I’m cranky and burnt out. So I’m throwing everything into one humourless post today. Eat it, suckahs.

Yet ANOTHER ebook reader hits the market like a pile of crap falling from the anus of a robotic rotweiler

Frankfurt, blah blah, publishing, nyah nyah, deals, yadda yadda

Ang Lee to direct Life of Pi—no word yet on whether it will be more crouching tiger or more smashing monster

Bad poetry—on purpose (most bad poetry is on purpose… purpose is a value free zone)

Style guide lacks style, truth

In necrophilia today: author to pen new novels as Asimov (who is seen here posing in his aged, nerdly Wolverine costume for Halloween)

Top titles of 09? Meh. Call me when they announce the Topless titles of 09

Waterstones stops meeting with sales reps

Canwest threatens to shut down National Post to chorus of echoes and dry rasp of tumbleweeds… Fack, they were just getting good…

The Millions has a funny piece on the absurdities of some jacket photos. Listen, I once had a photographer ask me to climb up on a ledge on Susan Sontag’s roof so he could get the Empire State Building in the shot. We do what we’re told when people pay attention to us.

There are a few of Ettlinger’s photos I like.  The full-body shots are better than the close-ups.  Take the one, for instance, of David Foster Wallace; his plaid jacket, his downward gaze, and the sky above, create a lovely, even haunting, composition.  Or the one, of James Ellroy: he’s gone whole hog with the photo’s anachronistic qualities, and it’s fun.  Other full body shots, however, are a disaster.  Hey, Melissa Bank, did you learn that pose in yoga?  If I were to title this picture, I’d call it, “The Failed Seduction.”  We’ve all been there, Ladies, haven’t we?

Some of the close-ups, particularly of the women, are just weird.  I hate when authors cup their own head with their hands. What, will it fall off?   Clearly, the writer is trying to appear thoughtful.   Most of the time, though, they look like they’re starring in a pain killer ad. Ann Patchett and Amy Hempel’s pictures are the worst examples of this, although, to be fair, this is an epidemic in many author photos, not just ones by Ettlinger.

A spelling bee for famous authors. Good luck. Also newsworthy here, James Frey continues his claw-fingered climb back to respectability by continuing to get invited to things. “Motherfucker.” Ooh. I shiver. Nasty. He’s still got it. Somebody check him for crack!

Inside, C.L.M.P. executive director Jeffrey Lependorf circulated. Nelson’s nemesis Burham chatted with authors James Frey and Joseph O’Neill (who left before his wife, Vogue editor Sally Singer could display her prowess).

“The word I’m most familiar with is ‘motherfucker,’ and I don’t think they’ll give me that one,” mused Frey. But Frey was no dark horse, his publisher assured us. Burnham himself was worried about “the German words. Hassenpfeffer, especially.”

Fellow contestant Francine Prose walked up moments later. “The British always win,” she nodded to Burnham. “I hope they don’t use Hassenpfeffer this year,” she added.

In my case, they say Dude needs to get more organized. Here is more than you ever wanted to know about F. Scott Fitzgerald via American Scholar’s version of the IRS rubber glove treatment.

What can be learned from Fitzgerald’s tax returns? To start with, his popular reputation as a careless spendthrift is untrue. Fitzgerald was always trying to follow conservative financial principles. Until 1937 he kept a ledger—as if he were a grocer—a meticulous record of his earnings from each short story, play, and novel he sold. The 1929 ledger recorded items as small as royalties of $5.10 from the American edition of The Great Gatsby and $0.34 from the English edition. No one could call Fitzgerald frugal, but he was always trying to save money—at least until his wife Zelda’s illness, starting in 1929, put any idea of saving out of the question. The ordinary person saves to protect against some distant rainy day. Fitzgerald had no interest in that. To him saving meant freedom to work on his novels without interruptions caused by the economic necessity of writing short stories. The short stories were his main source of revenue.

Aside from selling kids a steaming load of plastic shite (along with a few TV tie-in books) in their “book” catalogues, Scholastic has now pitched their corporate tents in the realms of bigotry, censorship, and homophobia. Glad to see them diversifying in the very competitive world of cartoonish evil. They asked an author to remove some offensive language (understandable, to some degree) from her book and change the protagonists parents from a lesbian couple to a pair of breeders. The author capitulated on the language, but stood firm on the dykes. So Scholastic said they would exclude it from their book fairs.

Luv Ya Bunches, about four elementary school girls who have little in common, but bond over the fact that they’re all named after flowers, is the first installment of a four-book series. But Scholastic says the book, released on October 1, failed to meet its vetting process because it contains offensive language and same-sex parents of one of the main characters, Milla.

The company sent a letter to Myracle’s editor asking the author to omit certain words such as ”geez,” “crap,” “sucks,” and “God” (as in, “oh my God”) and to alter its plotline to include a heterosexual couple. Myracle agreed to get rid of the offensive language “with the goal—as always—of making the book as available to as many readers as possible,” but the deal breaker was changing Milla’s two moms.

“A child having same-sex parents is not offensive, in my mind, and shouldn’t be ‘cleaned up.’” says Myracle, adding that the book fair subsequently decided not to take on Luv Ya Bunches because they wanted to avoid letters of complaint from parents. “I find that appalling. I understand why they would want to avoid complaint letters—no one likes getting hated on—but shouldn’t they be willing to evaluate the quality of the complaint? What, exactly, are children being protected against here?”

The good news Scholastic has rolled over like a good, flip-flopping corporate asshole facing bad publicity and the power of the gay dollar. Yay for online petitions!

