It had to happen sooner or later. Somebody went to the trouble to compile a reference book of sorts for smut. Filth. Dirt. Bawdiness. “Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex” might not be the complete and unabridged guide to smut, but takes its best shot at 94 sex-related terms, as Advertising Age’s Media Guy says, “in often unexpected ways. What’s genius about this book, edited by Ellen Sussman, is that it features some 100 writers (including Jonathan Ames, Phillip Lopate and Patricia Marx), so the definitions (from cyber sex to… way, way beyond) are often deeply, charmingly (and sometimes bizarrely) idiosyncratic and personal.”
Kind of like sex itself.
If you act quickly, the Media Guy is giving away one free copy to some lucky e-mailer on or about Aug. 28. For more details, CLICK HERE.

It seems that the Ayatollah Kohmeini wasn’t the only party writer Salmon Rushdie annoyed.

In his autobiography, “On Her Majesty’s Service,” former Special Branch detective Ron Evans wrote that the author of “The Satanic Verses” so infuriated his British protectors that they once locked him in a cupboard while they went out for a pint or two at a nearby pub. No wonder that comedian Dennis Miller once joked that Rushie was in a “rush to die.”

Rushdie, whose book was seen by some to blaspheme Islam, led the Iranian Ayatollah to issue a fatwah for Rushdie’s death in the late ’80s and early ’90s. He had a knack for annoying the people who were supposed to protect him.

Writes the Telegraph of London: “Evans paints an unflattering picture of Rushdie as tight-fisted, rude and arrogant, and claims the team of protection officers nicknamed him Scruffy because of his unkempt appearance.”

Nobody said protecting the First Amendment (which doesn’t apply in England anyway) was easy.
For more, CLICK HERE.

Randy Pausch, a well-regarded scientist who rocketed to even greater fame after the publication of “The Last Lecture,” has died.
The Carnegie Mellon University professor of computer science in Pittsburgh died Friday, 10 months after he was told he had a few months to live. What started as an actual lecture after learning of his terminal condition, word of his inspiring words went viral and propelled Pausch to unexpected fame outside of academic circles. The book adaptation, “The Last Lecture,” was a New York Times No. 1 best-seller.

To learn more, CLICK HERE.

Jim Holt had a serious assignment from The New Yorker: “Why does humor makes us laugh?” Along the way he learned that there have been non-laughers in history: Sir Isaac Newton was always serious, and Josef Stalin was no day at the beach (or the comedy club). The assignment grew into a life of its own, and now you have the book.

His book, “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: The History and Philosophy of Jokes,” manages to be funny even as it helps explain the mechanisms allow humor to makes us laugh. Writes Very Short List:

“Freud’s take on jokes was interesting (he saw them as a release of inhibitions) but his delivery absurdly terrible (‘An impoverished individual borrowed 25 florins from a prosperous acquaintance . . .’).”

http://www.veryshortlist.com/vsl/daily.cfm/review/512/Book/stop-me-if-youve-heard-this-a-history-and-philosophy-of-jokes/?tp

Lee Israel’s memoir, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger,” tells of how, in a period of desperation, she published a series of letters that she presented as written by famous writers (they weren’t — well she was fairly famous, but that’s beside the point).

Running counter to the recent trend of memoirs being billed as truthful but turning out to be lies, this one is being billed as the truthful recounting of the author’s outright lies about supposedly true letters, which, (ironically?) seems rather believable. She says they were typed in 1991 and ’92, and she took care to use only the oldest typewriters to ensure their appearance of authenticity.

Says Very Short List : “Israel recounts her astonishingly rapid descent from best-selling biographer (of Talullah Bankhead and Dorothy Kilgallen) to flat-broke striver, typing counterfeit correspondence in her Upper West Side apartment and selling it to dealers. Whether she’s writing about being banned from the Strand bookstore or stealing authentic letters from university libraries, she does so with honesty and a rapier wit. And in an age of promiscuous apology for the slightest wrongdoing, the fact that Israel never fully apologizes for her crimes is actually part of the charm of her memoir.”

A brief excerpt:

“Noël Coward’s soi-disant letters were typed by me on what I remember was a 1950ish Olympia manual, solid as a rock, bigger than a bread box, not so much portable as luggable. (Noël’s Olympia was the one I would have the most trouble schlepping when the FBI was about to come calling.) For the nonce, I was content, researching my Tallulah bio — just me, my cat, and my contract, in my cozy, rent-controlled room-with-no-view.”

Can’t wait? Well, you have to. The book comes out in early August.

To see more, CLICK HERE.

Or HERE.

