Omnivoracious

Steampunk and Jake von Slatt: Retro Tech for the Now Generation

   
The cover of Steampunk and one of Jake von Slatt's steampunk creations...

Steampunk fiction features a heady blend of influences like Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and inventor-hero fiction from the American pulps of the 1800s. It typically includes some mix or mash-up of airships, mad (or, at least, heavily-invested) scientists, eccentric inventors, Victorian-era adventure, and clockwork technology of the sort that we've largely abandoned. Its godfather may well be Michael Moorcock, with his novel The Warlord of the Air, and it gained huge popularity in its first wave because of novels like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine in the 1980s and early 1990s. Other classics include Paul Di Filippo's The Steampunk Trilogy, K.W. Jeter's Infernal Devices, and Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates.

Now, it's returned in full force through what's being called the "steampunk subculture"--a subculture my wife Ann and I have encountered and enjoyed while editing our most recent anthology, Steampunk. The book collects iconic short stories of the subgenre by the likes of Joe Lansdale, Michael Chabon, James Blaylock, Neal Stephenson, Mary Gentle, Rachel E. Pollock, and many more. Quite purely by accident, Steampunk's release has coincided with major features on steampunk in the national press, like a recent article in the New York Times. Not only has our anthology already gone back to reprint, but we've been inundated with requests for interviews (including from the Weather Channel website!), with the anthology featured recently on the LA Times blog and on Australian national radio. (For an amusing moment or two, listen to the radio interview and wait for my major brain freeze when asked about steampunk fashion, whereupon I babble about "mechanical corsets," which prompts the interviewer to ask, "What are you wearing?")

   

But the great thing about having edited this anthology is the cross-pollination. Some in the steampunk subculture--brought there by other media like comics or movies, or simply through their friends and social groups--are encountering these classic stories for the first time. Meanwhile, we're getting a crash-course in the steampunk aesthetic, which especially appeals to our tastes in art. Baroque laptops and other retro-fitted gadgetry show that functional does not have to be seamless and slick to be pleasing to the eye. Websites like Brass Goggles, Voyages Extraordinaires, The Steampunk Librarian, and Dark Roasted Blend, among others, frequently hold forth on steampunk-related subjects. There's even a Steampunk Magazine, and bands that create steampunk music, like Abney Park.

One of the best-known "steampunks" is Jake von Slatt, the driving force behind the Steampunk Workshop. He's been featured on Boing Boing and in the previously mentioned NYT article, among many others. I interviewed him recently to satisfy my own curiousity about steampunk and the surrounding subculture...

Purple Prose

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today 2 talk about 21 Nights, the just-announced debut book from Prince. Available September 9, 2008, it's a multi-media volume filled with poetry, lyrics, and 124 full-color images from photographer Randee St. Nicholas, who had an all-access behind-the-scenes pass ("on stage, backstage, and into his sleeping quarters") into the public and private life of the multi-award winner. The book highlights the energy of last year's record-breaking sold-out 21 concerts in 21 nights at London's O2 Arena, and will come packed with Indigo Nights, an exclusive 15-song CD featuring one brand-new song and 14 live versions of Prince classics and recent favorites that captures Prince's "speak-easy, after-hours, raw, after-show sessions of pure unadulterated jams."

--BTP

 

New Anthologies: The Starry Rift and The Del Rey Book of SF and Fantasy

                   

The prolific anthologists Ellen Datlow and Jonathan Strahan have been up to their usual creative antics again, bringing to fruition yet more unique fiction projects for hungry genre readers.

Datlow's The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction & Fantasy is an unthemed collection of stories by the likes of Margo Lanagan, Elizabeth Bear, Maureen McHugh, Nathan Ballingrud, Jeffrey Ford, and eleven others. Locus wrote about the anthology, "....Datlow's ambitious volume could easily be [the now defunct online fiction site] Scifiction resurrected in trade paperback. Much the same authors, much the same sensibility--edgy contemporary or near-future stories, full of good prose and suspense, with a touch of horror often evident. ...a feast of good short fiction..." Although not as focused as Datlow's previous anthology, Inferno, genre enthusiasts should enjoy this interesting selection of tales. Datlow also has a blog where she writes about a variety of topics, including her anthologies.