Late today we got word, after discussions with Scholastic representatives, that the company has decided to reverse their earlier decision and include the book in their spring book fairs. That’s an awesome victory from one of the biggest and most influential educational book publishers and book retailers in the world, and it sends the clear message that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with two men or two women raising a child.

You can read Scholastic’s full statement right here. The statement doesn’t speak to the reasons they initially excluded Luv Ya Bunches from their book fairs (which was because Myracle included same sex parents and refused to include a heterosexual couple when that was requested by Scholastic), but it does make clear that not only will they be including Luv Ya Bunches in their spring fairs, but they have also affirmed that they “are committed to a review process that considers all books equally regardless of their inclusion of LGBT characters and same sex parents.”

Naipaul to FBI: But I’m not dead yet!

If you felt your heart palpitating at the thought of Dan the Man in Tan being cast out of his gold mansion on the moon by low Kindle sales, fret not, young Brownian…

Hemingway papers go to JFK Library

Asterix wins over the tar-and-plaque coated hearts of the French

B&N consolidating from big box stores to REALLY big box stores?

Foyles stocks e-readers launches e-book store… yaaaaawwnnnnn…

If you’re a Macmillan US author, check your next contract for your atrophied e-book royalty rate

The battle for Jack Kerouac’s estate continues—word is, most of this is over who gets the seeds from his legendary pot plant “Mikey”

Alison Flood swims the murky waters of the tan and tits set to find out whether the genre we all love to hate is actually supporting the genres we love to love. Sure they take spots, money, and interest away from new authors, established authors, and good books, but they also bring in the cash to publishers who can usually only expect to sell a smallish number of literary titles.

The more these celebrity novels sell, the more money publishers will have to fund debut literary fiction writers, poets, biographers; the kinds of books that might not sell hundreds of thousands of copies, which in fact might barely sell 1,000 copies, but which make it all worthwhile.

From the sounds of it, we’re really lucky to have another high-visibility publicity vehicle none of us will ever be able to use. But I find the viewer contribution stuff interesting.

Heminsley, who will be chiefly in charge of picking titles, said they would be chosen “thematically”, such as “a whole section on Stephen King’s new book, ‘top five historical novels’ or perhaps an interview”, and that the titles highlighted would be both new releases and backlist. She added that the programme’s style would be “inclusive” and akin to ITV1’s “Loose Women” but “younger”.

Heminsley and Griffin will discuss the titles with a rotating selection of Griffin’s “friends” so far confirmed as DJ Sara Cox; ex-Blue singer Duncan James; actors Lisa Faulkner and Jeremy Edwards; TV presenters Zoe Salmon, Jayne Middlemiss and Amanda Lamb; and model Nancy Sorrell.

Viewers will also be able to contribute via Skype, Twitter and the show’s website, with a plasma screen on show during the programme. The daily lifestyle club will also look at films, health and beauty and fashion.

…is the fastest selling item at B&N. Yo, Yanks: any of you have this or have seen it in action? What’s it like? Better than Kindle? I hear good things.

The Nook has become the fastest selling single item at Barnes & Noble since the retailer introduced the e-reader October 20, company CEO Steve Riggio said in Tuesday morning’s investor presentation. Last week, Amazon reported that the Kindle was its fastest selling product in both unit and dollar terms. Neither company has disclosed the number of devices that have been sold and/or ordered, but B&N.com president William Lynch told analysts the company expects to get a “big chunk” of the 900,000 e-readers that some analysts believe will be sold over the holidays. Riggio said B&N’s goal for the holidays is to make sure they have enough Nooks in stock to meet demand. B&N plans to start shipping Nooks November 30.

The boys at Electric Literature have made the publicity big time with a profile in the NYT. Their formula for success? They let you have good authors and stories your way.

The brains behind Electric Literature are Andy Hunter, 38, and Scott Lindenbaum, 26, writers who met in 2006 at Brooklyn College’s M.F.A. program in fiction writing. From an office of roughly 300 square feet in an industrial building between the Dumbo and Fort Greene neighborhoods, they added an iPhone application in July, a month after their first issue.

“Everyone is reading short-form text,” said Mr. Hunter, the editor in chief. “Literature has not made that jump.”

Mr. Lindenbaum, the fiction editor, added, “The short form could work increasingly well in a hectic age.”

Edwin Frank, who besides being the editor for the NYRB Classics series was also my neighbour when I lived in New York (and possibly the nicest guy I met there), is interviewed at the Amazon blog.

Amazon.com: How do the books come to you? Through your own reading and research, or through recommendations from other writers and readers you know? Are the writers who write your introductions often the ones who bring the books to you?

Frank: All sorts of ways. Readers write in recommending things, writers do the same, as do agents. Used bookstores, reference books, blogs, and libraries are all sources too. Henry James’s The Other House I discovered in a library, pulling it off a shelf when I didn’t recognize the title. When it turned out to be a novel I’d never heard of I felt dizzy with surprise and delight.

Sometimes introducers introduce the book to us; sometimes it’s we who first introduce the book to the introducer: for example, I sent Michael Cunningham The Pilgrim Hawk and he fell in love with it.

Amazon.com: A few years ago, Mark Moskowitz’s documentary, Stone Reader, followed his rediscovery of one forgotten novel, Dow Mossman’s The Stones of Summer. There’s a kind of romance to these lost classics that have barely survived the obscurity of time through the words of a few mouths or a single passionate reader. I know that sense of reading something nearly lost is part of the thrill for me of discovering (thanks to you) a book like Stoner or Hard Rain Falling. Is that part of the pleasure of publishing them?

