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| Hearsay: |
Who needs mind-altering drugs when you can just ride the virus coaster. Man, I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe! Did you know that Lisa Loeb can fly once she puts on that devil outfit? It’s true. And her guitar is covered in mouths that back up her tunes with more voices than Def Leppard has track overdubs.
- The English (American) language in 3000 AD
- Woman who kept library books (and tried to pay for them) on sexuality because she didn’t want kids to read the content, has been ordered to return them (takeaway message of sadness? somewhere, some other double digit IQ is calling this woman a hero)
Dudes. Duuuuuudes. I am so fucking sick it’s not funny. Those airplanes are like tuberculosis labs with all the caps left off the test tubes and petri dishes. I’m dying here. Wasn’t I supposed to have caught all these colds by the time I was 20? I swear this has to do with my mother’s OCD cleaning when I was a kid. She’d spray me in the face with Lysol if she thought a germ was about to drip from my nose. Anyway, another day of links instead of individual posts. I guess this is better than the last five summers, in which we shut down for August. Things will ramp up again in September.
- Conservative cuts amount to censorship, say artists (pitch forks and torches, people!)
- In defence of Random’s decision to not publish book about Muhammed’s daughter (and of course, the Danes want it already)
- Top 10 endangered languages (wouldn’t that be Bottom 10?)
- Pimp my Kindle
- Kids book controversy down under
- Text books go online where they belong and should be less crippling to your average student beer budget (and of course, Amazon is right there for the rebound… and they’ve also acquired Shelfari. One day I hope to link to the “Amazon acquires Bookninja” story. Sigh…)
- Vernor Vinge profile at NYT
- The ultimate in tech upgrade
- Borders: losing less money one year in a row
Well, here I am once again in the clutches of my old nemesis, the Halifax International Airport. I’ll struggle to keep its claws from my throat while reaching for the dagger in my boot; you read these these links.
- Rushdie is about to sue the pants off his lying bodyguards
- Rawi Hage talks up his new novel to occasional ‘Ninja Kevin Chong
- Jacob Two (plus) Two
- What are we teaching our kids?
- Mental note: run for White House with Obama
- Haruki Murakami cover pr0n
- Seattle bookstores on the ropes
- SF author Scalzi on “writing for free on the internet” (from SFSignal)
- Libraries: LIBRARIES!
- On the semicolon
- For the deadline-challenged among you: the Sunday Times lit quiz
- Sharon Osbourne, novelist
- On the lure of the tie-in novel
- Where have all the lushes gone, long time passing (out)
Or girth, depending on how you look at it. Book titles are getting longer. Stories are getting shorter. Soon they will pass each other in a bizarre literary Möbius strip.
Think of what would have happened to George Orwell’s snappy title. 1984: One Man’s Discovery that Big Brother is Indeed Big but Hardly Fraternal and that Sex with Comrades Can Have Torturous Consequences.
You can forgive Herman Melville for adding “or, The Whale”, to Moby Dick, since, firstly it has no colon, and secondly, when he published it no one would have had a clue what it was all about. However, Moby Dick: How Ishmael Lost His Shipmates and Found His Soul While Chasing Jungian Archetypes Around the Globe and Carrying Out Experimental Marine Mammal Research, does not really cut the wasabi for the sushi.
When I woke up this morning, I was suprised to find a pimple on my face. Hm, that’s strange, I thought. I usually don’t get a pimple until right before I’m making a public appearance. D’oh! I should have mentioned last week, so you could clear your hectic schedules, that I’ll be reading at the Tree Reading Series in Ottawa tomorrow evening. The event starts at 8, rest of the info at the link above. I realize this is short notice, but I figure that with a well-timed combination of sleepless standby and the use of all your points, you should be ablet to catch a flight there in time. Listen, people. No pain, no gain.
This guy really doesn’t like crosswords. I myself went through a craze a couple years ago where I was doing cryptic (British) crosswords every night. I couldn’t get enough of them. Now I do maybe two or so a week, mostly in pursuit of procrastination. I find the quick clues (North American-style) to be rather facile, so I don’t do them anymore, but find the cricket and legal references in the British ones frustrate me sometimes. Fucking bowled-over maidens and periwigs. Back when I was working in a press room in New York, it used to madden my colleagues that I could complete the NYT puzzle to Saturday and usually get quite far in the Sunday puzzle. I always played it up by dropping my copy on the desk in the Press Chief’s office at 10am and then emailing the group that they could check their answers there. Strangely, in the US ones it’s baseball and legal references that stump me. Fucking ERAs and torts. Anyway, this dude is seriously frothing at the mouth about crosswords, saying that they aren’t a marker of intelligence and that they keep supposedly smart people from reading. Um, no arguments on point one, but about point two: what if you do both?
What always gets to me is the self-congratulatory assumption on the part of puzzle people that their addiction to the useless habit somehow proves they are smarter or more literate than the rest of us. Need I suggest that those who spend time doing crossword puzzles (or sudoku)—uselessly filling empty boxes (a metaphor for some emptiness in their lives?)—could be doing something else that involves words and letters? It’s called reading.
But somehow crossword types think that their addiction to this sad form of mental self-abuse somehow makes them “literary.” Sorry: Doing puzzles reflects not an elevated literary sensibility but a degraded letter-ary sensibility, one that demonstrates an inability to find pleasure in reading. Otherwise, why choose the wan, sterile satisfactions of crosswords over the far more robust full-blooded pleasures of books?
