• The Sydney Morning-Herald examines the disparity between male and female writers, suggesting that female novelists outrank male novelists. Unfortunately, they base their conclusions on a survey from a print-on-demand publisher. Much as I’d love to hear that this news was real, I’d believe this claim if (a) the Morning-Herald had gone to the trouble of sifting through the hard data to corrooborate it, (b) a URL to the survey was listed or linked from the article, (c) the Morning-Herald had actually questioned the results instead of blindly accepting them from a publisher (rather than, say, a statistician). The chart in question can be found here, but it groups bestsellers together by decade, rather than by year or even week. Further, its blue male-centric arc travels downward all the way into the 2120s, basing this prediction on only fifty years of data. Is this another case of old media being bamboozled by new media? And why was SM-J reporter John Ezard so easily duped? [RELATED: Galleycat has some fun with Lulu’s graphics and notes that the Book Standard was also taken in by this “survey.”]
• Editorial wunderkind Jonathan Karp is moving over to Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers publisher Jamie Raab said, “We’re hiring him because we believe he can do what he set out to do, so he’s going to have a great deal of control. But nobody gets total control. We’re part of a corporate culture, and everybody has some controls placed on them.” Ms. Rabb then proceeded to unveil a leash and several buttons that had been surgically implanted into Mr. Karp’s skull, which would be used to keep Mr. Karp in his place during his upcoming stint at Warner, lest the uppity bastard get some crazy ideas.
• Poet Stanley Kunitza is still alive! But for how long?
• We were trying to avoid the whole Roman Polanski thing, but now Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham has offered testimony in Polanski’s libel case against Vanity Fair. Lapham was apparently the main source of the tale making the rounds that Polanski hit upon a Scandinavian model on his way to Sharon Tate’s funeral. What next? Robert Gottlieb called in as a character witness?
• If you thought Macrovision was bad, apparently “some countermeasures” have been placed within Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to curb privacy. The countermeasures have not, however, stopped people from revealing the major character who dies at the end of the book.
• No Thanks: Why Your Acknowledgment Page Sucks. (via Maud)
• I’m stunned that anyone would publish what this woman has to say. (via Mark)
• And it looks like the folks in Kansas now have a pornography law on the books. Any material or performance is obscene if “the average person applying contemporary community standards would find that the material or performance, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest” or the average person “has patently offensive representations or descriptions of intercourse or other sex acts.” Further, material or performance is obscene if “a reasonable person would find that the material or performance lacks serious literary, educational, artistic, political or scientific value.” What amuses me the most about this antediluvian approach to legislation is the distinction between “the average person applying contemporary community standards” and “a reasonable person.” Does this imply that the person applying community standards is unreasonable? How then can the law be successfully enforced?

James Wood vs. Dan Green.

“You rely too much on the brain. The brain is the most overrated organ, I think.” — Isaac David, Manhattan

I should say from the onset that I am not chronicling Rebecca Solnit the writer, at least as she presents herself in her text. Rather, I am dwelling specifically upon Solnit the public intellectual, the figure you are likely to encounter at a book reading. Or perhaps this is about Solnit the writer. You see, that’s the way things work in the Solnit universe. Terms are set up, but they merely serve as a needlessly convoluted bypass to Solnit’s vast depository of heavy reading and inventive associations. Basic premises are not followed up or questioned, because the intellectual peanut gallery (in Berkeley, no less) is too busy fawning over just how damn smart Solnit is and how damn articulate she is. Which must count for something if you live a life cloistered from actual feeling and when regular people aren’t nearly as interesting as arcane books intended to be endlessly deconstructed by gray pates.

I should point out that it is not anti-intellectualism that fuels this post. Rather, it is context and dimension. Because anyone who publicly declares herself “the love child of Gary Snyder and Susan Sontag” must be taken to task. Anyone who constantly kveteches about the evils of the right-wing in a completely unrelated tangent while expatiating about a French philosopher must be reconsidered.

There were seven of us, including Tito, Scott and several other nice people, at Cody’s Books. We were there to see Solnit, who lives here in San Francisco and has written eight books, including a microhistory called Wanderlust. The latest book is A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which was germinated by a fair enough premise: How to go about finding something unknown to you? Solnit, a self-described cultural historian and activist, was dressed in a close-fitting grey leather jacket, a black top, black jeans, and a faded pink scarf embedded with thin white stripes that suggested an explorer motif. She had a very large head on a very petite body. She stared at the crowd with enormous owl-like eyes that blinked in mechanical measure just above a slight aquiline nose. She had blonde hair with a slight shock of grey, suggesting Sontag’s famous white streak, just above her right temple.

I liked her best when she was mispronouncing French terms. I liked her best when she drifted away from lecture mode. She was better slinging unexpected malapropisms. Because this insinuated a well-read and potentially down-to-earth person with a self-deprecating sense of humor. A human who might just communicate with the layman or, if not that, anyone with a bit of a brain. A human who might be viscerally as well as intellectually lost.

Unfortunately, when Solnit read, the hauteur was laid thick. There was a pompous and elitist New England intonation when she read from her pages that suggested the worst aspects of NPR. It did not help matters that she would follow her sentences with a deep sniff, as if expecting to engage in an obnoxious breathing contest with Parisian intellectuals.

Never mind that what she read was quite interesting. First, she noted the history of maps, pointing out how Las Vegas was developing so fast that it required a new map every month so that parcels could be delivered and residences could be found. She referened terra incognita and referred to San Francisco as the mysterious island attached to North America. But when she read and when she lectured, it sounded like some soporific narration from the Discovery Channel. This may have had something to do with the microphone volume, which meant hunching close to the mike so that the folks in the back could hear.

