There should be an emoticon for that sound cartoon characters make when they triple take in disbelief. Oi-oi-oi-oi! Peer, rub the eyes, peer again.

China quietly removed its chief censor, who had provoked a furore on the internet this year with a ban on eight books, yesterday. At the same time it unveiled new rules aimed at ensuring greater government transparency as part of a campaign to eradicate corruption and misrule.

Given the silence surrounding the departure of Long Xinmin, head of the powerful General Administration of Press and Publication, it was unclear just how much transparency will sit comfortably with China’s traditionally secretive rulers.

Mr Long will retain his current rank but become a deputy director of the Central Party Literature Research Centre — a clear demotion. Officials declined to give a reason for his transfer, amid speculation about his possible involvement in a corrupt land deal or that the publicity triggered by his ban on the books had embarrassed party leaders.

The ban on eight books that examined sensitive events in recent Chinese history resulted in a wave of anger on the internet, prompting the authorities to allow the books to remain on sale until stocks ran out.

Come on, China… Freedom… You know you want it….

Michael Chabon shudders to think what would have happened if he had published an early draft of a novel against his editor’s wishes. You can’t beat a good thrashing at the hands of an experienced editor.

It was the end of 2005, and Michael Chabon was rushing to finish his latest novel. The blurb was in his publisher’s sales catalog. The on-sale date was set. Then his editor slammed on the brakes.

“I shudder now when I think that I would have published the old draft,” says Mr. Chabon, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.” Instead, after consultations with his editor, he spent about eight months reworking the entire book — a murder mystery set in a fictional Yiddish-speaking Jewish homeland in Alaska. He added a flashback structure and pared down the language into a hard-boiled, Yiddish-inflected patois. “I felt like I had to invent a whole new dialect of English to finish it,” he says.

Next week, after five years, four drafts, two trips to Alaska and a title change, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” will arrive in stores. While long gestation periods and multiple drafts aren’t unusual in the publishing industry, the time and effort expended on behalf of Mr. Chabon’s vision are illustrations of the book’s importance to HarperCollins, which won it in a four-way, seven-figure auction in 2002, when it was little more than a one-and-a-half-page proposal. Now the company has again bet big, printing 200,000 copies of the finished product, Mr. Chabon’s first full-length adult novel since winning the Pulitzer in 2001. “The stakes are high,” says Jonathan Burnham, HarperCollins’s publisher, “for Michael and all of us.”

Then one has to wonder why the editor didn’t put the kibosh on that title as part of this edit… It’s closing in on “The Contrabulous Fabtraption of Professor Horatio Hufnagel” for clunkiness.

• Canadian prize for Arab writers
• Manitoba book awards
• Science book prize goes to hot turtle sex book

A funny and sobering article at the NYT on mis-blurbing — the practice of strategically pulling quotes out of reviews and rearranging sentence elements to your advantage. The illo with this piece is hysterical.

It happened to me about 10 years ago. I had called David Sedaris’s memoir “Naked” a “tour-de-farce” in a review in Newsday. Shortly thereafter, the publisher ran an ad in which my 600-word review had been boiled down to one phrase: “tour de force.”

Call it misblurbing. We’d like to think that while the quotations in movie ads regularly feature near-hysterical raves from marginal or even nonexistent critics, the genteel world of book publishing is above all that. But that doesn’t seem to be the case, and some say publishers are becoming only more brazen. “It’s gotten much worse recently,” said Po Bronson, the author of “What Should I Do With My Life?” and a member of the board of advisers of Consortium, a book distributor that specializes in independent publishers. “There’s a feeling of, ‘Ah, no one’s looking anymore.’ ” The liberal editing of promotional verbiage can extend even to blurbs that publishers ask successful authors to provide for less-established ones. “Usually they come back with changes and say, ‘Is this O.K.?,’ and it’s very different from what I gave them,” Bronson said.

Sometimes the publishers don’t even ask. On seeing the finished version of “Never Eat Your Heart Out,” a memoir by Judith Moore that he had blurbed, Bernard Cooper was surprised to see that his words of praise had been topped off with the hosanna “Bravo!” “I certainly thought her book was deserving of a hearty exclamation,” Cooper said. “It’s just that my saying ‘Bravo!’ is about as likely as my saying ‘Touché!’ It made me sound like someone who wears an ascot.”

Actually, this happened to me as well, with no less than Dave Eggers. A review I wrote of his first novel, HWSG, came out in the Globe on the same weekend as all the big reviews in the states. It was the early days of reviewing for me, and where many other reviews of the book were fawning, mine was positive but pulled back to a reserved final judgement. I seem to remember using a bit of his own style in the review, making light and fun (who, me?) in an earnest way, but also wondering whether the book truly represented a work of genius. Anyway, a year or two later, I am in Three Lives (perhaps the best bookstore in NYC) when I see the paperback version with a blurb from that review. All one “quotation” excerpting the good bits, but with no ellipses, no dashes, no indication that these words hadn’t been written in a row. I was offended at first, but then realized it was just how things were done. It sure taught me to be careful about what I actually say versus what I imply in reviews.

A Carol Shields memorial maze is being built in Winnipeg. Now ‘Peggers can get lost in style. Shields in the Shield.

The commemorative project took shape after Shields’s death from breast cancer in 2003, and is being designed by Friesen Tokar Architects + Landscape + Interior Designers. A big chunk of the $130,000 cost is coming from friends, family and Shields’s publisher, Random House of Canada.

The labyrinth’s 2,000 square metres, with stone pathways, a reading area and a healing garden, will be the largest maze in Canada.

Hopefully this thing will be heated so we don’t have to clean up from that final scene from The Shining every spring.

I’m sure both of these fine poets didn’t really intend their words to set up an article about how the pursuit of poetry is okay, despite it all. But so it goes — even when we are lauded, we’re insulted. Who am I to talk? It’s our bread and butter around here when we’re in our ninja costumes.

When we celebrate National Poetry Month each April, we’re tipping our hats not only to the art form, but to the poets themselves, who perform the thankless task of writing what few read and fewer still understand. It takes a very particular kind of masochism to engage in this pursuit, which brings the practitioner neither glory nor income and is derided even, occasionally, by poets themselves.

“Poetry is – with good reason – easy to make fun of,” says Toronto-based poet Ken Babstock, one of the nominees for this year’s Griffin Poetry Prize. (The prize, awarded yearly, offers $100,000 to be split between one Canadian poet and one international poet.)

“Poetry is often the last resort for a lot of losers,” adds avant-garde poet Christian Bök, Canadian winner of the 2002 Griffin Prize. “Confessing you’re a poet never gets you laid.”

Okay, let me have a crack at it, too: “Poetry is the bastard lovechild of The Ego’s premature ejaculation in Leisure Time.” Nah, I’m not quite buying it…. today.

