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Get rich quick by giving your product away. Freeing your books on the web, Doctorow-style, is good for you. If you love something, let it go, and if it doesn’t return, you were never any good to start with and should never pick up a pen again in your life. The World Wide Web: literature’s Simon Cowell.
Thinking about it, giving away free digital copies of books makes a lot more sense that giving away free digital copies of music. Downloading a couple of chapters allows you to see how much you might like an author unknown to you. The point being that most of us who like what we read are then likely to go on and purchase the physical copy of the book, because so few of us have the stamina to read an entire book from a screen. Whereas music downloads, free or paid-for, are conveniently portable and these days more and more preferred to traditional media.
An interesting piece riffing on George Steiner’s thoughts about envy. In the literary world we see this affliction in every nook and cranny of existence. In some ways, the whole system is based on jealousy. It’s surprising, in fact, that more people aren’t killed on a yearly basis.
The most fascinating chapter is entitled Invidia, or Envy, and envy is a perennially fascinating topic for writers, and indeed for anyone who has put their careers at or near the centre of their lives. Steiner writes that he once wanted to write a book about the obscure 14th-century Italian poet, Francesco Stabili. The project would have been fascinating but Steiner had to avoid it because it would have meant analysing the poet’s legendary envy of his contemporary Dante; Stabili was reputed to have been as madly, insanely, self-loathingly jealous of Dante as Salieri is now thought to have been of Mozart.
This struck too near the bone for Steiner who confesses – in the most grippingly personal way – that he is often crucified by envy. A critic and scholar of his exalted position is often on very close terms with the greatest thinkers and authors. Agonisingly, he is almost, almost in their league. But not quite.
Apparently e-media sales are up 29% last year at Amazon. The company, in fact, is doing quite well over all. Why do I hate the Amazons so much less than I hate Crapters, even though they too are killing the indie bookstores of the world? Maybe because it’s so different an outlet? It has some evolutionary advantage and momentum you can’t deny. It’s like a foreign species introduced to the food chain, a purple loosestrife or zebra muscle of books. Before you know it they’re everywhere. But at some point you just give in and say, you know, that’s a pretty flower — shame about the wetlands. Whereas with Chindigo, it’s just the greediest of its species. It would be like a rabbit flooded with gamma rays by some mad inventor until it was giant and had three foot fangs coming along and eating up all the other bunnies in the field, and then changing itself into a lazy farting warthog. And selling candles. Fucking giant cannibalistic wartbunnies.
Yes, I realize these arguments don’t hold water. I’m just quarter way into my coffee and feeling cranky.
My dream bookshop has the shelves on wheels so I can push them out of the way behind some blackout curtains to turn the place into a gallery or black box theatre. It also has Lisa Loeb at the cash. And she basically just sings to me all day while I ignore the six customers who come in. God, I need to cultivate more relationships with aged, heirless rich folk.
As a ready cure for boredom, I like to daydream about the bookshop I am going to own in a pleasant Georgian block on a pedestrianised street somewhere in central London. Maybe in Hackney, or better still in Soho, Cecil Court. Perhaps Clerkenwell Green would be right – or better still just off Brick Lane near that house where Gilbert and George live.
In my bookshop, all hardbacks will retail at £4 and all paperbacks at £2. Obviously, I will also stock incredibly expensive rare first editions. These fine books will rest in a separate room at the back of the shop where I shall sit behind my gargantuan oak desk reading modernist fiction and drinking brandy from a silver, inscribed hipflask. That – briefly – is my dream bookshop.
Obviously I know this bookshop is never going to actually materialise. But just to imagine it is enough for me. Luckily, there are people in the world who possess the knowhow and get-up-and-go to turn such dreams into a potentially working reality. I say potentially because it is getting harder and harder to open such an establishment.
James Woods gives a primer on good characters in the Guardian.
There is nothing harder than the creation of fictional character. I can tell it from the number of apprentice novels I read that begin with descriptions of photographs. You know the style: “My mother is squinting in the fierce sunlight and holding, for some reason, a dead pheasant. She is dressed in old-fashioned lace-up boots, and white gloves. She looks absolutely miserable. My father, however, is in his element, irrepressible as ever, and has on his head that grey velvet trilby from Prague I remember so well from my childhood.” The unpractised novelist cleaves to the static, because it is much easier to describe than the mobile: it is getting these people out of the aspic of arrest and mobilised in a scene that is hard.
But how to push out? How to animate the static portrait? Ford Madox Ford writes wonderfully about getting a character up and running – what he calls “getting a character in”. Ford and his friend Joseph Conrad loved a sentence from a Guy de Maupassant story: “He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway.” Ford comments: “that gentleman is so sufficiently got in that you need no more of him to understand how he will act. He has been ‘got in’ and can get to work at once.”
A tech survey of the ebook (the concept that won’t die–and I hope it doesn’t) leads to some positive riffing on the health of reading in America. Hey! Those same stats were just used for t’other side of the argument! Damn trecherous stats–always proving something you don’t want them to.
To Mr. Jobs, this statistic dooms everyone in the book business to inevitable failure.
Only the business is not as ghostly as he suggests. In 2008, book publishing will bring in about $15 billion in revenue in the United States, according to the Book Industry Study Group, a trade association.
One can only wonder why, by the Study Group’s estimate, 408 million books will be bought this year if no one reads anymore?
A survey conducted in August 2007 by Ipsos Public Affairs for The Associated Press found that 27 percent of Americans had not read a book in the previous year. Not as bad as Mr. Jobs’s figure, but dismaying to be sure. Happily, however, the same share — 27 percent — read 15 or more books.
