Is the Book Dying?

In a departure from my usual posting about the historical past, I write today about the history being made in our present: The digital revolution and how it is transforming the way we read and experience narrative. 

By the end of 2010, 10.5 million people owned an eReader of some form. An estimated 20+ million will read on an eReader or a tablet PC by the end of 2011. EReaders and tablets represent perhaps the fastest growing market in the history of capitalism, which has led many to ask: Is the book dying? 

Well, yes, in a solid, physical sense anyway, the book may be dying. But the good news is that people are still reading and, as evidenced by the numbers above, they may be reading more than ever before.

The even better news?  Story is alive and well. 

I’m just back from two professional conferences dedicated to the dual experiences of creating and consuming story:

Digital Book World (DBW) and the

Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). 

One conference focused on the various media through which story can now be experienced – computers, eReaders, mobile devices – but lacked any real discussion of what makes good creative content. The other was all about great content, but the discussion was perilously behind, even resistant to, the ways in which new media might be used to serve that content. 

By example, everywhere I turned at SCBWI, people were talking about books.  “Are you writing a book?”  “Tell me about your next book.”  “I just signed my third book.”  When a participant asked a top editor of a major house, “to whom should I submit an idea for an app?”, the answer was “pitch your book through the usual channels and if we think it would make good app, we’ll take it from there”. 

But in this age of choice between print or eBooks, apps or socially-networked gaming worlds, it is possible to create a story that won’t work as a book, that may be better suited, as in the case of the Time Traveler Tours interactive storyapps, to mobile device. 

It’s time to stop talking about “books” and to focus on Story. 

These days, it should be the story that determines the medium, not the other way around.  And it’s imperative that members of the traditional publishing industry recognize this because until they do, they’ve lost their role as curators of content. Hence, as Rick Richter of Ruckus Media observes, there are 30,000 apps for kids but only 3,000 worth buying.

In this not-so-brave world of electronic reading devices and smart phones, the boundaries of Story and storytelling are being exploded like never before. Stories are no longer limited to the experience of reading on a page. They can now be read on a screen, or listened to, or played with. They can be expanded such that one can enter into whole story worlds with multiple plots, characters, and perspectives. Through transmedia and networked games, "readers" are transformed as well, no longer merely consuming stories, they experience and even participate in creating them. 

Just as the oral tradition of passing on stories through the storyteller gave way to the development of writing systems, ink and parchment gave way to the printing press, paper and binding, so too have digital media given us new opportunities to share stories in myriad untapped ways.

We need to let go of the term “book” in order to shed the semantic connotation that that word implies.  It’s time for digital media creators and story curators to hook up, collaborate and develop excellent content across all platforms, both digital and print.  

It’s time to let Story speak for itself. 

Coming soon: Beware Madame la Guillotine for iPhone and iPod Touch. 

Paris History in the Palm of your Hand.

Claude Monet: The Angry Years

 

Paris' current talk-of-the-town exhibit – a 200-piece retrospective of the work of Claude Monet – is now in its final days at the Grand Palais.  I managed to score four tickets to this sold-out show and bundle up the Uber-mensch, the Lucky-one-and-only (Loo), and her beau Beau (le BB) for a fun afternoon of French history and culture. 

Though we are already quite familiar with Monet’s work – being semi-regular visitors to Giverny, where we love to bike to the gardens from the train, as well as to our neighborhood Musée Marmottan Monet, where a younger Loo loved to go after school to make small-scale pastels of Monet’s grand Nympheas – the exhibit was well worth the visit.  It was fascinating, for example, to view the artist’s now far-flung multiple studies of a single subject all hanging side by side.  Examples of this include the Rouen Cathedral series; paintings of London’s Houses of Parliament and Charing Cross Bridge; his poplar trees and Normandy haystacks.

From the very start of his artistic career, Monet’s main subject of painterly interest was light and how it danced upon, stroked and gave character to the objects before him.  His multiple studies express precisely how light, illusive and forever changing, offers us a different impression of life at any one moment on any given day due to atmospheric shifts and their effects on our senses of perception. 

Monet worked quickly, applying paint directly to canvas to record his impression of light's fleeting interaction with nature and object.  He is therefore honored as the Founder of French Impressionism.  Indeed, his 1873 series, Impression, Sunrise, gave the style its name.  He captured scenes with immediacy, before the light and his sensation had a chance to change.  He often worked on several canvasses at a time, moving from one to the other as the light softened or darkened with the time of day or become blotted out all together by cloud or fog or rain.

