I just got back from a baby shower (for Baby Ninja 2: The Second Shurikening). On the way there, I caught the last moments of Canada Reads. Paul Quarrington’s King Leary won it with a wrist shot that bounced in off Lanny McDonald’s mustache.

I think there should be a personal-worth-dollar-value at which you can no longer claim you’re being “ripped off”. But that’s just the whining of a poor poet. Is JK getting fleeced by this upstart small press looking to publish a Harry Potter lexicon? Rowling is framing her argument as a need to protect fans and fan-generated work… Um, yeah. Undoubtedly the guy in question is out to make a buck, as is Rowling, who was just about to buy that new ivory backscratcher. So what’s The Law say? I believe it says, “Sorry, Jo.”

Ark is editor of a Web site containing a fan-created collection of essays and encyclopedic material on the Potter universe, including lists of spells and potions found in the books, a catalog of magical creatures and a who’s who in the wizarding world.

Rowling said she was especially irked that the site’s owner and the lexicon’s would-be publisher, RDR Books, continued to insist that her acceptance of free, fan-based Web sites justified the efforts.

“I am deeply troubled by the portrayal of my efforts to protect and preserve the copyrights I have been granted in the Harry Potter books,” she wrote in court papers filed Wednesday in a lawsuit she brought against the small Muskegon, Mich., publisher.

She said she intends to publish her own definitive Harry Potter encyclopedia.

“If RDR’s position is accepted, it will undoubtedly have a significant, negative impact on the freedoms enjoyed by genuine fans on the Internet,” she said. “Authors everywhere will be forced to protect their creations much more rigorously, which could mean denying well-meaning fans permission to pursue legitimate creative activities.”

She added: “I find it devastating to contemplate the possibility of such a severe alteration of author-fan relations.”

Canada Reads is down to three books. My top two choices are now gone. I would have voted first, in terms of literary value, for Gallant and second, in terms of entertainment value, for Hopkinson. Now I’m left with two I haven’t read and one I have. The Findley is good and I think it would be a fine choice. I suspect it will win, in fact. But I’d like to see the Quarrington win because I know he’s a great writer and because it’d be nice to see an out-of-print book get a second kick at the can.

In what can only be described, from my point of view, at least, as a massive “I told you so”, it’s become apparent that the Harper government is beholden to special interest religious groups. After word got out about the Conservatives trying to censor the Canadian film (in essence crippling it completely), a prominent evangelist is taking credit for the policy decision (and remember, evangelist ministers aren’t just regular men-of-god… they’re like the L. Ron Hubbards of Christianity).

A well-known evangelical crusader is claiming credit for the federal government’s move to deny tax credits to TV and film productions that contain graphic sex and violence or other offensive content.

Charles McVety, president of the Canada Family Action Coalition, said his lobbying efforts included discussions with Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, and “numerous” meetings with officials in the Prime Minister’s Office.

“We’re thankful that someone’s finally listening,” he said yesterday. “It’s fitting with conservative values, and I think that’s why Canadians voted for a Conservative government.”

Mr. McVety said films promoting homosexuality, graphic sex or violence should not receive tax dollars, and backbench Conservative MPs and cabinet ministers support his campaign.

“There are a number of Conservative backbench members that do a lot of this work behind the scenes,” he said.

Mr. Day and Mr. Nicholson said through officials yesterday they did not recall discussing the issue with Mr. McVety.

So, Canada. There you have it. After ignoring the fact that Harper and a significant percentage of his wingnut lackies are religious zealots (Harper himself belonging to a church that CODIFIES the subservience of women), you’re stuck with a strong dollar and “God” making laws in your “parliament”.

i09 has a list (blah) of 20 sci fi novels that will change your life. I’ve read about seven of these, if I can count other works of authors listed, it would be eleven. I guess it’s a good enough list (if I wrote a version, it would switch out some titles by certain authors (the Marge Peircy pick would be Woman on the Edge of Time, for instance) and the rest of the list would definitely include Canticle for Lebowitz, Left Hand of Darkness, Farenheit 451, and Handmaid’s Tale), but wouldn’t you like to read the essay that fleshes out exactly WHY each title is life changing?

• Conrad prepares to fluff new pillow, cellmate
• The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar wins the Shaughnessy Cohen prize
• Attention Upper North Side: GG-winning authors in New York
• Eminem writing his memoirs (with a rap star, can’t you just get a memoir by stringing all the songs together and removing the similes?)
• Tolle book enjoys Oprah bumpf

A little bit of non-lit politics to start your day: the arts-hating, draconian Conservative government that ran on an accountability platform to oust the middle-of-the-road Liberals has now been caught in its own scandal, one that goes deeper into moral decay than a few assholes making money on the side. In 2005, the Conservative party approached an independent MP who was dying of cancer and tried to buy his vote with a million dollar life insurance policy. Imagine, playing on the hopes of a dying man who’d like to see his family taken care of. Harper, of course, says nothing was out of line. Maybe not out of line for you and your cartoonish posse of bullies, Stephen.

