America’s army of zombie novelists grows ever stronger. Robert Ludlum now riseth from the grave to stalk the world of the living for “brains” of his fans. Apparently he’s still apprenticing to VC Andrews, but soon he’ll move up to Zombie Crew Chief and that’s where the real pay will start to roll in, baby.

Twelve Ludlum books have been released since his death, with a 13th due out in September. The business is deployed now as a kind of film studio, presenting books completed by others or new ones written using his name.

Since early 2006 there have been three alone: “Robert Ludlum’s The Moscow Vector,” the sixth in the “Covert-One” series of paperback originals; “The Bancroft Strategy,” and “Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Betrayal,” by Eric Van Lustbader.

Mr. Ludlum did not want to be forgotten or leave behind only an enormous backlist that started with “The Scarlatti Inheritance” in 1971. He had little reason to worry: he is now a brand extended far into his afterlife.

“This goes back to 1990 or ’91 when Bob had quadruple bypass,” said Henry Morrison, the agent for Mr. Ludlum. “One day we were talking about what would happen when he was gone. He said, ‘I don’t want my name to disappear. I’ve spent 30 years writing books and building an audience.’ ”

His estate has borrowed from the examples of V.C. Andrews, dead since 1986 but selling well thanks to novels in her name written by an uncredited author; Ernest Hemingway, whose estates issued several books after his suicide; and Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler (both quite alive) who diverted from their skin of solo thrillers to create series written in conjunction with, or solely by, others.

Pure class, the living ones.  Imagine, Tom, you’re in the company of other brand greats like Piers Anthony and P. Diddy. That must be the real thriller.

I have to say, when I used to work as a bookseller (but we just called ourselves “clerks” back then), I was always surprised that the schlock series readers (ie, Steel, Clancy, Ludlum, etc.) could never seem to find the books. People would come up and say, “Where do you keep the Robert Ludlum?” Some days I would say, “Um, have you looked under, say, ‘L’?” and others I would say, “In a special titanium vault in the back of the store. Do you have the code to open it? Then, I’m sorry.” And I’m sure more than half of my anecdotes about people walking in and saying, “I’m looking for a book… I can’t remember the author or title, but I know it’s blue…” could probably have been solved by just sizing up the customer on gender lines and then pointing them towards Ludlum or Steel.

Nan Talese says the only person involved in the Frey scandal who owes an apology is Oprah, for stoning Frey in public on her show.

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Um…

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(I suspect Nan Talese has mister Frey confused with the little people who live in her briefcase — the ones with spiral pupils in their eyes, and those fancy red hats, who dance and sing on rainbows and shit gumdrops…)

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Now. People. You know how I feel about Orpah. I think she’s an overbearing ego- and money making- machine with no redeeming value. But. Come. On. This just can’t be right. She must have been misquoted. I agree Oprah was engaged in foul-mannered ass-covering, but…

An interesting piece on black SF and the challenges faced by authors and fans. It’s funny, I was just talking about this the other day, and I could have seriously used this article in my argument. Mental note: postpone all arguments for four days.

In the last decade, sci-fi/fantasy fans of color have begun creating their own communities. These spaces are necessary in a world where they stand out as geeks among blacks, and as “the other” in the speculative-fiction world. There are conferences such as 2004’s “Black to the Future: A Black Science Fiction Festival” in Seattle, and Web communities such as SciFiNoir (groups.yahoo.com/group/scifi noir2), the Carl Brandon Society (carlbrandon.org), and Afrofuturism (afrofuturism.net). The books “Dark Matter” and “Visions of the Third Millennium” show that the black contribution to science fiction goes beyond the well-known names of Delany and Butler. M. Asli Dukan is finishing a documentary about this unique community called “Invisible Universe: A History of Blackness in Speculative Fiction.”

“It’s tiny,” says Nalo Hopkinson, 46, from her Toronto home, of the black sci-fi community. “And it’s happening in an environment in which, particularly in the US, to talk about race is to be seen as racist. You become the problem because you bring up the problem. So you find people who are hesitant to talk about it.”

It’s also complicated. In his essay in “Dark Matter” titled “Racism and Science Fiction,” Delany writes about how race constricts black writers. He describes being paired with Hopkinson during a book signing at Readercon in 1998, and how grouping blacks together can affect how they’re perceived. “One of [racism's] strongest manifestations is as a socio-visual system in which people become used to always seeing blacks with other blacks and so — because people are used to it — being uncomfortable whenever they see blacks mixed in, at whatever proportion, with whites,” he wrote.

Good writing often contains something that will offend someone. One hopes, at least. Teen books are a special case because, from the parents’ point of view, it’s a pivotal time that needs to be finessed with a certain amount delicacy. For the kids, however, it’s a raunchy, hardscrabble time that when reflected properly in fiction can be quite compelling.

Superb writing is being done for teenagers these days, but praiseworthy books often contain scenes that raise a protective adult’s hackles. During a Vancouver panel discussion of censorship of young-adult literature, Ken Setterington gave Chris Crutcher’s 1989 novel, Chinese Handcuffs, as an example.

In it, a teenage boy is lifted out of his wheelchair and forced to participate in a gang rape. Afterward, he can’t live with what has happened and shoots himself dead. That is, as they say, gritty. But look on Amazon.ca and you’ll see that the novel has a 41/2-star (out of five) approval rating, with some of the warmest reviews coming from kids.