Zach points to this podcast (audio) of CBC’s Q wading into commentary on the joint Salon des Refusés between CNQ and TNQ and critical of the Penguin short story anthology—-Penguin apparently declined to send someone to debate, so they got Adrian Michael Kelly to comment alone on who has the right to make a canon for the entire country.
So apparently Rushdie isn’t “Scruffy” after all. While the writer me is relieved on Sir Salman’s behalf, this makes the Bookninja me kind of sad. It was like an extra birthday, when I heard that. Oooh! A gift!? For me?!
Rushdie’s lawyer Mark Stephens said today that the authors of the book now “accepted that much of the story published in the Mail on Sunday was false”. He said that Evans had been “over-egging” his position at the time: “He was a police driver making out he was an armed special protection officer,” he said.
Stephens added that Rushdie had made no requests for damages, nor for any changes in opinions in the book, merely for “the falsehoods” to be changed. “The authors have admitted that there were falsehoods in the original manuscript and have made amendments accordingly,” he said.
Screenwriter turned “accidental” novelist, profiled in the Guardian.
Despite the melodrama of the story, Jones’s prose is sparse and uncluttered; she says the dialogue has changed very little from its time as part of a film script, although she’s had to alter the pace a little as it was too staccato for the book. “It’s such an emotional story – love and grief and all these giant feelings, I was always trying to find that balance where it wouldn’t tip over into overstating a thing but where it wouldn’t be so cool as not to tell it,” she says.
“In my mad head it was sort of a novelisation. Film scripts are like the tops of little mountain peaks or the tips of icebergs, then having the rest of the iceberg there, and being liberated to write that iceberg, it was like being let off the lead – it was wonderful.”
Having struggled to get her scripts produced, the success of her novel has brought the film and television world knocking on her door. The Outcast itself has now started “the slow trudge” towards becoming a film. She’ll be writing the screenplay herself, and intends to approach it, as much as possible, as if she hasn’t seen the book before. “Won’t that be fun? I’ll be thinking ‘Do we need to have this?’ and ‘That bit’s rubbish, we’re not going for that.’ I think I have to liberate myself from what’s there – it’ll be hard to do.”
Seems like this cycle, everyone’s got an article on signing books. The bizarre Craigslist ad didn’t hurt the chances of every arts section hooking an article on it. So, is signing a pleasant task for authors or a chore? (There’s even a Frankenhand namecheck at the end.)
Umpteen authors can report the awfulness of the day nobody queued to buy their book, let alone have it signed. Abi Titmuss, the former nurse turned national sexpot, arrived for a signing in Manchester two weeks ago, to find a queue of three men in zip-fronted leisurewear waiting in WH Smith to inspect her memoirs. By contrast, the queues of people avid for signed copies of Katie Price’s new “novel,” Angel Uncovered, have broken records. Dozens of poets can recall poetry readings where no books arrived for sale, but where they were asked, as a kind of booby prize, to sign a member of the audience’s copy of Summoned by Bells.
Excessive success, however, can also be a burden. There’s a shocking story about Stephen King signing books in a Seattle shop. He signed for hours until his shoulder ached and a publicist had to apply an ice-pack. Then his fingers dried up; they cracked and began to bleed, and he asked for a bandage. Hearing this, a fan in the queue demanded to have some authentic Stephen King blood on his book. Others joined in and he signed in his own blood for hours. Chuck Palahniuk, the modern gross-out novelist, author of Fight Club, recalls a visit to a store in Austin, Texas, where the staff dished out free beer to the signing queue, and where an aggressive queuer, possibly not Chuck’s greatest fan, demanded of a quaking employee: “Why should I wait in this long line to get my books signed by that dickwad?”
This Q&A with a raft of Aussie independent booksellers is quite entertaining.
I worked at a bunch of bookstores in my day and you’d be surprised at some of the stupid shit that goes down with customers. When I was 15, I worked at Coles and remember once during the Christmas rush I was totally frazzled with a lineup stretching around the store and out into the mall. This one dude waited in line for probably 25 minutes and came up to the cash with no book.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Where can I find the cement.”
I blinked a few times and then tried, “Do you mean rubber cement, like for models? You can try next door at Leisure World.”
“No,” says he. “I mean mixing cememt.”
… … … …
Even the other customers were gob-smacked. I locked my till.
“Come here,” I said and walked him out to the mall. I pointed up at the sign over the store. “What does that say?” I demanded.
“Coles…” he said.
“Coles WHAT?” I asked.
“Coles, The Book People.”
“The BOOK People!!!” I screamed. “What makes you think store called “The Book People” would have cement?” I was ushered inside by my assistant manager and did receiving for the rest of the day. Which was fine by me and probably for the best.
Other times often we’d get the “I’m looking for a book and I don’t know the author, title or publisher, but I know it’s blue” customer. After dealing with this earnestly for a year or two, I started getting daring.
When they’d fumble out the question, I’d smile and say, “I know which one you’re talking about,” and I’d point vaguely at the far wall. “It’s right there.”
They’d wander over and spend a few minutes looking, then they’d look back over their shoulder in a helpless way. I’d pump my pointing finger up and down repeatedly like I was pressing a button and mouth “look down.” Nine times out of ten they’d look for a while longer and then leave.
Of course, it isn’t all stupid customers. Sometimes it’s stupid, or niaive, staff. Once, this pinch faced woman brought up a book to the counter called “The Yeast Connection”. I was standing with my assistant manager. I know now that the book was a self-help about yeast infections, and I also know now that my assistant manager was a lesbian, but at the time I was 15 and knew neither of these things.
