Category Archives: Lauren

September 30, 2011   Lauren   Lauren, music, reading, tradition  
5

Ritual

Earlier today, Rachel and I were talking music.  I’ve recently discovered that Rachel has pretty much my exact taste in music, but is also aware of a much larger list of musicians than I am.  She’s the workplace music soulmate I’ve been missing ever since Chasya left us for grad school.  She pointed me to a list of bands she loves that I should check out, which I decided to make my weekend reading background music playlist.

Toward the end of the week, when I have a big reading weekend planned (i.e. when life isn’t planning to intrude on my desire to curl up with a bunch of books and manuscripts), I start to get excited about the ritual of it.  If I’ll be reading at home, there’s preparation that needs doing.  For one, I need to know the order in which I’ll be reading things (so that I can disregard it later, oftentimes).  My Kindle and any books that will take part in our day together need to be stacked upon the coffee table in my living room.  Coffee, of course, must be brewed.  I will have to take the French press with me into the living room, even though pouring another cup will mean going to the kitchen to get milk anyway.  I’ll begin my reading with coffee in the morning, but transition to tea by early afternoon.  Perhaps at lunchtime, there’ll be a stroll about the neighborhood or quick bike ride, just to avoid losing my mind, or an errand to run.  Then, sufficiently wired from caffeine, in the late afternoon or early evening, it shall be time to break out the red wine.  If I can patiently make it through the day from breakfast through dinner—the reading compelling enough, the body not so fidgety, the soccer games of my favorite teams not beckoning me to distraction—then it’s probably time, before bed, to settle down with the thing I’ve most wanted to read, the one that I’ve been promising myself if I am good about reading the others without calling up a friend to make plans or watching TV or going for a bike ride.  And along with that dessert of a book, it’s probably time for a stiff drink of some kind (varying with weather and book).  Then, drained mentally and sleepy from the booze, it’ll be bedtime, eventually.

The reading will be done on the couch, because I lack an awesome reading chair like Michael’s, with liberal use of ottoman (of which I now own two—one bench-like, the other smallish and square).  There will be music, of course, as I mentioned—this weekend, Rachel’s favorite bands, but always something that I like enough to not feel the need to constantly DJ but don’t know well enough to know the words.  I read best with minor distraction from background noise, because total silence makes me look for something with which to distract myself, oddly.  Probably, given the weather, the windows will be wide open, with a cozy blanket close by for later in the evening, when it would be smart to close the windows but the chill is helping to keep me alert.  And of course, the clothes, they shall be comfy.

What about you?  Do you have reading rituals?  When you prepare yourself to really hunker down for a good spell with the written word, do you do things differently than you would to read on the morning commute or before bed or when just picking up the paper casually?  What helps you really immerse yourself in the worlds others present to you?

September 23, 2011   Lauren   authors, fun, Lauren  
8

Spiders, Planets, and Islands

Apparently last month I missed Publisher’s Weekly’s PWxyz blog’s round up of some bizarre things named after writers.  I’ve actually been to the James Fenimore Cooper, Joyce Kilmer, and Walt Whitman rest stops in Jersey—I always support going to the writerly rest stops over the random historical figures.

I think Stendhal wins, though.  Stendhal Syndrome is “an illness that’s caused when an individual is exposed to art, particularly if the art is overwhelmingly beautiful.”  Though it refers to an experience of his, not to the beauty of Stendahl’s written art, it’s still a pretty great thing to have associated with your name.  (Bonus points for Gabe Habash’s excellent link choice in that paragraph.)

Since I missed the first round, I’m so pleased they followed up with some more this week.  I didn’t know that the term “quark” comes from Finnegans Wake, but it’s pretty impressive.  There’s something about a scientist of significance enough to be naming quarks also being the sort of literary mind who reads Finnegans Wake.  I mean, come on, no one reads Finnegans Wake.  Most people are only pretending to have read Ulysses, and that one uses actual words and sentences.  In AP English, when we presented end-of-year projects combining author bio with analysis of two of the author’s works, I boldly selected Joyce, Dubliners, and Finnegans Wake.  I quickly realized my error when I tried to read the latter and ended up presenting on Joyce’s life, Dubliners, and a reading of nonsensical passages from Finnegans Wake along with the admission I hadn’t read it and an interview Joyce gave about how he was deliberately screwing with the heads of readers by writing such a non-book.  But at a minimum, Mr. Gell-Mann, quark namer, was browsing the pages.  Perhaps he just pretended that’s where it came from, knowing no one would ever catch him.  I’m certainly not going to fact check him.

