In a bizarre little piece in the SMH, an author learns to appreciate everyday language by performing a literary examination of a friend’s offhand comment. And here I thought a literary examination would destroy anyone’s enjoyment of anything.

A FRIEND of mind is in a coffee shop, from where he sends me an email via his BlackBerry. It starts thus: “I’m out supposedly walking and have slipped into a coffee shop to overeat.”

Granted this fellow has a way with words but even so, in just this two-clause sentence, I’m refreshingly reminded of the richness of language.

NYT books editor Sam Tanenhaus riffs of America’s literary relationship with the heat of summer.

It’s not surprising, then, that American literature is a catalogue of summer disturbances, especially the literature of the South, thanks to geography. Its swamplands and deltas bristle with heat-stoked tensions. In William Faulkner’s fiction, the “ardent and unheeding sun” pours down mercilessly on parched country roads and backwoods hollows. “Heat quivered up from the asphalt, giving to the familiar buildings about the square a nimbus quality,” Faulkner writes of a sleepy town in his novel “Light in August.” Elsewhere he describes the grim fates dealt in “the bloody September twilight.”

The same friction is found in Tennessee Williams’s plays, beginning with their sultry titles: “Summer and Smoke,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” No literary work captures the languid menace of summer better than “A Streetcar Named Desire,” its characters squeezed into a sweltering tenement in New Orleans, all gnawing at one another. “Temperature 100 on the nose, and she soaks herself in a hot tub,” Stanley Kowalski growls when his sister-in-law, Blanche, the corrupt hothouse orchid, hogs the only bathroom in his cramped, overheated apartment.

Imagine winning a lucrative literary prize and then giving the prize money away. Is this a bid for karma, a shrewd publicity move, or just someone who actually cares about civil liberties realizing $10G can go further at a good charity than in her own bank account?

Speaking this morning, Lalwani confessed that it was an impulsive decision. “I hadn’t planned to give the money away because I really didn’t think I would win,” she said. “But when it happened, I just felt it was the right thing to do. We live at a time when we can’t take personal freedoms and civil liberties for granted any more – in this country as in others – so an organisation which campaigns on these issues deserves our support.”

Pete! Pete!? Whither ye goeth?! Are the days of the newspaper copy editor numbered?

I went to the Newseum, a shiny new building in Washington that news companies and foundations have erected as a shrine to their industry. Since it’s my industry, too, I thought a museum, where sacred relics and texts have been placed safely in the equivalent of a big glass jar, might make me hopeful about the future.

“Where’s the section on copy editing?” I asked the guy at the entrance.

He wasn’t sure. “Try Internet, TV and Radio, on the third floor.”

“For copy editing? Newspaper copy editing?”

He checked with a colleague. “News History, on five,” she said.

Junot Diaz rocks my world by admitting he’s addicted to Grand Theft Auto (in the WSJ, no less!), and considers the game as one would a story—-well, at least as a phenomenon on it’s way to being a story. I think I might have previously admitted that I played Half Life 2 and it was like “reading” a novel in some ways, with a slowly developing story (you know, between the beating people’s heads in with a crowbar parts). Anyway, I think in the coming years you’ll see an increasingly dense collection of arts pages articles devoted to rubbing out the shame associated with video games. Much like you’ve seen the last five years of articles that have the sub header: “Comic books not just for kids anymore!” So be prepared. And upgrade your systems. Oh, and get a full spectrum light so you don’t turn Morlock-white like me. (Actually, that’s genetics… sigh)

I am one of them, the early adopters. I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto since the beginning. I was there in 1998 when GTA was a throwaway with two-dimensional graphics on the original PlayStation. I was there in 2002 when Tommy Vercetti, the main character in a follow-up, blew a “Scarface”-size hole in Vice City. I rebuilt my gang with CJ, star of another sequel, San Andreas. Sandbox games (which is a fancy way of saying a game where you can ignore the game’s objectives) shot through with criminal aberrance have always been a weakness of mine. Call it the American in me. Call it permanent adolescent.

So it’s 2008 and the latest edition of the GTA franchise has come upon us like corporate lightning. The new game took in more than $500 million in world-wide sales in its first week. The critical reaction has been widespread and adulatory and in certain corners beyond over-the-top: GTA IV is better than “The Godfather,” better than “The Sopranos,” better than say, a novel!
…
GTA IV is brilliant, but despite what virtually all the reviews claim, it ain’t the revolution. If you played GTA III or higher, GTA IV won’t exactly catapult you to higher plane of existence or induce metanoia. GTA III was the revolution, and established the grammar for the franchise. That grammar — the toggling back and forth between driving game and third-person adventure, the sandbox play with its many missions and bizarre admissions, the hot tunes in the background — is why we’re even talking about GTA in these pages.

Is the biography dying? I guess this is asking from the point of view of someone who cares about literary worth, because, numbers-wise, I’ve never seen so many of those damn things crawling round the shelves, like lice on a gradeschooler’s head, so they must be selling. And about as hard to get rid of. So the biography isn’t dying, it’s just going through a mid-life crisis and buying the literary version of a Mazda Miata.

Nigel Hamilton opens his new primer How to Do Biography (Harvard) with the bold boast that we are living in “a golden age” of life writing. Really, he should know better. To anyone who reads, reviews or writes on the subject, such confidence is baffling. (Hamilton, a Briton, lives mainly in the States, which may account for his rosy myopia.) Seen close up, and with an eye to proper detail, biography appears in rather a bad way. “Crisis” would probably be putting it too strongly, not least because it suggests a certain convulsive energy. “Sclerosis” might be nearer.

