The Week in Pieces

Media Murmurs

Peter W. Olson, the chief executive of Random House, will be out of a job shortly, according to a piece in the New York Times. ‘Mr. Olson who has run Random House, the world’s largest consumer publisher, since 1998, has come under mounting pressure in recent months as Bertelsmann’s financial results have been damaged by lower profits at Random House and steep losses in its American book clubs, which he also oversees.’ Piece indicates Olson will have left Random House by June. ‘Sales at Random House fell 5.6 percent in 2007, hurt by the eroding dollar and weak consumer spending. Operating profit declined 4.9 percent, though Random House maintained its impressive run of bestsellers, among them Playing for Pizza by John Grisham, On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, Giving by Bill Clinton, and Women & Money by Suze Orman.’

Worth Noting

According to M.A. Orthofer at the Complete Review’s Literary Saloon, ‘African Wars’, the dramatically titled discussion (featuring Nuruddin Farah, Chenjerai Hove and Abdourahman Waberi) at the PEN New Voices conference in New York City was ‘the most disappointing of the events I’ve been to so far’. Orthofer writes that ‘Hove tends a bit to anecdotal rambling, and readily offers up his opinion at any point, while Farah is more of an elder (literary) statesman type, his speech much more measured and carefully worded.’ Even worse: ‘The question-and-answer session was a complete disaster, with [the moderator] losing any remaining control over the proceedings, as audience members failed to grasp the basic concept of succinctly directing a (possibly relevant) question at the authors.’

Helen Gordon, an associate editor at Granta, has only good things to say about Tim Winton’s new novel, Breath, in Sunday’s Observer. Gordon writes that Winton ‘revisits some of his past preoccupations: masculinity, self-discovery through a journey into extremes and, most strikingly, the landscape of Australia: yellow acacias, the peppery smell of the heath, the nip and dash of honey eaters. At his best, Winton writes with an unsentimental lyricism that remains rooted in the Australian vernacular; rough, choked dialogue clashing against passages of great beauty’.

The Weekend in Pieces

Carole Mallory, one of Norman Mailer’s many lovers, has sold seven boxes of her papers to Harvard University Library. Lionel Shriver disapproves, in a piece that examines our culture’s preoccupation with gossip and greed.

Shriver writes, ‘I did one event last year whose moderator squandered the hour on pressing me to come clean on my relationship with my mother. It was the most mortifying exchange I have ever conducted before 300 people, not only because my mother is alive, but because I was horrified by the arrogant imputation that I imagined anyone else might give a hoot about how I got on with Mom.’

Shriver argues that we should ‘return to the days when writers had mystique’.

Our recent post on Salman Rushdie’s incipient movie career reminds us how, in the last fifty years, writers have adapted to a culture that encourages access and exposure, to say nothing of outrageous appearances on national television. And who was the first successful writer to realize that new media is the key to fame, sex and increased book sales? It was none other than Norman Mailer, an early pioneer of the writer as shrewd yet shameless media operator. Advertisements for Myself indeed.

But we have another question: If, as Shriver says, being a writer is ‘secretly the dullest job on the planet’, what does that make being a blogger?

Is Self-Publishing a Good Idea?

In the New York Times Book Review, Rachel Donadio explores the popularity of self-publishing in America. She writes: ‘In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles.’

Donadio’s article is most interesting when detailing the uneasy relationship between self-published titles and the ubiquitous bookstore chains. She notes, ‘Amazon.com owns BookSurge, a print-on-demand operation that produces and distributes books for as little as $3.50 per copy. Borders recently started a self-publishing program with the print-on-demand company Lulu. Would-be authors can pay $299 for formatting, printing and an ISBN code, or for the $499 “premium package,” an editor will address structure, plot and documentation, along with basics like grammar, punctuation and spelling.’

In a rare critical aside, Donadio writes, ‘Borders lists its self-publishing program under the rubric “Borders Lifestyles,” as if writing were a hobby, like golf, rather than a calling or a craft.’ But for many self-published authors (most of whom only publish one book) writing is a hobby and isn’t a calling.

