What a loss. Nobel laureate, and one of the world’s greatest playwrights, dead at 78.

“What’s generally meant as a ‘Pinter play’ in the purest sense usually revolves around one or more characters who are imposing on themselves a constricted, even deprived existence in order to hold off a presumed but uncertain threat,” Anderson wrote.

Pinter’s plays featured sparse dialogue, often spiced with paranoia or simple befuddlement. In “The Birthday Party,” a boardinghouse resident is accosted by two malevolent visitors who insist it’s his birthday; in “The Homecoming” — which won the Tony Award for best play when it premiered on Broadway in 1967 — a professor and his wife return to his working-class British family, where the wife becomes the center of attention.

Pinter credited Samuel Beckett, among others, as an influence. (He starred in a production of Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” in 2006.) In turn, writers such as David Mamet and Sam Shepard followed Pinter’s elliptical lead.

Last issue of the Globe Books section today. Get it as a souvenir of when the mainstream media in Canada cared about literature nearly as much as advertising revenue. Furthermore, looks like there’ll be another two week “hiatus”, but this time to “retool”. After the raging lie they told us in August, are you sure they’ll be back at all?

This issue of Books will be its last in stand-alone form.

Beginning Jan. 10, Books will have a new home, in print and on the web. We’ll be part of a Focus & Books section every Saturday with the same authoritative survey of the Canadian literary scene, along with descriptions of our new online content.

We’re taking the next two weeks off to retool so that we continue to bring you not only the sharp and insightful reviews and features you have come to expect, but some new and, we hope, exciting ones.

Well, it’s almost time I gathered the elves, put on my red suit, leather boots and big-assed belt, and start calling Ho ho ho! And you just KNOW that’s a sex allusion that has nothing to do with the holidays, right? Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, Joyous Kwanzaa, Happy belated Diwali, Festive Yule, and whatever else I’m supposed to say. I may post a few times over the holidays, so feel free to check in or set your rss feed, but I’m really really going to try to NOT post and set my blogging batteries back in the charger for a while.

The new Joy of Sex purportedly considers women to be “participants” in sex instead of “recipients” of sex… hm… Fascinating, Captain… What’s next? The vote?

TV memoirs are the big thing this season

The three best cities for booklovers

Lynne Cheney plans to write James Madison bio (husband Dick will retire to private ranch near the border where he can practice his evil all day in a fresh, open field)

Chicklit morphs into Cooklit

Interview with a book binder

Why publishing’s failing: no confidence in readers makes them dumb things down

British poet laureate sighs out a protest against library closures (man, he looks tired.. I can’t wait to get him back to writing real verse again instead of commenting on every literary story that comes down the… …. … … … … … … please, pass me that rope, and tell my family I love them…)

eBook reader on a treadmill?

Scientists (those clowns of the white coat world): Oliver Twist was a lying little manipulator

More bad layoffs news at Random

And for your viewing pleasure: John Denver and the Muppets perform his poem “Alfie the Christmas Tree” Man, I so wish I had those glasses. I’d just stare at people with wide eyes all the time and my lips slightly parted until they grew uncomfortable and left. It’d be the greatest social weapon of all time.

If my holidays were an arterial system, doing Bookninja would be a blockage slowly making it’s way to my brain. Running this blog has brought me to the overlap zone in a ven diagram showing the sets “habit” and “obsessive compulsion”. I had planned on taking December off, but here I am. Sigh. Somebody bring me my meds.

Conflicts of interest pervade the world—right to very top

Obama picks his poet—Elizabeth Alexander

Following the lead of the Pulitzer Prize, the Best American Short Stories series will now also allow web-based writing to compete

Some odd phrases and words

JK has fastest selling book once again

Publisher’s Association in US launches anti-piracy website

Top 10 Canadian arts newsmakers—the inclusion of Lawrence Hill being the only reason there isn’t a paranthetical *yawn* between “Canadian” and “arts”

Random gets a new editor, while Doubleday sees layoffs

What’s behind Rupert—besides big, heavily armed dudes?

Poets & Writers gets $2M donation…! Hardly a Lily’s worth, but a nice chunk-a-change

Newspapers—part of a long tradition of things killed by the computer

Typo in Prop 8 legislation may save lycanthropic marriage

Wind in the Willows at 100

We regret the error—best news corrections of 2008

Your CANYOUFUCKINGBELIEVEWESURVIVEDTHELASTEIGHTYEARSTOLIVEINTHESETIMES? news item of the day: Obama appointee quotes from Faulker…

John Updike likes hot ebook pr0n

Proust’s dirty letters up for sale

JK Rowling takes a lot of abuse around here (which glances harmlessly off the billion dollar force field erected around her), but she does do good work for charity—I like rich people who aren’t just idly rich

Some thoughts on John Banville as a white collar thug of supervillian proportions

Ottawa library offers free ebooks to “armchair” borrowers

John Betjeman: gay hero

New Oz centre for writing and books to be headed by former Sydney Writers Festival director, who is not only apparently an awesome director, but, if photos don’t lie, is also WAY hotter than Meg Ryan

Gadget time: allow me to coin some terms: the Screll Phone, the Notester, the Growlio (okay, that last one is stretching it… what about “the Growdex”? No. “The Leaflet”…? naw…)

More on the melting book industry down south

Your sickwithjealousy post of the day: a custom writing retreat (thanks, Roland, I think)… What I want to know is what the HELL is she writing that she can afford to have that studio designed and built by someone who employs a design philosophy? If my studio doesn’t come from the back lot at the Home Depot where they keep the chipboard sheds, I ain’t gettin’ one

In the early days of Bookninja, I started a one-year-only “tradition” where I gave out Golden Shuriken Awards for Ridiculous Behaviour. It’s been quite a few years since I’ve done it, but was wondering if people wanted to see it return. It’s a kind of anti-award, for literary/media people/organizations who/that did damaging, silly, stupid, unethical, or just plain bizarre things during the preceding year. If you’ve got a suggestion for who should be nominated and why, . Here’s the 2004 edition for reference. If you can mimic this form and send me your award title and winner, I’ll give it some consideration and see if we can’t build an entertaining list. As you can see, some of the entries are double-tongued and ironic, while others are pretty cutting. See what you can come up with. [NOTE: Your award should relate to a news story that we covered here in the last year and not just be a chance to promote yourself or attack your enemies. Contributions will remain anonymous unless otherwise requested.]