Strahan enters the YA world with his The Starry Rift, which collects new science fiction stories for teens by Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link, and Scott Westerfeld, among others. Strahan says about the anthology, "started with the idea that when people talked about science fiction for young adult readers they kept talking about the classic juveniles of the 1950s. Those books, novels like Robert Heinlein’s A Door into Summer, are wonderful, but they were written by people born before the First World War and were published not that long after the Second. However great those books might be, I wondered if they could possibly be meaningful to someone who’d been born in 1995. It seemed to me that it would be worth asking today’s best SF writers to write new stories that hopefully would resonate with readers today. And writers responded." For more information, check out the website created for the book.

1984 in 2008: Cory Doctorow's Little Brother

This week marks the publication of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, which as we reported here last month is a young adult novel that functions in part as a correction and update of such dystopic novels as 1984 and Brave New World. Except here the hero is Marcus, a smart seventeen year old caught in the aftermath of a terrorist attack in San Francisco. Picked up by homeland security, interrogated brutally, and then released, Marcus finds himself in a world where fear rules and every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. Marcus has a choice to make--and he decides to fight back. Doctorow has wedded his fascination with cutting-edge technology and the choices we make about technology to a riveting suspense plot in this potentially controversial novel.

Reviews and previews are all over the internet, of course. Ed Park in the LA Times writes that Doctorow is "terrific at finding the human aura shimmering around technology." SFF World believes the novel will "only further reinforce Cory Doctorow’s presence as one of the visionaries of free speech advocacy and great storytelling in the twenty-first century." Strange Horizons comments on the distinction Doctorow draws between privacy versus security: "Doctorow offers a distinction between the two which I am still pondering. He suggests that privacy is individual, with no implications of power over anyone else. Secrecy, in emulation of the old formula ('power + prejudice = racism') can then be framed as power + privacy = secrecy. Secrecy is what you do to others; it is withholding information or demanding access to another's privacy, or demanding of others that they keep 'private' something you have done to them."

A Publishers Weekly feature that ran in January suggested that "Time will tell if the book’s political awareness and tech-savvy will resonate with readers (teen or otherwise), but [Patrick] Nielsen-Hayden [Doctorow's editor] hopes that it will inspire them to become more active and involved. 'It’s not a call for anarchy in the streets,' he says, 'but it is a call for a more reasonable social order.'" Nielsen-Hayden shares more thoughts about Little Brother on the Making Light blog.

Doctorow also talks generally about SF and young readers at the website for a new YA anthology, The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Tonight he's in Toronto to kick off his book tour. Check out the reviews and check out the novel--you'll be glad you did.

Tom Piccirilli: Award-winning Master of Suspense Pens an Instant Classic

Tom Piccirilli is one of the hardest working writers out there, selling his first book while in college and never looking back. Over the last twenty years, he's created keen psychological portraits of people in extreme situations, mysteries as noir as they come, and suspense-thrillers that'll keep you, as they say, on the edge of your seat.

Some of the most recent of his books include The Midnight Road, The Fever Kill, and, in another week, the amazing The Cold Spot, of which suspense superstar Ken Bruen says, ""[the book] is truly dazzling. Piccirilli has taken the mystery to a whole other level."  Publishers Weekly calls The Cold Spot, "a violent and dark tale in an appealingly noirish narrative style, highly economical yet bracingly intimate." As ever, Piccirilli approaches his work with honesty, humanity, and a keen sense of the traditions he's working in and with--highly recommended for anyone who loves mystery and suspense. This may just be the book that catapults him to the top of the bestseller lists. I read a lot of suspense/mystery novels and The Cold Spot has an intensity, economy, and tough lyricism that just plain blew me away. As far as I'm concerned, it's a stone-cold instant classic of hardboiled/noir fiction. (Click here for my full review.)

I caught up with Piccirilli recently and interviewed him about his perspective on fiction generally and his own work...

Amazon.com: From your perspective, how has horror and suspense fiction changed over the last 20 years?
Tom Piccirilli: I don’t know if there’s been much of a change in form or content. New subjects come to popularity of course. At the moment it seems like readers can’t get enough of the Knights Templar or Da Vinci or historical mysteries, whereas fifteen years ago it was courtroom dramas. The topic of the hour is always changing. In the field, there’s still a lot of fine and intriguing material being produced, as well as plenty of garbage. That’s just the way of all things, and always will be. So far as publishing is concerned, I think we all know that “Horror” is a despised term. I’m not even sure that Leisure Books, who was one of the few publishers with a dedicated horror line the last ten years and who actually put the word “Horror” on the spines of their books, does that anymore. The word itself is anathema although the subject matter of ghosts, monsters, serial killers, etc. is still popular. Maybe even more popular now than ever thanks to “paranormal romances” which take vampires and werewolves and inject a little erotica and Hepburn and Tracy dialogue in order to mine a whole new extremely popular niche. As for suspense, I think that nowadays writers, readers and publishers appreciate the good old crime stuff a lot more than they once did. There’s been a resurgence in reprints of pulp, noir and hardboiled material from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, and that seems to have had an influence in producing neo-noir stylized writing. 