To honestly evaluate the self-publishing option one must acknowledge that its literature is often awful. The great virtue of self-publishing (its democratic nature and lack of editorial intervention) is also its great deficit; its freedom from constraints is itself a constraint. But many novels branded and packaged and publicized and paid-for by big houses are awful, too.

Donadio also confuses the phenomenon of self-publishing with the phenomenon of the MFA. It’s true that some self-published books are by MFA graduates; most, however, are not. For one thing, it’s easier for an MFA graduate to get an agent and a publisher, and thus bypass the option of self-publishing, which is for almost every writer a last resort.

Donadio doesn’t discuss authors who self-published by necessity before gaining larger fame. For example, the precocious Christopher Paolini self-published his first novel (or at least his parents did), which went on to become a New York Times bestseller. Paolini’s books are now published by Knopf. The Nigerian novelist Helon Habila self-published a collection of stories, one of which won him the first-ever Caine Prize for African Writing in 2001. His fiction is now published by W.W. Norton.

The big literary prizes won’t consider self-published books (for reasons that are entirely sensible and also perhaps elitist), and there are small, struggling, independent houses (many of which have admirable lists) that find it as difficult to get attention as a do-it-yourself author.

At times, Donadio’s tone comes close to condescencion. After all, she writes for the New York Times Book Review. It’s difficult to look out from the establishment when you’re firmly ensconced within.

Of course everyone wants to express themselves, to tell a story (often their own), but the reality of self-publishing is less cute and more complex than Donadio describes.

Worth Noting

Carmen Callil discusses how and why she started Virago. Hers is a vibrant and fun piece, especially enjoyable for its recollection of literary London in the 1970s.

Salman Rushdie, Obstetrician to the Stars

Salman Rushdie has a small role as Helen Hunt’s obstetrician in the upcoming Hollywood film Then She Found Me. We hope the film is better than its title, which reads as if it’s been composed by committee.

Hunt, who also directed, envisioned an Indian obstetrician. Rushdie – who played himself in the film version of Bridget Jones’s Diary – lobbied for the role. Says Hunt, ‘He got the part and suddenly this novelist was my obstetrician. He sought me out and I thought he was wonderful.’ He sought her out? Shouldn’t Andrew Wylie be doing that for him?

Padma Lakshmi, Rushdie’s ex-wife, couldn’t establish herself as a successful actor, and became a celebrity chef instead. Is it the case that, after their divorce, Rushdie wants to spite Lakshmi by becoming a movie star? Or maybe he’s trying to boost the sales of his latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence. Either way, we’re impressed.

Then She Found Me opens in Britain in July, so fans here must wait to see whether Rushdie should quit his day job. Judging from John Sutherland’s review of The Enchantress of Florence in the Financial Times, Rushdie may want to stick with the writing. ‘If The Enchantress of Florence doesn’t win this year’s Man Booker I’ll curry my proof copy and eat it,’ wrote Sutherland, who may or may not be angling for a photo opportunity of his own come October.

(Question for extra credit: If you were forced to eat a book, which one would you eat? We’d go for something short and light, although we hear Chocolat tastes good. If you have problems with digestion, try A Million Little Pieces.)

Capturing the Candidates

The Guardian has a fun feature on American cartoonists and their sketches of, and views on, the US presidential contenders: John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Rick Meyerowitz draws attention to McCain’s underbite, ‘the Arizona senator shows his bottom teeth like a wily old badger ready to take a piece out of anyone’. Writes Barry Blitt, ‘there’s no way around that mouth full of teeth’. Not since Martin Amis in the 1980s has anyone had their dentistry scrutinized so savagely.

According to Blitt, McCain’s ‘head looks like a keg of pilsner’. This anatomical abnormality will presumably help McCain gain the beer-drinking, working-class vote – but why pilsner? Why a Czech or German beer? Couldn’t McCain’s head resemble a keg of a good old American brew, like Rolling Rock? (You saw what happened to Hillary Clinton when, on a populace-pandering pub-crawl in Northern Indiana, she ordered a shot of Crown Royal whisky, which happens to be a Canadian brand. Infidel!)

