Hi kids, Bookninja will experience a brief (we hope) outage tomorrow as our service provider moves us to a different server. Hopefully (he says with crossed fingers knocking on wood) this will not result in problems, but will rather clear up some load issues we’ve been having. We’ve grown significantly in the last year, doubling our traffic to many thousands of visitors a day, and there are, at times, too many of you connected to the site at once, and it’s screwing with the server we’re on. So we’re hoping the move will rectifying things.  Please bear with us if you show up tomorrow and can’t see the site. It’ll be back.

Happy Canada Day to Canadians and their allied socialists everywhere.

 I’ve never met an author I didn’t like. Wait, let me rephrase that: I hate everybody. But Rachel Toor is more forgiving in this piece from the Chronicle in which she examines the phenomenon of asshole authors. (Rachel, have I got a few stories for you…)

By the time I left publishing, in the mid-90s, I had decided there were no bad books, only bad authors.

That, of course, is not true. There are plenty of bad books. But after a dozen years in the industry, the whining and whingeing of authors had worn me down: The conspiracy theories about how a publisher set out to ruin an author’s career by not sending his 15-year-old book to a small regional conference; the notion that a publisher sullied an author’s reputation by giving her a red cover; the complaint that there were not enough ads promoting the book (there were never enough ads); the indignation that we didn’t get the author reviewed in The New York Times, or booked on Oprah.

In general I adored my authors. But there were those few whose behavior suggested to me that flipping burgers or mucking out stalls would have been an easier and more pleasurable career choice. When I was an editorial assistant, I watched as one well-regarded author so managed to vex and trouble every single person at the press that by the time his book came out, no one would take his calls. Including his editor.

People go into publishing not only because they love books but because they love working with authors. Editors, in particular, are possessive: They speak of “my books,” “my authors.” It is, therefore, disconcerting and disturbing to see the disconnect in how some authors perceive publishers and how frequently writers are dissatisfied with the process. Friends in publishing think of those writers as the spawn of the devil, the evil seeds.

I asked my literary agent, Susan Arellano, what makes for a “bad” author. Susan has worked as an editor at both trade and university presses and now commands six-figure advances for academic authors. With characteristic acumen, she answered: “Bad authors are the ones who don’t know, or can’t remember, that publishing is a business.”

Also, the ones who torture and kill people in their basements. They’re bad too.

The rock novel has a history of luring unsuspecting writers to their doom. DeLillo, Rushdie, Coe, et al. All ships sunk on the sirens’ rocks. God rest their pirate souls. Yarrr.

It seems that the best pop-themed novels are those that dance nimbly around the edges of their subject, never quite getting to the microphone, or even the moshpit: books such as The Rotters’ Club, or High Fidelity, or Tom Perrotta’s The Wishbones. It is when a writer attempts to be more definitive that problems occur. How do you encapsulate the ephemeral, train-spotterish world of pop and rock without coming up with a book that is ephemeral and train-spotterish?
…
A criticism that has often been levelled at the rock novel is that, because the literati are largely upper-middle-class, they haven’t ever experienced the struggle and graft that go with dreaming of a headline slot at Glastonbury. This is almost certainly rubbish, partly because the middle class has just as much historical right to comment on rock existence as the working class, and partly because musicians are, on the whole, roughly 13½ times lazier than novelists.

I want to write an anti-rock and roll novel called “Country Folk Sing the Blues”. It would mostly be about a large redheaded fellow in a 10-gallon hat and sparkly shirt playing alt-country folk versions of Oasis tunes and getting laid by librarian barmaids.

Beth Webb examines the joys of self-publishing in her Guardian blog. After years of writing occasional verse and stories for friends and family (as gifts during penniless years or as sympathy, etc.), Webb wonders why anyone who actually enjoys writing would bother going through a major house.

Self-publication of a neatly produced, high quality (the paper is never less than 100 gram, preferably 120 gram) booklet with a smart Photoshop cover professionally folded and stapled makes a great gift, or maybe a summary of a good year at the writing group, a fundraiser for a school, or a memorial for a special person.

Why bother to go through all the heartache and hassle of fighting to get your precious memories or thoughts into mainstream publication? Your own PC, printer and digital camera are waiting to make someone’s day. If you really want to go big and produce a novel, there’s the internet or print on demand (no surplus stock there!).

Getting published by a mainstream company is great, but in all honesty, how many of us can really afford to give up the day job, even when we’ve signed that contract? Such a long, heartbreaking haul for what? The joy of writing should be just that – the writing.

I love chapbook years (ie, years in which I have a new chapbook out) because they do make awesome cheap Christmas gifts. Plus I love to see my dad’s face when he pretends to be pleased.

Apparently poet and NEA head Dana Gioia wasn’t name brand enough for the commencement of Stanford. Or so said the students back in January, citing the need for someone more politically oriented and with more name recognition. I mean, how are these poor, underpriviledged kids supposed to get a job with such a ghetto commencement address?

The surprise choice of Dana Gioia as Commencement speaker on Monday had students scratching their heads and searching Wikipedia for more information about the poet and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. As University and student leaders praised the Bush appointee, immediate reaction from the senior class was mixed.

“The fact that a lot of us don’t know who he is,” said senior Susan Rodriguez, “is not a good sign.”

I wonder how they feel now that he’s delivered his speech? I’d love a followup to this.

Is the internet killing research? My guess is that the answers to this will be sharply divided along a tweed/no-tweed border, with elbow patches and pipes at one far end of the spectrum and clever tshirt slogans and chai lattes at the t’other.

Recently I have been attempting to write a novel that I have decided should take place in a small village in Romania; nowhere else will do. Yet, I’ve never been to Romania. I also have no disposable income to pay for a trip there, nor a benevolent publisher who might cover the cost of the trip under the guise of “research”.

