Poet who feels women are under-represented in mainstream anthologies compiles one herself.

The poets who rose to prominence in that era were also uncompromising, and fiercely feminine. Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich were warriors, precursors of a flood of new talent that would confidently arise in the latter half of the 20th century. I was lucky to begin my university studies when these strong women writers were making their mark on the new canon of the period. I was also lucky enough to witness the arrival of the next generation of poets, including Sharon Olds, Molly Peacock, Jorie Graham, Louise Glück and Carol Ann Duffy. Now, I find that after nearly 20 years in poetry publishing, there are dozens more names on this list of women poets of note.

But I have also noticed something peculiar. The great flowering of talent that I could see from my reading was not reflected in the mainstream anthologies of poetry being produced.

I had long harboured a dream of compiling an anthology of these women writers, but had been deflected by the resistance that I felt from at least two prominent women writers in Wales, Sheenagh Pugh and Ruth Bidgood, both of whom had turned down similar projects. I knew also that the estate of one of the finest women poets of the 20th century, Elizabeth Bishop, turned down requests for her poems to be reprinted in such books. Bishop took the line, a line that seemed to be echoed by some later poets, that to be in a women-only anthology is a kind of ghettoisation of women’s work rather than helping to establish a more inclusive canon.

An NYT report claims publishing has a split personality during the economic depression, while the Observer illustrates real-world outcomes of hard times: the brown bag lunch for execs.

Though many agents say they’re still being wined and dined several times a week, a number of the publishers who are paying for it agree that it should no longer be part of an editor’s job description to regularly eat in fancy restaurants on the company tab. Forget those two martinis, we’re talking about food—as in, no more of it.

“All over town, people are saying, ‘Cut back,’ and that’s certainly what we’re saying,” said HarperCollins publisher Jonathan Burnham, who stunned agents last spring when he asked his staff in a memo to eliminate their lunch expenses for the entire month of March. “I think it’s mutual—I think agents expect to be taken out less. It’s not like they’re calling and no one’s returning their calls. It’s just that the idea of sitting down for a lunch that costs $130 for two, or even $80 for two, seems beside the point.”

At Collins, Harper’s sister division at 10 East 53rd Street, editors have been asked to scale back on their expenses, and at Random House, several sources confirmed, some supervisors were recently given guidelines indicating how much employees should tip and which restaurants near the company’s midtown headquarters are thrifty enough to do business in. While the guidelines were advisory, the message was clear.

“I think some lunching might still be going on, but I think one does that at one’s own peril,” said a senior editor who works at one of Random House’s varsity league imprints. “I think it’s generally understood that it is not the smartest way to show your individuality.”

Juan Marsé wins the Cervantes Prize

NYT offers a holiday gift guide for books from its prominent critics Maslin and Kakutani

Freedom prizes go to Burmese comedian and Zimbabwean playwright

Yasar Kemal, the great Turkish writer, profiled at the Guardian

“Man With Apple Hovering In Front Of Face Sues René Magritte’s Estate”

WaPo has a worst endings contest to counter the Bulwer-Lytton worst beginnings (item begins under heading “Report from Week 788″)

Here’s hoping your boss isn’t a cheap bastard and making you work today. But if so, you should goof off on her/his dime and enjoy this piece of footage which has been making the rounds for some time now. And it’s perfectly illustrative of the kind of thing you should be giving thanks for…. When I showed this to my pal last weekend, he laughed so hard he nearly peed. My favourite part is when someone off camera obviously tells the disbelieving yokel in the background, “I don’t care about the camera, get back to work.” The look on his face is priceless. Is she really going to do this? I also love how the cameraman framed the shot, probably thinking, EMMY, BABY!

Eeeeeeeeinteresting…. States with the lowest literacy rates have the highest search numbers for MySpace. Proof of correlation between the two? Skank-assed web design and the stupid stick go hand in hand, I guess.

Internet users in states with high illiteracy rates are more likely to search for MySpace, according to a site called StateStats. Plug a search term into StateStats and it shows how common that search term is in each state relative to the other 49. StateStats colors the states where a search term is common red — uncommon, blue.

A British report has found that the practice of deeply discounting books is bad business. Hm. This sounds like that essay I wrote in college where I proved you need to keep the majority of your blood inside your body to live. But I don’t remember getting funding to carry out my research.

In the week of the big tax giveaway, a new report about the state of British bookshops suggests that booksellers such as Waterstone’s, Amazon.co.uk and W H Smith have been giving too much away for too long by offering bestselling books with massive discounts.

The report, commissioned by The Booksellers Association, found that UK booksellers have been making less money, seeing less market growth, and sacrificing more in discounts than booksellers in countries such as the US, Ireland, Finland, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

In bald terms it means that selling a £20 title – in the shape of Guinness World Records – for £10 has been bad business. This may seem obvious: “I wonder if the BA would look at what bears do in woods,” was one of the comments that greeted the release of the report.

Just in time for Giftmas, the NYT has released it’s 100 Notable Books list (and Notable Children’s Books list), most of which link to reviews on the site.

First time poet Dodds, and to some extent his publisher Coach House, profiled in the National Post. Guys, slap me in the face here. Am I starting to LIKE the Post? The book coverage there is actually getting exciting… What’s next, a section?

“It seems to me like there’s some sort of interpretation that occurs in reverse order,” he says. “These poems are being built up of all this junk, really. Junk from the language.”

He describes the writing process as one of pulling stuff apart only to put it back together. He has written hundreds of poems, most of which did not survive, though remnants of these old works can be found in the collection. “I was always taking stuff from other poems that I’d done earlier,” he says, in essence cannibalizing his own work.

