Atticus Finch reminisces about days gone by.

After old Bob Ewell closed that chapter in our lives by falling on his knife, the kids settled into their schoolwork and joined glee club. Jem played baseball for a while, but he didn’t really like it. Sometimes they’d drop in at the Radley place to pay their regards to Arthur. They even stopped calling him Boo. After a couple years he died of pneumonia. Or was it diabetes? I suppose I was saddened that he didn’t live to see another adventure—but then again, how many chances does one reclusive idiot man-child usually get to stand up for justice in the face of small-minded ignorance, and change the course of a community forever?

Scout’s gone through some changes of her own. All fairly standard. Back when I was arguing that case, she was so young and spirited. Always fighting for what she thought was right, bless her heart. I thought she’d go to college and get a degree in journalism, like she talked about, but she dropped out of Tulane after a year and moved back to Maycomb and became a waitress.

I guess she was all adventured out after she got knocked down in her ham outfit.

In a very ‘Ninja-esque move, the Guardian has four authors chatting about love. Actually, I don’t think they chatted, so much as gave four takes, but it’s getting there. Included is Annie Proulx, a writer I just can’t quit, and part-time Bookninja Alissa York.

Much has been made of boundaries in recent years. To be clear, I’m speaking now not of borders and checkpoints, but of personal boundaries. Current thinking holds that it’s unwise-even unhealthy-to lose track of the line where your own psyche leaves off and your lover’s (or mother’s, or employer’s) begins. As is often the case, folk wisdom got there first: good fences make good neighbours. Would that it were quite so simple. If the long, looping tale of human history has taught us anything, it’s that those fences-the ones that keep neighbours sweet-also serve to keep them, well, separate.

Coming up on Bookninja in a couple weeks is another all-star panel in the tradition of the “Empathy” panel from last fall–this time discussing “The Reader”.

“The cruellest month” quote tops Google in April. Can you believe it? A poet is accidentally on top of the world!

The line appeared on Google’s aptly named Hot Trends list, a utility offered by the company that offers a glimpse of what the online nation is most furiously searching for at any given moment. Hot Trends is Google’s answer to the “most viewed” pages that have become a fixture on so many news and entertainment websites. Popularity is the web’s basic unit of currency now, a dynamic that works about as well as it did in high school. Chances are you know the names of the head-turning, eye-candy types—and have been unable to avoid the loud-mouthed troublemakers. As for the rest of us, sorry guys, if you’re not in the in crowd, you’re just…in the crowd.
…

Even more confusing was the list of related searches listed alongside the Eliot line—meaning the other terms the same people were searching at around the same time. Among them were “melanite,” “bouzouki,” and the “cayenne, sugarloaf, red Spanish.” More googling revealed that the first is a black mineral, the second an Irish stringed instrument, and the last a trio of pineapple varieties. What any of these had to do with “The Waste Land,” however, was beyond my grasp.

That’s the funny thing about Hot Trends. Whereas popularity lists on other sites, like YouTube, MySpace, or cnn.com—are occupied by site-specific stories or video clips that people have already looked at, Google’s most-searched is by definition a list of what people do not yet know enough about.

And that gives rise to this strange new kind of popularity mystery, where even if somewhere, for some reason, something has caught on, it can be difficult to figure out why. We’re not used to this, any more – you should be able to find out anything on the Internet, anything.

Even –GASP– poetry?

• Bookstore sales climb again in US… I wonder how much of this is actual books
• Publishers considering dropping the paper catalogue (thank god!! stop sending them to me now, please! I can almost feel the planet crying)
• Does anyone actually read political memoirs?
• Kiddie book-to-film adapter getting into “original” books (”Besides publishing, the unit will actively explore possible film adaptations of its titles.”)

Alberto Manguel writes about finding a place to store his 30,000 books. I can almost smell it.

In every place I settled, a library began to grow almost on its own. In Paris and in London, in the humid heat of Tahiti where I worked as a publisher for five long years (my Melville still shows traces of Polynesian mold), in Toronto and in Calgary, I collected books and then, when the time came to leave, packed them up in boxes to wait patiently inside tomblike storage spaces in the uncertain hope of resurrection. Every time I would ask myself how it had happened, this exuberant accumulation of paper and ink that once again would cover my walls like ivy.