Sales, it’s true, are still good, though showing signs of softening. According to Nielsen BookScan, literary biography reached an all-time high in 2005, but has since started to fall. General arts biographies are also down. However, to give an idea of how the non-fiction market as a whole has recently been bent out of shape, it’s worth noting the exponential leap in celebrity memoir. Thus Katie Price has managed to shift 335,649 hardback copies of her life story Being Jordan, despite her jaunty admission that someone else wrote it. Meanwhile, Hilary Spurling’s Costa-winning Matisse the Master, surely one of the best biographies of the decade, has lifetime hardback sales of just 12,451.However, it is when you look at the quality of work produced rather than the number of books sold that you start to fear for the health of a genre that not only predates the novel by centuries (think of Plutarch’s Lives), but holds peculiarly British credentials.

Profiled in the SMH around her obsessive behaviour that leads to writing.

Moore often says in interviews that her real life is too boring to talk about. She grew up in Glen Falls, a small town in upstate New York, and after graduating from St Lawrence University, lived for a couple of years in Manhattan before moving west. For the past 25 years she has lived in Madison, Wisconsin, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and suffers bouts of claustrophobia and the occasional backlash that comes from being a well-known writer in a relatively small community. When she first moved there, she says, she felt so overwhelmed by professorial life that she tried to cultivate a flameproof persona. “I had such a reaction to the academic culture that I used to ask myself, ‘What would Goldie Hawn do?’ Because I thought she was completely unflappable.” But she says there is also a lot to like about the place, not least the breathing space that it has allowed for her writing.

When she was growing up, Moore wrote stories about “crazy magical things – things flying off into space to different planets and stuff”. Her teachers seemed to like them, though she says: “I don’t know that they were any good.” Her father worked in insurance and her mother trained as a nurse. They were both creative, which, perversely, made them less enthusiastic about their daughter’s preferred career path; creativity was something you did in your spare time. Moore has vivid memories of being taken as a child to watch rehearsals of the Glen Falls Operetta Club, in which both parents were involved. “They both had a lot of artistic and intellectual impulses in their lives. But in the end they just became classic middle-class parents, you know – you’ve gotta get a job, you’ve gotta work.”

Tell me about it, sistah.

It’s a long weekend coming here in Canada, with July 1 being “Canada Day” (formerly the more poetic “Memorial Day”), and I have grandpa Ninja in visiting the Ninjlets, so I don’t know if I will post Monday, but definitely won’t post Tuesday. And it appears to be a slow news day today anyway, perhaps in anticipation as the vast world media machine gears up for its 24 hour coverage of the Festival of Radical Canadian Nationalism in which we ride beavers in the annual Birch Branch Joust, drink maple syrup, and participate in ritualistic cleansing ceremony known as the Canadian National 24-Hour Beer Enema (sponsored by Labatt). So here’s a little roundup to tide you over. There’s plenty of meat in recent days below, so feel free to scroll down and catch up on discussing important issues and bashing me.

• Break in at LM Montgomery’s birthplace … theives said to have made off with velvet-lined stocks, one of six antique anal bead sets, and Gilbert’s original Prince Albert hoop
• The secret to success as a children’s illustrator — rat piss
• Rowling loses privacy battle
• From Maud comes a dual page e-book allows you to simulate flipping pages (Whoa! Look at this! It’s almost like reading a real book! I feel so alive and so connected to a time when people touched things!)
• Summer reading list for nerds as they tan in the radiation of their computer displays

The perils of publishing too frequently… Funny, there’s a few people I can name right around the corner here in the Great White North who do this and don’t seem to suffer anything but the derision of their peers. I once made a comment on this for a CBC article about the same issue. I think it’s imperative we all stand by our competitive-eating analogies, out of respect for the athletes, if for no other reason.

To be prolific shouldn’t be a curse, and yet it has about it the miasma that hovers around all tendency to excess. If there is so much of it, can it all be quality product?

There must be a reasonable limit, but where does it lie? Beyond a certain level of productive output, the ghost of Dame Barbara Cartland materialises, recumbent on a chaise longue, dictating screeds of barely serviceable pap. In an era, however, before the domestic electronic distractions mentioned by Freeman set our daily contexts, writing could often constitute almost the entire mental armature and consuming business of a life. There is so much of Dickens that we wonder how he managed to do anything other than write, and yet only a cultural studies undergraduate would call him the Barbara Cartland of his day.

A NBCC guest blogger riffs on using the internets latest and greatest fads (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to promote your work and differentiate yourself from the masses… who are, you know, all doing the same thing….

How to lure readers? One friend intersperses witty posts with the occasional suicide threat, prompting comments by the dozens: no no, don’t do it. His subtext? I’ll hang in as long as you buy my books. The combination is dynamite.

Another posts beautifully crafted advice on writing that makes me feel– well, inadequate, but how much of his time does that take? He intercuts soul-searching with accounts of literary gatherings at which glossy writers laugh and dance and get famous together, like those grownup parties we children watch from the top of the stairs.