In Coach House Books, Dodds may have found the perfect home for a young poet; he’s well aware of “the mythology” of the press, whose attic library includes tomes by the likes of Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood. He says “secretly I was doing backflips” when Coach House founder Stan Bevington asked him to submit a manuscript.

Blue Met honours AS Byatt

There has never been a cooler shirt that didn’t have the Bookninja logo on it: Optima Prime

CBC News guy to become Toronto Star publisher

“World’s most expensive book” arrives in New York, becomes addicted to crack and spends itself into a gutter at 145th and St. Nicholas

Some examples of bad sex (I’ll go no further here)

Pubs increasing e-book production

Life on the hitlist — Rushdie and Saviano talk about what it’s like to live in fear

Surely the first title stocked in Wubblewoo’s presidential library, besides the extensive collection of flattened Smarties boxes on which defence briefing notes were taken, will be Laura Bush’s upcoming memoir… Insert cliche followed by colon followed by explanation of cliche here. Please let me be the first to say: Ooh! Ooh! Title Contest!!!!! Here’s mine:

“The Great Pretender: Faking Your Way Through Love, Happiness, and Literacy”

or maybe:

“Executive Orders: A Book of Sandwiches for Our Commander in Chief”

or maybe:

“Xanaxdu: Running the Empire on Coke and a Smile”

The George Wubble Bush Memorial Library and “Freedom Institute”, Dallas, Texas (let the easy wisecracks begin!)

Border’s on the border?

In UK, the public will help pick the next poet laureate (Dylan Moran! Dylan Moran!!!)

Louis Riel’s poems fetch tidy sum

Canada Reads announces jurors and titles

You can’t kill narrative. So don’t even try, hear? Even if you burn all the paper and stop up with sweat socks the mouths of those sunken-eyed, pony-tailed people who hang out at story-telling festivals, the story, as a force, will stick around. On Twitter and in Grand Theft Auto?

As an adult, settling deep into a popcorn-scented cinema seat as the house lights go down. In old age, becalmed, combing your memories. Telling stories is as old a game as language itself.

So it’s odd – not to say alarming – to read reports that some people seem to think we’re on the verge of running out of narrative. A group of academics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in cahoots with some Hollywood moguls, have announced the opening of a “Center for Future Storytelling”.

“The idea as we move forward with 21st-century storytelling is to try to keep meaning alive,” explains its founder David Kirkpatrick. Baffling.

In the UK a bunch of authors, lead by Philip Pullman, who’s becoming the Greenpeace of literary causes, are trying to convince a school to keep its library rather than rebranding itself as a “virtual learning environment“. Wlawck. Excuse me. Gulp. I’m sorry. I just threw up in my mouth. Listen, unless there’s a sentient, smart-alec hologram replacement for the librarian, I’m afraid I have to agree.

Philip Pullman, the bestselling author, has warned a school that it will become a ‘byword for philistinism and ignorance’ if it goes ahead with the closure of its library.

The comprehensive in Chesterfield has become the focus of an authors’ campaign since it announced that its librarian will be surplus to requirements after Christmas, when the school is to become a ‘virtual learning environment’. Pupils will be encouraged to read at break times and at after-school clubs, but its traditional library will go.

‘The idea that fiction is not worth looking after properly and does not need a qualified librarian runs contrary to every experience I have ever had,’ Pullman wrote in a letter to Lynn Asquith, headteacher of the 759-pupil Meadows Community School. ‘Are you going to relegate the whole activity of reading fiction to the status of a trivial and innocuous activity, like stamp collecting or playing with a Frisbee?’

‘A library with a dedicated and professional staff should be at the very heart of any institution dedicated to learning,’ he continued. ‘I am deeply dismayed to hear of the decision, which cannot be in the best interests of the students. Nothing can replace a proper library, with its resources centrally available and with the expertise of a qualified librarian to guide the students in the best and most productive ways of research.’

The Guardian has a new bit where writers reveal their fantasy careers. Ian Rankin is up first: rock star.

Like most crime novelists of my acquaintance, I would rather have been a rock star than a writer. Some of my earliest jottings were lyrics for a band. I was 12 years old and the band was called the Amoebas. They only ever existed on paper and inside my head. I was the lead singer – Ian Kaput. This was in 1972 and they resembled Slade, T-Rex and the Sweet.

I’m not sure what to make of this. When a very well established poet told me after 9/11 that my generation’s writing would change to an earnest embrace of the possible instead of the irony and cynicism that was going on (at least in the US among a certain set), I said, “Cool, I guess.”* Apparently this prediction of irony’s death happens every few years.

“Something bad happens, like 9/11, it’s the death of irony,” Mr. Whitehead said in an e-mail message on Thursday. “Something good happens, like Obama’s win, it’s the death of irony. When will someone proclaim the death of iceberg lettuce? I’m sick of it making my salads boring.”

To be sure, President-elect, you’re no 9/11. Back then, irony seemed, for a time, impossible. Nowadays, Ms. Didion said in her talk, which will be published Monday in The New York Review of Books, it is simply “not the preferred way” of viewing events.

* I didn’t really say that. I just nodded, checked my fresh water and gas mask supplies, and re-reviewed my on-foot upper-Manhattan escape route options.

Cory Doctorow on the power of science fiction as a force for good in the world and how the low cost of failing on the internet allows writers to do crazy shit that just might work.