The library as it now stands, between long walls whose stones carry in some places the signature of their 15th-century masons, houses the remnants of all those previous libraries, including, from my earliest one, the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers in two volumes, printed in somber Gothic script, and a scribbled-over copy of “The Tailor of Gloucester.” There are few books that a serious bibliophile would find worthy: an illuminated Bible from a 13-century German scriptorium (a gift from the novelist Yehuda Elberg), half a dozen contemporary artist’s books, a few first editions and signed copies. But I have neither the funds nor the knowledge to become a professional collector, and in my library, shiny young Penguins sit happily alongside severe-looking leather-bound patriarchs.

Reader Camilla points (with a note saying the it’s “fun except for the fact of reminding us we have no reviewing culture here”) to this article that briefly reviews a bunch of prominent critics. Notably included are Jessa of Bookslut as the only webbie, as well as Alvarez, Kakutani, and Wood.

HarperCollins is launching a site where authors can upload their work and have readers give it the thumbs up or down. I suppose a bit of momentum here might get them to take your book more seriously for the editorial big kids’ table. Eventually, you might even get to use the fork that doesn’t have a cork on the end. After that it’s just the crash helmet and you’re almost normal. Guardian blogger Jean Edelstein examines:

Officially, Authonomy is a “social network for writers and book-lovers alike”. Just as MySpace allowed bands to succeed without the prior approval and investment of record companies, so Authonomy will theoretically help separate the unpublished wheat from the chaff. The idea is that aspirant scribes can upload up to 10,000 words to the site and then have their masterworks judged by what HarperCollins refers to as “keen, talent-spotting readers” – other people, that is, who have registered on the network.

Thus, the democracy. No longer will the disgruntled writing masses be able to complain that their work has not been published because it has been vetoed by elite, snobbish publishing industry professionals. Now they will be kyboshing each other. (Or launching each other’s careers.) Of course, this isn’t remotely the first time a social network for writers has been launched – there are numerous sites on which thousands of people upload their work and have it critiqued by others. YouWriteOn.com (funded by the Arts Council) and thefrontlist.com have both been used as sources for new material by agents and publishers, although only to a limited extent.

Yes, a very very very bad one.

But the project itself is ripe for sociological study. It’s a fully and publicly documented interaction between over a thousand would-be authors, a postmodern literary critic’s orgiastic wet dream. And the recently released analysis from De Montfort is a good read. The researchers study the actions and psychology of the most active editor, “Pabruce,” picking apart certain edits, describing his relations with other editors, and guessing at his motives.

This is also the only research paper to ever include the heading “YellowBanana — genius, vandal or troll?”

Should literary criticism embrace a scientific method?

Though the causes of the crisis are multiple and complex, I believe the dominant factor is easily identified: We literary scholars have mostly failed to generate surer and firmer knowledge about the things we study. While most other fields gradually accumulate new and durable understanding about the world, the great minds of literary studies have, over the past few decades, chiefly produced theories and speculation with little relevance to anyone but the scholars themselves. So instead of steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition, the field wanders in continuous circles, bending with fashions and the pronouncements of its charismatic leaders.

I think there is a clear solution to this problem. Literary studies should become more like the sciences. Literature professors should apply science’s research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof. Instead of philosophical despair about the possibility of knowledge, they should embrace science’s spirit of intellectual optimism. If they do, literary studies can be transformed into a discipline in which real understanding of literature and the human experience builds up along with all of the words.

• RIP: Nuala O’Faolain, Irish writer, dead at 68.
• Indiana sues shady vanity press
• More on burning books in Berlin (Thanks, P)
• Newsflash: Bedtime reading good for kids (restart the timer… this article should reappear in six months)
• Atlantic book prizes announced (Domanski won for poetry, but having spent three days with him in a car touring the Atlantic provinces, I’d already made peace with that… Congratulations, Don! We could have made a wicked documentary of that road trip.)

An interesting piece on a 50 year-old intellectual war, when the academics fought the Beats, most likely with deoderant and a comb.