Some criticism of the LAT’s decision to merge its books section with the Sunday review section. In the LAT. The effort to save money and paper may in the end damage papers more than it saves them, by damaging reading itself.

Even at the Los Angeles Times, the fine newspaper at which I am proud to have once worked as a reporter, the attention devoted to books is changing. Gone is the stand-alone Book Review. Two weeks ago, Book Review was merged with Sunday Opinion as part of a plan to save pages and save money.

There are many sound business reasons for these moves, and perhaps The Times is going about it in the best way possible — attempting to make sure that between the Sunday newspaper, the daily paper and its website, the Book Review content is still there for those readers willing to chase it down.

To be sure, a newspaper is a business, and book reviews have always been a loss-leader of sorts. Book sections have never generated much advertising, and no doubt publishing houses ought to bear some of the responsibility for the straits we’re now in. Unlike films or automobiles or even food products, few books enter the marketplace with a budget for newspaper ads. This has become even more pronounced as more and more of the money that is set aside for promoting books is shifted into “co-op” — paying for position on the front tables in chain stores.

So I understand why newspaper executives think that space dedicated to books is space that loses money.

But maybe not in the long run.

James was stuck between needing to make art and needing to make money. I hear you, my brothah from anothah mothah. The central part of my day is taken up with the wrestling match between my inner poet and my inner larder stock boy. And the stock boy has big beefy arms from loading family-sized cans of chick peas to the top shelf, if you get my drift.

All of his life as a writer, James worried about both the purity of his work and the making of money. It was as though he himself was a married couple. One part of him cared for the fullness of art, and the other part for the fullness of the cupboard. He sought both with stubborn, steadfast zeal. Sometimes when he realised that he could not achieve one without failing the other, he argued with himself. However, he seldom gave up trying to match them. He struck hard bargains with publishers and editors. His notebooks are full of hopeful jottings of ideas that might come to full fruition not only as works of art, but as objects that would take the measure, as he called it, of the great flat foot of the public.

Speaking of which, buy my book, yo.

Came right about the same time as birth of the eBook. I still think the idea will fly, eventually — we just have to wait until us old fogies are bred out of the system and those smaller humanoids with the unusually dextrous opposing digits finally rule a world full of tiny, glowing screens and flickering interest.

There are many subtle, minor disadvantages to e-books. For example, they’re expensive. The hardware costs hundreds of dollars. Worse, books tend not to be hugely discounted in electronic form. The paperback version of “The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time,” by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, costs $11.20 on Amazon.com. The same book in electronic format on eBooks.com costs $9.95. You save $1.25. The reason is that the value of a book lies mostly in the intellectual property, not the wood pulp that constitutes the physical book. So e-books aren’t cheaper.

Another huge barrier to the growth of the e-book market is that everyone already has alternatives. You can read written content on your PC — in fact, you’re doing it right now — on tablet PCs, laptops, cell phones and PDAs.

These are all real, but minor, hurdles e-book makers would have to clear in order to make e-books a major gadget category. But none of them really matter, because there is one unavoidable and fatal fact that will kill the nascent e-book market in its cradle: People love paper books.

In other words, e-books are not, and cannot be, superior to what they are designed to replace. …And that’s the simple reason why e-books will never even come close to replacing paper books.

Whoa, Tex. “Never”’s a long time, there. EBooks can indeed be superior, especially for non-fiction and information. They just need to be easily annotatable. And fully searchable and cross-referenced. And ownable. And secure. And cheap. And fast. And clear. And and and. But it will happen.

Youse guys are so tolerant down there that you didn’t even fire a teacher who played student newspaper advisor at a school in Indianna when she allowed one of the students to express tolerances for homosexuals in an editorial. You just reprimanded her, destroyed her chance of upward mobility, moved her to another school and forbade her to work with J students there. That’s growth, America. Real growth. But then, so is that irregular black and brown crusty spot on your grandmother’s lip.

A high school teacher who faced losing her job after a student newspaper published an editorial advocating tolerance of gays can continue teaching at another school.

Amy Sorrell, 30, reached an agreement that allows her to be transferred to another high school to teach English, said her attorney, Patrick Proctor.

“The school administration has said in no uncertain terms that she’s not going to be given a journalism position,” Proctor said.

Sorrell, who had been an English and journalism instructor at Woodlan Junior-Senior High School, was placed on paid leave March 19, two months after an editorial advocating tolerance of homosexuals ran in Woodlan’s student newspaper, The Tomahawk. Sorrell had been the newspaper’s adviser.

What’s next? Reparations?

Robert McCrum, seen here looking like a cross between Antonio Banderas, Gary Busey, and that angry English guy from American Idol, looks at Ian McEwan: the brand. Now with 50% less fat?

This week, the process of McEwan’s branding took a step further when prime ministerial hopeful David Cameron chose to be photographed on the tube not reading the Economist or Beano – or playing with his Gameboy – but immersed in a copy of On Chesil Beach, McEwan’s recently published novella.

As a contemporary brand, this has already enjoyed widespread (and mainly glowing) notices and is currently high in the bestseller lists – a rare case of a serious writer enjoying both critical and popular acclaim. The McEwan brand is perfect for Cameron. It says “I like fiction. I’m in touch with my feminine side. And I support the arts.” Cameron’s endorsement is a moment of brand-recognition no amount of money can buy… Interestingly, it is more than equalled by his popularity in the US.

All this is not necessarily good news for McEwan’s publishers. In the short term, of course, their author’s high profile will guarantee acres of media coverage and commentary – and incredible sales. Further down the line, in the inevitable dialectic of literary criticism, the revisionism will begin.

What ever happened to being funny? Why are so many literary types today afraid of a larf? I bet seriousness runs in inverse proportion to the level of hardship experienced by the readership. As we get richer, fatter, and more leisurely, we prefer to get our tragedy vicariously. Were we starving and the proud owners a 35-year lifespan and a 40% infant mortality rate, we just might need a few chuckles…

Two things were striking about the 21 writers recently anointed by Granta magazine as America’s “best young novelists”. The first is that nearly all of them are graduates of university creative writing courses. The second is that they are a uniformly depressive, angst-ridden lot.

In his summing-up essay, Granta’s editor Ian Jack remarked upon this second fact: “We read many books infused by loss and a feeling that present things would not go on for ever, written by people whose age put them at a distance from their own mortality.” Jack went on to lament the exclusion from the list of Joshua Ferris, who “had the singular distinction …of making me laugh aloud quite often.”

In other words, of the 21 best young novelists in America, not one is producing work that makes people laugh. Isn’t this more than a little peculiar? It isn’t as if the comic novel doesn’t have a distinguished pedigree.

