Frankie the C writes: “Your readers should have fun with this one”, and indeed you will, my pretties. Especially once I’m done with it. Two anti-homophobia books for kids have been withdrawn from a British public school after protests from Muslim parents. Just as religious extremism is a pan-religious problem*, it appears that passive aggressive censorship fo the purposes of keeping children ignorant, and thus more inclined to believe in mystical bogiemen, knows no one style of arched window.

The decision was made to enable the schools to “operate safely” after parents voiced their concerns at meetings.

Around 40 are said to have gathered at Easton to speak to staff and another 50 at Bannerman Road.

Members of the Bristol Muslim Cultural Society said parents were upset at the lack of consultation over the use of the materials.

Farooq Siddique, community development officer for the society and a governor at Bannerman Road, said there were also concerns about whether the stories were appropriate for young children.

“The main issue was there was a total lack of consultation with parents,” he said.

“The schools refused to deal with the parents, and were completely authoritarian.

Um, Mr. Pot? Mr. Kettle on line 2?

(*Except for Quakerism… their most extreme moments happen a the ice cream counter: vanilla, please–WITH chocolate chips!)

This is almost funny. Conmen who pretend to be stranded authors in order to get some money from bookstore employees. It’s like the blind stealing from the blind.

Dear conmen,

It would be good fraudulent policy to pick not just gullible targets, but RICH gullible targets.

Yours,
WH Auden

With the explosion of computer viruses, identity theft and Nigerian e-mail scams over the last few years, it may have been inevitable that bookstores got a part of the action. And slowly but surely, stores are being contacted by people claiming to be someone they’re not and trying to persuade the bookstore staff to send them money. It’s bewildering to a community that operates largely on trust and personal relationships.

“It’s an annoyance,” said Jennifer Ramos, who handles the more than 300 author events a year at Pasadena’s Vroman’s Books. “It was funny at first, but it seems wrong now.”

This tale is typical: Slattery was heading out of the store, not long ago, to see a movie down the street when a staffer handed her the phone. The caller addressed her like an old friend: “Oh — thank God I got you before you left,” he began.

The call came from someone who said he was the Los Angeles blogger and first novelist Mark Sarvas, who was reading at the store in a few days and seemed to be in a pinch. His car had been impounded, he needed money to get it back and he needed it right away.

“I thought, ‘Why isn’t he calling his wife?’ ” recalled Slattery. “But maybe he can’t reach anybody, maybe he had an extra drink. . . . It never occurred to me that it wasn’t him.

That fucker Sarvas has owed me $75 for three years, ever since that time I paid for his cab home from the mental hosp… but… WAIT A MINUTE!!

A young writer on getting started. I didn’t really read this, but I know a few of you are readers on the edge of trying to write, so go nuts, be inspired, be hateful. Whatever turns your crank. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The writing bug bit him at 15, when a teacher at Bancroft’s School, north London (alma mater of fellow novelist Hari Kunzru), asked him to take part in a poetry workshop. “I felt instantly this was what I was going to do,” he recalls (he’d wanted to be a zoologist till then), and he quickly started firing off three or four poems a week. He has been frenetically writing ever since – at Oxford, where he studied English and fell under the wing of Craig Raine; on the University of East Anglia’s MA writing programme, where he was taught by Andrew Motion before switching from poetry to novels; and in a succession of mundane jobs taken in a deliberate attempt to give himself “mental space”. Hence the recent stint as a fork-lift driver.

Such intensity – and it shows in writing that is full of remarkable, concentrated and pungent images – has its perils. He admits to having had nightmares, lots of them, while writing The Broken Word. “They were mostly related to the detention camps, nightmares about physical violence. As I had these dreams, I had this uncomfortable feeling of being complicit and somehow responsible.” He has, too, occasionally alarmed friends and colleagues – as when, while testing some computer software, he sent his agent a Kafka quote about buried axes and needing to write books that “affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves… like a suicide”. “I do think that,” Foulds says with a shamefaced smile, “but I also want to entertain people. What I’m after is somewhere between trauma and a holiday.”

Is writing, I ask, that sensible a profession for him? “I’ve wondered about that, particularly after writing the poem. I don’t know… EL Doctorow says somewhere that when a novelist composes a novel, the composition of himself is at stake. That’s true, but I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

Aw.

I know the Griffin claims to be the richest poetry prize in the world, but Gary Snyder just took home the Ruth Lilly Prize (100 large) for a half century of nature poetry. I guess this is more of a lifetime achievement thing than a book contest, but it’s still a whole lot of scratch.

Snyder, 78, began writing in the 1950s as a member of the beat movement along with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He spent most of the ’60s in a Zen monastery in Japan. He was the inspiration for Japhy Ryder in Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums.

Now a professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Snyder lives in northern California.

The jury called him “a deeply learned and meditative artist, an impassioned ecologist, and a poet of great scope.

If a book could have scabby facial sores, brown teeth, and a hairdo that could harbour a pair of rutting, medium-sized badgers, this would be it. Would somebody please commit that poor girl?

Now THAT’s got to be a pisser of an embarrassment. Imagine fending off the critics of teh world only to getting nailed by your mother. This reminds me of a phrase that came up regularly during my days working for a private school in Italy (much less profane in the original Italian than in English here), which translated roughly to “it’s like getting fucked in the ass without butter.”

Michel Houellebecq is a literary icon whose novels have been acclaimed by critics as the cruel illumination of a troubled era.

But France’s most celebrated and controversial contemporary author could be pushed off his pinnacle following an astonishingly vitriolic attack from a critic with a unique insight into his oeuvre.

