A previously published Plath poem written as an undergrad in response to The Great Gatsby will appear in an online lit journal. Ouch. Creative. Writing. Exercise. But it will be interesting to see how one of the truly greats handles it.

On a vaguely Halloween related topic, BoingBoing points to Neil Gaiman, who urges writers to develop a literary Will. Inspired by the death of his friend, and the mess his friend’s lack of Will created, Gaiman offers a simple template for creating your own. Inspired by Gaiman, I’ve created one for poets. It begins thus:

I declare that this is my Will. I hereby revoke all prior Wills, Donnes, Keatses and Ashberies.

1. I bequeath [insert description of property, money, books, ephemera] and all other debts owed to _______ if he/she survives me, or if not, to my next most loved individual who supported me for my entire life and must now bear the added burden of said love by paying for my disposal.
2. I nominate _________ as executor of my Will, to serve without bond, especially if Will’s book does better than mine.
3. Notwithstanding any other provision of this document, after my death, my executor shall evenly distribute any remaining part of my estate consisting of (a) one jar of loose change, once picked through for quarters to help with burial costs, (b) sixteen Scream in High Park Tshirts, (c) goldfish bowl of KGB Bar match books, (d) signed (in hieroglyphs) copy of Erin Moure’s 2005 Griffin Prize speech, (e) fifty-five Moleskine notebooks filled with the ramblings of a madman (of interest to future graduate students, perhaps in the field of abnormal psychology or cloning. You’ll see why.)

If you want a copy let me know. There’s also more Gaiman, on Halloween, in the NYT.

Ms. Munro thinks The View from Castle Rock will be her last book. Sad. We wish you the best. As much as you’ve given us.

“I feel it’s the right time to stop. I used to start writing at 7 in the morning, the best hours as far as freedom goes,” says the author, who had a heart bypass four years ago. “Now I’m not out of bed ’til 8:30 and by 9, I’ll get a phone call. I don’t have the energy I used to.

“Being a writer has been such a lifelong preoccupation, I don’t know what I’m going to do next. I have no other talents. Travel? The world has changed too much — it is no longer a playground.”

The US elections have preempted some normal programming and the Gillers have slipped in to the 10pm slot on CTV. This is even more pleasing than normal because the most glamorous folks there will be the judges.

Canada Council has announced how it will spend the $50M of shut-up money it was promised by the Feds back in May.

“We will be taking a strategic approach to the allocation of this new funding,” Robert Sirman, the director of the Canada Council, said in a statement.

“Key objectives are to enhance the long-term growth potential of the Canadian arts sector and to have a significant impact on Canadians across the country.”

That’s corporate speak for “party at my place!”

The Guardian has cottoned on to fan fiction. This means it can no longer be considered cool. Oh, wait. It never was.

Fan.fic, as it is sometimes called, is broadly defined as fiction in which the author creates new storylines based on established characters from established literature. It’s been on the literary margin for years – there were several unauthorised sequels to Robinson Crusoe in the 18th century; several revisions of Alice in Wonderland in the 19th; a popular revival of Jane Austen imitations in the early part of the 20th century and dozens of sci-fi-inspired fanzines, including the finely titled Spockanalia, in the Sixties. But with the proliferation of self-expression over the internet, it has become more noticeable.

I wrote a fan fiction piece once when I was a kid. It was about Leonard Cohen hanging out with this young poet guy named, um, let’s say, “Egroge”, and teaching him how to parlay a tuneless voice into a riches and a string of faceless bed partners.

What’s a niche to you? Poetry? Poetry about one-eyed, albino, left-handed Frenchmen? Well there’s probably a website for you.

For most of the past decade, the basic strategy for building a successful Web site was encapsulated in the phrase “Get big, get niche, or get out.” You could appeal to a broad constituency, with all the blandness and generality that implies (think Yahoo), or you could target a tightly focused group that was far smaller but easier to reach and more loyal than a mass audience (think Slashdot). Getting big would yield high volume and low margins, while getting niche would bring the inverse. Getting out was what you were forced to do if you ended up stuck somewhere between the other two approaches.

That was when 36 million people were online. Now that more than a billion people have access to the Web, there is no longer a trade-off between size and specificity. The basic math is simple: A tiny piece of an immense pie is huge.

