The man known as the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, has been in the news again — or rather, his property has.  The Huffington Post announced that Kaczynski’s 1.4-acre parcel in western Montana is on the block for $69,500.

John Pistelak Realty of Lincoln said that the listing offers potential buyers a chance to own a piece of “infamous U.S. history.”

Kaczynski was a subject of a blog post on the Book Haven awhile ago — on the basis of his writings, not his crime.  Psychologist and French scholar Jean-Marie Apostolidès takes the Unabomber’s anti-technology manifesto very seriously. He tells the story of how he translated the Unabomber’s works into French, and was briefly Kaczynski’s pen pal:

In retrospect, Apostolidès thinks the lawyers wanted him to help certify Kaczynski was insane. Yet, he said, “I’m convinced he has neurotic problems – but no more than anyone else. He has to be judged on his ideas and his deeds.” Our insistence on his insanity may be a way to avoid grappling with that, he said.

In an interview, Apostolidès leaned forward across the desk in his campus office and his voice dropped: “This will shock you. He’s a very nice guy, sweet, open-minded. And I know he has blood on his hands. You cannot be all bad – even if you kill, even Hitler.”

More here.

We have a winner!

According to The Guardian’s Susanna Rustin, literary sex appears to be on the way out.  I say it’s about time.

The cause for the ruminations was this year’s Booker Prize and The Literary Review‘s Bad Sex award a few days ago.  Beating out nominee Tony Blair, novelist Rowan Somerville, author of The Shape of Her, took home the dubious prize with “one killer sentence using the image of a butterfly collector – ‘like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.'”

“He graciously accepted the honour, presented by film director and food critic Michael Winner, saying: ‘There is nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of the entire nation I would like to thank you.’

“The judges were also impressed by his nature notes, such as the pubic hair ‘like desert vegetation following an underground stream’, and the passage: ‘He unbuttoned the front of her shirt and pulled it to the side so that her breast was uncovered, her nipple poking out, upturned like the nose of the loveliest nocturnal animal, sniffing the night. He took it between his lips and sucked the salt from her.'”

If you sense a sort of groping for effect (pun actually not intended), join the club. I think that’s the danger of sex scenes in novels.  They try too hard. I, personally, would have awarded this line alone from Somerville:  “She released his hair from her fingers and twisted onto her belly like a fish flipping itself, her movement so brusque his chin bounced off her head.”

At best, they make sex sound like hard, hard work.  At worst, they come across as parody.  Or simply very, very gross.  For grossity, this bad sex passage from The Literary Review‘s potpourri is enough to chase anyone into celibacy:

It felt to him as if he were tending a delicate weeping wound, and as he probed it with his tongue he heard her moan quietly. Excited by the oysterish intricacy of her he sucked and licked the salty folds until they became sweet …  (Anthony Quinn, The Rescue Man)

Ewwwwwwwww!

Yesterday's hot is today's kitsch

The truth is, nothing dates faster than sex – or rather, its expression.  Look at the cutesie or “exotic” nude postcards of the 1920s, or the squeaky clean coyness and plastic artificiality of G.I. pinup girls in World War II.  I have a feeling all these hot, hot, groaning-and-panting sex scenes in our movies and books are going to cause a lot of yucks for a future generation.  Just like we attach funny captions to those 1920s postcards and laugh at yesterday’s turn-on.  Just like the Bad Sex contestants give us a giggle now.

The contest appears to have had a chilling effect on the Booker prizes, the British equivalent of the Pulitzer:  ‘What was really striking, and we talked about it all the time in the meetings, was how little sex there was,” says biographer Frances Wilson, one of this year’s  judges.

“I thought I was going to have to steel myself to read a lot of sex stuff,” says the chairman of judges, Andrew Motion, “and about halfway through I realised that it wasn’t happening.”