“The Walking Dead” by Gerald Seymour follows the story of a young Saudi man who travels to England, with dreams and determination to go to paradise a hero for Islam as a suicide bomber. He would, of course, kill many innocent people in the process.
In the book, Seymour inhabits the mind of an idealistic radical who believes in what he is about to do with unwavering fervor.
Writes a BookBrowse reviewer:
“In the hands of a lesser writer, The Walking Dead could have become a run-of-the-mill pot-boiler. What makes this novel noteworthy is Seymour’s attention to the book’s underlying themes. He delves into the question of how young men get into situations where they willingly risk their lives for their ideals, drawing parallels between the suicide bomber and a young volunteer fighting in the Spanish Civil War seventy years earlier (1936 – 1939). Other sub-texts explored are the efficacy of intelligence gathering and old-fashioned detective work, and the roles chance and coincidence play in events.”
“The Walking Dead,” ISBN 9781590200056, is available now from Penguin books.

To read the review, CLICK HERE.

Dissecting the feminine psychology

By Diane Evans
DelMio.com

The other day I won a bingo-like game during one of the summer courses at Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York. I was the first to call out four corners – which meant I got first pick of several books spread out on a table. For my prize, I chose a thin paperback titled She: Understanding Feminine Psychology, by the psychologist Robert A. Johnson.
After class, the instructor’s husband, a defense attorney from the Buffalo area, whispered that I had picked the best book there.
Interesting paradox, right off. First, a book written by a man about understanding women. (Are we not sufficiently unpredictable to remain a collective mystery?) And second, another man saying “right on.”
OK, enough of the jibjab. Johnson is a noted lecturer in the teachings of the late psychologist Carl Jung, and this Buffalo defense lawyer is married to an expert on Jung and he, along with his wife, studied at the Jung Institute in Switzerland. The book She examines the ancient myth of Amor and Psyche and what it says about the universal challenges that women face.
My revised edition, published in 1989 by HarperCollins, is only 80 pages, so it didn’t take long to read. For me, not every point was easy to understand. But it was well worth getting through the occasional difficult passages to discover the many precious nuggets of timeless wisdom.
Take this little tip as an example: “If you wish to give your children the best possible heritage, give them a clean unconscious, not your own unlived life.”
Or this: “For a young woman to cope with her mother-in-law’s power system is to attain feminine maturity.”
The myth of Amor and Psyche is one of those stories you can spend a lifetime studying and still not uncover all the nuances. In the broadest sense, the story deals with the suffering that Psyche must endure to come into her own, be the authentic person she was meant to be, and reach her full potential in life. The process requires Psyche to meet challenge after challenge, until finally she must travel to the underworld. Yet as painful as her journey is, there is reward in the end. She ultimately marries Eros (or Amor, depending on your version of the story) and the two give birth to a daughter named Pleasure.
And the mystery of women? Near the end of the book, when he describes Psyche emerging from Hades, Johnson addresses this point:
“The deepest interior mystery for a woman may not be named or given any label,” he writes. “It is the essence of that feminine quality which must remain a mystery, certainly to men, and hardly less so for women. It is not less than the element of healing itself.”
Also, you might be interested in a couple of companion titles by Johnson: He: Understanding Masculine Psychology, and We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love.

Tor, the sci-fi imprint of Macmillan, is ending its weekly giveaway of e-books, but not before unleashing one final giveaway bonanza.
Says Publishersmarketplace.com:

“This has had some odd side-effects, such as convincing some people that the name of the site you are now looking at will be ‘Watch the Skies,’ or that its main purpose will be to give away free e-books, perhaps along with free cars, savings bonds, real estate, a pony, etc.” The site has now turned into a sci-fi community vertical, with regular news and blog posts and an extensive message board.

“But they are ending the program in a blaze of free-dom: through Sunday, site visitors can still download any or all of the 24 books (plus a batch of free wallpapers) in formats that include HTML, PDF and Mobi.”

Scoop ‘em up while you can, before they’re gone. The cover art is interesting too. To visit the site, CLICK HERE.

I was half-listening to the NPR guy talking about three must-read baseball books, and my ears perked up when I heard Veeck — as in Wreck.” It’s a funny title based on the whacky baseball life of an unapologetic baseball huckster. He left his mark with the Cleveland Indians, among other baseball franchises. I remember seeing it on my dad’s nightstand in the last year of his life. My dad grew up in the Cleveland area, Solon mostly, moved to Columbus when he was in high school and went to Ohio State (as did I — go to Ohio State, that is, not grow up in Solon). But he always had great affection for all things Cleveland, including the Indians and the Browns. Both teams had good years, and they had interminable stretches of being either mediocre or downright awful, especially the Indians.