Setterington, the Toronto Public Library’s child and youth advocate, said the original publisher of Chinese Handcuffs was one known for its children’s books, so librarians mistakenly shelved it in the children’s department. Later, “we moved it to YA (young-adult). I don’t consider that censorship.”

The Rum Diary is coming to the big screen, with Johnny Depp in the lead role. Thompson fans everywhere literally ooze excitement and fear.

David Orr on the difficulties encountered in a new Zbigniew Herbert collected in translation.

It’s easy to say which nation has the fastest trains (France) or the largest number of prime ministers who’ve probably been eaten by sharks (Australia), but it’s impossible to know which country has the best writers, let alone the best poets. Even so, if cash money were on the line, you’d find few critics willing to bet against Poland. Since 1980, the Poles have two Nobel Prize-winning poets, 34 pages in the “Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry” (11 better than France, a country with 25 million more people) and enough top-flight artists to populate dozens of American creative writing departments, probably improving many of them in the process. The 19th-century Polish poet Cyprian Norwid said he wanted to see “Polish symbols loom / in warm expanding series which reveal / Once and for all the Poland that is real” — for decades now, those symbols and that reality have been hard to ignore.

Of course, for most of us, discovering “the Poland that is real” means reading works translated from Polish.
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So if translation is always a matter of approximating, does it matter that Herbert’s “Collected Poems” has its weaknesses? Well, yes: after death, a translated poet may, as Auden said, become his admirers, but only after he’s become a poet in English who’s interesting enough to attract admirers in the first place.

Literacy tied to longer life! I just KNEW there was a way to offset all this booze I’ve been drinking. Roll out the barrel, my friend.

Older people who lack “health literacy” — that is, they cannot read and understand basic medical information — may be paying a high price. A new study finds that they appear to have a higher mortality rate than more-literate patients.

As the authors note, education levels have long appeared to play a role in longevity: one study found that people who did not graduate from high school lived an average of nine years less than graduates.

The explanation, researchers have suggested, may be that better education tends to result in better jobs, housing, food and health care.

But, writing in the July 23 Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers say that one particular characteristic of a poor education, low reading skills, may alone account for much of the problem. The study was led by Dr. David W. Baker of the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University.

But what about reading interests…. That I’d like to see. For instance, do Harlequin and/or Mills & Boon junkies die sooner from lung disease incurred through life long Players Light smoking and hanging out in laundrettes where the air is filled with floating dryer fibres? Do chicklit readers die earlier of skin cancer brought on by addiction to cosmetics? Do Tom Clancy readers die, on average 20 years earlier due to hunting-related incidents? Do Dan Brown fans die earlier as the neural pathways in their brains atrophy from disuse? Do Thomas Pynchon readers die of a yet-to-be-named syndrome that seems to mimic a catatonia-like state of confused boredom? Interesting stuff.

An intrepid Guardian blogger, helping you keep abreast of the Misituation in comic bookland.

This year, for instance, three tawdry incidents have left DC Comics and Marvel Comics, the “Big Two”, facing accusations of misogyny from even their most ardent fans.

First and worst was the case of “Mary Jane Watson: slutty housewife”, when Marvel released a statuette of Spiderman’s girlfriend bending over to pull his costume out of a laundry pail, showing off maximum cleavage and thong. Soon after came two issues of monthly comics with irredeemable front covers: Heroes For Hire #13 showed three busty superheroes menaced by an alien insect called the Brood, which many saw as a deliberate reference to the “tentacle rape” genre of Japanese manga comics; Justice League of America #10, meanwhile, showed Power Girl with breasts that were surreally oversized even by comics’ regrettable standards.

This is a real problem here. How are our young Hollywood starlets and porn stars supposed to feel when they realize their legs are never going to comprise 66% of their body, their eyes will never cover three eightths of their face, and with a waist that small there’s actually no place to store your vital organs?  If comic books make life shit for our starlets and porn women, just think of how shitty your daughters, mothers, and sisters will feel when they realize a lower back tattoo just ain’t enough for either a pimply-faced teen or the stock broker he’ll become. But seriously. Ew. She looks…. pathological.

Book hoarders can have a hard time getting rid of their collections when the time comes, which just proves the old saw that things are only worth what people are willing to pay for them.

Many people bring book collections to Zubal with hopes of making good money or at least knowing some other person will eventually buy it and love it.

Alas, sometimes neither happens. Libraries tend to accept small collections, but that’s mostly for “Friends of the Library” fund-raisers. It’s rare for them to incorporate those books into their circulating collection.

Zubal can’t afford to stock books that sell for less than $8. What happens to the rest? They’re recycled, though Zubal says the prospect sickens some book lovers.

“I have people say, ‘You throw away books? The Nazis burned books! This is a good book – there must be someone who would want this book.’ ”

Zubal responds, not unkindly, “Well that’s true, but FIND that person.”

I find it funny, and sad for me, that the guy profiled in the beginning of this piece is having trouble keeping 258 books. I think I had accumulated that many by the time I was 17 — rougly about the reading list of my humanities B.A.

Twenty-five years later, Fighting Fantasy readers are normal, productive adults instead of demon-obsessed Satanists. Go figure. See, your parents’ apoplectic fits of exorcism-like screaming were largely unnecessary.

The FF books really were compulsive reading for a ten-year-old: I remember spending an entire 15-hour car journey one holiday ploughing through The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, mapping my progress and losing my dice under the seat. When we finally arrived I was still completely lost in Firetop Mountain, and eventually had to be prised from the car and returned to the real world, where the decisions seemed a lot more complex and there were considerably fewer goblins. Reading was a solo pursuit, but games you usually needed friends for: FF ingeniously combined the two and so proved invaluable to solitary kids.