Once I went to his MySpace page. OMG, as the kids say. It says right there that he has 450 friends, many of whom cheer him on in posts. But listen, that’s nothing. Another writer I know via Facebook (oh yes, friend me. Friend me!) cheerily reports that he has 5,500 friends on his MySpace page, many of whom follow his blog. He also maintains a page on Goodreads, and his Second Life character spends hours sitting in front of his virtual bookstore, where if you have a character, you can click through and buy his titles after you chat.

Oh, to have 5,500 friends. Do they all come to his readings? Buy books? Send presents and bring him chicken soup when he’s sick?

• Madre dios! Atwood wins big Spanish prize
• Sword comes near Rushdie’s neck, bodyguard don’t intervene
• Curious George killer convicted… It’s twisted enough that I can’t even really make a joke here… (Thanks K-to-the-P)

I know a few of you reading this track your stats regularly at Amazon. I know some big-assed famous novelists who watch it hourly like school kids with ears pressed against the proverbial (in a Porky’s sense) wall between the locker rooms, hoping to hear their name mumbled on the other side. But perhaps you shouldn’t. I mean, besides because it wastes your life and makes you look like an idiot when people find out.

It is not uncommon to hear an author talk about Amazon rankings. Amazon is one of the few places to get a sense of how a book is doing in real time — the elaborate, drawn-out process of getting sales numbers from bookstores and back to authors is (to say the least) Byzantine.

Despite its specialization — Amazon counts only its own sales, after all — the immediacy of these rankings can be addictive. I’ve heard authors talk about tracking their status against other books or trying to gauge exactly how many places a single sale might raise their rank. It can get a bit obsessive.

Of success! A bunch of medals (apparently children’s authors don’t win prizes, they seem to just be weighted down with pendants) for kidslit and an opinion piece on letting kids choose what to read for themselves. I agree. But it’s taking us to some strange places. Like Moomin Valley. Those fucked up little Finntrolls are so eloquent, wise and surreal. I personally love those books, but sometimes I worry the books will turn Ninja Boy into an avant garde performance artist who cracks eggs on his head and peforms the dance of the colour blue to atonal synth music. But I suppose if it came down to a choice between that and financial analyst, I’d have to go with that Darwinism-defying branch of the art.

Who can be trusted to get the guidelines right? Not the publishers, I’d say. I recently put a book described by the publishers as 12 upwards into the hands of a group of 13 and 14-year-olds, and they all felt the book was too old for them. With hindsight, I agree.

The authors? Not necessarily. Eoin Colfer firmly believes the Artemis Fowl books lose their appeal once you’re past 13 or 14, and it just isn’t true. Some books have so much to offer, that even though they are “safe” from an early age, they have more adult layers, too.

The censorship I have encountered on behalf of my children has mostly come from librarians; that group of people I thought were there to encourage reading. The borough librarian who told me that I couldn’t supply my child with books by Terry Pratchett obviously had her own agenda, whatever it may have been.

I’m a little skeptical of some of these decisions. Rogers on a book show? Does this mean we’re losing Brown’s Talking Books? Sad. But I think Q makes a good morning show.

CBC announced in March it was cancelling Sounds Like Canada, after Rogers announced she would end her six-year run on the program at the end of May. SLC and The Current are considered CBC Radio’s flagship morning programs. Rogers had also previously hosted This Morning, the precursor to the two shows.

This fall’s new endeavour will feature Rogers interviewing writers and issues affecting the literary landscape in Canada. Also to be broadcast from Vancouver, the show will air Saturdays at 3 p.m.

Though details are still being ironed out, “it most certainly will feature Shelagh in conversations with Canadian authors, out at some literary events across the country and talking about Canadian books,” Boyce said.

Cory Doctorow was commissioned by The Bookseller for their 150th anniversary to write a short story about the next 150 years of bookselling. This link leads to a stupid flash interface which is more annoying than you can imagine, so you really need to want to read this to follow.

The thing that Arthur liked best about owning his own shop was that he could stock whatever he pleased, and if you didn’t like it, you could just shop somewhere else. So there in the window were four ancient Cluedo sets rescued from a car-boot sale in Sussex; a pair of trousers sewn from a salvaged WWII bivouac tent; a small card advertising the availability of artisanal truffles hand made by an autistically gifted chocolatier in Islington; a brick of Pu’er tea that had been made in Guyana by a Chinese family who’d emigrated a full century previous; and, just as of now, six small, handsomely made books.

The books were a first for Arthur. He’d always loved reading the things, but he’d worked at bookshops before opening his own little place in Bow, and he knew the book-trade well enough to stay well away. They were bulky, these books, and low-margin (Low margin? Two-for-three titles actually *lost* money!), and honestly, practically no one read books anymore and what they did read was mostly rubbish. Selling books depressed Arthur.

These little buggers were different, though. He reached into the window — the shop was so small he could reach it without leaving his stool behind the till — and plucked one out and handed it to the kid who’d just asked for it. She was about 15, with awkward hair and skin and posture and so on, but the gleam in her eye that said, “Where have you been all my life?” as he handed her the book.

This Guardian blogger writes on how we love indy music and film, but can’t seem to accept indy writers. Why is that? My theory is it’s because most of them are gravel-pit ugly. Just kidding. (no he’s not) Really, I am. (uh-uh) Truly, a joke’s a joke. (… … … *cough*ugly!*cough*…) I kid because I love. (no, really, he hates) And love is what makes the world go round. (that and a collision with a passing celestial body early in the planetary development phase of our solar system). You know what I mean.

