… um … I especially love the poetry–ackbarfsnortfartpuke–list. Nothing like a Maya nomination to say: “irrelevant”. And by that I mean, to say “irrelevant” in unintentional doggerel.

The Sunday Times talks with Curious Incident author Mark Haddon about trying to get it right two times in a row.

So what do you do after your novel is such a monster hit, I ask? “That’s the tough part,” he says. “You must write another one, mustn’t you? Unless you’re Harper Lee or something, though I’ve heard whispers that even Harper’s doing a follow-up. To Kill a Mockingbird II.” He whistles. “Can you imagine the pressure?” Can you? “Yes,” he laughs. “I can, a bit. I’ve had one big hit, and that’s fantastic, because I’ve done the single thing I set out to do in life: write a successful literary novel. If I’d got to 65 without doing it, I think I’d have ended up a cranky, difficult person on his way to a psychiatric ward, so I’m not going to pretend for a minute that success wasn’t a relief.

“But a one-off success is also scary, because I am, as yet, not proven. The one thing I’d like A Spot of Bother [his second adult novel, published next month] to do is make people think not that I am the writer of one good book, but that I am a good writer.” As the thought takes hold, his giggles cease and the smiley mouth droops with worry. “Of course, I know there have been quite a few people who have written one really good book, then slipped away somewhere and been forgotten. I really, really hope that’s not me.”

So do we, Mark.

We like. Trevor Cole has started a new Canlit web venture that showcases readings by all our very own pretty people, including Steven Heighton, Madeleine Thien, as well as, soon-to-be-Ninja-contributor John Terpstra reading a wonderful poem called “I Moved To Burlington In My Sleep” (writing down this title has produced a gut pain so profound, I have to rest now). World meet AuthorsAloud. (Thanks, cfg)

It’s an up-and-down kind of week for Günter.

• First a times Op-Ed says he can’t be who he was
• then Christopher Hitchens cuts him no slack (as Hitch is wont to do).
• But on the other hand Elizabeth Kiem says humanity trumps history
• and his letter to Gdansk convinces Walesa to stop yelling

I’m working on creative stuff today, since the weather is total ass here, so I’m leaving you out in the cold with a bunch of point form links instead of proper insouciant commentary.

• Coleridge papers sold!
• Lorca anniversary marked with Lorca profile and much tsking
• Macleans: voted most likely to have a great idea every else had three months ago
• Jonathan Franzen, profiled in Time (from Bookslut)
• Jolt Culture: life is becoming so trivial (from GoodReports)
• Bush’s massage buddy weighs in on Grass
• The great unknowns: who have you been meaning to read? (from SFSignal)

Staying dry… I may post more later if I have time.

No, this isn’t about a medical procedure to ease your cramps.  This is so funny, because just last night I was chatting with a friend debating the possibility of doing a colony in Saskatchewan later this year. I’ve been thinking about going down south for one for years, but then I heard about these monks out in the prairies, as folks swear by them.

For writers, nothing compares with that rare feeling of isolation and immersion where work begins to seep into every corner of your life. Hence that most coveted retreat: the artists’ colony. Part monastery, part summer camp, colonies give writers a clean, well-lighted room of their own, three square meals a day and a few dozen creative types to share them with. It’s a strange chemistry — artists alone, together. And just imagine the possibilities for capture the flag! Abstract vs. figurative painters, writers of nonlinear narratives vs. composers whose chords never resolve, nature poets vs. urban photographers. Quirky and bucolic, artists’ colonies have given rise to friendships, rivalries, and more than a few torrid love affairs.

I heard they call Breadloaf “Bedloaf” because of that. I think the Abbey in the wheat fields might be more my speed these days.

Stephen Fry on free verse: piano teachers don’t sit students down at the keyboard and tell them to just bang away.

This is a debatable tactic; it emphasizes his contention that, even should you choose to write free verse, knowledge of and utility with the formal aspects of poetry is a necessity for any serious poet, whether professional or amateur. It also sets a quite reachable bar for fledgling poets struggling with the often maddening demands of sonnets and sestinas. But Mr. Fry does his missionary work a disservice by so de-emphasizing the sensual pleasures of verse in his pedagogical examples; what’s the point of following all of these rules if there’s no visceral payoff?

Some rescue relief for the embattled Grass.

To me it is clear that he felt that it was only at this age that he could do any real justice to this incident, which was both a choice and an accident. And by “do justice” I mean to tell the story without any oversimplification, so that it could encourage true reflection in future readers. He chose the story’s time with the courage of a burrowing storyteller.