She is his mother – and she is threatening to knock his teeth out with her walking stick if he mentions her again in one of his works.

In a book of her own to be published next week, Lucie Ceccaldi depicts the cult writer as an untalented social climber whose ego is only matched by his dishonesty.

Speaking as someone who knows about insane mums, I have to say: Dude, run into the basement and lock the laundryroom door, then crawl out the window into the back yard and run for your Toyota pickup. Someone on the next concession line will surely lend you the five bucks gas you need to make it to your buddy’s place in North York, and then you’re free. Free as a gypsy.

The government of Iran has asked its authors to censor themselves, presumably to cut down on the workload at the top. Should work. I mean, considering it comes from a pack of religious nuts in charge of a nigh-nuclear state, it’s almost a reasonable request.

Saying that publishers and writers “are aware of the vetting code” in Iran, Safar Harandi urged self-censorship.

Literature should reflect the country’s “religious, moral and national sensitivities,” steer clear of “an excessive portrayal of a man and woman’s private relationships” and not “subject our youth and adults to descriptions of intercourse,” he added.

Safar Harandi also said the country “should not allow opposition to God to be reflected in the media.”

All publications in Iran must be first approved by the government, but the industry has increasingly complained of tightening censorship under the rule of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad since 2005.

Nicholas Lezard warns that dumbing down Shakespeare to contemporary language actually removes all value from the work. He’s refering to the UK equivalent of an ebonics translation, but doesn’t his reasoning mean that translating the Bard to ANY language would in essence be killing its worth? Without the language, is Shakespeare “nothing special”?

Apparently he’s also trying to get gangstas n hoodies and people who can only communicate by text into Shakespeare. Yes, fine, and someone called Jacqui O’Hanlon, the RSC’s director of education, has broadly welcomed the book, saying, “Shakespeare is much more than a masterful story teller, it’s the way he uses his stories and the language he uses.”

The two striking things about this statement are (1) its total linguistic and even syntactical poverty, and (2) the fact that it seems to contradict completely the thrust of Baum’s project. Yes, it is about the language Shakespeare uses, and while we appreciate that it’s not easy for modern ears (the miracle is that so much of it is comprehensible after 400 years), without the language he is nothing special.

See, I’d made that one up a couple years ago, but didn’t get to use it before the story was so dead you lay it on two workhorses and serve dinner on it. Anyway, Frey is back with a novel. If there’s anything America likes more than watching someone fall down, it’s watching them get back up and finish the race.

“Despite the fact that he writes books, he’s much more a part of the art world than the literary world,” Mr. Frey’s friend John McWhinnie said of him. With the money from his two memoirs (the second was “My Friend Leonard”), Mr. Frey has purchased works by, among others, Mr. Prince, Matthew Barney, Damien Hirst, Ed Ruscha, and Cecily Brown, Mr. McWhinnie said. (Mr. Frey was unavailable to be interviewed for this article, because, as Mr. McWhinnie put it, he is “in media lockdown” in advance of his novel’s publication, under the terms of his contract with HarperCollins.)

Of course, it will turn out that by “media lockdown”, they mean at home with the phone unplugged and a sac of Dorritos tied to his face like a horse’s feed bag.

• Book withdrawn before pub because it was based unwittingly on a hoax (that’s gotta be depressing for the author)
• ISBN graffiti in Toronto
• My lovely Maud points to this piece on AL Kennedy’s office hours (10pm – 4am)—after a few similarly sleepless nights (the baby sleeps through the night, but I suddenly can’t anymore), I found this funny for some reason
• Wikis for scholars, as opposed to panicked undergrads

Michael Chabon (I can never get that Simpson’s moment out of my head when I read his name… Chay-BONE!!!) riffs on highbrow vs. low in this piece about the value of entertainment.

Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie-house lobby, of karaoke and Jägermeister, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, a “Street Fighter” machine grunting solipsistically in a corner of an ice-rink arcade. Entertainment trades in cliché and product placement. It engages regions of the brain far from the centers of discernment, critical thinking, ontological speculation. It skirts the black heart of life and drowns life’s lambency in a halogen glare. Intelligent people must keep a certain distance from its productions. They must handle the things that entertain them with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs. Entertainment, in short, means junk, and too much junk is bad for you — bad for your heart, your arteries, your mind, your soul.

But maybe these intelligent and serious people, my faithful straw men, are wrong. Maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted — indeed, we have helped to articulate — such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment. The brain is an organ of entertainment, sensitive at any depth and over a wide spectrum. But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve.

I’d like to believe that, because I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain.

The Guardian picks up on Manguel’s new book.

As Manguel ruefully observes, the ‘multimedia library’ of the web inverts and potentially erases the universal library of which Renaissance humanists dreamed. The traditional library was a citadel sacred to the notion of omniscience; the web, by contrast, is ‘the emblem of our ambition of omnipresence’, like a supermarket that boundlessly proliferates in space and deluges the planet with its tacky wares. ‘The library that contained everything,’ Manguel laments, ‘has become the library that contains anything.’ No wonder he values the spatial enclosure of his nocturnal barn, whose shelves and thick stone walls serve the purpose of exclusion.