From their redoubts at “little magazines” like Partisan Review and Commentary — whose cultural authority far surpassed their low circulation — writers like Leslie Fiedler, Dwight Macdonald, Norman Podhoretz and Lionel Trilling were trying, in their different ways, to preserve the idea of serious literature against the rising tide of mass culture. “The ’50s really was a period when to be a highbrow meant that you had to really have problems with middlebrow and lowbrow and commercial culture,” said Louis Menand, a professor of English at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker who is writing a cultural history of the cold war. Among the intellectuals, for example, “there was a feeling the Beats were not serious,” Menand said. And back then, “serious” was the benchmark of high praise.

And in other the-more-things-change news:

• Lad mags almost 200 years ago… exactly the same
• Fear for the OED
• The history of Israeli literature is fraught… As opposed to, say, the history of Israeli [insert subject here]?

Until I get back to St. John’s on Wednesday, we’ll have to go with this form, because blogging in a hotel is quite possibly the lowest point my life has ever reached. And I’ve reached some low points.

• Lessing calls the Nobel win a bloody disaster
• UberBooker down to six (Rushdie is favourite… if Disgrace doesn’t win, then we’re in the wrong continuum and have branched off from a saner reality)
• Booknerds rally for Palestine at Turin bookfair
• Passionate readers to be found in Sci Fi… of course, they’re all dressed like klingons and have inhalers, but you get the drift
• Werebeasts… Sydney writers fest head Wendy Were loves animals
• Tess Of The d’Urbervilles, for and against…

• File under “oddly appropriate”: publishers and airport books
• Agent wins a publishing prize
• Belgian author scoops prizes (listen, if these prize scoops aren’t buttery icecream onto waffles, I’m not sure I’m interested)
• Rowling wins privacy case
• Gabriel Garcia Márquez: not so retired after all
• Saving the book review, one college newspaper at a time (where Hoover’s byline?)
  
• Newspaper cartoons a hate crime, says Islamic group (come on… you know you want to get in on it… Nathan? Roland? Crazy bigoted American army guy who writes c-level action novels… I can’t believe you’re all resisting this juicy bait)
• Someone who’s enjoyed the Hollywood adaptation experience
• China’s hot author a pop culture phenomenon

I’m sitting in the Halifax airport on a FOUR HOUR stopover, waiting to fly on to St. John for a reading tonight. I’ve said before how classy I think it is that airports like St. John’s, NL and Halifax have free highspeed wireless for commuters. But that said, I’ve just learned the hard way that both Bookninja and my colleague Jessa’s site Bookslut are banned by the filter here as having a banned phrase…

Access To This Webpage Is Restricted

(http://www.bookninja.com/)

You are seeing this page because the webpage you are trying to access contains material that does not comply with this hotspot’s Terms of Use. The reason given by the content filter is Banned phrase found..

If you think this is not correct, please go back and check the link or url you requested. You may have mistyped the URL of the website.

Email with questions concerning this message.

I realize this is a robot that’s looking for keywords, etc., and that robots are fallible and prone to misreading context, but am surprised to find myself there. Must be all the goatse porn. Oops. Now I’m banned in New York too. I can’t see the homepage. Can anyone guess what it might be? Particularly acerbic comments?

Reader Frankie points out this article in the Globe that covers a library fundraiser in Collingwood, ON. The article hints that the staunchly partisan Tory leaders there, or at least their people, began to circulate rumours that the library would lose its federal funding because they’d invited Liberal heavyweight Michael Ignatieff to a fundraising dinner. This apparently caused the library board’s VP to get the message to Ignatieff’s people that “just make things a whole lot easier if he did not come anywhere near the place.” Ignatieff cancelled, presumably to much hand rubbing and mustache twirling on the part of the Tories. Actually, I’m pleasantly surprised this even made the papers. I’ve heard several different versions of this (don’t bite the hand that feeds you, even if it occasionally slaps you around) in the last little bit, and while the whole thing stinks, it’s hardly news, but rather business as usual. Perhaps my long dreamed revoltion is at hand? I’ll get the pitch for the torches! You raid the haylofts of the country!

Mr. Dulmage confirmed yesterday that he spoke to Mr. Levine and does not deny his comments.

The riding, Simcoe Grey, is represented by Helena Guergis, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and International Trade. She is well-known in Ottawa as a fiercely partisan Harper Tory; she is engaged to Tory caucus chairman Rahim Jaffer, a veteran MP from Edmonton.