I’m pretty happy with our niche of 3,000+ users. You guys are like family to me. Well, like someone else’s family. If you were like my family, we’d all be throwing bread at each other at dinner and someone would be passed out drunk with a cigarette dangling from their lips, ready to set the polyester sofa on fire.

Atwood, Richler, and Coupland get the handicam treatment.

CBC takes a page out of the Bookninja discussion format and trades emails between Rachel Giese and Katrina Onstad about men’s and women’s magazines.

I have such mixed feelings about the whole enterprise. Obviously, it’s quite odious to cut up a woman’s body month by month, and defuse that reality with text that claims it’s all a big celebration of womanhood — ick. But the weird thing is how closely I’ve been following the reveal, issue to issue (good marketing, Esquire), since I’m clearly not the audience. Yes, I am a magazine junkie, but increasingly, I find something in men’s magazines that’s lacking in women’s magazines.

The great Canadian audio book press, Rattling Books, will be making stops in your areas in the coming weeks. Be sure to check them out. What’s exciting is not only their new audio book of Joel Hynes’ Down to the Dirt, but also their major score in getting the rights to Mavis Gallant’s fiction (Hynes will be reading on Nov 3 at the KGB Bar with Margot Dionne, the voice artist on the Gallant CD — the reading billed as “from an upstart to a master”. Order their audio books here and here). If you’re at all interested in Newfoundland, Hynes is your man. I don’t think there are too many opportunities down there to hear that kind of rapid-fire writing done in the authentic accent, so now’s your chance. Also, here’s the Boston info, for Nov 5 at The Middle East in Cambridge.

And if you’re at all interested in short fiction, you should be bowing down at the alter of Mavis Gallant. On Nov 1, she’ll be fetted in New York by the likes of Russel Banks, Michael Ondaatje, Jumpa Lahiri, and others and Rattling will be at the ceremony. All you need to know is at the Rattling Books Blog. But I don’t think you can get tickets any more, so I would go with the KGB reading as your best bet.

What I like about Rattling is their Canadian mandate but international flavour. They feel bigger than they are, in part beceause they take big risks, but they also retain much of the aesthetic and production values associated with a small professional company. I urge you to visit their sites, get involved with their events and buy their books. (As a side note: while she has plenty of worshippers that are younguns like me, I think Gallant’s audio book would make a holiday great gift for that aging, visually-impaired adult in your family… hint hint.)

Robert Fagle’s new translation of Virgil’s Aeneid is getting some hot press.

Some of the success of the Homer translations is doubtless attributable to the glamorous, high-powered audio versions, released almost simultaneously with the print ones. Derek Jacobi recorded Mr. Fagles’s “Iliad,” with great rhetorical force, and Ian McKellen his “Odyssey,” with particular feeling for the more intimate moments.

This is the way Homer meant us to appreciate his poems, Mr. Fagles pointed out: by hearing them. Noting that another great British actor, Simon Callow, had been recruited for the new “Aeneid,” he said that, though written down, that poem too is a kind of performance.

But another reason for the success of the Fagles translations is that there turned out to be a far greater audience for them than either the author or the publisher had anticipated. “I was very surprised,” Mr. Fagles said, “because I’m an academic, and a lot of hand wringing goes on in the academy about the illiteracy of the public. The great joy of this work was to discover that there is in fact a great number of very intelligent, hardworking readers out there.”

The evolution of language is run as much by the recycling of existing words as the invention of new ones. In this NYT essay, Steven Johnson looks at what the internet means to this process, as compared to other times when in depth ethnographic research was needed to study things changing.

Williams’s essential point about the social and political stakes in simple words and phrases is as true today as it was in the 1970’s: think of the many battles that have erupted around terms like “liberal,” “torture,” “pro-life” or “intelligent design.” And today, no less than in Williams’s time, the public intellectual’s place is on the front lines of those skirmishes, reclaiming or challenging or championing the meanings of words that matter most to our vision of the world. For the public intellectual, those skirmishes cannot take place exclusively in ivory towers, as semantic disputes among academics. Instead, he has to direct his work toward the general public for the struggle to be meaningful.

