Book news: No strings attached

The newspaper columnist who “discovered” the musician who became the subject of columns, then book, and now movie tells how his encounter with Nathaniel Ayers led to this series of events, culminating – for now – in the movie being released amid a ton of buzz starring Jamie Foxx and  Robert Downey Jr.

Steve Lopez talked to NPR a year ago about how this unlikely friendship grew: “Lopez says his friendship with Ayers has ‘always been a two-way street, it’s not just me doing for him.’ The writer explains that the musician re-ignited his passion for journalism and gave him a sense of well-being: ‘You know, there’s this humility, there’s this good feeling I have from giving something,’ Lopez says.”
The story is pretty well-known at this point, of how Ayers had been a promising violinist at the prestigious Juilliard School who dropped out as he struggled with schizophrenia. He moved to L.A. and landed on the streets there.
As Lopez wrote about Ayers in the Los Angeles Times, readers sent instruments to Lopez on behalf of Ayers. One thing led to another, Ayers got off the street and into an apartment and treatment for his mental illness.

Hear excerpts from the movie and from Lopez on radio before the movie was released: “It was the violin that turned my head,” he told NPR, then he noticed the player was in rags and the violin had only two strings.

The book is  The Soloist: A Lost Dream, and Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music.

Book news: Crime of the century

It’s early in the new century; societal upheaval seems everywhere; new industries are being born as older ones die; and news seems to travel instantaneously.

Welcome to 1911.

Vanished Smile by R.A. Scotti takes a look at an event that occurred nearly 100 years ago and triggered one of the biggest sensations of its day: Crime of the century! Media frenzy! Scandal! Celebrity suspects! International Public outcry and huge, public displays of grief.

She truly is a woman of international mystery.

Mona Lisa has long been the subject of song and mystery, and continues to intrigue us still.
In this fictionalized mystery based on very real events, Scotti’s story unfolds like this: “The prime suspects were as shocking as the crime: Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, young provocateurs of a new art. As French detectives using the latest methods of criminology, including fingerprinting, tried to trace the thieves, a burgeoning international media hyped news of the heist.”

In reality, the painting was stolen by a former Louvre worker, Vincenzo Peruggia, who reportedly hid inside the museum on Aug. 20, 1911, and made off with the famous painting. He kept it in his Paris apartment for two years before returning to Italy with it. Apparently Peruggia expected to be rewarded for returning the Mona Lisa to Leonardo Da Vinci’s homeland, Italy.

He was rewarded with a trip to jail.

The painting was returned to Le Louvre in 1914.

Peruggia (his name is usually spelled Perugia, reports Wikipedia) was released from jail after a short time and served in the Italian army during World War I.

In an interview, author Scotti talks about the mystique of the Mona Lisa that attracted her to the story and how she was not even aware that the Mona Lisa had once been stolen (that makes at least two of us). But once she started investigating the theft, many conspiracy theories came to light.

“There is no question that Peruggia—aka ‘Leonardo’—performed the actual theft. He left his calling card. The left thumbprint on the frame was his, and examinations by French and Italian experts proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the Mona Lisa he returned was the same painting that he stole. But the idea that Peruggia was the lone thief is implausible. Although I don’t believe he acted alone, I could not crack the case. Who was behind the theft and, even more puzzling, why, remains a baffling mystery that will probably never be solved.

Speaking of Da Vinci mysteries, one of this century’s most popular books still grabs attention: The Da Vinci Code.

Book news: Hawking on the mend

After reports came in of Stephen Hawking being gravely ill, family members said the author of A Brief History of Time was expected to make a full recovery.

Hawking, who has been in a wheelchair for years and communicates via a voice synthesizer, was touring the United States when he contracted a chest  infection. His condition worsened back at Cambridge and he was rushed to a hospital Monday for tests and treatment.

Wednesday, he was reportedly doing better.

He developed symptoms of motor neurone disease at the age of 21 and was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), the most common form of motor neurone disease. He has defied the odds by living more than 40 years with the disease, which typically kills patients in five years or less.

The Cambridge University professor is widely regarded as the best-known living scientist. In 1988, he published A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes.
In 2004 he announced he had solved the Black Hole paradox, admitting that black holes may allow some information to escape them. He had argued in a friendly bet with other scientists that black holes destroy everything that falls into them.

Book news: Author Ballard dies

JG Ballard, author of Crash and Empire of the Sun among others, died Sunday after a long illness.
The BBC said Ballard had suffered from cancer for some time.

He grew up in Shanghai, China. During World War II he was interned for three years in a camp run by the Japanese along with his parents and younger sister. That experience informed Empire of the Sun, a fictionalized account of life in a prison camp.

Ballard’s first published book was The Drowned World, published in 1962.

