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| Hearsay: |
A profile of Bloomsbury, the uk indie that seems to be buying up the market lately:
Bloomsbury is on a spree. Last week it was reported that it had acquired a political memoir by David Blunkett for £400 000. Then there’s the multi-book deal recently concluded with novelist William Boyd for £500 000. New books by Richard Ford, Germaine Greer and Charlotte Rampling have been snapped up. But these are small potatoes next to the huge contracts lately issued to cookery writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and travel writer and historian William Dalrymple — each worth £1,9million.
Envy abounds:
Then there is Bloomsbury’s awesome buying power. There is no rival publisher who is not envious of Bloomsbury’s £53million war chest. “We’re very aware of how much money they have,” says an editor at Penguin, through gritted teeth. “We, and others, have been losing out in some big auctions recently.”
The big question seems to be, what will Bloomsbury look like post-Harry Potter? I think the real question is rather, what wil the world look like post-Harry. According to Gwinnett County’s supermom, Laura Mallory, it’ll be safer, Holier and the closest thing to Paradise this side of the New Testament. Okay Laura, but what about the shareholders; did you give them one second of consideration?
Not entirely sure when this was announced. Goran Simic and treeplanter-ninja Charlotte Gill make the cut; that’s good to see.
Congratulations, all around.
Robert Pinsky, of all people, takes us on a tour of the poetic barb.
The tradition of poetry as a way of being mean is an ancient one. The inventive range of Greek and Latin put-downs suggests that they were playing variations on a long, rich tradition of barbs and comebacks reaching back into prehistory.
So wait, this rap stuff isn’t new?
Well, pretty girl’s nightmare continues as her publisher withdraws her book from the shelf. I think it’ll come out in the end here that she didn’t even really write the book and just allowed her face to be slapped on the outside — it would certainly explain how perplexed and betrayed she seems. One salivating commentator, who in another era would be standing at the front of the circle with the biggest stone in his hand, asks how she should be punished.
Ms Viswanathan and Mr Swanson had their defenders, particularly among those who stand to profit from their success. But any honest writer will tell you that, like “unintentional larceny,” the term “unintentional plagiarism” is an oxymoron, and that the appropriation of another’s work is rarely unintentional.
But because we are so forgiving, we encourage bad behaviour compounded by absurd explanations. Here a historian all but blames her researchers for what were her own repeated acts of plagiarism. There a columnist claims he never read the book whose witticisms he so liberally borrowed. Now we have an internalizing teenager and a folksy CEO who forgets that words and ideas carry as much value as his blinking missiles.
I wish we could find a way to treat these miscreants as we do our errant students. Banish them from jobs or contracts in their field for a year. Let them acknowledge the intent to do wrong – an element of the “crime” – and let’s hear their apology before welcoming them back to the company of honourable writers, journalists, and even CEOs.
You know what? Here’s my idea: I wish we could find a way to treat these miscreants as we do our errant students… What if we banish them from jobs or contracts in their field, say, for a year or so? Then we can rest assured that the world will be a safer, more just place. Oh, wait.
Apparently it read: “Order in the court! I’ll have a hamburger, fries and coke.” Or something about a ship. You know, the joke would have gotten the judge laid more.
London’s legal world has been in a whirl since it was revealed earlier this week that Smith had encoded a message within the 71-page judgment. A sequence of italicized letters was sprinkled throughout the text, with the first 10 spelling out “Smithy code” — an apparent clue, and a play on the judge’s name.
An article on, yet again, why The Orange Prize is necessary.
The prize is necessary because the most prestigious prize-giving culture in Britain still often shows itself weirdly unable to recognise and reward the greatest writing, and for some reason books by women are still often the ones that lose out. When Zadie Smith’s ferocious and heartfelt novel On Beauty lost out in the Booker race last year to John Banville’s desiccated The Sea, it was only what one has come to expect from the Booker prize. From time to time the panel gets it right and finds a winning book that is truly a work of great imagination, but all too often it steers towards an easy consensus. The differing opinions, often refereed by an academic or politician, tend to cancel each other out, leaving the panel on the polite middle ground. What you get as a winner is a book that will be accepted by all the judges, rather than one passionately espoused by any of them.