Veeck (rhymes with wreck) was one colorful character connected to the Indians, staging goofball promotions and fielding funny characters in the games — anything to put butts in chairs, as the expression goes. As far as I can tell, he was not connected with the 10-cent beer fiasco of the early-mid ’70s, one of the most infamous riots in sports history.

But that radio commentator declaring Veeck — as in Wreck a must-read seemed to create a connection to a memory that had begun to fade.

Brought a smile to my face. The reason Alan Schwarz of the New York Times liked it and the other two titles so much is that they didn’t get all nostalgic about the “good old days” when baseball was pure and innocent — because it wasn’t. It was racist, for starters. As Lou Brock told him a while back, baseball tends to reflect society as a whole. Baseball in the ’40s was segregated, observing the same ugly Jim Crow laws American society honored. To look back at the ’40s and ’50s and see segregation viewed as something that’s normal is as foreign to today’s kids as is the concept of slavery. It simply does not compute.

So yeah, maybe you could get a bag of peanuts for a nickel and a beer didn’t cost $8 (or more), but there are some things in baseball’s history that we ought not be so proud of.

Kind of got off on a rant there, didn’t I? Oh, well.

The New York Times’ Talking Business columnist Joe Nocera has conjured a list of the best nonfiction business books. He had solicited readers’ input on business fiction a few years back, but the results were unsatisfying.

Here are some of his picks, and we are quoting the column here:

“Liar’s Poker,” by Michael Lewis (even though I’ve since become convinced that the anecdote that gives the book its title never happened).
“The Devil’s Candy,” by Julie Salamon. (Greatest dissection of the movie business ever written.)
“The Box,” by Marc Levinson. (Hard to believe you can write a great book about the rise and importance of the shipping container, but he pulled it off.)
“Indecent Exposure,” by David McClintick. (Published in 1982, it single-handedly created the business narrative genre).
“The Go-Go Years,” by John Brooks. (The best book by the most elegant writer to ever make business his subject.)
“The Kingdom and the Power,” by Gay Talese. (Yes, the subject is The New York Times, but how can you leave it off any list of great business books?)

To see the whole list, CLICK HERE.

Alan Schwarz, sportswriter for The New York Times, has three must-read books about baseball. On NPR radio, he rhapsodizes about some of the great characters of the game, including an especially colorful owner, in the autobiography Veeck — as in Wreck:

” (Bill) Veeck rollicks through his days of running the Cleveland Indians, the old St. Louis Browns and the Chicago White Sox, all the while introducing us to characters such as Satchel Paige, Hank Greenberg and, of course, his famous walk-drawing leadoff man, Eddie Gaedel. Veeck dedicated his life to the notion that the fan is king.

“Who can’t love a guy who writes, ‘Nothing annoys me more than to be told [not] to do something … because it is lacking in dignity’?”

The other two must reads are The Long Season by Jim Brosnan and October 1964 by David Halberstam. They aren’t schmaltzy pinings for the “good old days” when baseball was pure and innocent because, well, it wasn’t. October 1964 pays attention to the racial tension during that world series in the height of the civil rights movement pitting the integrated St. Louis Cardinals vs. the all-white New York Yankees.

To listen, CLICK HERE.

Of the six titles that list John McCain as an author, the book that gives us the largest window into McCain’s soul and personality is Faith Of My Fathers. Written with longtime staffer Mark Salter and published in 1999, this memoir chronicles the larger-than-life lineage of a family tree whose roots reach back to Scot Presbyterian warriors.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee explains his military ancestors this way: “The McCains, bred to fight as Highland Scots of the Clan McDonald, arrived in the New World shortly after American gained her independence, when Hugh McCain settled his wife and six children in Caswell County, North Carolina, and built his estate, Lenox Castle.”

To see more about John McCain’s Faith of My Fathers, CLICK HERE.

Kindle is testing the market for interest in Mitch Albom’s “Commencement Speech To His Nephew’s Graduating Class: May 30, 2008, Nice, France.” First question: Was it in English, and could the class understand it? (True, Europeans tend to be bilingual, unlike most Americans.)
Priced at bargain-basement 99 cents, the Kindle file clocks in at fewer than 4,000 words.

Amazon pitches it: “Albom created a memorable testament to what we know and what we need to learn. In his passionate, touching and frequently funny address, he warned the class of 2008 of the many things they should watch out for in life, from sushi at airports to religions that advertise in the back of magazines.”
At 99 cents, there’s not much risk in that investment — except for the $400 machine it comes in.
For more information CLICK HERE.

By Diane Evans
DelMio.com
OK, explain life to me.