An interesting roundup of young teachers being fired for inappropriate web behaviour. Remember that Canadian principal who ended up resigning because he posted his questionable (content-wise as well as worth) poetry on a personal site? Well, this WaPo article kicks things up a level with teachers posting Youtubes of themselves painting with their asses, confessing to patronizing hookers, and calling their students crack babies. Many young teachers are themselves barely out of puberty. Do they have the maturity, much less the common sense, to comport themselves with dignity and composure in cyberspace?

t’s almost like Googling someone: Log on to Facebook. Join the Washington, D.C., network. Search the Web site for your favorite school system. And then watch the public profiles of 20-something teachers unfurl like gift wrap on the screen, revealing a sense of humor that can be overtly sarcastic or unintentionally unprofessional — or both.

One Montgomery County special education teacher displayed a poster that depicts talking sperm and invokes a slang term for oral sex. One woman who identified herself as a Prince William County kindergarten teacher posted a satiric shampoo commercial with a half-naked man having an orgasm in the shower. A D.C. public schools educator offered this tip on her page: “Teaching in DCPS — Lesson #1: Don’t smoke crack while pregnant.”

Just to be clear, these are not teenagers, the typical Internet scofflaws and sources of ceaseless discussion about cyber-bullying, sexual predators and so on. These are adults, many in their 20s, who are behaving, for the most part, like young adults.

I used to teach at a Canadian private school in Italy, back when I was 26. I was a proctor in a dorm of 36 boys, many of whom were seniors, and at one point they asked me in a house meeting why I was so good at catching them at their shenanigans. The fact of the matter was, at the time I wasn’t too far away from having pulled the same shit, and all I had to do was ask myself, “What would I do if I was two notches less clever than I am.” Now, I didn’t catch them at everything, of course, but much of what I didn’t catch I was able to still punish because of rats in their midst — kids susceptible hard looks, drummed fingers, and well-timed, Vaudeville-esque Colonel Klink eyes. Ah, the deadly combination of intelligence, experience, and betrayal. Suckahs. (Thanks, JG)

A theatre group in NYC has adapted Gatsby to the stage and now wants to take on Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury.

“All the inadequacies of live theater are exciting to me,” Mr. Collins said. “I like to throw a big problem at it and watch it all fall apart and come back together again. That’s the thing I’m most interested in: figuring out how to solve problems.”

Mr. Collins’s theater company, Elevator Repair Service, has operated in this boundary-pushing mode for 17 years. Among the works it has staged are an adaptation of the Euripides play “The Bacchae” in which Dionysus appears as a thermos, and a re-creation of vintage television interviews of Jack Kerouac using the actual transcripts.

Last year Elevator Repair Service mounted a seven-hour production of “The Great Gatsby,” without cutting a single word of the novel. “Gatz,” as the play was titled, received positive reviews in Europe, although a dispute over the rights to the novel prevented it from being performed in New York.

A few interesting links on the philosophy of signing/signed books: from the perspective of the giddy reader, the journalist, and the author forced to sign someone else’s book.

The peculiar practice of signing books must be familiar territory for regular readers of the books blog. Sarah Weinman’s change of heart provoked heartfelt comments both for and against the custom, with very few shades of grey in between. But the discussion always assumes the book is signed by the author. And I don’t mean with Margaret Atwood’s LongPen.

Last week children’s author Mary Hoffman wrote on her blog about a recent bookshop signing session, which had her signing a copy of Horrid Henry, by Francesca Simon, because the young customer was very insistent. And I suppose it makes sense, really. A child doesn’t necessarily know why you have a book signed, but if there’s a signing going on, then they won’t want to miss out.

I remember having dinner with Roddy Doyle right before a reading, and I asked him whether he had any preferences for the signing afterward (there was an hour long line up), such as not wanting to sign too many books, etc. “No, no,” he said. “I’ll sign anything. It doesn’t even have to be mine.” Then there was the phase I wen through about 10 years ago when everyone kept mistaking me for Mark McGwire. It was a span of about 6 months when I was wearing contacts and had short hair and a goatee. People tried to buy me beers, strangers patted me on the back and asked what I was doing in town, and kids kept asking for autographs.  Now I’m not a small dude, but I’m no Mark McGwire. At first it was fun. Then it got annoying and a little sad, so I grew out my beard. One particularly shy kid of about 10 or 11 had his mother come over and ask for an autograph. She was holding a baseball card. “My son wants to know if you’re Mark McGwire,” she said. “No,” I said. “But do you want me to sign it?” She looked back at the kid and nodded. So I signed it with a squiggle. I hope he’s not a collector and never finds out.

Everyone’s got a book in them, they say. “They” being the people whose tongues I’d like to cut out to wear on a trophy strap round me neck.

In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles. University writing programs are thriving, while writers’ conferences abound, offering aspiring authors a chance to network and “workshop” their work. The blog tracker Technorati estimates that 175,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day (with a lucky few bloggers getting book deals). And the same N.E.A. study found that 7 percent of adults polled, or 15 million people, did creative writing, mostly “for personal fulfillment.”

In short, everyone has a story — and everyone wants to tell it. Fewer people may be reading, but everywhere you turn, Americans are sounding their barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world, as good old Walt Whitman, himself a self-published author, once put it.

“As publishing has become less expensive, the urge to write my own self has become the opportunity to publish my own self,” said Gabriel Zaid, a Mexican critic and the author of “So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance,” a meditation on literary life in an over-booked world. Today, he added, “Everyone now can afford to preach in the desert.”

Mind you, I like this self-publishing angle. So long as they go POD. The thought of 10000 copies of a grammatically questionable family history that essentially amounts to a contemporary retelling of the Bible’s “begats” rotting in a basement in Sheepshead Bay makes the rainforest cry.

A few Canadian links for your blinky, Monday-morning yawning pleasure.

