In honour of old Ninja Pete, I post this link to a Globe piece on a doc about the Helvetica typeface. HOT!

His message to the audience: “Look around, look at the thousands of words that you see everyday. Do you think about them? Do you think about who made those letters and why the designer picked those certain letters for those signs or that advertisement? Typefaces are a subtle form of manipulation, and can be very political, and I think it’s important that people realize that, and notice it.”

Three people at Christian publishing house in Turkey have been cut down execution style by radicals claiming to be protecting Islam.

Sam Jordison writes in his Guardian blog about joys and pains of first editions.

I love these editions, and they’re treasured gifts, but even so, I am aware that such fetishisation of books as objects is rather daft.

To an extent I can justify the pleasure I take in them. I like the idea that because they’re editions published in their lifetimes, there’s more of a chance that the writers had some input into the design. What’s more (as is certainly the case with my Jonathan Cape Hemingways) those designs can often be lovely. Even so, in my rational mind – where books are just meant to be read and objects are only useful as tools – there isn’t much space for first editions.

The thing that strikes me as most ridiculous about first editions (or first printings, if we’re being as anally exact as many of their collectors) is that they should be worth so much more than other almost identical versions of the same book. Very often all that distinguishes a valuable first printing from a near worthless second is one small digit on the title page.

It’s a strange way of distinguishing worth and there’s something unappealing about the way book collecting prioritises the rarity of a book over its contents or even its appearance. Not to mention the fact that physical condition is given far more importance than the pleasure a book has imparted to its readers.

This naked capitalism of the book-dealing world was revealed to me at its most obscene when I did a quick search for first editions on eBay while thinking about this blog. More than half of those that came up were by Kurt Vonnegut. Speculators were attempting to profit from his death only a matter of days after the sad event.

Why is the Orange Prize important?

The unveiling of the Orange prize shortlist yesterday comes amid murmurings that the award, now in its 12th year, is dated and otiose. Some detractors would, I suspect, have opposed its inception as Britain’s only literary prize for women. Auberon Waugh mocked it as the Lemon prize, but then here was a critic who, when reviewing a book by two women, could volunteer a judgment on the co-authors’ photograph that “neither was sexually very attractive”. That few today would feel at liberty to dismiss a book in such terms is partly attributable to a change in the recognition accorded to women writers, in which the Orange fiction prize has played its part.

Tolkien is back from his pipe-smoky grave, and now it’s not only the elbows of that tweed jacket being eroded. It’s Harry’s sales. Children of Hurin has pushed Harry out of the number one spot on Amazon and is ready to a stick a balrog up the arse end of anyone who gets in the way. I may actually read it. I drew a line in the sand at the Silmarilion years ago. I said, if I get through this, I swear I’ll quit fantasy for good. And I did, for a time. But now a shadow thought long gone rises in Angmar and the forces of darkness are once again descending to creep upon the lands of free men… Stop it! Stop! What’s happening to me? I like literary fiction! Someone get me 500 ccs of Ishiguro, STAT!

Was this reported while I was gone? Desai leads the list of shortlistees going into the spring Prize Season.

More on Yann Martel’s plan to send Harper-the-Slasher a book every two weeks. Also notable is Susan Swan’s tips for emerging author Harper.

Dear Prime Minister Harper, I hear you are writing a book. On the history of hockey, no less. So I thought as someone who has been writing books for more than 20 years, I would offer a few tips to you, an emerging writer.

First of all, you are starting your writing career at a good time. Canadian literature is known around the world for its excellence. At least six of our prominent Canadian authors have recently won major international awards such as the Booker (now the Man Booker), the IMPAC Prize and the Orange Prize. And only two days ago, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Alice Munro were nominated by an international jury for the Man Booker International Prize for a body of work.

Many, many Canadian writers, both English- and French-speaking, have found readers in foreign countries. Why, just the other day a friend told me that on a sailing holiday in the Caribbean, she and her partner discovered they could trade one Canadian book for two American books with other sailors. These sailors were both American and Canadian and they all thought Canadian books were terrific, hence their exchange rate.

However, I admit that my first reaction to the news that you were writing a book wasn’t so charitable. I asked myself: Is it right for Mr. Harper to be indulging his literary ambitions on our time? Then I realized that you are no different from many authors who hold down a job in order to buy time to write. So why should I begrudge you the few hours of scribbling many of us struggle to fit in?

You mentioned that the research for your book has slowed down since you became our 22nd prime minister. Naturally, I wasn’t surprised, and I thought of suggesting that you try for Ontario’s $1,500 emerging writers’ grant and hire your own researcher. Like all emerging writers in Ontario, you are entitled to apply, although this modest start-up will barely cover a researcher’s fee for any more than a month. Nor will it help much to offset some of your moving costs, Mr. Prime Minister, if, God forbid, you lose your day job in another election.

