California Literary Review

An Appraisal | Michael Crichton: Builder of Windup Realms That Thrillingly Run Amok: Michael Crichton, who died on Tuesday at the age of 66, was like a character in a Michael Crichton novel. He was unusually tall (6 feet 7 inches), strikingly handsome and encyclopedically well informed about everything from dinosaurs to medieval banquet halls to nanotechnology. As a writer he was a kind of cyborg, tirelessly turning out novels that were intricately engineered entertainment systems. No one — except possibly Mr. Crichton himself — ever confused them with great literature, but very few readers who started a Crichton novel ever put it down. [NYT]

Obituary – William Wharton: When William Wharton’s first novel, Birdy, was published in 1979, he was already 53 years old, an American expatriate painter living in Paris. But his identity remained a mystery, because Wharton, who has died aged 82, chose that name as a pseudonym for his writing, while painting under his real name, Albert du Aime. The Wharton persona was soon the better known, as Birdy became an instant bestseller, won the American Book award for best first novel, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize. It was adapted in 1984 by Alan Parker into a well-received film, starring Matthew Modine and Nicolas Cage. [Guardian]

College Bans Nietzsche Quote on Prof’s Door: “God is dead.” That phrase, from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, is among the philosopher’s most well known — and most hotly debated. At Temple College, a community college in Texas, the words in the original German — Gott ist tot — have been barred from a professor’s office door. While the college says that to leave the phrase up would offend others and constitute and endorsement of the phrase, the professor and others see a double standard in place, and a violation of academic freedom. [Inside Higher Ed]

John Leonard, 69, Cultural Critic, Dies: John Leonard, a widely influential and enduringly visible cultural critic known for the breadth of his knowledge, the depth of his inquiries and the lavish passion of his prose, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 69 and lived in Manhattan. [NYT]

Google’s copyright war will have open access advocates up in arms: From one perspective, Google is making “fair use” – the use of short extracts, allowed under copyright law – of the books. Possibly a small snippet may be shown, while the searching ability is a valuable “transformative” application. But from a competing perspective, Google is making commercial use of the entire book itself overall. Doing it in little pieces per transaction might then be akin to the “salami slicing” computer crime technique of stealing extremely small amounts from a large number of items. [Guardian]

A Writer in a Living Novel: The novelist Carolyn Chute doesn’t have a working phone, a fax or a computer. She writes on a washtub-size electric typewriter that was probably state of the art in the ’70s. Ms. Chute (pronounced CHOOT) and her husband, Michael, live in a small compound at the end of an unpaved road in this rural Maine village near the New Hampshire border. [NYT]

Jane Austen wrote about baseball 40 years before it was ‘invented’: Jane Austen wrote about baseball 40 years before its official invention, according to a new book. But evidence of the game’s British origins was erased from history by the American sports magnate Albert Spalding, according to the book’s author Julian Norridge. Austen mentioned baseball in the opening pages of Northanger Abbey, which she wrote in 1797-8. [Telegraph]

Nobel laureates defend Kundera over spy charge: Four Nobel Prize-winners for literature have joined seven other distinguished writers in issuing a statement of support for the Czech-born author Milan Kundera, who has been accused of informing for the Communist secret police when he was a student. [Independent]