Despite the accusations of moral decay, FF proved itself in some ways a force for good: a young boy wrote to a newspaper in 1986 complaining about the bad press and explaining that “these books are complicated and exciting and stretch a child’s mind and make them want to read more”.

And only last year a Year 8 tutor writing in the TES described his success in using a FF book in the class-room to engage reluctant readers.

It should be noted that I was hardly classifiable as a “reluctant reader”, but that I still enjoyed these books, when I could sneak them past my nutty mother. I seem to remember, even at age 10, being aware they weren’t great literature, but they were fun and engaging, and who cared about great literature at 10? Plus you could cheat. Which you can’t in real life. Much. Perhaps that’s why none of us ended up axeing our neighbours in bloody occult rituals. There’s no eraser on the pencil of real life and you don’t get a re-roll, and the brain has a way of figuring these things out.

Do novels fall into two categories: those A novels about language and those B novels about the world?

In his meditation on the works of James Joyce, Anthony Burgess delineated the two different types of novel, categorised into types A and B. The A novel, to summarise his argument, is completely in thrall to convention, tapping into traditional literary archetypes with a distinct focus on plot and character. The B novel, however, can incorporate plot and character (though it occasionally dispenses with such trivialities altogether) but its ultimate aim is to explore literary form, narrative and language.

Typical examples of the A novel range from Pride and Prejudice and The Hound of the Baskervilles to Portnoy’s Complaint and Saturday. Tellingly, the ultimate B novel is considered to be Finnegan’s Wake. Then there are, of course, those A novels that trespass upon B territory such as Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow which has a linear narrative style (albeit recounted backwards) but in its reversal of conventional speech encroaches upon ideals more common to the B novel.

Sven Birkerts gets into the blogs vs. print debate and Ed responds.

In the past few years, as revenue flees from print on paper, newspapers have worried their declining circulation figures and have had to make cutbacks. We’ve seen shrinkage and reallocation of space for book reviews at the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and even here, in the city where America’s literary culture was born, at The Boston Globe (which cut a page from the Ideas section last year and reduced the Books pages).

A flashpoint of sorts was reached this spring when The Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced that it would eliminate its book-reviews editor and rely on wire-service reviews exclusively. The decision prompted swift response from the National Book Critics Circle, which spearheaded a picket protest of the paper. The ensuing crossfire (mainly online, as it happens) between bloggers and print critics was intense and acrimonious enough to suggest that more than the disposition of a few column inches is at stake.

The controversy has to do with the fact that people in various quarters, literary bloggers prominently among them, are proposing that old-style print reviewing — the word-count-driven evaluation of select titles by credentialed reviewers — is outmoded, and that the deficit will be more than made up by the now-flourishing blog commentary. The blogosphere’s boosters pitch its virtues of variety, grass-roots initiative, linkage, and freedom from perceived marketing influence (books by major trade publishers, which advertise more, sometimes appear to get premium treatment in the print book review sections).

I’m hard put to repudiate these virtues of the blogosphere. But can it really compensate for losses in the more clearly bounded print sector? The bigger question, if we accept that these are the early symptoms of a far-reaching transformation, is what does this transformation mean for books, for reviewing, for the literary life?

Down with the epilogue! Apparently it was a slow news week in Philly.

Sometimes, people don’t know when to quit.

Even, or maybe especially, novelists, directors and playwrights.

It’s not enough that they get the last word. They have to reach into the future, too, and tell us what the fictional characters they’ve created will be doing some time, usually years, hence.

The allure of the epilogue is undeniably strong, powered by the fragrant aroma of authorial omniscience and the human desire for closure. Filmmakers seem the most vulnerable, but authors can yield, too.

The latest to give in is J.K. Rowling, who appends a chapter to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with information about what a few of the characters will be doing 19 years down the road.

It’s a wart on a masterpiece – maybe not a hogwart, but a wart nonetheless, although useful for anyone who can’t wait to find out who lives and dies.

A new emphasis in publishing on experiencing local nature is part of a growing trend that might become an entire genre, a sort of half-adventure / backyard exploration — and through this, one hopes, Joe and Jane Blow will get a new appreciation of nature as a holistic environment to which we’re tied.

There’s also a backlash against a culture that is increasingly virtual; so much experience is mediated by electronic gadgets that entail sensory deprivation – of touch, of smell, of certain sounds. Meanwhile, our obsession with comfort and safety not only deprives our children of the sense of freedom inspired by outdoors, a fact we now frequently lament, but it deprives adults as well: how many of us see stars on a regular basis? Or remember the feeling of getting wet or cold? Or see the thick darkness of a night free of city street lights, or hear the call of an owl at night?

We need that attentiveness to nature to understand our humanity, and of how we fit, as just one species, into a vast reach of time and space. Cocker keeps a flint pebble in his pocket (all these writers mention the pebbles lined up on their desks), which is 70m-90m years old. He points out that rooks followed the spread of farming from the Middle East to Europe and the clearing of woodland, so that every rook call carries the echo of a Neolithic axe.

An obscure miner’s dialect rescued from obscurity.