• Gary Geddes wins BC award
• Ontario senator saves writer’s house
• Manitoba book of the year
• Frye festival included Banks and Ford
• Vancouver could be city of literature (which would go a ways towards dispelling the current City of Scabby Track Marks on Your Doorstep designation)
• Margaret MacMillan on abuse of the truth

The LATimes examines the numbers around the health and general viability of The Book and comes out saying, everything’s gonna be aw-ight. Why? Because we love to hold them. Aw.

Edward Tenner, visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who spoke at the conference, said: “What’s valuable in a text is not just the text, but the way it is presented — the typography, the materials. The growth of electronic information puts books in a new light.”

And that light often is an exquisitely reverent one, embodied in the gentle contemplations of book fanciers such as Alberto Manguel. In “The Library at Night,” published this month, the Argentine-born author and bibliophile celebrates books as brothers, as crucial companions for a lifetime.

As information is digitized, the books that remain gripped between covers seem to be cherished all the more. Yet, that too carries some peril, as Bruce Hatton Boyer, associate professor of English at National-Louis University and a member of the Caxton Club, pointed out in a recent edition of the club’s journal.

“Will we have a world in which the only value books have will be those of the rare object, making all libraries in effect rare-book libraries?”

Schreyer hopes not. She loves her job, but she doesn’t want the “special” in special collections to make the books in her keeping seem arcane or untouchable.

“There’s an emotional rapport you get with an era by holding a relic that is hundreds of years old,” she said. “Part of the history of a book is — who were the people who touched this book at every stage in its life?”

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: “The Book” as a concept/object isn’t what’s in danger… “The GOOD Book”, however, is holding up two fingers above the choppy surface. It’s a numbers game. Like if all the cockroaches under the fridge in my old apartment on Bathurst had decided to rise up against the parade boots my girlfriend and I wore at the time, and which became our main offensive weapons. It would have taken them about an hour to munch us away to nothing in the bed.

Are they still allowed to be called cult books if they’re taught in every 10th grade class in America?

Cult books include some of the most cringemaking collections of bilge ever collected between hard covers. But they also include many of the key texts of modern feminism; some of the best journalism and memoirs; some of the most entrancing and original novels in the canon.

Cult books are somehow, intangibly, different from simple bestsellers – though many of them are that. The Carpetbaggers was a bestseller; Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a cult.

They are different from books that have big new ideas – though many of them are that. On The Origin of Species changed history; but Thus Spoke Zarathustra was a cult.

They are different from How-To books – though many of them are that. The Highway Code is a How-To book; Baby and Child Care was a cult. These are books that became personally important to their readers: that changed the way they lived, or the way they thought about how they lived.

The Bible, the Koran and the Communist Manifesto, of course, changed lives – but, in the first instance, they changed the life of the tribe, not of the individual.

The Guardian has a longish piece on the tradition of the artist’s book.

What has slowly changed over time is artists’ involvement in the process of creating and producing a book. In the 19th century, they were regarded as subservient, their job being to supply a graphic paraphrase to the text. This isn’t to say imaginative interpretation was ruled out: in John Martin’s mezzotints for Paradise Lost, say, or Manet’s lithographs for Poe’s “The Raven” (as translated by Mallarmé), the artist reinvents or reinvigorates the original. Gustave Doré, William Morris and Aubrey Beardsley also produced striking work. But the freedom of the artist, coming second to the author, was necessarily constrained. At best, artists were junior partners, employed to furnish pictorial comments; at worst, they were hired hands, their work shrunk or cropped to fill pre-allotted spaces. The label “hack” was unfair when applied to men such as Phiz or Cruikshank (who illustrated Dickens), but successful painters of the period tended to see book illustration as a sideline, to be resorted to only for money.

All that changed, dramatically, in the 20th century, with the notion of the livre d’artiste – a book in which the artist takes precedence, sometimes even to the extent of being responsible for text as well as image. The French invented the term and established the form; the Americans arrived later, joining in only after the second world war. But whatever its origins, the artist’s book, or artists’ book (or even, as it is sometimes designated, “artists book”, with no apostrophe), is now an accepted part of the cultural landscape of the past century.

• George W library as cautionary metaphor
• Tech page fluff on Free downloadable Shakespeare (don’t try to follow the link in the article… you’ll notice they misspelled “Shakespeare”)
• Harvard buys steamy Mailer letters… excuse me, I just threw up a little in my mouth… couldn’t you get the letters of someone a little sexier, like maybe Danny DeVito?
• Commas, Turning Up, Everywhere

• Ozick picks up two lifetime achievement awards from PEN
• Science book award shortlist
• Orwell Prize for political writing goes to Palestinian
• Argentinian wins Cervantes Prize
• Vancouver one city/book is tome about Toronto

Apparently poetry is alive and well, supported by unknown masses of practioners.

Recently I found myself in Adelaide at a monthly meeting of the Friendly Street Poets, a venerable group that’s been friendly to emerging poets for 32 years. I had anticipated a dozen or so people in a small room. It was a very large room, and it was packed. People were standing at the back. They were all types, all ages, and they were all taking turns to read their poems.

It went on for hours. We were shouted at, whispered at, harangued, cajoled, moved, amused. We listened to music and joined in sing-songs. At one point I found myself singing an anthem in defence of our bush creatures, conducted by a marsupial puppet.

Well, I, for one, feel much better. Most poets at readings just move their hands AS THOUGH there’s a puppet there. This one ACTUALLY HAD a puppet. And you thought art was in danger…

Profiled at the Telegraph.

