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| Hearsay: |
Paul Coehlo, not much younger than our grand dame, has made the trek to Siberia, all in the name of selling books. Publicists world-wide bow to him.
Paulo Coelho, the best-selling Brazilian author, took book promotion to a new level yesterday when he completed a two-week, 5,770-mile train journey across Russia.
Senhor Coelho, 59, arrived in the far eastern port of Vladivostok on board a specially adapted train, complete with showers, personal chefs and a retinue of publishers and bodyguards. Huge crowds had turned out to see him on his stopovers in Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk, highlighting the growing appeal of popular Western literature in Russia.
I’ll tell you what: give me a personal chef and I’ll go anywhere in the world you tell me to. … … … What? Where? Um, technically, that’s not so much in the world as under it…
The NYT interfiles John Updike who is shilling for his new novel Terrorist. I think it’s supposed to be topical or something.
The new novel is Mr. Updike’s 22nd and in some ways a departure. It loosely follows the conventions of a thriller, for example, one of the few forms that Mr. Updike, a jack of nearly all literary trades, had not tried before. And yet as he spoke about “Terrorist” it became clear that the novel also knits together some themes and preoccupations that have been with him almost from the beginning: sex, death, religion, high school and even Paterson itself, which also figures prominently in his novel “In the Beauty of the Lilies” and which Mr. Updike said he sometimes imagines as another version of Reading, Pa., near his hometown, Shillington.
Wow. What a slippery slope this is. And in a country like Germany that knows all about slippery slopes. I guess that’s part of the problem. An author is losing a $50K prize because he has expressed sympathies for that thankfully-rotting-in-the-grave scumbag Slobodan Milosevic. Just Düsseldorf living up to its reputation as being full of idiots.
Brooklyn’s indie publishers get some attention in the Village Voice, a magazine that has become, with the exception of the occasional interesting article like this, a complete waste of time for the literararararily inclined. Nice to see both Richard Nash of Soft Skull and Johnny Temple of Akashic in there.
She’s so charming. I don’t know how anyone can not like her.
What happened next? I think I did an event about my book The Penelopiad, and there was a book signing, and then we had dinner with Jamie Byng of Canongate and two of his authors, James Meek of The People’s Act of Love and MJ Hyland of Carry Me Down. Everyone was genial. Gone are the days, it seems, when authors would yell at each other or get blind drunk and fall backwards out of plate-glass windows. Or maybe the younger generation saves that part until after I have gone off to bed. Rumour has it that there was dancing.
How did she find out about the plate glass thing? I swore everyone to secrecy!
As Indigo creeps closer and closer to becoming a knick knack shop that happens to sell coffee table books, so Starbucks creeps closer and closer to a bookshop that happens to sell bad coffee. Yeesh.
Following up on yesterday’s post about Indigo banning the new issue of Harper’s containing Art Spiegelman’s 10 page article about outrageous cartoons:
News coverage from:
There’s a big difference between re-publishing these cartoons for the sake of paper-selling sensationalism and the equivalent of political racism (a la that Alberta paper earlier) and what Spiegelman is doing, which is thoughfully examining the phenomenon not only as an interested tradesperson, but as a cultural critic smart enough to look at all sides of the issue.
Well, at least the architecture is interesting.
“I felt the building . . . needed some saving,” said project director Mary Soper in an interview with CBC Television.
The work involved dismantling and rebuilding parts of the exterior and digging below the structure to create a large, climate-controlled space for books and documents. The copper roof has been replaced and parts of the exterior masonry rebuilt.
I wonder what the ellipse replaces in that quote from Soper. Any guesses? I felt the building rather than the books, which after all are just leather bound phone books dating form the 19th century, needed some saving. I believe no one is ever allowed to touch those “books” except Bell repairmen and even they have to wear speacial acid free gloves and under go lobo-erasure afterwards.