A bit more meaty a piece needs its own post in case you want to argue. Why does it appear that literary studies are falling by the wayside in our schools. I have two words for you: stem cells. If I had it all to do over again, I’d become a biologist and fucking REGROW PEOPLE’S BLOWN OFF LIMBS AND FAILED ORGANS! Legalize that shit, America! Regulate it to keep the horror novel clones out if you have to, but get it done! You have this giant pool of intellectual and monetary resources being held up by some bizarre moral/religious objection to saving people’s lives. But I digress. Please don’t forget about literature yadda yadda yadda….

Literary studies split off from reading in the early-to-mid-20th century as the result of science envy on the part of literature professors. Talking about books somehow didn’t seem substantial enough. Instead of reading literature, now we study “texts.” We’ve developed a discipline, with its jargon and its methodology, its insiders and its body of knowledge. What we analyze nowadays is seen neither as the mirror of nature nor the lamp of authorial inspiration. It just is — apparently produced in an airless room by machines working through permutations of keys on the computer.

Science has its objective world, the entirety of what is. The world of texts is the objectivity of literary studies. Thus we can insist that there’s no objective world outside texts — as the impish Derrida claimed. (But how un-impishly he was echoed in the halls of American academe for so many decades!) And we can also get some mileage out of insisting that canons, the choice of what texts we take down from the library shelves to teach students, are merely “constructed.” Of course they are — every reading list is limited. What we really mean is that our own pet author was forgotten when the canon was formed. The door shut too soon. If our boy or girl were inside the door rather than out, the fact of “construction” would be trivial. Teach my author! we cry. Not that one! What if who’s taught, or isn’t, doesn’t end up mattering to the students, who don’t share professorial concerns? To us it matters, and we’re the ones in charge.

We’re not teaching literature, we’re teaching the professional study of literature: What we do is its own subject. Nowadays the academic study of literature has almost nothing to do with the living, breathing world outside. The further along you go in the degree ladder, and the more rarified a college you attend, the less literary studies relates to the world of the reader. The academic study of literature nowadays isn’t, by and large, about how literature can help students come to terms with love, and life, and death, and mistakes, and victories, and pettiness, and nobility of spirit, and the million other things that make us human and fill our lives. It’s, well, academic, about syllabi and hiring decisions, how works relate to each other, and how the author is oppressing whomever through the work. The literary critic Gerald Graff famously told us to “teach the conflicts”: We and our squabbles are what it’s all about. That’s how we made a discipline, after all.

I’m running behind on many things, namely snow tires and Santa duties, so I’m going to be doing roundups today and then blogging sporadically for the next couple weeks as family descend from far and wide on our little island paradise for the yule season. Ah, Quakers and humanists. We’re a match made in heaven-on-earth.

First, some rare good news: HC has somehow managed to get part of their products around the Borders return policy…. I wish I could write you a cartoon bunny triple take. Publishers might actually be able to survive under a system like this… hmm…

Happy birthday to the world’s best board game since chess

Rabbie’s got some new poems and rude letters to show

Is the Newberry Medal failing kids? Melts it down, Oi says, and makes us a Newnewberry, moi lovely!

Some links to critiques of the Nobel Prize via Jacket Copy (I think Carolyn might be getting paid to blog there, so if I disappear for a day, it’s a good place to go because she’s under the constant pressure of unreasonable bosses… but if you stay away, I’ll hunt you down, drag you back here and throw you down in the pit with Kathryn and Pete… yeah, that’s right… he TRIED to quit….)

Robert McCrum says literary Britain is a smallish place… sounds familiar…

On the ever-contentious, and international, nature of prizes and conflict of interest

Macmillan moves from wage freeze to lay offs of 4% of staff

FSG follows suit (no! Not FSG!!!)

Even bigger booksellers like Powells are feeling the pinch too …


… though Amazon bizarrely seems to have enough money to force its staff to work 7 days a week

Sun Media here in Canada cuts 600 jobs

Well, here’s something you don’t see everyday: the recession hitting a website. In this case, the much-lauded Torontoist. I guess when paycheques are involved, things change. Good thing I get, as the French say, Jacques Squatte for maintaining this leaky ship, or I’d be closing the doors, filing for bankruptcy and looking for bailout money. It’s sad to see Torontoist go, though, because in the tradition of the great -ist sites, it’s a valuable resource.

I’ve been the editor of Torontoist for two and a half of the site’s four years, first with Ron Nurwisah (until December 2006), and then with Marc Lostracco (from January to December 2007). During my time here—which has spanned seven thousand articles, thirty-six thousand comments, and ten million hits—I’ve seen Torontoist grow dramatically in number and breadth of readers and contributors. I’ve seen it take a spot in the margins of Toronto’s media, and prove that the relationship between vast media empires and small internet publications need not be a parasitic one where the latter feeds off the former but a symbiotic one where both use—and complement, and need—one another. I’ve seen it twist the “city blog” format into something greater than that, something that saw the quality of content, not its quantity or profitability, as the ultimate end. I’ve seen it lauded, slammed, copied, envied, loved, and overlooked. But most of all, I’ve seen the city and Torontoist change together, day after day, article after article. I am intensely proud of what Torontoist has done and what it has become, and I’m very hopeful for the future of the city that has always been its focus. But in 2009, as Toronto continues to move forward, I’m very sorry to announce that Torontoist will no longer be there to bear witness.

