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| Hearsay: |
With all the death-of-the-newspaper articles around, one question keeps getting asked: when the papers are gone, and their advertising dollars with them, who will bankroll investigative reporting for the people? Apparently the answer is: “that guy…oh, and her…and them”. Online news outlet The Huffington Post is creating an investigative journalism wing funded by private donors and organizations. Gee, there’s no chance for partisan politics to creep into this process, is there.
The Huffington Post has announced it will bankroll a group of investigative journalists by teaming up with donors and other organizations.
Their first mission will be to examine stories about the U.S. economy.
The Huffington Post website, which has seven staff reporters, contains a collection of opinionated blog entries and breaking news.
The popular blog is uniting with The Atlantic Philanthropies and other donors to launch the Huffington Post Investigative Fund. It will have an initial budget of $1.75 million US.
Howdy all, Remember to enter the new Bookninja contest (covered here by Alison Flood in the Guardian) to remasculate the authors, titles and plot summaries of famous books. Remember, we’re not looking for porn here, though that may seem the logical choice for some of you…. We’re looking for “remasculation”, whatever that means. And don’t worry about the cover, if you don’t have photoshop, but if you do and feel like playing, send one along! This is more about the ideas than the design. See previous examples here and here. And a few below. You can .
Beloved, by Toni Morrison becomes Beloved Patriots, by Tony Morrison
One man’s quest to follow the NFL team he loves to every game during the
07-08 season.*
Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Everything That Rises Must Converge” becomes “Everything That Rises Must Submerge“, by Brandon E. O’Connor
A tender, postmodernist take on the testosterone-fed capers of a small time Dixie mayor who alternates chasing ass with loud spontaneous diatribes on structural flaws in Faulkner’s plot maps, his “take no prisoners!” button affording an in at most S & M functions in foreign cities.
*
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath becomes The Bell Jar by Sid Plath
“To the person in the Bell Jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”
Ten years ago, Edward Greenwood was a top agent for the C.I.A. Retired and working as a magazine editor Edward is living the simple life and no longer thinks about those dangerous days. But now somebody in the Agency wants what’s in Edward’s head. Kidnapped from his family, Edward is brought to a top secret facility known as The Bell Jar, where torture and psychological mind-games rule. Faced with his sanity being slowly stripped away, Edward must use every dirty trick he knows to kill and survive.
*
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, by Ann Brashares becomes Brotherhood of the Traveling Panty-Raids
This sensitive tale of male bonding, tells the story of four army buddies who, after discharge, return to college and participate in four separate panty-raid missions, only to discover that they each came away with the same pair of panties, and magically, the panties fit each of them perfectly, despite their different body shapes and “package” sizes.
Fathers get post-partum too? That would explain a few things. Anyway, apparently this study shows that while both parents get pp depression, only the father’s depression affects kiddie reading levels. Great. The mess in the kitchen AND an illiterate kid. Can I do anything right? I’m headed into the bathroom to cry for a bit. (From Rebecca Skloot’s Twitter feed)
Some of the results were not surprising: Nine months after the child’s birth 24% of mothers and 20% of fathers reported mild symptoms of depression, and 9% of mothers and 6% of fathers reported at least moderate symptoms of depression. This confirms what other studies have shown, that parental depression is very common, and that it also affects fathers almost as frequently as it affects mothers.
However, there was one surprising finding: while mothers’ depression reduced the mother-child reading activities, and similarly, fathers’ depression reduced the father-child reading activities, it was the fathers’ depression (but not mothers) that significantly affected the child’s vocabulary development at 24-months. Why? The authors suggest that even though maternal depression reduced mother-child reading time, the mother stills spends a significant amount of time with the child, so that such reduction is not likely to have a major effect on the child’s development. However, the father may spend so little time with the child, that any reduction in father-child reading time may have a noticeable impact on the child’s language development.
The fact that Eliot rejected Orwell’s Animal Farm just goes to show you that one genius’s lack-of-genius is another genius’s genius. Or something.
In a letter from 1944 explaining why he would not be publishing the work, Eliot told Orwell that he was not persuaded by the “Trotskyite” politics which underpin the narrative. To publish such an anti-Russian novel would jar in the contemporary political climate, explained the poet.
“We have no conviction … that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time. It is certainly the duty of any publishing firm which pretends to other interests and motives other than mere commercial prosperity to publish books which go against the current of the moment,” wrote Eliot, before going on to say that he was not convinced that “this is the thing that needs saying at the moment.” The letter, which has been in the private collection of Eliot’s widow, Valerie, since he died, is explored in a forthcoming edition of the BBC documentary series, Arena.
In the letter, Eliot argued that Orwell’s “view, which I take to be Trotskyite, is not convincing.”
Apparently AS Byatt and Margaret Drabble are related. And they dislike each other. Because of a tea set. Huh. My god, this is just like at my house growing up. Except that we weren’t writing and it was over a Chewbacca figurine. And an unappreciated wedgie.
“Any small thing may cause offence,” says Miss Drabble of Miss Byatt. “She was so upset when she found that I had written, many decades ago, about a particular tea set that our family possessed because she had wanted to use it herself. She felt I had appropriated something which was not mine. Writers are territorial and they resent intruders.”
In the constant quest for relevancy and timely reportage, the publishing cycle keeps getting contracted. Now books, especially in politics, are going from concept to print in as little as ten days. Aw! Ten days?! But I want it NOW!
For generations the publishing industry has worked on a fairly standard schedule, taking nine months to a year after an author delivered a manuscript to put finished books in stores. Now, enabled in part by e-book technology and fueled by a convergence of spectacularly dramatic news events, publishers are hitting the fast-forward button.