Why would anyone let this creepy man near their kid, even in book form. Okay, so I’m not a fan. I don’t mind the nastiness so much as the horrible writing and the incessant prose interruption while whatsiname explains what a word means. Creative writing 101: NEVER EXPLAIN WHAT A WORD MEANS; IF YOU CAN’T MAKE IT APPARENT STOP WRITING AND TAKE TAKE BASKET WEAVING 101. But he’s so funny, Kathryn. Meh. Anyway, here’s a competition that looks like it’s open to anyone.
£35m below asking. Now, there’s a deal.
HMV – which owns Waterstone’s books – is paying less for Ottakar’s because the bookseller’s problems have deepened after the original deal was referred to the Competition Commission.
The commission gave the green light to a merger, saying it would not lead to a significant lessening of competition.
“The strategic rationale for the acquisition of Ottakar’s is now stronger than ever,” Alan Giles, the HMV chief executive, said.
What? Buy low?
David Beckman, at 31, will be writing another autobiography. How much of the royalty advance does the ghost get?
He admits he struggles to help his seven-year-old with homework, while his wife says she has never read a book in her life.
But that has not stopped David Beckham signing a £1million deal to bring out his third book in five years at the still relatively tender age of 31.
The England captain and Real Madrid star, whose 2004 book My Side was the biggest selling autobiography of the year, has signed a new deal for Making It Real.
Oh, for Christ’s sake. This sort of thing, more than any other world event, marks the end of civilisation. Fine, don’t believe me.
I haven’t heard about this before. Have I just not been paying attention or is this getting no coverage here?
Federal authorities are investigating dozens of American television stations for broadcasting items produced by the Bush administration and major corporations, and passing them off as normal news.
Some of the fake news segments talked up success in the war in Iraq, or promoted the companies’ products.
Investigators from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are seeking information about stations across the country after a report produced by a campaign group detailed the extraordinary extent of the use of such items.
The report, by the non-profit group Centre for Media and Democracy, found that over a 10-month period at least 77 television stations were making use of the faux news broadcasts, known as Video News Releases (VNRs).
Not one told viewers who had produced the items.
Astonishing, if true. Utterly astonishing. The bleak view is that it’s a more direct version of the media manipulation already in effect. Well, that’s not true. The bleak view is that it’s exactly what it seems to be. I can’t stand those sections in magazines and papers now that mask themselves as content. But at least they usually have a small print watermark at the top of the page that reads “advertisement” or “special advertising supplement” (like you’d supplement your vitamin C with a pill. Are you dangerously low on advertising? Here take this supplement. And buy a home while you’re at it.)
Be sure to check out the latest article in the Bookninja Magazine section. Poets Aislinn Hunter and Sean Horlor pick up a drunken discussion that began on a patio in Vancouver with Horlor’s challenge: “You live in a relatively large North American city, yet the urban world–and you know what I mean by that–is nowhere in your work. I think you have a responsibility as a writer to explore that, so why aren’t you?”
I don’t think the poet is obliged — not to modernity or history or to urban relevance. I think we live in a world where we see what we see, care about what we care about and write out of a concern. Further to that I think most of us write out of our education, by which I mean our informal worldly education and, if we’re lucky, our academic one. I have no experience of heroin / meth addicts though I do have sympathy for them. That said I think its liberal naiveté to say that ‘these women’ deserve a place in poetry. It makes for a lovely optimism — what poetry must be capable of — but I wonder about the entitlement aspect of such a claim. How far do we take this idea? Who deserves our attention? I’m being an ass but I don’t think poets should have to bear the weight of that responsibility, in part because I know that if we all tried to write about the addicts down on East Hastings , a lot of the poetry would be bad. So I don’t think we can mandate content.
Scientists have unearthed an early email from the distant past of 1995, shedding light on civilizations gone and opening our understanding of early eHominids.
Written by a “” and addressed to a “,” the writer expresses the ancient equivalent of boredom, asks the receiver about his or her status in their primeval office environment, then refers to the act of sending the e-mail itself.
…
Only four known e-mails pre-date this one, including a 1992 ASCII drawing of Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, found by a group of Indian laborers salvaging precious metals from computer hardware in a Mumbai dump in 2004.
Very exciting times we live in.
