I guess that’s just like basic nerds. There are book sites, and plugins for your Facebook and MySpace that allow you the voyeuristic pleasure of browsing your acquaintances’ (and strangers’) book shelves. Remember, “Anonymous” is usually in the upper left corner…

For anyone with even a moderate interest in books, snooping at other people’s bookshelves is one of life’s great pleasures. Like music collections, personal libraries offer tantalising encapsulations of character; a quick glance at an acquaintance’s bookshelves or a scroll through their iTunes provides juicy fodder for all sorts of assumptions and judgements. (The students I knew at university who crammed their shelves with reams of avante-garde theory were far too aware of this.)

When these projections of personality are done online, they are what Christine Rosen calls egocasting – “the thoroughly personalised and extremely narrow pursuit of one’s personal taste”. This follows the same principle as the radio site Lastfm, which is based on tracking down music similar to your existing tastes by finding people who like the same sounds as you.

As we purportedly experience Facebook fatigue and Myspace exhaustion, web forecasters predict that the next phase of social networking will be all about specialist sites like these. And where music goes, books will follow, as a wave of new book-related social networking sites promise to do for readers what Lastfm did for inquisitive listeners.

Was the press an enabler for the Bush agenda? Scott McLellan and a bunch of other journalists think so.

For five years, antiwar activists and media critics have claimed that the national news media failed to keep the White House accountable before the invasion. Andrew Heyward, who headed CBS News in 2003, said in an interview on Thursday that the trauma of the Sept. 11 attacks and the ensuing sense of patriotism might have muted press skepticism about the war.

Greg Mitchell, the author of “So Wrong for So Long,” a book about press and presidential failures on the war, argues that some media organizations have yet to come to terms with their role. Even at the fifth anniversary of the war last March, he said, “in the orgy of coverage of what had happened, there was almost no media self-assessment.”

NBC and CBS would not make executives available for interviews on the subject.

Circle them wagons, Hoss, and wait fer marnin’.

Can you, aspiring young author, imagine winning a contest that grants you a travel budget and Nobel Laureate as a mentor? Well, this young lady now has Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka looking over her literary shoulder.

TARA JUNE WINCH’S mouth is caught in a smile, her cheeks worked into neat apostrophes on either side. She has just been selected for one of the most coveted creative mentorships and is about travel to Europe to begin the program.

“You could look at it one way as this competition, this philanthropic game, if you like,” the Wollongong author said of the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative, awarded to her in London overnight.

“You can look at it another way where it’s parallel to how culture is passed down – you have a mentor, you have an elder, and you have a young person that is being presented with something true and something sacred.”

They at Hay say nay!

The controversy over plans to put recommended age ranges on the covers of children’s books ignited at the Hay festival yesterda, with authors speaking both for and against proposals due to be implemented by a wide group of children’s publishers later this year.

Marcus Sedgwick, who won last year’s Booktrust teenage prize with a sinister vampire tale, My Swordhand is Singing, described the initiative as a “disaster”, while Carnegie medal-winner David Almond called it “silly”. Francesca Simon, author of the bestselling Horrid Henry series, said the proposals were “ridiculous”, while the Carnegie medal-winner Mal Peet, called them a “very bad idea”.

A few publishing related links that deal with things I don’t understand, like “statistics”, “money”, and “sales”.

• Potter’s wand creates onan magic rather than sharing the love
• POD books drive publishing stats up
• BEA looks toward new ideas and change… as in, brother, can you spare any…?

Local tough Michelle Butler Hallett (disclosure: a friend and coworker) has been shortlisted for the Sunburst spec fiction award. She’s up against some stiff competition though. This might be the first time ever I’ve seen Hopkinson’s name on a shortlist where I wasn’t cheering for her over everyone else. Go Michelle!

Personally, I’m ready to lay down my weapons and talk peace with our new cyborg monkey overlords.

In the experiment, a pair of macaque monkeys were fitted with electrodes the width of a human hair that transmitted signals from areas of the brain linked to movements.

The signals directed the arms to grasp marshmallows and fruit and place it into their mouths in “one natural-looking motion,” the Nature article said.

With their real arms restrained, the monkeys learned how to control the arms in a matter of days, negotiating obstacles and tilting their heads and moving their eyes without affecting the robotic limbs.

And what do you think they’ll do when released? That’s right, use their robot prosthetics to strangle the bastard scientists who strapped them down. If I’ve learned one thing from the movies, it’s that you never trust the subjects of torturous scientific experiments because they only have one thing on their minds: revenge. Oh, and brain eating. And we all know scientist brain is the veal of the cyborg zombie monkey culinary world.

An interesting visit to the set of The Road, McCarthy’s end-time novel being adapted to film, starring Viggo Mortensen, aka hottest sweaty orc killer alive.

“The Road” began filming in late February, mostly in and around Pittsburgh, with a later stop in New Orleans and a postproduction visit planned to Mount St. Helens. The producers chose Pennsylvania, one of them, Nick Wechsler, explained, because it’s one of the many states that give tax breaks and rebates to film companies and, not incidentally, because it offered such a pleasing array of post-apocalyptic scenery: deserted coalfields, run-down parts of Pittsburgh, windswept dunes. Chris Kennedy, the production designer, even discovered a burned-down amusement park in Lake Conneaut and an eight-mile stretch of abandoned freeway, complete with tunnel, ideal for filming the scene where the father and son who are the story’s main characters are stalked by a cannibalistic gang traveling by truck.

