The Cookbook Edition! You can’t copyright titles, but that doesn’t mean you can’t whine about it! That’s right, get ready for the food fight of the century. … … Though the century is quite young, and we still haven’t gotten round to meals-in-a-pill, like we were promised in the 50s. At which point, food fights will take on a new seriousness as people find a way to fire a turkey dinner from a .22 rifle.

(Seriously, I was thinking of titling my eternally-in-progress novel The Marching Season. Then I did a little search on that title. Um, okay, I’ll think of something else. But what if there’s nothing left when I finally get it finished? This reminds me of that classic SNL sketch.)

On the fate of the amateur Amazon reviewer: microcelebrity in a web 2.0 world.

On the surface, Grady Harp seems just the sort of enlightened consumer who might lead us out of Web 1.0’s darkness. A 66-year-old gallerist, retired surgeon, and poet, he has reviewed over 3,500 books, CDs, and movies for Amazon. In turn, he has attained a kind of celebrity: a No. 7 ranking; a prominent profile on the Web site; and, apparently, a following. In the week after his endorsement of my work appeared, more than 100 readers clicked on a button that said, “I found this review helpful.” His stated mission is to remain “ever on the lookout for the new and promising geniuses of tomorrow.” At present, Dr. Harp’s vigil runs to about 500,000 words—a critical corpus to rival Dr. Johnson’s—and his reviews are clearly the product of a single, effusive sensibility. Jose Saramago’s Blindness is “A Searing, Mesmerizing Journey” (five stars); The Queer Men’s Erotic Art Workshop’s Dirty Little Drawings, “A Surprisingly Rich Treasure Trove” (five stars).

Such efforts have led a quorum of enthusiasts to hail Harp as a standard-bearer for literary amateurism. “Keep your pen hot, Grady!” one comments. Yet an equally energetic chorus of detractors carps that Harp’s Amazon reviews are more self-interested than they might appear. The comment threads accompanying Harp postings devolve into litanies of accusation: GH engages in back-scratching; GH is unduly influenced by publishers; GH has failed to read the book under review.

Paradise Lost, the Muuuss….. The MuuOOOooosss… Wait, I’ll get this. Paradise Lost, the Muuuuhuuusss….sssehk…. The MuuuuhUUUhuuussssiiikkkk…l. Damn. I just can’t do it.

Perhaps someone should finally set Dryden’s libretto to music. The State of Innocence and Fall of Man: The Musical could be ideal Christmas entertainment, introducing a new, young audience to the basic characters and story, and showing the way to the greater splendours and pleasures of Paradise Lost.

[Clkkpt]. Sorry, I just barfed into my mouth a little.

The Independent is reporting that UK indie bookstores are making a comeback. Does this have something to do with the fact that you find fewer and fewer books at the big box chains these days, as they slowly morph into department stores?

Just over a year ago, the future of the nation’s independent bookshops looked grim. Competition from internet sites, supermarkets and discount-offering chain stores appeared to be eliminating the lone operators from town high streets.

But a year is a long time in the bookshop trade. Latest statistics reveal that in 2007 the “indies” made a remarkable comeback. According to annual figures from the Booksellers Association (BA), the decline in the number of independent booksellers was halted last year after numbers had plunged in 2006, when indies were closing at a rate of almost two a week.

Yet 81 new independent bookshops opened in 2007, more than making up for the 72 which closed the same year, according to The Bookseller magazine.

Great shades of Jim Frey! Holy Laura Albert! It looks like there might be another literary non-fiction crisis abrew! This makes news aggregators/fun-makers like me cry with a mixture of dispair and joy.

He is a former child soldier whose account of being a cocaine-addicted killer forced to fight in Sierra Leone’s civil war was a literary sensation.

More than 600,000 people have bought Ishmael Beah’s memoir A Long Way Gone, which received rave reviews from authors such as William Boyd and Sebastian Junger, was marketed in Starbucks and which was number three in Time magazine’s top 10 non-fiction books last year.

Now an Australian newspaper suggests there may be serious flaws in the young man’s account of his life as a teenage killing machine, forced to become part of a government corps of boy soldiers before being rescued by Unicef, the UN’s children’s agency.

In Oz you can only get the Tom Tell-All by going to the black market. Or e-Bazon, or whatever it’s called these days. I wonder if on the Tom page, Amazon “also recommends” Dianetics and “courses” to rid your body of alien spirits? Drink the Kool Aid, Tom. Please.

The New Yorker has a good piece on what’s at stake in the Carver edits bruhaha happening in the US publishing world. And it’s sympathetic to the cause of publishing an unabridged Carver, which seems to have been Carver’s implicit wish. I wonder what the people who said we shouldn’t listen to Nabokov’s wish to burn his last ms will say about this. Should we listen to Carver from the grave?

When “What We Talk About” was published, in April, 1981, it enjoyed enormous critical success, capped off by a front-page review in the Times Book Review, a rarity for a collection of short stories. The critic Michael Wood wrote that Carver had “done what many of the most gifted writers fail to do: He has invented a country of his own, like no other except the very world, as Wordsworth said, which is the world of all of us.” Wood also wrote, “In Mr. Carver’s silences, a good deal of the unsayable gets said.” Many of those silences were the result of Lish’s editing.

