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| Hearsay: |
A press release from Anansi is announcing the promotion of Sarah MacLachlan to a position apparently above president (in the case of the Bush administration, that would have been called “Vice-President”). Freehand gets Melanie Little pinched away to join Anansi, and Janie Yoon moves around on the inside. Sounds like things are settling down at the Big A.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Scott Griffin announces changes at House of Anansi Press.
Sarah MacLachlan, President of House of Anansi Press, has been named President and Publisher, following the departure of former Anansi publisher Lynn Henry.
Mr. Griffin stated: “Over the past six years, Sarah MacLachlan has, in collaboration with her team, created a strong identity for Anansi, both nationally and internationally. I have every confidence that in the combined role of President and Publisher, Sarah will lead the house on to greater successes.”
“We’ve been building on more than forty years of great publishing here at Anansi,” MacLachlan remarked, “and I hope to continue to effectively lead this house in its commitment to publishing ‘Very Good Books’ for years to come. It means a lot to me that Scott Griffin continues to support us 100% in our ongoing endeavours to make this company Canada’s preeminent independent publishing house.”
In restructuring the editorial department at Anansi, MacLachlan has made some changes and a key hire. Melanie Little will be joining the company as Senior Editor, Canadian Fiction. Little was formerly the Founding Editor at Freehand Books, where she published a number of talented Canadian writers, including Marina Endicott and her Scotiabank Giller Prize–nominated novel Good to a Fault (which was also the winner of the Commonwealth Prize, Canada and the Caribbean). Most recently, Little has been working for Annick Press as Editor-at-Large, Series Editor, of “Single Voice”: acquiring and editing the short, first-person novella series for older teens; she was also advising on acquisitions for the French-language books in the series and on editing their translations. “I look forward to working with what I know will be a crack team,” said Little of her upcoming move to Anansi.
Making up the editorial team, along with Little, will be Janie Yoon, former Managing Editor and now Senior Editor Nonfiction. Yoon, who has been with Anansi for the past two years, has proven herself to be a gifted editor and worked on a number of books, including the critically acclaimed, award-winning national bestseller The Cello Suites by Eric Siblin. “I’m thrilled to be working with Sarah and Melanie, and to continue to build on Anansi’s reputation for consistently publishing high-quality works.” Before coming to Anansi, Yoon had been with Key Porter. In addition, Yoon, along with MacLachlan, will participate in the acquisition of international titles. She will also oversee the packaging of Anansi’s paperback reprints.
Rounding out the team is Kelly Joseph, former Editorial Assistant for both Anansi and Groundwood. Joseph will now work exclusively for Anansi in the role of Assistant Editor. Joseph has been with Anansi for two years, and before that she was at Key Porter.
What exactly is the purpose of the dust jacket these days? Speaking personally, I can say the dustjacket, and the press flack, is what I use to calm the baby when he freaks out that I’m opening a package and there’s nothing in it from him. Later, when he’s finished, I collect the dustjacket back again, piece by piece a “dustpan”. Now you know where that term came from.
What is the point of dustjackets? The clue can’t be in the name: on the shelf, the most dust-prone part of a book is the top, which a jacket doesn’t cover (these days, anyway). Decoratively, too, they are a recipe for disappointment. Bring home your expensive new hardback, lift up its gorgeous plumage, and underneath – in the UK at least – you’re liable to find rough-textured and drably covered board, with the only graphic element a cruder reproduction of the lettering on the spine of the jacket. In America, land of the deckle edge, your chances of a pleasant surprise are greater; but the jacket remains an unnecessary and vulnerable encumbrance. That, at least, is how it has always seemed to me – and some in the book trade appear to be reaching the same conclusion.
What’s with all the dead teenagers in books these days? In my day, teens were forced to stay alive and figure things out until they became crushed adults plodding through a banal life to a much later, wrinklier physical and mental disintegration. These kids today have no sense of purpose because they’ve never had to mildly struggle, I tell you.