The director of “The Road” is an Australian, John Hillcoat, best known for “The Proposition,” and many crew members were Aussies as well. In conversation the “Mad Max” movies, the Australian post-apocalyptic thrillers starring Mel Gibson, came up a lot, and not favorably. The team saw those movies, set in a world of futuristic bikers, as a sort of antimodel: a fanciful, imaginary version of the end of the world, not the grim, all-too-convincing one that Mr. McCarthy had depicted.

“What’s moving and shocking about McCarthy’s book is that it’s so believable,” Mr. Hillcoat said. “So what we wanted is a kind of heightened realism, as opposed to the ‘Mad Max’ thing, which is all about high concept and spectacle. We’re trying to avoid the clichés of apocalypse and make this more like a natural disaster.” He imagined the characters less as “Mad Max”-ian freaks outfitted in outlandish biker wear, he added, than as homeless people. They wear scavenged, ill-fitting clothing and layers of plastic bags for insulation.

Yeah, Pittsburgh sounds just about right for post-apocalyptic America.

If you’re a ‘Ninja reader in LA, I beg you to attend an event remembering the great Octavia Butler. Then send us a report!

Jobs are scarce. Water is even scarcer. Pollution, racial tensions and general poverty have transformed Los Angeles into a dystopian wasteland dotted by pockets of privilege. Sounds like a page right out of 2008, except for the fact that it was written back in 1993, as the setup for Octavia E. Butler’s science fiction novel “Parable of the Sower,” set in 2025.

Writing at a time when there were few women writers and even fewer African American women in the sci-fi genre, the pathologically shy Butler produced a dozen novels and a handful of eerily prescient short stories before she died in 2006 at age 58. On Saturday, the second annual Leimert Park Book Fair will honor Butler, a Pasadena native, with a posthumous tribute.

If you thought it was some debonair spy’s author turning 100 that captured the public’s imagination and inspired that headline, you’d be half right. If, however, you thought it was about Theodore Roethke, you’d be offered membership to my gang. Decoder rings are by the minifridge and the comics are in the chest by the corner (Playboys in the false bottom, shh.) You break any of the rulz listed by teh door, including the spilling or disparaging of Mountain Dew, and you get Pantsed, Charlie Horsed, and then Rear Admiraled, in that order. Don’t pretend you don’t know what it is.

Rowling contributes an 800 word Potter “prequel” to a charity auction. World deafened by simultaneous crashing of piggy banks being futilely broken.

The one-off 800-word handwritten “storycard” hardly counts as a book, but that won’t stop bidders at Waterstone’s on June 10, when – with the assistance of Sotheby’s – it goes on auction for writers’ charity English PEN and Dyslexia Action. “There is just no telling how high the bidding will go,” Sotheby’s specialist Philip Errington said, and with good reason – one of seven handwritten copies of Rowling’s book of stories The Tales of Beedle the Bard netted 1.95 million for charity in 2007, the highest ever price achieved at auction for a modern literary manuscript.

The storycard finishes with the words “From the prequel I am not working on – but that was fun!” and is signed J. K. Rowling, 2008. It will be sold alongside 12 other storycards, written by A-list authors such as Margaret Atwood and Tom Stoppard. In August a printed postcard book featuring all 13 stories will go on sale, with profits going to English PEN and Dyslexia Action.

Take this piece on blurbs with a grain of salt because it’s coming from the New York Post, journalism’s retarded lovechild (born to a facile, ranting religious right pamphlet of a mother and fourth grade dropout, celebrity-stalking father), but it has Jonathan Ames in it, and I kind of dig his schtick.

Come July, a new book will come out called “Up for Renewal,” about bettering life through magazines.

On the back of it will include the following quote: “You know that warm, relaxed, pleasurable feeling you get when cracking open the latest issue of your favorite magazine? That’s what reading Cathy Alter’s ‘Up for Renewal’ is like. Prepare to . . . get truly inspired.”

And I meant every hyperbolic word of it. See, sometimes you can judge a book by its blurber.

“I have no idea at this point how many books I’ve blurbed,” says humorist Jonathan Ames, who is approached frequently to dish out book-jacket praise.

“It may be about 50. It might make some long, strange poem if I was to collect them all.”

In fact, one of his blurbs was even declared “best blurb” by New York magazine for “The Only Bush I Trust Is My Own,” which Ames notes, “on the title alone, deserved a great blurb.”

While he tries to blurb honestly, he does admit, “Once I promised someone that I would blurb their book, and then I read it and didn’t feel so strongly about it. This was years ago. But I blurbed it anyway, and then a fan e-mailed me and said they bought the book because of my blurb and were sorely disappointed. I felt bad about this. But I guess it shows that blurbs actually do work once in a while.”

• Anna Porter book among Jewish book award winners
• Pengiun sees ebooks take off — is it really happening this time?
• Borders gets back into e-tailing, but it may be too little too late
• Apparently only two things are really happening right now: a new Bond novel that’s getting a critical drubbing from most quarters and Scott McLellan’s last shot at karmic salvation… In both cases one wonders what price the soul went for

Haaretz asks what’s happened to the backlist in the face of the throw-it-at-the-wall-and-hope-it-sticks publishing model.

In a very competitive culture that emphasizes newness and fashion, and promotes the reading of a current blockbuster which is forgotten in a moment’s time, the backlist is a vanishing phenomenon. The volume of sales of one-year-old or older books is shrinking, while newer books capture an increasing share of the market. Most major publishers realize that this ratio has changed. The scope of the decrease is estimated to be 20 percent: the backlist which once accounted for 60 percent to 70 percent of the sales volume now represents 40 percent to 50 percent, depending on the size and age of the publisher.