“The job of a science fiction writer, historically, has been to understand how technology and social factors interact,” he says, “how technology is changing society. An activist’s job is to try to direct that change.”

This time his message is aimed at the teenage readers who wear the kind of skater jeans and T-shirt combination Doctorow is sporting today. “If you don’t read the Anarchist’s Cookbook when you are 16 you have no soul,” he says. “If you are still reading it when you are 36 you have no brain.” (He himself is 37, but if he’s abandoned anarchism, he’s clearly not settling into a conservative middle age.)

“My hope is that Little Brother is a verb and not a noun, that it’s a thing you do, not just a book you read,” he continues. “That’s where thinking about the future and influencing the future converge.”

Hunt for next British poet laureate begins (Begins? What have all these articles for the last six months been about, then?)

Sports book award

Academic cuts out pages from priceless texts in British library

Speaking of literary criminals: audio book counterfieter caught and convicted (Dear Asstard, grab the brass ring next time, if you’re going to jail anyway, and go for video games…)

The Secret Life of Words (non-fiction), takes John Llewellyn Rhys prize

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt tells its editors to stop acquiring books… bong… bong… ask not for whom….

Deathlit may be on the rise, but on YouTube, you never die (some great videos here)

First new translation of Arabian Nights in 120 years

Rock band names that come from literature (pretty comprehensive… can you see any that were missed?) (Thanks, Dan)

Catch up on your reading here and here about the outcry over the a questionable awarding of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry (by a jury that was obviously, at least partially, in a conflict-of-interest situation) before you read this synopsis piece in the Toronto Star in which the Canada Council defends the jury process and this jury in particular.

This has sparked an outcry among some in the poetry community. Eyebrows were raised almost immediately after the $25,000 award was announced last week, with naysayers venting their objections on the literary website Bookninja.com

“We followed guidelines and process to the letter,” Melanie Rutledge, the Canada Council’s head of writing and publishing, said yesterday. “We feel that it was a consensual decision reached by all three of the jury members. We stand behind the process. We stand behind the professionalism of the committee.

“At the same time, if some in the poetry community believe that we should not have been satisfied with the committee’s ability to be 100 per cent objective, then we must graciously and responsibly accept this feedback and continue to try to do the best we can.”

The Canada Council guidelines stipulate that a conflict “may” exist “if the assessor has made a direct, intellectual contribution to one of the books” or “if the assessor’s name is listed in the acknowledgement section.”

As the word “may” suggests, it’s a discretionary call.

I have no doubt the process was followed to the letter of the law. But what this illustrates is that the letter of the law needs to be changed because its obvious that leaving it a “discretionary call” isn’t working.

Yeah, but what happens when, like me, you need therapy to deal with the poetry?

There are a few basic, accepted methods of poetry therapy. In one group method, the therapist selects a poem that highlights a problem that the patient group is dealing with, and that might help open a dialogue on the subject. Reading Emily Dickinson, for example, might help patients realize that loneliness isn’t unique. Reading Roethke’s “The Waking” might serve to focus a discussion on taking life one step at a time. Of course, this has to be carefully managed: poems mean different things to different people, and a poem that uplifts one patient might depress another.

A second method of therapy calls on patients to write their own poems. Longo holds poetry workshops for patients which are structured a lot like workshops in academia. When a patient’s poem comes up for discussion, a couple of people read it to let the rhythms and the music sink in, then the group silently considers it until someone offers up a question or opinion. Of course, in poetry therapy, poems aren’t looked at for their value as art, but as a window into the psychology of the poet and, by extension, as a means of healing. According to Longo, there are two major facets to such healing: defining the self, and helping to make connections between the self and others.

If you’ve ever written a poem, you know that the act of writing a poem can certainly achieve that first facet. Every poem I’ve written has given me at least some sense of defining myself. For a patient with mental illness, this act can take on particular importance. Longo once asked a patient how it felt to hold a published copy of a poem he’d written. The man simply replied, “I feel like I am somebody, finally.”

And then, once you start sending the others out, you feel like nobody again.

Profiled on her seemingly limitless ability to writewritewrite.

There’s no denying a collective fascination with prolific artists. Just how did Mozart produce so many symphonies in his 34 years? How did Picasso produce thousands of works in so many media, given his tumultuous love life – even if he did live to 91? The questions really have no simple answer, and so the mystery endures.

Among major contemporary writers, Joyce Carol Oates, now 70, yields a similar reaction. Since 1964, when her first novel debuted, she has published 54. Then there are the 31 collections of short stories, as well as the volumes of essays, plays and poetry. By the most conservative estimate, that’s two-plus books a year.

Just how does she do it? To Oates, her level of production isn’t all that mysterious.

“Truth is beauty, beauty truth, sir!”
“But the truth can be harsh and disturbing! How can that be considered beautiful?”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we poets are less unacknowledged legislators and more idiot savant mathematicians of instinct and luck.

Rolf Reber, together with mathematician Morten Brun and psychologist Karoline Mitterndorfer, all from the University of Bergen, Norway, have reported first empirical evidence for the use of beauty as truth and they have provided an explanation for this phenomenon, based on the processing fluency theory of beauty.

Mathematicians and scientists reportedly used beauty as a cue for truth in mathematical judgment. French mathematician Jacques Hadamard, for example, wrote in 1954 in his famous book, “The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field,” that a sense of beauty seems to be almost the only useful “drive” for discovery in mathematics. However, evidence has been anecdotal, and the nature of the beauty-truth relationship remained a mystery.

