.
| Hearsay: |
If the poem is his, Brett Gardiner of Winnipeg has accomplished something rare. An excerpt of a poem that is alleged to be his was published by a major daily newspaper.
How? Write a love poem that becomes central to the biggest mass murder in modern Ontario history.
What’s potentially damaging for Gardiner isn’t the sentimental content of the poem, but rather a line at the end of it, which connects its author to the Bandidos, the world’s second-largest outlaw biker club, behind only the Hells Angels.
The poem was allegedly sent on April 5, 2006 from Kellestine’s farmhouse by someone who identified himself as “PROSPECT BANDIDO BULL MANITOBA.”…
The poem has a decidedly unbikerish tone, continuing, “I held back whimpers as I watched you go/ An event that would lead to everlasting sorrow
“I fought back emotions as I watched you depart/ I didn’t think I’d lose my only sweetheart.”
Is that unbikerish? I thought ‘tough on the outside, soft on the inside’ was the basis of a biker’s sex appeal, yes?
(via Sean Dixon)
The Bookseller put up a sensational headline, ‘English writers outperform rivals‘ to accompany the news:
English writers continue to outperform their rivals across Europe, according to an analysis of the top 10 international fiction bestsellers published by book trade magazines, including The Bookseller, Germany’s Buchreport, and France’s Livres Hebdo, over the past 12 months.
Only to be taken down again:
I’ll get to the actual content of the article in a minute, but first off, what is up with this title? Since when did English writers have “rivals”? Is there some sort of secret literary tournament going on that I’m not aware of? If so, I hope there’s at least some good smack talk going on: “Take that, Spain! We will dominate you and your florid prose, fine wine, and beautiful beaches once again with our English wit and neo-realistic family dramas.
Within this kerfuffle is hidden the secret code that will unlock the mystery of why the UK can’t sit comfortably within the European Union. Find it and you will hold the key to convincing the Irish to ratify the Lisbon treaty.
(via Maud Newton)
Punch the clock (via VSR)
In case of guilt: I don’t actually believe this is a waste of your time. My advice is to keep pushing through the hamburgers, even though you will want to quit. Only the strong will make it through a second day. Around the time you take the last drive home, your mind will start to wander a wonderful way. The hallucinations will start as you make dinner and get ready for bed. By the time you close the browser, you will be in the perfect state of mind to start that novel.
This man wrote a novel with his fingers
This man wrote a novel with his thumbs
This band takes the A Train with a tuba
Julie gets on at Spadina with none
[update] And this little prankster went swinging – wee wee wee wee – all the way home (via The Rumpus).
Yesterday books were hollowed out for Heroin and the perpetrators were not caught. Today we learn that the man who is believed to have smuggled a scapel into the British Library to extract and steal precious pages has had his sentence cut.
A spokesman for the British Library said: “When Hakimzadeh damaged and stole pages from Library items he abused the trust that we extend to all researchers using our collections.
“We have zero tolerance of anyone who harms our collections and will pursue anyone who threatens them with utmost vigour.”
Are we going soft on book crime all of a sudden? Obviously the threat of longer sentences is the only way to assure our books safety. How about a three books and you’re out rule? I’ve heard that works.
(via @bookpatrol)
Dear fellow Earthlings,
“I” am pleased to bring you this primitive media recording of operative 6721b “Margaret Atwood” (iteration 2.8), as funnelled through the puppet regime of “our” inconsequential nation’s state-controlled propaganda system. This utterly unremarkalbe human “Atwood” may seem to be getting an inordinate and coincidental amount of film media-related attention, but rest assured this is all according to plan.
Signed: Most-definitely George
With the last gasp of April come the final celebrations of National Poetry Month.
Some highlights from the month:
Your highlights? Please make suggestions them in the comments and I will add to the list.
Note that www addresses will get nixed by the spam filter. You can either add the title of the page in your post and I will Google, or insert the URL into the ‘your website’ part of the comments form.
Tonight at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto, a night for remembering Derek Weiler, editor of the Quill and Quire. More information is available on the event’s Facebook page.
Nathan Whitlock, who is organizing the event alongside Chris Reed of This is Not A Reading Series, sets the tone:
This is a chance for people who knew Derek, worked with him, wrote for him, or just chatted with him at events to spend the evening raising a glass and remembering him. There’s going to be lots of good music, and the bar will be open late, so I hope to see you there.