Thus good books, which are also fairly new, vanish from cultural memory. This is not only true of classic literature, which can always find someone to fight on its behalf, but it is mainly true of good books released two, three, or 10 years ago, which disappeared without leaving a sign. It appears that anything produced in the gap between Cervantes and Harlan Coben is likely to pay a price.
…
One suggestion for toning down competition in the industry and shoring up the backlist is a bill that would establish a stable price law for books. A law of that type would ban discounts of new books during the first year of their release. Publishers are still arguing the efficacy and potential damage of such a law, but most of them would support it.

If such a law was passed, it would to some extent contribute to the recovery of the backlist, based on the assumption that bookstores would continue to hold sales, but discounts would pertain only to books that are more than a year old.

The cultural price of such a law is that new books may be neglected, and Israeli publishers would, in general, release fewer new books making the industry less vibrant and current than it is now.

• Newfoundland Book Awards announced
• Trillium Book awards include Dennis Lee and Trillium Poetry Awards include Rob Winger
• Wales Book awards shortlists
• BookExpo America: not quite green, maybe almost seafoam
• Granta gets female editor (Bookninja depressed we live in a society where this is news)
• Indiana jonesing for defence against raiders of the smut arts (I crack me up)

The Onion’s man-on-the-street interview section is the best it’s ever been today, with news of Playboy losing money. The first response is probably my favourite of all time.

It’s amazing how much more informed, interested, and loyal staff can be when you treat them resources worth developing… Hm. But this travel bookstore, for instance, actually encourages its staff to take time off to “travel”. So you’re saying it would benefit your business to allow staff to pursue business-related activities? Biz. Arre. Are you trying to make them feel invested or something?

True to form, one of the first sunny Sundays of the season found the bookstore packed with customers. The three booksellers on duty cheerfully dispensed advice on destinations from Paris to Tanzania. And, in between, they kept up a steady banter about travels of their own.

“How many continents did you hit last year, Simone?” queried Will Carrier, a college student, occasional part-time staff member, and the son of Harriet and Pat. “Was it four?”

“Four? No, I think it was five, actually,” responded fellow bookseller, Simone Kearney. “I made it to every one except Australia and Antarctica.”

“Slacker!” colleague Lisa Peterson called out from the other side of the store.

What do you do when you’re innocently minding your own business mining the news headlines for realistic plot devices for your novel and all of a sudden, you realize people aren’t killing each other as much anymore (here, at least–like everything else, killing has apparently been shipped offshore). This is the plight of the mystery writer trying to keep it street.

AROUND 8 o’clock on a breezy evening in 1992, two private investigators stepped out of their car at the Christopher Street pier in Greenwich Village and approached a group of drunks and addicts huddled over a small fire. The investigators were soon joined by three Chinatown gang members who had information that the investigators needed. But the conversation was brief; the gang leader had a temper, and guns were drawn fast.

That was the opening salvo in a chaotic scene that also featured undercover police officers dressed as winos, a surprise attack by another gang from a car speeding along the West Side Highway, and a double-cross scheme by a member of the first gang.

The encounter combined some of the most characteristic elements of New York crime during that decade, which began with 2,245 homicides in 1990 and enveloped the city in a fog of fear. And though the shootout was purely imaginary — a scene from S. J. Rozan’s 1994 novel “China Trade” — it fully reflects the spirit of those tumultuous years.

Such scenes are much harder to imagine in today’s New York.

Not where I lived, man.

Robert McCrum creates a sort of book news uberlist, for those of you who felt they couldn’t possibly jump into the current book news season without knowing the back story. (it’s like me playing catch up with Lost — I’m halfway through season 3, and have suddenly realized that, having eschewed TV since 2001, I don’t have any way of watching the rest of the series until it’s all out on DVD. I should have just waited until it was over.)

Commonwealth Prize winner, part time ‘Ninja, and General Purveyor of Awesome Lawrence Hill writes on the state of black literature (in a white system) for Bookforum.

Is it a problem that many of the most famous and enduring fictional accounts of African Americans have been penned by whites? After Styron released his Pulitzer Prize–winning Confessions in 1967, some African-American writers were so incensed that just a year later they retaliated with the essay collection William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. I think that Styron, Twain, Stowe, and Lee wrote valuable books that deserve to be read and understood within the body of literature exploring the black experience in America. However, I do deplore that voices by African-American and African-Canadian writers continue to be crowded out of the picture. True, W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and, more recently, Edward P. Jones’s The Known World have been duly embraced, as have Alex Haley’s astoundingly resilient Roots and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. But the average elementary or high school student in the United States or Canada who wants—or is told—to learn something about black culture and history is more likely to begin and end his or her reading with Twain and Lee than with any of these African-American writers.

One way to interrupt this trend—whether unconscious or deliberate—of ignoring African-American writers is to incorporate memoirs into the body of Civil War literature. In its transparency and vitality, the African-American memoir has the power to reach out and grab readers and hold them chapter after chapter. A great slave narrative, for example, offers the drama of fiction and the cutting edge of historical fact.

Place your bipedal locomotion assistance units in the stirrups to facilitate insertion and avoid disintegration, Earthling. We sent a library to Mars. It’s there now. Great. They’ll know everything about us when they come to take over.

Bob Hoover, in tracing the rise and fall and economic rebirth of the memoir, seems to lay some of the credit/blame at the feet of the confessional poets. The piece ends with some justified calls for reason and restraint in publishing.

In past years, two-dozen autobiographical works was the typical output for the year, often written by interesting people who might have had a good reason for telling us about themselves.

They were part of a lively literary tradition that produced wonderful personal histories of the writer’s time and place, portraits of contemporaries and insight into intellectual and emotional growth.