The Simpsons may be the prime philosophical voice of our generation. I believe there’s only one way of summing this up: sweet merciful crap!
To speak truthfully and insightfully today you must have a sense of the absurdity of human life and endeavour. Past attempts to construct grand and noble theories about human history and destiny have collapsed.
We now know we’re just a bunch of naked apes trying to get on as best we can, usually messing things up, but somehow finding life can be sweet all the same. All delusions of a significance that we do not really have need to be stripped away, and nothing can do this better that the great deflater: comedy.
Lisa, I’d like to buy your rock.
Last winter Critical Inquiry published a list of the top 25 literary theorists. This was a bad thing because…
Why — at a time when we distrust megacorporations and any word from high, when we know it only makes sense to suspect the fix is in with any such lists unless they are produced by a klutz like Posner or a clown like Letterman — would the leading specialized journal in the humanities toss very likely bogus social-science tools into its hitherto beautifully humming engine?
And herein is the fundamental flaw in the outrage. It’s not a time when we (humanity) distrusts megacorps and word from on high. It’s a time when we (the shrinking body of over-educated humanists) distrusts Walmart and Bush. It’s a kind of intellectual Darwinism, this trying to create a broader appeal. If the readership of CI isn’t growing beyond us, the chances of CI surviving are headed downhill. So we get well-packaged, easily-digestible fluff pieces and sidebars are the soup du jour. Don’t get me wrong, I agree. I think lists are facile and can cause harm in the wrong venue. And I’ll give you my top ten reasons why….
The Saloon points to some articles highlighting Britain’s pay-to-play system for getting on to supposedly “impartial” recommendation lists for the Christmas rush this year.
BRITAIN’S biggest bookseller is demanding payments of £50,000 a week from publishers to get books on its supposedly impartial list of “recommended” reads in the run-up to Christmas this year.
The WH Smith scheme is the most expensive in a range of confidential deals being operated by retailers to promote lists that consumers believe are based on independent assessments of a book’s quality.
No authors appear on recommended lists unless their publishers pay the fees, and those refusing to pay may not even find their titles stocked.
Some commentary spreads the blame from the greedy big box stores and desperate publishers to the daft public.
I mentioned the cynical groans of authors because they do, in fact, know about this. It is often made clear to them by their publishers that their advance (already long spent) was the least of the expense, and that their months of slogging round festivals and welcoming impertinent journalists to comment on their front room are relatively unimportant. Seventy per cent of promotional budgets go on furtive payments to bookshops. The message to the author is: “Nobody would read you if we didn’t pay, so shut up grumbling.” To the reader the message is: “You are a fool pig, guaranteed to go for the shiniest swill-bucket.” To the newspapers who publish bestseller charts it is simply: “Gotcha!”
Undoubtedly there’s something similar going on here, but being a poet, I don’t know about it. Publishers can barely decide whether it’s cheaper to store or pulp our titles. Can anyone illuminate how the pay-to-play system works in Canada? The US? The comments are anonymous, Chapters and B&N people………
Margaret makes a personal appearance at Hay Festival, leaving the Frankenhand behind, presumably to clear up the dishes and write books while she’s gone.
Interfiled at the Guardian about his crazy tendency to not always do the same thing.
But the variety also comes simply from having what Haddon describes as “a butterfly mind“, flitting impatiently from subject to subject. “I’m really lucky in that I can do lots of different things. It must be really hard to just be a poet or just be a novelist – a constant cycle of effort and exhaustion and recuperation.”
Craziness. Plain craziness. You know, on a corporate resume “butterfly mind” means either “can’t hold a job” or “can’t settle on one thing”…. So they tell me.
Indigo has pulled an issue of Harper’s containing a 10-page article reprinting the infamous Mohammed cartoons, as well as work by Art Spiegelman and two Israeli artists inspired by that cuckoo Iranian call for Holocaust cartoons to “test the limits of Western tolerance of free speech”.
In a memo obtained by The Globe and Mail that was e-mailed to Indigo managers yesterday about “what to do if customers question Indigo’s censorship” of Harper’s, employees are told to say that “the decision was made based on the fact that the content about to be published has been known to ignite demonstrations around the world. Indigo [and its subsidiaries] Chapters and Coles will not carry this particular issue of the magazine but will continue to carry other issues of this publication in the future.”
