John Waters Talks About His Books and Role Models in a Whimsical Animated Video

in Animation, Books, Film, Life | March 10th, 2014

Kudos to cartoonist Flash Rosenberg for having the huevos to illustrate cult film icon John Waters’ remarks at the New York Public Library in real time before a live audience. The first half minute of this animated Conversation Portrait had me worried on her behalf. What a relief when the the coiled lump she was swabbing with brown watercolor turned out to be a cinnamon roll, and not the substance Divine (the director’s muse) famously ate—for real—in 1972’s Pink Flamingos.

It’s a very free associative process. The topic under discussion turns out to be not baked goods, but rather role models. (Roll models, get it?)

As to who the Sire of Sleaze chooses to elevate in this capacity:

Crooner Johnny Mathis, whose heavenly pipes Waters prescribes as a potential remedy for bipartisan ugliness.

Playwright Tennessee Williams (whose work Cardinal Spellman denounced as “revolting, deplorable, morally repellent…”)

And, touchingly, his parents, whom Rosenberg draws with arms encircling their pencil-mustached tot, a sweet Three Is a Magic Number tableau. (In non-animated life, Waters is one of four children.)

The Prince of Puke modestly deflects interviewer Paul Holdengräber’s assertion that he himself is a role model, advising his fans to pick ten flawed individuals from whom they’ve learned something and “let them know how much you mean to them.” (He may have meant “let them know how much they mean to you,” but it might be a fun sort of exercise to follow his instructions as uttered.)

And if on some far off evening, you’re moved to have sex on his grave, know that this role model’s ghost will rest content.

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Ayun Halliday told you cha cha heels, black ones! Follow her @AyunHalliday

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Stephen King Creates a List of 96 Books for Aspiring Writers to Read

in Books, Writing | March 10th, 2014

Image by The USO, via Flickr Commons

I first discovered Stephen King at age 11, indirectly through a babysitter who would plop me down in front of daytime soaps and disappear. Bored with One Life to Live, I read the stacks of mass-market paperbacks my absentee guardian left around—romances, mysteries, thrillers, and yes, horror. It all seemed of a piece. King’s novels sure looked like those other lurid, pulpy books, and at least his early works mostly fit a certain formula, making them perfectly adaptable to Hollywood films. Yet for many years now, as he’s ranged from horror to broader subjects, King’s cultural stock has risen far above his genre peers. He’s become a “serious” writer and even, with his 2000 book On Writing—part memoir, part “textbook”—something of a writer’s writer, moving from the supermarket rack to the pages of The Paris Review.

Few contemporary writers have challenged the somewhat arbitrary division between literary and so-called genre fiction so much as Stephen King, whose status provokes word wars like this recent debate at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Whatever adjectives critics throw at him, King plows ahead, turning out book after book, refining his craft, happily sharing his insights, and reading whatever he likes. As evidence of his disregard for academic canons, we have his reading list for writers, which he attached as an appendix to On Writing. Best-selling genre writers like Nelson DeMille, Thomas Harris, and needs-no-introduction J.K. Rowling sit comfortably next to lit-class staples like Dickens, Faulkner, and Conrad. King recommends contemporary realist writers like Richard Bausch, John Irving, and Annie Proulx alongside the occasional postmodernist or “difficult” writer like Don DeLillo or Cormac McCarthy. He includes several non-fiction books as well.

King prefaces the list with a disclaimer: “I’m not Oprah and this isn’t my book club. These are the ones that worked for me, that’s all.” Below, we’ve excerpted twenty good reads he recommends for budding writers. These are books, King writes, that directly inspired him: “In some way or other, I suspect each book in the list had an influence on the books I wrote.” To the writer, he says, “a good many of these might show you some new ways of doing your work.” And for the reader? “They’re apt to entertain you. They certainly entertained me.”

10. Richard Bausch, In the Night Season
12. Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
13. T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain
17. Michael Chabon, Werewolves in Their Youth
28. Roddy Doyle, The Woman Who Walked into Doors
31. Alex Garland, The Beach
42. Peter Hoeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow
49. Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club
53. Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
54. Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air
58. Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
62. Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes
66. Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden
67. Larry McMurtry, Dead Man’s Walk
70. Joyce Carol Oates, Zombie
71. Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods
73. Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
84. Richard Russo, Mohawk
86. Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
93. Anne Tyler, A Patchwork Planet