That tradition started to grow thinner with the appearance of the “all-important ME” confessional in the late 1980s, inspired in part by the initially shocking personal poetry of the Larkin-Lowell-Plath-Sexton school 20 years earlier.

Gradually, the memoir changed. I don’t know who gave permission to the thousands of unhappy, ill, abused or just dissatisfied people to feel it was OK to reveal in raw, vivid — and as it turned out, sometimes fictional — words their dark secrets, or just a bad day at the office, to the masses, but the technique proved successful.

Still sick. Sick of being sick. Mleh. Here’s some news for the non-Americans who aren’t celebrating a holiday today.

• Microsoft to scrap book scanning plan
• Dickens vs Andersen: Unwelcome houseguest
• More reporting from Hay: Hitchens spoiled bully
• Rushdie hoping to get focus back to his books
• Canadian short story award
• Is the Sydney Writers’ Festival engaged in censoring its critics?

Appearing at Hay, Hanif Kureishi slams university creative writing classes.

Kureishi, himself a research associate on the creative writing course at Kingston University in London said, “One of the things you notice is that when you switch on the television and a student has gone mad with a machine gun on a campus in America, it’s always a writing student.

“The writing courses, particularly when they have the word ‘creative’ in them, are the new mental hospitals. But the people are very nice.”

Kureishi – whose most famous work includes The Buddha of Suburbia, My Beautiful Laundrette and The Black Album – was speaking at the Guardian Hay festival about his latest novel, Something To Tell You.

He said that he was impelled to start teaching writing by the example of his children, who have tennis lessons, piano lessons and the like. He became convinced that teaching a skill was an honourable calling: “I felt if I knew something, I should pass it on.”

But he said of his students, “When I teach them, they are always better at the end – and more unhappy.”

Salon asks two of its lit-types to discuss whether the professional critic is dead, esp in the age of the free opinion yelled into the cyberwind. Miller kind of goes where I tend to go: after the critic with the best prose stylings. Good writing trumps all? Also, they’ve just discovered Frye down there, apparently.

Bayard: I find I’m drawn to critics for the same reason I’m drawn to any writer: the quality of their prose. They can misinterpret and misevaluate to their heart’s delight as long as they make the words dance. Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom may be preeminent in their respective fields, but I read their prose only under duress. Whereas, no matter how wrongheaded she is, I’ll read anything by Pauline Kael. Or Anthony Lane or Clive James or, yes, James Wood.

And thanks to McDonald’s book, I now want to read more of Northrop Frye, who fired this sterling round of grapeshot at T.S. Eliot for fiddling with the canon of great writers: “…all the literary chit-chat which makes the reputations of poets boom and crash in an imaginary stock-exchange. The wealthy investor, Mr. Eliot, after dumping Milton on the market, is now buying him again; Donne has probably reached his peak and will begin to taper off; Tennyson may be in for a slight flutter but the Shelley stocks are still bearish. This sort of thing cannot be part of any systematic study, for a systematic study can only progress: whatever dithers or vacillates or reacts is merely leisure-class gossip.” Of course, I take Frye’s thematic point — the vagaries of taste are a fickle criterion for evaluation — but I’m more impressed by the dazzling execution of that stock-market metaphor and that ever-so-subtle colon in the last sentence. Anyone who wants to write about writing should be able to write.

Miller: Oddly enough, I read Frye’s “Anatomy of Criticism” just last year. Not all of it, alas, is quite so witty as the line you quote (underlined in my copy!), but I still found it illuminating, however unfashionable Frye may be these days. That man was well-read; one of the more lamentable casualties of the theory boom was that it produced thousands of English majors who can speak Lacan but who’ve never read, say, Philip Sidney.

This is funny as hell, and so true. Thanks to reader and old pal Nicci D. “That’s it. That’s why we do this.”

I think a cold I got two weeks ago while on tour has finally caught up with me, so I suppose you best stay away. You can get started on that list of 1001 books you MUST read before you die. I apparently, won’t have time to start any of them before I kick off later tonight.

I’ve been meaning to post this all week, but just got around to it now. Poet, novelist, and professional writer advocate (as well as sometime ‘Ninja) John Degen has long been engaged in fighting the anti-copyright lobby. He’s been tireless in his defence of writers’ rights during what is surely a watershed time for the future of intellectual property law. He sums up the battle and its attendant issues and absurdities in an article for the Globe and Mail and declares that the battle is over, in part because many people on both sides are fighting the same fight. As an experiment, he also releases his first novel, the brilliant and witty The Uninvited Guest, for free download on his site. Is this giving in to the copyleft lobby? No way. It’s a clever move to unite the fronts fighting for artists’ rights. It’ll be interesting to see how it all works out.

Canadian copyfighter Michael Geist is very proud that 40,000-plus Canadians joined his Fair Copyright Facebook group to protest as-yet-untabled copyright law adjustments. Yet this represents just over .1 per cent of our total population. As a popular uprising, Geist’s army looks an awful lot like a mediocre crowd at a Jays game, a good portion of whom are wearing Yankee caps.

The panic merchants who continue to try to sell the idea of an epic struggle for control of our culture have an agenda functionally unrelated to how we all continue to interact with that culture. For the most part, they just want cultural product to be free – not free as Lessig defined it, as in free of unreasonable access-constraints; but free as in we shouldn’t have to pay for it. Name something we don’t pay for, one way or another. We’ll learn, and adjust.

Here’s how I’ve adjusted. I’m declaring peace. I’ve asked my publisher, the visionary Nightwood Editions out of Vancouver, to produce a PDF version of my most recent novel, The Uninvited Guest, which will be available as a free download on my website as of the publication of this article.

