Excited with a New Assignment–Helping Protect the Freedom to Read/Part II

/0 Comments/in , /by

As I reported on The Great Gray Bridge last month, I have a new consulting client, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), a non-profit organization that acts as the voice independent booksellers and the book community raise in opposition to censorship and book banning.

Today, the daily book biz outlet Shelf Awareness reported on the new arrangement, with the additional news of another hire for ABFFE–Kristen Gilligan Vlahos, who will be working as ABFFE’s auction manager–which I’m happy to link to here along with screenshots of the Shelf’s item.

The funds Kristen and I are helping ABFFE raise support the Foundation’s programs promoting free expression and freedom to read, like their signature initiative, Banned Books Week. ABFFE also advocates for bookstore customer privacy, which has become a flashpoint several times over the past couple decades. If you want to learn more about ABFFE and help support their initiatives, there’s more background at this blog post of mine, and at ABFFE’s own website. You can also ‘like’ their Facebook page and follow them on Twitter, @freadom, an apt handle.
Shelf ABFFE itemShelf masthead

Read more

Update on Alamo Drafthouse Cinema–They’re Really Coming to Manhattan!

/3 Comments/in , /by

Alamo MetroIn the past year I’ve blogged twice about the announcement and expectation that Austin-based Alamo Drafthouse Cinema is really going to renovate the Metro theater in my Manhattan neighborhood and show movies there. However, despite press releases from Alamo that I’ve cited in my coverage, there’d been no sign of progress, leaving myself and others in the area unsure if it’s really going to happen. Finally, a banner on the old marquee I spotted the other day (pictured at the left) seems to make their plans clear at last: They’ll be opening in 2014. Here’s what I wrote about Alamo last summer:

[They’ve] begun seeking the city permits required to begin gutting the interior and renovating the space to accommodate the five screens and viewing spaces they envision for the theater which first opened to the public in 1933. For readers unfamiliar with the site, the classic Art Deco marquee–[seen below] in a photograph and below in a painting by my wife Kyle Gallup–has landmark status and will be preserved as is, though the interior has no similar exemption. I’m very pleased with this news, and look forward to having them in the neighborhood, perhaps in 2013, or the next year.
Metro-Theater-marquee-Kyle-GallupMetro-Theater-Alamo-fb-page

Read more

Live Music from SXSW–Courtesy of TuneIn Radio App

/0 Comments/in , /by

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, where nearby Lake Erie, and all the Great Lakes, ensured terrific radio reception. Especially after dark, terrestrial radio waves along the AM band would hitch a ride with the assistance of all that inland freshwater. I routinely pulled in signals from great distances, listening to stations to the east (from Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Toronto, Montreal, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City) and west (from Detroit, Windsor, Ontario, Chicago, St. Louis, and Milwaukee). I got that sort of reception even from small transistor radios I would listen to in my bedroom at night.

Even when I lived in the White Mountains while attending Franconia College I was able to listen to Cleveland stations, listening to Cleveland Cavaliers basketball games, including when they won a playoff series against the Washington Bullets in 1976, with a buzzer-beater in the clinching game. In those days, I listened on a sturdy table radio with a good speaker.

When I moved to NYC in 1985, I lost contact with the stations to the west of Cleveland, though I could still listen to my old sports teams, especially Indians baseball games. On September 11, 2001, I had my AM-FM radio headset with me, and the confusion and fear of that tragic day was eased somewhat by being able to listen to local radio reports. In short, I’ve been a radio listener all my life.

In more recent years, with the advent of Apple devices such as the IPod Touch and the IPad, and apps that pull in stations via the Internet or a cellular data line, without any need to seek and find radio signals of old, I listen to radio stations from around the world, from New Zealand, South Africa, Cajun Country, the whole assortment of BBC stations, and the CBC from many different Canadian cities. There are many such apps, though I find one best of all. That is TuneIn Radio, a stable and reliable free service that offers easy browsing, favorite-tagging, and a sleep timer.

For music and stand-up comedy from the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival later this week and next, TuneIn Radio is making it very easy to stream live performances from Austin, via a Web page, Live from Austin. Here’s a screenshot of that page, as well.
TuneIn screenshot

Read more

White-suited Mark Twain in Only Known Film Clip

/0 Comments/in , /by

As shared on the website Open Culture, which describes itself as offering “the best free cultural and educational media on the web,” here is the only known piece of moving picture film that includes Mark Twain. This was recorded in 1909, by Thomas Edison, a year before Twain’s death at age 74.

Read more

Zerlina Maxwell, Bravely Refusing to Let Haters & Rape Talk Ruin Her Day

/0 Comments/in /by

Zerlina MaxwellYesterday I noticed an alarming retweet of a message from a woman named Zerlina Maxwell. She was determinedly reporting on verbal abuse and threatened violence flung at her by some offensive people online, and letting them and everyone else know she’d reported them. Seeing the screenshot of the vile Facebook message from a Jordan Mayer denouncing her and expressing hope she’d be raped, I quickly sent a supportive response to her, one that my tweeps would see, and thereby also learn about the situation. Screen shot 2013-03-10 at 9.29.05 PMI learned that the invective had been directed at her after an interview with Sean Hannity when she turned around the suggestion that women should arm themselves to be free of worries for their personal safety. Maxwell said, in effect, “No, let men learn not to rape!” Much of the background is given in this TPM story along with video from the interview, including the fact that she is herself a rape survivor. TPM’s article, like my tweet, was meant to heighten awareness of the incident, and shine a bright light on the haters. After I had sent her my supportive message. I looked at some of the messages on her Twitter feed and see that she’s enduring more abuse, but lots of people are also sticking up for her, as she tweets below.