That’s what the life’s work of the late psychiatrist Carl Jung attempts to do. Sure, a lot of people try to explain life. But Jung’s work stands out, and is the subject of so much modern study and commentary, because he appeals to what many of us know intuitively. In other words, he validates concepts many of us feel and believe through our inner wisdom.

Each year, I look forward to classes on Jungian thought during the summer season of programs at the nonprofit Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York. Jung taught that myths and fairy tales mirror the basic patterns of the human psyche. The Chautauqua classes most often focus on these myths and fairy tales, through the masterful teaching of Kaye Lindauer, now in her 21st season at Chautauqua, and recently retired as a school librarian and lecturer at Syracuse University.

During one recent session, Lindauer told an Italian fable about The North Wind.
In the story, a poor farmer worries about how to feed his family after winds destroy his crops several years in a row. The farmer goes to see the North Wind, to plead for help. Depending on your beliefs, you can see the North Wind as a symbol for God, or a higher power, or even a positive force of energy.

Long story short: The North Wind helps the farmer, but the farmer keeps sabotaging his own interests and his family’s interests, by letting his landlord (who also happens to be a priest) take advantage of him.
Each time the farmer falls into despair, he goes back to The North Wind (a good move). The farmer ultimately prospers once he learns not just to take the gifts of the North Wind, but also – and this is critically important – to protect those gifts from people, such as the priest-landlord, who are greedy and try to push others around.

The moral of the story: Living a just life doesn’t mean you’re so goody-goody all the time that you let other people take advantage of you. Balance is required, and that means you need to be tough and aggressive at times for your own good and the good of those in your care.

The key is balance. If you’re too passive, expect to get snookered. But if you’re too aggressive, you’ll end up being a bully and you’ll pay consequences in the end.

Balance is central to Jungian thought, as it is to various religious beliefs. In Jewish mysticism, for example, the whole idea of the tree of life is about keeping life in balance. Each positive attribute must be kept in check against its negative counterpart. For instance: Too much generosity and you go broke. Yet on the other hand, too much stinginess and you end up poor in spirit.

Standing up for ourselves – with just the right dose of force – can be one of the most difficult balancing acts of all. In The North Wind story, the farmer takes his blows until he finally learns the hard way.
You probably don’t need to study Jung to know that’s the way life is.

After a spate of so-called memoirs being exposed as occasionally fictitious accounts of “truthiness,” New York Times columnist David Carr spent three years of verifying and fact-checking his recollection of his former life as a coke-dealing crack-house regular before his improbable rise as a, well, New York Times columnist, which is a pretty cherry gig, especially for a crackhead.

The result is “The Night of the Gun,” which sounds like a good title for a crazy incident based on hazy memory and conflicting accounts that finally wound up in a marginally literate police report. (We’ve read enough police reports to find this term — marginally literate police report — almost redundant.)
Carr’s account includes 60 interviews and the examination of hundreds of medical, legal and personal documents.

For those of us who have led secret lives while leading seemingly normal lives, this is probably a how-to guide of survival as a crack user and recovery guide.

A prominent media critic, Carr probably wanted to be sure his account was as bulletproof as a memoir can be by getting third-party corroboration of events as he remembers them. And, seriously, when you have a nose- or lung-full of cocaine, you need a little backup.
For more information, CLICK HERE.

By Diane Evans
DelMio.com
Ever heard of a fairy tale called The White Snake?
I hadn’t, until hearing a lecture on it recently during the 2008 summer programming at the nonprofit Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York.
The classes on myths and fairy tales are among my favorites each year at Chautauqua. A lot has to do with the teacher, Kaye Lindauer, recently retired as a school librarian and lecturer at Syracuse University. Lindauer, who is in her 21st summer season at Chautauqua, teaches from the late psychiatrist Carl Jung’s perspective that fairy tales mirror the basic patterns of the human psyche.
Now to the story. The crux of it is this: A wise king has a servant bring him a covered dish every day after dinner, but no one, including the servant, knows what’s on the plate, because the king waits until the servant leaves before lifting the cover. Each day the king eats a piece of the white snake.
You can guess what happens next: The servant gets curious, and one day lifts the cover unbeknownst to the king. The servant, too, takes a bite of the white snake, and immediately gains the ability to understand the language of animals.
On the very same day, the queen loses her ring. The servant becomes a suspect and faces execution unless he can find the ring. Turns out a duck had swallowed the ring, and because the servant understands the language of animals, he overhears the ducks talking, learns what had happened and retrieves the ring – saving himself but not the duck.
The servant then asks the king for a horse and a little money to travel. The king agrees and the servant sets out. End of story.
For Kaye Lindauer, the symbolic meanings of even this short story took up two days of 75-minute lectures.
A couple points, to give you an idea:
• Fairy tales show how a new cycle of growth evolves in a person. Change is the goal, which is huge, because it means that a new dominant voice within you must replace the voice that has you locked in your comfort zone and trying to please others, even to your own detriment. If you opt for change, expect conflict in your life, because the price of growth is that you must fight resistance. In this story, the snake represents renewal, because a snake sheds its skin. As Lindauer pointed out: Jung believed that we are constantly pushed toward growth, and if we try to repress such growth, it comes out in the form of sickness or maybe an accident. Status quo is not an option. We either grow or we digress.
• Once the servant tasted the snake, he gained new insight, and once that happened, he couldn’t go back to being the person he was before. Lindauer: In real life, the process can take years. Once you know what you know today, you can’t go back to where you were before. Your own knowing keeps you from going back to the place of not knowing. It’s the Garden of Eden metaphor: Once Adam and Eve tasted the fruit, they couldn’t go back to their prior innocence. And the white snake? Given that we, too, are constantly shedding old skin, the challenge becomes that of saying yes to a life that over and over will never be the same.

