News: Commercialised Criticism, Book Fights, and Language

Review revelations
A (former) peddler of paid-for book reviews is profiled in the New York Times and kind of lifts the lid on all those 'positive' reviews received by certain blockbusters. Not news, really.

This report raised quite a bit of odour and soon, just about everyone had a take on this, most of it bad. One author felt buying paid-for reviews to ramp up book sales is akin to using drugs in sports. Another voice says 'buying respect' with paid-for reviews is "lazy" and runs "counter to the true indie spirit". "Unethical scumbags", was another author's choice words for paid-for reviewers and those who hire them.

The fake review 'revelation' prompted relook of Amazon review graphs - why "beware" THAT shape? Someone even compiled a list of major best-sellers with over 150 one-star Amazon reviews which kind of suggests that something's not quite right.

Elsewhere, others are wondering if the paid review revelations will eventually kill the critic. Meanwhile, a critic offers his (long) manifesto on being a critic.

While we're on the subject: another reviewer gets brickbats and threats after pissing off fans of Emily Giffin by suggesting, among other things, that the author encourages mob behaviour against critics among her fans. She'd subsequently downgraded her review fron four stars to one and explained why. She got more than a taste of said mob behaviour not long after - which may include practices condemned by a group of authors (crime author Jeremy Duns, who uncovered the instance of sock puppetry that led to the outrage, was also caught up in another literary scandal some time back). Looks like critics and reviewers aren't the only ones who need to search their souls.


Settle down
Publishers Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster reached a US$69 million settlement with various US attorney-generals over supposed fixing of e-book prices. Much of the money wil be refunded to bookbuyers, and the US state of Kentucky may get as much as US$700,000. But would this case really mean lower prices for e-books in the future?


SEAL hunt
A former US Navy SEAL who authored a potentially explosive tell-all on the Bin Laden takedown had his identitiy blown by US rightwing "news" outfit Fox News. Since then, some details about the book have been released, and the author had received threats from al-Qaeda. The US military argues that the former SEAL's book had violated protocol and are considering pressing charges. At the time this is written, the book's publisher is going ahead with the release. The co-author defends the book in The Huffington Post.

A bunch of Special Ops veterans hold a different view, and they are releasing an e-book in response, which includes an examination of the author's version of events and the rather prosaic motives for publishing the book:

..."[Owen] was treated very poorly upon his departure ... once he openly shared that he was considering getting out of the Navy to pursue other interests." [Owen] was essentially given a plane ticket back to Virginia and nothing else—not much of a thank-you for his "honesty and 14 years of service."

One wonders if things might have been different for Owen (the author's pen name) if he'd kept his "getting out of the Navy to pursue other interests" under wraps, but given the subject matter and timing of the release, tongues are bound to wag.


Flaming protest
A charity for victims of domestic violence has condemned the "misogynistic crap" that is Fifty Shades of Grey and they're calling for a bonfire of said book. In spite of my own opinions on the books, I can't agree with that. You'd have to harbour an exceptionally towering amount of hatred towards a book to want to light it up.

There are better forms of protest, like this review (more like a roasting) of the audio book ("Bambi [in] de Sade's '120 Days of Sodom'" - SIZZLE, CRACK!) in The Telegraph. Because bad writing in any other language is still bad writing.