In December the FT Press released an e-book edition of “Barack, Inc: Winning Business Lessons of the Obama Campaign” a month after the authors delivered a manuscript. Last month Free Press, a unit of Simon & Schuster, published an e-book version of “Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation” just three weeks after Daniel Gross, a writer for Newsweek magazine, completed the book.
And as the financial crisis was deepening last March, George Soros submitted a manuscript to the publisher PublicAffairs. Ten days later the e-book of “The New Paradigm for Financial Markets” went on sale.
“People can’t wait a year to get timely information on critical subjects,” said Amy Neidlinger, associate publisher of FT Press. “Especially today it’s dated 10 minutes after you’ve just received the first installation.”
Of course many publishers and authors suggest that taking time to produce a reflective work is what books are about, and that they should not succumb to the pressures of the 24-hour news cycle.
We don’t need art here, people, we need information!! Now back in the salt mines, you dirtbag! You canll yourself an author!?
The latest in arts page, made-for-bewildered-old-people-and-sad-artists contextualizations of the rise of the ebook and its devil-sent machine, The Kindle (it even sounds like it has to do with FIRE!)
We can place the blame on various factors, including the increased costs of collecting and reporting news, higher materials costs, the fast-paced move of advertising to the Internet and the difficult economic environment that all businesses are facing today. But we can’t discount the fact that readers — of newspapers, magazines and books alike — now have better alternatives than ever to satisfy their information appetites. Google, Sony, Amazon and others are pushing very hard to get us to change our reading habits in a decidedly digital way.
If you think about the past decade, we’ve had alternatives — including reading on our computer screens. But the alternatives all had their disadvantages. Reading from your desktop or laptop display, for instance, is difficult for long periods of time, and frankly, not very appealing.
But the experience is getting better, thanks to enhanced designs on the latest e-books, and the proliferation of reading choices for the devices.
And in related news, JK Rowling and Ken Follett are fighting some alleged pirates (yarr) who are offering free e-versions of their books in the US.
Remember how the last five years have been a papier-mache Godzilla’s-worth of arts pages articles on how graphic novels aren’t just for kids anymore? Here’s what’s next.
Douglas Adams understood well how an idea could cross literary genres. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has had multiple incarnations – radio, book and eventually a film – but forgotten now is the interactive fiction game, written by Adams himself. In 1984, it sold 350,000 copies. And while Italo Calvino probably never touched a computer game, he is one of several writers to immerse the reader, not a character, in a world by writing in the second person.
Interactive fiction (IF) is probably the place where literature and games intersect most cleanly. Curses, by Graham Nelson, is a cerebral and whimsical epic that begins with the search for a lost map and spreads out through Eliot, Proust, and most of 20th-century literature. (Curses is huge, so newcomers to IF with an afternoon free could try the game Lost Pig, by Admiral Jota, in which you are a slow-witted caveman called Grunk on a quest for porcine reunion.)
Stories make games compelling, and interactive fiction is an old, old genre born in a time when computers were barely more functional than staplers.
Amazon is refusing to budge on new terms in their “Advantage” program that basically hold payments hostage for increased discount. The take-away good news here is that they’re not just screwing books, they’re screwing everybody! We’re finally accepted!
In a bulletin sent to IPG members, executive director Bridget Shine, said the guild had expressed “concern” over the move and stressed that “these changes will have an impact on the most cash flow-vulnerable publishers”. The trade body also voiced its “disappointment about the way in which this news was conveyed to publishers”, noting in particular the short period of notice. Publishers were told by email that they had until 1st April to pick one of the options available to them.
But Amazon’s director of books, Gordon Willoughby, told the IPG that the move was “a global programme covering other products, and that they would not be able to alter the terms especially for books”.
Krautrock, ya. You know, at first this looks like it’s going to be painful, but if you have patience, they bring it and convert your ass to a believer at around the three minute mark. Totally dig Wolverine’s nerdy brother working over the organ.
- Former financial head douche, now citizen douche, Hentry Paulson to write a book … but, seeign the lights of raised torches and twinkling in reflected steel of pitchforks and machetes, he’s wisely not accepting an advance or taking profits… all money goes to charity
- No one would have the guts to write Satanic Verses today says Kureishi of Rushdie fatwa
- Yeesh! NYT announces layoffs and salary cuts… run for the hills, Ma!
- People Magazine reporter held hostage by Timothy Hutton extremists…
Well, the entries in the Bookninja.com “Remasculation” Contest are starting to roll in. Riffing off an article calling for the “remasculation” of books so that men can read shamelessly, we’ve decided to make a contest to take classic titles and gear them toward a “masculine” market, whatever the hell that means. So give us a “masuclated” author, title, and one sentence plot synopsis. And a cover, if you can. Make sure you get thinking about this, and remember that illustrations (covers redesigned to suit your title) will score you extra points. What better way to waste your boss’s resources on a Friday than by dicking around in Photoshop? !
A few examples from those received, sans attribution for the time being, are below.
Classic Charlotte’s Web becomes “Charlotte’s Web of Death”, by E. B. White
“When Wilbur befriends his neighbour Charlotte he has no idea that he
will be sucked in a web of intrigue, deceit and mayhem, leading him as
far as Frankfurt and Milan before returning to his humble farm for the
chilling conclusion that will leave you breathless.”*
Marion Engel’s Bear becomes “Sex with Bears” by Marlon Engel
Lou, a repressed librarian, lets down her hair, switches her glasses
for contact lenses, and discovers her inner wild beast soon after moving
to a remote island and meeting a group of rural residents.
