November 29, 2011 | 6:44 pm

Ray Bradbury Enters a Brave New World

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

"Fahrenheit 451": Does it smell like burning fuel?

A certain irony attaches to the fact that Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian classic about book-burning, “Fahrenheit 451,” is now available as an electronic book.  Bradbury himself had long vowed that his work would never be issued in the form of e-books, which he characterized as “smell[ing] like burned fuel,” but not even a futurist as famouos and accomplished as Bradbury cannot escape what is happened to the publishing industry nowadays.

“It’s meaningless; it’s not real,” Bradbury said of the Internet in an interview with the New York Times a couple of years ago. “It’s in the air somewhere.”

Indeed, at metatextual level, there’s something eerie about reducing a book that celebrates the civilizing function of the printed page to a bunch of binary digits in a black box. But, after all, “Fahrenheit 451” ends with a memorable scene in which books are preserved through the act of memorizing and reciting their contents, which is just another way of converting a book from one medium to another.

The e-book version of “Fahrenheit 451” was released today by Simon & Schuster with a suggested retail price of $9.99, a price point that is to the ebook what 99 cents is to the music download. For best-selling authors like Bradbury, that’s a much greater threat than digital conversion since it is less than half of the price of a newly-published hardcover.

Now that’s something to fear about the future, at least if you’re a writer who is waiting for the next royalty check.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

November 17, 2011 | 10:57 am

God Has His Critics, and So Does Harold Bloom

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Harold Bloom as depicted in TNR.

Harold Bloom’s recent musings on Mormonism in the New York Times caught the attention of my colleague, Mark Paredes, who blogged about Bloom in The Jewish Journal.

I’ve been reading Harold Bloom with interest and admiration, and quoting him often in my own work, ever since I picked up “The Book of J” many years ago. I have often found him to be impenetrable and sometimes wrongheaded, however, as when he credits Shakespeare rather than the author of the Book of Samuel for “the invention of the human.” But Bloom’s ability to rub people the wrong way was brought home to me when a distinguished Bible scholar complained to me that Bloom had extracted an idea about biblical authorship from the scholar’s writings without acknowledging the source.

“I think he’s a big fat idiot,” the scholar told me, thus destroying one of my illusions about the elevated nature of academic discourse.

Another recent example of Bloom-bashing can be found in The New Republic, where William Deresiewicz reviews Bloom’s latest book, “The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life” (Yale University Press: 357).  “With ‘The Anatomy of Influence,’ Harold Bloom has promised us his ‘swan song’ as a critic,” writes Deresiewicz. “Fat chance.”

“[A]fter some thirty original books and hundreds of edited volumes,” he goes on, “after evidence of a logorrhea so Niagaran even death will be hard-put to shut it off, there is little possibility that Bloom has given us his ‘final reflection upon the influence process.’ …  ‘The Anatomy of Influence’ is not only not his last book, it’s not even his last one this year. Already in September came an appreciation of the King James Bible, billed, inevitably, as the book that Bloom had been writing ‘all my long life’… ‘The culmination of a life’s work’: is that the last one or the latest one? Neither: it’s the one he published thirteen years ago. The Harold Bloom Show, we can rest assured, is good many seasons yet.”

The Harold Bloom Show is still a ratings winner in American letters, of course, but there are plenty of naysayers.  Deresiewicz is one of them.

“Bloom must surely be the most solipsistic critic on record. Harold is, indeed, a world unto himself,” he writes. “Reading him reminds me of the scene in Being John Malkovich where the title character enters the portal that leads to his own brain to find himself in a world where everybody looks like him, and all they can say is “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich.” In the world of Bloom, every author looks like Bloom, and all they can say is “Bloom, Bloom, Bloom.”

His remarks reminded me of one of my favorite passages from the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, where Singer likens the world to a novel whose author is God.  Bloom expressed a similar idea in “The Book of J.” (“I myself do not believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God,” writes Bloom, “than are Dante’s ‘Commedia,’ Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear,’ or Tolstoy’s novels, al works of comparable literary sublimity.”) But Singer acknowledges that even the Divine Author has his critics.

“We know that the angels have nothing but praise,” writes Singer. “Three times a day they sing: Sublime! Perfect! Great! Excellent! But there must be some angry critics, too. They complain: Your novel, God, is too long, too cruel: Too little love. Too much sex. They advise cutting.”

If God has his angry critics, I suppose, then Harold Bloom, the critic par excellence, cannot be surprised to find that he has a few of them, too.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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November 15, 2011 | 11:18 am

The Mystery of the Missing Index

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Another kind of index entirely: The Roman Catholic Church's index of banned books.

There’s always something new in publishing in the digital era.

Gilad Sharon’s biography of his father, Ariel, which I reviewed here not long ago, bulks up to 626 pages, but the U.S. publisher of “Sharon: The Life of a Leader” apparently decided to save a few dollars on the printing bill by leaving out the index.

For those of who us need, use and value an index, it is necessary to go to the HarperCollins website, where the index is displayed online.

Some bloggers have complained about the missing index, and it struck me as an odd way to cut down the size of the book.  I found the on-line index awkward to use since it requires those of who still read printed books to look back and forth between the bound volume and the computer screen. 

The inclusion of an index is still a benchmark of a certain degree of seriousness in general publishing, and it is recognized as such by discerning readers. Indeed, I learned a practical lesson about the value of an index when, some years ago, I appeared on an author interview show that was taped in advance of the official publication date of my book, “God Against the Gods,” a book about the history of religion.

After the taping, one of the camera operators approached me with a complaint: “I was looking at your book, and when I saw that it didn’t have an index, I realized that I couldn’t take it seriously.”

I hastily picked up the copy that my publisher had provided to the producer. All of my books include an index, and I was alarmed and concerned about the omission. I shared the cameraman’s assumption that an index was an essential element of a non-fiction book.

What I discovered is that my publisher had resorted to sleight of hand to solve a scheduling problem.  Finished copies of the book were not yet available on the day of the taping, and so the publisher put the dustjacket of my book on another volume of approximately the same size — a novel, as it turns out.  I quickly pointed this out to the skeptical cameraman and assured him that the book as published would include an index, too.

If the same question is asked of Gilad Sharon, of course, the answer to the question will be: “Look for it on-online.”

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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