The Quill and Quire also has a comments page with messages and tributes.
In the Guardian, Stuart Jeffries writes a long overdue article on the proliferation of exclamation points in email and elsewhere:
After all, exclamation marks – those forms of punctuation derided by the funless and fastidious – are making a comeback, thanks to an internet renaissance that is bleeding over into every form of written communication. Once it was bad form to end a paragraph with an exclamation mark. Now it’s borderline obligatory.
To make sense of the headline, ‘Lynne Truss, in her book on punctuation, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, calls, “a screamer, a gasper, a startler or (sorry) a dog’s cock”‘.
Yesterday, the news broke that the deadline for authors to opt-out of the Google book settlement was extended to from May 5 to September 4, 2009.
Later in the day it became clear that the opposition to the settlement is building strength. The Justice Department has launched an inquiry into the antitrust implications of the settlement. From the New York Times:
The inquiry does not necessarily mean that the department will oppose the settlement, which is subject to a court review. But it suggests that some of the concerns raised by critics, who say the settlement would unfairly give Google an exclusive license to profit from millions of books, have resonated with the Justice Department.
More on the specifics of the inquiry from Mobylives:
The probe seems to be focussed on the fact that, as a Reuters wire story reports, the settlement “would allow Google — and only Google — to digitize so-called orphan works” and sell access to them. Orphan works are books that are out of print, but still in copyright.
“There are legitimate antitrust issues related to Google’s ability to solely commercialize this content,” commented Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive. IA also digitizes books, and Brantley “said his organization had ‘multiple conversations’ with the Justice Department about the Google plan,” according to Reuters.
This just in from Dayton:
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers in Ohio said they seized 17 pounds of heroin that was hidden inside of hollowed-out books.
Customs spokesman Brett Sturgeon said the books, containing $1 million worth of the drug, were seized from four separate shipments…Sturgeon said the packages originated from Tehran and were bound for Toronto.
Didn’t George say he was coming to Toronto? I wonder if “reassembled in geostationary orbit” is some sort of code?
This looks just like something I would post at the end of the day in order to brighten your futile lives, doesn’t it? It is. End communication.
Dear Devotees of “Bookninja”,
“I” am having a completely unremarkable absence from “my” daily activities here on Earth. “I” have not left the planet to conduct inter-species breeding experiments, and even if “I” had done so, “I” would have left willingly, instead of being neurally disrupted, atomized, and reassembled in geostationary orbit some 10237.68 Earth kilometers above “my” domicile.
Do not send “our” governments to look for “me” as “I” will likely be returned unharmed and well-milked within 1/36.5th of a circumnavigation of “our” oddly yellow solar body. Furthermore, any action taken to hasten “my” return will be in violation of EvXT Convention Document 132b, subsection 12.1 and will be met with a resumption of the Cleansing Agenda.
End communication.
“George Murray”
Margaret Atwood’s international bestseller Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth will be made into a movie, ahem, a feature-length documentary for release by the National Film Board. Jennifer Baichwal, who directed the superb doc Manufactured Landscapes, is to write and direct.
The NFB’s producer Ravida Din, credited with conceiving the idea, tells the what its’ like to get an email from Atwood when you haven’t even read the book:
“Not too long after,” says Din, “Atwood herself responded and said, ‘Okay, what do you have in mind?’ Of course, I panicked because I hadn’t yet read the book! So I sent a quick reply, letting her know of my interest in her as a writer and how it really made sense for me that an important public producer like the NFB would partner with a writer of her stature.”
Over at BookOven, Hugh McGuire tells us that the iPhone application Stanza has been acquired by Amazon. This is very significant, but I haven’t the foggiest clue why. Luckily, we have people like Moby Dick-reading Hugh to help:
Stanza is what convinced me that ebooks were real, and I’ve spent more time reading books on Stanza than I have reading book books [McGuire's term for e-books] since I first set eyes on the simple, clear interface in October of 2008. In fact I was up with a bout of insomnia last night, at 3 am, reading Moby Dick on Stanza.
For those at the back, Stanza is an application that allows people who shelled out for an iPhone to read e-books. For the price, I hope an iPhone will also do laundry and mow my lawn, yes?
Over at the Guardian, Decca Aitkenhead interviews Kazuo Ishiguro.