Okay, in the Olympics women and men compete separately because of obvious biological differences. No one suggests that woman compete there separately because we’d otherwise be under-represented. The winner of any prize, including The Orange Prize, is decided very similarly, from prize to prize. As everyone seems to know in the industry, the prize is a crap shoot. The liking of this book over that is a matter of educated opinion, yes, but also (egad!) taste, and so Banville might indeed win over Smith because the judges that year preferred ‘dessicated’ to ‘ferocious and heartfelt’. Truthfully, I find it appalling for my sex that this sort of argument even sees the light of day. Okay, I’m in a bit of a mood, but is it gaining anything to suggest that women writers tend to lead from the heart, and men from the head? Is it possible that The Orange Prize is made necessary because of this mentality or that possibly we are holding ourselves down in a self-imposed gender apartheid? If The Orange Prize is necessary, I suggest it is not because of the type of books women write compared to the type of books men write, but that, culturally, the prize juries are conditioned to favour heady intellectual ‘dessicated’ writing over the stirring up of ‘passion and heat.’ Indentured sexism you may say and you may be right. So, how to change that?
Can blogging every day help your writing? The answer is: not. Not help. Not help for writing you do.
As a mere stripling, I was advised that if I hoped to become a good writer, I should write every day. More than that, I should read good writing every day. This can be accomplished on the internet as easily as it can by reading a book or magazine. But if you’re the sort who prefers People to The New Yorker, well, again, what’s the point?
So my riposte to Topsy was, while the internet may be a nifty vehicle for delivering one’s polished prose and penetrating insights to an impatiently waiting world, it can’t help you become a better writer if you, pardon my French, suck.
Also, blogging makes brain messy. Brain is where me keeps that grey stuff and my hat.
More and more and more on the embattled young lady at Harvard.
Cryptomnesia, which is the medical term for this kind of thing, is a powerful defence against charges of plagiarism. Rightly, copying material out of someone else’s book, or lifting it from the internet, is deemed a much worse offence than regurgitating it. The former can get you expelled from university; the latter can get you an upper second. Still, as internalisations go, Viswanathan’s are not the kind you’d hope your unconscious is brimming with. By most accounts, this is a sweet, funny, harmless novel. But the phrases she allegedly lifted are pretty unedifying.
But she’s just so pretty and rich. Can’t we buy her a present?
Da judge who ruled on the Da Vinci Code trial (which one?) has included a code of his own in the written judgement! When even the judge is making fun of you, you’re pretty much a fucking cartoon, Daniel-san. Time for ritual suicide. I’d make a joke about this being your next book, but we both know you’re set for life.
For the past three weeks, lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic have been puzzling over a series of strange italicisations in Mr Justice Smith’s 71-page judgment, which was handed down on April 7. The odd letters appeared to crop up randomly throughout the text and most people assumed they were typographical errors. But on closer examination, a pattern has emerged.
The first clue – the word claimants with the s in italics – is found in paragraph one of the document. In the next paragraph, the m in claimant is italicised. Read together, the italicised letters in the first seven paragraphs spell out the self-referential legend “Smithy code”.
Damn, that judge must have had some good fun.
Who would have thought that a musical adaptation of a schlock horror novel by Anne Rice would suck the life out of theatre? Let me try my hand at a witty lowbrow theatre review headline… Okay, here goes. “It Bloody Sucks!”… Too obvious. “Shouldn’t Have Seen the Light of Day” … Too long. Um, “Vamp Tramp is Damp Camp”? No, that just stinks. Okay, “LeStat Shat in Elton’s John”… no, that’s no good either. I’ll think of one and get back to you.
Profiled at the Ceeb by Ninja favourite Rachel Giese.