Naturally, prudery is blamed, rather than a resurgence of good taste:

“Adam Thirlwell, whose debut novel, Politics, was a startlingly explicit examination of bedroom manners, believes we are living through ‘a very conservative era’ in literary terms. …

He points out that there is no such thing in a novel as a ‘scene’, and that even by thinking in terms of ‘sex scenes’, both readers and writers are showing the influence of cinema, in which sex is depicted according to a narrow vocabulary bearing the taint of pornography, which is all about visual stimulation and bears little relationship to the questions about language, and the representation of interiority, that novelists should be worrying about.”

Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?

They ignore something else:  I, for one, as a reader am not that terribly curious about the author’s idea of what his or her characters do behind closed doors.  I actually have a pretty vivid imagination.  Most of the time, I feel that the author is indulging his own fantasies, and, while writing, is … how can I put this delicately?

“Australian novelist Christos Tsiolkas goes further, saying that the attacks by some critics on his novel The Slap as being vulgar or pornographic ‘bemuse me as they seem to ignore how much of sexual imagination, particularly male sexual imagination, is now experienced through pornography itself.'”

And that’s what concerns me, as a human being.  I agree with René Girard that we are, to a much larger degree than generally supposed, mimetic creatures.  The one place that had been fairly insulated from imitation was sex — when the bedroom door closed, what happened within remained there. Thanks to our inundation in sex in movies, billboards, advertising, books, people are haunted by the idea that there is something that they are not getting, some fun others are having that they are not, something that some sex counselor, newspaper article, or survey told them they should be doing or feeling.  The one corner for a man (or woman’s) inimitable stamp has now entered the world of the media, marketing, and “branding.”

I don’t find myself agreeing with Naomi Wolf all that often, but this passage in her “The Porn Myth” had something worth pondering, as she recalled a conversation she had with a student at Northwestern, after she had talked about the effect of porn on relationships.

“Why have sex right away?” a boy with tousled hair and Bambi eyes was explaining. “Things are always a little tense and uncomfortable when you just start seeing someone,” he said. “I prefer to have sex right away just to get it over with. You know it’s going to happen anyway, and it gets rid of the tension.”“Isn’t the tension kind of fun?” I asked. “Doesn’t that also get rid of the mystery?”

“Mystery?” He looked at me blankly. And then, without hesitating, he replied: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Sex has no mystery.”

How much for the lady in the window?

I hold in my hands  a slim, attractive book of a little over 100 pages.  The well- (but not lavishly) illustrated paperback costs 50 bucks.

The reason:  it includes art reproductions. No, I’m not talking about the cost of 4-color reproduction, special shiny paper, et cetera.  These images are reproduced on regular paper stock.

Over a quick dinner at the Stanford Faculty Club, the author told me that his small publisher had to fork out $25,000 in royalties to secure 30 images for a press run of 1,000 books.  That’s $25 per book for artwork, before you even factor in the costs of reproduction.  Nearly $1,000 per image.

Nor are we talking about spanking new artwork, fresh from SF-MOMA, or the need of starving artists to buy kitty litter for their cats.  These are all old paintings — some several thousand years old.  They are all in the public domain.

Basically, it’s the photo rights monopolies like Bridgman Art Library and the museums who own the paintings and charge though the nose. These controlling entities make using full color photos in books prohibitively expensive. Especially for books put out by the shoestring academic presses. You are paying for their images of the images — and no, you can’t go to the museum and take your own snap.

Our current copyright mess is not, of course, confined to images.  Words get pretty messy too.  For my own book, An Invisible Rope, which should be out within days, I had to pony up to more than four different organizations for rights to republish a small handful of poems, poems excerpts, and a few chunks of letters:  HarperCollins in the U.S., Penguin in the U.K., the Andrew Wylie Agency in New York, the Andrew Wylie Agency in London, and as a few others as well.  Andrew Wylie (nicknamed “the Jackal”) is, of course, notorious for his tough dealings and arrogance (no, I don’t know much about his latest electronic deals and can’t comment).  I have to say my dealings with the Wylie Agency — for three books now — have been unfailingly cordial, professional, and fair.  I have nothing but good things to say about Wylie.  Nevertheless, I was in some cases paying for translators to cite poems they themselves had translated.  In other cases, I was paying to cite iconic poems that are already all over the internet.

Ouch!