Well, it might be unauthorized by one-half of the famous stoner comedy duo who rode their “ganja journalism” to fame and fortune in the 1970s and ’80s . The book, to be published Aug. 18, is likely to be chockfull of wild stories of the comedy team’s misadventures as comedy stars.

Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong’s brand of humor faded for a while after a bitter breakup in 1985, according to reports, but Marin has extended his career on film and television, and Chong found a gig as a stoned out (big stretch) Foto Hut owner on “That ’70s Show.”

Chong’s well-documented run-ins with the law, mostly over his unapologetic advocacy of marijuana, are featured in his bestseller, “I Chong,” and they don’t seem to have hurt his popularity among his fan base. Rumors of a reunion tour appear to have some legs. Meanwhile, Tommy Chong has some books to sell.

Advance information is sparse, but CLICK HERE for more info.

The family of the author of the classic “Lassie Come Home” has won on appeal the right to terminate Classic Media’s copyrights to the story of a boy and his faithful dog. It reverses a lower court’s ruling in favor of Classic Media.
In a complicated case, Winifred Knight Mewborn, one of Eric Knight’s daughters, sought to reverse her father’s granting rights in 1940 to make a television series to a predecessor of Classic. And now, 70 years after he first wrote the classic story, the rights return to Knight’s family.

To see more, CLICK HERE.

The Black Swan is not a fairy tale. Far from it. The Black Swan explains how sudden, unexpected events are the most powerful agents of change in the world. Change happens usually in violent spasms that, at least briefly, touch off chaos before a new order is instilled. In addition to challenging what he calls Platonic assumptions (focusing on the easily discernible), Nassim Nicholas Taleb exercises a mischievous sense of humor. He quotes Yogi Berra often: “You can observe a lot just by watching.” (epilogism) “It’s tough to make predictions about the future.” “The future ain’t what it used to be.” He gleefully bashes everything French (his parents are French citizens and he is fluent in French, so maybe he’s entitled to). He skewers the high-on-the-hog riders: “We humans have the largest cortex, followed by bank executives, dolphins, our cousins the apes.”

Having dwelt in the worlds of both academia and business gives him a rare perspective. He notes that being called a practitioner is an insult in academia, and being called academic is an insult in business.

On theory: “A theory is like medicine (or government): often useless, sometimes necessary, always self-serving, and on occasion lethal. So it needs to be used with care, moderation, and close adult supervision.”

Take your time with this book. Don’t take it to the beach. Expect to have some assumptions challenged. And expect to discover some new concepts.

To learn more, CLICK HERE.

New York photographer Phillip Toledano went deep behind the scenes to develop the material for his new picture book, Phonesex, due out this fall. Even if you haven’t, um, participated, you’ve seen the TV ads for phone “companionship” featuring attractive people playfully cavorting as they chat on the phone.

Well, if you think that’s how it actually works, you might be a tad disappointed.
Writes VerShortList.com: “Its putative allure lies partly in the mystery of who could be on the other end of the phone line, but in his new photo gallery at the online magazine the Morning News, New York–based photographer Phillip Toledano puts faces to the disembodied voices.

“Not surprisingly, the subjects aren’t beauties, but their appearance gives the images more punch: When you think of the roles the operators play convincingly and what they really look like, you know you’re seeing a true testament to the power of the imagination.”

What redeeming quality does this book offer society? We’re not sure, maybe it humanizes the disembodied voice we imagine is talking on the other end of the line. But we never call those lines, do we?
To read more, CLICK HERE.