Does this mean I’ve surrendered, that I agree cultural product should cost nothing to obtain? Not at all. I’m a professional writer and I insist on a viable economic model for my work, and for the work of publishers and booksellers. I’m not giving my novel away out of a sense of hopelessness. Rather I’m investing in my confidence in the literary marketplace.

In related news, NPR has an interesting piece on how first time authors are using the web to “add value” to their work…

This article uses Rowling bashing, something of a national sport in the great country of Bookninjastan, to make a case that critics are sexist and predisposed to hate female fantasy writers.

A subtle mechanism is operating here, clanking into gear to restore the dominant man-worshipping default mode while reserving a few token high-priestess places for the ladies. In speculative fiction that would be Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood and Ursula K Le Guin, geniuses all. These women are the real deal, rightly worshipped for their vision, philosophical trenchancy and pertinence. But apart from the hallowed three it’s men-only when it comes to casual recommendations of mainstream books.

In terms of which books sell plentifully and are acclaimed among knowledgeable fans, speculative fiction is not male-dominated at all – quite the opposite. It is the critical establishment which marginalises women. Bestselling female contenders remain unacknowledged while their male counterparts are robustly namechecked, absorbed reliably into the official history of the genre.

I love good fantasy writers, period. The idea that misogyny is at play when the world gives plenty of kudos (and sales) to people like Mary Stewart, Octavia Butler, Marge Piercy, Andre Norton, Tanya Huff, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula LeGuin, Susanna Clarke, Tanith Lee, Katherine Kerr, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Diane Wynne Jones, et al. is just plain silly. While I know a few of those are cross overs to scifi, and that misogyny is endemic in our culture, I think this whole argument, based on the literary bashing of a mediocre pop fantasy writer, is ridiculous. I remember a time as a teenager when I thought the fantasy novel was a woman’s game to lose. Put Terry Brooks up against Bradley or Mary Stewart and there’s no contest. I don’t even know that most critics are saying that Rowling sucks. They’re saying, what the hell is all the hype for when the story, writing, and scope are middling at best?

I’m sitting in a cafe with a half-awake baby while his mother sees the dentist, so I have to make this quick and dirty.

• Will B&N buy Borders?
• Breton ms goes for unreal price
• Naipaul profile
• Enright profile
• Report from Palestine Lit fest
• The importance of betting on book awards
• More on the shocking, newsworthy idea of a female poet laureate in sunny Ing-uh-land

Poet and occasional ‘Ninja Paul Vermeersch unleashes a scathing rant against spoken word on his blog. Should be interesting to see how this pans out.

Now, when I say the meters and rhythms are forced and contrived, I mean that if you could see the words written out on a page, and if you applied the most basic principles of English scansion to the composition (I’m loathe to call it a poem), you would find that almost all of the stresses in the delivery of the composition are not naturally there in the writing. In short, the rhythm of the piece as performed is quite different to the rhythm of the piece as written, thus, the rhythms, while over-exaggerated, are also forced and contrived, probably because the author lacks the skills required to get the meter of his own writing the way he wants it.

Sadly, many of the compositions in this genre carry with them a message of social or civic outrage. This is kind of noble, I know, but the delivery is usually intended to scold the audience for their implied complacency in, or culpability for, some on-going social injustice. When the message isn’t born of social consciousness, it’s generally born of self-aggrandizement and cocky posturing. Either way, it’s fucking horrible to watch, even worse to listen to, and does it a disservice to actual poetry by calling itself “poetry”.

My message to any aspiring MCs out there is this: if you actually have a talent for rap and for hip-hop music, then I wish you luck in the music business. To the rest of you wannabes, if you have no real talent for rap or for music, or for poetry for that matter, why are you stinking up legitimate poetry readings with your musical failure?

Winterson opened the Sydney Writers’ Festival with a rousing call to arms for the culture sector. The creative life is not an extra part of life or luxury. It’s integral. I like it. It’s greeting-card perfect.

“Festivals like this [respond] to a need, to a hunger, to an impulse in people. That tells me that people’s genuine natural creative impulses, both to make and participate, are real and they want those instincts to be fed.”

Art had been stripped from life unfairly and its seeming disappearance was not reflective of real aspirations, she said. Imagination had been cut from life in favour of pragmatism, but the festival was not “a version of the band playing while the Titanic sank”.

Television had killed culture and a “pseudo-culture” of Disney and popularism had been imposed at the expense of art and oral history.

Those who spoke out were beaten back by tags of elitism.

“It’s like a wake-up call, that’s all. You’re not telling people anything they don’t know – you’re telling them something that gets buried under the accumulating emergencies of modern life,” she said.

Is Scotland really going through a literary golden age?

We’ve been hearing for years now that we are living through a golden age of Scottish literature. The former MSP Allan Wilson referred to this renaissance when introducing the National Cultural Strategy in 2001. The Scottish Arts Council’s head of literature invoked it at a prizegiving in 2005. Professor Willy Maley, in an essay published in 2008, wrote: “Either Scotland is enjoying a Golden Age of Letters, or it’s got a brass neck like a tuba.” Even a critic as perceptive as Robert Crawford opens his history of Scottish literature with the claim that the world “disproportionately enjoys” Scottish writing. The same grandiloquence can be found everywhere in Scottish culture at the moment: we “punch above our weight”, there is an “unprecedented explosion” and a “remarkable efflorescence” of writing. It goes without saying that all those who claim this have a vested interest in promoting the idea of Scotland’s exceptional status.I know from personal experience that confessing to any scepticism about the golden age is unlikely to win me many friends. I fully expect to be upbraided as a quisling and a pawn of that nebulous and nefarious entity, the London literary establishment.

