Time is running out on the Bookninja photo contest. See here for links to past entries and instructions. Gather your contemporaries and get your photo snapped with our logo and either some exotic locale, as below, or even just in your bathroom or underneath your corportate logo (almost the same place, really, if you’ve got any punk left in you) and . Accompanying this picture, in which he shows off his cred, loyal ‘Ninja reader Shawn sent a message that read, “In this photo, I can be seen paying homage to Bookninja deep in the Smoky Mountains, at the entrance to Clingman’s Dome, the highest point both in the state of Tennessee and along the Appalachian Trail.” (Pic after the jump)

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• Pinch hitting for David Halberstam
• Digested read of McDermid takes a funny poke at Rankin
• Norris Church Mailer (Norm’s 6th) profiled
• Not all politicians hate art like Harper… but they all do stand in judgement…
• Audio book sales up… be sure to check out Bookninja’s favourite Canadian audio book publisher, Rattling Books
• Clive James vs. Sydney

In what may be the busiest time of my worklife ever, I currently have no childcare and am halving days with Lady Ninja to make sure Ninja Boy doesn’t shuriken someone’s forehead when no one’s looking.

• Horror writing for children
• More on Woods’ move to the New Yorker
• McCarthy wins James Tait Black prize
• John Ashbery — MTV poet laureate… seriously
• Two takes on Coetzee’s latest… Guardian and Telegraph
• Toronto writers sue Nobel laureate over book deal
• Library dustup in UK
• Naipaul on Walcott
• Widow completes late husband’s trilogy
• Mailer considered in the NYT
• Faber lit quiz, for those of you who aren’t buried to your eyeballs in work

Only a short while left for blueberry picking, I would think. And my freezer is only half full!

• RIP: Grace Paley (CBC, NYT, LAT, WaPo)
• Was Barnes and Noble lying about their reasons for not carrying OJ…? (My answer is “who cares, so long as they don’t”)
• And their profits get Potter boost
• Poet vagues-up poem for publication
• Toronto’s Queer lit festival
• A bit of perspective into the bizarre life of literary hoaxster Laura Albert… it almost makes me feel sorry for her. She’s obviously a sick person… She need more friends in her life like the tv producer, but in the end, I doubt even an army of them would help…
• Another, older, literary hoax
• Guardian First Book Award and shortlist

YouTube Friday:

• Poetry technical support line (from Bookslut)
• Anne Sexton footage
• The Plight of the Romance Novelist
• Davidson fighting Ames in the publicity event for Ames’… wait… who was that supposed to benefit again? This was painful to watch. Two seconds in Davidson is already going for a rest in the clinch. I couldn’t get through the whole thing. I feel so sorry for him. It must be terrible to have no outlet for testosterone. I spend my excess on looooooovemaking… That’s right ladies and gentlemen… Chicks may line up to my left for make outs… Guys to my right for high fives.

Welcome to Thursday. So close, yet so far.

• Poems and prisoners
• More on non-reading Americans
• Youngest Booker nominee, Edward Docx, whose name would make a great play in Scrabble, profiled in the Telegraph
• Scholarly society heads to for-profit publisher — that sentence is almost funny…
• Up in smoke: great literature and the tobacco connection
• Oddly enough: the bestselling sex manual on AbeBooks is a Christian book hotly titled: Intended for Pleasure: New Approaches to Sexual Intimacy in Christian Marriage… The sub-sub title is, Overcoming Revulsion in the Effort to Populate God’s Army. Mostly it advises the risque practice of making eye contact long enough for God to plant a miraculous seed in the woman’s belly
• Bring back children’s dinosaur books with bite
• Festival International de la Littérature profiled in the Gazette (go figure)
• A writer’s tale of torture in and exile from Iran

Time is running out to get your Happy Birthday Bookninja pics in and be entered in our contest to win a free tshirt. Email your entries by . Today’s pic comes from ‘Ninja addict and novelist Leona Theis, who writes, “Happy birthday, Bookninja. Attached is a computer’s-eye photo of me enjoying the Bookninja site. I’m not calling it Crackninja, not just yet. Points if you can figure out what’s reflected in the window behind me (besides the computer screen).” Pic after the jump.

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If it rains one more day, I will scream! There are blueberries rotting on the bushes! Okay, calm down… breathe deep. There has to be a way to solve this… Think, dammit, THINK! … Wait! I have it! I’ll just get wet! Crazy, I know, but crazy like a FOX!

