by David Burn | Jan 4, 2006 | Literature
According to this report, The Sunday Times of London, sent two typed manuscripts to 20-plus publishers and literary agents to test a hypothesis, namely that the publsihing industry has become incapable of spotting genuine literary talent.
The manuscripts were the opening chapters of novels that won Booker Prizes in the 1970’s. One was Holiday, by Stanley Middleton; the other was In a Free State, by Sir V. S. Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature. But the “experts” did not know what they were reading. In all but one case, rejection letters were sent out.
Doris Lessing, the author who was once rejected by her own publishers when she submitted a novel under a pseudonym, said: “I’m astounded as Naipaul is an absolutely, wonderful writer.”
by David Burn | Jan 3, 2006 | Literature, Nebraska
Janet Maslin of The New York Times is not loving Dog Days, the new first novel by Nebraskan Ana Marie Cox, better known as Wonkette, thanks to her political blog of that name.
Dog Days manages to be doubly conventional: it follows both an old-fashioned love-betrayal-redemption arc and the newer, bitchier nanny-Prada chick-lit motif. Melanie is a myopic and self-interested heroine by the standards of either genre.
Anyone expecting Dog Day to sound like Wonkette will wait a long time for any Wonkette wit to kick in.
Jessica Cutler, a woman who once worked on The Hill and gained fame via Wonkette’s reporting, also has a book out. The Washingtonienne is a fictionalized account of her real life sexual antics/conquests.
[UPDATE] As hard as this is to comprehend, Cox–who is without a doubt a media darling–now has a more complimentary second review in the Times, care of Christopher Buckley. Buckley says Dog Days is a “brisk, smart, smutty, knowing and very well-written first novel.”
by David Burn | Jan 2, 2006 | Digital culture, Literature
Cory Doctorow: For the first time in my life, I am a full-time writer. Effective today, I’m no longer an employee — effective today, I’m a full-time, freelance word-maker. It’s something I’ve dreamt of since I was 12 years old, and now it’s a reality. Whew. Scary.
I’m going to write. More blog posts, and longer ones. I have three novellas in the pipe. I’m tripling the pace of work on Themepunks, my fourth novel, and plan to have it in the can by early spring. I’m going to do a fix-up novel with Charlie Stross, completing our “Huw” stories (Jury Service and Appeals Court) and publishing them between covers. My podcast is going thrice weekly. I’ve got articles in production for a bunch of magazines and websites.
There’s also some big plans for a long, nonfiction DRM-book/research project lurking around here. With any luck I’ll be able to announce more about that in late January or early February.
This is the most exciting day of my life — the day I quit my day-job. Thanks to everyone who made this possible, all the readers and bloggers and friends and editors and agents. I’ll do my best not to screw it up!
by David Burn | Jan 2, 2006 | Music
Dead News picked up on an Associated Press report that says Robert Hunter is living the ascetic life these days, writing novels in Northern California. According to the story, Hunter has already written one full novel called Doppleganger, which has something to do with the quantum mechanics theory of physics.
“I feel like I’ve got ten books in me,” Hunter says.
Steve Silberman, co-author of the Grateful Dead book Skeleton Key, said, “Hunter really located a traditional sense of character in story line found in English Literature and childhood ballads.”
No word yet on when Doppleganger will hit stores.
by David Burn | Dec 31, 2005 | Film, Food & Beverage, Place
If you enjoy wine, Mondovino, a documentary by Jonathan Nossiter, is a must see. The film has a fascinating cast of characters, and its central theme explores the mounting tension between local producers and global behemoths like Napa’s Robert Mondavi and Sons.
Aimé Guibert of Languedoc and Hubert de Montille of Bordeaux, both determined believers in terroir–the sense of place that gives wine its true character–are the clear heroes in the film. Michel Rolland, a wine consultant who espouses the values of modernization and the Mondavi family who value globalization are the villians.
Hubert de Montille told The Telegraph, “I am un partisan du terroir. But you have vin terroir all over the world, including the United States – wherever you have people who cherish diversity and individuality in wine. For me, the battle isn’t between Europe and the US. It is industrial wine against the culture of wine, that’s the real conflict. These big companies are so powerful and their ambition is so great that they may not keep a space open for vin terroir, for all wine that has a sense of place, rather than just a sense of marketing.”