After years of failure, illness, work, and obscurity, Carver naturally relished the reception. The public praise also insured that he kept to himself his ambivalence about the way Lish had edited some of the stories. In Tess Gallagher’s view, Lish’s work encroached upon Carver’s artistic integrity. “What would you do if your book was a success but you didn’t want to explain to the public that it had been crammed down your throat?” Gallagher said recently. “He had to carry on. There was no way for him to repudiate the book. To do so would have meant that it would all have to come out in public with Gordon and he was not about to do that. Ray was not a fighter. He would avoid conflict because conflict would drive him to drink.”

In the years following the book’s publication, Carver seemed determined to keep Lish as a friend and “brother,” even as an editor, but he now set stricter editorial boundaries. There was a shift in power. Carver demanded his autonomy. “Gordon, God’s truth, and I may as well say it out now,” he wrote in August, 1982, about his latest stories. “I can’t undergo the kind of surgical amputation and transplant that might make them someway fit into the carton so the lid will close.”

Carver’s next story collection, “Cathedral,” was published in 1983, and was an even greater success, winning praise again on the cover of the Times Book Review, this time from Irving Howe, who wrote that in Carver’s more expansive later work one saw “a gifted writer struggling for a larger scope of reference, a finer touch of nuance.” In an interview with The Paris Review that year, Carver made clear that he preferred the new expansiveness: “I knew I’d gone as far the other way as I could or wanted to go, cutting everything down to the marrow, not just to the bone. Any farther in that direction and I’d be at a dead end––writing stuff and publishing stuff I wouldn’t want to read myself, and that’s the truth. In a review of the last book, somebody called me a ‘minimalist’ writer. The reviewer meant it as a compliment. But I didn’t like it.”

Little Sister’s Bookstore, they of constant battle with the government over pornography, is up for sale. People with lots of cash and an iron will: please buy this and carry on.

“I consider Little Sister’s to be much more than bookstore. As everybody knows, it’s the nerve centre of the gay and lesbian community in this city,” says Arvay.

“Little Sister’s can probably take a great deal of credit for the increased awareness and sensitivity and tolerance and respect that the gay and lesbian community has in the city,” he contends, adding that he hopes whoever the new owners are will “carry on with the store.”

“A point I always like to make, whether in court or out, [is that] the fight wasn’t just about sexual freedom for gay people. The fight was about sexual sanity, and sanity about the sexual imaginations and lives of all people,” says John Dixon of the BC Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA), which supported Little Sister’s in its book-seizure struggles with Customs.

Brick Books has organized a tour of poets laureate, with Agnes Walsh (St. John’s) and Lorri Neilson Glenn (Halifax) visiting cities and other laureates across the country. Neat marketing strategy on the part of one of Canada’s best publicity folk, Kitty Lewis.

The tour is the brainchild of Brick Books’s general manager Kitty Lewis, who noted that “in the last little while we’ve seen poets laureate named at various levels of government all over the country.” In fact, there are now 19 poets laureate across Canada including the current parliamentary poet laureate, John Steffler. Since Neilsen Glenn and Walsh each have recently published new collections of poetry for Brick, the fanfare “seemed like a good marketing project, with the poets laureate from the east coast travelling the country to visit other poets laureate.” The total budget is about $15,000.

Oolichan Books publisher Ron Smith has published a book, with Oolichan. Generally, bypassing the (supposed?) editorial quality controls of objective eyes is looked down on in the publishing world. But is it truly unethical? What about publishing your wife and making her book the lead title for the season? It’s kind of the like Haliburton getting the Iraq contracts, isn’t it? Opinions?

Rather than send Elf to another publisher, as Penguin Canada publisher David Davidar did with his two novels, Smith decided Oolichan would bring it out. Furthermore, its lead title for spring is A Song for My Daughter, the first novel by his wife, Patricia Jean Smith. It’s about the collision of native culture and European culture and its main character, Salmon Woman, can assume human form.

Pat, who met Ron when they were undergraduates at the University of B.C., worked on it for 20 years.

Ron says he and Oolichan’s managing editor, Hiro Boga, decided Oolichan would publish Song because he wanted control over the editing and book design. “I would be a more sympathetic editor [than an outsider],” he reasons, “having lived with the book for 20 years.”

Desire for control is, of course, one reason why less experienced authors choose to self-publish.

You’re a best selling novelist. So what’s the next step up the ladder? Comics, of course.

For some time, the two biggest imprints, Marvel and DC, have welcomed writers and directors from Hollywood to write story arcs for their long-running superhero sagas. Famous names who have turned to comics, with varying degrees of success include Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy, Kevin Smith, the writer-director of Clerks and Richard Donner, the director of Lethal Weapon. But this year, it’s the novelists coming aboard.

The size of the influx is startling. Stephen King, one of the world’s bestselling authors, has recently overseen the first in a series of comic adaptations from his Dark Tower novels. Ian Rankin, having retired the bibulous Inspector Rebus from print, has turned his attention to John Constantine, the hard-bitten Chandlerian sorcerer of Vertigo’s Hellblazer comics. Michael Chabon has published several issues of The Escapist , a superhero created by the fictional protagonists of his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, while his contemporary Jonathan Lethem is halfway through a run on Omega the Unknown, a timely resurrection for one of the most philosophically baffling superheroes.