But one immense change separates us from the semantic battles of the mid-70’s, a change visible in the term “key word” itself, which is now most commonly used to describe computerized search requests. In Williams’s time, if one was seeking the real-world associations or usage of a given term — to see a specific word in its native habitat, and not the caged environs of Roget’s Thesaurus or the Oxford English Dictionary — the options were limited. Today, however, we type our key word into Google and instantly get an entire field guide to its present usage: in op-ed columns, advertising blurbs, blog posts, MySpace pages, diaries, scholarly publications, wherever.

You should see some of the searches that lead to Bookninja. They’d make you toes curl and your stomach turn. Here are a few bizarre entries from the logs — I won’t even include the nasty, vomit-inducing illegal porn ones: “ninja scroll sex and fucking”, “the 400-pound ceo”, “laura mallory is a fucking idiot”, “romance novels cockney pete”. Actually, I could see myself typing in at least one of those. Guess which one.

It reads like a typical Victorian melodrama: an impoverished young woman, “strangely, wildly and darkly beautiful,” becomes a governess in a wealthy household, and, behold, a French count falls for her and wants to sweep her away.

But there’s a crucial difference: It is race-torn America; the heroine is mulatto; the book, “The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride,” is believed by some scholars to be the first novel ever published by an African-American woman.
…
But the republication has stirred a dispute between its editors — William L. Andrews, an English professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Mitch Kachun, a history professor at Western Michigan University — and the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., who says that “The Curse of Caste” is not, as stated on the jacket, the first novel by an African-American woman.

Profiled in the Guardian.

I mean, moreso than any other book? An Iranian Studies scholar in the US says, “Yes”.

Dabashi’s extreme, long-winded assault on Nafisi, who has taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington since 1997, might have caused little commotion had the Chronicle not given it so much attention. Still, it raises a host of issues.

First, beneath the rhetorical bluster and postcolonial jargon(‘‘Rarely has an Oriental servant of a white-identified, imperial design,’’ Dabashi writes of Nafisi, ‘‘managed to pack so many services to imperial hubris abroad and racist elitism at home—all in one act’’) there’s the question of whether anything in the book could be said to match the critic’s description. More broadly, there is the issue of how a discussion of women’s rights in the Muslim world ought to be framed in the West.

The company that runs the subscription end of a math journal that charges individuals $100 for a year has sufficiently enraged its editorial staff and they’ve up and quit. Of course, the argument of the company in charge could be as simple as, Hey, eight people read this world-wide and four of them are in any given issue… we have to make a buck somehow.

Striking back against those Cylon-like bookstores with coffee shops in them, Starbucks has begun its invasion of the books market. Score one for the little guys! Wait….

Starbucks has sold 45,000 copies of Mitch Albom’s novel For One More Day (Hyperion) since it went on sale at the chain October 3, a week after the book reached bookstores. The figure accounts for roughly 12% of a total of 391,000 copies sold, as tabulated by Nielsen BookScan. (BookScan, which added Starbucks to its file the week it began selling For One More Day, represents about 70% of total book sales).

Mo. Fo. Um, do you guys do poetry?

And if you can’t find a Starbucks within walking distance, you will soon. Recognizing America’s need for less exercise and more caffeine, they’ve started opening across the street from one another. Eventually they’ll have a service whereby an attendant will come to your home and push your motorised fat-guy scooter all the way down the street for you and hand-spoon you your latte while reciting from the latest Wally Lamb novel.

Jim Crace’s new book on Amazon is doing quite well. Trouble is, he didn’t write it, and it doesn’t exist. Crace says he had nothing to do with this one, swearsies.

I am overjoyed to discover that my latest novel, Useless America (a catchy and fashionable title) was published at the end of September in a hardcover edition by Viking Penguin. It’s a snip at £16.99 for 224 pages. How do I know? Amazon have emailed any of its customers who previously bought my books. The nation’s largest online book shop is offering a persuasive Our Price discount. The truly impecunious, it suggests, can wait until September 2007 when, evidently, Useless America comes out in paperback at £7.99. During that time, no doubt, the novel will have been entered for prizes, presented at festivals and will have attracted the usual batch of mixed reviews, including the customary splenetic rebuff from DJ Taylor.

During the few minutes it took me to access Useless America’s details on Amazon’s web pages, the novel’s sales rank jumped from 70,301 to 69,844. It jumped another 60,000 places when I submitted my own order. Sadly, sales have tailed off a bit in the last few days – down to 219,986 at the last check. Maybe Amazon have sold out and Viking Penguin are reprinting. But my copy must be on its way by now. As the named author of Useless America, I’m looking forward to my first sight of it.

