send you books that authors/publishers have forwarded to us.
To get an idea of what we’re looking for, you can visit the site directly at www.oncewritten.com/BookReviews.htm, to see what our current editorial looks like. To apply, send us ONE previous review (either a real one or a sample) to the craig’s list email address listed above.
· Compensation: $5 per review
What these people want are not book reviews. To “review” is “a: to go over or examine critically or deliberately (reviewed the results of the study) b: to give a critical evaluation of (review a novel)” — that’s how Merriam-Webster puts it, anyway.
So this site will pay a reviewer less than 1/4 the cost of a hardcover to review it, with barely enough words to wipe the book’s ass. The reviewer can only write nice things. And then the reviewer is supposed to be grateful for the five bucks, because that’s more than they would get from the site’s “competitors” — which would be who, exactly?
It appears that OnceWritten gets its money by charging authors for placement on their site. By the looks of things, these are aspiring self-published authors trying to get exposure, who’ll cough up $75 for two months of being a “featured author” on the homepage. There is no distinction, on the site, between content and advertising — because it is almost all advertising. Aspiring authors should be highly skeptical of the traffic numbers OnceWritten claims.
Because I can’t let this go (let it go, let it go) I decided to see what the site’s reviews are like. Luckily, the second-most prominent review was of a book that I knew had been widely reviewed elsewhere. (It’s got a cute cover.) Here’s the first paragraph of the OnceWritten review of “Beginner’s Greek” by James Collins, reviewer’s name withheld (by me).
As a frequent traveler, I read the blurb for BEGINNER’s GREEK with interest. Seems that Peter, the lead character, has always fantasized that his dream woman will one day sit in the empty seat beside him on a flight to somewhere. And that’s exactly what happens. However, rather than being the “happily ever after” part of this romantic comedy, that’s the place the story begins. Peter does, in fact meet Holly, the woman of his dreams, on a flight between New York and Los Angeles. They bond over literature and soon both feel their romantic expectations building.
Woah. That’s really awful. That first sentence is so awful that when I try to parse its badness my eyes hurt and my fingers turn away from the keyboard in shame. I have now deleted seven separate rants from this place in this post. I could run a full Seminar in Composition class on that first paragraph alone. Thankfully, I never had to, because my Comp students wrote with more verve and clarity.
By contrast, here’s how the NY Times review begins:
This is a deeply strange book. In fact, it is, to the best of my knowledge, a nonesuch: a 400-plus-page first novel by a 49-year-old American male, dedicated to the highly dubious proposition that such a thing as perfect romantic love is possible in these doomy, gloomy, over-psychologized, terminally ironic, post-humanist, post-postmodern times. Part comedy of manners, part chick lit in male drag, James Collins’s “Beginner’s Greek” is a great big sunny lemon chiffon pie of a novel, set, for good measure and our sociological titillation, among the WASP ruling classes, people who work at white-shoe investment firms and own villas in southwestern France and can instantly tell the difference between fine Bordeaux and plonk.
Wow, now that’s saying something! We’ve got zeitgeist and this book’s place in it, we’ve got wine and love and sociological titillation. Language! Ideas! And positioning - if you find WASPy ruling classes enchanting, you’ll want more; if you don’t, you’ll go to the next book review (it’s possible you’ll finish this review, seething about wine snobs, but you’ll only have yourself to blame — the reviewer warned you).
Entertainment Weekly gives it just a one-paragraph capsule review, and again, manages to position the book according to expectations, and to telegraph what kind reading experience the book provides.
Beginner’s Greek has a classic romantic setup: Kinda awkward young financial type Peter meets girl-of-his-dreams Holly, loses her phone number, then spends a lot of pages trying to prove his fantasies really do match fate. As such, James Collins’ debut relies on a stunning number of familiar tropes — the meant-to-be lovers thwarted, the hapless romantic in love with his best friend’s girl, the treacherous boss. But he makes magic of it all by infusing those would-be clichés with so much old-school charm that you want to believe, and with so much patient detail that you actually can.
I encourage new entries in the online world of reading and writing and literary discourse. I am all for passion, for bringing light to alternative books, and for making room for novice book reviewers. But not at OnceWritten.
That is not book reviewing. It is not a good place for writers to “promote” their books. It is a sad scam on all fronts — especially, I think, for people who consider “book reviewing” something worth doing well.
paperhaus September 20th, 2008
Jessica Stockton Bagnulo wants to open a bookstore, and the NY Times is on the story.
I knew Jessica — aka Booknerd — as a colleague in the LitBlog Coop. When I finally met her in person, I thought, wow! She’s got all this energy and excitement! She’s awesome!
Which is what everybody thinks. Working as a bookseller after college, she took one business class, entered a contest, and was a finalist — then won with her bookstore business plan. This, when bookstores have been closing like crazy — the NY Times says 75 in the NYC-area since 2000. The neigborhood of Fort Greene in Brooklyn wants a bookstore. And they want Jessica.
When Jessica opens her bookstore in Fort Greene, I hope she’s open to nepotism, and carries all the LBC members’ books: Mark Sarvas’ novel “Harry, Revised”; Leila Lalami’s upcoming “Secret Son” and her short story collection “Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits”; Lizzie Skurnick’s upcoming book based on her column Fine Lines at Jezebel; the collections featuring stories by Matt Cheney; and whatever else comes along.
While Jessica has been working hard to become a bookseller, I pedaled to Silverlake to watch ANTM. The biking was hard, too.
paperhaus September 13th, 2008
Outtakes from my interview with Jhumpa Lahiri for the piece on “State by State” are up now at Jacket Copy.
The photo above is from a 1977 newspaper clipping from the Narragansett Times. Girl Scout troop 850 was helping to sell postcards for the historical jail building. I can’t decide what my favorite part is: the fact that it’s a fallout shelter, or that the jail guy looks really uncomfortable surrounded by a bunch of Girl Scouts.
In the picture:
Top row: Anne Wright, Glenda Vittimberga, Dee Dee Sormanti
Second row: Natasha Dornberg, Karen Kelly, Erica Lawson, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sarah Bergfalk
Third row: Debbie McNab, Carolyn Kellogg, Julie Conway
Bottom row: Cindi Conway
Why do I remember these names so clearly, when there are people from college I don’t even recognize? Must’ve been the beer.
paperhaus August 25th, 2008
My cousin is creating incredible photos that turn parts of the city of New York into planets. Although it’s not the most planet-like, this one is my favorite, I think, because it’s of the corner in Brooklyn with Kellogg’s Diner. I used to live up the street.
Of course, I loved Kellogg’s for being Kellogg’s. My cousin changed his name, so I don’t think he cares so much. I’d guess that he likes the eggs, but I don’t think it’s open anymore.
paperhaus August 20th, 2008
More people should be doing this.
Not getting detained.
But trying to point out the problems China has with a free and open society. (And Tibet, and whoever else is on their shit list).
May all those who are in custody be released soon.
paperhaus August 18th, 2008
Ben Ehrenreich’s story on a transgendered detainee — a Mexican native who was pulled over in LA for driving under the influence — who died in detention is in the new issue of Los Angeles Magazine. It’s a great, compelling article, and the fact that it could be researched at all seems almost impossible, given his description of the detention centers’ lack of regulation and oversight.
When I was on USC’s crew team, Terminal Island sat out in the harbor just out of reach. We’d joke about rowing around it, abandoning people to it. It had a jail then, but not a detention center. That detention center is where Victoria Arellano died.
If you can find the article (”A Death on Terminal Island”) on the LA Magazine website, you’re a better researcher than I am. One of the benefits of pet/housesitting is reading someone else’s periodicals.