Doing it yourself is to be much admired in music and cinema. That mainstay of Hollywood, Robert Redford, was so enamoured by the growing movement of indie cinema in the United States that he set up the Sundance Festival to give the film-makers an outlet and an audience.

Without indie music, there would be no Smiths, no Happy Mondays, no Kylie, even (she was on Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s own indie label, PWL). Without indie cinema, there would be no Reservoir Dogs, no Ghost World, no Night of the Living Dead. Without indie publishing there would be no … who? Who are the big indie writers, those who refuse to compromise by not allowing The Man to dictate what and how they should write, and earn massive respect because of it?

The literary world only bestows acceptance, it seems, on those who are published through the traditional avenues. Independent and small presses get short shrift – national newspaper supplements seem loath to review indie books, the big high street sellers won’t stock them, unless the books are about the tough lives of mill girls or histories of public house names, which can be shoved on a shelf marked “local interest”.

Rankin has joined an investigative literacy commission in Scotland.

Speaking at the launch this morning, where members of the new commission met a class of eight-year-olds who have been working on literacy issues, Ian Rankin said that “being able to read is something that every child in Scotland should be able to enjoy. Reading gives choices and chances to young people as well as opening up new worlds of books.

“I will play my part in working as part of the commission and hope that its work might help Scotland produce even more successful writers than we already do.”

The Scottish Labour education spokeswoman Rhona Brankin was also present at the launch. She stated her party’s vision for Scotland to become “the first country in the world to become fully literate.

Awk, aye.

I feel like I’ve just linked to this recently, but I can’t find it in the archives. Given that I woke up this morning and was positive the year was 1996, I suppose I could have and just haven’t caught up to the moment yet. Anyway, this guy’s on about books he hates. For a list. It’s always for a list.

Of the acknowledged greats that cropped up on our list, Henry James took a kicking from a few quarters; so, too (inexplicably, to my mind) did Dostoevsky. But much of the bile was reserved for Powell. “What, really – I mean, really – is the point of A Dance to the Music of Time?” asked Matthew d’Ancona, editor of The Spectator, adding that he found it “stunningly tedious”. The broadcaster John Humphrys concurred, having confessed to starting the entire, endless procession of Powell’s life work, but always giving up by around about chapter five. Me too. Herman Hesse, meanwhile, was nominated by a good few, including the controller of Radio 4, Mark Damazer, and the broadcaster Andrew Marr (who, incidentally, nominated Don Quixote as the worst novel ever written).

The new CEO of Simon and Schuster, Carolyn Reidy, is interviewed over lunch by the LAT.

As she toyed with a bowl of chowder in a Rockefeller Center restaurant, Simon & Schuster Chief Executive Carolyn Reidy sounded as much like a Hollywood producer as a book world maven: How do you spot the next big blockbuster title, she mused — and how can you be sure?

Reidy, who is the highest-ranking woman in New York publishing, laughed at the notion that anyone could answer such a question with certainty (echoing the famous William Goldman quote, “In Hollywood, nobody knows anything”). Even if a bestselling author’s new title looked like a sure-fire bet and booksellers couldn’t wait to stock it.

“In New York’s publishing houses, all of our lists have authors we thought would achieve bestselling consistency but who never got there,” she said. “You can always tell in the beginning how marketable an author is. The big question is whether they’ll truly reach that level and whether they do it consistently, over and over.”

Open Book Toronto has an interesting discussion between two agents, Sam Hiyate and Hilary McMahon, on the nitty-gritty of agenting in tough times.

I’m not tempted to try the editorial side, because I love the diversity of my job. I have incredible freedom, not only on a day-to-day level of when I work and how I organize my time, but more importantly to choose the writers that I represent, and help shape their careers. I enjoy working with an author to develop a proposal, or giving feedback on the first draft of a novel, but I also really relish the business side of things – selling the books and negotiating the deals. When you can call an author and make them weep because you’ve sold their novel to the house they’ve always dreamed of, or have negotiated an advance that buys them significant time to write, or feel like you’re having a hand in the development of a truly worthy project, it’s tremendously rewarding. But when you go through those weeks where you simply can’t sell anything; when books you believe in just can’t find a home, it’s very discouraging. And it’s made worse because of the relationships you’ve established with those authors, when you know all too well how much they’ve invested in their work.

• When Leonard Cohen came through here, you’d think he was the reincarnation of Christ the way people responded… Imagine how his hometown crowd handled it
• Odysseus nailed down to 1178 BC by star charts
• Cody’s in Berkeley closing
• First edition Emma goes for £180,000
• Copyright renewal records availabe—-means you can check which books are public domain (from BoingBoing)

I used that title because lists are so easy and kind of hot, but you feel dirty after reading most of them. And what follows is the midget beastiality scat porn of book lists. Entertainment Weekly, that bastion of cogent thought and literary ideals, has come up with a top 100 books since 1983 (?) list aududicrously dubbed “The New Classics”. Now, no one was expecting them to want anything but Kraft Singles on their Ritz crackers, so at least there are a few good books here, but Harry Potter at #2? Stephen King at #21? Tom Wolfe anywhere on the list at all? I mean, come on. (Thanks, ND)

John Freeman writes on the art of not publishing early and not pumping one out every year in a culture that is telling you you should do just the opposite.

Edward P Jones, Junot Diaz and Jeffrey Eugenides all took 11 years to write their Pulitzer prize-winning novels -a blink, really, when compared to Shirley Hazzard and Marilynne Robinson’s 23-year gaps preceding The Great Fire and Gilead respectively.

