Clever headline. Some characters jump from book to book. Much like some people keep appearing at party after party. The difference is, the characters more often have something new and interesting to say.

Characters whose lives are left hanging often haunt a writer’s mind. Sometimes they demand straight sequels. Julian Barnes waited 10 years to call in on Oliver, Stuart and Gillian, whom we first met in Talking it Over and rediscovered in Love, Etc. Other writers fill out complete fictional existences for their creations. John Updike watched Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom respond to each decade as it rolled out, offering a commentary on life in 20th-century America. Chroniclers such as Anthony Trollope and Anthony Powell slowly colour in whole social circles.

Other characters refuse the authorial invitation to reincarnation. In The Apple, Faber wanted to bring back Henry Rackham, “a decent character who deserved so much more than he got in The Crimson Petal. I offered him an opportunity to live again, as a younger person, even as a child; I urged him to seize the chance to say the things he’d been too shy to say the first time round. He remained too shy. Such things must be respected.”

A short bit on two writers, years apart, lose their sons and voice the concerns of their people during times of war.

Seven days ago, the son of another national writer was killed in battle: Uri Grossman, the son of David Grossman. There is no reason why David Grossman should feel personal responsibility, as Kipling did. But Uri’s death had a heightened impact in Israel because Grossman had called a press conference on the previous day to argue against expansion of the war.

Wait a minute. There’s a younger generation than the one currently reading SF? Isn’t the common perception that SF needs to do outreach to the adult community?

While you may convert a few adults, I doubt you will make rabid SF readers out of them. Not so with kids. lets face it, one of the cool aspects of SF is the sense of wonder inherent in most stories, the ability of SF to make you look at something in a new and different manner, or to encounter something you might have otherwise. In effect, to be a kid again and to experience something for the first time, and to be affected by it, to be moved by it, to be awed by it. SF is a much harder sell to adults who are set in their ways and are used to looking at the world in a certain manner. Kids don’t have that problem. They haven’t formed a worldview yet. They are experiencing something new every day. I believe there is no better time to reach someone than when they are a child. This is where the outreach programs should be focusing. I’d love to see someone, anyone, trolling the SF community, asking for book donations, then donating those books to school libraries. I’d like to see some organization make a concerted effort to actually reach the kids in schools, and not just through books. Why not a 30 minute tour of SF, showing film clips and reading excerpts from books? At the very least, its something different from regular school work and an attempt to equate SF with fun, not work.

Aha, get em while they’re young. Like the cigarette companies. Smart.

The Arab world’s Nobel laureate remembered at:

• NYT
• CBC
• Washington Post
• LAT
• The Scotsman

The Times and The Times both look at the purported shittiness of one AN Wilson.

“The response of all right-thinking people will be to roll around on the carpet shrieking with laughter,” the columnist Libby Purves wrote in The Times of London. She added that the incident showed the importance of focusing on great writers’ works, not their messy private entanglements, in biographies.

“The bamboozling of a modish author by a fake Frenchwoman is a salutary reminder that lives, however picaresque, matter less to posterity than works,” she said.

I’ve been giggling since day one. I think it’s a lovely prank to play on a anyone who can’t take it.

Blurb.com is offers a chance to put your blog between covers.

“The role of a 21st-century publisher is making books available offline and on,” said Brian Murray, group president of HarperCollins, which announced nine months ago it would digitize its entire library and offer tools like browsing as well as audio and video to compete with Amazon and iTunes. HarperCollins is, far and away, the most digitally progressive traditional publisher.

HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman says self-publishing is little more than a vanity press. “A good book will get published,” she said. “Self-publishing is denying that fact. The filters of agent, editor and publisher are still essential.”

Pundit Jeff Jarvis, who has written extensively about the future of book publishing, disagrees. “Every author I know says the publishers don’t get the job done on marketing — they end up having to do their own. As for a middleman, you can sell enough books on Amazon now to make it worthwhile.”

“The face of publishing will change,” he said. “As for who wins, the big guy or the little guy — I have no idea.”