Anyway, it will all be clear sailing once you’ve found a Canadian publisher. Then you will be a candidate for the perks that are available to veterans like myself — the Canadian writer-in-residence posts (whose payments don’t come close to politicians’ salaries, although these positions amount to a second, full-time job done to finance your writing.) Or maybe you will be able to scrounge up the odd grant, although I should warn you that competition is tough since our literary success has encouraged novices such as yourself.

Thanks, LM!

What is the purpose of the literary reading? For me, it is like foreplay for getting drunk. And it’s a place to hurl things indescriminently.

Reading is decidedly anti-social behavior. The freedom to read whatever we want to read is a shining legacy of our democracy, but one’s response to a book need not be democratic. One’s response is a totalitarian regime within each individual reader, morphing over time, and fighting for dominion of the imagination.  In our producer-consumer version of literature, where authorial voice is a commodity for which publishers pay six-figure advances, the literary reading overlooks the single most important commodity in any literary transaction: a reader’s voice. Most writers write to be heard in that imaginary voice that comes from within a reader’s head, a natural compliment to the writer’s own. Literary readings, and perhaps even audiobooks, misunderstand where a book derives its power. It is not from the printed words on the page—the words themselves—but from the silence that surrounds them as we repeat them in our heads. From the comfortable chair where we’ve spent many a Thursday night.

Oh, come on. Like you’ve never hurled live, rabid porcupines at a reader before. Or wanted to.

The funnest game to play with juries is six degrees of separation — only in the small Canlit gene pool, it is more often like one degree. Good luck folks and better you than me.

Winnipeg author David Bergen, winner of the 2005 Scotiabank Giller Prize for English-language fiction, has been named to the jury panel for that prize’s 2007 edition.

Joining him are Toronto novelist Camilla Gibb, herself a nominee for the 2005 Giller that Bergen won for his novel The Time in Between, and Lorna Goodison, a Toronto-based poet, short-story writer and visual artist.

Hanif Kureishi accuses the BBC of censorship.

The author Hanif Kureishi accused the BBC of censorship last night, after it dropped a radio broadcast of his short story describing the work of a cameraman who films the executions of western captives in Iraq.

Radio 4 cancelled a reading of Weddings and Beheadings, one of five nominations for the National Short Story prize due to be broadcast this week, after concluding the timing “would not be right” following unconfirmed reports that kidnapped BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston had been killed by a jihadist group.

Is it the job of media to protect the people from themselves?

Well, yeah.

The 73-year-old wins $10,000 for his tale of a father and son on a journey south in a world where a disaster has occurred, reducing nature to a nuclear-grey winter and humans to savage, scavenging cannibals. While the landscape is scorched and some of the set-piece encounters almost Beckettian, the nightmare vision is leavened by McCarthy’s stripped-down poetic language and his description of the powerful and poignant relationship between the boy and his father.

For those who like that sort of thing, a Charles Dicken’s theme park. I don’t like that sort of thing but I think I like this anyway.

Dickens World feels like Disney gone to the dark side. In place of the Magic Kingdom there is Newgate Prison; instead of talking animals there will be shady characters loitering in dark corners. Although the attractions are all faithfully Dickensian, the larks are very much 21st century. The centrepiece is a boat ride which, loosely speaking, is Great Expectations presented as a log flume. It’s the longest of its kind in Europe. I found it fairly hard going but then I did wade through it in wellington boots several sizes too big on a day when it had sprung a leak. Builders were busy draining all 210 metres of it. Where’s Brunel when you need him? I imagine it’s a more leisurely affair in a boat, which will travel through a Victorian sewer, past a graveyard and on to a crypt showcasing a greatest hits of Dickensian villains. The boat then rises over the rooftops of a dilapidated London skyline illustrating Abel Magwitch’s bolt from the capital (that’s the Great Expectations bit) before splashing back down.

We are sorry to be so tardy in posting on the death of politcial activist, writer, and strong strong woman June Callwood.

James Adams at the Globe on Callwood’s writing

Sandra Martin’s obit in the Globe

Jonathan Kay on his hero in the Post

Last night’s Toronto candlelight tribute

I was in transit all day today between Ottawa and Toronto. You wouldn’t believe how much nothing there is between cities in Canada… There. With that one last comment, I finally tipped the balance and can now never make a serious run for public office in this country. Anyway, sorry for no posts, but it looks like you minions have been busy in the comments, so thanks for entertaining yourselves. More tomorrow if my host lets me back on his computer. For now, make sure your Toronto calendars are tuned to the upcoming shows. Hope to see you there.