At the end of this month, I will be stepping down as Torontoist’s Editor-in-Chief. I’ve loved everything about this job since I started it, and my decision to leave was not an easy one to make, but it is, ultimately, the right one at the right time for the right reasons. Gothamist has decided, as a result of both my resignation and the recession, to close Torontoist on January 1, 2009 and concentrate on their more lucrative American sites. That decision is the right one, too: as it exists now, Torontoist can barely be sustained, let alone developed, and it has survived and thrived as long as it has, in spite of modest means, largely because of the ceaseless hard work of that aforementioned collective. Torontoist may return at some later date, if conditions are different; until then, it will remain in suspended animation, its content still public and searchable.

A poetic institution returns to the New Yorker in a triumph of late life creativity. Or something.

Longtime readers of The New Yorker will not, of course, need to be reminded who Mr. Angell is — an eminent baseball writer, an editor at the magazine since 1956 and the stepson of E. B. White. But they may wonder where “Greetings, Friends!,” an annual poem that was a New Yorker institution for nearly eight decades, has been. It was written by Frank Sullivan from 1932 until 1974, and by Mr. Angell starting in 1976. But “Greetings, Friends!” vanished after its 1998 iteration and has not been seen again until now.

What happened?

“I stopped writing ‘Greetings’ because I thought I couldn’t do it anymore,” said Mr. Angell, 88, who is less a pale and geezery presence than a pink and twinkly one in his tidy book and memento-packed New Yorker office on the 20th floor of the Condé Nast building in Midtown.

Conjuring up the perfect rhyming names, he explained, became harder with age. “There’s that great, huge, trashy mixture of pop names — from televisions, songs, movies — that we all have in the back of our heads,” he said. “And I began to think I didn’t have as much of that as I once had. I’d reach for something and it wasn’t there.”

“Greetings, Friends!” is back this year, Mr. Angell said, because he missed writing it and because he had a few flashes of inspiration while on vacation in Maine last summer. “I got a few lines down,” he said. “And once it gets going, it’s terrific fun to do.”

We should write more doggerel (well, on purpose, I mean). It’s kind of a precursor to the Simpson’s era ironic reference as a form of humour, and ever so much fun. Richard Outram, Canada’s best poet ever, used to do it occasionally. It was like reading witty, terrible jokes that made you groan and clap at the same time. Whatever happened to the tradition?

The Huffington Post asks what will happen when the current generation of “hybrid readers”, ie, those who were raised on books but are digiliterate (ie, us), dies out.

But what happens when we die out? Will the young’uns feel as we do about books? I’d like to think so, but I guess in twenty years or so, what I think won’t make a shred of difference, not to the young’uns, or the text they are reading.

I was thinking about this recently in relation to my boys. They’ve never known a world without computers and video games and TV. But they’re also buried in books. Will there be enough kids like them to keep books alive? Will this early education in books (and holding off on the tv and internet) pay off for them as adults or hobble them? Certainly in our little urban literary/academic biosphere of a social circle it will be an advantage, but what about the larger world? My son (almost six) has started drawing detailed replicas of Nintendo machines and controllers, and he walks around the house “playing” them and telling me about the game levels he’s created. I can’t hold back the flood waters much longer. I told him that when I was a kid we loved books because “stories” are better than “levels” and that if he could come up with some video games based on real narratives, I’d think about helping him design some levels for it, and all he said was, “So your parents wouldn’t let you buy a DS either?” (Also, when recently investigating how religious our elementary school’s curriculum is, I asked my eldest what he knew about “Jesus”, he said, “Jeezes? What are they?” I had a pang of Proddy guilt like you never felt, let me tell you.) Anyway, it doesn’t seem like it’s a winning battle. My kid will be literate and well-read if it kills us both. But will his peers? Will their kids?

I suppose if we had a Bulgakov or Gogol worth fighting over, we’d be scratching at the knees of our nearest culturally dominant neighbour as well. Oh wait…. I guess this is kind of generally the opposite of what we do. We take important people born elsewhere and claim them as our own because they once spent a few summers on the beach on one of our coasts (left or right… unlikely the upper coast). When someone who really WAS born in Canada does something great but is claimed by another country, think Saul Bellow (look at the opening text of this Wiki entry, right across from his birthplace) and that guy who invented basketball (though “great” is relative term with the latter), we take endless pleasure in pointing it out to those who claim them. But we’re not fighting over them. So why not?

The identity crisis arises it seems because although Bulgakov was born in what is now Ukraine’s capital, a city he immortalized in his first novel The White Guard, the playwright and novelist was ethnically Russian, wrote in Russian and moved to Moscow when he was 21. So, while in a recent poll of Russians, the author of The Master and the Margharita was named the country’s second greatest writer, in similar poll in Ukraine, he was claimed as Ukraine’s third best playwright.
…
The issue is, understandably, more politically fraught in Ukraine. As Malakhov said, “the problem is, that before 1990, we were all thought of as Russian”. I was reminded of this recently when Anton Chekhov’s dacha in Yalta, Ukraine hit the news. The playwright’s Crimean house, where he wrote both Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, is falling apart, but the governments of Ukraine and Russia have been in a stand-off over who should pay to fix it up.

It’s a cultural cold war with little sign of tensions easing; Nikolai Gogol is another playwright often pulled into the fray. Although Gogol wrote in Russian, ethnically he was Ukrainian and his comic stories drew extensively on his Ukrainian background. The war over Gogol’s nationality though, is fought everywhere from scholarly journals to Wikipedia. Alas, there are no government inspectors coming to town to rule on the subject.

Where stories I don’t want/care to comment on go to rot—news slumlord that I am…

Chicago factory sit-in to become book

Guardian’s top 10 Onion headlines (my two favourite papers, together at last!)

Thompson’s widow to turn his Owl Farm into writers’ retreat

Trove of lost Larkin recordings unearthed

Laura Albert still wringing wet dishtowel of her 15 minutes

9-year-old gets more tail, publications than you

UK library service near breaking point

Who will be Obama’s point person for poetry?