In days gone by, this would have caused a problem. To accurately portray a country as unfamiliar as Romania is to me, I would have had to spend weeks, months even years in libraries digging out facts about population, geography, cultural preferences, history and so forth in order to create a believable backdrop against which to set the story. I might have spoken to people from that country, or those who had visited it; maybe sampled indigenous foods, listened to music – anything to get a better feel for the place.

That process is changing. Nowadays, thanks to the internet and its many search engines writers can conduct their research at a much-accelerated pace. Chief among the millions of web resources is its most frequently-visited encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

Wikipedia means no more hours spent in dimly-lit library backrooms, shoulder deep in dusty books. Research has now been boiled down to a few hours on a laptop at a crumb-flecked table in an overpriced coffee shop.

This may not necessarily be a good thing.

Norman Mailer ponders what he has kept to himself all these years, in light of Grass’s late life Nazi confessions.

Mr. Mailer said he searched his own life to figure out why Mr. Grass didn’t speak about his experience earlier. “What have I held onto for so long?” he asked, and then answered: stabbing his second wife, Adele, in 1960. “It’s something I’ll probably never write about,” he said. “I’ve never felt ready to write about it.” Unless you can “write something that’s brilliant,” he added, you’re better off not writing about it at all.

Me, I’ve just kept that one night Bangkok to myself. It can make a hard man humble, let me tell you.

Poet and critic, dead at 86.

In the coming years everyone in Atlantic Canada will be on the idea of Elizabeth Bishop being one of us. Here Nova Scotia kicks things off with a remembrance.

Bishop spent several summers with her maternal grandparents in Great Village, maintaining a connection to the area until her death in 1979.

Last Saturday, the siblings returned to the area to participate in an official ribbon-cutting ceremony of an outdoor, historical installation depicting the story of Bishop’s life and work. The panel display, a post and beam structure designed by Halifax architect Ann-Marie Duggan, is located adjacent to Wilson’s service station. It was completed as a collaborative effort between the Great Village Historical Society and the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia, based in Halifax. ,

“I hope the community will see it as a point of pride,” says Sandra Barry, a Halifax-based scholar and a member of the Elizabeth Bishop Society, who had already spotted graduates posing for prom photographs in front of the display.

“We wanted to write large the history of Great Village, as well as give people who come here for Elizabeth Bishop, a point of reference,” she said.

I like how at one point the article refers to Bishop “growing up” there, and then later says “several summers”. In Canada, you just have to have passed through, eaten some peameal bacon and not killed anyone for the population to claim you as their own. You don’t need to immigrate, you just need to be famous and vocally admire the scenery. Presto. You’re a Canuck. Wait and see. Jack and Meg White are next. (Speaking of which, I have tickets for July 16!! I plan to be the oldest looking person there.)

Alex Good of GoodReports writes in Canadian Notes and Queries a long essay about book reviewing.

In George Orwell’s oft-quoted 1946 essay “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” he was already remarking how “the standard of reviewing has gone down.” In 1959 Elizabeth Hardwick wrote an essay on “The Decline of Book Reviewing” for Harper’s Magazine, much of which is still relevant today. But by the time of my “Defence” things seemed to be getting even worse. And in the five years since, the situation has scarcely improved. Review space has continued to shrink. Authors as various as Robert Sawyer and Philip Roth have publicly stated that book reviewing serves no purpose at all and should be done away with.[1] Every few months there are new revelations about the scandal of “reviews for hire.” Virtually illiterate columnists as far away as India have even been piling on. Like this, for example, from an essay (unironically) titled “Who Will Criticise the Critics?”:

“The book review itself cannot be missed. Either they are all-out gush or a nasal nasty. A book page is the newspaper’s cover-up of its corporate concerns with a pseudo-cultural cough. The space so sacred that nuances are martyred in the marvellous new world of cut-paste editing and the ensuing sloppy scribbles served sunny side down.”

Sheesh. I still can’t figure out that last sentence. Who will criticize the critics? One is tempted to answer “Damn near everyone.” And in particular the critics themselves.

At least they haven’t been rushing to our collective defence. Even well-qualified, responsible book reviewers have always felt their trade to be something vaguely shameful. Note Orwell’s calling his essay a “confession,” a point picked up on by Douglas Glover at the beginning of his 2003 essay “On Book Reviewing: A Recovery”: “Dear Lord, Forgive me my sins, especially my stint as a book reviewer for which I am heartily sorry.” And Philip Marchand’s introduction to his collection of essays and reviews Ripostes – “Confessions of a Book Columnist” – seeks to expiate the same sense of guilt. “At any rate,” he declares (I think a bit disingenuously), “I never asked for the job.” This from Canada’s only full-time book reviewer!

I have relatives coming in today for the next month (!), and the whales are in down the coast, so I’m going to shoot some bullet links at you and bugger off for the day — unless something really interesting and non-Paris Hilton related comes up.

• Michael Cunningham on adaptations (from Ed)
• Library drill teams  – HAWT!
• Nasty Spectator-killed Brown Diana book review gets ink the Guardian
• Kids believe what they read… wait, kids read? (You mean the universe isn’t going to explode? I better get to work then…)
• JT Leroy — does a lying scumbag author make the books any less good as fiction?
• Adichie in running for James Tait Black Prize
• Coelho’s The Alchemist headed for adaptation (Lawrence Fishburn to direct?)
• All wars, famine, pestilence and death put on hold while world waits for last Harry book, which is selling well (maybe we could see about delaying it a bit longer?)
• Mario Vargas Llosa profiled at the WSJ (thanks F)

Salon looks at the Jane Austen mania that’s feeding chicklit and seems to conclude the frenzy is over style, not substance. Huh. Really?

In 2007, it’s still Jane Austen’s world (or some mangled approximation of it); we just live in it.

How many 200-year-old authors of just half a dozen novels get this much play outside the ivy-covered walls of the academy? For that matter, despite complaints about current celebrity culture, how many scantily-clad half-wits get this much play? You can buy Austen puppets, dolls and posters, along with bumper stickers and tote bags that read “What would Jane knit?” and “Prepare yourself for something very dreadful.”