I’d be less pleased to have that creeptastic spider named after me if I were Bram Stoker, but I imagine he’d be cool with that (as would some of my clients, I bet).  So, pray tell, what would you like to have named after you, authors?  I might quite like something astronomical, if I were a writer.  Maybe a newly discovered moon?  Probably not an ugly cement building housing a Cinnabon, McDonald’s, and infrequently cleaned bathrooms, but hey, it’s a nice gesture on New Jersey’s part.

September 16, 2011   Lauren   fun, Lauren, reading  
10

Sneaky reading

PW ran an interesting piece on the iPad’s potential to bring joy to a whole new audience of readers, through the lens of one twelve-year-old who really discovered reading when the iPad came into her life.  Now there’s surely some takeaway about the future of publishing here, but we’ve touched on that numerous times already.  The thing that caught my attention was the reference to the childhood joy of reading by flashlight.

I can definitely recall giving the old secret reading under the covers thing a shot as a child, though I don’t think it ever really took.  I found it a little hot and claustrophobic, and my prevalent fears of various spooky things were most easily calmed by knowing I could see as much as possible of my room.  I was completely convinced that nothing could ever attack you except from behind, though I’m not sure exactly what I thought I might do if faced with a ghoul of some kind right in front of my face.  I was not, it must be said, a terribly brave child.  Post-nightmare, I usually climbed into my little sister’s bed—always careful to sleep between her and the wall.  I can actually remember trying to rationalize it, possibly even telling her I knew she preferred the outside, but I was more or less hoping that whatever might come to get us would be satisfied with taking just her if she were easier to reach.

I did love a good surreptitious read, though, and frequently stayed up past my bedtime straining my eyes to read by the crack of light coming in from the hall.  Growing up in a 100-year-old house has its drawbacks (read: bats), but also the great benefit of creaky stairs so you can hear your parents coming well before they can see you.  This habit might explain both my adulthood night owl tendencies and my terrible eyesight.

I was also a fan of the other classic kid reading maneuver—pretending to read a school textbook while actually reading a real book.  I was a bit too much of a chicken to try to pull it off most of the time, but my friend Meredith was a master at it.  I’m pretty sure she even defiantly continued after the Great Math Class Romance Novel Incident, when her math teacher completely humiliated her in front of the whole class for some oh-so-scandalous cover.  That story spread throughout middle school pretty fast, much to her dismay.  But still she read.

In retrospect, I doubt my parents were that bothered by my staying up late to read Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Now that I know so many parents, a kid who reads too much seems like the least of one’s worries!  And the idea of middle school gossip about someone reading seems so quaint.

What about you all?  Was secret reading a favorite childhood pastime?  Any tips and tricks for today’s young bookworms?

September 09, 2011   Lauren   fun, Lauren, reading  
6

Should we be concerned?

Uh oh.  Apparently, per a study I first read about at The Awl, when we read about violence and aggression, it affects us psychologically and might alter the way we respond when provoked.  I don’t want to alarm anyone, but I’m on record for loving antiheroes and sociopath protagonists, plus a whole bunch of us represent books with clear violence in them.  Should our interns be watching their backs?  Or maybe just being careful not to provoke us?  I’d hate to accidentally shank someone with my letter opener when they came for help about the copier not working just because I happened to be in the middle of an edit memo to a horror novelist.  (Full disclosure, I just googled the difference between “shank” and “shiv” because I wasn’t sure if they were synonymous or if both could be verbs.  I watch plenty of police procedurals, so you’d think I’d know, but I’m still not totally sure I’m using it in an appropriate manner.  Parts of the un-policed wilds of Urban Dictionary seem to think I’m in the clear.  Others seem to disagree, since I won’t be crafting the shanking object myself from a normally non-stabby object. Anyone have an authoritative opinion on the matter?)

