Traffic stops in streets, chattering of computers goes silent, world awaits reading over loudspeakers. Eightth graders in US sigh in resignation.

And lo, on the horizon he appeared astride his pale horse, and all the winds of hell came with him. Sony gets ready to launch its literary iTunesish service and reader.

Waterstone’s has finally developed an independent online retail presence. I’m willing to bet that for the last five years or so, quite a few Waterstone’s senior execs have been having that nightmare where they get to school only to realize they have an final exam for a class they’ve never attended. Then they realize they’re naked. And it’s cold outside.

Mr Johnson insisted that Waterstone’s prices would be “very competitive”, but said that online shoppers also tended to take other factors into account. “In the online world you have to differentiate yourself in a different way,” he said.

Ooop! That’s doublespeak code for “higher prices”, despite what it sounds like.

Lions and tigers and bears! A good primer on the copyright wars so far. Our embedded reporter, of course, was not allowed to publish her findings because the copyright to the word “war” is now owned by Fox News.

Last May, Kevin Kelly, Wired magazine’s “senior maverick,” published in The New York Times Magazine his predictive account of flux within the book-publishing world. Kelly outlined what he claimed will happen (not might or could — will) to the practices of writing and reading under a new regime fostered by Google’s plan to scan millions of books and offer searchable texts to Internet users.

“So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas?” Kelly wrote. “First, works on the margins of popularity will find a small audience larger than the near-zero audience they usually have now. . . . Second, the universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilization is scanned and cross-linked. Third, the universal library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority . . . .”
…
As it turns out, the move toward universal knowledge is not so easy. Google’s project, if it survives court challenges, would probably have modest effects on writing, reading, and publishing. For one thing, Kelly’s predictions depend on a part of the system he slights in his article: the copyright system. Copyright is not Kelly’s friend. He mentions it as a nuisance on the edge of his dream. To acknowledge that a lawyer-built system might trump an engineer-built system would have run counter to Kelly’s sermon.

John Gibbens tours Hay-on-Wye, which in the festival off season remains bookish as the self-proclaimed World’s Biggest Secondhand (Ye Olde) Bookshop(pe).

And you got your Chomsky in my Chávez! Mmmmmm! Two great tastes that sell great together.

Author of The Known World and All Aunt Hagar’s Children is interviewed at Small Spiral Notebook. I’ve been meaning to read this guy for a couple years now, and everything I read about him and everyone I talk to only convinces me more and more that the longer I wait, the more I’m missing out.

My mind is always working. And like that morning when this woman [character] came back to me and there she was a couple of decades younger, and she was on Ridge St and was with this boy friend that was abusive and the community was seeing all this—that became a story. So tomorrow morning I might wake up with some idea for something. But if I don’t, I don’t. I don’t want to feel that I have to slit my wrists—I wouldn’t do that. I would find a milder way of killing myself, I guess. Writing is important and I am glad I am able to do it—they talk about the Mona Lisa and everything but if someone burned the Mona Lisa, up tomorrow the world shouldn’t end because of that, the world should end because some child in India doesn’t have enough to eat. So if I don’t write, if nothing that comes to me— then the world shouldn’t end. My world certainly shouldn’t end. But I hope I do [continue to write] I have things that I still have to say.

A brief history of the fairy tale that’s about to be released as an “kidult” animated movie.

Adolescent girls of the time didn’t have to wait for Freud to discern the message in the story of the dangerous, hairy protruberance that may lie behind unthreatening clothes. “Seeing the wolf” even reportedly entered French slang as a euphemism for losing one’s virginity. Perrault directed his allegory at girls wandering off the track and chatting to chaps, although in earlier European oral versions the heroine is more reminiscent of the Red character in Hoodwinked, who outwits the wolf to survive.

The Grimm brothers, in their 1812 variation Rotkappchen (Red-Cap), made the girl less culpable and less helpless. In their vision, a woodkeeper – representing a benign masculinity which contrasts with the wolf’s – is able to free both granny and granddaughter from the wolf’s stomach by performing an emergency gastric operation on the interloper. The women together then see off a second wolf.

They of course forgot to mention the one where poor Little Red Riding Bush gets tricked by the big bad Saddam Wolfsein  into a military and humanitarian quagmire in which all the good woodsmen get blown to bits. But that’s… another story.

The Hunger’s Brides hardcover was a massive thing closing in on five pounds. Now a new paperback has come out edited significantly and retitled. Shades of Catherine Bush!