In 2004, Rolf Reber (University of Bergen), Norbert Schwarz (University of Michigan), and Piotr Winkielman (University of California at San Diego) suggested – based on evidence they reviewed – that the common experience underlying both perceived beauty and judged truth is processing fluency, which is the experienced ease with which mental content is processed. Indeed, stimuli processed with greater ease elicit more positive affect and statements that participants can read more easily are more likely to be judged as being true.

I have no fucking idea what that means, but I sure know when to end a line. (Of course, I don’t surf science sites for poetry references, but it seems like a bit of an oversight on the part of the article author to not use a Keats hook for the piece, doesn’t it?)

Is it more important for your kids to be literate in text or film/media? The future (the present?) is one where anyone can make moving images that engage culture and mass audiences, and the level of professionalism necessary to reach the world with art or media is changing forever. Ouch. This one is going to hurt, people.

When technology shifts, it bends the culture. Once, long ago, culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation and rhetoric instilled in societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate and the subjective. Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology. Gutenberg’s invention of metallic movable type elevated writing into a central position in the culture. By the means of cheap and perfect copies, text became the engine of change and the foundation of stability. From printing came journalism, science and the mathematics of libraries and law. The distribution-and-display device that we call printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a sentence), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact) and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book. In the West, we became people of the book.

Now invention is again overthrowing the dominant media. A new distribution-and-display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the center of the culture. We are becoming people of the screen. The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority. On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link. We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality.

Apparently death is a (ironically?) “hot” topic among writers these days. These days? Um….? Since when has death been on the outs with our perpetually moribund set?

Judging from what’s being published these days, writers have been tackling that disappointing last act a lot lately — analyzing, deconstructing, fiddling with the lighting — even when they know it’s futile to try to change the ending. The result is a groaning shelf of books about aging, illness, dying, grief and ruminations on what it all means.

Is this proliferation a reflection of the bleakness of the times, mirroring the doom and gloom of war and the economy? Is it exacerbated by erosion of faith in an afterlife? Do we obsessively probe mortality because we’re spoiled and can’t quite believe — or accept — that science and medicine still haven’t managed to conquer it? I suspect it’s all of the above, plus demographics: the aging of a generation of post- World War II writers in tandem with baby boomers coping with parents who are living longer but not necessarily better. It all adds up to an epidemic in the literature of loss.

Atwood’s intro to a book of Paris Review interviews highlights the magazine’s contributions to the sanity of struggling young writers.

There are many tips and helpful hints, which, if the interviews were cookbooks, would involve such craft-lore things as parsley drying and how to tell if an egg is addled. We all appreciate such tips: maybe they’ll help us, maybe they won’t, but it’s nice to know there are some. (Here are mine: read your manuscript with a ruler; you catch the typos better that way. Make a birth chart for your characters; then you’ll always know how old they are.)

Finally, as many have said, these interviews are a great encouragement to other writers, especially at moments of wavering faith. Why am I doing such an eccentric thing as writing? Is it just undigested neurosis? Why spend all day in a room, in the company of a bunch of people who don’t really exist? What good does it do the world? Isn’t it unhealthy? Why waste the paper? Every writer has such thoughts from time to time, and to know that others have had them too is reassuring: I am not the only one who has viewed the page with loathing. Not only that, but there’s no obvious positive correlation between good writing and commercial success – good does not equal profitable – but on the other hand, there isn’t a negative one – profitable does not equal bad. It’s reassuring to know that anyone who’s kept at it over time has written a few clunkers. And sometimes – not always, but sometimes – the writer knows quite well which ones those are. But look: the clunkers are survivable, we find in these accounts of writing lives, because after some defeating piece that, despite endless rewriting, never quite came right, there will be a clear masterwork. And that too is encouraging.

John Freeman writes in his Guardian blog about a “new deal” for US publishers under Obama. Are our political books going to change from anti/pro war/Bush to strategic economic tracts?

But presidential administrations also have an agenda setting power: they write the reality reel in which we live and that writers describe. Already it seems that an Obama presidency will inspire, require, and provoke a very different sort of political narrative.

If Bush’s focus was war (”I’m a war president”) and the use of American power, Obama has signalled – in his appointments and policy platforms – that passing an economic stimulus package, kick-starting recovery, bipartisanship, health care, and resurrecting America’s relationship with countries around the world will be at the forefront of his agenda.

There will be many books chasing these themes, but there ought to be a backward glance into backlists as well – for many terrific books on these topics have already been published, even quite recently. Robert Kuttner’s inspired Obama’s Challenge, published this August by tiny Chelsea Green press, argues that the new president’s way out of the economic crisis will be the institution of a new New Deal.

I find the sudden PR scrubbing these two are undergoing horrifying, but the Guardian makes a case for why lefties should be glad they’re getting deals to “write” books. There is of course a fatal flaw in this logic.

Republicans are, of course, not famous for their love of the first amendment to the constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech, reserving their ardour for the second, which provides them with the right to shoot moose from helicopters. Enthusiasm for free speech was never one of George Bush’s strong points, but by writing these books, Palin and Wurzelbacher are living the American dream: in America, you can write whatever you want. Even if it is rubbish!

Remember when a survey found that twenty-five per cent of Americans hadn’t read a single book in the previous year? Or the year before, when a national survey found that of the top ten least literate cities, seven were in then red states? From these bits of data, I jump fearlessly to the conclusion that the chances are high that Republicans are not readers, and that must be in part because most books out there are written and published by members of the dreaded mainstream liberal media.