Writing in an adolescent voice was “most fun and most difficult,” says Mitchell, whose usually exhaustive research period was, for this book, “a relative holiday of calling up old friends and lurking on those school reunion websites, where you realize exactly why you haven’t seen those people for 20 years.” In writing Jason, Mitchell says, “it was easy to get the slang and diction right, but harder to get the emotion and insight. I didn’t want him to be an overly bright, Holden Caulfield type. Instead, I looked for accidental poetry and accidental wisdom.”
That’s so funny, David, because here in Canada, so much of the good poetry and wisdom also seem accidental. Maybe we’re on, like, the same vibe or something, eh?
In the States they are updating the reading lists in schools to reflect the contemporary post-colonial (agh!) nature of the student body. (I hearby initiate a movement to always append “(agh!)” after every mention of the term “post-colonial” (agh!).)
Largely in response to their more ethnically diverse student bodies, high schools in the area are broadening their literature selections to include more contemporary writers, more women and more minorities.
Students say the books engage them more immediately than the classics yet still raise timeless questions about existence and meaning.
Teachers say the contemporary books appeal more to students who don’t like to read and need an introduction to the power and pleasures of literature.
Meanwhile, in the sunny UK, a library is being recognized for drawing the football hooligans of tomorrow into its dusty stacks today.
“Once we started talking to them we discovered they weren’t a bad bunch,” chips in Andrew McTaggart, a library officer at the sharp end of the project. “We even got one lad to write his own ‘acceptable behaviour’ contract – no bad swearing, that kind of thing – and it was remarkable how things changed.”
The result is a library reborn, with a range of new cultural and community facilities from a football literacy project, to a ‘computer crazies’ club, IT classes, arts and creative writing courses. Guest authors – including the Edinburgh-born Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh – have held workshops.
To encourage participation, a youth literacy worker, has worked with library staff and a group of young people to select books and CDs for the library.
Canada, what have you done for us lately?
23 blank pages, presumed to be an unpublished play by Samuel Beckett, discovered by scholar.
The 23 blank pages, which literary experts presume is a two-act play composed sometime between 1973 and 1975, are already being heralded as one of the most ambitious works by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Waiting For Godot, and a natural progression from his earlier works, including 1969’s Breath, a 30-second play with no characters, and 1972’s Not I, in which the only illuminated part of the stage is a floating mouth.
Alice Munro has been awarded a medal by the MacDowell colony (somehow that makes it sound like a writers’ ant farm, no?)
Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro has been named the winner of yet another prestigious award. She will become the 47th recipient of the Edward MacDowell Medal, awarded annually to a person who has made an outstanding contribution to the arts. The MacDowell Medal, named for the American composer who lived 1860-1908, is given by the MacDowell Colony, an artist retreat that was established in Peterborough, N.H., in 1907.
Check out the classy new Canadian poetry site run by ninja contributors Dani Couture and Alex Boyd (Dani has an inverse omnibus review coming up in a couple of weeks and Alex wrote and early essay on graffiti for us — one that hasn’t been transferred over from the old site yet, but can be read here). It’s really beautiful and chock a block full of good stuff.
That headline needs some frantic newsflash theme music with typewriter strikes in the background. Lizzie Skurnick, proprietor of the Old Hag blog, used to work as a ghost writer for the same company that put out young Ms. Kaavya Viswanathan’s YA book. She offers some interesting insights into how YA series titles are produced there in a factory farming-like atmosphere. Further, the way books are edited leaves some doubt as to whether Viswanathan wrote the book herself. This would explain her surprise at some of the nicked passages.