Some former convicts-turned-actors are riding an anti-crime Shakespearean gravy train into Toronto to teach kids in troubled neighbourhoods the difference between thee, thy and thou.

This week, former convicts turned professional actors Darren Raymond and Fabian Spencer are participating in a high school drama program called Shakespearience in Toronto, including in areas notorious for drugs, gangs and gun violence.

A simple workshop about the Bard can make a dramatic difference in a teen’s life, Raymond said.

“It can be a catalyst for change because Shakespeare is a universal language,” he told CBC News. “It relates to people at risk, to youth at risk.”

Convicts are just so CUTE! And for the record, I mean that more in a docile-tattooed-to-the-neck way as opposed to a strangling-me-for-making-snide-comments kind-of-way.

The Chicaman turns 100 and goes online. Pretty forward thinking for such an old fart, eh?

As it closes in on its centennial, The Chicago Manual has evolved yet again, this time for the digital age. Users have clamored to have it in digital form, Ms. Gibson says. “One of the things we heard over and over again was ‘Can you please make it searchable online?’”

In response the press just released the manual on CD-ROM, with a price tag of $60, five dollars more than the print volume. An online edition was set to debut on September 29. Users can sign up for a free 30-day trial. After that, a one-year online subscription costs $25, with an annual renewal fee of $30. Both digital incarnations reproduce the 15th edition faithfully, down to the last figure and table.

Ah, crap, there goes the other eye…

This would fill out my twin Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen collections!

A book by Danish philosopher Soeren Kierkegaard that features a handwritten dedication to famed storyteller Hans Christian Andersen is to be sold at auction in December.

The dedication in the book, a copy of Either/Or, is the only hard evidence of direct contact between two of Denmark’s biggest literary figures.

Oh. My. God. I am so excited I think I just lost an eyeball.

A brief history of the Nobel Prize — a prize that almost wasn’t anything but a coulda-been.

When Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite and more powerful explosives, died in 1896, he bequeathed the bulk of his fortune to create five annual prizes honoring ingenuity. The chemistry, medicine and physics prizes have come to be widely regarded as the most esteemed in their fields. The two others, literature and peace, are more controversial.

Yet in a little known story, the Nobel Prizes, the first of which will be announced on Monday, almost never came to be, largely because of the unsophisticated way Nobel drew up his will.

Alan Moore’s quasi-porn graphic novel, Lost Girls, is a big bucks boon for small press Top Shelf.

It’s the kind of project that any major publisher would drool over: cult author with legions of devoted fans, a project in the works for so many years its existence almost became a legend, and a built-in controversy that might end up sparking a lawsuit. As soon as the collected Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie was announced, demand started building. But what would have been a dream for a large publisher with plenty of capital behind it was a huge risk for a small publisher like Top Shelf.

So, many of you have been wondering where Ninja Kathryn is. She’s taking some time off blogging to concentrate on her novel, but she’s also taking over the day-to-day (more like month-to-month, around here) running of The Magazine component of Bookninja. Today we post the first of several upcoming articles: an interview with author Deborah Eisenberg, conducted by Heather Birrell. A discussion review of Eisenberg’s Twilight of the Superheroes will follow this week. Upcoming also are several audio interviews, essays, and other reviews.

As I mentioned on Sunday, I tried out the Frankenhand device at Word on the Street. It’s alive. Aliiiiiiive! Of course, I was only signing to the other side of the tent, but it was still nerfty. Here’s a Globe story on the device that somehow manages to leave out the grass roots WotS event at which the device was displayed.

T. F. Rigelhof reflects at CNQ on the loss of Montreal’s great bookstore Double Hook. Sigh. And there were one or two of you who asked me about piss in my cornflakes, re: my Reisman post from last week. See? See?

By giving the books of such “interplanetary strangers” a home in Westmount, where reading habits became a kind of identity, The Double Hook Canadian Books created an “oasis society” that was decent, fair and democratic in ways that no new bookstore can now afford to be. That’s a serious failure and I fell into a funk as I considered that loss while speakers came and went from Centaur’s stage.

Profiled at the Guardian.

An 11-year-old Chinese girl emailed her manuscript to the head of HarperCollins and got a global book deal. You can use my rope once you cut me down.