Imagine if you will, that you were a non-reading Republican, and you wandered into your local bookshop to be greeted by a wall of fresh new copies of The Audacity of Hope. No browsing the shelves for you, you’d hot-foot it to the local monster truck rally instead.

Now, imagine that the first thing you saw was a stack of books by that nice governor of Alaska. It might just inspire you to read a book this year. And once you start, it can be hard to stop. Maybe your Republican self would enjoy reading a book so much that you might perhaps decide to read some other books. Maybe, say, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Isn’t that a good thing?

A huge online pan-European library gets ten million visits per hour on the first day and crashes (if I had a dime for everytime I’d crashed from 8 figure visitor log, I’d have nickel…)

David Malouf wins first Ausian prize

Philly libraries in twubble

Remembering the Chicagoan

Random House feels economic sting—-pensions frozen

The WaPo has a nice meaty piece on “America’s Finest News Source”. So if you’re as big a fan as I am, this article about what makes the satircal news outlet tick is required reading.

According to Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review, the success of the Onion and its ilk lies in part in the ability of satirists to penetrate the hypocrisies of the news cycle that the straight press is compelled to dance around. For instance, just weeks after 9/11, when the likes of Dan Rather were pledging their support for President Bush on network TV (”Wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where,” he told David Letterman), the Onion was already presaging, from the safe bunker of satire, the leaps of credulity America would soon be asked to make in obeisance to the War on Terror. “If I Don’t Get My Medium-Rare Shell Steak With Roasted Vegetables In The Next 10 Minutes, The Terrorists Have Already Won,” read an Onion op-ed published in November 2001.

“The public’s frankly gotten frustrated with the convention of objectivity, the idea that you have to present both sides of the story, even if one side is completely bogus,” said Niles, citing as an example news reports on global warming in which the views of politicians and lay-skeptics get consideration equal to studies by climate science PhDs. Niles went on to argue that satirists gained additional traction in the post-9/11 news climate, when mainstream media outlets didn’t push back as hard as they might have against perceived intimidation of the press by the Bush administration.

“Take for example, [Ari Fleischer's] chilling quote that all Americans ‘need to watch what they say,’” an admonition Bush’s former press secretary made about TV talk show host Bill Maher at a White House news briefing shortly after 9/11. “That should have been the moment that all the journalists woke up and said, ‘Screw that!’ But it was generally the satirists who felt emboldened enough to say the things that the mainstream news wouldn’t for fear of seeming too partisan.”

But culture war considerations aside, Niles attributes the boom of the faux news corps to a plainer cause. “Quite simply, people like the Onion are creating more engaging content than the daily papers are.”

Bad Sex Award nominees

Delightful picture by kid now cover of new edition of Wind in the Willows

“Teenage Katrina survivor wins yet another essay competition“

PC Magazine to move, duh, online

Noddy’s back, and this time he’s not taking any prisoners…

Publisher of British PM’s book swears it didn’t hold off until the approval ratings went up

We’ve heard recently about the Obama-effect on the sales of books. So my suggestion is that next time you’re anywhere near the president, you rush directly at him with steely eyes while reaching into your inner jacket pocket for a copy of your book. Yeah, that oughta work. Anyway, here Obama gets a copy of a book that was made “for him”, and here the president-elect is warned against his disturbing use of proper English and complete sentences.

Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama’s appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday witnessed the president-elect’s unorthodox verbal tick, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth.

But Mr. Obama’s decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring.

According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it “alienating” to have a president who speaks English as if it were his first language.

“Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement,” says Mr. Logsdon. “If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist.”

The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, “Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate — we get it, stop showing off.”

Joe the Plumber gets book deal

Pope “Eggs” Benedict opens new Catholic bookstore (from Moby)

Ah-yhuk! Parents in Florida (and not necessarily toothless ones from the swamp) want The Kite Runner banned for high school students

BBC has huge Doctor Who archive (from SFSignal)

Abebooks charity auction

Rawi Hage finally nails one

US National Book Awards

Some coverage of above…

…And more

Aussie on new Warwick Prize shortlist

A day after the announcement of the Governor General Awards, people are buzzing, more in person than print, about apparent conflicts-of-interest on the part of the poetry jury. I feel sorry for winner Jacob Scheier who’s had his win tainted with this. I don’t think his book was the best on the list, but that’s a matter of taste. No matter how good it was, it will never be able to live down the fact that at least two of the three jurors were deeply connected to his book, including one blurbing the back cover and another COLLABORATING on one of the poems within. Both are thanked acknowledgements. It’s not Scheier’s fault that this happened, but it is a serious signal that something is deeply wrong with the process that this could happen. Is there no vetting of jurors? Is there no oversight of the process? Are we relying solely on the jurors to police themselves in situations like this? I remember Andre Alexis stepping off a jury recently because his then partner Catherine Bush was up for consideration. I also remember Christian Bok leaving a jury for similar reasons (because his then partner was …. har har). I can’t imagine what the thinking was behind this. It also makes me feel for Al Moritz, whose book was by far and away the best of the list and would have easily walked away with the award had an impartial jury been in place. Anyway, Zach is advocating shaming those involved with letters and open letters to the head of the CC and is providing addresses. I worry about this strategy because I feel that despite the fucked-up situation, everyone was probably very well-meaning. It was just a stupid move that has cost some people some dignity and has cost the award itself any real legitimacy.