For all you folks who want to be cool, but are tragically luke warm. (You should get it over with and just be like me… RED HOT!)

Reading should be fun, says Hornby. If it’s not, it’s well within your rights to hunt the author down and do him in. Or something like that.

One of the problems, it seems to me, is that we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they’re hard work, they’re not doing us any good.

I recently had conversations with two friends, both of whom were reading a very long political biography that had appeared in many of 2005’s ‘Books of the Year’ lists.

They were struggling. Both of these people are parents – they each, coincidentally, have three children – and both have demanding full-time jobs. And each night, in the few minutes they allowed themselves to read before sleep, they ploughed gamely through a few paragraphs about the (very) early years of a 20th-century world figure.

At the rate of progress they were describing, it would take them many, many months before they finished the book, possibly even decades. (One of them told me that he’d put it down for a couple of weeks, and on picking it up again was extremely excited to see that the bookmark was much deeper into the book than he’d dared hope. He then realised that one of his kids had dropped it, and put the bookmark back in the wrong place. He was crushed.)

The truth is, of course, that neither of them will ever finish it – or at least, not in this phase of their lives. In the process, though, they will have reinforced a learned association of books with struggle.

Google has launched an online word processor that’s pretty darn smooth looking. Might not be right for us writer/conspiracy theorist types.

Paul Garrison is tired. The man of the sea, with a permanent squint from scanning a thousand horizons, is tired of the games, the disguises, the elaborate cover stories. He’s through with deceiving friends, colleagues, and clients. After years in the shadows, he is throwing off his mask and revealing his true identity.

After publishing several books under his real name and a few under pen names known to his publishers, the man who is Paul Garrison went undercover. He became the swashbuckling mariner who spends as much time as he can at sea — except when managing business interests from his Hong Kong base. He published five novels of adventure on the high seas with HarperCollins, landed lucrative movie deals (no movies have been made yet), and enjoyed healthy sales in Europe. Yet, until yesterday, not even HarperCollins knew the truth.

More than a story of one writer’s life, this is a story of modern publishing, where a flat or falling sales record can stick to an author like bad breath or an ugly tattoo, where booksellers’ fixed ideas of who a writer is and what he’s capable of can freeze or end his career.

Interviewed at Guernica. (From Backwards City)

British poetry needs more minority voices.

When poetry editors were questioned about their selection criteria for publishing poets, they unanimously declared it was based on quality, irrespective of race or gender. Ah, “quality” – as if it exists outside the context of history, culture, literary traditions and values, all ingredients which constitute personal taste. As poets of colour are not being published, the message is received loud and clear: they’re not good enough. In the past that was said about black people who wanted to be footballers, actors, novelists, golfers, judges, pilots and politicians.

Many poetry editors fiercely guard their independence. Elitism is not a dirty word in the poetry world, it’s a badge of pride. No one in the arts wants to be told what to produce, yet if the status quo goes unchallenged, nothing changes. I can hear the foot- stamping already. No! You can’t make me!

Yeah, quality sucks.

NYC librarians are reorganizing (or re-orging, as the self-important, neologism-obsessed corporate types are saying these days) the main reading room’s reference texts.

Librarians have begun a yearlong project to reorganize, reclassify and update the roughly 25,000 reference works on the room’s open shelves. When they are done, officials promise, readers will have a much easier time locating many of the most commonly consulted works, from the Encyclopaedia Britannica to Shakespeare’s plays. The project will be the biggest change to the room since it reopened in November 1998, after a 16-month restoration. The core problem is this: Most people have no clue how to find books shelved in the Main Reading Room.

Wait. Those are reference texts? I thought they were just those falsie book spine things you see at Ikea on the display shelves. I thought they were decorations. You know, except for the occasional loose volume that ghosts float across the stacks to scare dowdy librarians late at night. Isn’t the library for porn now anyway?

Profiled in the Guardian as “King David”.

Well, while Gunter is fighting back against critics, sales of his autobiography, released early for some unknown reason, are going berserk. Imagine that. I bet no one there saw that coming. And an open letter lays it all bare:

You spent your life signing books, not death warrants. But you were in a different league of culpability from the Kiesingers and Globkes and Waldheims. You, unlike them, were a member of the Waffen SS. The Waffen SS was declared a criminal organization by the Nuremberg tribunal just after the war.