Part of what differentiates this round of Austen consumption from dozens of past infatuations is the degree to which the satiric acid of Austen’s work seems to have been drained and replaced with 100-proof, widely accessible romance.

“It’s all about the dresses,” laughed Rachel Brownstein, professor of English at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center at CUNY, when I asked her about the current bout of Jane-itis. She was only half joking. “Everybody really wants to be Jane,” she elaborated, meaning that they all want “to wear long ball gowns and go to dances and be genteel,” not that they want to live in constant financial jeopardy and die single in their early 40s.

Brownstein suggested that in addition to a frock, readers may want to borrow some perceived strength from their favorite author. Reading Austen’s books, in which bright, funny and not-always-beautiful women tend to win the day, “you get a sense that you can be sexy and self-expressive in a way that women feel they’re not allowed to be,” she said. “Jane Austen, in spite of all the constraints [of her era], is remembered as the greatest woman writer, who managed to be her unique and brilliant self. So whatever your obstacles, you can be unique and brilliant too.”

Giant of literature,  reconsidered at the Guardian. Under the Volcano is mind-blowing. Or was, when I read it about 10 years ago. Or maybe that wast the pot and late nights at the James Joyce. Not sure. I can’t really think straight anymore.

Malcolm Lowry thought of himself as a poet first. In a famous letter defending his novel to Jonathan Cape against a negative reader’s report, he pointed out his structuring of the Volcano “like a churrigueresque Mexican cathedral”:

“Poems often have to be read several times before their full meaning will reveal itself, explode in the mind, and it is precisely this poetical conception of the whole that I suggest has been, if understandably, missed.” Schopenhauer remarked: “Any book that is at all important ought to be at once read through twice; … on a second reading the connection of the different portions of the book will be better understood, and the beginning comprehended only when the end is known; and partly because we are not in the same temper and disposition on both readings.” Nothing could be said more truly of Under the Volcano than this.

The FBI has found a heretofore missing original manuscript of Pearl Buck’s Good Earth. Missing since the 60s, the pages contain handwritten annotations by Buck herself as well as additions by another, presumably later, hand — doodles of anthropomorphic be-jowled phalluses underwhich is scribbled “Nixon sux cox” and a picture of a stylized semi truck cab sporting devils horns and a grinning grill that is popping an unlikely wheelie while creating copious amounts of rubber smoke during a burnout. The caption underneath reads crypitcally, “Breaker, breaker, Keep on Truckin’”. The FBI has placed every North American 50-year-old on the list of potential suspects.

“The manuscript has been missing since at least 1966 and is considered priceless,” the FBI said in a news release yesterday. Buck, who died in 1973 in Vermont, lamented to an author about the disappearance of the original masterwork from her Bucks County home. “The devil has it!” she said.

David Bloom, Freeman’s vice president of manuscripts and books, notified the FBI this month of the discovery after determining that the manuscript had been reported stolen in the 1970s by Buck’s heirs, who suspected that an employee or someone with access to the house had taken it.

Bloom said the document contained “a large number of annotations in her hand, including changes of phrases that would be of real interest to Pearl S. Buck scholars.” The consignment also included several letters to Buck from world figures.

Bloom did not identify the consignor, but said the person appeared to have taken the manuscript in “with all innocence and good faith.”

Bloom said the FBI told him it did not plan to file criminal charges.

Goes for £9,000 at auction. In related news: in both the UK and elsewhere, children continue to starve, many of whom have never heard of Harry Potter.

Reader Glen urges us to share NEA head (and poet) Dana Gioia’s commencement address to the graduates of Stanford. He urges these fledgling adults to seek challenge along with fun in their entertainment. Hopefully not all of them were buried under iPods while texting their friends in other rows and jamming away with their thumbs on PS2s.

Everything now is entertainment. And the purpose of this omnipresent commercial entertainment is to sell us something. American culture has mostly become one vast infomercial.

I have a reccurring nightmare. I am in Rome visiting the Sistine Chapel. I look up at Michelangelo’s incomparable fresco of the “Creation of Man.” I see God stretching out his arm to touch the reclining Adam’s finger. And then I notice in the other hand Adam is holding a Diet Pepsi.

When was the last time you have seen a featured guest on David Letterman or Jay Leno who isn’t trying to sell you something? A new movie, a new TV show, a new book, or a new vote?

Don’t get me wrong. I love entertainment, and I love the free market. I have a Stanford MBA and spent 15 years in the food industry. I adore my big-screen TV. The productivity and efficiency of the free market is beyond dispute. It has created a society of unprecedented prosperity.

But we must remember that the marketplace does only one thing—it puts a price on everything.

Copies of Mr. Gioia’s books were on sale in the lobby after the address.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama fancied himself something of a poet in his day. The New Yorker examines his work with the help of one Harold Bloom, who is surprisingly gentle.

Harold Bloom, who in fifty-three years of teaching literature at Yale University has had many undergraduate poems pressed hopefully upon him said, when reached by telephone in New Haven last week, that he was not familiar with Obama’s oeuvre. But after studying the poems he said that he was not unimpressed with the young man’s efforts—at least, by the standards established by other would-be bards within the political sphere. “At eighteen, as an undergraduate, he was already a much better poet than our former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, who keeps publishing terrible poetry,” Bloom said. (Cohen has published two collections of verse: “Of Sons and Seasons,” in 1978, and “A Baker’s Nickel,” in 1986.) “And then there is Jimmy Carter, who is in my judgment literally the worst poet in the United States.” (Carter’s first volume of poetry, “Always a Reckoning and Other Poems,” which was published in 1994, included a work called “Why We Get Cheaper Tires from Liberia”: “No churches can be built / no privy holes or even graves / dug in the rolling hills / for those milking Firestone’s trees, who die / from mamba and mosquito bites.”)

He already had my vote before this, but now he’s in like Flynn.

