Been Shopping? No, Been Shopping!

With the eagerly anticipated Return to the Outer Boroughs now less than two weeks away, I took some time earlier today to gather together a bunch of advance reader copies that had been gathering dust on the floor next to the sofa over to Housing Works Café where I knew they’d eventually find a good home. But right there on the bookcase opposite the front counter I spotted a copy of Fallingwater Rising, a “biography” of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most iconic building, by architectural historian Franklin Toker. With 16, count ’em 16, pages of color photographs. So of course I had to have me some of that, especially at half-price.

A quick browse of the outer tables also turned up Small Pieces Loosely Joined by David Weinberger, whose name turns up a lot on many of the technocultural blogs I’ve been reading of late. I’m a sucker for Internet theory and have been pretty much since I got my email account the first day of grad school, so I’m willing to spend an afternoon, probably after the Return, glancing at this. (Apparently Weinberger’s currently consulting for Howard Dean on Internet organizing, so I must have him to blame for my daily emails from Joe Trippi. Not that I’m complaining; at least the Dean campaign’s communiques don’t lapse into the whining tones all too common to MoveOn.org’s missives.)

Though I hadn’t really been intending to get anything apart from maybe some stuff on 17th-century England I’ve been wanting to read so I can better appreciate what Neal Stephenson is doing with that Baroque Cycle of his, I guess coming back with two books after getting rid of a dozen isn’t so bad, all things considered.

8 January 2004 | read this |

In the Village Voice…

Cynthia Cotts reports on a study that suggests The New York Times Book Review assigns too many men to review too many books written by men. Paula Caplan, the clinical psychologist who collaborated on the Brown University study, says:

“[W]hen you see mostly men’s names in the [NYTBR], even if you don’t consciously count them, it creates a context. It narrows what occurs to girls and young women as possibilities for their lives.”

From the story as reported in the article, though, it seems like outgoing editor Charles McGrath is on the right track as far as getting more women in the pages. (I know from my own casual browsing, for example, that all of my former Amazon colleagues who were allowed to do “books in brief” reviews were women.) Except that he suggests the review’s “standards are so high that a great many writers—even published writers—don’t meet them.” To which those who recall Ward Just’s amazement at the existence of the black upper middle class or Lucinda Rosenfeld’s drive-by of Molly Jong-Fast can only respond with gales of laughter.

Here’s an interview with Caplan, focusing on how creative people’s “difficult” behavior is often pathologized as mental disorder, particularly in the case of women, with an interesting take on the Zelda Fitzgerald issue I hadn’t seen before (but then, that period really hasn’t been of major interest to me).

8 January 2004 | uncategorized |