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| Earl Coleman, Publisher and Poet, Dies at 93 Mr. Coleman started a custom translation service and built it into the Plenum Publishing Corporation, one of the world’s largest translators and publishers of scientific and technical material. feeds.nytimes.com |
The postman always used to ring twice Most years produce an unexpected Christmas hit. Roy Mayall's rhapsody to the beleaguered postie could be the one for 2009The consolation of nostalgia is one default position for English prose. As long ago as the Normans, the worse the experience of French rule, the more attractive the myths of old Britain. Folk tales about King Arthur had circulated for centuries until, in the 1130s, a wonderful old fraud known as Geoffrey of Monmouth bundled up a version of the pre-Saxon past into a volume with popular appeal. Thomas Mallory, who understood that the first rule of the bestseller is to embellish an oft-told tale, reheated the best of this material in Le Morte D'Arthur, perhaps the ur-text of British literary nostalgia.British readers will never tire of Camelot any more than they will lose interest in Flanders. In our time, the end of Edwardian England and the subsequent slaughter in France has inspired a quasi-pastoral myth to which bestsellers such as Regeneration and Birdsong subscribe. A subset of this genre is found in the prophetic, bittersweet regret of Orwell's closing lines from Homage to Catalonia – "The deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs."I mention all this because I have just received a copy of a little Christmas book that trades in an equivalent nostalgia. And just because it's about the Post Office doesn't make it any less potent. Dear Granny Smith by Roy Mayall (Short Books) can't be more than 15,000 words, but it distills that same longing for a better past while at the same time launching a passionate attack on the Scylla and Charybdis of rationalisation and modernisation and those contemporary weasel words "profitability" and "cost-cutting".Roy Mayall, who first popped up in the London Review of Books, has been delivering post since 1979. He's a postie with literary aspirations who begins Dear Granny Smith, his "letter from your postman" with a cri de coeur: "The world doesn't seem to be made for human beings any more." Writing as his union is about to go on strike, he says his letter is "an apology for everything that's gone wrong with the Royal Mail".It's also an elegy for a world that is no more, a world in which the postman worked a six-day week and started the day at 4.45am by sorting the post for his "frame". In those times, Mayall claims there was no junk mail, just letters and postcards from correspondents who wanted to communicate through the intimacy of the written word.By 6.45am, you'd sorted your bag, a groaning sackload, and were off on your round, "cycling through your own personal corner of Eden". Mayall rhapsodises in Hovis prose about "that lovely, soft golden light of early morning, listening to the birds singing. There's just you, the milkman, a few dog-walkers and the occasional late-night reveller". He was happy in this prelapsarian world, he says. He had a song in his heart and it was composed of "dawn colours and bird song, and letters bathed in morning light".In any golden age, the weather is always perfect and time stands still. "We used to have time," Mayall declares. "Not just time for ourselves: time for other people too." Time, he says, addressing Lord Mandelson, his nemesis, "is service". He claims that the postman's service was universal."Granny Smith is everyone," he writes. Everyone is vulnerable in the end. And when the chips are down, he asks: "Who do you have left? Just the postie, the postie bringing the mail." Here, Mayall echoes Larkin's "Postmen like doctors go from house to house". It's not all cloying sentiment. The rosy tint of nostalgia sharpens to a precise account of what a postman used to do: the organisation of "the frame", the memory games played to distribute the post efficiently, the extraction of the bags from the "yorks". Rarely have the minutiae of everyday work been so lovingly narrated. Not surprisingly, Mayall makes no reference to "squiffing", the practice of dumping the items of mail you can't be bothered with at the end of your round.This, says Mayall, is "a tale of loss and deceit, of anger and despair, of the wanton destruction of an ancient and venerable organisation". I think he might be wrong: Dear Granny Smith looks uncommonly like the British Christmas book of 2009.Bye bye Borders, we'll miss youRumours about the end of Borders have swirled through the book world for so many months that the arrival of the men in suits was rather anti-climactic. Just as predictable: the usual claque of cultural conservatives came up with that depressing whinge about the golden age of the glorious independents. Sheer make-believe, of