Hey, look at SA on the Book Bench!
paperhaus December 12th, 2009
The New Yorker takes note of S.A. Griffin’s poetry bomb on its book blog, the Book Bench.
Go SA. Go Book Bench. Go poetry. Go bombs. Oh, wait….
Archive for the 'online' Category
When marketing promo sucks the soul
paperhaus October 27th, 2009
I tried to read a book today, planning to write about it. I got up at 5am and read the book, marking the places that were interesting. It’s a marketing book, one about promoting oneself, which seems to have some traction these days.
But I just couldn’t do it.
It’s so entirely awful. It’s full of bromides and intellectual falsehoods. It’s slick and personable. It’s a big huge fat waste of time and money. Anyone’s. Everyone’s.
And it’s cast a dark cloud over my soul.
Today the LA 140 Conference begins. The roster seems, in my shadowy state, to be full of self-promoters, jivers, people with big voices who take advantage of those doing real work. They are not all like this, I am sure. But I can’t see the content through the promotional social networking tweeting hoo-ha.
When days like this strike, the best thing to do is retreat from the online world: write and create. Read. Fold laundry, garden, visit the stacks in the library. But there is Jacket Copy blogging to be done. I will try not to cast too much gloom over it all.
Wish me luck.
I broke my iPhone
paperhaus August 15th, 2008
And wrote about it for the LA Times Tech Blog. And it got dugg.
LA Times books. Wasserman on PBS. And why I care.
paperhaus July 28th, 2008
I was excited to learn that Kassia Krozser (aka Booksquare) would be on PBS’s News Hour tonight. Hooray for book bloggers! Also exciting: she would be appearing with former LA Times book review editor Steve Wasserman.
(She couldn’t see him, though: instead of having him on a monitor, they had a picture of Ren — or was it Stimpy? she couldn’t recall which was which — in his place.)
As a contributor to the book review and a blogger for Jacket Copy, it’s been hard for me to hear about the changes at the LA Times. I wish that people weren’t losing their jobs. I wish the paper and its book coverage were not just surviving but flourishing. I wish that resources were boundless and column inches long. But I understand that the situation is tough at the LA Times, if not dire, and that if wishes were horses I’d be cantering up La Cienega by now.
On the show (mp3 here), Steve Wasserman spoke fairly about the issues of newspaper contraction and somewhat snidely about internet book criticism/coverage (”bloviating” is not nice). Then, near the end of the interview, Wasserman said:
The Los Angeles Times — as well as other newspapers around the country, the Hartford Courant, which only recently let its book editor go — has constricted its space not only in the print medium, but they have not added people to expand what they do online either.
OK, my dad faithfully watches the News Hour (he also reads this blog. Hi dad!). He is under the impression that I am freelancing with the LA Times to expand what it does online. Mr. Wasserman, you’re bumming my dad out.
See, you’re making him think I am a bad daughter, one who’s either fibbing about her responsibilities or is failing at them. Oh, I’ve done that before, sure — the time I forgot to mention, for a couple of months, that I’d dropped out of college, that was both a failure and a fib — but in this case, I’m hard at work at Jacket Copy. And I think it’s pretty good.
Check it out. Today we posted a man-on-the-street video about what Angelenos are reading. I think videos count as an expansion. Fun expansion, even.
I agree with you, content is king. Come and consume some bookish stuff online at the good old LA Times.
don’s fountain of health
paperhaus July 16th, 2008
I wonder what ever happened to Don. Why did his shop close? Maybe people weren’t sure what he sold (although I think health food is a safe guess). Was the food not great enough? The people not nice enough? Were the people too nice?
I bet Don was a fan of the Moosewood Cookbook, the 1977 hippie multiculti cookbook that later became bit controversial because the other people in the coop restaurant that came up with the recipes didn’t think author Molly Katzen gave them enough credit. Then they put out more cookbooks collectively and everybody became nice again.
Were there other seminal hippie cookbooks that I missed? Ours was not an epicurean household.
My suggestion for a new LA Times publisher
paperhaus July 14th, 2008
She turned out, against all expectations, to have balls of steel. She had the highest journalist principles and trusted her staff to get things right. She even had a tolerance for difficult writers, like Truman Capote (photographed together here in 1966, at the Black & White ball).
