Dibs

GalleyCat addresses an article in the Newark Star-Ledger about “gangsta lit” — novels such as G-Spot, Candy Licker and Thug-A-Licious aimed at “serving the appetites of a certain segment of young black urban America … 18 to 35 and interested in rap music and street life.” A Pocket Books exec calls it “the largest growing and consistently growing genre,” pointing to the success of Sistah Souljah’s novel The Coldest Winter Ever — a million copies sold and 1,048 Amazon.com reader reviews, such as those headlined “This book is the Mother of all HOOD Books!” and “where da movie at?” (Remember back in ‘92 when Souljah was quoted in the Washington Post as saying, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?”) Other authors cited in the article include Wahida Clark, a Trenton, NJ native who started writing while incarcerated in Kentucky for money laundering, conspiracy, and money and wire fraud. Her books are the Essence bestseller Thugs and the Women Who Love Them, Every Thug Needs a Lady, and the latest, Payback Is a Mutha. And it is! As author-consultant Earl Cox explains on his Web site: “When author Wahida Clark received bad checks in lieu of royalty payments from her former Brooklyn-based publisher, she turned to Earl Cox & Associates for help. We successfully terminated her previous contract, recovered a percentage of the money due her, and found her a far better deal with Kensington Publishing.” Cox charges $250 per hour for personal consultations. So if you’re an ex-con having troubles with your publisher, start filling your piggy bank. Or commit some wire fraud.

Between them, they did so many things: shot up drugs, married Playboy and Baywatch gals, died and came back to life, went to jail for assaulting Pamela Anderson, and played hair metal for decades. Now you can read books about them! Perth, Australia native Paul Miles – who calls himself “the world’s #1 Mötley Crüe historian” — is the author and publisher of many books about his fav band, including Chronological Crue, Vol. 1, Chronological Crue, Vol. 2, Chronological Crue, Vol. 3, Mötley Crüe Down Under and What Mötley Crüe Means to Me. The weird thing is that Miles’ publishing company and blog and three of his books, which all share the name Chronological Crue, defiantly omit the umlaut. Yet the title of his other two books, MCDU and WMMMTM for short, include it. Puzzling! But who can unlock the methodologies of a diehard fan who remembers a long-past birthday on which his wife “had a pair of black leather pants with a lace-up crotch made for me by the ex-wife of Sex Pistol Glen Matlock and they were just like Vinces from the Too Fast for Love album cover”? Miles started his site when, “after reading various online FAQs covering all sorts of topics, I realised there was no FAQ for Mötley Crüe.” It took a while to get going, but “after … two years, the site was ready to go live in the early part of 1997. On the 16th January, a teaser awareness campaign began directing fans to a singular introductory page that invited them to come back for the launch on 27th January 1997, the day Vince Neil was to re-unite with the Crüe onstage at the American Music Awards. The website became fully accessible on the morning of the 27th so Mötley fans could spend the day reading through the band’s past, then later that evening witness the beginning of a new chapter in Mötley Crüe history.” Exactly! The site includes gig updates, pix, the umlautless Chronological Crue Newswire, and a year-by-year history of the band that is so unbelievably detailed you might confuse it for a nightmare, what with every line conjuring a jet-ski accident, a road-rage punch “splitting his knuckles to the bone,” a wedding to a stripper who is also a mud wrestler, taped orgasms, “cancerous tumours on both her kidneys,” an ibuprofen overdose, opening for KISS, a blue soda-pop called Mötley Brüe and … oh. So. Much.

If he had been blown to bits last July 7 — as desired by young Mohammad Sidique Khan, who stood three feet away from him and set off a bomb in a London subway car — then sociology professor John Tulloch wouldn’t have been able to write a book about his experiences on that fateful day, and about how he does not consider himself an “innocent victim.” In One Day in July, due out this month from Little, Brown in time for the one-year anniversary of the bombings, Tulloch describes his injuries — the head wounds, the shredded face, the shattered eardrum, the shrapnel still lodged behind his ear. Noting that he feels no anger for his would-be killer but rage for the foreign policies of Tony Blair, Tulloch declares: “I’m not on one side or the other,” according to Australia’s The Age. As reported in the Guardian, Tulloch gazed at photographs of the terrorists, thinking of them on a first-name basis, and wept in sympathy to see “one of the suicide bombers, Germaine [Lindsay], with his wife and babies. Here was this loving woman with her children. It brought tears to my eyes.” He adds, “I don’t approve of their actions.” Well, well! Harsh words! He ends the book with a letter to his would-be killer, who can’t read it, being dead. In the letter, Tulloch declares: “I don’t accept the label of innocent victim that the media want to give me. My British and Australian governments have taken that innocence away.” In The Age, Tulloch misuses the imperfect-past tense as he comments: “If I lost somebody very close to me, I don’t know if I could have written the book at all.” Dude, you almost lost somebody very close to you.

The next celebrity who’s busy writing a book (in line after Teri Hatcher, whose depressingly titled Burnt Toast advises fortysomething women about life) is Pervez Musharraf. Pakistan’s head of state is now at work on an autobiography, according to Indiaenews.com. In Line of Fire is expected in bookshelves this fall. “Musharraf may go to town with version of what made him do a U-turn in Afghanistan after 9/11, ditching the Taliban regime and the joining the US-led global war on terror,” reports Indiaenews. “There might be a message for the Muslims, both at home and abroad — balancing it with a call to the West on what he has done to make Pakistan a moderate Muslim nation.”