course. My memory of old-style bookselling is of dingy, cramped premises, redolent of boiled cabbage, unable to supply the book you actually wanted in less than a month. High-street book chains get a bad press, but the inconvenient truth is that they provide an excellent service for most of their customers. No, the staff probably can't name the author of Culture and Anarchy or The Stones of Venice, but they work long hours, promote a good atmosphere and exhibit a real devotion to contemporary literature. Borders, particularly, were market leaders in promoting a family-friendly ambience that catered to the recreational tastes of young and old. So what if it came with chat and cappuccinos. The experience of browsing a book need not be like a scene from Germinal.A warm welcome for a vulpine incomerGraham Greene used to say, not entirely joking, that his fantasy life was to be a secondhand bookseller. Fossicking for bargains was one of his recreations. He also invested in his nephew Nick Dennys's book business which, for the past several years, has been based at the Gloucester Road Bookshop in South Kensington. To the sadness of many customers, who include VS Naipaul, Valerie Eliot and Edna O'Brien, Dennys has just sold up to devote himself to private dealing from home. The good news is that his shop at 123 Gloucester Road has been taken on by the excellent literary quarterly Slightly Foxed. Defying the jeremiahs of the book trade, SF will celebrate its sixth year by launching itself into the cut-throat world of secondhand bookselling. A spokesperson told me that the new shop will be a natural extension of Slightly Foxed, "introducing people to books that have stood the test of time". I wish them well.Royal MailRobert McCrumguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Milorad Pavic, Serbian Author of Novel Novels, Dies at 80 Mr. Pavic was an internationally prominent Serbian writer whose novels upended the traditional relationship between reader and text. feeds.nytimes.com |
Philip K Dick's estate ready to sue Google over Nexus phone name The estate of the science fiction writer Philip K Dick plans to sue Google over its decision to brand its new mobile phone the Nexus OneThe estate of the science fiction writer Philip K Dick – whose book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was filmed as Blade Runner – plans to sue Google over its decision to brand its new mobile phone the Nexus One, on the basis that the brand already exists in Dick's books.Isa Dick Hackett, the daughter of the author, indicated in December that she was "shocked and dismayed" at early reports that Google had chosen the Nexus name when reports of the mobile began to leak out. "We were never consulted, no requests were made, and we didn't grant any sort of permissions," she told the New York Times.The book and the film both revolve around the story of a bounty hunter who is tracking down escaped Nexus-6 cyborgs, the sixth generation of robot humanoids in a dystopian future.On Wednesday the estate of Dick, who died in 1982, sent a letter to Google asking it to cease and desist from using the Nexus name. Google said on Tuesday when announcing its phone – which it dubs the Nexus – that there was no association with Dick or his novels or films, and that the word was being used in its generic sense, of a place where things meet.However, the phone was first detected at the end of last year ahead of its official announcement by websites noticing through its browser signature which calls it a Nexus One. HTC, the phone's manufacturer, and Google both registered documents using that phrase. And the software that runs the phone is called Android – making Nexus an apparent reference to Dick's work, which is enormously popular among programmers and technology fans, especially in California where he lived.Motorola had already licensed the word Droid from George Lucas, the writer and producer of the Star Wars films, for the name of another Android-based phone. There is no official comment on the matter at Electric Shepherd Productions, the production arm of Dick's estate co-founded by Hackett, or on the official Philip K Dick site. Whether Dick's estate will get a paycheck on the use remains unclear: Dick never registered Nexus as a trademark, so any claim by his estate would have to show that Google was somehow making use of a name that many people might never have associated with a phone – and that it was trading off the "goodwill" associated with a team of murderous near-human machines.GoogleMobile phonesPhilip K DickIntellectual propertyCharles Arthurguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Paperback Trade Fiction Top 5 at a Glance1. A RELIABLE WIFE, by Robert Goolrick2. THE LOVELY BONES, by Alice Sebold3. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, by Stieg Larsson4. DEAR JOHN, by Nicholas Sparks5. TRUE COLORS, by Kristin Hannah feeds.nytimes.com |