Have you ever seen a book at your local used bookstore and thought, I’ve always meant to read that, so you picked it up and brought it home and suddenly realized it was your book that you sold in a fit of housecleaning years before? Paper Tiger’s Peter Robins has. But this wouldn’t happen to me. Because, see, I never clean house or empty my shelves. Though I do keep a rubbermaid container full of chicklit books sent to Bookninja, which I occasionally leave out in the rain hoping someone will take.

Pictured are the fruits of my most recent brainfart in this line. Not an especially galling case, because neither copy was more than a couple of quid, the mistake made me read The Happy Hypocrite again – always a good thing – and I think I know someone who’ll enjoy the spare.

Still, I can’t really afford to be buying books twice by accident, and I certainly don’t have space for them. So why do I do it?

It may partly be a consequence of being a cheapskate, buying large numbers of low-end second-hand books and remainders; I don’t think I’ve ever done this with a new book, or indeed any book costing more than a fiver. And then there is the enhanced capacity to lose track of things that one gets from double-shelving.

Mainly, however, it means that I’m not paying enough attention. The answer is the usual one for the over-acquisitive bibliomane. Reduce buying. Increase reading.

Imagine a press where they give you the book for “free”—-if you donate to a charity. It might be a nice change this Giftmas from giving your granola-y aunt and uncle a charity goat. I mean, how many self-righteous, guilt-reducing goats-for-others can one affluent, self-hating first world couple get-give?

In the beginning, there was a book: “Give and Take” by Massachusetts-based author Stona Fitch. “Give and Take” was orphaned at a publishing house when its editor departed, and it didn’t find a new home. Fitch just wasn’t sure what to do with it. So he decided to give it away.

But there’s a catch: He gives you the book for free and asks that you give money to charity.

Fitch has founded the nonprofit publishing house Concord Free Press which operates on this unusual Robin Hood-style publishing model. The press gives away its books, and its readers give away money. Readers, who get the books by requesting them from the website or at bookstores (now, mostly, in New England), are asked to note their donations on the company’s website; using its GivingTracker, they can log in the exact numbered edition of their book, how much they gave and to whom.

Sarah Palin may get $7M book deal (and some people think Obama is the Anti-Christ?)

A font made from Kafka’s handwriting

Costa shortlists announced

Dmitri Nabokov is now sure (SURE) Vlad wanted Laura published (you know, despite the deathbed promise to burn it thing) (from Maud)

A remaindered copy of Conan Doyle’s letters gets AN Wilson thinking

Cory Doctorow on why he copyfights

Faber’s CEO is pleasantly surprised by e-books

How does a small press like Godine (Le Clezio’s US publisher) deal with the sudden fame and demand for an author that a Nobel win brings? An interview with Godine’s head honcho illuminates.

SE: You’ve mentioned elsewhere that at the time the Nobel was announced, Godine had about 400 copies of The Prospector, out of 6,000 originally published 15 years ago. You’ve since gone back to press on a paperback edition. What’s the run on this, and what have orders like been so far?

DP: That’s right, we had 400 copies of The Prospector in stock to ship that day—thank God we print with quality material, or it all probably would’ve been unsalable after 15-odd years. Our books practically don’t age; it’s astounding. Someday a goat herder will find them in ancient clay pots in mountain caves. Now we’re reprinting the hardcover and producing a new softcover as fast as a little house can, doing what is probably a modest run by the big-boys’ standards; it’s hard to say in this climate what kind of sales a book like this will get over the course of a year, especially where we don’t have marketing capabilities as extensive as the conglomerates. Godine doesn’t have a newspaper or movie studio or a radio station. Plus this is our first Nobel. Notice I say first. We’re such optimistic folk. A big house would probably print something like five hundred thousand books, make a movie with Russell Crowe, and pulp whatever copies remain. (That’s a depressing site if you’ve never seen it: pulping books; a sin.) The back orders are really strong, in the two to five thousand range for both the hardcover and the softcover, rising, and we expect it to pick up some more in November and December. I’m hopeful that we’ll be reprinting again when his next novel, Desert, comes out in 2009.

SE: Could you generalize a little about the kinds of new bookstores this announcement has brought to Godine? Are they largely coming to you? Are they making large buys or just sticking a toe in to test the water?

DP: I think most of the stores are independents that we just hadn’t been in contact with, who now have a name to google; you know, the industry just turns them over and over so we do our best but it’s impossible to keep track perfectly. Most people know David. There are a lot of stores going out of business but at the same time there are new ones being opened, too. Mayhem. A lot has to do with physical distance—we don’t get down to Texas, Tennessee, Iowa, Indiana, for example, as much. For purely practical reasons. They’re big places. It’s very spread out, and David is our primary salesperson for the most part, so he ends up driving for hours and hours to make appointments. It’s hard. He’ll visit a city on his way from place to place as its possible. And then chains have obviously contacted us. I think B&N called towards the end of the day that Thursday Le Clezio won and ordered every copy we had left. Because they knew it was only like 100 books by then! No one is diving in, I don’t think, and we don’t expect them to do that in this economy. I think if they have a good showing on the books they DO buy, they’ll come back.

Can’t win. Don’t try. Got it. Blogging is over, I’m told. All I can say is, Phew.

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

The Governor General’s Awards have been announced. Besides Nino Ricci winning in the fiction category, there’s the little matter of what we were discussing earlier in the morning here and over at Zach’s blog. Jacob Scheier takes the poetry prize, but ethical questions remain about connections with the jurors.

BoingBoing points to a piece about SF pulp mags trying to survive against the series of tubes that is the web. Seems like every genre has its share of eschatalogical freakouts.