A peculiar odor was emerging from the Illinois home of prolific 77-year-old author Charlotte Towner Graeber, and police entering the building on Monday discovered that it was full of live animals kept in “atrocious” conditions, according to Surburbanchicagonews.com. Nearly two dozen exotic birds and a “two-foot-long reptile” were among the creatures removed by mask-clad inspectors from the riverside home where the award-winning author has lived for some forty years. A neighbor described Graeber, who is also a local librarian, as “a nice lady.” The home was red-tagged and deemed unlawful for habitation. Graeber’s 26 books include the children-with-animal tales Grey Cloud (about pigeon-racing), Fudge (about a boy and his dog), and Mustard (about a cat that dies). Suburbanchicagonews.com adds that in the mid-’80s, “she penned a dozen short children’s books featuring Mr. T, the brawny, gold-draped, Mohawk-wearing television and movie actor known for his signature catch phrase, ‘I pity the fool!’ In Phony Baloney, The Counterfeit Kid, Graeber describes the star’s arrival at an airport through the eyes of a child: ‘Down the steps came Mr. T. His boots clicked on the metal steps. His gold chains flashed in the sunlight. He walked straight towards us.’” … Well, that should be toward, shouldn’t it? Graeber has been charged with several city violations including “companion animal hoarding” and is due in court on July 25. In years past, she also owned a skunk and a flying squirrel. And why oh why does this story also appear in the North Korea Times?

Yes, journalists do get sentenced to jail time for what they write. According to Turkish site Bianet.org, Istanbul reporter and author Murat Yetkin is on trial, facing a 4.5-year sentence, for “attempting to influence a fair trial” by criticizing in his paper, Radikal, the court case of Orhan Pamuk. Once beloved in his native Turkey but now controversial — his bestselling novel Snow is about the clash between Western and Islamic values — Pamuk faced charges last year after publicly raising the topic of the 1915-17 Armenian genocide. He considers himself a rare Turkish free-speech advocate. Yetkin is one of several reporters now facing charges based on their coverage of the trial. This puts freedom of speech and of the press around the world in perspective, doesn’t it?

Cops in Baytown, Texas pulled Joanne Ibarra over for disregarding a traffic sign, then wrote her a citation for having neither a driver’s license nor insurance. Then she was clapped into handcuffs when it was discovered that she had not returned a library book. According to KTEN.com, local Channel 10 news, not returning a library book violates a city ordinance. Overdue notices had been sent to Ibarra, and a warrant had been issued for her arrest for ignoring them. She was released after paying a $118 fine and $50 in fees. But what was the book??? KTEN leaves out the one fact that inquiring minds want to know.

If you’ve ever sat there gazing at Amazon.com’s URL while waiting for its pages to load slowly, then you’ve probably noticed that it contains the word “obidos.” Some of us were well aware that Óbidos is the name of a Portuguese town, and figured that head honcho Jeff Bezos’s ancestors might have hailed from there. But in its July issue, New Scientist reveals that the Óbidos in Amazon.com’s URL isn’t the Iberian one; it’s the one in Brazil, which in the 18th and 19th centuries was a thriving and populous seaport whose fortune was largely derived from Amazonian manatees, tubby whiskered marine mammals that were subsequently hunted to near extinction.

Nearly 22,000 attendees arrive every week at evangelical pastor Rick Warren‘s 120-acre Southern California church complex. Warren, whose book The Purpose-Driven Life has been dubbed a 21st-century Christian manifesto, plans to use the Korean edition on his upcoming visit to Pyongyang, where Beliefnet.com reports that he “has been invited to preach this summer to some 15,000 Christians in North Korea, a communist country infamous not only for its nuclear threats but also for its religious persecution.” When he told his Southern California congregation last Sunday that North Korea would allow him to preach in a stadium seating 15,000, “a collective gasp arose from the worshippers. Then, claps and cheers,” according to Beliefnet. In North Korea, where religion can be a capital crime, proselytizers and members of “unauthorized” religious organizations are regularly arrested, tortured and executed, according to a 2005 US State Department report. Nevertheless, religious leaders including Billy Graham have visited North Korea. According to Beliefnet, Warren asked Graham for advice on his own trip, which he suspects will be highly choreographed by Kim Jong-Il’s government. Answering a question about whether he was afraid the invitation might be a set-up to expose North Korean Christians so that the government can arrest them, Warren said: “I know they’re going to use me. So I’m going to use them.”

Alexander McCall Smith’s lighthearted mystery novels featuring plump female detective Precious Ramotswe have introduced the African country of Botswana to readers worldwide. The author is also a bassoonist (his wife plays the flute), and his first-ever concert in Botswana drew an enthusiastic crowd, according to Mmegi, a Botswanan paper. Dressed in a kilt and other “traditional Scottish attire,” the Zimbabwe-born novelist and professor of medical law presented “An Evening of Music & Laughter with Precious Ramotswe.” The paper reports: “During the break, hundreds of patrons who had carried their copies of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, had a light moment with the famous author as he signed autographs and shared ideas with some. Despite not singing, McCall Smith had brought the opera pair of Nicola and Malcom Wood to add colour to the concert. They performed Summertime, Hippopotamus Song and a Scottish song, The Wee Cooper of Five.” The reporter mis-heard the song’s actual name, which is “The Wee Cooper of Fife.” Its first stanza goes: “There was a wee cooper wha’ lived in Fife,/Nickety nackety, noo, noo, noo./And he hae gotten a gentle wife,/Hey Willie Wallacky, Ho, John Dougal,/Alane quo’ rushety roo, roo, roo.”