The popularity of these books, believes Forman, isn’t necessarily because teenagers are drawn to the morbid – more that they are attracted to dramatic stories with stark moral choices. “When you’re at this age, you tend to be experiencing so much for the first time – first love, first time away from home, first heartbreak – so life is imbued with extra intensity,” she says. “I think teens are drawn to books that reflect that drama, or which evoke feelings that match the emotional rollercoasters they’re riding in their own lives. So, while I don’t think a story necessarily has to be all sturm und drang, it needs to stir something up.”
Cate Tiernan isn’t so sure: she does perceive a certain yearning towards the macabre among teen readers. “Traditionally, teenagers tend to be fascinated by morbid topics,” she says. “The Lovely Bones probably spurred an interest in a dead teenager narrating a compelling story – you know it will be dramatic, because she’s already dead. The storyline and impetus are in-built.” Her new book, Immortal Beloved, out in September in the US and next January in the UK, follows the life of immortal teenager Nastasya who, says Tiernan, “can look forward neither to the dread nor the release of death: she’s forced to continue living in the world day after day, forever”.
My blog pals circle is pretty small these days, owing in part to time, but also to personality and even insanity on the part of some. But a few general book bloggers I call friends are Maud, Jessa, Dennis, Mark & Ron, Steve, and Michael “The Velvet Lips” Schaub. Here Schaub is interviewed at Willamette Weekly about blogging, hate mail, being an internets celebrity, and the Kindle.
WW: OK, from one blogger to another…where is the money coming from? Seriously, how do you eat?
Michael Schaub: Umm, just barely? I have a day job. I work in client services for an e-commerce company in Austin. Most of the rest of my money is [from] freelance book reviews, which are nice, because they help me afford something other than Dinty-Moore beef stew for dinner.
What about money from blogging?
[Laughs] Bookslut gets some revenue through advertisers, but not a lot. I make enough to buy whiskey, which is a job necessity anyway.
As my blog grandpappy Moby points out, a lot of hubbub has been made over the publishers v Amazon ebook price war. Forgotten in all of this is a wee part of the equation: bookstores. Doesn’t anyone care about the small bookstore anymore? Wait… I’m not sure I want your answer.
Tongue in cheek title, no doubt, but buckle up nonetheless. Some shit is about to go down.
There is only one conclusion I have arrived at after the dust of the first battle of the e-book wars has come to a close. It is a simple one. Like all modern wars the reason it came about is control. Control of pricing, auspiciously, and control of format in reality.
Just like all the bright faced lefties when Bush II invaded Iraq, screaming about blood for oil, many of the commentaries about this publishing conflict fall short of addressing an important aspect of this discussion. Essentially the format has been accepted and now the big players are jockeying for control. So I ask you, nostalgia shelved neatly at the dusty back next to poetry, what the hell is happening to bookstores in all this?
- iJesus… download Him now… into your HEART
- Apparently Batman had some Kryptonite in that thar leather harness utility belt
- A “Christian diet book”, a lawsuit, and… hilarity! Sounds like a celebrity reality show down there
- Travel writing industry in such peril this man may no longer be able to afford to care for mustache
- Scribd expanding into open content
- PEN/Faulkner awards list includes, but can never contain, Lorrie Moore
- Random Culture Link: Required reading for brooding poets and short story writers
Part time Ninja Russell Smith responds to the Guardian’s advice on writing fiction by examining the parasitic cottage industry of advice writing and wondering at the ridiculousness of the whole thing.
It’s strange that a publisher is almost guaranteed to sell a few thousand more copies of a book about how to write fiction than it would an actual work of fiction. Books of anecdotes about the eccentricities of writers or compilations of rejection letters are always popular too. A recent very entertaining one of these is Canadian: It’s called Page Fright: Foibles and Fetishes of Famous Writers, and it’s by the veteran journalist Harry Bruce. It doesn’t teach you anything coherent about the creative process except that everyone’s is wildly different.