In a country that invented the internet, let alone the interstate, where computers are replaced every two years and iPhones tossed out after mere months, this is beyond pokey. It’s positively counter-cultural.

The mainstream loves it, though. How easy it is to get tired of writers who publish every year – to take them for granted. When a writer disappears, only to return seven, ten years, the whiff of something heroic is afoot.

• Tobias Wolff
• Nam Le
• Joseph O’Neill
• Robbie MacGregor/Invisible Books
• On Munro’s supposed retirement despite the new stories (not really a profile, but amusing) (thanks, Paula)

Word of Mouth is the best publicity you can’t buy. This NYT article, likely assigned because a demographically-questionable demographics team realized there hadn’t been enough pandering to the religious right in the last fortnight, focusses on a spunky Christian bestseller that—-gollygeeshucks—-reached for the sky and came away with a little piece of Heaven. Aw.

Eckhart Tolle may have Oprah Winfrey, but “The Shack” has people like Caleb Nowak.

Mr. Nowak, a maintenance worker near Yakima, Wash., first bought a copy of “The Shack,” a slim paperback novel by an unknown author about a grieving father who meets God in the form of a jolly African-American woman, at a Borders bookstore in March. He was so taken by the story of redemption and God’s love that he promptly bought 10 more copies to give to family and friends.

“Everybody that I know has bought at least 10 copies,” Mr. Nowak said. “There’s definitely something about the book that makes people want to share it.”

Thousands of readers like Mr. Nowak, a regular churchgoer, have helped propel “The Shack,” written by William P. Young, a former office manager and hotel night clerk in Gresham, Ore., and privately published by a pair of former pastors near Los Angeles, into a surprise best seller. It is the most compelling recent example of how a word-of-mouth phenomenon can explode into a blockbuster when the momentum hits chain bookstores, and the marketing and distribution power of a major commercial publisher is thrown behind it.

Actually, if you keep reading, the book almost starts to sound interesting—-at least in terms of the brain-stir it might give a few close minded folks who would have to weigh their need for fluffy spiritual validation against the inherent race/sex/class-ism that comes with their religion. Anyone read it? How bad is the writing? When an article focusses so much on the subject/phenomenon relationship, I start to get suspicious.

Slate tracks the slow, modern-life-inspired demise of the semicolon. Not quite a comma, not quite a period; she died of indecision and lack of respect for relationships. She lives on in our most difficult poetry; missed by few, mourned by fewer still, read only by the stout-hearted. An open stanza service will be held Tuesday and Punctuation Hall.

1865? But surely that’s a century off: Isn’t modern life to blame?

Not exactly: From the 1850s onward, it’s virtually impossible to find anyone claiming a prevalence of semicolons in writing. We now lived, complained a critic in 1854, in a “fast era” that neglected punctuation; by 1895, the Times took it for granted that “[m]any writers have adopted the plan of punctuating as little as possible.” What these writers intuited had an empirical basis: A 1995 study tallying punctuation in period texts found a stunning drop in semicolon usage between the 18^th and 19^th centuries, from 68.1 semicolons per thousand words to just 17.7.

Researcher Paul Bruthiaux notes the steepest semicolon drop-off came in the mid-19^th century—a finding that matches the gap between Poe’s 1848 complaint and that 1865 “rejection.” Technology is a leading suspect in rapid aesthetic shifts, so consider what debuted in the 1850s that might radically change language usage: the telegraph.

• Venerable and awesome Coach House wins Ontario Premier’s Award for Excellence in the Arts — congratulations, CHB!
• Tickets for this year’s Edinburgh book fest are hotter than fresh shit, esp since it was announced Connery would show up to growl and squint a bit
• Normally I try to steer clear of linking to “news” about the mutual backpatting society of dilettantes and dabblers known as the League of Canadian Poets (with a few exceptions of course—-most of whom I suspect are there for either the readings budget or out of some misplaced sense of civic duty), but they had their AGM in St. John’s and two good poets have won their awards
• Dan Brown tourism in Rome (I’m guessing this means people flooding shops that sell black turtle necks and tan jackets… but that’s just a guess)
• My pretty ‘Ninjas, you know I only call on your assassination services once a year or so, and because I might have earlier this spring, I think it’s high time I upped 2008’s quota and asked those of you well-placed (you know who you are) to slip a lethal dose of extra strength Ex-Lax into the coffee of Sam Jordison… Now FLY! FLY!!

Following the most-loathed comes the most life-changing, whatever the hell that means. I’m just totally tickled to see Bob Rae writing on 1984 in the National Post. How’d that get past the Post’s Editorial Ministry of Truth?

Bob Rae

When I was 14 I read both Animal Farm and 1984. I then started reading every Penguin paperback of Orwell’s I could find. I still have them on my shelf. I had a terrific history teacher named Michael Knight who told me to read Homage to Catalonia because “that explains Orwell.” I read it over again because it’s such a compelling account of faith, disillusionment and, despite it all, a compellingly clearsighted view of politics. Orwell did not emerge from his experience of the Spanish Civil War as any less a democrat, but he did learn to hate the political phonies around him, and in particular the ruthless commissars who threw him in jail and were ready to let him die. He began the war as a committed opponent of Franco and ended it realizing that Stalinism was an even greater threat. And so the road to Animal Farm and 1984. Orwell’s later essays and letters show the controversies that dogged him as he fought the “smelly little orthodoxies” of his time. It is worth reading and rereading the joys of the camaraderie of revolutionary Barcelona, the courage of the battlefield, the squalor of it all and the loyalties and betrayals that forged the crystal spirit. No political writer came closer to telling it like it is in the 20th century, and Mr. Knight was (in this and many other things) quite right.