Ah, the old pre-emptive strike tactic. You sly devil. I can say nary a thing without you pointing a finger of triumph and saying, “Ah?!”

The NEA’s Big Read involves Egypt this time. That oughtta just about wrap up this whole Middle East thing. Sigh. Now that we’ve fixed this PLUS the rain forest, communism and acid rain problems, what the hell can we conquer next?

The initiative follows a similar exchange between the US and Russia involving To Kill a Mockingbird and Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and another round involving Mexico is at the planning stage.

Egypt’s Big Read was originally announced at the Cairo International Book Fair in February by NEA chairman Dana Gioia and deputy assistant secretary of state Alina L Romanowski.

Commenting on the exchange programme, Romanowski said: “Literature can set the mind free and allow the soul to journey to lands and times where the body can not. Books are our imagination’s wings, taking us into the homes and worlds of others. Through literature and The Big Read Egypt/US our nations will deepen our understanding and respect of one another, one community at a time, one page at a time.”

Save the world!!!

The next poet laureate could work from the heart of government to influence areas from literacy to public health, from roadbuilding policy to the Ministry of Defence. It’s a wide remit, but poets are wide thinkers. He or she could sit on those committees that decide what money goes where, and gently suggest that members of the civil service had workshops with a poet as part of their training. Poetry could influence NHS thinking even more than it does at the moment; it could become fundamental to prison policy and to adult learning and to the idea of what public transport can become. These things happen already, of course, but often in an uncoordinated way. The poet laureate could present the world with a country that took language seriously, as a unifying force and a liberating and redistributing tool.

Because we all know gentle suggestion works wonders in an impenetrable bureaucracy.

• CBC looks at the uberBooker horserace
• Bertelsman appoints head of printing division to head of Random House… Now there’s something you don’t see every day…
• Al Purdy finally got his statue
• Book about dog wins big Oz award (they seem to be handing out an awful lot of money down there… Oi! Aussie? Room for one more?)
• Flood shuts Canada Archive (won’t somebody think of the ephemera!?!)

A book that examines several notorious genocides, including the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide and the massacre of Armenians has been pulled from the cirriculum of a Toronto school after concerns raised by the Turkish community there.

A book about genocide has been pulled from the recommended reading list of a new Toronto public school course because of objections from the Turkish-Canadian community, the author says.

Barbara Coloroso’s Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide was originally part of a resource list for the Grade 11 history course, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, set to launch across the Toronto District School Board this fall.

The book examines the Holocaust, which exterminated six million Jews in the Second World War; the Rwandan slaughter of nearly one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994, and the massacres of more than a million Armenians in 1895, 1909 and 1915.

But a committee struck to review the course decided in late April to remove the book because “a concern was raised regarding [its] appropriateness. … The Committee determined this was far from a scrupulous text and should not be on a History course although it might be included in a course on the social psychology of genocide because of her posited thesis that genocide is merely the extreme extension of bullying,” according to board documents.

(Thanks, FtC)

Well, now here’s a laureate who doesn’t hesitate to speak his mind. Harry Potter’s no good for children because the books are a unique combination of complicated and boring.

Michael Rosen, 62, the poet and author of We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, succeeded Jacqueline Wilson as the fifth children’s laureate in June. A £10,000 bursary goes with the post, which involves promoting reading and writing for children.

Despite their popularity, however, it seems that Rosen is not a fan of the boy wizard books that have earned Rowling an estimated £560 million and spurred young readers into queueing up for copies.

“They don’t grab me personally,” he said. The narratives are complex and most young children would struggle to cope with their challenging and often sinister themes. He would not choose to read them to his own children, he said, because he did not want to bore them.

I suppose it depends on where your kids are when you haul these needlessly fat tomes out. My five year old would probably be bored by them, but not because they’re too complicated. Once you’ve read books like the Moomins series and the adventures of Mr Bliss with his bizarre glowing bears, Potter’s wand and broom and mysterious dark bad guy seem a little simplistic. In some ways, I wonder whether his expectations haven’t been completely shattered enough by the Disneyfication of life for him to find Potter “imaginative”.

Why are critics so mean? I mean, boo-hoo.

Literary criticism is famously red in tooth and claw. Terry Eagleton, Mary McCarthy and Dale Peck are just a few reviewers who have made their names with funny and often frankly showy cruelty. With the book market more crowded than ever before, a bracing and briny critique can be just the thing to cut through the prettily packaged chaff. As Eaves pointed out, critics are brokers, advising readers where to invest their time and money with a duty to the often less-than-lenient truth – an image that is especially appealing to bloggers, avowedly fearless mouthpieces for the common man. Moreover, in his article this week on the notoriously prickly VS Naipaul’s new work of criticism, A Writer’s People, Radhakrishan Nayar reminds us that a clever tongue-lash can be a defining symptom of uncompromising and idiosyncratic literary brilliance. “Great writers can be impatient, quirky, rudely iconoclastic literary critics,” he says. “It is almost a professional deformity. They achieve greatness through a stern commitment to sharply individual visions of the world.”

Much is being made of Carol Ann Duffy possibly being the first female British poet laureate. A little too much. One wonders, why not sooner? And why not Wendy Cope, in that sooner timeline? Though, with his charm, affable nature, and wicked skill, Armitage would also make a great poet laureate, for sure. He’s the most likely successor to Ted Hughes, I would think. Though I fear the supposed paranormal curse of the position robbing us of his work, if anyone could survive it, it would be Simon.

On the death of Ted Hughes nearly 10 years ago the search began for a writer to fill the historic role of Poet Laureate. Among those considered frontrunners, alongside Andrew Motion, the current laureate, were two brilliant rival poets: Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage. While Armitage was ruled out because of his relative youth, Duffy’s unconventional lifestyle was said to have counted against her.