But what exactly does 17th Street do? In light of the plagiarism scandal, this question has taken on new importance. Alloy Entertainment’s president, Leslie Morgenstein, told the Crimson that, “as has been previously reported, we helped Kaavya conceptualize and plot the book.” But it’s not clear where it was ever “reported” that the company “helped Kaavya…plot the book.” The first and most substantive public references to 17th Street’s role in the creation of Opal Mehta came in a February 22 article in the Boston Globe. There, writer David Mehegan said that the company “proposed that Viswanathan put her mind to something lighter, something closer to her own background” than her original writing samples. Based on a “fun, chatty e-mail” that Viswanathan wrote about herself, the “voice and idea for Opal” emerged, Viswanathan told the Globe. But her language makes it impossible to know who actually came up with the “voice and idea” — her or 17th Street.
…
For her part, Skurnick thinks that the realities of the market, but not any malicious plagiarism on Viswanathan’s part, may account for the similarities with Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings. “They seem like very brief and stupid phrases to copy,” Skurnick said after reading the passages in question. “I’m sure the same phrases are in like 20 teen novels…I think in the case of teen fiction, obviously there are stock characters, there’s a stock plot often, there’s sort of these stock areas — the boy, the body, the family, the friend.”
In further developments, Random House has rejected Viswanathan’s apology. You’d think they’d lie a little lower after the whole Dan Brown thing. But you’d be wrong. (First link from Maud)
UPDATE: People on the street react!
The number of Kirkus hot fiction debuts is higher than the average age of the authors… Just 35? Come on, the publicists tell me they’re ALL “hot”…(pdf)
A roundup inspired by not caring all that much except for the bit about Connolly who is long overdue for some proper recognition:
Harvard girl does the right thing and plans to revise her book to excise the offending passages for future editions. However, the remaining books of the offending edition will remain on the shelves. Furthermore, she plans to stop dangerously combining Polo shirts and Ivy League education, effective immediately. That is one smart, young lady. (Thanks, Ian)
Michael Posner interviews Camille Paglia in yesterday’s Globe.
Consuming a force-fed diet of the French intellectual method of Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, she adds, students emerge “passive to language, indifferent to fact, and arrogant towards culture.”
Academic dissidents have been silenced. “If you don’t embrace the consensus, your career stops in its tracks,” Paglia says. “I had a woman call me from the literature department at Harvard. She said no one can speak out because if you do, you don’t get the courses you want, the hours you want, you don’t get graduate assistants. It’s pathetic. It’s authoritarian, a regime of terror. Anyone opposed has either left the university or is totally underground.”
The result, she maintains, is two generations of lost talent — those who refused to surrender, and entrenched mediocrity among those who remained.
The only Canadian poem that made it into her ‘custodial’ book of poetry Break, Blow, Burn is Woodstock by Joni Mitchell. So here is Paglia, taking poetry back for the people. And if any of you poet-people have anything to say about it, I suggest you come at it fangs first and in rhyme. (Thanks cfg and J)
Can’t find a link to the 2006 Awards online, but a vigilant reader sent the list in. Thanks, Adria.
The 2006 Arthur Ellis Awards Shortlists
Best Non-Fiction
Linda Diebel, Betrayed: The Assassination of Digna Ochoa (HarperCollins Canada)
Rebecca Godfrey, Under the Bridge: The True Story of the Murder of Reena Virk (HarperCollins Canada)
Susanne Reber & Robert Renaud, Starlight Tour: The Last, Lonely Night of Neil Stonechild (Random House Canada)
Daniel Sanger, Hell’s Witness (Penguin Canada)Best First Novel
Rob Harasymchuk, The Joining of Dingo Radish (Great Plains Publications)
Mike Harrison, All Shook Up (ECW Press)
Illona Haus, Blue Mercy (Pocket Star Books/Simon & Schuster)
Louise Penny, Still Life (McArthur & Company)
Ilona van Mil, Sugarmilk Falls (McClelland & Stewart)Best Novel
Rick Blechta, Cemetery of the Nameless (RendezVous Press)
Giles Blunt, Blackfly Season (Random House Canada)
Alex Brett, Cold Dark Matter (Castle Street Mystery/Dundurn)
William Deverell, April Fool (McClelland & Stewart)
Peter Robinson, Strange Affair (McClelland & Stewart)
The National Book Critics Circle has established a blog at http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/. In related news, the National Critical Mothers Circle has also established a blog at http://whydontyouvisitmoreoften.blogspot.com.