• Bob Rae, the Liberal Party’s foreign affairs critic, has written several books on Canadian politics.

A bunch of writers and critics pick their “most-loathed” books of all time, which actually comes out more as a “most-overrated” list than anything else. (Otherwise, I’m sure you’d see a lot more Danielle Brownsteel Koontz.) If that’s the case, chuck Richard Ford’s Independence Day in there for me. Just couldn’t get it going.  Have you got some to add to the list? I know you do.

Susannah Herbert, The Sunday Times literary editor

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook deconstructs the life of Anna Wulf, an ex-communist single mother with writer’s block and a fragmented, alienated consciousness, the kind that was de rigueur among 1960s feminists. Apparently, the book’s experimental structure is meant to evoke the symptoms of a nervous breakdown, but, as it fell from my limp hand 20-odd years ago, I can’t be sure. It’s highly autobiographical and, at more than 600 pages – not bad for a blocked writer, eh? – highly unreadable.

Dissent reconsiders women writers.

In the 1970s a number of books were written to reappraise women authors and the literature they produced. For the most part these books focused on nineteenth-century Britain (to a lesser extent on the United States and France) and they clearly “started something.” The work of women writers was taken far more seriously in this criticism than it had been before. Its sources and content were examined with the assumption that they had both literary and cultural value. After these critical works it was no longer possible to claim that women’s literary work was tangential to the “tradition” or marginal or derivative. At the same time, and even more important, it became impossible to maintain that you did not have to pay attention to the gender of an author to understand her work, that you could pretend that she had not had characteristic experiences as a writer and as a woman. It became harder and harder to sustain habitually dismissive and narrow responses. In effect, these critical works created a new field. The field asserted itself on the literary scene, and after that, work in this area grew so rapidly and with such vitality and scope that it seems unfair to focus on only a few books written at the start of this period.

A lengthy, intelligent discussion, via blog, on the issues surrounding the serial novel as a contemporary form (springing obviously from Denis Johnson Playboy). I think you read bottom-up.

I may have become addicted to instant narrative gratification. I love the magazine One Story because it’s just one story, to be read and finished, neat and quick. On the Internet, don’t ask me to click through 10 pages of self-absorbed prose — if it doesn’t grab me early on, see ya, I’m out.

Getting just Part 1 (of four) of “Nobody Move” is a tease. We DO have to wait a whole month before we get the next piece. We DO have to save space in our spilling-over brainpans for Denis Johnson’s characters and plot twists. It’s unfair. It’s painful. It’s frustrating.

And then I realize: It’s seduction.

When I hunted down my copy of Johnson’s “Tree of Smoke,” it was there in all its hefty glory, an elaborate, enormous work, and if I could just keep my eyes open and brain sharp long enough, I could consume it all in one sitting. Now I see there is something of a marvelous torture in the delayed gratification of a serial. I can’t possibly get it all at once, and that brings on a craving that’s missing when I can just turn the page to get to the next chapter.

• 100 yeas of Anne of Green Gables (and Red Buttplugs)
• Puzo estate suing over Godfather video game
• Coverage of Oz book awards
• Artists in PEI want their share of the PIE, tired of charities asking for donations
• Good and bad news from the children’s illustration world: RIP Tasha Tudor and hello Lauren Child
• Blackwells launches “clicks and bricks” POD in stores

This guy hates second hand books. Why? Because they’re gross. I have to say, I can see some of this. There’ve been a couple of times I’ve opened a recently purchased second hand book and played the guess the stain game. But then, try looking up the stats on fecal matter, even just for your office environment, and you see that it doesn’t really matter what precautions you take, you’re still always eating shit at work.

As someone who buys far too many books – and even reads some of them – I should be the sort of person who jumps at the chance to save precious funds by purchasing second-hand. Thanks to the growth of Amazon Marketplace, and the continuing presence of charity shops on every high street, it is now easy to spend pennies rather than pounds on a book. This is great news for bookworms everywhere.

Well, not quite everywhere, because I can’t stand second-hand books. For me, as a literary experience, they are akin to sloppy seconds, a salad bar in a staff canteen at the end of a hot weekday, or a recently-vacated cubicle in a public toilet. Let’s be clear: I don’t merely have a mild preference for buying brand-new. No, I’m digestively squeamish about used books. It’s all those stains, thumbprints and creases that get me so queasy. I’m far from a gentle reader and by the time I’ve taken in the first few chapters of any brand-new tome, it will often be creased and coffee-stained beyond recognition. But they will be my creases and my stains, and that’s what matters.

Slate looks at how we read online and why we choose to read it. You’ll understand the schizo bold use once you read the piece.

Back to the Jungle
Nielsen’s apt description of the online reader: “[U]sers are selfish, lazy, and ruthless.” You, my dear user, pluck the low-hanging fruit. When you arrive on a page, you don’t actually deign to read it. You scan. If you don’t see what you need, you’re gone.