Maud points to an interesting article that highlights the cracks in the supposedly impartial treatment media gives to research. For instance, studies supporting anti-feminist positions receive far more attention than those that support independence and equity for women (which are quite often ignored).

Now what could possibly explain the difference in the media treatment these two studies got? As Caryl Rivers speculates in her new book, Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women, could it just be that studies that appear to support traditional roles for women tend to get picked for instant popularization?

This phenomenon doesn’t just apply to studies about daycare with the potential to guilt-trip working mothers. Rush Limbaugh, also in March, cheerfully reported the results of a Swedish study that seemed to show a correlation between poor health and a more gender-equal distribution of societal resources. That same study was picked up by the British Independent.

The popularized message was that feminism makes you sick.

Neither Mr. Limbaugh nor the Independent paid any attention to an earlier study by the same researchers showing the reverse. They also ignored other studies finding a positive correlation between greater gender equality and better overall health.

Sigh.

And I don’t mean by getting them on the couch to talk about their need to conduct their lives in public, but rather looking at the “effect” named for their chat-show book club.

The receivers of Richard and Judy’s blessing have certainly been winners. Between 2004 and 2006, according to The Bookseller, the Book Club selections sold a total of nearly 12m copies, worth some £67m. Books such as Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth and Victoria Hislop’s The Island have been unmissable presences in bookshops: in the windows, on the front tables, in three-for-two promotions. It follows, naturally, that there are other books that have not achieved such success. Some books sell a lot of copies, and others sell a few: Richard and Judy did not invent that tough law of commerce.

They may, though, have exaggerated the effects of that law. Publishers and booksellers concentrate their marketing efforts on the books that are likely to generate the most turnover; increasingly, the rest are left to fend for themselves. The trend in the book market is for the haves to get richer, and for the have-nots to get poorer. Should Richard and Judy, some bookish types wonder, exert such influence over writers’ fortunes? The question arises not only from snobbery, but from unease that such life-changing selections are the responsibility of a small team, led by Amanda Ross at Richard and Judy’s production company, Cactus. “There is a sense that it [the selection process] is very much about corporate dealing,” James Robertson told the Herald.

Sam Jordison weighs in on the subject of what happens to place between books and reality. I felt just this way when I first visited Hogwarts. No ghosts, no giants. Just sallow, pasty children in knickered uniforms without a hint of magic or exceptional personality. You can beat them up easy as pie and they can’t change you into anything. Pffft. Nerds.

When you’re looking for the perfect match between literature and location, satisfaction is not always guaranteed. Places change after writers describe them, often for the worse, sometimes for the better (I’m going to Cannery Row next week and expect that things are going to be much more cheerful there than in Steinbeck’s day). And it’s part of the job for writers to use considerable poetic license when describing location. It’s foolish and naive to expect places to be exactly as they are in the books we love.

Full disclosure: Now, the police are claiming this wasn’t JK Rowling’s “Hogwarts”, per se, but rather the local playground. I, on the other hand, say that’s for the courts to decide.

In Russia, pen writes you! But seriously. Putin and/or his allied assassins will kill you if you speak against them. Here in the lands of George W. Bush (the less charismatic, one-eight-as-intelligent, noodly-armed, faux-cowboy-toughguy, combat-duty-avoiding, non-Judo-ass-kicking Putin) we just ruin your life economically, socially, and ensure you never work in a national market again.

Since Russia enshrined freedom of speech as a constitutional right in 1993, a total of 152 journalists have been murdered there. A database set up this month by two media monitoring organisations, the Glasnost Defense Foundation and the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, sets out the details of each case. Yelena Tregubova is trying hard not to be the 153rd.

“I am not going to keep silent, because if I do, they will kill me silently,” Tregubova declares. “I am in a privileged position because I can speak freely. Many of the colleagues I left behind in Moscow think as I do about what is happening, but they can’t speak up. I don’t have nuclear weapons, I don’t have an organisation like the KGB behind me. Journalism is my only weapon.”

But forget about oil-less places like Russia and North Korea. We need to concentrate on the smoldering rubble heaps we’ve invested so much in — Iraq and Afganistan (the war that everyone except Canada has forgotten about). See, what we’re fighting here isn’t nuclear ambition and totalitarianism anymore. That’s so 1982. That’s so Reagan. What we fighting is a war to ensure the wealthy get wealthier and the rest of the world remains oppressed by Western consumerism. So its perfectly fine for Russia and NK to go about their business of rattling sabres while eroding what freedoms reamain, assassinating opposition and quietly aiming weapons at the rest of the world. So long as the oil money keeps flowing. There. That oughtta draw out a few of the crazies in the comments.

The British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction has just had it’s purse value substantially increased. Speaking of valuable non-fiction writers, I just received a hard cover copy of Karen Connelly’s latest edition of The Lizard Cage. Can’t wait to cut into it.

I think I said somewhere recently something like, there are only so many times you can shill your own book on a site like Bookninja before you lose credibility. Hopefully this does not constitute the last of these times.

I got a very nice review in the Globe and Mail on Saturday and I’m hoping it will convince to you order the book at your local independent or buy it outright through something like Amazon.com or Amazon.ca, whichever you’re closer to free shipping in. If that’s not enough, what about a review from The Independent? Okay, what about this interview? Okay, then what about this one? Wait, that’s not about the book. Bookninja is coming up on four years old in August. I feel old, Frodo. Stretched thin. Buy my book and make me feel young again.

It’s actually a holiday here, so I’m going to sum up with some remainders and get back to gardening. They have more holidays here than you can shake a stick at. I think in July there’s actually something like three long weekends in a row. One wonders how they keep coming up with events deserving of a stat holiday. Then one just looks at the weather. Today is something like “It’s Summer So Get Outside for Your Vitamin-D Day”.