Pop Culture Report #3: James and Kathryn Morrow's European SF Anthology

Earlier this month, Tor Books released the trade paperback edition of James and Kathryn Morrow's The SFWA European Hall of Fame, a collection of sixteen stories translated from a variety of European countries. Contributors include Jean-Claude Dunyach, Panagiotis Koustas, Joao Barreiros, Andreas Eschbach, and many more. Most of these writers are well-known in their own countries but have had very little work translated into English. Our Pop Culture Report #3 (above) gives you more information on this intriguing, some would say essential, anthology. I conducted the interviews with the editors and Greek contributor Koustas in Nantes, France, last year, at Utopiales, a wonderful speculative fiction festival.

From Publishers Weekly's starred review: Wondrous worlds await U.S. SF fans in this sensitively chosen, impeccably translated anthology of Continental European science fiction stories, ranging from 1987 to 2005. Offering "emotional satisfaction and cerebral excitement," as James Morrow puts it in his introduction, highlights include Johanna Sinisalo's "Baby Doll," a Finnish denunciation of materialistic exploitation of children; Romanian Lucian Merisca's "Some Earthlings' Adventures on Outrerria," an excruciating political satire; Valerio Angelisti's "Sepultura," which offers a neo-Dantean Infernoscape; and W.J. Maryson's "Verstummte Musik," a Dutch near-future Orwellian nightmare. A French twist on human-machine interface lifts Jean-Claude Dunyach's "Separations" into a meditation on the nature of artistic creativity, while Elena Arsenieva's "A Birch Tree, a White Fox" exquisitely illustrates the quintessential Russian soul. These "disciplined speculations" by European writers and their painstaking translators not only excite the mind, they move the heart.

A New World for Lemmy Caution

I love Godard, so whenever I find a new interpretation, I'm pretty excited.

BoingBoing reported this morning that the next Scott Teplin exhibition at the Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York would be Alphaville, based on the 1965 Godard film about a futuristic city where the hero, American private eye Lemmy Caution, meanders until he learns that, basically, love has been weeded out of human experience.

Teplin's version doesn't look quite so dark. In his vivid pen and ink and watercolor drawings, Teplin has created his own Alphaville, preserving the humor and sense of confusion of the original with modern-day rooms that play with scale and unexpected juxtapositions.

Even if you won't be in New York for the exhibition, which runs May 1 through June 7, 2008, you can see previews from the gallery or Teplin's site of the Alphaville drawings, the alphabet rooms (like the "O" shown here), and photos of an artist book set “Sinker Down and Out,” which the gallery describes as "a Kafkaesque journey of a donut’s travels through the digestive path."

One of the Alphaville drawings will also be the cover of McSweeney's #27, due out in early summer.

And, if you're into seeing art in progress (I'm a sucker for it), you will probably enjoy Teplin's blog, Future Trash, which shows the evolution of the drawings as he's been working them out.

After discovering Teplin's awesomeness in his work and his blog, I was excited to also discover that he and I (and fellow Omnivoracious contributor, Paul) worked on the same book: Beasts! (2006) for Fantagraphics. His Loathly Worm can be found on p. 121. --Heidi

Bothering the Coffee Drinkers: The Multi-Talented Doug Hoekstra

         

Doug Hoekstra has quietly become an icon of Americana music and the Nashville scene, writing beautifully spare songs that contain genius-level observations about people. As Wired magazine has said about Hoekstra "a lot of people write songs, Hoekstra writes five-minute worlds." So it comes as no surprise that Hoekstra also writes fiction and nonfiction, collected in Bothering the Coffee Drinkers, which won an Independent Publishing Book Award.

The book is just as fascinating as Hoekstra's music. I really can't put it any better than the Midwest Book Review: "Each detail segues compactly into the next and before you know it, the book has hooked you in a distinctly quirky and entertaining way. Like all great music, it sounds easy to do. As all great musicians know, this is a deceptive effect that is only maintained through constant work and practice. [Hoekstra] is like a quirky art collector, putting together odd bits and ends, and then making them into something with an effect so much more than the mere sum of their collective oddities."

