Phillip M. Parker has “written” over 200,000 books, however some might say he cheated. The New York Times interviews the author who has taken The Long Tail to a whole new level.
Parker has a computer program which compiles the books based on search criteria. In the interview Parker agrees that his books don’t really have any new insight but help take the leg work out of the research process.
It seems Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has pulled The Simpsons from the nation’s airwaves. Citing The Simpsons’ poor morals as the reason for the hook, Chavez replaced the cartoon with a show of exemplary taste and a solid moral foundation…. Baywatch?
Your guess is as good as mine.
In recent years, Charlton Heston was more well known for his role with the National Rifle Association than his Oscar-winning acting performances. It is interesting to look at his career from several points in time, just to see how opinions have changed.
Heston himself has written a few books about his life and times:
From 1978 The Actor’s Life: Journals, 1956-1976 by Charlton Heston
From 1990 Beijing Diary: The personal story of a remarkable theatrical and political event by Charlton Heston
From 1995 In the Arena: An Autobiography
I think this weekend I am going to rent Ben Hur. Fans of the film should take a look at this, it’s a pretty amazing collector’s piece.
Movie star Nicholas Cage can now carry on with the rest of his life… after dog stealing slurs were revealed to be unfounded. Kathleen Turner says sorry for getting it wrong in her autobiography - Send Yourself Roses: My Life, Love and Leading Roles.
I simply can’t imagine life as a celebrity.
I’m going to create a crazy blog and then wait for the megabucks book deal. Cue article in the NY Times. Stuff White People Like is a very clever blog - as a middle-class white person, I think it is very funny. The amazing thing is that this blog has only been around since January. Someone told me about it three weeks ago and here they are getting the $300,000 advance from a publisher.
Over in the UK, there are several stories this morning….the Orange Prize for Fiction is paying a price for recruiting a flakey celeb as a judge. While at The Bookseller magazine, If You Want Closure in your Relationship, Start with your Legs has won the oddest book title of the year award - I don’t think its an odd title. And in Harrogate in the Republic of Yorkshire, a rare Sherlock Holmes book, A Study in Scarlet, has turned up at a charity shop reports the local paper.
More madness! Disney has cast its evil, evil spell on Enid Blyton’s Famous Five. Walt has made them all look like Bratz.
But the Famous Five’s offspring are now multicultural; their enemies include a DVD bootlegger and they sport modern gadgets like iPods and mobile phones.
AbeBooks.co.uk has finished joint top of a online retailer customer satisfaction survey conducted by UK consumer protection magazine Which? Congratulations to the AbeBooks.co.uk team and the booksellers who keep satisfying our customers in the UK.
For sale - one gently used bookstore chain.
This is a wonderful example of the kettle calling the pot black in the New York Times. The US of A refuses entry to British memoirist Sebastian Horsley, the author of Dandy in the Underworld, because he’s a former druggie and used prostitutes. Interesting! The still warm Eliot Spitzer nonsense is generating acres of newspaper print but US customs and immigration is making sure a sicko Brit doesn’t taint any God fearing Americans.
Here what he would have outlined to America….
In “Dandy of the Underworld” Mr. Horsley, who is notorious in Britain, writes of being raised by alcoholic, sexually promiscuous parents and bouncing through several schools. He details a debauched life of cocaine, heroin, opium and amphetamine use, writing that he spent more than £100,000 (nearly $200,000) on crack cocaine and £100,000 to consort with more than 1,000 prostitutes. He also chronicles his trip to the Philippines to be hung from a cross, an event that was recorded by a photographer and videographer and formed part of an art exhibition that was extensively covered by the news media in his home country.
Sounds like a regular memoir to me - I wonder if he made it up?
It’s a sad day for Science Fiction lovers as one of the greatest authors in the genre has passed on. Arthur C. Clarke died today after decades of battling post-polio syndrome.
Clarke had a phenomenal creative output, writing more than 80 novels but was most well known among SF fans for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Songs of a Distant Earth, or The City and the Stars.
Almost more amazing was Arthur C. Clarke’s scientific mind. Not only did he write about futuristic settings and outlandish ideas. Clarke described scientific concepts decades before their eventual production. An example would be communications satellites, which he described in 1945 because of this geosynchronous orbits are called Clarke orbits.
However for all the things he did in his life I will remember him as a great writer, and I am glad that he agreed with me!
“Sometimes I am asked how I would like to be remembered, I have had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer and space promoter. Of all these I would like to be remembered as a writer.” - Arthur C. Clarke
A signed, first edition, copy of The Hobbit was just sold at an auction house in London for £60,000, twice what the projected value of the book was. The Hobbit is considered one of the most collectable modern firsts because of its small initial print run and is the most expensive book ever sold on AbeBooks.
Also on the block was a first edition of The Hobbit in Swedish (the first foreign translation of the title) as well as the last known photo of J.R.R. Tolkein.
The Orange Prize shortlist has been announced and I’m pleasantly surprised to find myself reading one of the books up for the award - The Outcast by Sadie Jones. I started it last night and I’ll be interviewing her in two weeks.
When I Googled Sadie Jones, I found a porn star that shares the same name. Eventually, I found this review of her book in last Sunday’s Toronto Star.
Sick Boy and Co are back, according to The Independent - excellent. Isn’t Begby simply the scariest character ever? There are many people like him in the pubs. Go to any provincial market town in the UK and wander around at around 11.30pm on a Friday night.
The Times profiles Julian Barnes.
Here are five things we didn’t know about the novelist Julian Barnes. He was a “zealous and unflagging” masturbator in his youth. He has never been to a normal church service. He is deaf in his left ear. His father never said “I love you” to him. And he fears death so acutely that he wakes in the night beating his pillow and screaming, “Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh no!”
Oddball story - a former German World War II fighter pilot has claimed he shot down French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince. How could he tell when he’s flying at 500 mph in a mid-air dogfight?
This one isn’t book-related but still interesting. Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the Internet as we know it, talks about the evils of tracking people on the Web. Remember, he’s the ultimate open source guy - he could have patented the Internet and think how much money he would have made.
More from The Independent…. Alexander McCall Smith is blasted by some charity over racial stereotyping. Just like Irvine Welsh stereotypes Scottish people as drunks and druggies? Do me a favour.
I’d love to say there was something interesting from the American papers but there wasn’t.
The Guardian sticks it to Oprah and her latest self-help recommendation.
The Observer takes a big long look at The Booker Prize.
A £5 million donation means that everyone will get to see the Bodleian Library’s best stuff - a few pictures of the treasures.