The only hitch is that Useless America is a phantom book – and its not even a phantom of my own creation.

Turns out, he’s changed publishers and titles since, and an original title was either misheard or mistyped years back and has sat around in the database ever since. This actually happened to me as well. Back in 2003, all three major English-language Amazons had originally listed my last book The Hunter, as “The Hunger, by Russell Murray”. Seriously. It was like untangling a ball of duct tape to get it fixed. Last time I checked, a year or two ago, the British one still had it listed wrong.

And not in the papers. She’s okay, but was roughed-up and robbed in her Johannesburg home.

Ninja favourite Michael Winter is not only a nice guy, he’s a tough guy. And hot. Real hot. Like, on fire. Need proof of these two things? The Quill and Quire reports:

Upon returning home to Newfoundland [after the Giller shortlist announcement], he decided to make a trip to the city dump in order to dispose of a bunch of old roofing materials that had been stripped from his house. After arriving at the dump, he backed his truck up to an open-air incinerator, got out of the cab, and began tossing his cargo onto the flames. Somehow, Winter told Q&Q, he lost his balance and fell in.

He’s okay, folks. Just look for the gauzy bandage on his arm at the Gillers. Get-well cards and Bactine are being accepted at Anansi. Not really. Real men like Winter don’t use medicine. They just squint and heal themselves. But I’m sure if you bought him a drink or two to quiet the pain, he wouldn’t say no. (Thanks to Q&Q for giving us a peek behind the paywall.)

For those of you who don’t already know, Bernhard was/is Austria’s leading literary light. A novelist, playwright and poet, Bernhard is only just now starting to gain appreciation here through translation. The NYT has a profile on him, but more accessible for you Toronto Ninjas is the English-language world premier of his play “Ritter, Dene, Voss” being mounted in November by North America’s only theatre company dedicated solely to exploring the boundaries between poetry and theatre, One Little Goat. (Full disclosure: I am one of three board members for this company.) Artistic director (and experimental poet) Adam Seelig, who brought One Little Goat from its native New York City to Toronto two years ago, has gathered some of the city’s best talents for this production and it looks to be a real coming-of-age for an already distinguished company. It’s history in the making and over the next few years I predict you’ll hear more and more about Bernhard as his works come back into vogue and become more widely available in English, and more about OLG as they work their way into the Toronto artistic scene. Ironically, I can’t attend because I’m now in St. John’s, but I encourage you to buy tickets early for this limited seating engagement, and to bring some friends to support this great theatre endeavour. All the info is there on the “Now Playing” page — and you can even charge it by phone. Artistic integrity AND convenience. Can you do no wrong, One Little Goat?

I just got a knock on the door from the postman who had, in addition to the other three books already in the mailbox, an over-sized package from Random House. When I opened it I was surprised to find two things inside — the eco-book Heat by George Monbiot (how to stop the planet from burning) and a two-pack of those high-efficiency coiled mini fluorescent bulbs that fit in standard incandescent light sockets (and there was also that giant bubble wrap, which will provide me, I mean, my child with hours of entertainment). Well, this is good because our whole house is already filled with these, so when they burn out in five or six years, I’ll have replacements. But it’s also an attention getting marketing strategy.

It’s rare I pay attention to non-fiction that isn’t about the literary world, so this really brought me up cold (you only need your thermostat at 18 degrees, right?). If it had just been the book, I might not have noticed it among the others. I even looked at the press release, which was stapled to a page of tips on how to save the planet. Top of the list? “Cut your flights. Nothing else you do causes so much climate change in so short a time.” Um? Airmail?

Anyway, I am going to give it a read. My attention has been got. I figure if I don’t say something now, the innovative thinkers at Random publicity might send someone over to sabotage my air conditioner or something.

I guess my point here is that it really does take something new to get attention for your book, particularly when you’re dealing with an unpopular topic — like what selfish energy pigs we are. I’m figuring the bulbs cost about six bucks and the price of shipping was probably doubled. From the publisher’s POV, that’s money well-spent, I would guess, if people take notice. (And yes, I checked –  “ancient-forest friendly (100% post-consumer recycled) and chlorine-free” paper.)