The passage of time does worry him, though, for, until now, he has published a novel only once every five years. By this standard, he smiles, Nocturnes is “a year early – I think because I was so aware of how slowly I was publishing. There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you’re going to write before you die. And you think, hmm, God, there’s only four left, and so you start,” he laughs, “well – it’s a bit alarming. So I thought I’d better adopt a less leisurely attitude.”
It is often said that Ishiguro is obsessed with the fact that a writer’s best work is produced in their youth, but when I mention this, he says quickly, “Yeah, that’s not quite my obsession so much as Martin Amis’s. He keeps quoting me.”
And then I quote Aitkenhead’s quote of Ishiguro quoting Amis’s quote and so it goes.
By the way, I first read ‘And you think, hmm, God, there’s only four left,’ as ‘And you think, hmm, thank God, there’s only four left.’
Ninja favourite Lee Henderson has won the BC Book Prize for Fiction, plucked from a distinguished short-list which included Steven Galloway for The Cellist of Sarajevo and Patrick Lane for Red Dog, Red Dog. Terry Galvin received the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence. The full list of finalists is on the website.
Of note: Henderson was interviewed for the Bookninja magazine by editor Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer not long ago. Well worth the read.
Speaking of which, Bookninja editorial standards are notoriously rigorous, hence not so much as a whisper that Kuitenbrouwer’s new book Perfecting is now available.
McSweeney’s is offering a new course ‘ENG 371WR: Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era’. The syllabus is up on their website (via Bookslut).
A sample:
Course Description
As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade.
Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new “Lost Generation” of minimalists who would much rather watch Lost on their iPhones than toil over long-winded articles and short stories. Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness.
Prerequisites
Students must have completed at least two of the following.
ENG: 232WR—Advanced Tweeting: The Elements of Droll
LIT: 223—Early-21st-Century Literature: 140 Characters or Less
ENG: 102—Staring Blankly at Handheld Devices While Others Are Talking
ENG: 301—Advanced Blog and Book Skimming
ENG: 231WR—Facebook Wall Alliteration and Assonance
LIT: 202—The Literary Merits of Lolcats
LIT: 209—Internet-Age Surrealistic Narcissism and Self-Absorption
George is otherwise disposed, so I will be your host for the next few days. He is fine, just busy.
I think.
Now you mention it, he was acting a bit odd. He was distracted. Did he mutter something about living his dreams? Near the end of our conversation he broke into song. I was about to ask why, but he hung up abruptly saying that his new regime requires no talking after 7 a.m. That does seem strange.
Is George up to something?
I’ll be posting late today, folks, so come back later. I just cleared up some serious personal admin work that takes about 20 years of coronary-inducing worry off my plate, so I’m going to celebrate by having a coffee and muffin before I go on the local radio (CBC 1) at 1pm to attempt to answer the unanswerable question: “Does Poetry Still Matter”. Crosstalk gets poetic in Newfoundland with Murray, Agnes Walsh, and Randy Maggs. Be there or be square.
You will most likely see this Monday morning. Here’s hoping it starts your week just right.
It’s likely you’ll get these conflicting reports over and over again, so I’ll try to group them together where possible to show you just how fucking clueless we all are about what’s going to happen. I think the only real solution to our woes is more arts page articles with wild finger pointing and cries of “Eureka!” that become mild groans of embarrassment next week.
- The book trade needs to look beyond the recession: McCrum
- NPR starts layoffs (welcome to Canada, American public radio…)
- Amazon sales up, but not really in books and not really outside America
- Getting randomly picked to make half-court shots now best way to make living
- Even the egg heads are getting axed…
- Ontario dumps a chunk of change into the arts
The Independent looks at UK Children’s Laureate position and recent occupants’ efforts to turn kids on to poetry. Who will succeed the outspoken Michael Rosen?
Want a spokesman on the Today programme about the latest development in junior fiction or poetry? Call the Children’s Laureate. Need a voice to question the government’s literacy drive when this seems to be at the expense of reading for pleasure? Ask for a quote. Searching for a keynote speaker to promote picture books, poetry or novels? Look no further. The Children’s Laureate is alive, kicking and here to stay at www.childrenslaureate.org.uk.
Much of this success is due to the high quality of the incumbents so far, each required to work at the job for two years. Quentin Blake, the first Laureate and Roald Dahl’s genial illustrator, set a hectic pace when appointed in 1999, speeding around innumerable schools and conferences. He also launched Tell Me a Picture, an exhibition of 26 works by artists and illustrators at the National Gallery, each focusing on one letter of the alphabet. It has since been turned into a book, along with Laureate’s Progress, Blake’s own recollections of his time in the hot seat.
