According to Page Six, researchers wishing to learn more about Norman Mailer’s sex life–and why would anyone would want to do that?–can contact Harvard:

The storied Ivy League institution - where the Pulitzer-winning author received a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering - has purchased a treasure trove of books, papers and letters relating to Mailer from his longtime mistress, Carole Mallory, including X-rated descriptions of their red-hot bedroom sessions.

“There’s a 20-page sex scene from an unpublished memoir I wrote called ‘Making Love With Norman,’ ” Mallory told Page Six. “It’s very steamy. Norman was a real man and he knew what he was doing.”

Mallory, who carried on with Mailer during his marriage to sixth wife Norris Church, maintained a sense of decorum about the affair:

“I thought I should wait until his passing before releasing any of it out of respect to his family,” Mallory said.

Norris Church, of course, is still alive. 

If the purple passages of The Castle in the Forest are anything to go by, I’d suggest keeping the papers under lock and key to protect unawary undergraduates.

Once in a while I read something that just seems so, well, I don’t know what, but my opinion of it would seem so obvious that writing a caustic (or, less often, constructive) comment just seems redundant. But duty compels me, and so I persevere.

The use of children’s books as educational tools isn’t new, of course. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing. I do worry that some people believe educational value is the most important component of all children’s books (they should be more than manuals), but I’m sure we all agree on the kinds of things that children’s books should teach, right? Good manners, good citizenship, self-reliance, the importance of a flat tummy and a straight nose and big breasts…. If we use children’s books as educational tools, they’re sometimes going to be used as propaganda, too.

Michael Salzhauer, a Bal Harbor, Florida-based plastic surgeon, has written a children’s book to help parents prepare their kids for mommy’s changed body. And teaching children to cope with their mom’s poor self-image, of course, prepares them to one day have poor self-images of their very own. Touching, isn’t it? From the AP (”Book takes on mommy’s plastic surgery“):

Illustrations show a crook-nosed mom with loose tummy skin under her half shirt picking up her young daughter early from school one day and taking her to a strapping and handsome “Dr. Michael.”

Mom explains she’s going to have operations on her nose and tummy and may have to take it easy for a week or so. The girl asks if the operations will hurt, and mom replies, “Maybe a little,” warning she’ll look different after the bandages come off.

The girl asks: “Why are you going to look different?”

Mom responds: “Not just different, my dear - prettier!”

My Beautiful Mommy is available through Big Tent, a fee-based publisher.

(Thanks, Corey!)

Q. Why isn’t there an FAQ for modern poetry?

A. There is. From Salon (”Why Don’t Modern Poems Rhyme, Etc.” by Robert Pinsky):

9. Well, I like poetry that is amusing, that maybe makes me chuckle a little. I’d rather read something reassuring and light than something complicated or gloomy. Is that bad? Does that mean I am a jerk?

Yes.

Signet is so over Cassie Edwards. From the Boston Globe (”Romance writer, publisher split up over plagiarism claims,” by Hillel Italie):

NEW YORK—Romance writer Cassie Edwards and publisher Signet Books have decided to break up after allegations emerged in January that in she lifted passages in several of her books from other sources.

“Signet has conducted an extensive review of all its Cassie Edwards novels and due to irreconcilable editorial differences, Ms. Edwards and Signet have mutually agreed to part ways,” the publisher said in a statement Friday.

“Cassie Edwards novels will no longer be published with Signet Books. All rights to Ms. Edwards’ previously published Signet books have reverted to the author.”

Over at Under the Covers, Lisa Chellman is trendspotting (and I’m reproducing her list, with links to the books we’ve reviewed):

1. The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
2. The Secret Life of Sparrow Delaney
3. The Puzzling World of Winston Breen
4. The Daring Adventures of Penhaligon Brush
5. The Very Ordered Existence of Merilee Marvelous
6. The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp
7. The Invisible Rules of the Zoe Lama
8. The Secret Identity of Devon Delaney
9. The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio
10. The Virtual Life of Lexie Diamond
11. The Secret History of Tom Truehart
12. The Amazing Flight of Darius Frobisher
13. The Loud Silence of Francine Green
14. The Marvelous Misadventures of Fun-Boy
15. The Secret Blog of Raisin Rodriguez
16. The Silver Spoon of Solomon Snow
17. The Midnight Diary of Zoya Blume
18. The Rising Star of Rusty Nail
19. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
20. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing

I love this stuff. Be sure to visit Chellman’s blog to see her funny suggestions for classics retitled according to this formula. I suppose if I were to retitle the book I just finished reading, it would be The Prickly Ruminations of Paul Theroux.

(Thanks, Dan!)

Remember Thomas Kohnstamm? Well, he’s in the news again. His claims that Lonely Planet guides are not entirely trustworthy have irked a number of people, including, er, Lonely Planet. On their site, they address his charges, although they respond to one of his biggest complaints in a fairly vague manner:

5. Thomas claims he was not paid enough by Lonely Planet to do the job without shortcuts. While we ask a lot of our authors, we lead the industry in the fees we pay, and are committed to a yearly review of author fees. 

Yes, but what if no one in the travel-guide industry pays their correspondents enough to do a thorough job? Wouldn’t that be an interesting story? (And hardly unimaginable: many freelancing gigs pay so poorly that they rely on the notion of writers doing the work for free/for fun/for their resumes….)

There’s plenty of chatter at the Lonely Planet forums.