You knew this, I assume, because you have often said that you were one of the millions of Germans who did not believe the Holocaust could have been perpetrated by the nation of Goethe, until you were convinced by the evidence at the Nuremberg trials.

Man, what a lot of crap coming at a late age in life. There are some thoughts being shared on the whole thing in the comments section of yesterday’s post. Feel free to add your two cents.

Then cart yer arse on over to Vancouver where the lattes are hot, the weather is mild (with a chance of showers) and arts and culture infrastructure is looking for a new way to spend its dough.

The Gunt will keep his Nobel. Well, it’s not like it was a Peace Prize….

Scifi gets a petting out in the prairies. I can hear the wind blowing and sighing in the wheat… as the mothership lands and slowly releases more Saskatchewanianeseites into the wild. How do you think that province got populated originally? Settlers? Boy are you niave. They are among us!!

Robert J. Sawyer, probably Canada’s best-known science fiction writer, rigorously researches the scientific concepts which inspire his novels … but even he would admit that he doesn’t really think that, as happens in his novel Hominids, a gateway will soon open in Sudbury, Ont., between our world and a parallel world where Neanderthals instead of homo sapiens dominate — and discharge a Neanderthal scientist.

Pshffft. Um, hello? Excuse me? Didn’t this already happen with that boxer dude Tyson a few years back? Who’s to say those extra-dimensional Neanderthals don’t have scientists as well? You bigots.

When it’s a trailer.

HarperCollins specifically chose the Albion and the Woodside theatres, which specialize in Bollywood films, for their predominantly South Asian audience. Londonstani is 29-year-old Gautam Malkani’s debut novel about a gang of young Muslim, Sikh and Hindu men in West London, a tale told in a pungent blend of expletive-laden British street slang, Punjabi and text-message abbreviations. The novel sparked a bidding war among British publishers and has received rave reviews (though naysayers have compared it to a bad Ali G spoof). The audience response to the book trailer was considerably more tepid at Toronto’s two Bollywood theatres. An unscientific sample of viewers this week found that most were underwhelmed by the short ad and didn’t recognize the book’s distinctive cover, which is the trailer’s final image.

“What is it?” asked a frowning Tia Bano, who had watched the trailer two hours earlier. Told Londonstani was a novel, she said, “Well, I don’t like fiction books, so it doesn’t matter.”

Now, that’s publicity gold, baby!! Just keep spending Rupert’s ill-gotten, filthy lucre on stupid things, guys! Smart thinking. Shhh. You’re bringing him down from the inside.

The Book Standard links to the Kirkus reviews of the Booker Prize longlisted titles. Everyone seems to be saying MitchellMitchellMitchell, assuming he’s the favourite. But what about this darkhorse that everyone seems to be forgetting about? So dark it’s not even really on the list. I put my money on the long odds of brilliance.

One of my favourite poets, Montrealer Eric Ormsby (at least, I’m assuming this is him), writes in the New York Sun (NYC’s more literate right wing paper) about a book linking seven stages of life with seven ovarian texts.

When we’re engrossed in a good novel we slip easily into other skins. The process is mysterious. We walk down streets we’ll never see, enjoy or suffer experiences we may never know, enter the cities of the past or of the future as though their keys had been given to us. The imagination holds in constant reserve its own fantastic theater, where all the actors and stage sets, the props and costumes, lie waiting for that magical prompt when the novelist’s vision lights up the mind’s proscenium. At the least we escape boredom for a few hours, but if we’re lucky, the novel becomes an event in our lives, forms part of our memory, and may even alter our view of things. The best novels offer us the possibility of transformation and for that reason alone are precious.

It’s a truism that great novels have something to tell us not only about life but about our own lives. But for decades literary criticism has neglected or scorned this useful truth in favor of “theory” and its barbarous jargon.

It’s better than unsolicited manuscripts, that’s for sure. Ladies and Jellybeans, you could do way worse than getting tips from these folk: Gail Godwin, Wallace Stegner, Francine Prose, John Kenneth Galbraith, etc.

All writers know that on some golden mornings they are touched by the wand—are on intimate terms with poetry and cosmic truth. I have experienced those moments myself. Their lesson is simple: It’s a total illusion. And the danger in the illusion is that you will wait for those moments. Such is the horror of having to face the typewriter that you will spend all your time waiting. I am persuaded that most writers, like most shoemakers, are about as good one day as the next (a point which Trollope made), hangovers apart. The difference is the result of euphoria, alcohol, or imagination. The meaning is that one had better go to his or her typewriter every morning and stay there regardless of the seeming result. It will be much the same.