The only thing bad about Katharine Graham is that she’s dead.
Come to think of it, even dead, she might be a good choice for publisher.
Linkety binkety boo
paperhaus July 8th, 2008
A short piece on Steve Erickson appeared in the July 2 issue of the LA Weekly, and I’ve just caught up with it. I’m not sure the author thinks about Erickson’s writing the same way I do — he cried at Zeroville, a book which made me laugh — but the more props Erickson gets, the more just this universe becomes.
Darn that pesky universe! Book pages are being cut at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Scales shift back to less just.
Take heed, people: Wikipedia is convenient but it can be amended by any bored fourteen-year-old, deposed world leader or other psychopath. If your job is to prep your boss for his meeting at the G8 summit, don’t give him pages from Wikipedia. Seriously. (via)
Rachel Resnick is revealing the westside highlife and sharing writerly advice (from Samantha Dunn and others) at Bookfox this week while proprietor John is elsewhere.
Mark is getting Rothalicious, a condition that will most likely worsen before it disappears.
Maud thinks about twitter, both as a source for publishing industry leaks and as potential means of hype and buzz manipulation. Very smart. I’ve also got twitter notes coming up Wednesday on Jacket Copy — unrelated, but the meme seems to be out there.
Writer Jules Tygiel died in Northern California on July 1 from cancer. While everyone mentions his baseball histories first, I knew him by his book The Great Los Angeles Swindle: Oil, Stocks and Scandal During the Roaring Twenties. The story of C.C. Julian was so unbelievable that it makes Enron look logical and transparent, but Tygiel unraveled it well.
In Los Angeles in the early years of the Great Depression, C.C. Julian and the Julian Petroleum Corporation were household words. They symbolized, not merely what President Franklin D. Roosevelt would later deplore as “a decade of debauchery of group selfishness,” but the failed hopes and dreams of the great boom of the 1920s. Indeed, no single story captures the essenc of the 1920s in Amrica — its booster optimism and rampant speculation, its entrepreneurial mania for mergers, its overlap of business and politics, its application of new communications technology, and its cast of oilmen, stock promoters, Hollywood stars, cinema moguls, banking executives, Prohibition-era gangsters, and evangelists — quite so well as the Julian Petroleum swindle.
Ice on Mars! Ice on Mars!
paperhaus June 19th, 2008
Holy ice shards, Batman. Ice = water. Water = possibility for life forms we understand. Ice on Mars! What’s next — spiders?
Out Stealing Horses and more criticishness
paperhaus June 12th, 2008
Per Petterson’s “Out Stealing Horses” is currently the bestselling book at Powell’s. Which makes me feel not so bad about saying it just didn’t do it for me. Initially, I found it both too quiet/cold (man walks dog by frozen lake, appreciates remote wilderness) while also being too halcyon (he remembers his teenage youth in golden fields — literally, at one point, harvesting hay). But then there was some blood, and some sexual intrigue, but the drama dribbled along without ever heating up much. The narrator is the classic passive observer — he observes his friend, his father, his own memories, the Norway/Swedish border — and it felt like he sat in the passenger seat of the story when I wanted him to jump behind the wheel and rev up the gas. As for action, he chops up a tree and feels achy afterward. Pretty darn low key, right? It felt like one of those movies I’m supposed to like, with long takes and quiet contemplation of the landscape; I get itchy, wishing something would please please happen.
But so what? How valuable are the opinions of book critics? This morning, that’s what Minnesota Public Radio asked agent/former book review editor Steve Wasserman, Chris Lavin from the San Diego Tribune and litblogger C. Max Magee, proprietor of The Millions. Audio is online (Wasserman namechecks Sarvas).
Litblogger Ed Champion performs a little book criticism today, reviewing The Reel Stuff, a book that returns to the science fiction origins of scifi films, in today’s LA Times.
On Monday, Salman Rushdie will be at Town Hall Los Angles in conversation with — Carrie Fisher. If that’s not the most fabulous literary mashup of 2008, I don’t know what is. And yes, I’ve got tickets.