Read more

#FridayReads, March 8–“The Heretics” by Will Storr

/1 Comment/in /by

Heretics#FridayReads, March 8–The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science by Will Storr, a reporter’s journey through the nether regions of pseudo-science, religious fundamentalism, Holocaust deniers, climate change skeptics, and their ilk. I first heard of Storr’s book when I read his account of traveling with the odious David Irving to former concentration camps where the disgraced historian preached his so-called gospel to true believers that masses of Jews and other minorities were not annihilated during WWII.

Like Jon Ronson, author of  The Men Who Stare at Goats, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, and Them: Adventures With Extremists, whose books I made #FridayReads in December 2011 and again in January 2012, Storr is an affable traveler who is able to ingratiate himself with fringe characters, hang out with them, plumb the depths of their irrationality, and deliver a compelling story to readers. I highly recommend his book, and those by Jon Ronson. Them

Read more

Announcing a Great Gray Bridge Bookselling Partnership With Powell’s Books of Portland, Oregon

/0 Comments/in , /by

Some readers of The Great Gray Bridge will recall that I ran a bookstore for many years, Undercover Books of Cleveland, Ohio, which I operated with my two siblings and our parents. I worked in the store from 1978-85, before moving to New York City and beginning to work as an editor and publisher. It was a great way to begin a career in the book business, instilling in me the passion to share my favorite books and authors with other readers. I worked as an in-house editor and publisher until 2009, when I began working as an independent provider of editorial and publishing services, which has now grown to the point where I offer quite a broad menu of services. The new role was immediately fulfilling, though I soon realized that there was something I missed about editing and publishing a full list of 20-25 books each year–that was the act and process of curation, in which I chose and sifted and assembled a coherent list.

It was with curation in mind that I started this site–I envisioned it like a garden that I would tend, a venue where I could share with friends and readers my enthusiasms for books and authors (and musicians and music, and the endless variety of urban life). I hoped it would be a very personal sort of curation, and indeed, I’ve relished doing it every day since I began the site in October 2011.

However, as a former bookseller, I sometimes felt as if something were missing–that was the opportunity to actually sell the books I was writing about it here. It could have been  books I had once published, contemporary classics such as Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance; Edward Robb Ellis’s A Diary of the Century: Tales From America’s Great Diarist; and Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia, or more recent titles, ones that I didn’t have a role in publishing, but which I’ve ardently recommended on this site, such as Richard Ford’s hypnotic novel Canada; James Kunen’s memoir of the recession Diary of a Company Man: Losing a Job, Finding a Life; or Dan Fesperman’s ingenious spy novel, The Double Game.

At last, I’m excited to announce that even that gap in curation will now be filled, as I have found a bookselling partner: Powell’s Books, the great independent bookstore of Portland, Oregon. As shown in Powell’s promo that I’ve placed near the upper right corner of this site, you can now click through to Powell’s website to purchase books I’ve written about that have intrigued you, or really any book at all. Please note that Powell’s stock is vast, and includes new books, as well as really hard-to-find used titles. In their partnership program, a portion of the money that Great Gray Bridge readers pay to Powell’s will then be remitted to me, which I will use to help maintain the site. It’s a win-win-win–Powell’s get a referral of new business; you get books you want to own and read; and I get to recommend books that I know you, my readers, will appreciate, while your purchases help me maintain and improve this website. As the message at the upper right corner of this site explains, you can use that little search window to look up a book, research that will take you directly to Powell’s website. In addition, from now on whenever I include book titles in a blog post, as I so often do, a click on any of those titles will reveal them to be live links that are going to take you to that book’s page on Powell’s site. See the above paragraph, as an example.

I will also be creating what Powell’s calls Partner Bookshelves, curated book lists of up to 100 titles, so please watch for those, too. In short, this is an ingenious program and I couldn’t be happier now that it’s installed and ready for use. Please note that I will be updating older posts where books are mentioned to make the titles into live links. However, this will take time, as my archive currently contains more than 540 posts published since the site began 16 months ago. So if you read an older post with a book you’re interested in and it hasn’t been updated yet, please just enter that title in the search window and a click will take you through to Powell’s website.

Thanks for trying out this new system with me. No doubt I will be tweaking it in the weeks ahead, so please let me know of any questions you may have, or suggestions, particularly if you encounter any glitches. It’s great to be back in the bookselling business!

Read more

Jonah Lehrer’s Reputation Falls Another Rung, as Plagiarism is Seen Again

/0 Comments/in , , /by

As reported in the Daily Beast, Jonah Lehrer’s publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) is going to ask bookstores to take How We Decide off their shelves and return the book to their warehouse for credit. The title will no longer be available from them. Having earlier pulled Lehrer’s book ‘Imagine,’ they’re now doing the same with HWD after seeing evidence of Lehrer’s plagiarism in it provided by journalist Michael Moynihan, who earlier exposed egregious authorial misdeeds by Lehrer. HMH says they see no problem with Lehrer’s first book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, and they will keep it in print.

HMH’s latest announcement comes only two weeks after Lehrer appeared at a public venue for the first time since his reputation crashed, when he gave a paid address at the invitation of the Knight Foundation. He apologized during that talk and in a tweet, but it only raised more criticism of him, since he was paid $20,000 for the occasion.

Knight, which beforehand evidently had no problem with rewarding a plagiarist with an ample payday, should have known better. After the news of the hefty honorarium was disclosed, they backtracked as rapidly as they could, though they’d damaged their own reputation, as well.

A round-up of Lehrer coverage can be found at the Poynter.org website, at this link.

It’s been a sad shameful chapter for Lehrer who’s also lost magazine posts at the New Yorker and Wired. I hope Lehrer, 31 years old, can someday rehabilitate himself as a writer and a trusted journalist. He’s dug himself a big hole.

Read more