Yeah, I’m sure you lot would shell out 30 bones to read this when there are no links. I can just see a few of you (and you know who you are) “clicking” at the page over and over, yelling, “Honey, fucking Bookninja’s broken again!”

The n+1 editors had a schmancy fund-raiser in New York last week to help offset the cost of a pamphlet on the avant-garde. Suits, classical music, tote-bags, thieves. Yep, someone walked off with their entire pot of gelt.

But it wasn’t inebriation that led to the editors’ absentmindedness, Mr. Gessen said. “We’ve been much drunker than this,” he said, “but the party was so nice that we were lulled into a false sense of security. Everybody was wearing jackets; there was classical music.We didn’t think anyone was going to steal our money.”

Ah. I heart NY!

Five months after his arrest, Iranian authorities Wednesday released an Canadian-Iranian writer who had been imprisoned on charges of spying, Iranian media reported.A spokesman for the Evin prison in Tehran told Iran’s semi-official news agency, FARS, that Ramin Jahanbegloo was released on bail.

More a recommendation, really. I don’t normally do this, but a book came in the mail that totally blew me away, so I am interrupting my regularly scheduled lack of reviews to bring you this poetry tip: Amy Newman’s Fall riffs on 72 dictionary definitions for the word “fall”. It’s a tightly-wound thing of sublime constraint and lyrical-narrative beauty. I didn’t know Newman’s poetry before this, but I’ll be checking out her backlist as soon as I get a chance.

Scifi badboy Harlan Ellison groped someone on stage while accepting his Hugo. You didn’t see this coming? Still, it was wrong. And everyone is up in arms… so to speak. SFSignal, the best little sf blog out there, has the call. Ellison apologises, in his way, here. And speaking of clutches at the Hugos, Canada’s own Robert Charles Wilson took home the Best Novel award for Spin.

How’d the NYT get its hands on Peter Pan? Reader Terry sent in this link to a news release about the outrage over the NYT leaking vital Peter Pan state secrets to the terrorists.This is the most singularly vile breach of trust to occur in the West since Tom Cruise revealed he’s a raving lunatic. The Guardian picks up the sordid story of blood, revenge and pixie dust here. This is real wrath-of-God type stuff, people. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling. Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes… The dead rising from the grave. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together: mass hysteria!

This, in turn, has translated to a trickle-down drop in stock prices for the manufacturers of short yellow school buses.

The number of books threatened with removal from library shelves dropped last year to its lowest total on record, with 405 challenges reported to the American Library Association.

The ALA has been tracking efforts to pull texts since the early 1980s, when it helped found Banned Books Week as a celebration of free expression. The 25th annual “Banned Books” program takes place Sept. 23-30, as libraries and bookstores highlight works that have been removed or faced removal.

Penguin is set to release a small army of classics into the Madarin market — the fasting growing readership in the world. How will the Chinese take to Moby Dick? Isn’t the party line already consistent with the idea of us being a bunch fat, white, marauding, vengeance-obsessed, hubristic mammals anyway? And they might find a way to work the whale in there too.

Kathryn Hughes counsels Wilson and his rival Hillier (suspected of being the author of the AN WILSON IS A SHIT Betjeman letter) to chill out.

Suspicion initially fell on Bevis Hillier, a man who gave up 25 years of his life to writing a monumental three-volume life of Betjeman, commissioned by the poet himself before his death. Hillier has strongly denied being the hoaxer, but in any event has a long list of grievances against Wilson, whom he accuses of handing out a deliberately insulting review of the second volume of his book and of leaning heavily on his research without acknowledging the fact. Wilson, in his sprightly way, has responded with some choice bits of venom.

As the whole sorry business suggests, there is no literary spat more hateful than that between two biographers working on the same subject. Novelists may flounce over shortlist tampering, historians may get shirty about mutual accusations of political bias, but biographers will tear each other to death rather than give up their subject to a rival.