I looked at it curiously and said to my assistant manager, “What kind of cookbook is this?” She snorted and then grabbed me roughly by the bicep. Guess what I did for the rest of the day? Receiving.
After an announcement that early sales of an Obama book would be offered solely through Amazon, brick retailers are fighting back by reducing orders.
Mary Ellen Keating, a spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble, said in a statement on Monday evening that the initial order “was based on the book being available to all booksellers simultaneously — an even playing field — which is common practice in book publishing.”
She declined to say how many copies the retailer ordered.
Katharine Walton, a spokeswoman for Chelsea Green, said Barnes & Noble was angry at being excluded and threatened on Monday afternoon not to stock the book.
Chelsea Green, a small Vermont-based company, decided to sell “Obama’s Challenge,” an admiring portrait of Mr. Obama, through Amazon’s print-on-demand service so that it could be available to attendees of the Democratic National Convention in Denver next week.
Can you even imagine? An ad on Craigslist is seeking people to make extra money by faking authors’ signatures.
The advert says it is looking for 14 people who can do a blitz of false autograph signing on behalf of two unnamed co-authors of a newly released, and equally anonymous, book.
“You will need to be able to copy the look and style of both author’s signatures,” it says.
In return, the successful applicants will be paid $25 (£13) for 200 books signed.
The New York-based blog Gawker, which spotted the advert, has been unable to ascertain the identity of the publisher, or the authors involved. But they are clearly major players, judging by the scale of the operation.
The advert says the fake signing, to be held in Los Angeles, will run over two days at eight hours a day.
This just can’t be true. I mean, most authors can’t make money from their signature. How cruel would the universe have to be to let you know that even when no one lined up to get you to sign your own book, that somewhere in America some schmuck is making bucks faking the signature of someone else? Well, that’s it for me, folks. I’ll be handing out free samples of the new Jonestown-flavoured Crystal Light in the lobby after the show.
If this author can accept her marginality as a marketing tool then, dammit, so can I. Confession: I am a straight, white male between the ages of 25 and 45, a father of two with no physical or mental disabilities apart from being of Scots Irish descent.
I won’t be shoved into a box, shelved on a section, categorised and pinned to a board like a dead moth. I will flit and fly and occasionally land on a flower or a carcass. I will disguise myself as a butterfly and then trick you by coming out at night to hang around your lamp and disturb you with my fluttering. I am a flowing river marking the divide between two states in this split society of ours, a tsunami crashing through your preconceptions and obliterating the gender/genre notices in the bookshop. OK, maybe that last one was a bit much, but you get the picture. I am a lesbian author but I am so much more. In the words of the main character of my novel: I am not a cardboard cutout. However …
[Takes deep breath] There comes a point in the career of every author, unless unconcerned with book sales, where you have to bite the bullet, throw in the towel, judge your book by its cover, and accept the most clichéd of all clichés: the newspaper headline. The soundbite catchphrase that draws the readers’ attention to the fuller article cannot possibly be as long as the paragraph above, which barely scratches the surface of my identity. Publicity material will focus on that which is most likely to generate interest. “Author Josie Henley-Einion is Waterstone’s Welsh book of the month for August” is not half as eye-catching as “Lesbian Author Josie Henley-Einion …” Throw the word “lesbian” into any pot and the bubbles begin to rise.
I suppose you could count the red hair and mottled pale skin as a kind of marginality—-it does prevent me from picking blueberries for more than two hours in a row without reapplying sunscreen… Geez. Come to think of it, I’m TOTALLY marginalized. I got to get on this. I need to form my own brand of music and make some kind of fashion statement instead of just singing Violent Femmes off-key and wearing jeans with an untucked collared shirt.
An unlikely hero has landed a first-time novelist a bestseller overseas. I smell a movie.
In a quite unsuspected outbreak of literary cultdom, Firmin, the first novel by a retiring 67-year-old from South Carolina about the adventures of an erratic, paper-gobbling, self-pitying rodent, has spent the summer knocking Ken Follett and Stephen King from bestseller spots in Spain and Italy.
Such is the rat’s fame in Italy that La Repubblica felt able to begin a recent article with the words: “By now everyone must know Firmino, or have heard of him.”
“It’s been flat out,” admits Savage, with a laugh. He’s a tall, gaunt man with delicate features, a soft, cultured voice and an impressive flyaway beard that recalls, by turns, a hippy sage and a Greek philosopher.
“In Italy they changed the name to Firmino, so it sounded like a Mozart opera… I thought the book would sell in hundreds of copies, perhaps. I was very pleased with it, but I thought, well, this is an odd book, maybe it’ll be a good odd book. But I’m not writing bestsellers. I was thrilled, but it made me worry a little.”
A UK professor proposes and amnesty on phonetic spellings. UK? Excuse me, sir, but we rely on you UK prof types to be charmingly befuddled and outraged monocle-wearing elitists that keep the rest of the world in line by being outliers in the data that makes up the “average English” chart. If you let this battle go, I ax you pacificly: who gonna care for the healfth of our langwage?
THREE words. World. Hell. Handcart. It’s not often I despair of civilisation as we know it (okay, I despair rather more often than is good for my peptic ulcer, but that’s what comes from dedicating the best years of my life to the glorious Fourth Estate). But when a university lecturer proposes an amnesty on students’ 20 most common spelling mistakes, I fear things may have taken a turn for the apocalyptic.“I am fed up with correcting my students’ atrocious spelling,” moans Dr Ken Smith, a senior lecturer in criminology at Buckinghamshire New University. Excuse me, doctor, but isn’t that your job?