George Murray, Blaise Moritz and Roseanne Carrara
Tranzac Club
Thursday, April 19, 7pm (note new time)
292 Brunswick Avenue, Toronto (behind Future Bakery on Bloor)

George Murray, Rick Crilly, Moez Surani
IV Lounge Reading Series
IV Lounge
Friday, April 20, 8pm
326 Dundas St West, Toronto (across from AGO)

Joshua Bell, world reknown violinist, who sometimes makes $1000/minute, plays in the DC subway, earns $32 and, guess what? He finds his confidence eroding.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?

and later in the article

A hundred feet away, across the arcade, was the lottery line, sometimes five or six people long. They had a much better view of Bell than Tindley did, if they had just turned around. But no one did. Not in the entire 43 minutes. They just shuffled forward toward that machine spitting out numbers. Eyes on the prize.

This is why we have to protect our culture.

Interviewed at the Globe.

Do you end up liking your books?

As far as I know them. I like the people in them. But I haven’t read them since I finished writing them. I haven’t read any of my books after they’ve come out.

So what are you like when you’re writing? Do you cry while writing sad scenes?

I don’t know how I am. I remember when I was writing In the Skin of the Lion, the part where Patrick was going through this tunnel underwater, it was a bright sunny day outside, the birds were twittering. And I was inside this damp tunnel, blackness all around me. It is a schizophrenic behaviour in some ways. I’m so nervous about saying, “That was a great day [writing].” It could be something dropped six months from now.

You just have to love Yann Martel. No really, you have to. Readers of the Globe on Saturday were treated to a display of awesome power and a lesson in how to wield it. He’s created a new website called WhatisStephenHarperReading.com where he has vowed to send the arts-unfriendly Stephen Harper (who most likely only keeps Chick tracts by the bed for nighttime reading) a new book every two weeks, and post any response he gets. I wonder what that response will be. Cue the crickets. Here’s the open letter from his site.

“The Prime Minister did not speak during our brief tribute, certainly not. I don’t think he even looked up. The snarling business of Question Period having just ended, he was shuffling papers. I tried to bring him close to me with my eyes.

Who is this man? What makes him tick? No doubt he is busy. No doubt he is deluded by that busyness. No doubt being Prime Minister fills his entire consideration and froths his sense of busied importance to the very brim. And no doubt he sounds and governs like one who cares not a jot for the arts.

But he must have moments of stillness. And so this is what I propose to do: not to educate—that would be arrogant, less than that—to make suggestions to his stillness.

For as long as Stephen Harper is Prime Minister of Canada, I vow to send him every two weeks, mailed on a Monday, a book that has been known to expand stillness. That book will be inscribed and will be accompanied by a letter I will have written. I will faithfully report on every new book, every inscription, every letter, and any response I might get from the Prime Minister, on this website.”

Yann Martel

Susan Swan has an open letter floating around too, but the Globe is still trying to squeeze subscription money out of internet users so I can’t send the shadowy hoarde there to read the article, view their advertising and perhaps earn them some actual money. Oops. Was that unsolicited advice?

In other related news: today marks a day of protest in Ottawa designed to dull the axe Harper regularly uses to hack away at the arts in Canada. I’ll be there. Will you?

A range of good and famous writers reveal what gets them primed for writing. Coupland loves chocolate, Franzen loves his squeaky chair. The answers are more and less precious, depending. Here’s the start of a good one:

David Guterson: driving

I used to have clear ideas about writing, but as time has gone on I’ve had to acknowledge the difference between my ideas about it and reality. What actually occurs when I write has no form or principle. I don’t know what’s going to happen or how it will happen, and most of the time I’m either happily or unhappily surprised by what’s going on, as opposed to being in charge of it.

I get primed for writing by fleeing companionship into the public organ. That is to say, I go out to a bar or cafe and think with my head down so no one will speak to me. Then I come home and compose. Wait. That’s what I USED to do. Now I jot notes between sneak attacks by Boy Ninja. The kid is like that stuffed tiger Hobbes sometimes. When you least expect it, POW!, he’s either climbed over your shoulders from behind or is jumping on your stomach somehow. And he’s 45 pounds.

Forgotten author reanimated in a Guardian blog.

In Canada, that means about 85 years of cancer. But that’ another story. This one is about Daphne and the centenary of her birth.

Why is it that du Maurier still has such a hold? Why do so many women writers (with the exception of PD James, who voted Rebecca as ‘worst’ novel) want to write about her? After spending the past weeks submerged in the novels, I can volunteer one thing, and it is not an answer, more the beginning of a question. Du Maurier was mistress of calculated irresolution. She did not want to put her readers’ minds at rest. She wanted her riddles to persist. She wanted the novels to continue to haunt us beyond their endings. And several of them do.

The original laptop. From BoingBoing.

I feel we’ve linked to this list of Kurt tips for writing short stories before, sometime in the distant past? Yet I am too lazy and hotel-bound to check or care.