Holy crap it’s nice here today. And I say that with a certain amount of trepidation that the fearsome sun god hovering above will hear me and return to smitething my Rock with cloud, mist, and fog (locally pronounced as “fahg”). So I’ll keep it brief today and head out to kill and burn stuff in this firey god’s honour (brain cells and skin, respectively).
- Arthur Ellis Awards for Canadian crime novels announce shortlists (are Canadian crime novels mostly about drunk tank visits and illegal parking? NO!)
- Oxford poetry chair still up in the poetry air… now a little known Indian poet is in the race
- Touchstone gets new publisher, which is news for some reason
- Did I link to this already? The PEN English literary atlas?
- Book Espresso machine launched to rabidly fawning press in London (New York mulls similar technology called Book “Expresso” Machine)
- Jian Gomeshi talks culture and regulation
- SNAP! Oh no, she di’nt! Some literary gossip in a British paper? Shocking!
- A new reason to think Prince is both highly intelligent and a total douche
- Yeats + poetry = great, Yeats + drama = fail
Young publishers at the LBF show the old fogies how it’s done (from Moby):
Do novelists have a duty to write more about contemporary social dilemmas? Try to be more like The Wire, says this guy. I guess that’s a tv show of some sort. And I guess it’s pretty good. I suppose you might want to work your way up to it though, through Married with Children and that show with Hugh Laurie sporting an American accent.
Walter Benn Michaels, the punchy professor of American literature and theory at the University of Illinois at Chicago, came to New York last week and delivered an emphatic message to novelists: Please start writing more about class issues and the social order of contemporary life! It was a rainy evening, and Mr. Michaels spoke as part of a panel at the New York Public Library. At the center of the evening’s discussion was a brief, polemical essay that Mr. Michaels had recently published in BookForum in which he argued that the leading voices in American letters had, in their work, rendered “the reality of our social arrangements invisible.”
In his essay, Mr. Michaels implicated three groups of writers: those who traffic narcissistically in memoir and self-examination; those who write fiction about past horrors like the Holocaust and slavery; and those who focus in their work on the tribulations of individual characters while ignoring the societal pressures that determine those characters’ lives.
None of them, Mr. Michaels argued, would ever produce great art unless they reversed course. What novelists need to do, he said, is take a cue from David Simon, the creator of the The Wire, a show that portrayed over the course of five seasons the inner workings of Baltimore.
Daily Dose of Digital
News Bits
- Suspects admit firebombing publisher’s house in “protest” of Jewel of Medina book (’member that?)
- “Quiet”, “productive” LBF… (communications code for BOOOOORING!)
- Some sort of interal agent quarrel makes it into a book… For me, this is like a war between two distant countries I don’t really like… of concern, but coming somewhere after remembering trash day
- HC pulls book Ballard was working on before he died
It’s World Book Day today, apparently because several of our literary messiahs died on this date. Should we be exchanging gifts and singing hymns or something? I love how we call it “world book day” and those who do buy books today will probably be going for business books or celebrity memoirs over poetry. As I said earlier in the month after going to bakery one morning: April is indeed the crullerest month.
Lots of people know that today is the day William Shakespeare, the greatest poet in the language, was born in 1564 and that it’s the day he died in 1606. I don’t want to sound like a local radio DJ doing a less than cheery “on this day” feature for dark times, but for poets in particular, and for creative literary people in general, this day really is hard to ignore: William Wordsworth wandered his last lonely walk on this day, as did the great Spanish author Cervantes. Henry Vaughan, the Welsh metaphysical poet, breathed his last lungful of gorgeous Welsh air on this day. Rupert Brooke died today in 1915, and Harold Arlen – whose songs such as Stormy Weather and Let’s Fall in Love (mind you, he didn’t write the lyrics) approach the status of poetry – passed to the far side of the rainbow on 23 April 1986.
You might say that because there are only a certain number of days in the year and there are more than enough poets to go round, then any day is going to be peppered with cadaverous bards, but I’m afraid that’s just not true. Take yesterday, for instance, 22 April. We lost only Hans A baron von Abschatz on that day: bad for him and his fans, but hardly a poetic massacre. No, there’s something about today, something about late frosts or April showers or bodies that have fought their way through the winter months finally giving up the struggle. There’s perhaps also something about being called William as well as being a poet that weakens you in April, but that’s just speculation on my part.