And it’s not you who has to change. It’s me, the writer

The new proposed copyright law has whole range of folks mildly apoplectic. Some moreso than others. BoingBoing says it makes criminals out of ordinary Canadians, moreso even than the comparative US act. Book people, however, seem to have mixed feelings.

In the aftermath of last week’s introduction of Bill C-61, Ottawa’s proposed reform of Canada’s copyright laws, analysis focused squarely on the implications for the music industry’s high-profile battle against illegal downloads.

That wasn’t the case at this year’s Book Expo Canada, the annual, four-day publishing industry trade fair that wrapped up yesterday at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. The event began Friday with a panel discussion on copyright as it pertains to publishing. And the topic was never far from the surface, even threatening to eclipse the never-ending debate about book pricing.

“It is the issue in the publishing world right now,” McClelland & Stewart’s Douglas Pepper said of copyright. “While there are concerns, I don’t think there’s panic.”

The concerns largely relate to a potential loss of control over content as the industry increasingly becomes digitized. No one predicts anything as dire as the havoc that unauthorized downloads have played on the music industry, but the introduction of the Sony e-reader into the Canadian market last month has helped focus the conversation.

I have a day long meeting today, after which I head back into the bizarre torture contraption that is the Air Canada network of flights. I should be home by Tuesday. Pray for Mojo.

• Lawrence Hill and Naomi Klein pick up awards from booksellers at BEC
• Harry Potter breaks 400 million copies?
• Copernicus book apparently centre of someone’s universe
• Speaking of expensive books..
• Plagiarism in academia
• You can now eat in Toronto libraries… just when I though certain patrons couldn’t get more disgusting, a whole new avenue for revulsion presents itself

So my trip to “Ottawa” just took me to Halifax, half way to Montreal, then down to Moncton where we sat on the tarmac for an hour before heading back to Halifax. So I’m here in the airport, waiting for a 6pm flight to Ottawa, assuming of course it doesn’t need to take me to Chicago and Jamaica first. Sorry, no updates today. I need to expend all my psychic efforts willing the grusome deaths of many executive decision makers. I love how Air Canada thinks it can charge you for everything from chips to actually ensuring you get a seat* but then can’t get you to where you paid to go.

*Next time you book, make sure you check—-the lowest rate (Tango, usually) is now basically a standby flight, and because they’ve made a policy of heavily overbooking, you’re not guaranteed to get on unless you’re paying for one of the more premium packages. Nice eh? The best part is, they’ve tried to sell it as a perk, some kind of high class club. Someone said to me at a party recently that the business folk really love AC’s new model, and I said, Yeah, that’s the problem—-I’ve come to learn that the kinds of things busines folk like are usually no good for guys like me.

I’m on a plane for Ottawa in about 10 minutes, so the update will have to wait until I get there and get settled in an internet friendly cafe. I was hoping to score tickets to tonight’s sold out premier of poet Dave O’Meara’s play Disaster at the Natalie Stern Studio of OSSD, but haven’t had any luck. If anyone wants to help a guy out for tonight (I’m only in Ottawa one day!), please contact me!

For selling his book. Um…

A few weeks ago John Mitzel, proprietor of Calamus Books in Boston, was surprised to open his mail and discover he’d been named in a lawsuit filed by an author. The suit, filed by Larry Townsend’s attorney for copyright infringement, stems from a dispute over unpaid fees allegedly owed the author by his distributor, the Oklahoma-based Nazca Plains Corp. Nonetheless, the suit charges that Mitzel, along with over 40 other booksellers (including Amazon and Barnes & Noble), infringed on Townsend’s copyright by selling the author’s books in his store.

The Catholic Church seems to have some sort of grudge against Dan Brown. Not sure what this is all about, but they’ve banned the production of Angels and Demons from filming in churches in Rome. My guess is he’s been caught dropping pennies in the collection plate.

When I read this I was all, like, pfshsh, then I thought, wtf?? Do journalists really think they’re gooder with them headlines–”Feds tap security czar for terror flap”, etc? But seriously there are plenty of poets floating around in po-space who have been ruining the sentence since long before cyberspace.

The demise of orderly writing: signs everywhere.

One recent report, young Americans don’t write well.

In a survey, Internet language — abbreviated wds, :) and txt msging — seeping into academic writing.

But above all, what really scares a lot of scholars: the impending death of the English sentence.

Jessa points to an interesting and funny piece on the disadvantages of an elite, Ivy League education. I’ve often referred to my frustration with academics as the “prof in the bubble” syndrome, wherein highly edumacated folk seem to walk around with their eyes focussed solely at the distance needed for reading a book—about the distance between the centre and skin of a beach ball. Anything outside that distance they bounce away from, just like said beach ball, rolling around in the wind.

When we were in NYC and Lady Ninja was at an elite-ish school there, we also called it the “stop/rewind moment”. That’s when you say something to an academic that does not compute and you get a sort of somatic error message, which is a blank stare and a couple blinks before they seem to stop the mental tape, press rewind, and then restart the recording over what you just said.

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League dees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

• Global warming book takes science prize
• Toronto writer part of Richard and Judy list
• Why Joanna Trollope loves chick lit and is pleased to judge and award for it
• Geraldine Brooks wins big in Oz
• More Oz awards — the Miles Franklin shortlist gets some serious ink in The Age

I received a note from the Booker people this morning telling me voting was “well underway” for their Best of the Booker prize where readers pick the best of the best. I was a little surprised to see that they said “thousands” had already voted. Not millions. Not hundreds of thousands. Not even tens of thousands. Does this mean that fewer than 10,000 care to vote for a best of the best contest in what’s supposed to be the world’s top literary prize? I guess even with my lowered expectations and leanings towards apocalyptic pessimism, I was still not quite hopeless enough, eh? P.S. Vote for Coetzee. Disgrace is hands down the best book on the list.