Fan has since been hailed as a prodigy by her editors who will use her book in a new attempt to establish the firm in China. Her story, Swordbird, is an epic allegory about the struggle for peace and will be printed in this country in the new year. Those who have seen it talk about it as the product of a mind as imaginative as some of the greatest names in children’s writing.

The key word here is “use”. In keeping with its corporate profile, HarperCollins has agreed to advance Nancy Yi Fan three times as much as it pays most of its Chinese workers ($1.82) and will occasionally let her out of the sweatshop where Rupert’s shoes are sewn with the hair of her siblings as he sits on the back of her parents. (Of course, none of this joking is fair to what seems to be a bright, driven young lady and her family, so I wish her all the best for her bravery and success. But it is, however, quite fair to Rupert and I wish him a long fall from a short pier.)

Finally, all of the pieces are falling together. All of the trippy, I-searched-for-myself-but-only-found-the-”my”-part and get-these-freaking-ants-off-my-arms pieces.

Yet as Fred Turner points out in his revealing new book, “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism” (University of Chicago Press), there is no way to separate cyberculture from counterculture; indeed, cyberculture grew from its predecessor’s compost. Mr. Turner suggests that Stewart Brand, who created the “Whole Earth Catalog,” was the major node in a network of countercultural speculators, promoters, inventors and entrepreneurs who helped change the world in ways quite different from those they originally envisioned.

No, man, I mean I really reallyreally reeeeallly LOVE you, you know? Don’t you get it you shad shack of shit? Here, let me count the waysh. (Apparently Shakespeare quite often wrote whilst recovering from the quaffing of golden libations.)

Thus spake the Bard’s great contemporary, Ben Jonson: “I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn’d) hee never blotted out line. My answer hath beene, would he had blotted a thousand. Which the Players thought a malevolent speech.”

The loyal theatricals have turned. Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of the Globe, has finally said the unsayable. Malevolently. There are “Monday morning” lines in Shakespeare’s masterpieces. They are the verse equivalent of the Friday afternoon lemons that used to roll off the production line at Dagenham.

This is a surprise? I thought everyone, pre-1825, had a flagon of mead in their grubby paws. Isn’t that how Man made it through the grosser parts of history?

Profiled at the Telegraph.

Of the golden generation of British novelists now within hailing distance of old age, Julian Barnes is much the hardest to pin down. Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan – you know where you are with them, and have done for years.

But the unifying theme of Barnes’s work? The through line? If there is such a thing, it’s an elegant unknowability, a distaste for the business of sifting through the contents of his own navel.

He might be boosting Chomksy’s sales, but he’s really killing the Bush-is-on-his-way-out buzz. Somebody ought to give bold third-world leftists a class in rhetoric and oration.

The Frank O’Connor award — the richest short story prize in the world. That’s so funny, because, as I understand it, short story writers are some of the poorest writers in the world. Nice synergy!

A book critical of the Thai king has been banned from shelves in… Thailand! Long live the king! Long live an ignorant populace! Long live whatever we say and die everything else!

Dummies books are part of the American dream.

Pitched middle- to lowbrow, the books all adhere to the same format: goofy chapter headings, bullet points, tips and lists, leavened with a laugh track of cornball, sitcom humor. Although Dummies titles have been translated into more than a dozen languages — an original French title, “L’Histoire de France Pour Les Nuls,” has sold more than 125,000 copies — there’s something profoundly American about the enterprise. Amiable and nonthreatening, the books are informed less by populist anti-intellectualism than by a bedrock belief that knowledge is democratic, that you too can master things — especially by ignoring those highfalutin experts who make you feel inadequate.

Despite high hits and stats, blog books seem to be floundering in the retail world. Gee, I wonder why. How much did youse guys pay to get in here, by the way?

At Georgia Tech the Engineering students are forced to take poetry classes. They read and write it. My heart is a-flutter. I am tittering like a schoolgirl. Teehee. Teeheehee.

“We’re trying to diminish the stereotype of the poet as some dreamy bozo who wanders around and then all of a sudden gets struck by inspiration,” says Lux. “Poems are made things. They have everything to do with intense emotions … but poems are made things. They don’t just happen.”

I actually like a swath of Thomas Lux’s stuff, so this is particularly good for me.

Kathy O’Beirne, currently under 24-hour Frey-watch, seems to have some supporters, including other abusees and her brother. So, don’t go spending that money on sharp onions to make you cry, there’s still a book that can give your misery quotient for the week! Oh joy!