Other news

• After what I presume was a long period of sluggish shelf movement, Jeremy Chin's book Fuel may be yanked from local bookstores. I think it's quite a good (albeit syrupy) read. Get a copy online or borrow one from friends. And I think there might be a copy on the shelf at a local café somewhere....
• The release of the latest Godfather novel, The Family Corleone, sparked a fight between Paramount Pictures and the state of Mario Puzo over rights to the franchise. Unable to find a solution, both parties have taken the fight to federal court.
• Chicken Soup for the Soul publishers to 'publish' Chicken Soup for the Stomach. But will it taste as good?
• "Promiscuous reading". Does that phase even make sense?
• This guy endured some great writers' worst books, so that we don't have to.
• Is our dependence on technology making us forgetful,like this book suggests?
• Servers at Jamie Oliver's restaurants were, I read, told to talk like Jamie Oliver when describing the food. "May I rec'mend th' bayked p'tat-uhz wi' th' skins on? Abs'lutely wicked, scrummy, and proper rustic. Throw in s'm crispy baykon bits 'n a duhlup o' s'ouh cream... funtastic!" ...If Jamie-O wunts t'give 'is rest'ronts 'is Mockney flavuh, he c'n do i' 'imself. 'Coz no one else cud'do it bet'er.
• Talking Turkey: the roots of Indo-European languages.
• Parents in China duped by 'special skills programme' for kids. Reading "waves" from books and poker cards? What is this, a Stephen Chow film?
• 'Vanity publishing' and 'legacy publishing': Why must they always be at loggerheads?
• It seems book publishers have to start thinking of themselves as - (SOB!) - "multimedia content producers".

Casting Pearls Before...?

US fantasy magazine Weird Tales published an extract from Victoria Foyt's self-published YA novel Revealing Eden: Save the Pearls Part One, which is set in a sort-of dystopian world where a black-skinned race dubbed the Coals lord over a white race called the Pearls on a sun-scorched Earth. To survive on the surface, the Pearls cover themselves with a substance that makes them look 'black'.

The premise of the novel touched of one of those fires where everyone can look righteous by calling it for what it is: racist. Just how long has it been since another issue about colour in books was raised?

Weird Tales has since removed that excerpt and apologised for publishing it. In that apology, publisher John Harlacher, concluded that "the use of the powerful symbols of white people forced to wear blackface to escape the sun, white women lusting after black 'beast men', the 'pearls' and 'coals', etc., is goddamned ridiculous and offensive. It seems like the work of someone who does not understand the power of what she is playing with."

Foyt denies racism, and says that, on top of the positive reviews it has received, her work aims "to turn racism on its head in order to portray its horrors and its inevitable road to violence. I believe that anyone who reads the novel will understand its strong stance against racism." However, she doesn't boost her case by saying that "if you ask if all these reviewers are white then consider that you have a racist point of view".

From the reviews of the book here, here and here, Foyt's novel looks like the literary equivalent of a collapsed and burnt soufflé. The standfirst for the first review alone says it all, with phrases such as "falls at every hurdle" and "awful prose with negligible plot". The 'heroine', said to combine "the most irritating characteristics of Bella Swan and Anastasia Steele with a predilection for dropping the full Latin names of bird and animal species once every paragraph", could probably be enough of a turn-off.

This reminds me of an author who, at this year's Edinburgh Literary Festival, suggested that political correctness may have weakened the stomachs of readers and maybe writers, making them sensitive - perhaps, more than before - to certain hot-button topics. Has the message in the book (which sounds like the first part of a series) been eclipsed by the portrayal of the characters and seemingly bad world-building?

Highlighting complex and sensitive issues such as race, religion and the origins of dishes - through writings, artworks and film - can be a dicey affair akin to making a soufflé. Most attempts generally fail. The timing of the book's release may not have been a good idea as well, as this commenter points out in his response to Foyt's defence.

Still, could some of the reactions have been more measured? I don't think this "fantasy action romance" intentionally propagates this world view, so why behave like it does? And how much did the outrage against Foyt's book help fight racism which, from incidents such as this and this, still persists?

I think the Guardian review was one of the better responses to this book. Racism is too easy to call out, so a critic should delve deeper to see if it accomplishes its purpose and, above all, if it is a good book - which said review suggests otherwise.

Maybe the final verdict should be withheld until the series is released in its entirety.

News: Snark Week in Publishing

Shnark attacks
Online mobs stifle literature, author suggests. One can also extend that to literary criticism, but it doesn't help when you have reviews that sound like the shitstorm-stirring put-down of Alix Ohlin's books. From the looks of it, the reviewer couldn't find much to say about the books (i.e. he didn't like them). Martim Amis's Lionel Asbo also received brickbats, along with the occasional 'balanced' opinions like this.