Profiled at the NYT.

Earlier this month, at age 35, she became the youngest woman ever to win Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize, for her novel “The Inheritance of Loss” — a career-stirring event for any budding novelist but particularly so in her case because it is an honor that has eluded her mother, Anita Desai, who has been a finalist for the prize three times.

Ms. Desai wrote the novel, which is based partly on her family history, in her mother’s house in Cold Spring, N.Y., in “a completely happy atmosphere of stillness and peace,” she said in a soft, Anglo-Indian lilt. “The light in her house seems golden.”

Mother and daughter worked side-by-side on their separate manuscripts during the day, then cooked together at night and drank rum, Ms. Desai said.

That’s funny, in my house we didn’t so much write and get drunk with our mom as sit in front of Price Is Right and watch her get drunk, but I see the connection. It’s universal.

Scuz-ball librarian teef manages to escape a prison sentence by claiming he did it for the emotional thrill, not the money. Isn’t that’s the same reason sociopaths kill people?

A librarian who stole more than 500 antiquarian books worth £175,000 from Manchester Central library, and then offered several for sale on an internet auction site, was given a suspended jail sentence yesterday. Norman Buckley, 44, began his thefts after breaking up with his long-term girlfriend. He made more than £11,000 from sales of books on eBay but hardly spent any of the money, claiming the sales gave him a buzz.

Hey, man. Don’t bogart that seventeenth century Donne. Next time, try getting a plant or a pigeon or something. Pigeons being the plants of the animal world.

Like a couple of childless lawyers creating a bidding war on a four bedroom house in High Park, HC keeps laying down the cash to get its grubby little nail-bitten hands on what it hopes will translate to a English language publishing blockbuster. Scrooge McDuck would be appalled and proud.

Jonathan Burnham, the senior vice president and publisher of HarperCollins, declined to disclose what the publisher paid for the book but said it was a substantial sum.

Mr. Littell, 38, the son of the spy novelist Robert Littell, was educated at Yale but has spent most of his life in France and now lives in Barcelona. He has already sold publication rights to the book for Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, among other countries. Industry executives say the German rights alone fetched $567,000.

Cha-biddy-chu-biddy-CHING!

Newspapers could be in financial straits for the next 30 or so years. This is probably because they are cutting out their books sections, the bastards.

Remember Craig Davidson’s sanctioned boxing match with poet Michael Knox-out-Craig-Davidson? Well, former Book TV filmmaker and Ninja-reader Ian Daffern sends us a couple YouTubes of his efforts at documenting the entire rumble in the jumble. Nice work, Ian!

Authors Kevin Chong and Steven Galloway are nice guys. Not only are they occasional ninjas, they are also enjoying bashing the shit out of each other online. Galloway altered Chong’s Wikipedia entry and so it seems Chong responded by creating a nice, unicorn-themed MySpace profile for Galloway. At least I think that’s how it went down. Knowing these two, it could have been something they each did for themselves. I want to noogie them.

Profiled at the CBC.

The acclaim has come with a certain burden, Adichie says. “I’m often uncomfortable with the position my writing puts me in. Because, as a writer, my first responsibility is to my art. But sometimes, I think that’s too easy to say. Because I’ve grown up in Nigeria with the history I have. And I’m a black, African woman who writes realistic fiction, and in doing that, there is a political role that emerges. And it’s my responsibility to accept it.”

That responsibility has made her a little wary. She confesses she is so anti-social that “by the time I’m 50, I’ll probably become a full recluse.” Yet, even with the stress of juggling a book tour and the start of the fall semester at Yale — where she is working on a graduate degree in African history — Adichie is voluble and energetic. With her brown almond eyes and flawless skin, she is also, like her character Olanna, “illogically pretty” — a selling point her publisher has picked up on.

Ah, those publishers and their selling points…. To dangerously leave the art and book discussion for a moment — I, for one, don’t see anything illogical about her beauty. She’s drop-dead gorgeous by any standard.

Watch walking on the pitch in those heels… you’ll tear up centre field. Robyn Harding has a successful career as a novelist. But she feels ostracized because her work is not only humorous, but labelled as chicklit. Is this double-barrelled pigeon-holing keeping her out of the literary limelight?

