As part of year-long festivities marking the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe's birth, the writer received a true funeral on Sunday. Poe is credited with inventing dark, detective fiction, but the man led a hapless existence until his death on October 7, 1849. He was 40 years old when he died and was seen wandering the streets of Baltimore, muttering unintelligibly. Despite Poe's fame at the time, he was said to occasionally write magazine editors for $10 here and there to purchase train fare. His cousin, Neilson Poe, neglected to tell anyone of his death, and only 10 people attended his three-minute funeral.
Once a proper funeral ceremony was decided upon, several U.S. cities engaged in the battle to claim ownership of the author. Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, New York and Boston all wanted Poe for their own, but Baltimore's claim--"We have the body!"--seems to have been most compelling.
The cities buried the proverbial hatchet, along with a life-sized recreation of Poe's body, yesterday morning in Baltimore.
You can read Poe's original obituary, wedged between other eerie bits of news, here.
On December 1st, the new Federal Trade Commission Web guidelines will take effect, smacking violators with a potential fine of up to $11,000. The regulations require that bloggers indicate links they have to the companies whose products they endorse. The document, the FTC's first foray into Web regulation, is a response to consumer-group concerns that readers are becoming increasingly dependent on purportedly independent blogs, and that purchasing decisions are being made as a result of endorsements that lack necessary transparency. The new regulations, with their vague definitions and loose interpretations, mark a quiet attempt by government to begin acknowledging that social media has radically altered the face of advertising. Twitter, Facebook, and Yelp are among the websites that will have to adhere to the guidelines.
While some bloggers, such as Elisa Camahort Page of BlogHer and Wayne Sutton of TalkSocialNews, see the rules as mere codification of existing Internet ethics, others call it a "dangerous federal intervention in social media." Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, has been furiously tweeting his disdain for the well-intentioned regulations. He calls the "non-binding guidelines," as they're called, unworkable and impractical, and says that they function on a 20th-century assumption of advertising rather than the conversational advertising that exists via social media today. Moreover, the guidelines are virtually unenforceable, and their ambiguities leave them vulnerable to manipulation for a slew of lawsuits. The word is still out on both whether other mainstream bloggers will find the FTC's gentle prod equally outrageous, and whether the rules will result in any positive change for Web transparency and those who rely on it.
Almost as soon as he took office, President Obama set the January 22nd, 2010 deadline for the closure of the detainment facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the last year, only 27 of the 250 prisoners have been relocated from the prison to other countries. Just last week, the House of Representatives voted to prevent detainees from being transferred to U.S. soil for prosecution; and, the president has faced criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike concerning his plan to move at least some detainees to the U.S. mainland upon closure of the Guantanamo facility. The funds required to close Gitmo--as it is lovingly referred to--have also been denied by lawmakers.
But stories of prisoner abuse and legal loopholes continue to threaten relationships between the branches of government and between the people and our lawmakers. Kristine Huskey, UT law professor and former director of the National Security Clinic at UT Law School, has been embroiled in the necessary dramas of Guantanamo since its inception under Bush, Jr. in 2002. Huskey has represented detainees for years now, but her high-profile cases include Rasul v. Bush, where Gitmo detainees won the right to challenge their detentions on the federal circuit, and the defense of Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen detained at Guantanamo. She has been to the prison over a dozen times, and frequently tells tales of the horrific little restroom-less jet that transports lawyers to see their clients. On October 22nd, she'll be at Austin's BookPeople discussing her book, Justice at Guantanamo: One Woman's Odyssey and Her Crusade for Human Rights.
Roller derby, an American sport dating back to the 1920s, is now almost exclusively played in women-only leagues. The sport involves lapping members of the opposing team around an oval rink, and, as a full-contact sport, the risk of injury is high. Roller derby gained a following in the 1960s and again around 2002. The women who engage in this rough-and-tumble enterprise today are of a third-wave feminist culture--one that breaks-down gender binaries with a punk-rock ethic resulting in grassroots community organizing. The aesthetic is bold, and the sport has become a type of performance, blending athleticism and campy accoutrements.
