Summer Reading

Ahhh . . . summer reading!

Here are some lists to get you started:

• NPR's Critics' Lists: Summer 2008
• ALA's Summer Reading and Learning
  for Children
• UC Berkeley's Summer Reading Lists
• Salon.com's suggestions for thrillers, chick lit, and memoirs

Photo: "Book on the Beach," by Michaeljohn, at http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaeljohn/165934384/

Found in a Book

AbeBooks conducted a little survey where it asked its booksellers to identify the most surprising things they have found inside books.

The answers are amazing: "Thousands of dollars, a Christmas card signed by Frank Baum, a Mickey Mantle rookie baseball card, a marriage certificate from 1879, a baby’s tooth, a diamond ring and a handwritten poem by Irish writer Katharine Tynan Hickson are just some of the stranger objects . . .."

For more on these bibliographic discoveries, see Found in Books.

50 Greatest Parodies of Commercials

Nerve has listed videos of the 50 Greatest Commercial Parodies of All Time. We're delighted to discover that Saturday Night Live's ad for the Bass-o-matic with Dan Ackroyd (1976, pictured above) is listed No. 1.

The beauty of these parodies is that they cut to the bone of the various advertising genres that have assaulted us through the years.

50 Good Web Sites & Web Applications

EduChoices has posted an article titled 50 of the Most Dependable Web Resources for University Students, which lists 25 good web sites for research and 25 free web apps that help students organize their work.

The 5o selections are a great starting place, with this caveat: EduChoices includes some online encyclopedias among the web sites, and we would remind students that it's not a good idea to include general encyclopedias among one's research for college-level work. The appropriate use of general encyclopedia articles is during the initial phase of research when deciding upon a topic's viability.

Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy

The Metropolitan Museum of Art curates the online exhibit Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy.

An introduction to the exhibit says,

"Since the first appearance of Superman in 1938, the superhero has exercised a powerful influence over our collective imagination, serving as avatars or conduits for our hopes, dreams, and desires. . . .Fashion not only shares the superhero’s metaphoric malleability, but actually embraces and responds to the particular metaphors that the superhero represents, notably that of the power of transformation."

The exhibit explores connections between the fashionable body and the superhero body, and runs through September 1. Sections of it seem especially relevant to this summer's movie releases of Iron Man ("the armored body") and The Incredible Hulk ("the virile body"). Pictured above, "the graphic body."

Oddest Book Title of the Year

The book If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs, by an American writing as Big Boom, won The Bookseller's Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year.

Runner-up titles include I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen (second place) and Cheese Problems Solved (third place).

You can read more about the 30th annual Bookseller prize on its web site.

Excellent Links

Five days a week, we receive an automated email from Very Short List, an email that gives us a single internet link with a little description and background. Very Short List is a free service "that points to excellent new (and sometimes vintage) entertainment and media that haven’t been hyped to within an inch of their lives. Each weekday, we tell our subscribers about a single recommended gem from among the vast pile of feature films and documentaries (in theatres and on DVD), television shows, novels, nonfiction books, magazine articles, Websites and services, CDs, radio programs, and more."

None of us need more junk in our in-boxes--this is a little email that is never junk.

A Widget We Love

BombayTV is an online widget which allows users to add their own subtitles to clips from classic Bollywood films. The possibilities are endless.

Take a look at this movie made by Rob Koelling for his English classes:

Ian Fleming Centenary

Today marks the centenary of Ian Fleming, writer and creator of James Bond (28 May 1908).

If your travels take you to London in the coming year, we recommend the first-ever exhibition dedicated to the life and work of Ian Fleming--For Your Eyes Only, at the Imperial War Museum.

Our Department of Dubious Honors notes that Devil May Care, a new James Bond book has been commissioned by Ian Fleming Publications Ltd., written by Sebastian Faulks, and will be released today.

We recommend you return to the originals by Ian Fleming. As John Cawelti and Bruce Rosenberg say, "no other writer so simply and forcefully expresses the basic formulaic structure of the heroic spy romance."

Recommended links:

• Ian Fleming Centre
• Ian Fleming Centenary
  

Dashiell Hammett

Today marks the anniversary of Dashiell Hammett's birth, 27 May 1894. Author of enduring American classics such as The Maltese Falcon, Hammett was a master of American style.

Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley; it doesn’t have to stay there forever, but it was a good idea to begin by getting as far as possible from Emily Post’s idea of how a well-bred debutante gnaws a chicken wing. He wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street.

Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. He had style, but his audience didn’t know it, because it was in a language not supposed to be capable of such refinements. They thought they were getting a good meaty melodrama written in the kind of lingo they imagined they spoke themselves. It was, in a sense, but it was much more. All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech. Hammett’s style at its worst was almost as formalized as a page of Marius the Epicurean; at its best it could say almost anything. I believe this style, which does not belong to Hammett or to anybody, but is the American language (and not even exclusively that any more), can say things he did not know how to say or feel the need of saying. In his hands it had no overtones, left no echo, evoked no image beyond a distant hill. He is said to have lacked heart, yet the story he thought most of himself is the record of a man’s devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hardboiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before. --Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder," (1944, our emphasis)

Recommended links:

• PBS's American Masters page for Hammett
• Video of Richard Layman's lecture at the Library of Congress to mark the 75th anniversary of the publication of The Maltese Falcon (57 mins.)