*
Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel beceomes “The Stone Demon” by M. Laurence
Hagar Shipley makes a deal with the devil to regain her youth and become
more beautiful than she ever imagined. And now it’s time for revenge.
[ed note: I would have called this The Stone Angels and Demons, but that's just me]
*
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Drink Pray becomes “Eat, Drink, Punch Him” by Gilbert Elizabeth
Rebounding from an excruciating divorce, author comes of age during a
year-long pub crawl of Ciudad Juarez, rediscovering that muscular bond
between mind and body in a dizzying bare-knuckle quest for the next free
drink.(No cover shot for you. I don’t have any of that girly InDesign, PhotoShop
stuff.)*
Veronika Decides To Die by Paulo Coelho becomes “The Death Wish of Vernon K.” by Paul Coalman
“When Vernon K.’s suicide is thwarted by a twist of fate, he awakens in a mental asylum, in the hands of a Doctor with his own agenda!”
(Oh, and I know that Paulo is a man but I thought his name wasn’t
masculine and macho enough.) [ed. note: And "Paul" is better?]
*
Marget Mitchell’s masterpiece becomes “Gone with the Wind” by Major M.J. Mitchell
The war is only just beginning for ace fighter pilot Rhett Butler. He’s
sent on a dangerous mission to drop an H bomb on Cuba, but that’s the
least of his worries. Scarlett O’Hara, a dashing femme fatale has
revealed a deadly secret, and one that destroy the world as we know it.
When Scarlett is captured, Rhett must try and find her before it’s too
late, and the world will be damned to hell.
- Moby points to How Books Get their Titles
- And in related news: Oddest book titles pick a wiener for Diagram Prize
- Afterword points to Countryman Press’s Twitter page where they are laying out the catalog, 140 characters at a time
- NL poet Randy Maggs knicks Winterset Book award from the jaws of Sara Tilley… I’m so torn here… poetry wins a book award, but over a very interesting novel…
- Ontario posts budget with no harmonized tax on books… !!
- Charles Darwin was a student like any other: spending more money on the good life than books (mind you, I wonder if the publishers of the day had worked out how to gouge students like they do now)
- The Bodleian Library at Oxford is bursting at the seems, so a spillover site has been designated to save the groaning shelves
- Amazon.com layoffs
- Scholastic having financial problems like everyone else
Okay, we had some fun yesterday making fun of this piece from the Guardian that calls for the “re-masculating” of books so men can be turned into page turners instead of roll-over-and-go-to-sleepers. The whole thing is so ludicrous. So I’m going to propose we have a contest: “remasculate” the title and basic plot summary (one sentence, max) of a famous book—and if the book is by a woman, “masculate” her as well. Bonus points if you include a cover redesign. I’ll start us off below. Send your entries to me at .
The Sea, The Sea (And a Giant Sea Bass)
by Ira MurdochAn old man withdraws from the world of professional sports fishing to a house by the sea where by extraordinary coincidence he encounters a giant sea bass he almost caught many years before, but no matter how many times he tries to hook ‘er, she keeps getting away, thereby revealing his arrogance, entitlement, and solipsism, which he realizes is a pretty awesome way to be.
Although my example springs from a pretty masculine book to begin with… Winners will get some Bookninja swag for their troubles.
I want this so bad, but if I get any more connected to the internet, I will probably get disconnected by Lady Ninja. I’d totally program it to project the faces of people I like over the faces of those I don’t. It might make me more charitable to the idiots of the world.
Continuing her blog series, AL Kennedy gives us another witty, well-written installment in her musings on being a famous author, which is remarkably like being everyone else, except with more travel.
…as it turned out, there was only one “private clinic” which could see me during the five hours I had available. Lovely though the establishment was – in a homely and vaguely unhygienic way – the place was clearly geared towards patients afflicted by ailments too embarrassing for their family doctor, rather than those seeking, say, celebrity breast adjustments – or suffering from ear infections. I therefore entered the consulting room, which cunningly doubled as a storage cupboard, and proceeded to be examined at cross-purposes.
“What’s wrong?”
“I have an ear infection.”
“Well, just pop up on the examination…shelf there and remove your jeans and hampering underthings.”
“Um… Thanks for asking, but I actually have an ear infection.”
“Of course you do. You’ll find there’s enough space to lie down between the paper towels and those boxes of stool softener.”
“No, I mean I have an ear infection that’s in my ear.”
“If you can just remove your things.”
“And afterwards will you look at my ear?”
I left with some horse tablets and proceeded to Manchester for a workshop and a reading which may have gone well, but mainly seemed far away and wibbly under the influence of whatever the pills were. Still, at least my ear was hurting less.
Russell Smith is a newspaper junkie and will defend them to the death. Well, Russell, despite agreeing in principle with a significant portion of what you’re saying, it was nice knowing you. I’ll plant a tree that won’t get cut down on your grave.
I love newspapers. I love the dry wit of newspaper people. I love the size and portability and recyclability of a paper product. The ritual of the morning paper creates the most focused, and perhaps pleasant moments of the day.
The security of the kitchen table, the morning light, a bit of baroque guitar, a hot coffee give me, for some reason, a sudden and deep concentration that I am unable to recreate for the rest of the day. Perhaps it’s because of that moment’s proximity to sleep. Perhaps it’s because a sheet of newsprint is so static, so stable, so unflashy: It does not distract me with links to brighter, sexier images, or to the gossipy and stressful world of e-mail, as reading on my computer does.
But it works in a coffee shop at lunch, too, or at a bar at the end of the day. I can sit by a window, look at the street, pick up that smudgy sheet and focus intensely on something like tax laws, and then look back at the street; it’s an invariably intense moment of connection to what’s going on around me.
