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Land Of The Undead

“Do you want to know what depresses the American spirit? Do you want to know why it feels as if the center cannot hold and the tyranny of mediocrity has been loosed upon our world? Do you want to know what instills thoughts of suicide and creates a desperate, low-level rage the source of which we cannot quite identify but that we know is right under our noses and that we now inhale Prozac and Xanax and Paxil by the truckload to attempt to mollify? I have your answer. Here it is. Look. It is the appalling spread of big- box strip malls, tract homes like a cancer, meta-developments paving over the American landscape, all creating a bizarre sense of copious loss, empty excess, heartless glut, forcing us to ask, once again, the Great All-American Question: How can we have so damned much but still feel as if we have almost nothing at all?”

FCC Obscenity Complaints Down Dramatically

Complaints to the FCC about obscenity on TV and radio in the US were down dramatically in the last quarter of 2004. “FCC officials attributed the marked drop — which saw complaints plummet from 317,833 to 157,650 from one quarter to the next — to the end of e-mail and write-in campaigns aimed at certain television and radio stations. The report did not identify which organizations were behind the campaigns or which broadcasters were targeted.”

Textbook Prices Through The Roof

The cost of textbooks has gone up twice the rate of inflation each year since the late 80s, says a new report. “The average annual cost of textbooks for a student in 2003-04 was $898 at a four-year college and $886 at a two-year college, the report found. While overall prices have increased 72 percent since 1986, the report said, college tuition and fees have increased 240 percent and textbooks 186 percent.”

Deffending Your Life

You’re writing an autobiography. You’re writing about people around you. But some of it might not be flattering. Indeed, some of it might be bizarre. So how much do you have to disguise your descriptions of these people, and will you be sued? These are the issues in a case brought against a best-selling memoir “Running With Scissors.” The book world is following it closely…

A Quarter Of Us Never Read Books

“For every four Britons with their noses in a bestseller, there’s one adult in the UK who does not read books at all. Research by the Office for National Statistics, commissioned by the National Reading Campaign in 2001, found a quarter of adults had not read a book in the previous 12 months. The figure rose to almost half among males aged 16-24. This is despite soaring book sales – up 19% in the UK in the five years to 2004. This rejection of books is not connected to literacy – the number of adults with reading difficulties has decreased by two million in the past decade to about five million.”

Going Graphic

Comic books… er… graphic novels are hot in the adult market right now. “In the United States, sales of graphic novels have leaped from $75 million in 2001 to $207 million in 2004. Booksellers in America, Britain, Germany, Italy and South Korea cite graphic literature as one of their fastest-growing categories. In Borders, one of America’s largest bookstore chains, graphic-novel sales have risen more than 100 percent a year for the past three years. In France, where comics have long been mainstream, sales are reaching record highs, up 13.8 percent to 43.3 million copies in 2004; indeed, five of the 10 best-selling books in France last year were comic books.”

The Critical Temperament

Choire Sicha looks in on New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelmen’s new book on artists, and observes that “the mild-natured chief art critic of The New York Times, has been for a while now less a critic and more a hagiographer. He has seemed unwilling to use his position as a pulpit.”