Ancient forest friendly, eh? Anyway, Raincoast is trashing all remaining copies of Paul William Roberts‘ ironically titled A War Against Truth, which it turns out contains passages plagiarised from a paper in Georgia. (Um, isn’t that like cheating off the stupid kid in class during an exam? What was he thinking?)

In February, it appeared the major redress would be the insertion of a typed correction into the warehouse stock, since The Atlanta Journal-Constitution had previously indicated it was “not looking for monetary compensation.” But earlier this month Raincoast decided that freezing the stock, then disposing of it “would be the most straightforward way” of handling the issue, Raincoast’s vice-president of marketing, Jamie Broadhurst, said yesterday.

A letter to that effect was sent to Roberts this week, while Raincoast’s sales representatives were informed of the action late last week. Booksellers who may still have the book in stock are being invited to return copies to Raincoast for full credit, but “we’re not having a formal recall of the books,” Broadhurst said. “Truth be told, we wouldn’t anticipate much activity in that regard. . . . There’s not much stock out there” since the hardcover was published almost three years ago and the trade paperback in fall, 2005. Moreover, since the plagiarism story broke in February, no purchaser of the book “has come forward [to claim a refund],” Broadhurst said, “so I would characterize the matter of compensation as a hypothetical question at this point.”

Sounds like a lovely headline, doesn’t it? But it’s just the Goldman’s asking a judge to allow them to bid without money on the manuscript so they they can roast marshmallows over it and ensure it never gets published.

Greg K. Hafif, the attorney for the Nicole Brown Simpson estate, said the estate wants the judge in the case to allow it to take a portion of the $33.5-million civil judgment won from O.J. Simpson and use it as a “credit bid” on the book during the auction. He added that the goal would be to “make sure this book is never published.”

You know, nobody thinks of the tabloids in all this. How are THEY going to feel when this is over? I mean, Brittney’s hair will grow back and eventually Angelina Jolie will tear off her mask, reveal her reptilian face below and consume Brad Pitt with a speedy dart of her tongue and a might clamp of her serrated jaws. Then what? Then what will they have to report?

Hi all. The trip seems to be going well. Among other things, I’ve made several failed attempts to fix Carmine Starnino’s toilet with plumbers Goop, and Simon Armitage’s daughter has taken to calling me “Doris” while I call her “Billy”. Also, I urged most of Ottawa to refer to Rob McLennan and George Bowering as Young George and Old George. Not too sure how the books are selling, but I’d say the rest indicates the trip is on it’s way to being a stunning success. Hello to the Montreal and Ottawa Ninjas who have introduced themselves.

Isn’t that when you’re watching the TV and a celebrity profile comes on and like Britanny just looks so beautiful before she met that Vanilla Ice guy and now she’s like this bizarro Sinead O’Conner rip off and you’re all like choked up because she’s becoming the Michael Jackson of the Mousekateer set, and you just hug that Beanie Baby you have lying around and pad over to the icebox in your fuzzy slippers and housecoat for more Ben and Jerry’s and you realize your like totally out and the tears just come and come and don’t stop until American Idol comes on. Isn’t that it? Oh. I guess not.

Expect bits and pieces and retrospectives to roll in for quite some time. I would hope so, at least.

• Guardian looks at writers loving Kurt
• NYT ed on why he was indispensible

Well, I have dumped my suitcase of crap in the front hall of Casa del Starnino here in Montreal and am readying myself mentally for the battle royale with Ken and Simon tomorrow. Wait. This isn’t a celebrity boxing match?

I’ll try to update regularly this week, but as you can see, I’ll be helped by my capable former co-blogger-cum-Magazine-editor Ninja K. More as I find the time. Please come out tomorrw afternoon if you can. Info here.

Prize goes to shopping carts.

In a week in which attention has been focused on the big names and big money of the Man Booker International prize, the 29th winner of arguably the most original literary prize has also been quietly announced.

The Diagram Oddest title of the year award – for which content is irrelevant and the prize is a bottle of wine – has had a surprise winner this year: The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by Julian Montague.

I hope this book spawns an interest among Britain’s stalwart trainspotters, that other noble past-time. Wait, I mean this kind of trainspotter (int he lovely?).

This is new favourite children’s book author. This book is absolutely gorgeous, I promise: the little red fish. Click on the book cover on the webpage to see more of Taeeun Yoo’s illustrations.

Geri Halliwell is creating a series of children’s books about a little girl who looks, guess what and stop the press, a lot like her!

Geri, 34, started writing the book while pregnant with 11-month-old daughter Bluebell Madonna.

Her decision to follow the path of other star children’s authors Madonna and Will Smith doesn’t signal the end of Geri’s music career though.

She plans to record a theme song in conjunction with her books.