There is something about that conjunction of pleasures, of the coffee, the view, the city, the sense of being among people that is conducive, for me, to thinking and understanding.
And now everyone is telling me, everyone believes, that this pleasure is coming to an end. We have all read the statistics and know the long list of American papers that have disappeared or are about to disappear.
- In moment of awesomeness, richest kids prize goes to Palestinian community educators
- Sana Krasikov Wins the $100,000 2009 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature
- Orwell prize has international slant
- Poet Ben Okri is Twittering a new poem as its first publication… line… by… line… by… line…
- The creation of a typeface (from ex-Ninja Pete)
- Apparently Ismail Kildare is not a political writer…
- 25 books that stirred the pot
Say, hypothetically speaking, that your publisher took you out to dinner one night and said, over candlelight and silverware, Listen, baby, I totally think you’re the shit, but, see, this other guy has WAY more profile than you, and he wants to title his book the same thing you do (Brooklyn), so even though you’ve been working on this for years, I’d like you to come up with something else for the midlist catalo—er, I mean, publicists to use.” That would suck, wouldn’t it? Hypothetically speaking?
Joanna Smith Rakoff had just turned in a major set of rewrites on her novel, Brooklyn, when her editor at Scribner broke the news to her over dinner that she would have to change its title. It seemed that Irish novelist Colm Tóibín, a Scribner author since 2000 who has been twice short-listed for the Booker Prize, wanted to use it for his forthcoming book, which was scheduled to come out this spring, just a month after Ms. Rakoff’s.
Would the young debut novelist mind terribly getting out of the way?
This was last April—roughly six years after Ms. Rakoff first started working on the book and gave it its name, and four months after Scribner acquired it at auction for a six-figure sum.
This is pretty bold and dark. Amazon has created what it calls its “Advantage” program. The cost? An additional 2% on each title sold. The advantage? Getting paid in a timely manner. So in essence, you need to give up more of your already deeply cut profit in order to see any money at all before 60 days. I know 90 days is common, but this thing just reeks of a cash grab.
Amazon.co.uk is offering publishers who participate in its Advantage scheme an “early payment” option of 15 days, in exchange for an extra 2% on top of the current discount given by publishers. But publishers have claimed that Amazon is trying to pinch an extra month.
Those publishers who do not offer the extra discount will see their payments made on Amazon’s “standard terms”—effectively 60 days. This means a publisher who sells a book through Amazon in April would not be paid until the end of June. Under the revised terms, a publisher would be paid on 15th May—a full 45 days earlier.
Publishers have hit out at the new terms. One said this early payment, which becomes effective from 1st April, is “more or less what they pay us on now”. The publisher added: “At the moment, if you sell in February, you get the report at the start of March and payment at the end—which is in effect what they are saying will happen here. If you don’t give the extra discount, payment would be sometime in April.” He continued: “[Amazon is] trying to take an extra month . . . In these tough times, it’s absolutely outrageous picking on small guys.”
“Advantage” narrowly won out at the meeting that formed the program over other suggested program names, including: “Pretty Extortion”, “Fuck You, Peons”, and “Once More, This Time Without Lube”.
Science is trippy. You may want to turn down your volume as this thing progresses.
Do we need to man-up our books? In light of yesterday’s bit on the differences between two sexes’ reading habits, a Guardian blogger says yes. Yeesh.
But how can the publishing industry exploit this potentially under-served market of Slow Worm men, transforming them into Page Turners and Double Bookers – or, at least, into Serial Shelvers, since they’re fairly profitable for publishers as well? Thanks to the endurance of the stereotype that reading is for girls, is it too late to persuade those in possession of Y chromosomes that enjoying a book (or two or three simultaneously) is a perfectly masculine activity? It doesn’t help, of course, that so many books are clad in covers which are bright pink or otherwise offensively girly. I don’t want to read them on the bus, so I can only imagine that men must be even more discouraged.
Real change won’t occur until publishers band together and make a concentrated effort to re-masculate reading. One option, I suppose, would be to publish special gentlemen’s editions of books that are currently targeted at women, but might actually have male appeal. Female protagonists could be given male names, and romantic plots could be tweaked slightly to be more about football. My editor was not a fan of my suggestion of a special manned-up print run of my (quite feminine) book with a cover featuring a tractor and a pint, but I am holding out hope for the second edition once the trend catches on.
Apparently some people find books intimidating. Really? “Books”? All books? I mean, have you SEEN some of them? Even Danielle Steel and Terry Brooks? They’re like the literary equivalent of pleasant lap dogs with bows in their hair, little body sweaters, and full harnesses. Their poop looks like raisins. Seriously.
Publishers, retailers and librarians are missing out on a potential market of 20m consumers because the book world is too intimidating, according to research conducted by HarperCollins, the Trade Publishers Council and the National Year of Reading (NYR).
The research, to be published this week, looked at attitudes to books in the C2DE socio-economic group, characterised as lower income, non-professional families and estimated at 20m in size.
It found that in many such families, books were seen as alien and unattractive, while reading was considered an anti-social activity for people who, as one respondent said, “don’t know how to live”.
Choosing a book in shops and libraries was also a major obstacle for many, the research found, with many of the codes and references setting out where books were located being off-putting for this segment of the population.
When the world is falling apart, don’t turn to fiscal prudence and help develop sustainability measures. Join a writing group and get penning that novel!
“When reality stinks,” the crusty old novelist quipped, taking a quick drag on his cigarette, “write fiction.”
No, Raymond Chandler didn’t snap out that advice. And many Philadelphia-area fiction writers plainly started on their literary tasks long before 401(k)s began dropping by half.
