Text Messages Improve Literacy?

Call me an old fogey, but I have yet to be swept up into the thrilling world of text messaging (probably because I tend to find that world more annoying than thrilling). However, I am apparently missing out on untold opportunities for erudition: "Mobile phones improve literacy, says researchers."

Researchers at Melbourne University are conducting trials in schools and technical colleges to see how mobile phones can boost learning and claim to be achieving remarkable success. Instead of seeing mobiles as simply communication devices, they say they can serve as hand-held computers, as the next stage along from laptops....
In an article in the journal Professional Educator, Elizabeth Hartnell-Young, a Melbourne University researcher, says it is time to give mobile phones a new name. Ms. Hartnell-Young said: "It's understandable that many educators view these phones as a huge distraction, dreadful intrusions and tools of the evil 'snapperazi'. But as with all tools of learning, once a purpose is established, mobile devices will have a role to play."
A rational behind the Melbourne project was that students are using technology they value and with which they feel comfortable. In the trials, students have used the phones' cameras to create 'digital stories' and share information. For some students who find writing difficult, the phones have improved their literacy.
As an example, Dr Hartnell-Young refers to three boys from Palmerston high school in the Northern Territory who are using the phones to develop their writing and reading skills: capturing images, writing about them, and emailing the work to friends, families and teachers. The school's principal said he had been looking for something to excite disengaged students and had been "overwhelmed by the resulting enthusiasm".
Adding to the text message mania, a novel composed entirely of text messages (The Last Messages by Finnish writer Hannu Luntiala) has entered the scene. (It was only a matter of time, I suppose.)
“I believe that, at the end of the day, a text message may reveal much more about a person than you would initially think,” said Luntiala.
But a few years earlier, Chinese author Qian Fuchang beat Luntiala to the punch...sort of. While Luntiala produced an actual physical book (made of paper, etc.) whose text itself was a series of text messages, Qian Fuchang composed a novel (Out of the Fortress) and distributed it exclusively via text messages (although he sold the rights to the novel, so it will most likely find its way to conventional print).

"Out of the Fortress," showed up on tens of thousands of mobile telephone screens on Friday. It is the text-message novel, a new literary genre for the harried masses in a society that seems to be redefining what it means to be harried.
Weighing in at a mere 4,200 characters, "Out of the Fortress" is like a marriage of haiku and Hemingway, and will be published for its audience of cellphone readers at a bite-size, 70 characters at a time - including spaces and punctuation marks - in two daily installments. Other "readers" may choose to place a call to the "publisher," hurray.com.cn, a short text-message distribution company, to listen to a recording of each day's story as it unfolds. All this for a small fee charged, like any text message, directly to the readers' mobile phone accounts.

Where do persecuted writers go? Vegas, baby!

I just found this out and cannot get over how weird it seems:
Las Vegas was the first official U.S. City of Asylum for persecuted writers from around the world.

(Really? Las Vegas? I was thinking more along the lines of Walden Pond...or at least any locale not so well known for celebrating mindlessness. And not the good, yogic kind of mindlessness; the boozing, "Girls Gone Wild" kind of mindlessness that doesn't really mesh with my conceptions of the writerly life.)

Anyway, I digress.

In 2001, City of Asylum Las Vegas was founded, the first such program in the United States. Groups in Ithaca, New York; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Iowa City, Iowa, have since formed similar programs. The IIML is now in discussion with groups in Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. about developing programs in those cities.
Each City of Asylum in the network provides a safe haven for a writer whose voice is muffled by censorship, or who is living with the threat of imprisonment or assassination. The writer receives a $30,000 annual stipend, a home or apartment, health insurance, and help securing an appointment, if the writer wishes, at a leading academic institution.

In summary: really cool program; really (fill in the adjective: awful; depressing; just-plain-odd; soaked-in-intellectual-depravity) location.

(Thanks to Chekhov's Mistress for the link to the story.)

The 10 Most Expensive Books Of 2006

Forbes runs down the list of 2006's priciest tomes.