• Rushdie updates — Bhutto supports, Pakistan condemns
• PKD’s unlikely Library of America title examined
• Farming books growing
• JCCs, Jewish book festivals and Jewish authors
• Günter Grass interviewed at the Guardian
• Maeve Binchy asks the question we all want to know the answer to: why does she write?
• Brontë birthhouse up for sale
• UK needs more Pride
• The joy of middlebrow (note, this doesn’t include uni-brow)
• How to get rid of your books

An author/artist in the UK is rejected for being too artsy and then pursued by those same companies when his book is published to acclaim by a small press. Indies are what saves literature’s place in the world of “art”.

Art people are literate. When Margarita Gluzberg, who recently exhibited to much praise at the Paradise Row gallery, describes the thought behind her drawings, she turns to Madame Bovary. Rut Blees Luxemburg, discussing her photographs hanging in Tate Modern, talks about Hölderlin. I know at least two artists who have done work based on Huysmans’s Against Nature, and countless others whose images grapple with the labyrinthine architecture of Robbe-Grillet’s novels. The art world, it seems, is the place not just where literature is understood, but also where it is creatively developed, carried forward.

This paradox played out for me directly. By the time I did my ICA cut-up project, I’d finished writing my novel Remainder. But no mainstream press would touch it, deeming it “too literary”. Eventually the art publisher Metronome Press distributed a limited edition through art venues; the literary press picked up on it; then the editor-in-chief at Vintage in New York decided to do a mass-market US edition – at which point a couple of the mainstream British publishers who had rejected it changed their minds and started making offers. Unimpressed, I let a good, new independent, Alma Books, do the mass-market UK edition – a publisher that, maybe not coincidentally, also prints books by and about artists.

None of this is new, perhaps. Literature and art have always looked to one another when they want to reinvigorate themselves. Surrealism developed through an extended dialogue between the two forms. Futurism did the same, and the fallout from its image-derived concrete poetry on these shores led to Vorticism, which in turn, through Pound and Eliot, shaped modern poetry.

Nowadays, though, the traffic seems to flow one way only. While artists and curators still draw inspiration from writers, publishing has dumbed itself down. Marketing departments, not editors, rule the roost.

Sigh. This is all so true it hurts.

Kudos to all US librarians who stand up to the McCarthy-esque bullshit going on down there to this day. When they come in the night, it’s the book people they take first.

Life in an FBI muzzle is no fun. Two Connecticut librarians on Sunday described what it was like to be slapped with an FBI national security letter and accompanying gag order. It sounded like a spy movie or, gulp, something that happens under a repressive foreign government. Peter Chase and Barbara Bailey, librarians in Plainville, Connecticut, received an NSL to turn over computer records in their library on July 13, 2005. Unlike a suspected thousands of other people around the country, Chase, Bailey and two of their colleagues stood up to the Man and refused to comply, convinced that the feds had no right to intrude on anyone’s privacy without a court order (NSLs don’t require a judge’s approval). That’s when things turned ugly.

The four librarians under the gag order weren’t allowed to talk to each other by phone. So they e-mailed. Later, they weren’t allowed to e-mail.

After the ACLU took on the case and it went to court in Bridgeport, the librarians were not allowed to attend their own hearing. Instead, they had to watch it on closed circuit TV from a locked courtroom in Hartford, 60 miles away. “Our presence in the courtroom was declared a threat to national security,” Chase said.

Profiled at the CBC.

BEHOLD! The Espresso book machine! Tremble! Quake! Bow low before your new master! The world as you know it has officially changed.

Beginning July 2, the New York Public Library will operate a 1,660-pound, Internet-connected book- making gizmo that can deliver a 200-page paperback in six to eight minutes — although mine took 12.

Through the Web, the “Espresso Book Machine,” from New York-based On Demand Books LLC, has access to 200,000 titles in the public domain — that is, books that aren’t protected by copyright.

On Demand is trying to secure arrangements with publishers so its 8-foot-long machines eventually can print and sell virtually any book published.

“It’s kind of a funny-looking revolution,” co-founder Dane Neller said yesterday at the NYPL’s Science, Industry and Business Library on East 34th Street. The machine will be displayed there until Sept. 7. “But it is a revolution.”

A funny-looking revolution. It’s just like that time John and Yoko got naked in Montreal.

A jury finds literary hoaxer Laura Albert guilty of fraud.

Ms. Albert, 41, was found by the jury in Federal District Court to have strayed beyond the normal limits of pseudonymous invention, in part by signing a movie contract using her nom de plume. After the verdict was announced, she stood with friends in the courtroom, saying she had somehow known hours before that the jury’s decision would not fall her way.

“I knew it this morning,” Ms. Albert said, wearing at her neck a tiny typewriter pendant with a legend that read “Write Hard, Die Free.” “I already went through it.”

Bookninja cuts straight to the heart of this whole matter with the following commentary: CUCKOO! CUCKOO! WOOP WOOP WOOP!

Michael Winter plans to serialize his new novel on Facebook. Time to sign up, if you haven’t already.

Publisher Penguin Canada announced the plan as the world’s first Facebook novel serialization.

Winter plans 47 posts over the next 10 weeks, including commentary, notes, and visuals to accompany the novel.

The novel features the character Gabriel English, who figures in Winter’s earlier novels This All Happened and One Last Good Look.

We can’t be sure this is the first serialization on Facebook, but we can be relatively sure it’s the first by someone who isn’t 14.

Guantanamo Bay prisoners release book of poems, at least 40% of which include the phrases “WHAT THE FUCK?” and”PLEASE TELL SOMEONE I’M IN HERE!”

An 84-page anthology entitled Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak, is to be published in August by the University of Iowa Press.

Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky has written a few words for the cover of the book, saying the prisoners’ voices deserved attention, although not necessarily admiration.

Their voices are sometimes angry and tormented, sometimes resigned and spiritual.

Afghan prisoner Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, who has since been released, told his lawyer that writing poetry kept him from losing his sanity.

Oh, so you have to be in prison for it to keep you sane. I’ve been doing this all ass-backward.