Frank: Finding something lost gives us a sense of new possibility, don’t you think? There’s more out there than you were taught in school; more than your friends know about, too. It’s reassuring to think that old good things can survive the action of time–and when an old thing rings true and new it allows you to think the world can be remade.

Palin made $1.25M from “writing” her book BEFORE she left office… we have no way of tracking what she’s made since…

RIP: Don Ivan Punchatz, artist/illustrator, dead at 73 (if you don’t know who this is, you most definitely cannot gain access to my tree fort)

Something about Indigo’s profit margins or something like that where people exchange invisible currency for invisible commodities until the process filters down to real people exchanging visible money for stainless steel water bottles

The French try giving away newspapers to young readers… look, mes amis, your best bet is to print the news on rolling papers. There. Problem solved.

A cheapo e-book reader for the AA battery set

National Post’s Mark Medley interviews Ian Rankin, who’s some guy from Scotland

Stephen King finally adds pictures

In deference to whatever new library-science-oriented readship I may have picked up last week, I present an installment of the hard hitting feature “Late Breaking Library News!” Hollah back, my homies in the stack.

Ebooks responsible for surge in library memberships

Seattle libraries to close two days a week? Seattle??

Kindles and laptops to replace books at school library

An Obama Presidential library? Already? What’s next, the Nobel?

Library douchebag patron blacking out language they find offensive and returning books

Dude, I’ve been doing some serious boosterism around here lately. You’re my Nobel pick, you’re brilliant, yadda yadda. Why you gotta hate a playah? I’m just starting out, man. Let me live in my fantasy world a little longer.

Roth has long been pessimistic about the survival of the novel in a gaudy, short-attention-span culture, but his latest prophesy is one of his bleakest yet, predicting that the form will dwindle to a “cultic” minority enthusiasm within 25 years.The author believes that the concentration and focus required to read a novel is becoming less and less prevalent, as potential readers turn instead to computers or to television. “I was being optimistic about 25 years really. I think it’s going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them but it will be a small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range,” Roth told Tina Brown, editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast.

He said it was “the print that’s the problem, it’s the book, the object itself”. “To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by – it’s hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities,” he said.

Oh, “cultic minority enthusiasm”. I can get that. That’s like poetry. Okay, so I can still write novels, I just have to work a grindingly depressive day job until they bury me in the cold, cold ground. Gotcha. Thanks, Phil!

I guess that’s not very hard. But still. A cautionary tale for the darkly-souled among us: one day you too will look like someone’s grandmother and be preaching about angels instead of vampires. Yes, I know. Not you. She said that too once. And now look at her. “Would you like some tea, sonny?” It’s coming, Cruella and Vlad. It’s coming.

“Being on the side of the angels, it feels much better than being on the side of the vampires. Vampires were tortured, tragic figures,” Rice told the Wall Street Journal. Her novel, Angel Time: The Songs of the Seraphim, follows the adventures of Toby O’Dare, an American killer who is given the chance by a mysterious stranger (who turns out to be an angel) to go back to 13th century England to find salvation.

“Vampires for me were always like feeling grief for my lost childhood faith, being cut off from that life. I reached the point where I didn’t have any more stories to tell from that point of view,” explained the author, who said the angel series was “In keeping with [her] commitment to do Christian fiction in a variety of forms” since she converted from atheism back to her childhood Catholicism in 1998.

Meh, says she. Why do we line up for prize listed books?*  Because we’re told to. And like good Canadians, we likes to be linin’ up, whether fer da books or at da Tim Hortons fer our double-doubles, eh?

Like everyone else, I have followed the coverage and pondered the obvious: When exactly did Douglas Coupland find time to write another novel? Who does Annabel Lyon’s hair? Is Margaret Atwood pissed?

One thing I have not wondered, however, is which of the anointed books to add to my shelf, worthy efforts though I’m sure they are. You read that right: This fall, I won’t be reading any of the books that are nominated for Canadian literary prizes. And I don’t feel guilty about it either.

This is one of her better columns, but my bet is that most of you (ie, “everyone else”), like me, probably didn’t pause to wonder who does Annabel Lyon’s hair. But that’s just a guess. I could be wrong. I could be wrong.

* Better question: Do we (ie, everyone else/Canadians) line up for prize listed books or is it just we (ie, lit types) who line up for prize listed books? ‘Cause I just don’t see the sales numbers jumping on most shortlisted titles.

Everything that would be flushed down the drain of disinterested if I didn’t know someone somewhere might be missing something they found important.

Frankfurt fires official over China incident

Thesaurus makes reviewer horny, let’s all point and laugh

If Keats died today, his family would be rich off a malpractice suit

Brits catch wind of Palin mockery

News: Self-published book expo to be held in location other than street corner

JK Rowling’s lawyers have broken up a planned Harry Potter-themed dinner party. Next they plan on kicking over a pile of sticks some Christian kids were making to burn a Hermione doll at. After that they’ll be going after the lucrative whistling-of-the-movie-score piracy. Listen, unless Big Mama Jo-Jo gets her cut, don’t nobody go wavin’ wands around here, see? We wouldn’t want any accidents to happen, now would we? So yous all just make like trees and get outta here before someone gets hoit. (Personally, I think public opinion on this would shift if the lawyers just sued her instead for loving marmite…)

The host, a woman known by the pseudonym Ms Marmite Lover, regularly holds themed evenings at her home which she has recently transformed into new dining experience “The Underground Restaurant”.