But it also may very well be that Solnit is too institutionalized to see the real world. After all, she did refer to Novato, the city where a good deal of my extended family lives, as the “redneck part of Marin.” Never mind that an average home there goes for $366,921.

Solnit confessed that she “had a lot of fun with tangled tangential narratives” when writing the book. I’ve had a lot of fun with terms that are too intricate to vocalize myself, but you wouldn’t catch me announcing such an unfortunate phrase in public. And she described the sensation of being lost, only to describe how she perceived the color blue and her take on country music. During eight rounds of questions, I kept my hand patiently raised, wanting to ask her how settling on pure constructs and ideas actually led to one genuinely being lost. After all, wasn’t the idea of being lost visceral? Didn’t it involve letting the mind go and, if returning to a terrain, recapturing the initial lost feeling you felt when first discovering it? If one knew the intellectual terrain, then the sensation of being lost was, to my mind, emotionally challenged.

But Solnit, perhaps seeing my wry smile, passed. Even when Tito tried to get Solnit to remark on how her sensation of San Francisco compared to Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Solnit evaded the issue, preferring to expatiate on another subject, rather than convene with another thinking mind who wanted to understand where she was coming from.

Here were some of the pronouncements uttered midway through Solnit’s responses:

• “The self is a trauma” without any real elaboration on this idea.
• “Socrates always wins, even though he’s so annoying.”
• A brief allusion to a “punk rock youth,” presumably to establish streetcred.

Solnit also made reference to being “cross-examined” on a hour-long radio show (“a weird interview”) shortly before her hegira to safety and unquestioning mass acceptance across the Bay. The radio show hosts in question had dared to ask Solnit about what she intended by the title.

The Berkeley liberal crowd ate Solnit up like a rock star. One almost expected them to touch Solnit’s hem when she was done. A father asked Solnit how he could instill the spirit of “being lost” within offspring. Call me crazy, but parenting advice from a deconstructionist is never a sound proposition. One woman declared that in light of Solnit’s ability to get lost in her native environment, she couldn’t “possibly imagine how you’d get lost on an exotic cantina!” Another commented upon how “musical” Solnit’s voice was, presumably confusing hollow etherealness for an actual key.

Solnit’s strategy seemed to be to evade any question asked of her, throwing in a Walter Benjamin reference or two, and speaking without so much as an “uh” or “ah.” Although again, there were plenty of prerigged sniffs.

Rather interestingly, Solnit had been told by some unknown representative that she needed to repeat all questions and flattering remarks to her bookstore audience.

The book, incidentally, had been padded out because Solnit’s editor told her that a handful of chapters was not long enough to sell her book. So four chapters, chronicling “The Blue of Distance” were inserted among Solnit’s ruminations upon the issue of being lost.

But my general conclusion was that the real person who was lost was Solnit herself, no matter what her strengths on paper. Perhaps more than she knew.

[RELATED: Scott Esposito’s account of the event. Also, Tito offers a Consumer Reports-style comparison of the Ames and Solnit readings.]

[UPDATE: Mere Observation wonders if I’m being “too assholian” with this post. Again, I was very clear to explain from the onset that my opinion reflected Solnit’s public persona — a valid perspective, given that Solnit went out of her way to compare herself with one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. To refrain from anything less than an honest assessment here would be to serve injustice upon what I experienced. Nor was I completely negative in my depiction, as I’m sure the above will attest. However, in hindsight, I should point out that I find myself willing to subscribe more towards Scott’s view, which laid the onus at the crowd.]

Ask Yahoo looks into the origin of “peanut gallery” — a term that I’ve been enamored by over the years, perhaps because the idea of happy elephants enjoying a show (itself a fixation that goes back to my love of the film Fantasia) has always appealed to me. Not that I associate cheaper seats with elephants or anything, but this term that has always played tricks on my associative mind.

In any event, Ask Yahoo claims that the term predates Howdy Doody, dating back to 1888 in American theatres. The theory making the rounds is that people who sat in cheap seats often ate peanuts. But if I have a hunch this isn’t entirely correct. If these cheaper seats were the cost of “peanuts,” then it’s also possible that the “peanut gallery” may have come into popularity from this slang defintion. In the case of a theatre, a gallery is a roofed promenade or a long passage. So we’re talking about “peanuts” that were either fixed in place (as in seats for “peanuts”) or the sitting nature of theatregoers who were eating peanuts.

The question here is whether or not the affluent theatregoers actually went out of their way to crane their heads at people eating peanuts, or whether the “peanuts,” so to speak, drew attention to themselves:

The Word Detective weighs in with this:

The topmost tier (what we would call “the nosebleed seats” today) was the gallery, where the less affluent patrons ended up. Many of these folks were not shy about expressing their opinions when they found the performance lacking, and often employed the peanuts they bought to munch as handy missiles to get the actors’ attention. Thus, “peanut gallery” gradually took on its figurative meaning of “rowdy rabble.”

No doubt peanuts themselves were as noisy to eat back then as they are now, with considerable shell-cracking to boot. But there doesn’t seem to be anything I can find that corroborates what was served back then. If anyone is an expert on snacks that were served in theatres before the turn of the century, I’d definitely be curious to hear from them.

It is worth noting that peanuts were quite popular in the 1890s. George Washington Carver promoted the peanut as a replacement for the cotton crop, which had been decimated by the weevil. Only a decade or so later, all sorts of devices had been created to harvest peanuts in droves. So the transplant of the Brazilian nut must have taken a major hold upon both American life and, accordingly, American language.