I’m not sure if all of you know, but I do Bookninja as something of a public service/sideline to keep me off the mean streets of St. John’s when I’m not writing poetry. So I’ll be doffing ye old Ninja costume this weekend and giving a couple readings/talks at Princeton this coming Monday and Tuesday. One is even public! So if you’re an Ivy League ‘Ninja reader and/or, shock-of-all-shocks, a poetry lover, and you happen to be in the neighbourhood, please stop by!

Monday, March 3, 7:30pm
Trinity Church, Princeton
with James Richardson
(public reading)

Tuesday, March 4, 4:30pm
209 Scheide Caldwell House, Princeton
(students and faculty only)

The rest of the world’s authors could learn a thing or two from the Hollywood writers strike. Apparently we’re all getting shafted on electronic rights. I’m so confused. Who’d actually notice a strike of literary writers? (Is this my insane cousin?)

Writers of the world arise! It’s time to throw off the shackles of traditional publishing contracts and face a brand new digital future with a brand new set of priorities. Let’s copy or, should I say, learn from our brothers and sisters in Hollywood: don’t let the industry take our digital rights away! Give us our digital dues! In the shift from print to digital, writers are in danger of losing out big time.

Here in the UK, the book industry is suddenly waking up to the idea that there are many potential new platforms for content, aside from that much loved and reliable old technology, the book.

Ebook readers, such as the Kindle, which store hundreds of books at a time; ever more sophisticated phones that can handle and display content beautifully; computers we can’t bear to be parted from that can morph from television portal to e-reader to web browser and back again; there will come a day when we will ask ourselves: why did I think filling up my tiny house with dusty old books was a good idea?

The Zippo is getting closer to the last we’ll see of Nabokov. His son Dmitri is apparently pretty angry with the Slate writer who brought the dilemma to everyone’s attention. Now the ms. seems to be in even greater danger of being torched. How will we live without it now that we know it was missing from our lives all this time!? If I was a chisel-jawed cop on the scene of this hostage taking, I’d squint into the sun and turn to Dmitri and, removing the toothpick from the corner of my mouth, say in a gravelly voice, “Go ahead, punk. Do it. You don’t have the guts.” I’d probably shoot his knees out too, but I can’t be sure ’cause I haven’t read the script yet.

Dmitri’s threat was the latest episode in the long, twisted saga of Laura, which by then had become the literary equivalent of an old-fashioned serial melodrama, as full of cliffhangers as The Perils of Pauline. The irascible Dmitri would tease us with hints of Laura’s thrilling salience, then suggest he was inclined to destroy it, anyway; following which, the literary world (most of it) would beg him not to. Dmitri would then back off—”reserving judgment”—only to stir things up by giving interviews (or, in my case, sending e-mails) that once again suggested an intent to destroy. (For instance, the irritated e-mail he sent me—A LONG, SINGLE PARAGRAPH ALL IN ANGRY CAPITAL LETTERS—after the publication of my recent Slate piece.)

I’d thought I’d portrayed Dmitri’s Hamlet-like dilemma sympathetically. I had defended his conflict, his need to balance the deathbed wish of his father, one of the great artists of modern times, against the demands of “posterity.”

Shouldn’t the father have the right to expect that his son would carry out his wishes? And yet Dmitri had himself fueled our desire to possess Laura with some of his comments, as when he called it the “most concentrated distillation of [my father's] creativity” and a “totally radical book.” Who would not wish to get even a sketchy glimpse of the omega point of Nabokov’s artistic evolution? However fragmentary the clues, they might give us a hint of the final stage of his aspirations for his art—or perhaps offer a lens through which to reconsider his published work.

But my empathy for the difficulty of the choice—and my offer to share Slate reader comments with Dmitri—seemed to exacerbate his irritability, and, alas, to place Laura in greater jeopardy.

What started as a wonderfully complex dilemma about literary value and filial loyalty is rapidly becoming an unwatchable farce.

Reader B points out this (INCONTHEIVABLE!!) article about American poet superstar Mary Oliver, not only selling out a 2500 seat venue, but actually sparking near riots online as people try to score tickets to the event.

“There’s a very great concentration of Mary Oliver fanatics in the Northwest,” says Helene Atwan, Oliver’s editor, who heads Beacon Press, the poet’s publisher. “She’s a premier poet of nature, and Northwest people are so attuned to that. Mary could be a rock star there.”

Poet as rock star may be a strange notion outside of places like Russia, but Oliver has become a poetry phenomenon.

She regularly dominates the national poetry best-seller list put out by the Poetry Foundation. The current list has four Oliver titles in the top seven spots, including her most recent book, “Thirst,” in the pre-eminent position. There are more than half a million copies of Oliver’s work in print.

In the wake of the cancellation of its book festival, the Guardian looks as the literary city of Calcutta.

This isn’t the first year the book fair has resulted in controversy. A massive fire in 1997 burned over 100,000 books and caused one visitor to die of a heart attack. In 2004, the fair was banned from its location in the heart of Kolkata, the Maidan. Last year, it was forced to shift to a stadium in the city’s periphery, Salt Lake, an area defined by malls and IT. Plans have been floated for an alternative book fair to go ahead at the same venue in early March this year, but nobody seems very excited at the prospect.