• Barnes and Noble avoids Bookninja curse of genital warts on the lips of its executive class by refusing to sell OJ’s book… Borders execs looking to reserve appointments with plastic surgeons in advance
• Frightening statistics: Writing tops poll of ideal jobs… Scientists and statisticians thrilled with new data gathered on “romatic ideals” and “naiveté” (Of course, I suppose this result reflects Britain’s more intellectual culture, at least as opposed to our own. I was always surprised, back when I was teaching, to hear students respond to the question, “Where would you most like to work?” with, “In business.” Business? Like, anything? You want to work in an abstract category?) Don’t give up your dayjob, says John Crace
• In related news, 1 in 4 Americans did not read a book at all last year
• New Bradbury leads to Bradbury profile
• Harper Lee honoured by Alabama
• Hospital has own press
• Libraries not dying — this is good news for lovers of hot librarians who would otherwise be forced into work as cubicle organizers
• Rankin says JK not writing crime novel (Rankin’s been the centre of some scandal this summer… some think this is part of a publicity plan)
• Armistead Maupin and SF

A second novel? It’s true.

It was only after Ellison’s death that Fanny Ellison chose Callahan to become literary executor. This was an honor, but it soon became clear it was also a Herculean task. Manuscript pages, computer disks and scribbled notes lay helter-skelter, everywhere in his home. Ellison had not suffered from writer’s block, after all. He had writer’s fury. He had written and written and written. A gush of words, and chapters and notes about the chapters. There were background notes — musings on writing and America and fiction — much of it also beautifully written; notes about plot outlines and more characters, built word by word, then buried under more notes. It was a spouting gusher of artistic creation, fat manuscripts covering other fat manuscripts, almost all related to that second novel.

And Fanny had hoarded it all. The one thing she didn’t save, because it had never existed, was any instruction about what to do with it.

(Thanks, KP)

My litblog grandpappy, the ultra cool superintellect known as Dennis Loy Johnson, writes in to say:

My man Malcolm MacPherson has been blogging about why he–a former Marine and long-time war correspondent for Time and Newsweek–has rejected journalism (not to mention his longtime book publisher Random House) to publish a satirical novel [Hocus Potus] with an indy publisher.

Here are the first two entries. Writing about war for laughs and what’s funny about the war in Iraq. You can find the rest for yourself. (Dennis is so cool he’s barely got a pulse. He’s so cool you can get a brain freeze just chatting with him.  Dew forms on objects near him. Even though his name is Dennis Loy Johnson, his initials are AC. Every time he sends me books, I have to turn the heat on in my house. So buy some MPH books and you too can drop a few degrees.)

The rare and elusive ‘Ninja of the Deep North can live in many harsh and beautiful habitats. Here we see one wonderful specimen perched with a stern look on his face, just moments before striking out with cobra-like reflexes at a arts-budget-slashing-politician (offscreen). (Pic after the jump.)

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It’s Monday and I’m sore and tired from a weekend of fishing and picking blueberries. Hey, don’t laugh, I hauled up some massive cod and had a bucket of berries so big I could have used it for a Rocky Balboa training montage. In fact, “Eye of the Tiger” was playing in my head the whole time I was lying in the moss plucking away at the little bushes. So, another roundup, but also a warning: after today, posting may be light because we’ve run out of daycare for Ninja Boy for the next two weeks and I may have to (gasp!) take time off work to care for the fruit of my loins. This means hours of cut and paste, throwing stones into a vast and empty ocean, and dressing up as knights in order to tilt at windmills. That’s pretty much what I do here, metaphorically speaking, so I don’t want to repeat myself.

• Germaine Greer on the Bard’s wife
• JK Rowling takes step up in ambition for next novel
• The face of scum: At first this lit agent says she was disgusted by the idea of OJ’s book, but then she changed her mind. Why? Hm. Tough one… I’ll venture… um, let’s see… hmm… oh! I got it! She realized she could make a shitload of money from it. Of course, that’s just a guess. I wish weeping sores on everyone invovled with this.
• Samizdat in Saudi Arabia (thanks, Frank)
• Chinese dig e-novels
• Speaking of which — the effects of computers on literature
• Yann’s bookclub-of-two gets some Guardian love
• Why Kerouac still matters (besides keeping the turtleneck market from collapsing)
• Jonathan Coe gets serious (how sad)
• To write great biography you have to be invisible
• Hidden treasures of UK’s libraries
• DH Lawrence papers donated
• Günter Grass in the US
• Novelist recovers after a stroke (great piece)
• Backlash over anti-Israel lobby book
• “Hard To Tell If Wikipedia Entry on Dada Has Been Vandalized Or Not“

Don’t forget to submit your happy birthday Bookninja photos for our contest. Winners receive a free Bookninja Tshirt that will make them the coolest kid in the cubicle farm. Publishing people, get us shots of you and your fellow ‘Ninjas standing in front of the company logo with something ‘Ninja in hand. Writers, a shot of you in your workspace reading Bookninja. Editors, send some pics of you feasting on the freshly-killed corpse of a bad writer. Readers, show us a pic of you, the Bookninja logo, and your favourite book. Whatever you like, just send them along to . What better way to say happy birthday to your daily time-waster than with a photo that says, Hey, I just wasted more time… for you. Aw.