Bookslut points to an interview with young author Scarlet Thomas, who expounds on a range of topics, including the use, or lack-thereof, of her website.

I have no idea why I have the website. I don’t have it to increase my sales or anything — I don’t even have those ‘buy the book’ links on it. I find all that capitalistic self-marketing a bit grubby and I just can’t do it. I think my website probably puts people off the idea of me and my books anyway. In fact, as soon as I get around to it, I’m going to delete the whole thing. Earlier in the year I had a really persistent stalker, and then when I took the site down — for ONE DAY — and replaced it with a message saying “fuck off and die”, the books press all went mental about it. The Bookseller said something like “I wonder what’s upset young author Scarlett Thomas”. Great journalism — I mean, if you’re a journalist and you wonder something about someone, why not ring up the person (or their publisher, or their agent) and ask them about it? It’s not hard to find my phone number — the stalker managed it. Anyway, then that dick McCrum ran something unpleasant about it and it all got out of control. So yes — I need to abolish the website, I think. But I probably won’t. I got my Russian publisher through the site, which is always what I think before I don’t delete it.

Hm. That’s kind of what I think when I get ready to delete this site.

Got to make the damn thing last.

So what to read? That’s the question. But as Mr. Sutherland’s title suggests, there’s a second question entangled with the first, addressed in several new books devoted to the lost art of reading. It’s a Malthusian problem. The amount of printed material increases exponentially, but the time available for reading remains static or, in many cases, decreases arithmetically. So once we have decided what to read, the question then becomes, How to read? And the paradoxical answer is, Much more slowly.

I’m a terribly slow reader of fiction. I linger and wallow. With poetry I blow through it the first time like a Hollywood exec through a pile of scripts. Second and third time (yes, I read each poetry book at least twice) I slow down and see what’s what. It’s a rare book of poetry that forces me to slow down the first time. But occasionally I find one that forces me to respect it. Harsh mistress.

Dudes! I was just at Word on the Street here in Toronto and I totally used the Frankenhand! I’ll try to get the image scanned in the next couple of days and get it up here. One of the demo people asked me if I wanted to try it and I said, “No thanks… I call it the Frankenhand and it kind of creeps me out.” He said, “That’s not original, I’ve heard that before.” I said, “Oh, where?” He said, “A website.” I said, “Bookninja?” He said, “Yeah.” So I told him I was Bookninja and he cajoled and I acquiesced and next thing I know I was writing away. Then he interviewed me for a documentary he was doing and I really couldn’t find anything bad to say. It’s quite an invention. I was surprised to find the user interface so simple. It’s like it’s fool proof….. (wait a minute!?!) More when I get back to St. John’s. I’m not really getting enough oxygen to blog properly in this urban pea soup air, so I’ll try to post tomorrow, but it might have to wait until Tuesday when I hope to get a scan of my Frankenhand signature up.

Warning: a large picture of Anne Coulter’s possibly-medicated face. Don’t scroll down too quick.

Two recent cases expose the increasingly elastic journalistic and publishing standards vis-á-vis plagiarism. In early July, The New York Post reported that John Barrie, whose company iParadigms provides a plagiarism tracking service, had found “textbook plagiarism” in Ann Coulter’s latest vehicle for personal enrichment and self-promotion, Godless. The passages in question, lifted from the San Francisco Chronicle, a Planned Parenthood publication, and a newspaper in Portland, Maine, ranged from 24 to 33 words each.

(From Maud)

Elif Shafak has been acquitted.

Where do you go first when you get into someone’s house for the first time? Well, if they don’t know I’m there, I go for the porn and jewelery stashes. But if I’m visiting, I head straight to the bookshelves to see what they’re made of.

What interests me about other people’s books is the nature of their collection. A personal library is an X-ray of the owner’s soul. It offers keys to a particular temperament, an intellectual disposition, a way of being in the world. Even how the books are arranged on the shelves deserves notice, even reflection. There is probably no such thing as complete chaos in such arrangements.

In my house it’s several units of poetry and fiction, a few more of social and cultural theory and shelves and shelves of gender theory. Oh, and I also keep a few Where’s Waldo in there for when my family visits.

The Giller folks made a big publicity mistake releasing their first ever long list in the middle of the Toronto Film Festival. What? People care more about visiting celebrities than small press fiction? Huh. It’s a strange world outside my door. I gotta say, I think the same audience who cared last year probably got the message this year. You weren’t ever going to get much coverage in the Sun, people.

