Well, the time has come, the Walrus said… The first ever Bookninja Office Haiku Competition has a winner, and new Tshirt owner, as well as three runners up and two honourable mentions. It was an extremely tight race in the end, as you will see, and many voters expressed frustration at only being able to pick two poets. A few even blatantly disregarded orders and boldly chose to include three or four or even five favourites. Bravo on the huevos muy grandes, amigos. The winners after the jump.

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Dear Mr. Harper,

Please take some time away from slitting puppy throats and pissing on poor people to read this article on how the arts brings $21.2 billion into the NYC economy and then assign one of your flying monkeys to get the numbers for major cities in Canada.

Sincerely,

Bookninja

Interviewed at the Guardian.

Gary Snyder: It may well be that some writers are beginning to express their views, and outrage, over some of the social and political outcomes of current US policy. It doesn’t feel anything like the 60s, however. Today’s youth generation is less engaged, for several reasons. One, there is no military draft in the US any more. During the Vietnam war, college students could be drafted, and that helped make it enormously unpopular. The present administration is very careful to avoid a draft because they know it would turn the nation against it. The volunteer army, which has many black Americans and poor white Americans from rural areas, is relatively apolitical. Two: there is a resurgence of Christian evangelism and right-wing fervour, both of which make a virtue out of patriotism. This group did not have a sense of its own identity or power in the 60s. In my own writing I have taken on the question of our society’s relation to the natural planet, to non-human species, and to human identity and capacity as we can see it through the last 50,000 years.

David Eddie (whose daddy memoir I read years ago when I was myself a wandering, dishevelled stay-home dad) is writing an advice column in the Globe. Here he counsels a nympho publisher on her illicit affair with an aspiring author. Let the gossipy speculation begin. Just don’t post any of it here.

Then, after one boozy business dinner, he wound up back at my apartment. The sex was great and I want our personal relationship to continue. But after revisiting his pitch the other day, I decided to pass on his proposal.

Now he’s threatening to tell my boss about our affair, and claims that I led him on. Is there any way to smooth things over personally and retain my professional credibility?

Throwing SWAG at waning sales since 1902 . Good strategy. Like throwing lifeboats off a sinking ship to make it lighter. Here the LAT talks about networking amid the sweat and furtive glances.

Gabriel García Márquez is headed to his hometown of Macondo (which you might remember from a little book called something like “A Century of Being Alone” or something like that) for the first time in 20 years. While I love this old fellow dearly, I am amazed that apparently everything he does is news. Watch for the article later this afternoon when it’s reported that he left two fingers of syrupy coffee at the bottom of his cup.

Samuel Beckett’s longtime publisher says goodbye to his association with his favourite author.

I first met Beckett after seeing Waiting for Godot. I went to Paris hoping to obtain British rights, but my previous letter to his French publisher had arrived too late, and the rights had gone to Faber & Faber when I arrived. Over dinner, Beckett said to me: “I’d rather have you as a friend, because one always fights with one’s publisher.”

We met many times as friends, until Faber & Faber – having accepted Godot – decided the novels were obscene under the current laws, and allowed me to publish them – obscene or not.

Long long looooooong time Bookninja reader Brenda Schmidt has turned from poet into book designer. When Dan Wells at Biblioasis (a great new literary press out of, of all places, Windsor, Ontario — the perinium of Canada) posted some cover designs on the new company blog, Brenda decided to submit her own cover idea with the joking price of $8 plus a one year subscription to CNQ. Wells liked the cover so much, he decided to run with it. Now THAT’s people power in action! Way to go, Brenda! We only hope you’ll continue to write now that you’ve entered the lucrative world of book design. And, btw, you need to get a business manager. Jack your rates up!

Dear Shadowy Minions,

Don’t let your voice go
unheard. You sat back while Bush
won: don’t fail again.

Read the Bookninja Office Haiku Competition entries here and send me an email () listing your two favourite. I’ll collate results tomorrow and post the runners up and winner. The winner gets a free Bookninja T-Shirt.

The heir apparent to Tony’s lame duck British empire, Gordon Brown, unveils a reading list that leaves a little time for magic. Because, you know, that’s what it’s going to take for Britain to unglue its lips and tongue from George W. Bush’s anus.

Mr Brown, who has described the Potter books as Britain’s “greatest export”, told the BBC’s Today programme that he planned to “dip into JK Rowling, hoping that is something my sons will want to read later”.

Speaking from the Hay festival – where he was promoting his book, Courage – Brown added that Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason and Thomas Keneally’s The Widow and Her Hero would also go into his suitcase.

At three, and approaching a year old, both of his children are still too young for the Potter experience. Whether Mr Brown is using parental concern as a cover story for his own fascination is for the moment a matter of pure speculation.

Rather cryptically, Mr Brown also said: “I think reading, in the literal sense, broadens the mind”.