And yet the advice keeps coming, unvaried in its inconstancy, every year. It’s interesting that The Guardian article on how to write was inspired by a book that came out in 2007, and that book was itself simply a reprinting of an earlier New York Times article. Which was itself in many ways similar to Stephen King’s much earlier handbook On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. And there are a few dozen others with titles like Why I Write; it’s almost mandatory for hugely successful writers to give up a few secrets toward the end of their careers.
Well, no comment on that headline, but this is kind of neat. A Toronto artist has revised a huge crude graffiti some kids obviously stomped into newly fallen snow—a giant cock (that’ll never get old, kids)—and turned it into a message of hope and fun for the soulless condo dwellars who have to look down on the city from their cold, utilitarian glass cages on the skyline. Aw! (Thanks to the awesome Sharon’s FB feed)
There it was. All 30 metres of it stomped into the freshly fallen snow in an empty patch of land near CityPlace Park.
The renderings were of unmistakable profanity and a gigantic penis that some might look at then shake their head in disgust and think: Is this what our city has come to – offensive pictures of the male anatomy etched into the snow?
Many people who saw it Tuesday night as they looked from their condo windows at the corner of Spadina Ave. and Lake Shore Blvd. W. likely turned away, slightly disturbed and saddened.
But artist and poet Gregory Alan Elliott saw it as an opportunity.
Fantastic article. Start doing some math around contemporary poetry and you realize it’s sea of shit. Somehow everyone and their dogs (post-modernism, I blame thee) got the idea they could be a poet, and now everyone and their dogs are “poets”. It’s like the Exxon spill of literature—good poems end up like lame seabirds among the rocks, covered in gunk. And it turns out a few of the “real” poets working to contain the spill are mostly just scratching each others’ backs.
The notion that writing and performing “poetry” is the easiest way to satisfy the American itch for 15 minutes of fame has spilled out of our campuses and into the wider culture. You can’t pick up a violin or oboe for the first time on Monday morning and expect to play at Lincoln Center that weekend, but you can write your first poem in May and appear at an open mike in June waving a “chapbook” for sale. The new math of poetry is driven not by reader demand for great or even good poetry but by the demand of myriads of aspiring poets to experience the thrill of “publication.”
The new math is stunning. Len Fulton, editor of Dustbooks, which publishes the International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, estimates the total number of literary journals publishing poetry 50 years ago as 300 to 400. Today the online writers’ resource Duotrope’s Digest lists more than 2,000 “current markets that accept poetry,” with the number growing at a rate of more than one new journal per day in the past six months. Some of these journals publish 100 poems per issue, others just a dozen. If we proceed cautiously and assume an average of 50 poems per publication per year, more than 100,000 poems will be published in 2010.
But hold on to your pantoums, your prose poems, and ghazals. If journals merely continue to grow at the current rate, there will be more than 35,000 of them by 2100, and approximately 86 million poems will be published in the 21st century!
As stunning as those estimates are, they are likely to prove conservative. That’s because Duotrope’s editors “do not attempt to list all the poetry journals that are currently publishing” and, more important, because the rate of growth will almost certainly continue to rise as technology makes it easier for editors to accommodate the increasing number of poets clamoring for publication.
…
time has never been asked to test the astounding number of poems being published today, let alone what promises to be published in the future. To truly survey 21st-century poetry, future English professors will have to limit the scope of their courses so severely as to invite laughter. Professor X might specialize in the month of May 2049 while Professor Y concentrates on the first week of September 2098.Like golf, poetry is becoming a sport that multitudes pursue and enjoy—and if it were simply a matter of more and more men and women writing poetry, I would be cheering along with the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Foundation, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, poets in the schools, poets in the prisons, and hundreds of other state and local advocates. Exercising language at its highest level is an absolute good, and (Plato be damned) in an ideal society everyone would write poetry.
But there’s a difference between writing and publishing.