Unexpected revelation: "The top 10 list for 2006 includes a surprising number of atlases--five, including three versions of works by Ptolemy."

So much for the stock market; looks like atlases are the way to invest (who knew?).

(Link courtesy of the Literary Saloon--thanks!)

Jenna Bush, author?

First Twin Jenna Shops a Book

You can soon add the title of author to first daughter Jenna Bush's résumé. Whispers learns that the 25-year-old blond twin of Barbara Bush is shopping a book proposal to major publishers in New York City.
(Thanks to Rake's Progress for the link.)

"Lest We Forget": The Best Forgotten Authors/Books

The Guardian's book blog explores forgotten authors, particularly recommending Alfred Chester, an American author whom I'm admittedly unfamiliar with, although he sounds worth tracking down. (Coincidental sidenote: Chester's papers are housed at my alma mater.) One can only hope that his writing is as interesting as his life:

Here was someone who was courageous enough to be openly gay in the 1950s, but who vainly tried to hide his baldness (brought on by a childhood disease) under a crazy ginger toupee, and who forbade any words relating to hair or wigs to be mentioned in his presence.

After shining briefly, his supernova-like talent burnt out when he was still a young man. Unrecognised by the public, and not enough loved by the critics, he was driven to despair and madness.
More generally, this post got me thinking...what authors or books do I like that may have drifted into obscurity (or out of fashion)? I don't consider myself an especially exotic reader in that sense, but I do cherish a few favorites that most people seem to pass by. I'll list them for now and probably describe their individual merits at a later point.

Barabbas by Pär Lagerkvist
Jerusalem by Selma Lagerlöf
(the first female winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
(I like my Swedes, obviously!)
The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic
A Death in the Family by James Agee
(I know this won a Pulitzer and all, but I've met very few people who've actually read it.)
And the most prominent move from obscurity to critical favor that I can think of,
Call It Sleep by Henry Roth

Oh, and let's not forget John Grisham...

For more info on books that have fallen by the wayside, check out Forgotten Classics blog, The Neglected Books Page, Moorish Girl’s Unappreciated Books Archive, and The Lost Books Club.

Also, any recommendations from anyone out there? I'm always on the prowl for good reads!

"The Hardest Novels to Film": Guess what tops the list?

The Unfilmables: A List of the Hardest Novels to Film.
Naturally, Ulysses features first in the unfilmable list:

Considered to be the greatest novel ever written, Ulysses is ripe with obscure references, wit, and a style of lyrical writing that makes the book better said than read. There have been two Irish films, one in 1967 and other recent version in 2003, called Bloom. Both are utter failures, and the best they can do is have passages read over the basic action in a desperate attempt to maintain James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness style of writing. It’s the cardinal sin of adaptation. A true adaptation of this novel would have to substitute the written associations and wordplay with a solely visual language, allowing the power of the image and editing to represent the novel’s essence. I should also give Joyce’s last novel ‘Finnegans Wake’ a nod for being the most unfilmable novel of all time, despite this.
If anyone can do it: Quentin Tarantino has displayed a habit of… just kidding. If the novel does truly require a focus on imagery as opposed to the word, then Wong Kar Wai has proven his ability for doing just so. In The Mood for Love was a simple story about forbidden love, explored in the most luscious of ways. It’s sort-of sequel 2046 was even more abstract, a rough circle around the idea of first love unregained filmed in the most mesmeric and sensual of ways. Unconvinced? Then check this out.
This article also cites 100 Years of Solitude as unfilmable, but there I'd have to disagree. Not only are today's audiences more accepting of the surreal, but today's filmmakers also have access to the kind of technology that can bring surreal images to life on screen (without distracting, cheesy visuals). One point of the article I do agree with: it would be most interesting to see a Wes Anderson production of Catcher In The Rye.

(Thanks to From the Mind of Manxom Vroom for the link.)

