This is not chick lit

Dzyd Julia:

Flipping through the pages of this month's O Magazine, I was shocked to read Gabrielle LeBlanc's "Worth a Read" column. Could it be that Macolm Gladwell's new book Outliers, which examines extraordinary achievers, does not include a single woman? Bill Gates, Mozart, Robert Oppenheimer, and the Beatles are among Gladwell's subjects. But what about Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, Tina Brown, or Indra Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiCo?

What about Oprah?

The omission of women in Outliers says more about the nature of "big think" books than it does about Mr.Gladwell. Since the publication of The Tipping Point we've seen a proliferation of books that present a single, shrink-wrapped idea as a means of understanding the world at large: books like The World is Flat, The Black Swan, The Wisdom of Crowds, The Long Tail. Now some of these books (the ones written by behavioral economists) tend toward the gee-whiz-isn't-that-interesting set like Predictably Irrational, Freakonomics, and The Undercover Economist. But the point is, all of them promise access to a club whose sole activity is the exchange of ideas; all of them promise, however covertly, to make us feel smarter. And all of them are written by men.

It is hard to know whether women are better at telling stories than propagating ideas (I'm thinking of Susan Orlean, Mary Roach, Karen Abbott), or whether the intellectual audacity required to sell our hypotheses about the world simply isn't in our genetic makeup. But until we get in the ring and start claiming our own big ideas in book form, I suppose we shouldn't be surprised if current discourse leaves us on the sidelines. Still, Malcolm Gladwell is one of the most influential public intellectuals of our time and it's a shame he didn't use his platform to celebrate a few women outliers. —The 26th Story

(Via Galleycat)

Editor turned blogger

Et tu, Julia?! Personal Days editor Julia Cheiffetz, now at Harper Studio, is blogging at the imprint's The 26th Story.

Here she suggests five books for those fretting about the economy. (Heyyy...shouldn't people be curling up with Personal Days, too???)

Ghost of a smile

Mediabistro reports on the Personal Days party at the New York Society Library. Here I am with my editor, Julia Cheiffetz; comic novelist extraordinaire Amanda Filipacchi is visible off my left shoulder.

(Photo by Adrian, Ghost lapel pin by Sarah!)

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for May 20, 2008

I. Come down to McNally Robinson tomorrow! I'll be reading from Personal Days, then talking to my editor, the mighty Julia Cheiffetz.


II. Am I the only one having technical difficulties using Gmail in Firefox?

III. Dzyd Joshua has memes aplenty up at Capsules Exquis. Normally he consolidates news articles/reviews:

Rush Hour 3
Directed by Brett Ratner

$247,538,093. $328,883,178. $453,796,824. DVD revenue, fairly ludicrous. Threequel, again. Bloodlessness isn’t the worst of the summer. Complacency is. One-dimensional glut. A global conspiracy of mutual abasement and self-humiliation: people are desperate and static, tired, lack originality; Paris seems to be the location of choice this year.

Straight man Chris Chan von Zhang is played as an adult, delivers vulgar African bang with Asian sexual neuter. Tenuous chemistry — anti-Gallic, tautological. Bad detectives bumble and slog. Who’s to blame? Roman Polanski is threatened, decamps. Nostalgic, hubristic. Bergman really is dead.

Sources:

Kevin Crust, Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis, The New York Times Claudia Puig, USA Today

...and now he's composing nifty acrostical poems:

An Acrostic Poem for/on James Frey

Just
As
My
Eyes
Suspected:

For now,
Redemption is quick,
Easy, and —
Yuck.

IV. Levi's post on Oblomov/office novels/PD featured a bizarre photo of what looked like a potato chip in the midst of a heated phone conversation. He explains that it's actually a hash brown—and that the inimitable Rocketlass did a whole series of Hash Brown at Work!

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for May 9, 2008

I. Saki Knafo, a/k/a the greatest journalist in the world, is still on the paragraph symbol beat. We thought it was just called a pilcrow...until he came across this in a recent New Yorker:

"Alinea" is the word for the backward "P" symbol that proofreaders put at the beginning of a new paragraph.

II. A really smart take on Personal Days is up at Barnes & Noble Review—it's long and thoughtful and basically pull-quote-proof, and I'm doing it an injustice by cutting and pasting, but here's a taste:

In a nameless Manhattan office, a group of be-cubicled peons huddle in fear on the staticky carpeting. They are proofreaders, perhaps, or copywriters, or fact-checkers —at any rate their work (never discussed) is unfascinating and redolent of squandered IQ. Neon-blanched, sharing an intimacy that cannot thrive—that dies immediately, in fact—outside the strange conditions which created it, they have nonetheless made a world: pet names, in-jokes, the minor voodoo of office life....The fragmented narrative and shaggy-dog tangents of Personal Days operate in the service of a seeping, slow-build paranoia, of the sort that has sustained whole seasons of ABC’s Lost.

"The minor voodoo of office life"!

III. Save the date: I'll be giving my first post-publication PD reading on May 21 at McNally-Robinson. Then I'll chew the fat with my editor, Julia Cheiffetz, whose name I am invoking for the first time on The Dizzies!