But as our little group wandered through the exhibit, we were struck by a small collection of paintings completed late in the artist's life: the weeping willows and Japanese bridge of 1918-24.  These were different from the majority of Monet’s other works in their use of bold reds, oranges, and yellows applied in thick paint with aggressive strokes and wild, curvy lines.  These paintings, hot and unrelenting, seemed to vibrate with anger in their frames as if wanting to explode off the wall.

We couldn’t help but wonder at the extraordinary difference between these works versus a lifetime of paintings characterized by rich purples, vibrant greens and soothing blues.  Here’s what I’ve managed to piece together by way of explanation:  

In 1911, Monet lost his second wife, Alice.  Not long after, in 1914, he faced the death of his eldest son, Jean.  Already shattered by these personal loses, Monet was plunged further into depression with the start of the First World War and the destruction and dissolution of life as he knew it.  Additionally, a cataract formed over one of his eyes at that time, causing Monet to cease painting, which could not have helped his depression. Finally, his friend Georges Clemenceau encouraged Monet to paint again as a way to express his mourning.  The weeping willows, painted in homage to the fallen soldiers, may well have been part of this period of therapy. 

Another theory is that the cataracts effected how Monet perceived light, resulting in a general reddish tone in his vision and therefore in his painting.  Indeed, in 1923, the artist underwent two operations to remove his cataracts.  After that, his palette returned to purple, green and blue hues once again, as he was able to ascertain ultraviolet wavelengths he could not see with the cataracts.  Then again, the war now over and the worst of his grieving behind him, perhaps he had learned to cope with the loss of loved ones and a world forever transformed.

In all events, Monet lived a long life and left us with an enduring and important legacy of work.  A prolific and dedicated artist, he was a participant and a leader at a watershed moment of both history and art.  The Grand Palais exhibit reminds us most expertly that Claude Monet will continue to be remembered for decades to come. 

All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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Coming soon to the Château de Versailles...

Orangerie at the Palace of Versailles, by Urban at fr.wikipediVersailles' Hôtel du Grand Contrôle, a dilapidated mansion built in the 1680s as home and offices for the king's treasurer, is getting a multi-million dollar makeover.  In 2012 it will reopen its doors as a five-star luxury hotel. 

Standing a mere 100 years from France’s most renowned cultural landmark, the Hôtel du Grand Contrôle was evacuated during the French Revolution and has been falling into disrepair ever since.  Unable to afford the $7.3M (5.5Es) price tag to restore the building to its former glory, Versailles administrators have handed over this treasured piece of French cultural heritage to a private operator, a rare occurrence in France, indeed. 

Ivy International SA, a Belgian hotel concern, will renovate the 23-room mansion in cooperation with France's chief architect for historical monuments, Frederic Didier.  A percentage of the future hotel’s profits – to be called l'Hotel de l'Orangerie – will then return to Versailles in the form of rent in a lease agreement to last 30 years.

The Hôtel du Grand Contrôle boasts views of Louis XIV’s sumptuous Palace as well as his Orangerie, the greenhouse that housed the king’s tropical citrus trees.  Louis XIV was a great admirer of orange trees, in particular.  He enjoyed the way their scent perfumed the air.

If you’ve ever dreamed of living like a king, even for a day, now just may be your chance!

Click here for more news from National Public Radio. 

And here for news from France24.

Le Réveillon

Photography by Semnoz, August 2005, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.New Year’s Eve!  The day known in France as Le réveillon de la Saint-Sylvestre, a 4th century pope whose feast day just happens to be 31 December.  From the French verb, réveiller, meaning ‘to wake’ or ‘revive’, Le réveillon will be celebrated tonight in homes and restaurants throughout the nation with elaborate feasts of rich culinary delights, such as oysters, foie gras, and enough bubbly, of course, to keep everyone up until well after midnight.

Each region boasts some variation on the theme of the all-night party.  In southwest France, for example, it’s not unheard of for revelers to enjoy a torchlight procession, following a midnight mass, that takes them eventually into the vineyards where mulled wine awaits to keep them going into the wee hours.

Perhaps it goes without saying that after all the late-night soirées, New Year’s Day -- le jour des étrennes or day of New Year’s presents -- is a national holiday.  It is spent among friends and family who exchange gifts and cards in honor of the awakening of the coming year. 

But the fun doesn’t stop at January 1st.  No, the celebrating continues until 6 January, the day of Epiphany, which I’ll post about then…

Until then, I'm off to help the Uber-mensch prepare a seven-hour lamb.

