News & Opinions

Our writers have been around books for a long time and are never shy to share their opinions…

What’s Up With All The Filmed Fairy Tales?

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A promo advertising a film about to be released called Hansel and Gretel, has me shaking my head and asking why now? Why all the fairy tale inspired, interpreted, twisted, films and TV now? They’ve been around for centuries and other than Disney, pretty much ignored. Besides Snow White, Disney has a tendency to lighten up its fairy tale fare. Not today’s offerings. Some seem to try to find the grisliest way to interpret what are quite violent stories to begin with. A few years ago a film was made about the Grimm brothers, and never made a sound as it sunk into the rental pool. Since that time, two TV shows, two new Snow White films, and now a Hansel and Gretel movie. None of them stick to the original sources.

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Gently Used, Unfoxed, And Totemic

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by Jas Faulkner 

It was one of those finds in the LitCrit section of McKay’s Books that looked like a good cold weather read.  Playing Joan is an anthology of interviews with actress who have played the Shavian heroine over the years.  The book looked like it was nearly new and had never been read.  At $1.50, it was a deal.  Then I noticed there was a name written on the title page.

Before I get into that, I need to make an admission.  I’m one of those people who loves finding old things in books.  By old things, I don’t mean the dessicated corpses of insects or antique Fritos.  I’m talking about postcards, invoices, ticket stubs,  newspaper clippings and class schedules.   They give me a clue about who read this book before it fell into my hands. I’m also a fan of old library book discards.  It makes my shelves feel well-traveled.  

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Just a Little Bone To Pick, Like What Else Is New?

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I was seated in a nice quiet dark movie theatre waiting for the main feature as the screen filled with cacophonous gunshots, car crashes, screeching people, horrible grotesque creatures, all trailers as they are called now–when I was a mere lassie, we called them coming attractions because, well, that’s what they are. The film may trail at the end of a reel, but the pictures themselves are of movies about to be released. Doesn’t matter, what did was what one of the trailers showcased-a new version of The Great Gatsby. I believe there have been two already–maybe more, one starring my mother’s matinee idol, Alan Ladd, the other starring my generation’s dreamboat, Robert Redford. Each film presents NY in their own way, the latter tries to show a bit grittier world. What I witnessed in the 3 minute promo was complete fantasy. Opulent, over the top, ritzy, decadent behavior with sets that cost more than any one at the time could have possibly afforded to build. With a computer generated city skyline,  showgirls, debauchery, and a florid Leonardo Di Caprio as the iconic Gatsby, I recoiled in my seat as if slapped.

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Why Masculine Pen Names?

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A friend of mine gave me a recent article revealing that women are still using male pen names, or initials to disguise the very fact they are women. The statistics show that men will invariably ignore anything that hints at a feminine hand, whereas women will read either sex. The publishing industry does nothing to encourage women to fight the trend, either. They ask or even demand that a science fiction or hard boiled suspense author write under initials or a male pseudonym. They claim they want to gain every reader, and if a man picks up a book in a typically masculine genre with a woman’s name on the cover, they are likely to put it right back down again, and who wants to lose a sale this way? Female authors wanting desperately to be published will give in to the pressure and the cycle continues. We all know the historical pen names–The Bronte sisters; George Sand–I couldn’t remember her real name if I tried;  Isak Dinesen–author of Out of Africa; E. Hinton is really Susan Eloise Hinton-surprise, she authored The Outsiders, a classic about teen boys that her publisher felt would never be accepted if her sex was known; and a more recent fraud, J. K. Rowling–if she used her real first name, her publishers contended, would a 12 year old boy have picked up the book? We’ll never know.

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Can Digital Books Furnish a Room?