They’ve got Stephen Hawking’s wife Lucy searching out great science writing books at the Times.

“Putting some human element into it is very important,” says Leonard Susskind, Professor of Physics at Stanford University and author of The Black Hole War. “When I write, I always talk about science through stories.” Susskind, one of the originators of String Theory, probably the most difficult concept in modern physics for a lay person to understand, describes his thought process as one of imagination and explanation: “I think in terms of explaining to someone who doesn’t know; to an outsider.”

Just as imagination and physics may seem an odd pairing, intuition is not a word that many people associate either with the research work of scientists or the translation into familiar language that popular science writing represents. It is, however, key to the process of both.

I don’t find imagination and physics “an odd pairing”. Frankly, I couldn’t have one without the other.

An author writes on the post-coital whorehouse shame, and advantages, of promoting yourself through the author video. Start your own video today. Pimps and escorts not included. ‘Nuff said.

Once upon a time, an author published a book and left the selling to the experts in the marketing department. This was the case as recently as last week. But that quaint notion has suddenly gone the way of Duran Duran. Now, because of recent developments in the world of publishing, writer and merchant are fusing into one. Willy Loman and Arthur Miller have commingled. Call it — forgive me — Birth of a Salesman.

Publishers still occasionally provide promotional support for an author to whom they have paid a whopping advance. Other authors, however, the ones without giant deals, are placed on an ice floe and set adrift. Yes, you say. Of course. ‘Twas ever so. But if once comfort might have been derived from such platitudes, this was before the Internet and the anticipated Death of Print.

And yet, the ironic thing about the Death of Print is that no one seems to have told the publishing industry. Even as review column inches shrink and fewer writers appear on radio and television, books continue to tumble out like bunnies during birthing season.

Profiled in the Guardian.

Ballard claims that he has “always treated England as a strange fiction”. The real world, in which he was formed, was Shanghai, where he was born in 1930 and brought up as a typical privileged expatriate boy in the city’s International Settlement, without learning Chinese or tasting a morsel of native cuisine. “I didn’t have a Chinese meal until I returned to England.” In 1943, his world flipped upside down when he was incarcerated with his parents in the Lunghua detention camp. In his collection of memoirs, Miracles of Life, published earlier this year, Ballard writes that he was “largely happy” in Lunghua, finding there “a relaxed and easygoing world” that he had not known in everyday life. He claims that he thrived during his two and a half years in detention, “even when food rations fell to near zero, skin infections covered my legs, malnutrition had prolapsed my rectum, and many of the adults had lost heart”.

Apparently Amazon is inventing new and ingenious ways of punishing publishers who refuse to toe the line. Here they simply disable the 1-click for a rebellious publisher and watch as customers disinclined to punch more than one button per purchase disappear into thin cyber-air.

Amazon, the online retailing giant with a fast-rising share of the consumer book market, has adopted the literary equivalent of a nuclear option for rebellious publishers who balk at its demands.

In the latest in a series of disputes over the division of revenue from online sales, Amazon has disabled the “buy now with 1 click” icon on its British Web site for hundreds of books published by the British unit of Hachette Livre, from back-list Stephen King novels to, naturally, “The Hachette Guide to French Wine.”

The button allows registered users to purchase titles instantly, with free shipping. Customers can still buy the affected books, but they have to navigate to an open marketplace that links them to third-party sellers of new or used books. And they have to pay for shipping.

The struggle comes at a time that Amazon’s power as a bookseller is increasing, with sales growing online in an otherwise tepid global book market. Some publishers fear that with the introduction of Amazon’s Kindle electronic reader, the company will rise into a position to be able to demand more concessions.

For UK ‘Ninja’s, Richard and Judy are like Oprah-level bookseller crack, even thought they are apparently in some kind of broadcast/cable trouble-that-doesn’t-interest-me-in-the-slightest. So scroll down for their summer reading list.

Today’s glad tidings for the book trade are, however, tinged with melancholy, since this is the last book club to feature on national terrestrial TV. Richard and Judy are soon decamping with their show to UKTV, and the move is likely to cut their audience from 2m to 500,000. It is not yet clear whether a parallel reduction in sales is now inevitable.

John Howells, a spokesman for Waterstone’s, was today putting a hopeful spin on the prospect. He declined to reveal “market-sensitive” information about how many additional books are sold on the strength of a show, but said that he expected each of this summer’s titles to be among the summer’s bestsellers.

Howells said he was optimistic that Richard and Judy’s market influence would remain a potent sales stimulus. “People seem to forget that their audience shrank when they moved from ITV1, but the book club brand seems to have gone from strength to strength. They have a very active website, and are very involved with reading groups.

Interviewed at the NYT.

Your new collection includes an essay in which you note, “Calvino does what very few writers can do: he describes imaginary worlds with the most extraordinary precision and beauty.” What about American novelists? Can’t think of one.

Norman Mailer? Oh, dear, we’re not going to go into pluses and minuses now.

Philip Roth? Ditto.

I admire Roth. He never became complacent. He had no reason to. He’s a good comic writer.