I wish the cowboys would reclaim the term branding, and come at these people with a big hot tzzzzzz.

Yup.

Controversial though it may sound, men write better books than women, at least according to the staff of Britain’s biggest book chain, Waterstone’s.

The company asked its 5,000 employees to name their favourite five books written since 1982, when Waterstone’s opened its first store. The resulting list of the top 100 favourites is dominated by male authors.

The list features the cream, both male and female, of the modern, international literary world, from Umberto Eco and Bill Bryson to Robert Harris and Ian McEwan; from Margaret Atwood and Jung Chang to Zadie Smith and Zoe Heller. But male authors outnumber female writers by a staggering 66 to 27.

If a clerk’s taste in literature is the litmus test for good writing, slay me, right now.

The International Booker is a doozy of a shortlist. At 15 strong with some of contemporary fiction’s heaviest hitters, it’s bound to be a literary bloodbath the likes of which ye have ne’er seen! Yar!

Ernest Hemingway used to fantasise about slugging it out with fellow writers to decide who was the undisputed literary world champ. Today, 46 years after his death, Hemingway’s notion edged a little closer to fulfilment when the Man Booker International award announced its shortlist, pitting 15 towering writers of contemporary fiction against one another for a £60,000 prize.

From the US it takes Philip Roth and Don DeLillo; from Mexico, Carlos Fuentes, one of the trailblazers of the Latin American “boom” of the 1960s; from Canada, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Alice Munro; from Nigeria, Chinua Achebe, the most translated African author in history; from Israel Amos Oz; and from Britain, Doris Lessing and Ian McEwan.

Hot! My blood is pumping! My skin tingles! I’m alive! Truly alive for the first time ever! Or is that the third coffee?

Don’t lose all the jargon and flowery language in your effort to make things understandable, says Shirley Dent. Something good can happen in the brain during those blank stares when you’re trying figure out what some pompous ass has just said about a book you enjoyed but, after his commentary, now feel slightly medicinal about…

A motion tabled at last week’s Association of Lecturers and Teachers’ conference saw Orwell’s admonition against jargon writ large: in an effort to rid the teaching profession of “edu-babble”, the ALT motion agued that some members of the profession were guilty of using “pointless, artificial and incomprehensible expressions” and that the worst examples should be publicised to discourage jargon.

This smacking down of such language seems to be a worldwide phenomenon: in March, Los Angeles county, in a bid to help employees write clearer English, spent over £200,000 installing StyleWriter software on office machines; in February the Queensland education minister, Rod Welford, heralded the Australian state’s new syllabus saying: “Curriculum waffle is out, clear English is in.” But despite the fact that I, like most people, want the instructions on my tax-return form to be as clear and jargon-free as possible, all this talk of pared down plain English makes me nervous. My fear is that ban-the-babble campaigns are not so much about undoing waffle as ironing out the eccentric and difficult in language. We’re not automata and language isn’t just a matter of immediate computation: sometimes we need to wrestle with it. This is particularly true of literature.

Seriously though, I am all for working to make things easy up to a certain level. Especially for kids coming up through an education system that seems more bent on making them multi-syllabic parrots than critical thinkers. But I have to agree that at a certain point, readers must either make (or not) a leap into a new world of thought and expression that inherently requires a new vocabulary. This isn’t to say that things should be incomprehensibly dense or clumsy the way they have been, especially in the wake of French criticism (god knows the academic world suffers from a dearth of good writers), but that, as Dent says, there are benefits to be had from working hard for something.

For example, while I try very hard to make my reviews in the papers readable and accessible for a wider audience, I no longer feel the urge to have my poetry gloss on the first reading. If I were writing higher end theory in a journal as opposed to reviews in a daily newspaper, I wouldn’t feel this compulsion because I know my audience would be choosing and expecting to read it at that level and would be working with the same language tools I have accumulated over time. In the same way, I think readers who are intrigued by what they find cryptic or confusing in poetry are often rewarded for taking a second look. This is how I discovered some of the greatest poets I know: Ashbery, Hill, Outram, etc. (That said, I also appreciate the Wislawa Szymborska’s of the world who write narrative lovelies with concise points. These poems have deeper levels as well, but can reward to some basic level on the first reading. )

Where a reviewer, or an essayist writing to a mass audience such as school kids or undergrads, needs to be concise and accessible and inviting with their language, I just don’t see it as the poet’s or novelist’s or critic’s job to hand-hold people through their reading. Teachers and professors should be doing that with accessible texts early on, preparing readers make the choice to step up beyond that or just let it lie there.

Commentary on a guy’s commentary as he tries to fathom why women love certain books.