The not-for-profit event, which has been renamed “Generic Wizard Night”, was to have a menu of dandelion wine, pumpkin soup and Dumbledore’s favourite – mint humbugs. Guests would have been led down ‘Diagon Alley’ by the side of the house and been met by a portrait of the “Fat Lady” who would have demanded a password before they could be let in.

Phew. Turns out fucking up my posts here daily means I’m a marginalized freedom-fighter. I just knew I was cooler than I suspected. So where’s the tshirt with my face on it? Salon says the grammar police should like totally back the hell off, man.

To protests that the language police are only protecting the accuracy, precision and clarity of our tongue, Lynch lifts a skeptical eyebrow. Many of the most roundly deplored “debasements” of English are nevertheless perfectly comprehensible: I didn’t confuse you by writing “Ain’t it the truth?” in my opening paragraph, did I? The only truly unbreakable rules of grammar and usage are the ones that, when broken, result in a genuine failure to communicate. The rest is a form of covert class warfare, and today’s usage reproofs constitute a status-protecting thump on the head delivered by the upper middle class to uppity members of the lower middle.

Thinking of the grammar wars in this light helps explain why they provoke such rage. Much as some people might detest seeing the noun “impact” used as a verb, if a lot of people say it and almost everybody understands it when it’s said, then a coup has been effected. The “verbing” of nouns (or the creation of “nerbs”) has been a flashpoint for the past four or five decades with the growth of business management lingo. Complaints about this point to a particularly American social fissure: between the cultured sensibility of the liberally educated and the can-do utilitarianism of striving MBAs.

I’m torn between astonished pleasure and intellectually-privileged outrage to find Walt Whitman narrating a Levis commercial. I’m also slightly disappointed I let the Chinese guy with the lisp, yellow hair, and pointy shoes talk me into Kenneth Cole jeans instead of my requested Levis at The Bay this weekend. Slate has an article on it here.

Margaret Atwood told me this weekend that she was going to be “joining Paris Hilton, eh?” by becoming an honourary Member of the Harvard Lampoon Castle. I didn’t know if it was common knowledge then, but it is now, according to her Twitter feed.

What fun to have been made Honorary Vixen at the Harvard Lampoon Castle tonite-joined Paris Hilton among others. Thank you-deeply pleased.

Actors read short stories as part of a live performance program in New Haven coffee houses. Haven indeed!

In an era in which book reading is in decline, it is at once curious and logical that an alliance of New Haven arts groups is tapping the written word in a new venture.

Called Listen Here, the project offers free weekly short story readings in New Haven coffeehouses by actors from the New Haven Theater Company.

“It’s first and foremost a community endeavor; it’s not, per se, a literary endeavor,” said Bennett Lovett-Graff, publisher of the literary journal The New Haven Review. “It’s really more based on listening.” Mr. Lovett-Graff created the series with David Brensilver, spokesman for the Arts Council of Greater New Haven.

This isn’t about New Coke vs. Coke Classic, but it kind of is. What of old whatshisface and whoshewhatsit?

Eighty years ago the Manchester Guardian (as this paper then was) ran a poll to discover from its readers’ votes the “novelists who may be read in 2029″. Only another 20 years to go, and the top five are already looking shaky: John Galsworthy (1,180 votes), HG Wells (933), Arnold Bennett (654), Rudyard Kipling (455) and JM Barrie (286).

What of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrence, Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Agatha Christie, EM Forster, and Jean Rhys? This distinguished crew either do not figure in the 1929 poll, or clock in with derisory counts (Joyce gets fewer than 10 votes – alongside Max Beerbohm, it’s pleasing to note).

Why would our choices be so different from those of our grandparents? Because we see literature as “literature”, through the prism of literary criticism and A-level prescriptions. It’s “modernism” that was the big bang in the 1920s. Everyone knows that. In 2009.

Now that the ABA is challenging the corporate hatchet job known as the book price war, the world* must ask itself the next logical question: why isn’t this happening in Canada?

The American Booksellers Association in a letter Thursday asked the justice department for an immediate meeting to discuss what it calls “the illegal predatory pricing” of the three retail giants.

The bestsellers include books by John Grisham, Stephen King and Barbara Kingsolver that usually sell for from $25 to $35 (U.S.).

In Canada, neither Amazon.ca nor Wal-Mart Canada is engaging in that type of deep discounting.

Andrew Pelletier, vice president of corporate affairs for Wal-Mart Canada, told the Star Friday morning that the company takes “a Canadian approach” to retailing based on “what is good for the Canadian market” that often differs from how Wal-Mart operates in the United States.

“We are two different countries. The U.S. approach is based on their marketplace,” he said. Wal-Mart Canada also doesn’t sell books online, he said.

*Oh, did I say “world”? What I meant was, of course, “Canada-which-will-desperately-seek-any-way-to-make-an-issue-local-even-to-the-detriment-of-the-readers”. Of course, I’m glad it isn’t happening, but it’s like the guy at the party who responds to your comment about your mother dying of Alzheimer’s with “Yeah, well you know the thing about ME and memory is….”

I expect this will generate a few well-reasoned, rational comments around the web-o-sphere.

The author claims she is is fed up with increasing levels of “sadistic misogyny” in crime fiction and says authors are simply jumping on the bandwagon to get a bestseller.

“Each psychopath is more sadistic than the last and his victims’ sufferings are described in detail that becomes ever more explicit as young women are imprisoned, bound, eaten, starved, suffocated, stabbed, boiled or burned alive,” she told the Observer.

