A Poem For Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration
by Elizabeth Alexander
Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.
All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.
Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.
Oprah interviewing Kate Winslet after her two golden globe wins for Revolutionary Road and The Reader. In this clip, Oprah is talking about scenes from The Reader.
Note – in searching for links for this clip, I couldn’t find news sites that DIDN’T make double entendres with their “Winslet’s Golden Globes!” headlines. Golden indeed. Dorothy Snarker provides lots of pictures of Kate and her assets.
I had the time to get some extra reading in over the holidays, and I managed to add a couple of books to my list at the end of the year. And good ones, too.
The Big Book Of Lesbian Horse Stories
by Alisa Surkis and Monica Nolan
No, the horses aren’t lesbians. The lesbians love horses. But not in THAT way. Very much a comedic book — the cover is filled with racy, pulp-fiction-like quotes, that that’s the closest the book actually gets to racy; it’s a collection of rather sweet, very funny short stories about girls who love other girls and who also love horses.
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
A great analysis of ideas that are successfully communicated and why they are unforgettable — what it takes to make your ideas stick. If you have anything to do with marketing, this is a must-read book; as I was reading it, I found myself wanting to give copies of it to people I thought would get a lot from it.
Outliers: The Story of Success
by Malcolm Gladwell
While many people have innate talents – the people who are truly Outliers are those who come from a background that nurtures their talent and gives them opportunities to practice what they have a passion for – and thousands of hours of practice make them truly great in their field. Publishers Weekly: “Gladwell tears down the myth of individual merit to explore how culture, circumstance, timing, birth and luck account for success–and how historical legacies can hold others back despite ample individual gifts.”
It’s my 12th Annual end of the year reading recap. Grand total: 30 books. I don’t think that’s my lowest total, but it’s no 98 titles like in 1997. And boy, oh boy did I hit the genre fiction this year. It did help to have lots of fun light reading while all the wedding planning and such was going on — too much to think about during all that to be reading weighty tomes.
Maybe I’ll finally get that “year of reading Proust” started in 2009. Ha! Who am I kidding? I started Swann’s Way more than once and kept falling asleep. I should go back to it just to cure my insomnia. I have lots of other good books on my shelves, so I need to range further afield in the coming year, though.
A Grave Talent (Kate Martinelli Mysteries)
by Laurie R. King
To Play The Fool (Kate Martinelli Mysteries)
by Laurie R. King
With Child (Kate Martinelli Mysteries)
by Laurie R. King
Earlier this year, I read the fourth and fifth books in the Kate Martinelli Series. This time I circled back around and read the first three to get caught up. These aren’t terrible, but I don’t enjoy them as much as I liked King’s other series – The Mary Russell mysteries, set in Sherlock Holmes’ era. The Martinelli mysteries seem much darker and grimmer. But still interesting reading; I obviously read them all the way through and picked up others. 🙂
I actually also started but couldn’t finish another Laurie R. King novel — A Darker Place. Set in a cult – it started out too creepy for me so I couldn’t finish. Maybe I’ll pick it back up in the summertime.
The Spice Box
by Lou Jane Temple
A nicely-written mystery. I’ll look forward to reading more from this series. — “The first of a new food-themed historical series, Temple’s charming tale of New York City in the Civil War era introduces Bridget Heaney, a clever, streetwise Irish immigrant. The day Bridget starts as an assistant cook in the Manhattan household of wealthy merchant Isaac Gold, she makes a terrible discovery: the body of the family’s youngest son, Seth, who’d been missing, crammed inside a dough box.”
Slammerkin
by Emma Donoghue
“Donoghue takes scraps of the intriguing true story of Mary Saunders, a servant girl who murdered her mistress in 1763, and fashions from them an intelligent and mesmerizing historical novel.” — I just thought it was grim and upsetting. I read it on recommendation from several people who loved it. I did not feel the same.
Snobs
by Julian Fellowes
Fellowes also wrote the script for Gosford Park. Snobs is an entertaining comedic look at the snobbery of British upper class, set in the 1990s.
Bel Canto
by Ann Patchett
Invoking the first and second rules of book club.
Books I just picked up from the book store:
Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters
by Jessica Valenti
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Editorial Ass has some good advice for those in the book publishing industry. Since I’m one of those people, and I’m married to one, and most of my friends have something to do with publishing, I’m going to quote quite a bit of this blog post:
Let’s talk a little bit about what happened in October.
You’ve heard about the massive layoffs at Doubleday; you’ve heard about Harper’s terrible state of profit, BNN’s worst quarter and projected year ever, and the closing of Impetus, an indie press (which, as I’ll explain below, I don’t think was Impetus’s fault even vaguely).
Yes, there’s a crisis.
However. Anyone who wants to talk about “the death of publishing” can leave the room. I’m at the beginning of my career and I plan on being an editor for a long time; a lot of you are yet-to-be-published authors and I’m sure you’re equally intent on not seeing book publishing fold (not that it’s going to; that’s ridiculous). So instead I want to talk about what’s actually causing the problem–it might help us come up with solutions for protecting what’s important to us.
