As I kick about my old hometown of Toronto, I am simultaneously nostalgic, exhilerated, and repulsed. It’s a city of contradictions: so tall and yet so sprawled out and low, so clean and yet so dirty, so polite and yet so inconsiderate and mean. Anyway, suffice it to say that I’m torn between my lifelong love of this place and my newfound love for St. John’s. I suppose couch surfing with a family of three-and-a-half doesn’t aid the city’s case. I’ll be back in St. John’s New Year’s Day and will take up blogging again shortly thereafter.

In the meantime, to help me remember why the Big Smoke is a helluva town, theatre and writing Toronto fixture Sean Dixon sends me this link to Imagining Toronto, a website dedicated to exploring the borders between literature and place.

Well, I am headed off to visit family and friends for the holidays. I’m up at 4am tomorrow, kid and Lady Ninja in tow, and headed to get my shoes xrayed and my dangerous toothpaste sealed in what is apparently an explosion-proof plastic baggie. Thank god they’ve taken all these time-consuming precautions against all the least efficient ways to create havoc.

Remember to check out stories and podcasts you might have missed in The Magazine, including the Tom McCarthy email interview that just went up this week, audio interviews with Michael Winter and Alissa York, and the huge discussion piece on “empathy” in fiction by five of the best names in Canadian fiction (Peter Behrens, Catherine Bush, Barbara Gowdy, Sheila Heti, and Lisa Moore).

I’ll say what I always do: It’s unlikely that I’ll post much until the new year; but this is Bookninja’s fourth holiday season, so I am experienced enough to know that I’ll get sick of people and steal off to a quiet corner of the house to bang out a few posts here and there. If you’re similarly smothered, please stop by to witness my desperate pleas for rescue.

There haven’t been enough good entries for me to run a statistically sound Golden Shuriken Awards this year, but keep sending in your story tips and ideas in case anything good comes up. Have a good holiday. And remember, drinking and shurikens don’t mix. Except in extreme circumstances. And by that I mean “weekdays”.

Hungarian author, dead at 90.

A guy who helped the guy who wrote the Sopranos meet the guys he need to to meet to get the guys in the show right has been denied a payout by a jury of guys who are presumably his peers.

A federal jury in Trenton, N.J., has dismissed the claims of a man who wanted compensation for helping David Chase create hit TV show The Sopranos.

The jury took just two hours to reach a decision Wednesday in the suit brought by Robert Baer, a former prosecutor and judge.

They ruled that Baer was not owed anything for help he provided Chase in writing an early draft of the mobster drama.

One of my best pals in NYC, we’ll call her Polly, has a great story about this time she was at a bar and had been stood up by a guy she was starting to date. Some Micky Rourke-esque guy sidled up to her and her consoling friend at the bar. He had everything but the zoot suit — including a little jumpy guy named Sal who finished his sentences. Let’s say his name was “Mike”. After a bit of chit chat with the ladies, he asked, “Why you lookin so sad tonight, sweetheart?”

“I’ll tell you, Mikey,” said my pal, well into her fifth daquiri and ready to play the role. “It’s this Irishman. He’s broken my heart.” Mikey went stone faced.

“What’s his name?” he asked ominously. “Yeah, what’s his name?” chimed Sal in a squeaky voice.

Polly steered the conversation away for fear of getting the Irishman sized for a pair of cement shoes, but later that night when they were leaving (the bar had been kept open for Mikey and they were all the last ones there), Mikey picked up the several hundred dollar tab and gave Polly his business card, which read (and I’ve seen this, though I’m changing the names here):

Michaelangelo Pastafazouli
Debt Management and Reconcilliation

Does it get any better than that? I told Polly that she should have it framed. Even if the guy was a con man, I would still have set eight inches of expensive matting and wood around that tiny card, in a heartbeat. And hung it over my desk. Of course, things would have turned out rather differently, I suspect, if I’d told old Mikey that an Irishman broke my heart. But still.

Part of The Onion’s end of year roundup.

Thousands lined up at bookstores to purchase the fanciful tale, which chronicles the exploits of the adolescent wizard with his pointy hat and glasses, as he and his magical little friends go traipsing into the forbidden forest and attempt to defeat the evil Hufflestuff people with the sword of destiny, magic potions, and other such fantasy dragon bullshit.

• In praise of bookish judges
• Why no central Asian writers in translation?
• Pogues to play uncensored (not literary, per se, but close to me heart)
• Jackson back on track with The Hobbit
• Ed Champion calls it a day — we’ll miss the crazy ranting, Ed!
• Edmund Wilson considered
• Kids reviewing kids’ books… hm, what a concept (FYI, I tried to institute this on Bookninja, but getting kids to write to deadline is like herding cats…) (Thanks, K to the P)

According to the CBC. Rachel Giese does an admirable job of hitting some of the highlights.

Harry Potter. Nathan Zuckerman. John Rebus. It would be difficult to come up with three literary heroes with less in common than the boy wizard, the embattled novelist and the lager-soaked Edinburgh detective. Yet in 2007, they all faced the same fate: retirement.

Guy Gavriel Kay, interviewed by podcast previously here in The Magazine, writes about the world we are creating with our instant updating of the world wide web. Be careful what you say, writes Kay. It may appear online.

For some of us, no context is “limited” any longer. That is the point I’m offering for consideration. And “some of us” can be pretty extensive. This isn’t about Brad Pitt or Amy Winehouse. Ask any high school student whose pratfall is recorded by a classmate’s camera phone and posted to YouTube. Or the microcelebrity (a nice term I first saw in Wired magazine) snapped while at a party looking less-than-sober, with the photo online immediately, to derision-inducing effect.