Sorry about no links yesterday. I was experiencing a weather- and stress-induced headache of Japanimation proportions. I swear to god, there were tenticles shooting out of my eyes, Akira-style. I feel better today, but am awaiting the arrival of the giant teddy bear dripping glowing yellow blood.

• Ian Rankin vs. the lesbians (fifty bucks on the lesbians) Why ARE women attracted to read and write in the genre?
• His accuser, Val McDermid, interviewed here
• Stephen King: book vandal (You just knew he was up to something on the side…)
• They’re remaking Enter the Dragon? Every guy I grew up with just felt his testicles kiss each other in excitement right before he soiled his 501s and hightop runners in a fit of ecstacy
• The ninth ring of publishing hell (thanks, Pat)
• RIP: Luigi Meneghello
• A William Gibson reading was so packed the author had to squeeze in via the fire escape… In SECOND LIFE (Um, can’t they just teleport him in or something? And if they can make a fake guy read in cyberspace, when the hell am I getting that jetpack and cottage on the moon I was promised back in the 70s?)
• Stuart McLean’s new book-buying policy (thanks, Kimberly)
• Poe taster mystery solved (there was a mystery?)
• Sci fi names for kids… whatever. So long as no one is stuck with “George” ever again
• iPhone books (see commentary above… I also want turkey dinners in pill form and a robot servant… Is this too much to ask of the future that never was?)
• It’s been too long since we had a link to a George Saunders piece (from Ed)
• Germany hates its reviewers (from The Saloon) The rest of us just hate Germany’s cuisine… Those people season their meat with other meats. If they could, they’d stuff bacon with cheese made from bacon fat. Maybe they already do.
• Chicklit’s older sister (romance as the cougar to chicklit’s fox? I think of it more like the laundry lady to chicklit’s halfwit yuppy)
• Arthur Miller’s dark side (thanks, Frankie)

Continuing with our teasers of submissions for our Bookninja Abroad contest, wherein my shadowy minions (aka you) send in pictures of themselves and their loved ones posed with Bookninja somewhere in the background, I give you the following (pic after the jump):

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You guessed it, another news roundup. There are blueberries to be picked, people. Sure, laugh all you want. But while you’re chattering away the winter with a scurvvy-ridden mouth and any number of creeping cancers, I’ll be eating museli sprinkled with little blue balls of anti-oxidant goodness until well into May.

• Borders to publish one of its employees’ books — literary world waits breathlessly for bildungsroman featuring disaffected clerk who shoots lasers of derision and condescension from his eyes to smote customers whose tastes fall below the “Irvine Welsh threshold”…
• Kite Runner has long legs in the book club world
• Thai literary thriller gets politicos worked up
• Poet hired to soothe customers on Britain’s worst rail line (I think Thomas and those whacky troublesome trucks are bound to play a naughty trick on this fellow… Like maybe holding his mouth open and pouring lead paint down his throat. Speaking of which, what the hell am I supposed to do with 30 wooden Thomas trains that probably cost me $500? Can I get some money back or what?)
• Adam Gopnik on PKD
• Doris Lessing, interviewed
• Plath’s childhood and crappy teen art, discovered in an attic (leave the dead some dignity, vultures)
• Murakami, profiled in Time
• On the Road — 50 years later it’s still inspiring creative writing students everywhere to hand in their last minute crap
• Which rockers would Canadian publishers most like to get a memoir from?

You think the pics below of northern SK and Ghana are exotic? You ain’t seen nothing yet. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the New York City Harlem Chuck E. Cheese. Pics after the jump.

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New in The Magazine is our audio interview with playwright, actor, novelist and banjo impressario Sean Dixon. Marianne Apostolides interviews Dixon in Toronto about his new novel The Girls Who Saw Everything, which started life as a play. They also talk about the lines between theatre and fiction and about Sean’s love affair with the banjo. And yes, he does play it in the clip. Enjoy!