That last made me laugh. I’m reading Gore’s book now. It’s frightening and painful, but very good. Where was this firebrand in 2000? Hiding behind the over-handled Vulcan science officer that seemed to be playing presidential candidate. I would love to see a Gore/Barak ticket. Sweep the world clean, Al!

Nobel winner Orhan is headed in some new, much more graphic directions.

How much control should heirs and estates have over the artistic works of those who’ve died? You get nuts like Joyce’s boy and others who seem to be prepared to deny the world access to archives and papers just because they can or because they’re holding out for cash or because they’re contentious little pricks who like disturbing shit and being the centre of attention. Should they have these rights?

Since Bernard-Marie Koltès died in 1989 at 41, his reputation as a playwright has continued to grow. In February, for the first time, one of his plays, “Le Retour au Désert,” entered the repertory of the Comédie-Française, the historic Paris theater popularly known as the House of Molière.

Yet soon after Muriel Mayette’s production of the play opened there, Mr. Koltès’s brother, François, who owns the copyright to his works, ordered that it be taken off the stage on June 7 after just 30 performances. The reason? The Algerian character, Aziz, is not being played by an Algerian, as stipulated by the playwright.

The French theater world was stunned. Need a German actor play Faust, a Dane play Hamlet? In any event Michel Favory, the French actor cast as Aziz, was considered more than up to the role. So was this political correctness gone crazy? Or was Mr. Koltès justifiably protecting his brother’s legacy?

It’s takes one to know one. An ex-crack dealer writes an dictionary of the street.

There are several clues in Street Talk as to how Kearse used to make his money, all of them dictionary entries for crack cocaine. There is rock (a piece of the drug), covert names for crack: crillz, crizz, crizzack, jacks and there is the chilling expression for a crack addict: rock star.

Nicholas Lezard, in his Guardian blog, says good novels SHOULD be bad influences. Huh, you mean to tell me it should do something? I thought they just held paper down and became ad hoc horizontal surfaces for collecting dust.

So to keep the argument sane, we have to stick to the issue of whether a book can influence a reader’s moral or religious behaviour. The standard liberal response is “certainly not”. After all, plenty of novels contain awful behaviour, which would result in worldwide carnage among the literate were such behaviour to be imitated. Likewise, few people became Christians after reading the Narnia books, which all but explicitly encourage belief in the Redeemer.

I would beg to differ. Ms Mallory, deranged though she may be, is unwittingly on to something. Novels do influence our thoughts, and can even inspire us to do naughty things. We forget the roots of the novel, which are in indecency and sedition.

McDonald’s wants to excise the word “McJob” from the OED. Speaking as a form McJob holder (including three whole days at McDonald’s itself when I was 15), I have to say that I would have preferred that term of scorn to the much more helpless-feeling “BradfordOntarioPostGraduateHoldingPen”. I’m not saying, I’m just saying.

(Did I tell you the story of Ninja Boy who was scheduled to attned a little pal’s fourth birthday party at a local McDonald’s? We got the present wrapped, got all dressed up and were in the car when he said in a worried voice, “Daddy, I don’t think we should go to this party…” When I asked why, he said, “Because McDonald’s doesn’t make very healthy food and I don’t think we should go. Maybe we could go somewhere else instead.” So we did.  We’d only been to McDonald’s a few times before that, back when he was two and I was looking for something do with him on Sunday mornings. I’d take him over and order a kids breakfast and watch him pick at it. One day he got sick and when I told him it was because the food wasn’t too healthy, it stuck. The only saving grace of that whole scene was that I had taught him, at two years old, to order eggs with air quotes around them. So each time he’d walk up to the counter, hold his hands up beside his head in bunny ears and say, “I’d like some “EGGS” please.” You can’t buy that kind of laugh.)

The British Library is seeking emails from regular Britons to create an archival snapshot of the present day. It’ll be like a time capsule but with an inordinate amount of sniping and penis elargement references.

“E-mail is the first major upheaval in written English since the invention of the printing press,” said Jonnie Robinson, a sociolinguistic and education specialist at the library who has been working on the project, known as Email Britain.

“And this is the first archive of its kind,” he added. “We’re looking at it as an electronic time capsule — for social historians it’s going to be an incredibly rich resource.” (For Microsoft, meanwhile, it serves as promotion for its new Windows Live Hotmail program.)

As the project’s Web site (newhotmail.co.uk/emailbritain) explains, the library wants “memorable or significant e-mail” messages that fall into 10 categories: blunders, life-changing e-mails, complaints, spam, love and romance, humor, everyday e-mails, news, world around you and tales from abroad.

Just what it says. (From the lurvly Maud)

DOMINION
By Calvin Baker
Less jaded than Colson Whitehead, less kitschy than Toni Morrison, Calvin Baker is my favorite contemporary African-American novelist, and Dominion is his best book yet.
—Dale Peck

THE LAST SAMURAI
By Helen Dewitt
For its playful, steady, angst-attuned intelligence and its utter conceptual exceptionality.
—Sven Birkerts

I found the tactic of putting Birkerts and Peck’s choices back-to-back in a list of praise, as opposed to scorn, quite delicious.