We are, in other words, always “on” now, at least potentially, always in a wider public than might appear to be the case, and it compels adjustments, and some regret.

This hits home with me in a big way because I see it from both sides, watching what I say publicly when I’m out, but also having hung out with a few lit types who have seemed wary and stiff in my company. Usually I would chalk this up to the inherent Asperger’s-like behaviour of people who like to be alone with machines and pens, but sometimes you can just feel it’s something else. After either a certain amount of observation (or prodding) on my part, I’ve realized that sometimes these folk are wary of saying anything around me in case it appears on Bookninja. I almost can’t help laughing at this. I basically link to stories that are already posted online. If news comes up that doesn’t have an extant story with its own URL, I usually don’t bother posting for FEAR of it being mere gossip. Further, other than a couple reports from the Griffin prize/M&S anniversary, I can’t remember ever posting any lit without verifying sources and asking permission, and even then I didn’t name names. This isn’t to say gossip isn’t mailed to me daily. It is. I’m just a vault, baby. (And fully aware of how dangerous gossip can be.)

So if you see your ‘Ninja commander at a party down the road, rest assured, you can share a beer with him (preferably with your own glass) and be yourself, and you won’t be quoted or named without permission. I’m not a gossip columnist. I aggregate and make fun of literary news stories already widely available, just not necessarily collected in one place.

Do you look up words when you encounter ones you don’t know? I do. Sometimes I find myself making entire lists and looking them up later in one big orgy of dictionary browsing. Especially after playing my friend Kate at Scrabble. This guy took a solemn vow to look up every word he didn’t recognize. My kind of dude.

Although it may not always seem like it, writers do want to get through to readers. When Don Paterson uses “litotes”, “recrudescence” and “concupiscence” in the course of an introduction to a book of Robert Burns’s poetry, he isn’t showing off, or being obscure for the sake of intellectual exclusivity. He is being precise. The first example is a technical word for a type of understatement, my ignorance of which shows how poor a literature student I was at university; the second and third belong to the shameful category of words which I used to skim over repeatedly without ever being quite sure what they meant. Paterson was being demanding of his readers; but if you can’t be demanding in an introduction to a book of poetry, where can you be?

Post-albedo I resolved that I wouldn’t pretend to myself any more that I knew what a word meant when I didn’t, or that the context was enough to understand it, or that I’d find out what a word meant one day, but not today. I would set my rudder against the prevailing attitude, which is that anyone who doesn’t know a word we use is a fool, and anyone who uses a word we don’t know is a snob. I’d look the words up then and there, and write the meaning down. I might even learn them; so help me, I might even use them, although I doubt I shall live long enough to work “banausic” and “threnody” into the same sentence (Margaret Boerner of Villanova University: it is you and your website that I refer to).

I love watching people’s faces in conversation when they use a word I don’t know and I stop them and say, “Sorry, what exactly does that mean?” It’s like I’ve crossed a social boundary of some sort. Aren’t we all supposed to pretend we all know what we’re all talking about? (That might be fine for some people, but I often hang with academics — a subspecies of humans invested in having their own impenetrable dialect.) Quite often they can’t define it, which is awkward.

I especially pull this kind of in-your-face asshole routine out at business meetings when people “utilize” “paradigm shifting” “boiler plates” to “ramp up” “communications” “functionality” with their “publics”. Someone says “utilize” and I say, “Beg pardon, but do you mean “use”?” Then they say, “functionality” and I say, “I’m sorry, do you mean “capability”?”

I’ve probably told this story before, but it’s my blog and one of my last posts before Giftmas, so hush up: My favourite example of this was a friend who called out a Microsoft exec at a product demo way back in the late 90s. The guy up front had been rattling on in this techno jibber-jabber of invented board room words and said, “As you can see, this represents a complete paradigm shift in how we approach these problems.”

My buddy stood up, raised his hand and said, “Excuse me, can you please define the word “paradigm”?” The guy stumbled and sputtered something like, “Well, what I, uh, mean is that it’s a completely new way of…” “That’s not what I asked you,” says my pal. “I asked you to define the word “paradigm”…” People actually clapped. These days, my bro would likely have been tased for this. But it’s still a fond memory of being an asshole on behalf of the language.

Creative Writing programs are booming in the UK, but are they any good? Suckahs. You’ve fallen into the Heffalump trap American set years ago. You think that 1812 thing was over? Prepare to be colonized. And I’m not talking about settling people there.

Today’s aspiring writers, flocking to creative writing courses at postgraduate and undergraduate levels, seem to feel this need for an experienced eye especially keenly. Two years ago, writing in the Guardian about the decline of the fiction editor in publishing, Blake Morrison observed that the “massive growth in creative writing programmes in Britain” could partly be explained by writers seeking “the kind of editorial help they no longer hope to get from publishing houses”. And friends with the literary judgment of Ezra Pound or Philip Larkin (who helped Eliot and Amis respectively) are hard to come by.

But are students taking these courses in such numbers just to become painstaking editors? Graham Hodge, a second-year student on the part-time MA at Birkbeck, says: “There is the notion – fuelled by rock-star writers like Zadie Smith and tales of six-figure advances – that being a writer of literary fiction is a pretty tasty career. So I think some people see a creative writing MA as being a bit like … an MBA – your passport to a nice pad in Notting Hill.” But, he continues, “A term into my second year as a part-time MAer, I can confirm these perceptions are false … planning to earn enough from writing to give up the day job will almost certainly lead to disappointment.”