This is partly why while many others are out “promoting poetry” by reading on street corners and holding events to “increase the profile of poetry”, I basically sit on my ass at home and scribble away. I’ve given up thinking in terms of readers, writers, audiences, performers, and even “contemporaries”. I try to just think in terms of poems now. And beyond that, in terms of art. Sometimes it works.
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February 21, 2010
It’s hard to figure out how much poetry is being published in America. When I suggested to Michael Neff, founder of Web del Sol, that anyone can start an online journal for $100, he pointed out that anyone can start one via a blog for nothing. If current trends persist, the sheer amount of poetry “published” is likely to double, quadruple, “ten-tuple” in the decades ahead.
Who is writing all this poetry? In quieter times, the art’s only significant promoters were English professors who focused on reading poetry for its own sake. Today colleges across America have hundreds of programs devoted to teaching men and women how to actually write the stuff. Those in charge of undergraduate and M.F.A. programs have cast themselves in the role of poetry-writing cheerleaders who are busy assuring tens of thousands of students that they are talented poets who should expect their work not only to be published but to win awards as well.
The notion that writing and performing “poetry” is the easiest way to satisfy the American itch for 15 minutes of fame has spilled out of our campuses and into the wider culture. You can’t pick up a violin or oboe for the first time on Monday morning and expect to play at Lincoln Center that weekend, but you can write your first poem in May and appear at an open mike in June waving a “chapbook” for sale. The new math of poetry is driven not by reader demand for great or even good poetry but by the demand of myriads of aspiring poets to experience the thrill of “publication.”
The new math is stunning. Len Fulton, editor of Dustbooks, which publishes the International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, estimates the total number of literary journals publishing poetry 50 years ago as 300 to 400. Today the online writers’ resource Duotrope’s Digest lists more than 2,000 “current markets that accept poetry,” with the number growing at a rate of more than one new journal per day in the past six months. Some of these journals publish 100 poems per issue, others just a dozen. If we proceed cautiously and assume an average of 50 poems per publication per year, more than 100,000 poems will be published in 2010.
But hold on to your pantoums, your prose poems, and ghazals. If journals merely continue to grow at the current rate, there will be more than 35,000 of them by 2100, and approximately 86 million poems will be published in the 21st century!
A lot of people are responding to the Guardian’s awesome collection of novelists offering novel-writing advice, but Laura Miller at Salon has flipped that on its head and offered novel writing advice to novelists from readers.
A lot of the advice focuses on practice (work every day, keep a diary, stop while you’re still interested, etc.), and almost as much strives — gently or not — to inform aspirants that they shouldn’t expect much (or, really, any) money or fame from a literary career. It soon struck me, though, that the perspectives offered are limited. What makes Leonard’s advice so refreshing, after all, is that none of it fusses over the writer’s own process and delicate ego. His tips ruthlessly focus on the creation of better fiction.
Readers are what every novelist really wants, so isn’t it about time that a reader offered them some advice? I’ve never written a novel, and don’t expect to ever do so, but I’ve read thousands. More to the point, I’ve started 10 times the number of books that I’ve finished. Much of the time, I’m sampling brand-new novels that aren’t great — that frequently aren’t even very good — each one written by someone sincerely hoping to make his or her mark. I can tell you why I keep reading, and why I don’t, why I recommend one book to my fellow readers, but not another. I’ve also listened to a lot of other readers explain why they gave up on a book, as well as why they liked it.
Why are trashy tabloids like the New York Post (or Toronto Sun, etc) so popular? They know where to look. Some of this is a bit of a reach for me. While this is interesting, I’m still think they’re mostly popular because of the celebrity gossip, sports coverage, and hooker ads in the back.
I’ve long felt there are things to be learned from tabloid stories that one does not learn from the “serious” journalism favored by elitists and J-school prudes. It’s true that there is a campy, somewhat condescending relish for Post headlines among some serious journalists, but behind that there often lies a sneer at the subject matter of the paper itself. I’ve encountered it at the three J-schools where I’ve taught. And consider this characterization from the comments section of Nytpicker.com, the erudite Times-watching blog, published after a Times hire from the Post was caught plagiarizing: “[W]hy did the NYT hire from the NYP anyway? Are there not more reputable news orgs from which to hire? Jeez[.]”
