Bring On The Books For Everybody How Literary Culture Becomes Popular Culture by Jim Collins

Bring On The Books For Everybody How Literary Culture Becomes Popular Culture by Jim Collins.

Jim Collins is a professor at the University of Notre Dame. This book is published by Duke University Press in 2010. Jim Collins is writing for a popular audience. The word choice is quite interesting and wonderful. He uses terms like lit-lit, bibliotherapy, adaptation film, and superstore. There is melding of the academic with the popular. Jim Collins easily moves between subjects like Ladies Home Journal and modernist literature. The juxtapositions are striking.



The writing is at times funny, ironic, and witty. The author is describing how literature is transformed into a popular medium and taken out of the academy. He describes adaptation films (films adapted from literary works,), the New York Times Book Review, Oprah's Book Club, and chick lit.



Jim Collins explains how literature is treated as both a form of self cultivation and self actualization. Many people read the classics to be better people. We get a of an Oprah Winfrey episode of television where Oprah encourages people to read Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, the classic Russian novel. It is at times appalling, fascinating, and poignant.

I espcially liked his sections on books to film. Two of the books which he spends quite a bit of time on are The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje and The Hours by Michael Cunningham both of which were turned into excellent films.



Jim Collins is describing the packaging of books into a complete line of products; books, films, furniture, and other products. Books become a brand unto themselves. This is an article that explains the phenomenon with the book, Eat Pray Love. http://www.mercurynews.com/fashion-style-headlines/ci_15797294?nclick_check=1



Classic literature becomes swept up in the process as well. Shakespeare becomes books like Shakespeare In Love and Jane Austen becomes The Jane Austen Book Club. This marketing is exploited by companies like Target, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other super shopping sites. Henry James and other writers become commodities.



I am not completely comfortable with this. I find some of it goes too far. For example, books like The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger are clear attempts at romantic consumerism; a mix of buying the right stuff, sex, and relationships.  Sex and the City for literature.



This is a very interesting book. It is quite topical for librarians, booksellers, and people interested in books. It even mentions Nancy Perl and her segment on books on National Public Radio. The book is well indexed and has an extensive bibliography. I highly recommend reading this book.

Daily Thoughts 8/25/2010 (Bring On the Books For Everybody, the Facebook Era)

English: Interesting Story, 1898, Laura Muntz Lyall (1860-1930)

Daily Thoughts 8/25/2010

I have been reading more of Bring On The Books For Everybody.  I like Jim Collins description of many of the newer womens novels being "romantic consumerism".  It fits nearly perfectly with books like The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger.  He also uses another term postliterary novel for books like The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Jay Fowler which has a nice ring to it.  He is showing how books and films are tied in knots together.  I can see how shows like Sex and The City are a natural extension of modern "chick lit". 



On the subway home, I finished reading Bring On The Books For Everybody. Jim Collins excerpts a paragraph from The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon in the final chapter of the book.  It is about the "cemetery of forgotten books" one of my favorite places in literature.  The author is challenging the idea of Fahrenheit 451 in the final chapter, offering us a vision of popular culture which combines literature with visual mediums like film and television.  It is much closer to my own view of the future of books.








Today was another quiet day.  We discussed vendors today.  I am going to take a look at Ingram.  Ingram has slightly better discounts than the other vendors for hardcover and paperback books.  We also discussed how we are going to keep track of missing books.  I spent quite a bit of time on the floor helping patrons with reference. 


Last night was kind of interesting.  I had to work on cleaning up a trojan on my machine.  There were a lot of attacks on computers focused on companies spoofing other peoples machines and asking them to buy their antivirus software.  The warning comes as a popup, then says your machine is not properly protected.  I went through Computer Associates, Microsoft, and another company to get my machine back up.  It took many hours to clean up.  Microsoft had me use a company called Esoft to finally clean up my machine.



I also had a chance to read a bit of the Facebook Era.  There is a concept which is introduced called the "online social graph" which is a map of all the people on the internet and how they are connected.  Clara Shih reminds us that the internet is about people.  In her view social and consumer networks are beginning to merge and old fashioned advertising is no longer working.