Like much of King’s own work, many of these books suggest a spectrum, not a chasm, between the literary and the commercial, and many of their writers have found success with screen adaptations and Barnes & Noble displays as well as widespread critical acclaim. For the full range of King’s selections, see the entire list of 96 books at Aerogramme Writers’ Studio.

via Galleycat

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The Only Drawing from Maurice Sendak’s Short-Lived Attempt to Illustrate The Hobbit

in Art, Books | March 10th, 2014

I envy nobody the clearly torturous task of interpreting the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, from Peter Jackson on down. With his three Lord of the Rings films in the early 2000s, New Zealand’s cinematic native son actually did an admirable job of deflecting much of the inevitable wrath of Tolkien’s enormous, highly detail-oriented, easily angered international fan base. One senses, however, that he stands on slightly less firm ground with his newer adaptation, and indeed expansion, of The Hobbit. The novel, which Tolkien wrote for children in 1937 and whose success led him to go the full distance with the Lord of the Rings books, now finds itself turning into its own trio of film spectacles, each installment of which gets the strongest possible marketing push (up to and including Middle-Earth-themed dishes at Denny’s) upon its theatrical release. It can seem an awfully grand treatment for a humble (if enduringly adventurous) book. To grant The Hobbit a separate visual dimension, then, wouldn’t we want a talent which, though formidable, tended toward subtlety and understatement — and, lest we forget the novel’s target audience, one who understands children?

We nearly had one in Maurice Sendak, he of Where the Wild Things Are, who in the mid-1960s created sample artwork for The Hobbit’s proposed 30th-anniversary deluxe illustrated edition. For a variety of reasons, from Sendak’s reluctance to Tolkien’s crankiness to a labeling snafu by the publisher to a heart attack that took Sendak out of commission for a while, the promising concept never came to fruition. Specifics of the accounts conflict, though you can find one from Tony DiTerlizzi at the Los Angeles Times and another, proposing corrections to the former, at Too Many Books and Never Enough. Whatever the ultimate obstacle, Sendak completed just two drawings for the book; the only one that survives appears at the top of this post, showing us how he envisioned the hobbit hero Bilbo Baggins and the wizard Gandalf. Just above, we have Tolkien’s own drawing of Bilbo at home, proving him none too shabby an illustrator in his own right, and one who by definition gets the details right. Still, I grieve for never having seen the directions in which Sendak could have taken this bit of material from the beloved Tolkien canon — and, better yet, what minor heresies the irreverent artist could have slyly inflicted upon it.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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100 Books to Read in a Lifetime

in Books | March 3rd, 2014

Amazon’s Books editors set out to compile a list of 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime, with a few goals in mind:

We wanted the list to cover all stages of a life (which is why you’ll find children’s books in here), and we didn’t want the list to feel like homework. Of course, no such list can be comprehensive – our lives, we hope, are long and varied – but we talked and argued and sifted and argued some more and came up with a list, our list, of favorites. What do you think? How did we do?

Overall pretty well. That’s how I’d answer the editors’ rhetorical question. The list doesn’t pander to the lowest common denominator of reading tastes. It features substantive works by Albert Camus, Alice Munro (see our collection of free Munro stories), Ralph Ellison, Robert A. Caro, Haruki Murakami, Rebecca Skloot and many others. It’s a hearty list, so far as these lists go, offering plenty of good selections for someone seeking a new read. But let me add this one caveat. If the Amazon editors didn’t sell out, they did intend to sell. Or so it seems to skeptical me. Of the 100 books on the list, only a handful are older works in the public domain and thus free. Maybe the Amazon editors would claim that reading books written a century ago is tantamount to homework. But that seems fairly short-sighted. All of this reminds me of a post we wrote last year called The 10 Greatest Books Ever, According to 125 Top Authors. Here we looked back at a 2007 book called The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books where editor J. Peder Zane asked 125 top writers to name their favorite books — writers like Norman Mailer, Annie Proulx, Stephen King, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Michael Chabon. The lists were all compiled in an edited collection, and then prefaced by one uber list, “The Top Top Ten.” All but one book in the top 10 was written before 1931 (which means they’re almost entirely free and available in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections). It just goes to show, I suppose, that one person’s homework is another person’s read of a lifetime. Feel free to sift through both lists (here & here) and see which texts belong on your personal bucket list.