The Commonwealth first book award has gone to Canadian DY Péchard.

Philip Pullman is after broadcasters for poisoning today’s youth with terrible TV.

Pullman castigated broadcasters for sacrificing high-quality programmes in favour of those that yield more marketing opportunities. ‘Children are regarded by broadcasters as a marketing opportunity at best, a dangerous and feral threat at worst, and an expensive nuisance otherwise,’ Pullman said. ‘This social poison goes much deeper than broadcasting, of course, but it’s particularly visible there.

‘There used to be … a sense of responsibility among broadcasters: a feeling that this extraordinary medium … should be used to make things better, richer, more interesting for those who made up the audience – especially for children,’ he added.

Boy Ninja, who doesn’t watch TV except when visiting friends, says to me the other day, “Dad, did you know that Ninja Turtles like fighting? They LIKE it. That’s what Reed says. He loves Ninja Turtles. Because they LIKE fighting. With SWORDS.” I asked him whether he liked Ninja Turtles and he said with a modicum of horror, “I certainly don’t like FIGHTING!” I suspect that means yes.

Just like Dan Brown in whatever part of the world has a mysterious symbol on a stone or curtain or something, Rankin and Rowling are taking over from Burns in Britain. And up the 400 highway in Ontario, they’re starting tours of the 9th Concession bridge under which I used to get drunk as a teenager before mooning the speeding cottage country traffic above. Hey, it’s progress. Plus, I might very well be the only writer to ever emerge from the hideous IQ valley that is Bradford, Ontario.

How come Philip Roth doesn’t have a Nobel Prize yet? I could ask this same question for about 10 others right off the top of my head.

Forget LA Confidential losing the Best Picture Oscar to Titanic, and Englebert Humperdinck stopping Penny Lane from getting to number one: the worst cultural snub in living memory is that Philip Roth hasn’t won the Nobel prize for literature.

My guess at the answer is, there’s only one prize a year and only so many years…

Comic books are adopting seasons, like television. Hopefully this means we can also pull the plug after 6 episodes if they suck.

Hollywood has never been shy about poaching ideas from comic books, whether it’s the “Adventures of Superman” television series that inspired a generation of young cape-wearers in the mid-1950s or this month’s “Spider-Man 3,” which has earned nearly $300 million at the box office in just three weeks.

But now it is the comic-book industry that is grabbing ideas from movies and television — in this case not necessarily stories or characters, but the way Hollywood does its work.

I always thought “Hollywood” was reserved exclusively for film… Shouldn’t TV be more like “Boise” or something?

A bunch of creepy/crappy stories on the death of independent publishers and bookstores. I can’t bear to separate them out into multiple posts, so you get bullets instead.

• Indie imprints die out
• Bookseller burns his stock in protest
• Gotham lost to landlord
• Life after Harry for Raincoast

What’s your favourite font? Slate asks a bunch of writers and gets various answers, but quite a few “couriers”. Here’s Jonathan Lethem’s response:

I dislike the temptation of making a raw draft look like it’s already typeset. Before computers, I wrote three novels on a typewriter, and there can never be anything but 12-point Courier (double-spaced) forever: I write on an eternal Selectric of the mind. I can even hear the rattle of the metal ball against the sheet of paper, I swear.

• Degen Davis wins the Percy Janes First Novel award — yay Degen!
• Montrealer D. Y. Béchard has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize
• Jake Kennedy wins bpNichol Chapbook award

Okay guys, here are the haiku I culled from the pack as best exemplifying the spirit of defeat and helplessness I know you feel every day. You each get to choose two, ranked in order of preference. You’re voting on style, technique, sass, and the strength of the “knowing chuckle”. . All votes are confidential. The haikuist with the most votes gets a free tshirt from the Bookninja shop. Runners up are encouraged to buy a tshirt anyway and lie to their friends about winning. Alright? Okay. Continue reading below.

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I’ll take entries of work-related haiku until midnight tonight. I’m back in St. John’s and going through the entries. It’s taking quite a bit out of me, considering that I have to cut some great haiku that didn’t meet the criteria. They must be OFFICE/BOARDROOM/CUBICLE-related. I tried to be generous with interpretation, but just had to narrow it down. Otherwise it’s too hard to compare a train conductor to a teacher to a centrefielder to a …. etc etc. So, if you submitted something you think might not make the cut, send again before midnight. Come on, it’s just a haiku. Send to me at .

Entries will be posted tomorrow and judged by the Bookninja-reading public on content, technique and contribution to a world of corporate pain. See you tomorrow.