Shelley Calton, a Houston-based photographer, has been chronicling Houston's "derby girls" since the resurgence in the early 2000s. From 2005 to 2008, this Bayou-City native photographed the rowdy entertainment of derby matches and leagues, as well as the women who partake in them. Her book, Hard Knocks: Rolling With the Derby Girls, explores the women's self-image and the integration of masculinity and femininity in their sport. The tongue-in-cheek humor, sexual innuendo, and outrageous, burlesque costumes juxtapose the ferocity with which these women train and approach derby. There's a mystery--a sense of empowerment gleaned from their refusal to adhere to any particular norm; from the combination do-it-yourself attitude and the stage names like "Panty Raider" and "Becky Booty." Roller derby, to these women, is a negotiation of womanhood itself.
Calton will be signing books at Domy Books, Houston, on October 15th at 7 pm. Admission is free.
Simon and Schuster announced today that it will collaborate with California-based Vook, to make a combination book-video product. A press release calls the new technology "seamless" because it integrates text and video on the same screen at the same time. Among Vook's inaugural titles are Jude Deveraux's novella, Promises, and the informational "The 90-Second Fitness Solution." We see how an informational video could be a useful supplement to textual instruction, but to throw in fiction might be dangerous. It raises questions about the quality of these videos, and what they mean for the way that we'll read and, by extension, process information. Moreover, it raises questions about what the seven-dollar vook price will do to print publications. What do you think?
Cushing Academy, just west of Boston, recently decided to update its traditional, brick-and-ivy look by becoming a book-less campus. James Tracy, the school's headmaster, claims this "isn't 'Fahrenheit 451' [...] [w]e see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology." Meanwhile, bars were placed on the bookshelves at Harvard yesterday to prevent the theft of valuable first-edition texts from among the university's 16 million titles. Students, upset at what they consider a "rash" response to thefts, have argued that the attempt renders books artifacts instead of resources.
These and other issues will likely be discussed at a panel titled "Are Books Dead? The Digital Future of Reading," on Saturday, October 31st at 10 am. The three panelists have yet to be determined, but they'll be discussing what the digitalization of books means for the way books are written and published, and for the public response to and the market for them. The Texas Book Festival has now released its schedule, and The Texas Observer's very own Bob Moser will be moderating a panel at 2:30 on Saturday the 31st.
Those of you who enjoy the popular blog "Stuff White People Like" will take particular joy in author Christian Lander's discussion of his new book, aptly titled Stuff White People Like: The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions. Lander mercilessly calls out individualists on their utter conformity, and though his generalizations apply more to yuppies at-large, they do in fact eerily reflect the tastes of white people [as a monolith, obviously] is hilarious. Equally funny will be his warm welcome in Austin the Saturday of the Texas Book Festival.
Presumably to prevent more attempts to coopt her name and fame, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling is now on Twitter. Though she has 50,291 followers, she currently follows no one [oh, so many meanings].
In case you had plans for November 17th, you should consider adapting them for this little gem: Sarah Palin's memoir, titled Going Rogue: An American Life, will be released far earlier than its anticipated spring 2010 date, and you couldn't ask for a better Thanksgiving gift. The 400-page book was completed in just four months, and Harper-Collins publisher Jonathan Burnham attributes the early release to both the passion with which the ex-governor threw herself into her work and the anticipated demand. In preparation, Harper is printing 1.5 million copies of the book. Not quite enough for each American to have her own, but we'll cope.
On a related note, this week is National Banned Books Week. Started by the American Library Association (ALA) in 1982, the last week in September celebrates the freedoms of expression and choice. As for the past 13 years, ACLU Texas published a report detailing the books that have been banned. The organization breaks them down by district and by ensuing challenges to their bans. Stephenville, Houston and Irving independent school districts reported the greatest number of challenges for the 2008-2009 school year, with Stephenville even going so far as to preemptively ban two different vampire-oriented series. To clarify: These books have not yet been published, but they are indeed banned from Stephenville ISD libraries. Ninety-eight challenges to public school book bans were reported across the state this year, and 27 books were banned. According to the ACLU report, the most challenged and banned authors of the year were P.C. Cast's House of Night series and Rachel Meade's Vampire Academy series, both dealing with paranormal romance. Interestingly, though, Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series remained unchallenged and unbanned, perhaps due to its message of abstinence and its author's own religious affiliations.