But these sneers are not necessarily warranted. A tabloid focus on “sensationalist” stories can teach us more about human passions than any wonkish analysis of cap-and-trade amendments.
Still, the bagel headline has deepened my understanding of and appreciation for the paper’s continuing distinctive appeal in an age where almost all other tabs have succumbed to celebrification. The bagel was not your conventional celeb.
Under the main headline—
$177
BAGEL—was this subhed:
Councilman
Ripped Off
‘Hole’ Lotta
Dough: FedsIt was not an earth-shaking story, not what you’d usually consider Post front-page material. The bagel photo was less alluring than the previous month’s parade of Tiger Woods “gal pals.”
But it helped me recognize the true mainstay of Post stories. It’s not just that the paper focuses on human passions; it also focuses on the right humans.
Crap. Why the hell does this “life” thing have to keep interfering with my obligations as a faceless news aggregator and occasional pundit?
- Remember how that guy lied and basically voided an entire non-fiction book? Holt won’t pull it, but will “correct” it… hm, that’s a neat trick….
- Salman Rushdie to write memoir of his time in the crosshairs of the zealots
- Can Batman takes Superman? Depends on whether the contest is comic book price or sexy bondage outfit… Because I see one happening before the other
- Remember when all those A-Listers gave novel writing advice? On to the rest of the alphabet! (Though that’s not fair to Rooke, who’s an A.5-lister, really…)
- Nothing like conducting the buzzard feast on your dead parent’s corpse in public
- Barnes and Noble is struggling, and looking to shake things up. Let’s hope it’s Shakira-style! Brrrrahaa!
- Reading trends broken down by American city (I imagine if we did this in Canada right now it would be beer labels and sports pages)
- John Grisham finally reaches his comfort zone in language level and will write kids books, presumably about the intricacies and gummy underbelly of schoolyard justice
- Couple typographical links, dedicated as always to ex-Ninja Pete: Sexy effing letters and a typographical mohawk!
A bunch of A-List authors, including Atwood, Doyle, Enright, Ford, Franzen, Gaiman, etc, give their top 10 lists for writing fiction:
Roddy Doyle
1 Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.
2 Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph –
3 Until you get to Page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety – it’s the job.
4 Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy.
5 Do restrict your browsing to a few websites a day. Don’t go near the online bookies – unless it’s research.
Which sites would you recommend, M. Doyle?
AN attempt by Martin Amis to defend his reputation against the media “recklessly distorting” his views backfired spectacularly this weekend when Anna Ford, the broadcaster, claimed he had “social autism”.
Instead of rallying support against his critics, a self-justifying article by the novelist so angered Ford, his acquaintance of 30 years, that she went public with accusations that he had embroidered his past for public consumption.
“He needs to see a psychiatrist who, I’m sure, would have a field day with him,” said Ford. “I really don’t think he is able to relate to people properly or understands their feelings. It’s all about how he sees things.”
Rarely one to turn the other cheek, the novelist Martin Amis – who was the subject of an open letter from Anna Ford in Saturday’s Guardian accusing him of narcissism, neglect of his godfatherly duties and smoking over her late husband’s deathbed – has counter attacked, calling the former newsreader’s outburst “ungenerous and self-defeating”.
Amis retaliates against Ford, who is the widow of Mark Boxer, a close friend of Amis until his death in 1988. “I was astonished. I was best man at her wedding. [The attack] makes me wonder how long all this has been brewing,” he told the Guardian today.
Calling Ford’s letter “eagerly ungenerous and self-defeating”, he said: “She’ll regret all this. She is undermining the memory of Mark, whose friends really did adore him.” He added, addressing Ford: “You only have to ask yourself two questions: if Mark were alive, what would he think and how would he feel?”