Here are a few more selected entries for the Bookninja Office Haiku competition. Next week I’ll make up a shortlist on which we can all vote. The winner will get a Bookninja t-shirt. I’ll take entries up until then. But it’s important that they be OFFICE-related — centrefielders and escorts are noble workers, but I want your dead-eyed, cubicle farm, mental stasis poems.

Accused of killing
the office jade plant with spite,
my boss memos me.

I drink black coffee
my boss at the door:
you get my memo?

I owe two dollars
for the weekly coffee pool,
twenty-five for the plant.

I have not emailed
regarding the office jade:
this staff is a team.

Today is Thursday.
I think it’s Friday: wear jeans–
subordination.

Dead plant, old coffee,
memos for staff softball games:
not a team player.

Strange apiary:
busy work, bookninja,
give notice at noon.

-Tammy Armstrong

She opens the file
I pluck a single white sheet
she winces, thanks me

She waits for copies
the machine drums and flashes;
I’m dancing inside.

-B.G. Rotchin

some poems are not for
Friday afternoon proofing
too much blood on hands

-Crissy Boylan

Day-timer

Lagavulin at noon
Lagavulin at two; work
is not so hard

-Chris Jennings

All day I edit
Words that nobody will read
And that includes me

Where is ‘le mot juste’?
I had it just this morning,
In perfect English

How often must I
Tell you? Impact is never
A transitive verb!

-Stephen Pigott

Every day, I take
The number 7 Dunbar
to work. Smells like pee.

*

Dear employee, due
to a change in infrastructure
we’re letting you go.

You’re letting me go?
I don’t think so. Not this year.
See my shop steward.

*

Stocking candy for
a union wage is awesome!
I have two degrees.

I have two degrees.
Yet, these sweatshirts need folding.
MFA’s conundrum.

*

Socialist asks: of
my two jobs: one paid, one not,
which should I prefer?

Capitalist says
A job with no pay…sounds great.
How do I hire you?

-Liz Bachinsky

Boredom ricochets
Softly off of fabricked walls
Almost waking me

-M. Black

The walls are colored
like the snot from pneumonia
that I’m not over.

This explains why we
identify with mucus
dried, flung behind things.

The blessing, though, is
that I occupy my mind
while I pick boogers.

-Stephen Fisk

Eff one, tab, escape
Unix database keystrokes
Infinite blank fields

-Heather Cromarty

Sixty hour work weeks -
now they want us to revise
the “Vision Statement”?

Hung over from last
night’s gig, ten a.m. photo shoot -
no business like it

-Art Norris

clock hands ticking round
slow and stilted second hand—
outside it is spring

-Kerry Clare

Your teacher is sick
Substitute your coke for gin
Please skip today’s class

-Kevin Herir

No cubicles here.
My door closed. No one bugs me.
I will never leave.

-Sharon McCartney

Did you think I would leave you high and dry? Well, that was my plan, but as I sit here in a cafe insousciantly named “Riverdale Perk”, I have suddenly realized my moleskine is mocking me, so I switched over to my e-Molie to look around and found this pile of crap for you. Happy Thursday.

• The truth about the slushpile
• Garbage writing
• Maybe I should take a walk …
• … or go fishing
• Or I could try to reach new markets
• From blog to book (not quick enough for me, let me tell you… and buy my book if you haven’t yet. What kind of shadowy minion are you?)
• This is the end

You know, the chances that I’ll have another uninterrupted stretch in a cafe in the near future are pretty slim. You’d think I’d be able to get something done…

Last week we linked to a story about Japanese business folk blowing off steam with some recreational vocational haiku. Now, we at Bookninja idolize our misappropriated Japanese heritage, at least the silly part, if not so much the monster porn part, so we put out the call for more cubicle farm haiku from our readres. It was surprising how many of you didn’t get the “work” part of the haiku challenge, but I’ll post a selection so far, regardless. The lines are still open if you want to add to this bounty of aphoristic human resources wisdom. So .

In the cubicle
a frown is easily wiped
off with a soft butt.

-Brenda Schmidt

1.
Barren cubicle
farm where only lichen grows.
Photobiont-brain.

2.
Orthopedic chair
essentially useless since
I slouch, chin in hand.

-Mélanie Grondin

Book review section
Diminished in newspaper
Blogs report sadly

-Paula Eisenstein

Students stare at me
Blank-eyed and incurious.
My words fall unheard.

-Anonymous

*7 Haiku for Coach Travellers*

Your lousy feet stink,
You’re crazy and I hate you.
Thank you, come again.

*
It’s too bad for you
You pissed your pants. Not your stop?
Too bad, too. Bye now.

*

Your child is ugly
And you have spoiled him rotten.
How can I help you?

*

I care not at all
For your sadsack life-stories:
I’m paid to be here.

*

You can’t have coffee–
We open at 6:30
And I’m having mine.

*

If you knew the time
Of your arrival today,
Would you feel better?

*

No smoking onboard;
Did you think that life was fair?
Maybe. But I’m not.