…
Errors that would be featured in his proposed amnesty include ‘Febuary’ instead of February, ‘kew’ instead of queue and ‘twelth’ for twelfth – which makes more sense in any case, according to the learned Dr Smith. “How on earth did that ‘f’ get in there?” he says incredulously. “You would not dream of spelling the words ’stealth’ or ‘wealth’ with an ‘f’ (as in ’stealfth’ or ‘wealfth’), so why insist on putting the ‘f’ in twelfth?”Excuse me while I splutter into my English breakfast tea, Dr Smith, but that is because stealth and wealth are not spoken with an ‘f’, whereas twelfth clearly is.
The NYT is reporting on the loosening of the iron secretarial fist of doom that clutches Kafka’s papers like a giant mysterious hand from space clutching the actually-important members of the Justice League so tight that even Superman can’t pry a finger off and Wonder Woman is straining in that cute way that the weaker superhero does when even the stronger one can do nothing and Aquaman is like I’m-fucking-quitting-cause-there’s- never-any-water-near-these-space-fists and nobody’s even thinking of Green Lantern who can do pretty much anything with that ring so long as he’s got the self-confidence of a 1984 New York stock broker hepped up on coke in the bathroom at Studio 54.
As her mother did, Hava Hoffe is keeping scholars and archivists up at night wondering about the condition of what they believe are letters, diaries, photographs and perhaps unpublished works of the two authors, with Kafka one of the best-known authors of the 20th century.
“Brod was an extremely versatile, fertile, even obsessive writer who kept a diary,” noted Nurit Pagi, who is writing her doctoral dissertation on Mr. Brod at the University of Haifa. “What we believe Hoffe must have is the diary he kept from the day he arrived in Tel Aviv in 1939, filled with observations. For researchers, it would be very significant.”
The question preoccupying Israeli scholars is not only whether or when Ms. Hoffe will sell or donate the literary estate to which she and her older sister, Ruth, are heirs, sharing it with the world. It is also whether a way can be found to keep the trove in Israel, which many here consider its rightful home, as the stronghold of Jewish national and historic heritage.
Why do they always forget about Green Lantern until they need a cage or something? They guy is virtually omnipotent. He could have solved this Kafka thing years ago.
It’s a common problem these days. You hear the announcement and you go cold: your favourite book is being adapted for Hollywood. Realistically, it’s not a matter of whether they’ll destroy, but how torturous the destruction will be. It’s no longer your book. It’s the book that inspired the movie.
Elitism? Of course it is. But then, the love of books is surely a minority sport, isn’t it? It takes time, effort and determination to finish a book with the rest of the rubbish that modern life throws at us, so surely we readers should be rewarded with some kind of badge of honour.
You can tell people until you’re blue in the face how good a book is, and the chances are most of your friends won’t even bother to pick it up. But then the film comes out and suddenly everyone’s an expert. The story has been plucked from its secret place where only those willing to go the distance of several hundred pages can find it and thrust into the attention-deficit glare of mainstream culture for quite literally anyone to come along and “love” just as much as you do… for a week, anyway.
I was complaining on the phone to ‘Ninja K this morning that with all the hostility towards arts and culture and the anti-intellectual vote, I often just feel like just removing myself from the conversation. “We’re just rarefied,” she said. “So, are dodos,” I replied.
Adapting (*cough*stealing*cough*) Margaret Atwood’s famous brain surgery joke, Allegra Goodman offers some advice for would-be writers. My advice to these people is as follows: write your hearts out, but don’t feel the need to publish it just because it’s on paper.
WHEN PEOPLE hear that I’m a novelist, I get one comment more than any other. “I’m a physician (or a third-grade teacher, or a venture capitalist) but what I really want to do is write.” A mother of three muses: “I’ve always loved writing since I was a little girl.” A physicist declares, “I’ve got a great idea for a mystery-thriller-philosophical-love story – if I only had the time.” I nod, resisting the temptation to reply: “And I have a great idea for a unified field theory – if I just had a moment to work it out on paper.”
Book sales are down, but creative writing enrollments are booming. The longing to write knows no bounds. A lactation consultant told me, “I have a story inside of me. I mean, I know everybody has a story, but I really have a story.”
Forthwith, some advice for those of you who have always wanted to write, those with best-selling ideas, and those who really have a story.
(Thanks, MS)
Well, the rumours are flying fast and furious, fueled in part, no doubt, by the paranoia that comes from an insane round of culture funding cuts at the federal level. Cannon to the right of us,/ Cannon to the left etc etc. It’s starting to feel like the Bible’s prophesied Siege of Idiots is coming to pass*.
Here’s what we know:
- the Globe says the books section is on a two-week hiatus to allow its two staff holiday time (which sounds reasonable enough, if you’ve ever seen Martin Levin’s hair, you know he needs a holiday)
- rumours have it that this is a testing of the waters by the corporate purse-string knotters (but rumour also has it, among other things, that Tom Cruise is straight)
- the Star has definitely halved its books coverage (but since Marchand left, has there been much of anything to read there anyway?)
It’s just rumour right now with the Globe, but the pattern seems all too familiar, given what’s happening down south. And the Globe is the last book section of significance left in Canada. It’s the cake, icing, and possibly the poisonous candles too. I think of this like I think the global warming/environment issue: if the doomsayers are wrong, it’s a smaller cost to have worked unnecessarily than it is to have not worked at all if they’re right.