A major European financial newspaper releases an eReader edition, which gussies up the entire technology and loans some cred.
Les Echos, which is owned by Pearson, the London-based parent company of The Financial Times, is taking a different approach. Instead of shifting the print format directly to a device, the company is customizing information with a look different from its traditional newspaper format, much as it would for its Web site version. The newspaper plans to test Sony’s e-readers first, but the intention is to make the newspaper readable on a variety of devices. The plan is to offer the device “to our subscribers if they subscribe to Les Echos for a period of years,” said Philippe Jannet, director of electronic publishing for Les Echos.
I really only want one of these things if they have search functions that can scan my entire library for strings of text. And I want to OWN the books on there, not rent them.
BoingBoing points to a long journal entry on how the finance of fiction publishing works.
P&Ls and how books make (or don’t) money: part the first: the mass market original complete failure
In which I explain how we figure out how much money to pay authors for their advance, and also in which I explain how sometimes books make money and sometimes they don’t:
A P&L is done a couple of different times. The first time is when we are estimating what we think we will spend on a book versus what we think we will make. If we buy the book, P&Ls are done throughout the book’s life.
P&L usually stands for Profitability & Liability or Profit & Loss.
In order to buy a book at Tor, we have to fill out a P&L to make sure that the book will be profitable.
Hmmm. Who knew?
Can it still be called self-publishing when he’s a billionaire who could own any number of publishing companies if he wiggled his nose and blinked?
Philip Roth usually won’t allow his photo on the jacket of his books. But given that his new one, Everyman, is about mortality, he thought he’d show a pic of him in the pink to stave off “autobiographical interpretations.”
“Everyman” is a slender volume of less than 200 pages. In that brief span, the novel’s nameless protagonist, a retired advertising man, undergoes a series of increasingly drastic surgical procedures. Stents, angioplasties, operations to ream out his carotids and one to install an interior defibrillator. Nor is he the only one not doing so well. One of his ex-wives has a stroke.
Um, rushing right out for that one.
Dan Brown uses push-ups, sit-ups and gravity boots to help generate ideas and avoid creative stagnation. Which makes me wonder what didn’t he do to avoid the bad writing. Given the year’s delay in getting The Followup Key to print, I wonder if he’s getting a little flabby around the middle there. (Also, Nabokov wrote on index cards and Philip Pullman writes by hand on strange paper before typing it up. Any strange habits among you lot? Not THAT strange, please.)
I’m considering spinning off a site from Bookninja that focusses wholly on plagiarism accusations. It would be called Knocking on Hell’s Door and would have all these cool graphics of like hanging people and firing squads and like an ambulance crashed into a school bus n stuff with this big devil puppet master with Dan Brown’s face hanging over it all and laughing and you just like KNOW the laugh is so high pitched and hideous that you’d just drop to the ground holding your ears, and you’d be all screaming like nah! nahhh! NAAAAH!!!! make it stop for the love of god make it stop, but god won’t be listening because you’re a plagiarising bastard and are first in line for Jesus to pop you like a zit on his Left Behind.
A professor on the outs at Columbia decides to out the whole process of cloning that is the MFA pyramid scheme. There are whole parts of this I can’t follow, which makes me think it was written in anger. How fun and sad!
There is no point in being coy. Despite the presence of a small minority of talented and committed faculty members and an equally small core of serious, gifted students, what prevails at the writing division in the School of the Arts, and to some extent at the School of the Arts as a whole, is an institutionalized and self-perpetuating culture of mediocrity so out of step with the general climate of excellence for which Columbia is rightly known that most would be shocked to be apprised of the details. A senior colleague of mine recently put it quite neatly: “Leaderless, rudderless, standardless. The worst among us sense the vacuum and rush to fill it with their own kind. So sad. How I wish I could believe there will be some surcease, some righting of the ship in the foreseeable [future]. Alas, I fear it will not be so.” I would like to believe otherwise.