To Anita Kunz, McCain is ‘pretty easy to draw’, which is amusing in itself as she can’t seem to get his features right. Kunz’s mock bust of McCain makes it look as if Karl Rove’s chubby cheeks have been transplanted onto Boris Yeltsin’s face.

To Steve Brodner, in a first-rate sketch, McCain is a low-slung gunslinger circa 1930s Chicago, sporting a fedora and the infelicitous, squash-faced features of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy. You can’t argue with Brodner’s summation of McCain as a ‘stubborn, foul-mouthed, angry fighter’. Brodner wonders if McCain is ‘hiding missiles in those cheeks’. If yes, this gives new meaning to the phrase ‘armed to the teeth’.

Brodner has an hilarious take on Hillary Clinton, who ‘has a long, sloping nose that draws her face down and almost crowds out her mouth, which is small and feisty. It is as if her face twists to accommodate her various constituent groups. I see a kind of conflict in there. There is also something in her intensity: there may be traces of latent Nixon chromosomes in her sullen, victimized, enemy-listing, openness-averse, highly ambitious mien’.

Meyerowitz draws Clinton from behind but gets her hairstyle all wrong. He’s cannily chosen to portray her in a variation of the honeybee-coloured pantsuit (or dress) that’s been her outfit of choice this year. The outfit is bright and warm, as opposed to the down-to-business, no-nonsense, boardroom-savvy black pantsuit Clinton wore so often while campaigning for New York Senate (she even joked about it in her victory speech). Meyerowitz does well with the populist, primary-campaign, honeybee Hillary – inoffensive,optimistic and yet perhaps hiding (or turning her back on) what she really thinks and feels.

Blitt makes Clinton look like a British punk being electrocuted, while Kunz draws Hillary with Bill thrown over her shoulder like some desperate-for-affection, attention-craving monkey in a suit. But Kunz has the shape of Bill’s face wrong – she’s confused it with John Kerry’s – and Hillary’s babyish face looks more like Gorbachev’s here. Kunz’s sketch is also let down by the lazy rendering of Clinton’s bottom half, which draws attention away from the top, where the sketch makes its point.

One of the best cartoons in this collection is Meyerowitz’s sketch of Obama, the epitome of cool. Meyerowitz’s portrait is fluid and imaginative, almost perfect – Obama as a combination of Abraham Lincoln and Miles Davis. What the cartoon lacks in irony (and why should all newspaper cartoons be ironical or acerbic or darkly cynical?) it makes up for in artfulness. Here Obama is so cool that he transcends cool; his political skills and public persona are as difficult to define as a jazz riff.

In photographs, the long-faced, jug-eared Obama sometimes looks like Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman. In cartoons, though, Obama is more of a shape-shifter than the other candidates; he slips in and out of forms and conceptions. Sometimes he’s more an expression of an idea or ideal than an actual human being (unlike Clinton and McCain, who, in these sketches at least, are portrayed as painfully, punishingly human, their very visage sometimes little more than a manifestation of one or other Deadly Sin).

Cartoonists don’t yet know what to make of Obama. According to Blitt, ‘Obama’s body language is relaxed. You want to capture that’. To Kunz, Obama is Superman, ‘the great hope for the future’. The future, which must improve upon the past, as symbolized by Kunz’s statue of McCain. Between the past and the future, sits the cartoonist, pen poised.

Déjà Vu

If the headline of Clive Crook’s latest Financial Times column - ‘Clinton’s Last Chance to Stop Obama’ (April 20) - feels familiar, that’s because you’ve probably read it before. Nearly two months ago, on February 26, both the Guardian and the Los Angeles Times were calling the Cleveland Democratic debate ‘Clinton’s last chance’ to influence voters and overturn Obama’s momentum. After Cleveland, pundits said Clinton would be finished by the close of the Ohio primary on March 5. Of course, she won Ohio and the last month and a half has been one long ‘last chance’. How many last chances can one person have? Sure, the phrase is dramatic, but how accurate is it, really? We’ll find out tomorrow. Or maybe we won’t.

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