So, if you want to take no chances, your best bet is to get involved by writing a preemptive letter to the editors and letting them know you’ll be cancelling your subscription if they pull the section or significantly reduce its current coverage. My letter is copied below.
Dear Editors,
There’s plenty of speculation floating about in the wake of Saturday’s Book Section-less paper that the Globe is testing the waters for a cut to its coverage of books.
I realize that, at this point, most of this is speculation, but I am writing to say that I buy the Globe at a local newsstand every Saturday morning, and will no longer continue to do so if the books coverage is cut in any way.
Further, I run Canada’s largest and most widely-read books news website (bookninja.com, with a Canadian and international readership of several thousand) and regularly link to your stories on the web. If you cut the books section, I will never link to another Globe story again.
Please show your readers that you value this section by reassuring us that you have no plans to cut this section or change it in any way that reduces the breadth of its coverage.
Sincerely,
George Murray
Editor, Bookninja.com
[UPDATE:] There’s also a Facebook group, which seems a little early in the case of the Globe and a little late in the case of the Star, but you like joining things, don’t you?
[UPDATE #2:] It seems like letter-writers are receiving versions of this reply, which I copy below:
Dear Mr. Murray, Ed Greenspon has asked me to reply to you. This is only a two-week pause before the fall season. There is no plan or intention whatsoever to discontinue the Books section. yours truly, Gerald Owen reader response editor
*By “Bible” what I actually mean is “George’s moleskine”.
No one seems to be able to let this story die. Man has wicked porn stash. Literary world shocked, appalled and rewriting own wills to include more explicit instructions.
Beloved writers often get reclaimed for a new readership. Oscar Wilde, best known for being a wit in his own time, would become a gay icon in ours. Long after his death, the Romantic poet Lord Byron would receive the diagnosis of manic-depression. Rudyard Kipling would be embraced during the British Empire and then criticized as imperialist and sometimes racist as the Empire collapsed. Ernest Hemingway, a beloved, swashbuckling figure in his day, would later fall out of favor for a time as a chauvinist.
Now it’s Kafka’s turn. In a new book, “Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life” (St. Martin’s Press), James Hawes, a British lecturer and satirical novelist, considers the man behind the literary myth. According to Mr. Hawes, the myth is all penniless failure and tubercular despair, struggle and saintliness. The man is more dashing. He held a high-paying job, visited brothels and enjoyed some popularity, romantic liaisons and literary admirers in his lifetime.
Oh, yes, and smut.
Similar to the “Oprah” argument, but held over tea and in British accents, which makes everything seem so much more civilized and intelligent.
‘[The Richard and Judy book club] is a wasted opportunity … They have a massive captive audience of people who aren’t completely undiscerning; they aren’t stupid. Why are they treating them as if they are stupid? There is an opportunity to use that connection to turn a generation on to good writing.’
He said that this had worked in America. ‘We know it isn’t impossible because Oprah Winfrey did it in America. I know she introduced a lot of cack, but along the way she had them reading Tolstoy and Jonathan Franzen – who wasn’t happy to be read but that was inverted snobbery. You can’t wave a wand over the audience for Richard and Judy and say: “You should be reading Kafka”. It is a lifestyle show, but these books oversell a reduced, unimaginative notion of what people’s literary enjoyment might be. If they were to up it just a little bit, that might be good news.’
The debate, which included Booker Prize-winner Anne Enright, and Nicholas Spice, publisher of the London Review of Books, condemned what Spice called ‘a kind of low-grade literary rapping that goes on a great deal in the contemporary novel’. O’Hagan, author of The Missing and The Atlantic Ocean, was the most outspoken on the ‘fripperies’ of bad modern novels.
Anne Enright on naming characters. Maybe that’s why we see so many retellings of historical stories around here: so people don’t have to think up their own names.
Naming is nice. It took me days before I was able to speak a name for my first child (what if people did not like it?), and I suspect we gave her a secret, second name as well, to keep her safe. Of course, we did no such thing. We just put a word on this new human creature and used it freely and easily, the way you do. We told it to the government. We bandied it about. By the time the second child was named, we had steeled ourselves into a state of insouciance.
Naming characters is much less fraught – you know a lot more about your characters than you do about your babies, for a start. I use a dictionary of names that I bought many years ago, trying not to look pregnant at the till. I also have a dictionary of Irish surnames, to check the provenance and the meaning of a particular family name. I use the phone book, and I ask people, all the time, where their name comes from, which in some societies, particularly multicultural ones, is considered rude. I hope I am not rude, but I do want to know their story – surnames can tell you about wealth or class, but more usually they speak of movements and migrations, both ancient and modern.
Rachel Donadio starts in at the NYT about a new company that lets authors, mostly self-published, buy and sell blurbs (classy!) and then moves on to a short history of the jacket copy bj. The blurb is literature’s syphilis—-hollow in the bones and passed around between whores. (No, I don’t really believe that. (Yes, I do. (No, I don’t, really. (Yes… (No. (Uh-huh! (Nuh-uh. (mm-hmm. (mm-mm.))))))))
A new company recently emerged on the publishing scene, offering writers the chance to buy and sell book endorsements. Aimed at self-published authors, Blurbings LLC traffics in “blurbs,” the often hyperbolic declamations on book covers alerting readers that they’re holding the greatest single work of literature since the Bible — or perhaps since “The Da Vinci Code.”
At least one writer was so affronted by the idea of blurbs for cash that he complained to the Authors Guild. But the more jaundiced might say that asking one unknown writer to endorse another unknown writer hardly helps to make one of those writers known. Besides, some might argue, what the company appears to have done is simply put a price — starting at $19.95 for 10 blurbs — on the logrolling and back-scratching that have long marked the process by which mainstream publishers or agents ask authors to blurb a book.