I don’t think anyone’s being really straightforward about what exactly happened, and a lot of it is not very complicated.* The crux of the problem is that book publishing is a returnable industry. That means that say Big Chain Store (BCS) agrees to stock a book that my company publishes. They buy 100 copies at, say, $1 a piece (to be easy). They give me $100; I send them the books. Two months later, they didn’t sell any, so they send them back. I have to give them $100.
Keep in mind a couple of things about this system that don’t work in the publisher’s favor:
1) Shipping costs. Books are heavy.
2) Production fees incurred by the publisher (because, unfortunately, we can’t return the books to the printer).
3) Inflation. Haha.Why do publishing companies put up with this? Yeah, it’s stupid. But it’s an industry standard, and if we don’t let BCS have the option to return books, they simply tell us they won’t stock them. They can carry CDs and calendars and greeting cards, instead.
All right, but this has been the case for awhile. So what went wrong in October?
As you MIGHT have heard by now, we’re having some kind of economic hardship (or something like that). So people spent less cash in September and October. So bookstores sold fewer copies in those two months, and were hit hard like all the other businesses in the country and in a lot of the world.
However, BCS and all its chain compatriots are counting on Christmas sales to save them. They need to stock up! They need to plump their stores with new enticing merchandise so they can convince customers to save them from foreclosure!
Where to get the cash for all the holiday books they needed to stock in October and November? Three. Guesses.
In October, bookstores returned so many books that most publishing companies had more coming into them than going out of them. For some companies, the incoming number was more than several months’ outgoing.Although bookstores are suffering (and how), it was the publishing houses that had to absorb the cost of this cash flow creator. This is why Impetus, a relatively new indie company without the history to survive this shock, folded. Some houses lost so much money in returns in October that profits from the entire rest of 2008 have been negated. Can you imagine? Losing enough in a month to destroy your entire year? (Keep in mind that publishing is a very low profit margin enterprise in the first place; now see how if one month involves more outgoing than incoming money you can easily undo the good of an entire year or more.)
Now you can see the ripples that are happening, the layoffs, the dwindling advances, the precautions about acquiring anything in this climate. If publishing companies are shelling out money to publish books that bookstores only bother to stock for a minute and a half, we are all going to hemorrhage money until there is nothing left standing.
This would be a bad situation for more than the sake of my job or your future novel. It’s about a lot of things–education, hampered information dissemination, conglomerations swallowing mass media, censorship. Whatever. I could extenuate, but I’ll spare you. The point is, when you have a problem, the best thing to do is try to solve it.
For anyone who cares about the book publishing industry and wants to do their part, there’s one simple action step:
Buy a book this weekend.
Just buy one.
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own back yard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
In an MTV interview – Obama tells you to pull up your pants. He does it more politely than I do to teenagers in target.
Sway: Our next question comes from Eric out of Huntington Beach, California: “There are numerous cultures and subcultures in the United States today. Powers-that-be set statutes with monetary penalty on how people wear their clothes. Do you find it intrusive on civil liberties to create such ordinances?” And you know I got ‘locks.
Obama: I wasn’t going to pass a law, man. You look tight.
Sway: I know people have piercings, tattoos. Eric, in particular, is talking about a ban on sagging pants. Do feel like people should be penalized?
Obama: Here is my attitude: I think people passing a law against people wearing sagging pants is a waste of time. We should be focused on creating jobs, improving our schools, health care, dealing with the war in Iraq, and anybody, any public official, that is worrying about sagging pants probably needs to spend some time focusing on real problems out there. Having said that, brothers should pull up their pants. You are walking by your mother, your grandmother, your underwear is showing. What’s wrong with that? Come on. There are some issues that we face, that you don’t have to pass a law, but that doesn’t mean folks can’t have some sense and some respect for other people and, you know, some people might not want to see your underwear — I’m one of them.
Sway: In regards to piercings, tattoos, I had a friend who worked for UPS and he had ‘locks. He almost lost his job, but he fought for it. In regards to those things, how do you feel?
Obama: It’s one thing if an employer discriminates on the basis of gender or sexual orientation or, obviously, race or ethnicity. I think employers can set standards. Now you got ‘locks, but it looks clean, man, it’s tight, and my little girl has twists, Malia, and to me, it looks great. Obviously I would be upset if she were discriminated against on that basis. On the other hand, if you are working at a fancy store and you show up to work in jeans and a shirt and you have a tattoo across your neck like Mike Tyson, for them to say, you know, “That is not the kind of image we are trying to project,” obviously, that is in their rights as well. I think any business has the right to say, “This is the kind of tone we want to set,” as long as they aren’t discriminating on the basis of things people can’t control.
The New York Times interviews Rachel Maddow at home, and includes this excellent picture.
I had no idea she lived at our house in the corner of our library.