Dude, tell that to the article about second novels from yesterday.

At the Booker site. They now have discussion forums. If you 2400 lurkers start posting there when you never post here, I’ll… why I’ll… um… plotz.

Back to work on the place and my book today, my shadowy minions. I may post some more later, depending on how much I get done this morning.

• Reading classics with a limp
• Will non-fiction be the death of literature?
• The sophomore curse
• The best way to honour Irving Layton is to name a street in a banal, non-Montreal bedroom suburb subdivision after him — I’m sure he’d appreciate that — Irving would want Sainte-Catherine renamed Sainte-Irving
• Harry Potter for PM! Um, asking Americans about world affairs for comic effect is old news and, while it’s still funny, I don’t think it proves much about anything other than… well, America
• Biographies of books? What’s next? A biography of salt? Wait…
• Why is Bush “reading” Camus? Because he’s interested in Killing an Arab.

That last one was too easy.

Booksignings as competitve sport.

Three-nil. Someone approaches shyly. They’ve – oh, blinking mother of God – they’ve got another copy of Hugo’s book.

He’s smiling really charmingly and asking to whom it should be inscribed.

Should I join in the banter in the hopes of guilt-tripping them into getting one of mine, too, or – better yet – abandoning Hugo’s book altogether out of embarrassment? Too late.

Which, perhaps surprisingly, don’t have that Mohamed Ali punch drunk slur to them yet. But you can hasten Craig’s early dotage by resetting his clock for him in Toronto. I’d do it but, you know, I’m a lover, not a fighter. (Oh, and a deadly assassin of darkness, but I don’t think they allow shurikens and smoke bombs in the ring these days. Went out with crushed glass and finishing nails on the mitts, you know?)

Here’s who I will and will not fight:

• If you are a noodle-armed fancy lad, I will not fight you.
• If you are a good man with a noble heart, I will fight you.
• If you suffer some debilitating mania or dementia, I will not fight you.If you are here to kick ass and chew bubblegum (and you’re all out of bubblegum), I will fight you.
• If you are missing one or more of the following limbs — arms, legs — I will not fight you.
• If you are known by one of the following nicknames — “The Hammer,” “The Mangler,” “The Wizard” — then yes, by all means, I will fight you.
• If you are over 80, have a heart condition, or an irritable bowel, I am sorry but I cannot fight you.
• If you have the courage of a lion and the guts of a burglar, I will fight you.

Wow, you pull that off a dime western, C? Seriously, sounds like good clean, and then not-so-clean-due-to-all-the-blood, fun. (I have the guts of a burglar. I keep them nailed to the front door to discourage his friends from coming back.)

The cutting and mulching of Günter’s proverbial grass because of his late life Nazi admission has begun. Like it would.

Mary Lawson is the lone Canajun on the Booker Prize long list. It’s just her and some other folk I’ve never heard of (Waters? Lasdun? Carey? Messud? Mitchell? Gordimer? Pshffft! Nobodies!) Some people think the list smacks of predictability (haven’t heard that argument before, thanks). Others think the list lacks humour. Still others think the insistence on calling it the “Man Booker” is totally ridiculous. No link for that last one. That’s just me.

A good overview of the situation in Turkey. Ugly.

Since its inception in 1923, the Turkish Republic has policed its writers fiercely. Its penal code, taken from Mussolini’s Italy, puts serious curbs on freedom of expression, but Turkey’s leading writers have never toed the line. The great modernist poet Nazim Hikmet spent much of his adult life in prison and died in exile. The novelist Yashar Kemal, for many decades Turkey’s most famous writer, has been serially harassed and prosecuted. During the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, so many writers, journalists and scholars were imprisoned for their views that a prosecution became a badge of honor: if you had not yet angered the state, then perhaps you hadn’t said anything of importance.

Irvine Welsh, seen here channelling Salvador Dali, was attacked by several audience members over a scene from The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs they considered degrading.

In the book this character, Mary, has refused to give the young man, Skinner, her advice without the payment of “a good cock”. One of the first questions Welsh – whose previous books include Ecstasy, Glue, Filth and Porno – took from the floor was on whether he considered the passage misogynist, and he took no fewer than four others, with only one woman speaking out to defend him.