Foer doesn’t make people laugh? Um? And it continues, in much greater depth, in a Prospect Magazine essay here:

Yet western culture since the middle ages has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic. We think of tragedy as major, and comedy as minor. Brilliant comedies never win the best film Oscar. The Booker prize leans toward the tragic. In 1984, Martin Amis reinvented Rabelais in his comic masterpiece Money. The best English novel of the 1980s, it didn’t even make the shortlist. Anita Brookner won that year, for Hotel du Lac, written, as the Observer put it, “with a beautiful grave formality.”

The fault is in the culture. But it is also internalised in the writers, who self-limit and self-censor. If the subject is big, difficult and serious, the writer tends to believe the treatment must be in the tragic mode. When Amis addressed the Holocaust in his minor novel Time’s Arrow (1991), he switched off the jokes, and the energy, and was rewarded with his only Booker shortlisting.

But why this pressure, from within and without? There are two good reasons. The first is the west’s unexamined cultural cringe before the Greeks. For most of the last 500 years, Homer and Sophocles have been held to be the supreme exponents of their arts. (Even Homer’s constant repetition of stock phrases like “rosy-fingered dawn” and “wine-dark sea” are praised, rather than recognised as tiresome clichés.)

The second reason is that our classical inheritance is lop-sided. We have a rich range of tragedies—Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides (18 by Euripides alone). Of the comic writers, only Aristophanes survived. In an age of kings, time is a filter that works against comedy. Plays that say, “Boy, it’s a tough job, leading a nation” tend to survive; plays that say, “Our leaders are dumb arseholes, just like us” tend not to.

More importantly, Aristotle’s work on tragedy survived; his work on comedy did not. We have the classical rules for the one but not the other, and this has biased the development of all western literature. We’ve been off-centre ever since.

What’s the use of big book gatherings like last week’s London Book Fair? I say the use is to let publishing types feel rich and pampered for once. And that’s good enough for me. Everything I say is a lie.

It all sounded wonderfully sophisticated – publishing houses from around the world had flown their execs in to listen to the 30-minute pitches, pick up a few bestsellers, generally swan around boutique hotels and catch up with the shopping. It is, no doubt, good for us all that London hostc one of the two great book fairs, and consequently can claim to be more than the world’s biggest collection of bankers.

But how useful was the London Book Fair, really? For a start, even if a book does sound interesting, someone still has to read it and make a decision to buy the rights. Editors walked away with around 200 books each – and will probably read less than half of them. They may feel they should get round to buying something, anything, if only to justify the hotel suite, but will really have derived the most value out of simple networking. And because the fair was later this year – it’s normally in January or early February – everyone pitched their best books weeks ago.

Banff, town of ski bums and artists, is trying to block the installation of another conformity centre for the advancement of yoga matts and scented candles (aka Indigo Books). Go, Banff!

Banff may refuse to grant a business licence to Indigo Books in the face of a groundswell of public opposition to the corporate giant’s plan to set up shop in the national park townsite, putting its legal strength to the test once and for all.

The Town will also host a town hall meeting, tentatively scheduled for May 8 at 6:30 p.m. in the Banff High School gym, to get public feedback on chain stores that many argue are delivering a crippling blow to local mom and pop shops and ruining Banff’s character.

I love the word “groundswell”. It’s revolutiarific!

Profiled around his new book in that even-handed, give-a-little take-a-little-back way Marchand has of expressing grudging admiration. Of particular note is Marchand’s lingering on Ondaatje’s sex scenes. Hm.

I say “perhaps inevitably” because nearly all the major characters in the novel, faced for any prolonged length of time with an individual of the opposite sex, have sex with that character. (Much of the sex involves penetration of the female from behind – future Ondaatje scholars can puzzle this one out.)

As is the case with most Ondaatje-esque sexual behaviour, the activity itself is highly aesthetic, almost ethereal – Coop’s “fingers moved back and forth on her stomach as if he were thoughtlessly or thoughtfully trailing them in a river.”

New in The Bookninja Magazine today is a discussion piece called Home Turf — between long time Ninja Lynn Coady and new recruit Christy Ann Conlin, and conceived in response to a previous Magazine piece, Rachael Preston’s Miss Appropriation in Fall 2006. Preston had examined the joys and pitfalls of writing about places you’ve never been. Now the locals respond. Cape Bretonner Coady, whose childhood and novels both are set in the East, and Conlin, a native of Nova Scotia, look at the idea of us CFAs (come from aways) gobbling up all the good stories, and then go deeper and deeper into the whole issue of “place”. Upcoming in the next week or so are two podcasts with poets Simon Armitage and Dennis Lee.

The British Library has opened an exhibition of ancient Islamic, Jewish and Christian texts, displayed side-by-each to show how each tradition influenced t’other.

Graham Shaw, the lead curator, said: “We were determined not to create faith zones, but to show these wonderful manuscripts side by side, and demonstrate how much we share – not least that these are three faiths founded on sacred texts, books of revelation.” Many exhibits are among the oldest of their kind, including a Qur’an made in Arabia within a century of Muhammad’s lifetime.

The exhibition also shows how calligraphers and manuscript illuminators shared influences and styles. The microscopically detailed decorated capital letters of the Lindisfarne Gospels are echoed in Islamic and Jewish manuscripts, while Christian and Jewish texts borrowed Islamic-inspired decoration, so that a 14th century Qur’an and a translation of the gospels into Arabic are indistinguishable at a glance, and two 13th-century French texts, one Christian, one Jewish, use virtually identical images of King David.

I feel like lighting a candle and singing some peace songs.  A warbly, “The answer, my friends, is blowin’ in the wind…” (I’ve always wondered about the antecedent event to that song… when the wind snatched the fucking answer right out of someone’s hand and whisked it away over the countryside. It’s natural for the truly poetic moment to be outside the text, but I think it’s high time some wrote that song. The prequel to the Dylan, as it were. I think it will probably need more electric guitar in though.)

What’s the first thing you do when you get into someone’s house? Assuming it’s not pee in the corner and/or that you didn’t come in through the basement window with a dollar sign-decaled sack, I suspect it’s check out the bookshelves. But what happens when you don’t like what you find there? How much can we judge people by what’s on their shelves? Personally, I’ve condemned people to the scrap heap of friendship for even the slightest transgression. Danielle Steel? See ya! Anne Coulter? Sayonara, suckah! Dean Koontz? May your armpits rebel and cover you in a carpet of sweaty hair. Dan Brown? Look out in the field there, Old Yeller. (Okay, you get a hype pass if you have the Da Vinci Code, but if you bought Angels and Demons after, you deserve whatever karmic train accident you get smushed in.)

Judging character from someone’s reading habits is a favourite game in the media. Can we tell something about the deep heart of Gordon Brown from his love of Lewis Grassic Gibbon? Is it revelatory that Tony Blair insists his favourite book is Treasure Island? There was a frenzy among columnists when Dubya revealed that he settled down after a hard day on the ranch to a close study of L’Étranger: the idea of the president indulging in a discussion on the origins of existentialism was met with howls of derision. Biggest laugh of all came when the leader of the free world insisted that his reading list was “eckalectic”.