I think this stuff is smashing for the whole genre. I can’t remember the last time an article about biography didn’t put me right to sleep. I’d like to see more people prepared to humiliate and perhaps push their peers under a bus over ideas and intellectual ownership. It might cull the herd somewhat. (And just so you don’t think I’m being too high brow in my intellectual elitism: dude’s name is Bevis. Heh heh heh.)

Hey, Hoover said it, not me. This time. But seriously, I guess this means they are a people who like to mispell their “donuts” and eat them too.

Our obsession with weight is well established, obvious from the steady drumbeat of medical studies warning about the dangers of extra pounds, the multimillion-dollar diet industry and the news pictures of our favorite young female stars hollow-eyed in the grip of anorexia.

But, it doesn’t really matter. Every American, young and old, today is heavier than ever.

As for reading, there should be no excuse for what is perceived as the fatal decline of books, the death rattle of fiction and the total capitulation to the computer because there are free literacy programs for every age coast to coast.

Alternate headline for this piece: Today’s reading-in-crisis article! (P.S. Boy, I could sure go for a tasty doffnut right now.)

Egyptian Nobel winner, dead at 94… or 95.

I shudder to think. Stats show women read more fiction than men. What does this mean? I mean, besides the fact that they’re smarter?

In recent years, various pundits have used this so-called “fiction gap” as an opportunity to trot out their pet theories on what makes men and women tick. The most recent is New York Times columnist David Brooks, who jumped at the chance to peddle his special brand of gender essentialism. His June 11 column arbitrarily divided all books into neat boy/girl categories—”In the men’s sections of the bookstore, there are books describing masterly men conquering evil. In the women’s sections there are novels about … well, I guess feelings and stuff.” His sweeping assertion flies in the face of publishing industry research, which shows that if “chick-lit” were defined as what women read, the term would have to include most novels, including those considered macho territory. A 2000 survey found that women comprised a greater percentage of readers than men across all genres: Espionage/thriller (69 percent); General (88 percent); Mystery/Detective (86 percent); and even Science Fiction (52 percent).

Brooks’ real agenda, however, is not to deride women’s fiction, but to promote the latest conservative talking point: blaming politically correct liberals for a “feminized” school curriculum that turns young boys “into high school and college dropouts who hate reading.” According to Brooks, we have burdened little boys with “new-wave” novels about “introspectively morose young women,” when they would be better served by suitably masculine writers like Ernest Hemingway.
…
Desperate efforts to “macho” up the novel include Penguin’s “Good Booking” campaign, which sent out—who else?—beautiful models to award prizes of £1,000 each month to any British man under 25 caught in flagrante with one of its testosterone-friendly titles. The advertising tag line? “What women really want is a man with a Penguin.”

Apart from sex with beautiful models, men are also socialized to seek out activities that confer status—which, these days, sadly doesn’t include reading novels. According to novelist Walter Kirn, “If novelists have become culturally invisible—at least to today’s men—it’s partly because the life of a novelist offers few rewards to the traditional male ego. It’s not about power, glory and money,” unlike the adulation our culture reserves for rap stars, athletes and movie actors.

You mean, those girls in the coffee shop aren’t hitting on me? I thought that was barely-restrained sexual tension, not giggling! Hey, speaking of raw cauldrons of bubbling tension, Phillip Marchand is quoted here. (Thanks, Franklin)

As part of my stats package, I can see what search strings lead people off the googles and on to Bookninja. I was slightly disturbed today to find “borders books employee blog” was one of those. The conspiracy theorist in me immediately wondered whether it was a manager or corporate type looking for dirt to fire employees. But it could just as easy be a lovelorn customer jonsing for another peak at that babalicious employee with the lip ring and figuring there might be a blog. Actually, come to think of it both of those are creepy. But, hey, what do stats really mean, anyway? Apparently searches for “book online church conference in malta for 2006″, “sex in heaven”, and “buzz the tower gay slang” will all get you here too.

Profiled at CBC Arts. Here she talks about the Air India bombing.