My headline today would be, “Onion staff stage suprise coup in CNN newsroom“…

The publishing industry has made a who’s-who video of famous people urging you to buy books as gifts. A noble cause. I mean, who better to go to in tough times for shopping advice than the world’s richest people? Yes, yes… Chuckle… And monsters, Elmo.

Things haven’t been looking good for US publishing lately, and so with untypical team spirit, most of the major publishers have teamed up to create an online advertising campaign which attempts to persuade Christmas shoppers that books make great presents.

They’ve got their authors on board, so if you fancy watching writers from Dean Koontz to Dan Brown, Jonathan Lethem, Deepak Chopra and Maya Angelou come up with a raft of bizarre reasons why you should be buying books this Christmas, then give it a whirl.

Listen, you want to do this right, you ask some poets. Tip 1: The regift — only attend New Year’s parties and present “belated” gifts you received from your family to your friends. Tip 2: The savvy decorator — save the labels from your tins of tuna and catfood and use them to decorate the envelopes you’ll be handing out, because love coupons make great gifts (get those massaging-fingers/instruments of artistic genius ready!). Tip 3: The valid excuse — there are plenty of cars going way too fast on your street, so avoid the shame of Giftmas altogether by throwing yourself in front of one and hope for a broken leg or arm, holiday avoision gold!

Neither. I’m a kitty cat. Do I get in? Oxford and Cambridge have some weird-assed questions on their entrance exams.

You might expect Oxford and Cambridge universities to ask prospective students to compare the works of Chaucer to Boccaccio or to explain the theory of relativity.

Instead, Oxford wants to know: “Would you rather be a novel or a poem?”

Cambridge asks applicants: “What would you do if you were a magpie?”

Probably drop a turd on this page, pass some lice on to my neighbour, and then snatch that shiny broach off the exam adjudicator’s breast.

Hey man, it’s not just the US that’s shitting bricks, it’s also the UK and Canada. Might I suggest a name for this new trend in books: misery publishing. Where all books that see print are tinged with hints of abuse, regret, envy and hatred.

While some in Canadian publishing circles believe that business will not be as bad in that country as in the U.S., others have already taken belt-tightening measures. Last week, Corus Entertainment, the parent company of Kids Can Press, made staffing changes that included the departure of v-p of sales and marketing Judy Brunsek. According to Sally Tindal, director of communications for Corus, a review of KCP’s operations resulted in shifted job responsibilities and the elimination of three positions—one in sales and marketing, one in editorial and one in production. With the changes, Lisa Lyons, president of KCP, will add sales and marketing to her responsibilities, with the director of sales and the director of marketing reporting directly to her.

Additionally, Thomas Allen Publishers, part of Thomas Allen & Son, is “postponing” the release of most books on their spring 2009 list until next fall. Requests for comments on this change were not returned by the company. Over at HarperCollins Canada, CEO David Kent confirmed that they “have a corporate-wide freeze on salaries announced last week,” but added, “Other than the obvious belt-tightening objectives, we haven’t made any draconian steps.”

Australian poet, dead at 54.

My dad. I’m pretty sure of that. That guy knows more about town council meetings and zoning changes than anyone I ever met. But it’s tough times for newspapers and magazines, competing with the internet and, you know, economics. In the end, does it really matter if they disappear?

They say that journalists prefer bad news to good news. There is plenty of that close to home.

This is becoming a terrible week for the US newspaper industry. On Monday, the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, filed for bankruptcy. The New York Times Company followed by saying it might mortgage its Renzo Piano-designed headquarters building by Times Square to reduce debt.

The recession has turned the long, slow decline of newspapers into a brisk fall. On Tuesday, I dropped into a UBS investor conference in New York to catch Gary Pruitt, chief executive of the McClatchy newspaper chain, calling its results “lousy”. At this rate, US newspapers will be lucky to make it to the weekend.

Many American journalists, facing job losses and the death of an industry they loved, regard it as a tragedy not just for them but for society. They fear that television, radio and blogs can never replace what newspapers provided for readers.

Shortlist for BC Non-fiction prize ($40G!) includes ‘Ninja favourite Russell Wangersky

Library kickstools as home decor: I’ll take two! But only if they come with saucy librarians with scratchy wool skirts and pointy glasses

Christian group can’t stop march of poetic anti-Christ

James Frey extends his 15 minutes to a solid 17 with an internship at Gawker

McCain’s Christmas letter to family

Solzhenitsyn rulez teh intertubes

Celebrity memoirs hit the remainder bins as readers tire of being reminded they’re not rich and careless

Maud asks how Google’s searchable magazine archive will affect paid services like Lexis/Nexis…. good question

California’s new poet laureate, Carol Muske-Dukes asks, What the hell have I done?

Could there be an honorific less American-sounding than poet laureate? The title conjures images of a laurel wreath askew on the pale brow of a loitering bard — scribbling couplets beside a throne (”I am his Highness’ dog at Kew; / Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?”) British poets laureate write occasional verse to celebrate royal birthdays, ship christenings and Tube station openings. As California’s new poet laureate, I haven’t been asked to write a sonnet or triolet in honor of Gov. Schwarzenegger, who appointed me last month, nor a pantoum in honor of Maria Shriver — and I don’t expect to have to honor such a request. The governor and first lady clearly admire the idea of the poet laureate without insisting on a job description or the odd panegyric.

In Britain, the poet laureate remains a half-jester, half-noble figure. In the U.S., we remain “half-cracked,” as Emily Dickinson said. We have a poetry tradition — a “Body Electric” anarchic romance — which gives rise to our present poetry polyglot: neo-formalist, plain style, abstract, imagist, l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e, ethnic, feminist, mystical, abcderian, post-colonial, lyric-narrative or minimalist, William-Carlos-Williams-take-the-damn-refrigerator-note-down-and-mix-me-a-plum-daiquiri schools of poetry.

Poetry is, like prayer, spun from the imagination — from ultimate contradiction — like the idea of a democratic crown. Who’s lucky or brazen enough to wear this headgear?