Last week’s controversy surrounds an event to raise funds for a new library in Collingwood, which is to open next spring and is expected to cost $7.4-million. The library board has applied for a $5.8-million federal grant, which is supported by Ms. Guergis.

May 10th is the 75th anniversary of the the most infamous (at least from our modern western perspective) book burning in history–the Nazi’s youth corps idea roast in Berlin in ‘33. In memory, the people at AbeBooks have collected a bunch of book banning and burning links.

People have burnt books for almost as long as they have printed them. JK Rowling’s Harry Potter novels are regularly torched for promoting witchcraft. Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses were burned by Muslims in 1988 for allegedly insulting Islam. Burning a book is a symbolic act – words are not just being suppressed, they are being destroyed by fire. In reality, the Nazi burnings were a very public, very threatening public relations stunt. The real impact was felt in homes, libraries and bookshops. Ray Bradbury once said: “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

New James Bond author Faulks gets to pick 40 books he can’t live without. The list may surprise you. In part becuase it also acts as a laser cutting device, a cardioverter defibrillator implant and a military issue, multi-functional tactical condom.

I sat down with a piece of paper and, on a principle of natural self-selection, wrote the first names that came into my head. Then I had to cut back the 80 or so titles to the required 40. Although it was tempting to show off, I first whittled away some of those Bolivian experimentalists. The other lure – to be a crowd-pleaser – was harder to resist, because many of the books I wanted were not in print; so some mainstream choices were promoted just because they are available. Here, I tried to pick books that are not just classics but which offer something different on each reading. Hence The Catcher in the Rye over Gatsby; the latter is always good, but the former is always surprising.

The Financial Times looks at a few books on the rise of English.

What is the future of English? Here are a few statements that I’ve recently read, heard or overheard. “If you don’t speak English, you can’t feel part of the world.” “English isn’t much more than an ugly symbol of white supremacy.” “All this unchecked immigration is turning a once-beautiful language into some sort of mongrel.” “English is popular because it’s so accommodating.” “True English keeps getting diluted.” “In the future, we are all going to speak just one language, and it’s our one.”

As such anecdotal evidence suggests, statements about language are typically freighted with political judgments. People characteristically identify their own language as precious – an embodiment of their heritage, a measure of their prosperity. They see other languages as rivals or dangerous intruders. And native users of English are particularly proud in their awareness that the language of Shakespeare, Adam Smith and The Simpsons is becoming the world’s sovereign tongue.

Ninja favourite Alexis profiled around his new book Asylum at the CBC.

Asylum, the long-awaited new novel by André Alexis, is a Russian doll of a book, thick with layers and twists. For starters, there’s its dedication to Harry Mathews, a member of the merry band of mathematical and literary pranksters known as Oulipo. Then there’s Mark Ford, its very unreliable narrator. From the remove of a self-imposed exile at a Tuscan monastery, Ford relates the ups and mostly downs of a loosely connected group of intellectuals, politicians and bureaucrats in Ottawa in the 1980s.

• The artist former known as Prince now the author Princer formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince (I suspect the jacket flaps of this book will have two cut out ovals in place of synopsis and bio, so you can remove it and wear it like an assless skirt)
• Quebec publisher still being sat on at lunch by fat kid/world’s richest gold company
• Amis to do film version of London Fields
• Larkin letters reveal him to be image-conscious… a poet? Really? But seriously, he seems to have disliked his gob almost as much as I dislike mine (except in this one pic John MadDonald took of me — that guy could make boiled dinner look appetizing)
• JK Rowling, played here by Lisa Kudrow, wins right to continue privacy trial

Houellebecq’s nutty mum still in the news in her housecoat, rollers, fuzzy slippers, and ankle stockings. Everybody duck! She’s about to throw a cat! Or is that her wig? Regardless, watch out for the wooden spoon she’s waving around. It’ll give you some nasty red welts and maybe even splinters.

Houellebecq has vowed to stay silent. But even detractors of his own hard and bitter writing are starting to feel slightly sorry for him. Literary theorists welcome the precious psychological insight into the biggest voice of a generation, but Houellebecq warned two years ago that his mother was “too egocentric to produce a significant account of anything other than herself”.