Daily Thoughts 8/23/2010 (Bring On The Books For Everybody )

Child Reading A Book, Public Domain Clip Art

Daily Thoughts 8/23/2010

I like reading Bring On The Books for Everybody.  The language is fantastic.  I like his word choices; teleliterary, postmodern fiction, adaptation films, and bibliotherapy is just some of the language.  The writing has a slightly humorous, slightly edgy wit to it.



He talks about taste makers for books.  His section on Nancy Pearl and Oprah Winfrey is right on target.  Jim Collins is describing how classic literature is turned into popular taste.  I think it is very relevant for booksellers and librarians.

I also like the writing on adaptation films.  He describes the words in films like Shakespeare In Love or The Jane Austen Book Club as being special effects.  These film create a link between the book, the movie, and all the ancillary forms of communication.   This is even becoming more true because films are now digital products, just like ebooks are a digital product, and MP3 books are a digital product.






Today I checked books on back order and looked at the displays.  Our computer catalogs are down for maintenance.  This means I had a little more time to do reference work.  I also printed up a few flyers for a program this month.  It has been a very quiet day.

Daily Thoughts 8/21/2010 (Winning Grants, Barnes and Noble, Bring On The Books For Everybody

Photograph of the "tower room" or "Owl's Nest" at The Wayside in Concord, Massachusetts. This room was added by author Nathaniel Hawthorne and is where he did his writing while living in the house. It was redecorated by Margaret Sidney when she became the home's owner. Date 1904. 




Daily Thoughts 8/21/2010

This morning I finished watching the Screencasts on the dvd that came with the book Winning Grants A How To Do It Manual For Librarians.  What this book talked about a lot was how to plan before looking for a grant.  The steps in creating a vision, planning, and getting support from outside organizations.  I think that I might have an idea based on corporate and community sponsorship more than grantwriting after reading this book.



After going to the supermarket, I stopped by Barnes and Noble.   There were a few titles that caught my attention, in the large print I thought the Danielle Steel book Family Ties would go well, the title Ice Cold by Tess Gerritsen which is a mystery just got turned into a television miniseries,  the book Halo The Fall of Reach by Eric Nylund will be popular because of the video game, also there is manga Bleach Official Bootleg Color Bleach which will popular.  For fashion, Nina Garcia's Look Book should be very popular.  The Four Fingers of Death by Rick Moody looks fantastic it is a literary comic novel about horror and science fiction.  It is something which I will definitely be reading.  Also there was posthumous mystery novel by Dick Francis and Felix Francis called Crossfire which caught my attention.




I have been reading more of Bring On The Books For Everybody.  It is very enjoyable.   Jim Collins is describing the concept of self-cultivation in literature.  The idea is that people should "Read only the very best books."  This will make them more cultivated.  This self-cultivation is for people who are not part of academia.  It allows them to attain a certain cachet.  I find it interesting.  There is a constant back and forth between popularity and quality and what we should get in a library.




I am a firm believer that many high quality books can become very popular if promoted and introduced correctly.  People want to improve themselves.   There is a genuine cultural value in reading that extends beyond the academic.  In fact, if you have a computer or even a cell phone and an internet connection, the classics and most of the canonical books should be available to you, not just the western cannon, but also many quality titles from all over the world in places like Project Gutenberg or the Internet Archive.  Most of the western academic literary cannon is already freely available for anyone to interpret any way they like.



This includes doing horrendous unique things like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or having amateurs recite the classics at Librivox, or adding video content to classic works like the $1.99 Sherlock Holmes Experience which combines text and video on Vook  http://vook.com/the-sherlock-holmes-experience.html




Some of the commentary is truly entertaining.  For example, Virginia Woolf owned Hogarth Press so she was much freer in her ability to write what she wanted than many other authors.  I also like the description of the book becoming a much more social object.  People talk much more about books recently than they did before. I am on P. 66 and do not think I will hurry through reading this book.  There are so many things that are entertaining to me in this work.  I even like the photographs of Barnes and Nobles and Borders.