Now lets hear your loud roaring noise of sadness and dispair.

• Teh internets is invizabul cheezburgr for buks! LOL!!1!1r0×0r
• The gossipy joys and shame of the publishing party
• Free spec fiction online!
• Telegraph year in books
• SMH best of

Profiled at the Guardian around his new book in which he suggests that Jesus was a Palestinian insurgent. And apparently any pissing off of Martin Amis was only an added bonus.

‘Let me make one thing clear before we start,’ Terry Eagleton says. ‘I did not do this book about Jesus just to piss off Martin Amis.’ I guess he wouldn’t mind too much if it did, though. The book about Jesus is a new reading of the Gospels, out in time for Christmas, in which Eagleton asks the question, ‘Was Christ a revolutionary?’ and answers it mostly in the affirmative. It is a typical Eagleton stocking-filler: short, iconoclastic, fiercely clever; it places Jesus on the fringe of Palestinian insurgents against Rome, in the political wing of the anti-imperialist Zealots. The essay takes Eagleton back to his earliest intellectual outings at Cambridge in the Sixties, where he made a name for himself contributing to a curious Marxist Christian magazine called Slant. It is also the latest offensive in his argument with what he likes to call ’smug, liberal, rationalist’ opinion, of which his ongoing war of words with Amis is the most visible engagement.
…
Eagleton has a practised ability to change the terms of a question, a product of the years when he used to excuse himself from High Table at Oxford in order to debate the progress of the struggle with comrades from the Workers’ Socialist League and shop floor activists from the car plant at Cowley. The caricature has always been that of the armchair revolutionary, singing rebel songs in Irish pubs, before slipping back to the dreaming spires. He liked to romanticise himself in his Oxford days as ‘the barbarian in the citadel’, spreading sedition to the sons and daughters of privilege. Though his detractors charged him with intellectual bandwagon-jumping, he has stayed stubbornly faithful to his teenage socialism, a fact which has given him revered status among two generations of dissenting undergraduates.

Scholastic is holding out hopes that something called 39 Clues will be Harry’s successor. Oh, wait… it’s not even a book. It’s book/game based on the kid-crack model of Webkinz. Why don’t you just include a free shot of heroin with it? It’s like the prize-in-a-cereal box of books, except this is in Krusty-Os and has sharp metal edges.

The series is also Scholastic’s attempt to create a branded franchise for which it owns all the rights. Ms. Rowling retained the rights to the Harry Potter series, which meant that she could pursue separate deals for film and other licensed products, effectively cutting out Scholastic.

An online game will allow readers to search for the 39 clues themselves, while solving puzzles and playing mini-games that will be refreshed daily. Mr. Levithan said the site would include blogs written from the points of view of characters, and maps, treasure hunts and videos, many with historical and geographical content.

Each book will come with six collectors’ cards that can be used to find further clues in the online game. Players can also win cash and other prizes.

The publisher hopes that reluctant readers will be drawn to the books by the game. “Reading the books will make you better at the games, so that is the incentive,” said Suzanne Murphy, publisher of Scholastic’s trade division.

Seriously, didn’t ANYONE see that episode of Star Trek where Wesley got addicted to that game that looked like headgear braces for your eyes? Have we learned nothing from the good people of the Starship Enterprise? Please don’t let Wil’s years of suffering as Wesley have been in vain.

We’re fast approaching the day when this Ninja lord must return to the Shadow World of Wind and Ghosts from whence he came to recharge his chi — that well of soulful energy that leads to well-being, creativity, and grusomely shuriken-peppered enemies. I will consult with the other dark lords of awesome death and rampant silliness (Bookmuskateer, Bookblackknight, and Bookpirate) and imbibe the nectar of the Other Side, which will sustain me for the coming year of corporeal manifestation (but will first leave me dizzy and incapacitated on the couch of a stranger’s house on New Year’s Day). In the spirit of these end times that seem like death but are actually not and are only being trumped up to counteract the tinny Christmas musak on the speakers overhead, I give you several “end of the world” articles for your litschatological pleasure.

• A dismal year for books
• Twilight of the books
• England faces bloodiest arts cull in half century
• Near death experience still haunts author
• Leno heads back despite writers
• Google vs. Wikipedia
• Conrad Black loves the Frankenhand
• Googling oneself is growing in popularity (I’d like to see some stats on how much the average person finds…)
• Investigative reporting on the decline
• Former Defence Secretary to head Booker Prize jury…

Okay, a few of those aren’t quite end-of-the-world worthy, but you can see why I might have stuck them in there.

New in The Magazine: Ninja K interviews Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and Tintin and the Sccret of Literature, and the man The Independent calls “one of the fictional finds of the decade”, about his newest novel Men in Space. Here they chat via email about, space, art and literature.

“How a precocious group of high school poets learned to provide verse on demand.” (Thanks, FC)

On Thursday morning, the day of the poetry stand, I gave this assignment: An old widow has just moved to Bloomfield. She plans to make an embroidery or needlepoint and would like a rhymed couplet blessing her house.

To some in the room, this was the last straw. They had come to an exclusive arts program, to write eight hours a day for four weeks, and they were being asked to do this? I asked if they thought I had suddenly become some kind of conservative. They knew better. I asked if they thought the prompt itself was too conservative, or just silly, and they said, “Hell yes: a housewarming poem for an old lady’s needlepoint?”

“It’s just writing,” I said. “An old lady wants a poem.”

“No she doesn’t. You made her up.”

“You don’t think there’s old ladies doing needlepoint out there in deep dark New Jersey?”