But as stock markets tank, newspapers go bankrupt, and city services vanish, the humble, bracingly personal act of trying to write fiction – preferably with the support of a writers’ workshop – appears more popular than ever.
The latest in a series of ongoing articles by people seemingly stunned by the Kindle and what it represents for the future of humanity. And they might actually be right about its importance, if war, global warming, pestilence, and economic collapse don’t get us first.
Like the early PCs, the Kindle 2 is a primitive tool. Like the Rocket e-book of 1999 (524 titles available!), it will surely draw chuckles a decade hence for its black-and-white display, its lack of built-in lighting, and the robotic intonation of the text-to-voice feature. But however the technology and marketplace evolve, Jeff Bezos has built a machine that marks a cultural revolution. The Kindle 2 signals that after a happy, 550-year union, reading and printing are getting separated. It tells us that printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.
SF author Mark Charan Newton writes about the “dying Earth” subgenre of spec fiction. I guess Al Gore is verging on this. But that’s not even funny. It’s just scary.
Many a young whippersnapper may ask, “So what the hell is the Dying Earth genre about?” And they’d be quite right to bring it up – there have not really been many novels steeped in this tradition for some time. I don’t want to discuss individual works too heavily, so I decided to use James’s kind invitation for a guest blog post to give only a brief outline and history for those people who have never heard of it.
Dying Earth fiction is science fantasy set, quite obviously perhaps, when the Earth is dying. But in what way? There is a plethora of post-apocalyptic fiction these days, when the Earth has been gutted, but the Dying Earth is something a little different.
Although I’m concerned with the business of genre taxonomy here, there are a few things worth noting that sets it apart from other sections of the genre. For one, the setting is consciously towards the end of time, not merely after any particular major event (possibly after several dozen events in fact). The genre is more fantastical, I suspect. It is very much a secondary world creation, and by that I mean there is less of a reliance on current realities for the infrastructure of the world. There is certainly a melancholy associated with the setting, a conscious reflection at how great things once were. A sense of fatality. There’s a mix of technology, too – the fantasy isn’t merely limited to magic, and the magic is intended to have more of a justification, often through science.
- Check out HC’s new online catalogue here. Quite nice! Bravo, HC! (Note: I still hate your boss.) And so very very paperless… (if you print it, I’ll send assassins to your house or store, I swear)
- Al Gore rises from grave to perform miracles in service of Earth’s last supper
- Coolest old man alive, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, turns 90
- Picador starts a book club on Twitter… Brilliant. Finally, a foolproof method for keeping the rambling bourgeoisie succinct
- Oz publishers have won (for now) battle to keep import limits
- RIP: Hortense Calisher, author, dead at 97
- Happy birthday, Library of America
So I suppose we’re seeing a gradual increase in poetry-related arts page filler. Also, with the death of poor Nicholas Hughes, expect the Sylvia nostalgia to continue (this one with some allstars editorializing for the NYT):
Suicide is humbling for us, the observers. In the case of Sylvia Plath, we have all the narrative information anyone could wish: her prose fiction, her poetry, her correspondence, her journals, and then the Husband’s, too.
With all this testimony — brave, generous, self-aware, subtle, forceful — we do not know. Does Ted drive her to it, and his next wife as well? Or is it progressive deterioration of the brain? (Now that we’re better at examining them, we can say that the brains of suicides look very bad.) Both, is the sophisticated conclusion, environment and genes, social circumstance and biology, cognition and animal drive — which is to conclude vaguely indeed.
“Of course there are two,” Plath writes in her poem “Death and Co.,” meaning the wife and the husband — but now one might think of the mother and the child. Two turns out to be a low estimate.
That said, here’s a decent remembrance of the day Romanticism died under the iron heel of Ezra Pound and his cabal of sack-of-doorknobs-swinging thugs.
History identifies them as fledgling imagists, artists who promoted poetry of personal impulse and, crucially, rebelled against set metres and rhyme, which had been established in English poetry since the 16th century. These were men and women in their 20s who saw the decline of Romanticism and wanted something new, a poetry based on images.
Richardson, who co-edited a book on the Imagists, argues that this was the first modernist movement to take place in London, marking a dramatic shift in poetry in the UK and the US. “The historical and cultural importance of this centenary is immense,” he said. “It just cannot be overemphasised.”
This week, Richardson will lead an imagist walk round central London, bringing to life some of the key venues and players such as Hulme, Storer and Flint — all there on day one — and, importantly, the American poet Ezra Pound, who first attended an Imagist meeting on 22 April and was to become its most famous practitioner.
“It’s those three meeting [Hulme, Flint, Storer] together, on the same night in the same place that makes this very important,” Richardson said. “A month later, the final piece of the jigsaw, Ezra Pound, starts attending. They meet for about 18 months, every Thursday evening.
Twelve-year-old plays that Cantina Band number from Mos Eisley. On a full size harp. (video after jump)
Anne Giardini writes about growing up in a writing household and how advice can change the way a young writer enters things.
I grew up in a house in which books were read and written, and so for me the jump into novels from journalism and short stories did not feel like an enormous leap. Finishing and then publishing my first novel, The Sad Truth About Happiness, four years ago, felt to me like the next logical step in a writing life.
I do think it is an advantage (although not essential) to grow up in a writing house if you want to be a writer, and I compare it sometimes to being the butcher’s child and becoming a butcher yourself in turn. If you grow up around a particular art or business, there isn’t as much mystique in it. You know generally how to go about it.
Hm, in my experience, young writers don’t listen to dick all if it doesn’t come from their own infallible, brilliant, perfect minds. But that’s coming from a formerly-young writer who grew up in a house where people were not only not writers, they weren’t readers either.
