Notes in the Margin Weblog

The Internet vs. books: Peaceful coexistence - Los Angeles Times:

Books require a different sort of communion with one’s subject than the Internet. They foster a different sort of memory — more tactile, more participatory. . . . For literary works, books are still, and most likely always will be, indispensable.

In the Los Angeles Times Beau Friedlander, editor of AirAmerica.com, weighs in on the debate over whether the Internet is supplanting printed books. Tangentially, he also addresses the question of whether the Internet is making us dumber; his answer seems to be that books and the Internet provide us with different kinds of information that are useful in different situations.

Ultimately, Friedlander quotes Markos Moulitsas Zuñiga, founder of the political website the Daily Kos:

Google makes it possible to learn anything, near instantaneously. Like natural selection, there are species that adapt to the changing environment around them and thrive, and others die off.

Books | “Promised Land” looks at books that shaped who we are | Seattle Times Newspaper:

Some books are so well-known that almost no one actually reads them. They have had so much influence that we ‘know’ them merely by living in the world they have helped create. And yet, as the distinguished poet, novelist and critic Jay Parini demonstrates in ‘Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America,’ there’s a lot to learn by giving them another (or a first) look.

The Seattle Times reviews Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America by Jay Parini.

Here are two retrospectives on Tony Hillerman:

• In Appreciation of Tony Hillerman, The Christian Science Monitor
• bestselling mystery author provided insight into the native people and culture of the Southwest, Los Angeles Times

A whale of a debate over ‘Moby Dick’ | csmonitor.com:

Please, spare us any more giant mammal jokes! Here in Massachusetts we’ve had to listen to every possible commentator refer to it as a ‘whale of a debate,’ but, after a lively discussion in our state House of Representatives we are now a step closer to having a new ‘official state epic novel.’

That would be ‘Moby Dick‘, Herman Melville’s 1851 classic.

The original request, made by the state representative from Pittsfield, where Moby-Dick was written, was for the novel to become the official state book. But that proposal met with opposition by the representative from Concord, home of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Louisa May Alcott.

Personally, I’m more concerned about the defending World Series champion Red Sox, who are now down 3 games to 1 in a best-of-seven series to determine who plays in this year’s World Series.

Going Down the Road - In a Town Apart, the Pride and Trials of Black Life - Series - NYTimes.com:

Eatonville, the first all-black town to incorporate in the country and the childhood home of Zora Neale Hurston, is no longer as simple as she described it in 1935: ‘the city of five lakes, three croquet courts, 300 brown skins, 300 good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools and no jailhouse.’ It is now a place of pilgrimage. Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Ruby Dee have come to the annual Zora! Festival in Eatonville to pay their respects to Hurston, the most famous female writer of the Harlem Renaissance.

This article is the sixth in a NY Times series highlighting the American Guide Series of travel books written during the Depression by the Federal Writers’ Project.

Just in time: Banned Books Week | csmonitor.com:

Given the recent public scuffle over Sarah Palin’s conversations while mayor with a Wasilla librarian about the possibility of banning books, there probably couldn’t be a better moment for the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week, which begins tomorrw, Sept. 27, and runs through Oct. 4.

Update - Hartford - Writers Unite to Keep Twain House Afloat - NYTimes.com:

The Mark Twain House in Hartford, CT, has for some time now been in financial trouble. The New York Times reports on the latest fund-raising effort aimed at saving it: “On Tuesday, Tom Perrotta, Tasha Alexander, Phillip Lopate and at least seven other nationally best-selling authors will gather in the auditorium to read Twain’s works.”

If you’ve never seen the Twain House in Hartford, don’t miss these photos.

Nova Scotia News - TheChronicleHerald.ca:

In Nova Scotia’s The Chronicle Herald, Judith Meyrick reviews Magic Island: The Fictions of L. M. Montgomery by Elizabeth Waterston. Montgomery was the author of Anne of Green Gables and several subsequent best-selling novels.

Montgomery kept journals and scrapbooks passionately and meticulously, preserving for us a picture of her daily life and the times she lived in. She was hugely talented and wrote obsessively, through good times and bad, occasionally using her writing as “therapy,” however unwittingly. She suffered through depression, the loss of her second son and the sometimes extreme mental distress of her husband. Through it all, she kept writing.

According to Waterson, Montgomery used writing as therapy. She suffered periods of depression throughout her life but used her own misery to develop powerful characters: “She found it possible to neutralize her miserable thoughts about herself by giving some of her worst traits to characters in her books and making light of them.”

From The Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of Robert McCloskey, . . . the author and illustrator of children’s books, born in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1914. He grew up loving music, especially the harmonica. He said, “The musician’s life was the life for me — that is, until I became interested in things electrical and mechanical. … The inventor’s life was the life for me — that is, until I started making drawings for the high school annual.” He got a scholarship to art school in Boston, and he did well there. But afterward, he couldn’t make it as an artist, and all he sold were a few watercolors of Cape Cod. One day, he went to visit an editor of children’s books in New York City, and he brought along his portfolio. It was filled with fantasy scenes, with magic and strange beasts. He took the images and the characters and the stories from life there, and he wrote and illustrated a picture book about a regular boy in a regular Midwestern town. The boy can’t whistle, so he learns to play the harmonica, and the boy and his harmonica save the day when the mayor’s homecoming celebration is almost ruined. This book was called Lentil (1940), and the next year he published Make Way for Ducklings (1941), which won a Caldecott. In 1987, bronze sculptures of Mrs. Mallard and the ducklings from the book were installed in the Boston Public Garden. McCloskey also wrote Blueberries for Sal (1948) and Time of Wonder (1957).

Robert McCloskey said, “I get a lot of letters. Not only from children but from adults, too. Almost every week, every month, clippings come in from some part of the world where ducks are crossing the street.”

The Writer’s Almanac is produced by Prairie Home Productions and presented by American Public Media.

The photo above is of the “Make Way for Ducklings” sculpture in Boston.

Newfound Tapes Offer Clues to Agatha Christie’s Life - NYTimes.com:

Agatha Christie’s only grandson has discovered a box of audiotapes in one of Christie’s former houses:

The tapes — 27 reels running a total of more than 13 hours — are filled with Christie’s painstaking dictation of her life story, rough material recorded in the early 1960s that eventually made up her autobiography, published posthumously in 1977. It stands as one of only a handful of recordings of Christie, the British mystery writer, who rarely agreed to be interviewed.