…
Harper’s publisher John MacArthur said he was “genuinely shocked” by Indigo’s action, in part because two large U.S. chains, Borders and Waldenbooks, are selling the issue.
…
“I’d expect an American company to do this, not a Canadian,” Mr. MacArthur said yesterday. “Even though you have tougher libel laws than us and your own versions of political correctness, to my mind [Canada] has always been a freer place for political discourse.”
Not any more Johnny-boy. As per usual, we inherit your political climate about 5 years later. There suddenly are stetsons with fat, old, politically-connected CEOs under them everywhere.
Some of the works have never been read and are in mint condition. However, as their existence was recorded only in increasingly illegible hand-written catalogues with no keyword search facility, most of the material has been invisible to scholars.
Professor Secord said: “The bulk of it still hasn’t been touched. The typical book in there that you order up hasn’t really been looked at before.When you go in to use the collection, you put in your slip and have the librarian bring up the paper knife so you can cut open the pages.”
I don’t know about you, but I just went weak in the knees. They bring you a paper knife. They bring it. It. And you get to cut the pages. I’m giddy, I swear. It’ll all be on-line by 2010, with, one can only hope and pray, a cyber paper knife. Maybe Atwood can re-invent the Longpen for this vastly more visceral and practical purpose.
Jesus on a stick, if I’d known it was this easy, I would have simply mortgaged the farm.
More than £40,000 a week is being paid to booksellers by publishers anxious to get their books into the bestseller charts. The payments demanded by the retailers are to ensure display of the book in the most prominent area. The payments, highlighted by The Sunday Times, also ensure a generous stock of copies in the store. Before Christmas, deals of possibly more than £50,000 a week will help to secure a book’s place on “recommended reads”.
Why do we even bother? I’m thinking it’s a conspiracy of silence and, also, a complete dumbing down of the population. Not to say that all the books pushed are dumb, but just that the average customer has no idea she is being thus manipulated. I’m also curious to know what is paid for prominent space in the Great White. A two-four?
Yup. Protected from books depicting gay relationships. Here’s what one wacky, angst-ridden, sexually hung-up politician had to say about a Sydney childcare centre’s use of gay-positive readers:
Health Minister Tony Abbott said it was “really pretty wacky stuff” and children should be saved from adult hang-ups.
“Kids of that age just want to get on with being kids, and why should we inflict all our adult hang-ups and angst on kids?” he said. “Let children be children.”
Inflict? Wacky stuff? Listen, pal, all parenting is wacky stuff; elsewhere in Australia it’s okay to sell terror manuals. But that’s way less of a threat to society than smiling happy families.
You think you’ve got it bad, wading through a transit strike to get to a job you’d rather not be at? Try falling in love with a boat. Now that’s heartache. We’ll have to give him a stern talking to so he’ll bow out. Wakka wakka. Then there’s the red alien rain to deal with. Oh, and then there’s the possibility of armageddon via brain-controlled robots. Well, armageddon or freedom for paralysed people. One or t’other. But what if they’re the SAME?!
The picture books are disappearing from the kiddie section. What’s being done to save the illustrated book from extinction? More, it seems, than whatever’s being done to save the whales, rainforest, condors, etc.
Oh, wait, no, it’s the death of Robert McCrum’s faith in the novel. Slight difference.
In 2006, the novelist has become a cross between a commercial traveller and an itinerant preacher. The cultural historians of the future will surely pick over the larger meaning of this festival fever, but one thing is indisputable: in just over a generation the novel has gone public in the most astounding way. In the process, the genre has sold out and become big business, the preferred medium of self-advancement and self-promotion for Blair’s children, and almost unrecognisable to fiction-lovers raised on the literary names of the Forties and Fifties.
And he walked back and forth to school every morning, six miles over broken glass and through hail and gunfire, too. But you know what? HE WAS GRATEFUL HE HAD SHOES TO SHARE WITH THIS BROTHER!
