Category: publishing

This week’s survey by the National Endowment for the Arts “indicates that people who read for pleasure are many times more likely than those who don’t to visit museums and attend musical performances, almost three times as likely to perform volunteer and charity work, and almost twice as likely to attend sporting events. Readers, in other words, are active, while nonreaders — more than half the population — have settled into apathy. There is a basic social divide between those for whom life is an accrual of fresh experience and knowledge, and those for whom maturity is a process of mental atrophy. The shift toward the latter category is frightening.”

A National Endowment for the Arts report documents the decline of reading in America. “The NEA, like many other observers of trends, blames technology. In 1990 consumers spent 6 percent of their leisure spending on audio, video, computers and software. Now, according to the report, those items account for 24 percent of recreational spending. Book-buying hasn’t done that badly, standing at 5.7 percent in 1990 and 5.6 percent in 2002.”

Jim Fusilli quit his job reviewing crime fiction for the Boston Globe. “Writing that monthly column for the Globe was easily the worse job I’ve ever had, and this coming from a man once responsible for the nightly hamburger run for a dock’s worth of Teamsters. The assessment has nothing to do with the Globe or Boston, which, one could argue, is the epicenter of American crime fiction.” Why was it so bad? Too many books…

Portions of a new novel by Saddam Hussein have been published in London. “The manuscript was found in Iraq’s Ministry of Culture after the U.S. military overran Baghdad. The newspaper said it had received its copy from Saddam’s physician, Alla Bashir, who fled the country following the war.”

What’s the most common grammar mistake in English? “Misuse of “diffuse” or “defuse” (as in “A coach can diffuse the situation by praising the players”). Research for the new Concise Oxford English Dictionary, published today, found that this word crime was committed in some 50% of examples on the database. It is now rated as the commonest in the language.”

Reading critic Dale Peck on criticism, one gets to know what motivates him. “Loving and liking are as much a part of criticism as are hating and hacking; and that the impulse underlying good criticism ought to be affection for literature rather than animus toward writers. After his novels, after his memoir, and especially after Hatchet Jobs, we know pretty well whom Peck has hated, and why. Now it’s time to say goodbye. The serious critic, after all, is measured—and judged—as much by what and how he praises as by what and how he blames; and he should be as stimulated by the pleasure he gets from his reading as he is by the pain.”

After the New York Times raided the LA Times’ culture section for critics, the LAT moves quickly to find replacements. “The newspaper named recently hired TV critic Carina Chocano as its new movie reviewer, and show-biz columnist Paul Brownfield to be Chocano’s replacement as TV critic. Meanwhile, Los Angeles magazine’s star writer Amy Wallace confirmed to L.A. Weekly that she is being considered for the key entertainment industry beat position vacated by the NYT-defecting Michael Cieply.”

In the US “public libraries must begin taking steps to prevent child pornography and other harmful content from reaching the eyes of youngsters using their PCs under the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which went into effect July 1. If they don’t, the libraries will lose critical technology funding from the federal government.”

A new study on American reading habits by the National Endowment for the Arts paints a glum pitcure. “Among its findings are that fewer than half of Americans over 18 now read novels, short stories, plays or poetry; that the consumer pool for books of all kinds has diminished; and that the pace at which the nation is losing readers, especially young readers, is quickening. In addition it finds that the downward trend holds in virtually all demographic areas.”

Why is critic Dale Peck so mean? “Peck is hardly the first writer to enlist a congenial cultural form in the effort to repair injuries and redeem losses: Transforming such experiences and emotions into other idioms and forms is part of what makes culture emotionally resonant. But when a writer bends existing genres to suit such purposes, the critical question—and perhaps a larger question for criticism itself—is this: At what point does transformation fail, leaving a writer mired in psychodrama and family repetition?”