“The barriers to our intercourse were formidable,” they wrote in their report on encountering the Pitmatic dialect. “Numerous mining technicalities, northern provincialisms, peculiar intonation and accents and rapid and indistinct utterance rendered it essential for us to devote time to the study of these peculiarities ere we could translate and write the evidence.”The first Pitmatic dictionary, including pit recollections and analysis of the origins of the dialect’s words, has been compiled by Bill Griffiths, the country’s foremost Geordie scholar, whose previous work includes the standard Dictionary of North East Dialect. His new book reveals an exceptionally rich combination of borrowings from Old Norse, Dutch and a score of other languages, with inventive usages dreamed up by the miners themselves.

Bloomsbury bigwig on how he’ll continue to please the bank in a Potterless universe. You can practically hear the extra octave of tension in his voice. Happy family! Happy family!

There will be a Potter annuity for decades to come – a boxed set of the seven titles is out in October – but the company must prove that its successive Potter windfalls have been invested wisely. The stock market’s ambivalent view on Bloomsbury’s preparations frustrates Newton, who has seen the company’s shares drift down to 166p, far from the 374p they reached when the sixth Potter was published two years ago.

“The real question is what is going to happen in 2008 and 2009 and why should shareholders feel reassured about their holdings. Well you ain’t seen nothing yet,” he says. “If you look at the list we have put together and the strategic decisions we have made for the business, you will see a very strong publishing group in action.”

That is damage control-speak for either “LALALA–I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” or “I’ve just soiled my pants because I haven’t any real idea how this will turn out”. Maybe both.

In other late-breaking Potter news, JK has already started two new projects… sigh… So much for a break in the bi-yearly hysteria cycle.

While Rowling, whose net worth has been estimated at $1 billion (£488 million), said that she feels sadness about the end of the Harry Potter series, she went on to say that the lack of pressure on her to publish for financial reasons felt “quite uplifting”, adding that she was relishing the prospect of “wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing.”

Whatever the author publishes next is unlikely to replicate the exceptional success she has witnessed to date. “Of course I won’t write anything as popular as this again. But I have truthfully known that since 1999, when the thing began to become a little bit insane. So I’ve had a good long time to know that, and I accept it.”

Rowling expects the books to be judged by time: “When all the hype and everything else dies down, they will have to float or sink on their own merits, won’t they? So in 50 years time, if people are still reading them, they deserve to be read, and if they’re not, then that’s OK.”

JK… I’m impressed, m’lady. Cut back on the mascara and you’ve almost got me.

I’ll have you know that in order to make it to the computer this morning, coffee in hand, I had to actually KICK books out of the way to carve a path. It was like raking leaves with my foot. If you find a sudden silence here, please call the authorities.

Speculative fiction god profiled at Time Magazine.

Gaiman, 46, certainly looks famous. He’s quirkily handsome–he’s the hot guy whom the girls never noticed in high school because he was a mathlete–with suspiciously good hair and a black leather jacket. He lives near Minneapolis, but he grew up in Portchester, England. “My biggest problem with Harry Potter is that I went to an English public school and hated it,” he says. (By “public school,” the English mean what Americans mean by private school.) “I would have rather lived under the stairs.” When he was 17, Gaiman wrote his own novel about English schools. “At the end, all the dead teachers came back to life–there was sort of this plague of zombies ripping the thing apart–and our decapitated hero had his eyes pecked out by the school peacock. That for me was trying to write a version of my own public school experience that was nicer and more fun.”

And back then, no one went ballistic and called the cops every time a disgruntled geek kid wrote something disturbing. So now we have a famous author instead of a marked and disenfranchised ex-con. Hm.

Newspapers are increasing their focus on internet content in a strange sleeping-with-the-enemy relationship. But will print be swallowed by pixels? Philip Marchand investigates.

It’s a media zoo these days, especially the section where newspapers live and breed. Printed newspapers have been mating with computers and producing websites for some time. It’s a survival strategy in a zoo heavily shaped by electronic media. But will the offspring end up devouring the parent?

Such questions were in the air at a recent convention of the Media Ecology Association (MEA) held in Mexico City. The MEA is an association of academics specializing in communications and media studies. The word “ecology” in its title is a metaphor, based on what the Canadian Oxford Dictionary defines as “the branch of biology dealing with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings.”

In the Media Ecology Association’s case, the organisms are human inventions, but with a life of their own.

If e-paper gets here properly I hope print “survives”. I put that in quotes because, of course, it won’t be the same. But so long as we’re sucking up the world’s forests to print papers that are thrown out at the end of the day, I’ll continue to read and subscribe online.

There should be some sort of emoticon for that old type-writer/teletype soundtrack that used to run behind flash news items. If that existed, I’d be sure the internet was a force for good in the world. As it stands, I’m reserving judgement.

• Toronto Public Library funds cut
• New York Public Library changes course
• Reference library seeks your stories (as first reported here)

What to read on the way to work? It depends on the length of your commute. Oh, and for those of you driving on the 401, please, put the book down and concentrate on the tail lights in front of you. If I had a dime for everytime I’ve nearly been killed by a Michael Ondaatje fan….

Once, for a month, I enjoyed the good fortune of having to commute 50 miles to work each day. Getting up before dawn, I’d make my way down to the station through the untrammelled English countryside, where rabbits lolloped and ducks were still fast asleep at the weir. Then, as the train slowly dragged its carriages to the big city, I’d lose myself for the next hour and a half in a book. The process was reversed in the evening.