From Saskatchewan to Africa, the ‘Ninja pics are rolling in… This is one bandwagon you need to jump on. We’re asking Ninja readers to pose in exotic locations with their ‘Ninja shirts, or with their laptops showing the site, or with print outs of the logo, etc. The most creative and wild entries will win Bookninja merch. . See a couple pics after the jump:

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Yes, the spilled blood of my time is here coagulated for your linking pleasure…

• French teen, doing the evil work of fan translation, will not be sued by Harry Potter pubs — don’t mistake this for a second, it’s not grace or even noblesse oblige, but rather the simple fear of bad press
• Indian and Pakistani writing examined around the anniversary of independence (which coincided with the spike in grad students studying post-colonialblahblahblagh — and you know what they say, every spike in grad students is a nail in the coffin of literature. Okay, “they” don’t say that, I do. But you get my point.)  So, why did Indian writing catch on and Pakistani not?
• Joyce Carol Oates, profiled
• Norman Mailer, interviewed
• New sleezebags line up to take crack at OJ’s If I Did It — everyone involved in this deserves to end up like the Carter expedition…
• Bob Hoover on the enduring ridiculousness of literary prizes: “By its thoroughly political, haphazard and self-congratulatory nature, the awards industry has tried to turn writers and artists into performing seals, groomed and prepped for the cameras.” My rebuttal? “Orp orp orporp, orporp, orp orp orp.” And don’t you forget it.
• Follow that with a piece on the rising fortunes of the Carnegie Medal
• And follow that with a piece on the changing nature of children’s play
• World War 2.0 — the latest trend in publishing… I love how they already “know” what we’ll be reading for the next decade. Either laughably stupid or scary. Maybe both, like most other things these days. Meeeah!
• Making it everywhere but at home… hm…

Bookninja is officially four today. If Ninja Boy has been any template, this means the site should soon start disobeying my every command and treating me with equal parts love and contempt. Actually, it’s kind of been like that all along.

We have some great things coming up in The Magazine, including, today I hope, of a podcast interview with literary/theatre impressario Sean Dixon. I had hoped to have a banner discussion piece on empathy in writing and reading ready for posting today, but to get your appetite whet, I’ll just tell you this, the participants are: Peter Behrens, Catherine Bush, Barbara Gowdy, Sheila Heti, and Lisa Moore. Patience, it’s coming in a few weeks.

And what would a birthday be without a contest? . Based in the west of Ireland and have a laptop? Snap a pic of you surfing on a cliff face. Are you a Manhattanite with a view of the ESB? Hold up a printout of the front page and let us see your smile. Headed to Banff and already have some ninja wear? Climb a mountain and haul out the cell cam. Bill Gates’ secretary and have access to his desk? Send us the pictoral evidence of your snooping crimes (and the password to his bank account). An Aussi planning on wrestling a Great White off the Barrier Reef? Try stuffing a shuriken logo down its throat. The most creative entries win. You don’t need to be a photographer, you just need to get you and the logo and some interesting spot into the shot. Have fun with it! (Please don’t do anything dangerous. I love you, and I’m frightened our stats will sag….)

Just a few more weeks of this kind of cheap-assed roundup before be get back to making me work every morning.

• Christopher Hitchens on Harry Potter
• William Gibson, sticking to the now
• New Yorker board game
• Hemingway vs. the marlin
• World Fantasy Awards shortlist (from Bookslut)
• Summer reading programs for college kids
• Mohsin Hamid, profiled around Booker nod
• LA black literature expo

Crikey! A retailer down under, redeveloping its business model, will be setting a “minimum earnings ratio” for publishers. You don’t meet their standards? They don’t carry your books. As far as I know, this goes on everywhere here already. The news here is just a matter of it being said so boldly and the correspondence being published and the publisher kicking the retailer’s ass in a well-worded return letter. We’re headed to hell in a handbasket, people. And shoppers and retailers are the ones carrying us there.

Angus & Robertson’s demand that small- to medium-sized Australian publishers and distributors pay amounts said to range from $2,500 to $100,000 in order to have their books stocked in the chain’s stores has brought angry reaction from the book industry and book buyers. (See Undercover yesterday.)

Below is the full text of the letter that began the furore, and the reply sent by Michael Rakusin, director of Tower Books, to A&R Whitcoulls Group commercial manager, Charlie Rimmer. He has not yet had a response from A&R.

With the raw contempt on display in the first letter, I imagine he never will. Aussie readers: tell us the situation. Is it time for a boycott?

An enormous loss for Canadian letters. One of our greatest poets, dead at 89.

• Globe
• CBC
• Vancouver Sun

The Frankenhand 2000 is featured heavily at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival with sold out shows of up to 700 people lining up to talk to and get books signed by a machine!! On the other end? Just some small fry writers like Alice Munro and Norman Mailer. It looks like the LongPen has finally come into its own. Ghosts in the machine!

 Enjoy!

• Pimhole — Fry and Laurie on censorship and swearing…
• Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant via the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside
• Unbound
• Rejected novelist, the song
• Ali G plays hardball with a publisher
• Dave Chappelle does race on Def Poetry Jam and here he does Ashton Kutcher

Friday’s here. You all have permission to undo your waistband, put your feet up, and do nothing but surf today. If your boss complains, just tell her/him I said you could. They can email any complaints about this to “”.

