She'd Be Great on TV

First, an image













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And now, the paper of record

She'd Be Great on TV
by Rachel Donadio, The New York Times
. . . Chast perfectly captures the grotesquerie of today's publishing circus, in which writers -- and certainly publishers -- are grateful for anything that helps a reader hear that one small voice in the cacophony of the zillion-square-foot megastore. . . Hence jacket photos of writers looking as sexy as possible... Little, Brown has been promoting Elizabeth Kostova's Dracula thriller, ''The Historian,'' like crazy; in her author photo, she reclines languidly, a knowing glint in her eye . . .


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An entertainment


The State of Things, circa 2005


Media maven: So what's the name of this woman you were telling me about?

Marketer: George. Interesting?

MM: Hmm. Maybe. Get some male readers. Camera-friendly?

Marketer: Well . . . Henry says that "She is magnificently ugly--deliciously hideous . . . in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her."

MM: Henry? That bald, nattering, a-sexual fellow? The Anglophobe?

Marketer: Phile. Anglophile. He's quite good, you know. And so is George. Geniuses, the pair of them.

MM: But ugly. Not just a little bit ugly. Magnificently ugly. Hey--maybe we could do something with that.

Marketer: You think so?

MM: Nah. Lemme see the picture.

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& a final thought

George Eliot is among the foremost writers of her time. In spite of her gender, her looks, and her eccentric beliefs, she earned a prominent place within the Victorian literary canon. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/collections/projects/eliot/middlemarch/

Corey Mesler, Quixote in Memphis

Some years ago Corey Mesler wrote an interesting review of The Wolf Pit, and I have kept up with his pursuits since in my fitful mother-of-3 way. Corey is curious in his own right, in part because he pursues impossible windmills--that is, nigh-impossible in the current state of publishing and bookselling.

Corey's Windmills:

1. He and his wife own an independent bookstore of considerable note and history and have managed to keep the doors open despite the slings and assaults of all that is non-independent.

2. He writes poetry. (I know, I know. Yes, I write poetry--but I haven't accomplished 1, 3, or 4, although like every other innocent ninny in the world, I think it would be "fun" to have a bookshop!)

3. He has written a novel entirely in dialogue.

4. He has put the word "pandiculating" into a poem: http://www.threecandles.org/poetry/cmesler.html. (Last time I saw a picture, he had neither hat nor glasses...)

One of these would be notable; four is entirely against the grain of the American Way, circa 2005.

Here's his bio:

Corey Mesler's poetry and prose have been published in Paumanok Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, Dicey Brown, Cranky, Re)verb, StorySouth, Arkansas Review, Turnrow, Rhino, and others, and in a number of anthologies. He is the author of four chapbooks, the most recent of which, The Heart is Open, is due from Mayapple Press later this year. One of his short stories was chosen for the 2002 edition of New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, edited by Shannon Ravenel. His novel-in-dialogue, Talk, was published by Livingston Press in 2002, and received rave reviews from Lee Smith, Robert Olen Butler, and Frederick Barthelme. His next novel, We are Billion-Year-Old Carbon, is also from Livingston Press. He and his wife own Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores.

Fantastic, dark and light--

Personal Lovecraftian health meter measure is at level 3:

Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.

Lesson learned: Never, never chaperone adorable small schoolchildren in the rain, especially if they haven't properly washed the bad little viruses and bacterial parties off their wee sticky hands. What is tiny can get you!

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The editor of Argosy (a must-be-discerning man who has published one of my novellas and will soon publish another), James A. Owen, has a sweet-sounding deal with Simon & Schuster:

I'm thrilled to report that David Gale, the Vice President and Editorial Director of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, has purchased my forthcoming illustrated novel HERE BE DRAGONS, (and optioned a sequel) for a very substantial sum. The deal includes World Rights, which, given S&S's success with Tony and Holly's SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES (among many others) was a no-brainer.We're not saying anything about the story itself except for what was said in the Publisher's Lunch Current Deals: that it's a period fantasy set in London during World War I. I'll also be painting the cover, as well as providing two-dozen full-page pen and ink illustrations in what has become known as my 'signature style' (translation: many, many pen lines). The first book is scheduled for publication on Simon & Schuster's Fall 2006 list.For information on current and upcoming work by James A. Owen, please go to www.coppervaleinternational.com

To see samples of that "signature style" from Obscuro, go to Apocatastasis: http://www.livejournal.com/users/coppervale/.

A Gap in the Palace, with Lions

Aporia . . . I think George Puttenham defines that as a literary device called "the gap" in The Art of English Poesy (1589, or thereabouts.) The lovely Art is one of many desirable books in 25 boxes of books jettisoned between New York and North Carolina, many moves ago.

After chaperoning small children last week and being caught in two rains at various pleasure spots and in one flat-out downburst at the Fun Park (while driving a miniature two-seater race car with a pleasantly rotund, hungry, red-haired boy named Toby, too short to drive alone), I caught the big bad crud or the flu or something. Something evil, like the black goo that chases Howl in Miyazaki's new film, a loose interpretation of Howl's Moving Castle. Which I hear is not very accurate as to the book and needs to be either more true or less true. Nevertheless, I must see it, because I am a fan of Diana Wynne Jones' books and Miyazaki's movies, and my daughter adores the book.

The only thing that has caught my attention in this Time of Flu & Goo was the AP wire story about the little Ethiopian girl kidnapped by seven men and "saved" by lions who stood around her and then vanished in the forest "like a wish." Now voices of reason are saying that really the lions who saved her were probably about to devour her. . . However, it's just a little too Daniel-in-the-lions'-den to reason away: luminous and mythic, rather than ordinary. Not that being eaten by lions is ordinary, exactly.

It occurs to me that my agent is on safari right now, somewhere in Africa.

It's a big place.

More anon.