Hoekstra has just released a CD, Blooming Roses, which consists of another eleven perfectly understated songs that incorporate elements of country, rock, and even jazz. From the easy-going "Naper Vegas Scrabble Club" to the quirky/driving "Your Sweet Love," Hoekstra has crafted some great new songs. I interviewed Hoekstra recently to talk about both writing and music.

Book-Beer Pairings (Part I): Arianna Huffington, Michael Chabon, Lauren Groff, and More

(Lauren Groff's Monsters paired with Brewery Ommegang's Three Philosophers, along with another great Ommegang beer, and an interloping stout.)

For a long time, I’ve wondered why wine and food should have all the fun. Here at Omnivoracious, we also believe in the complementary pairing of books with...beer. Now, please note that we’re not advocating irresponsible reading, but with the current popularity of micro-breweries and the role of beer in the writing of books over the centuries, it seems somehow irresponsible not to pair the two. We’re frankly a little surprised no one’s done it before.

Thus, I took it upon myself to explore the connection between hops and writing chops, going far afield to ask a diverse group of writers what beer or beers would go best with their latest work. The results were so revelatory and comprehensive that we’re running the first half of this feature today and the second half on Thursday...

Light Beers, Lambics, Arrogant Bastard, and More!

Naturally, everyone approached the question in a slightly different way. Eastern European surrealist Zoran Zivkovic appeared to have already sampled a brew or three, sending in the rhyming verse, “Drink Bud West, drink Bud East,/Drink Bud reading Steps through the Mist.” Elizabeth Hand echoed Zivkovic, even while confessing she hasn’t drunk beer in thirty years: “But the last time I did have one, it was almost certainly a glass of Bud with a shot-glass of Jack Daniels in it. A boilermaker, which is what Cass Neary in [the dark thriller] Generation Loss would drink--24/7, and minus the beer.”

Arianna Huffington, author of the just-released Right Is Wrong, decided on a more political (and surprisingly conservative) approach, writing, “Busch, of course!  Besides the homonymic convergence, distribution of this beer helped make Cindy McCain rich and funded John McCain’s political career.”

Other books that apparently take a lighter approach include Karen Joy Fowler’s Wit’s End, paired with Sierra Nevada Pale Ale: “The company describes it as a new take on a classic theme; it's light, but complex.  This is a North Californian company, which fits me and my book.  But what I like best is the slogan--‘the beer that made Chico famous.’ The where?”

Friday Night Videos: Shelf Monkey vs the Monsters of Templeton

Welcome to a little thing I like to call Friday night videos. If you're here on a Friday night, you're definitely a bibliophile, so to you Omnivoracious gifts: Corey Redekop talking about Shelf Monkey and a very trippy trailer for Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton.

For the rest of the Redekop interview, check out the author's blog--and go to Cultpop TV, a great resource, for more interviews, including one with Groff!

Liz Williams' Near-Future Detective Inspector Chen Novels

Looking for something different? Something immensely entertaining and yet with some depth? Something you can sink your teeth into? Well, I've got just the books for you: the new mass market paperback editions of Liz Williams' Detective Inspector Chen novels: Snake Agent, The Demon and the City, and Precious Dragon. (Night Shade Books)

In these near-future occult mystery novels set in Singapore, Chen and his demon sidekick Zhu Irzh--one of the Underworld's vice-detectives!--explore cases that involve ghosts, Chinese mythology, feng shui, martial arts, and travel between Heaven and Hell.

Booklist says readers looking "for something uniquely imaginative will find it in Williams' surreal fusion of Chinese mythology, paranormal high jinks, and satisfyingly suspenseful sleuthing," while Publishers Weekly praises the unique storylines, "colorful characters and imaginative settings extrapolated from ancient Chinese mythology...that fans and new readers will enjoy."

Whatever makes you tick as a reader, you'll something to like in this unique, well-written, and fast-paced series.

Author Fact: A British novelist with a background in magic, Williams is a past Philip K. Dick Award finalist.

The Novel vs. the Screenplay (Guest Blogger: Lisa Lutz)

Thank you for the comments and suggestions. It looks like a number of people are curious about the topic of screenplays vs. novels, and since I have a number of things to say on the subject, I’m going to focus on that topic. Keep in mind that there’s so much information that I’m unlikely to do more than skim the surface, but feel free to post comments and questions, and I’ll try to respond to what I can.

Note: For about twelve years before I wrote my first novel, I wrote screenplays. I have written about my saga for Salon and since it’s easy to access online I won’t rehash it here, but will try to address other issues.