Every year Locus Magazine, “The Magazine Of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Field,” publishes a year-in-review of the genre. This summation always includes a rundown of the circulation of the remaining speculative fiction magazines, sometimes referred to as the “pulps” because of the cheap wood pulp paper on which they used to be printed. In their heyday there were dozens of pulps — ranging from the mystery to science fiction genres — with circulations of 100,000 or more. But the medium steeply declined through the ’80s and ’90s, with magazine circulations for all the publications plummeting to well below six figures.

By the 21st century and the advent of the web, most of these once-great magazines — Amazing Stories, Argosy, SF Age — had died off, leaving only three speculative fiction magazines struggling to stop hemorrhaging readers: Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

The figures displayed in this year’s Locus Magazine roundup were, as usual, not promising. Analog, the best performing of the three, had fallen to a paid circulation of 27,399, while Asimov’s dropped 5.2% to 17,581. But the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction saw the sharpest decline — 11.2% from the previous year — to a paid circulation of 16,489. Countless science fiction convention panels and online message board topics over the last decade have tried to pinpoint the cause of such catastrophic declines and learn how to stop them. Such discussions often lead to at least one person predicting the eminent death of the short fiction magazines, always seen lurking just around the corner.

Google/Publishers/Judge/somethingorother (from Moby)

You’re a lying piece of shit, says mother who claims she’s been falsely accused in misery/abuse memoir

Joe the Plumber can fix your sink and write a book in mere weeks!

Teen book prize winner beats heavyweights to take prize

Don’t all booksellers sell at the recommended price? Apparently not.

I shake my head with resignation and defeat. I’ve died on this hill at too many parties. The man is a great songwriter. Nuff said. …. … … Okay, I just can’t stand it: America is so desperate for a cultural history that isn’t based on a transitory pantheon of celebrity godlets that they’re trying to manufacture an enduring mythology out of the remains of a gaggle of ageing culture-makers (I’m guessing Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyon and Davy Crockett just didn’t cut it in terms of an tweaking the public’s subconscious beyond 1932). I’ll be happy when this generation of well-placed public intellectuals, myth-makers and empire-builders who grew up worshipping Dylan because he took a traditional music and applied it to contemporary concerns, and who now want insert him into this academically-managed, yet wholely imaginary American Olympia, just die off one-by-one and we can get back to appreciating Dylan as a great musician and stop this foolish quest to brand him a poet. Don’t get me wrong, I love his music. I just don’t think you can make a case for him to the Nobel committee on literature.

Sometime in 1964 Dylan wrote a suite of 23 poems inspired by Feinstein’s photographs of Hollywood, a spectacular collection taken over the course of the early Sixties. Although the photographs were made for a variety of assignments and in a number of different contexts, they have a remarkable consistency and a clearly identifiable theme: the passing of old Hollywood. The studio system and all that went with it, the industry that had created the movies as we knew them from the Twenties onwards, had reached its terminus at last. It was a subject that clearly resonated with Dylan. He was a major part of the wave of change that was in the process of overthrowing the old guard, but then again, as he wrote in Chronicles about 1941, the year of his birth, “If you were born around this time or were living and alive, you could feel the old world go and the new one beginning. It was like putting the clock back to when BC became AD. Everybody born around my time was a part of both.”

The Guardian looks at the history of literary vices. Can you guess which entry I’ve falsified in the excerpt below?

Charles Baudelaire, hashish

Baudelaire was a member of the Club de Hachichins (Hashish Club), which met between 1844 and 1849 and counted Alexandre Dumas and Eugène Delacroix among its numbers. Baudelaire wrote widely on hash, saying: ‘Among the drugs most efficient in creating what I call the artificial ideal… the most convenient and the most handy are hashish and opium.’

Robert Louis Stevenson, cocaine

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) was written during a six-day cocaine binge. His wife Fanny said: ‘That an invalid in my husband’s condition of health should have been able to perform the manual labour alone of putting 60,000 words on paper in six days, seems almost incredible.’

George Murray, sugar, sleep-deprivation and boilermakers

The Rush to Here, Murray’s fourth collection of poetry, is said to have been written on a steady diet of a cheese made from the reduced milk/chocolate broth at the bottom of countless bowls of Cocopuffs cereal; Pop Rocks, Cola and a brisk head-shake taken at midnight; and many jars of Guinness spiked with Wild Turkey.

Aldous Huxley, mescaline

In The Doors of Perception, his famous 1954 book, which inspired Jim Morrison’s choice of band name, Huxley recounts at length his experience on the drug mescaline. Found naturally in the Peyote cactus, mescaline induces hallucinations and it is these Huxley found opened his mind and inspired him to write his book.

So long as he keeps carrying around books of poetry with all those boring political biographies, I sure as hell hope so.

When President-elect Barack Obama appeared on “60 Minutes” on CBS on Sunday in his first interview since winning the election, he mentioned having read “a new book out about F .D. R.’s first 100 days” without specifically naming a title or author.

That tantalizing reference set off a scramble for the claim to First Reader rights all day Monday before a spokesman for Mr. Obama disclosed what the president-elect had actually read.

The publishers and authors of at least three such books that could fit Mr. Obama’s description each spent much of Monday wondering whether they had just gotten a plug from the soon-to-be leader of the free world.

Christian Bök is already famous here in Canada for his outrageous poetry achievements and stunts, but now he’s also famous in sunny Eng-uh-lund where they are just now cottoning-on to the mind-blowing Eunoia.