LAT’s blog points out a blog called Daily Routines which looks at various artists’ … um … daily routines. There’s also Desk Space, which had asked me to photograph and write about my desk space, but I couldn’t get a fish eye lens on camera to encompass the entire scope of the mess, so I declined. You’ll notice Ninja K’s desk in there, but I happen to know it never looks like that. She must have cleared away her mail order sex toy business inventory.

Is there a zeigeist of hate mounting against Jonathan Safran Foer? At first it was just jealous wannabes, but now it seems to be gaining a popular foothold. Aw, but he seems like such a nice guy.

Jonathan Safran Foer is a young, rich and successful literary writer, an oxymoronic state that arose at the moment his debut novel Everything Is Illuminated was published in 2002. As a result Foer has become that rare bird: a bona fide celebrity whose seven-figure advances, choice of dwelling in the pricey Brooklyn neighbourhood of Park Slope, marriage to fellow writer Nicole Krauss, crusade against kosher butchering practices, family ties and awards have been scrutinised and criticised by those on the lower rungs of the literary ladder.

It got to the point where Nicole Aragi, Foer’s agent, complained to the New York Times magazine that the jealous frenzy “had me ripping my hair out”. Lately, though, it seems like Foer-bashing has moved out of the domain of catharsis-seeking wannabes on to a larger, more public stage.

Margaret Trudeau to write book about bipolar disease, an idea that makes me both happy and sad

Christians incensed at profane book of poetry want to jam the jagged fuckstick of divine justice up shit-eating poet’s ass

American publishing in (almost?) peril updates, daily… daily…

Do you know how many times lying that I’ve read Finnegan’s Wake has gotten me laid? That’s right. Exactly zero. Well, let’s say .5…

Jane Austen meets Facebook (from paper tiger)

MLK documents up-for-auction not up for auction

Note to publishers: hire some fact checkers — respectable science magazine looking for Chinese text for their cover print “classic poem”, which turns out to actually be a menu from a brothel in Macau… Bookninja covered this story years ago, of course… (There was a guy a few years ago who was keeping a blog of tattoos with bad kanji translations, but I’ve lost the link)

US award for first-time YA authors

Coming in this weekend’s NYT is this essay on a bailout plan for the scribbling set.

A little while back my daughter told me the following depressing joke:

Woman: What do you do?

Man: Me? Oh, I write books.

Woman: How interesting! Have you sold anything recently?

Man: Why, yes. My couch, my car and my flat-screen television.

A snarkier writer-father might have added, “and I sold those things to pay for your private school tuition!” But instead it got me thinking that there was a real problem here. Not just a small problem involving issues of respect between one writer and one teenager, but rather a national problem of respect where being a writer has become so widely associated with being a loser that we have become the stuff of common jokes.

My friends (as the nation’s most famous loser, John McCain, likes to begin his appeals), in these times of plummeting consumer confidence and evaporating labor markets, it is time to address the problem head on. We must now go boldly forward and bail out the writers.

Robert McCrum gives his top 10 books of the year, but with full disclosure of his relationships to those involved. Now you can take it or leave it and decide for yourself when and where his opinion might have been influenced by wine. Plus, this represents a great new way to name drop.

Simpsons up for Writers’ Guild awards…

One last DFW book, compiled from a 2005 lecture

Book sales up in Canada because of weak dollar… In related news: dollar down in Canada because of weak leadership

For those about to “Meh”: Gabriel García Márquez working on new book

Turkish writers risk it all by apologizing

MLK documents up for sale

Pulitzer Prize dips toe in web-writing water

Tina Brown takes print medias tired, poor, huddle masses. So lovely. So selfless.

On the day the perennially troubled Radar magazine folded, its editor Maer Roshan got an email from an old friend, Tina Brown, with whom he’d worked at her own sunken ship, Talk.

“Maer my darling, I’m grieving so terribly,” she wrote in her Masterpiece Theatre trill. “I’m running into a meeting, but do nothing either yourself or with your staff until you’ve spoken to us. I will call you as soon as I can.”

Maybe Barry Diller’s mammoth IAC Corporation, with whom Ms. Brown launched her aggregator Web site, the Daily Beast, was prepping a bailout plan for the magazine!

Or was she looking for spiked pieces she could use to add original content to her own online magazine?

If there was ever any doubt that eBooks are finally making it big, you can pretty much throw them out the window. A video game platform will now accept eBooks. I can only imagine the rush to chuck the Pokemon games out the window and grab for the latest Ishiguro.

The creator of Donkey Kong and Super Mario is hoping that Austen and Dickens will prove as great a pull to computer game fanatics. It has worked with HarperCollins to select 100 titles – from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to Gulliver’s Travels, Pride and Prejudice, A Tale of Two Cities and Treasure Island – which will be available in a single software package for the Nintendo DS costing around £20.

The device, said Nintendo, can be held horizontally, “just like a book”, with pages turned using a stylus. Additional features include an electronic bookmark, adjustable text sizes, and a “story synopsis mode” which details the story and themes of each title “without giving away any of twists and turns of the plot”.

Perhaps aware that it’s catering to an audience with a short attention span, Nintendo is also offering the option, for those “stuck for somewhere to start”, of telling the software your mood, upon which it will present you with a range of options. Bleak House, for example, would be a bad option for those pushed for time, while King Lear might not suit those in need of a pick-me-up.

Publisher’s Weekly person of the year? The Beez

A summation of my bit on Q yesterday

Beedle Bard digested… what do you think?

Brain cells for learning discovered, Murray places order for replacement set

A reality show like Idol, for writers… (warning, terrible music on page, so turn your speakers down…)

Who wrote the Koran?

Let’s admit it: things are in the shitter. So, how do we get the publishing world moving? Well, when you’re in the shitter the options are usually to pull something out or push it through, right? Someone’s got to clean up, and this guy is taking a stab at laying out a future for publishing that involves e-publishing and works toward some level of sustainability outside the mega-publisher. What do you think?