Before I become completely subjective, I want to begin with some objective differences between novel-writing and screenwriting, which might be obvious to some people, but still worth mentioning.

• If you have a completed novel and a completed screenplay, your chances of getting the novel published far exceed your chances of getting a screenplay produced.

This is an obvious statistic when you think of how many books are published every year vs. how many films are made.

• In terms of money, the scales tip in the other direction. If you have a major Hollywood film made you’re bound to make more money off the script sale than you would from a novel.

According to my agent, the average advance for a first novel is somewhere between $5,000 and $50,000 dollars, depending the type of material and the format in which it would be published. Most novelists have a second job. Obviously there are exceptions to that rule, but we’ve all heard the common lament about how people don’t read anymore (unless Oprah tells them to), so novelists struggle to find an audience—and therefore an income.

I then asked the screenwriters currently adapting The Spellman Files for some rough estimates on what a film script might sell for. Let’s forget about option money for now, which can start at $1, (an option is like renting a script for a period of time) and just focus on the script sale amount. For the most part, the bottom number (for a non-independent film) would be around $50,000. But the numbers shoot up much, much higher based on track record and demand (i.e. if more than one studio is interested in the script). It’s true that the numbers for a big Hollywood movie can often reach into the millions of dollars (which would rarely happen for a novelist). But, like I said before, the chances of that happening are not unlike winning the lottery.

• A screenplay is approximately 20,000 words (much of that filler—character names, scene headings, etc.); a novel can be anywhere from 70,000 words on.

The obvious point is that you can tell a lot more story in a novel. I mention this because my novel The Spellman Files, about a family of private investigators who solve their personal problems using their professional tools, was first envisioned as a screenplay. In the screenplay, the family has reached a point of crisis in which they’re essentially playing a game of cat and mouse with one another. I showed the crisis, but I didn’t have time to explain how they reached that crisis. The novel, on the other hand, was essentially about how a family could reach that point of conflict. For me, writing a novel meant that I could tell the story I wanted to tell and not just the story that there was room to tell.

• When you write a screenplay you tend to write by committee. You can get notes from anywhere between five and twenty people. (My screenwriters both estimated that they’d get notes from an average of ten people per project). When you write a novel, there may be some revisions that your agent requires, but primarily you work with one editor.

It might seem that five or six or twenty heads is better than one, but I don’t think so. In my experience (so now I’m getting completely subjective), concurrently receiving notes from several people fractures the consistency. Not all those notes will jibe, not all the people providing notes are as invested as an editor often is. Notes can be tossed around without much consideration for the big picture. It used to drive me crazy that a note that would suggest a change in Act I would not take into account that it disrupts Acts II and III.

My editor, on the other hand, lives with the book for a while. She knows it; she understands the causal effect of small changes. I can’t argue that all movie industry people are reckless with their notes, nor can I argue that all book editors have my editor’s skills—but this is my experience. While revising screenplays from producers’ notes, I’ve often been unconvinced that I’m making the project any better. (There’s that old joke where a producer asks the writer “Can you make the nun a hooker?” which rings truer than you might imagine.) However, working with my editor, there is never any doubt in my mind that we are making the novel better. Now let’s remember something: I was an unsuccessful screenwriter, so I’m happy to admit that I too could have been doing something wrong.

By now my bias is obvious. But let me finish by explaining the primary reason that I prefer writing novels to screenplays. There are a lot rules and limitations structure-wise to a screenplay. For years I always felt comfortable with these rules. I liked writing dialogue; like most people I’m an avid film consumer and so that language felt natural to me. However, at some point, at least ten or so years after writing my first screenplay, I began to feel stifled by the rules. So when I finally resorted to writing a novel, I decided there were no rules. If I could figure out a way to hold the reader’s attention, it didn’t matter to me how I did it. What I didn’t anticipate was how much more I enjoyed writing when I was free to do it the way I wanted to. It is now hard for me to imagine returning to the screenplay; I imagine it would feel something like writing with one hand tied behind my back.  --Lisa Lutz

Are You Infected? A Comprehensive Interview with Author Scott Sigler

Scott Sigler, author of Infected, released today by Crown, is known by some as the world's most successful podcaster, with more than 30,000 fanatically devoted subscribers per book. He's also been profiled in The New York Times, among others. Sigler's background is as a reporter, marketer, and project manager, although he was "writing the whole time." Infected is pulse-pounding suspense fiction with horror and SF elements, involving radical personality shifts and parasites. The novel has already received NPR coverage and an enthusiastic endorsement in Entertainment Weekly. When I asked Sigler if the book had a soundtrack, since he seems to bring a very punk feel to his fiction, he told me: "It runs from metalcore to Frank Sinatra to the blues to AC/DC and The Donnas. Killswitch Engage can pop up next to the Bee Gees then Evanescence. Lately I'm really into American melodic metal influenced by the 'Sweeds' (Killswitch Engage, Trivium, Bullet for my Valentine, etc.). I interviewed Sigler via email recently to give Amazon readers more of a sense of both him and his writing--including his insights about podcasting, parasites, fans, and secret fears...