Happy New Year!



Bonnes Fêtes à Tous !

Et Meilleurs Vœux !

From snowy Paris, France.

May 2011 be our year!

Found! King Henri IV's Mummified Head!

Frans II Pourbus, "Portrait of Henri IV (1553-1610) King of France:.After his untimely murder at the hands of a Catholic fundamentalist on May 14, 1610, King Henri IV of France was buried alongside his royal counterparts in the Basilica of Saint Denis.

During the Revolution, his body and those of his fellow monarchs were dug up and scattered by revolutionaries.  Among them was a certain secret admirer of "good king Henri" who, evidently, made off with his head! 

Find out what happened to it here: The Telegraph, 14 December 2010, and here: The Associated Press, 16 December 2010.

Another French identity mystery solved!

TTT Book Review: Revolution, by Jennifer Donnelly

The Lucky-one-and-only (Loo) and I had the great fortune of reading Jennifer Donnelly’s new book, Revolution, before its October 2010 release.  We literally fought over it; neither of us was able to put it down.  If you have not yet had the pleasure of being introduced to this wonderful book, allow us to do it now.  And let us encourage you, as well, to add it to this holiday season’s gift list for all your YA readers. 

Revolution is a TTT five-star-out-of-five must-read!

A dear friend and publishing exec gave us the book with good reason:

• it is thematically linked to the French Revolution, a topic I have been immersed in for years now with my own soon to be launched StoryApp, Beware Madame la Guillotine; and

• the main character, Andi Alpers, comes from our original stomping grounds, Brooklyn, NY, and “finds” herself…guess where…in Paris, kinda like Loo. 

So we cracked the book without hesitation, but Revolution turned out to be so much more than a superficial attraction!  It is a page-turning story of an otherwise privileged, intellectually gifted, and musically talented teenage girl who experiences the tragic loss of her younger brother and subsequent dissolution of her family.  And as if that weren’t bad enough, she blames herself for it all!  On the edge, failing school, unable to make sense of her imperfect world, Andi escapes into her music, playing her guitar until her fingers bleed.

Dauphin Louis Charles of France, third child and second son of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette of France. KUCHARSKY ou Couaski, Alexander (1741-1819).Suddenly, her estranged father swoops in and forces her onto a plane to Paris – the last place she wants to be.  He is heading there as part of an international scientific team to verify the identity, through DNA analysis, of the alleged heart of King Louis XVII.  This boy-King, who never had a chance to rule, died during the French Revolution at the age of 10, a prisoner of the mob, held in torturous solitary confinement in the Temple Fortress.  Although Andi does her best to shut her father out, creating a wall between the two of them with her music, she cannot help but be fascinated by the legend of this wretched would-be king.  Could it really be that his heart was cut out of his body, smuggled out the prison, and preserved these 200+ years? 

Before her father can solve the mystery of the heart’s identity through raw science, however, Andi discovers the truth herself.  In an antique guitar case with a faulty lock that responds to her junk-sale key on a red ribbon, she stumbles upon a never-before-read diary written two centuries before by a girl her own age.  The crumbling pages reveal Alexandrine’s courageous actions to help keep hope alive in the young boy’s still beating heart while also, inadvertently, contributing to his demise.  The harrowing tale literally draws Andi in and the two girls become inextricably linked as Andi faces her grief over her brother’s untimely end, discovers that love can and does endure even beyond death’s door, and learns to forgive. 

Grounded in sound historical research and ornamented throughout with musical accompaniment and theory, Revolution also contains all the elements of great story telling: an unpredictable multi-layered plot, compelling characters who you care about, and vivid writing on such universal themes as love, loss, forgiveness and redemption.  It expertly “depicts the eternal struggles of the human heart”, as promised on the book jacket, and for this reason, Loo and I believe, Revolution will endure on bookshelves for years to come!

Bravo, Jennifer!



How well do you know the Paris Metro?

Today in French History: Napoleon becomes Emperor

But which one?  Well, both of them, in a manner of speaking.

David, Jacques-Louis, c. 1805. Coronation of Emperor Napoleon I and Coronation of the Empress Josephine in Notre-Dame de Paris, December 2, 1804.