Naturally, I got through a good many books. But for most of the last 10 years, tragically, I’ve lived just 20 minutes from work; and at this distance I feel that, by reading on the train, I’m only ever snatching at literature. Though I see other people doing it, I don’t think this is the way to read books. Only if I didn’t care about a novel – only if I considered it not worth appreciating – would I subject it to such a reading process.

But while it may be difficult to enjoy strong narrative works in 20-minute bursts, perhaps this is less true of episodic novels.

And speaking of commuters reading books…. Don’t forget Seen Reading.

Bookstores are starting to cut back on the comfy couches for customers. The reason? Rudeness. Oh, and need.

Just a decade ago, the trend in the bookstore industry was to fit nooks and crannies with big chairs for browsing, which, it was hoped, would spur buying. The idea was to recast the bookstore as a community place or an extension of the home. Out with sterile bookstores where customers stood at attention to check out a book; in with warm, sinking chairs where book lovers could be by their lonesome.

But now the availability of so-called “soft” seating – overstuffed chairs and sofas – is on the decline at some bookstores, done in by various complications: homeless squatters, overly enthusiastic young lovers, food trash left behind.

“We were finding people staying for hours and hours and not necessarily buying books,” says Juliana Wood, district marketing manager for the Borders chain. “We obviously hope browsing turns to purchasing, but that’s a chance you take when you offer people a really comfortable setting.”

In recent years, Borders has cut its soft seating by as much as 30 percent. Backless seating – magazine benches, step stools – no longer takes the back seat. Also, given the choice between book space and seating place, books win every time. As Wood says, “You can’t sell a chair.”

Soon all that will be left is a stick with a dildo on it. This is part of a concerted effort to literalize the symbology behind big box bookselling. Luckily the kinds of bookstores I frequent are too small to have comfy couches, so I’m at a zero loss here. However, I’ll be upset if they take the big lounge chairs out of the kids’ area at the local Crapters. As I’ve said before, as a long-time hater of Indigo/Chapters, I find myself curiously drawn to its children’s section on rainy days. I bring the boy in there and let him play with the Thomas trains, read some Triple D (Dora/Disney/DC) product tie-in books that I’d never let sully his shelves, and finger the impulse merch, then I pop down the road to the independent and buy him something to take home. It’s deliciously vengeful.

Junie B. Jones is an, apparently, popular kidlit character who talks like real kids do. Some parents think this is not a good thing. You know, they might be right. Remember that entire generation that grew up talking like Dr. Seuss? We’re still in recovery from that, burbled the flinkflomp cat.

But more than a few parents have taken issue with Junie B., as she is called. Their disagreement is a pint-size version of the lingering education battle between advocates of phonics, who believe children should be taught proper spelling and grammar from the outset, and those who favor whole language, a literacy method that accepts misspellings and other errors as long as children are engaged in reading and writing.

The spunky kindergartener (first grader in more recent volumes) is prone to troublemaking, often calls people names and isn’t averse to talking back to her teachers. And though she is the narrator of the stories, she struggles with grammar. Her adverbs lack the suffix “ly”; subject and object pronouns give her problems, as do possessives; she usually isn’t able to conjugate irregular past tense verbs; and words like funnest and beautifuller are the mainstays of her vocabulary.

Children, however, are not usually strict grammarians. And it’s rare to find a child that isn’t quickly seduced by these silly, often slapstick stories. Even adults who are rankled by Junie B.’s impulsive, oft-unpunished shenanigans (playing with scissors or head-butting other children, for instance), can occasionally laugh at her odd little-girlisms. They include her passion for fixing toilets with her “grampa,” her desire to name her little brother “Mrs. Gutzman” after her favorite cafeteria lady, or her belief that green cucumber-like vegetables are named “Sue Keeny.”

Parenthood, though, is full of choices. Breast-feeding: Yea or nay? Muesli or Cap’n Crunch? Public or private school?

And now: To Junie B. or not to Junie B.?

Another major news outlet bites the dust. Goodbye Weekly World News. May the spirit of Elvis’s microscopic three-headed alien lovechild watch over you as you haunt the homes of the stars. The world is poorer, in a sort of richer way.

If you somehow missed Bookninja on Q, CBC`s national arts and culture radio program, yesterday afternoon, here’s the link to the CBC podcast. Hope you enjoy. It actually went pretty smoothly, I think.

Hey guys, today I’ll be on the CBC afternoon program Q. I pre-taped an interview yesterday with Jian Gomeshi and should appear, I’m told, in the last half-hour of the show (so if you’re in a small town that cuts away to local programming, much like I am here in St. John’s, you’ll have to tune back in tonight at 10 if you want to hear it.)

If you’re new to Bookninja and are popping in after the show, poke around and have fun.  Just don’t touch anything sharp. Our insurance doesn’t cover untrained ninjas.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… wireless devices are just Gameboy’s for adults. First they put games on your cell, then funky music, and a camera. Now you can get comics created specifically for that tiny little screen. (I can barely read regular text there, much less lettering in wee speech bubbles.) Next will be standard tri-corder functions so you can search alien planets for dilithium to help create an inverted static warp subspace shell.

The Guardian’s technology people are warning against downloading pirated scans of Harry Potter 7 from the internet. The reason? You know… the eyes.

The case of the Deathly Hallows, though, demonstrates that there is one section of the media which is still resistant to the attentions of file-sharing. And it is books. If you really thought you saved yourself the cost of buying the book by downloading and printing it, you’ll find all you’ve done is shift the cost to yourself – and, probably in a few months, to the optician who’ll sell you new spectacles for your weary eyes.