And so the magical, delicate dance that is the circle of life… continues. (Original letters, which are more boring than the reportage, linked to in the articles.)
Moby has a roundup about how an author and book can get screwed by a lying source. Turns out one of the main sources for Last Train from Hiroshima was lying. That’s got to suck for the guy who put in all the work writing it.
It’s a publisher’s worst nightmare: A new book from Holt about the atom bomb attack on Hiroshima, Japan, The Last Train from Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino, has gotten off to an amazing start, winning critical acclaim for “its heartbreaking portrayals of the bomb’s survivors,” landing on the New York Times bestseller list, and being selected by Avatar director James Cameron as his next film project. One reason for the book’s huge launch: a startling revelation of “a secret accident with the atom bomb that killed one American and irradiated others and greatly reduced the weapon’s destructive power.”
Here comes the nightmare part: That startling revelation has proven to be a lie made up by an impostor who was one of the author’s key sources for the book, leading to a “national outcry,’ according to a New York Times report by William J. Broad.
Joseph Fuoco described himself to author Pellegrino as “a last-minute substitute on one of the two observation planes that escorted the Enola Gay,” the infamous bomber on the run, says the Times. Fuoco, who died in 2008, said he replaced flight engineer James R. Corliss when he took sick just before take-off.
- Can you charge a piece of shit for thinking like a piece of shit in a piece of shit poem? Piece of shit charged with threatening to kill president in poem on neo-Nazi website… Sigh. Here comes the hard part for me: a poem is not a crime… this douchebag and his twisted ideology may indeed be a threat, but until you have something other than a poem, there is no crime
- Action Comics #1 sells for a cool mil
- Erotica book has day in the sun (sweat glistening on its long tan limbs as they writhe in ecstacy)
- Remnick’s Obama bio to start with 200k printing
- LAT Book Prize finalists includes Dave Eggers, assorted humans
- Looking to learn how to print books? Start here, in 1947:
I always regret taking a day off when trying to string together a narrative of the miscellaneous crap that built up while I was gone.
I have kids in the house today because of so-called “teacher development day”, which I suspect translates to hot-tub footsy with the principal day, so I am taking the day off to “care” for them, which means slitting open a box of granola bars and leaving the tap in the kitchen running while I descend into the basement to clean up from last week’s flood. Oh, yes, did I mention the flood? Razzenfrazzenfrazzarazza.
Go here for a laugh that’s directly related to my slowly disintegrating ambition.
This time it has something to do with Obama. Hard to believe them turning on him like that. Apparently someone took a photograph of bookshelves in the White House and it’s revealed a grand Communist conspiracy. I KNEW IT! I also heard somewhere that he was black. Pass it on. Vive la revolucion! Oh, wait. Can we use that?
The conservative blogosphere is having a collective climax today because a blogger from sayanything.com snapped a photo of some old reference books about socialism in the White House Library — which the tour guide said was stocked by Michelle Obama. Surely this means that every time President Obama is in the midst of important policy deliberations, he goes into the library, dusts off The American Socialist Movement, 1897-1912, and uses it to help him figure out what the most socialist policy would be.
John Crace is celebrating 10 years of his funny Digested Reads over at the Guardian. Coincidentally, I’m celebrating 10 years of being married to the deadly assassin Lady Ninja. It’s a good day.
Over the last 10 years, the Digested Read has changed locations several times – from the Editor to the main paper to G2 – but the format has remained the same; rewriting a book in 700 words in the style of the author. The primary goal is to entertain – something the book itself has often failed to do – but it’s also intended as a (semi-) serious critique, for much of the fun is derived from clunky plot devices that don’t work, pretentious stylistic tics, risible dialogue and an absence of big ideas. Literary criticism does not have to be dull to be serious.