(I’ll do my damndest to not type the title here because I just can’t bear to see the search strings in my analytics data that bring random traffic here. You should see of the horrific shit people are searching for on Google and somehow managing to end up here. Sorry to disappoint, perverts.)
Anyway, CBC appreciates Nabokov on the 50th of his disturbing little tale.
Nabokov (1899–1977), a Russian émigré, finished the novel in 1953, while living in Ashland, Ore. Five U.S. publishers initially rejected his manuscript, reportedly for fear of prosecution on obscenity charges. Former Random House editor-in-chief Hiram Haydn, who had a young daughter of his own, objected on moral grounds. “That loathsome novel will be published over my dead body!” he declared. It wasn’t until 1955 that Nabokov found a willing publisher in France’s Olympia Press. Exquisite literature was leagues beyond Olympia’s purview — it was best known for pulpy porno tracts. (That likely explains why the book’s original 5,000-copy run was littered with typos and absent Nabokov’s final corrections.)
It wasn’t until Aug. 18, 1958 that Nabokov’s jewel had its North American debut, thanks to G.P. Putnam’s Sons. U.S. consumer response was instant: [it] became the first book since Gone with the Wind (1936) to reach 100,000 domestic sales within three weeks of publication. Here in Canada, however, customs officials had already placed the Olympia edition on a secret list of books banned from importation. Almost immediately, they seized a shipment of the Putnam’s edition at the border. The order was overturned later that fall; by the year’s end, [it] was a Canadian bestseller.
A couple readers have written with various levels of dismay noting there was no Books section in today’s Globe and Mail. The website doesn’t seem to have new content, but I haven’t checked the paper. Does anyone have information on this?
In the latest Bookninja Magazine “podcast”, we bring together two great fiction writers to about this Andrew Pyper fellow. One of these two authors also happens to be named Andrew Pyper, the man at the helm of The Killing Circle, out this past week from Doubleday.
Does he feel like a great Canadian literary success story? Why don’t his books win literary awards? Are we constipated toward categories of fiction? What does he think of sending up the literary scene? What’s the point of reading books? Why should anyone read stories that are made up? Are there similarities between Pyper and The Killing Circle’s main character? How does this book straddles the line between genre and literary fiction? And, perhaps most importantly, how has Pyper has squandered his huge advances?
A gregarious and generous interview from one of Canada’s nice-guy authors.
I know, I know. We WEREN’T speaking of slimy agents, were we? We were speaking of love, AnneDeanDeniseHillaryDonBruce. Love. But I digress. This agent was called slimy, sued Wikipedia and has lost. (From Maud)
In a victory for free speech and user-generated content, a New Jersey judge has dismissed baseless defamation claims against the operator of Wikipedia. In a recent ruling, the judge correctly found that federal law immunizes the Wikimedia Foundation from liability for statements made by its users.
This case began when literary agent Barbara Bauer sued Wikimedia, claiming the organization was liable for statements identifying her as one of the “dumbest of the twenty worst” agents and that she had “no documented sales at all.” EFF and the law firm of Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton represented Wikimedia, and moved to dismiss the case in May, arguing that under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, operators of “interactive computer services” such as Wikipedia cannot be held liable for users’ comments.
Agents are apparently as painful to deal with as sweat from The Devil’s nutsack—-and perhaps just as useless. Dude, I could have told you that. No, seriously, I love you folk (*cough*novelcoming*cough*). Seriously. Look into my eyes: You complete me.
Several agents seemed interested but said that my writing needed smoothing out, and suggested I take a writing-based MA. Two agents gave me excellent references to help me onto the course, proving that not all agents are unhelpful to aspiring authors.
All writing courses really teach you is how to edit your work, which was what I’d sorely needed all along. When I sent my newly polished tome to independent publishers Legend Press they snapped it up.
I’d imagined walking into Waterstone’s or Borders and seeing my novel on the shelves would be the end, but it’s just the beginning. Being published isn’t enough: I need people to read my book, and time and money to write full time.
The first three agents I contacted (PFD, Curtis Brown and United Agents) told me to send in three chapters, a synopsis and SAE. I was slightly taken aback – I thought having a novel out might at least hoist me to the top of the slush pile. Other agents since have been similarly unimpressed by my track record. I’m therefore in the weird position of having a well-received novel on the shelves, yet am unable to find an agent who would be willing to represent me, either for this book or my future projects, of which there are several in the pipeline.
Sir Salman has thrown down the gauntlet: stop cowering, Random. If he can spend the last couple decades ducking sniper bullets, then you can stand to sift through the hate mail and evacuate the building a few times a year for bomb threats.
Salman Rushdie strongly criticized his publisher Thursday for pulling another author’s historical novel about the prophet Muhammad and his child bride over concerns about angering Muslims.
Rushdie, whose book The Satanic Verses led to a death decree in 1989 from Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and forced the author for years to live under police protection, said the Random House Publishing Group had allowed itself to be intimidated.
“I am very disappointed to hear that my publishers, Random House, have cancelled another author’s novel, apparently because of their concerns about possible Islamic reprisals,” Rushdie said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.
“This is censorship by fear, and it sets a very bad precedent indeed.”
German Kafka scholars are saying Franz’s porn collection wasn’t porn so much as high erotic art and are accusing a British author of sensationalistic lying in service of sales. I probably could have shortened that last to “marketing”.