No, no, sillies, not my new book, but thank you for jumping to that conclusion… It’s an actual monument being erected to the world’s languages (most of which are being killed by English – the fat, bullying, petulant, overconsuming North American citizen of languages).

Ethnically rich Surrey is an ideal place to erect a $200,000 monument to the spoken word, says the man behind the idea.

Mohammad Islam said yesterday that the world’s languages are being lost at the rate of one every two weeks.

“Six languages from B.C.’s First Nations are at risk of extinction. It is vital to take care of the mother tongue,” he said.

Is spam-based poetry the wave of the future? Sweet merciful crap. Somebody please kill me now, before I get to the end of this and see what’s written is as good (or bad) as 90% of what’s already out there…

I’ve been turning spam-mails into poems for some years now, so it has become something of a personal mission for me to draw people towards this odd art form. Here, perhaps, is the new poetry of the 21st century, a reinvention of language that pushes the cut-up technique of William Burroughs or the randomly generated ‘liquid writing’ of Jeff Noon’s Cobralingus into new brave new territories. Here is the future language of poetry: part machine, part human, all good. Just as pre-pen and ink societies produced narrative poetry, the industrial revolution gave birth to the Romantics, and the post-war American economic boom begat the Beats, so too – if the rash of blogs devoted to it over the past year or two are anything to go by – the technological age in which are living gives us spam poetry.

Why do kids love Thomas the Tank Engine (my son Ninja Boy including, those his interest is waning)? Is it the yummy lead paint? Is it the sniping and backstabbing that seems rife in their toddler 90210 world of training to be good religious/corporate lackeys (ie, really useful engines)? Is it the insider information on the class and gender wars?

This week the National Autistic Society (NAS) published a survey concluding that Thomas and his friends’ adventures are educationally valuable to autistic children – helping them distinguish emotions, as well as colours, numbers and words. Earlier NAS research, from 2001, found that children with autism and Asperger syndrome have a particularly strong relationship with Thomas, identifying with him more strongly than any other children’s character.

Why? Straightforward stories, overt narrative resolution, bold colours and clear facial features. One surveyed parent said of his son’s fascination: “It is the faces on each engine which first attracted his interest. The expression on the faces never changes.” A third of parents in the survey reckoned their children were obsessed with Thomas.

See, I could have sworn it has something to do with getting your buffers rubbed.

It’s a painful thing, but sometimes you just have to cut back on the books that occupy every horizontal surface in your house. It’s really a matter of survival, for some like me. If one of these stacks goes, they might not find me for days.

“I feel increasingly overrun by these things that, day by day, seem less useful,” he explained. “I am thinking of keeping only those books I refer to on a regular basis for writing lectures. Anything else, I can get from the library, or in a pinch, find a citation via Google Books or Amazon. I’ve already stopped keeping most paper journals, though there are a few things that aren’t available online. Is this crazy? Is anyone else you know making this kind of decision?”

The implied notion was interesting: my correspondent seemed to think this urge to purge might be a product of the increasing ease of instant access to material not on one’s shelves. I have no idea whether or not this is the case, or whether it represents anything like a trend. But the sense of being overwhelmed by accumulated books is only too familiar. My office and library are at home, and it has been necessary to trim the excess books on occasion, sometimes hundreds of books at a blow, just to keep them from piling up on the floor. (This is known as “preserving domestic tranquility.”)

I get so many books here that I can’t possibly look at them all, so whenever we have guests over, I try to remember to put some please-take-me-home stacks in the living room. You should come visit.

Jonathan Ames has become the second in what might possibly be a long line of writers to put the beat down on Craig Davidson. I’m sorry, I know Davidson is getting weepy about this on his blog, and I can barely bare to tease him this time around, but you would think someone at Penguin, after talking him into this ridiculous idea, would have seen the press it generated and had the common sense to talk him back out of it. Here’s a set of pictures from the match. Davidson’s back gets some real good publicity in among the Ames photos. This is a no brainer, Penguin. Stop letting this guy hurt himself trying to prove he’s a man.

Um, what exactly is being said here? I can’t tell if this is tongue in cheek or real. Is it the dry, British wit or my wet northern head? It looks like he’s saying we should police reading. I’m tired and disoriented and in a rather run down HoJo. Someone help me.

If a good book alters the way we see the world, a dangerous one changes how we treat it. My own problems began with James Baldwin’s Another Country. At the beginning the jazz man, Rufus, is at rock bottom. Things could not be worse. A few pages later they pick up. He is smoking marijuana while enjoying the favours of a pretty, rich girl on a balcony. I was a virgin who had never inhaled; I could see things would have to change.

Next I fell in love with Coleridge: Early Visions, by Richard Holmes. Near fatal. Of course, it does not exactly glamourise opium – but I loved poetry, cliff tops and the sea. I longed to bind it all together, to crackle with perceptions and stride out, reading meaning in mazy air. I attacked my mother’s poppies with a razor blade. Wrong sort of poppies, fortunately, but Holmes had turned me on to the other world, and helped to propel me into the depths of an English Lit degree. If that were not bad enough, volume two, Coleridge: Darker Visions (the bit where he goes to pieces, thanks to laudanum) did not appear for several years – too late Holmes, too late!

I must have watched an hour and a half of TV last night, but I can’t even remember what I saw. I think and old Simpsons was in there. Common recovery relapse.  You’d think after 6 years, the monkey would get off your back.

