Michael Jackson - The BookwormThe Los Angeles Times reports. "Owners of Los Angeles area bookstores (some no longer in business) recall encountering the late pop star perusing their shelves. A few years ago, Doug Dutton, proprietor of the former Dutton's Books in Brentwood, was at a dinner with people from Book Soup, Skylight and other area bookstores. "Someone mentioned that Michael Jackson had been in their store," Dutton said by phone Thursday, "And everybody said he'd shopped in their store too." "I've always wondered if there was a library in Neverland," Doug Dutton mused. Indeed there was -- Bob Sanger, Jackson's lawyer, told LA Weekly that Jackson's collection totaled 10,000 books.
"He loved the poetry section," Dave Dutton said as Dirk chimed in that Ralph Waldo Emerson was Jackson's favorite. "I think you would find a great deal of the transcendental, all-accepting philosophy in his lyrics." Largely an autodidact, Jackson was quite well read, according to Jackson's longtime lawyer. "We talked about psychology, Freud and Jung, Hawthorne, sociology, black history and sociology dealing with race issues," Bob Sanger told the LA Weekly after the singer's death. "But he was very well read in the classics of psychology and history and literature "
'Subterranean passion': John Brack and the search for order
The latest issue of the Australian Book Review has a long article, to coincide with the current exhibition at the NGV, by Chris Wallace-Crabbe discussing the art of John Brack. "He recounts his first encounter with the artist's work, whose odd austerity he found arresting, and recalls their robust lunches in Carlton".
Read the full review here.
"The Professor" stalks Maria Sharapova
The Times Higher Education Supplement of July 2 reports "tennis ace Maria Sharapova's early exit from Wimbledon was a blow to her fans, but was something more sinister than a lack of form to blame? The Russian beauty, who was knocked out on day three, reportedly hired a minder for the event amid fears she has a stalker known as "The Professor". A description of the middle-aged man was circulated among security personnel at the All England Club,... although it is not clear whether he has any genuine links to academia".
The London Evening Standard's Londoner Diary reports that "Cherie Blair’s efforts to persuade her husband to read romantic literature have fallen on deaf ears. She is currently enjoying Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie, about a woman who falls for a lawyer. Did the former PM enjoy it? “Tony read it quickly,” Cherie explains in The Lady magazine. “Skipping over some of the lovey-dovey bits.” Perhaps it was too close to home."
Alain de Botton tells New York Times reviewer: 'I will hate you until I die'
The UK Daily Telegraph reports "Alain de Botton, the philosopher and author, has launched an extraordinary internet attack on a book reviewer, telling him: "I will hate you until the day I die"... The New York Times is in its declining years. They don't really care, they quite like to cause a storm." The paper had an added responsibility to be even-handed in its reviews, he said, because of the position of unusual dominance it held over the American book market.
He also posted a message on Twitter, saying: “i was so wrong, so unself-controlled. Now I am so sorry and ashamed of myself.” The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work has received mixed reviews in Britain, with The Times' Naomi Wolf saying she was "ready to hurl it across the room" after 40 pages and The Sunday Telegraph's Anne Bilson concluding "Thank God for Alain de Botton."
The most revolting dish ever devised
The UK Guardian reports that while "Elizabeth David was the doyenne of food writers ... the bitchy annotations she wrote in her cookbooks reveal another side of her". Included in her manuscripts was this: 'Do not try this at home Italian salad'.
1 pint cold cooked macaroni
½ pint cooked or tinned pears
½ pint grated raw carrot
French dressing to moisten
2 heaped tablespoons minced onion
½ pint cooked or minced string beans
Mix the chopped macaroni and vegetables; moisten with French dressing, ?avouring with garlic if liked. Serve on a dish lined with lettuce leaves. Decorate with mayonnaise and minced pimento or chives."
The Guardian comments, "think you've seen an even less appetising recipe? Tell us about it at guardian.co.uk/wordofmouth."
The Impending Demise of the University
Don Tapscott, author of Grown Up Digital, questions in The Edge magazine, "how large research universities can survive in a world of digital natives. He suggests that traditional "broadcast learning" wherein the professor transmits knowledge to the student, the receiver, in a one-way, linear fashion is reaching a breaking point. The digital native students will demand a learning pedagogy that is interactive,collaborative and contextualized. "Universities should be places to learn, not to teach." We often hear the argument that universities,which dominate the list of oldest institutions, will be around long into the future. But Tapscott's essay serves to remind that a glorious past does not equal a glorious future."
More here.
Trou ble in Paradise. A new Helen Fielding short story is available online from the UK Daily Telegraph. It is set in a hotel resort and is taken from Ox-Tales: Air, one of four anthologies containing original stories released in Britain on July 4.
Story here.
What do tennis players read, or not, at Wimbledon?
The UK GUardian reports.
"Who should bookworms support at Wimbledon? Not the top-ranked players, on the whole, as their answers when asked to name favourite reading matter are dispiriting. Roger Federer, despite his sophisticated image, gives the standard sportsman's reponse: "A lot of magazines and newspapers and autobiographies"; while Andy Murray declares "I don't read. I haven't read a book since the second Harry Potter", ie since 1998. Only slightly better are Novak Djokovic (The Power of Present Moment Thinking, a motivational title), Andy Roddick (Angels and Demons) and David Nalbandian (The Lord of the Rings). Rafael Nadal, the injured reigning champion, wins marks for picking an Isabel Allende novel, but loses some of them for getting the title of The City of the Beasts wrong.
In the women's division, 27-year-old Serena Williams cites JK Rowling's novels, as does the 18-year-old world No 9 Carolina Wozniacki ("all of them!"). Serena's sister Venus picks the Bible, presumably favouring Old Testament smiting rather than New Testament charity. Maria Sharapova plumps for "Sherlock Holmes and Pippi Longstocking". But other players from eastern Europe seem readier to test their brains. The favourite read of Vera Zvonareva is Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. Serbia's Jelena Jankovic chooses Ivo Andric's The Bridge on the Drina, and her compatriot Ana Ivanovic, a part-time humanities student, says "I love philosophy", and goes for Rani Manicka's Malaysian saga The Rice Mother.
Top of the class is Elena Dementieva, ranked 4 and an Olympic gold-medallist in Beijing, who has said she "grew up with Chekhov and Tolstoy" and "likes to go to the pool to read Nabokov or Dostoevsky" between games; she told an interviewer during last month's French Open that a novel by the French author Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt was her current bedside book. Her Harry Potter-reading rivals might argue, however, that it's thinking mid-match about, say, the double narrative of Pale Fire that causes her celebrated propensity to serve double faults."
The New York Review of Books for July 16 is a Special Fiction Issue. Included is a new piece, 'Undated Fragments' by J.M. Coetzee. It begins "He goes with his father to Newlands because sport-rugby in winter, cricket in summer-is the strongest surviving bond between them, and because it went through his heart like a knife, the first Saturday after his return to the country, to see his father put on his coat and without a word go off to Newlands like a lonely child."
See also
Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood By Michael Chabon
ODD BOOK TITLE
Castration: the advantages and disadvantages. Victor T. Cheney. AuthorHouse. 2001.
Naturally, Libraries Australia report no holdings.