In fact, when we exclude Americans who had not read a single book in that year, the average number of books read was 20, raised by the 8 percent who read 51 books or more. In other words, a sizable minority does not read, but the overall distribution is balanced somewhat by those who read a lot.
It survived the Victorians, two World Wars, the Depression, and Brian Mulroney–169 years in all–but now Halifax’s The Book Room, Canada’s oldest bookstore has been killed by Indigo’s homogeneity machine. Heather! You’ve won! High fives all around the boardroom table! Mission accomplished. Booyah! And now that the competition is gone, you can finally remove books from the shelves and turn yourselves into the Walmart you really want to be! Mmm. Smell the plastic.
Did we not link to this once, years ago? In case we didn’t, here’s a feature length documentary on the sans serifiest typeface there ever twere, Arial’s classy cousin (the one who doesn’t work in middle management, live in the burbs, and drive an SUV): Helvetica. Ex-Ninja Pete is probably going into ecstatic convulsions as he reads this. Someone get him on his side before he swallows his tongue. (Some clips available on the site.)
Here’s a Telegraph list of 100 books every kid should read. We’re at 10 of 14 on the early years list, and aren’t at the middle years yet, though where ever The Hobbit fits in, we’ll be starting there soon. From the introduction by Morpurgo:
Of course we must and should study literature in our schools, but first we have to imbue our children with a love of stories.
And to do that, parents and teachers have to have a passion for stories themselves: they have to pass it on. The children have to know that you mean it, you feel it, you love it. And a teacher needs to find the space – correction, the Government needs to give them the space in the curriculum – so that she or he can read stories to the children for at least half an hour a day.
Our teachers need the chance at college or university to come to know and love books. Let us train our teachers, not blame them. We have to unchain them, and trust them. It’s the tests and the targets that inhibit them, that bring fear into the classroom when children are too young to cope with it.
In Finland they do things differently. Finnish children stay at home much longer. They play and tell stories years after ours are sitting down in school to a target-driven curriculum. Maybe that’s partly why Finnish children are happier, and maybe that’s why they rate higher in the literacy stakes. Maybe they haven’t put the cart before the horse as we do. They give their children the time and space to grow up with stories, to enjoy them, so that the association develops slowly, organically, is not imposed.
Of course, he leaves out the bit where the Finnish children are each obligated to spend 1500 hours of indentured servitude in Santa’s workshop during the sunless months, sewing W’s on Webkinz for North American children. But I see his point, regardless.
I thought this argument had been made recently with short fiction. But here it is again — fix contemporary society’s short attention span problem by accomodating it.
the chance of publishers successfully launching a novel by an unknown writer on the reading public are indeed slim in an information culture where we struggle to get through 10 pages without losing focus to the buzz of media white noise. Several hundred pages can feel like too much of a commitment when there is so much information to consume.
And who could deny that the actual experience of reading a long book can feel a little arduous if it doesn’t really make your heart sing? It is much like eating a delicious meal in an American restaurant – lovely, but you have to leave at least quarter of the portion behind or else you’ll explode. More than once I’ve been making my way through an 800-page novel only to conclude around the page 600 mark that I’m perfectly satisfied with my reading experience, indeed would recommend the book to others, but feel no particular inclination to finish.
Readable in a couple of hours, a novella demands far less time than a full-length novel: you can get through them in the same amount of time it takes to watch a film or two reality television programmes. If you read one in bed you can actually finish it in one go, as opposed to reading the same few chapters repeatedly because you keep forgetting what you covered the night before.
People shop online for books more often than any other product. That’s encouraging right? Maybe not so much when you think that most other things orderable through the internet come in plain brown wrappers.
Polling company Nielsen Online surveyed 26,312 people in 48 countries. 41% of internet users had bought books online, it said.
This compares with two years ago when 34% of internet users had done so.
The company said much of the increase was in emerging markets, such as South Korea and India, with British consumers in 10th place.
Nielsen says more than eight out of ten internet users purchased something in the last three months. That is a 40% increase on two years ago, to about 875 million shoppers.
Just kidding. I say that because when Ninja Boy points out the provinces on a map, he always makes his voice squeaky for “Prince Edward Island” and prefaces it with “TEENY-TINY”. In fact, PEI’s new laureate is the very large, strapping personality of David Helwig. Congratulations David. Getting right down to work, Mr Helwig has posted a poem by Bookninja prodigy and regular comments section shit disturber Zach Wells. (Ironically, the PEIPL site doesn’t seem to be up right now…. My guess is Wells crashed it.)
Canadian Andrew Davidson has received two million dollars in advance for his first novel, The Gargoyle. Two MILLION dollars. That’s some serious scratch. While I congratulate the young author, and remind him that he’ll need a security detail of one judoka/poet to ensure his safety, I can’t help but wonder if this represents good business decision making on the part of the publishers involved.
In Canadian publishing lore, there is only one recorded case of an unpublished novelist scoring a seven-figure advance for a single book.
This was in 1985. Ottawa’s Anthony Hyde earned national headlines after he sold his debut effort, a thriller, The Red Fox, to Penguin U.S. for a reported $1 million.
Of course, a cool million in 1985 went further than $1.25 million today. But Davidson might still own bragging rights.
He has scored a separate advance from Random House Canada, which will release The Gargoyle here, also in August. He has a deal with Canongate Books in the U.K. and with its subsidiary for Australia. Foreign-language rights have already been sold in 18 jurisdictions.
Though Davidson isn’t saying, his total advances so far (and these exclude potential film sales) probably exceed $2 million.
(Thanks, Dani!)
Now, this? This is news.