What the title says. It kind of makes one want to contemplate the window ledge. And not for the interesting patterns of bird shit…. I’m feeling a little cramped and short of coffee, so I am heading out to find some presumably decent java and a place to read for a bit before I head into the day of long meetings that’s brought my sorry ass to Toronto. I urge you do two things — check out the new fiction by Heather Birrell in The Magazine and continue creating limericks out of famous poems. Listen, I know you have work to do, but it’s summer and everyone else is having fun while you’re dying in your cubicle farm/ writer’s garret of vitamin D deficiency. You owe it to Tyler Durden to bring the entire organization down from within by goofing off today, at least for the 10 minutes it would take you to entertain the rest of us cubicle/garret rats. Post them anonymously, if you’re worried about being caught/laughed at/sullied by the limerick form. But have fun. Ciao, my shadowy minions. I’m riding off into the smog-set.

It’s time to give them a litte appreciation… The invisible (and often drunk and lecherous) heroes of the publishing world. Paranthetical statement added for a particular person… you know who you are.

I’ve wanted to write about editors and editing for years, but since I was one of that invisible tribe myself until a year ago, it felt unseemly. But now that I have switched full time to the other side of the desk, I can gush without stint. [That's what you think, bub -- Ed.]

To people not in the business, editing is a mysterious thing. (Actually, it’s mysterious to most bloggers, who despite having been in existence for less than 10 years, probably outnumber every writer who ever wrote. But more on them later.) Many times over the past 20 years, people have asked me, “What exactly does an editor do?”

It’s not an easy question to answer. Editors are craftsmen, ghosts, psychiatrists, bullies, sparring partners, experts, enablers, ignoramuses, translators, writers, goalies, friends, foremen, wimps, ditch diggers, mind readers, coaches, bomb throwers, muses and spittoons — sometimes all while working on the same piece. Early in my editing career I was startled when, after we had finished an edit, a crusty, hard-bitten culture writer, a woman at least twice my age, told me, “That was great — better than sex!”

And by that, of course, I mean your work. But seriously. Following last week’s submission and subsequent rejection of several Jane Austen titles to a bevvy of publishers, an editor speaks out on why great work gets missed in the almighty slush pile.

The real reason that publishers miss good books is no secret, and it is nothing to do with literary judgement, knowledge of first lines or acquaintance with the classics. It is the same reason that film companies miss great scripts and record labels fail to sign up the most interesting bands. It is the numbers game – the sheer volumes of paper (and now, worse still, the email attachments), that cross our desk every day. Every year 200,000 books are published. This is far too many, and really the first duty of every publisher should be to publish fewer, rather than more, new titles.

But the situation is worse than that, because for every title that we sign up, we turn down 20 to 30 others. The ratio is worse still for new fiction. So the maths is simple. If an editor commissions 20 titles a year, which is probably about average, they are being asked to consider around 500 manuscripts a year. That is an awful lot of words. No one can be surprised to learn that not every manuscript gets the careful attention it deserves. It should not come as a shock that many manuscripts are returned unread to the sender. We need to clear our desks in order to look after the authors whom we do sign up, and the unsolicited manuscripts are often a chore to be dealt with at the end of the day by an overworked intern.

Jessa points to an interesting Lynn Truss review of a book that’s ostensibly a nostalgic for old fashioned girl childhoods.

I suppose these are confusing times, gender-wise. When I was a sportswriter covering football tournaments abroad, I used to do tapestry work in the evenings – which is an extreme example of gender dysfunction, but you see my point. Postfeminists would argue that girls can be in favour of equal pay and opportunities, yet still enjoy traditional female skills such as knitting, so why shouldn’t they decorate eggs for Easter, make fancy hats out of bits of cardboard, do a spot of windowsill gardening, create a crude piggy-bank out of papier-mâché, rake the leaves in autumn and attach their mittens to a piece of ribbon threaded through their coat sleeves? The answer, of course, is that such domestic omni-competence turns them not into old-fashioned children but into old-fashioned mothers. It is only when you realise that The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls is actually a gentle primer for useless millennial mothers that it starts to make sense, or at least stops being quite so bewildering.

Vintage UK is releasing new classic editions as shrink-wrapped pairs — with one accepted classic and one “new” classic bound together in a sort of literary harmony. A Guardian blogger comments.

In TS Eliot’s essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, the theory is advanced that the canon is retrospectively altered by the introduction of new works – works that themselves would mean nothing were it not for their historical sense, their “tradition”. As he put it, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.”

I wonder whether Vintage Classics had the old fellow in mind when it launched its latest wheeze, Vintage Twins, which involves the shrink-wrapped pairing of past and modern masters. To pick just a few, Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith is sold side by side with Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky. Haruki Murakami’s Wind-up Bird Chronicle nestles next to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised finds an ideally acidulous travelling companion in Gulliver’s Travels. Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers engages in a little well-protected frottage with Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. How the years fly by when you are having fun!

The cover art on these is gorgeous!

I have to catch a plane to Toronto, so I’m going to post the last few links in a roundup form.

• Blogging 101, by Ed!
• Why reviews matter
• Authors in the workplace

More later if I find a nice cosy place with free wireless.

Was it really about not spoiling the ending for the kids? Naw. It was about… wait for it… money. Can you believe it? The LAT opines.

Here it’s necessary to distinguish between the newspaper critics and the cyber crooks, who may have posted sections of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” on the Web. That’s theft, and if we don’t protect the intellectual property of even fabulously wealthy creative people like Rowling, they’ll have less and less incentive to produce the things that entertain and delight us. Her publishers are right to go after these looters with laptops with every lawyer they hire.