Refreshing and Amusing: "75 Books I Failed to Read in 2006"

From thumb drives & oven clocks, the "Howevermany Books Challenge Round-up Extra: 75 Books I Failed to Read in 2006":

"What I read this year" lists: they're great fun, but incomplete portraits of the blogger as a human being. Because for every great book we glide through, for every satisfying book we consume then forget, for every middling book we choke back like cough syrup, there are 37 other books we're thinking about reading, and 4376 other books we could be reading.
Hooray for someone who finally owns up to the fact that even the best of readers doesn't read anywhere near the number of books he'd like to. And an extra hooray for crafting a hilarious post; it will truly make you laugh out loud.

Take, for instance, #22: Underworld by Don DeLillo.
I have this theory that outside of White Noise, nobody actually reads Don DeLillo's books. People just talk about them at dinner parties so they can attract mates, but if you gave them a pop quiz on the contents of the books, they'd all fail miserably.
Or #50: Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaahahahahahahahaaaa.

Amen, brother.

Latest Acquisition: Fun Home

Just arrived: Fun Home, the graphic novel reviewers have been raving about (written by Alison Bechdel, the artist behind the Dykes To Watch Out For comic strip).

I've never read a graphic novel before, but if this one proves even half as fantastic as people make it out to be, I'll be thrilled.

Wildly enthusiastic press coverage:

"Fun Home" is a beautiful, assured piece of work, by far the best thing Bechdel has done in over two decades as a cartoonist. Her language and drawings are impressively sensitive to the details of her physical experience and to the trickier folds of her own self-consciousness; she dives over and over into the cloudy waters of her past, swimming deeper every time. A compulsive self-documenter, she nonetheless glossed over or omitted some of her life's crucial details as they were happening, and now she's gone back to reconstruct them.
Salon

If the theoretical value of a picture is still holding steady at a thousand words, then Alison Bechdel's slim yet Proustian graphic memoir, "Fun Home," must be the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced. It is a pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics and memoir) in multiple new directions, with panels that combine the detail and technical proficiency of R. Crumb with a seriousness, emotional complexity and innovation completely its own.
The New York Times Book Review

The unlikeliest literary success of 2006 is a stunning memoir about a girl growing up in a small town with her cryptic, perfectionist dad and slowly realizing that a) she is gay and b) he is too. Oh, and it's a comic book: Bechdel's breathtakingly smart commentary duets with eloquent line drawings. Forget genre and sexual orientation: this is a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other.
Time's "10 Best Books" of 2006

Simon & Schuster & Garfunkel

Turns out that Art Garfunkel is not only a delightful harmonizer but a voracious reader. Who knew? And he's kept a list of the near 1000 books he's read since 1968. (Thanks to Bookslut for the link.)

Way to go, Art! Fronting a wildly successful pop duo and managing to read a thousand books at the same time? Suddenly I feel less accomplished...

"Liberals have more books"

In Psychology Today's article, "The Ideological Animal", we are treated to such nuanced observations as follows:

Psychologists John Jost of New York University, Dana Carney of Harvard, and Sam Gosling of the University of Texas have demonstrated that conservatives and liberals boast markedly different home and office decor. Liberals are messier than conservatives, their rooms have more clutter and more color, and they tend to have more travel documents, maps of other countries, and flags from around the world. Conservatives are neater, and their rooms are cleaner, better organized, more brightly lit, and more conventional. Liberals have more books, and their books cover a greater variety of topics.
And that's just a start. Multiple studies find that liberals are more optimistic. Conservatives are more likely to be religious. Liberals are more likely to like classical music and jazz, conservatives, country music. Liberals are more likely to enjoy abstract art. Conservative men are more likely than liberal men to prefer conventional forms of entertainment like TV and talk radio. Liberal men like romantic comedies more than conservative men. Liberal women are more likely than conservative women to enjoy books, poetry, writing in a diary, acting, and playing musical instruments.
Really, how scientific is this? Evangelicals with empty (but extremely clean!) bookshelves? Effeminate male liberals crying during "chick flicks"? Yeesh... This article reads more like caricatures of both ideologies than a substantive examination of differences between their adherents. (Besides, on a purely anecdotal level, who can't think of a million exceptions to these profiles?) I'd be curious to read the full publication of this study to see if its conclusions are as cartoonish as this summary implies (surely not, I hope!).