“Authors must be free to write and publishers to publish. But critics must be free to say when they have had enough. So however many more outpourings of sadistic misogyny are crammed on to the bandwagon, no more will be reviewed by me,” she added.

And the most disturbing plots are by female authors, she says.

Le Carré leaves Hodder for Penguin, the philandering bastard

France has a black woman tipped for their major lit prize… sadly, this is both news and new…

Is the Iliad the greatest story ever told?

Kafka’s papers are all fubar

A brief herstory of “Ms.” (see what I did there?)

Daily Dose of Digital

The WaPo has switched to Neilson charts for its bestseller list

On the tyranny of email

Oprah, CNN, and Facebook form unholy trinity of book clubbishness

4% of Brits have read an ebook

Rebecca Skloot is trying something interesting for her grassroots book tour…

Well, I met with my legion of adoring librarian fans (made it out with most of my clothes not torn off, but barely) on Friday and then attended a couple IFOA events on Saturday. Great shows, both.

First, the Paul Quarrington tribute event, which was so packed with celebrities that it made me reflect on whether I could even get my family to show up at such an event for me. My conclusion: unlikely. The place was name-drop central: Roddy Doyle, Margaret Atwood, Paul Gross, Dave Bidini and the Rheostatics, Alistair MacLeod, Nino Ricci, David Bezmozgis, etc., virtually every big-time editor and publisher of note in the Toronto area, and a bunch of film/tv types. And those who weren’t on stage were in the audience. I know it sounds corny, but there was definitely a lot of love in the room. Srsly. I almost wiped my eyes at one point and I barely know Paul. It was more about the assembled communicating an incredible flow of celebration and joy at his having been than anything to do with death. Lovely all around.

That night I lined up with the pleebs to see Margaret Atwood and my friend Paul Durcan read. Atwood read from her new book and even sang a “hymn” to close out the piece, surprising everyone but herself. I’ve never heard her voice so modulated! And she CAN carry a tune. It was fun, to say the very least.

Durcan walked out on stage, an elder statesman of Irish verse, opened his book and read. Not a word that wasn’t poetry except “Thank you” at the end. Besides being a poet of great talent and importance, he’s also an incredible reader. Back and forth between the highbrow serious and chattily humorous, he seemed to have no trouble navigating a range of poetic and dramatic forms. I know him as a humble, generous man, but it was something else to see him dramatically transformed by his own poetry into a thundering powerhouse. What amazed me afterward were the line ups for signings. At first the Atwood line dwarfed the Durcan line. It reminded me of the time I read with Steven Heighton and Anne Marie MacDonald. (I sat between them after the reading to sign books and their two lines stretched away and around a corner while mine was done after one or two signatures. It was like sitting in a tunnel for the rest of the afternoon. Even MacDonald and Heighton noticed and started chatting with me to distract from the situation. Finally Dave O’Meara and a couple other people came over and stood in front of me to chat so it didn’t look so bad. Brutal.) Everyone there already had her book and were immediately in line to get it signed. I was getting ready to go buy another one of his books to get it signed and start the line, but slowly, as people made their way to the book table and back, Durcan’s line grew and grew until it rivaled a good portion of Atwood’s. That’s not bad for a poet in Canada. People had obviously been taken with the reading and realized through the power of his delivery that they would be missing something special if they didn’t buy the book. Well done!

After the reading I retired to the bar with some friends, and later to the IFOA “Hospitality Suite”, which some people call the “Hostility Suite”, but which I call the “OMG Free Whiskey Suite”.  There I chatted with all manner of people more famous than I and generally tried not to make a fool of myself. (I know..) The next morning I flew out of the Island Airport and bumped into Graham Gibson. I tried to hide my hangover from him, but I don’t think I was entirely successful.

Now I’m sick. F’n booze and its immune system-deperssing properties and f’n flights filled with hacking wheezebag passengers. I’m kind of hoping it’s Swine Flu so I can just get the damn thing over with. I’ll let you know in a few days.

Nicole Winstanley ascends to Penguin Canada throne

Lydia Davis on narrative (from lovely Maud)

Alice Munro reveals on stage a recent figh with cancer (here she is on video at IFOA)

The ABA has asked the Justice Dept to investigate the major retailers’ price war that will devastate the industry… here’s the open letter

Okay, I’m done with the librarians (and, yes, it was packed with hotties… No underwear thrown at me, but I nearly threw mine at them) and I am going to work on the novel after all. But because you’re a pack of voracious, news obsessed freaks like me, I thought I’d throw you a bone for your Friday goof off session at work.

Daily Dose of Digital:

Amazon brings Kindle reader to PCs (I thought the Kindle on a PC was just called “the internet”)

The Nook from B&N is awesome… but will it kill B&N?

Author to write book on Twitter… in related news, ‘Ninja to not read book written on Twitter

Amazon profits/sales way up

They’ll have to pry the printed books from your cold, dead hands

More Twitter fiction, this time with multiple authors, including Neil Gaiman

Tech tops topics in Boston

Twitter just doesn’t cut it with “serious” readers…. WTF with all the Twitter news today? And what the hell is a “serious” reader these days?

I’m headed off to talk to the Ontario Library Association about Bookninja, believe it or not. I know. Me in a room full of librarians. There better be a crack team of EMTs standing by with a defibrillation unit. I’ll try to be good and not run amok. That ends around noon, after which I may find a nice cafe to hole up and either write my novel or procrastinate by making posts here. Either way, nothing will happen here until noon EST.

nb from the crazy world of cyberspace: five separate people reached my personal author’s website using the search string “mature poets in canada”. I … I…. I don’t know what to say. Perhaps “pass me the rope, please”.