Why books can’t, won’t, and shouldn’t change your life. Alastair Harper is a little creeped out by the language of the cover blurb and what it implies for the browsing book shopper. I’ve often had a good chuckle at the back of books. It just gets more ridiculous every year.
There is something else, a phrase rather than a single word, that also makes me shudder. Unlike “unputdownable” it is often used in broadsheet reviews, perhaps even more often in the sniffy land of the dedicated literary publication. That is the countless variations on: “This book will change your life.”
This phrase is never used practically, as in: “Your life will have a new angle as you will now have a useful knowledge of agricultural practises in eastern Europe.” In serious reviews, it is certainly not applied to self-help books, even though life-changing is what those sordid publications set out to be. No, I’m thinking of when it is applied to literature – high fiction in particular. The way a great book has to be life-changing in order to have its greatness justified. Watchmen can change your life, says Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance. Jane Austen changes women’s lives, says Professor Lisa Jardine. On the 1999 cover of Thomas M Disch’s classic Camp Concentration, there is a quote from Ursula K Le Guin that states, simply and irrefutably, “it is a work of art” – which may be true – and that “if you read it, you will be changed”. There is something unsettling in the “will be”. The reader has no conscious choice but to be muddled and messed around with as a direct result of reading the book.
The phrase implies some instant metamorphic shift in the essence of our character: not just a new opinion on whether something is right or wrong, but a shift in the very fundamentals of our being. The sort of change where you’re forced to admit at parties: “Well, before I read Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I was just plain Steve. Afterwards I’m afraid I found myself to be Stevian, the Magician of the Night.”
Thankfully, this doesn’t happen.
So it’s about commitment, then? Who’d have thunk it.
A study of reading habits showed almost half of women are ‘page turners’ who finish a book soon after starting it compared to only 26 per cent of men.
The survey 2,000 adults also found those who take a long time to read books and only managed one or two a year were twice as likely to be male than female.
Men are also more likely to have shelves full of books that have never been opened.
I think the researcher might have been recently jilted and is skewing the data… Just kidding. Though if we keep reading in, then I’m totally getting revved up over the next paragraph:
The only similarities between the sexes came among those who have two books on the bedside table at once and who start one book on the middle of reading another, switching easily.
Brrrowrrr!
I just discovered that you can by fish trimmings (ie, pieces of perfectly fine fish cut from the main fillet in order to make it look pretty) for about a quarter the price of full fish. Throw them in soup, or whatever and you’d never know the differnce. This news is like those pieces of fish: largely unwanted, but still finding a good home with me because they’re nutritious and cheap. (God, I’m becoming my father.)
- Princeton author proposes via acknowledgements page
- UK Authors of the year 08
- Jamie Oliver edges out Rowling for top author spot in UK
- Sloped text is the key to easier reading
- New Yorker reducing it’s frequency to bi-weekly?
- Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport (video)
I guess there’s some sort of scandal in the UK around a TV personality who wrote a book that accompanies a TV series, but only he didn’t write it, see, and, like, some other guy did? And, like, everyone’s totally getting shafted because there’s only one name on the cover? And, like, I feel so violated? (Insiders’ tip: We mostly call this “ghostwriting” in the biz. I’m sure most of you have NEVER heard of it. It’s very obscure, especially where celebrities are concerned… But ghostwriters don’t usually get acknowledged at all the way this young fellow has. This is mostly about throwing bones to a scandal-starved public in what we call (another insiders’ tip) “a slow news cycle”.)
The book’s publisher, BBC Books, said in a statement this morning that “in order to help shape the text he had already begun”, Paxman “worked with Neil Hegarty to bring the book to completion”, and that Hegarty’s “role in editing Jeremy’s own material and supplying additional research is fully credited”.
But in the book itself, Paxman had already gone further, writing that all television is a collaborative exercise, “so it is rather silly for this book – which accompanies a television series – to appear with only one name on the cover”.
For a long time, he said, he “resisted attempts” by his editor to finish the book, because he didn’t have the time. “In the end, the solution arrived in the form of the young Irish writer, Neil Hegarty,” he wrote. “Quite apart from pulling together the various elements – scripts, research notes, ideas and other material – his creative talents ensured, I hope, that the book is a worthwhile thing in its own right. He is a gifted writer and we shall, I think, hear much more from him.”
Lisa Jardine, centenary professor at Queen Mary University, London, said that Paxman had been “typically scrupulous” in acknowledging Hegarty.
“It’s a far fuller acknowledgement than the very many busy presenters and broadcasters who are fortunate enough to have researchers and writers give,” she said.
Well, in America they’re asking: where’s the beef? Why is everyone else getting a bailout, but not publishing? Meanwhile, in the UK, at Random, things are looking marginally better than having one of those spiky fish swim up your urethra, and at Macmillan staff are actually getting a pay raise. The Age in Oz paints a mixed picture of how things are going worldwide, which is probably closest to the truth.
THE start of the year has been full of fear and loathing, and book industries around the world have been performing in mixed ways. In the US in January, book sales were pretty well flat in comparison with the same month in 2008, but this lacklustre performance looked quite good compared with the US retail sector as a whole that dipped 8.3 per cent month on month. For the first 10 weeks of the year, however, Nielsen BookScan has reported that sales dipped about 1 per cent, the same as 2008’s performance on 2007.
In Britain, where sales also dipped 1 per cent year on year in 2008 (remember there was a Harry Potter book in 2007), publishers are reporting generally sluggish sales after the bonanza that Christmas always is. Interestingly, sales of classics are up sharply, as are those of “brand” authors such as Marian Keyes and Clive Cussler. Publishers Weekly says publishing lists — 120,000 new books were published in the UK last year — are likely to be cut.