Project Bookmark, noted here last week, is getting picked up in the mainstream press, and Miranda Hill, the force behind the project, deservedly gets the lion’s share of the credit.
Miranda Hill, the moving force behind Project Bookmark Canada, imagines the day when Canadians will be able to read their way from coast to coast, following a trail of plaques containing literary excerpts of some of this coun- try’s most geographically specific works.
The first step on that journey will be taken tomorrow with the inaugural Bookmark containing a passage from In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje’s iconic novel about the construction of the Bloor Street Viaduct. The plaque will be unveiled by the author and Mayor David Miller on the northeast corner of the bridge, as part of Toronto’s ongoing Lit City festivities.
Updike’s last verse considered his impending death.
John Updike’s prose could sometimes seem so coldly beautiful, so self-aware, that critics occasionally questioned its effectiveness in fiction. Such verbal dandyism, it was thought, actually short-circuited the reading experience: Updike’s striking similes and metaphors sucked attention away from the characters and plots. One admired the sentences instead of losing oneself in the story.
But poetry is different. In particular, light verse, at which Updike excelled, is almost by definition playful and self-regarding, overtly reveling in its own ingenuity and brilliance. The more clever, the more acrobatic, the more astonishing, the better. What may surprise, though, is that Updike’s many serious poems are so frankly personal, full of wistfulness and wonder, and unafraid of being sentimental.
The UN World Digital Library has gone up andli pubshers are getting more and more comfortable with technology and eBooks, even with offering them for free, sometimes. But some are still skeptical, asking, Where’s the beef? But, if you’re looking to make money off this new technology, says one columnist, you can’t be hesitant and half-assed about it.
It’s rare to see London publishing’s top four bosses lined up in a panel discussion all together.
Take John Makinson (Penguin), Gail Rebuck (Random House), Tim Hely Hutchinson (Hachette Livre) and Victoria Barnsley (HarperCollins), add the BBC’s media correspondent Torin Douglas as chair, and the London Book Fair’s keynote ‘digital’ session had a promising line-up.
Douglas began by asking each of the panelists “how enthusiastic are you about digital?” Everybody was. No publishing c.e.o. can be seen not to be enthusiastic about digital. The session’s topic, “Digital: Where’s the money?” has turned from being, pre-recession, a fascinating discussion, into a question in need of answers.
But “enthusiasm” isn’t a word I’d choose to characterise any of the four panelists’ positions.
- Scottsboro, Ellen Feldman
- The Wilderness, Samantha Harvey
- The Invention of Everything Else, Samantha Hunt
- Molly Fox’s Birthday, Deirdre Madden
- Home, Marilynne Robinson
orange arrowBurnt Shadows
Kamila Shamsie
What do we have in common with our Roman publishing ancestors? I mean, besides Dan Brown’s plotlines?
One Roman academic reported finding an old copy of the second book of Virgil’s “Aeneid” — not just any old copy but, the bookseller assured him, Virgil’s very own. An unlikely story maybe, but one that persuaded him to part with a small fortune to acquire it (rather more, in fact, than the combined annual wages of two professional soldiers). The risks on cheaper purchases were different. A cut-price book roll would presumably have fallen to pieces as quickly as a modern mass-market paperback. But worse, the pressure to get copies made quickly meant that they were loaded with errors and sometimes uncomfortably different from the authentic words of the author. One list of prices from the third century A.D. implies that the money needed to buy a top-quality copy of 500 lines would be enough to feed a family of four (admittedly, on very basic rations) for a whole year. If you settled for an inferior job, you could get a 20 percent discount.
But what about the candles and picture frames? And where’s the maze of impulse items like cheap googly-eyed pens, mixed CDs, and wineskin goat bladders you have to pass through to see your be-toga’d Barnius Noblus or Indigorum clerk?
Even if ancient writers did not make money from sales, many still wanted to announce to the world that their new volumes were now on the shelves.The Roman launch party took the form of select readings from the work, given semi-publicly or at exclusive invitation-only events, perhaps in the home of a rich patron. These could be just as frustrating for the author as the modern book launch where only half the expected guests turn up, drink a polite glass of wine and beat a hasty retreat without buying a copy. Pliny, writing in the early second century A.D., complained that in Rome “there was scarcely a day in April when someone wasn’t giving a reading,” and that the poor authors had to put up with small audiences, most of whom slipped out before the end anyway.