Most of us aspire to a bit of an eckalectic bookshelf. A central part of the dating ritual is the inspection of book collections. Any self-respecting man might well be put off by an A-Z of self-help manuals; all but the most understanding women would run screaming from rows of science fiction and motoring books. I once had to call on all my reserves of tolerance when a brilliant friend with degrees from Harvard and Oxford and a job as a top political operative brought the newest and fattest Harry Potter novel with him on holiday. There is something disconcerting about grown men reading children’s books. (I also have a lot of trouble with orcs.)

Trouble with orcs? What you need is a elven host. That’ll take care of em.

Interviewed at the Guardian.

Your books are thought of as guilty pleasures. How does that make you feel?

If they give people pleasure, what’s it matter if it’s guilty or not? I know some people think they are rubbish but I am very proud of them. And I’d rather be read than not read. Jeffrey Archer and I cry and cry for a kind word in the Guardian, and writers that get a kind word in the Guardian probably cry and cry for our sales.

Interesting idea this… what did you call it? “Plea-sure”? Jilly, I would like to purchase exclusive rights to this “Plea-sure” concept of yours. How do I go about it? Oh. So THAT’s why those massage parlors are open so late in Montreal, eh? I wondered which RMT would study for years only to work a midnight shift.

Sigh. Sigh sigh, sigh sigh sigh. Sigh sigh. Sigh sigh sigh sigh sigh. Sigh? (Heavy/resigned) sigh.

On April 19, after a day of teaching classes at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, I went out to my car and grabbed a box of old poetry manuscripts from the front seat of my little white Beetle, carried it across the street and put it next to the trashcan outside Wright Hall. The poems were from poetry contests I had been judging and the box was heavy. I had previously left my recycling boxes there and they were always picked up and taken away by the trash department.

A young man from ROTC was watching me as I got into my car and drove away. I thought he was looking at my car, which has black flower decals and sometimes inspires strange looks. I later discovered that I, in my dark skin, am sometimes not even a person to the people who look at me. Instead, in spite of my peacefulness, my committed opposition to all aggression and war, I am a threat by my very existence, a threat just living in the world as a Muslim body.

Upon my departure, he called the local police department and told them a man of Middle Eastern descent driving a heavily decaled white Beetle with out of state plates and no campus parking sticker had just placed a box next to the trash can. My car has NY plates, but he got the rest of it wrong. I have two stickers on my car. One is my highly visible faculty parking sticker and the other, which I just don’t have the heart to take off these days, says, “Kerry/Edwards: For a Stronger America.”

Because of my recycling, the bomb squad came, then the state police. Because of my recycling, buildings were evacuated, classes were canceled, the campus was closed. No. Not because of my recycling. Because of my dark body. No. Not even that. Because of his fear. Because of the way he saw me. Because of the culture of fear, mistrust, hatred and suspicion that is carefully cultivated in the media, by the government, by people who claim to want to keep us “safe.”

Please, people. Please, get a fucking grip. If you can’t get rid of the bigotry, at least bury it deep inside so your children have a fighting chance to improve the species once age or chance culls your negative influence from the herd.

It’s a sad state of affairs, but even here in Canada we have only one weekly stand-alone book section. Think of it what you will, but at least the Globe is still doing it. The National Post took a shot at it and then realized there were only so many business books and right wing screeds to review and dumped it. The Star has some good books coverage occasionally, and monthly reviews of poetry by Barbara Carey, but no section. The Sun occasionally covers the latest Maxim Magazine, I think… Then there was that front page article in the St. John’s Telegram on me as a poet and Bookninja a couple weeks ago. I complained about the photo, which was a sneak shot by the photog, but then the editor Russell told me, “Hey, do you know how hard it is to get a poet on the front cover of the paper these days?” Put it into perspective, that did. John Freeman complains in his Guardian blog:

Last week the London Book Fair hosted a panel to discuss the Spanish literary supplement. The tone of the panel was fretful, but it was hard to figure out why. The Spaniards can enjoy over 25 such supplements, we learned, with more on the way. Panellist Rupert Shortt of the Times Literary Supplement blushed for England by comparison.

But at least it wasn’t as bad as in America, he demurred, where between the coasts there “there were great deserts of cultural wasteland”. As a sixth-generation native of Ohio, I should have flipped my baseball cap round, and told Mr. Shortt, “It’s go-time, buddy”. But the sad thing is he was right.

I would be remiss not point out healthy book sections in Cleveland and Kansas City, St Louis and Milwaukee.

But you’ll be hard pressed to find a literary supplement in the beautiful state of North Dakota, or Nebraska, or Wyoming, let alone Iowa City, Iowa, home to the biggest, most prestigious writing program in America.

It’s beginning to seem that if some newspaper owners had their way, the rest of the US would look like this, too.

Now over to Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Ed:

Let’s forgo this column’s usual essayistic-shambolic approach and be very blunt. I am writing this as a member of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC), and am mainly addressing people who belong to the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and the Association of American University Presses (AAUP).

On behalf of my colleagues, I am making a plea to you for solidarity. We are in trouble. We need your help.

Over the past several years, the economics of daily newspapers have become much more complicated and many paper owners have felt that their profit margins weren’t large enough. Coverage of books has been one of the easiest things to cut. And the cuts have tended to come early and often. They have taken the form of various measures, including shrinking the space available for reviews and interviews; reductions of freelance budgets; and the increased use of syndicated material. Most book pages have always had very small staffs. Now it is rare that more than one editor handles the reviews full-time, and in many cases the entire section has been closed down.

In the defence of those without a books section, the reasoning there is that separating the reviews from the rest of the paper forms an intellectual “ghetto”. What do you think?

The awards season has hardly begun.

• Kidlit Schwartz award in Canada
• Donner prize for snoozing
• Canadian on Orange new writers list… (Karen is hardly “new”, but she is young, beautiful and an awesome writer)
• Richler getting richer
• Stuart MacLean (seen here in revolutionary gear) gets 3rd Leacock Medal for hypnotic vocal rhythm
• Carey up for Aussie Giller

There. Now you can go about your day armed with the knowledge that awards and prizes are indeed still being hyped beyond all relevance and even occasionally being given out.

Atwood drops the gloves. She circles Harper for a moment before lunging in and way up, cracking his glass jaw and sending the big offensive lineman to the ice.

She was deeply critical of the Harper government’s cuts to the arts, especially the literary arts.

“They basically just hate us,” she said in an interview with CBC Radio. “You know it’s people who have never seen any arts in their own lives — they would rather not have gardens, they would rather have parking lots. They just think it’s a frill probably.”

