While devoting much time and attention to this blog of late, I am also working as a manuscript editor so it was gratifying to find yesterday that on my LinkedIn profile one of my editorial clients left this blushingly good recommendation of the editorial services I provided him:
In addition to covering Book Expo America (BEA) next week as a member of the press I will also be attending the North by Northeast Festival, aka NXNE, in official capacity as a blogger. This annual extravaganza–held in in Toronto each June since 1994–features music, film, and interactive/digital/publishing elements. Their website trumpets “650 bands and 40 films” over the week of activities. I attended last year and had a great time, discovering such bands and artists as Imaginary Cities, Gramercy Riffs, Harlan Pepper, Zeus, Mohawk Lodge, Carolyn Mark, Graham Wright, Wayne Petti of Cuff the Duke, Matthew Barber, and Brian Borcherdt. I also participated in a grand meet-up of many friends from the informal community that congregates on the CBC Radio 3 blog organized by host, friend, and author Grant Lawrence. So it’s a real treat to be going back this year, and this time as a blogger with full access to all festival events. Among the artists on this year’s NXNE schedule I most look forward to hearing live are Matt Mays (#1 on my personal bucket list of Canadian indie rockers I’m eager to see play), Andre Williams and The Sadies, Plants & Animals, and The Flaming Lips. And of course then there will be the serendipitous performances I can’t predict–new musical discoveries–the very thing that makes festival-going such a rich and exciting experience. I hope to be live-blogging and reporting from on the spot as much as possible.
While in Toronto I will also meet with book biz friends and contacts and a new company called Speakerfile that I’m representing to literary agents, authors, publicists, and publishers, in New York City, and elsewhere in North America. They’re building a great platform–think eHarmony®–for conference organizers and meeting planners on one side and experts and authors on the other. I will also be working with them at Book Expo America (BEA) next week, and again when I’m in Toronto the following week. If you are one of my friends in publishing or the media and are intrigued by Speakerfile’s model, please ask me to brief you on them. We also have meeting times still available for next week at the Javits Center, and I would be happy to introduce you to their CEO, Peter Evans. They have a great product and services that will be helpful to many in the publishing community who are eager to surmount the discoverability challenges that face us all nowadays. I’m really excited to be working with them.
It’s sure to be a great week, attending and covering NXNE, and working with Speakerfile.
I was delighted to see this new, modern translation of Dante’s Inferno received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. I had made the book one of my #FridayReads on April 27. PW writes, “This will be the Dante for the next generation.” Here’s the entire review:
♦Starred review♦
Inferno
Dante Alighieri, trans. from the Italian by Mary Jo Bang. Graywolf, $35 (352p) ISBN 978-1-55597-619-4
Bang has done for Dante’s most famous poem something akin to what Baz Luhrmann did for Shakespeare in his 1996 film of Romeo and Juliet: updated the presentation of a classic for a contemporary sensibility without sacrificing its timelessness. Bang (The Bride of E) has preserved the feel and tempo of the original—and the many English translations that readers will be familiar with: ”Stopped mid-motion in the middle/ Of what we call our life, I looked up and saw no sky—/ Only a dense cage of leaf, tree, and twig. I was lost,” she begins. She has, however, modernized the metaphors; where Dante looked to the politics and culture of his contemporary Italy for allusions to illustrate his sense of faith and morality, Bang mines American pop and high culture. Yes, traditionalists and scholars may shriek upon seeing Eric Cartman (of South Park fame), sculptures by Rodin, John Wayne Gacy, and many others make anachronistic cameos in Bang’s version of Hell, but this is still very much Dante’s underworld, updated so it pops on today’s page. The result is an epic both fresh and historical, scholarly and irreverent: “ ‘Pope Satan, Pope Satan, Alley Oop!’ ” begins Canto VII with a line in which Bang mines various previous translations of Dante and the roots of the phrase “Alley Oop” in French gymnastics and a newspaper comic about “a Stone Age traveling salesman from the kingdom of Moo who rode a dinosaur named Dinny,” according to Bang’s comprehensive notes. This will be the Dante for the next generation. Includes illustrations by artist Henrik Drescher. (Aug.)
Interesting article by Jeff Sonderman at poynter.org, the journalism and media hub, about the model that forbes.com has created for itself, “’a full-fledged platform’ for 1,000 expert contributors and Forbes staff alike, and ‘a social media operating system’ to engage 30 million monthly unique visitors.” I know two of their thousand bloggers, friends Rick Ungar and Tom Watson–last month Tom invited me to cover the Hillman Awards as one of a posse of bloggers–and I’m definitely intrigued by the platform, what its originator Lewis DVorkin calls “our model of entrepreneurial journalism.” Unlike Huffington Post, to which it’s been compared, forbes.com pays many of its contributors, and seems to have developed reasonable metrics for rewarding writers based on their readership. They are also developing their own style of social media that their contributors can draft off of, what DVorkin calls the “FORBES Follow Bar,” making “it easier for our growing audience to follow and find all our staffers and subject experts.”