• Everyone’s a critic
• AT&T — pro Bush censors (Hey, Ma Bell! Fuck you!)
• Everything you needed to know you learned from Judy Blume
• Wuthering Heights beats Romeo
• Nutbars attack writer over “anti-Islam” book (I’ve heard this somewhere before…hm…)
• AL Kennedy, author, standup (I just do my standup here, where it’s more of half-conscious sitdown slouch…)
• Censorship through lawsuit? (Thanks, Frankie)

This is a sort of heartwarming Friday piece about a kid who’s been writing since highschool, who’s now 24 and has a novel that’s selling well (Zoology). Actually, it’s only heartwarming if you can swallow your soul-gnawing jealousy, which I know you can’t, but it warms my cold assassin’s heart to the bone. Yes, that’s right. My heart has bones.

For his 13th birthday, young Dolnick’s well-meaning parents gave him a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Before they could say “So it goes,” he’d inhaled every word Vonnegut ever wrote and thrown himself at the mercy of his local independent bookseller to find out whom to read next. (Among the suggestions: Tim O’Brien, Tobias Wolff, Barry Hannah and Ken Kesey, whose “Sometimes a Great Notion” he especially loved.)

In middle school, he demonstrated strong resistance to tasks like mapping the Chesapeake Bay watershed but fell under the sway of a passionate and demanding eighth-grade English teacher. Pretty soon he was showing the teacher stories he’d written on his own.

Beginning high school, he drew a freshman English teacher with whom, to put it mildly, he failed to bond. His adolescent coping strategy — sulking furiously and refusing to do what he considered mindless work — earned him a first-quarter F.

A couple of years later, still looking to replace his middle-school mentor, he sought out another teacher with a reputation for enthusiastic rigor and asked him to read a three-page poem. Dolnick knew he’d found his man when the teacher sat right down in the hallway, read the poem attentively, then Xed out the second page.

I kind of envy all you folks who started writing very young. How wonderful to know what you wanted to do from an early age. When I was this kid’s age, I was still a year away from even starting to really write, and my primary goal was to find five bucks to put gas in the tank of my pickup so I could hit the road again. Creative writing was, for me, correspondence with bill collectors. Gosh. How things can change in ten years… wait, I mean — Gosh. Nothing ever changes.

The National Post: Spitting in the Face of Atlantic Canada since 2007. She’s taking on water, boys! It’s just a matter of time. But who’s going to come rescue them when the ship sinks?

“As we took a look at our business model, looked at how and where we’re distributed across the country — and frankly no newspaper has 100 per cent distribution across the country, it’s just too big — we made some hard decisions,” said Steven Hastings, National Post vice-president of marketing and reader sales. “This was one of the decisions we took. The fact of the matter is that we think we continue to offer an incredibly robust product online. And it really is a reflection of how our business is changing,” Hastings told CBC News.

After delivering that steaming pile of spin, Hastings then raised his hands to cover his mouth and added in a stage whisper, “Elp-hay a uy-gay out-yay, I’m-ay ookling-lay or-fay a ew-nay ob-jay…”

A few links, compendiumamanized for your surfing pleasure.

• Maud points to a tale of an internet writer who just gets no respect “This will all be looked at differently one day. The Net will be seen as a repository of current and historical primary-source texts, its authors ambitious thoughtful writers, belle-lettrists, feuilltonists, memoirists, epistolary writers, daybook-keepers, fiction writers, poets, literary travel writers, pensées writers, epigrammists, unpaid journalists, humorless shits, propagandists, hacks, ranters, pollyannas, pricks, and illiterates—the same rogues as in print.”
• Flight of the Conchords (I don’t have cable tv, so I can’t see this, but I can assure you it will be funny… these guys are pure comic genius, with a very smart literary bent. I find it utterly bizarre and heartening that they made it to HBO. It’s business time, baby.)
• Boingboing points to the original book proposal for William Gibson’s Spook Country
• Judging the Bookers by their covers
• Edinburgh — built on books
• Katrina lit — fiction steps in where reportage stops
• Bookmakers take hit on Harry ending
• 16-year-old French boy arrested for translating Harry Potter — way to go authorities! You got him off the mean streets! I feel safer just knowing JK has been saved the couple hundred bucks she might have lost from this evil scheme.
• Looking for adventure? Try writing a novel about an unsolved murder you committed and then tipping police off to it

Shirley Dent has balls. Big brass ones. They chime while she walks. And she’s not afraid to chuck ‘em in your face.

My idea: it kind of helps if you know some stuff about history when tackling literature. It helps even more if you have a sense of what history is. Oh – and a good dollop of critical judgment, coupled with the courage to tell people they are wrong, never goes amiss.