“It does have a bit of a negative connotation as complete fluff,” Harding says over a cup of regular coffee, while I manfully pound back a stiff vanilla latte. “I find it weird that they always have to categorize women writers_ they have ‘mom lit’ and for older women they have ‘hen lit.’ I’m not really offended by it, but none of it is very flattering.”

Harding, the author of The Journal of Mortifying Moments and most recently The Secret Desires of a Soccer Mom, describes her books as “humourous women’s fiction”-nothing that will send readers’ temporal lobes into spasms, but entertaining throughout.

“It’s funny though,” Harding says, “I read a lot of books written by men, but men don’t seem to read a lot of books written by women. It’s the same with movies. If it stars a female then it’s a ‘chick flick,’ but if it’s a male…”

Harding also points to the lack of respect given to humour in general. “What is better than laughing? Why is that undervalued? Why do comedies hardly ever win an Academy Award? Unless it makes you cry or cringe it’s not considered worthy, whereas I think that making people laugh is a gift.”

Many famous quotes are actually misquotes. Now the people who brought you the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations are bring you a debunking of popular mis- and altered quotations.

Some of history’s most famous one-liners are about to be exposed as inventions by other writers with plenty of time to hone their prose. Hundreds of pithy remarks from “Let them eat cake” to “Elementary, my dear Watson”, turn out to be adaptations of comments that were more clumsy or more boring – or which were never said by those thought to have coined them.

The list includes many supposedly historical lines, such as Napoleon’s “Not tonight Josephine”, but also covers modern icons including Star Trek. No one ever said “Beam me up Scotty”, and Mr Spock never said “It’s life Jim, but not as we know it.”

Backwards City links to an article at Wired in which famous sf and horror types, including a few literary practitioners, write six word short stories. Yes, six.

Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket.
- William Shatner

Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer?
- Eileen Gunn

Vacuum collision. Orbits diverge. Farewell, love.
- David Brin

Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.
- Joss Whedon

Automobile warranty expires. So does engine.
- Stan Lee

Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
- Alan Moore

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
- Margaret Atwood

Absolutely wicked idea. David Brin has either got a lot of time on his hands or is procrastinating on a new book.

Music and fashion have discovered the world of Second Life, an online universe where anything can be created, bought and sold. Now publishers are getting into the act too.

Businesses as diverse as car manufacturers (such as Toyota) and clothing companies (including Adidas and American Apparel) have established a presence in Second Life; the news agency Reuters recently made the news itself by announcing that it is to embed a journalist within Second Life to hunt down stories to report back to the real world.

Penguin, however, is the first major publisher to dip its toe into the virtual world and, appropriately, it has chosen Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash as the book with which to test the waters. With its invention of the notion of a “metaverse” (a contraction of “metaphysical universe”) it is acknowledged as the inspiration behind Second Life and other virtual worlds.
…
Although slow to load (and many of the objects in Second Life suffer from a frustrating delay known as “lag”), the Snow Crash sampler is a neat offering from a company which appears, wisely, to have taken a softly-softly approach to engaging with the online community. The crucial factor, perhaps, is that Ettinghausen, who devised the initiative, had already been a resident of Second Life for six months, and came to the project with an insider’s understanding of this sometimes mind-boggling new environment.

He is also aware that there is some disquiet among longer-term Second Life residents about perceived bandwagoning by large corporations and the increasing amount of big brand advertising in their world.

I’d like to start an environmental movement in Second Life, where you can hold corporations responsible for polluting the Utopia with “economics”. I’d also like to start a logging company there, just to see what people do.

A school type in the US has suggested all students be provided with thick textbooks to use as shields during what seem to be the weekly shootings down there. Nice metaphor. I remember that old version of Snakes and Ladders where the justification for a climb or slide was based on a set of morals. One of the longest snakes had a girl leaning back, relaxing at her desk, obviously slacking off from studying. At the bottom of the snake, the same girl was huddled in rags on a bench. If you don’t use your books wisely, you’ll end up fashion-poor and cold. Or in this case, if you don’t use your books wisely, you’re likely to be shot dead by that nutbar kid you’ve been pushing around at recess. Of course, students are free to open these books as well and see if there’s anything useful inside besides the Kevlar pages. (From Maud)

Interviewed at the Morning News. (See left and support our advertisers!)

In Mexico they are forcing the police to read. And not just the parking meters.