As any writer will tell you, there’s often a substantial lag between the flash of inspiration and the moment pen is put to paper (or fingers to keyboard). For many years, the catastrophe felt too close, too raw for Badami. At the time of the disaster, she was living in the southern city of Madras (now Chennai). One of her neighbours was among the Air India victims; devastated by grief, the man’s wife later committed suicide. In the early ’90s, Badami and her son, Aditya, moved to Calgary to join her husband, who was working on a master’s degree in regional planning at the University of Calgary. It was only after she had published two acclaimed novels — Tamarind Mem (1996) and The Hero’s Walk (2000) — that Badami felt she had enough perspective to fathom the largest mass murder in Canadian history.

A review of Grass’s memoir thinks the great author is purposefully evading his past. No shit?

His memory quivers and shakes continuously concerning his revelation, now 60 years after the fact, about his time in the belly of the beast.

So much so that he insists his readers must understand his wavering can’t be separated from his method, or choice of a title (”Peeling the Onion”) – an approach that comes down to Grass pleading for the reasonableness of his story of tears and breaks in his stripping back of the onion’s fragile, slippery layers.

But my argument here is exactly with this dodge. Grass, the wondrous novelist and self-appointed in-house moralist for postwar Germany, constructed a book meant to blur the self-disclosure of his SS past and, in the process, dull that new reality’s potential moral hook on his legacy.

Grass’s selectivity is fobbed off as memory failure, but it is systematic enough so what is left is not much more than mild self-criticism, reminiscence, and the brilliant descriptive language that would be expected of him.

Can’t we all just get along?

Peter Pan is coming! In scarlet! Now we get to find out how much Peter paid in therapist bills and ritalin to get him ready for his position pushing paper in the cubicle.

British literary god Frank Kermode argues that the study of English in university shouldn’t be the easy option. Huh.

Looking back over the field he has dominated for half a century, Kermode’s words are unminced. Universities, he says, “are being driven by madmen”. And education in general “is being run by lunatics”.

The recent A-level and GCSE statistics, I point out, would indicate that at one level, at least, his subject is increasingly popular. “Well,” he replies, “I don’t know what they call ‘English’ now. I can understand the attractiveness of it. But I don’t hold the view that reading English is a soft option, or at least it shouldn’t be. It should be a severe option, restricted to those people who are qualified to do it. I’ve been out of touch with student life for a long time. But I don’t believe that many people nowadays get many visible benefits from studying English. It doesn’t do them any harm, of course.”

Is he suggesting that English should be re-engineered to be more in line with currently unpopular “hard” subjects – like physics? “Yes…”

But what will people take when they can’t decide what else to do? Have you ever thought about the idly rich, Frank? Don’t they deserve to have an excuse to be at school drinking before taking over the family business of buying things?

Ol’ Alex is this close to getting mowed down to make way for something important to the Russian people… SHOPPING!

For more than 120 years Alexander Pushkin has seen off every threat. Joseph Stalin deported him (if only 100 metres), McDonald’s first outlet in Russia opened nearby and Chechen militants allegedly detonated a bomb not far from his left foot.

All along, the statue of Russia’s most famous poet preserved a bubble of calm in the centre of Moscow. Now, finally, it seems the killer blow is at hand.

If the city government gets its way, a four-storey shopping mall and traffic tunnel will soon be built on the square where Pushkin stands on his pedestal.

Wodka. Pushkin needs more wodka.

Your life could be worse. You could be a circus dwarf who was swallowed by a hippo. Or, conversely for some of you, your life could be better…

Hyperion is starting an “imprint for women“. Which, considering the statistics, is like starting a line of “sanitary napkins for women”.

Whether book buyers even notice the logo on the book spine, though, is a matter of debate. Although consumers might recognize a Harlequin romance or a Penguin Classic, few other imprints are instantly recognizable to consumers.

Some book buyers “might know that Vintage prints a lot of fine novels or that a particular imprint has writing that is generally good,” said Vivien L. Jennings, president of Rainy Day Books, an independent bookseller in Kansas City, Mo. “But that’s a very, very astute consumer, and I don’t think that that’s your average consumer. For them it’s much more author-driven.”