I meet Ceccaldi while she is having lunch before addressing a rock’n'roll radio station and a prime-time TV show. At the first mention of Houellebecq’s name, she strops and rolls her charcoaled eyes, saying she’s sick of him and only wants to talk about herself. She feels she’s not getting enough attention focused solely on her and stamps her foot under the table. “I haven’t written about him, I’ve written about myself! No! Fuck! I say no!” she thunders. She calls me a maniac obsessed with her son. “If I wasn’t Houellebecq’s mother, I would have written the same book. All you can reproach me for is not giving enough importance to my son, but that’s how it is.” Then she sits back and smiles sweetly at the polite restaurant staff. The title of her memoir, L’Innocente – The Innocent – sums up her position.

This almost makes me nostalgic. *Wipes tear*

More on the great experiment to end returns and save the bums who live in our landfills from all that extra reading. The battle has begun and the two sides are moving toward each other like two land masses of serious shit. You know what’s at work here? It’s shit tectonics… when two shit plates strike and come together under incredible pressure, you know what happens, don’t you? Shitquake.

Returns date back to the Depression, when publishers implemented the practice as a way to ensure that bookstores would continue stocking new books.

Today, publishers have convinced retailers that stacks of books piled high in the aisles will attract customers and spawn bestsellers. It’s a leaky theory posing little risk for booksellers. If the books don’t sell, they’re only out the cost of shipping and handling the returns.

“Let’s face it, returns are bad for everyone, and things have to change,” Miller said in a telephone interview last month. “The only way to make it happen was to start something entirely from scratch.”

In 2005, roughly 1.5 billion books were shipped in the U.S., according to the Association of American Publishers. Of those, 465 million, or 31 percent, were returned to publishers.

“In the past, when economies of scale made it cost- effective to overprint books, we saw numbers as high as 40 percent,” said Jim Milliot, an editor at Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine. “But just-in-time shipping, inventory management and better point-of-sale data have helped the number come down.”

The infamous Danish Mohammed cartoonist has translated the Qur’an into Danish, but can’t find a publisher willing to take him on. Apparently, they all prefer their lobbies in plush seafoam green as opposed to scratchy charcoal black, and they also like that their buildings are standing instead of relaxing in freeform piles of rubble.

The Danish writer who commissioned cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, igniting violent protests across the Muslim world, says he can’t find a publisher for his latest work, a translation of the Qur’an.

Kaare Bluitgen says he has finished two new versions of the Muslim holy book, translating them into Danish. The second is a prose version of the text using simple language so ordinary Danes can understand.

“It’s important to learn from each other and to learn the main values of our society,” Bluitgen told BBC News.

The journalist says his country needs the book due to the growing number of Muslims in Denmark. Regardless, he can’t find a publisher to help get the versions to market.

Maud points to this interesting retelling of a David Mamet reading in which half the 92nd street Y walks out on him. Ouch. You’ve really got to be bombinb in order to flip the rudeness switch on the blue rinse crowd.

Kaufmann Auditorium is a cozy, elegant hall with coffered wood-paneled walls, around the top of which are emblazoned the venerable names of Moses, Isaiah, Jefferson, and Washington. Regulars know that the audience is normally very well-behaved and never very aggressive. We sit in plush velour seats–calm browsers of the facsimiled scribbled-up manuscript pages inside the programs.

Nevertheless, things got worse. Members of the audience down front stood up and excused themselves from deep in their rows, center stage. Plenty of them for Mamet to notice, who I don’t think was being sadistic–not exactly sadistic–in reading his Faustus. But he read on.

I had the dark realization that the people leaving were right. And I started to think it was a pretty bad personality flaw that I couldn’t get up and walk out like the others.

On his side, Mamet commented mildly as literally half of a very full auditorium made for the exits. He was bombing, and he did seem to enjoy it, as if he was involved in seeing what would happen if he persisted. If his play-in-verse lacked drama, at least he could enjoy the drama of human nature.

• Vanderhaeghe a Trudeau Fellow
• Oppel wins Schwarward
• I guess this isn’t a prize but the gay penguin book is the number one challenged kids’ title

Another award nomination for a self-published author. It’s good to see that at least some of those perhaps unfairly trapped in the editorial sieve who have decided to strike out on their own are not getting trapped by association under the crushing weight of crap that is most self-publishing.