Would Milne mind? Would Adams? How about Stoker? Should we care? Should we throw petulant tantrums every time someone makes a buck off our nostalgia? Can this Bookninja dude get away with another rhetorical question or is this really the upper limit?

The literary creations of authors stopped being sacred territory roughly 20 years ago, when the estates of late authors began leasing out the copyrights to old works. Scarlett O’Hara rose to meet another day years after Margaret Mitchell died; James Bond has had endless adventures since the demise of his creator, Ian Fleming; and Peter Pan flew again a couple of years ago, three-quarters of a century after J.M. Barrie passed away.

Michael Brown, the chairman of the Pooh Properties Trust for the past three decades, says he never would have greenlighted a new Pooh book when he joined the trust, which oversees the Milne literary estate. Back then, the mention of a Pooh sequel would have had everyone from publishers to the public throwing “up their hands in horror,” he says.

“But there’s been a change in the attitudes of society,” he continued. “There’s a sense that nostalgia is fine, but you can bring these things out of the cupboard. . . . Of course, there will still be the purists, or Eeyores, who’ll say it’s a rotten idea before they open the front cover.”

Publishers delay ebook releases to squeeze a few bucks out of hardcovers—Stephen King leads the charge… wait, didn’t he quit writing?

Moby expounds on the impact of this on bookselling

Amazon drops price of international Kindle only days after it came out… suckers…

Canadian John Ralston Saul, seen here dressed as me at age 50, ascends to throne of World PEN… Muwahahahahaha! (He’s a Bookninja sleeper agent.)

Gabriel García Márquez spied on by Mexican government… wait for it… wait for it…

Some great poets on the TS Eliot Prize shortlist, but no Don Paterson

Party for Norman Mailer a success, most likely because of death of Norman Mailer

Anti-censorship folks love Judy Blume… come on, who doesn’t love Judy Blume?

Dane’s take a stand against Dan Brown, Dan Brown looks into buying Denmark

Literary zombie news anchors attack!

Books spoofing Sarah Palin are coming out the same day as her Goin’ All Rogue-y book. I already know which ones I’ll be buying, dotcha know!

The book – the title is a reference to the US newsreader who mistakenly called the autobiography Going Rouge – will see a series of contributors examine Palin’s origins in Alaska, her rise in the Republican party, and “the nightmarish prospect of her continuing to dominate the nation’s political scene”, OR Books said. It will be published as a paperback and ebook on 17 November, the same day that Palin’s hardback Going Rogue is due out.

Another spoof, Going Rouge – The Sarah Palin Rogue Coloring and Activity Book by cartoonist Julie Sigwart and Micheal Stinson, is also out on 17 November. Featuring mazes (”Help Sarah find her way to the White House”; “Where in the world does domestic Alaskan oil go?”), puzzles and word games, the authors promise to “mercilessly lampoon and parody everything Palin in 48 pages of hilarity”.

Well, I’m headed to Toronto, in part to speak at an OPLA event tomorrow, and in part to take in the Paul Quarrington fets and Margaret Atwood/Paul Durcan reading at Harbourfront. Perhaps I’ll see you around? I’m flying Porter for the first time, and am curious to see whether I’m actually treated like a paying customer instead of a much-resented piece of cargo (a la Air Canada). So far so good. The check in counter clerk actually looked me in the eye and smiled in a way that didn’t look painful.

The Neuronovel? N+1 looks at the patterns. My novel has someone who gets shot in the head in it. Does that count? Cause I like to join things. You should see my wallet.

The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel. What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel—the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind—has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes the brain. Since 1997, readers have encountered, in rough chronological order, Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (de Clérambault’s syndrome, complete with an appended case history by a fictional “presiding psychiatrist” and a useful bibliography), Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette’s syndrome), Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (autism), Richard Powers’s The Echomaker (facial agnosia, Capgras syndrome), McEwan again with Saturday (Huntington’s disease, as diagnosed by the neurosurgeon protagonist), Atmospheric Disturbances (Capgras syndrome again) by a medical school graduate, Rivka Galchen, and John Wray’s Lowboy (paranoid schizophrenia). And these are just a selection of recently published titles in “literary fiction.” There are also many recent genre novels, mostly thrillers, of amnesia, bipolar disorder, and multiple personality disorder. As young writers in Balzac walk around Paris pitching historical novels with titles like The Archer of Charles IX, in imitation of Walter Scott, today an aspiring novelist might seek his subject matter in a neglected corner or along some new frontier of neurology.

Google finger condoms provoke snickers

Barnes and Noble comes up with stupidest e-reader name, with “Kindle” close second

Nooky reader profiled here

and here

Format concerns readers as much as hardware

A SoHo nightclub venue housing a paid party for an “urban” author turns away her black party goers (who were “fat”) and allows in the white lawyers. Gee, I just don’t understand… I thought racism was fixed now! [knuckles in dimples]

Woods, author of New York Times best seller “True to the Game,” said she arrived to find that all her black guests – some of whom had traveled from as far as Virginia – had been turned away without explanation.

“They left all of my friends and family standing outside,” she said. “I had really serious people out there: lawyers, doctors and people in the entertainment industry.

“I was embarrassed. I was just walking around in circles and in tears. They took my moment.”

A handful of her guests who were white lawyers were allowed in, she said.

“There was nobody out there who was fat, and even if there was a fat person, who cares?”

Robinson, the sister of rapper Queen Pen, said, “When I asked the doorman what was the problem, he just looked past us like we didn’t exist.”