I’m having a hard time really wrapping my mind around the distinction that it doesn’t increase aggressiveness, but: “In both cases, provoked people who were given the opportunity to engage in a specific form of retaliatory violence were more likely to do so if they had just read a fictional account of similar activity.”  The key here may be provocation and specificity of response, but I’m not entirely sure.  Still, it’s an interesting idea, even if it’s not “Hollywood and video games! Who will think of the children?!?!”-style panic.

On the one hand, aggression isn’t good, and retaliatory violence seems ill advised.  On the other, it’s good to know that books can impact us in myriad subtle ways.  We’re readers here, so we all know books can make us think, laugh, cry.  They can move us and transform us.  It’s nice to know they can also subtly alter us and change our perceptions, since they’re still more likely to come with some sort of moral or ethical agenda—however nuanced, well crafted, and non-reductive—than plenty of video games and movies.  Nice for anyone not getting shanked as a result, at least.*

*No interns were harmed in the making of this blog entry.

September 02, 2011   Lauren   fun, Lauren, reading  
15

Long books for a long weekend

As we head off into our final, glorious Summer Friday (sniff), I’ve got some grand plans to read my little heart out this weekend.  I’m hoping some lovely weather will mean reading somewhere outdoors and catching up on a tiny bit of work reading.  Mostly I’m looking forward to sinking into one or more of the many books teetering on the end of a table in my living room, calling out to me to read for pure, unadulterated pleasure.

None of those books are especially hefty tomes, though occasionally those taunt me from my shelves—the books I bought to prove to myself I don’t have the attention span of a gnat but am too scared to crack open, because I don’t want to be wrong.  Now Flavorwire sees fit to join in the finger pointing with this list of 10 books that they actually dare me to finish.  (What did I ever do to you, Flavorwire?)  Of them, War and Peace, A Suitable Boy, Cryptonomicon, and Infinite Jest are already on my To Tackle list—and have been since at least college.

What about you guys?  What’s the longest book you’ve ever actually finished?  I’m going to say it must be The Stand for me.  Back before I became an English major and then publishing professional, I used to feel a tremendous need to finish anything I started.  In publishing, that’s a virtual impossibility, but as a teenager I opened The Stand, never really liked it that much, and refused to stop reading till everyone had slowly plodded their way to their inevitable doom.  I actually think I probably could have walked to Vegas myself in the time it took me to get to the end of the book, but I made it.  And I’m still a little scarred from it.  I’ve never really been able to become a Stephen King fan after that.  I probably should’ve started elsewhere.

Are there any books you’re putting off because their heft is too daunting, waiting for some magical fictional future in which you’ll have endless time and patience?  Maybe this long weekend is the perfect time to give it a go.

And is there anything on this list you’ve read that’s worth struggling through?

Enjoy your weekends, and I hope you have some fun planned to see the summer off properly!  Me, I ‘m heading to the most exciting museum exhibit of all time at the Museum of the Moving Image, since I am an avowed Jim Henson Super Fan.  You’ve been warned, Astoria!

August 26, 2011   Lauren   fun, great books, Lauren, lists  
1

Some levity for your weekend

So, guys, things are getting a touch serious around here.  The city’s apparently closing mass transit tomorrow, and New Yorkers get a little edgy when there’s a routine train delay, so the impending hurricane has people somewhat nervous.  Instead of deliberating what degree of panic I should ratchet up to with that new announcement, I decided those of us in Hurricane Irene’s way or just having a rough day might want something to distract ourselves.  So I went to the best distraction source I know, cracked.com.

If you’re also feeling a bit freaked out or just down in the dumps, use some of that electricity while you’ve still got it and find out why Neo-Nazi’s love Lord of the Rings, that Machiavelli was a troll, how Dick and Jane made us stupider, and if Plato might’ve been trying to tell us where Atlantis was.  By the time you’re done clicking through the treasure trove of humorously rendered dubious facts that is Cracked, probably all your problems will have fixed themselves, right?  Right?