Amazon.com: Let's pretend for a second no one knows who you are. How did you get started doing podcasts, and was it always fiction you were podcasting?
Scott Sigler: I started podcasting fiction in March, 2005, with my first novel Earthcore. The book was originally going to be published by AOL/TimeWarner in May 2002, but they shut down the imprint the book was on, and I was back on the slush pile. It took my agent a few years to get the rights back, and by the time we did, we'd lost interest and momentum. I'd had enough. When I discovered podcasting, I went looking for fiction novels, as it seemed like a great way to revive the weekly serialized fiction of 50s radio--but I couldn't find anything of the kind. No one was podcasting fiction at the time. Once I realized I could be among the first, I figured out how to record, edit, make an RSS feed and scrambled to get an episode up.

Amazon.com: Do you find that writing fiction for podcasts is any different than writing fiction with the idea of a "book" in mind? And did this come into play during the editing process with your editor at Crown?
Scott Sigler: Fiction writing and podcasting fiction is the same for me, because I write a manuscript first, then podcast. I write, edit, re-write, re-write some more, then when the book is finished I podcast it. So the process is the same, but I get some great feedback from the Junkies and that lets me tweak the story in ways that will appeal to the fans. It's like market-testing your fiction. The changes are usually subtle, but significant. I find out what characters they like, or when they do NOT like my main character, plot holes, factual errors and more. I consider this a job, and my employer is my listening audience. I work hard to make stories that entertain them, so if they can point out problems I'm always listening to whatever they have to say. This makes the final print version much, much stronger. The Crown editor (Julian Pavia) brings another level of analysis to the story. He rocks the house. Between Julian and 30,000 avid listeners making suggestions, the story is forged into something cohesive and logical with a big payout at the end.

Anthony Minghella, 1954-2008

We were sorry and very surprised to hear that Anthony Minghella, the director and screenwriter behind The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Cold Mountain, died today following cancer surgery at the age of 54. We'll leave it to our Movies colleagues to say more about him, but I did want to mention a favorite book of mine that's full of his spirit. It's one of those oddball books that fits no obvious category and likely missed a lot of attention: disguised as a technical guide but one of the most interesting books on filmmaking (a favorite subject) I've read recently. A few years ago, New Riders, a publisher mostly of computer manuals, released Behind the Seen: How Walter Murch Edited Cold Mountain Using Apple's Final Cut Pro and What This Means for Cinema (an unwieldy subtitle but total catnip to me). Murch is the legendary editor of such movies as The Conversation and Apocalypse Now (and The English Patient), and he's also perhaps the most fascinating writer on the inside of moviemaking (see In the Blink of an Eye and The Conversations, his book with Michael Ondaatje). He didn't write Behind the Seen (Charles Koppelman did) but you see the very modern process of digital moviemaking (in which tech support from Apple can be important as the key grip and the best boy) through his eyes. Full of interest in its own right (although it was a bit of an anticlimax for me to watch Cold Mountain after reading so much about its production and find I didn't think the final result was very good), but of note today for the side portrait it paints of Minghella (standing behind Murch in the photo above), who replaced Francis Ford Coppola as Murch's most frequent collaborator, and who comes off, as he does in every other account, as a complete prince of a guy: imaginative, open-minded, tireless, and wonderful company. --Tom

Watching The Wire with the Thugs (and Reading with My Eyes Closed)

I wrote last month about Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader for a Day, one of my Best of the Month picks, and I was neither the first nor the last to describe it as a real-life, Chicago version of The Wire. This week I checked into the Freakonomics blog on the New York Times site for the first time in a while and saw that Venkatesh, who first came to popular notice when his work on the (lousy) economics of crack dealing was featured in that megaseller, has been guest-blogging about watching the fifth and final season with some self-described "real thugs" of his acquaintance.