A new trend in publishing: sex manuals for people who don’t have time to Just Do It.

The Kama Sutra could blithely assume a readership with sufficient time and resources to allow installation of the rope-and-pulley system required to lower a woman into the Crippled Starfish on a Spike position. But times have, alas, changed. The latest fashion in publishing, spreading faster than chlamydia at a mixed comprehensive, is for sex manuals aimed at people who don’t have time to Do It any more.

According to the likes of Urban Tantra, Mating in Captivity and Quickies: Sex for Busy People, the pressures of modern living are taking their toll on our willingness and ability to bump uglies, and we need to find new ways to combat our sexual anomie. But of course, who has time to read an entire book to find out how? Fortunately, the Guardian can offer you 10 top tips, distilled from the latest publications.

Crippled Starfish on a Spike? Yeesh. Sounds sexy. I must have missed that one.

Torches and pitchforks. And not over the quality of the prose. Straight out of Pirandello.

Lussaud is a tiny hamlet of 25 inhabitants with old stone cottages perched at an altitude of 1,000 metres, in a landscape framed by the ancient volcanoes of central France. Jourde’s father was born and buried there; his ancestors had houses and a family farm, and the writer spent long periods there in his holiday home.

In 2003, he published Pays Perdu, (Lost Land), a novel recounting the reality of life in this bleak and under-populated area he likened to Outer Mongolia. He described a place where the gods were called “Alcohol, Winter, Shit and Solitude”; where having one tooth was a status symbol akin to wearing a monocle and where an old lady let dead dogs decay in her bed, tucking herself up beside them every night.

Paris’s literary critics seized on it as a fascinating warts-and-all depiction of La France Profonde. But villagers thought differently. The owner of the nearest shop, “which sells everything, from cheese to underpants”, propped a few copies near the till. It took a while for the reaction.

And then, you know, they attacked him.

Short stories, says one Guardian blogger, don’t belong in short story collections. They’re best when found on there own, shivering in the cold hinterlands of a magazine.

Blame my gnat-like attention span if you like, but I don’t believe that short stories belong in collections. Bundling them together in volumes is convenient for publishers because they can treat them more or less like novels, but it doesn’t do much for the fictions themselves, especially if there’s only one author involved. It’s too easy to see common themes and distinctions get lost in the crowd. A short story works best published in a magazine or newspaper, where it can stand alone in contrast to the writing around it; putting them in collections is a waste.

I don’t know about this. I don’t usually read collections of short stories from cover to cover anyway. I cherry pick and abandon and return several times over several months. It’s true that it’s only the very occasional collection that ropes me in to read straight through, but I don’t know that they’re meant to be read that way anyway.

Why are scraggly trees covering thrillers these days? I was just speaking about this last night with my publisher who’s in town for a visit. He said he’d put a tree on a cover but with the font choice it looked too much like a thriller, so he had to change it.

Following the initial breakthrough of John Grisham’s best-selling legal thrillers, it felt as if every crime book cover sported a gavel, a pair of scales and a statue of justice (plus or minus a dagger or a letter opener). Today, for reasons I cannot fathom, trees are in. Could it be that some designer a few years back had a traumatic and formative experience in his childhood and still wets his bed following recurring nightmares involving menacing trees whose branches sway in the breeze and now believes we all suffer from the same affliction?

A hacker claims to have broken into Bloomsbury’s computers and has posted the end of the new Harry on line in order to “to make reading of the upcoming book useless and boring.” Oh. You make my job here too easy. In fact, I can’t even do it. I can’t possibly go there. It would be lowering myself.

Rowling is to take part in a marathon overnight autograph session in London to celebrate the publication of the final book.

The author will read from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at the Natural History Museum at midnight on 21 July.

She will then meet 1,700 fans and sign their copies of the book in a session that is expected to last until dawn.

The fans will be chosen in a ballot.

The luckiest fans will be drowned in a vat of chocolate and will be mounted, a chocolate statue frozen in a horrified death pose, on Rowling’s mantel. Easter bunnies will be arranged around this one lucky individual so it appears they are devouring him or her alive.

The Carnegie Medal, very much cherished among children’s writers, were handed out with Meg Rosoff (a regular blogger at the Guardian, might I add) taking the cake. Almost overshadowing her win, however, is Philip Pullman winning the Carnegie of Carnegies, topping the list of Medal winners for the last 70 years with Northern Lights (The Golden Compass).

• Author Sid Tafler created a short funny video to promote his new book
• Robert Heinlein book completed by Spider Robinson…
• Literary football
• A positive response from a literary agent

The celebrity gossip site TMZ is under scrutiny as the Goldman family urges charges against them for posting the manuscript of OJ’s If I Did It. TMZ were dirtbags before this, but mostly in a greasy paparazzi fashion. This is a new level of low in the battle for traffic. A slimy, free murderer, a family of professional law suit holders, and a greedy gossip site. Who’s going to join this little drama next season in order to boost ratings? Paula Abdul?

The family of murder victim Ron Goldman is urging contempt charges against gossip website TMZ.com after it posted a manuscript of O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It.

The manuscript was posted for about 10 minutes on Tuesday, lawyers for the website have said.

On Wednesday, excerpts from the book are still on the website as part of a news story.

At an emergency hearing in Miami, U.S. bankruptcy Judge A. Jay Cristol heard from lawyer’s for Goldman’s family requesting the contempt citation.

All 11-year-olds in the UK will get a free book from a list of twelve in an effort to keep them reading between middle- and high school (when they have the love of reading beaten out of them with a bludgeon called the “content quiz”). One book should about do it. That ought to hold them until they’re 18 and then can take up reading the paper instead.

The choice of books was made by a panel of experts, including booksellers, librarians, teachers and journalists, and aims to represent a diverse mix of levels and styles. The omission of the current crop of big name children’s writers such as JK Rowling, Philip Pullman and Jacqueline Wilson is a deliberate attempt to encourage the year seven readers to try something new. Authors on the new list include Philip Reeve, Malorie Blackman and Eva Ibbotson.