August 19, 2011   Lauren   covers, fun, Lauren, subsidiary rights  
3

Clearly this book has a Christian Slater/Minnie Driver vibe

One of the myriad joys of foreign rights (beyond the mixed blessing that many of the people I want/need to contact right now are spending the month on vacation) is getting to spend time perusing foreign book covers.  The ones I love most are the ones that emerge from their packaging to a chorus of “Whaaaat?”s.  So I was pleased to stumble across this delightful piece by Sam Kean in Slate about his efforts to understand how his book on the periodic table of elements wound up with a cover in China that features smiling anime sperm.  Instead of just sharing the joy and confusion with others, as I usually do, he actually tracked down the designer and asked her to explain.  In the end, it actually makes much more sense than I’d have guessed it ever could, and her explanation sums up quite clearly what foreign book covers try to do: “I have to build a bridge to connect our culture to your book!”

But while most publishers are admirably bridging a gap, some make choices that are strangely, impenetrably delightful.  My first experience with this was years ago when Michael handed me a foreign edition of a thriller we represent to send to the client.  Then I noticed something odd.  Christian Slater was on the cover.  With Minnie Driver.  The publisher had, inexplicably, used a totally unrelated movie still as their book cover.  Leaving aside the questionable legality of doing so, it’s a very dubious choice.  Unless Slater and Driver are some kind of cult heroes in Russia, I’m not sure why that was supposed to be a selling point for the novel.  In Holland, one author’s books are stunningly gorgeous, designed just for that market.  Her publisher always asks her opinion before finalizing the cover, which is actually quite unusual in foreign publishing.  The author’s reaction to the latest cover draft was something along the lines of: “I love it, it’s beautiful.  I really don’t understand why they keep putting wolves on the covers, since there’s nothing remotely wolf-like in the books.  But don’t tell them, because I think the covers are great anyway.”

Book covers are, if nothing else, a glimpse into what the publisher has decided the book can be successfully marketed as.  In foreign publishing, sometimes things get lost in translation, but at times others are gained.  Like a wolfish Minnie Driver subtext the author could never have imagined.

August 12, 2011   Lauren   Lauren, opinion, reading  
6

Spoiler alert!

I have these two friends.  We’ll call them…Jack and Jill.  They did not fall down a hill, but they did have a falling out.  A falling out about spoilers.  You see, several Top Chef seasons ago, the day after the finale, Jack posted his disappointment at the outcome on Facebook.  It’s hard to imagine anyone other than the winner and his parents actually wanted him to win that one, and Jack’s disappointment was understandable.  But Jill was furious.  She hadn’t watched yet, and now Jack had ruined something she’d been excited about.  Jack apologized, but Jill was having none of it.  I’ll admit, I too had planned to watch it that evening and didn’t bother, knowing the outcome.  Unlike Jill, I didn’t feel Jack was in serious breach of the unspoken codes of civilized society, but I felt her pain and wished he’s restrained himself.

It turns out, though, that even though we think we hate spoilers, we don’t.  According to a UC San Diego study that’s been much written about this week, including at Ars Technica, we actually enjoy things more when we’ve been spoiled.  I initially found that surprising, since I’m the sort of person who rarely bothers to read or watch something if I know the twist ending or surprise reveal.  I think it’s a product of my high school AP English class, which trained my brain to believe it’s more important to know what happens and why and what it means than to read the book.  For test prep, we each regularly read and reported to the class on a different book, covering by the end of the year the entire spectrum of classics that might find themselves on the exam.  It was an intelligent and highly effective way to teach to the test, and knowing such a wide swathe of the literary canon well if not intimately has been a valuable tool in my arsenal as both an English major and publishing professional.  The unfortunate side effect has been that I don’t necessarily feel obligated to read things that I already know a lot about, which is of course missing the point when there’s no exam on the line.  In life, as opposed to AP English, the experience of reading a book is far more valuable than knowing what happens in many books you haven’t read.  I’ve got context, but I’ve cheated myself out of enjoyment and genuine edification.