James Hawes, a Kafka expert and novelist, claims in his book Excavating Kafka, published in Britain yesterday, that the writer was a subscriber to upmarket pornography. Furious German academics reacted by accusing Hawes of prudishness, sensationalism and even antisemitism.
“Hawes has given us a look through the keyhole of a Kafka with his trousers down … but to call the illustrated magazines he subscribed to as hardcore porn, is like comparing a poem by Heinrich Heine with an advertising slogan for McDonald’s,” wrote Anjana Shrivastava, a Kafka researcher on Spiegel Online, calling Hawes a “prude”. She said he had made himself a “preacher of hate” in the world of Kafka scholars.
Of course, you have to then ask what the Germans DO define as hardcore porn. And you probably don’t want to know the answer. Nicholas Lezard shares his own opinion.
Every year I think I’m going to hate this, but I always end up chuckling a little. The funny thing is how close the winner always is to something you might actually find in a published book.
The winning entry came from Garrison Spik, a 41-year-old communications director and writer.
“Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped ‘Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.”‘
The annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is named after Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, who began his most famous novel “It was a dark and stormy night.”
It awards a grand prize of $250 for the worst opening sentence to an imaginary novel.
At the Telegraph blog, Peter Robins, who looks eerily like my editor, asks whether authors should get a share of sales from the secondhand book trade. A subject sure to light a few sparks, for sure.
Two recent articles brought the subject back to mind for me: they demonstrate both why the issues that concern DeWitt are becoming more urgent, and why her case seems unlikely to be taken up at more than a piecemeal voluntary level.
The first article was a piece of news from The Bookseller: Amazon, subject to regulatory approval, is buying AbeBooks. Abe is the dominant player in secondhand books on the internet; a network of more than 12,000 shops sell through its site. If their offerings were integrated with Amazon’s – as those from the rather similar Amazon Marketplace service are at present – then secondhand books would compete with new, royalty-paying ones on an unprecedented scale.
Imagine playing “Dictionary” with a guy who had not only read the entire OED, but had written a book about it. That would be like me trying to skate past Bobby Orr in his prime (though I’m pretty sure I could take him now—-and by that I mean he’d kick my fat Irish ass).
As the game went on, certain patterns developed. Botanical and zoological terms were big among the fake definitions, possibly because we assumed (safely) that our opponents wouldn’t know the actual words for those things. We also invoked the color yellow a lot — “wem” isn’t really a yellow pea; “tilleul” isn’t really a greenish yellow, paler than primrose green — maybe because we were staring at Post-its while we waited for inspiration to strike. The clearest pattern, though, involved the former lexicographer. She was beating our socks off. Her time writing real definitions for a living gave her a clear advantage writing fake definitions; she just sounded more like a dictionary than the rest of us did. For “Buhid” (actual definition: “a predominantly pagan people inhabiting sothern Mindoro, Philippines”), the lexicographer wrote, “Any of a genus (Chitinae) of hard-shelled insects having segmented bodies and rudimentary wings.” We didn’t stand a chance.
But we had to play until someone reached 20. Pizza arrived, and french fries, and alcohol. Shea drank cup after cup of coffee. We confabbed and we yakked. One of my Times colleagues left, replaced by another, and the lexicographer rolled on and on. “I could still blow it after this propitious start,” she said gamely. My colleague across the table leaned toward me and whispered: “She just said ‘propitious.’” I nodded. “We’re doomed.” Shea went to the men’s room and returned with a definition stuck to his shoe. I asked him how an avid dictionary reader comes to date a former lexicographer, and he told me he’d been hired to move her furniture. While he was in her apartment, her little dog kept barking until the lexicographer said, “Hush, Pumpernickel!” Shea couldn’t contain himself: “Do you know the etymology of ‘pumpernickel’?” he asked. “As a matter of fact, I do,” she replied. (The German is, roughly: flatulent goblin.)
Before the book’s even written, every Little Jack Horner involved is digging around for film/tie-in revenue. Thumbs are stuck in everywhere. Um. Ew. Someone’s going to pull out a plum. Assuming, of course, we’re talking about a pie.
Simon & Schuster plans to test-drive the new deal with a middle-grade book series by the filmmaker David O. Russell, scheduled for publication in the fall of 2009.
“It’s about having more control in the process,” said Rick Richter, president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing. “Typically publishers tend to stick their heads in the sand after the book hits Hollywood.”
In exchange for a percentage of the revenues, Simon & Schuster may agree to publish a book long before it is written, based on an assurance from the Gotham Group that it has Hollywood potential.
Simon & Schuster will also receive money when its children’s books are turned into video games, comic books or other properties.
“Traditionally, the big incentive for them is hoping to sell books,” said Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, president and chief executive of the Gotham Group, which has an exclusive partnership with Simon & Schuster. “Now they’re going into this, and there is already planted the notion of film and television and some other form of media. And the two go hand in hand.”
Publishers and Hollywood producers refer to the arrangement as an “end-in-mind relationship,” where decisions on what is made into a book or pitched as a movie are made long before a book or a script is written.
Is the second sentence of a book more important than the first? (Thanks, DJ)
I don’t really have a favourite first line (perhaps I should have admitted this a couple of weeks ago). But I do have two favourite second lines. And the second sentence, I’d argue, is the better gauge of a book.
First sentences are a place to make your bid for the dictionaries of quotations, to let off verbal fireworks; they are the opening ceremonies of the literary Olympics. As always with opening ceremonies, there’s a temptation towards the overblown.