Our whole copyright law is screwy, and my own book (as well as my friend’s) demonstrates it.  (See Carol Shloss of James Joyce lawsuit saga fame for a true horror story — copyrights controlled by one whack job destroyed a generation of Joyce scholarship.) Copyright is not designed for heirs to control what scholars say about an artist or author — even though that’s how it’s been used by the Joyce Estate and the Ted Hughes/Sylvia Plath Estate, and others.  Nor should it be legalized extortion.  Rather, it is to protect the financial interest in an artists’ works.  So, say, on a Lescaux cave drawing or an Ptolemaic mural — whose interests are being protected?  My own limited use of poems will not damage anyone’s pockets — in fact, I sincerely hope it will increase interest in Czesław Miłosz‘s oeuvre.

However, this impoverished writer is feeling lucky, after a dinner with the author, that she only had to shell out several hundred bucks for permissions (though it came out of my own pocket, not my hardscrabble publisher’s).

Postscript on 12/5: More thoughts from the worldwide web:

The incomparable jazz scholar Ted Gioia wrote at Facebook:

Yes, this is all too true. In many instances, the person who has the rights to the images included in a book makes more money than the author.

And Blogger Art Durkee wrote over at Books Inq., where this post was linked:

I’ve been to several museums lately, and mostly they let you make non-flash photographs of their permanent collections, for personal or scholarly use. But they make you pay through the nose for any commercial use. It’s partly about control, yes, but it’s also partly about making money from their collection. It’s an interesting conundrum. The copyright control of the aspect is actually fairly open-ended, and perhaps more open to question than they would lead us to believe.

The Shah of Blah celebrated being in “a great bookstore” last night, and lamented he had “never made it to Kepler’s before.”

“I am delighted to finally find my way to Menlo Park.”

Delighted to be in – what?  Menlo Park?  At Kepler’s?  Salman Rushdie, who has lived in London, Bombay, and New York looks forward to quietly signing books for a hundred people in this polite little burg?

Clearly, this was not the abrasive Salman Rushdie I remember from 2008.  Was there the sort of metaphysical body switch one might find in his latest book Luka and the Fire of Life?  Even the voice was different:  The word choice was distinctly British, but the accent softer, Americanized.  There wasn’t a bodyguard in sight.  He was nothing but charm and affability.  (I wrote about the recent kerfuffle with Jon Stewart and the Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam here and here and here.

Luka and the Fire of Life was written for his son Milan.  His older son advised Rushdie:  “Dad, don’t write novels. Write series.”

“It is very good commercial advice.”  He didn’t take it.  It was more than two decades between his first children’s fantasy, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and the sequel. 

What motivates him to “make it new”? “A low boredom threshold,” he said.  “Repetition is the most boring thing in the world for me.”

Here are my notes as he answered questions from the audience:

Are Western audiences missing a lot of the cultural references?

“They’re missing something, sure, but they’re all still sitting here,” he said, indicating the audience.  Polite Menlo Park laughter.

He noted that William Faulkner is now popular in India; apparently, “what they’re getting is enough.”

We lose cultural references not only in space, but in time, he said.  Tolstoy, for example, is full of references that are lost to a 21^st century audience.

But still, he said, it’s fine if only one-and-a-half billion people get it – “merely one-fifth of the human race.  So it’s kind of a private joke.”  More polite laughter.

How long has he been writing books?

“Books that got published?  Since 1975.  I was writing before that – just nobody liked it.

How did he move from unpublished to published?

“I started to write better books.”  It took “12 and a half years getting it wrong.”

“I’m grateful my earlier efforts never saw the light of day,” he said – it’s the   advantage of being a novelist over a playwright.  “You can make your mistakes in private.”

But a play’s not alive till it’s performed.  “You’re naked, vulnerable in front of an audience.”

Are his books autobiographical?

Writing from the borderland (Photo: Mae Ryan)

“People are always asking if the characters in my book are autobiographical,” he said, noting it was any novelist’s most-frequently asked question. “It means I must have had one helluva life.”

He recalled giving opposite answers to this question to journalists in the same city, on the same day.  When the responses were published at the same time, “nobody even noticed.”