It was particularly short-sighted to cut funding for cultural tours that allow Canadian artists to develop fans overseas, she said.

“When selling artistic things abroad, that money comes into Canada and is taxed in Canada, so it’s a net gain for Canada,” she said.

“Would they like to guess how much Yann Martel’s novel The Life of Pi generated abroad? Would they like to know … how much my foreign editions bring in? Would they like to know how much [Canadian producer] Robert LePage generates abroad?”

The arts are being neglected despite bringing economic activity and prosperity to the country, Atwood said.

The sky is falling on these two young, damaged men. Someone rescue them from their eyes and penises!

A Bentonville man asked the city to pay his two sons $20,000 and to fire the library director for including what he called “pornography” in the Bentonville Public Library collection.

“The Whole Lesbian Sex Book” by Felice Newman was removed from the library shelf after Earl Adams of Bentonville complained it is “patently offensive and lacks any artistic, literary or scientific value,” according to a letter he wrote and faxed Feb. 16 to Mayor Bob McCaslin.

Adams said his 14- and 16-year-old sons, Kyle and Ryan, looked at the book while the 14-year-old was browsing for material on military academies. He requested the city pay him $10,000 per child, the maximum allowed under the Arkansas obscenity law.

“My sons were greatly disturbed by viewing this material and this matter has caused many sleepless nights in our house,” he said in another e-mail to McCaslin earlier in February.

(Thanks, Frankie)

The Contemporary Poetry Review looks at the tradition of pilgrimage in poetry in a rather long essay, which turns out to be something a journey in itself.

Strictly speaking, the term “pilgrimage” should be applied only to journeys with a religious object in view. In this narrower frame, only a few poems qualify as “poems of pilgrimage,” yet they include some of the central works in the tradition. What distinguishes Dante’s Commedia from others is that his itinerary is non-geographical; it is spiritual or imaginary only. He does ask the reader to suspend disbelief and accept that Hell is a place below the earth’s surface, whose entrance could be reached on foot, and its deeper recesses penetrated with the assistance of a guide, a boatman, and a fanciful monster. Moreover he assigns a surface-of-the-earth location for the entrance to Purgatory, positioning it on the side of the globe directly opposite Jerusalem. But once the pilgrim exits the Earthly Paradise at the top of the Purgatorial Mountain, he has left our planet behind and catapulted himself into pure vision. Otherwise he observes the conventions of the pilgrimage poem closely, describing how he gets from place to place and even specifying that, as he spirals down into Hell, his left foot is always lower than his right. This and other specific details about his progress force us to describe him as a literalist of the imagination—and one who rubbernecks at the sights as much as any modern-day tourist on a package tour to Florence. Dante knew that his readers would follow his itinerary with all the curiosity and eagerness that travel writing usually excites, sufficient reason to be as specific as possible. Besides, no one can reproduce his journey in actuality; the only way to sign on for the Dante excursion is to read his poem. His freedom to invent is balanced by a responsibility to make his invention as concrete and credible as possible.

The internet is killing “the browse”, a time-honoured tradition of vagrants and time-rich artsy-types alike. Without browsing how will we ever keep alive the more important tradition of the poetry-shelf-pick-up — the only time old ugly folk have a chance to impress the younguns?

Margaret Atwood, the Canadian author whose books include The Edible Woman, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin, which won the Booker Prize in 2000, said that the “serendipity” of discovering something in a bookshop has not been replicated online.

Kazuo Ishiguro, another Booker Prize winner, agrees. He told The Times yesterday that shopping for books on the internet was helpful for his work “but it’s not fun”.

Atwood told the London Book Fair last week: “You are not going to get the same experience on the net. Amazon is trying, by saying, ‘If you like this book you might like this other book’, but it’s often something quite offensive that they suggest.”

She added that the success of internet retailers meant that bookshops were missing out on “the sales that they wouldn’t expect to make, but make because somebody sees this beautiful cover and they pick it up and read the front flap.

Hollywood backstabbing and infighting comes to the literary world. Does that mean literary backstabbing and infighting is headed to Hollywood? They could use a little more petulance and passive aggression…

Steve Rubin, Doubleday’s publisher, said these were indeed good days for turning high-quality literary material into film adaptations: “People are somewhat belatedly realizing that this is a sensational pile of material. It’s worth its weight in gold.”

But as the hunger for adaptation-ready books grows, powerful agents like Abate, representing some of Hollywood’s biggest talent agencies, are fighting for elbow room. Besides independent agents and those working for larger agencies, a swarm of production companies has also joined in the hunt. Although several have been doing such work out of New York for some time — Scott Rudin and the Weinstein brothers being prime examples — others are newcomers to the game, eager to make their presence felt.

“Not a week goes by that I don’t get a call from someone with X, Y and Z production company saying that she’s going to be in New York next week and could she please come by and talk to me,” said Simon Lipskar, with Writers House agency. “Everybody wants to get their hands on new material first; they all want the first look that can give them a big advantage. The market for books is in full throttle.”

The fight for the inside literary track can be brutal, and agents live in constant fear of being out-hustled. They’re also playing a gossipy perception game. Abate triggered bicoastal chatter in February when Variety reported that he was walking out on a long-term ICM contract and turning down a pay raise. Although he said he simply wanted to run his own shop at Endeavor, ICM called it a high-level betrayal and launched a counterattack.

Now thou hast twin laser cannons of tragic Bardly damage! Romeo and Juliet: the space-based video game geared to fooling kids into being interested in Shakespeare.

On the 443rd anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth, the University of Guelph yesterday launched an interactive adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, using 21st century technology in an attempt to get schoolchildren excited about English literature’s most famous writer.

Entitled ‘Speare, the video game requires the player to lead “an elite squadron of spacecraft” to overcome a dangerous enemy, which has plunged the entire Prospearean Galaxy “into an age of dark despair” by capturing the ancient text of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

A successful mission, the narrator says in the game’s introduction, will do nothing less than “restore literature, knowledge and peace to the universe – to usher in a new age of compassion and learning.”

While such a take on the tragic love story might cause literary scholars to bristle, Shakespeare to turn in his grave and tweens to roll their eyes, those responsible see the game as a logical and powerful way to improve the literacy of kids aged 10 to 15 and interest them in the Bard’s works.

Peow! Taketh that, Montague!

Scholars are always looking to fill in the gaps of the Willie Shakes DNA sequence. Check your eccentric uncles’ trans-Atlantic chests for million dollar copies.

We can be confident that Shakespeare was the principal author of the 36 plays that Hemings and Condell printed in the 1623 First Folio, the original Complete Works edition – though recent scholarship has revealed an element of collaboration with other dramatists in some of the lesser-known works there, such as Timon of Athens, Henry VIII and Henry VI, Part One.