Ballard was mostly known as a writer of science fiction, although he referred to his books as “picturing the psychology of the future.”
Empire of the Sun was made into a Steven Spielberg movie and, more recently, Crash caused quite a buzz when it went onto the silver screen.

HarperCollins canceled plans to publish Ballard’s most recent project, Conversations, when it became clear that Ballard was too ill to continue. The book project was following Ballard’s conversations with oncologist Jonathan Waxman.

Read more here.

Book news: Nabokov plans take shape

Maybe we should call it Fahrenheit 72 – as in room temperature, as opposed to the much warmer fate the author of The Original of Laura once meant for it.

Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished manuscript for The Original of Laura will be published in November, more than 30 years after the great author died.
The author’s son Dimitri decided to publish the book in spite of his father’s wishes that the manuscript be destroyed.

Thebookseller.com notes that Nabokov also once intended to burn his best-known work, Lolita (“the book by Nabokov” noted in Don’t Stand so Close to Me by The Police and the inspiration for countless movies and a particularly high-profile attempted murder case in Long Island).

Penguin plans to reproduce the index cards Nabokov wrote the manuscript on (as he did with all his novels). Nabokov fans will also notice an ongoing theme of nostalgia (obsession?) for young love in The Original of Laura.

Penguin Classics will publish it in U.K. and Knopf will publish it in the United States. Editor Alexis Kirschbaum of Penguin Classics also bought rights to other Nabokov works, some unpublished, including love letters to his wife, Vera. They will roll out over the next couple of years.

A year ago, Dimitri Nabokov said his father came to him in a vision to give his blessings to publish. And now the vision is taking shape.

Book news: Let them eat Depression Cake

What’s old is new, and just in time for summer is a Depression-era book about American cuisine that sprang out of the Federal Writers’ Project. Before the original project could be finished, World War II came along, and the manuscripts generated by the likes of Eudora Welty languished in the Library of Congress until writer Karl Kurlansky unearthed them.

The Very Short List, recent nominees for a Webby Award, describes the book: “The result, The Food of a Younger Land, is less a history than an especially well annotated cookbook. You’ll find Eudora Welty’s recipes for barbecue sauce and gumbo, Nelson Algren’s notes on the eating habits of Sioux and Chippewa Indians, and odes to Florida hush puppies, Maine clambakes, and ‘a Los Angeles sandwich called a taco.’ Most of the entries have aged well, and some look like they may be due for a comeback: Skip to page 316 to see the recipe for a butterless, eggless creation known as Depression Cake.”

If things don’t get better soon, maybe the current administration will take a cue from FDR and revive the writer’s project as part of the new stimulus. (Mr. President, DelMio is ready to serve!)

The Food of a Younger Land is scheduled for release on May 14.

Previously mentioned at DelMio.com.

Our Daily Red: Readers object to the objection

Amazon’s explanation that the removal of certain sexually explicit materials from its sales ranking over the weekend were a clumsy accident didn’t do much to placate angry advocates of said materials.

Media portrayals (Oh, wait – we’re media too) of the wounded parties as primarily gay-rights activists seemed to only annoy critics even more.

The Seattle Times reports that Amazon is chagrined: ” ‘This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection,’ said Drew Herdener, Amazon’s communications director.

” ‘It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles — in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted  books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing books from Amazon’s main product search.’

“Amazon previously blamed a ‘glitch,’ which seemed to intensify anger among some gay and lesbian activists who suspected homophobic censorship.”

Could this become yet another Seattle-based company that has become so large and ubiquitous that it has become the Seattle behemoth we all love to hate?

Well, Amazon is the nation’s largest online retailer by far (with nearly three times the Internet sales revenue of runner-up Staples, according to Wikipedia). A quick Google of “I hate Amazon” yields “about” 4,500 matches, and Yahoo finds a robust 13,800 “I hate Amazon” matches. Lotta hatin’ goin’ on.

Microsoft and Starbucks are two other Seattle bigs that have legions of haters. Perhaps Amazon’s success has made this status of  “most-hated”  inevitable. Perhaps Amazon will view it as a badge of honor. You hate us – you really hate us! Oh, joy!

There have been no reports of mass Kindle burnings or “Seattle Tea Parties” or other pointless gestures of futility at this juncture..

(Editorial aside – the editor here really dislikes the use of impact as a verb, as in “it impacted 57,310 books” as quoted above – we thought you should know this.)

Dave Wilson’s Our Daily Red is seldom daily and rarely red, but it is full-bodied, piquant and tannic. It does not necessarily represent the views of DelMio.com, its sponsors or its editor’s mother – and, in fact, his mom probably has not given a whit of thought to Amazon.com’s handling of sales rankings.