What’s the attraction?

I’d like to see a few poets take a stab at it.

A bunch of author profiles:

• Peter Carey
• Geoffrey Hill (I’d love to pop the stupid Kiwi woman’s brain with a bit of my favourite poet here)
• Tom Wolfe
• Bernhard Schlink
• Jimmy Breslin

Get children interested in stories and the rest will follow:

 We are in a muddle about literacy. We worry endlessly that children in Britain are not becoming readers. Report after report reveals that we are slipping further and further behind in child literacy levels when compared with other countries. Interesting that Finland finds itself at the top of a recent child happiness table as well as child literacy levels. More of Finland and happiness later.

I’m thinking that education itself is in part to blame. Ironically, it may be responsible both for the great blossoming of our literature, and at the same time for leaving so many with the impression that literature is not for them, but the preserve of a certain educated elite. As a consequence, much of our society has become separated from its own stories.

“Stupid” woman decries “stupid” poetry that makes her feel “stupid”.

Everyone has a stab at it but, as with anything which looks easy, very few succeed.

But why do we fall about at the feet of poets whose work is just plain dull? I suspect it is fear of being labelled a cultural philistine, similar to the nation’s reluctance for robust debate about contemporary art. If it’s obscure and you don’t understand it, then it must be good.

I think that’s nonsense and, as shown when I voiced my opinion about the braying portaloo masquerading as high art, I don’t give a hoot if those self-appointed experts, the “isn’t it marvellous darling” brigade, call me stupid.

She had me at the dull part, and even a bit on the grammar, but then lost me when I realized this is all about her frightening lack of education and hope for a target that her half-wit SUV driving rugby fans would lap up. I don’t know the Kiwi papers, but this piece makes it seem the New York Post of New Zealand. I’m sure a few people will call her stupid, but many more will just laugh.

An all-male freshman English class in small town Ontario gets a poetic makeover.

For many of the students it was the first time they had written a poem and the first time they had been in an all-male class. The poems were written last year in an Applied English class and some were on display at the Jim McCuaig Education Centre Wednesday.

Teacher Jennifer Seeley says it was pure coincidence that there was no girls in the group and they saw it as an opportunity to experiment and she thinks it had a positive affect on the students.

”The section on poetry was intended to be the shortest unit of all but because of their interest, l lengthened the time that we spent on it” Seeley said. ‘

She said this class provided an opportunity to try out some strategies outlined in a Ministry guide that pointed out ways to improve boy’s literacy skills.

From Hogard to Harvwarts, or something like that. JK to deliver commencement address at real school full of messy haired weirdos in robes.

Toronto’s public libraries are doing well despite the bums and porn and predictions of doom.

Today, libraries are more popular than ever. In part that’s because they are a prime example of what urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his book The Great Good Place calls a “third place.” The first place is home, the second place is your workspace, and the third is a public space where you can simply drop in, relax, read a book or magazine, talk with other people. Examples, according to Oldenburg, are pubs, coffee shops, streetscapes such as the Yonge-Dundas Square.

These places are vital to civic life. They “lend a public balance to the increased privatization of home life,” Oldenburg says.

A case can be made that the public library is the example of the third space. “We’re everybody’s living room, the place where anybody can come in to access information,” says Anne Bailey, the Toronto Public Library’s director of branch libraries.

“We’re still people. You can’t sit in a room all day looking at a disc. People need to have that public space and to learn from each other. The public library provides that perfect venue.”

Very disturbing new condition: reading. I shudder to think what this means for mankind.

Sitting in a quiet downtown diner, local hospital administrator Philip Meyer looks as normal and well-adjusted as can be. Yet, there’s more to this 27-year-old than first meets the eye: Meyer has recently finished reading a book.

Yes, the whole thing.

“It was great,” said the peculiar Indiana native, who, despite owning a television set and having an active social life, read every single page of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

A final unfinished Nabokov ms sits in a vault in Switzerland. At his death Vladimir asked for it to be destroyed. His son and translator, Dimitri, now 73 himself, has been torn about this for years. Should he heed his father’s last wishes and destroy the ms, or show it the world for a last glimpse into the writing process of one of the greatest writers ever? Ron Rosenbaum wants you to weigh in at Slate and he’ll send the best responses on. But after this somewhat opportunistic play, Rosenbaum goes on to muse on who owns the moral rights to what after an author dies.

Dmitri’s predicament goes beyond Laura. It’s one that raises the difficult issue of who “owns” a work of art, particularly an unfinished work of art by a dead author who did not want anything but his finished work to become public. Who controls its fate? The dead hand from the grave? Or the eager, perhaps overeager, readers, scholars, and biographers who want to get their hands on it no matter what state it’s in?

To burn or not to burn? It’s not a question we can argue over forever. Time is running out, and the stakes are high: Dmitri’s past pronouncements suggest that Laura is not merely another scrap of paper. At one point he called it “the most concentrated distillation of [my father's] creativity.”

I say destroy it. We trusted him to know what he wanted to give us in life. Why wouldn’t we extend the same trust to him after his death?