Allow me to elaborate. A short list of documentable facts—I’ll begin with the smaller issues and proceed to the larger ones—would include master’s theses that are routinely passed despite the fact that the level of writing exhibited in them is remedial at best and virtually illiterate at worst, tenure-track hires of close personal friends of the chair who have, quite literally, not a single publication credit to their names and who are hired over candidates with two and three books—resulting in a situation in which students often have more experience and more publications than their instructors, and an institutional culture in which those who have done nothing for 10 or 15 years hire others like themselves in order to make their own lack of accomplishment less visible and, for the same reason, discriminate against those who are active in their fields.
Thoughts, people? I know you have them. (From Backwards City)
No worries. Just use the text from a lesser known work. But please, make it a really lesser known work, for Chrissakes.
Little, Brown and Co. published Viswanathan’s How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life in March and it is currently on the New York Times bestseller list.
The young writer had made headlines because of her youth and the two-book, $500,000 US deal she signed with Little, Brown while still in high school. Her book has also been reportedly optioned for a film.
This looks like a pretty compelling argument. Viswanathan is under scrutiny for copying passages from the books of Megan McCafferty, a former Cosmo editor. Check this out:
On page 6 of McCafferty’s book Sloppy Firsts, she writes: “Sabrina was the brainy Angel. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: Pretty or smart.”
On page 39 of Viswanathan’s book, she writes: “Moneypenny was the brainy female character. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: smart or pretty.”
McCafferty’s books are called Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings. Go ahead, go buy them all. They look like life enhancing novels. Botox for the soul. Or something.
Write something that Harper doesn’t like.
Dream Catcher, which operates out of a tiny office in Saint John’s business district, has put out few big sellers in its eight years of operation. However, publisher Elizabeth Margaris thinks she’s sitting on one now. “Things have just gone crazy,” Margaris said. “I guess you could say they’re hotter than hell.”
Hotter than Hell is the title of an obscure first work of fiction by scientist Mark Tushingham about global warming and a subsequent Canada/U.S. war over fresh water.
Maybe with the unexpected sales, they’ll redesign the cover for subsequent printings. Yikes.
It’s just the French stand in its way. I can just see the average Frenchmen, sausage in one hand, baguette in the other – “Why should I care about zis stupeed book. The Louvre iz not for deeze peoples. The Louvre, she’s for le sen-sual intellectuals, you know, the French peoples; you understand, no?”
A spokeswoman for the Louvre said: “There are many novels that mention the Louvre, so this is nothing special. It is not about the history of art. People who like the book are free to come and look at the art, but we don’t want to be associated with the book.”
I once witnessed a hostess in a one star hotel berate an American scholar for putting sugar and milk in his coffee. She told him babies take sugar and milk in their coffee.
Creative writing classes breed like Roman Catholics on Viagra in the UK.
Lucrative book deals and the new breed of celebrity author have led to a surge of interest in a potential career in writing.
Universities across the country are cashing in on the glamorous new image, with 85 offering postgraduate creative writing courses, compared with fewer than 10 a decade ago.
Statistics from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas) show that a third of institutions now run an undergraduate creative writing course, or offer it as an option with disciplines as wide-ranging as theology and human biosciences.
Okay, fine, take their money, but please, for the love of God, crush their spirits before they leave rather than empowering them. Maybe do it in third year and then offer a bunch of advertising and business writing courses in fourth…
A roundup:
The death of the book party. How sad. Just when authors were finally getting younger and sexier too.
Once, book parties “were as central to the book-publishing experience as collecting blurbs and freaking out over your book jacket,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “How else could you get through this self-induced ordeal without imagining the scene: reviewers and critics and editors and writers. . . . The hugging, the raised glasses, the rueful toast by one’s editor about how long the book took, the copies displayed on a mantelpiece.”