Two further collaborative plays – Pericles, co-written with a brothel-keeper called George Wilkins, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, another joint job with Fletcher – were excluded from the Folio, but published independently with Shakespeare’s name on their title pages. Computer-aided “linguistic fingerprinting” has revealed exactly which scenes were Shakespeare’s and which his collaborator’s.

The anonymously published Edward III is a more dubious case: there is no early attribution to Shakespeare and the modern computer tests are far less decisive.

Linguistic fingerprinting is beginning to make a stronger case for another – much better – anonymously published play of the early 1590s, Arden of Faversham.

Poetry-wise. But the museum version of him is apparently pretty good. So says Sam Jordison on his Guardian blog.

Let’s not beat about the bush. Daffodils is a crap poem. For a start, clouds are rarely lonely, especially in Cumbria. For second, who cares if Wordsworth saw some flowers? For third, and for all sorts of reasons, the following is surely one of the most painful rhymes in the English language: “A poet could not but be gay, / In such a jocund company.”

Naturally, I’d quite enjoy recreating some of the controversy that followed a similar statement I once made about Henry James, but I find it hard to imagine that anyone will disagree this time. I’ve never come across anyone that likes the poem, and I don’t think I ever will.

That’s why it’s always struck me as odd – and wrong – that the tourist board of somewhere as beautiful and inspiring as the Lake District should insist on using it to promote the region, while the extent of their cynicism and literary blindness is only too well demonstrated by their attempt to turn Wordsworth’s mawkish verses into a rap.

The Feminine Mistake has unleashed the wrath of the Oprah set. Turns out hegemony really really works and millions of invisibly-shackled thralls to the patriarchy would rather remain under house arrest than face reality about what their relationships with the world mean.

The explosion of commentary on blogs and elsewhere about “The Feminine Mistake” joins a growing list of similar fracases stirred up by books that touch on the perennial dilemma of mostly upper-middle-class women: return to work or stay at home with the kids. But the truth is that, with rare exceptions (and it’s too early to say whether Ms. Bennetts’s book may be one of them), these so-called mommy books fail to transform their talk-show and blogosphere buzz into book sales. Talk, it turns out, is much cheaper than the $24.95 cover price.
…

Recent mommy books that have not lived up to the promise of their publicity include Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s “Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children,” which sold only 11,000 copies in hardcover and 2,000 in paperback, according to BookScan, despite the book’s appearance on “60 Minutes,” “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and the covers of Time and New York magazines.

And last year Caitlin Flanagan’s “To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife,” a collection of essays that said, among other things, that when a woman works, something is lost, generated a media and Internet frenzy, but sold only 9,000 copies in hardcover, according to BookScan.

What is striking about these limp sales figures is that these books cover a topic that raises fierce passions, as anyone who has spent time on a playground or near an office water cooler knows. But that may get at the heart of why women are not buying books about these subjects.

“I always felt it was something that women didn’t want to look at too closely,” said Jonathan Burnham, publisher of HarperCollins, who was editor in chief at Talk Miramax Books when Ms. Hewlett’s book, which suggested that women who pursued high-powered careers could end up childless, was published five years ago. “It was a problem that touched very complicated feelings, so while they read a magazine article or watched a segment on ‘Oprah,’ they didn’t want to read a whole book about it because it was such a difficult subject.”

Ah, humanity. Put your fingers in your ears and sing LALALALALA! Hey, it’s easier than getting a divorce and starting over. (This post means in no way to devalue the choice to stay home and raise kids. Rather, it devalues the mechanisms that drive people to be so invested in ignoring their own marginality that they in essence destroy themselves and their chances at experiencing the rest of life for an illusion. With that, I open the comments. Let the crackpots commence cracking pots.)

Apparent 12-year-old profiled at the Guardian. Sweet merciful crap, I’m getting old. OoOoOoOolllld. There was a day when I was so young to be so accomplished. Now people spit in my face and kick me down stairs just to laugh at the old man crumpled at the bottom. OoOoOoOolllld, I tells ya!

At 28, Riley has already carved out a place as one of the UK’s most talented young authors – and, as her third novel, Joshua Spassky, is published, one of the most prolific too. She first edged into the spotlight aged 22, with the publication of Cold Water (named one of the five outstanding debut novels of 2002 by the Guardian Weekend magazine), before Sick Notes a few years later. Both featured a protagonist in her early 20s, rattling around a Manchester full of dive bars and dust, cleaving to friends for comfort and starting and ending relationships with unpromising men.

What distinguished these slight novels was their poetry and perfection – you could read them in a single sitting and never once snag on a wrong note. The setting and tone made it clear that Riley was a Smiths fan (”I must have seen Morrissey play a dozen, maybe 20 times”), but her books have none of the sentimentality and drama of her idol’s songs, no girlfriends in comas or gang members dying. When her first protagonist, Carmel McKisco, is told, “You’ve got quite a downbeat disposition, haven’t you?”, it seemed an apt summation of her style.
…
It’s often suggested that being a young, full-time writer is a romantic existence. “It’s better than having to work in a call centre,” notes Riley, “but then, well … you really have to trawl the depths. To me it seems like the only way to live. The thing is, according to whatever inner orthodoxy I’ve created when I’m writing, I just want to get it right. So it’s not as though there’s any tremendous triumph or romance – I feel like I’m just always trying to be accurate, to get everything in the correct proportion.”

Sigh. When I was your age, lady, I was just trying to get getting drunk right. It took a lot of practice, let me tell you. It takes a certain amount of practice to drop a shot glass neatly into a Boiler Maker, but I stuck with it and now look at where I am. Hic.

Novelist Claire Cameron knows you have to think outside the box to sell books. You also have to think outside the city. And outside the rig. That’s why she’s touring Husky truck stops in Southern Ontario to sell her book The Line Painter. She’s keeping a record at her blog.

Some truckers read in their downtime. When you are driving all day, it’s nice to stop and talk. Choice of footwear is confusing me, truckers seem to wear everything from slippers to sports sandals to hiking boots.
Tally:

- Books sold = 6
- Cups of coffee = 2
- Good conversations = 8

Not a bad set of stats for any part of St. Catherines, much less the truck stop.  Good luck, Claire.

In Slate’s yearly National Poetry Month piece, Robert Pinsky goes to bat for difficulty. I would have liked to have seen him hit a few more contemporary names, but I guess this was the safer route.

This time, let’s take up a serious issue: the stupid and defeatist idea that poetry, especially modern or contemporary poetry, ought to be less “difficult.” Should poets write in ways that are more genial, simple, and folksy, like the now-unreadable work of Edgar Guest (1888-1959)? Guest’s Heap o’ Livin’ sold more than a million copies (in the days when a million copies was a lot), and he had his own weekly radio show. But Guest’s popularity is history, while every day people still read the peculiar, demanding poems of Guest’s approximate contemporaries Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens. People still read the poems of Moore and Stevens because they don’t wear out, because they surprise and entice us—and maybe, in part, because they are difficult?