To say Eunoia is not like anything else you will ever read is not hype. It’s a statement of fact. Bök calls it a “univocal lipogram”, but this does not convey its elemental madness. Each chapter uses only one vowel. Not one vowel once, but the same vowel over and over again, in real words that are almost never repeated, formed into real sentences with real meaning.

Force language through this horrifying meat grinder, season with ribald Canadian wit (not an oxymoron, as it turns out), and you get sentences such as this: “Slick pimps, bribing civic kingpins, distill gin in stills, spiking drinks with illicit pills which might bring bliss.” Or this: “Porno shows folks lots of sordor – zoom-shots of Bjorn Borg’s bottom or Snoop Dogg’s crotch.”

This is some of the milder rude stuff. It gives a flavour of the real smut that is a hilarious feature of each chapter, and which Bök, who takes his art seriously, says he included “to provide as many avenues of entry to the book as possible”.

When Eunoia was first published in Canada, most mainstream critics wrote it off as a gimmick. Which it is, as Bök almost admits. “Everyone who writes a poem according to a formal constraint is accepting a contrivance,” as he points out. But his contrivance was a hit.

My favourite quote from the article: “Bök is a modest man…” Umm….?

Miriam Toews, Michael Winter, Saleema Nawaz, Sylvia Fraser. A great list for good awards. Nice to see Newfoundlander Winter there. He’s a genuinely great guy and I quite enjoy his work. And Nawaz makes me feel good about the future of Canlit.

Zach has a post that starts out trashing the Governor General’s shortlist in poetry, but goes on to decry the general power-trading and conflicts-of-interest that go on in the awards world here in Canada (and presumably everywhere else) and brings up some good questions. One of the writers on the list has two of the three jurors thanked profusely in his acknowledgements. It’s a sort of catch-22 for the writer involved here. He didn’t choose the jurors and can’t help if his book was elevated to the shortlist by what are likely well-meaning people who probably really did enjoy his book. But when one juror has provided a blurb for your cover and another has collaborated on one of the poems within (and is thanked for editing), you have to wonder about the ethics of the choice — especially from the jurors’ point of view. Wouldn’t you recuse yourself? I’ve often said of these sorts of national awards that if you draw lines between each of the judges and nominees in any given year, you come up with a pentagram. But this is a bit more blatant, surely. Or is it? Do we just have too few people capable of writing/editing/judging the kinds of books that make it to these contests? And remember, for every story like this, there’s the inverse, where so-and-so is complaining his book got left OFF the list because of XYZ to do with the jurors (though, I do have one really great, and very true, story about that myself which I will tell you one day over beers … Last year, when my latest book was eligible for awards, I realized had wildly offended at least two of the three judges on a major award jury—-and there was the possibility of a trifecta, but I can’t really remember that night.) My editors have always told me its a lottery, that you wait to see who the jurors for an award are and set your expectations from there. If you’re lucky enough to have your book come out in a year when your literary allies have seized the reigns, then you stand a chance. If not, it’s a fluke if you get anywhere near the list. So what’s to be done here? How can this kind of ugly situation be fixed?

This happens way, way more often than it should. Which is never. Since the CC obviously doesn’t give a shit about enforcing its own conflict of interest policies , perhaps we should have recourse to public shaming. Given the present administration’s–I hesitate to call them a government–hostility towards the arts, this is even more important. Blatant conflict of interest/nepotism in the disbursement of taxpayers’ money is actually a pretty good argument for making the kind of cuts that Harper has made and would no doubt like to continue making. Smarten up, Canada Council.

I felt this one might generate some discussion, so I thought it needed its own post. The real problem isn’t snarky negative reviews, the real problem is false positives. Have at it.

This brings us to the least-discussed subject in the world of belles-lettres: book reviews that any author worth his salt knows are unjustifiably enthusiastic. Authors are always complaining that reviewers missed the whole point of “Few Mourn the Caballero,” or took the quote about the merry leper ballerinas out of context, or overlooked the allusions to Octave Mirbeau, or didn’t mention that the author once jilted the critic after he kept begging her to go out on a double date dressed as one of the Boleyn sisters. Authors are always complaining that reviewers maliciously cited the least incandescent, least Pushkinian passages in the book, or have a grudge against them because of something that happened the night the Khmer Rouge or Joy Division broke up, or only said mean things because the author went to Exeter while the reviewer had to settle for Andover.

What makes this bellyaching so unseemly is that the vast majority of book reviews are favorable, even though the vast majority of books deserve little praise. Authors know that even if one reviewer hates a book, the next 10 will roll over like pooches and insist it’s not only incandescent but luminous, too. Reviewers tend to err on the side of caution, fearing reprisals down the road. Also, because they generally receive but a pittance for their efforts, they tend to view these assignments as a chore and write reviews that read like term papers or reworded press releases churned out by auxiliary sales reps. This is particularly true in the mystery genre, where the last negative review was written in 1943.

A family emergency. Here’s a few quick links:

Bookninja in the NYT

My personal favourite, “meh”, makes the dictionary

Journo sues CanWest

Canadian wins Commonwealth short story prize

Editors: gods of the literary world

The death of the bookstore

George! He’s loveable… George!

I know the books that presidents carry are mostly props, but… swoon…

On the other side of things, though no one cares to hear inarticulate ramblings from Wubblewoo about his time vacationing and killing on the taxpayer dime, his wife Laura is getting some serious attention from publishers

Poetry booklaunch halted in Wales after Christian groups protest

Do you have unpublished Audens in your attic?

Fidel Castro book released, immediately boards leaky boat bound for Miami

Unpublished Thomas Bernhard to see print in Germany next year—-very exciting news!