There are many people and blogs doing an obsessively thorough job thinking about and writing about the effects of e-books on publishing, so I’m not going to try to recreate their work.  But my recent posts on the Google Book Search controversy and the Amazon Kindle have gotten me thinking about what the book publishing world might look like in the not-too-distant future.  More specifically, I’ve been wondering if and how writers will get published and make money under whatever new model takes hold.

I suppose I’ll be making some predictions here, but this is more of attempt to envision a viable future of book publishing that is better, although not perfect:

Print Is Dead Shrinking:  Some people think that true readers will always prefer a bound paper copy to hold, smell, fondle (the descriptive terms tend to get kind of gross).  These people are wrong.  Some others think that print books are dead, that they’re just going to go away.  These people are also wrong, I believe.

Okay get this: BoingBoing points to a story about a US school district that has ripped pages from the middle of a book to “protect” students from the content. That’s answer! To every problem! Mutilation! I think I’m going to answer every question with that today and see how it works out. George, how are ya? Mutilation. Do you have change for a five? Mutilation. What do you think about this whole proroguing of parailment business? Mutilation. It’s just endlessly useful.

Students at New Rochelle School High School are going to find it difficult to complete their next assignment: comparing the film adaptation of “Girl, Interrupted” to the best-selling book. In the book, Kaysen recounts her confinement at a Massachussets mental hospital in the 1960’s.

Pages from the middle of the book have been torn out by the school district after having been deemed “inappropriate” by school officials due to sexual content and strong language. Removed is a scene where the rebellious Lisa (played by Angela Jolie in the movie) encourages Susanna (played by Winona Ryder) to circumvent hospital rules against sexual intercourse by engaging in oral sex instead.

“The material was of a sexual nature that we deemed inappropriate for teachers to present to their students,” said English Department Chariperson Leslie Altschul, “since the book has other redeeming features, we took the liberty of bowdlerizing.”

Debt’s a popular subject right now. But writers have been thinking about it for years.

The relationship between literature and debt, though, is not just a matter of impoverished novelists scribbling to keep themselves out of the clink. The business of lending has also generated literary riches. John Milton was the son of a scrivener, who (like most members of his profession) regularly made loans for interest. This income supported his unemployed son through his early periods of study at Hammersmith and Horton, and enabled him to become the most learned poet of any age. Debt also shaped Milton’s personal life: his first unhappy marriage was to Mary Powell, whose father owed the elder Milton £300, which he never repaid.

Until quite recently debt was not regarded as a purely financial matter. Money was generally lent to people whom you knew, and financial ties between households could be sealed by marriages. You lent to people whose social status encouraged belief (hence “credit”) that they were reliable. This complex idea of credit – part financial, part moral, part social – goes back a long way. In Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale the merchant states a general truth that we can only borrow “while we have a name” (ie a good reputation). And because lending money was linked with social and erotic relationships, a financial debt could be repaid in any number of ways. So in the Shipman’s Tale the merchant lends money to his “cousin”, a friar, which the friar lends in turn to the merchant’s wife. She sleeps with the friar and then with her husband to repay the debts. For most of our ancestors, debt was not simply what we think of as debt. A metaphorical economy of status, friendship, sexual favours and trust existed in parallel to the monetary economy of financial exchange, profit and loss.

These parallel economies were vital to English writing. It meant that stories about debt could touch on almost any aspect of human relationships, from friendship to commerce. What would happen if someone of good credit (in the moral sense) borrowed money from someone who had lots of money but not much social standing? What sort of bonds and conflicts would result?

Forrest J Ackerman, uberfan, dead at 92.

Be careful what you join. It might end up like the comments section here at Bookninja. Except dumber. Considering I can’t wade through the books I  WANT to read, it’s unlikely I’ll ever join a group that tells me WHAT to read.

Today there are perhaps four million to five million book groups in the United States, and the number is thought to be rising, said Ann Kent, the founder of Book Group Expo, an annual gathering of readers and authors.

“I firmly believe there was an uptick in the number of book groups after 9/11, and I’m expecting another increase in these difficult economic times,” she said. “We’re looking to stay connected and to have a form of entertainment that’s affordable, and book groups are an easy avenue for that.”

Most groups are all-female, but there are plenty of all-male and coed ones. Lately there have emerged plenty of online-only book groups too, though — given the difficulty of flinging a drink in the face of a member who suggests reading Trollope — those are clearly a different animal.

And more clubs means more acrimony. Sometimes there is a rambler in the group, whose opinion far outlasts the natural interest of others, or a pedant, who never met a literary reference she did not yearn to sling. The most common cause of dissatisfaction and departures?

“It’s because there’s an ayatollah,” said Esther Bushell, a professional book-group facilitator who leads a dozen suburban New York groups and charges $250 to $300 a member annually for her services. “This person expects to choose all the books and to take over all the discussions. And when I come on board, the ayatollah is threatened and doesn’t say anything.” Like other facilitators, she is hired for the express purpose of bringing long-winded types in line.

Eight MILLION copies of new Harry book in stores…

Harry Potter encyclopedia suit-loser to publish book anyway

Time Out owners seeking time away


First edition Anne of Green Gables sold at auction (goes for extra because it contains an unabridged version of the Gilbert/horse beastiality scene where Anne whips them both with the crop, crying, “Faster! Faster!”)

LAT’s favourite books of 2008

le Clézio uses Nobel lecture (full text here) to combat “information poverty”… Dude, I don’t know about you, but my information cup runneth o’er most days…

I love the Onion. I mean deeply. They’ve been doing this sporadic series of detached, sterile news briefs about lame duck Bush being injured in horrific ways… a crocodile bites off his arm, he passes a three pound kidney stone, gets dragged behind his motorcade for blocks and he accidentally nails his eyelid to a wall in the Whitehouse, and always ends up resting comfortably in a hospital, recovering… It hit the point today where I just broke down laughing in public, almost in tears. It’s just so wonderfully subtle in how over-the-top it is. I’m enjoying being teased for how good the revenge-element of his discrediting feels.