Embargoes on reviews and discussions are another matter. All the outrage surrounding this particular book notwithstanding, contemporary publishers impose these blackouts not in the interest of readers but to protect the carefully planned publicity campaigns they create for books on which they have advanced large sums of money.

This is the economic imperative that leads publishers to withhold the contents of even nonfiction manuscripts that contain news that the public has a vital interest in knowing.

It’s also why newspapers, including this one, routinely break those embargoes without any pang of conscience. Our first and most compelling obligation is to our readers’ right to know and not to the commercial interests of publishers.

One in ten parents struggles to understand the stories they’re reading to their kids at bedtime. Meanwhile, I just struggle to understand my kid.

One in 10 parents struggle to understand the bedtime stories they read to their children, a survey by adult learning organisation Learndirect has found. Almost a quarter (23%) skip passages they cannot read or invent words to get to the end of a sentence, the poll found. A third of parents also admit to difficulties in helping their children with their maths homework.

Despite the difficulties, the poll found that reading stories is enjoying a renaissance, with 73% of families preferring it to playing in the park or watching TV.

You mean 73% of families SAID they prefer it to watching TV….

You’ll notice it’s smaller today than previously. And for now things will be about the moolah generated, but in a week or woit’ll change to introspective pieces on the impact of the series and the state of kids finishing the book. Then in a couple more weeks, we’ll get a what-ever-happened-to-JK-Rowling piece that shows her on a private island being served cocktails by Dan Brown in a leash and studded collar.

• 11 million books in 24 hours… 11 MILLION! It’s just insane!
• More on sales…
• … and more
• Harry digested
• What should you read after Harry?

Oh, god, this is delicious. (From BoingBoing) I’d sense another contest coming on, if we’d had more than 10 responses to the last one….

The Bookninja Magazine is proud to present new fiction by Journey Prize winner, and sometime Ninja, Heather Birrell: “Impossible to Die in Your Dreams“. Birrell last wrote for the magazine last fall when she interviewed and reviewed American short story goddess Deborah Eisenberg.

You know, I guess the idea of soldiering on through crappy books is noble, in some twisted, Protestant way, but this kind of just reassures me that I’ve made the right decision to read books on my own. I am a church of one and the books need to worship me, baby.

Time-deprived women — and a few men — are making room for book clubs, a trend that took off in 1996 when Oprah Winfrey launched her club with Jacquelyn Mitchard’s “The Deep End of the Ocean.” But members often find it difficult to choose a book.

In metro Atlanta, even clubs that predate Oprah struggle to hit just the right gem. The many books available make it hard to narrow the field. Avid readers have plowed through the obvious choices. And some members, like Carswell, don’t want to be responsible if their pick lands with a thud.

Some crave juicy reads, while others want to tackle classics. As a result, members may join a book club in hopes of diversifying their library and instead find the club taking a safe route.

Jessa Crispin, the proprietor of Bookslut and a Chicago literary impressario, reports that she, along with a host of other lit-types, got her talented ass kicked out of an art gallery lit party. She links to this recounting of events:

For the moment, I think I am in a poetry paradise. The party is only beginning.

And then a swarm of police wearing bulletproof vests with badges on ropes around their necks like characters from The Shield illegally storm into this private art gallery. Without so much as a search warrant or even an explanation, five of them surround the DJ and demand he turn off Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack.” Issuing uncompromising threats, they force the DJ to announce over the microphone that without so much as a discussion EVERYONE MUST LEAVE THE PREMISES.

Like a scene out of Robocop, a small army, in ominous black jumpsuits with CHICAGO POLICE in big white letters across their chests, arm the exits as hundreds of literate citizens file out into the night.

Some big time writers, including Munro and Malouf, were left off the Frank O’Connor short story prize long list…

“Naturally, as a festival programmer, I would love to be inviting big names like Alice Munro and David Malouf to Cork,” admitted Cotter, “but as prize administrator my concern must be that the best books make the shortlist – the prize is for a best collection of stories and not a lifetime achievement award. The fact that the jury each year selects names that may be obscure to a wider readership demonstrates their independence. Time will show that Cork has been an early champion of tomorrow’s Munros, Maloufs and William Trevors.”

Only half of the six-strong shortlist is made up of full time writers. New Zealand’s Charlotte Grimshaw is a three-time novelist, shortlisted with her first collection of short stories, Opportunity; Manuel Muñoz is a short story writer whose second collection, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue (10 interlinked stories set in a Mexican-American neighbourhood in California) draws on his own upbringing in an impoverished Latino community. Etger Keret, shortlisted for Missing Kissinger, the only translated collection in the final six, is one of Israel’s foremost writers.

Shortlist announced.

What are the most “successful” people in the world reading? The very books that made them rich.

“My wife calls me the Imelda Marcos of books,” Mr. Moritz said in an interview. “As soon as a book enters our home it is guaranteed a permanent place in our lives. Because I have never been able to part with even one, they have gradually accumulated like sediment.”

Serious leaders who are serious readers build personal libraries dedicated to how to think, not how to compete. Ken Lopez, a bookseller in Hadley, Mass., says it is impossible to put together a serious library on almost any subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars.

Perhaps that is why — more than their sex lives or bank accounts — chief executives keep their libraries private.

The most telling thing about this article is the photo that includes that infamous Goethe…