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Read The Coming of Jap Herron, the Novel Mark Twain “Wrote” Through a Ouija Board After His Death (1917)

in Books, Literature | March 3rd, 2014

“You’re moving it!” “No I’m not; you’re moving it!” Thus spake the excitedly anxious preteen voices of an-early 1990s Parker Brothers Ouija board commercial I must have seen a hundred times in childhood. Though by then such devices had scant import outside the realm of sleepover parties, people took them more seriously in the early twentieth century, especially around the time of the First World War. While some must, alas, have regarded them as functional channels to the great beyond, others saw in them the potential to gin up major publishing events. Here we have one of the most curious, 1917’s small-town Missouri bildungsroman The Coming of Jap Herron, allegedly written Mark Twain, at that point seven years dead. A misplaced manuscript the executors of Twain’s estate found amid his papers, perhaps? Nothing of the sort: he began writing the book in 1915, as a disembodied spirit, through a Ouija board. So claimed, at least, one Emily Grant Hutchings, who brought Jap Herron to publication, presenting herself as a mere scribe taking dictation from the deceased icon of American literary humor.

She’d even had some contact, albeit through the mail, with the living one: “In their exchange of letters he had given her advice and, interestingly, also marked one of her letters with the words: ‘Idiot! Must preserve.’ ” That priceless find comes from The Public Domain Review’s post on Jap Herron, where you can read the short book in full, a much easier option than struggling to find a copy that survived the ceasing of publication and subsequent pulping ordered by Twain’s daughter. (You can also access it by clicking on the image above.) And how does this “final work,” whether composed as a pastiche or paranormally, hold up? “The humor impresses as a feeble attempt at imitation,” said a contemporary New York Times review, “and while there is now and then a strong sure touch of pathos or a swift and true revelation of human nature, the ‘sob stuff’ that oozes through many of the scenes, and the overdrawn emotions are too much for credulity. If this is the best that ‘Mark Twain’ can do by reaching across the barrier, the army of admirers that his works have won for him will all hope that he will hereafter respect that boundary.”

via The Public Domain Review

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, aesthetics, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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“Be All You Can Be. Read”: Peter Max’s 1969 Psychedelic Poster for National Library Week

in Art, Books | February 22nd, 2014

In 1969, Peter Max was creating psychedelic illustrations that captured the countercultural spirit of the 1960s. Bright, trippy, and thought-provoking, Max’s artwork fused together “eastern yogi philosophy, astronomy, comic books, studies in color, and music.” And it certainly found an audience. By the late 60s, college dorm rooms across the U.S. were plastered with Max’s posters. 72 corporations — from General Electric to Burlington Mills, a manufacturer of socks — licensed his art for commercial use. Meanwhile, in ’69, Max appeared on The Tonight Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, and the cover of LIFE magazine (with main article titled “Peter Max: Portrait of the artist as a very rich man”).

Even while the corporate gigs were rolling in, the German-born illustrator took on less commercial projects, like creating this poster for National Library Week, an annual event organized by the American Library Association. Measuring 36 x 24 inches, the 1969 poster, aesthetically speaking, is vintage Max. And it carries a message that sounds as good today as it did then: “Be All You Can Be. Read.” Now dare I steer you toward of our collection of 500 Free eBooks? An easy way to make you, a better you.

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via Biblioklept

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David Foster Wallace’s Surprising List of His 10 Favorite Books, from C.S. Lewis to Tom Clancy

in Books, Literature | February 18th, 2014

Image by Steve Rhodes, via Wikimedia Commons

Like many David Foster Wallace fans, I bought a copy of J. Peder Zane’s The Top Ten (previously featured here), a compilation of various famous writers’ top-ten-books lists, expressly for DFW’s contribution. Like most of those David Foster Wallace fans, I felt more than a little surprised when I turned to his page and found out which ten books he’d chosen. Here, as quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, we have the Infinite Jest author and widely recognized (if reluctant) “high-brow” literary figure’s top ten list:

1. The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis

2. The Stand, by Stephen King

3. Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris

4. The Thin Red Line, by James Jones

5. Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong

6. The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris

7. Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein

8. Fuzz, by Ed McBain

9. Alligator, by Shelley Katz

10. The Sum of All Fears, by Tom Clancy

Thrillers, killers, and a dose of Christianity to top it off; I didn’t blame Zane when he asked, “Is he serious? Beats me. To be honest, I don’t know what Wallace was thinking. But I do think there’s a certain integrity to his list.” Wallace himself seemed to read assiduously all over the map — or, more to the point, all up and down the scale of critical respectability. Rattling off “the stuff that’s sort of rung my cherries” to Salon’s Laura Miller in 1996, for a contrast, he named, among other worthy reads, Socrates’ funeral oration, John Donne, “Keats’ shorter stuff,” Schopenhauer, William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Hemingway’s In Our Time, Don DeLillo, A.S. Byatt, Cynthia Ozick, Donald Barthelme, Moby-Dick, and The Great Gatsby. (You can find many of these texts in our Free eBooks collection.)