“Okay, but what’s that got to do with real poetry?”

Wendy Cope on Show Me the Money and Oliver Burkeman on Where Wendy Went Wrong.

Cope: “In the long run – if our poems survive into the long run – we’ll be in no position to benefit from royalties or permission fees. All poets hope that their work will outlive them. I’m no exception. Even so, I sometimes feel a bit annoyed by the prospect of people making money out of my poems when I’m too dead to spend it.”

Burkeman: “Focus for a moment on Cope’s argument that it hurts her sales when someone sends one of her poems to their friends. Suppose I email a Cope poem to 10 people, along with a note urging them to read it. Most recipients, presumably, will be neither more nor less likely to buy one of her books as a result. One or two, I suppose, might dislike the poem and resolve never to pay money for a collection. But of those who read the poem and respond positively, what is really more likely – that they will savour it and conclude that, having done so, they need not buy a Wendy Cope collection as they had previously been planning to do? Or that her work will strike a chord with them, prompting them, now or at some point in the future, to buy a book, for themselves or as a gift for a friend? Cope surely can’t really believe that the former response is more likely than the latter, can she? Apart from anything else, what about the people who’d never even heard of Cope until the email reached them?”

IN the UK they are doing a large study to investigate the culture of childhood through the folklore of skipping songs. I love it! I took a whole course on this in university and it was fantastic. One of the only courses in which I learned anything at that dump.

Politicians, along with films stars and members of the royal family, have always been prominent in children’s rhymes. Now Heritage Lottery-funded research into the changing nature of these childhood ditties is to prove just how rich the tradition remains. ‘Reports of the death of the playground song are always premature,’ said Michael Rosen, the children’s laureate and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Word of Mouth, which recently celebrated children’s songs. ‘These songs and rhymes run across classes and across cultures and they are often about breaking taboos. It is what you might call “subversive laughter” and it is popular, I think, because it undermines authority.’

Remember all the astronaut jokes and rhymes after the Challenger disaster? Just like Grimm tales, so much of the folklore of childhood is about death and other boundary breaking. It’s not just about taboos, it’s about how they process and exchange information as a culture.

Age guidelines on kids books are more about helping aunts and uncles figure out what to buy than protecting one set of kids from the naughtier or scarier bits of books outside their range, but this isn’t going to help in our house where four-year-old Ninja Boy is going through Stuart Little (there are some seriously out-of-date scenes in there that require a bit of context, I warn you) for the second time and has always read (and worn clothes) outside his age group. I’m prepping him for Charlotte’s Web and The Hobbit, which I did at 6 and 7. I suspect he’ll go for them by 5 and 6.

Publishers are preparing to put reading age guidelines on the covers of all children’s books in an important breakthrough for children’s literacy.

Some of the main companies in the children’s book market have made the decision after two years of consultation with parents, young readers and literacy experts. The information will appear as a recommended age band.

The rest of the industry is expected to follow suit and the bands, which categorise books by reading age as Early (for five years plus), Developing (7 plus) Confident (9 plus) and Fluent, could become industry standards next year. The scheme would bring books into line with toys, DVDs and video games, which all carry age guidelines.

Clarke, turning 90, releases a birthday wish list for the future that includes Sri Lanka, aliens and global warming. Here’s the actual video of his list.

Richard and Judy helped a whole host of authors send a letter to PM Gordon Brown begging for a plan to confront illiteracy in the children of the UK. The letter (transcribed here) was signed by an all-star list of authors. Over here, we can be sure such a noble letter, should it ever get written between the squabbling sub-committees of Canlit, would be read and immediately discarded by someone very close to someone the Prime Minister had instructed to sit in the corner and remain silent.

We, the undersigned, are therefore pleased to lend our support to Channel 4’s “Lost for Words” campaign, which aims to get all our kids reading. The fact of the matter is that all children in mainstream schools are capable of learning to read — and so all children should be taught to read in school, for an hour every day, until they are able to read properly.

In fact, everyone who cares about the future of our children’s education needs to ask: What more can we do? A year ago, for example, half the children at Monteagle Primary School in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham were more than a year behind where they should have been in their reading levels. Twelve months on, after a concerted effort by staff, parents and pupils, the school has managed to cut this level of functional illiteracy by half and doubled the number of children who are reading to their age-appropriate levels or above.

Author and feminist, dead at 68.

What makes a bestseller at Christmas? My guess is “a large number of books sold during the last month of the year”, but that might be an impractical, idealistic view of things. In the UK, it’s spoof books to keep beside the can.

Is Nielsen suggesting that the British Christmas books market – which accounts for about half of the year’s total sales – does not evolve? “It does evolve, but it also revolves. It evolves in the sense that occasionally a book will come along that no one expected would be a bestseller, but often these are, on closer examination, not really new. For instance, when Schott’s Original Miscellany became the bestseller of Christmas 2002, it wasn’t exactly fresh, even though many retailers got caught out because they didn’t see they had a hit on their hands and so didn’t get enough copies in. It could have been published 100 years ago. Even the design, which was self-consciously retro, was aimed at tapping into that tradition of almanacs and those great, eccentric hardy British annuals like Wisden.”

Ever since, publishers have been on the hunt for little books with big appeal and minimal intellectual demands.

Coetzee’s writing, politics, and loyalties considered and reconsidered in a lengthy profile at the NYT.