But these days, there’s an embarrassment of riches in books for children and teenagers, much of it high quality and Canadian.
As Arlene Perly Rae wrote in the introduction to her 1997 book Everybody’s Favourites, “Why not head for the best?”
Ken Setterington, children and youth advocate with the Toronto Public Library, agrees. He believes kids should read a mix of everything and not rule out even the more demanding classics.
“I don’t think the classics are so far beyond where children are reading,” he says. “We do families a disservice when we say, `This is too hard.’”
He cites the Harry Potter books, The Golden Compass series and The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a combination 533-page novel/picture book that recently won the prestigious Caldecott award, as examples of challenging books that are being gobbled up by children and families. And he predicts they will become classics themselves.
According to Lisa Huie of Indigo Books and Music, some children’s classics are always in demand. Along with Anne of Green Gables, other top sellers are The Wonderful World of Oz, Treasure Island and The Secret Garden.
Of course, all the Thomas the Tank Engine toys, meaningless impulse items, mindless board games, and crappy TV tie-in books around Dora the Explorer not only visually drown out these classics, but also cut into parents’ budgets for such books. Have you ever tried to FIND these books at an Indigo? It’s like digging for buried treasure. But that’s the business plan: hide the books in the spaces between the crap then create nostalgia about what people love. Gets ‘em nice and disoriented when they come in to the overwhelming smell of scented candles and cheap plastic.
McDonalds UK is getting into granting high school credits for learning to operate a deep fryer. I haven’t said it in a while, so I will now: HELL IN A HANDBASKET!!
Along with two other large companies, McDonald’s Corp. was given the power to award the equivalent of advanced high-school qualifications as part of a plan to improve young people’s skills, said the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, a government education regulator.
It is the first time the government has granted national recognition to corporate training schemes. But universities and colleges will have to decide whether to accept the corporate qualifications as grounds for admission.
The fast-food chain had been granted approval to develop courses and set exams up to the standard of A-levels — the final exams taken by high school students that determine college and university admission.
RE: “given the power to award the equivalent of advanced high-school qualifications as part of a plan to improve young people’s skills”… Really? It looks less like improving young people’s skills and more like padding their resume with certificates applicable only to the work at McDonalds. Seems more like an apprenticeship than a high school education. I can only imagine how much further “Basic Shift Manager 101″ will take you than “English Lit 101″. I mean, Lit only teaches you to think critically and develop an awareness of the human condition. How can you apply that to anything pertinent to procuring steady lucrative employment like, say, scheduling someone to mop the lobby? And don’t give me the myth of the McDonald’s worker who starts on the floor and ends up a VP or CEO. There are only a very few spots at the top, even the middle, and while everyone has to take a turn on the floor, the ones that go further are like RMC students to the cashier’s infantry — they’re hand picked and highly educated. But I digress …. My problem here is with a state sponsored “diploma” being developed that actually traps students into working at the same crappy job for life. It distresses me that our education system is becoming a training system, that kids are being prepped to be the button-pushers and level-pullers of the future instead of how to think.
Literary couples like Ted and Sylvia, Simone and JP, Anna and Nikolay, Iris and John, Gertrude and Alice — why are they so fascinating? Actually, if you read Ted’s letters, as I’m currently doing vvvvverrrrry slllllllowllllllly, they become a little less so, as he calls her things like “my kish puss ponk”. That’s enough to turn a goat’s stomach.
Reviewing the past year in non-fiction, Salon magazine critic Laura Miller concludes literary marriages are again a great source of fascination for writers and readers. Why are we so fascinated? It might be because they are not like us — some of these “marriages” are highly unconventional, even by 21st-century standards, and some of the partners are indeed geniuses. But it might also be for the opposite reason, as Miller says: in personal relations, at least, they are like us. Anyone can identify with the fraught negotiations they go through to try to make their partnerships work.
And we should never underestimate the gossip factor. Some writers are worried that the celebrations of the centenary of Simone De Beauvoir’s birth will focus too much on her deliberately outrageous sex life, particularly her “open marriage” with Jean-Paul Sartre. But isn’t it that outrageousness exactly what draws us in the first place?
Just like Wayne Rooney, he earned global fame as an outrageously gifted young tearaway, became a magnet for controversy as he matured, and secured a transfer to a leading Manchester institution. But until yesterday no one suspected that Martin Amis earned more per hour lecturing at the University of Manchester than England’s finest footballer does playing up front for United.
The celebrated author, who once wrote that “weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough”, is contracted at just under £3,000 per hour to teach creative writing at the university. His £80,000 salary obliges him to work a distinctly achievable total of 28 hours a year.
In contrast, Rooney makes £50,000 per week — far more than Amis in real terms. But the footballer trains for 30 hours a week, meaning that his hourly rate is 50 per cent lower than the novelist’s.
Amis strongly defended his pay deal yesterday. “It’s very much Manchester University’s decision to make and I abide by it,” he told The Times. “This is really an invidious conversation. Who’s to say I wouldn’t earn less money anywhere else?
Apparently J. Milton was not only a cracking first rate poet, but also a prodigious producer of neologisms.
According to Gavin Alexander, lecturer in English at Cambridge University and fellow of Milton’s alma mater, Christ’s College, who has trawled the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for evidence, Milton is responsible for introducing some 630 words to the English language, making him the country’s greatest neologist, ahead of Ben Jonson with 558, John Donne with 342 and Shakespeare with 229. Without the great poet there would be no liturgical, debauchery, besottedly, unhealthily, padlock, dismissive, terrific, embellishing, fragrance, didactic or love-lorn. And certainly no complacency.