But authors said that the new imprint, with its smaller list, would give them more distinctive marketing than they might get at a general-interest publisher. “Any author’s greatest fear is that you’ll publish a book and it will kind of get lost in the shuffle on a large list at a large house,” Ms. Bennetts said. “The great appeal of going with Voice was that it was a highly targeted list with a very specific audience.”

Fuckin women. Coming up here and taking all our imprints. If they don’t like Mack Bolan they should just go back to where they done come from.

Who wrote the Odyssey and the Iliad? Not Homer. It’s now becoming apparent that at least the Odyssey was written by a woman.

Dalby thinks both works were composed by the same person, but that the more developed female figures in the Odyssey — particularly the heroic character Penelope — reflect change in the author’s life.

“By the time she came to create her second masterpiece, the woman poet understood at last that in consigning her work to writing, she was able to address a whole new audience (including women),” he said.

While no master copy of the poems exists, many different written versions of the poems were circulating in Greece by 300 B.C.

Anthony Snodgrass, emeritus professor of classical archaeology at Cambridge University, agrees that, because of its emphasis on domesticity versus aggression, the Odyssey could have been written by a woman. But he finds it hard to believe a female could have composed the violence-infused Iliad.

Ahem. Remember: “emeritus” means “old”.

Michael Redhill’s play Goodness won the best of the Edinburgh fringe and gets a 10 day run in NYC at 122. Rock on, Michael. (Thanks, Adam)

Several sources [audio] are riffing on Bushie’s reading list, which apparently includes 60 *coughhacksnort*bullshit!*coughcough* books. It’s like the kid who forges straight A’s on his report card instead of going for a C and D passing spread, George. We know you’re lying because it’s just too unbelievable. And because, frankly, we’re pretty sure you’re the kind of kid who actually did forge his report card. Or had his daddy and the CIA do it for him.

Harper’s has been serializing the novel Happyland after it was mysteriously dropped by Norton in the 11th hour. Even though he’s still looking for a publisher, it may have been the best thing to ever happen to author John Robert Lennon.

Norton declined to specify why it dropped “Happyland.” But Lennon said the editing process had been going smoothly, and that legal questions emerged only after he submitted the final of multiple drafts. Since signing a contract with the publisher in June 2004, Lennon had been working with Robert Weil, a veteran editor known for line-editing as aggressively as he tries to drum up attention for his authors. “I’d worked with Bob before on ‘Mailman’” — Lennon’s well-received 2003 novel, also published by Norton — “and we had a really good editorial relationship,” he said. It was Weil, Lennon said, who suggested he cut a lot of subordinate characters and bring Happy Masters to the fore. “He wanted there to be more drama and a stronger narrative through line,” Lennon said. “I’d send them pages, he’d send them back for more tweaking. The whole issue of legal questions never came up.” (Weil declined to comment.)

I’d like to remind you about the Canadian Happyland, and ask you to take a moment buy it to flesh out your poetry collection with some real good stuff. Um, obviously not here, but somewhere.

The family of that psychopathic fucknut that claims to have killed the little beauty queen (I think he’s just an obsessed pedophile who’s jealous it wasn’t him who did it) is offering their story for sale to the highest bidder. Ah, I see predation runs in the family. I hope there’s a special ring of Hell set aside for people who profit off gruesome book deals.

But while larger Wikipedias, like those written in English (1,377,015 entries and counting) and French (348,243 entries), wrestle with questions of accuracy and vandalism, as well as the imposition of limits on who can create and edit entries, smaller Wikipedias face more basic questions: How do you create an online encyclopedia when few native speakers have access to the Internet? What use is an encyclopedia when literacy rates among a language’s speakers can approach zero? (This is not a problem for Swahili.) And who should control the content of an encyclopedia in a local language if not enough native speakers are moved, or able, to contribute?