Brilliant. It’s like slam poetry, but with talented POETS participating.
Here’s the setup: Two writers are given 15 minutes each to compose a poem based on a little inspiration furnished by an editor. They type their poems for posting on a Web site called QuickMuse (quickmuse.com). Fifteen minutes later the poems go up on the site, and can be played back so that readers see the keystrokes unfold second by second and follow each erasure and false start, all the little compromises necessitated by the constrictions of time.
As one or two ninja-readers can attest, this system would not work for me. It would take me several days and many drafts sent on the hour to get the poem right. But I still likes the idea.
The New Yorker is getting a digital facelift. Soon it won’t look a day over 70.
After perusing the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Sun, which land daily on the doorstep of the Manhattan apartment he shares with his wife and three children, Remnick ventures online into what he calls the “infinite supermarket of voices and experimentation.” He checks out the left-leaning TalkingPointsMemo.com, then peeks at the conservative National Review Online. Salon and Slate get stop-bys, as do the Web sites of papers like the New York Post, the Washington Post, and The Chronicle. He’ll follow the day’s top story through the blogosphere, looking for story leads.
And he has his guilty pleasures.
Aha! A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat. Say no more. No, really: say no more. Turns out he surfs…. are you ready for this? Dylan sites. Yeesh. That shit is just freaky and unnatural, David.
Charlotte Gill wins The Danuta Gleed Award.
The judges called Ladykiller “a startling collection of stories that explores some of the darker undercurrents of human existence.”
Both comic and gentle, the seven stories in the collection touch on themes of escape, self-sabotage, and the power of unconscious desire. Selections from Ladykiller were heard on CBC’s Between the Covers last year.
One of the stories from this collection, Hush, was a finalist for the 2003 Journey Prize and the collection was a Governor-General’s Award nominee.
Bookninja spoke with Charlotte early this year about her awesome book, Ladykiller, and her work life up north treeplanting.
Bawbawa Wawters has backed out of a $6,000,000 book contract with Miramax and is shopping her memoir around for more money. Aw… Wasn’t six large enough for the Elmer Fudd of soft-lit/ball interviewing? So hard done by. I hope the same thing that happened to Alec Baldwin with the Patriot Games movie happens here. Namely, that they pick Harrison Ford instead, to teach her a lesson.
Of course, when posting about the beat box Nirvana below, I missed the all-ukulele version… So so so so so so gooooooooooood. My youth is a joke.
Now you can edge out the singles with that ridicuous power stroller, get yourself a Chai grande, and properly settle into a long conversation with Marg Winton, even though she’s got an even bigger and more expensive stroller, but never mind her kid is already showing signs of ADD; yes, actually have a full conversation, that one about how to tone up the baby belly and have seen Holt’s new season? Not a peep out of the children, and gosh doesn’t little Arnold look sweet in his bumble bee jumper and oversized earphones.
Starbucks will sell “The Velveteen Rabbit” and “The Night Before Christmas” audio books, which are narrated by actress Meryl Streep. “The Velveteen Rabbit,” written by Margery Williams, will go on sale at Starbucks on Aug. 29, and “The Night Before Christmas,” by Clement C. Moore, will go on sale Nov. 7. The books will be available only at Starbucks stores for four months before being available at traditional retail outlets, Starbucks said.
Omigod, this is so, like, awesome.
The clever marriage proposal. What’s great about this is that if she says no, you can always just “find and replace” all instances of her name in the text and reprint it for the next future almost-fiance ex-girlfriend.
Sylvia Brumbach has run out of phone books to rip in half.
German-born Sylvia Brumbach, known as The Woman of Steel, says she is about to run out of books after destroying over 100 at Blackpool Tower Circus.
“I just brought 200 over from Germany … I’ve used over half of them already,” she told Reuters.
The phone book maw!
Finally, someone is taking Harry Potter seriously. Real live scientists are designing a cloak of invisibilty. What a wacky crazy topsy-turvey thing to do. I can just see the powerful nations of the world, their armies hidden under these things bumping into each other. “Sorry pal, didn’t see you there.”