After realizing that I’m making them up all the time to make people laugh, I started keeping a file with some of my own better portmanteaus and neologisms — like “Redoh”, which is “Fucking things up a second time”; or “Shavior”, which is “Jesus, just after a shower”; or “Pointificating”, which is “Jabbing your finger at someone while lecturing them”. I probably shouldn’t release these things here, because some bastard stole my “Douché” from a long while back and put it on a tshirt! But that strategy assumes I care.
I know that headline doesn’t sound pleasent, but you had to know that people would respond negatively the idea that fumes made it difficult to write literary fiction and forced an author to the “easier”, lower tier of crime fiction.
One example given of her problems – and here we come to the reason that Brady should probably not walk down any dark alleys filled with crime writers – was that she had become so confused by the fumes that she was forced to abandon a serious novel, Cool Wind from the Future, and turn instead to mystery fiction, with Bleedout.
So, in the course of a compensation dispute, we have medical and legal support for the traditional libel against crime writing: that it is done by authors whose brains aren’t fully working. Perhaps, in the way that the dim in showbusiness became known as airheads, leading crime and thriller writers should in future be designated fumeheads.
And yet this is a strange time for the claim to be made, because the boundaries between the two sides of fiction – which we can loosely call literary and populist, although all of the terminology used in these debates tends to be pejorative – is visibly breaking down.
Should a successful author get a chance to have his work republished years later without the edits? The Carver story leads to a longish examination of the whole tradition at The Age.
The carved-up Carver saga, which first came to light almost a decade ago when a New York Times reporter checked out Lish’s boast that he had played a major part in forming the voice that influenced a generation of fiction writers, is only one of a string of cases in which the texts of well-known books have been “restored”.
Some readers regard the process as unnecessary interference with a writer’s words by someone who, in many instances, the writer never knew, far less authorised. Others see it as a legitimate step in directing the reader back to the author’s primary intentions.
“The publication of ‘original’, ‘lost’ and ‘restored’ versions of works by noted writers is a well-established practice among modern publishing firms” — so says Stull on the website that he and his wife, Maureen P. Carroll, have set up to promote the Beginners project.
Among the cases that have commanded attention in recent years are On the Road by Jack Kerouac and Native Son by Richard Wright, two examples that serve to illustrate the good and bad sides of restoration.
Writer/illustrator/Caldecott winner, profiled in the NYT.
His obsessions with old French movies, automatons, clockworks and the filmmaker Georges Méliès inspired “Hugo,” which earlier this month won the Randolph Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book for children.
At 533 pages it is the longest book ever to win that award, although more than 300 of those pages are pictures that, like movie storyboard frames, propel the story forward. In the novel, a boy who lives in an attic in a Paris train station desperately tries to fix a broken automaton — a kind of robot — that also interests a mysterious toy-stall owner (who turns out to be Méliès) and a young girl.
“The way the illustrations told the story was so exquisite,” said Karen Breen, chairwoman of the Caldecott judges committee and the children’s book review editor at Kirkus Reviews. “It was a favorite right from the start.”
The book, published last year by Scholastic Press, was a finalist for a National Book Award in young people’s literature. It has spent 42 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list for children’s chapter books and sold 130,000 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales.
Mills and Boon’s 100th celebrated through sales figures at the Guardian, while the Times embeds a reporter in the boddice ripper sweat shop to get a better handle on its rippling, um….its throbbing…ahem…its stiffening…ah, er….process?
There comes a moment in every unpublished novelist’s life when she wonders, is it time? Time to change her name to Valerie Lafayette, take to bed with a box of chocs, a dreamy smile and a big pink notebook and begin her career as a romantic novelist for Mills & Boon.
And why should she be ashamed to admit this? Perhaps because Harlequin Mills & Boon, which celebrates its century this month, is considered by most to be pretty much the lowest form of novelising.
But this is the publisher that launched P.G.Wodehouse and Jack London. An M&B is bought in the UK every few seconds and its books are devoured by millions of women the world over. Plus, it allows readers to stipulate the kind of stories they want and supplies tailor-made multipacks of books to their homes – usually four a month. How democratic can you get?
It’s so nice to see Mills and Boon finally catching up in age to its readership. Can I get a rimshot, please?
Wiiiiiitch! Burn ‘im!!!
If ever there was an author I was born to love, it is Philip Roth. He was made for me, was Philip. In the first place, I love modern American fiction, from Don DeLillo to Tom Wolfe and Saul Bellow. In the second, many of my favourite authors are huge fans of Roth’s work and acknowledge their debt to him. And finally, if that weren’t enough to have me falling at his feet, I’m a sucker for stories themed around Jewish culture, including those of “the British Philip Roth” Howard Jacobson.
So why is it that I’ve never truly enjoyed a single Roth novel?
Statistics can be used to prove anything. 14% of all people know that. I love this, if just for the nice pastel colours. And that Dune is so prominently featured. Can anyone with half a brain more than my quarter tell me which book makes you the stupidest, according to this?
Ever read a book (required or otherwise) and upon finishing it thought to yourself, “Wow. That was terrible. I totally feel dumber after reading that.”? I know I have. Well, like any good scientist, I decided to see how well my personal experience matches reality. How might one do this?
Well, here’s one idea.
Books <=> Colleges <=> Average SAT Scores
Though some of us hope he’s quit while he’s ahead, others, namely those hoping to roll in the piles of money even his excrement would generate at this point, are wondering where the hell his Da Vinci followup book is. Meanwhile, Dan Brown Himself continues to sit quietly on his blue whale- and condor-bone throne, wiping spilled wine from his black turtleneck and tan jacket with the corner of the Queen’s cloak, and eating peeled grapes from a plate balanced on the head a shackled, kneeling, Sphinx-like People Magazine critic.