Big, bountiful Victorian novels are all going to appear – to anyone whose primary interests are Latin, Greek and politics – as giant, sprawling, unwieldy messes with too much “extraneous” detail to fit them either for relaxation or adding in an efficient manner to the sum of human knowledge. They require the kind of mind that is used to detail and to dealing with sprawling, messy businesses like real life and real relationships and which likes to see something of their infinite complexities reflected in the book it reads.

Women’s lives are detail and they naturally gravitate towards books that contain it – be it Middlemarch, Aga sagas or 300-page Maeve Binchys http://www.maevebinchy.com/ . They are neither fazed by nor dismissive of it. They know that the meaning of life resides there as much as in grand themes worked out with cold reason, ruthless economy and cardboard characters.

As for why women love Middlemarch in particular – well, it may have something to do with the fact that Dorothea’s various struggles to break through the boundaries of her heavily circumscribed life have historically resonated with women of subsequent generations equally trapped by social and cultural expectations and prohibitions. Or it may have something to do with the fact that she is a rare example of female nobility in literature, a quality traditionally and, especially for an author, more easily ascribed to men.

I don’t even want to go near this one.

I don’t think this book meets Canada Council guidelines for funding, so I’m sorry, we’ll have to pull the plug on your little operation here.

t’s a big feat of the tiniest proportions. Simon Fraser University’s Nano Imaging Lab has produced the world’s smallest published book.

The only catch — you’ll need a scanning electron microscope to read it.

At 0.07 mm X 0.10 mm, Teeny Ted from Turnip Town is a tinier read than the two smallest books currently cited by the Guinness Book of World Records: the New Testament of the King James Bible (5 X 5 mm, produced by MIT in 2001) and Chekhov’s Chameleon (0.9 X 0.9 mm, Palkovic, 2002).

(By way of comparison, the head of a pin is about 2 mm).

Novelist, dead at 84. A massive, important mind is gone. There is no way to overestimate the importance of Vonnegut to comtemporary letters. My favourite comparison in this raft of encomium is “Mark Twain for the nuclear age”.

• BBC
• NYT
• Guardian
• CBC
• Boston Globe
• Salon
• AP
• Times
• Blog Critics

I remember going through a Vonnegut stage, devouring virtually everything I could. It made me feel smart to get even parts of what he was doing. I wonder now how much I really got. I should go back and revisit them. I’m sad to lose his writing, but I’m also sad to lose his fearless, much-needed political voice. It’s popular now to speak out against the current American administration’s ridiculous policies and murderous decisions, but Vonnegut started early.

Okay, my shadowy minions, I am off tomorrow on my 10 day poetry odyssey. I expect Stephen King-like sales and crowds of adoring fans to mob me in the streets of the cities I deign to visit. And by that I mean I’ll be pleased if anyone speaks to me and buys me a drink. As a reminder, here are my tour dates. There are some time and lineup changes, so keep an eye out.

George Murray, Ken Babstock and Simon Armitage
Nicholas Hoare Westmount
Saturday, April 14, 3 pm – 5 pm
1366 Greene Avenue, Montreal (note new location)
Tickets: $5, includes 1 drink

George Murray, “Building a Better Blog”
Ottawa International Writers Festival
Sunday, April 15, 6pm
Library and Archives Canada
395 Wellington Street, Ottawa

George Murray, George Bowering and Rob McLennan, “Poetry Cabaret #1”
Ottawa International Writers Festival
Sunday, April 15, 8pm
Library and Archives Canada
395 Wellington Street, Ottawa

George Murray, Blaise Moritz and Roseanne Carrara
Tranzac Club
Thursday, April 19, 7pm (note new time)
292 Brunswick Avenue, Toronto (behind Future Bakery on Bloor)

George Murray, Rick Crilly, Moez Surani
IV Lounge Reading Series
IV Lounge
Friday, April 20, 8pm
326 Dundas St West, Toronto (across from AGO)

George Murray (with introduction by Mark Callanan)
Book Launch
The Ship Inn
April 23, 2007; 6pm – 8pm (with some hanging around after)
265 Duckworth St, St. John’s

I really hope to meet as many of you in each city as possible. And not just ’cause I want you to pad the audience and buy my book. Partly, but not just. Mostly I want to see who’s reading Bookninja and have an audience that isn’t afraid to hoot and throw underwear. (And no metal chastity belts this time.) Remember that if you can’t make it, you can buy the book at your local independent or at Amazon.com or Amazon.ca.

Dan Rhodes on his top 10 short books of all time. Should anyone need more than 200 pages to tell the story? I suspect the opinions of any number of Ninjas on this might alone run to over 200 pages.