Somebody at Salon.com makes a case for positive book reviews, and gives some further reading on the subject. But here's how to write a good "bad review" - if you really, really need to. Meanwhile, a reviewer looks back at his "infamous" review of Pretty Woman two decades ago and decides it wasn't really that hot, thanks to its "miffed, hectoring, and righteously unamused" tone. Another case for ditching unrestrained snarkiness.


Controversy? Not here
Glenn Beck, peddler of paranoia, may publish David Barton's controversial book on Thomas Jefferson, said to contain factual inaccuracies. No problem for Beck, who seems totally immune to facts. Meanwhile, Ousted Komen exec Karen Handel will tell her side of Planned Parenthood story in a book whose title says everything. Note also the September 11 launch date - what is she trying to say? Somewhere south of the border, two old Latin American recalcitrants may be working on a book. 2012 is a good year to publish, it seems.


Even authors need agents these days
Getting the right fit: the job of a literary agent. For some authors who think six months is too long a period to get noticed, Michael Bourne writes, "Mainstream publishing is a Rube Goldberg machine of perverse economic incentives, in which large numbers of mostly idiotic self-help guides, diet books, and airport thrillers subsidize an ever-shrinking number of mostly money-losing literary novels and books of poetry.

"But just because publishing operates on a crazy economic model doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense," he adds. "There is a market, however tiny, for good books, and there are a small number of smart, hard-working people who live for the thrill of finding a talented author. If you are one of those talented authors, then it is your job to stop whining and figure out how to make it easy for them to find you."

Unless you're Barton, Beck, or Handel, perhaps. "Talent", you understand.


Other news

• The late Alexander Cockburn more or less accused Orwell of being racist and bigoted. WINCE. And someone else suggests the author of 1984 wasn't quite the truth-teller people thought he was.
• From what Man Booker prize-winner Howard Jacobson says, 'good readers' are getting harder to find, and that political correctness is partly to blame for weakening appetites for the "expression of an ugly point of view" in books.
• Lee Goldberg on book trailers: "Why don't you just take whatever cash you have and flush it down [the] toilet?"
• "We were quoted out of context:" Lonely Planet responds to Foreign Policy's "leftist planet" article.
• Who needs publishers and bookstores? Everybody, it seems. ...Okay. I'm paraphrasing, but that's the impression I got after reading it...
• In India, it's raining publications but the literary landscape is dry.
• Funny, crass non-person Ruth Bourdain is coming up with a "guide to gastronomy". Someone (forgot who) asked the obvious question: Who will they make the royalty cheques out to?

Late News: New Words, Spilled Ink, and Apple for Orange

Despite one additional day, I didn't quite enjoy the long Hari Raya (Eid ul-Fitr) weekend. But I didn't want the whole week off, since next week's a four-day week.

Anyway:

• CNN pundit Fareed Zakaria was the latest to be snared in a plagiarism scandal. The blog Foreign Policy tries to figure out why. Zakaria was eventually reinstated at TIME and CNN after brief suspension, but he has resigned from his position at the board of Yale University.
• Buenos Aires gives pensions to ageing writers, as GOP candidate pledges cuts to US arts.
• Mob justice goes awry as authors shut down legit book lending site.
• Tired of celebs touting quack cures and dubious science? Here are some fictional characters, promoting cures based on established science. What? Darth Vader's a fellow asthmatic? And Sauron uses OPTREX eye wash?
• Some pleasures and pitfalls of online self-publishing. Because you can't have too many of such lists.
• Coffee, cafés and coups: A Naguib Mahfouz novel and a café's role in Egypt's revolution.
• How paperbacks transformed the way Americans (and us) read.
• When writing can kill you: AL Kennedy's hard lesson.
• "Imma sexting in mah man-cave, stuffing mah brains wi' Kanye's newest earworm of a track, y'all." New words in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
• Are these travel guides - "clotted with historical revisionism, factual errors, and a toxic combination of Orientalism and pathological self-loathing" - shilling for dictators? Maybe not.
• "Prestige-free zone": Has the young adult genre become a woman's world?
• Apple may emerge as the new sponsor for Orange Prize for Fiction. Let the fruity puns fly.
• A reader laments the disappearance of great books.
• Follow the travails of a literary débutante - if you really must.
• Blogger/writer doesn't trust online book reviews.