According to Booktrust, the charity that runs the scheme, “secondary school children are less likely to find reading difficult than they did 10 years ago but their enjoyment of reading has declined rapidly – one in four children now say they find it boring.”

What is it? The recycled Harry Potter stories making stabs at money at the expense of your little minds? Tell us! We’ll do whatever it takes to continue pillaging your fragile demographic… Uh… And by that I of course mean, furthering your education and enjoyment.

London book festival gets “cheeky” blogger-run fringe.

It may seem a little cheeky but the organisers are adamant that, more than anything else, they want to celebrate London’s multitude of scenes. “We’re not trying to take over or ruin the LLF,” James Bridle, of the litblog Booktwo.org explained. “We just want to highlight all the other literary activity going on around us, all the time, that often falls beneath the radar: the small, the cheap, the marginalised, the suburban, the passionate and the personal.”

Literary-hoaxer Laura Albert is defending herself in court by claiming that her JT Leroy personality, which she sold to the world as a very real figure, was at least real to her. She should have just written her own life down. It would have been just as fucked up and only half as much a lie. After faking an AIDS narrative for personal gain, I can’t help but feel she’s abusing a whole other range of marginalized people with her claims of abuse and mental disorder. I have no doubt abuse and mental disorders are involved here, I just think they’re probably not the ones she’s trying to use as heartstrings designed for tugging.

The woman who penned a fictional “autobiography” about a male truck-stop prostitute defended her actions in court Wednesday, saying the story she presented was real to her.

San Francisco writer Laura Albert, who wrote under the pseudonym JT LeRoy, is being sued by a film producer who bought the rights to her book, Sarah.

Albert said she had assumed male identities since childhood and the boy she described in the book was real because he was inside her.

“It was my respirator,” she told a jury in U.S. District Court in New York. “If you take JT, you take my other and I die.”

Albert kept her identity secret while giving interviews about the book under the name JT LeRoy.

Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, president of Antidote International Films, is suing Albert for $110,000 US, saying he did not know the JT LeRoy character was imaginary until 2006, six years after the book was published.

Vincent Lam and Michael Redhill lead the pack of shortlistees for the Toronto Book Award. I’m pleased to see Redhill there, but even moreso to see Souster, Toronto’s unofficial poet-laureate for the last umpteen thousand years. Winners are judged on reflecting the spirit of Toronto, which is said to be kept in a jar on a Bay Street CEO’s desk and released for a day once a year when the wading pools open.

Rudy Weibe, accepting his $25G cheque for winning the Alberta Provincial Meat Catalogue Publishers’ Ho-down, Rib-cook and Write-off (aka the Grant MacEwan Author’s Award), says the government should support writers more. Ooops. I did it again. I kid, but his point is well-taken, people.

Edmonton writer Rudy Wiebe won Alberta’s richest literary prize Tuesday and used the occasion to appeal for greater provincial government support for culture.

“The reason that we know about the Greeks and the Jewish people and their world, long before the birth of Christ, is because their societies fostered great writers,” Wiebe told a sparse gathering at the Royal Alberta Museum during the presentation of the Grant MacEwan Literary Awards.

“If we want to build an outstanding and memorable society in Alberta, we need to support our writers so that they can tell our stories.”

Now before all you globally warming cowpokes get your chaps twisted up over a joke, let me just say that Ontario as tight as a yuppie’s bunghole, Saskatchewan was made flat so the bored people in Manitoba would have a view, Quebec is what happens when cigarettes and acid wash jeans don’t go out of style, BC’s picturesque mountains aren’t snow-capped and ringed with clouds but rather covered in syringes and ringed with pot smoke, and if Newfoundland gets any wetter and colder I’m going to grow gills and just jump the fuck into the ocean and get it over with. Oh yes, New Brunswick is a rejected US state, Nova Scotia only remains in the collective consciousness because of a bank, PEI is the perinium of Canada, and all six people in the Yukon and NWT are only there because they licked the permafrost and have been yelling “A yittew hep!” since 1966. And Nunavut. Don’t even get me started. Oh, wait. I’m done. (P.S. I love you all.)

Angelina Jolie’s handlers, out of tranquilizer darts and foreign children to placate the beast, and with the lock on her cage nearing its shearing force limit from repeated shoulder rams against the bars, have tried to get celebrity journos and mags to sign a contract declaring they’ll refrain from saying bad things about her and will stick to writing obsequious trailer sysnopses. Besides issues of censorship, writes Ron Rosenbaum, the question is, what celebrity journalist isn’t already doing just this?

But the joke of it all—the Angelina Jolie contract and the revolt against the contract—was that anyone was foolish enough to think a written contract was really necessary. When was the last time you read a celebrity profile that was “disparaging, demeaning or derogatory”?

The rules of the game, as established by the glossy magazines and the stars’ PR reps, ensure that “access” (well, a half-hour chat in a restaurant that enables the magazine to proclaim it has an “exclusive” interview) and the all-important exclusive cover shot are granted only to those magazines and journalists who will refrain from anything but fawning prose. It works out well for everybody. Celebrity journalists who play along get a good payday, magazines get newsstand sales bumps, and the rest of us are inculcated into the received myths of Celebland, the legends that sustain the illusion that it is somehow truly important.

Sure, it’s possible to publish a rant on the Web (as U.K. journalist Brendan O’Neill did in a devastating piece calling Brad and Angelina “celebrity colonialists“), but such critiques are largely irrelevant to the vast, well-oiled, pap-dispensing Publicity-Industrial Complex

Of course, you won’t see a reprint of this article appearing in Esquire.