He also commented on the longing of readers to be in the book.  He recalled meeting a “very grand” lady covered in jewelry and carrying a fan.  She swatted him with the fan, and accused him of representing her in his book. “Naughty boy!  Never mind.  I forgive you.”  He replied to no avail: “Madam, you have to accept that this is the first time I have ever laid eyes on you.”

“I don’t know why you’re going on about it.  I said I forgive you,” she replied haughtily.

On roots

“The place you land is not the place you start from.”

Rushdie said that we live in a world where “everyone knows everything within ten seconds.”  But he recalled growing up in a slower world in India, where communication was pretty much left to the radio and newspaper.

He commented on “the individual in the world to whom the idea of roots is not important — not uprooted, but who moves around in the world without a sense of belonging.”

“We have privileged roots and the idea of belonging in our culture,” he said. “Other ideas are not given air time, except in art,” where we often celebrate the outcast, the voyager, the cowboy, the adventurer. “Official culture says, ‘Stay home.’”

On imagination and reality

“Things cross between imagination and reality,” he said, noting that we live among “things even our grandparents would have found ridiculously fanciful – airplanes, cellphones.”  (Well, his grandparents perhaps.  Mine whizzed about in airplanes.)

“Before you can make a wheel, you have to imagine a wheel.  The world begins in imagination and move into reality.”

“I wanted to write about that borderland.”

And not a word about the fatwa.

Not only is Why the West Rules — for Now the bedside reading of Niall Ferguson, but The Economist has just named Ian Morris‘s weighty tome  as one of the top books of 2010:  “An entertaining and plausible book by a British historian at Stanford University that shows how debates about the rise of China or the fall of the West are ultimately a sideshow, as nature will bite back savagely at human society.”  (We wrote about it here and here.)

The Economist reviewed the book last October:  “Ian Morris, a polymathic Stanford University professor of classics and history, has written a remarkable book that may come to be as widely read as Paul Kennedy’s 1987 work, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.”

Also receiving The Economist‘s best-of-the-year praise — in fact, right above the Why the West Rules, is Timothy Snyder‘s Bloodlands: “How Stalin and Hitler enabled each other’s crimes and killed 14m people between the Baltic and the Black Sea. A lifetime’s work by a Yale University historian who deserves to be read and reread.”  (Bloodlands was discussed on The Book Haven a few weeks ago, with Norman Naimark‘s Stalin’s Genocides, and again here.)

In the spirit of Morris’s book, if you’d like to watch ten centuries roll by in five minutes — click “play” below.  We think it’s kind of fun.

Archaeologist Morris digs for the secrets of the ages

Foreign Policy has published its Second Annual Top 100 Global Thinkers List — “a unique portrait of 2010’s global marketplace of ideas and the thinkers who make them” — and there are inevitably some surprises.

The one that pleased us most is that nestled in Niall Ferguson‘s recommended reading list of three books (Ferguson comes in at #80) —  Ian Morris‘s Why the West Rules — For Now.  We’ve written about Morris, the man who knows everything, here and here.

Other names mentioned in these pages appear on the list — Christopher Hitchens, Liu Xiaobo, Mario Vargas Llosa, Clay Shirky, David Grossman.  Ayaan Hirsi Ali made the cut, and so, ironically, did the man who has derided her — Ian Buruma finishes the list at #100.  (Tariq Ramadan follows immediately after at #62).  But what’s curious about her blurb is this bizarre understatement:

“The first time you heard about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it was likely the story of a brave Muslim woman fleeing her forced marriage in Somalia to become an outspoken critic of Islam. But her flight didn’t stop there; after more than a decade living in the Netherlands, she left Europe and its painful debates over assimilation for more comfortable ground: conservative America.”

Well, no.  Not quite.  They neglect to mention that she fled Holland because a fatwa called for her death, her colleague Theo van Gogh was murdered, and the Netherlands not only failed to protect her, but turned on her, questioning her immigration status. Big difference.

Why did no one at Foreign Policy flag this boo boo?  I guess all the copy editors have been laid off.