Misery fans want to be sure the pain and suffering they’re rubbernecking at on any given moment is the real thing and not that counterfeit sorrow passed off as real neglect that seems to be filling the shelves these days. How can we help these poor consumers?

Hey all, just a reminder that I’m reading in Toronto tomorrow night (I’m here now, in fact, in Ninja K’s house) and would love to see you there. Info is all here.

Backwards City points to the following grammatically correct sentence.

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”

(Bless them. For that, they’ve made it onto our permanent links list to the right.) This reminds me of the time my partner described Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus” to me as “A structured and structuring structure that structures structure.” When she said that, a single vein in my left eye swelled up to enormous size and popped, spraying the room with blood.

Apparently Ken Alexander of The Walrus has been driving more people to the edge. And perhaps pushing them off. First it was the founding editor, who was a liability to any magazine he came in contact with, so that was no biggie, but then it was good editors, and now it seems like most of the board has quit. This could spell big problems for a mag that needs its charitable status to survive (I’m not sure how the richest magazine of its kind in Canada got charitable status, but that’s another story). Since Ken’s parents are ponying up the dough, he’s paid to play and everyone else can suck his tusk. Read the comments below the main commentary. Ken himself makes an appearance to assure everyone that everything is alright. Doublespeak if you’ve ever heard it. All I’ve ever heard out of the people who work there is how much they all don’t like him. It must be everyone else. Eh, Ken? (Thanks, JD!)

Gets a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Awards. Hey, didn’t those guys have something to do with Stephen King last year?

Indigo is hoping to boost the bottom line by offering more toys for kids. It’s like Reisman has no shame. Oh wait, it’s not LIKE she has no shame… she just really does have no shame. It’s because she’s a businessman, as opposed to a bookseller, see.

Here’s a strategy for you, Head (you don’t mind if I call you “Head” — do you, Head?): first, don’t irrationally swell your business as fast as possible to match your ego. Then niche-sell your books to the local area based on need and interest instead. You won’t get the cartoonishly-evil pleasure of ruining the livelihoods and intellectual communities of lesser folk, but you will stay in business actually selling books. That or you can just switch to pimping hookers and pushing hard drugs. I mean, that’s where you’re really headed, isn’t it, Head?

I would encourage all shoppers to immediately stop browsing at Indigo stores. Instead, I suggest you to pause expectantly out front, peek in as though interested, and then just walk on by. If you step in, see, you risk being converted to a statistic in Head’s next report. And don’t think she doesn’t think of you like that that. The last time she bumped into someone who wasn’t a “yes, ma’am”-man, she was handing him the keys to her Jag and telling him to put a towel down in the seat this time before he drives it around back.

Is the format. Backwards City points to this older piece with thoughts on how things have gone awry in the world of little magazines.

People have heard of Open City, people want to be published in Open City, but people do not want to read Open City. Or, perhaps, more accurately, people do not want to buy Open City. Again, this isn’t to knock Open City in particular; what’s true for Open City is true for almost any literary magazine I could name. Open City just makes a convenient example.

Open City is published three times a year. I have an issue of Open City here, issue 18, titled whimsically, “I Want to Be Your Shoebox.” It is 253 pages long. It’s list price is $10.

253 pages is a pretty big commitment. After all, I could spend that time reading a 250-page book by Fitzgerald or Faulkner or anything else that I would know was good in advance, rather than material by a bunch of people the vast majority of whom I’ve never heard of. In fact, to read even a fraction of the reputable literary magazines that come out, say Open City, Fence, n+1, Granta, The Paris Review, Agni, Zoetrope, The Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Tin House, and Glimmertrain—each of whom produce three periodicals a year on average—I would need to commit all the time and money I would otherwise spend on the novels and short story collections I normally read.

I like how the piece offers a few alternatives at the end, rather than just pointing out the problem. It also reminds me that I’ve been meaning to get a subscription to One Story.

A story of abuse at the hands of the Catholic church comes under fire from the memoirist’s family. THEY don’t want to go to Hell, see?

Her description of being handed over to the notorious “Magdalene laundries” – where difficult children were sent – by an abusive father at the age of eight fed public curiosity about life under the punitive regimes supposedly operating behind the walls of so many convents. To date, it has sold 350,000 copies.

Kathy’s Story also tapped into the outrage generated by The Magdalene Sisters, a black comedy released to critical acclaim in 2002. The film stirred up popular anti-clericalism while celebrating the resilience of those who survived after being incarcerated for “’sinful” behaviour.