Some residents see the absence of the book fair in Kolkata’s centre as a significant blow to the city’s traditional cosmopolitanism and cultural vibrancy. “The Book Fair was a typical modernist Bengali cultural space,” says novelist Amit Chaudhuri, who has lived in Mumbai and the UK but returned to his birthplace of Kolkata nine years ago. In contrast with the indoor book fairs in Frankfurt and Delhi, Kolkata’s, he suggests, was “a kind of temporary illusory city within a city defined by the predominance of walking, bonhomie, conversation, eating – urban activities that have always been integral to the production of culture.”

Finding myself in Kolkata with no book fair on the horizon, I decide to tour the city to seek out the roots of Bengal’s rich literary past and to discover if, despite the court’s decision, book culture is still flourishing here.

A bizarre set of instructions for how and when to display your books in your own home has gotten some people up in arms. I follow only one principle for the display of my books. I call it “Area Maximization Principle” (AMP). According to AMP, however I can jam more paper onto the wood is what wins in the end. I stack them two rows deep and then pile horizontally on top. I use dust as a buffer layer. Eventually, when I lose a pet or elderly relative to the crashing bookcase, I buy another set of shelves.

“Bookshelves are not for displaying books you’ve read,” says Klein; “those books go in your office, or near your bed, or on your Facebook profile. Rather, the books on your shelves are there to convey the type of person you would like to be. I am the type of person who would read long biographies of Lyndon Johnson, despite not being the type of person who has read any long biographies of Lyndon Johnson. I am the type of person who is very interested in a history of the Reformation, but am not, as it happens, the type of person with the time to read 900 pages on the subject. More importantly, I am the type of person who amasses many books, on all sorts of subjects. I’m pretty sure that’s what a bookshelf is there to prove. The reading of those books is entirely incidental. The question becomes how we’ll project all of this when Kindles takes off and all our books are digital.”

There is bravery in such candor. The word “poseur” is still around, after all, even if the people who study consumer behavior, and try to channel it, have coined the kinder and gentler term “aspirational taste” for this sort of thing. David Brooks could probably get a best-selling analysis of the American middle class out of the contrast between Seligman’s moralistic injunction and Klein’s jaunty expression of dandyism. Just throw in some references to the difference between Blue and Red states, and the thing writes itself.

That all said, I tend to store my most beloved tomes and the books of my friends in a kinder manner. And I’ve recently come, by the Grace of a Minor God named Matthew, into a few early Geoffrey Hill first editions that complete my collection and need some extra care. Can I just store these with my others or do they need some sort of antiquarian humidor for books?

• Vanderhaeghe’s awesome novel The Englishman’s Boy to become miniseries
• Robert Bly to be the first Minnesota poet laureate
• Dr. Seuss goes digital
• Political contributions from US authors (from Maud)
• Stats Can says reading spending is down in average Canuck household (probably because I get all my books for free now) (from Quill)

A Quebecois author is threatening to burn his entire French language oeuvre if the province continues to lighten its stance on bilingualism. Sounds perfectly logical. And by “logical” I mean “marginally insane”. I sympathize with the passion here,  and understand the publicity stunt, but think the whole situation smacks mildly of saying you’re going to stop violence against you by killing yourself. What happens when the world shrugs and says, “Go ahead…”?

Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, the author of some 70 works of fiction, non-fiction, drama and poetry, is giving the province two months to correct what he considers its errant linguistic ways, or the books will burn.

Beaulieu, 62, started making good on his symbolic ultimatum earlier this week by tossing a copy of his most recent novel,La Grande Tribu (The Big Tribe), into the wood stove at his remote cottage northeast of Quebec City.

A comic book is being used to teach German gradeschoolers about the Holocaust.

The visual style of “The Search” is clear, simple, pastel-colored, in a classic Belgian-Franco comic tradition. “Less is more,” Mr. Heuvel, the artist, said in a recent telephone conversation, acknowledging that he pilfered liberally from Tintin’s inventor, Hergé. “We spent endless hours making sure that the Nazi costumes were kept to a minimum because boys can glorify these things.”

Thomas Heppener, director of the Anne Frank Center in Berlin, said, “There was also a lot of discussion about color.” Black-and-white, he noted, is now a cliché of art and movies about the Holocaust. Color is less melodramatic. “And you know the trees were still green at Auschwitz,” he added.

It’s a bright autumn day in the book when Esther’s parents are rounded up and sent off to die. The comic is more heartbreaking for being understated and cautious about violence. Ruud van der Rol, one of the writers, explained: “There are no piles of bodies, because we knew from experience that this could block children from dealing with the whole subject. Also — and we had endless conversations about this — we decided not to show Hitler as a beast or inhuman because the Nazis, after all, were human beings. That’s the point. Anyone can be a perpetrator or a hero. The choice is yours.”

In the wake of the Oscars you might ask: Are more Hollywood movies staying truer to their source novels? Yes, says this pre-Oscar article in the LAT. Maybe it’s just that films that ARE staying truer are winning more awards.

This is an old story; Ken Kesey, Wilner notes, went unacknowledged when “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” won the best picture Oscar in 1976, and 19 years later, Winston Groom was similarly slighted after “Forrest Gump” took the top prize.

Such a disconnect is particularly ironic this year because so many films, nominated and otherwise, have roots in literary work. Not only is there “No Country for Old Men” and “Away From Her” but “The Namesake” and “Atonement”; not only “There Will Be Blood” but “Persepolis.” Literature figures even in “The Savages” and “Margot at the Wedding,” which deal, in part, with the struggle to come to terms with writing, its odd and at times parasitic connection to the world.