Difficulty, after all, is one of life’s essential pleasures: music, athletics, dance thrill us partly because they engage great difficulties. Epics and tragedies, no less than action movies and mysteries, portray an individual’s struggle with some great difficulty. In his difficult and entertaining work Ulysses, James Joyce recounts the challenges engaged by the persistent, thwarted hero Leopold and the ambitious, narcissistic hero Stephen. Golf and video games, for certain demographic categories, provide inexhaustible, readily available sources of difficulty.

Actually, I agree with Mr. Pinsky here. What’s the point of being hand-held through life? Unless it’s stracciatella gelato scooped by Lisa Loeb, I see no point in being spoon fed.

A wealth of things we don’t-want-to-but-probably-should-know are secreted away in old Russian/Soviet archives slowly being made public.

Kyrill Anderson, the director of the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (formerly the Communist Party archive), acknowledged in a telephone interview that declassification is not going as quickly as many would like. But the picture isn’t entirely negative. Last year, Anderson said, his archive declassified 20,000 documents, while the archive of the Communist International is partly available on the Internet. In the past five years, other scholars say, significant new material has become available, including documents about Stalin-era Politburo meetings, Khrushchev-era Presidium meetings, Central Committee plenum transcripts and associated documents from 1967 through 1990, and the complete Communist Party Congress records.

Now if only we could get the world’s other authoratarian super power to start declassifying its secret documents of wrong-doing…

At the London Book Fair there’s not much reading going on. Shocking. Utterly shocking.

You might be forgiven for thinking that the London Book Fair is about books and authors — and of course in a sense it is. It is just that few books and even fewer authors are seen here.

Rather, with the public excluded from the fair’s site, the hangarlike spaces of Earls Court One in west London, thousands of book editors, agents and scouts are able to indulge in their favorite pastime: schmoozing.

They do so every fall at the Frankfurt Book Fair, but increasingly London is their gathering place in the spring, above all for the lucrative part of the publishing industry that involves selling foreign rights for English-language books.

So no, this three-day book fair, which closes on Wednesday, is not a celebration of literature or high-profile authors in the way that, say, the Salon du Livre in Paris draws crowds of devoted book lovers and ranks as an important event in the city’s cultural calendar.

At the London Book Fair, what is on display is the art of the deal.

Profiled at the Guardian.

According to fantasy fiction writer China Miéville, the world can be divided into two camps.

“When I was moving into my new house a few years ago we were having all our kitchen stuff delivered and my then-partner got off the phone, turned to me and said ‘the fridge men are coming,’” explains Miéville. “Now, it seems to me that there are two kinds of people: those that hear that sentence and think ‘oh good, delivery of the white goods’, and then there’s those people who imagine a kind of enormous cyborg thing…” Miéville trails off. There’s absolutely no doubting which camp he falls into.

I, apparently, fall into an unacknowledged third camp: the one that says, “Huh? Did you say something?”

The digested read.

Saeros was sore jealous of Thingol’s affection for Turin in the Land of Doriath and called him Woodwose. For this, Turin was much tempted to strike Saeros with his mighty sword; but Saeros fell and died anyway and Thingol unfairly blamed Turin for his passing. Once Nellas had told the truth of Turin’s restraint, Thingol forgave him but Turin was determined on his exile.

“Forsooth,” he swore. “Henceforth shall I remain a derivative Wagnerian hero and wander mindlessly through the realms of Middle-Earth on a quasi-symbolic quest and, Children of the Eldar, resolve only to talk in sentences of unspeakable leadenness, punctuated by manifold parentheses.”

The list is heavy with “big and serious” books. Run away!

The NYT Magazine, the cover of which often hysterically parodied weekly at the Onion, gives us a long piece on the literary firm of Amis and Amis.

Aside from publishing books that are mostly comic, moreover, Kingsley and Martin aren’t much alike as writers. Kingsley’s comedy stems from precise social observation. Martin’s characters tend to be caricatures and exaggerations, as their names suggest — Keith Talent, John Self, Guy Clinch, Clint Smoker — and he is more of a satirist and a moralist than his father was, with a vision of the world that is gloomy and scabrous. The shadow of nuclear annihilation hovers over “London Fields,” and “Yellow Dog” evokes a world run by thugs and pornographers. Father and son also used to disagree all the time about conspicuous literary style, or what Kingsley called “a high idiosyncratic noise level in the writing.” Martin recalled not long ago: “He was always saying, ‘I think you need more sentences like “He put down his drink, got up and left the room,” ’ and I thought you needed rather fewer of them.” A more typical Martin sentence tends to be maximalist and attention-grabbing, a riff with all the speakers turned up high, as in this “Augie March”-like streetscape from the beginning of “Money”:

I strode through the meat-eating genies of subway breath. I heard the ragged hoot of sirens, the whistles of two wheelers and skateboarders, pogoists, gocarters, windsurfers. I saw the barrelling cars and cabs, shoved on by the power of their horns. I felt all the contention, the democracy, all the italics, in the air. These are people determined to be themselves, whatever, little shame attending. Urged out from the line of shufflers and idlers, watchers, pavement men, a big blond screamer flailed at the kerb, denouncing all traffic. His hair was that special mad yellow, like an omelette, a rug omelette.

If Martin has a true literary father, in fact, it’s not Kingsley but Saul Bellow, to whom he became quite close in the mid-80s and whose leather jacket and down coat he now owns, as if literally inheriting the mantel.

Like the peanut butter cups of yore, the PEN Festival makes a chocolatey-peanut buttery delight of the mixture between politics and literature. And the overpackaging ensures all writers get served in individual little paper cups.

“Discussion from people of different backgrounds with different problems,” said Ms. Ravanipur through an interpreter, “actually leads to the development of solutions of these problems.”

That optimistic spirit is the organizing principle of the festival, which brings together people from 45 countries to talk not only about problems directly affecting writers, but also about other issues, from global warming and the international refugee crisis to the war in Iraq and political torture.

It is that direct engagement with political topics that perhaps makes the festival — at least in the United States — stand out.

Founded three years ago in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and in the midst of the Iraq war, the festival was conceived as a way of addressing America’s cultural isolation. This year the theme is “Home & Away.” Writers of fiction and nonfiction will be speaking and reading at 66 events in 29 locations throughout the city.

Merely bringing so many international writers to the United States, where fewer than 3 percent of the books published are translations, can be seen as a political act.

Mmmm. Papery cups of chemical goodness. Hey, don’t scoff. All those chemicals and preservatives are what ensure the goo inside won’t get stuck the roof of your mouth. Or the side of your intestine.

Pulitizer Prize winner, dead in car crash at 73.