At one point, the session’s chair even took a vote from the increasingly restive audience to determine whether another question on the subject was warranted – the audience voted against, but Welsh’s interrogators remained persistent.

Welsh rejected the accusation: “I find it strange that you use the word misogynist when it is Mary who is taking Skinner for her own sexual pleasure. Misanthropist I would take, but not misogynist.”

Okay, dudes, you know me, to some degree. My facetious commentary is more often directed at promoting feminist and socialist ideals than deriding it, but I gots to call Bullshit when I sees Bullshit. Ladies, you’re full of Bullshit. Sit down and shut the fuck up because you’re embarrassing yourselves and the cause you think you’re fighting for. I hate it when people misuse words like “misogyny” and “racism” because it robs them of their power.

Holt is sinking tons of money and effort into The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld.

At Barnes & Noble, Sessalee Hensley, the fiction buyer, said the book “got some really strong, passionate reads” from store managers. And the big marketing campaign undeniably sparked her interest. “If a publisher is fully committed to a title, that’s what we need to see,” she said. “When it comes to looking at if the book did better or worse, a lot of times it comes down to marketing.”

But marketing often inflates expectations, which are then not met.

Good to hear the marketing is more important than the read. I like that kind of confirmation. Just come right out and say it, why don’t you. Hell, I bet just the recent American love affair with yokel names like “Jed” alone would sell it.

I so know how black, Moslem and Southeast Asian writers must feel. Being part Scottish, part Irish, with a dash of Welsh for seasoning, I too am a multicultural jumble. Sigh.

No wonder authors like Ali — who was born to a Bengali father and white British mother in what is now Pakistan, and who grew up in England — feel like they’re on the hot seat. And no wonder one of the first questions Ali faces these days while promoting Alentejo Blue is whether, in changing settings, she was fleeing the moniker of “British-Asian writer.”

And I just can’t seem to escape the power and priviledge being a 30 something white Anglo brings me. I feel like I’ll always be pigeon-holed here.

In slap-your-face-to-wake-you-up news from the weekend: Günter Grass was a Waffen SS Nazi. No, really. He said so himself. And the Germans aren’t taking to kindly to it. Not the whole Nazi thing, but the fact that he sat on the info for 60 years. Grass dropped the news in a newspaper interview leading up to the release of his memoir. He’s surprisingly honest and elegant in his admission. The problem is, people think it smacks of book promotion. Sounds more like a deathbed confession to me.

I just remembered: Bookninja is three today…

For those philistines among you who can bear to part with books, there is now BookMooch. Coming up next in the file of Murray-can’t-comprehend-it: ChildSwap. That’s right. Got labelled with a literary redhead when what you really wanted was a mathematically-inclined Phillipino? Look no further! I shudder. (Thanks, Steven)

Salon looks at Montreal through the lens of young David.

I was 19 when I moved to Montreal to attend McGill University. The previous year, McGill had been rated the top university in Canada by a prominent national magazine. The ranking meant little to me, but it allowed my parents, albeit grudgingly, to justify allowing me to move such a great distance from home. The distance was actually less than 600 kilometers (about 370 miles), or four hours by train, but its implication was vast. Montreal was not just another city, it was practically another country. To me, it represented independence, self-realization and adventure — all the things that seemed unattainable in Toronto or really anywhere else in Canada.

You have to click an ad link to read the entire story.

This book is a barn burner.

I disagree with Zoe Margolis on one matter, and so far as I can make out, only one – she thinks her story is not particularly newsworthy. She insists that, personally, she is not interesting, and politically, well, come on, there’s a war going on in the Middle East, how in God’s name can we be talking about a sex-blogger. I, conversely, think her story is fascinating, and the politics it rips open are not trivial, whether there’s a war going on or not.

To recap: Zoe Margolis is her real name. Under her pseudonym, Abby Lee, she started a sex blog at the beginning of 2004, which is witty, moreish and incredibly explicit. She gets laid, with exes, with people she’s met on the internet, with friends of friends, with people who are doing some research on, er, getting laid. It is very rare that she goes more than a couple of days without having a wank somewhere unusual. The wanking bits are the funniest, actually, especially a memorably neat definition of a “bully wank” (see the extracts from her book below). She has the odd same-sex experience, she remembers past shags and ruminates on techniques she would like to refine a bit.