Importantly, given their connection to Forbes magazine, forbes.com goes well beyond just business and finance, and it is not in thrall to the conservative ideology identified with Steve Forbes. Ungar has a blog covering healthcare and politics, while Watson is a contributor commenting on “social ventures, media, and change.” Forbes.com’s audience doubled this year, from 15 million monthly visitors to 30 million. According to Sonderman, “Fifty-five writers have more than doubled their audience since last June, DVorkin recently wrote, and ‘a handful’ periodically draw more than 1 million readers a month.” Sonderman reports “that Forbes hires each contributor to write about a specific subject, and requires them to stay in their lanes.” Considering that I cover more than half a dozen subjects on this blog–city life, books, music, culture, media, current events, and city life–I wonder how writers do operating in a narrower silo like that. Of course, people like Tom don’t write only for forbes.com, as he also has a site and blog of his own.
I don’t hear too much about Forbes magazine nowadays, and wouldn’t be surprised to learn that forbes.com is increasingly important to the company’s
I enjoyed reading Richard Ford’s first book Piece of my Heart, and then his breakout novel, The Sportswriter, and still own the copies I read in the 1980s. However, I missed several of the books that followed–this was during the long interregnum when as an in-house editor of topical nonfiction for several publishing companies, I rarely had a chance to read novels, or really anything for recreation. I noted Ford’s subsequent books as they came out, but never had a chance to pick up another one. Now that I’m running my own editorial services business and curating and writing this blog, my reading diet is as broad and nourishing as I can make it–as those who follow my weekly #FridayReads posts will have noticed–and I can make time to read books like Ford’s latest.
Ford changed publishers after Lay of the Land in 2006, leaving Knopf after many years there for Ecco Books, where Dan Halpern must have been eager to add him to his list, at least partially on the strength of this newest novel. As a confirmed Canuck-ophile and honorary Canadian, I was certainly intrigued when I saw the title of the new book–Canada. After about 150 pages into it, I can totally see why Dan wrote this in a personal letter printed in the advance readers’ copy [Letter also pictured below–click on it for a larger view.] :
I also admire the work of Saskatchewan native Guy Vanderhaeghe, especially his two novels set on the Canadian prairie, The Englishman’s Boy and The Last Crossing, and so, in addition to reacquainting myself with Ford’s work, I was eager to be snared by the locales of the new book, and that is just what’s happening. Ford renders a sense of place and an interior state of mind with strength and assurance. The narrator with the compelling voice one notices instantly is a teenage boy, Dell Parsons, who in the course of the narrative is swept up in a bizarre and destructive family breakdown. Dell’s modesty and manner of telling have bound me to his uncertain fate. And the sentence-making, as Dan promises, is full of constructions that are giving me joy in the reading of them, sentences to savor as they trip along the paragraphs and pages. As for the plot, it centers around an improbable bank robbery by Dell’s hapless parents, an escapade that evokes Sidney Lumet’s classic 1975 film with Al Pacino and John Cazale, “Dog Day Afternoon,” featuring another bank heist by two ill-prepared robbers.
This past Monday night, reading late in bed as is my wont, with my little bicycle light serving as my book light, I was at the same time listening to CBC Radio over the Internet, with my TuneIn Radio app on my IPod Touch. CBC Radio’s nightly news program “As It Happens” replays at midnight, and so that’s what I was listening to when I heard co-host Jeff Douglas introduce an upcoming segment,
That announcement was about the only thing that could make me put the book down, and so I listened for the next half-hour as Ms. Off led Ford through a deep conversation about fiction-writing, his own creative enterprise, and this new book. Following this link will allow you to listen to their conversation. It was after 1:00 AM by the time the program ended, but I couldn’t resist reading a couple more chapters, having gained new insight into this deeply satisfying book which I’m so eager to continue reading in upcoming days.
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On this anniversary of what would have been my late brother Joel’s 61st birthday, my sister Pamela and I remember him with all the force of memory and familial affection, as well as our departed parents, Earl and Sylvia. On May 4, 1978, the five us founded Undercover Books, the bookstore that would give all three of us siblings our adult careers. For those who didn’t know Joel–or who did and want to be reminded of his personality and accomplishments, which included a run for Congress in 2000 and earlier being among the very first online booksellers, several years before Amazon.com–you may read an obituary in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the remembrance I wrote that was excerpted in Shelf Awareness and Bookweb. The entire piece is pasted in below, set in the Comic Sans font to which Joel was partial (for readers able to view it that way) along with photos of him.