That, some Wallace readers may think, sounds more like it. But those who’ve paid close attention to Wallace’s language — that often breathlessly but hopelessly imitated mixture of high-caliber vocabulary, casually spoken rhythm, deceptively sharp-edged perception, shrugging presentation, and deliberate solecism — know how fully he simultaneously embodied both “high” and “low” English writing. Just look at the Literary Analysis syllabus from his days teaching at Illinois State University, which demands students read not just The Silence of the Lambs but another Thomas Harris novel, Black Sunday, as well as more C.S. Lewis (in this case The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) and Stephen King (Carrie). Lest you doubt his commitment to the serious reading of popular fiction, note the presence of Jackie Collins’ Rock Star. In the classroom and in life, Wallace must truly have believed that there exists no low fiction; just low ways of reading fiction.

Looking for free, professionally-read audio books from Audible.com? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free trial with Audible.com, you can download two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

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Mark Twain Creates a List of His Favorite Books For Adults & Kids (1887)

in Books, Letters, Literature | February 12th, 2014

In January of 1887, Mark Twain wrote the above letter to a Reverend Charles D. Crane, pastor of a Methodist Episcopal Church in Maine, to advise him of the most suitable reading for both children and adults. Twain’s letter—which, as he did nearly all his letters, he signed with his given name of Samuel Clemens (or “S.L. Clemens”)—came in response to a query in three parts from the Rev. Crane. But we do not seem to have Crane’s letter (at least a thorough search of the exhaustive catalog at the online Mark Twain Project yields no results.) Nonetheless, we can reasonably infer that he asked the famous author—who was between Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court—something like the following:

1) What books should young boys read? 2) And young girls? … 3) [and both/either] What should grown-ups read? [and/or] What are Mr. Samuel Clemens’ favorite books?

Twain, in a hurry, “took a shot on the wing” and replied with the letter below, which, despite his protestations of haste, seems fairly well-considered. I’ll admit that the ambiguity of the last sentence, however, gives me the researcher’s buzz to go back and dig through more archives for Crane’s original letter.

Dear Sir:  

I am just starting away from home, & have no time to think the questions over & properly consider my answers; but I take a shot on the wing at the matter, as follows:  

1.Macaulay;
Plutarch;
Grant’s Memoirs;
Crusoe;
Arabian Nights;
Gulliver.  

= 2. The same for the girl, after striking out out Crusoe & substituting Tennyson.   

I can’t answer No. 3 in this sudden way. When one is going to choose twelve authors, for better for worse, forsaking fathers & mothers to cling unto them & unto them alone, until death shall them part, there is an awfulness about the responsibility that makes marriage with one mere individual & divorcible woman a sacrament sodden with levity by comparison.   

In my list I know I should put Shakspeare [sic]; & Browning; & Carlyle (French Revolution only); Sir Thomas Malory (King Arthur); Parkman’s Histories (a hundred of them if there were so many); Arabian Nights; Johnson (Boswell’s), because I like to see that complacent old gasometer listen to himself talk; Jowett’s Plato; & “B.B.” (a book which I wrote some years ago, not for publication but just for my own private reading.)  

I should be sure of these; & I could add the other three — but I should want to hold the opportunity open a few years, so as to make no mistake.  

Truly Yours  

S.L. CLEMENS  

See all six manuscript pages of Twain’s letter (and zoom in to examine them closely) at the Shapell Manuscript Foundation. We’ve added links to Twain’s recommended texts above. You can find many in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

John Waters Talks About His Books and Role Models in a Whimsical Animated Video

Stephen King Creates a List of 96 Books for Aspiring Writers to Read

The Only Drawing from Maurice Sendak’s Short-Lived Attempt to Illustrate The Hobbit

100 Books to Read in a Lifetime

Read The Coming of Jap Herron, the Novel Mark Twain “Wrote” Through a Ouija Board After His Death (1917)

“Be All You Can Be. Read”: Peter Max’s 1969 Psychedelic Poster for National Library Week

David Foster Wallace’s Surprising List of His 10 Favorite Books, from C.S. Lewis to Tom Clancy

Mark Twain Creates a List of His Favorite Books For Adults & Kids (1887)

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