So what happens after you win the Nobel? VQR investigates.

What do you do after you win the Nobel prize? Sure, you spend a few months resting on your laurels. You go to Stockholm, you collect your prize, you give your speech, but then what? What happens when the ceremonies subside and the congratulatory telegrams trickle away to nothing? Surely, there are some laureates who can make a career from speaking engagements and consulting. And there are some laureates who have at least a few more years of running the free world ahead of them. But for those workaday laureates, for those laureates who have to go back to the office or the lab or the classroom, does the Nobel really change anything?

Melville House best small press!! But we already knew that, didn’t we?

Sears assures you via higher mathematical mumbo jumbo that their contribution to the book price war will work out better than Walamazarget’s—look just buy something already

Anti-cheating software proves Shakespeare play written by same man or woman who wrote other Shakespeare plays

Hey, look! The French finally aren’t surrendering! I guess you pick your battles, you know?

Chinese titles eaten up like good dim sum at Frankfurt

Wu Tang enters the field of hip hop artists writing ridiculous compendiums of collected “wisdom”. Of course, any effort in this genre will automatically be better than Kanye West’s embarrassing verbal bowel evacuation, but that’s not saying much…

Natch: just in case you were worried he wouldn’t be able to afford to make that new throne out of the co-mingled bones of The Elephant Man, Michael Jackson, and George Clooney, Dan Brown still leads sales and all future projects are on track

Penguin up and down like Amy Winehouse on a crackhouse porch

Did White hate Strunk and other grammarians?

President of the Congo is unethical? Good God! But in a world where killing and the seizure of power is fairly common, this kind of stands out as particularly bold—he faked a foreward by Nelson Mandela for his book

“Privileged Little Artiste Writing Something Oh-So-Precious Into His Moleskine Notebook”

After gently unfastening the elastic strap keeping his dearest musings safe from prying eyes, little literary artiste Evan Stansky penned a few more darling thoughts into his clothbound Moleskine notebook Wednesday. “These are much higher quality than the notebooks you find at CVS,” lilted the auteur, who couldn’t be bothered to use—dare it be said—a journal of lesser craftsmanship or pedigree, or one not famously used by such legendary artists as van Gogh and Hemingway. “They’re a little more expensive, but I try to write on both sides so I don’t go through them as quickly.” At press time, the princely scribe was seen finishing his apricot jasmine tea, asking a mere mortal sitting nearby to watch his literary accoutrements, and then prancing off to the Starbucks powder room, light as a feather.

Stephen Marche on how the e-reader is the next step because it makes your book a “transbook”, ie, a book to contain all books.

My paper library consists of 2,000 volumes, making it both much too big and much too small. I consider a working library to have about 5,000 volumes, but a mere 2,000 has been sufficient to be one of the most continuous problems of my life. Moving it around is a nightmare. A hundred boxes of books is a terrible burden in the 21st century. Yet I know that I will never get rid of them. I’m too attached now. Just as the ancients respected the scroll more after the development of the book, just as the hand-written manuscript became sacred after the invention of print, the printed book is now beginning to glow with its own obsolescence.

But I am immensely excited for the new phase of the book. So far the new technology has been called the “e-reader,” a term obviously picked by engineers, not poets. In literary terms it’s a transbook, by which I mean that it is the book which can contain all books. Why are so many writers so afraid of this staggeringly wonderful possibility? A book is a singular object that can contain many voices, but the transbook has the potential to be a singular object containing all voices. It is not just another kind of media; it is the dream of ultimate text.

I’m not paraphrasing.

Telling the story of a naughty little boy, Max, who is sent to bed without his supper only to journey by boat to a land where wild monsters live, Sendak’s classic tale was first published in 1963 and has captured children’s imaginations ever since. With a film version adapted by Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze out later this year, Sendak told this week’s edition of Newsweek that he would “not tolerate” parental concerns about the book being too scary.

“I would tell them to go to hell,” Sendak said. And if children can’t handle the story, they should “go
home,” he added. “Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like. But it’s not a question that can be answered.”

[Slow clap accompanied by slowly nodding head with approving look, eventual rise to feet.]

Cory Doctorow lays out his plan for giving himself away in a lengthy piece at PW.

Free e-books work for me. I’ve been a full-time writer since I quit my day job as European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (a charity that works for online civil liberties) in January 2006. Since then, I’ve made my living through a combination of royalties and licenses (foreign translations, film options, etc.); earnings from Boing Boing, the popular blog I co-edit and co-own; speaking fees; column writing; and the occasional grant, teaching gig or residency. Mine is the semirandom hodgepodge of income sources that characterizes most of the freelancers I know, as skills, circumstances and capacity dictates.

Still, this business of my giving away e-books is a controversial subject. I encounter plenty of healthy skepticism in my travels, and not a little bile. There’s a lot of people who say I’m pulling a fast one, that I’d be making more money if I didn’t do this crazy liberal copyright stuff, or that I’m the only one it’ll ever work for, or that I secretly make all my money from doing stuff that isn’t writing, or that it only works because I’m so successful. Of course, when I started, they said it only worked because I was so unknown.

People want proof that this works—that I’m not deluded or a con artist. But it’s hard to prove. I don’t have a time machine I can use to republish all my books without the free downloads and compare royalty statements. And the skeptics aren’t the only people who claim I’ve got it wrong. There are also the True Believers. The True Believers are the people who say that I’m a fool to give 90% of the cover price of my books to the publisher and bookseller. After all, I have three or four million people a day who read my blog. I could just self-publish all my material and get it directly into the hands of my readers, and pocket the lion’s share of the income.