This year’s 39-strong longlist for the €35,000 Frank O’Connor international short story prize sees a runaway American bestseller vying with an almost unknown, self-published author.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest collection, Unaccustomed Earth, recently topped the US book charts and has been immediately pegged as the frontrunner. But the prize for the year’s best short story collection in English has a record of rewarding new talent over established names – so Mary Rochford’s self-published volume, Gilded Shadows should not be written off too quickly.

I’m shedding the proto-spring of The Rock for the full-bloom spring of the mainland this weekend where I hope to compensate for an entire winter without vitamin D.

I’ll be making several appearances in support of the Atlantic Book Awards, in which I’ve been shortlisted for the Atlantic Poetry Prize, starting May 9th and leading up to the award ceremony on the 12th, and then in St. John’s shortly after. If you’re handy to any of these venues, I’d love to see you there. Details below.

May 9th, 7pm
Reading with: Don Domanski, Anne Simpson, and Herménégilde Chiasson
Saint John, NB – University of New Brunswick, Ward Chipman Building, Study Lounge

May 10th, 3:30pm
Reading with Don Domanski
Charlottetown, PE – Confederation Centre Library

May 12th, 4pm
Atlantic Book Awards Ceremony
Dartmouth, NS – Alderney Theatre

May 15th, 7pm
Reading with Marq de Villiers and Bernice Morgan
St. John’s, NL – The Studio, 272 Water Street

New York passes anti-libel measure that will benefit writers.

Neil Gaiman on the success of graphic novels.

“Finally we live in a world where every bookshop and library has dedicated shelving for graphic novels,” says Minnesota-based Gaiman, who is on a panel at the Children’s Book Council National Conference this weekend.

In the late 1980s, Gaiman started his Sandman series — a collection that Norman Mailer called “a comic strip for intellectuals”. These days Gaiman refers to the books as graphic novels that were written as 75 comic books.

He agrees that the line between comics and graphic novels has blurred over the past two decades and that readership has changed, too.

“Twenty years ago if you were reading comics, you were male. Now, especially in places like Singapore, readers are more likely to be women,” he says.

Are online review sites taking up the slack from the endangered print section?

At the same time, newspaper reviews are a self-limiting form. There’s only so much critical analysis even the best reviewer can provide in a small space. Given this, one might wonder if reviews are really that important in terms of book sales. The short answer is that they are.

“They absolutely sell books,” says Cathy Langer, lead buyer for the Tattered Cover Book Store. “I very regularly help customers who come in holding review clippings, sometimes multiple clippings. Or they mention that they saw a review here or there, or heard it on NPR.”

Because a book editor can receive upwards of 10,000 books annually, of which perhaps one-tenth can be reviewed, there is a good deal of pressure applied by publicists and authors competing for review attention. Given the resources of New York publishers, it’s not surprising that most books reviewed by major publications are by well-known authors.

On the power of your “flower’s” crass cousin. The most important women in my life have all reclaimed this word and can pepper their speech with it. But it still makes my little Proddy heart cringe, every time, and the brainwashed boy in me is sure God is torturing kittens in retribution.

Is there a bertter use of the C-word in literature than in Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement? It is used in a spirit of love, in a letter that is never intended to be seen by anyone.

But in a series of mishaps, it is exposed to a number of people, including a child. The taboo word, still so potent in our own time, arouses horror in a wealthy British family of the 1930s. It is seen variously as a sign of deviancy, violence or ungovernable passion. It derails the course of several lives.

So powerful is this word – or, perhaps, so terrifying – that in the film version of Atonement, we never hear it spoken. We see it typed, the letters looming huge on the screen. (For similar reasons, I cannot write this word in full for this newspaper.)

I’ve been keeping a file for the last little bit with portmanteaus and neologisms I’ve come up with. A few I’ve posted here (”douché”: what you say when you’ve lost an argument to an asshole; “pointificating”: poking someone while you lecture them; “Shavior”: Jesus just after a shower…etc). This article goes a ways towards explaining the joy of the practice.

A portmanteau was a suitcase that hinged in the middle like a book, allowing one to carry clothes in one side and anything else in the other. The word is itself a portmanteau, formed by combining porter, the French for to carry, with manteau, meaning coat, cloak or mantle.

Today I release one of my weirder, but funner, neologistic babies into the world: “Dodojo”… Where martial artists train for extinction.