What does this signify? I have a friend who believes people tend not to trust something that lacks an established lineage, that there is a cachet — for producer and audience — in a film that comes from an iconic book.

I tuned in for a bit yesterday to Canada Reads, and was glad to hear the group speak. The good people of the CBC sent me the books being discussed, two of which I have not read (Icefields and King Leary), so it will be nice to cut into the Quarrington at some distant point down the road when 150 books aren’t lined up ahead of it. It’s great to see some out-of-print and small press books getting a second kick at the can. (I’m desperate for Canada to have to read Nalo, in part for the entertainment and education, but also to witness the collective, barely-supressed apoplexy of the straight, white community–I realize this won’t happen, but….) All in all, it’s an eloquent enough group, particularly Jemeni and Moore, but it’s also nice to hear from astronaut MacLean, who brings an (ironically?) earthy, somewhat closed-minded “real-reader” perspective to the show. I didn’t hear the whole thing, but from what I did hear, there were some tense moments around culture and race, which was actually healthy discussion, but I wonder if some people wish they had their comments back and could give the moment a “take two”.

• Dashiell Hammett (around digression)
• Ian McEwan (around being a public intellectual)
• Paul Auster (around fantasy vs. reality)
• Wordsworth (around…. incest?)

• S&S doing well in the US
• Did con man cult leader L Ron Hubbard plagiarize Scientology from an earlier German work?
• Early Da Vinci puzzle book (don’t get your knickers in a twist, it’s the real Da Vinci, not the Brown one)

But will not budge on its stance on photoshopped breasts. Having reviewed the upcoming Black Crowes album when they couldn’t have heard more than one song, Maxim apologized to the band (Chris Robinson pictured here hoping he looks like Lennon) and said that as a gesture of goodwill, the band is welcome to stop by the office and pick up a couple pairs of strappy, transluscent, high-heeled ho sandals to take on tour.

The Crowes released only one track of the album early — Goodbye Daughters of the Revolution, which appears on their website.

“It’s a disgrace to the arts, journalism, critics, the publication itself and the public,” Angelus said.

A magazine spokesman declined to say whether the writer would face disciplinary action over the review.

Noah Richler writes in the Times about Vincent Lam’s short stories and his fortuitous relationship with Margaret Atwood, bringing Lam to a whole new audience abroad.

Lam asked Atwood if she would read his stories.

“Do you want me to tell you something nice, or something honest?” Atwood answered.

“I was writing my book and not sure how to move forward,” Lam says over lunch at a busy Vietnamese workingman’s diner in his West Toronto neighbourhood. “I thought: ‘Well you know how to write, so why not share some of your wisdom with me?’”

Lam laughs: “One good thing about medicine is that it teaches you, when you don’t know something, not to be afraid to ask people who know more than you. Medicine teaches you to be humble.”

Later, Atwood e-mailed Lam the message: “Congratulations, you can write.”

And this, my dear friends, is the reason geek suckahs like me have children: Star Wars according to a 3 year old.

Pretty much what that loudmouth headline above said.

After a debate that left senior members of the Telegraph’s literary staff with pulled hair, black eyes and, in one case, an infected bite, we this week present our list of the 50 great crime writers of all time.

We present them in no particular order, and make no apology for our omissions. But we would like to know what you think. Should Ellery Queen have been two of the names on the list? Hate Highsmith? Log on, or write in, and say so.

Neil Astley, the editor of the great British press Bloodaxe Books, weighs in on the “use” of poetry.

George Szirtes gave this a sharper focus in his 2005 TS Eliot lecture, Thin Ice and the Midnight Skaters. Previewing his lecture in the Guardian, he wrote:

“‘If poetry makes nothing happen what use is it?’ scoffed a recent letter in a serious newspaper. It is not a new question, if a bit Gradgrindish in nature. What does music make happen? Or visual art? The writer might have been thinking of social change.”

Listing various poems which had worked towards such change, Szirtes continued: “The subject of poetry being life, and politics being a part of life, poets have written as they thought or might have voted. Whether they actually made anything happen is not clear. The quotation about poetry making nothing happen is, in fact, half-remembered from the second part of Auden’s In Memory of WB Yeats, that goes:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper; it flows south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

“Those who want poetry to make things happen forget the last line of the above: that poetry is itself a way of happening.”
…
As the world’s politicians and corporations orchestrate our headlong rush towards eco-Armageddon, poetry may seem like a hopeless gesture. But if Seferis and Heaney are right, poetry can at the very least be “strong enough to help”.

Just shoot me now. If I don’t get to an email within the first 25 minutes, it’s likely to get pushed further an further down the list and lost. Can you imagine that happening with book chapters? Actually, that might not be a bad idea, given some of the flab I’ve read lately. It would just have to be the right chapters. I think we got an email from these dailylit people the other day in fact… I seem to remember seeing it go by while thinking, I should really open that.