This apparently was too much for some of my peers. It seems the spectre of relativism – the idea that there is no such thing as an objective judgment, everyone’s opinion having the same value as everyone else’s – is roaming free once again. The notion that some ideas in history matter more than others was sniffed at. My assertion that Enlightenment ideas were a step up from what went before was greeted with horror. And as for the concept that academics really should challenge and push their students – well, what kind of loon was I?

I heartily support ballsy critics, but only when what they’re doing is reasoned criticism instead of academic jargon-laced posturing or wallowing in jealousy or contrarianism. In Canada, our critical culture is somewhat subdued by our over-sensitive tendency to take everything personally, as well as a general sense of horror at anything that seems like conflict. There seems to be a growing caste of writer/critics (though I’m not one of them), some of whom are the real deal and others who are just self-styled superheroes, fighting Injustice (see posturing/jealousy/contrarianism above) in their own cartoon universe. You know, the kind of people who have their own anthem running in their heads when they write. I’m more of a book reviewer and very occasional essayist than an actual critic, but I support the work of the best of these people — think, in fact, that it’s invaluable. I sometimes think of the more painfully confrontational essays as “taking one for the team” — like stopping a puck with your face or taking a particularly vicious crosscheck — a victory that’s sure to start another fight. Some of my favourite ballsy critics in Canada are Carmine Starnino, Philip Marchand, Bert Archer and Zach Wells. Actually, I think that may be all of them. Oh wait, there’s Henigan at Geist and James Grainger in the Star. Out here on The Rock, Mark Callanan has been known to let fly with a fearless barage or two. Can you think of anyone else unafraid of risking limb and career on their criticism?

Back to the old summer roundup format. Hey, it’s a beautiful day here… wait, no, it’s cloudy and damp. I don’t know whether to sweat or shiver.

• Judith Thompson gets playwright prize from CC
• Yorker scoops Republic’s Wood in battle of the “New”s
• Rowling loses court case
• NYT to drop paywall!
• The latest in Maud’s series on great bookstores
• In a new take on the old slow-news-cycle filler: Is publishing flourishing? (From Ed)

As expected, the muttering around the Booker longlist has mostly to do with the absence of big names. Yet, it’s largely positive, especially given the decision to whittle the long list down to 13 from somewhere nearer 30. I imagine Coetzee, Ondaatje, Lessing, et al, would have appeared on a longer list, but this is closer to a real short list. I’m not sure what the logic is in reducing a “long” list to something shorter, but I am still impressed that people saw through the names to the books. Here’s some miscellaneous reporting/commentary:

• Sarah Crown reports
• CBC reports
• Giant-killing long list
• On Redhill
• Don’t confuse appeal with talent

Toronto playwright, poet and novelist (and Brick publisher) Michael Redhill is on the longlist for the Booker. There were two novels last year that I said got a bum rap in Canada because they were too close to home for Canuck readers’ liking: Dennis Bock’s The Communist’s Daughter and Redhill’s Consolation. I predicted that these two novels would receive the acclaim they were due once they went abroad, and that’s largely come to pass. Yes, it’s all about me. Congratulations, Michael. (Thanks, B)

Continuing with our summer tradition of shirking actual work by skimping on the commentary:

• Is society breaking because of a weakening connection to intellectual culture? (See gratuitous gastronomical comments below)
• Saving the arts through religion by… Camille Paglia?? (Insert sound of cartoon cat doing triple take here) “I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion.” Okay, Ms. Paglia (if that IS your real name), you may proceed with your argument… But step lively, and for the remainer of your essay, please abbreviate “fine arts” to “f.arts”
• Timbuktu and old manuscripts
• I hear you, brother… I hear you
• William Gibson, interviewed around his new novel Spook Country. You know, there used to be a day a new William Gibson novel would be a lining-up-in-the-rain kind of event for me. Now not so much. Where did we go wrong, Bill? I heard good things about Pattern Recognition though. Maybe I need a to take a chance, take a chance, take a chance chance on you again.
• Alex Good responds to Sven Birkerts’ ancient and plodding print vs. blogs argument
• The raging, throbbing rock machine that is Punk Farm, interviewed
• Keith Richards “memoir”

The CBC has new guidelines that require ALL employees to get a supervisor’s permission before starting a PERSONAL blog in which the blogger self-identifies as a CBC employee. Ew.

Besides what you’d expect in a document like this, like not using the CBC’s resources (email, bandwidth, time, etc.) to update your blog, the policy states that such bloggers are “expected to behave in a way that is consistent with our journalistic philosophy, editorial values and corporate policies.”

Further, the blog cannot advocate for a group or a cause, or express partisan political opinion. It should also avoid controversial subjects or contain material that could bring CBC/Radio-Canada into disrepute.