BBC, which owns 75% of Lonely Planet, reports on the foofaraw (”Lonely Planet rebuts ‘fake’ claim“), and–hey, this is interesting:

Other travel writers, while not endorsing Mr Kohnstamm’s methods, said he was reporting genuine failures in the travel-writing industry - that writers are poorly paid, have to cover their own costs, and were expected to check a vast amount of detail.

As for myself, when Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? came across my desk, I had a strong feeling of deja vu, given that I had recently published a short story about a Hunter S. Thompson-wannabe travel writer (”If You Should Have Any Need at All“) in the Chicago Reader last December.

I’ve avoided mentioning the latest Harry Potter news–primarily because my fingers fight back when I try to type “J. K. Rowling”–but I must force them to obey. If you haven’t been following it, Rowling and Warner Brothers are suing tiny publisher RDR Books for RDR’s plan to publish Steven Vander Ark’s book, The Harry Potter Lexicon, based on his website of the same name.

RDR claims they’re operating in the long-lived tradition of literary companions, while Rowling calls it “wholesale theft.” RDR says they’ve paid the author a tiny advance for a small print run; Rowling clearly feels it sets a dangerous precedent.

Reasonable people, of course, can disagree on these matters, although reasonable people also might feel that a billionaire author could find some accommodation with a thousandaire publisher and an author who is quite clearly one of the author’s biggest fans. Pottermania would have happened without The Harry Potter Lexicon, of course, but it’s precisely that kind of effort that helped the phenomenon along.

But this besieged billionaire now finds herself forced to leave her castle and defend her very right to earn a living. The stress of fending off earnest lexicographers has forced the juggernaut of youth fantasy fiction to a standstill (”Rowling Testifies against Lexicon Author,” by Anemona Hartocollis, New York Times):

It has been so difficult, she said, that her normal writing life has been all but paralyzed by “stress and heartache.”

“It has really decimated the demands of my creative work for the last month,” she testified, at least once stoically holding back tears as she talked about the Potter books as if they were her children.

“You lose the threads, you worry if you’ll ever be able to pick them up again,” she said.

Really, Ms. Hartocollis, stoically?

And now Ms. Rowling is making Mr. Vander Ark, a former librarian, cry (”Sued by Harry Potter’s Creator, Lexicographer Breaks Down on the Stand,” by Anemona Hartocollis, NYT):

Then he burst out crying. “Sorry,” he said, regaining his composure. “It’s been difficult because there’s been a lot of criticism, obviously, and that was never the intention.”

It was an emotional culmination to three hours of testimony in which Mr. Vander Ark gushed over Ms. Rowling and her work like the devoted fan that he claimed to be, and disarmingly preceded almost every answer to a question with an “Um.”

One of RDR’s lawyers makes a reasonable guess as to why Rowling is really pulling out the hammer and tongs (”Rowling to Testify in Trial Over Potter Lexicon,” by Motoko Rich, NYT):

David Hammer, another lawyer representing RDR Books, said he believed that Ms. Rowling was acting out of vanity. “She wants to be the only one to write this encyclopedia about Harry Potter,” he said. “She’s determined to write it, and she doesn’t want competitors.”

But, personally, based on the following remark, I think it boils down to aesthetics:

She also objected to what she called the book’s “facetious asides,” like a comment about whether Hagrid could fit into a booth at McDonald’s.

“I think it’s dire,” she said. “I think it’s atrocious.”

Another day, another apology for another day without posting. Having recovered from my malicious bot attack, I’m now trying to recover from a software update. Careful readers will have noticed that, while the blog’s search function started working again yesterday, an error message was appearing, and now many archived posts seem to be colonized with gibberish.

Actually, I have to take the blame for some of the gibberish, but there still are some odd symbols showing up. We’re going to get that cleaned up, but in the meantime, the blog must go on.

I didn’t post yesterday because I was busy working on something for Booklist’s May 15 Spotlight on SF/Fantasy–a core collection of apocalyptic fiction that preceded The Road. Whew! I may as well have chosen SF that involves space travel, or fantasy that features scaly beasts. I’m exaggerating, of course, but (and I’m quoting myself in advance here):

the idea of the end of the world is hardly new. In fact, as we revisit the apocalyptic works that paved the way for this modern classic, we find that, for writers, the end of the world is practically an annual occurrence.

Rimshot!

Here’s a sneak peek at the shortlist. I’ll be doing a web-only version (or, if you prefer, “Booklist Online Exclusive”) that’s much, much longer.

The Bible

Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart (1949)

I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson (1954)

On the Beach, by Nevil Shute (1957)

A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)

The Stand, by Stephen King (1978)

Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban (1980)

Fiskadoro, by Denis Johnson (1985)

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood (2003)

The Pesthouse, by Jim Crace (2007)

(OK, The Pesthouse came out after the road, but I had to put it on there anyway, since Crace couldn’t have McCarthy while he was writing it.)

Arnost Lustig has won the Franz Kafka Prize. Details are sketchy, but it is reported that the Czech will take home a $10,000 check (or, if you prefer, cheque). You might think that there’s some favoritism at work here, but, in the eight-year history of the prize, Lustig is only the second Czech to win it.

The prize, though prestigious, carries with it a unique burden. Previous winners report recurring nightmares of living in a bureaucratic and impersonal world, and also persistent sensations of having undergone unsavory transmogrifications. But, even for prize-winning authors, writing can sometimes be a trial.