The suggestion seems to be that reading is a chore, something to be planned for rather than enjoyed in a free moment. But surely the day is full of potential moments to open a book: waiting for a bus, over lunch, in bed… and now, in the workplace. Dailylit.com puts paid to the excuse about not finding time for good books; now the books come to you, as daily morsels in your inbox. Over 800 books have been divided into bite-size pieces to be emailed to you every day. The books are complete editions and each instalment takes just a few minutes to read – as much time as it takes to update your Facebook profile.

The American site evolved out of the founders’ realisation that they were spending hours each day on the internet but struggled to find time to read. Further inspiration came when the New York Times serialised classic novels and they found they enjoyed incorporating reading into their daily routine.

Novelist Rosoff, whose Guardian blog we link to quite a bit, profiled at the CBC.

Rosoff was already in her mid-forties when she took up writing. As if to prove her late-blooming success was no fluke, she immediately fired off two more stellar novels. Just in Case (2006) focused on a depressed 15-year-old playing a game of hide-and-seek with fate. What I Was, which was recently released in Canada, is less showy than her previous work but even more satisfying: Set on Britain’s ruin-strewn south-east coast in the 1960s, it’s a platonic love story between a lonely schoolboy and a mysterious orphan.

Now 51, Rosoff is the first to admit that she might be overcompensating. Not for time lost, though she says she “pretty much loathed every minute” of the 15 years she spent working in advertising; nor does she have any regrets about becoming a writer later in life.

Publishing’s dependence on mega-selling books, examined at The Star.

Depending on your place in the book business, another megaseller by Brown could be a proverbial tide that lifts at least some boats or a peripheral distraction that likely won’t do much to mitigate more systemic woes, such as pricing issues related to the Canadian dollar.

“It’s event publishing and we can use an event like this at any time,” says Martin. “This business, like the movie business, is a hit-based business.

“Yes, we have a back catalogue that provides us with our ongoing cash flow, but what really moves the needle in this business is a hit, a big hit – whether it’s an Oprah book or a Dan Brown or a Sophie Kinsella that breaks out from nowhere and becomes a blazing success. These are the types of things that drive our bottom line.”

On the retail side, the most obvious potential beneficiaries are the chains, including Indigo, whose share of the homegrown market rose to 44 per cent in 2006, according to a recent study by Heritage Canada.

Unlike in the U.S., where Costco and other box stores are gobbling up larger shares of the market, books in Canada are still sold mainly through book stores.

Oh, I guess I was wrong. I thought they were mostly sold through that place that looks like a Ikea’s carpet obsessed sister but sells mostly picture frames, scented candles, junk plastic items for children, double shot half caf frappalattes.

Oh, gee. It’s like I started this site five years ago just to get to today. It’s as though every smart-assed remark for the last thousand days has just been a workout for the title match. Sniff. And here it is, The Day, and I’m simultaneously all nervous and verklempt. Okay, breathe, Ninja, breathe… Ffoo ffoo ffffooooooohhh. I promised myself I wasn’t going to cry, so just relax into it and go with the normal flow: 5 seconds of thought, 10 seconds of writing. You can do this.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the George W. Bush Library:

• Hop On Pop
• defence debriefing notes taken on the back of carefully peeled Schlitz labels
• a complete 2000-2008 run of Maxim Magazine with White House “received” stamps
• 344 instructional stickers from Laura’s Xanax prescription
• a series of hand-drawn cartoons showing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wearing a turban and explosive vest mostly with the caption “Ayatola Assahola”,
• a selection of Jenna’s most redacted report cards
• the ashes of the paper trail that sprung him from active duty during Viet Nam
• and of course, The Pet Goat

All this and and some peanut shells piled in a Katrina aide carton and left on the floor of an empty postmodern warehouse designed to represent the unfulfilled promise of an America the world used to love to hate, but now mostly just hates. Phew. A bit of a let down, after all, but I can pretty much quit now. See ya!

• Writers Trust Shortlists
• Kiriyama Prize finalists
• Canada Reads is underway… (Loves that Lisa Moore. She’s some hard ticket, b’y.)
• The Quill Awards have been suspended for some reason, despite advancing “the cause of literacy”… hmm. Geez, if it was such a success, why stop now? Oh, I see, the public doesn’t care enough about your manufactured onan-award to actually buy books because of it and so you’re not making the money you planned to make in the guise of philanthropy… Hey, public! For once, I love you!

The Quill Awards have truly helped us advance the cause of literacy for the hardest to reach children in our country, helping to give them the skills and resources they need for a hopeful and successful future,” said Kyle Zimmer, First Book President. “First Book is tremendously grateful to the Quills Literacy Foundation; their legacy will live on through their generous contribution as we continue to provide beautiful, new books to the children who need them the most.”

And that above passage, my friends, is a textbook example of what communications professionals call a “steaming pile of horseshit”.

Cory Doctorow, everyone’s favourite bespectacled mine-fighter, on the term “intellectual property”.

Does it matter what we call it? Property, after all, is a useful, well-understood concept in law and custom, the kind of thing that a punter can get his head around without too much thinking.

That’s entirely true – and it’s exactly why the phrase “intellectual property” is, at root, a dangerous euphemism that leads us to all sorts of faulty reasoning about knowledge. Faulty ideas about knowledge are troublesome at the best of times, but they’re deadly to any country trying to make a transition to a “knowledge economy”.