Some people object to its cruelty. I have no defence. Satire often is cruel, especially when it’s accurate. Here’s the thing. I read every word of every book I digest, scribbling notes on the pages as I go along. I can’t afford not to because if I get something wrong, I’m stuffed. So you could argue that I show rather more respect for the integrity of an author’s work than a reviewer who gives a book the thumbs up after a skim read. And that does happen. I’ve read reviews of books I’ve digested and can see the critic has only read the blurb, the first few chapters and the ending. But who cares so long as it’s a positive review? Certainly not the author or the publisher. You might, though, if you fork out £10 to buy it.
Slate’s Chris Wilson noticed a trend, and so looked up the back catalogue of poetry in the venerable NYer. His findings will shock and frighten you. Or maybe not. But I’m shocked and frightened by most things these days. AHHH! A pen! Coffee cup! Glenn Beck!
About a year ago, a friend and I noticed a theme running through many New Yorker poems: With astounding frequency, they were about writing poetry. We would read them aloud up until some explicit mention of writing, words, grammar, typewriters, or anything else in the poet’s arsenal. It felt like we got to the end of maybe half of them.
Take, for example, the poem “Only So Much” by Rachel Hadas in the Jan. 4, 2010, issue. “I bend to the open notebook,” Hadas begins. (Here we would normally stop reading, according the game’s rules.) Later the narrator gets distracted by some ants, “I shut the notebook and open it from the back, to write.”
“Only So Much” got me wondering whether there was a more scientific way to gauge The New Yorker’s fondness for meta-poetry. I downloaded every poem on The New Yorker’s Web site—which came out to 316 specimens dating back to January 2008—and conducted a simple computerized search for the words poetry, poem, writing, reading, words, lines, or verse. I granted clemency in cases where words or lines were clearly used in a non-poetry-writing context.
By this measure, 84 poems—27 percent of the whole lot—mentioned poetry, including 32 that used the P word explicitly and 15 that mentioned writing in the title.
(You know, there’s a school of thought that has all poems being about poetry… BWAhaha! I can’t say that with a straight face.)
- Iranian dissidents take to pens and panels to make their points
- Just because you wrote a story that was adapted to screen and is now up for six Oscars doesn’t mean you’ll get a ticket to the event, you filthy piece of original content producing shit
- Oddest book title prize prizes oddest titles…of books!
- Best translations prize ‘Ninja I can get behind
- Astrid Lindgren Memorial Awards has 168 candidates on its… long? list … not sure if a shorter list is coming, but the award is announced in March
- Casanova’s memoirs, pubic lice given to French library
- Random starts new UK book festival
- Journo reads 75 vampire novels in nine months, staves off suicide long enough to write about experience
Whoa whoa whoa. Back up there, Tex. If you toss one friggin dime towards one of these ridiculous projects before you drop something in my tip jar, I swear to god I will funnel myself through the ethernet jack on my computer and use your mouse cord to strangle you at your desk. Now that we’re clear: what’s your honest opinion? Would you help out a begging author who’s down on her luck with nothing in return? (In Bugs Bunny voice: NOW HIT DA ROAD!)
Zandt has a publisher for this book, Berret Koehler, but they do not provide authors with advances to write their books. For some (unexplained, especially as the book is due to be published in June 2010) reason the book is “incredibly fast-tracked” and so she needed “to stop working as a consultant for the next three months and do nothing but write the book. Thus, I need investors. I need you to help me raise $15,000 to cover my expenses, travel, and research. Please toss some money into a ‘Feed Deanna’ pot!”
Surprisingly, perhaps, Zandt had reasonable success with her call out for “investors” (although there is no payoff for donors other than a copy of the book for those who donate more than $100. And a nice warm feeling inside, of course). She raised more than $6,500, somebody covered her rent, and a pizza company provided free snacks.
I’m not sure Zandt helps her case by writing in the “about me” section on her blog that “alas, I was not meant for the world of ‘getting up’ at the ’same time’ every day”. Zandt, that’s how most writers get their work done early in their careers – by fitting it before or after or somehow around a day job.