Metamaterials are engineered to include tiny physical structures — metal coils, or rods shaped like aerials. Scientists have been able to “tune” these materials to bend electromagnetic waves in strange ways.
The plan, according to Sir John and his colleagues, is to channel light or other electromagnetic waves around an object, then restore them to their original trajectory on the other side.
“The cloak would act like you’ve opened up a hole in space,” says David Smith, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University in North Carolina. He and Sir John co-authored a paper on cloaking devices published in this week’s on-line edition of the journal Science.
Clever clever.
As I see it, the trouble with “adaptation” is that in the book world it’s not necessarily the fittest that survive. But this take is also valid.
So the filmmakers have precisely replicated what Mr. Brown described, and by doing so they offer a textbook illustration of how badly “The Da Vinci Code” fizzles as movie material. The image looks right, but the brain-teasing fun that accompanied it has vanished. And the best of Mr. Brown’s gamesmanship has no cinematic equivalent. As Freud might have put it, sometimes a book is just a book.
So what you’re saying is that Brown’s book is so bad it isn’t even filmable, right? C’mon, say that.
Ariel Gordon, Canadian poet and (more importantly) ninja reader, gets the Guardian workshop treatment for her poem “Seven months: the navel gaze”.
This is the most visceral set of images, and yes, it really works. I almost can’t believe someone could pull off the image of “My belly button is a muddy worm run/ just before it rains and the whole thing sinks in on itself”, but you sure did.
Rock on, Ariel.
Backwards City points to an absolutely wicked all beat box cover of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. Perfect for a guy who needs a haircut and is just trying to survive Friday.
A series of articles on the slow, eventual demise of books and reading as we know them.
James Patterson spends more time than most large authors promoting his own books, taking a hand in design, arranging readings, etc. So much so that he’s now hiring people to help him with the side of things he doesn’t seem to like so much: the writing.
It began with “Miracle on the 17th Green,” a story of a middle-aged man seeking the extraordinary from his ordinary life, written with De Jonge.
“Peter is a better stylist than I am, and I’m a better storyteller than he is,” Patterson says. He’s since worked with five co-authors. Patterson writes the story outline. The co-author pens a first draft. After a series of back-and-forths, a new book is produced in about half the time.
…
Of critics who say he has industrialized the art of novel writing with an assembly-line production style and flashy marketing, Patterson shrugs, yet seems to take offense.“Just because it’s clean prose doesn’t mean it’s necessarily easy to do,” he says. “It’s hard to keep people glued to the page. Almost nobody does it … and if nobody does it, it can’t be that easy.”
My partner, heretofore known as Lady Ninja, is also a sociologist who studies art, identity, culture, and sexuality, among a few other smart-sounding things. Her dissertation was on poetry communities and identity and she was interviewed on NPR last month as part of a show on poets, and in particular, Samuel Menasche: a woefully unrecognized poet who I happened to befriend during my time in NYC who just received a major award in the US. She talks about what keeps poets going when there’s no likelihood of ever winning any recognition. (Scroll down to the “Professional Poets” headline.)
Chatelaine’s new publisher is former small publisher Sarah Angel. She’s young and pretty and possibly, it seems, qualified. But fourth paragraph in, she provides this deal breaker for anyone under 40:
Chatelaine is “my mother’s magazine” and “my grandmother’s magazine,” Angel said in an interview, pledging to keep the magazine relevant to a new generation of women.
I can just see the tagline on 50,000 dusty copies right now. “Chatelaine: Your mother’s (and grandmother’s) magazine…” Some front-of-book items announced on the cover: “10 ways to improve your sexlife without waking your husband!” “How to cook boiled cabbage — with ZING!” “Viagra: from God or Satan?” “We told you not to pop those knuckles, and now look!” “Plus all the regular over-50 celebrity gossip in our special pullout section: HOT FLASH!”
Um, can we get a communications chief to the front door of Chatelaine, STAT!?
Or lack thereof. This whole article has particular resonance in my life right now, and I read it with the attention of a desert explorer who has stumbled upon an article about dowsing.