Fundamentally, the stuff we call “intellectual property” is just knowledge – ideas, words, tunes, blueprints, identifiers, secrets, databases. This stuff is similar to property in some ways: it can be valuable, and sometimes you need to invest a lot of money and labour into its development to realise that value.

CUNY will open a graduate centre for the study of biography. Gee, just in time for the boom in bored, rich, geneology-obsessed old people hoping to write down their lives and the lives of their ancestors. What a fortunate (and lucrative) coincidence! Naw, I’m being too cynical here, aren’t I. Universities wouldn’t prey on the hopes and dreams of aspiring dilettantes, only to send them out into a world they’re brutally unprepared and unqualified for, would they? *cough*MFA*cough*

David Nasaw, a professor of history at the Graduate Center who will serve as the faculty director of what is to be named the Leon Levy Center for Biography, said he had been mulling such a project for “a gazillion years.” But, he said, the idea finally crystallized last year when he met Nancy Milford, the author of “Zelda: A Biography” and “Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay” and now a distinguished lecturer at Hunter College.

The two talked about wanting to combine scholarly rigor with literary quality and how it would help to be able to talk regularly with other biographers.

“We saw how important it was for the two of us to share and talk craft,” said Mr. Nasaw, who is working on a biography of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., while Ms. Milford is writing a biography of Rose Kennedy. “We thought if we could formalize this, it would be extraordinary.”

Mr. Nasaw, who is also executive director of the Center for the Humanities at CUNY, said he wanted to address the sense among university professors that biography was “the stepchild of the academy.”

The strangest book titles of the past year include a bunch that leave you scratching your head.  “Are Women Human? And other International Dialogues“, “Cheese Problems Solved“, “I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen” and “How to Write a How to Write Book”. At least none of these are something totally off the wall like, say, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union“.  See brief commentary here and here.

Australian poet Les Murray is one of the best there is. But either he’s been caught out here trading favours or he’s truly the driest wit ever. Asked for a blurb for a J.K. Murphy’s selected, Murray said, sure… if you publish my wife. Murray’s not known for being easy to get along with, so I imagine there was some measure of cynical antagonism intended in his letter. In post-bruhaha commentary, he goes on to bash the blurb, a favourite pastime of mine.

In a letter dated February 13 to the poetry editor of a small publishing house, Puncher & Wattmann, Murray offers to provide a blurb requested for a book by the poet J. K. Murphy in exchange for publication of a “migrant chronicle” by his wife, Valerie. Murray describes and praises his wife’s manuscript and in “a proposal I think eminently fair”, says “if you will read this book and bring it out in print, I will furnish a quality blurb for Mr Murphy’s book and give it as good a boost as you could hope for. Let me know quickly if you wish to enter into this arrangement, and Valerie’s ms. will be swiftly on its way to you.”

Contacted by the Herald yesterday, Murray dismissed the letter as “a joke” and said his intention was to say no to the publisher, “but I said it in a baroque way”. Told it did not read like a joke, he replied, “It reads like, ‘Piss off’, actually.”

For 40 years, he said, “people have been preying on me for free services and this is only a desire to stir trouble. People are forever asking me for blurbs. I’ve been

pestered unmercifully.” Anyway, he said, “blurbs are nonsense – they’re all hyperbole and hype, a publishers’ bad habit. Read the contents of the damned book.”

Porn for the literarily addicted. You’re going to die in a fire, you know that, don’t you?

• The bookshelf staircase
• The bookshelf bed

• Mumbai book festival deteriorates into recriminations
• Forgotten Frost to get ink
• Lost Larkin to be broadcast
• Macbeth as graphic novel
• Bush hopes recession he caused won’t affect sales of his memoir
• And speaking of political books — former Blair crony to publish novel

Okay, I’m getting back on the tin can today for St. John’s, so please pray for Mojo.

• CBC Literary Awards announced
• Variety magazine up for sale
• Life of Pi leads Booker-of-Bookers nominees
• Harry loses to Narnia for top childrens’ book of all time… in fact, comes in 6th — I’m surprised it made the top ten
• Random House abandons audio book DRM

The hard-hearted folk at the Quill and Quire, Canada’s leading trade print mag, are asking publishers to stop sending books in bubble envelopes. Apparently their black little hearts are the only ones on earth that aren’t instantly charmed and gratified by the popping soundsation of these things under foot (I use them as carpet). But seriously, they’re right and making perfect sense. I’d like to second their call, and add a couple others:

• American publishers, please stop sending those paper/cardboard envelopes stuffed with what looks like a cross between dust bunnies from the back of the couch and asbestos — because I feel as though I have emphysema every time I open one of these, I’ve stopped opening them… get it?
• All publicists, when you’re mail merging names into an emailed flack sheet to try to fool us in to thinking you’ve personalized the pitch, it’s probably best to ensure your database entry doesn’t read “editorsGeorgeBookninja” or somesuch
• All publishers, when you’re shipping books straight from your printer, check to see how they’re packaging them… I’m having single books arrive in boxes (BOXES!) that look like care packages for soldiers in Afghanistan — one book surrounded by six inches of packing material
• All book people, I have a new rule: if you ship books to me for Bookninja care of one of my publishers (M&S has graciously, and at their own expense, been forwarding your packages to my business address), that title will be BANNED from coverage on Bookninja… FOR.EV.AR. In fact, I will likely never cover one of your books ever again, if I can help it. I’m not sure if it’s just poorly trained interns who are getting the address wrong in your database, but I shudder to think that working publicity people could be so lazy as to take the first address they find on the web associated with my name. Take a second and send an email. (The vast majority of book people, of course, know this is common sense, but you’d be surprised at some of the big players who do this.)