Across the Channel, the French book industry is holding up, according to Celine Fedou, who runs the book market sector of GfK France. In January, book sales jumped by 4.3 per cent. Which is good timing given the Paris Book Fair was on last weekend. And in Germany, the number of books sold rose by 2.3 per cent in January
Even the usually recession-proof/apocalypse-proof Christians are feeling the pinch. Or that just might have something to do with what’s on offer, I don’t know. (I mean, why buy it when the JoHo’s are going door-to-door giving it away for free?)
Graphic artists condemn wording of proposed ban on lewd comix that involve children. I ain’t touching this one. Somebody get me my 10 foot pole. Yeesh. Let’s face it, this is probably mainly about tentacle manga, or something. But as usual, censorship sucks everyone in…
A coalition of graphic artists, publishers and MPs have condemned Government plans to introduce a new set of laws policing cartoons of children, arguing that the current broad wording of the legislation could lead to the banning of hundreds of mainstream comic books.
This week Parliament will discuss a new Bill which will make it a criminal offence to possess cartoons depicting certain forms of child abuse. If the Coroners and Justice Bill remains unaltered it will make it illegal to own any picture of children participating in sexual activities, or present whilst sexual activity took place.
The Ministry of Justice claims that the Bill is needed to clamp down on the growing quantity of hardcore paedophilic cartoon porn available on the internet, particularly from Japan. But critics of the legislation say the current definitions are so sweeping that it risks stifling mainstream artistic expression as well as turning thousands of law abiding comic book fans into potential sex offenders.
- Canadians huddle together in garrison to consider implications of dark Googly wilderness
- U Mich is going all e-stuff! The paperless office: now only 20 years overdue…
- HarperCollins going all digital with catalogues, trees around world relax imperceptibly
- BookNet Canada’s Michael Tamblyn has six ideas that could change publishing (excellent, frenetic talk, but really more for book business types than general readers)
Here’s a nice surprise: the CBC arts page actually posted a book related article. I don’t know what’s happened over there, but they used to be go-to people in terms of interesting featuer pieces on books. Anyway, here’s a profile of Wetlands author Charlotte Roche, who seems to have everybody’s knickers twisted up. And, from the sounds of it, likely used as handcuffs. With barbed wire. And mayonaise. And a duck.
Like its 18-year-old narrator, Charlotte Roche’s novel Wetlands comes on strong. After paying tribute to both her hemorrhoids and the joys of anal sex, the novel’s heroine, Helen Memel, takes readers on a guided tour of her body electric, clinically detailing her blood, smegma, blisters, bowel movements, blackheads, ingrown hairs, homemade tampons and perhaps most shocking of all, her tears.
Roche’s debut novel, translated from its original German (Feuchtgebiete), arrived in Canada earlier this month amidst rumours of people fainting at some of Roche’s readings in Europe. How’s that for buzz? More impressively, Wetlands is the first German work of fiction to rise to the top of Amazon.com’s global bestseller list — to date, it has sold over a million copies worldwide.
The world’s best prank call. Played on a telemarketer. (pretty offensive near the end, but generally SFW if not SFS) (video after jump)
Attention Toronto Ninjas:
This week is your last chance see my beloved One Little Goat Theatre Company’s production of Someone Is Going To Come, the newly (re)translated work by Norwegian uber-playwright Jon Fosse. Please come out, bring friends, and support the only company around that specializes in exploring the boundaries between theatre and poetry. It sucks that I live so far away and can’t see our own shows. Please live for me!
(Tue-Sat 8pm, Sun 2pm: www.OneLittleGoat.org, 416 915 0201)
“21st-century Beckett… played with creepy charm and impeccable comic timing.”
– Globe and Mail, J. Kelly Nestruck“The play is wonderfully creepy, the script a smorgasbord of poetry and bleak humour.”
– Toronto Star, Robert Crew“Keen insight and superb acting!”
– EYE Weekly, Christopher Hoile“Kudos to Seelig for bringing us intelligent writers virtually unknown in North America.”
– Classical 93.6 FM“An intriguing glimpse into the genius of Fosse.”
– SCENE CHANGES, Jeniva Berger
Andrew Motion is the first poet laureate to retire from the position, as opposed to dying in/from it. Here he writes about the struggles laureates face in pleasing everybody.
I’ve written eight royal poems in the past 10 years: one about the wedding of Prince Edward, one about the 100th birthday of the Queen Mother, one about her death, one about the death of Princess Margaret, one about the 18th birthday of Prince William, one (set to music) about the golden jubilee, one about the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles as she then was, and one about the Queen’s diamond wedding anniversary. I have to admit that no other writing that I’ve undertaken, of any kind, has been so difficult. The problem is partly to do with the subjects (if “subject” is quite the word for someone who is not a subject). How was I to connect with them, knowing only what newspapers tell me? How was I to steer an appropriate course between familiarity (which would seem presumptuous) and sycophancy (which would seem absurd)? And how was I to weigh and value them, knowing that a large part of the population doesn’t want there to be a royal family, or feels indifferent to it? The other part of the problem is to do with reception. In every case, after I’d written these eight poems, I sent them to my agent, who sent them to newspapers, where they landed on news editors’ desks. News editors don’t think a poem is a story in and of itself, so they then get on the phone to as many people as it takes to find someone who doesn’t like the poem – then they have their story: poet laureate writes another no-good poem.