-Zach Wells

My job is pointless.
I don’t do a thing all day.
No one notices.

-Doug Stuart

I often forget
the important things in life.
What was I saying?

-N. Keyser

Joy! Celebration!
I will sleep tonight knowing
I met the milestone.

answering the phone
we try to sound cheerful, like
we are not in pain

The sign on the door
says meeting in progress. But
this is not progress.

cleaving my pale breasts
a fiery identity
on thick red lanyard

-Jennica Harper

Old men eye younger
men’s wives, while office staff’s flirt-
ing fucks with their minds.

-Tracy Hamon

It’s good stuff, guys. Let’s keep them coming. There’s a ‘Ninja t-shirt in it for the winner. We’ll have a vote from a shortlist. You’ll be so cool you won’t be able to stand yourself.

I am headed to Toronto tomorrow (5:20am flight with a four-year-old who needs 12 hours sleep a night but refuses to get more than 10… I pity you if you’re on our flight) for a short visit with relatives, so I’ll try to update during that time, but it might be a bit sparse. Perhaps more unimaginable to me is that I might be away from my Facebook crack for more than a few hours at a time. (Actually, after a month of shoddy productivity, I’ve got that particular monkey back in its cage, but I still check more than a few times each day.)

• Stalin the poet
• Pullman’s movie
• Where are the laughs in comic books these days?
• Why publishers are still afraid of teh internets
• Straight and narrow — why don’t hets read homo books?
• Plagiarism as a force for good…
• …and here as well (thanks, F)
• “Out of print” redefined for POD… thanks, S&S!
• Deeply abridged classics
• Elie Wiesel reconsiders Night
• The emotional striptease of misery memoirs — not about affirmation, but actually about misery

Yes, it’s true.

In the UK, people are going nuts over literary festivals.

The literary festival scene is undergoing a boom akin to that in the music industry, with new events mushrooming around the country to compete with venerable annual showcases like Hay-on-Wye, Oxford and Cheltenham.

From the revelation that London’s South Bank Centre is to hold its first literary festival, attended by figures as diverse as the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka and the children’s author Lauren Child, to the unveiling of new events all over the UK, there are now more than 100 jamborees for the prose and poetry-obsessed every year.

While thousands will flock to the 450 music festivals in Britain this summer, contributing an estimated £500m to the economy, it seems there is a similar thirst for dub poets and multimedia memorials to literary greats.

This sounds healthy.

A new site is offering internet users a chance to bet fantasy cash on real book proposals they think will get a deal. A major publisher has teamed up to get a sense of what the public will vote for. Guess which one? Yes, Simon and Schuster. In the next phase of this continuing drive to engage audiences, S&S is looking at adding caffeine and nicotine to book pages, taking readers’ families hostage at gunpoint, and holding Temptation Island-like skin flicks in which dust jackets fly and pages get all dissheveled and eared — doggie style.

When predicting which candidate is likely to win an election, what a movie will make at the box office or how much the price of oil will fluctuate, the guesses of a crowd can be remarkably accurate.

But can crowds predict whether a book will succeed?

That is the hope of the founders of Media Predict (www.MediaPredict.com), a virtual market beginning today, and Simon & Schuster, a publisher that plans to select a book proposal based on bets placed by traders in the new market.

Media Predict is soliciting book proposals from agents and the public, and posting pages of them on the site. Traders, who are given $5,000 in fantasy cash, can buy shares based on their guess about whether a particular book proposal is likely to get a deal, or whether Touchstone Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, will select it as a finalist in a contest called Project Publish. If either happens within a four-month period, the value of the shares go to $100 apiece; if not, the share price falls to zero.
…

For Simon & Schuster, the partnership is yet another attempt to gauge popular tastes. Earlier this year, the publisher teamed up with Gather.com, a social networking site, to run an “American Idol”-style contest in which voters pick a manuscript for Simon & Schuster to publish.

In the case of Media Predict, traders are not voting on the book they like best, but rather are placing bets on which they think will do well. According to Mark Gompertz, publisher of Touchstone Books, Media Predict could do for book publishing what focus groups do for soap and soda and what screening audiences do for movies.

Soap operas and Hollywood? These are yardsticks for success? Whenever I think of S&S now, I think of this room full of smug, Canali-suited men sitting around tapping pens until someone says, “Gentlemen… work with me on this, okay?  Don’t think about it. Just ‘experience’ it… Okay? Alright… ‘Bloodsports’… Ah? Just ‘bloodsports’… No, no. Don’t speak for a moment. Don’t think. Just let it… be…. Bloodsports. We put two aspiring authors in a room full of blunt instruments with one contract and one pen between them. The one who signs it first gets the deal, no questions asked. Scene one, take one, ACTION!” “But what about the quality of the book?” “What did I just say? WHAT DID I JUST SAY?! Don’t think. Just let it be. (And your fired. Escort him out.)” Somebody please fire the boardroom full of idiot suits who are running that place.