McEwan's long-lost brother and the color of his collar

Currently reading Ian McEwan's Saturday (yes, I know I'm the last person in the world to get around to reading this, etc., etc.), so this Guardian article about McEwan's long-lost brother ("Bricklayer traces his long-lost brother, Ian McEwan") caught my eye.

What strikes me as extraordinary about this story is not so much that Ian McEwan's long-lost brother is a bricklayer but that Ian McEwan has a long-lost brother at all. (I mean, how many people meet a full-blood sibling that they never had the slightest idea existed?) Yet the article seems very blasé about the whole 'family-I-never-knew' aspect and instead strains to point out the blue collar history of the brother (prime example: the title of the article; why use "bricklayer" as the lead-off word?). Perhaps I'm reading hypersensitively*, but the article comes across as somewhat elitist, particularly when Dave Sharp is referred to as "the bricklayer" instead of simply using his name or even saying "McEwan's brother."

At least Mr. Sharp seems to be keeping the discovery of his sibling in perspective: "I had never heard of him. Of course, I've read all of his books now, but whether he's a road-sweeper or an author is immaterial. He's just my brother to me."


*BTW, I am hereby campaigning for "hypersensitively" to be acknowledged by the dictionary as a "real word." So useful!

"The thinking person's American Idol..."

Literary wannabes get Pop Idol treatment

"They are billing it as the thinking person's American Idol, a search for the next big superstar but with literary, as opposed to pop celebrity, pretensions.
Touchstone, an imprint of the publishers Simon & Schuster, yesterday launched First Chapters, a competition designed to find writing talent through the internet. It is inviting unpublished authors to submit the first three chapters of a manuscript to the scrutiny of the voting public. The winner's book will be published and distributed by Touchstone and the author will enjoy a $5,000 (£2,575) cash prize."
Isn't "the thinking person's American Idol" a contradiction in terms?

Reading 24

This is going to be, ostensibly, a literary blog--or more precisely, a blog about books (as the actual literary merit of this blog will be questionable, at best!). I've decided to write about books because that's what I like best, what I think about the most, and what strikes me as worthiest of being written about. (Other things I like that would not make for stirring blog topics: basil; Sensodyne toothpaste; checking the mail; etc.)

However, now that I've outlined my blog's purported intent, I am immediately going to disregard it. There will be moments when other non-book topics creep in. Like right now, for instance. Because no matter how much I like to think about books, the one topic endlessly thought about in my home right now is 24.

Yes, certain members of my household have a predilection for--nay, a downright obsession with--Fox's television thriller. And since the new season debuted this week, I'd feel remiss if I let this much anticipated event pass by unheralded.

Thus, I attempted to uncover some link between 24 and books of some kind, hoping to relate back (however remotely) to the supposed purpose of this blog. This proved trickier than I'd thought. Since Kiefer Sutherland has yet to grace us with the next Pulitzer, the only books I could find in the meantime were direct product tie-ins to the show, sporting charming names like Trojan Horse, Veto Power, Cat's Claw, and my personal favorite, Operation Hell Gate. (Although to Kiefer's credit, he did write the forward for 24: Behind the Scenes.)

(BTW, who actually reads books that are based on TV shows or movies? Have any of these ever been good!? I'd like to know...)

Oh, and lest I forget, the other book/24 connection I stumbled across was Stephen King's review of the new season in Entertainment Weekly, which describes season six as "a book you can't put down...even though there are times when you may want to." (Heck, couldn't that phrase apply to a fair bit of King's own work?!)

Here we go again...

I am, for what seems like the millionth time, attempting to start a blog. (Perhaps 2007 is the year of the blog for me? Time seems to think so, anyway, in what seems like one of the lamer "Person of the Year" selections in recent memory.)

I guess we'll just have to wait to see if this blogging resolution sticks.