I’ll be on CBC’s arts and culture show, Q, this morning, sometime just after 9am EST, I think. It’s a panel with Judith Thompson, who has her own reservations about the Siminovitch Prize, and Jian Gomeshi on reforming the jury process for arts awards I have no idea what to expect, but it should be interesting.

Toni Morrison profiled at the CBC by part-time ‘Ninja Donna Bailey Nurse.

One of the things I recall about visiting Morrison’s home in 1998 was a painting of a watermelon with deep red flesh that hung high on her living room wall. It made me laugh a little: how like Morrison to take that old stereotype of black folks eating watermelon and embrace it, reframe it and exhibit it as art.

Indeed, that was what she did with the history of slavery in Beloved, a novel that changed my life. At public school in Pickering, Ont., where I grew up in the 1970s, slavery comprised a dusty corner of the curriculum. What I knew coming out of Grade 6 was that slaves were people in my textbooks who looked like me; that they were unpaid workers that had picked cotton on plantations in the American South and that they had been treated harshly. I knew that some slaves had escaped to Canada, where they became free at last, and that the rest were liberated after a civil war that demolished a gracious Southern lifestyle. Our lessons about slavery were vague: although it was made clear to me that it was a wicked institution, it was also subtly communicated that as a black person, the shame was mine.

A Guardian blog muses on the art of the rejection letter. My favourite rejection letter I received years and years ago when I first started writing was for a story I sent to a fiction journal here in Canada. After 6 months, I received the story back with a quarter-page slip of letterhead containing three hand-written words: “We liked this!” But it was a rejection nontheless. Check out these examples here.

…writing rejection letters is a delicate skill, one that must be fine-tuned over time (weeks, even) as one digs out from under the slush pile. For it is not easy to achieve and balance the two central goals of a truly accomplished rejection letter: trying not to make the writer feel distraught whilst also discouraging him or her from ever contacting you ever again.

In many respects, techniques for achieving that first goal have much in common with the kind of rhetoric that many people popularly apply to the end of a romantic relationship: the “It’s not you, it’s me” approach. We all know, of course, that it doesn’t really work – that the person on the receiving end of this sentiment almost always concludes “It is me!” but writers of rejections go on trying it for want of any less cruel approach.

Harry Potter book goes on sale

Guardian first book prize goes to first book

“Black Wednesday” roundup: the New York publishing world took a shiv to the left lung yesterday. Here are some links covering it. (NYT re HMH) (NYT re Random) (LAT blog overall coverage) (Moby’s coverage here and here) (WaPocoverage)

What makes moguls think they belong in publishing anyway?

The ten best books of 2008, divided evenly between fiction and non-fiction (because no other genres could possibly have produced anything so likely to buy advertising), at least includes Toni Morrison and Roberto Bolaño. Are there any surprises here?

Last month word starting going around that the Globe Books section would be folding. I had been contacted by a couple major news outlets seeking comment, but even they were saying it was still just a rumour, so I was reluctant to go on record with my rage, especially after August’s “scare”. Instead I called Martin Levin, the editor of the section and asked what was up. He said the section wouldn’t be folding but that undisclosed changes were indeed coming. So I waited to see what those were. Now the changes have been announced and it seems the section will cease publication as a stand alone tabloid in the broadsheet—not folding but folding-in to the Focus section. The Globe brass are playing this off as beneficial, citing the Focus section’s larger readership and calling the Books section a “ghetto”. Nice. They also cite the strengthening of online presence and new books-related tools. As you know, I see the online world as a positive thing, so I appreciate this move toward the future, but I am suspect of the motives. They outrightly say books coverage will be driven by advertising dollars. That stinks, and is obviously the reason for the change, since advertising across the board is down, but has always been week in the books section. Smacks of buying space for criticism. My instinct is to freak out, yell “THIS IS SPARTA!”, and kick Greenspon into a pit, but with all the recent controversy hereabouts, I’m kind of running out of indignant steam. Besides, Steven Beattie has some sober commentary over at his blog. So what do you think? Now that we know precisely what the danger is, would you say it’s time for our readers to crack each other’s heads open and feast on the goo inside?

Naipaul’s wife seeks witch doctor hex on Naipaul’s biographers…

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publisher resigns

Narnia’s secret code uncovered, message read: “Whatever happens, don’t let Disney adapt these books to film”

Literary job opening; must hate Americans

Lawsuit over Harry Potter embargo breach resolved, wheels of justice grind on

Amazon now officially owns Abebooks… sniff

Jane Austen museum bans scattering of crazy people’s ashes at author’s cottage (from Maud)

Embed stories in your computer… possibly wonderful and possibly crazy-making

UPDATE: Mark Medley interviews ECW editor Michael Holmes about the controversy at the National Post’s arts blog. Holmes, whom I greatly respect and like very much, says the issue is a non-issue and calls the reporting of it cyber bullying, which I disagree with. I certainly hope no one feels we’ve been bullying hereabouts. I’m interested in fixing the process, which is obviously broken, not bullying anyone. I think I’ve made it abundantly clear that I feel Scheier and ECW should be left out of this. There are some people I respect and trust telling me the rules were followed. So let’s allow that. The rules were followed. However, given what the rules have allowed, I think it’s safe to say the rules need changing. The Canada Council needs to strike a committee to consult with stakeholder groups about these concerns and address them before the next round of judging. Clean the process as best we can so future winners (and jurors) won’t have to bear the burden Scheier and Brandt now do.

A reader, who wishes to remain anonymous, wrote in to say the Winnipeg Freep has a piece on the GG conflict-of-interest kerfuffle (previous posts here, here, here and here). Another level-headed examination of the affair.

It is tough to know what to do. Abandoning expert juries and going with some wider voting system, involving teachers, publishers and editors, could turn literary awards into an exercise in self-congratulation like, say, the Oscars.

But in this case, you have to side with the G-G critics. In a country with thousands of poets who labour in obscurity for decades, the poetry winner was a first-time author with public ties to two of the jurors.

Somebody should have seen this one coming.