• UK lit funding rising insteading of falling?
• Spiderman steps into time machine and comes out a bachelor (for most men, this usually this happens later, around 45-50, and it’s a Porsche dealership they step into…)
• 20 Ways of Reading Ondaatje, part the second
• Are free newspapers on the subway killing reading?
• Steve Jobs on publishing: Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
  
• JCO in conversation
• Awesome mystery writer Laurie R. King interviewed
• Waaa waaa: On whiny middle class novels
• Schadenfreude of the day: the bio of alien cult nutbar and part-time actor Tom Cruise is condensed at Slate — it’s like watching a train wreck… he comes off so googly-eyed crazy I expect him to start drooling and throwing cats at any moment

Say it by writing it in your own blood. Or, more likely if history is any template, someone else’s. Seems like it must inevitably invite comparison to the Frankenhand, but mostly because I keep waiting for the Frankenhand to rise up and jab Conrad Black in the eye.

An introduction to the future monster in the western lit market. If this were about Japan, I would make a crack about Godzilla or rising suns, but like the article says, I’m at a loss about how to frame this, because I know so little.

The world’s most populous nation, the world’s biggest consumer of raw materials, and now the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, China strides irresistibly towards its economic and political destiny. But as Beijing prepares for its Olympic extravaganza this summer, the cultural life of the 1.3 billion people who live and work in this economic superpower remains a closed book to many in the west – their bestselling authors unfamiliar, their most exciting writers untranslated.

It’s a situation rendered all the more peculiar by the immense size of the Chinese publishing industry.

“The sheer scale of everything in China is overwhelming,” says Richardson. “China has one of the three great book publishing industries in the world. Along with the UK and the US it publishes around 200,000 new titles and new editions a year, well ahead of the nearest rivals, Japan, Russia and Germany. It is by far the largest publishing market by volume – officially about 6bn units a year, but many more when pirated copies are taken into account. In terms of value the market will probably amount to around £4-5bn in 2007, which would put it fourth in the world – behind the US, Germany and Japan and ahead of the UK. If you take purchasing power parity into account it is second only to the US.”

The Chinese literary world is like a parallel universe, almost invisible to many in the west, complete with big hitters (Su Tong and Jia Pingwa), innovators (Xi Chuan and Che Qianzi), and bestselling superstars (Han Han and Annie Baobei), some of whom are earning more than £1m a year.

An Australian publisher flinched while playing chicken with a pyramid scheme/alien cult and has dumped plans to sell the unauthorized biography of a bizarre, washed-up celebrity. Apparently the company’s lawyers think the volume might run afoul of the law and cause the entire company to be flooded with thetan spirits and the wrath of Xenu.

 TS Eliot winner Sean O’Brien takes on comers who think the last couple decades have been harsh on poetry.

About 15 years ago, I think, the word “mainstream” gained new currency in the discussion of poetry. As tends to be the case, the momentarily convenient term became an imprisoning category, with mainstream used to corral poets who wrote for the page rather than performance, and whose work was not self-consciously avant-garde. Elsewhere lay the realm of the performance poets, and elsewhere again the avant-gardistes.

There’s a book to be written about this, which I’m thankful I won’t be undertaking, but one consequence has been a tendency to view the alleged occupants of these sometimes antagonistic camps as homogeneous; thus, for example, “mainstream” poetry is said to be “all the same”. But when I listened to my nine colleagues’ work at the TS Eliot reading the other evening, what struck me was its range and diversity, and the complexity of its relationship to tradition, as well as its quality.

I just feel that these kinds of headlines should be yelled in as fear-mongering a voice as possible, in homage to the Fox News-like tradition from which they come. I propose a five year moratorium on the use of “the end of” and “the death of” in arts journalism.

Are we all reading less these days?

That’s not what the level of book sales in the UK suggests – 2007 was a record-breaking year in terms of the amount the British spent on a good read. More than £1.8bn was spent on books last year, a 6.2 per cent increase on the previous year. That was thanks in part to some big releases, such as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which took around £36.5m, and accounted for two per cent of all book sales in 2007. But with seven-and-a-half books sold every second last year, Britons seem keener than ever to get their noses into a book.

Why do we borrow fewer books then?

The rise of huge bookstores and the close competition between them has seen the price of new books plummet in recent times. The average price of all books sold last year was £7.57, and that figure includes the pricier hardbacks. Shoppers can now go to the main book shop on their high street and come out with three bestsellers for around £15. Not only that, but they can enjoy reading their new book with a coffee and a comfy seat without even leaving the store, as major bookstores have coffee shops inside.

According to Professor Rose, changes in education and social mobility must also play a major role in why the library no longer plays as great a role in our lives as it did for past generations. “At the start of the 20th century, the library provided access to learning and betterment for the working classes that wasn’t available anywhere else,” he said. “Now, with schooling and social mobility so much more comprehensive, people from the working class who show that kind of attitude and desire are creamed off. The library is no longer such a vehicle for social mobility.”

A few loose items that were rolling around like hair- and schmutz-covered mints at the bottom of a purse.

• Book sales up in November
• Lessing joins in UK funding row
• Dictionary wallpaper (from Maud)
• Ebook vs paper — case closed (thanks Art!)
• Erotic library in Paris? Hot damn!
• Today in shock and disbelief: tobacco companies are worried about books ruining THEIR image? As opposed to, say, CANCER?

