The Week in Pieces

Worth noting

Mike Allen on upcoming books about the 2008 American presidential campaign by top political journalists.

Orhan Pamuk on football and fandom.

Vincent Rossmeier on the vanishing American newspaper film critic.

Ruth Franklin on the fabulism and fiction of James Frey.

Publish or Perish, Digitize or Self-Destruct

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes this week on e-books and the drive towards digitization in the publishing industry. The ‘strategy of giving intellectual property away so that people will buy your paraphernalia won’t work equally well for everything. To take the obvious, painful example: news organizations, very much including this one, have spent years trying to turn large online readership into an adequately paying proposition, with limited success. But they’ll have to find a way. Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we’ll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account’. This is one reason why the New York Times decided late last year to cancel TimesSelect, of which Krugman’s column was an integral part.

Quote of the day

Gore Vidal on writers and envy, in an Esquire interview: ‘I went into a line of work in which jealousy is the principle emotion between practitioners. I don’t think I ever suffered from it, because there was no need. But I was aware of it in others, and I found it a regrettable fault.’

Worth noting

Stephen Knight has a worthwhile profile of poet, translator and Granta contributor Michael Hofmann in The Independent. Read Hofmann’s poem, ‘End of the Pier Show’, published in Granta 100, here.

Congolese novelist suing the South African government

According to a story in the Cape Times, Cape Town’s top English-language daily, Congolese novelist Kabemba Ngulu is attempting to sue Cape Town’s High Court for losses suffered when his publishing business was looted, during the ongoing, nationwide campaign against immigrants in the townships.

Ngulu, whose novel, L’Ombre du Soleil, has been nominated as one of the top twenty-three novels at the London Book Festival, ‘sleeps outside the Cape Town police station with about 150 other refugees’. The article, which is available to subscribers only, can be found here. It’s an important piece as it highlights and humanizes a catastrophe that the South African government has been intent on ignoring. See below for a scanned copy. ‘No one’s coming to help us,’ Ngulu told the newspaper. ‘This is an SOS to the international community. This is a war. Our people are dying.’

Worth noting

In the Telegraph, Ian McEwan discusses his opera libretto, which was first published in Granta 100.

Charles McGrath on filming Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Road.

Christoper Hitchens reviews the short fiction of Saki.

Helen Vendler on the poetry of Frank O’Hara.

Writing courses are ‘the new mental hospitals’, says Granta contributor Hanif Kureishi at the Hay Festival, while Owen Sheers discusses his novel, Resistance.

Salman Rushdie’s writing self

‘I’m totally eligible, single and available,’ Salman Rushdie tells Patricia Cohen, in a New York Times profile that coincides with the American publication of his new novel, The Enchantress of Florence. The profile is an entertaining combination of intelligent discussion and tabloid chatter. Rushdie compares his divorce from Padma Lakshmi to ‘a nuclear bomb dropped in your living room when you’re trying to work’.

Equally incisive is his description of writing: ‘There’s a writing self which is not quite your ordinary social self and which you don’t really have access to except at the moment when you’re writing, and certainly in my view, I think of that as my best self. To be able to be that person feels good; it feels better than anything else.’

Rushdie admits to being frequently parodied in the press. ‘A cartoon of yourself is created, then it is used to attack you with,’ he says. He would have done well to keep this in mind before agreeing to appear in a Scarlett Johansson music video.

What will Michiko Kakutani, the The New York Times’s chief book reviewer, think of The Enchantress of Florence? In a 2002 interview, Rushdie called her the ‘vile Michiko’, after she nuclear-bombed one of his books.

For more posts on Salman Rushdie, click here.

Quote of the day

Umberto Eco on other writers: ‘If they are different than me, I hate them, and if they are like me, I hate them.’ Quoted in a New York Times profile of Salman Rushdie.

Worth noting

In an insightful and acerbic essay in The New York Times Book Review, Matt Miller reflects upon teaching English in Beijing ahead of the Olympics. He scrutinizes the English manuals in a local bookstore: ‘So just what are Chinese people learning about the English-speaking world? For starters, we’re moody sluts. A book called Love English teaches that “Do you want to go to a movie?” really means “I’d eventually like to have sex with you,” while “I’m bored” really means “Do you want to have sex?”’ What is more disturbing is that the Beijing police, ‘sixty percent of whom are supposed to be competent in English in time for the Olympics, study from a book called Olympic Security English. Dialogues called “Dissuading Foreigners From Excessive Drinking” and “How to Stop Illegal News Coverage” introduce useful phrases like “Don’t pretend to be innocent”’.

The Wall Street Journal’s L. Gordon Crovitz endorses Amazon’s Kindle reading device and asks, ‘If the Internet is the most powerful communications advance ever – and it is – then how do this medium and its new devices affect how and what we read?’

In The New Republic, Cynthia Ozick discusses the novels of Lionel Trilling.

‘Two potent factors make 1001 Books compelling,’ writes William Grimes in The New York Times Book Review), ‘guilt and time. It plays on every serious reader’s lingering sense of inadequacy. Page after page reveals a writer or a novel unread, and therefore a demerit on the great report card of one’s cultural life.’

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