Man, I am so there. I just wish we today could carry the occasional gladius to one of our readings… it would be so much easier to stay if you knew stabbing was an option. And if readers knew we were armed, it would presumably act as something of an incentive…
Dan Brown’s follow up to The DaVinci Code, now titled The Lost Symbol (wasn’t it supposed to be “The Solomon Key” or something?), will be released in September. Reports on its first print run range from Holy Fuck to Holy Fucktard. And speaking of fucktards, the big boxes are already trying to squeeze the little guys out by slashing prices by 50%. OMG-OMG-OMG! SALES! (runs in place while nervously shaking hands at sternum level) GRAB!! GRAB!! GRAB!! Thankfully, there are only a few authors who can make the entire industry start to pant and panic as though a suitcase full of money has popped open on the cultural interstate. Ah, Dignity… when is your holiday over, again?
- Seamus Heaney in the LAT
- WS Merwin, Pulitzer winner, in the NYT
- Robert Silverberg, sf writer
- Samantha Harvey, around Orange shortlist
- Al Purdy, not an article, but a gathering tonight in Toronto… I wish I could be there
I may actually go see this, which looks (given what you can tell from the trailer) like a dignified adaptation of one of the single greatest novels of the 20th Century.
JOURNALISM:
- Public Service – Las Vegas Sun
- Breaking News Reporting – The New York Times Staff
- Investigative Reporting – David Barstow of The New York Times
- Explanatory Reporting – Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart of the Los Angeles Times
- Local Reporting -
- Detroit Free Press Staff
- and
- Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin of the East Valley Tribune, Mesa, AZ
- National Reporting – St. Petersburg Times Staff
- International Reporting – The New York Times Staff
- Feature Writing – Lane DeGregory of the St. Petersburg Times
- Commentary – Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post
- Criticism - Holland Cotter of The New York Times
- Editorial Writing – Mark Mahoney of The Post-Star, Glens Falls, NY
- Editorial Cartooning – Steve Breen of The San Diego Union-Tribune
- Breaking News Photography – Patrick Farrell of The Miami Herald
- Feature Photography – Damon Winter of The New York Times
LETTERS, DRAMA and MUSIC:
- Fiction – Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)
- Drama – Ruined by Lynn Nottage
- History – The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (W.W. Norton & Company)
- Biography – American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham (Random House)
- Poetry – The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press)
- General Nonfiction – Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon (Doubleday)
Music – Double Sextet by Steve Reich, premiered March 26, 2008 in Richmond, VA (Boosey & Hawkes)
The WSJ looks at great works of literature we have somehow misplaced. I suspect my novel is in there somewhere. I’ve been looking for it for 10 years. It’s like the car keys or the phone. Always in the room I’m not.
While it may seem inconceivable to us that the smallest scraps of Shakespeare’s genius would fail to be preserved like holy relics, oblivion was not an uncommon ending for plays of the early 17th century. Shakespeare’s “Pericles” exists only in a lousy quarto, which is so badly transcribed scholars assume it was done by someone jotting down the script from memory after having seen the show (the early modern equivalent of the grainy pirated videos you can buy on the subway). Like most dramatists of the period, Shakespeare didn’t care about his plays after their performances, made no effort to publish them and received no money from their publication.
This is the guy who developed Comic Sans. Someone get that man a wig and dark glasses and get him to a safe house, for his own protection.
The jolly typeface has spawned the Ban Comic Sans movement, nearly a decade old but stronger now than ever, thanks to the Web. The mission: “to eradicate this font” and the “evil of typographical ignorance.”
“If you love it, you don’t know much about typography,” Mr. Connare says. But, he adds, “if you hate it, you really don’t know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby.”
British suspense writers are mounting an organized challenge against the factory-farmed thrillers of American corporations like James Patterson, John Grisham, and Tom Clancy. They even strive for some sort of “literary value”… Huh. What’s next, foreign and female characters developed outside descriptions of their brown and round bits?