Now that Harry Potter — the only bigger publishing phenomenon of the age — is retired, no book has been as eagerly awaited as Mr. Brown’s next novel, purported to be about freemasonry and the Founding Fathers. The problem is, it is still awaited…and awaited…and awaited.
The whole industry is impatient. Book sales are generally sluggish, and one explosive, high-profile title can jump-start sales across the board as customers pour into the stores and walk out with a bagful of titles. When Bertelsmann AG reports 2007 results in March, it will be the first time since 2002 that it didn’t get a boost from “The Da Vinci Code.”
When Devils make deals between themselves, no one gets the moral upper hand, but at least in the Judith Regan vs News Corp lawsuit, it looks like someone’s gotten paid out.
The settlement spares both sides from what could have been a nasty trial. At the time of Regan’s firing, her attorney had promised “war,” not an unrealistic threat from the famously temperamental publisher.
Financial terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but Regan did attain one major goal: Her name cleared from allegations of anti-Semitism. At the time of her firing, when she still had more than two years on her contract, News Corp. said that Regan made anti-Semitic comments to a HarperCollins lawyer during an angry telephone conversation, complaining of a “Jewish cabal” at the company.
“This charge was completely fabricated,” according to Regan’s lawsuit.
“After carefully considering the matter, we accept Ms. Regan’s position that she did not say anything that was anti-Semitic in nature, and further believe that Ms. Regan is not anti-Semitic,” News Corp. said Friday.
News Corp. lawyers punctuated this statement with several pantomimed winks, vigorous shaking of the head, and the jamming of fingers down throats. The deal was sealed by both parties with a celebratory Rupert Murdoch Happy Hour Special: 3 kittens skewered between 2 doe-eyed orphans and dropped, boiler-maker style, into a pint of Fosters. Gear!
Well, I kind of added those last bits myself…
- AL Kenneddy gets lots of love from the Times…
- …before they go on to riff on the Costa award itself
- Will Ferrell wins James Joyce award… seriously
- McCarthy adaptation sweeps SAG awards
Fear of a “Canadian” planet? Though I hesitate to link to anything in the National Post, Canada’s right wing rag of sputtering irrelevance, this is too interesting to pass up: apparently in the American south, “Canadian” is becoming a coded form of ethnic slur used against blacks. Bizarre. Can anyone corroborate this? And anyone know why? The underground railroad? Tendency to vote liberal? Maestro Fresh Wes?
The bigger mystery is how “Canadian” came to be code for black. An online directory of racial slurs defines Canadian as a “masked replacement” for black.
Last August, a blogger in Cincinnati going by the name CincyBlurg reported that a black friend from the southeastern U.S. had recently discovered that she was being called a Canadian. “She told me a story of when she was working in a shop in the South and she overheard some of her customers complaining that they were always waited on by a Canadian at that place. She didn’t understand what they were talking about and assumed they must be talking about someone else,” the blogger wrote.
“After this happened several times with different patrons, she mentioned it to one of her co-workers. He told her that ‘Canadian’ was the new derogatory term that racist Southerners were using to describe persons they would have previously referred to [with the N-word.]”
(Thanks to Jeet, who comments here)
Billy Mills riffs in a Guardian blog on finding the right words to talk about poetry.
Campion also talks of poetry “raysing the minde to a more high and lofty conceite”. This view, in which the teaching of morality is, to quote Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, “the very end of poesy”, leads inexorably to Shelley’s own Defence and the suggestion that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”.
This is, it seems to me, the most dangerous definition for a poet to accept, and not just because we have come to see morality as relative rather than absolute. The Irish poet Brian Coffey wrote that “the political use of words kills the capacity to use words to make poems”, and I am inclined to agree. The poet who would enter into the sphere of the legislator, either political or moral, is likely to find that the debasing of language in these spheres becomes something of a problem for the making of poems. For me, at least, poetry has more to do with uncertainty than certainty, questions than answers.
You know it had to happen sooner or later. As my aunt, whose both an optimist and a fatalist, said when she broke her leg in that car accident: I’m glad that’s over. Badump bump!
When a friend told me that a new Rimbaud film was being released Jan. 25, I was elated. “That’s terrific,” I said. “We’ve hardly seen any movies about the great French symbolist poet. The only one I can think of is Total Eclipse, with Leonardo DiCaprio, and that was back in 1995—”
“No, no, you idiot,” she said impatiently. “Not Rimbaud. Rambo. You know, Sylvester Stallone? Vietnam vet, mucho violence, headbands…”
Ah. Rambo. I seemed to dimly recall such a character from back in that dark era known as the ’80s. Had anyone else ever confused the two? I did an internet search of “Rimbaud” and “Rambo.” It appears that on the rare occasions when the two are mentioned in the same sentence, it’s by way of a contrast: sensitive artist versus macho brute. A Times of London article from 2005 entitled When Rimbaud meets Rambo focused on the differences between Dominique de Villepin, the poetry-writing French prime minister, and George W. Bush and his war-mongering cronies. In Rimbaud/Rambo, a recent song by Detroit band the High Strung, the singer tries to choose between the two types of men.