Hello? Ceeb…. Ceeb, Ceeb, Ceeb…. Ceeb. I shake my head with weary disappointment. This will disappear pretty quickly, I suspect.

“Publishing never had a golden age” argues this Guardian blogger, who works for one of “the big four”.

Twenty years ago we all wanted cheap food and loved supermarkets; then we noticed that the supermarkets had put all the small shops out of business and were offering us bland food … cheapness and conglomeration have a detrimental effect on quality, whatever the business.

What about all the celebrity rubbish, I hear you cry? Well, again, it is hypocritical to bitch about publishers buying celebrity-penned (or not) books, when the marketplace, and readers, seem so very thirsty for it. Perhaps nobody who contributes to this blog ever reads Heat (not even over another’s shoulder), watches reality TV or uses YouTube? Yes, publishers can be accused of copying trends and following the herd – but so can we all. Publishers are businesses; they need to make money and if there are a million readers willing to buy a celebrity biography, is it really possible to argue that they shouldn’t publish it?

Read the discussion below too.

There have been times, struggling over the page, that you’ve thought, what if I just jammed this pencil right into my eye and was done with it… Well, then they’d have to remove it 55 years later. Sweet merciful crap. Talk about getting the lead out… Badump bump! She’s no pencil neck — more an eraser head! Badump bump! … … … um … … Two, that’s all I got.

The fashion for a long and purple acknowledgment page has gotten wedged up this fellow’s bum like a pickle turned sideways. Of course, Bookninja was on this trend years ago… My next book will have to thank Facebook’s Scrabble application for keeping the page count under 100.

An extraordinary change has overtaken book-launch parties recently. A few years ago, when the author was asked to say a few words, he had to be pushed forward until he stood alone, a pitiful figure with a frantic, empty expression on his face. These were always embarrassing moments. Did he actually say anything? It was difficult to tell. His guests, often fellow writers, would try to help out by taking no notice of him at all, raising their voices along with their glasses and forming circles of loud, impenetrable conversation. The truth appeared to be that writers, though good drinkers, were no good with words – words which, so alive on the page, got painfully caught up in their throats whenever they were obliged to speak spontaneously in public.

But that has passed. We are all performers now (even those of us who aren’t performers) and our launch parties have taken on the air of backstreet Oscar ceremonies. Authors have, in fact, already written their speeches a year or so before the parties. They are printed, quite brazenly, in their books’ acknowledgments, which gather together and pay tribute to crowds of people “without whom this book would never have been possible”. Prominent among this cast, allegedly of thousands, stand the authors’ parents, dead or alive, and sometimes various ancestors (mostly dead).

Speaking of Scrabble, Lady Ninja started a game yesterday and the first draw of letters she received fell coincidentally into “TEATNOG”. And the area where the virtual tiles are kept is called “Your Rack”. Heh. I propose we start a movement to dub breastmilk from a mother who’s had a glass of wine “teatnog” and have it officially recognized by Scrabble. I almost couldn’t believe it wasn’t already a word!

We continue with our August tradition of rounding up the links or not posting at all. A week today marks the four year anniversary of Bookninja. Still trying to figure out whether to do something special, and if so, what to do. I notice that at least one part-time ‘Ninja is proudly displaying her gang colours. If you have pics of you in your Bookninja Sunday best, do send them along.

• Hooked on Proust
• More on US poet laureate Simic
• Erica Jong on fighting intellectual terrorism (”The fact remains that Rushdie, by writing, did not cause injuries and deaths. The fatwa did. A free society cannot tolerate words being mistaken for actions. Words must be free while murder and mayhem must be punished. To confuse this because of a fatwa issued for political reasons is to confute the values literature is based on.”)
• Why the right is so alluring to the masses
• Second chance for author out of chances
• Canadian avant garde poet bpNichol profiled
• Good reviews for Peggy
• Jack Kerouac reassessed for today’s disaffected yoots
• Check out the new McNally Robinson website… Very simple and elegant with 2.0 qualities that I find appealing and personal… I may begin sending Canadian readers here instead of Amazon.ca — any other indie booksellers out there update your e-commerce portal recently? Drop me a note.)
• The maddening world of Amazon rankings (the fool’s gold of the internet, I tells ya!)