Martin Amis defends 9/11 book

Quack publisher profiled

Mark Sarvas interview

Junot Diaz in the SMH

• Modern technology vs the writer’s skull
• Spice Girl gives up “music” in favour of “writing”
• More on such… celebrity authors
• Big guy leaves Random
• Why I doodle
• Three sad Rowling links:
• Potter finally falls off bestseller lists
• Potter DOESN’T top kids’ reading lists either
• Harvard students embarrassed she’s the commencement speaker

Bookninja pal Maud Newton has a secret. I won’t say anything, but here’s a clue: she won second place in Narrative Magazine’s short story prize. Can you guess what it is? Go on. Try!

• Which scifi books have the best and worst endings?
• £100,000 gone from Scottish lit funding
• “Dying newspaper trend buys nation’s newspapers three more weeks“
• On cleaning out your parents’ attic
• Tim Winton profile
• Writing about perfume (thanks C)
• Frog Hollow Books: business profile (thanks F)

I know there are a few of you with quickened breath right now, hearts racing at the thought of so storied a publisher switching to POD, so I won’t delay in telling you it’s just for a few out-of-print classics. It’s really a fantastic idea to keep the long tail stretching.

Could out-of-print books be a phenomenon of the past? That’s the question that will be facing publishers, agents and authors after the launch on June 2 of a new imprint from Faber and Faber designed to make available a large number of titles which until now have been out of print.

The new imprint, called Faber Finds, will publish such classic titles as Angus Wilson’s Anglo Saxon Attitudes and John Betjeman’s Ghastly Good Taste, as well as relatively recent titles such as John Carey’s acclaimed biography of John Donne. Faber Finds will make use of print-on-demand technology in order to allow for print runs of between one and 50 books at a time, thereby avoiding the financial risks associated with traditional publishing’s requirement for large-volume print runs.

The article runs through the Faber decision and then segues in to a recap of Amazon trying to corner the POD market.

This is what the silliness known as Bookninja is all about, people: Rick Moody splatting a cream pie in Dale Peck’s face. Literally. With video. Could you possibly go wrong here?

It wasn’t exactly Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr in Weehawken, or Foreman versus Ali in Zaire. But the event, which drew some hundred-plus bloodthirsty literati to Brooklyn’s Montauk Club, had a certain world-historical buzz, at least compared to what you usually find in Brooklyn on a Tuesday night.

The setup was elegant enough: For every $5 raffle ticket sold, Moody would move one inch closer to his target, from a starting point 9 feet away. “I warned Dale I was really bad at sports,” Moody said in a pre-toss interview. “But if I’m three feet away, I can’t miss.”

Peck, whose evisceration of Moody is collected in his book “Hatchet Jobs,” came dressed for the occasion in a t-shirt reading “I’ve Got an Axe to Grind.” (Note: I disabled the redeye reduction feature in the accompanying photo, to intensify the demonic effect.) Peck claimed to be relaxed. “The whole feud is a nonstarter,” he said, though he did add: “I specifically requested that someone else make the pie.”

You know, year-in and year-out I suffer through buckets of crap stories because I know you people want to be informed about your boring shite (I kid because I love). Every now and then, though, something comes along that reminds me why I got into this in the first place. Because the whole thing can be reduced to a good-natured farce.

Luckily the aggressors haven’t any more money than the little publisher… what? Oh, scratch that. A small not-for-profit publishing company in Quebec is being sued by THE WORLD’S LARGEST GOLD PRODUCER over a book that claims the company was complicit in the death of Tanzanian miners. I believe the only official legal response one can give when sued by a company of this size is: “Eep”. But teh publisher isn’t backing down.

In a statement of claim, Barrick accused the authors of the book, Noir Canada: Pillage, Corruption et Criminalité en Afrique, of engaging in a carefully orchestrated campaign to smear its reputation. It said the book falsely claims that Barrick was involved in “involuntary homicide and genocide” at a mine site in Tanzania.

“Their campaign of defamation has been carried on in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada, and they intend to extend it to Europe,” the lawsuit alleges.

It also states that the authors – Alain Deneault, Delphine Abadie and William Sacher – have attempted to apply a veneer of academic legitimacy to their accusations by claiming the book was impeccably researched.