No, not the poorly designed naughty bits at the back of the store, but literary greats passing themselves off as someone else, or no one at all. John Mullan writes in the Guardian about this long tradition in British letters.

Anonymity was sometimes elaborately achieved. Jonathan Swift arranged for a sample part of Gulliver’s Travels, transcribed in another man’s handwriting, to be dropped in secret by an intermediary at the house of publisher Benjamin Motte. It was accompanied by a letter from one “Richard Sympson”, supposedly Lemuel Gulliver’s cousin, offering the whole of the Travels for publication in return for £200. Motte was told that, within three days, he should either return the “Papers” or give the money “to the Hand from whence you receive this, who will come in the same manner exactly at 9 a clock [sic] at night on Thursday”. Motte bravely accepted the mysterious offer and a few nights later he duly got the rest of the book. Soon afterwards, Swift’s friend and probable co-conspirator Alexander Pope discussed the business with the puzzled publisher, pretending to be equally mystified. He reported the conversation in a letter to Swift: “Motte receiv’d the copy (he tells me) he knew not from whence, nor from whom, dropped at his house in the dark, from a hackney coach.”

There have been a few attempts at this here, but most that I know of are mediocre at best.

What if you’re gay but just can’t seem to enjoy “gay” fiction? Worse still, what if you find yourself liking books aimed at straight men? Is this like me being unable to enjoy Maxim and NASCAR but going to a trannie stylist because the conversation is so fun? Or is it something not quite so much about photoshopped breast implants, transluscent pumps, and stupid fat men?

I must come clean. We all have dirty secrets and it’s time I got mine off my chest. The thing is, although I’m gay, I can’t stand gay literature. A lifelong bookworm, I’ve never enjoyed a gay novel in my life. As a teenager, Edmund White’s novels bored me deeper into the closet and I’ve not fared any better with the genre since.

There, I’m feeling better already. There’s more to it, though. I’ve always had a soft spot for the sort of novels that are aimed at straight men: The Rachel Papers and Success by Martin Amis, Filth by Irvine Welsh and – go on, you might as well hear my most shameful confession – High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. Were I inclined to “do a Hornby” and name my top five novels, more than one of them would come from the “lad-lit” camp.

I’m beginning to think that my reading self is not just heterosexual, but – given the discomfort I’ve felt whenever I’ve tried to read a gay novel – almost homophobic.

Labels. Pfft. Who needs ‘em? Um… but… er, I do like soccer and the new Eddie Vedder album, does that count for something? Wait a second, I just realized I also like rainy days and long walks in the woods….! Gasp! I find Lisa Loeb irresistible! Double gasp! And my hair is short and spiky now! Agh! I prefer the company of lesbians…! If I wear a black hiking jacket, jeans, and Blundstone boots its all over! (Agh! I just checked: black jacket, jeans, and Blunds!) Let’s face it: I’m a lesbian. A big, fat, butch, red-bearded lesbian. Meh. I guess I can live with that.

• McCarthy papers go to Texas school
• Kids book prizes handed out, includes Canadian
• Thinking with our bodies as well as our brains
• 12 year old writes self help book

Sean O’Brien picks up the TS Eliot Award on the heels of the Forward. That’s got to feel good for the one in six billion people it happens to.

O’Brien was inspired to write as a boy when a teacher introduced him to the poems of Hughes and Eliot. “I suddenly found language very exciting,” he said. “It seemed to lend the world an extra degree of solidity.”

The Drowned Book also landed him last year’s Forward Prize which he had already won with Ghost Train in 1995 and Downriver in 2001. “Writing poetry is often frustrating, while not writing it can be intolerable. Poetry is a vocation – it possesses you,” he said.

But a grinding day job is as good as an enthusiastic priest with a vial of holy water, let me tell you.

A murdered Sardinian poet, vengeance against the shepherd who killed him, and now brothers shot in the face as the cycle of vendetta violence continues. Or is all as it seems in this small part of the world? God, I so want this to be a movie starring Gandolfini and Pacino.

a quickly gave way to the rumours about Mattana. No witnesses came forward, but as Marotto once wrote of Orgosolo: ‘You hear a voice in the countryside and you understand immediately. You see a light go on in the village and in that house you can imagine everything.’

On 4 January, two killers fired up to 14 shots at the Mattana brothers, suggesting they gave themselves time to reload before fleeing.

But for many, nothing made sense. ‘No way was this the poet’s family taking revenge – they are intellectuals,’ said one local. ‘And why would anyone else do it on their behalf? Vendettas don’t work like that.’

Spanish poet and revolutionary, dead at 82.

There’s actually a mini snowstorm going on here today, so in case you don’t hear from me, it’s because the power went out. I’ve taken to keeping matches and candles in the foyer. It’s kind of nice, this “perhaps power”. Hey Dad, it’s snowing pretty bad. Do you think we’ll have power when we get home? Perhaps….

This weekend I was looking at cottage properties an hour and a bit out of town and was thinking how lovely it would be to be forced off line. Just me, a pond, some sneaky-but-not-too-sneaky trout and some books. I actually salivate at the thought. It would be like sending a heroin addict to a rehab centre out in the woods (you can counsel them all you want, but if that smack is nearby, they’ll get to to it), but only at first. Sigh. Anyway, let’s get to it. Pass me that syringe…. You cleaned this with your spit, right?