Although he said he had been drawn by Australia’s “spirit” and “beauty,” Coetzee’s further reasons for emigrating and assuming Australian citizenship remain elusive; he rarely speaks to the press and declined to be interviewed for this article. But the fraught events leading to his departure have been much discussed in South Africa. In a country where every inch of physical and moral ground is contested, Coetzee has been criticized for refusing to play the role of writer-as-statesman, one more easily played by his fellow Nobel laureate, Nadine Gordimer. (Unlike others who have delivered rousing Nobel lectures, Coetzee, true to form, gave an elliptical disquisition on decoy ducks in Daniel Defoe.) But he has been criticized even more harshly for his work. Nothing struck a rawer nerve than Coetzee’s powerful 1999 novel, “Disgrace.” Rather than offering comfort or encouragement to a defensive new nation, the book brilliantly explored the unresolved tensions of the post-apartheid order.

Oz poets left out of the PM Awards winfall. Why?

NOT EVERYONE WAS punching the air with delight at the news of the Prime Minister’s new literary prizes – $100,000 each for a work of fiction and non-fiction.

Some poets raised their eyebrows that there was no consideration of their old art. And Ivor Indyk, the man who runs Giramondo and published this year’s Miles Franklin winner, Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, described the exclusion of poets as “appalling. If it was deliberate, then the omission implies a debased sense of the literary culture. If it was unintentional, then it suggests a high degree of ignorance in the person who made the decision, or those who advised on it.”

An MMOPRG for Shakespeare? Will this make William roll (role?) in his grave? Presumably you can ask him when he rises from it and attacks your character with his Hewn Limb of Verily Smiting +1.

Social scientists would perform experiments on the thriving world by fiddling with its defining characteristics. Some of the changes could be obvious, such as the rate of inflation, or more subtle. But, said Prof Castronova, the results should be instructive – even for the real world.

“I have seen nothing in virtual worlds that violates any social theory I know about,” he added. “A market is a market whether it is in ancient Athens, Shakespeare’s London or Azeroth.”

“If you have a theory about human society and it does not survive the transition across the membrane to a virtual world then it’s not a very interesting theory,” he said.

Social theorists such as Karl Marx might have reached very different conclusions if they had been given a pocket society to experiment on, said Prof Castronova.

The first public version of Arden is now available for anyone to visit – provided they have an up to date copy of the NeverWinter Nights game and have installed the Arden add-on produced by Mr Castronova and his colleagues.

Anyone expecting a gritty recreation of Elizabethan life might be surprised by what they find in Arden, said Dr Castronova.

“Shakespeare has a very rich lore and fantasy environment second only to Tolkien,” he said. “Both have elves.”

“We felt that it should not be historical but like Shakespeare’s dream so you could have Rome next to Bohemia or the Forest of Arden,” he said.

Adventuring in the world involves carrying out quests for familiar Shakespearian characters such as John Falstaff.

[Regular news below]

Well, everyone and their dogs are releasing best of year lists, so harkening back to an earlier day when I released a biting list of the year’s top stories under the insousciant header “The Golden Shuriken Awards” (no longer available online), I thought I’d revive the tradition but with a wider input.

Send me your vote for top lit-story of the year, either as reported on Bookninja or as missed by Bookninja.

Was it something skeezy, controversial or stupid like the OJ/the Goldmans/Judith Regan money grab? The dumbening of The Golden Compass? The Martin Amis/Ronan Bennett racism dustup? The rise of the blog? Stephen King winning literary awards? Canada Customs screwing Little Sister? Stephen Henighan pointing the shaky finger of conspiracy at the Canlit family? The Google/digitization arguments? The kindling of The Kindle? The exposing of the misblurb? The end of US reading according to the NEA? Brown writers being mistaken for terrorists? The death of the books pages? Rankin vs the lesbians? etc etc etc?

Or was it something heartening, triumphant or smart like the OJ/the Goldmans/Judith Regan money grab? The dumbening of The Golden Compass? The Martin Amis/Ronan Bennett racism dustup? The rise of the blog? …. (No seriously, what about the Lessing Nobel? What about the fact that literature still didn’t die, despite the internet? What about Peggy and Yann taking on Harper (though depending on your view, this could fit in the first category)? What about the end of Harry Potter? etc etc etc?)

Send in your votes for the year’s top ‘Ninja stories, with commentary explaining your position — please also include a note about whether or not I can identify you by name on the site (if you don’t offer permission in your note, I will NOT post your name beside the comments) by emailing me through this link: . (If you don’t use this link with the subject line provided, I may not get your mail because the spam is so bad it’s got one of those Star Wars trash compactor beasts swimming around in it.)

I’ll try to get the list up by the 20th.

Ah, the perfect combination of two of the basic elements of my day… The sonnet and the PowerPoint presentation, which is karma’s way of remind you you tortured kittens with acid in a previous life.

Shirely Dent looks a the importance of literary “cliques”, a word dear to my heart, but only for its Scrabble pointage. See, despite any level of success, some of us seem to have a problem fitting in to cliques and sometimes feel like the bum pressed against the restaurant window, or the kid with his face held down in the slush at the bus stop while his bully, named Danny Sutton, uses those big ski mitts with those sharp little metal clips on the side to stuff snow down the back of his jacket while the other kids laugh and laugh and laugh… … … Sniff. To all of us, I raise a glass here in our little e-salon and scorn everyone else. Wait-A-Minute?! (Can 5000-10000 people comprise a clique? I think of us more like a mob. Or maybe a “frique”. That’s a mob of outcasts. Niiiiiice.)