Southern France’s Languedoc region is one of the places where this conflict was most recently fought. Mondavi had identified forested land in Aniane as suitable for making world-class wine, but citizens of the town with the aid of their Communist mayor rebuked their advances.
According to Wine Spectator, Mondavi had planned to spend about $8 million developing the vineyard and building a showcase winery, which would eventually produce up to 20,000 cases per year of high-end Syrah.
But the site they chose was on the 2,200-acre undeveloped massif, which is flanked by woods and nearly impenetrable bush (known as garrigue), and topped by 750-foot-high plateaus with sweeping views. Hunters, ecologists and naturalists fought against any development in the area, which they consider an environmental shrine.
Mondavi was in part attracted to Aniane because it is home to one of the finest wineries in southern France, Mas de Daumas Gassac, which makes a long-lived red wine in Aniane. But the winery’s founder, Aimé Guibert, criticized Mondavi for wanting to develop a winery on public land.
by David Burn | Dec 29, 2005 | Literature, Music
Paul Ford is a great writer. Evidence for this theory exists on his website. He’s also employed by Harper’s Magazine and he has a new novel out. Like I said, the guy can write.
Here’s something he wrote last fall that I find funny.
Back in 1995 Jerry Garcia died. I was just finishing up college at Alfred University in Alfred, New York. I never really cared about the Grateful Dead all that much. Some of the Dead’s music is okay if you don’t have anything better to listen to, like, say, silence, or the sound of flies buzzing. I don’t really have a problem with it, but I do have a problem with pious hippies. They get on my nerves in the same way that, say, Objectivists do. And I like all the stuff that hippies hate, like wearing solid colors, and living in a house that’s not made of corncobs, and Western medicine.
My roommate in college had the same problem with hippies that I did. So we decided to put together a one-hour radio program for the college radio station, WALF, about the assassination of Jerry Garcia, complete with commentary and analysis and a slowed-down, audio-processed, totally fake bootleg of the song Sugar Magnolia to which we added fake gunshots. We played it one night and our friends were amused.
This was the early days of the web, and I figured I might as well put up a few pages about our assassination theory with some audio clips and see what happened. What happened is that Jerry fans sent me long emails explaining how important Jerry was to the world and that my theory was insanity and should be removed from the Internet immediately. Sometimes people would ask to speak to my supervisor.
I’d always write back. I’d send a fake email from the Internet Management Council, an organization that does not exist, telling the complaining party that their Internet would be shut down from this day on. And then they’d write back even more full of burning rage, telling me that they were going to write the Internet Management Council as well and have my Internet revoked. Sometimes I’d let them in on the joke, reminding them that Jerry Garcia had been in close contact with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and wasn’t afraid of a good prank himself. They didn’t write back. I did it over and over, and I was happy.
I share Ford’s distlike of pious hippies, but I like Grateful Dead music. And I like hippies when they have a sense of humor and adventure.
by David Burn | Dec 28, 2005 | Music
David Gans, host of the nationally syndicated Grateful Dead Hour, recaps some of the songs he can’t get out of his head this year.
Rocking Horse – Donna the Buffalo. DTB is just about my favorite band these days: great groove, great vibe at the shows, a spiritually positive (and decidedly non-hippie-dippy) message, and – most important of all – two great songwriters, Tara Nevins and Jeb Puryear. Jeb has an utterly unique and (to me) irresistible style; he’s one of those songwriters who creates a universe of his own right next to ours and sends these messages back to Earth for the good of us all. What I want from a band – jamband or otherwise – is music that speaks to the head, the heart, the soul, the gonads, and the butt. DTB does that. When I’m in the audience at a Donna the Buffalo show, there is no place else I’d rather be.
I have to concur with Gans on this. I attended my first Donna The Buffalo show this year, at Floydfest. I now listen to their records, Wait ‘Til Spring (with Jim Lauderdale), Positive Friction and the aforementioned Life’s a Ride all the time.
Speaking of Jim Lauderdale…for me, he’s far and away the artist of the year. Not that 2005 was a huge year for him. I just didn’t know any better until this year. Now that I know what a national treasure this guy is, I’m fully in his corner. Honestly, I don’t think I can properly express how magnificent Jim’s work is. If you have yet to give him a listen, it’s high time to do so. Trust me on this one.