Here are a few dangling articles:

• Aussie bookshop bows to pressure from Xenu alien cult and won’t stock Tom Cruise book
• Preliminary nominees for the Nebulas
• Cromwell fans asked to make TV commercial for her
• Harry cookbook
• The Percy you didn’t know
• Writers near deal with Weinsteins?
• Rusdie will beat Atwood to the punch

I’m a mixed breed, in a very outdated sense of the term. I’m a Scottish, Irish, Welsh mix, but mostly Scots-Irish. I suppose it all goes back to Viking somewhere, but within the divisions of very pale people the last millenium, I’m a potluck dinner. Sort of like half-and-half cream for your coffee — a bit of both, but uniformly white. And tasty too! I digress. I must be hungry. What I CAN say here is that I know of no Scot under 75 who could stomach being called English. So on behalf of a people that have been kicked around (and kicking back) for many centuries, I say, Hey, thanks for the little things.

The literary world was hailing a remarkable coup yesterday after the United States Library of Congress – one of the largest and most influential in the world – agreed to reverse a decision to classify all Scottish writers under the general heading of English.

The original move, which was disclosed by The Times, had meant that the term “Scottish Literature” was no longer to be used. Instead, Scottish authors from Burns, Scott and Stevenson to Irvine Welsh, Alexander McCall Smith and Ian Rankin were reclassified as English writers, causing a storm of protest from politicians, academics, libraries and publishers.

Now the library has backed down. In an e-mail sent yesterday to the National Library of Scotland and the British Library, it announced: “After reviewing thoughtful comments received from several correspondents, the Library of Congress will be reinstating headings for Scottish literature, Scottish poetry, and similar headings.

Bonus quote: “It’s shite being Scottish! We’re the lowest of the low, the scum of the fucking Earth. The most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilization. Some people hate the English. I don’t. They’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonised by wankers. Can’t even find a decent culture to be colonised by. We’re ruled by effete arseholes. It’s a shite state of affairs to be in, Tommy, and all the fresh air in the world won’t make any fucking difference.”

I had heard that Peggy’s agent (who only handles Margaret and Tom Wolfe Tom Robbins, is that right?) was in town. And you know what that means. So the news is out. No word yet on what kind of novel it is, but we’ll know by the fall. I really enjoyed Oryx and Crake, the last half of which was a chase scene involving a mutant pig. Does any fiction ever get any better than that?

The NYT has an entertaining piece on what happens when philosophical differences, and comments about ex-girlfriends, come between two men of deep thought. The answer? One of the most brutal reviews of a philosophy book ever written. (This just goes to show it goes on everywhere….)

Mr. Honderich, he said, “maintains the review was so negative because there’s a feud instead of because his book is so bad.” He said that he remembered the comment about his ex-girlfriend, but that he considered it no more than a “bit vulgar and crass” and “certainly didn’t nurse it for 25 years.”

“There was no feud before. It was just a negative review,” he said, acknowledging that “it was the most negative review I’ve ever written.”

Whether criticism should be so harsh is a legitimate issue, Mr. McGinn said. He said that though some might call him aggressive, “rightly or wrongly it was my intellectual judgment.”

A Seattle bookseller wants to set the record straight: things aren’t as bad as they seem.

While I was sorry to read the article in the Jan. 5 Seattle Times that M Coy Books will be closing, I was disturbed by the tone. The local media are quick to mark the demise of an independent bookshop and say once again how it is nearly impossible for a small independent to survive. Difficult, sure. But not impossible.

When we moved our shop, the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, over the Memorial Day weekend in 2005, we sent out a press release saying how here was a story about a small, independent bookshop that was doing so well that it could move to a larger space after 15 years, and no one in the local press paid any attention. Two and a half years later, business is terrific; 2007 was our best year yet, a 6.5 percent increase in sales over 2006.

Wait a minute, and you haven’t screwed anyone over or made any bargains with tall goateed gentlemen in red? What are you, some kind of magic elf or gnome or Irishman something?

I think this is a heartening story of perseverance and blind luck. But I understand where you’re coming from. So, after reading this article, please help yourself to the complimentary sets of rafters, chairs and nooses we’ll be handing out in the lobby.

With a draft of her novel completed, Brunonia Barry of Salem wanted to find an audience. But instead of chasing after publishers – often a discouraging task for any new author – she and her husband took a different tack. They published “The Lace Reader” on their own.

Then something amazing happened: Buzz exploded around the book, both online and in stores, and mainstream publishers came calling. In October, a literary auction was held, and Barry sold the book, and a future one, for more than $2 million.

Drool. I can hardly believe my eyes that This Ain’t The Rosedale Library isn’t on this list. Oh, PRETTIEST bookstores… Sorry boys and girls of This Ain’t. I really didn’t mean to call attention to that. Seriously, we should make a list of the top indie bookstores in the world. Ones you just HAVE to visit if you’re in their town whether because of stock, staff, location, or look. I’ll start with This Ain’t in Toronto (staff), Soft Skull in Brooklyn (stock), Three Lives (look and staff) and St. Mark’s (location) in Manhattan. Any others? And you can’t nominate your own.