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Manchester Last Lion with ReidIf I were to make a New Year’s resolution for 2013, it would be to read William Manchester’s Churchill biography, the last volume of which was completed by Paul Reid in 2012, nearly eight years after Manchester’s death. Of course, I don’t make resolutions since there are more than enough failures to tolerate in life without me adding to the list. But Reid’s story is almost as interesting as Churchill’s. Reid was a college dropout who went back to school in his 40s, and at 46 became an intern at the Palm Beach Post. It was through his newspaper work that he met Manchester, who was ill and dying and unable to finish the last volume. Manchester unexpectedly chose Reid to finish the third volume, even though Reid had never written a book before, let alone a biography. He wasn’t even a historian. Yet Manchester saw something appealing in Reid’s background and approach, something a more conventional thinker would have missed. For me, the subject of middle-aged career metamorphosis has a new relevance; I am often asked why, as old as I am, would I want to recreate myself as a bookseller. The answer, which is hard to explain, is that I just didn’t see it as a big deal. I never thought of changing careers as being that strange. And neither did Reid. He seems to have moved from one thing that interested him to the next, taking opportunities that presented themselves and not spending too much time doubting himself. So, that’s one book I hope to read this year.

On the subject of doubts, one that I felt gently tugging at my sleeve as I prepared to invest myself into this new business was my awareness of the steady migration of book buyers from paper reading to digital reading. It was hard not to take seriously the threat to hard-copy booksellers implicit in headlines like this from the New York Times from January 22, 2012: “Tablet and E-Reader Sales Soar.” The article reported that the number of adults in the United States who own tablets and e-readers nearly doubled from mid-December to early January last year.

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Nature vs. Nurture

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I used to believe that every human behavior could be explained by environment. Bad parenting begets bad people. No one is born evil, I’d scoff. It’s always the mother’s fault, Freudians would have us believe. And aren’t mothers of  perpetrators  who create mass destruction at fault?   The latest horrific act of violence has already been laid at the feet of the killer’s mother. The dead can’t speak, they can be assigned blame. Because we so need to blame. It must be the mother, autism, etc etc  Can’t be that someone is born with a piece missing, a vital piece of humanity left out. The ability to feel. More specifically, empathize, the human response to others problems or simply of being. To put yourself in someone else’s shoes, to use a more colloquial term. Society has discarded that old chestnut long ago. The idea that a crazy person’s offspring will be nutty  too, dissipated as more and more people lay on couches being psychoanalyzed. No more does the center theme of Eugene O’Neill’s odd never ending play, Strange Interlude, exist–that the son of an insane person has insanity in the blood, and one must not marry and interbreed with such people. Ok, so that concept my be extreme, but science has found the propensity for depression is passed from generation to generation, just as other bodily or mental conditions are. Is crazy, I mean violent crazy, also genetic and the ‘evil’ one not responsible, due to genetic predisposition? How about none of the above? What if sociopaths are born, and made? What if you take two individuals, treat them exactly in the same horrific manner, abuse them, deny any warmth or love to them, generally make life a living hell–and one turns out to be a decent member of society, the other a serial killer? Is it Nature or Nurture? I believe it’s both.

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Words That Don’t Fail

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by Jas Faulkner

The night that Susan Smith confessed to killing her two sons, I had drawn the short straw and was working the front desk and crisis line instead of my usual eight to sixteen hours behind the double layered locking steel doors that kept the rest of the world separated from my adolescent psychiatric clients and vice versa.  I watched the bright red sunset over West Nashville fade into the comforting  night that seemed to becalm the small hospital that had been rocking and rolling with code after code all day.

And then the first call came in.  It was a man and he was sobbing.

“I just want to know why,” he managed to choke out his question.

“Why what?”  I shifted into de-escalation mode without even thinking about it. “Talk to me and we’ll see what we can do to make this better.”

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Copyright, Book Illustrations, and the Internet

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In the public domain.

I collect vintage images–illustrations, as it were. Have for over 40 years. Paper ephemera, books, sheet music, postcards, Halloween, greeting cards,  bridge tallies, you name it, if it’s illustrated art–I collect it. And on flickr I found a community of others just like me. I began sharing this collection as I continued making vintage illustration jewelry from my collections, and from things I found floating around on the fabulous internet. And, from some things I found on flickr-that was downloadable and in the public domain. What does that mean? I can only speak for the United States, because other countries have different laws, but, anything, anything printed before 1923 is in the public domain. Which means they are not protected or owned by any individual. I checked this over and over again, due to problems that occurred on flickr when I had the audacity to explain that I was going to start a digital download business, and that there was a slim possibility that some images from flickr streams may get into my business–inadvertently. I am nothing, if not stupid enough to be honest about what I am doing. This started a mini firestorm of flickr morality. And supposed legal questions. And here’s the point of this post.

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