When I do manage to go in unspoiled, I actually tend to ruin for myself the pleasure of twist endings anyway, determined to figure out before the author wants me to what’s actually going on.  As Jonah Lehrer says in the piece linked above, “The human mind is a prediction machine, which means that it registers most surprises as a cognitive failure, a mental mistake.”  I definitely feel that way, on a conscious level, when I don’t figure out what’s going on before I’m told.  On the one hand, it’s the mark of a successful story, and I always applaud the author for pulling it off, even on a reader like me who insists upon trying to best them on each page.  And on the other, I do always ever so slightly feel disappointed in myself for losing that fight.  Perhaps that does mean that if I read all the things for which I was spoiled, I’d actually enjoy them more!  Maybe, like Lehrer, I should just start reading the last few pages on everything, so I can go with the flow and stop trying to win a nonexistent competition.

For what it’s worth, my second favorite observation in the Ars Technica piece is: “Every genre is a kind of spoiler.”  Meaning that when we watch or read something, we know what to expect to a certain extent based on what it is.  The hero’s going to get the girl.  The world will be saved from destruction.  The enemy will be defeated.  Unless we’re watching something where the twist is the name of the game or the whole point might be a miserable ending, we have a certain expectation, and movies and books usually give us the ending we want.  I’ve never thought of it that way, but it’s a pretty interesting thought.

What about the rest of you?  Do you prefer your entertainment to be a spoiler-free zone, or do you “cheat” and sneak a peek at the ending (or the numerous websites providing the answer)?

July 15, 2011   Lauren   Lauren, retailers  
2

Steal these books!

Gabe Habash at PW blogged about the sort of subject that gives me flashbacks to being screamed at by shoppers: the most frequently stolen books.  As I’ve mentioned, I toiled away in college at a bookstore in the West Village.  That particular store had a few factors influencing the selection of stolen lit, including the general romance of the Beat Generation’s heyday in the neighborhood, proximity to NYU’s “campus,” and a table out front selling books of, shall we say, questionable provenance.

So as not to unduly disparage the table seller of books, I’m sure many of them come by their wares honestly.  I once tutored a very nice man in basic computer skills through a volunteer program, and he turned out to be a guy who sells books on the street and had emails from publishers he bought books from.  I don’t even know if the particular gentleman whose selection mirrored what our store suspiciously lacked still sells books anymore at all, much less at that spot.  What I do know is that one day my colleague went out on his lunch break, walked immediately back inside, walked over to an end cap and glanced down at the empty floor, went back outside, and returned a minute later with the 25 copies of Randy Tamborelli’s Madonna bio that used to sit in front of that end cap before mysteriously disappearing a couple hours earlier, still with the company’s 50% off stickers affixed to the front.  The guy at the table apparently had no objection to their returning to their rightful home.  (He also once accosted Whoopi Goldberg as I was ringing up her purchase to tell her she is his favorite actress.  This is unrelated, but awesome.)

Anyway, our most stolen list was similar in many ways to those linked above, though I can’t recall anyone stealing Martin Amis.  We did lose all the rest of those, in abundance.  We also, repeatedly, lost an entire shelf of Paulo Coelho books.  So we lost the beat generation, we lost the sort of books you could sell to NYU kids, and we lost the kinds of books that sell well on the street.  We then started shelving all those authors on the shelves you could only reach by rolling ladder, so that when customers asked for them, we wouldn’t have to say, “Yes, we have 5 copies right…here.  Sorry.  Can I order that for you?”

This led to its own special problem, which is the aforementioned screaming customers.  Some people found this whole thing interesting from a sociological perspective, but there were people who did not take kindly to the implication that people who read the sort of books they like are also thieves.  I can see why people would be offended, but we would try to calmly explain that we totally understood their frustration, but knew from repeated experience that if the books were placed on shelves, we wouldn’t have any to sell, and no, we didn’t like that either, but knew that we had customers like them who would be happy to buy from us and wanted to make sure we could meet their needs.  I’d say about ½ the angry people calmed down upon explanation that we were not merely book bigots, but it wasn’t unusual for others to call me choice names and storm out.

In my last year or so of employment, the store cracked down on security and theft definitely declined.  (Prior to that, either the Village Voice or the New York Press named the company as the best to steal from in their annual best of NYC roundup, erroneously claiming that the company didn’t prosecute offenders.)  The thieves we had left were regulars.  They were scary.  Several of them had elaborate return scams.  One of those, who almost made me cry the time I caught him, seemed like he might have a side job in organized crime.  Many others coupled their theft with seemingly rather intense drug addictions.  Another guy was super friendly to cover up the fact that he was in fact robbing us blind, but he was really good at it, so it took ages to catch him out on it, and when he tried to return to me an art book that no one had ever purchased from the store with a fake receipt, it was one of the most tense moments of my life.