The National Book Critics Circle has announced their finalists. All details here. Joyce Carol Oates leads the pack. I’m waiting for the year she’s nominated in every category simultaneously.

The Cassie Edwards (pictured here, possibly with looming husband photoshoped out of background) plagiarism case made the NYT. Nora Roberts thinks this is a good time to reevaluate intellectual property rights. If this were Dynasty, she’d get the Alexis Carrington leitmotif behind her to go with that arched eyebrow. I think there’s only one way to settle this. Yes, you know where I’m going: chess. That’s right. We set them up at a chess board and the first one to correctly name a piece other than the knight is in the right and the other … must serve as a scullion whore to Captain Rip Chestington on a pirate vessel bound for a leper colony in the South Pacific.

The investigation began when a friend of the bloggers, who is a college student, began reading Ms. Edwards as part of a course in romance novels. Noticing that “Shadow Bear” sounded strangely didactic in places, she used Google to trace the source of the writing.

The Romance Writers of America said in a statement that Ms. Edwards’s membership appeared to have lapsed. She is listed on their “honor roll,” the statement said, and “if guilt is admitted or established, the R.W.A. will take appropriate steps with regard to the honor roll listing.”

Hhoooohsssst. That’s gotta sting. She’s going to have to take down the plaque. Wait till Jiffy Lube and her grandkids find out. Her exhaust inspection certificate and World’s Best Grandma will have to come down from above the computer as well. Sigh. Party’s over, people. Gather up the heavily-gelled and softlit glossy author photos and put Fabio back in the box of styrofoam shipping peanuts. It was fun while it lasted.

A Quebecois story teller has caught the eye of the province and is bringing elves and imps and Eggers-like screaming crowds to a smoky cafe near you.

Not only does he orate to sold-out crowds across the province, Pellerin has published four books of stories, including 2003’s Il faut prendre le taureau par les contes! (You have to take the bull by the tales) and 2005’s Comme une odeur de muscles (Like an odour of muscles). His titles have made it on Quebec’s bestseller lists and he has been awarded the prestigious Félix award for live performance. Just before Christmas, Pellerin narrated Babine, a film based on one of his stories, and wrapped up the publicity tour for an album of Quebec folk songs he released with his brother Nicolas.

During his performances, people scream out from the audience like he’s some kind of rock star. Indeed, Pellerin has done a rare thing: he’s taken a folkloric tradition that’s as old as Lower Canada itself and penetrated this province’s massive pop-culture machine. In short, he’s become a star by simply telling tall tales.

Normally we’d think of popular abridgements and adaptations as harming a great work of literature. Not so, says Sophie Gee in the NYT. They are in fact rescuing it from itself.

Mass-market adaptations make Great Books go bad. Or so conventional wisdom would have it. But every so often, plundering and pillaging a canonical text for the sake of entertainment gives it the kiss of life. Take “Beowulf” and “Paradise Lost.” The unpalatable truth is that both originals are now virtually unreadable. “Beowulf” is written in Old English, an inflected Germanic tongue that looks a lot less like our language than one would hope. As for Milton’s epic, it’s in “normal” English, but its blank verse is so densely learned, so syntactically complicated and philosophically obscure, that it’s almost never read outside college courses. Even Samuel Johnson, writing 100 years after Milton, said: “‘Paradise Lost’ is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.”

Now, modern popularizers have come to the rescue, with striking commercial success. Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary’s film version of “Beowulf” has taken in more than $180 million worldwide since its opening in November.

Well, $180M, eh? I guess that’s rescued, in a sort of Iraq sense. Someone should start an art collective to rescue some contemporary works from themselves. I’m sure we could come up with a list of novels from the last 20 years that need to be given the once over to be understood and reappreciated for the story within that was never told.

I just got a note from Vehicule with a link to this “virtual chapbook” they’ve created for a Asa Boxer’s narrative about finding a small pocket of his dad’s (Avi’s) old pics at the family cabin. There’s some great stuff in here, including Layton, Souster, Newlove, Page, Dudek, and very young Margaret Atwood staring dotingly at a wonderfully disshevled Al Purdy. These photos are a priceless treasure and will warm even the coldest Canadian poet’s crystaline heart.

Poking around back in the attic in Val Morin, I came across a batch of photos I had been looking for; this is a collection of candid photos of a whole slew of Canadian poets. My father had (apparently) tried to sell the photo-collection to McGill only to have it turned down because the shots were candid! I brought them over to Michael Harris’s and we spent an enjoyable couple of hours going through this wonderful cultural archive and, wherever possible, indicating names and dates. Priceless in my eyes are images of Frank Scott on the bongos; Louis Dudek on the accordion; John Richmond as “Don Quixote in Housecoat,” slumped in an armchair with a cup of tea and a silver platter-cover on his head; Margaret Atwood, happily sandwiched between Purdy and Boxer with an inscrutable but definite look of meaning in the sideways and upward glance and smile she is pouring over Al Purdy.

In Britain, presses that are facing financial difficulties because of government cuts and low sales fight to keep their publishing programs alive. It’s like they care about books over money or something. Biz. Arre. Daedelus fights for survival:

News of the decision has shocked the literary world. Julian Barnes, Marina Warner and Ali Smith are among writers who have expressed their dismay to Dedalus. More than 800 people have signed an online petition on its behalf.