Some bookstores aren’t all that worked up about Harry, esp in the UK and Oz where big box retailers are creating a price war so viscious that most indies aren’t really going to make much off what should be their biggest title of the year. In this case, selling copies doesn’t necessarily mean making money.

The reality, though, is that when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is released at 9.01am on Saturday, July 21, the only big winners are likely to be the publishers and magicians.

Discounting, led by big department stores, will cut the price of the book so severely that even though it is tipped to match or even break the records set by the last instalment, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, bookshops like Readings say it will not turn a significant profit.

The specialist children’s bookshop, The Little Bookroom, in North Carlton, won’t even be open at 9.01am on the release date, and when they do open at the usual 10am they won’t bother displaying the book in the front window.

Well, I’m glad someone’s getting rich. Oh, wait, no I’m not. I’m disgusted. Yes, disgusted.

Martin Levin, the editor of Canada’s only (?) stand-alone tabloid books section at the Globe and Mail, weighs in on what he calls the “topic du jour among us bookish types”: the disappearing books section and the rise of the blog.

In a world where information is fragmented into a million little pieces, where anyone can set up a blog, where will new voices be widely heard? On blogs, sure, but for every thoughtful books blog – and there are quite a few – many more are little better than rant-forums for the disaffected and unappreciated.

And to a large extent, blogs are still parasitic upon newspapers, relying on the latter as fonts of information and opinion from which they may interpret, criticize, diverge. And book review sections are still where casual readers, and that’s most readers, go to find out what books they might possibly want to read.

Grragh! I just KNEW he’d take the books section side! I KNEW it! So predictable! I could just spit!

Remember that post on the Japanese and their boardroom haiku? We’ve had a number of submissions so far, but need more to make a good run of it. I know you’re out there, looking for a way to make love to the pooch this Friday afternoon. What better way to spend your boss’s money than with haiku for the Bookninja Work Haiku Competition. . You can even ask me to post yours anonymously, if you like (coughwhimpcough). I’ll show you mine if you all show me yours. Whoa… I meant the haiku.

I swim in a sea of cranky whining. My head nearly explodes from the effort of listening. There’s junk scattered all over the house. In one room a storybook CD plays, in another it’s the Beatles. In still another a television mutedly regurgitates saccharine pap. The coffee’s run out already. The cream is going bad and makes white flotsam instead of carmel clounds in the black infusion. I am a set of climbing bars for a moaning, solipsistic monkey with delusions of grandeur. I would ask you to send help, but I’m too afraid you’d get caught in the gravity well of this ugly situation. So don’t send help. But, please, pray for Mojo. No more posts for today, unless the human petri dish loses consciousness and blesses me with a couple hours of work time.

Profiled by Helen Oyeyemi in the Telegraph.

You Must Set Forth at Dawn is a memoir from a writer who can find the political buried in every story and who, having come to the height of his powers, wants to address the embattled history of his country.

He rejects my suggestion that the memoir could have been written to give himself the courage of his convictions.

Rather, “You cannot live a normal existence if you haven’t taken care of a problem that affects your life and affects the lives of others, values that you hold which in fact define your very existence. It’s almost an existential imperative: in order for you to continue with a sense of fullness of yourself you have to respond to a particular situation.”

In the UK they’re released a list of books for reluctant to read boys and some people are getting their knickers twisted about it. This fellow says to relax — it’s not about literature, it’s about saving reading.

Children who already love reading don’t need lists, initiatives or even encouragement. They’ll sneak into bookshops and libraries on their own, peering at top shelves and into dusty corners, searching out whatever excites them. By the time that they’re fourteen or fifteen, they’ll already have read The Hobbit, Robinson Crusoe and probably Anna Karenina too. They will have found the pages at which Portnoy’s Complaint and Lady Chatterley’s Lover fall open. They’ll be plunging through manga, science fiction, forgotten classics and all kinds of books that you and I have never even heard of.

This list is for boys who aren’t so confident about reading. They need some suggestions and a bit of encouragement. Thrust a copy of Le Grand Meaulnes in their hands and they’ll run screaming back to the Xbox. Let them start with Calvin & Hobbes or a cartoon version of Kidnapped and they’ll soon be asking for more recommendations.

Way way waaaaaay back in second year, I took a course called something like World of Childhood and I wrote an essay about creating “steps to literature” for reluctant to read boys. I said you should step from comic books with themes similar to where you’d like the  boys to end up and work up from there. From X-Men to Dragonlance to Tolkien to “X”, kind-of-thing. The prof loved it and put it in some sort of steel vault archive. This means it’s protected, but unread, which is probably for the best.