Induced Nostalgia

I'd gotten this book sometime back, but I can't remember if I put it into my reading list.

Was this a good book? Not really. Though it was reminiscent of a previous book, something about this one felt rushed.

---

Induced nostalgia

Don't dwell on the past

first published in The Star, 19 August 2012


For some, nostalgia is like a drug. In the United States, for instance, many are longing for the good old days. This nostalgia-as-drug metaphor is expanded and explored in Dan Simmons's novel Flashback, which takes place in what could be the mother-of-all-post-apocalyptic-worlds.

About 20 years from now, global order is topsy-turvy. The United States, European Union and China have collapsed; Japan is run by clannish feudal families and oversees a new South-East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere; large swathes of Israel are uninhabitable nuclear wastelands; and there's a Global Islamic Caliphate.

Also: the United States is several states short, Texas is a republic, and criminal elements comprising Hispanic gangs, Russian mafia and others are wreaking havoc.

Every (middle-class white) American's nightmare has come true, and over 80% of the population is seeking respite through flashback, a drug that lets its users mentally re-live the best moments of their lives. Contributing to the chaos are flash gangs, groups of miscreants who commit crimes and revisit them with the drug.

Disgraced police officer Nick Bottom (great name!) is a flashback addict who finds solace in the memories of his late wife. Embarrassingly, he's caught using the drug on video prior to a meeting with a client. So this client, a Japanese bigwig called Nakamura, sends his top goon with Bottom to make sure he does his job and keep him from going "under the flash". Nakamura wants the truth behind his son's death, a case Bottom investigated years ago.

Back home, Bottom's father-in-law receives an ominous warning to leave home over a flash gang's crime – a gang whose members include Bottom's estranged son, Val. Things get really hot when Val's gang ambushes and fails to kill a top Japanese diplomat. Son and grandfather go on the run, while Bottom learns, to his shock, that his late wife might be involved in the case he's now investigating. Old wounds are opened as Bottom gets to the bottom of the unsolved murder – and the murky beginnings of the American addiction to the past.

In Black Hills, Simmons suggests that that mankind's greed may eventually ruin the world. That happens, in a way, in Flashback. How it happened can be found in the book, but it's so tangled up with the other threads in the story, unravelling each thread for a better look can be tedious. About halfway through, you just don't care anymore.

The novel starts out slowly, exploring the Bottoms' background which nobody will eventually care about. About two-thirds into it, the pace accelerates because the book is running out of pages. Things start "falling into place" like Newton's apples at various points: A cellphone, some video footage, and bits of information from shady power-brokers reminiscent of James Bond villains, all build up to a plotline pile-up of an ending where the whole novel is supposed to – finally! – make sense ... but falls short of that.

Bottom's not even a protagonist in the true sense of the word. He feels more like a pawn in a very cluttered, ruined chessboard with mostly broken pieces.

It's hard to connect or relate to characters, whom I feel are less important than the world they're set in. The "eerily possible" scenario feels authentic, but the characters don't seem to belong there.

At first blush, and from the inclusion of a reading group guide, it looks as though Simmons is trying to do more than just entertain with this novel, despite his claim that, "hell, no!", Flashback does not state his political views. Why he wrote this book is explained in the guide, more or less, which leaves little room for a reviewer to come to his own conclusions.

But let me try.

Simmons' dystopia is America's nightmare, writ large. He's taken the fears of his fellow Americans, ramped it up to 25, and weaved it into what looks like a dystopian sci-fi thriller with a message: Stop dwelling in the past, face the pain of the present, and move on towards what could be a better future. And there's a lot of pain in the United States right now.

"You can't have life without pain," Simmons writes. "You can't have a future without pain. Being alive means having the strength to face pain and loss and to find something real through it and beyond it."

