Month: June 2014

Jennifer Weiner argues that some of it is “straight-up packaging”:

If you’re writing for FSG or Knopf it’s like it cannot, by definition, possibly be something as degraded as chick lit, because they don’t publish that stuff! If your book has a cover that’s just typography and color, it’s literature, but if there’s a female body part, it’s chick lit. If you’re smiling in your (color) author photo, it’s chick lit. If you’re smirking, or giving a stern, thin-lipped stare in your black-and-white picture, and if you go out of your way in every interview to talk about how “unserious books do not deserve serious attention,” then it’s literature. (Or, more likely, it was literature all along but you just want to make quadruply sure that absolutely no one is mistaken about your serious intentions and gets you confused with one of this icky pink girls who have cooties.)

Eliza Berman pushes back against Weiner’s observation about authors’ book-jacket photos:

I compared the photos for the top 20 best-selling female authors in [Amazon’s] “Women’s Fiction” [category] with the same group in “Literary Fiction.” If they didn’t have a photo, I skipped them and moved on to the next one. If they appeared twice within the top 20, I only counted them once.

On the first count, smiling versus unsmiling, Weiner was right. Sort of. Seventy-five percent of “Women’s Lit” authors were smiling, compared to 55 percent of “Literary Fiction” authors. But if you look at not just whether someone’s smiling, but with how much gusto, of the shiny, happy writers, 60 percent of chick lit authors bared their pearly whites, while more than 70 percent of the literary writers did. The chick lit writers smiled more often, but when the literary writers smiled, they did it with abandon.

Julian Baggini brings some perspective to the reader’s dilemma:

[D]ebates over whether print beats screen are hopelessly simplistic, not least because reading on a computer, with endless distractions a click away, is very different from reading on a dedicated e-reader. Much depends on what you’re reading and why. In a Taiwanese study led by Szu-Yuan Sun, the results suggested that reading linear texts in the manner of traditional paper books was “better for middle-aged readers’ literal text comprehension” but reading on computers with hyperlinks “is beneficial to their inferential text comprehension”. In other words, the joined-up environment of the web encourages people to make connections and work things out, while straightforward reading encourages them to take in what’s on the page in front of them. Hence the prevalence of hyperlinks and multiple windows on computers could be seen as creating either unwelcome distraction or more opportunities for active learning.

Where research has suggested that comprehension is diminished by screen reading, it is hard to know if this is an artefact of the particular piece of technology and people’s familiarity with it. “Having a device that requires a lot of attention to simply operate could essentially steal working memory resources,” says [researcher Sara] Margolin. That did not appear to be the case in her own research, which she suggests was probably because “the device we used was fairly easy to manipulate and my participants were familiar with technology”.

This is a nice example of how hard it is to know whether the preferences we have for one type of reading device over another are rooted in the essentials of cognition or are simply cultural. As another researcher, Simone Benedetto, points out: “The fact that the large majority of the population is still trained to the use of paper since early childhood has a major influence on the preference for paper.”

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

Last week we posted a beautiful poem by John Clare, born in 1793 in Helpston, England, which he described as “a gloomy village in Northamptonshire, on the brink of the Lincolnshire fens.” Clare was schooled locally in his village but often forced to abandon school when times were hard to work as a child thresher, a ploughboy, or a potboy at a local inn. In 1820, he fell in love with James Thomson’s poem The Seasons and set about writing poetry himself. His Poems, Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, published when he was 26, brought him fame, patronage, and the acquaintance of London literary figures such as Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. In the 20^th century, poets as various as Robert Graves, John Ashbery, and Seamus Heaney wrote sweetly of their love for his poems.

Clare married and fathered six children, five of whom died before him. He suffered his first episode of major depression from 1823-25 and another from 1830-32. Five years after that, his condition complicated by hallucinations and aberrant behavior, he was certified insane and confined until his death in 1864 in various institutions although free to roam about during the day in the woods he found so entrancing. (From “Memories of Childhood”: “Ah what a paradise begins with life & what a wilderness the knowledge of the world discloses. . .”)

Today and in the days ahead, we’ll post poems written while Clare was an inmate at the places that sheltered him. At the last, the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, one of the stewards, William Knight, transcribed and preserved many of the more than three and a half thousand poems of his. Jonathan Bate’s biography, John Clare, is superb. He is also the editor of the most recent edition of Clare’s Selected Poetry.

“How Can I Forget” by John Clare (1793-1864) :

That farewell voice of love is never heard again,
Yet I remember it and think on it with pain:
I see the place she spoke when passing by,
The flowers were blooming as her form drew nigh,
That voice is gone, with every pleasing tone—
Loved but one moment and the next alone.
“Farewell” the winds repeated as she went
Walking in silence through the grassy bent;
The wild flowers—they ne’er looked so sweet before—
Bowed in farewells to her they’ll see no more.
In this same spot the wild flowers bloom the same
In scent and hue and shape, ay, even name.
’Twas here she said farewell and no one yet
Has so sweet spoken—How can I forget?

(From “I Am”: The Selected Poetry of John Clare, edited by Jonathan Bate © 2003 by Jonathan Bate. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Photo by Andrew Hill)

Gillian Tett marvels at the success of Starbucks’ “secret menu” – which includes the Cotton Candy Frap(puccino), Grasshopper Frap, and Rolo Frap – among teens and tweens:

As a piece of marketing strategy, this is pure genius. It is also a striking symbol of our age. Until the early years of the 20th century, the concept of a teen – let alone a tween – was unknown; in western society people were classified either as adults or children. The concept of the teenager sprang to life as consumer companies discovered a new market for their goods. They realised that the key to selling things in this demographic was to make teen brands different from parental brands, and a little subversive too.

Until recently, Starbucks did not seem keen – or able – to tap into the teen demographic. Coffee bars are generally branded as grown-up places where young professionals hang out; coffee drinkers are, on average, relatively old. But Howard Schultz, Starbucks’ CEO, knows that if he wants to keep expanding, he has to get creative. Since the 1970s coffee consumption has been flat or falling; today Americans “only” consume 23 gallons of coffee a year, half the level of 50 years ago. But Starbucks is convinced that it can use the 13,000 outlets that dot the US today to sell something else. Hence the secret menu campaign, which is now cropping up in other places too: Chipotle, Jamba Juice and even McDonald’s are playing with the concept.

(Photo of Cotton Candy Frap(pucino) by Elizabeth Faith via Pinterest)