“Noir Canada is highly polished and heavily footnoted for the purpose of conveying the misleading impression that the book resulted from extensive, thorough and objective research concerning the business affairs of Barrick,” it alleges.

Écosociété distributed 1,700 copies of the book last month, notwithstanding a threatening letter from Barrick. The book reviews a series of abuses and crimes in Africa allegedly committed by Canadian-owned companies.

Mr. Deneault said the lawsuit is an attempt to chill free speech: “It is a way to intimidate small groups by using legal procedures,” he said.

(Thanks, F!)

A Guardian blog piece on Michiko the Mighty and ends with a nice little anecdote about Mailer getting served his own ass my Ms. Kakutani.

Salman Rushdie has described Kakutani as “a weird woman”, while Nicholson Baker said that one of her reviews “was like having my liver taken out without anaesthesia”.

Rather than blunting her criticism, these counterattacks have made Kakutani one of the world’s most influential book reviewers. In her early 50s, she has worked at the New York Times since 1979, and despite being described as “reclusive” — avoiding literary parties and interviews — her prominence is such that she once featured as a plot device in an episode of Sex and the City. Little is known about her other than that she is a Yale graduate, her father was a mathematician, she likes the New York Yankees and may well be friends with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

What’s significant is the criticism. In 1998, Kakutani was awarded a Pulitzer for her “fearless and authoritative” journalism, and her work has been described as “destination programming”, meaning that it’s required reading for literary types.

A Vanity Fair piece re-covers the Frey incident and gives a wide angle, if a bit overly-sympathetic, perspective on how things went wrong.

The book world dumped him. Friends deserted him. He was stalked by the tabloids as if he were a Britney Spears–size train wreck. Readers told him they hoped he’d burn in hell, get hit by a bus, get “ass cancer.”

“I was a pariah,” he says today. “I was under no illusion that I was anything but that.” Each morning brought a crash of emotions—rage, bewilderment, panic, and shame—and Frey came close to drinking again. Instead, he did something shocking. He wrote another book—and not a lame apologia/self-justification such as The Fabulist, by Stephen Glass, or Burning Down My Masters’ House, by Jayson Blair.
…
The story of what really happened with A Million Little Pieces has not been told in its full complexity. Owing to a non-disclosure agreement between Frey and Random House (which owns Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, the imprint that published it), neither he nor the publishing house can speak about what happened. But an investigation by Vanity Fair suggests that the story is significantly more complicated than Man Cons World. There were no fake Web sites, no wigs worn, no relatives pretending to be spokesmen for nonexistent corporations. It is the story, first, of a literary genre in which publishers thought they had found the surefire recipe for success, but one with such dangerously combustible ingredients that it could explode at any moment. On the one hand, memoirs have often been afforded a certain poetic license to stray from absolute truth in the interest of storytelling. On the other, they have the appeal of the real. Over the years, the marketplace hungered for more of both. Give us more drama! And tell us it’s all true! The publishing world responded, pumping up both. It was inevitable that one day the mixture would blow up in someone’s face. Frey had the right story to tell, the talent to get heard, the soaring ambition, and the right professional champions hungry for a hit. Now he would just as soon forget the whole mess.

You know, except for the whole coming back round again and using the story to get publicity for the next book. But, you know, let him have another shot. Maybe he’s a decent novelist. Give him another rope and see if he doesn’t hang himself with it this time. I give him props for continuing to write, at least.

Maud points to this piece at VQR that highlights some particularly low moments in the lives of their first line editorial people: readers. A list of notes included with read submissions gives a good sense of the range of pain one can go through while panning the slush pile.

“Soon he fitted his body into mine like a puzzle piece.” NONONONONONONONONO!

Planet of the Apes fan-fiction! Have we no standards?

Why does the speaker’s wife only want babies from Chinese shacks? This is the craziest poem. And the scariest. I feel like we should the call the cops on this guy. (There should be a category called “Inappropriate to Humanity.”)

Unpublished Faulkner. Should remain unpublished.

I can’t enumerate all the ways in which this is horrible.

Louise Penny shortlisted for crime novel award

GMA (genetically modified assassin) book takes AC Clarke award

Self-published novel takes Leacock humour award

National Magazine Award finalists are announced… my old haunt, Maisonneuve, is up for Mag of the Year