With the role due to fall vacant again next year, both candidates have emerged at the head of the pack once more, with Duffy the favourite at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

Glasgow-born Duffy would be the first woman to hold the 400-year-old office, should she accept, as government sources now suggest she might.

Should you leave the business of titles to people who know better?

An enticing picture in G2 on Thursday showed a soulful man, darkly handsome, white shirt unbuttoned, leaning forward to embrace a woman in a vibrant red gown. Above their heads was the legend: Gone With the Wind, to advertise the musical version of Margaret Mitchell’s novel, also running in London. Would this image, I mused, have been quite so alluring if the title across the top had been not Gone With the Wind, but, as was once proposed, Pansy? Or Tote the Weary Load? Or even – hardly credible, but I found it solemnly listed as one of the earlier contenders – Ba! Ba! Black Sheep?

And though copyright disputes are rare in these matters, they’re not unknown. David Lodge, who’s just published a novel with the not entirely grabby title Deaf Sentence, wanted to call one of his earlier books The British Museum Has Lost Its Charm – a line from the George and Ira Gershwin song, A Foggy Day in London Town. The custodians of the Gershwin legacy forbade him to do so, and he had to make do with The British Museum is Falling Down. Later he produced another book whose title came from the Gershwins – Nice Work (from the lines “Nice work if you can get it, and you can get it if you try”). This time, there was no prohibition.

But pride of place in the study of titlography that I’ve just begun must go to F Scott Fitzgerald. This Side of Paradise started life as The Education of a Personage. The Beautiful and the Damned was at one stage due to be called The Flight of the Rocket. But the biggest struggle of all was over the book we know as The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald wanted to call it Trimalchio or, later, Trimalchio in West Egg.

Brilliant author (and part time ‘Ninja) Lawrence Hill has landed the Commonwealth Writers Prize for his amazing novel, The Book of Negroes (sold in the US as Someone Knows My Name). Congratulations, Larry!

Font Vader.

McGonagall, reviled in life and death as one of the worst poets ever, is enjoying something of a campy renaissance, and a portfolio of a bunch of broadsides is about to go for a pretty penny. I’d buy that if I had the money. And if poets came over, I’d lovingly take them out and show them as though they were rare Ted Hughes publications–of which I was an exceedingly proud owner–without the betraying slightest hint I was aware of their status in the poetry world. Full of awe, I’d quote passages aloud, letting the final words disappear into a hushed silence of reverent head-nodding.

Oh! Think of the working man when he’s no work to do,
Who’s got a wife and family, perhaps four or two,
And the father searching for work, and no work can be had,
The thought, I’m sure, ’tis enough to drive the poor man mad.

Because for his wife and family he must feel,
And perhaps the thought thereof will cause him to steal
Bread for his family, that are starving at home,
While the thought thereof makes him sigh heavily and groan.

Alas! The pangs of hunger are very hard to hide,
And few people can their temper control,
Or become reconciled to their fate,
Especially when they cannot find anything to eat.

“Mmm. Mmm. True dat. Words of wisdom,” I’d say. “Words. Of. Wisdom.” Think of it as the cheapest way to keep poets out of your house.

CJR has a longish piece on the future of reading, that wily pastime that keeps wriggling out of the mean ol’ pop culture coyote’s ingenious ACME traps. What they’re saying here is that you can’t kill reading, even with rocket powered rollerskates. Because reading has its own gadgets to keep it going. Scrolls, books, audio books, bridge underpasses, fat guys asleep on the beach with squirt bottles of sunscreen nearby, Kindles, etc..

The possibilities are endless, and many are obvious. Currently, authors are hampered by the nature of the publishing process. Books are begun years before their publication date, and finished months before they will ever reach readers. A book on electoral politics may be completed in 2007 and released in early 2008, its continued relevance reliant on nothing more concrete than the author’s vision and the vicissitudes of polls. With electronic text, however, the original “book” could be just the first step in an ongoing relationship between author and reader. In the most simple form, the book could be updated with new chapters and commentary. Corrections could be downloaded automatically, as could new pieces of supporting evidence. Debates could be held with critics, and the transcripts e-mailed out to all who purchased the original title. The book could be released in 2008, and updated through the election and even beyond, the author routinely applying the insights of the original work to the daily news reports.

This could profoundly alter the relationship between authors and their audiences. One of the finest bloggers around is The Atlantic’s Matthew Yglesias, who’s also the author of the new book Heads in the Sand, an examination of the politics of American foreign policy. Currently, his blog is supported by The Atlantic. But what if readers of his book were offered the opportunity to subscribe to his commentary for $5 a year? Imagine that some thirty thousand copies are sold, and half those readers decide to pay for Yglesias’s further thoughts. That’s now a yearly income of $75,000, flowing directly from readers to author, unmediated by ads or institutions.

It’s not only the relationship between writer and reader, however, that could deepen in the age of electronic text. Reading, mostly a solitary pursuit, could become a social act. It’s now common for newspapers to host comment sections where readers can weigh in on their articles, and books could do much the same. How much easier a dense work of philosophy would be if we could communicate with others struggling through the same chapters, and even be helped along by the author. Indeed, once we were open to the idea, much of what we do with books could be dragged into the public sphere. Already, a popular application on Facebook, Visual Bookshelf, has roughly thirty thousand daily users. It allows your friends to see what books you’re reading, how you’ve rated them, and any reviews you feel like posting. In turn, you have access to the same information about them. The curmudgeons in the audience may wonder whether we need all that in the public sphere, but they’ve never experienced the thrill of learning that an acquaintance you saw only for the occasional football game in college shares your affection for John Kenneth Galbraith.

