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.
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