I’m in the St. John’s airport waiting to board a flying Pepsi can bound for Corner Brook, so you get your basic news in roundup form today.

• Anne gets coins and stamps to mark 100th (coins only redeemable at Northbound Leather, Toronto)
• Libraries starting to carry CC licensed books (from Boing Boing, of course)
• Libraries are going open source as well
• Self-publishing boom challenging old order?
• Rushdie vs. the history of the Booker…
• …More related news here with readers being asked to choose the best of the best…
• …Official release here

Globe and Mail journalist, dead at 57. Rembrances from Stephen Strauss, Peter McKenna, and Clive Doucet.

For those of you still addicted to Scrabulous on Facebook, I sympathize, because I was once like you: a twisted parody of a human being jonesing for someone to make a move so you play that QI on the triple letterscore. To offset my vitriol about the hours lost, here is a music video celebrating your predicament.

Right up until I quit, I was waiting eagerly to have it taken away, but there’s been no movement except threatening letters (get it?) on Hasbro’s part, so I had to take matters into my own hands and delete the game. I have to say, quitting was surprisingly easy, all things considered. I mean, after the first few days, which felt like a 72-hour-long waxing of the perineum. That shit is crack, yo. But I just kept thinking about poor Wesley Crusher and the challenges he faced with that headgear-braces game. If Wesley had the stronf to get through it, so did I. The power of positive thinking, people. And demerol. (Yes, I am riding Facebook without a single extra application installed. I might be the last one. Despite parttime Ninja Derek telling me I have to “gay this place up”, I prefer the zen, spartan surrounds of a base profile page.)

A fluffy AP piece framed around some regurgitated flack copy for his new book starts off with some interesting observations by the big man on campus himself, Mr. John Grisham.

“I’m not sure where that line goes between literature and popular fiction,” the mega-selling author says. “I can assure you I don’t take myself serious enough to think I’m writing literary fiction and stuff that’s going to be remembered in 50 years. I’m not going to be here in 50 years; I don’t care if I’m remembered or not. It’s pure entertainment.”

Grisham is happy to write what he hopes is “a high-quality popular fiction.” But that matters not to fans, who gobble every word.

I like his attitude. Hmm. Sounds reasonable and intelligent. Maybe I should buy that book and give it a…WHAT THE!? Someone chain me to the mast until we pass these islands!!

Philippa Gregory watches, mildly horrified but not completely unconvinced, as her novel is adapted for the screen.

My novel can plough its own furrow. It has only one producer, one writer, one director and one actor: all me. If the book is not bought and read because it offends traditional readers, it will only be me out of work. In the novel I have hundreds of pages to develop my view and persuade the reader of my version of the characters. We follow Mary as she slowly realises that there is an interesting life to be had outside the glittering circle of the court, and this is both her realisation and also a revelation to the reader.

My unconventional take on the story does not fully translate to film. Historical drama can explain only so much. The medium of film traditionally shows the actions and the reaction of the characters. Even though the script sets out to adapt my novel as closely as possible, the film has to focus on the personalities of the two Boleyn girls, and their love affairs with the King. It makes the emotions of the women the centre and the driving force of the action.

Film is wonderful at conveying and evoking emotion, but books are better for ideas and evoking thought. And films, especially those with a huge budget, are bound to favour a conventional and popular view. It is assumed that the court of the king is of more interest than the house of the commoner, and undoubtedly it is a more beautiful setting. The combination of the snobbery of the audience, their love of celebrity and the glamour of the court is something brilliantly served by a film about handsome and sexually active royals.

Don’t count the independents out yet. The big box one-two combo has sent them into the ropes, but someone just helicoptered Survivor in to play some background music for an unorthadox training montage. Pound that side of beef, booksellers of America! Yet another article with something positive to say about the indie trend in bookselling. It’s like a break in the clouds and a puff of warm air here in the sunless, frozen town of literary endeavour. And it’s even illustrated with a picture of Safran Foer, who’s really a decent guy and writer (I don’t care what you say) and just cute as a button!

The trade group for independents reported 115 new members last year, the third year in a row that more than 100 openings were recorded.

There’s still a long way to go from the halcyon days of the corner bookshop. In 1992, the ABA had 4,700 members; today, it numbers 1,900.

Many reasons are cited for the decline — rapid growth of the big bookstore chains, the deep discount sales of books at major retailers, the popularity of online purchasing and the general impression that Americans don’t read books anymore.

Yet, even that factor seems in dispute as recent sales figures for last year show a slight increase in book sales over 2006 — 7.4 percent — despite a drop in December, apparently a bad month for the retail trade all around.