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December 9, 2009
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
It was with great regret and sadness that we write to inform you of the recent, sudden passing of our dear brother, Joel C. Turner, 58 years old.
Many of you will recall that we three siblings together opened Undercover Books, in Shaker Heights, Ohio in 1978, on May 4 of that year, with the hard-working assistance of our parents, Earl (deceased, 1992) and Sylvia (deceased, 2006). From the original location at Van Aken Shopping Center, our family-run independent chain grew to occupy a location in the historic Old Arcade of downtown Cleveland, and a shop that also featured the sale of record albums and the then-new format of CD-ROMs, in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Joel’s role in the bookstores’ success and the good reputation we enjoyed in the book world was vital and indispensable. He was always generating exciting new ideas that drove our growth. Joel was a constant reader, a passionate believer in books and the power of the printed word. He derived tremendous satisfaction from selling books to the devoted readers whose trade we cultivated in our bookstores.
We were fortunate to open our business at a moment when throughout the country and particularly the midwest, much book retailing was migrating from older downtowns to suburban locales, as the book departments of long-established department stores and old-line independents gave way to new indies like us. Soon, we were being regularly called upon by publishers’ sales reps from all parts of the industry, as Undercover Books became a go-to store for houses eager to break out books on the national scene. Notable authors who launched books at our stores included Mark Helprin (“Winter’s Tale”), Richard North Patterson (“The Lasko Tangent”), and Walter Tevis (“Queen’s Gambit”).
The stores, indeed the Turner family home, helmed by Sylvia’s extraordinary cooking and hospitality and Earl’s gregarious nature, and Joel’s energetic raconteurship, also became a favorite stop for sales reps and authors.
By the early 1990s, competitive and economic pressures had mounted, and Joel had the vision to reduce the brick & mortar concentration of our enterprise and transform it into an operation that served businesses, corporate libraries, schools, and public institutions. As this shift occurred, the name of the business became Undercover Book Service, which soon also had an online presence, surely one of the first online booksellers. He also developed a sideline in the antiquarian and second-hand side of the trade. Joel was a true bookseller, and also served the book industry through active participation as an officer and board member of the American Booksellers Association.
In this decade, he and Sylvia moved to a lovely part of North Carolina, where he helped her live very comfortably for the remaining years of her life. After Sylvia’s death, he built for himself a beautiful home on a scenic mountaintop in the town of Bostic, Rutherford County, North Carolina, where he died in his sleep this past weekend. In addition to the two of us–his younger brother and older sister–Joel is survived by nephew and niece Benjamin and Emma Taylor; nephew Ewan Gallup Turner; brother-in law Ev Taylor; sister-in-law Kyle Gallup; cousins Stephanie Shiff Cooper and Brian Shiff; and Uncle Myer Shiff and Aunt Linda Shiff.
Plans for memorializing Joel are being considered as we write this to you. For those wishing to mark Joel’s life with a charitable donation we urge you to make contributions to the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE, http://www.abffe.com/) or for medical research in search of a cure for diabetes.
We write in sadness, but with fondness and appreciation for all the years that we three Turner siblings and our parents were recipients of your generous affection, respect, and consideration. The bookstores gave all of us, and especially Joel, great enjoyment and satisfaction, along with so many wonderful friends. Feel free to send this message on to any of your contacts in the book world.
Sincerely,
Philip Turner (philipsturner@gmail.com) and Pamela Turner (pturnertaylor@roadrunner.com)
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As he often does, Paul Krugman’s analysis in his NY Times column today totally captures the moment. He begins the piece, titled “Egos and Immortality,” like this:
This critique reminded me of the anecdote in a NY Times Sunday Magazine story from a few weeks ago that one denizen of Wall Street, in a meeting with an Obama emissary, urged that the president should give a major speech, similar to the one he gave on America and relations during the ’08 campaign, explaining why Americans should not revile the financial industry. I was struck then, and again in Krugman’s column, by the bloated self-importance that these folks assign to themselves and their industry. Many people, after causing a major debacle would be somewhat sheepish about insisting that one is entitled to regain a privileged place at the table, but not this crowd. I’d have imagined that crashing the economy would induce humility in those responsible, but clearly not so. And of course, the same is true for Republicans who act as if the 2000-2008 period never occurred.
Krugman ends his hard-hitting column this way:
#FridayReads, May 25–Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick, Paul Dickson’s superb life of the progressive-minded baseball team owner, 
filled with fascinating social history and baseball lore. Also dipping into BEA Buzz Books, the ebook collecting 30 top books to be featured at this year’s Book Expo America, with selections from Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace, Mark Helprin’s In Sunlight and In Shadow, and many others. 