Surface appearances can hide the seriousness of cliques. Easy though it is to mock the outward trappings of the Pre-Raphaelites and their later cousins the Aesthetes (as George du Maurier did in his Punch cartoons of delicate petal dandies), they had serious and sincere literary and artistic ideas they wanted to experiment with. The fact is that taking on difficult, challenging ideas, getting it wrong and being told you’ve got it wrong, is a matter of simpatico. The Beats may have been intellectually a loose amalgam, but they shared an enthusiasm for experimentation coming out of and confronting the post-war world. This was counter-culture at a time when counter-culture meant something.

Such empathy of minds and attitudes necessarily excludes some people. Too bad.

Michael Dirda looks at JCO in the NYRB.

Her work is regularly chosen for The Best American Short Stories—and for The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. In her thirties she won the National Book Award for Them, and in her sixties We Were the Mulvaneys was picked as an Oprah Book Club choice. In the years between, she received, among many other honors, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Horror Writers Guild. For more than twenty-five years she’s been rumored to be a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature.

Such astonishing range and productivity might instill envy in even the industrious Henry James and Virginia Woolf (the serious professional writers with whom Oates most identifies). Yet throughout her life Oates has also been a professor of English, first at the University of Detroit, and for many years now at Princeton. Her students have included the youthful novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, who has said that she acted as his mentor in producing his widely admired Everything Is Illuminated. Teaching clearly matters to her, since she could have afforded to give it up long ago.

With her husband Raymond Smith, moreover, Oates has edited The Ontario Review and, from time to time, published books under its imprint. She has regularly contributed substantial essays and reviews to, among others, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books. Somehow, the seemingly tireless writer also keeps a journal, plays the piano, jogs, gardens, draws, cooks, and reads as indefatigably as she writes. (But she doesn’t watch television: TV, Oates has said, is “for people who are skimming along on the surface of life.”) Her good friend the scholar Elaine Showalter once remarked that you had but to mention a book and “Joyce will have the novel read by next week.”

In short, Joyce Carol Oates is a major one-woman industry. Her journal tells us that she writes from 8 till 1 every day, then again for two or three hours in the evening. And she revises and polishes and reworks page after page after page. Such commitment, coupled with her literary fecundity, unnerves many people. Surely so many books can’t be that good, that deeply felt, truly authentic?

Sell your books at fair prices and cancel free delivery. Well, geez, if that goes through you might as well buy your books at a local independent and promote social interaction, community development, and environmentally conscious consumerism. Ooohhohoho! I get it!

The action, brought in January 2004 by the French Booksellers’ Union (Syndicat de la librairie française), accused Amazon of offering illegal discounts on books and even of selling some books below cost.

The court gave Amazon 10 days to start charging for the delivery of books, which should at least allow the company to maintain the offer through the end-of-year gift-giving season. After that, it must pay a fine of €1,000 (US$1,470) per day that it continues to offer free delivery. It must also pay €100,000 in compensation to the booksellers’ union.

Retail prices, particularly of books, are tightly regulated in France.

Do we need them? Judging by the fire hazard I call an office, I certainly seem to think I need mine. Oh wait, half of those papers are bills. Still, I like to keep them around to remind me of the paper cuts I got opening them. Sigh… What’s that? You have to PAY them? Explain this “pay” concept of which you speak, Earthling.

It is a market that has been created by vainglorious American universities that, in recent years, have been trying to buy themselves some scholarly heft. The competition between these wealthy institutions is such that even writers whom one might kindly call “middle-ranking” can find a munificent buyer. Arnold Wesker got £100,000 from the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas in Austin, which has unrivalled spending power. Julian Barnes sold his manuscripts to the same omnivorous institution for what is rumoured to have been $200,000. David Hare and Penelope Lively are amongst others who have tapped the Harry Ransom acquisition fund.

The British Library’s bid for Pinter’s papers is surely fuelled by fear that the Americans will get them. But all the talk of “saving them for the nation” is baloney. It is not like a great painting, which can only truly be appreciated in the flesh, so to speak, and which can be made available to anyone who chooses to visit the right art gallery. The manuscripts of an author are, in reality, available only to a few scholars. It matters that an author’s papers be kept together: a scattered archive is real hindrance to scholarship. But otherwise it is no tragedy that a modern literary archive ends up over the Atlantic.

• Goodbye WSJ, I’d miss you if I ever read you…
• Be calm! US book sales up four months in a row
• Rock rock rock rock, rock and roll Leonard!
• Copyright bill pulled for no apparent reason except the public outcry… what is this, a democracy?
• $4,000,000 for Rowling’s handwriting from secret buyer

• Bloggers vs. critics (from Maud)? At least one poll still puts the public opinion in favour of the traditional media outlets
• Fantasy author Terry Pratchett has rare form of early Alzheimer’s
• Academic file sharing
• For the Dorqus Malorqus in you (That’s not LATIN!!)
• I refugee from Guantánamo Bay
• Literature will survive pop singer infestation
• Pinter papers saved!!
• Ibiza bartender wins children’s book prize (probably saw a lot of people chewing on pacifiers in his day)
• Monetizing free web work…. hey…. um… Can you pass that article over here when you’re done?
• Lethem fiction on sentences…
• An alt booklist at the Voice of titles you might have missed

Paddington Bear is receiving a harsh lesson in how the times are a-changin. As a refugee from “darkest Peru”, Paddington gets the racial-profiling once over by immigrant-suspicious cops in his new book. Might as well teach the kids early. If there’s anything extraordinary about you, watch out.

While Paddington is never “actually arrested”, said Bond, there is “a bit of a kerfuffle”, enough for the Browns to “get worried [about his refugee status] after his visit to the police station. Is he going to get in trouble?” Everything turns out all right in the end, but it’s not before readers have seen something new in the diminutive bear, he explained. “There is this side of Paddington the Browns don’t really understand at all,” he continued, “what it’s like to be a refugee, not to be in your own country.”