Roundup heaven, you know you want it:

• Potter goes to second printing…
• Big day for Simic… not only is he now Poet Laureate, he also won the $100G Stevens award
• And speaking of Simic, will the Laureate have a political spine this time?
• The Outsiders — a reappreciation
• More bizarre literary gossip — I don’t even know what to say about this
• World tour Ireland
• Literary Oxford

Friday bizarro YouTubing:

• Barbie goes to literary night (it’s worth it for the headless doll part (and the Sedaris diss) about half way through…)
• The literal literary dispute — “I got a secret for you!”
• OCD Poet
• The Poet MacTeagal
  
• Bjork – Pagan Poetry (careful, some graphic moments near the end — I used to see her wandering the East Village in NYC, and let me tell you, this video is a direct translation of her demeanor… she constantly appears to be in the process of being transported away by faeries or something…)
• Blow your mind — people once cared about literature…
• Kafka and the destroyers of literature

Month of the publishing slow down… I’ll be posting regularly, but nearly so often throughout the month, so expect a lot of roundups. There are floods to be survived, sun rays to be harvested on the combine of my skin, and blueberries to be picked, doused in pectin and eaten on good bread. Bookninja turns four this month. Four. Sweet merciful crap. What will I think from my deathbed?

• No Logo — books as marketing tools
• More on China’s rampant pirating of Harry
• Language and evolution
• Literary cover bands
• Long suffering literary relationships (don’t believe it, Lady Ninja! I gots the goods!)
• Suburban thrillers? (Isn’t that an oxymoron)
• Charles Simic named new US Poet Laureate
• Unproduced Twain play to get Broadway opening
• Woolf’s servants
• The death of SF?
• World`s worst poet…

Philip Pullman is working on a sequel to His Dark Materials, one of the greatest fantasy trilogies ever. I’ll buy it. I just know it. Good writing, good characters, interesting ideas. Does it get any better? I don’t necessarily agree with everything Pullman comes off with, but you can’t beat the story and world he’s imagined.

In an interview with Literary Review, Pullman says thatThe Book of Dust will contain his response to accusations that the previous three books portrayed organised religion as exclusively repressive.

“This is a big subject and I’m writing a big, big book in order to deal precisely with that question,” he tells the magazine. “I don’t want to anticipate it too much by switching a light on the answer now. The interesting – the curious – question is, if people can be helped by something that is palpably not true, is this better than denying the thing that is not true and not being helped?”

The Onion blasts the latest Harry Potter book for containing too many spoilers about plot and what happens to the characters in JK Rowling’s universe… Shame to ruin it for the kids, isn’t it?

It’s pissing down rain here in such a way that I’m afraid this old building’s wiring might short out and kill me somehow, or that we literally might float away, so I’m going to wrap things up with a roundup … (Seriously. Apparently the TransCanada Hwy is washed out just west of here. You know it’s bad when the TCH is actually closed. Plus, I think I just saw the entire Burning Rock crew float by in an upturned umbrella… I could be wrong, but it looked like Winter was bailing.)

• American historians vs. American culture
• The joys of fantasy food lit
• And in this corner — diet books for the chicklit set
• The NYPL’s espresso book machine (from BoingBoing)
• Chinese market awash with Potter knockoffs
• A musical about rare book dealers… um… Orchestra, can you say, “Adagio”?

Dutch writer turns 80 and sparks reflection in a Guardian blog.

Mulisch is one of the great contemporary European novelists. Although he is regularly described as “a novelist of ideas”, that’s an unfairly depressing label; his books are actually rooted in character and narrative. He’s a witty, playful writer, always messing around with history and religion, but never shedding his intense moral seriousness. His non-fiction – which includes an account of the Eichmann trial and a book about Wilhelm Reich – is still waiting to be translated.

Hot literarty gossip — one writer throws a beer at another (from Bookslut) in San Fransico. I hope it wasn’t a GOOD beer.

Then, in a throng of people socializing offstage, Junker passed Elliott in the crowd, an opportunity the writer used to toss his beer on the judge and to make a humorous “bring it on” gesture. (He would never have engaged in a physical fight, he said later.) “All of a sudden my shirt was drenched,” said Junker. “I had no idea where it came from. I … looked back and saw Stephen Elliott had thrown his drink on me. I walked past him to tell the organizers that I was going home.” Litquake’s Jack Boulware took up Junker’s duties. “I don’t understand why Junker left last night,” said Elliott the next day. “I had a shirt in my bag he could have borrowed.” (Spy Passmore, splashed in the incident, said his own shirt said, “Are You Sure That’s Dignified?”)

You don’t know how many times I’ve had to use my right hand to hold my left hand back from this very thing. Personally, I think a bit of mixing it up like this is called for when a loser steps over the line and hijacks a fun event for a chance to cut others down. I just don’t want to be involved, thank you very much. I’m a lover, not a fighter. And by that I mean, I used to be a fighter, but now I’m just into getting laid.

Literary hoaxster and former author Laura Albert has been ordered to pay $350G of her ill-got gains to a film production company. All of this leaves a bad taste in my mouth. First, nutbar Albert syphons cred through an invented counterculture icon, then steals genuine interest from a good series of good causes, then makes buckets of money, then gets caught, then a film company ends up with a winfall. It’s all kind of skeezy to me, from soup to nuts. And I do mean nuts.