Reading and movies: equally exciting. Except when… you know… THAT guy wrote it.
Watching Keanu Reeves walk along the ledge of a skyscraper and lose his footing in The Matrix can make us skip a heartbeat or sweat, as if we were risking our own life. This sharing of other people’s emotions in movies has been shown to depend on the fact that observers the same brain regions are activated in the observers when they feel an emotion and when they see someone else experience a similar emotion.
We all know, however, that reading a book describing the same scene can be similarly gripping. This week, in a paper published in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE, Mbemba Jabbi, Jojanneke Bastiaansen and Christian Keysers show us why.
Visiting Pompeii was a transformative experience for me in many ways. I’ve often wondered what’s left to be discovered there. You can actually see the wall of unexcavated ground. Maybe some lost classics will emerge from this fascinating (and grisly) site? Chant with me now! Soph-o-cles! Soph-o-cles!
If a significant number of lost classics are found at the Villa of the Papyri it would enlarge the cultural and intellectual tradition, and might even alter its course. Should scholars find the famous lost second book of Aristotle’s Poetics, the narrative spring of Umberto Eco’s best-selling medieval mystery, The Name of the Rose, the discovery might shift the ground of Western aesthetics. Of Sophocles’ 120 plays, only seven are known, and of these the Oedipus trilogy has embossed itself eternally on the Western imagination. The Kypria, a martial epic believed to have been Homer’s source material, disappeared some time in antiquity.
All gone. Or perhaps only lost from view.
In a decision that could affect copyright(s) and how they’re handed down to family, a US appeals court says the Steinbeck family can’t end their contract with Penguin.
The appeals court decision overturns a 2006 ruling by U.S. District Judge Richard Owen in New York that had granted the rights to several classic books by the author to Steinbeck’s son, Thomas Steinbeck, and granddaughter, Blake Smyle.
Owen had found that heirs could terminate contracts under copyright laws to allow artists or their descendants “appropriate reward for the artistic gifts to our culture.”
While the family members had sought to end a 1938 agreement with the publisher by serving a notice of termination in 2004, that notice was not valid, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said on Wednesday.
It said Steinbeck’s third wife, Elaine Steinbeck, had entered a new publishing agreement in 1994 whose terms should stand. When she died in 2003, she left her copyright interests to her children and grandchildren from a previous marriage, excluding Steinbeck’s two sons and their heirs.
“We conclude that the 2004 notice of termination is ineffective,” a three-judge panel of the court wrote. “The 1994 agreement remains in effect.”
Oprah’s reading list for kids. You’ve let her think for you for years. Isn’t time your kids had the same advantage?
Funny, we’ve read everything on the classics list and nothing on the new releases. I guess I just have an old fashioned five-year-old. (I have to say, Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus was fun and sweet, and hot dog one was fun too, but don’t you think the franchise is getting a little stale Mo? Robot Dreams looks intriguing, though, and I know the Sir Lancelot will go over like a cloud of blue smoke at a Grateful Dead concert.)
Bookninja officially turns five today. On August 13, 2003 we had our first public posts (covering Greg Gatenby being ousted from Harbourfront, NY poet Dan Nester, a fight between some asstards and the literati, and, yes, of course, Oprah) and everything was manually set in html. I shudder. We sent the link out to about 20 people or so, and now there are thousands and thousands of you, all here by word of mouth or fortunate stumble. So thanks for that. Thanks to those who’ve been here since the beginning, and thanks to those who’ve joined along the way, and thanks to those who’ve just arrived. Thanks also to our advertisers who’ve helped us along the way, large and small. Large houses like Random, S&S, Penguin, HarperCollins, and M&S are joined by cool kids in small press world like Coach House, ECW, Biblioasis, W&W, and Signal. I didn’t put Anansi in there because when we started, they were still considered a small house, but I think you’d be hard pressed (oh, yes, I went there) these days to call them small. Nice to have been around long enough to see things progress. And thanks most of all to my fellow ‘Ninja Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer for stepping up to the task of managing the ever-more-awesome Magazine.
I guess this links back to yesterday’s piece about being a reading addict. How to stretch your dollar when it comes to reading. My secret is called “shoplifting”.
In his excellent 1946 essay, Books vs Cigarettes, George Orwell devised a rough calculation of how much his reading habit cost per year, concluding that he was forking out around £25 annually on reading material (according to my trusty inflation calculator, this works out at about £750 in today’s money).
“Twenty-five pounds a year sounds quite a lot,” concedes Orwell, “until you begin to measure it against other kinds of expenditure.” Namely, as he goes on to explain, fags. And what of Orwell’s conclusion? “Reading is one of the cheaper recreations,” he tells us. “After listening to the radio, probably THE cheapest.”
It would appear, however, that times have changed.
A 93-year-old first time novelist has hit the big time and used her winnings get her friends out of the old age home. I shed a tear. No really, this is cracking my stony facade. She had me at the word “raunchy”.
A raunchy novel with a dauntless heroine has transformed the lives of a 93-year-old author and three of her friends who were living in nursing homes.
Pushed by her daughter-in-law, who found the manuscript and couldn’t put it down, Lorna Page has become one of the oldest debut writers on record, with equally unusual social results.
Suddenly prosperous on the advance and sales of A Dangerous Weakness, a feminist thriller set in the Alps, Page has traded her one-bedroom flat in Surrey for a big, detached country house, and invited contemporaries to move in.
The NYT has a graphic piece on the author/designer collaboration, profiling three famous examples of Roth, Palahniuk, and Murakami and their allied tradespeople.
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