I consider myself a pretty eloquent guy. My grasp of communication is as tight as a three-dollar slipknot. I’ve been told my diction’s clear as strychnine. Heck, I’d even go so far as to say I’m akin to the red wine of conversationalists. But when it comes to relating two seemingly dissimilar things, often with the conjoining words “like” or “as,” I’m as hopeless as a springtime frog-fryer.

Dudes, I’m a total write off for the rest of the week. Dr. Ninja is at a conference and Baby Ninja is still requiring the TLC that comes of a big move when you’re three. So expect only a few posts today and tomorrow. Why not get in and mix it up in a discussion somewhere. I know you have un/popular opinions that you just can’t suppress.

• Some British kerfuffle over reading lists
• Citing the futility of resistence, UCal joins the Google Collective
• Some questions about journalistic ethics — when your nasty, semi-psychotic douche of a subject beats you up, should you still write the profile? (From Bookslut)
• Today in Da Vinci Code lawsuits
• Chick-lit in the mystery world

I’ll have my nay-sayers know that I just saved myself about $3000 by doing a sneaky workaround patch job on the drywall. I’ll have to repair it again in a couple years, but that’s a couple years of saving towards doing it right. So, in the interest of rising above your provocative catcalls: neeah nah.

The people behind The Frontlist sent us an email outlining their project and it seems interesting. I haven’t fully explored it, but it looks like it’s a community-based editing/filtering tool that allows writers to walk their manuscripts through several honing stages before possibly (if it’s top ranked by other users) having it submitted to a large press editor for consideration. From the pitch:

The project was born from a recognition that the combined effort of a community of writers (many with an online blogging presence) can be used to self-select promising new manuscripts. The selection takes the form of a structured peer-review process, in much the same way that papers are selected for publication in academia. Each month, well-received work is fast-tracked to the desk of a publisher to be considered seriously.

Two years down the line, and we have just gone live with the project. We have struck an informal agreement with a senior editor at Picador to review top reviewed work each month and have started to accept submissions from writers. It’s an exciting concept for the publisher as it allows them to gain access to promising new work that has already been critiqued by a focused, intelligent community. It’s an exciting concept for new writers, because it gives them a chance (or many chances) to test and gain structured feedback on manuscripts…and it provides a transparent route to publication.

Sounds like a noble project to me, especially considering that I can’t find anywhere that they’re asking for money. If this is indeed a free, interest-based tool and writers keep all their rights to submitted material, then I say, it’s could be as good and useful as its  users allow. In other words, stack the deck. (Thanks, Tom)

Men are breeders, baby. No, but seriously, [solemn, interested frown] gentlemen: why?

…when the federal Department of Canadian Heritage surveyed Canadian reading habits last year, it found a distinct gender gap. Women accounted for 60 per cent of the daily readers and 70 per cent of the heavy readers who had read 50 or more books in the last 12 months. Women also outnumbered men two to one as regular readers of both classic and contemporary novels.

The divide is not new: The department’s previous survey, in 1991, had found similar results, while academics can trace the characterization of novel reading as a genteel — or frivolous — female pursuit as far back as the 18th and 19th centuries. However, the gender gap is both particularly pronounced and much debated these days, partly because publishers have exploited it so successfully with their marketing strategies, and partly because teachers and parents are so concerned that boys lag behind girls in their literacy skills.

Publishers and educators say they don’t like to generalize about the tastes of half the population, but they will speculate as to why women prefer fiction, and are ready to debate both the social and the literary implications.

Hmm. Fascinating, Captain. They seem to be a species made of pure emotion. Let’s try a poetic paragraph on kissing by a plashing brook. Look! They’re turning a warm tourmaline colour! It’s working!

I don’t even care about this article enough to come up with a clever headline. It’s a bit fluffy, but you might like it. It’s about starting too many books at once. A problem if you aren’t very good at finishing too many books at once. Anyone can pull a Fischer and play twelve games of chess at a time. But only a Fischer can win all twelve.

AL Kennedy uses humour as a defence mechanism too?! Sister!

Gradually, I am discovering the voice that sounds like me and that is suitable for saying whatever might be necessary on any given night. With luck, the writing fades in favour of the voice, and holds the content without being too thick, or too sparse, or too needy, or too mad. And then maybe you can harmonise with the audience and move on. It’s like a very, very peculiar martial art – for masochists. Worse yet, there may actually be no sadists available – there may be no limit to how much fun we can have finding our own pains while enjoying the fact that other people could inflict them better.