The idea of getting the police reading in Neza, as the city is usually called, is part of a wider “cultural dimension” to training. This also obliges officers to learn to play chess, and encourages them to go back to school.

The tactic is multi-pronged. On one level the reading groups are designed to broaden minds, making officers more aware of what is going on in their local communities and more sensitive to the needs of the public.

But the idea is also to prove to the people that the police are no longer the scheming, corrupt low-life most Mexicans assume them to be. “We have a bad police force because society sees them as in the basement, in the sewer,” says Mr Amador, whose immediate predecessor is in a maximum-security jail for drug trafficking. “In Nezahualcoyotl we want to elevate the police so [they are] worthy of fulfilling their obligations.”

Despite my inherent distrust of all cops (even though I come from a military family with members in the RCMP), I think this is a good strategy. There are so many clever tips in books on how to torture without leaving marks. Who wants to let that kind of stuff go to waste on fiction?

An excerpt from a book on language, written by someone who is undoubtedly an expert, but will perhaps one day be found mummified under an avalanche of doilies and spent typewriter ribbons.

Alongside this commercialisation of our language, there has been an erosion of formality. Formality matters. It creates a space between us that allows for a measure of independence and freedom. Take it away and that space is open to all manner of intruders, not all of them commercial.

I kid because I love. Well, no. Actually, I kid because I know you like it. I’m concerned about the erosion of language too. Not so much that new language is evolving, but that the old is being needlessly forgotten when it’s still so very useful. It’s like the wealthy Japanese who throw out last year’s electronics just to have this year’s.

Ah, the utter ridiculousness of one of the world’s most oppressive regimes opening a “House of Free Creativity”, shaped like a book no less, in Turkmenistan.

Niyazov unveiled the $17 million “House of Free Creativity” last Tuesday. The building will accommodate offices of the Turkmen government-controlled press.

Niyazov personally approves the content of all newspapers, and the country’s only Internet service provider blocks web sites critical of Niyazov’s policies.

The nation’s few independent journalists are regularly harassed by authorities. Journalist and rights activist Ogulsapar Muradova died last month while in prison, and her body had traces of a major head wound and strangulation, her family said.

Welcome to the House of Free Creativity. Create. I SAID create! No. Not that. Something else. No…. No…. No…. Ok, that’s better—wait—no…. No… No…. (Thanks, T)

The Bookninja Magazine welcomes poet and memoirist John Terpstra, who knew from the first day he walked into his partner’s home (at 18-years-old) that he had to tell the story of her family’s struggle with muscular dystrophy. Thirty years later, in the highly successful memoir The Boys, he finally did. How did he get there? Terpstra’s candid essay takes us through the nuts and bolts decision-making behind switching forms from poetry to memoir, as well as negotiating the business end of things.

Could you imagine this in Canada or the US? Sad that you shake your head.

The country’s library association launched the reading campaign over the weekend. Members of the library can pick up free copies of Dubbelspel (Double Play), a 1973 novel by Dutch author Frank Martinus Arion.

There are enough free books to supply one for every 30 citizens. The association was inspired by the One Book projects in the U.S., where novels were chosen by city or state libraries for residents to read and discuss.

And when you’re all clustered around the book, you can hold hands or start singing in rounds or maybe vote to see who gets eaten first at break time. (Thanks, K)

Plenty of contemporary novels make it on to British highschool reading lists these days. That’s a lot of scratch for the publishers lucky enough to have a title in the mix. But how are they chosen? No one really knows.

The processes by which set texts are chosen by exam boards are obscure, but shape many readers’ sense of what Eng Lit is. How are the choices made? Teachers are able to select from the annual menu of books, but the origins of this menu are as mysterious to them as to any candidate. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), the government body that regulates the exam boards, offers the blandest guidance. “The texts read should be of sufficient substance and quality to merit serious consideration, and should have been originally written in English.”

Finding out anything directly from the exam boards is difficult. The actual decisions as to set books are arrived at, as far as one can tell, by “senior examiners” (the best description of the decision-making group that I could obtain from any of the organisations) “after wide consultation”. Who knows what this means?

Ours is an age of awards. We have one for pretty much everything. Sometimes two. And they’re growing, self-replicating like an army of tiny, invisible robots, waiting to turn our world into a writhing grey goo. Or something. A nice long piece on what prizes and awards are doing to our culture.