It takes Doris Lessing just four minutes to come out with something, if not actually controversial, then at least unexpected. It’s about Hitler. She says she understands him. This from a former member of the Communist Party. (She left in 1956, the year of Khrushchev’s speech to the 20th Congress, the one in which he denounced Stalin.) We are talking, I should explain, about Erich Maria Remarque, the author of All Quiet on the Western Front. She recently read another of his books, about three German soldiers who, like Hitler, return from the Great War to the economic chaos of the Weimar Republic. ‘They see people carting millions of marks around in wheelbarrows and, being old comrades, they stand by each other. And as you read that you suddenly understand Hitler.’

Literary fiction is undergoing a sexual revolution, according to this article. Which makes you wonder what happened to all the pioneering PVC/tenterhook work Margaret Laurence did back in the day. Remember that version of the Stone Angel that had to be sold in an opaque wrapper?

Now, when whatever suits your fancy is easily found online, exploring intense or unusual sexuality has become the purview of commercial and even highbrow literary writers too. Tom Wolfe indulgently explored coed hookup culture in “I Am Charlotte Simmons.” Walter Mosley’s “sexistential novel,” “Killing Johnny Fry,” starts with sodomy and gets dirtier and darker from there. Later this year, Chuck Palahniuk will publish “Snuff,” about a female porn star’s attempt at a record for most sex partners in one day, partially told from the perspective of participant No. 600. Memoirists such as Catherine Millet and Toni Bentley aim at highbrow readers as they describe sex lives many wouldn’t dare imagine.

Busy day with baby here, so I’ll post a bunch in roundup:

• Google generation sux at research
• More on the British library allowing the common folk in with all the learning
• Wikipedia on paper? This is like ice cream in a non-cone delivery unit… I just don’t see the point
• The liberation of Britannica
• A child soldier’s book contains major factual errors, publisher admits (not Beah)

• A self-published book up wins PEN/Ackerly award
• Anti-oilsands book wins business prize
• World’s favourite book? (I can’t at all see how this will end poorly)

Is the cover story in this week’s The Onion Magazine.

Mark Abley examines the slow disintegration of the language that gets a little boost every spring during the Stanley Cup playoffs.

For those of us who love language as well as hockey, the Stanley Cup playoffs bring a tricky question: Can we overlook the rampant abuse of words that goes on every spring?

I’m not talking about how foreign-born players mangle English (or, occasionally, French). Alex Kovalev’s English is far better than my Russian. I’m talking about broadcasters who are paid serious amounts of money, not just for their knowledge of the sport, but for their ability to talk.

Pierre McGuire, for instance. As a former coach, he has a keen eye for the contributions that coaches make during a game. On TSN last week, he got so excited about a decision by the coach of the Colorado Avalanche that he blurted out: “Joel Quenneville impacted this game huge!”

I’m not thrilled about the growth of “impact” as a verb, but I suspect it’s here to stay. My real issue with McGuire is his use of the adjective “huge” as though it were an adverb.

Sports commentators in general seem less and less willing to give an adverb its customary “-ly” ending. Is it felt to sound too effete, too unmanly? Maybe the teenage boys and young men who form the core audience for hockey telecasts prefer words that rush at them like a series of punches. Or maybe that’s just what the broadcasters think.

Stan Lee will oversee Virgin Comics line of superheroes.

Does Stan Lee have any more heroics in him? Richard Branson hopes so.

The British tycoon is going into business with the 85-year-old Lee, the co-creator of Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man, Daredevil and dozens of other signature characters made famous by Marvel Comics.

Branson’s upstart Virgin Comics will formally announce the deal with Lee at this weekend’s New York Comic Con, where Lee is being honored as “a living legend” and is scheduled to receive the inaugural New York Comics Legend Award at an event at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square.

The new venture will have Lee as the editor overseeing a line of superhero comics that will launch next year with a tentpole title he is writing himself. That project — the title of which remains under wraps — will center on a superhero team that sounds similar to his classic work on the Avengers at Marvel. (Lee ended his exclusive relationship with Marvel in the 1990s but still has ties to the company and even has cameo roles in the upcoming Marvel films “Iron Man” and “The Incredible Hulk.”)

“It will be a team of 10 heroes and they will be dealing with personality conflicts, personal problems and chemistry within the team,” Lee said in an interview this week. “I’m going to get started working on it right away and I’m very excited about doing something that will be fresh and breaking new ground. I can’t give away the details or the names yet, but I have some exciting things in mind.”

Let’s see, fresh-faced Iowa boy turned radioactive superhero by Soviet plot… no wait, scratch that. Good-natured New York boy bitten by radioactive ferret terrorizing city from Nazi U-boat in Hudson River… no wait, scratch that. Um, Well-meaning Canadian boy… no scratch that. Hm. Pharmaceutical company releases Prozac brand for mutants? Nice frat boys and underage girls with magically pert breasts compete for dominance in hazy, highly-charged, morally-bankrupt, corporate-sponsored atmosphere of socially pressured intoxication and sex? No, wait, that’s just spring break. Hm….

One of my favourite poets I’ve never met, Raymond Souster, the unofficial poet laureate of Toronto and vastly underappreciated in many circles, is profiled (for some reason—given the fluff length and content of the article, I can only guess it’s a Poetry Month thing and not a real appreciation of poet) at the Star.

His most recent verse, written a few hours earlier, was a gloss on a work by his late pal, F.R. Scott, who once wrote a poem about the old Montreal Star newspaper.

Souster’s poem?

From memory he recited, “Twinkle, twinkle, Toronto Star/How I wonder where you are/ high above this teeming city/ with little love or human pity.”