Not so now. “In these cost-cutting days, the book party is no longer to be counted on as a well-earned prize,” Atlas lamented. For one, publishers see book parties as a waste of money. The marketing budget, they argue, is far better spent on advertising or placement in bookstores. Unless you’ve written a surefire best seller — something about, say, sex, Hollywood, God, dogs, dieting or Abraham Lincoln — publishers are hesitant to spring for more than a few bottles of wine and some snacks from Fairway.
You’re lucky if you get a buy-your-own-beer and Doritos launch at most places these days. But where else will you sell 60 copies of your book at once, you midlist hack?
In Harry Potter-like fashion, The Solomon Key, Dan Brown’s followup to The Da Vinci Code, is being pushed from its original publication date of this summer to 2007. 2007? Is that code? Is that like, 7002, backwards, referring to the number of drafts that have had to be written to excise all the bad writing and plagiarism? Presumably this move is part of an overall plan to avoid release competition from the latest Star Wars novelization.
A poem Frost wrote for JFK’s inauguration has landed in the pile at the JFK Library. In other news, poems written by nearly everyone else have landed in the scrap paper pile beside the printer.
A good lesson for bloggers. Never comment on your comments. Or, at the very least, comment as yourself instead of pretending to be one of your own fans. I have a rule I try to stick to when possible, as I explained to a rather aggressive, grammatically-challenged fellow over the weekend — I never comment on reviews (in writing) of my work and I never comment on reviews of my reviews. It’s just not up for discussion. This space is different, since discussion is part of the spirit of Bookninja.
Toews is the one to read; but hasn’t the entire population of Canada already read it? Okay, I’ll admit I haven’t but I’m absolutely racing right out immediately to buy a copy. Serious!
Toews’s coming-of-age story set in a Mennonite community in Manitoba centres on Nomi, a 16-year-old who reflects with humour and pathos on her aimless life. “I think she’ll be one of those characters who inspire other books. There are girls reading this now who will go on to write other novels,” said singer-songwriter John K. Samson, who initially selected the book. A Complicated Kindness strongly evokes its setting, he said. “I can smell the place. I know that place,” he said.
Yup. The smell of prairie grass.
Slushpile comments on the advantages of and problems with self-publishing under the heading, “Why People Hate Self-Published Authors“. I’m there.
You remember Bobby? That weird kid in high school who went out of his way to wear plaid pants, day-glo sneakers, a green mohawk, maybe a little goth makeup, and sucked on a pacifier all day? Bobby spent more time planning his anti-conformity outfit (because, “you know, he just does his own thing, he’s such an individual“) every morning than Jenny the Cheerleader dedicated to her hair. But then he always bitched and moaned about how Pam the Prom Queen ignored him. Some self-published authors are the same way. They act like idiots and then wonder why they face such disdain.
w00t! That was totally hot. Lots of juicy commentary here. Go sink your teeth in.
Should be Hugh Hefner, but it’s actually a romance writer. I can’t remember which one and I only switched away from the article window two seconds ago. There’s about ten first names and ten last names that you just jumble up in as many combos as you can to come up with
the byline.
Dan Brown fends off another plagiarism lawsuit. He’s barely breaking a sweat in that black turtleneck and brown jacket. I mean, what could you do to him even if you won? Take away some of his money? Ha! Here, here’s a key. Go to one of the smaller treasure rooms in the north wing and take what you like. Then get out of my mansion before I release the hounds.