Our attitude to the Germans and their supposed lack of a sense of humour is best understood through the example of the joke known to comedy professionals such as myself as The German Child. It goes like this. An English couple have a child. After the birth, medical tests reveal that the child is normal, apart from the fact that it is German. This, however, should not be a problem. There is nothing to worry about. As the child grows older, it dresses in lederhosen and has a pudding bowl haircut, but all its basic functions develop normally. It can walk, eat, sleep, read and so on, but for some reason the German child never speaks. The concerned parents take it to the doctor, who reassures them that as the German child is perfectly developed in all other areas, there is nothing to worry about and that he is sure the speech faculty will eventually blossom. Years pass. The German child enters its teens, and still it is not speaking, though in all other respects it is fully functional. The German child’s mother is especially distressed by this, but attempts to conceal her sadness. One day she makes the German child, who is now 17 years old and still silent, a bowl of tomato soup, and takes it through to him in the parlour where he is listening to a wind-up gramophone record player. Soon, the German child appears in the kitchen and suddenly declares, “Mother. This soup is a little tepid.” The German child’s mother is astonished. “All these years,” she exclaims, “we assumed you could not speak. And yet all along it appears you could. Why? Why did you never say anything before?” “Because, mother,” answers the German child, “up until now, everything has been satisfactory.”
It’ll be interesting to see how things pan out for l’il ol’ me.
Following up on Ninja K’s post of last week, reader JB writes in to note that Canadian writers are about to get a boost to the Writers’ Trust Woodcock Fund.
The image of the starving artist might seem romantic to some. But that’s not a story you’ll likely hear from the many established authors in this country attempting to squeeze out a novel on crumbs. This week, the Writers’ Trust of Canada will add a little fat to the bones thanks to a $1.87-million bequest — said to be the largest cash gift to writers in Canadian history — from the estate of literary giant George Woodcock and his wife Ingeborg.
The Writers’ Trust will distribute the money through its Woodcock Fund, which was established by the B.C.-based couple in 1989 to help Canadian writers facing financial crises. Since its inception, the Woodcock Fund has distributed over $420,000 in financial support to more than 110 writers in need. With this latest cash infusion, plus additional money raised through recent fundraising efforts, the trust will now be able to double its dispersals to over $100,000 each year.
Good work by good people. Thank you from all of us. Now, buy me a new stereo.
Sad, sad adaptation news today. Unless you’re a Dan Brown fan or have a stake in the worth of musical theatre. In which case, break out the champagne. (For Dan Brown fans — champagne is like Coors Light, but with bubbles. And it doesn’t taste so much like water. And the “g” is pronounced.)
Did you remember your towel today? You’re obviously not someone to be reckoned with. Today is Towel Day, a day of honour and remembrance for Douglas Adamses past. Like any good Hitchhiker, you should be carrying your towel around with you all day. You never know when you might need it. (I would so have done this today except that earlier this year I rented the big budget hollywood HGTTG on DVD and found it mildly embarrassing. Then I remembered that, at some point, I must have grown up.)
Clive points to some interesting numbers. The life expectancy of any bestseller is down, according to a study by the scienticians at Lulu.
The average number of weeks that a new No. 1 bestseller stayed top of the hardback fiction section of the New York Times Bestseller List has fallen from 5.5 in the 1990s, 14 in the 1970s and 22 in the 1960s to barely a fortnight last year — according to the study of the half-century from 1956-2005.
In the 1960s, fewer than three novels reached No. 1 in an average year; last year, 23 did.
Hey, in America it’s our god-given right to all be number one. Especially if our last names are Brown, Rowling or “Diet”. It’s positively communist.
The fifth instalment of The Fictitious Reading Series will take place on Sunday, May 28th at 7:30 pm in the gallery space above This Ain’t the Rosedale Library (483 Church Street, Toronto). This month’s featured writers are Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer and Richard Truhlar. The evening will include readings by Kathryn and Richard, as well as an informal onstage interview with them.
Hope to see some Ninjas; shurikens confiscated at the door.
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