I was reading a new novel the other day when it struck me that the author might as well be a murderer. It wasn’t a bad novel, it was just too long. Passages that could and should have been lopped out had been left in, but I felt I had to plough through them in case they had any bearing on the story. It might have been a really good read if the author had had the gumption, or the balls, to shave off a hundred pages. And here’s where the murder comes in. Say it takes the average reader an extra two hours (two hours they will never get back) to read all the filler. And what if the book does well and finds 250,000 readers? By my calculations this author will have wasted a total of 57 waking years – the equivalent of a long human life. And what if this monster continues to publish such books? Surely that would make them a serial killer? I was about to dial 999 when I realised that maybe, just maybe, I was getting a little overexcited.

Sam Jordison on being forgotten as an author. There are plenty of examples in the archives of Harper’s that I wrote about last week. Names that were obviously the shit in their day but are unrecognizable now.

It’s a curious and melancholy thought that someone so well known can be so quickly forgotten. Especially since he was well respected – and well loved – by those who read him. For Delderfield, who lived from 1912 to 1972, and who had more than 25 years of continuous fame following the success of his novel All Over The Town, was no hack. His sagas encompassed the sweep of world history, right down to the minutiae of British suburban life. By all accounts the books were well written and his pioneering sense of social justice and sympathy for his fellow man would strike a chord with many Guardian readers today.

Profiled at Slate.

Do writers have a right to privacy after their deaths? Most writers think yes, but readers seem to vote no with their dollars.

If Auden is right, and a work of art is a “public object”, then it’s arguable that Kafka or Virgil had no more right than we do to consign their literary endeavours to the dustbin. Diaries and journals, on the other hand, I can much more easily see as private matters (and, if you’re a member of the “author is dead” brigade, critically irrelevant).

But of course, at the end of the day this is all vain speculation. Market forces are all, and I’m pretty sure that the real answer to these questions lies less with moral niceties than supply-and-demand. If people want to read the biographies and works they’re going to get published.

This is simply why I’ve cultivated illegible handwriting my entire life. Read that, suckah.

The IMPAC shortlist is like Mars. It needs women.

This year’s Impac award has whittled down a mammoth 138-strong longlist to a shortlist of eight – and removed all the female contenders in the process.

Three British writers – Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie and Peter Hobbs – are in the running for the prize which, at €100,000 (£68,000), is the world’s richest, as well as its most unpredictable. While a number of female literary big-hitters featured at the early stages, including Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, Booker-winner Margaret Atwood, Orange-winner Ali Smith and Zadie Smith, none made it through to the next stage, resulting in an all-male shortlist. Other big names to miss out include Kazuo Ishiguro, John Banville, Ian McEwan and Haruki Murakami.

Actually, I think there could be a serious argument made for any number of books left off (esp in place of ones there). How did Ishiguro not make the cut? How? What strange universe do we live in?

Big Brother, the real one, has his eye on George Orwell’s house. Egad. We’ve arrived.

According to the latest studies, Britain has a staggering 4.2million CCTV cameras – one for every 14 people in the country – and 20 per cent of cameras globally. It has been calculated that each person is caught on camera an average of 300 times daily.

Use of spy cameras in modern-day Britain is now a chilling mirror image of Orwell’s fictional world, created in the post-war Forties in a fourth-floor flat overlooking Canonbury Square in Islington, North London.

On the wall outside his former residence – flat number 27B – where Orwell lived until his death in 1950, an historical plaque commemorates the anti-authoritarian author. And within 200 yards of the flat, there are 32 CCTV cameras, scanning every move.

Orwell’s view of the tree-filled gardens outside the flat is under 24-hour surveillance from two cameras perched on traffic lights.

I wandered lonely as a cloud, packing a nine, armed out loud wit hos on each, yo.

The original:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

The rap:

I wandered lonely along as if I was a cloud

That floats on high over vales and hills

When all at once I looked down and saw a crowd

And in my path there was a host of golden daffodils

so Check it!

The kind of sight that puts your mind at ease

I saw beside the lake and beneath the trees …

Don’t panic yet. It looks way worse than it sounds.

BC comic artist, dead at 76.

Why are people so rude in libraries these days? It’s the kids. I blame it all on video games and D&D. Oh, that and their parents who in lieu of parenting — ie. establishing boundaries and the groundwork of a moral structure — have decided their impulse towards a selfish “me! me! me! memememe!”-lifestyle can be counteracted by extending the same philosophy to their children with a mighty, spoiling “you! you! you! youyouyouyou!”

SOMETIME IN the ’80s, I sat at a table in the town library in Lenox, Mass., doing my eighth-grade algebra homework. A man, probably about the age I am now, appeared in front of me. He wore a short-sleeved dress shirt and knit tie, both of unfortunate shades and textures no longer in active circulation, as well as a look of perturbation. “Excuse me,” he said. “That pencil is making an awful lot of noise.” I apologized. I may have even blushed with shame. I put a legal pad under my homework, and he returned to his task, frowning over a worn set of local census tables. I caught his eye, and he nodded to indicate that now, indeed, we had achieved that blessed thing called perfect silence.

