Most Recent Posts

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Following its successful antitrust lawsuit against Apple, the Justice Department is ready to mete out punishment. It has asked a court to force Apple to end existing deals with five publishers and submit to broad oversight intended to "reset competition to the conditions that existed before the conspiracy." An external monitor, to be paid for by Apple, would ensure the company was not engaging in anticompetitive behavior. The proposal also states Apple must "for two years allow other e-book retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble to provide links from their e-book apps to their e-bookstores, allowing consumers who purchase and read e-books on their iPads and iPhones easily to compare Apple's prices with those of its competitors." And Apple "will be prohibited from entering into agreements with suppliers of e-books, music, movies, television shows or other content that are likely to increase the prices at which Apple's competitor retailers may sell that content." Of course, Apple wasn't happy about the proposed punishments, calling them "a draconian and punitive intrusion into Apple's business, wildly out of proportion to any adjudicated wrongdoing or potential harm."

Caroline Alexander tries to make sense of Homer's famous phrase "the wine-dark sea" in a broad-ranging essay for Lapham's Quarterly: "The phrase is alluring, stirring, and indistinctly evocative. It is also, strictly speaking, incomprehensible."

James Folta and Luke Burns imagine "Fragments from the Ancient Gospels of 'The Church of a Pretty Good God' " in the literary magazine McSweeney's: "The Lord said, 'Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.' And the people replied, 'No other Gods? Even that one God with a crocodile head?' And the Lord conceded that the God with the crocodile head was hard to compete with."

In The New York Times, Jodi Kantor considers Portnoy's Complaint and the rise of the Jewish sex scandal: "Nearly half a century after the publication of 'Portnoy's Complaint,' politics is finally catching up with fiction, as libidinous, self-sabotaging politicians are causing grimaces among fellow Jews and retiring outdated cultural assumptions — that Jewish men make solid husbands and that sex scandals belong to others."

The Best Books Coming Out This Week:

Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems is Thomas Sayers Ellis' stingingly intelligent, heart-thumpingly lovely collection of poems on the broad theme of race and identity — though Ellis strives to defy categorization. In the opening poem, he writes, "These genres these borders these false distinctions / are where we stay at / in freedom's way."

The Goddess Chronicle is Natsuo Kirino's feminist reinterpretation of Japan's creation myth. Although the translation occasionally seems stiff and unskilled, the dark power of the story still manages to shine through.

NPR contributor Alan Cheuse writes that Robert Pinsky's Singing School is a " career-crowning book" and "a magnificent anthology of, as Pinsky defines it for us, poems to inspire — each of them with his brief and brilliant, offhand notes about how to read them."

Peter Greczner was not a fan of The Bachelor franchise, which closes its season Monday night, until he started watching with his girlfriend about a year and a half ago. When one of her friends suggested they fill out brackets, as they would for college basketball, he threw himself into research. He eventually got so into it that he found himself watching with a laptop open and big scratch pad covered in strategic notes.

That's how the software engineer got the idea for his website, The Bachelor Bracket, where people can create Bachelor/ette brackets and compete in online leagues for free. They're automatically scored and ranked by the site, which also provides contestant information, strategies and commentary. It has a total of 1,314 players and 375 leagues. But that's far from the everyone who's turning to the Bracketology of dating shows.

Others do it the traditional way, with a pen and paper. Katherine Somerdyk hasn't used the website, but this season she filled out brackets for two leagues: one with her friends and one with coworkers. Having done Fantasy Football before, she points out that in the same way an injury can make the third-string wide receiver on your team suddenly valuable, that "random wild card person ends up being much more normal than you thought." This season it's Zak W., a guy who creepily emerged from the limo without a shirt on in the season premiere, but somehow ended up making it to the hometown dates. On The Bachelor Bracket website, he only got 2 percent of the nominations.

While the brackets borrow from the sports world, there are certainly things about the pre-recorded, highly produced reality show that don't really translate. With sports, everybody going into the tournament has a ranking and stats from previous years to reference. With The Bachelor, you just have a blurb on the website and a first episode. As Greczner puts it: "It's more feelings-based." Somerdyk says she hasn't done that well this season, partially because she has very different taste in men than Desiree, the actual Bachelorette.

Others have made a career out of spoiling the outcome of the show, basically rendering the idea of a bracket meaningless. (Or more meaningless.) Steve Carbone, owner of the popular website Reality Steve, has been leaking spoilers before each season even starts for the past four years. He gets between 1 to 1.5 million unique visitors a month.

Carbone thinks that since he's started spoiling, things have changed. He gets a lot more emails from people who say they like reading the end of the book before they start. "Over time, people have realized that since they've only had two successful marriages in 25 seasons, [they] aren't watching this show for a love story, and if they are, they're watching for the wrong reasons, 'cause the last thing this show is about is love and marriage," he says. "It's purely entertainment."

The entertainment value is something that has kept fans like Amanda Hale engaged for the past decade, even if she knows the canned narratives and endings by heart. The way the sports world has its own set of traditions and recurring themes — everything from a game's structure to the internal politics — the same story plays out season after season on the show. "There's something about the suspense and build up...the ritual, the routine," she says on the show's similarities to sports. "It almost becomes Middle Earth...it has its own language."

This is a language that quite literally doesn't change. You'll be hard-pressed to find a lead who doesn't say, "I think my husband/wife is in this room" or fret over who's "here for the wrong reasons." There are characters — a villain, protector, whiner and good guy — that emerge every season. Every episode will start with a date card sending people off to skydive or hear a spontaneous concert or embarrass themselves but allegedly be good sports about it, and every episode will end with the rose ceremony in which someone goes home. And there are always hometown dates, a fantasy suite card (offering the opportunity to spend the night together before you decide in theory to "get engaged"), and breakdowns in the limo after eliminations.

The bracket, although genuinely pointless, heightens the stakes of these plotlines, and gives the viewer a sense that they have mastered the highly-produced reality show, rather than that it has mastered them.

"I think doing the bracket makes it a little more fun, because you almost have a vested interest," Greczner says. "It might be easier to lose that interest if you don't have something holding you on."

"In no way is that true. His mother was an incompetent robber who went to prison when Charlie was 5 for a couple years for a spectacularly bungled attempted robbery. But there is no record anywhere that she was ever a prostitute, ever arrested. Thanks to finding Charlie's sister, we now know the mother's side. She tried desperately to help him, to keep him in school. She loved him and to the end of her life, her heart ached for things he did."

On how Manson learned to manipulate people in prison

"The Dale Carnegie courses [on leadership and self-improvement] are being taught to prisoners to help them adjust to the outside world. Later in life and in his trial, in his testimony, you hear people say over and over, 'Oh, it was like he could read my mind. He came and talked to me, and it was like he was immediately the friend I'd wanted and had never had.' Every line he used, almost word for word, comes from a Dale Carnegie textbook in a class, How to Win Friends and Influence People [1936]."

On Manson's desire to become a music sensation

"Charlie Manson had nothing that would make you notice him as a musician. He had great personality, he had charisma, but in a recording studio where the music has to carry you, it wasn't there."

On Manson's place in American consciousness

"I think Charlie would be modestly remembered but mostly forgotten now if he'd been executed, as was his original sentence. But the California courts overturned the death penalty."

The Artist and the Model

Director: Fernando Trueba

Genre: Drama

Running Time: 105 minutes

Rated R for sequences of graphic nudity

With: Jean Rochefort, Aida Folch, Claudia Cardinale