Arcadia, another specialist in translated fiction, has received its £42,000 grant for this year and next, but has been told that it will then have to bear a 25 per cent cut after. Anvil, a poetry publisher with a strong translation list (and which nurtured Carol Ann Duffy) is understood to have received an immediate cut.

Swashbuckling heroes, brave knights, globetrotting scifi adventures. They’re making a comeback. Ninja Boy, almost age five, has in fact been on a “knights only” bedtime story kick for about a year now. I have separate, semi-invented stories for Lancelot (fights a dragon in one, the Black Knight in another), Galahad (as a boy, fights a giant), Gawain (fights a green knight who first lets him break his helmet — I have to do SOME age appropriate editing here), Percival (rescues a fellow knight from an ogre), etc. They all seem to end with a feast being thrown in the protagonist’s honour. It must be a subconscious thing on my part. I wish someone would throw a feast for me. But, I digress. One day, about a eight months back, Ninja Boy insisted that we needed to make up a new character, “Sir Scorpion, who has a scorpion on his chest, and who is actually a robot, but because he is in the time of knights they don’t know what a robot is, so they think he’s just a knight who never takes off his armour, and so when he comes to Camelot they put him through three tests for strength, bravery and wisdom and he passes them all easily because they don’t know he’s a robot, and then they have a feast in his honour but of course he doesn’t eat anything because he’s a robot, but they don’t know that, so they worry the food is bad…” Eight months later, it’s still developing. I can’t wait to see how he works Pokemon into the storyline.

In her NBCC Guest Post, Twenty Ways of Reviewing Ondaatje, Molly McQuade looks at the state of reviewing (in a time when everyone seems sure reviewing as we know it is coming to an end) by examining the reactions to Divisadero.

Even if the book review as it used to be is never coming back, back it comes to my mind now anyhow, only partly because my friend the editor said that it “never” could. Despite the widely mourned decline, over the past twelve months, in numbers of reviews published in mass-circulation venues, some reviews indeed remain among us. The next review, like the last, may quite possibly be published, and—improbable as this may sound—it may quite possibly be read. For those reasons, after a year of unusual tumult in the book-reviewing business, would it seem timely to review a few of the reviewers who continue, against whatever odds, to read and write?

The idea is half bad, and half good. Bad because it encourages intramural nitpicking when what the profession most needs, arguably, is money, vigor, and unforeseen imagination. Bad too because the idea itself doesn’t sound particularly joyful, or even—perhaps—all that illuminating. Yet it’s good, also, because if publishers (and advertisers) belittle the need for criticism, then who but a critic should try to prove them wrong, right, irrelevant, lazy, or crazy? Besides, although I don’t yet talk to myself (later, it may happen), I do think to myself, like many a critic, much of the time; and, just like any other critic, I pine to “share.” Lastly, I’ll pursue my idea because some questions seem worth asking at a moment when outsiders to the work of book reviewing have dashed the enterprise, or tried.

A few of my questions: what have we done, this past year; how did we do it; and why care?

To narrow the field to a tolerable squinting range of possible answers, it seems fair to choose a single new book that, when first released, seemed likely to pose an interesting challenge to critics and to evoke varied reactions in a wide span of periodicals—and then, to survey those. The book I’ve chosen is Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje, a novel published by Knopf last May. Unlike some other difficult and enticing books of 2007, this one would not be ignored. Enough time has passed by now for us to be able to look backward at it, but not so much that we’ll forget how.

Nora Roberts claims Cassie Edwards has ripped off some of her throbbing, feverish, turgid prose. As the deck of the schooner heaved beneath them like their chests heaved in excitement beneath the restrictive lace and whalebone of their corsets, the two women faced each other, belaying pins in hand, knowing that whoever stood last on those brine-washed decks would forever have the arms and lips and protection of the pirate lord, while the other rotted at the bottom of the remainder rack, covered in barnacles, with only the cold sea and coral for lovers.

 Edwards, interviewed earlier this week by the AP, acknowledged that she sometimes “takes” her material “from reference books,” but added that she didn’t know she was supposed to credit her sources.

“When you write historical romances, you’re not asked to do that,” Edwards said, speaking from her home in Mattoon, Ill. She then asked her husband to get on the phone. He told the AP that his wife simply gets “ideas” from reference books.

“She doesn’t lift passages,” Charles Edwards said, adding that “you would have to draw your own conclusions” on how closely his wife’s work resembles other sources.

She got her husband on the phone? Um, Daddy? There, my friends, is everything that’s wrong with the genre right there. It’s a good thing she has finally landed a man to protect her fragile beauty from the ravages of a world she never made.

Turns everyone into greedy backstabbers. Including JK herself. Slate offers an opinion why she should lose her lawsuit against the would-be Harry-lexicon publishers.

Author J.K. Rowling and publisher Warner Brothers have sued the Lexicon for copyright infringement, exposing the big unanswered question: Are fan guides actually illegal?

As sympathetic as I am to Rowling and her rights as an author, the answer is no. There is a necessary and healthy line between what the initial author owns and what follow-on, or “secondary,” authors get to do, and Rowling is running over that line like the Hogwarts Express. The creators of H.P. Lexicon may not be as creative as Rowling, but they are authors, too, and deserve a little respect from the law.