“We’re trying to say ‘why would you want to read fairly cynical, ghost-written books which are being pumped out by publishers when there are a lot of good new British writers you could be reading?’” explained Lynn. “We feel the genre has been quite neglected in the last seven to eight years … There haven’t been any new writers coming through. It might be because there aren’t any very good writers, or maybe it’s because publishers and booksellers have been neglecting it – they’ve become obsessed with the big names, and because they’ve got a new James Patterson or John Grisham four to five times a year to put at the front of the bookshop, it crowds out all the new British authors who are coming through.”
Speculation around Gabo’s retirement and confirmation around Drabo’s has lead Charles McGrath to look at the raft of authors who keep it up, sans literary viagra, right to the very end.
The geriatric writer, the one who persists into the twilight years, is something new. There were always exceptions, of course — long-lived authors who defied the actuarial tables. Thomas Hardy, for example, wrote (poetry, not novels) well into his 80s and once modestly confided that he remained sexually active as an octogenarian. (He was too old-fashioned to think there might be a connection.) But by and large writing used to be a profession whose practitioners, the great ones especially, died relatively young. Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë both died in their 40s. Balzac, Proust and Dickens all checked out in their 50s — spent, if not burned out — and so did Shakespeare, come to think of it.
In this country the record was just as bad. Fitzgerald, it’s still shocking to remember, died at just 44. Hemingway and Faulkner both made it to their 60s, but by then their best work was way behind them. It used to be practically a paradigm, in fact, that the great novelistic career in America was one that blazed early and then fell into premature, often self-destructive decline.
What has changed, obviously, is improvements in health care. Shakespeare didn’t have Blue Cross. And eventually smoking and drinking ceased to be part of the writerly job description in America. So lately we have seen a parade of writers flourishing long past the age when their predecessors would have become enfeebled or taken the Drabble option.
- Austen zombie author turns to vampire Lincoln… these are good days to be alive… or at least undead (love the illo…)
- London Book Fair opens with optimism, because who can be sad so long as we still got feathers?
- Chávez gives Obama book, creates bestseller
- Temp puts extensive knowledge of alphabet to good use
- Furniture designers <3 books
- The Pulitzer Prizes will be announced today… here’s some last minute betting
Please don’t ruin this novel. Too late. Well, if that’s the case, at least add in a Bladerunner sequence with a chase over the tops of cars or something. Oh, and a steamy sex scene. ‘Cause that’s how Kazuo would have wanted it.
The Atonement star this week started filming on Never Let Me Go, a tragic romance adapted from the Booker-shortlisted novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. Never Let Me Go plays out in a dystopian parallel Britain where the citizens are cloned in order to supply the trade in donor organs. Knightley takes the role of Kathy H, who is about to embark on her lifetime’s service but hears of a possible loophole in the system: clones may be able to avoid donating if they can prove they are in love.
“From the moment I finished the novel it became my dream to film it,” director Mark Romanek told Screen Daily. “Ishiguro’s conception is so daring, so eerie, so beautiful.”
Bleep bloop, bornk. Bleeert. I don’t know. Really, I don’t. I just thought that might sound a bit like a robot or something and aren’t robots the useful cousins of all things digital? I don’t know. I can’t keep this up indefinitely, people. I’m not a witty-comment vending machine for god’s sake. What are you looking at? You want a knuckle sammich? If I get out of this chair, I’ll give you such a caning, sonny.
- Digital AGE?!?! AGE!?!? WHAT FUTURE FOR BOOKS!!!!???? (It’s a good thing someone finally got around to writing this article)
- UK publishers getting Twitty with it
- What happens when your poets grow up with cell phones? This
Twice shortlisted for the Booker, western Australian Winton has won the Miles Franklin three times already, for Shallows (1984), Cloudstreet (1992) and Dirt Music (2002). Breath, his ninth novel, is an exploration of a young man’s addiction to danger whether through surfing or sex. It was described by judges who selected it for this year’s shortlist as “a searing document about masculinity, about risk, and about young people’s desire to push the limits”. Winton, the judges said, “is at the height of his powers as a novelist, and this is his greatest love letter yet to the sea”.
If he were to win, he would draw level with four-time winner of the prize Thea Astley. But Winton will be facing stiff competition from a novel gaining plaudits across Australia, Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap, which has already won the regional Commonwealth writers’ prize for best novel and is shortlisted for the Australian Literature Society’s gold medal. About the consequences that ensue when a man hits someone else’s fractious child at a barbecue, told from multiple perspectives, judges said it had “echoes of John Updike and Raymond Carver, if with a distinctly Greco-Aussie accent”.
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