An iTunes for poetry recordings, run by Bernstein from UPenn. And absolutely free. PennSound can be found here. These are the kind of things the revitalize me, just when I feel like I’m ready to sell this junk heap and move on, I find something cool, free, and useful — exactly how the internet was meant to be. (Most of the Canadians on here are of the experimental set, which isn’t a warning–since I’m a big fan of most of these poets–so much as a note for anyone trying to get a sense of what’s offered here. Not too sure if there are plans to expand that selection outside this particular poetic subculture.)

When literary photographer John W. MacDonald went to the Writers Festival in Ottawa with the intention of snapping a few of Michael Ondaatje, he was informed by a publicist that no pictures would be allowed. John, who can make even yours truly look good in colour, has been covering the Ottawa scene for quite some time and didn’t want this reading to represent a gap in his near perfect record, so he did what any self-respecting chronicler of our times would do…

To launch the Spring 2007 issue of The Magazine, I interview poet and critic Dennis Lee (audio) about his new book Yesno. Besides being the first poet laureate of Toronto, Dennis is something like the cool uncle for an entire generation of youngish poets. He’s also the author of some of the greatest children’s books ever written, including Alligator Pie and Jelly Belly. Lee’s last two books of verse, however, have probably left as many people perplexed as they have exhilerated, and those two conditions aren’t necessarily exclusive. Jamming sounds and words together in a kind of invented dialect, Un, and its successor, Yesno, work towards building a language of disbelief and outrage at the state of the world, while also looking for the right words to heal it. People who have come to think of Lee as a children’s poet might be surprised. But those familiar with those very same poems might not. I met with Dennis in Ninja K’s dining room in April to chat about it all.

Lady Ninja is in Fredericton for a conference and as soon as she left yesterday Ninja Boy was diagnosed with strep throat, so I am home today nursing a stubby foreshadow of the surly teenager he is destined to become. That said, I don’t have long here before he decides the computer is his machine for playing Webkinz and kicks my sorry ass off. Hey, it’s a sick day. He’s been drawing, reading and listening all morning to a CD of Pooh stories read by Judy Dench. I can’t complain if he wants a little pap now and then.

• Trillium Award shortlists announced
• NEA head Gioia on the state of the arts
• Science prize, blog prize, Waterstone’s top 25 prize
• Spinal tap — a fetish for book spines
• Alan Garner interview
• Ninja Zach on Canlit
• Short story news
• Helen Oyeyemi profiled in the Times
• The house at Kurt Vonnegut corner

An American policeman who dabbles in theatre has been caught plagiarizing plays the works of Canadian playwrights and staging them in the US.

Belke wrote The Reluctant Resurrection of Sherlock Holmes in 1992 and it was produced as recently as last year in Edmonton.

But after hearing that a similar play had been staged in Los Angeles, Belke and his agent went on sleuthing expedition of their own.

They discovered a version of the play had been staged in both Los Angeles and northern Ohio.

Herman may also have plagiarized scripts written by at least two other high-profile Canadian playwrights, Peter Colley’s I’ll Be Back Before Midnight and Kim Selody’s Suddenly Shakespeare, according to the Edmonton Journal.

In 1999, Herman produced a play called The Unexpected Return of Sherlock Holmes, which was character for character, word for word the same as Belke’s.

It played twice in Ohio with his Tree City Players, an amateur troupe in Kent, a university town near Cleveland.

Then Herman’s friend, Bill Wolski, asked for the rights to produce the play for a Los Angeles theatre company.

But come on, this is just words…. it’s not like it’s really stealing, per se, is it?

The Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards were announced yesterday in St. John’s. The awards are staggered with categories for fiction and children’s books being awarded in even years and non-fiction and poetry in odd. I was a judge this year for the E.J. Pratt Poetry Award, and I can tell you it was a tough decision. There’s not much media up yet, so I’ll spell it out here and link to any extra commentary if it becomes available.

The runners up for poetry were: Mary Dalton for The Red Ledger (Signal Editions)  and Stan Dragland for Stormy Weather (Pedlar Press).

The E.J. Pratt Poetry Award went to Patrick Warner for There, there  (Signal Editions).

In the non-fiction category for the Rogers Cable Non-fiction Award, the runners up were (ninja reader and MUN professor) Peter Hart for Mick: The Real Michael Collins (Viking) and Frederick H. White for Memories and Madness: Leonid Andreev through the Prism of the Literary Portrait (Mc-Gill Queen’s University Press).

The winner was Gerhard P. Bassler for Vikings to U-Boats:The German Experience in Newfoundland and Labrador, (McGill-Queen’s University Press).

Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg are planning a Tintin trilogy. Two stories have been picked from the books, and a 20 minute test reel has been produced. Fans are waiting with baited breath to express disappointment. Perhaps a giant mechanical spider in CGI would be a good idea.

In March, Moulinsart Studios, which holds the rights to Tintin, announced that Spielberg and his company, Dreamworks, had committed to producing at least one Tintin film.

Spielberg, Dreamworks and Jackson have been quietly developing the new project, according to the industry publication Variety.