Which is all just wonderful (and apparently they love the show), except that we are currently in obsessive catchup mode with The Wire at my home. We've Netflixed our way into the middle of season three, and now with season five live on the Home Box Office I've had to avert my eyes at any discussion of what's going on--and, as you'll notice if you're averting your eyes, there's a lot of that discussion these days. Even seeing a proper name pop out of a headline will tip you off that a character has survived a few more seasons, and just from the fragments of sentences I've let slip past my guard I've already spoiled major plot developments, which I now have to spend the next many months not revealing to my wife as we work our way through the episodes. So all I can say as I point you toward Venkatesh's Wire blogging is that it is there; I won't allow myself to find out anything more. And don't tell me! --Tom

Essex County Volume 1--A Highly-Recommended Alex Award Winner

As reported on Amazon a couple of weeks ago, the American Library Association have announced their Alex Award picks, spotlighting adult books with specific teen appeal. One of them was a favorite graphic novel from 2007, Jeff Lemire's Essex County Volume 1: Tales From the Farm. It's been five years since a graphic novel made the list. As I wrote in a Bookslut column several months back, "In this heartfelt and beautifully sparse tale of an orphaned ten-year-old named Lester, Jeff Lemire uses an illustration style that perfectly captures the wide open spaces of rural Ontario. After Lester’s mother dies, he’s sent to live on his uncle’s farm. He hardly knows his uncle and his father has long since left the scene. Lester forms a friendship with a gas station attendant named Jimmy Lebeuf who used to be a professional hockey player until a bad hit knocked him out of the game. Together, the two comics fans build a rich fantasy life revolving around the possibility of an alien invasion. In a watermark grayscale, Lemire also provides flashbacks to both Lebeuf’s career and the details surrounding the death of Lester’s mother. Another section, showing pages from Lester’s own home-made comic book, is imaginative and funny."

    

Highly recommended for all ages--and best of all, the equally evocative Essex County Volume 2: Ghost Stories is also available! - JeffV

Anderson and Coppola Dig Beyond the Bestsellers

Fall is highbrow time at the multiplexes, and this year even more than most the marquees are full of Oscar-bait adaptations of literary bestsellers from the past few years. Atonement, British and faithful, and No Country for Old Men, brutal and American, are getting the most attention, and don't forget about book-to-movie award contenders like The Kite Runner, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Gone, Baby Gone, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Into the Wild, The Golden Compass, Starting Out in the Evening, and Charlie Wilson's War. But a couple of late-breaking releases by A-list, triple-named directors dug further into the archives for their material; one is suddenly getting lots of love from critics and awards panels and one, ominously, is not.

First, Magnolia and Boogie Nights auteur Paul Thomas Anderson's latest, There Will Be Blood, which, bless its heart, has raised Muckraking Hall of Famer Upton Sinclair from the dead with an adaptation of Oil!, his 1927 novel about, well, you guessed it (Sinclair wasn't one for subtlety). (Speaking of raising Sinclair from the dead, that was pretty much the plot--repeated again and again--of Chris Bachelder's crazy and smart novel from last year, U.S.!) It's not out in theaters yet, but the Los Angeles Film Critics Association has already dumped a lot of hardware on the "audience-punishing epic" (sez Richard Schickel), giving it best picture, best director, and best actor (Daniel Day-Lewis) in their year-end awards, and folks are already debating the apparently over-the-top finale (NYT's Carpetbagger: "To wit, the ending stunk"). Voiceover narration is often the tar pit of word-to-picture adaptation, but I must say in this trailer it is used to excellent effect:

And then there's Francis Ford Coppola, who has left the hardware-collecting to his daughter while tending his vineyards, but who has self-financed his return to the screen for the first time in a decade with Youth Without Youth, based on the novella by the same name by the Romanian philosopher and myth-theorist Mercia Eliade. The fantastic tale, starring Tim Roth, of an old man returned to youth (is 40 young? Thank god!) by a bolt of lightning is appearing, as far as I can tell, on exactly no year-end lists, but New York's David Edelstein did like it despite its mysteries: "Coppola takes a subject that once would have made him gaga and explores it with tenderness and lucidity." I'm somewhat hopeful, if only because the plot (but nothing else about it) reminds me of a forgotten favorite of Coppola's, Peggy Sue Got Married. Here's Bookforum's interview with the director about the adaptation, and here's a trailer, featuring music by Alex Ross darling Osvaldo Golijov:

--Tom

Frost on Frost/Nixon: Questions for Sir David Frost

I spent much of my rare spare time at BookExpo in New York this spring trying to wrangle a ticket to Frost/Nixon, the Broadway drama by Peter Morgan (who also wrote The Queen) that quickly become a hit in its limited run. I never got in the door, but I'll get a second chance when the film adaptation hits the screens next year, with Frank Langella reprising his Tony-winning performance as Nixon. I'm a bit of a Watergate junkie, based in part I'm sure on nostalgia for my '70s-kid DC childhood (my dad says I played soccer against the kids of co-conspirator Jeb Magruder), but I had never seen the fabled TV interviews that Nixon did with David Frost in 1977, which managed both to serve as a confession of sorts for the disgraced president and to clear the way for his partial rehabilitation. I recently went back to watch some highlights of the series, spurred on by the publication of Frost's memoir of that bizarre and historic event, also titled Frost/Nixon. The interviews themselves are still compelling, but they are made even more so by reading Frost's story of the backstage machinations that made them possible, and the day-to-day drama of Frost's team's research and strategizing and then his on-camera jousting with the man who was both the subject of his cross-examination and his partner in arranging that one-of-a-kind piece of political theater. (And the man whom history and now art have tied him to forever--see the lineup of covers above!)

So you won't be surprised to hear I happily took the chance to ask the legendary interviewer a few questions of my own:

Amazon.com: It must have been an extraordinary experience when you went to see Frost/Nixon the play for the first time. How did it feel?

Frost: It was indeed a unique experience. But after about 20 minutes, I stopped thinking of Michael Sheen as "me" and more as "the Frost character." That was because I know and care about the underlying material so much and was concerned to see how that was depicted.

When I interviewed Michael in December 2006, shortly after the Broadway production and the film had been announced, Michael said, "Do you realise? I'm going to be playing David Frost for the next year?" "That's a coincidence," I said, "so am I!"

Amazon.com: When the producers of Frost/Nixon came to you for permission to adapt these events from your life into a play, they asked for complete editorial control over the story, which you say you hesitated before granting. That same control, of course, was one of the crucial agreements with Richard Nixon that gave your interviews such drama and importance. What was it like to grant the producers the same open-ended permission that Nixon had once given you?

Frost: You are quite right--the editorial control that we had during the Nixon Interviews was absolutely essential. Essential for ensuring that the most important material was all included, and essential for the credibility of the interviews. As I describe in the book, the moment that Nixon's agent, Swifty Lazar, told me that his client had no problem with my having editorial control, that was a great relief, and indeed an extremely pleasant surprise. Swifty Lazar explained that Nixon was also aware of the need for the interviews to have complete credibility. Indeed during the interviews he went further and said that he regarded himself to be speaking under oath throughout the interviews.

I suppose that the editorial control that I granted to Peter Morgan and Matthew Byam-Shaw for the play was somewhat different. I was in a sense giving them the right to fictionalise certain scenes--hopefully as few as possible--in the course of producing the play. There could never be any fictionalising in editing the Nixon Interviews because we were dealing solely with Nixon's own words, spoken by him.

Amazon.com: Why do you think Nixon thought it was in his interest to participate in a public interrogation he had little control over?

Frost: Richard Nixon often referred to "the power of television." When Jimmy Carter, who was President at the time the interviews were being taped, announced a fireside chat from the Oval Office, Nixon approved and said, "It's the tube. That's what matters. It's the tube." I think he hoped in this case that "the tube" would, in some way, exonerate him.

The fact that I had not been on the nightly news every night of his Watergate ordeal may have made him think that I would be more independent or open-minded, and he may not have been wholly aware of some of the heavyweight interviews I had conducted in America and the UK.

I think he was also in a state of some financial insecurity, not knowing for example how many of the people who were serving prison sentences for following his instructions might sue him when they were released.

Amazon.com: Much of the drama of the interviews comes from this strange relationship at the heart of it: on one hand, you and Nixon were partners in producing this piece of televised theater, on the other you were adversaries, nearly prosecutor and defendant at times. Can you describe what it was like to negotiate that relationship in real time, once the interviews began?

Frost: The tone of the relationship was affected by whatever the current topic of that day’s interview. On the first day of Watergate, we were indeed prosecutor and defendant, but when we were discussing the breakthrough to China, we were more like Johnson and Boswell. Once the arrangements were made and the interviews were underway, the arrangements faded into the background.

Amazon.com: What role do you think the interviews played in America's experience of Nixon and Watergate? Americans like trials--was it the trial of the president that we never had?

Frost: Yes, I think it was. Many commentators wrote that they felt the interviews--and particularly Watergate--were the catharsis that Americans needed after the traumatic events of 1973 and 1974.

A few months after the interviews, Richard Nixon wou