There’s pretty much nothing we like more around here than a good prank or hoax. Turns out Betjeman biographer and journalist AN Wilson was on the receiving end of a particularly nasty personal attack in the form of a hoax. A love letter, purported to reveal a hitherto unknown fling Betjeman had with a mistriss, has turned out to be a fake. The proof? The capitals at the start of each sentance spell out “A N WILSON IS A SHIT”. I think I would have questioned “tinkery-tonk” before noticing that.

Douglas Coupland has taken the stuffing out of the pillow of CanLit. Perhaps it was replaced with pudding, I’m not sure. But he wrote an article for an NYT subscription-only online source (so probably only about 100 people read it) saying that the grant system in Canada sucks and that old writers are taking up too much of the limited resources.

Coupland describes Canadian literature as being at a dangerous moment right now, as the younger generation is set to break out.

“There is a grimness around CanLit — the same sort of grimness that occurs when beautiful young adults are forbidden to leave home and are forced to tend to aging and dying family members, when they are forbidden to lead their own lives,” he wrote in the article on New York Times Select, an online service available only by subscription.

After the article was published, he reportedly stuffed a sock in his grandmother’s mouth and forced her into a questionably-run private nursing home.

A Globe report on the fall titles is prefaced by a gloomy piece that estimates there are fewer than 2000 “serious” readers in Canada.

Fifteen years ago, the acquisition editors at a prominent Canadian publishing house were regularly told by their sales and marketing colleagues that there were no more than 3,000 serious book buyers in the entire country.

The adjective “serious” was never precisely defined, but it was understood to describe those readers who could be counted on to go to a bookstore at least once a week and buy one or two titles on each occasion, mixing purchases of fiction with those of non-fiction. Since then — a time some publishing types like to call the B.C. Era (as in “Before Chapters/Indigo”) — that estimate has dropped, I’m told, to between 1,600 and 2,000, the result, one imagines, of the competing distractions-attractions of the Internet and the rise of digital media.

Well, if  those two grand know anything, they should get on to Michael Redhill’s Consolation and Dennis Bock’s The Communist’s Daughter — two fantastic novels I can personally vouch for. It’s a big season though, and I will likely go for Atwood, Munro, Johnston, and Richards as well.

Newspapers, helmed by old people, are just starting to discover the internet. Shock! Disbelief! No way!

Even the most confident of newspaper bosses now agree that they will survive in the long term only if, like Schibsted, they can reinvent themselves on the internet and on other new-media platforms such as mobile phones and portable electronic devices. Most have been slow to grasp the changes affecting their industry—“remarkably, unaccountably complacent,” as Rupert Murdoch put it in a speech last year—but now they are making a big push to catch up. Internet advertising is growing rapidly for many and is beginning to offset some of the decline in print.

Newspapers’ complacency is perhaps not as remarkable as Mr Murdoch suggested. In many developed countries their owners have for decades enjoyed near monopolies, fat profit margins, and returns on capital above those of other industries. In the past, newspaper companies saw little need to experiment or to change and spent little or nothing on research and development.

I think this resistance to change stems that time the Globe and Mail decided to experiment with printing an entire week of issues on Fruit Roll Ups to attract younger readers. We still haven’t killed all the flies here in Canada. (from Bookslut)

The NYT profiles audiobook collectives such as LibriVox, outfits that rely on volunteer help to offer free recordings of copyright-expired books.

LibriVox is the largest of several emerging collectives that offer free or inexpensive audiobooks of works whose copyrights have expired, from Plato to “The Wind in the Willows.” (In the United States, this generally means anything published or registered for copyright before 1923.) The results range from solo readings done by amateurs in makeshift home studios to high-quality recordings read by actors or professional voice talent.

At its worst a free audiobook can sound like a teenager reading aloud in high school English class. At its best it can offer excellent sound quality and skilled narration infused with a passion for the text. In between is a world of competent readings, sometimes spiced with affected accents, mumbled words and distant car horns and reflecting all manner of literary interpretations.

I like that the Times is using more hyperlinks directly in their online articles lately.