I am confident that he meant that it is the city, and not the newspaper, that is deficient. Frankly, love and pity fairly drip from these pages on a daily basis.

And I was delighted to learn that Souster’s first poem was published in this paper. He said, “I think it was called ‘Field In Winter.’ The Star had an editorial page in those days consisting of aphorisms, and things people sent in. I wrote the poem and my father sent it. I was 15 years old.”

More than 70 years ago.

Because of his vision, Souster uses a special ruler when he writes; it helps him lay a straight line of words, helpful because if his images are sharp, his handwriting is approximate. A neighbour translates his ink squiggles into legibility and reads the work back to him for his approval.

I said he was never not writing. Last year, Souster published an epic about the fall of Dien Bien Phu. This year he is working on a series of poems about the war of 1812. He is a veritable machine-gun of verse.

After much sputtering and hemming, Dmitri Nabokov will not burn Laura, the final ms of his late, great father, Vladimir. Why? His father’s ghost apparently appeared to him and told him go ahead and publish it. How ironic that the literary-device-equivalent of Draino has won the day.

Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura will now not be thrown onto the flames, the 73-year-old has told Der Spiegel magazine, arguing that his father, the creator of Lolita and Pale Fire who died in 1977, would not want his son to suffer any more over his most tortuous dilemma.

If he fails to carry out his father’s last will, Dmitri is effectively betraying him, but carry it out and the world loses forever what is potentially a precious gift from the grave from one of the greatest 20th-century novelists. The moral arguments over this have been discussed on this blog before.

From his winter home in Palm Beach, Dmitri justified his decision by saying, “I’m a loyal son and thought long and seriously about it, then my father appeared before me and said, with an ironic grin, ‘You’re stuck in a right old mess – just go ahead and publish!’”

He told the magazine that he had made up his mind to do so.

Bookninja fav Steven Galloway profiled at the CBC around his new book The Cellist of Sarajevo.

Like Advil, Canadian literary fame comes in a variety of strengths. There are the institutions, authors whose celebrity has taken on a life outside the printed word — think Margaret Atwood, whose crown of grey curls and Mona Lisa smile are familiar even to people who’ve never read the skewed sci-fi of Oryx and Crake. Then there are the stalwarts, the Rohinton Mistrys and M.G. Vassanjis — as well read as they are reviewed, their personal fame hasn’t yet eclipsed that of their books. Finally, there’s the writer’s writer, who is well regarded within the book world, but relatively unknown outside.

Until recently, Steven Galloway was a prime example of the latter. While his first two books, Finnie Walsh and Ascension, got good reviews, he remained a well-kept secret to all but the most intrepid literary explorers. But Galloway’s just-released third novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo, already has critics’ keyboards fluttering with synonyms for “moving” and “humane.” International suitors haven’t been far behind; Galloway has sold foreign rights in 18 countries for an advance of almost $1 million.

$1M smackers? Steven, feel free to send in your tithe any time you like. You could be the Tom Cruise in the church of Bookninja, my friend.

Most midlisters are dying to get any review whatsoever, good or bad, so long as their title and cover get out there a little bit. But what if you wrote a good book that got so scathing a review (in the NYT) that it went out of print and disappeared for 30 years? Maud points to a Papercuts piece about Joy Williams’ triumphant return with the previously evicerated The Changeling.

it has long been argued that Joy Williams’s second novel, “The Changeling,” published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in 1978, was burned and then buried alive by a review it received by Anatole Broyard in the daily New York Times.

Williams was a rising presence at the time. Her previous novel, “State of Grace,” had been a finalist for a National Book Award in 1972. Broyard had admired that first book, but he found nothing to like about “The Changeling,” a book about a young, heavy-drinking woman named Pearl.

In his first sentence, he called it “startlingly bad”; he wrote that its story was “an arbitrary muddle”; and he wrote that the children in it were “as artificially tiresome as any I have ever met in literature.”

And no, it’s not a po-mo battle for validity of interpretation, it’s a turf war at the library. I so want to snap my fingers rhythmically here and get ready for a fantastically Fosse-esque dance fight. When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet for LIFE!

When Karl Marx created the tenets of Marxism in the British Library’s Reading Room and Charles Dickens worked at one of its desks, they did not have to endure queues, a lack of chairs and tables, and rooms closed by crowd control.

Two years after one of the world’s greatest libraries opened its doors to undergraduates and anyone working on research, high-profile writers and academics say that the struggle to find a desk is now intolerable. Library directors stand accused of increasing visitor numbers to boost funds and performance bonuses.

Although there are 1,480 seats in the library, the author Christopher Hawtree was last week forced to perch on a windowsill while the historians Lady Antonia Fraser and Claire Tomalin have swapped horror stories of interminable queues. Library users complain that the line to enter the new building in St Pancras, central London, has recently been extending across its enormous courtyard.

A windowsill!? The horror! That’s natural light!! Don’t they know we melt?

A gaggle of pasty, be-monocled, pucker-faced, wrinkle storage units in the UK have hit on the publicity stunt of saying that all poetry must rhyme in order to be considered poetry. These kinds of debates are usually delicious and healthy, but this one starts from so a ridiculous point that it can only head towards ludicrous (and eventually plaid). It’s kind of like the harmless poetic version of that church full of psychos in the US who protest Marine funerals. Anyway, they have the ear of the BBC and others so it seems we have to go through this all again..

When Oscar Wilde argued that a ‘poet can survive everything but a misprint’ he had not foreseen the formation of the Queen’s English Society.Members of the group, set up to defend the ‘beauty and precision’ of the English language, have turned their attention to contemporary poetry and poets, arguing that too often strings of words are being labelled as poems despite the fact they have no rhyme or metre.