- Leno gets last laugh on joke book publishers
- Australia’s oldest magazine axed
- File under: lesson learned … publisher facing funding cuts in race for prestigious prizes
- Now here’s a cameo I wasn’t expecting… Malcolm Gadwell on the Colbert Report… singing… a black spiritual
- Canada featured in the Onion’s Dumb World Atlas (my favourite lines are Leafs/herpes, the Toronto fire, and the “national langauges: English (spoken), French (muttered)”)
If you haven’t read this essay by George Orwell on the filthy lying bastards that we know and love as booksellers…. Oh, George…
Given a good pitch and the right amount of capital, any educated person ought to be able to make a small secure living out of a bookshop. Unless one goes in for ‘rare’ books it is not a difficult trade to learn, and you start at a great advantage if you know anything about the insides of books. (Most booksellers don’t. You can get their measure by having a look at the trade papers where they advertise their wants. If you don’t see an ad. for Boswell’s Decline and Fall you are pretty sure to see one for The Mill on the Floss by T. S. Eliot.) Also it is a humane trade which is not capable of being vulgarized beyond a certain point. The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman. But the hours of work are very long — I was only a part-time employee, but my employer put in a seventy-hour week, apart from constant expeditions out of hours to buy books — and it is an unhealthy life. As a rule a bookshop is horribly cold in winter, because if it is too warm the windows get misted over, and a bookseller lives on his windows. And books give off more and nastier dust than any other class of objects yet invented, and the top of a book is the place where every bluebottle prefers to die.
(From BoingBoing)
Shoe factory + toxic fumes + creepy factory managers + highbrow literary novelist = potboiler novel. I find what’s implied here rather problematic, but totally sympathise with her.
She said that she fled to Oxford because she feared that the council bore a grudge against her and could make life difficult for her if she stayed. “The thing that was insane is that the environmental health guy stood with me smelling this stuff and saying he couldn’t smell it,” she said. “It was a bizarre situation.”
The council’s environmental health department said first that it was unable to test for the chemicals. When it did conduct a test, the equipment registered a reading so high it was off the scale. The council paid her £4,000 later, after an investigation by the Local Government Ombudsman found it guilty of maladministration.
Ms Brady, who was the first woman to win the Whitbread Book of the Year award, said that the numbness in her legs was so severe that she could stick a needle in her shin and not feel it. “I still have a slight impairment in the left hand. It’s like when you’ve been to the dentist and the anaesthetic is beginning to wear off.”
Doctors from the medical toxicology unit of Guy’s Hospital in London confirmed that she had neuropathy, or nerve damage, that was likely to have been caused by chemicals.
The Nestle Book prize has seen it’s last cover sticker.
The Nestlé book prize, which has been honouring children’s authors for the past 23 years, is being discontinued by its administrator Booktrust and sponsor Nestlé.
According to Katherine Solomon, press officer at Booktrust, the future of the prize has been in discussion for some time and the decision to end the partnership was “mutual and there was no hostility”. It was a “natural time to conclude”, she added, as the literacy charity’s focus moves increasingly into its national book-giving scheme – the Bookstart and Booked Up programmes that provide free books to babies and year seven schoolchildren.
This is, of course, publicity speak for “We can’t even begin to tell you the shit we’ve been through in that board room.”
Mills and Boon are setting up shop in India, as any smart business would. Man, I seriously hope at least one title recreates that scene where Mola Ram totally rips that guy’s heart from his chest and it’s, like, still beating and everything, and the guy’s still fucking alive, dude, and then, like, it bursts into flames in his hands and the guy gurgles and dies right there while everyone’s JUST CHANTING and shit like a pack of Tom Cruises at a Clambake, and Indy’s like, Fuck, this is going to be some SERIOUS SHIT man, and then suddently he’s fighting the only guy in India over 90 pounds and it’s, like, SO ON because he can’t pull that same non-chalant gun shit like he did in Cairo, bro, and then he gets that look that says, I’ve got a totally bad feeling about this, JUST LIKE HAN SOLO, because that’s just about his complete range as an actor, and then POW! the big guy, who apparently uses his hands like hammers to mine for magic stones is on him, and Indy just keeps taking it, bam bam bam, like the world’s most rubber archeology dude, and then suddenly he makes the guy drop a rock on his own head, waa waa, and then he’s achey and cut up so bad even water hurts, and in need of some TLC, so he finds Kate Capshaw, the only blonde woman in the country at the time, and gets his shiz on EVEN THOUGH HE’S JUST HAD THE CRAP BEAT OUT OF HIM. Now THAT’s romance, bro.
(Ten points for first non-Canadian to identify the reference in the headline.) This piece about Art Garfunkle’s 40 year reading list is titled “Rummaging in a rock star’s library“, but I don’t know that old Bright Eyes, (seen here portraying the bastard lovechild of a Malcolm Gladwell/Gene Wilder/Jack Nicholson menage-a-trois) qualifies as a “rock” star.
Literature festivals and the aggressive marketing of celebrity authors have created a damaging climate for new writing, Doris Lessing, the Nobel laureate novelist, believes.
In her first public appearance since winning the £750,000 prize last October, Lessing said that she felt “desperately sorry” for young authors.
Lessing, 88, told an audience at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London that in the 1950s her publisher apologised for suggesting that she do publicity work. “Now what happens is that if you are a girl who’s good-looking and has written even a passable book you can be earning enormous sums of money very quickly and are then sent on a promotional tour.
“I’ve met girls who’ve said that this was the worst thing that could have happened to them. There are people who can’t write a second book because they are always on the telephone or having to do some TV thing. I feel desperately sorry for them.”
Profiled around her Whitbread/Costa/whatever-it’s-called-this-year win.
Previous interviewers have detected self-pity in Kennedy’s narrative of her singleton lifestyle, but they seem to miss her talent for ironic overstatement. She is, after all, not just a prize- winning novelist but an accomplished stand-up comic who has plundered her own presumed glum biography, making it into comedy through exaggeration. At least, let’s hope. Personally, I found her charming, though God knows what I’d have done if she’d started crying.