Is there an emoticon for drooling? :)~ I have a semi-cool collection of old books on poetics and a sadly neglected hardcover sf collection from my teen years. I have an original Arthur C. Clarke Earthlight hardcover from ‘55ish. I wonder if it’s worth anything. I bought it from a used bookstore that was going out of business in a small town up north. I walked in and found a box filled with those old nickel paperbacks and a bunch of other stuff. At the time I was in my very early twenties and set on opening my own bookstore. “How much for the whole box?” I asked. “Make me an offer,” said the woman in a shrill voice. “I love to haggle. Come on, make me an offer so we can haggle. I love haggling. I really do. Haggle haggle haggle. I love it.” “Thirty bucks,” I said. “Okay,” she said. I probably made several hundred dollars off it. Chances are that wouldn’t happen at this fair. (Speaking of bookselling, I just received yesterday an ARC for a new Melville House fiction title called Convesations with Mr. Prain, in which the protagonist is an aspiring writer and bookseller who accidentally befriends one of the most powerful people in publishing. The skinny on the street is that this was a slush pile discovery. I opened it up and was totally hooked. I’m part-way through now. I’ll let you know more as I do.)
Between the lines of the first sentence in this article is the suggestion that English is also endangered. Do they not have editors at the NYT?
…by the end of the century, linguists predict, half of the world’s languages will be dead, victims of globalization. English is the major culprit, slowly extinguishing the other tongues that lie in its path. Esther Allen, a professor of modern languages at Seton Hall University, calls English “the most invasive linguistic species in the world.” Spanish and Hindi are also spreading, subsuming the dialects of South American Indians, and of the Indian subcontinent. In the next two weeks, however, some of these endangered idioms can be heard at two international literary festivals that celebrate languages big and small, as well as the power and resilience of words themselves.
Wise, if sad, ending to the piece.
Do you need to be good with words to write great song lyrics? Eddie Vedder, Thom Yorke and Gord Downie would make me think “yes” and Michael Stipe and those bickering coke heads from Oasis make me think “no”. Well, now One, by a little outfit called U2, is the top lyric.
The vote to establish the nation’s favourite song lyric by music television channel VH1 produced an unusually credible winner in One by U2. A twisted ballad about our obligations to our fellow humans, its central notion is that we need each other to survive, whether we like it or not: “We are one, but we’re not the same/We get to carry each other” is the chorus motif.
Apparently, One is among the most requested songs at weddings, which does make you wonder if people actually listen to lyrics. Band leader Bono has revealed it was written against the background of the painful divorce of guitarist The Edge. The bitterness of romantic failure is spelt out: “You say love is a temple, love the higher law/You ask me to enter but then you make me crawl.” I certainly wouldn’t have it played at my wedding.
For those of you racking your brain for a song with good lyrics, I have nine words for you: Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town.
Maud Newton, who just doesn’t understand, points to the death of the Moleskine. GASP!
Moleskine notebooks (properly pronounced Mole-uh-skine-uh, but which I prefer to pronounce as if they are indeed made of supple little subterranean rodents) are more than just the marketing hype-tripe and lies on the card that comes in them — they’re actually very good. Solid, sleek, with great acid-free paper — they’re the PVC fetish objects of the notebook world.
Now, the fact that a wide range of geeks like me fetishize them has less to do (one hopes) with their “storied” (as in fictional) history and more to do with the fact that they last forever and look great. There’s a sense of respect when you write in one, or respectability. I’m never sure which, but I like the illusion. I couldn’t give a fuck what Hemingway wrote in, much less Bruce (Um, Who?) Chatwin.
That all said, the quality of the books I’ve bought has been uneven the last few years as the company has tried to ramp up to global demand. Now the Italian owners of the business that employs 13 is calling quits, citing an inability to keep up with demand, and putting the company up for sale.
You can pretty much rest assured the product will completely tank when it’s bought by some cost-cutting corporation. And you can bet I won’t continue to pay $20 a pop if I find even a single corner folded down, much less a mushy spine, loose binding or scratched cover. I don’t know about all the other fetishist nerds, but I gots my principles, yo.
(Plus, I just bought about 20 of them in anticipation of my move to The Rock where they don’t sell Moleskines, preferring, in fact, to write on clubbed baby Sealskines. That ought to last me a couple years. By then I plan to have debilitating arthritis and be in the process of uploading my consciousness into a battle robot.)
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