As long ago as 1928 Ezra Pound could write that ‘The whole system of prize-giving… belongs to an uncritical epoch; it is the act of people who, having learned the alphabet, refuse to learn how to spell.’

He would have been even more indignant today. For ours is truly the age of awards. Prizes are becoming the ultimate measure of cultural success and value. One prize inevitably spawns another, in imitation or reaction, as the perceived male dominance of the Booker spawned the Orange Prize for women’s fiction. There are now so many, in so many different fields, that it can be difficult to find a professional artist, writer or journalist who has not been shortlisted for a prize.

Darwin loses to Primo Levi in the race for the best science book of all time.

The Periodic Table, published in 1975, fought off competition from Richard Dawkins, DNA legend James Watson, Tom Stoppard, Bertolt Brecht and Charles Darwin to win the vote at an event organised by the Royal Institution in London.

Um….?

As in all things business related, if you’re not thinking of China, you’re not thinking. Pubishing is there too. And the Chinese novel is on its way. Presumably in translation.

Literary agent Toby Eady of London, who brought Wu’s “February Flowers” to Macmillan, maintains that the reason so few contemporary Chinese authors are read in the West, and the reason modern China is so little understood by the West, is the dearth of good translations of contemporary Chinese writers. Wu, 33, overrode the problem by writing in English.

Two articles in the NYT this weekend on race as seen through the lens of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. First a story of the book’s slow revival and then an essay on the tumultuous literary relationship between James Baldwin and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Why would Baldwin, in his attack on Stowe, speak so harshly against the power of the fiction to persuade? Surely it was because he was, however unconsciously, speaking to his own deepest fears: that as a novelist, he was guilty of the very thing he disdained in Stowe. When Baldwin looked in the mirror of his literary antecedents, what he saw, to his horror, was Harriet Beecher Stowe in blackface.

Ninja fav Don Paterson riffs on poetry and translation in the New Statesman, using his recent Rilke translation as a base.

Translating a complex, visionary poem leaves you with two choices. Either you translate something you don’t understand in German into something you understand even less in English, or you make a single reading of it, knowing that this denies many others. In translating Rilke’s Sonnets, I took the latter course, which is to say I made a travesty of sorts – as any single interpretation must be.

The one thing a poet must avoid, however, is pretending that both the meaning and the music of the original poem can be carried into the new language. Because a poem works on the heretical principle that sound and sense are the same thing, a poem is locked for ever in its original form. The poem’s effect, which is all there is of it, can no more be “translated” than can a piece of music.

(From The Saloon)

Some authors appearing at the IFOA, including Nell Freudenberger, Rawi Hage, Claire Messud, and Marisha Pessl provide lists of their favourite books. Um, people? Poetry?

Some big bucks handed out to the picture book set. Of which I hope to become a member soon. This time I’m going to get rich. And quick! Doh.

As reader Paul points out, both Romulans and Tolkien would be proud. Scientists (those goofy-loofy, barrel-of-laughs-and-carcinogenic-material lab rats) are THIS close to bringing out the invisibility cloak.

Cloaking devices are built on the principle that radiation can be made to go around an object, by using special materials that are set in a circular pattern. The waves propagate through the material and to the other side, bending around the shielded object, partially the same way light can be directed through bent fiber optics with minimum losses.

Hot-diggedy-dog! All the free blueberry danishes I can stomach! Oh, I feel queasy in advance…

Elif Shafak on what Pamuk’s Nobel win means to Turkey. Some interesting points here — a very candid insider’s perspective.

With the establishment of a modern, secular Turkey, literature took on an even greater role. The new elite, depicting the new regime as a fundamental transformation from eastern civilisation to western civilisation, aimed to make culture the cement of the modern Turkish nation-state. For them modernisation and secularisation meant a complete detachment from the past, a mistrust of anything, of everything associated with the Ottoman heritage. The Turkish state elite was ready to speed up the flow of history from above.

So the novel – a literary genre which was new, modern and, unlike the old tradition of poetry, utterly western – gained a unique position. No wonder then that a novelist is always more than a novelist in Turkey. He is, first and foremost, a public figure. Novelists are the “babas”, the fathers of their readers. They are loved and hated, looked up to and looked down upon. This is a society which is writer-oriented, not writing-oriented.