How many of the books submitted to an award should the award judges actually read? I don’t know about this call-in thing. I realize the prize people want to have the best books, but it’s kind of like getting ready to draw the winner in a raffle, scooching out 75% of the tickets, and then asking your friends at the last minute to enter. Can’t publishers with eligible books be trusted to just do their job or face the consequences of missing out? On the other hand, there’s a whole raft of internal politics to deal with at publishers and reasons that some books (ahem-publicity budget-ahem) might get submitted over others.

Like most prizes, the Samuel Johnson allows publishers to submit a set number of books per imprint – in this case three – which brought in 131 titles. But then comes the dangerous business of call-ins. As the prize year runs to April, some excellent books hadn’t even been published by the entry deadline. Like kids at a pick-and-mix stall, my four fellow judges and I rummaged through the books pages, demanding more and more.

This was all very well until we actually had to find the time to read them – for one feature of non-fiction is that a lot of it is very, very long.

In the end we called in 31 books, which increased our workload by nearly 25%. For last year’s Booker prize, 92 novels were submitted and a further 18 were called in by the judges.

I love this idea that you don’t need the muscle of a big publisher if you have a good grapevine of dedicated geeks supporting your work. Of course, this isn’t necessarily true for everyone. I have you, my vinyard of book nerds, showing up every day for five years (!) and yet…. Excuse me while I rest my hand on my forehead and faint away. Was that passive aggressive? Why yes, I guess it was…

Suarez finished Daemon in late 2004, then submitted it to dozens of literary agents. “Three actually read it,” he says. “One thought it was too long for the thriller genre, and the other two thought it was too complex.”

Finally, he and his wife, Michelle Sites, also an IT consultant, decided to take a page from the Daemon playbook and infiltrate the Internet’s power grid. In fall 2006, they approached bloggers whose writings on gaming, warfare, AI, and social media Suarez had mined for the book. The couple formed their own publishing firm, Verdugo Press, and began producing copies through the print-on-demand service Lightning Source.

A dozen or so bloggers wrote posts about the book, kindling sales of up to 50 copies a month. Then in April 2007, Rick Klau, head of publisher services at Feedburner, got a copy. Two things happened: Google acquired Feedburner, and Klau, electrified by Daemon’s all-too-plausible IT scenario, began pushing the book on anyone who would listen.

I meant to link to this yesterday but got distracted by this annonying thing I’m burdened with called “a life”. Anyway, how would you feel if someone were releasing an “authorized” bio on your life that didn’t necessarily paint the prettiest picture of you? Too hypothetical a qusetion, given that your bio consists mainly of making scultures out of martini garnishes? Well, not for Naipaul. Some seem to be speculating about how authorized it actually is.

A shocking biography of the Nobel laureate Sir V.S.Naipaul, which exposes his cruelty towards those closest to him, is tipped to win its author the richest prize in non-fiction writing.

Patrick French’s The World is What it is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul heads the shortlist for the 2008 Samuel Johnson prize, worth £30,000. The five other books include an investigation of a Victorian murder and a study of crows, but it is French’s that is causing waves in literary circles, turning assumptions about official biographies on their head.

One reviewer has said of it: “Like it or not, this biography will change the way we read Naipaul’s books, and for the worse.” Paul Theroux, who wrote his own wounding account of his relationship with Naipaul, said: “It is not a pretty story. It will probably destroy Naipaul’s reputation for ever.”

A great guy and author profiled at The Age. I met Winton at IFOA a couple years ago when I hosted him and Jonathan Coe. Winton we so down to earth and friendly it made me want to start buying gifts for his family.  (Lots of people are friendly, but to find someone truly unconcerned with the whole froufrah is relatively rare–the only other guy there who was surprisingly as nice was Jonathan Safron Foer.) Plus, for anyone who was there and saw the interview, you know he has a remarkably low tolerance for pretentious bullshit, which is nice.

The writer is in Sydney to promote his new book Breath and you can tell he’s less than enthused about the obligatory publicity circus that will take him from Sydney to Brisbane, Melbourne, London, Dublin, Wales and LA over the next few days.

But Winton seems to be a genuinely nice bloke and says it would be “impolite” to complain.

“Its a challenge,” he says. “You’re in a different city, different bed every night. You’ve got to find your way to the dunny in the dark every night, bumping into furniture.

“I write books and that’s what I’m good at – though there’ll be people who tell you otherwise – but this sort of public performance … is not really my (thing)”.

That’s what my mother used to say when I asked her what was for dessert. If I persisted, she said, “A run around the table and a kick at the cat”. Upon reflection, and given that we never really got dessert that wasn’t in Oreo form, probably either of those options would have been better than anything she ever managed to boil to disintegration. I swear to God, I still have nightmares about grey brocoli. But I digress. When I first saw Janet Maslin’s glowing NYT review of James Frey’s new book, I did one of those slobbery stunned cartoon rabbit triple takes. Oyie-yoie-yoie?! Then the pans started rolling from everywhere else, and things seemed right with the state of the world. But as pointed out here, Frey’s book has gone from 666 on Amazon to number 25, based largely on the strength of that NYT review that may or may not have been written while “smoking crack” and “getting thrown in jail” for fighting.

Even though this book has nothing to do with the scandal around “A Million Little Pieces,” and even though there is some distance — more than two years — separating this book’s appearance from Frey’s auto da fe on “Oprah,” there has been plenty of response on the Web. Reactions have centered mostly on the differences between our paper’s review by Times book editor David Ulin and Janet Maslin’s for the New York Times.