Great message, albeit one that's about 500 pages too long.

---

Flashback

Dan Simmons
Reagan Arthur (2011)
553 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-316-10198-1

Wildlife Trap

Descending from a shopping mall escalator days ago, I spied an Indian girl with a pen and a board covered in signatures. Seeing me, she called out, "先生, 簽名." One of several promoters for the World Wildlife Fund.

I should've listened to my gut, but I was curious - and she was rather pretty.

As I neared, her superior took over. "Hello sir, do you know who we are bla bla bla this is what we do yadda yadda our programmes bla bla bla deforestation, trees being cut down everywhere this that this that do you know how many tigers we have left?"

Err... 200?

"There are five hundred left," she went, pointing to the figures in red on the pamphlet I was not allowed to take - probably because I haven't ponied up any F for the WW.

"Only 500, because they're being caught just for their fur Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet this is how you can help if you give consectetur adipisicing elit one ringgit a day sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt over 12 ringgit a year ut labore et dolore magna aliqua tax deductible keep the receipt you don't have to do anything Ut enim ad minim veniam fill in these forms what's your name Visa? Mastercard? Amex? Not Amex? Then you definitely must have one of the other two..."

In my fevered panic, I could only catch a few words; everything else sounded garbled. Without laying a hand on me, this wildlife conservation official pinned me down like a butterfly. Maybe she learnt that from tigers.

"...oh not yet what's your concern sir quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris why don't you visit our web site it's right here-" on the pamphlet I was not allowed to take "-have a look and if you're convinced we'll be here until tonight nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequa no problem sir have a nice day."

Sweet, sweet, freedom. I think I got off easy.

WWF certainly got their work cut out for them. Especially with the existence of characters like "a certain Mr Chan", a shark fin seller in Hong Kong, who makes his case for the massacre of sharks, thus: "It's not cruel at all killing sharks. There are so many sharks out there and if you don't kill them, they will kill you."

The web site for World Wildlife Fund (Malaysia) has a main donation page but, at the time of posting, the "Save the Tigers", "Save the Turtles" and "Climate Change" links were bad. Maybe the web site needs a donation campaign, too.

Do not get sucked in by signature collectors. Ever.

News: Matters of Style, A-Words, and Various Stuff

Stylo Coelho
Paulo Coelho says James Joyce's "Ulysses" is all style, no substance. Sure enough, the responses came. One even suggests that Coelho's work is no less... showy? Others wonder why he's doing this. Coelho's sticking to his guns, but denies attacking Joyce.


Jerk jock worship?
Ascent of the A-Word by Geoffrey Nunberg explores the apparent idolatry of assholes like Trump, Jobs and Zuckerberg. Just when this blogger/writer has had enough of snark in book reviews.

Speaking of which...


Books, reviewed - kinda
"The David Barton Lies"? A controversial book on Thomas Jefferson by the equally controversial demagogue was reportedly dropped by publisher for factual errors, spurred by the criticisms of the views presented in this book by some Christian scholars. As if something with a "foreword by Glenn Beck" has any shred of credibility.

For Keith Ridgway, author of Hawthorn & Child (2012), everything in life is fiction - but he seems to have no clue how to write it. Maybe that's why Scott Pack thinks Ridgway's latest says is "not a novel" but a "bloody frustrating", "mildly disappointing" book. These days, that's good PR.


Other news

• The publishing industry is burning bright, thanks to Fifty Shades. Like Nero's Rome, maybe?
• Follow the travails of a literary debutante - if you really must.
• John Steinbeck's son slams Texas's use of dad's fictional character to justify execution.
• New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus takes us into his world.
• Six things to do to get a short story collection published - if anyone out there is still writing short story collections.
• This guy wrote a sequel to Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island?
• E-books may be cheaper to make, but still need effort to sell.
• Will Self: "I don't write for readers." An interview with Will Self.
• Cyndi Lauper lands a book deal with Simon & Schuster, where she used to work at. Talk about "true colours".