In a move akin to the English planting the Scottish in Ireland to breed out the unwanted element, but not nearly so evil, Yann Martel is now not only seducing anti-arts PM Stephen Harper with books, but inviting him out on dates to the theatre. Yann, I think that door is closed. I suspect it’s forbidden by his church for one man to be alone with a another in the dark for longer than absolutely necessary to bury the body of an uncooperative wife. But good luck!

Anyway, Martel, you may have heard, has begun a website chronicling his attempts to make Harper a more arts-friendly prime minister. Part of Martel’s highly publicized campaign is to mail Harper a book and letter every two weeks for as long as he remains prime minister. The first offering was Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych. The next one has not yet been revealed.

In an interview, Martel says he has not yet heard any response from the prime minister to his literary gift. Nor has he yet received a response to his telephone invitation for Harper to attend the weekend performance of Helsinki, a one-man play about a young man dying of AIDS.

In Martel’s original plot, the dying man and a good friend pass the time by manufacturing stories about the fictional Roccamatios family of Helsinki. The drama is played out amid a blizzard of references to events, mainly tragic, that occurred throughout the 20th century.

Hm, maybe I should read that Martel story. I wonder if I can still buy the book—-Hey, wait! You got publicity in my politics! You got politics in my publicity! Mmmmm! Two great tastes… Seems like this plan is working. At least on me. Whether or not Nutty McCuttsalot is listening is another matter.

Or stupid, or daft, or illin’ or whatev the rugrats are saying today.

Yet poetry sales have been in the doldrums for years. Small presses are experiencing ever tighter purse strings, GCSE syllabuses contain less and less of the same stale verse, and besides the odd anthology of love poems, the general populace’s main exposure to poetry is though Clinton Cards. Hip-hop, on the other hand, goes from strength to strength. A recent article in the New Statesman on Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent’s latest efforts went so far as to say that the latter’s track Ghetto Quran outdid anything produced by Keats. While the greatest props an MC can receive is to be called a “poet” – such plaudits are now standard for Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls – maybe our poets could actually learn something from hip-hop’s ability to sell itself.

Word to your mothah… Wait, that’s not the kind of hip they mean, right? Less vanilla, more ice, is that it? I went shopping for jeans with Ninja K yesterday and when we couldn’t find anything I liked at the hip shops, she took me to the Levis store. I cut straight to the chase. “I’m old and suspicious of anything different. I want dark blue jeans without and wrinkles or creases or fading or holes. I just want some fucking red tabs.” They had to go into storage to get them. No room for plain jeans on the shelf. The whole wall opened like a scene from The Matrix and there they were, in cold storage, perhaps suspended animation, much like my fashion sense. It was sad and awe inspiring at the same time.

Well, I’m back in St. John’s after my Quebec and Ontario odd-essey. It was a wild ride of old and new friends and I’m glad to be home. Of course, I rolled into St. John’s at 4am this morning, got to sleep by 5 and was woken by an enthusiastic Boy Ninja at 6:10, so I’m feeling a little punch drunk. Besides possibly being Shakespeare’s birthday and the climax of International Poetry Month (is “poetry day” still that today or is it now that other day in March? I can’t figure it out), it’s also St. George’s Day, which is when people wrestle lizards for cash on the street. Even further, it’s the night of my St. John’s launch and I hope if you’re in town you can make it.

George Murray
(with introduction by Mark Callanan)
Booklaunch for The Rush to Here
The Ship
(265 Duckworth St, St. John’s)
April 23, 2007; 6pm – 8pm

Some highlights of the trip include audio interviews I conducted with Simon Armitage and Dennis Lee. Kathryn will post those in the Magazine in the coming weeks.

Isn’t that Arnold’s wife? Wait. No. An interview/profile at the Guardian illuminates.

When her novel won the Orange Prize in 2005, having been rejected by 30 publishers, the big question was: Who is Lionel Shriver? A woman with a man’s name, an American who had lived for years, unknown, in London, she seemed to arrive from nowhere to become overnight a literary star. But it turned out to be the usual story of overnight success – Kevin was actually her seventh novel, or eighth if you count one that was never published; she was 48 and had been writing for 20 ‘very lean and very hard’ years before she found recognition. Print runs of her early novels were so small that they are now collectors’ items – a tatty copy of her first novel, The Female of the Species, will set you back £83 on AbeBooks.

An interesting question posed by a blog called “After the MFA“… What does the Virginia Tech massacre mean for writing in schools? It’s a good question and I suspect the answer will be darker than any of us like to think.

The Virginia Tech student is an extreme case, one where his behavior included stalking and extremely anti-social behavior. But imagine what damage can happen to socially marginalized students — who pose no danger to themselves or others — when they feel like they will no longer be able to express themselves in the so-called safe environment of the writing workshop.

(Thanks, Maud)

You knows they’s rich ’cause they’s always wearing them tuxedos, wot? Penguin AU is throwing the cash around like coked-up pimps and it’s got the rest of the industry a little hot under the old oilskin.

It began in November 2005 when Ben Ball, 34, an Australian who had worked in British publishing for eight years, beat many local applicants to a coveted job, Penguin Australia’s publisher of adult books. Rival publishers waited to see which authors he would set his sights on.

It was almost a year before Ball announced his first piece of literary fiction: a 700-page first novel by Steve Toltz, a Sydney screenwriter. Most first-time novelists are happy to get an advance of $5000 to $10,000, so eyebrows were raised by Toltz’s advance, which was said to be more than $100,000.

Since then Ball has really been “splashing the cash”, to quote one rival. Kristin Williamson, wife of the playwright David Williamson, has apparently been given $150,000 to write about their lives together.

Please see my open letter below:

Dear Penguin Canada…

Hint-frickin-hint.

Sincerely,

George Murray
Bookninja.com

A peek inside the Granta list of young writers shows them to be looking out at the world.

What leaps out of the new list, as the Granta judges have commented, is a heavy emphasis on things foreign. Where are the urban wastelands through which John Updike’s Rabbit ran? Where are the suburbs that held the self-doubting realtors of Richard Ford, or the squabbling New Jerseyites of Philip Roth?

The LAT gives its take here.

Hi guys — we’re having some issues with the robot we have in place to catch spammers in the comments section. It’s programmed to examine each post for things like certain words and phrases, known spamming IP addresses and links to other sites. Some people are finding their comments blocked by this because they’re tried to include a link to their own site or someone elses. I try to save some of these by stripping out the link, but it doesn’t work for all of them. So please, for now, don’t add links to the body of your messages. That robot glitch, while annoying, is the lesser of evils here. To give you some context, it’s blocked several hundred thousand spam since February of last year.

You can put a link to your site in the Website field of the comments section at the bottom of the posts, but if you put them in the body of your message, you may disappear into a cruelly-run robot cyber prison. It’s sort of the online equivalent of being inconveniently brown and Middle Eastern in the US right now. You might just disappear.