Several unexpected obligations and occurrences over the weekend (resulting in lack of sleep) pretty much derailed my update plans and I’m still catching up. But I hope to get the final BEA post, the latest Tanenhaus watch, and my thoughts on the book-length version of James Kuntsler’s The Long Emergency up in the next few days. In the meantime, I’ve posted a writeup of the book I nominated for the LBC.
Author / DrMabuse
Quick Bites
- Which famous modern American poet are you? (Me: Sylvia Plath, apparently.) (via Gwenda)
- There’s an interesting niche blog, Living with Legends, which caters to books for residents of the Hotel Chelsea. This is a nice supplement to the literary map of Manhattan.
- The new Bookslut issue is up and there’s a good interview with Jon Scieszka.
- Still behind on email backlog. Bear with me.
- And my final BEA post should go up sometime this weekend (I hope).
Another Tragic Biography?
Blake Bailey, the author of the Richard Yates A Tragic Honesty who inspired a drinking game here earlier in the year, has a new John Cheever biography coming out. The Boston Globe caught up with Bailey. Thanks to a $42,000 Guggenheim fellowship, Bailey says he plans to spend the next two years explaining how Cheever arrived at his tombstone. (Bailey has until December 2007 to deliver the manuscript.) Which suggests an equally arduous and equally moribund biography of another great writer. But Bailey says that he plans to approach Cheever’s life as “a redemptive fable.” Bailey has already talked to half of his 150 sources and read all 28 volumes of Cheever’s private journals.
McGraw Hill: When Will They Learn?
In 2003, Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police chronicled the often ridiculous lengths that school textbook publishers resort to not to offend anyone. For example, according to some of the mandates, a dinosaur can’t be mentioned because this implies the theory of evolution. Further, no stories or pictures of a mother cooking dinner are allowed because this reinforces a stereotype. (Unsurprisingly, many of these ideas, which involve preposterous gender-neutral rephrasings of questions and promoting abstinence over contraception, were whipped up by McGraw-Hill. One professor, Sean G. Massey, was so furious that he initiated a boycott.)
As if publishing approaches to school textbooks wasn’t absurd enough, McGraw-Hill is now hoping to target children in Canada with ads placed within their textbooks. The Toronto Star reports that McGraw-Hill has been “quietly trying to coax companies into buying advertising space in their texts.”
McGraw-Hill has a history of doing this. In 1999, a McGraw-Hill mathematics textbook featured an equation asking students to figure out how much money they needed to save to buy a pair of Nikes. The outcry resulted in AB 116, banning commercial images in public school textbooks in California.
Hopefully, the Canadians might take a cue from this.
House Kills Public Television Funding
A House subcommittee has voted to cut all federal funds for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting within two years. That’s $400 million a year, comparative chump change in the federal budget, to destroy a broadcasting conduit that offers educational and alternative programming to the public.
These creeps truly want the public to remain uneducated. Super Bowl, yes. Sesame Street and Frontline, no.