Other amazing artists that appeared on to my radar screen for the first time this year: Darrell Scott, The Everybody Fields, Mary Gauthier, Larry Keel, Railroad Earth, The Gourds, Kathleen Edwards, Laura Cantrell and Patty Loveless. It’s been a year of terrific musical growth for me. In fact, it’s hard for me to imagine how I got by on jambands and such, prior to these developments.
by David Burn | Dec 27, 2005 | Music
I’m reading Bob Dyaln’s autobiography, Chronicles. I’m only 100 pages in, but so far it’s an amazing book.
One story that really jumped out at me was the fact that Dylan journeyed to Woodie Guthrie’s house in Coney Island (at Woodie’s request) in search of Guthrie’s unrecorded songs, some 30 plus years before Billy Bragg and Wilco would make these works into two masterful releases, Mermaid Avenue Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.
Danny Duncan Collum, writing in Sojourners, describes the Wilco/Bragg effort.
Mermaid Avenue adds up to something even greater than the sum of its parts. For one thing, it is a creation for these times. Guthrie wrote some of these lyrics in the postwar era, when the revolutionary dreams of the 1930s were going on ice. The hard-edged realistic hope of those songs seems appropriate to our own New World Order, and Bragg’s voice captures it well. As a rock group, Wilco represents a turn-of-the-century roots movement that is growing in reaction to the soullessness and placelessness of globalized culture. Their ragged beats and rough textures fly in the face of contemporary computer-perfect expectations, and their good humor and capacity for sincerity are an affront to the postmodern ethos of compulsive irony.
But there’s more to Mermaid Avenue than that. The album begins with a song called “Walt Whitman’s Niece,” which seems to evoke a sense of American populist tradition that reaches back past the 1930s, and past this century, into the age of steamboats and abolitionism. It’s a claim to a spiritual heritage. It says that there is an America other than the one of commerce and empire. It’s the land that was made for you and me. And even at this late date we can uncover it and call it our own.
Woodie’s wife was not home when Dylan arrived, and 14-year old Arlo could not locate the box of lyrics in the family’s basement. It’s funny how things work out sometimes.
by David Burn | Dec 26, 2005 | Digital culture
Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, explores our comfort with Wikipedia, Google and “that whole blog thing.”
When professionals–editors, academics, journalists–are running the show, we at least know that it’s someone’s job to look out for such things as accuracy. But now we’re depending more and more on systems where nobody’s in charge; the intelligence is simply emergent. These probabilistic systems aren’t perfect, but they are statistically optimized to excel over time and large numbers. They’re designed to scale, and to improve with size. And a little slop at the microscale is the price of such efficiency at the macroscale.
The good thing about probabilistic systems is that they benefit from the wisdom of the crowd and as a result can scale nicely both in breadth and depth. But because they do this by sacrificing absolute certainty on the microscale, you need to take any single result with a grain of salt. As Zephoria puts it, Wikipedia “should be the first source of information, not the last.”
by David Burn | Dec 20, 2005 | Music
Back in November, a bearded beatboxer named Matisyahu teamed up with Saul Williams onstage at the mtvU Woodie Awards to deliver one of the most talked-about live performances of the year.
For many, it was their first experience of the artist, born Matthew Miller, and his unique fusion of reggae, hip-hop and Jewish folk. But Matisyahu’s growing fanbase has been charting the Hasidic MC’s progress for a while now.
According to Wikipedia, Matisyahu was not brought up as an Orthodox Jew. He turned to Orthodox Judaism around 2001 and began playing with the Jewish band Pey Dalid. He counts among his musical inspirations Bob Marley, Phish, and Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. His fans are of different walks of life, religions, and ethnicities. He sometimes performs with Kenny Muhammad, a Muslim beatboxer.
His reggae vocal style is along the lines of traditional Rasta Roots stylings mixed with dub sound. The easiest comparison would be similar to the conscious and cultural sides of Buju Banton, Sizzla, Capleton, or Junior Kelly, but with the upbeat message of Luciano, Bushman and Everton Blender, and vocal dexterity of Barrington Levy.