There are few things more discomforting than breathless grown men and women dressed as wizards delivering academic papers — inventive, discretely-placed sex toys included. But, really, doesn’t this get to the twisted heart of the whole academia thing? Arcane knowledge horded, obsessive complusive tendencies enabled, secret societies that require hazing rituals entered, delayed adulthood and adolescence eternally extended?

A Berkeley professor called Frederick Crews did a rather gentle lampoon of literary criticism back in the Sixties called Pooh Perplex, a collection of essays purporting to be written by various academics on the subject of Winnie the Pooh. Then a few years ago he wrote a sequel, Postmodern Pooh, which included a paper on ‘The Fissured Subtext: Historical Problematics, the Absolute Cause, Transcoded Contradictions, and Late-Capitalist Metanarrative (in Pooh) ‘ by a Marxist called Carla Gulag who compares Pooh to Chairman Mao.

But what’s the point of parody when real life does it so much better? There are more than a hundred diff erent presentations listed including: ‘Disney Does Derrida: Joanne Rowling as a Writer of Our Times’, and ‘Parallels in Tyranny: Voldemort, The Ministry of Magic, and Jewish Persecution’ – and why invent Carla Gulag when there’s somebody called Todd J Ide presenting a paper on ‘Comrade Potter: A Marxist Reading of Harry Potter’?

I live with an academic who lamented all through grad school that she didn’t feel like she “fit in” with the others in the smarty-pants sandbox. Well, lovely, what about a robe and wand?

The NYT covers the Brick Lane film fiasco to this point. A good primer for those of you who have been skipping these posts. And don’t think I won’t find out who you are when we have the exam later this month.

Drywall… won’t… obey… laws… of physics… Must. Kill. All. Drywall.

• So what’s with Paris, anyway?
• Archives of Canada need help
• Domesday Book arrives just in time for Doomsday
• Publishers headed online
• Old Sammie Johnson was a slacker
• Bruce Willis sues over tell-all book (which was slated at 48 pages, the first 45 of which were choice quotes from Die Hards 1 through 3)

This is what you get for buying a 100 year old house in St. John’s. It’s so crooked it’s more like an Escher litho than a house. But the character…! More Monday. Sorry.

I’d call this a lazy-assed round up of links, but the fact is, I’m bailing on you because I’m wrestling drywall into submission here at Casa del Ninja in St. John’s. Oh, and by the by, b’y, it’s about 17 degrees here and lovely.

• India’s Emily Dickinson?
• Harper Collins steps up web presence (still waiting on word about whether they’ll step down their Fox presence before I buy their books…)
• Authors need flair for self-promotion
• Do it for the kids
• Jean Baudrillard appearance (I would kill to see this … Being a ninja, I may kill anyway, but I would kill specifically to see this…)
• Deborah Eisenberg profile (watch Bookninja this fall for extensive Eisenberg coverage including a review and interview)
• Texting doesn’t hurt grammar: Study (but headlines sure do)
• Dumb People Make Children Cry PBS fires young, female kiddie-show host over old, naughty video. Smart people groan (Thanks, F)
• Didn’t Coetzee used to be a recluse? (From Maud)
• Lionel Shriver designs own cover (white glue, construction paper, and crayolas sold out of local shops)

That oughtta hold ya.

Good thing MacLennan is finally coming back into vogue. There’s now enough of a profit margin there for McGill to bother hauling out the musty tomes they forgot about and publishing his “essential” oeuvre.

Death is not a good career move for writers. Typically their reputation sinks as soon as the funeral is over, and the books they had hoped would grant them immortality disappear from stores.

Take Hugh MacLennan, the once celebrated Montreal novelist who died in 1990 at the age of 83. The author of seven novels, three books of non-fiction, and three essay collections, he won the Governor General’s literary award five times — a record never beaten. Almost none of his sizeable oeuvre is available to readers today.
…
When he died, MacLennan willed his copyrights to McGill University, where he had taught for 34 years. McGill did nothing with this splendid legacy.
…
Sixteen years after his death, there are signs that a MacLennan revival is in the offing. Last year, a charming memoir I’ll Tell You a Secret by Anne Coleman told of her flirtation with the middle-aged author who had been the Colemans’ neighbour in North Hatley, Que., during her teenage summers. It revealed a playful side to the man that few suspected.McGill has licensed Philip Cercone, publisher of McGill-Queen’s University Press, to reissue all of MacLennan’s work.

Surprise! Now, that’s class — with a capital K!