“A survivor of the horrific system has never told their personal story – until now,” Mainstream, the Edinburgh publisher, declared in its publicity material. “Kathy O’Beirne spent nearly 14 years under the Magdalene laundry regime. At the age of eight her father called and asked if she wanted to go to the seaside. She was thrilled and ran to the front door only to find a nun waiting for her. She was taken to a Magdalene laundry and didn’t return home until she was 21.”

The trouble with her sensational version of events is that both the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity and now the O’Beirne family have dismissed it as unreliable.

I thought we’d already established that memoir, as a genre, was now to be thought of as “reality-fiction”.

Top 10 books on the English language. Note the list-maker manages to weasle one of his own titles in there.

This is encouraging news (second item). I was speaking with someone about this very thing a night or two back. It’s depressing to go out of print, but at least there’s the chance someone might come looking for you.

According to the BookFinder Report, which monitors the most sought-after out-of-print books, ‘98 to 99 per cent of all books ever published are now out of print.’

Titles that American readers most wanted to get their hands on last year include: The Bed Book by Sylvia Plath, The Mint by T. E. Lawrence, The Gremlins by Roald Dahl, Myra Breckenridge by Gore Vidal, The Science of Life by H. G. Wells and Sex by Madonna.

Nah, anything that has Madonna in it is still depressing.

Profiled in the Independent.

“Consumerism is so weird. It’s a sort of conspiracy we collude in,” says Ballard, who doesn’t do shopping himself. “You’d think shoppers spending their hard-earned cash would be highly critical. You know that the manufacturers are trying to have you on.”

We are sitting in the author’s modest semi in Shepperton, where manufacturers have failed to “have on” Ballard. Apart from the television there’s no evidence of consumer unendurables here. He doesn’t even own a computer. “My three children were brought up in this house and it hasn’t changed at all. Nothing has been moved for 30 years,” he says.

The Dallas Morning News is cutting way back on its arts section. It offered its staffers a buy out. The book critic took it. But neither his, nor any of the other 111 newly-leisured staffers’, goodbye column was never published. Here it is.

I know, I know. You spend your time heroically putting out fires and saving lives in the ER. All of this reading doesn’t really sound like work to you. But it is. Otherwise, we wouldn’t pay researchers, law clerks, teachers or librarians.

OK, so we don’t pay them much. Which just shows how little we actually value reading. Critic Walter Kirn has observed that the novelist is “culturally invisible” today because his job offers few rewards to the big-dog male ego. The same is true of reading. Nowhere in films or TV do characters read — other than the “bookish girl” or the action hero, but only when he must desperately decipher the Sacred Inca Brain Codex for clues to foil the arch-fiend’s dastardly plot — a plot the “bookish girl” could have figured out long ago.

Still, for reviewers, one of the accidental delights of the job comes precisely from reading many of those books we’d normally use for attic insulation. It’s a central pleasure of art: discovery. Finding that what we couldn’t imagine happening in a book can not only happen but succeed, endure, excite.

Newsflash: The world’s worst novelist isn’t from Canada.

The heaving bosoms, trembling lips, quivering voices and clammy hands that inhabit the world created by Amanda McKittrick Ros won her many admirers among the literary elite.

Her novels provided the entertainment at gatherings of the Inklings, a group of Oxford dons including Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien who met from the 1930s to 1950s. They competed to see who could read her work aloud for longest before starting to laugh.

I used to do this with the slush pile at a couple magazines I worked at. It can be surprisingly cathartic. Some of them are so bad that reading them aloud to other laughing-so-hard-they’re-crying editors can be a life saver.

Hang on to your hats, little ninjas, because I’m starting the morning off with a thrill-chill-spill-ride adventure the likes of which you’ve never seen!

Once used only by law students and lawyers, the yellow legal pad is now employed to a degree unrivaled in stationery. “End career as a fighter,” President Richard Nixon wrote on a legal pad in August 1974. Five days later, on the top of another one, he scratched, “Resignation Speech.” Jeff Tweedy, front man for the rock band Wilco, writes his songs on a legal pad. Jim Harrison, the laureate of the untamed heart, wrote Legends of the Fall on legal pads; Elmore Leonard writes his crime novels on them. Nonfiction criminals, it appears, are fond of them, too. How did they get so popular? And how so yellow?

Hooo! I can barely breathe! You?