Welcome to our podcast! Looks like this is your first time here - you may want to subscribe to ourRSS feed - it'll keep you up to date with our latest shows. Thanks for dropping by - and don't be a stranger!

Thanks to Dawn Endico on Flickr for the photo.

This week Litopia After Dark is delighted to welcome back Martyn Daniels, fresh from the Frankfurt Book Fair.  We take full advantage of his ringside view and ask the question everyone is asking… how were the parties?

A new book by Roy Blount Jr has just been published – Alphabet Juice (with nearly the longest subtitle in publishing history).  Blount contends that “through centuries of intimate contact with the human body, some words have absorbed the uncanny power to carry the ring of truth.”  We try to put our finger on the hidden language of words, particularly as it applies to peoples’ names - both your own, and those of your characters.

A fascinating article in this week’s New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert recounts the life of etiquette-guru Emily Post: it all began with a major scandal.  We ask how important etiquette is in today’s brash new world.

The looming US presidential election has spawned a rash of picture books for children – too young to vote, of course, but obviously their parents want them politicized at an early age.  Propaganda or political awareness-building?

All this, and the regular madness of Pitch the Nasty Agent (this week’s titles are all taken from “Books with odd or misleading titles” - a Listmania! list by E. A. Lovitt (”starmoth”) from Gladwin, MI USA on Amazon.com), the nail biting frustration of Toad Suck, Arkansas, Reverse Shuffle Six Card Strip Pokerette and the sob story of Cry for Help.

Our special guests are Martyn Daniels, publishing expert and author of the seminal report for the Booksellers Association of Great Britain about their digital future.  You can find Martyn on his blog Brave New World.  And we’re delighted to welcome back Dr Susan O’Doherty, writer, clinical psychologist and the author of Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: A Woman’s Guide to Unblocking Creativity.  Her popular advice column for writers, “The Doctor Is In”, appears every Friday on MJ Rose’s publishing blog, Buzz, Balls, & Hype.  Joining them are our regular stalwarts, Dave Bartram and Donna Ballman.

Links mentioned in the show…

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

In The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert…

Before Post became an etiquette expert, she was singed by scandal.

New York’s moneyed class has always loved to read about itself. In the early years of the twentieth century, it particularly loved to do so in a magazine called Town Topics: The Journal of Society. Far and away the weekly’s most popular feature, titled “Saunterings,” offered material of a sort that other publications, many of which had society columns of their own, deemed unprintable.

In late June, 1905, Edwin Post, a financier who had recently suffered a string of losses, received a visit from a representative of Town Topics named Charles Ahle. Ahle carried with him a letter of introduction from the magazine’s managing editor, along with a set of galleys. He offered Post a choice. Post could purchase a copy of a forthcoming book, a sort of Who’s Who of the Social Register crowd, tentatively titled “America’s Smart Set,” for the sum of five hundred dollars. (This price—roughly ten thousand dollars in today’s money—was, Ahle asserted, a bargain.) Or he could turn down the book, in which case he could expect to read about himself in “Saunterings.” The item would describe how Post, a resident of Manhattan and Tuxedo Park, New York, kept a studio apartment in Stamford, Connecticut. There he liked to entertain “a fair charmer” who favored “white shoes with red heels and patent leather tips.” Post told Ahle that he needed a few days to consider the matter.

In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda…

ALPHABET JUICE

The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory

If your eyes have only skimmed over the long subtitle of Alphabet Juice and just vaguely registered that the book has something to do with words, please go back and read the entire subtitle again, slowly. This time listen to the syncopation of the clauses, as well as the alliterative music of the p’s and t’s, then note the juxtaposition of high and low style (”combinations thereof,” “innards”), the punchy yet unexpected nouns (”gists,” “pips”), that touch of genteel sexual innuendo (”secret parts”), and the concluding flourish of the gustatory. Like Roy Blount Jr. himself, his new book’s subtitle neatly balances real learning with easy-loping charm.

…

Like many writers, Blount is drawn to lists. Alphabet Juice includes his half-dozen favorite one-word sentences (including “Fuhgeddaboudit.”), followed by some great sentences of two words (”Jesus wept.”) and concluding with a few classic three-worders (”Call me Ishmael.”). Several pages take up eccentric names in literature and life, noting the heavy-handed handles of Thomas Pynchon’s characters — Alonzo Meatman, Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin, the Reverend Lube Carnal — and speculating about what James Fenimore Cooper was thinking when he decided to call his romantic hero Natty Bumppo. Blount points out that he has known people named LaMerle Tingle, Snake Grace and Love Beavers, and that “among many reasons New Orleans should not die is that the spokesman for the New Orleans Housing Authority, as of June 2006, was Adonis Exposé.”

In the New York Times, Bruce Handy…

Barack Obama may well become the first black president of the United States. If this happens, it will alter the culture of this country in ways we can’t yet imagine. But what if he’s also the first lousy black president?

Don’t get me wrong. As an Upper West Sider and member of the media elite, one who’s scared of John McCain’s rickety temperament and doesn’t find Sarah Palin credible on any subject or even as hot as Republican bumper stickers and obliging foreign leaders would have us believe (though admittedly the bar for vice-presidential allure has been set pretty low, beginning with John “Someday I’ll Be Played by Paul Giamatti” Adams), I’m all for Obama. I raise the specter of failure only because there is such a heavy load of “hope,” as the posters say, riding on his success. This is especially true among publishers, who have been cleaning up with Obama books, pro and con, and have now released a spate of biographies for kids. These are a sunny, upbeat lot, unlike so many of their grown-up counterparts. Maybe there’s not much of a market in hatchet-job pathographies for kids, although I’d like to see Threshold Editions, Mary Matalin’s Simon & Schuster imprint, test the waters with a scary pop-up version of its best-selling “Obama Nation.”

Tags: agent, book, character novel, Frankfurt, publishing