I’m a contrarian on both of these propositions: that I’m losing money by giving away e-books, and that I’m losing money by using a publisher. I have a nice little Goldilocks gig going—not too hot, not too cold, just the right amount of DIY, independent publishing and just the right amount of professional support and administration from my publisher to sell. But I’m as curious about both propositions as anyone.

*Note: does not refer to absence of undergarments

The FTC says book bloggers seriously need to chill. “We’re not after you.” Oh really? Then how do you explain that car that’s been parked outside my house since I came home last night? You know, the black one with the carseats in the back? And my computer crashed twice yesterday. Coincidence? Oh, I think you DO know what I’m talking about, FTC, if that is your real name…. But regardless of who you say you’re after, the mechanism exists and can be applied broadly at will. I guess I’m overreacting. I mean, when in all of US history has legislation intended for one purpose been perverted at the suggestion of political or corporate interests? Pfft. I should totally take a pill. Or talk to this lady and maybe get a hug or something.

The Federal Trade Commission, which set the blogging world aflame two weeks ago with new guidelines governing truth-in-cyberspace-advertising, “never intended to patrol the blogosphere,” said Mary Engle, an FTC lawyer who addressed KidlitCon 09, a conference of kids’ book bloggers held last weekend in Alexandria, Va. “We couldn’t do it if we wanted to and we don’t want to.”

Engle, the FTC’s associate director for advertising practices, spoke to the gathering of 70 bloggers at the invitation of conference organizer Pam Coughlan, who blogs as Mother Reader. “Everybody who talked to me after she spoke said they felt so much better and that they understood the issues much better,” Coughlan said.

As reported yesterday, Amazon and Wal-Mart have decided to tromp around on publishing as they whack at each other in big rubber suits, but to truly destroy the industry, I postulated the inclusion of a third heartless beast. Enter Target.

Target Corp. has leaped into an online price war on books expected to be top sellers.

The discounter said Monday that it would offer some of this season’s most anticipated book titles at $8.99, with free shipping, matching moves by Walmart.com and Amazon.com.

Minneapolis-based Target said the price applied to preorders on Target.com of such books as “Breathless” by Dean Koontz and “Under the Dome” by Stephen King.

NYU joins digitization slog

Newsflash: scientists discover that TV and video games distract children from books!

Literary city San Francisco

Does star-lit depress “real” writers? Assuming I’m real, and we have yet to prove I am not indeed a hologram projected into a controlled experimental space, my answer is “sometimes”

Philip Roth bolsters his nice guy cred by boarding a bus that was touring landmarks from his novels and shaking some hands

Dahl characters still top list of kids’ favourites

Nobel laureate Saramago the latest in a long line of authors to win the most beneficial lit prize of all: the ire of the Catholic church

S&S signs trilogy of books based on iPhone app… next up: deals for a half-dead pigeon, the remains of Bill from Marketing’s sandwich, and a pair of shoes hung by the laces from a telephone wire…

Some book art to make you horny… for books!

Is this the right fucking place to buy a book? (Thanks, P)

The Writers Trust has awarded the Matt Cohen Prize (lifetime achievement/distinguished career) to Paul Quarrington (pdf), who will be fetted this weekend in Toronto at Harbourfront. I’ll be there and hope you will as well.

Apparently there’s a faction of folks over the pond who are upset with the recent appointment of a new head for the Edinburgh festival. So naturally there’s a Facebook page dedicated to slagging him. Perhaps it also lists what celebrity lapdog breed he is, his score on Bejewled! and what items he needs for his vampire war.

His critics are outraged that Barley was appointed less than two months after the Lighthouse, Scotland’s national centre for architecture and design, of which he was executive director, went into administration with the loss of 57 jobs. Founded in 1999 in Glasgow, the Lighthouse was funded by public money and commercial income, but failed after the government refused to bail it out when it ran into financial difficulties.

Barley had not been mentioned even as an outsider in the selection process, which began after the resignation of the previous director, Catherine Lockerbie, before this year’s festival in August. The applicants were believed to have included James Runcie, director of the Bath Literature Festival, and Alex Clark, until recently editor of Granta magazine.

Well, duh. Should be a fun couple weeks watching the stones fly between glass houses. The NYT piece has a gallery of images, none of which are sexually graphic. But the Telegraph piece has a good illo that will put you off getting jiggy for a while.

Mr. Crumb is known almost as much for his bawdy underground comix featuring characters like Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural as he is for “Crumb,” the 1994 documentary about him. But he has been driven less by his sexual impulses in recent years and more by the 45 minutes he spends in seated meditation every morning in the medieval town house he shares with his wife, Aline (they became grandparents this month), in the south of France.

One day 15 years ago, for no reason he can remember, Mr. Crumb decided he wanted to read the myths of ancient Sumer. Eventually he found a scholarly work that said some of the myths were similar to the stories in Genesis. He read Genesis closely, and the idea of illustrating it clicked. He told a literary agent friend that if he could fetch a big enough advance, he’d do it. W. W. Norton & Company came through with $200,000, which seemed enough; Mr. Crumb thought he could bang out the project in a year or two. It took four.

As unlikely as it may seem, Mr. Crumb has become something of a Bible scholar. In a telephone interview from France, he bristled at a description of his book by his British publisher as “scandalous satire.” “I had no intention to scandalize the Bible,” he said. “I was intrigued by the challenge of exposing everything in there by illustrating it. The text is so significant in our culture, to bring everything out was a significant enough purpose for doing it.”