Though the quality of these new banned books raises debate about whether teens should actually be reading vampire romance at all, Banned Books Week serves as a reminder that, as the ACLU's report is titled, "Free People Ready Freely." So, if vampire romance isn't quite your thing, consider (re)reading one of the classic titles banned in Texas every year: Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima; Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men; Salinger's Catcher in the Rye; and--yes, irony is truly sweet--Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Because not only do they exist, they exist as alternatives to Palin's memoir. And that makes the freedom to read them even more appreciable.
Today is the 8th anniversary of September 11th, 2001--a day that radically altered the lives, world-views, and perception of safety of millions of Americans. The healing process has been fraught with tumult, but it has also recently been infused with a hitherto-unheard voice: that of Muslim-American artists. I won't go into the ability of art--of writing, and the arts in general--to heal and inspire and uplift, but I will, for a moment, express how unprecedented it is that the writings of Muslim-Americans about Muslim-Americans are being read across the nation. One of the struggles of the American people these past eight years has been to reconcile the World Trade Center attacks with a largely underdeveloped awareness of their Muslim neighbors. On the other side, Muslim-Americans were thrust into an unwelcome spotlight back in 2001, and they found themselves floundering for ways to undermine the Clash of Civilizations theory largely taking precedence in the public mindset. As mosques were desecrated and veiled women jeered at, the moderate Muslim majority had little recourse or method by which to indicate that they, too, ascribed to the values of their non-Muslim neighbors.
Today, Wajahat Ali, a 29-year-old writer from the Bay Area, debuts a play Off-Broadway. "The Domestic Crusaders" attempts to depict the experiences of three generations of a Muslim, Pakistani-American family that gathers to celebrate the 21st birthday of the family's son. The play has been compared to American classics like "Death of a Salesman" and "A Raisin in the Sun." Says Ali:
You dissect all their "strange" customs, take away their Urdish and Arabic they mix in with their English, remove the Islamic piquancy, and replace biryani with an ethnic food of your choice, and they could - or should- resemble you, your family, or your friends. If they do not, I have failed and deserve to be called out for creating cardboard stereotypes instead of authentic human beings with all their glory, flaws, and warts for the world to see.
Ali's artistic success reflects the mainstreaming of Muslim-American identity, though he claims TV and movie producers have offered him production contracts contingent upon his making the characters "a little less brown or Muslim." Closer to home, Austin-based author Shaila Abdullah writes about the experiences of a Muslim woman in the United States after 9/11. Her newest novel, Saffron Dreams, follows Arissa Illahi, a Muslim artist in New York City whose husband is killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center. The novel's cheesy exterior, which somewhat unfortunately plays to an exoticized portrayal of the mysterious, veiled Muslim woman, nevertheless belies its incredibly pertinent subject matter and the question at its core: what it means to be an American after attacks that brought to the foreground simmering dichotomies of race, culture and religion in U.S. society.
Some may find today's post disrespectful to the nearly three thousand Americans who lost their lives on September 11th, 2001. I shouldn't be writing about the conflicted identities of Muslim-Americans; I should instead be writing about the innocent people who suffered that day. With the utmost respect, I disagree. September 11th, 2001, can never and will never be forgotten. But, art and dialogue and activism have heralded a new beginning for this country: one in which these selfsame media mark proactive attempts to bridge cross-cultural misunderstanding and bring to the foreground the incredible pluralism showcased by the American people. The violence, extremism and separatism exhibited elsewhere needn't exist in this, the country that actually weathered the chaos and tragedy of 9/11. And, as Wajahat Ali writes, "[C]atharsis never comes by inaction and silence."
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