On a cold December 2, 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned or, more rightly crowned himself, Emperor of the French. He did it amid much pomp and circumstance at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris – his choice – not at the Cathedral of Reims, the traditional location for royal coronations.  Although then Pope Pius VII was in attendance, he merely blessed the crown and other regalia.  Then, returning them to the altar from whence they came, he took his seat. That was Napoleon’s cue to advance on the now blessed replica of the Charlemagne crown (the original having been destroyed during the Revolution), which he placed briefly upon his own head, then touched it to the head of his empress, Josephine.  The crown of choice for the first Emperor of the French was a laurel wreath made of gold, the likes of which were worn by Roman Emperors.

 Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominuque. Napoleon on his Imperial throne, 1806Exactly 47 years later to the day, on December 2, 1851, the nephew of Napoleon I, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, engineered a coup d’état that brought an abrupt end to the 2^nd French Republic and National Assembly.  Shortly thereafter, in 1852, he re-established the French Empire that had fallen with the capture and life-long imprisonment of his uncle in 1814 and 1815 and took the name, Napoleon III.  Being a modern Emperor, however, he opted to neither have a coronation nor wear a crown.  But he did have one specially made for his empress, Eugenie.

December 2 is also the date of Napoleon I’s victory over the Russo-Austrian army at Austerlitz, in Moravia (present day Czech Republic), which brought an end to the Holy Roman Empire.



An American Thanksgiving in Paris

Image courtesy of http://www.holidayforeveryday.com

Last night, the Uber-mensch, Lucky-one-and-only (Loo) and I stole a moment from our French lives to celebrate a traditional American Thanksgiving.  Okay, it wasn’t an official day off school or away from the job, and we had no luck tuning in the Jets game or the Macy’s Parade.  But as per tradition, we enjoyed great company: two other US expatriate families, several trans-cultural teen-aged friends, and an accommodating French dinde we named “Thomás” who was just small enough to squeeze into our humble European-style oven.

Now, Thanksgiving is largely associated with the USA: a harvest festival, dating to 1621, when the Mayflower Pilgrims, after a devastating first year in the new world, finally saw their hard work and puritan efforts pay off.  The bounty of corn, fruits, vegetables, cured meats and salted fish that they reaped that fall would provide them enough food to survive the coming winter.  The colonists called for a communal feast to be shared with their Native American neighbors, with whom they were friendly and to whom they owed their lives.  For it was the Native Americans who taught the settlers how to cultivate corn and with that one crop the pilgrims had beaten the odds.

But harvest festivals and ceremonies of thanks have marked human history for millennia, like the seven-day Jewish festival of Sukkoth, falling on the 15^th day of the Hebrew month of Tichri (late September, early October), which has been celebrated for over 3000 years.  Many such celebrations are still observed today, each with its own customs and folklore, but all are characterized by communal harmony, food, merrymaking, and gratitude. 

The U-M, Loo, and I remember well from our China days the ancient Chinese harvest festival Chung Ch’ui, the Moon Festival, which takes place with the full moon on the 15^th day of the 8^th month of the lunar calendar, considered by the Chinese to be the moon’s birthday.  During this three-day festival, families feast on round cakes stuffed with fruit and nut pastes of all varieties and stamped with the picture of a rabbit – it is a rabbit, not a man, that the Chinese see on the face of the moon. 

Falling on the same day, a similar tradition, called Têt-Trung-Thu, exists in Vietnam.  This celebration gives thanks to the children who, throughout the year, as their parents worked hard to tend the fields, had to fend for themselves.  During Têt, parents take time off to shower their kids with love and affection.  While at the same, during the Korean festival of Chusok, families give thanks to their ancestors for providing them with rice and fruits.

Canadian Thanksgiving takes place a bit earlier than its US counterpart, on the second Monday in the month of October.  And in August, at the end of the rainy season, many African countries, such as Ghana and Nigeria, hold their traditional Yam Festival. 

India boasts a number of harvest-related festivals as well, each one characteristic of the food and culture of the region. An example is Pongal in southern India.  Starting on January 14^th each year, Pongal lasts three days.  On the first day, the gods, Bhogi and Indran, are honored for bringing the rains; on day two, gratitude is paid to Surya, the sun; and on the third day, the family cattle, mattu, are bathed and decorated with flowers and bells in appreciation for their hard work plowing the fields. 

Indeed, harvest-related celebrations of thanks can be traced back as far as the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians.  And so, we gathered last night in community with a Scot, an Italian-Swede, a Canadian, a Frenchman (Monsieur le Dinde), numerous US-born American expatriates, and several foreign-born Americans, like Loo, to create our very own thanksgiving celebration.  Thomás was delicious, as were all the trimmings.  And, most importantly, we fun!

Happy Thanksgiving to all!