The Tintin trilogy will feature work by Jackson’s New Zealand-based special effects house, WETA Digital, which was behind the amazing effects in his acclaimed The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Jackson has already produced a 20-minute Tintin test reel using motion-capture technology, Spielberg told Variety.

“Hergé’s characters have been reborn as living beings, expressing emotion and a soul which goes far beyond anything we’ve seen to date with computer-animated characters,” he said.

Because we all know the characters couldn’t achieve this level of sophistication on anything so dull and two dimensional as the page. All good characters are lined up at the digital doorway between fiction and reality, waiting for a moment in the CGI playtent, to truly live for once.

Interviewed at the CBC.

Q: Tell me about growing up in Lahore.

A: My teens were in the Zia years. In the 1980s, Pakistan was ruled by a dictator of the name of Zia ul-Haq. He was a big American ally, got billions of dollars of American money, and his mission was to [Islamicize] Pakistan. There was an atmosphere of repression when I was growing up. There were also — because of the Afghanistan war that Pakistan was allied with the Americans on, against the Soviets in the ’80s — all these bearded men with guns that had begun to appear. There was this flood of heroin into the city. Pakistan went from no real heroin addicts to a million heroin addicts in the space of the ’80s, because heroin was used to finance the Afghan war. Similarly, there were just weapons everywhere — Kalashnikovs and automatic rifles — that filtered back into the country from Afghanistan. The blowback, it was called. [All that] really shaped my teenage years.

A new internet startup is looking to duplicate NetFlix’s success with DVDs, but for books. With a subscription-based system that ensures you will never have to leave your tinfoil-coated windows again, BookSwim will deliver to your door your top five books and so long as you keep sending them back and paying your monthly bill, will keep you in reading for ever and ever.

“We were out looking for shelving solutions for our warehouse,” said George Burke, 25.

“By that, we mean shelves,” translated Shamoon Siddiqui, 24.

Starting an Internet operation is serious business. But these graduates of the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) know better than to take themselves too seriously. Grand dreams can rise or fall over mundane details, such as shelves for a warehouse that happens to be the basement of Siddiqui’s parents’ house.

BookSwim aims to be the “Netflix of books.” Since 1998, Netflix has become the king of online DVD services by renting batches of DVDs via the mail for a fixed monthly fee, and letting subscribers keep the movies as long as they like.

That’s how BookSwim is meant to work. For $15 to $20 per month, the company will send your top five book choices. Return three books in a prepaid envelope, and your next three choices will be mailed to you.

As a followup to Monday’s what-makes-a-bestseller, we have today’s what-makes-a-surefire-bestseller-fail. If a book has all the markers of success, including positive reviews, cover stories, media saturation, and presumably, a decently written story, how can it fail?

I’ll concede the point that book review sections don’t deserve to be whacked. But why doesn’t discourse result in sales? If Mr. Ford is right, then shouldn’t smart, alert readers have been lining up to buy the Ferris novel? Something doesn’t compute.

“Frankly, your question is depressing me,” Ms. Arthur, who made a pre-emptive bid for the book in the fall of 2005, said. “The book is profitable. It’s gaining more of an audience every day, slowly. Should it have been a bestseller? Probably. I don’t know why it wasn’t.”

I don’t, either. It used to be that books had the shelf-life of a container of yogurt. Nowadays it seems more like hamburger meat. If a book doesn’t make it to the New York Times bestseller list within the first several days of arrival, it never will. Even “Heyday,” Kurt Andersen’s hugely hyped historical novel that also garnered cover-boy treatment in the Times, only lasted a couple of weeks on the list before falling away. Interestingly — and not coincidentally — much of the commercial fiction that lasts the longest on the Times’s list doesn’t get reviewed at all. Does that mean book buyers are less interested in discourse, and more interested in the latest Jodi Picoult? Apparently.

Part of the problem may be that bookstores don’t pay close enough attention to reviews. I went to look for “Then We Came to the End” at the Lincoln Square Barnes & Noble the day after the Times review, and experienced the kind of scenario that leads authors into years of costly psychotherapy. No one knew where to find it. Three clerks and 10 minutes later, I’d bought one of the store’s last three copies. At that moment it occurred to me: What if bookstores created sections devoted to that week’s best-reviewed books? Or posted positive reviews alongside the books themselves? That way, book reviews (even those that appeared only online) would be easily accessible to those most likely to buy books — people already browsing in the bookstore. Right now, bookstores place all their marketing muscle behind bestseller lists, meaning that prize positions get awarded to those who’ve already won the horse race. Even movie theaters operate according to more democratic principles than that. Shouldn’t good bookstore placement go to good books? Just a thought.

You mean, behave like an independent bookstore? How radical! I have a better idea — disband the bix bog stores and just leave people who love selling books to do it. I know it’s crazy, but I think the “love” and “dedication” angles just might work.