Bond rejects the idea that there’s a “message” in the book, quoting Samuel Goldwyn’s dictum that “messages are for Western Union”, but is unabashed about confronting a hot political issue in a book for children.

“I think it’s quite good not to sweep it under the carpet,” he said. According to Bond there’s no duty for writers to explore difficult subjects, but authors should be “aware of them, and aware that life isn’t easy for someone who’s left their country and can’t go back”.

Paddington “hasn’t changed at all”, but the new stories “reflect life as it is”, Bond said. “It is a very different world to the world of the original book. I think life was much more settled then.”

A Guardian blogger considers the precedent this sets and what some of the other children’s classics characters might go through if they run afoul of the law.

It never occurred to me that Paddington might be on shaky legal ground. It might just be because of the sensible duffel coat and rain hat that I don’t necessarily associate with the South American continent. Or possibly because, in my mind, Paddington always sounds like a cross between my mother and Michael Hordern, which is quite terrifying enough, even before you start wondering at how little that voice sounds like a recent immigrant of questionable legal standing.

Still, if there was a loophole in the law that could have been exploited there, it’s right that the matter should be cleared up. If only because it may put the brakes on those crowds of hopeful-looking duffel-coated recent arrivals hanging around London railway stations with signs saying “Please look after this engineer/manual worker/human rights lawyer, thank you” hoping to claim the “bear precedent” in their impending immigration hearings.

The more worrying thing, though, is the possible effect on other treasured characters of children’s literature and television, if forced to conform to modern law.

My real worry is for Frog and Toad. Such a sweet, gay odd couple whose rights to experience joy and grumble while tobogganning and flying kites are constantly jeopardized by homophobic public policy.

Three Canadian playwrights, three acting troupes and twelve hours. Oh, and a script started by Tom Stoppard that must be finished and performed at the end of the half-day. Nice idea for a fundraiser. I’m cheering for Claudia Dey. Even if it’s not a competition.

In a competition requiring lightning wit and quick keyboarding, three Canadian playwrights will have four hours to each whip out a play begun by internationally renowned playwright Tom Stoppard.

Eight hours later, all three plays will be presented before a live audience at the newly renovated Capitol Event Theatre in Toronto.

The Bodleian recently displayed, side-by-side and for one day only, all four of its copies of the Magna Carta — partially as a nose tweak to Sotheby’s which is trying to sell the only privately held copy of the 13 left in the world.

The Bodleian would never put a price on its treasures, but Sotheby’s estimates its later copy to be worth up to £15m. If this proves correct – and it could be conservative – the older Bodleian copies, one at least in better condition, must be worth the best part of £100m. Every one of the visitors who queued for hours was photographed.

Nicholas Vincent, the professor of medieval history at the University of East Anglia, who has traced the history of all the surviving copies, describes the Magna Carta as “history itself condensed into a single parchment sheet”.

What I’d like to see is a copy of the Japanese version of this, known as “The Manga Carta”.

Um, w00t?

Copyfighter and blogger Cory Doctorow riffs on why Amazon’s downloads for books and music are so terrible. I seldom shop at Amazon, but when I do, I’ve never had a problem and am always amazed at how quickly things arrive. Now if they could just get the title, cover shot, and author name right on my books, things would be great.

As a consumer advocate and activist, I’m delighted by almost every public policy initiative from Amazon. When the Author’s Guild tried to get Amazon to curtail its used-book market, the company refused to back down. Founder Jeff Bezos (who is a friend of mine) even wrote, “when someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.”

More recently, Amazon stood up to the US government, who’d gone on an illegal fishing expedition for terrorists (TERRORISTS! TERRORISTS! TERRORISTS!) and asked Amazon to turn over the purchasing history of 24,000 Amazon customers. The company spent a fortune fighting for our rights, and won.

It also has a well-deserved reputation for taking care over copyright “takedown” notices for the material that its customers post on its site, discarding ridiculous claims rather than blindly acting on every single notice, no matter how frivolous.

One of the dumbest companies on the web

But for all that, it has to be said: Whenever Amazon tries to sell a digital download, it turns into one of the dumbest companies on the web.

There seems to be something of a trend afoot, in having celebrities sit on awards juries for things it’s unlikely they know much about (see Canada Reads). In the UK, the Orange Prize now has a young pop singer sitting in. Is this good or bad for the award and good or bad for literature? Nicholas Lezard ponders.

It was with mixed feelings that we learned that Lily Allen, the singer and songwriter, is to be a judge for this year’s Orange prize for fiction. On the one hand, we are pleased for her, for she is an intelligent and talented lyricist and musician, one who deserves her fame despite her appalling father; and excitingly young (at 22, the youngest judge ever for the Orange).On the other hand, we groan. The Orange has always had the whiff of the publicity angle about it (daring the conservative male literary establishment to get upset about a women-only prize); and indeed, in commenting on this latest development we are, regrettably, complicit in their latest stunt.

Frankie the C points out this Globe piece picking up the story, reported here several weeks back, about the Arab world opening its doors to Arab-language translations of the great books of the Western canon.

It’s been 375 years since Galileo published his earth-shaking Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 336 since John Milton wrote Paradise Regained and nearly 40 since James D. Watson had an apparent international bestseller with The Double Helix, about the discovery of the structure of DNA. Amazingly, however, none of these books, and thousands of classics like them, has ever been translated into Arabic, the first tongue of more than 300 hundred million persons worldwide. Indeed, according to a 2003 United Nations report into human development in the Arab world, more books are translated into Spanish each year – 10,000 – than have been translated into Arabic in the previous 10 centuries.