The campaigners say that there should be a new definition of poetry, outlining the characteristics needed before a piece of work can be called a poem.

Robert Pinsky’s poetry-for-dummies piece in Slate answers these claims (and several retarded sibling claims) with spare grace, a tongue planted in the cheek, and a clutch of examples.

This news roundup is (surprisingly) being typed two-handed, and will self destruct at the first serious conscious scream/wiggle combination from the larval human currently bundled by this ingenious ancient mechanism to my chest. Mental note: need quieter keyboard.

Shakespeare comic books a hit

Writers Guild in US releases scab list

Amsterdam is world literature capital, which makes me giggle uncontrollably for some reasongodamIhungryIwonderiftheysellDoritoshere

Spoken word brings its restless hands to the Youtube generation

Gary Geddes gets BC award in recognition of years of service and excellence

Boingboing notes that lining the walls of your house with dead trees is a environmental imperative (for me this has never been a problem, but I’d like to see some stats on the effects of lining floors, stairs, landings, and countertops with books)

Romance publisher dumps plagiarist Cassie Edwards, not comment as yet since husband is currently unavailable to tell her what she thinks

John Freeman on the merits of skinny poetry

Remember that Little Sister’s is for sale… someone brave and coated in kevlar please buy it (if you do, I’ll personally convince Triumph to reunite and play Fight the Good Fight at your opening)

Huh, who would have thunk it. Maybe these young fellers who seem to pine for another time.

Is it possible to lead a dedicated literary life in the billionaire-filled, media-crazed New York of today? To be heedless of the material world as you burrow into novels and ideas the way the old Partisan Review gang did in the ’40s and ’50s, to come up with notions that rock the intellectual landscape? And if so, who exactly is still paying attention?

Those are questions three reasonably young men are asking now in much-awaited first novels that emerge over the next few weeks. Each novelist takes a very different position toward rendering literary life in a city where bohemian writers have been forced out by hedge-fund guys. And each co-edits a journal that is proud, almost defiant about its print status — in a nation where the image has been replacing the word for at least half a century now, and even some well-funded publications are in free-fall.

A whole whack of Darwin’s work has gone online, 90,000 pages of work, in fact. Go frolic, ye of too much time.

I didn’t include this in the last post because I suspect a few of you might harbour opinions one way or t’other…. Book TV host Carolyn Weaver is protesting the Donner Prize’s lack of women jurors by not covering the awards on her show. This Globe piece looks at the gender divide as a whole in the Canadian awards system. This reminds me of a few years back when Dennis Loy Johnson of the late, great MobyLives started counting bylines in the New Yorker. If you look closely at things, they start getting ugly real quick-like.

On a strict numerical basis, Weaver’s complaint about a lack of gender balance is germane. In its 10-year history, 42 of the Donner’s 50 jury slots have been occupied by men. Of the remaining eight, only three women – Dalhousie political science professor Jennifer Smith in 1998 and 1999, former University of New Brunswick president Elizabeth Parr-Johnston in 2000 through 2004 and now McLellan – have been put into the adjudication seats.

It’s a trait shared by other major national book prizes. Nine of the 15 three-member juries assembled over the course of the Scotiabank Giller Prize for fiction have been male-dominated. In each of the past five years of the Gelber Prize for excellence in international affairs writing, the five-person jury has largely been a male preserve (four men in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008, five men in 2004). Of the seven, three-member panels assembled to date for the Griffin Poetry Prize, six have had the familiar 2:1 male/female ratio.

Meanwhile, the Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction has had a female majority only once on the seven three-person juries it has formed since its creation in 2000. Of the past 14 juries for the Governor-General’s Award for English-language fiction, nine have had a 2:1 male/female ratio (the 2004 jury was composed of two women only) while the five-member jury for the annual National Business Book Award has never, in recent years, featured more than two women.

But when the question of logistics comes up, people start saying it’s hard to get women because they’re too busy. Hm, I wonder why that is.

Meisner added that “a lot of women we’ve tried to get in the past have told us they just don’t have time.” There is, she stressed, “absolutely no prejudice” in favour of choosing males over females. “We’re looking for women all the time. … It’s not for lack of trying.”

Jennifer Smith, the first female juror in Donner history, said she paid virtually no attention to the fact the eight other colleagues on the two panels on which she served were men. “I’m not a complete believer in rigid representational formulas or quotas. … I suppose ideally you might want to get as wide a range of opinion and experience as possible. But I have an impression that these things get down to very practical matters. You might have an ideal jury in your head, but when it comes to getting people to commit to doing it, it’s not easy. You’re making up compromises all the time and you may end up sacrificing one sort of representational feature for another because the job has to be done.”

• More on the Atlantic Book Awards nominations
• Schwartz kids book shortlists
• World’s largest non-fiction prize founded in Canada
• Novelists ride high in Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize

Apparently she never actually wanted to stop him doing a book… This is apparent to astute observers from the way she has crushed him legally and psychologically, and could, from the looks of him, crush him physically at her whim.

Ms. Rowling told the judge in Federal District Court in Manhattan that she had been misunderstood. Mr. Vander Ark watched from the back of the room as the trial drew to a close.

“I never ever once wanted to stop Mr. Vander Ark from doing his own guide — never ever,” she said as she took the stand for the second time in the three-day trial, as the last rebuttal witness. “Do your book, but please, change it so it does not take as much of my work.”