• Paranoia Magazine: You didn’t hear about it from me, see?
• Japan yanks butt plug, allows room for Mapplethorpe
• Oprah gives away 1m free e-books in 33 hours
• Canada OWNS the record books — now we can finally get those categories added for consecutive toes lost to frostbite and ability to stomach the raw, watery sewage known as Molson Canadian

The author (aka team of eunuch slaves operating as an incorporated marketing division) known as James Patterson is after your children. And he’ll go through your wives, sisters and daughters to get them. I am so damn proud of how his first consideration is about the quality of the work we’re feeding our impressionable youth… Oh wait, I’m wrong, it’s about making money by preying on the weak-minded in the guise of literary altruism. Ah. I stand corrected. And publishers and (corporate) booksellers across America are lining up on their knees with mouths open to receive Mr. Patterson’s…communion. Yay! Everybody is happy, rich and, like, well-fluffed.

Mr. Patterson figures the best way to get young readers may be through their mothers.

“The reality is that women buy most books,” he said in a telephone interview. “The reality is that it’s easier, and a really good habit, to start to get parents when they walk into a bookstore to say, ‘You know, I should buy a book for my kid as well.’ ”

As a result, Little, Brown has asked booksellers to commit to keeping the new “Maximum Ride” book — along with “The Dangerous Days of Daniel X,” the first title in a new young-adult series, due out in July — at the front of their stores as long as Mr. Patterson’s adult titles usually stay there, in the hope of luring more adult buyers.

Lewis, and his new magazine, profiled at the New Republic.

Lapham’s zeal to combat the creeping debasement of truth in the culture, combined with his passion for history, drove him to leave Harper’s after nearly thirty years and found Lapham’s Quarterly. The Quarterly is billed as a historical journal and looks something like The Paris Review. Each issue, Lapham chooses a single theme–it premiered with “war” in November, “money” follows in March, and “nature” is slotted for the summer–and assembles a set of relevant texts. The material is wonderfully eclectic: Not just the stuff of history books, but pop-culture lists, CIA assassination manuals, and vintage memorandums proposing, for instance, a way to demoralize the Cuban people by spreading unflattering photos of an overweight Fidel Castro. This scrapbook of “literary narrative and philosophical commentary, diaries, speeches, letters, and proclamations” as Lapham describes it in his preamble, is essentially a 172-page expansion of the Harper’s Readings section, itself a Lapham innovation from the start of his second term as editor in 1984. There’s also some new content: four essays in the back by contemporary historians, each about 2,000 to 3,000 words long. But for all those essays, the journal’s clearest message is this: Its editor’s interest, and his genius, lies not in editing, but in curating. Lapham seeks to provide readers with a more complete portrait of current events by using historical documents to reveal how we got here. The issue dedicated to war, and more specifically to the abhorrent (in Lapham’s view) war in Iraq, presents excerpts including Henry V heroically landing on the beaches of Normandy, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and an excerpt from the Bhagavad-Gita about the “sacred duty of a warrior.” Lapham wants both to offer literature on its own terms and to stimulate the reader’s own thoughts. But he does this with the supreme confidence that after reviewing the texts, a reader will come to his same conclusions. Lapham might detest the use of literature for social commentary, but in Lapham’s Quarterly he practices just that, in its most developed form–disguised in the words of others.

Two different takes on the issue from two different authors/publishers. One tried it, was criticized, and then removed the references for the paperback, while the other, the owner of a marketing company herself, is gleefully placing products whereever she can.

Specifying a character’s brand of lipstick, shoes or handbag is a commonly accepted way to add an aura of reality or consumer aspiration to books aimed at young readers: just think of “The Gossip Girl,” with that series’s abundant references to Prada and Burberry. But what if writers and publishers enlisted companies to sponsor those branded mentions, as is the widespread practice in Hollywood?

Authors of two book series have come to separate conclusions: in one case, the writers tried it and then changed their minds; in the other, for a new series to be published next year, the author, who owns a marketing company, said she planned to give corporate sponsorship a chance.

It’s sadly inevitable, I fear, especially for junk work like this. Much like universities and high schools are selling out to one or another of the major snack and beverage corps (when I was there, York U in Toronto sold itself out to become Pepsi U, — classy). Vote with your dollars, people.

An Oxford American staffer is accused of embezzling $30G. In the NFP magazine world, that’s like pocketing the Hope Diamond. Why do I hear the theme music from the Benny Hill Show when I picture this moron fleeing across campus with an arm full of slush pile, pages and dollar bills swirling in her miniature jetwash.

The former employee, Renae Maxwell, who is 41, was arrested by university police last week. Maxwell had attempted to flee, Smirnoff says, following a confrontation with magazine publisher Ray Wittenburg.

According to Smirnoff, Maxwell, who joined the magazine in June, had issued company checks to herself by forging the name of a former employee. “The majority of checks were deposited in December and January, but we see the activity started as far back as September,” says Smirnoff. Wittenburg confronted Maxwell after a number of company checks that were made out to Maxwell but were returned due to insufficient funds.

The magazine staff is working with authorities to determine the full extent of the alleged theft. “We know there’s about $30,000 gone from the forged checks but we don’t know yet what else might have been taken,” Smirnoff says. “When you suddenly find yourself dealing with an embezzler, you have to double check everything as far as the finances go. You can’t trust anything.”

The pencils! Somebody check the cache of blue pencils!! (From Bookslut)

Innovative French author, dead at 85.