An analysis of British taste, based on the top ten books list from this past week.

The 10 most popular books in Britain this week run to an average of 459 pages. The longest is Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian at 704, the shortest Elisabeth Hyde’s The Abortionist’s Daughter, which is completed within 285. This casts doubt on theories about the time-poverty of contemporary Britons, which should encourage snack-narratives to flourish. Or perhaps clock-watchers – able to consume only one or two books each season – prefer summer stories that really feel like a read; novellas represent neither value for money nor a reward for the work put in.
…
So this year’s holidaymakers are not taking away a suitcase of laughs: at least 80% of the top 10 reads are sombre and intense, depicting crises and miseries. Rendell’s title – End in Tears – could serve as an umbrella summary for most of them.

The reason for this is probably to be found in the title of a recent non-fiction superseller: Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? All this fiction was written and purchased in the post-9/11 period, during which both authors and readers have been nervous of work that seems entirely trivial. Even at their lightest, these 10 books touch on the question of how we are to live our lives in dangerous times; on the balance between wider responsibility and personal pleasure.

Dude, I thought it WAS just me. But apparently everything really IS shit. Whew.

Controversial Israeli novelist, dead at 89.

No? Try staring at this site for more than 10 seconds without making that face Danny Torrance does when he sees all the blood spilling from the elevator at the Overlook Hotel.

The whole Armor of God Pajama set will help your children to depend on God to protect them from their fears, doubts, and uncertainties at night so their sleep can be restful and peaceful.

Danny’s not here, Mrs. Torrance. Waaaaugh!

Announced.

Advancements in Beer Bongology. (Thanks, Richard)

Reader Franklin sends in this gem on dealing with rejection as an aspiring journalist.

Like most 39-year-old, single, jobless, hetero men in Seattle, I thought I knew a thing or two about rejection.

Then I decided I wanted to write for a living.

Ho-ho-HO! I think see where this is heading and it just doesn’t look good! Let’s watch.

That’s funny, because it’s taking the life out of my savings! BA-dump-BUMP!

As psychiatrist Jack Leedy explained in his 1969 essay “Principles of Poetry Therapy,” “For poetry therapy, the standard is not whether it is good or great poetry, but whether it will help heal the ill. For this purpose, Longfellow may be better than Shakespeare, Herrick than Milton, Greifer than Donne, or Holmes than Sophocles.”

Proponents trace the notion of the healing power of art to ancient ritual singing and chanting, as well as to Aristotle’s concept of catharsis. The idea of poetry as a way to “get better” or “get healed” remains powerfully alive in our society today. In former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky’s anthologies from his Favorite Poem project, again and again contributors recommend poems because—as one Massachusetts finance manager says—they “helped me through the darkest times.”

That’s lovely. Sniff. But:

For poet August Kleinzahler, the difference between poetry as a tool and poetry as an art is the level of complexity and formal achievement of the latter. Reached by phone in Austin, Texas, he is somewhat sympathetic to poetry therapy’s goals: “Whatever works—rubbing pig feces or listening to Fox talk radio or taking serotonin reuptake inhibitors—if that makes someone less suicidal or homicidal or miserable, great. . . . But it has nothing to do with art per se.”

Gosh, I like that guy. (From GoodReports)

And by that, I basically mean lying.

To be fair, most writers (MFA-bound or not) have embraced or at least come to terms with the writing life—and the dedication to the art form it requires. Still, we aspiring writers are nothing if not tenacious, and ever more ambitious. While the names James Frey, Nasdijj, and JT LeRoy will surely go down as catchphrases for fabrication in the memoir genre, my growing fear is that those writers may only exist as the extreme cases among a generation (admittedly, my own generation) of writers who are tempted to dangerously and falsely exoticize their identities for the purpose of promoting themselves to agents and editors. As more and more emerging writers are warned—often before pen has even hit paper—of the difficulties they’ll face with agents and publishing companies, more of them will inevitably be seduced into presenting themselves as rare birds (albeit supremely marketable ones).