I bet those of you who haven’t worked retail didn’t realize it was so fraught with peril, eh?  Thanks for letting me unburden my brushes with the criminal element.  I’ll be sending your therapy invoice to PW for bringing up this whole mess.

July 08, 2011   Lauren   fun, interns, Lauren, opinion, teachers, tradition  
11

Antiquity

GalleyCat beat me to it, but when I saw this piece on the decision to let Indiana schools decide whether or not to teach cursive penmanship, I knew I had to blog about it.  A month or so ago, over a couple beers, a client and I got into a conversation on this very subject.  We were talking about our habits as students, and it suddenly dawned on us that school children might not be taught script anymore.  Learning JavaScript would probably have more use to them than knowing that an uppercase cursive Q closely resembles a 2.  Unless their names are Quentin or Quinn, they’re probably never going to use one anyway—besides which it’s a hideous letter, so I’d recommend they come up with a creative way around it in their signatures.

As with all questions about what the kids these days know, I base my opinions on surely 100% reliable anecdotal evidence from interns.  It seems every year or two I have to explain something new I assumed they’d know on arrival, so I use them as a gauge of how quickly the world is changing in little ways.  At this point, the majority of them have never photocopied anything before their first day here.  Ever.  I may have discovered my incessant Google habit in college trying to unpack the copious allusions in Paul Muldoon’s “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants,”* but I still spent seemingly half of my college income buying Bobst copy cards.

A few times a year, we have to handwriting test our interns for the odd task that requires handwritten legibility.  You’d be surprised how often I get a stack of 12 subrights contracts all missing the same clause, already signed by a far flung publisher who’d taken 6 months to put pen to paper to begin with on a contract they didn’t even have to draft.  Handwritten contract changes require printing, of course, but I’ve found that whether we want print or script, it can be hard to find even one intern who can write legibly anymore.  There have always been people who never learned or quickly unlearned how to write clearly, but the number of reasons to actually write with pen on paper just isn’t as high when you carry a computer in your pocket everywhere you go.  The number of interns who can be counted on to handwrite a mailing label that we can be confident will arrive at its destination decreases yearly.  The odd scribbled post-it to a roommate isn’t going to keep your penmanship in shape.

I’ve always prided myself on having nice handwriting (my Catholic school-reared mother has penmanship so impeccable that the bar was set very high in my household), but I wonder if Indiana isn’t on to something.  Other than signing our names, how often do most of use cursive?  You’ve got to be able to write clearly somehow, but these days, doesn’t print cut it for most things?  Schools have a finite number of hours to instruct students, and penmanship instruction is probably not getting them anywhere productive.  Yes, sure, they should learn to use a keyboard efficiently as early as possible—perhaps even instruction on predictive text and thumb typing would benefit them.  I say they should get more spelling lessons as well, since the deep recesses of their brains will need reinforcing against the detrimental effects of text speak and internet acronyms.  Let’s truly prepare the kids of today for the world of tomorrow!

What do you think?  Anyone clinging to fond memories of that weird beige paper with really widely spaced lines?  Are there still good uses of cursive?

P.S.  It’s been a quiet week on the blog, between the holiday Monday and three agents being on vacation, but we’ll return you to your regularly scheduled programming next week!  I’m sure you wait with bated breath.

*Nerd that I am, I count among the seminal weeks of my life the one I spent in the computer lab googling phrases in every poem in Quoof trying to figure out what Muldoon was getting at.  It’s what made me realize that the internet knew the answers to virtually everything one might wonder, and it’s the first time I really put a great deal of research time into anything I was studying.  It’s also the week I discovered the internet could lead you down a rabbit hole of fascination, obsession, awe, and disgust at the human condition, since the aforementioned googling led me to the transcripts of the then-ongoing Saville Inquiry.  I basically lived in the computer lab that semester, devouring knowledge the internet could offer me.  Man, I bet the interns don’t even set foot in the computer labs any more, do they?

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