Aaron Tucker of Inknoire writes in the Danforth Review on reviewing’s symbiotic relationship with the text.

the book critic’s task as well, to alternate within the body of a text, to scrutinize the limbs of plot and characters alongside the incisions of phrase and metaphor. If the book is an organism then the reviewer’s role is to asses and diagnose. Robert Maxwell in his introduction to Sweet Disorder and the Carefully Careless takes this further, defining the critic’s job as “helping to explain [a specific work], to give it meaning and hence to aid the assimilation of that work into society, and into culture”. Yet there remains two general modes of thinking surrounding the book critique: the review is the only way to spread the word of the work, is the exhaling breath of public discussion necessary before the inhale of reading; or the review is nothing, is the opinion of a self-involved failed writer rushing through the last twenty pages before deadline which is ultimately crafted into a too quick summary. George Murray of the successful Bookninja  literary website went so far as to call reviews “the cage-liner of the literary world.”

But both the positive and negative takes on the book critique exist mainly because the value of a “good review” is misplaced onto the end opinion of the critic. The “I” evaluating becomes larger than the actual work discussed. The critic’s preferred genres or styles of writing guide whether the book is appreciated and the review runs the very real risk of turning into a publicized diary entry. The idea of whether a critic liked or disliked a book is relatively unimportant; the book critique does not exist to reaffirm aesthetics (that’s what blogs are for). What is essential however, is a discussion of what the work is attempting to do and how well it succeeds. This means subverting the ego, turning away from the “I” on the reviewer’s behalf, and a refocusing on critical engagement with the text on its own terms.

I said that? Heh, heh. Well, um. Well, yes, that’s true… Except when the reviews are mine or are about me and good. Then they’re documents of earth-shaking importance. (I do say a lot of things, don’t I? You trying firing off ten witty and semi-witty posts a day at 6am without saying something that will come back to haunt you. Take that Margaret Laurence crack from yesterday that you may have cringed at, but declined to comment on. I’m sure I’ll get my ass kicked next time I’m in Manawaka.)

A NYT bestselling writer of erotica profiled at CNN.

More than 2.7 million copies of her books are in print, she’s a mainstay on the Essence magazine list of best sellers, and two titles, “Afterburn” and the anthology “Love Is Never Painless,” were New York Times best sellers.

The next frontier for the author: movies and television. She has approved a script for “Addicted,” an adaptation of her biggest-selling novel, about a woman who seeks counseling for sex addiction. She’s negotiating a deal to turn a collection of stories, “The Sex Chronicles,” into a cable-TV miniseries.

She’s also a publisher who runs Strebor Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster with more than 50 authors, many of whom get a sales boost from their association with Zane.

Not bad for someone who never planned to be a writer. Zane, the daughter of a theologian and an elementary school teacher, graduated from Howard University in Washington, D.C., with a degree in chemical engineering.

“Whenever I had creative writing assignments and stuff in school, the teachers would almost be shocked at what I turned in because it would be so far-fetched and so imaginative,” Zane says. “Most of my teachers told me I should be a writer, but I just never took it seriously until I got bored enough to do it.”

Exaaaaaactly.

The pejorative plural noun. Eat the rich? Yes, let’s eat the rich. (From Maud)

Jeet Heer on the worth of Canadian comic books and comic book heroes. This is the most interesting article I’ve ever seen in the LRC. (Full disclosure: my vehement apathy towards the LRC stems from my days there as Poetry Editor when it seemed like every meeting was an exercise in how to make things MORE boring. Now it seems to be getting better, though, with some good poetry and the occasional interesting piece in among the political chat pieces and academic froofraw.)

Superhero comic books, although they base their psychological appeal on childhood power fantasies, are almost always nationalist allegories. Just as in the Middle Ages the king’s body was a microcosm for the nation he ruled, so in modern times the superhero’s mighty strength is an embodiment of national will. Johnny Canuck spoke to the self-flattering belief that Canada’s efforts were crucial for defeating Hitler.

The link between superheroes and nationalism is one lesson that can be gleaned from John Bell’s Invaders from the North: How Canada Conquered the Comic Book Universe. Despite its bombastic title, Bell’s book is, at least in the chapters dealing with the superhero genre, a chronicle of failure. Bell speaks of “the somewhat quixotic search for distinctly Canadian superheroes.” “Quixotic” is le mot juste. No Canadian superhero has ever been successful for a sustained period or left a mark on the popular imagination, although there have been many rolls of the dice.

Time after time, Canadian publishers conjured up superheroes that supposedly embodied the national spirit. Aside from Johnny Canuck, there is Nelvana of the Northern Lights (a white goddess in a mini-dress who protected the Arctic from “Kablunets, Nazi allies armed with Thormite Rays”), Captain Jack (an all-round athlete who battled Nazi saboteurs), Northern Light (a science fiction hero whose enemies were space aliens), Captain Canuck (who also fought space monsters as well as complex international banking conspiracies) and the similarly monikered Captain Canada (originally known as Captain Newfoundland, he defended the royal family from giant Japanese robots).

All these characters have their goofy charm, but let’s face reality: none of them is a superhero of the first rank. They are not fit to hold the cape of Superman or Batman. They don’t even have what it takes to be a sidekick to Wonder Woman or Captain America. Creating a Canadian superhero is rather like growing bananas in Nunavut. With enough ingenuity and willpower you can do it, but is it worth doing?

It strikes me that the answer to this question is the same as the answer to the question about Canadian television. Five years ago the answer would have been, “No”. Now, there’s Trailer Park Boys and Corner Gas. So you just have to bear with us while we grow our popular culture into the 20th century.

The Lord of the Rings musical reopens in London this week after undergoing cuts to make it watchable, and presumably some technical changes to make sure no one gets caught in the transforming robot of a set. (Speaking of which, I am reading Children of Hurin now… It’s zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz huh, what? Oh, yes, it’s quite well-wrizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzen, snuh? Buh? Oh, as I was saying, I’m totally engag-zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz… snerf. Mer? Huh? zzzzzz But Mom! zzzzzzz my pants are too short! zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, ack, caugh, hrumf? Oh. Yes. I love the pictures.)