The nominees for the Atlantic Book Awards are up, and I’m happy to report I’ve been shortlisted (along with Don Domanski and Anne Simpson) for the Atlantic Poetry Prize for my book The Rush to Here. This means I’ll be visiting eastern provinces as part of the award tour in May (St. John, Charlottetown, Halifax, before heading back for a reading here in St. John’s).

An Australian summit in 2020 looks to revive a “creative nation”. Well said and good luck.

CREATIVITY is at the heart of every successful nation. It finds expression in great visual art, wonderful music, fabulous performances, stunning writing, gritty new productions and countless other media. Giving form to our innate human creativity is what defines us to ourselves and the world.

This is what the arts have always done. Think back to any significant time in the past and the chances are that it is the creative output of the time that comes to mind — from rock art in remote caves to the pyramids of Egypt, Michelangelo’s sculptures, Shakespeare’s plays, Beethoven’s symphonies, the beat of Elvis and the list goes on.

The lasting value and evidence of a civilisation are its artistic output and the ingenuity that comes from applying creativity to the whole range of human endeavour. Yet all too often the arts are pushed into a box that says entertainment, icing on the cake, when they are a key ingredient.

The story behind how McCartney came up with the song Paperback Writer.

He told me that he had the idea for Paperback Writer while driving out to John Lennon’s house in Weybridge in the stockbroker belt for a songwriting session. McCartney: “You knew the minute you got there you’d have a cup of tea and you’d sit and write, so it was always good if you had a theme. I’d had a thought for a song and somehow it was to do with the Daily Mail so there might have been an article in the Mail that morning about people writing paperbacks.”

By the time McCartney arrived in Weybridge he had the song’s structure in his head. McCartney: “I told John I had this idea of trying to write off to a publishers to become a paperback writer, and I said I think it should be written like a letter. I took a bit of paper out and I said it should be something like ‘Dear Sir or Madam, as the case may be…’ and I proceeded to write it just like a letter in front of him, occasionally rhyming it. And John, as I recall, just sat there and said: ‘Oh that’s it’, ‘Uhuh’, ‘Yeah’. I remember him, his amused smile, saying ‘Yes, that’s it, yes.’ You know, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. ‘That’ll do’. Quite a nice moment. ‘Hmm, I’ve done right! I’ve done well!’ And then we went upstairs and put the melody to it. John and I sat down and finished it all up. I had no music, but it’s just a little bluesy song, not a lot of melody. Then I had the idea to do the harmonies and we arranged that in the studio.” It was the first Beatles single that was not a love song.

What kinds of early fantasy stories “inspired” people like CS Lewis and JK Potter to rip them off?

A lament for the heady days when we didn’t know bookselling was a retail death sentence.

Only a few years ago, bookstores helped define neighborhoods. They were physical and cultural markers on the landscape – showcases of what mattered, there and then.

Now, instead of perking up when I step through the doors of a good bookstore, I wonder morosely how long it will last.

“It’s an antiquarian business model in a changing world,” admits Melissa Mytinger, manager of Cody’s Books in Berkeley.

That Mytinger still has her job is cause for celebration of a sort: Cody’s is a storied institution in more ways than one, but the saga of late has turned bleak.

In the past two years its Telegraph Avenue flagship has closed, and a quixotic foray into San Francisco’s Union Square fared no better. The latest plot twist came this spring, when the bookstore moved from 10,000 square feet on boutique-lined Fourth Street to a 7,000-square-foot outpost at Shattuck Avenue and Allston Street, one block from UC Berkeley.

But survival beats the alternative: locked doors that mean there’s no chance you’ll stumble across some unexpected volume of insight or delight. It’s a fate known to anyone who loves bookstores, who visits a familiar shopping street and remembers what was.

Now here’s an interview I’d like to hear. Waugh being raked over the coals by three ill-tempered BBC types out to get him. Sounds like he holds his own and throws a little sand in their faces to boot.

Waugh was being questioned by Charles Wilmot, Jack Davies and Stephen Black and the exchanges are, to say the least, “sparky”, according to British Library sound archive curator Stephen Cleary. “It’s three interviewers pitched against one subject and they don’t get on terribly well.”

The interview is part of a new CD from the British Library of BBC broadcasts not heard since they were made by Waugh between 1938 and 1963. It did not get off to the best of starts. One interviewer asks: “May I say to begin with that I personally find, reading your books, that you are to me … perhaps the most interesting, amusing, and at the same time depressing person now writing. Do you really feel that there is any future for mankind at all?”

Waugh complains it smacks of the “when did you last stop beating your wife” question.

The general tone does not improve.

Some of you may have cried foul when I cried “bimbo” at the appointing of Lily Allen to the Orange jury. As my older son might say, the younger still only able to crap at this point, I call foul on your foul!

Those who questioned whether reading was high on the list of the singer Lily Allen’s recreations appeared to be vindicated yesterday when the organisers of the £30,000 Orange Prize for fiction admitted that they had dropped her from their panel of judges after she failed to turn up to meetings.

Eyebrows were raised last year when the 22-year-old singer was controversially appointed to the judging team for the highbrow prize.

Reading books seems to have proved too much for Allen, a popular party girl who had a No 1 hit with Smile and regularly features in the gossip columns. At the time of her appointment, critics observed that serious writers had been sacrificed in the pursuit of celebrity.

Tears flow at the Rowling vs. her fans trial.

• He cries the publisher made him do it
  
• She cries she’s distracted and can’t write
  
• Baby Jesus cries over the quality of the encyclopedic entries
• I cry when I realize how much time and money is being wasted on this