Anyway, what she’ll soon realise, thanks to her increased bankability, is that men find money even more of a turn-on than tears. “Once I couldn’t make a living purely from writing, but in the last year I seem to have won lots of prizes.” She not only won £25,000 from Costa for its book award, but an additional £5,000 for winning the category of best novel. “And the thing is, the prize money is tax-free,” she says happily. What’s more, she expects sales to rise.
“Would you mind looking a little less despairing?” asks Sarah, as Kennedy leans her head on her palm and favours the camera with a bleak gaze.
A leading black bookstore chain in DC is closing. We’ve had some good indie news here lately, so I had to offset it somehow to get back to the gloom. We were losing the dank and gloom.
Karibu has five stores, one of which has already closed. All will be shut down by Feb. 10.
Like other specialty retailers, including gay and feminist bookstores, black bookstores have suffered in the past 10 years, partly because of the rise of superstore chains and Internet sales, but also because of the growing popularity of black authors. With superstores and online retailers now offering large selections of black books, at lower prices, black stores have had a hard time competing and many have closed.
Until recently, Karibu had been regarded as one of the few still thriving.
A Burmese poet’s secret message of dissidence lands him in the hot seat and could very well get him killed. Now, I’m no expert on the language, but I suspect this wasn’t too well hidden, from the sounds of it. Somebody get this guy a Soviet Veiled-Meaning training manual.
The eight-line poem in Burmese is about a man brokenhearted after falling for a fashion model, whom he thanks for having taught him the meaning of love.
But if read vertically, the first word of each line forms the phrase: “Power crazy Senior General Than Shwe.”
Than Shwe, 74, who has headed the junta since 1992, has little tolerance for criticism. He keeps himself sequestered in his remote, newly built capital, Naypyitaw, deep in the countryside.
The junta regularly arrests dissidents and critics, and drew the world’s condemnation after turning its troops on peaceful anti-government protesters last September. More than 30 people, including Buddhist monks who led the protests, were killed in the crackdown.
As reader Dan pointed out in yesterday’s thread, the allegations against Ishmael Beah were made by a less-than-reputable tabloid source, and Beah has now defended his book. The entire statement by Beah is copied below:
“For months I told Bob Lloyd and The Australian’s reporter, Shelley Gare, through my publisher, my agent, and my adoptive mother, that unfortunately they were wrong, that the man they claimed was my father was not my father, and that my mother and brothers were not alive, as Lloyd claimed. Last week, when The Australian sent reporters to my home in Sierra Leone, they were forced to acknowledge that this has been a hoax.
“Now The Australian’s reporters are trying to raise questions about the dates in my book, A Long Way Gone, regarding when the war came to my village. They offer as ‘proof’ a man named Mr. Barry who claims to have been the head of the school I attended when I was young. I have never heard of a Mr. Barry. The principal of my school was Mr. Sidiki Brahima.
“The war in Sierra Leone began in 1991. My story, as I remember it and wrote it, began in 1993 when rebels ‘attacked the mining areas’ (my words from the book) in my village while I was away with friends. I never saw my family again. The Australian, presumably, is basing their defamation of me on reports that the Sierra Rutile Mine was closed down by rebels in 1995. But there were rebels in my region, my village, and my life in 1993. They attacked throughout 1993 and 1994 before closing down the mine.
“Others from Sierra Leone can bear witness to the truth of my story. Leslie Mboka, National Chairman of the Campaign for Just Mining in Freetown, was a counselor at Benin Home, the rehabilitation center in Freetown, Sierra Leone, I entered in January 1996. He told this to my publisher, Sarah Crichton, on the telephone today:
‘A gentleman named Wilson was here investigating regarding Ishmael Beah’s book, and I told him emphatically—emphatically—that Ishmael’s accounts are accurate and correct. Wilson was going to Mogbwemo to find out if Ishmael Beah’s family was alive. When he came back to Freetown, he said he couldn’t find anyone alive, and the man who said he was Ishmael’s father was actually just a relative. But then he asked, what about confusion with the dates?
‘And I said, there is no problem with the dates. The rebels made sporadic attacks on the mining communities between ‘93 and ‘94, leading up to and in preparation for the major assault in ‘95. In fact, military personnel were deployed to the area because there were these sporadic raids. Ishmael was caught in one of the earlier attacks.
‘I told all this to Peter Wilson. I told him everything that Ishmael wrote is accurate and completely factual, and I explained to him what was confusing him.
I do not understand what his paper’s agenda is. I do not understand why they are trying to blackmail this brilliant and honest young man.’
“Mboka was contacted by The New York Times when they fact-checked the excerpts of my book which they published. His testimony did not appear in The Australian’s reporting.
“My publisher also spoke today with Alusine Kamara, former director of Benin Home, who now lives in Boston.
‘I have known Ishmael since he was a soldier and he came to our center. I have read his book, and I have no doubt that what he says is true I do not know why anyone would want to question what Ishmael writes about. He did not write a history of the whole war, he wrote about his experiences. And if anyone has any doubts about what Ishmael went through, or what it was like for those soldiers, I refer them to the BBC World—they made many documentaries about our center.’
“I was right about my family. I am right about my story. This is not something one gets wrong. The Australian’s reporters have been calling my college professors, asking if I ‘embellished’ my story. They published my adoptive mother’s address, so she now receives ugly threats. They have used innuendo against me when there is no fact. Though apparently, they believe anything they are told—unless it comes from me or supports my account. Sad to say, my story is all true.”