The piece starts with a hook that seems to imply the issue has been resolved or at least forgotten. As you can see, it’s not. And it gets worse. Readers in the area have also forwarded me an email Brandt had sent around last year (text below with emails and recipient names removed) introducing Scheier to her colleagues and urging them to apply for Canada Council funding on his behalf. This whole thing just gets uglier and uglier. I hate that people have gotten themselves into this, and I hate reporting on this, but if sites like Bookninja don’t, who will?

From: Di Brandt [redacted]
Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2007 13:06:09 -0500
To:[ redacted]

Subject: Introducing…the poet Jacob Scheier

hi friends,

i’m delighted to introduce to you Jacob Scheier, a young talented poet from Toronto, who is publishing his first book of poetry, More to Keep Us Warm, with ECW in September.  you may be interested to know that Jacob is the son of the late well known poet Libby Scheier.  this book is in some ways a book of homage and grief for Jacob’s mother Libby, but it is also in  a visionary book by a new emerging seer, who is looking into the dark future of our time with hope and wit and joy and sorrow.   i hope that you will consider inviting him to your university and/or city to read to your community.  he’s a great performer and conversationalist and would be wonderful to have as a visitor in a CanLit class as well.    ECW has of course limited funds for promo tours, but i’m hoping that some of you will be able to include him in your CC Readings program applications (Sept 1 deadline).

please pass this message on to relevant colleagues.  thx!     — Di Brandt     (Canada Research Chair, Brandon University, and a friend, mentor and and fan of Jacob’s poetry)

Raphael Lemkin, profiled.

Today, we call what happened at Auschwitz and the other death camps “genocide.” But at the time, there was no name for the Nazis’ crimes. The word “genocide” did not exist.

In 1944, Lemkin wrote a book about the Nazis. In it, he combined the Greek “genos” for race with the Latin “-cide” for killing: Genocide. Lemkin had named the crime he spent a lifetime trying to prevent.

As a child in Poland, Lemkin was inspired by the stories his mother told him at the fireside — stories of history and heroism, of suffering and struggle. As a Jew he witnessed cruelty and persecution firsthand: from the bribes his parents were forced to pay, to a pogrom that killed dozens nearby.

From his mother, and from his circumstance, Lemkin developed early a strong desire to better the world and protect the innocent and the weak.

“The appeal for the protection of the innocent from destruction set a chain reaction in my mind,” Lemkin later wrote. “It followed me all my life.”

The recent US presidential election gives new life to an old Brazillian scifi novel.

‘Apart from the fact that the President is black, his rival is a blonde woman,’ says Lucia Machado, from publisher Globo, which bought the rights to Lobato’s entire back catalogue. ‘It was a huge coincidence,’ she says. ‘The US was about to have its elections; we took advantage of that and sped up its release.’ The book hit Brazilian shelves earlier this year, as Obama and Hillary Clinton battled it out for the Democratic nomination, accompanied by the slogan: ‘Any resemblance to actual events is pure coincidence.’

Some believe the book also predicts internet technology, China’s rise as a global power and the discovery of oil in Brazil. Readers, however, will hope Lobato didn’t get it all right – the book concludes with the prospect of a black President looking set to trigger a race war.

A challenge: instead of going out and buying more books you fully-intend-to but are-not-going-to read, why not examine your shelves for ones that slipped through the cracks and feel lonely and neglected. (I know from experience that this exercise can yield pleasant some surprises. I once found a Mars Bar behind a copy of Elizabeth Costello.) I’m sure this strategy won’t help the publishing industry, but it might boost the hospitality services industry with all the extra beer money you’ll have.

As I scanned my shelves, I found I had convincing arguments why I shouldn’t read each one of the orphans — or convincing to me anyway. I rejected a book called “English, August,” by Upamanyu Chatterjee because it is, after all, November. No to “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists” by Robert Tressell because the book jacket says it’s about “the desperate lives of working people.” No to “The Unconsoled” by Kazuo Ishiguro because I heard it wasn’t nearly as good as “Remains of the Day” or “Never Let Me Go.”

Try it yourself and see how many pitiful excuses you can find for not reading a book you own.

A new play that looks at the relationship between Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath gets some press at the CBC.

“Strangely, there’s a lot of laughter in this show,” Clarke says over the telephone from Calgary, where the play premiered last winter as part of the Rabbits’ 25th anniversary season. “These were funny women. We’re not interested so much in how they died as in how they lived. And people who are that willing to examine death do tend to be pretty alive when they’re alive.”

Director Blake Brooker puts Sexton and Plath [played by Onalea Gilbertson] at centre stage, where they confide in us through their poetry [and, in Plath’s case, some journal entries, too]. Clarke’s gregarious Sexton links the poems by musing about her kinship with Plath, whom she envied for committing suicide first and “stealing” her death. Meanwhile, the women’s widowed husbands, a bemused Alfred [Kayo] Sexton [Andy Curtis] and the brooding British poet Ted Hughes [Michael Green], provide commentary from the sidelines.

In between the show’s spoken passages, all four characters engage in dance-like interludes, set to a jazzy score by composer Richard McDowell, that give kinetic expression to their relationships.

Uhmmm……..

Placido Domingo’s new album based on the poems of Pope John Paul II (can’t wait to hear how he rhymes “condoms” with “Sodom”)

In related news: gay version of The Bible gets a mixed reaction (correction: reaction not mixed)

Bressani Prize awarded

Mother loses libel suit against misery author daughter (more on misery memoirs here)

“Bailout” and “Change” are Merriam-Webster’s words of the year (Last year it was “w00t!”, a word that requires as many numbers as letters, and half as many punctuation marks, to spell (yes, those are zeros, grandpa..))

Did Tom Cruise get out his step stool so he could reach the phone and personally pressure Amazon into dropping an anti-Scientology book?

December is “Buy a Book by a Black Author and Give it to Somebody Not Black” month (thanks, K)

Favourite book covers of 2008 (some nice covers here and you get to vote at the end!)