These days, not only must the literary purist make posterity believe he did indeed live, but if he wants to find an agent, receive a decent advance, get published by a name house, and endear himself to a marketing and publicity team that will ensure a prime spot on the front table at Barnes & Noble, positioning his book to climb the sales ranks and thus securing a contract for his next book, he needs to make posterity believe—by writing it in his latest memoir—that he lived more dysfunctionally, more tragically, more multiculturally, more exotically than anyone else.

Sigh. There’s no faking my way out of this white, 30-something, middle class existence.
Guess I’m stuck with me and my mind. Crap.

Journalists replaced with computers. Honesty and bad-writing problems solved.

First it was the typewriter, then the teleprinter. Now a US news service has found a way to replace human beings in the newsroom and is instead using computers to write some of its stories.

Thomson Financial, the business information group, has been using computers to generate some stories since March and is so pleased with the results that it plans to expand the practice.

The computers work so fast that an earnings story can be released within 0.3 seconds of the company making results public.

Now that’s meeting a deadline. Seriously, how screwed is the world when people were replaced in March and NO ONE NOTICED? Here’s hoping the business pages get some personality. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

Apparently that’s where all the cool porn is these days. Peer pressure!

“Harlequin is the brand in publishing that is trusted by women around the world to provide them with great entertainment,” said Donna Hayes, publisher and CEO of Harlequin Enterprises Limited. “We are uniquely positioned to serve their needs and offer entertainment in new digital formats. Put simply, a lot of women are already there, and those who aren’t trust us to help them navigate the evolving digital space.”

For those who have trouble with foreign languages, allow me to translate: that’s bullshit communi-speak for, “shit, we are so fucking behind we better get our fat asses in gear or we’ll get completely clusterfucked (and not in a good heaving bosom way) by all the rippling, bronze-chested free stuff.”

The lovely Maud points to a funny bit this morning. Imagine sending your favourite writer your book and receiving a note of thanks. Then you find your book listed at Abebooks. Ouch. You know, a couple years back I found a listing on Amazon for a used copy of my last book. It was from a bookstore in California and the description read something like, and I kid-you-not, “Sticker on inside front cover reads ‘The Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry, Canadian, 2003′. Never opened.”

SWEAR. TO. GOD.

Of course, I bought it. It’s sitting on my shelf in a place of honour right now.

Because the book is going belly up. GASP!

The fingers have continued to jab left and right, zeroing in on this or that obvious culprit. But it appears more likely that, rather than falling under the lead pipe of some dastardly lone slayer, Cody’s died the death of a thousand cuts, from a thousand blades: disparate and even largely inadvertent but ineluctable. Telegraph Avenue … slash. Parking … slash. Chain stores … slash slash. The remaining perps have thus far eluded detection: transformations in Cal’s student body, for instance, and the ebbing of radical chic. Perhaps the hardest cut to endure is that books as we know them are fading, bit by bit, from ubiquity. We can no longer presume they’ll always be here. Actual books, with covers and pages and bindings and type, are increasingly artifacts, relics — old school, silverfish food, without hyperlinks. How long before that $24.95 best-seller, bought on Amazon yesterday, is displayed in a museum alongside rotary phones, cyclamates, and bustles? That’s why the death of Cody’s hurts: For all those who used to sneak-read as children under the covers with flashlights and books, it presages our own obsolescence.

Good thing there’s still a market for useless trinkets, yoga mats, incence and candles. Whew. Crisis averted.

SFSignal points to some great, spine-y leather and bindage smut. (Totally SWF)

Wee Georgie’s reading journal.

I begin to suspect that God is merely a way of coping with our fundamentally absurd condition, an act of bad faith, a desperate attempt to deny our own responsibility for creating meaning in a disenchanted world by locating it outside ourselves, in a fabricated transcendent will we then refuse to recognize as our own creation — bastard offspring we confusedly call “father”. I relate my epiphany to Karl with the excitement of a man beginning life anew. He says the message is unlikely to resonate with the base.