I’m not the first laureate to complain about this. John Betjeman (who got so fed up with it he considered resigning) and Hughes say exactly the same thing in their letters. But I am the first person to say it in public – call that a privilege of my 10-year span, if you like. My point is not simply that the response is tiresome for whoever happens to be laureate. The point is: it’s bad for poetry in general – but journalists apparently have some difficulty (or, more likely, no interest) in grasping this.
This little piece is not much of anything, noting that Beryl Bainbridge is sour about losing to Heaney in the Cohen prize, in part because it had gone up £10,000 pounds since she was last up for it and had to share it with someone else. But I wonder if this might start a discussion about prize pots and when and how often the purse should be increased. Is it a matter of matching the dollars of the day to keep the writers in bucks, or is it about keeping the prestige of the prize afloat, or something else altogether?
(God, in some shots Seamus Heaney is the spitting image of my dad. It makes me uncomfortable. They grew up down the road from one another, I suspect, and there’s probably a small genetic teapot in that part of Belfast.)
- Wubblewoo’s book on decisions set for 2010, and apparently written by Dick Cheney (it took several paragraphs before I was sure this was a joke…)
- Not to be outdone, Obama signed his contract for a kids book and a memoir… (I always want to pronounce memoir now like John Malkovich does in Burn After Reading)
- Kids author signs $1M deal for series of books
- British book sales hold up for 2008
- The NYT sets some standards for their blogs (pdf), Gawker promptly tears said standards to shreds
- Borders gets out of ebooks because, oh gee, didn’t see this coming, customers balk at high prices…
- Publishers jockey to get “hip” and “with it” at SXSW… Someone’s stopped pulling their pants up to their armpits…
- Blah blah blah sales tax blah blah blah Amazon blah blah blah affects us all somehow but I’m not sure blah blah blah
- Raymond Chandler deathiversary brings him back into the spotlight
Extremely sad news for a family plagued with sadness and, more clinically, depression. Hughes, 47, hung himself 46 years after his mother, the great poet Sylvia Plath, gassed herself in the family kitchen.
The news of his death adds to the tragic history of the family.
His mother, Sylvia Plath, was separated from Ted Hughes when she killed herself by breathing in fumes from the kitchen oven in February 1963.
She prevented the fumes from seeping into her children’s room by sealing the door with towels.
Six years later, Ted Hughes suffered another loss when his mistress gassed herself and their daughter in an apparent copycat suicide.
That’s a little reductive…
How come most of Ireland’s great contemporary writers are little known outside Ireland? Roddy Doyle, who actually reads Bookninja, and only Bookninja, so he tells me (I bet he tells all the girls that), informs Mark Salter, who gives a survey of what we’re missing:
…when Doyle offered the opinion that James Joyce was nearly unreadable. It wasn’t the criticism of Joyce that caught my attention. Doyle had said the same thing four years earlier on the centenary of Bloomsday, the day in which Joyce’s most celebrated work, Ulysses, takes place, provoking considerable consternation among Joyce-admiring literati. It was his subsequent declaration that Jennifer Johnston was the best writer in Ireland that provoked my curiosity. Doyle isn’t the only prominent Irish writer who so esteems Ms. Johnston. She is prolific and typically very well reviewed. I consider myself a pretty thorough reader of contemporary Irish writers. I’ve read and enjoyed Doyle, John Banville, Sebastian Barry, John McGahern, Bernard MacLaverty, Anne Enright, Colm Toibin, and others. There is no author whom I more admire than William Trevor. But I had never heard of Jennifer Johnston.
As it turns out, I’m not alone. Trusting Doyle’s judgment, I attempted to purchase some of her books. I went to eight bookstores and found not one of her 14 books in any of them. Nor had any Johnston book ever graced their shelves. Amazon didn’t stock a single title. She doesn’t have a U.S. publisher. I eventually purchased a half-dozen of her novels from online used-book dealers, all but one of them shipped from overseas.
If there’s anyone who’s gonna be rich at the end of the Obama administration, it’s gonna be Barack. Of course, his wealth won’t necessarily come off the blood of his people and souls of faceless foreign countries he’s pillaged for the benefit and kickbacks of his powerful oil friends. He’ll just make his money off writing. (Mental note: to succeed in writing, you just need to make yourself America’s first black president… got it. Okay, off to get started!)
The power of President Obama’s pen is $8,605,429, and counting.
Four years ago, Mr. Obama became a millionaire through the popularity of his autobiography, which was quickly followed by a second book, “The Audacity of Hope.” It is a gift that keeps on giving: $3.89 in royalties for Mr. Obama for each hardcover, $1.03 per paperback and $4.50 for an audiobook.
In a week when Mr. Obama scolded business executives for creating a culture of runaway salaries and bonuses, a disclosure form filed Tuesday showed that he signed a new $500,000 book agreement five days before taking office in January.
We’ve discussed this before here, especially around Nabokov, but Allison Flood briefly considers the issue around the publication of Roland Barthes’s “Bereavement Diary”, which is apparently so personal it would have horrified Barthes to have it made public.
Reading extracts, it’s obvious the diary is a highly personal piece of writing (and also very moving). “Sad afternoon. Quick shopping. At the pastry shop (pointlessness) I buy an almond cake. Serving a customer, the little female employee says, “Voilà.” That’s the word which I would say when I brought Mom something when I looked after her. Once, near the end, she half-unconsciously echoed, “Voilà” (I’m here, an expression which we used mutually during a whole lifetime). This employee’s remark brought tears to my eyes. I wept for a long time (after returning to the silent apartment).”
The book’s editor says it was published with the permission of Barthes’s half-brother, and that Barthes had given the book a name. “There is a title, an act of naming … it’s a real literary project,” he told Libération.
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