Kathryn Hughes writes in her Guardian blog about the Nabokov dilemma that drew such good commentary here. Reports are looking more and more like Dimitri will burn it. Though one of Hughes’ commentors makes a good point… either way, he’s being a bit of a tease about it.
I’m deeply ambivalent about this business of whether we should take any notice of writers’ last wishes about their unpublished manuscripts. The biographer in me pants at the thought that there might be a bit more Nabokov in a Swiss vault. How fascinating, too, to get the chance to see a snapshot of the Great One’s creative process, rather than simply being presented with the final polished work (for in N’s case, the shine on his published novels was so intense that it was very hard to see beneath the brilliant surface to the engine room below.)
But the writer in me is horrified at the thought of someone publishing something that isn’t ready to be seen.
A student journalist sentenced to death for blasphemy may actually be taking a bullet intended for his brother. Terrible news. Release him!
“(The brother) feels very strongly that it’s a campaign of intimidation against him and others like him who might want to take on these powerful commanders,” Jean Mackenzie, country director of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, told CNN.
The international organization trains journalists Afghanistan and other conflict zones.
A lower court in Mazar-e-Sharif on Tuesday sentenced Sayed Perwiz Kaambaksh, 23, to death Tuesday, after it tried him behind closed doors and without representation, MacKenzie said.
Prosecutors accused Kaambaksh of anti-Islam propaganda, contending that the third-year journalism student downloaded a document from the Internet last October that criticized Islam’s position on women.
I’d be sentenced to death twice a week in Afghanistan.
It’s a snow day here in St. John’s, so I have Ninja Boy (who still calls this site “Book-an-engine”) at home and have to make this quick while he watches a DVD of a bizarre Dadaist cartoon called “Toupee and Binoo”. It’s times like these that I thank my self-righteous earlier self for not letting him watch TV for four years: it’s like a shot of morphine for him now. The power is amazing. He won’t move for the entire show. Sometimes I have to check and see if he’s still breathing. Here are some related links around awards:
Bookninja favourite Clive Thompson writes in Wired on “why Sci Fi is the last bastion of philosophical writing“. Love Clive’s mind, and here he’s riffing on whether the standard literary novel is hobbled by inherent limitations imposed by reality.
If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.
From where I sit, traditional “literary fiction” has dropped the ball. I studied literature in college, and throughout my twenties I voraciously read contemporary fiction. Then, eight or nine years ago, I found myself getting — well — bored.
Why? I think it’s because I was reading novel after novel about the real world. And there are, at the risk of sounding superweird, only so many ways to describe reality. After I’d read my 189th novel about someone living in a city, working in a basically realistic job and having a realistic relationship and a realistically fraught family, I was like, “OK. Cool. I see how today’s world works.” I also started to feel like I’d been reading the same book over and over again.
Here’s my overly reductive, incredibly nerdy way of thinking about the novel: Consider it a simulation, kind of like The Sims. If you run a realistic simulation enough times — writing tens of thousands of novels about contemporary life — eventually you’re going to explore almost every outcome. So what do you do then?
A soap opera has developed in Toronto. For those uninterested in my home town’s gossip factory, skip to the next post.
For many years I’ve loved the Toronto Small Press Book Fair. While I’ve never participated as a vendor or reader, I have participated with my dollars, regularly buying copies of my favourite magazines as well as books and chapbooks from some of the best small- and micropress publishers in the world (Wayward Armadillo, Taddle Creek, Book Thug, Porcupine’s Quill, Coach House, etc). I’ve even begun taking my young son there, when we’re in town. To my eye, it’s generally been a place of cooperation, collaboration, and community (though it does occasionally smell a bit like sweat and toner).
Not so, these days, it seems. The small press community has been shaken by an accusation of libel. While SPBF was started years ago by poet Stuart Ross and some others, the fair regularly rotates coordinators. Apparently, some patrons and community members, most vocally SPBF founder Stuart Ross, are raising some questions about the fair’s current management. After deleting Ross’s posts from “official” SPBF public fora groups, two of the organizers have now sent a letter from a lawyer threatening to sue him for libel. Excuse me? Libel? I’ve followed this pretty closely, and I just can’t see the libel here. It seems to me that part of the benefit of a rotating management in a volunteer-staffed community organization is the opportunity for input and criticism of community members, participants, and past coordinators. The hush that often falls when people hear the word ‘libel’ seems less than constructive to me. Taking criticism is part of the job. Trust me, I know.
A full version of the events and more commentary can be found here.
The very fact (broadcast publicly by Wallin and Villegas themselves) that they have threatened litigation against one of their constituents is by itself a deeply troubling thing. It sends a message that criticism, constructive or otherwise, is something to be repressed rather than considered. It risks creating an environment of libel chill, in which constituents may become afraid to speak up for fear of being sued by those in positions of power and authority. For their part, Wallin and Villegas claim in their widely broadcast missive to the Lexiconjury list that their “legal response” was not motivated by Ross’ original criticisms of the most recent Fair, but was instead the result of subsequent “postings, mass e-mails and blog entries” and a 3 January 2008 letter to the Toronto Small Press Book Fair Board. No details of these communications have been shared, nor has any substantive basis been provided to justify the public allegations of defamation of character and interference with their professional lives. And yet, in representations on the SPBF’s “official” discussion forum (a Facebook group) dating back to November, the coordinators repeatedly challenged Ross’ right to post criticisms of the Fair even on his own blog, claiming that he was obliged instead to discuss his concerns with them privately. Indeed, the coordinators have regularly invoked Ross’ original blog post (available here) in their own representations, including in their most recent public statement, suggesting that it looms larger in their objections than they are willing to admit.
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