Sometime last week, I sat in a cubicle, in a lovely library in one of Los Angeles’ leafier suburbs, writing. Pardon me, I should say that I was trying to write, because close by, a girl in a Hollister LOVE sweatshirt shrieked into a pink Razr: “I’ll call you later. Look, I swear I will call you in like, one second!” Another girl, also in a Hollister sweatshirt, chatted animatedly to her friend: “So, I talked to my cousin Nicky, and you have to listen to this. Shut up! Guess who he has a crush on! Shut up! Guess!” She named the person. Her friend smacked the table in disbelief. “Shut up!” “Excuse me,” I said, turning around, smiling what was admittedly not a particularly nice smile, “Do you guys think you could be quiet?” Let’s just say that no one blushed.

See, “shh” just doesn’t cut it anymore. You have to fight rudeness with rudeness and say, “Listen, shut your fucking cake-hole before I tear you a new asshole, asshole.” If that doesn’t work, turn over the table, rip your shirt and scream, “You want a piece of this, mofo!?” Of course, this is assuming UFC fighters or teens with handguns don’t spend much time in libraries. (The owners and staff of Bookninja remind readers that this site employs satire and parody in attempts to comment on literary and publishing culture. Bookninja.com does not condone the use of aggrivated assault in settling library disputes, nor does Bookninja.com or it’s related individuals accept any responsibility for any injuries or loss sustained during the negotiations of personal relations between library patrons.)

Turns out, as any VC Andrews reader knows, some books, in this case big thrillers, are written by sub-contract. It makes sense, given they are trying to appeal to the widest audience rather than produce a work of art. Plus, once the assembly line and product network is created, you can cut the pesky author out of things to cut costs.

ACTION THRILLERS, whopping great doorstops with gold writing on the covers, are not only big books, they are big business.

When James Patterson, author of the Alex Cross series, produces a new book, 1.25 million copies are routinely printed. After he was poached from Headline by Random House last year the victors crowed: “Signing James Patterson is like acquiring a one-man publishing industry.” His fortune was estimated by Forbes to be $28 million (£14 million) in 2005. Another big name, Robert Ludlum, has 210 million books in print, and every one of his titles has been on The New York Timesbestseller list. Clive Cussler has 70 million copies of his Dirk Pitt series in print, and Penguin UK sells 700,000 of his books every year. The books are fast-paced and addictive and readers cannot get enough of them. Including paperbacks, Cussler alone has five books out in the UK this year and each one is a guaranteed bestseller.

Small wonder, then, that the production of so many page-turners involves more than lone writers toiling in garrets. More and more, the people producing million-sellers are leaning on collaborative authors to do much of the writing.

Profiled at the Telegraph by Ali Smith.

She died so young. She lived so fast. But what did she achieve in this “short-winded” life (as her great biographer, Claire Tomalin, has described it)?

A brief glance at literary modernism and its aftermath reveals just some of the force of both her presence, and her importance.

She inadvertently brought the influence of Chekhov to English modernism. She dunted Virginia Woolf, with a good sharp elbow, into the kind of experimental writing for which Woolf is revered. She unknowingly presented her friend DH Lawrence with one of the more sapphic narrative episodes of The Rainbow by telling him stories of her youth, and was later, again inadvertently, his model for the character of Gudrun in Women in Love.

She had vision beyond her own prideful ego, the kind of far-sightedness which meant that once on a visit to Woolf, who had given her some of Joyce’s Ulysses to read, she made fun of it, probably because she knew Woolf would enjoy this, then stopped, looked again: “but there’s something in this,” she said.

Mills and Boon fans (Harlequin fans with no dental plan — wait, that doesn’t really hold…) are now able to get thier bodices ripped via text message. Finally the cell phone has found a genre tiny enough to fit everything needing into a screen designed to make eyes bleed and souls shrivel. Plus people don’t have to have the embarrassment of of a M&B cover full of fainting damsels and rippled chests.

Tall, dark and ruggedly handsome strangers will soon be available at the other end of a text message. Mills & Boon’s tales of passionate love affairs might not be at the cutting edge of contemporary fiction, but the publisher’s distribution techniques are.

Mobile phone screens offer a convenient, portable and anonymous way to read some of the hundreds of romantic novels that it brings out each year.

Alison Byrne, the UK publishing director for its parent company, Harlequin Mills & Boon Ltd, said yesterday: “For many people there’s still that embarrassment factor of carrying your Mills & Boon around.

“When you are using your mobile phone nobody knows what you are doing, whether you are texting a friend or playing a game.”

It’s good that I don’t have to look at these book covers anymore, but what cues am I supposed to use now to instantly discount people as worthless?