Now this situation is being rectified by the sheikhdom of Abu Dhabi, one of the seven Muslim United Arab Emirates, which last month officially revealed its plans to translate 100 epochal foreign-language texts into Arabic by the end of next year.

Giving George Bush an award for mucking up the English language would have been too obvious, so they gave it to a footie coach instead. The real story though, is in the hundreds of other possible winners that roll in each year.

McClaren, fired as manager after the team failed to qualify for the Euro 2008 championships, is in distinguished company – past winners include model Naomi Campbell, actor Richard Gere and former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

There is never a shortage of entrants sent in by people baffled by bureaucratic language and befuddled legalese.

“We get 40 to 50 examples a week, mostly from British documents. The media, including advertising and marketing, is riddled with insider jargon,” Beer told Reuters.

Offering the best way to obliterate meaningless verbosity, Beer said: “Thinking before you write is the main thing and then re-reading what you have written.”

Maud points to a site that might help with some of this.

• Bonfire 20 years later
• The limits of the e-book
• Gore accepts Nobel… RUN, AL! RUN!
• Sci-fi Xmas roundup at the Times
• Late Robert Jordan’s replacement to finish Wheel of Time serie (from SFSignal)
• Oz writers pick their favourites of the year

Why not? I mean, at least it’s likely this kid will have the full vocabulary necessary to explain her exploitation-driven insecurities to Dr. Phil when her publicist forces her on the show in the coming years.

The UK’s youngest self-help author has written her second book, giving pupils useful tips on surviving the move from primary to secondary education. Libby Rees was just nine when she wrote her first 60-page book, Help, Hope And Happiness, outlining strategies she used to cope when her mother and father separated.

Her list of useful tips for coping with sad situations was published a year later by Aultbea Publishing and the book has raised thousands for the charity Save The Children.

Funny enough, the Guardian has two stories about disappearing literatures from places about as far apart as you can get, culturally-geo-socio-politically speaking: the beautiful and interesting Iceland, and that cess pool of excess and excrement, L.A.

The Catholic-types needn’t worry, says Salon. No one will even WANT to read the book after seeing this movie:

I can think of no more dispiriting experience this holiday season than seeing the crestfallen faces of several of my colleagues as they trundled out of a screening of Chris Weitz’s adaptation of “The Golden Compass.” Those faces said it all: Their faith had been shattered; there was nothing left to believe in; God must surely be dead. How could a book they’d loved so much be turned into such utter, soulless crap?

This movie version of Philip Pullman’s popular children’s novel has taken a lot of heat from Christian groups, particularly William Donohue’s one-man band the Catholic League, who fear the material will lead impressionable kiddies down the path to ruin. According to these reliable sources, Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy — of which “The Golden Compass” is the first book — instructs children to form miniature armies to go out and kill God, or something like that. Spokespeople for some of these groups have tempered their outrage after actually seeing the movie: Weitz has toned down whatever antireligious sentiment might have been found in the first book, replacing it with vague, nondenominational murmurings about the significance of learning to think for oneself. But apparently, the idea that children might actually think for themselves is still too hot to handle. These Christian groups fear that if children see the movie, they may want to read the books. And we can’t have children reading now, can we?

Conrad Black, on his way to the slippery showers of a US pen for six-and-a-half, apprently also writes in whatever time he can spare from a once healthy career in power-brokering and fraud. I’m even told he’s quite a good writer, though you wouldn’t know it in the US where his new book is getting few reviews. Everyone but Black’s family seems to be having a field day with this, the vile and scatologically-inclined Rosie Dimanno among them. Even here in Canada where Lord Conrad gets little sympathy, except from the rich and famous and his own paper, which is reporting on the detrimental effect Black’s enprisonment will have on charities and yet still spends editorial inches reminding everyone of its journalistic integrity (which is kind of like the man on the witness stand who utters the words, “I’m innocent!”) His partners in crime are getting off easy, some think. Oh, those “somes”. It could have been worse for Black, but I expect it will get even better with appeal.

Foes of a new Canadian copyright law are gathering a head of steam. From what I can see, the law is mainly designed to appease US corporate interests and allow downloaders to be sued, American-style. The fear is that it will squash artistic expression in virtually every field where copyright applies. I’d hate to be a documentary film maker right now. Forget what I think about copyright/left, I can’t help but wonder about the motivations behind any law introduced by this arts and culture-hating government, corporate ass-sucking government. If anyone thinks this is actually about protecting artists, I have some slightly damp land to sell them. (Thanks, Jonathan)

The NBCC has conducted an interesting poll that’s yielded a trove of info on what people think about ethics in book reviewing. What we need now is some sort of manifesto built from this and laid down on the populace like a blast from a water cannon at a riot.

68.5 percent of book reviewers think anyone mentioned in a book’s acknowledgements should be barred from reviewing it.

64.9 percent think anyone who has written an unpaid blurb for a book should also be banned from writing a fuller review.

76.5 percent think it’s never ethical to review a book without reading the whole thing.

And 52 percent think it’s not okay for a book-review editor, in assigning books for review, to favor books by writers who also review regularly for that editor’s book section.

Yes, it’s time again for “The Ethics of Book Reviewing,” an old NBCC favorite. From the numbers above, book reviewers sound like quite an ethical bunch, no? Yet not everything seems clear to them.

That hack just never stops writing, does he?