Zandt, however, argues that “I disagree that sacrifice is the only way to produce good work, and I feel like this is a perverse theme in western culture that hurts artists and creative folk more than it helps them. Suffering does not, contrary to popular belief, produce sustainable, good creativity. Joy does.”
The iPad (will this release a larger-screen edition called the MaxiPad?) seemed like a saviour from the Amazon-kills-publishing price of $9.99, with projected pricing of ebooks at between $12.99 and $14.99, but it appears this was only, you know, unless Apple wants to do something else. Like cut prices to corner the market. Hm. Man, this must be the first time we’ve ever learned the lesson that big media corporations are never our saviours, but always their own. Otherwise, we’d surely not be in this situation again, would we? ‘Cause we’d have learned. You’d think.
When Steven P. Jobs showed off the iPad last month, he announced agreements with five of the six largest publishers to offer their content through a new iBooks application. Those publishers — the Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan, the Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster — agreed to terms under which they would set e-book prices and Apple would serve as an agent to sell the books to consumers. Apple would take 30 percent of each sale, leaving 70 percent for publishers to split with authors.
Publishers indicated that e-book editions of most newly released adult general fiction and nonfiction would sell in a range from $12.99 to $14.99, under a complicated formula that pegs e-book prices to the list prices of comparable print editions. Publishers liked Apple’s deal because it resulted in a marked increase above Amazon’s $9.99 price for most new releases.
But according to at least three people with knowledge of the discussions, who spoke anonymously because of the confidentiality of the talks, Apple inserted provisions requiring publishers to discount e-book prices on best sellers — so that $12.99-to-$14.99 range was merely a ceiling; prices for some titles could be lower, even as low as Amazon’s $9.99.
Given that Beck’s so cartoonishly the antithesis of everything I believe, I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch for me to subscribe to a I’ll-buy/adopt-anything-Glenn-Beck-Hates philosophy.
Published by Semiotext(e), a small California press, best known for works of French cultural theory by Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault, the book has spent much of the week on Amazon’s top 10 bestsellers list, alongside better known titles like Game Change and The Help.
True, when Semiotext(e) launched its Intervention series last August with an English translation of The Coming Insurrection, it hit #24 at Amazon. After that it settled back to more typical numbers for a book with a 3,000-copy first printing, distributed by an academic press (MIT). Plus it’s available for free online in both English and French.
But even before the official pub date, The Coming Insurrection benefited from an “endorsement” from Glenn Beck. As part of a seven-minute rant on Fox News in July, he said, “I am not calling for a ban on this book. It’s important that you read this book.” Since then, each time Beck has talked about the book, sales have spiked, according to MIT Press associate publicist Diane Denner. It’s latest jump came after Beck devoted an entire segment to The Coming Insurrection, which he called “quite possibly the most evil thing I’ve ever read.”The book’s initial U.S. launch was equally, well, anarchistic. It began with an unscheduled reading on a summer evening at the Union Square Barnes & Noble in New York City. The reader refused to leave until the police arrived. Then the reading regrouped at a nearby cosmetics store.
As a result of the publicity generated by the reading, which was written up in the New York Times, as well as reviews and Beck attacks, The Coming Insurrection is now in its sixth printing. “We’re having trouble keeping stock in the warehouse,” says MIT Press assistant director Rebecca Schrader. “And we’re dealing with reprint quantities that we don’t see every day.”
- Google ruling hangs over industry like home invader with wrench demanding combo to safe
- Faber to open writing school in Toronto
- Faber to re-release novel smuggled from Nazi’s in cake
- Regional shortlists for Commonwealth Prizes release
- Boston about to chop libraries
- Yet another nobody with a book no one read takes a poke at JK Rowling’s billions
- Karachi authors festival would like to introduce the scattered pieces formerly known as Famous Author X…
- Steve Jobs will push aside cooperate and write himself a with biographer on book about his life
- Did commercialism kill Huck Finn?
Switzerland is looking at going back to controlling book prices. Should we? (Buchreport link for those Swiss-German speakers among you)
According to buchreport, the law could be adopted as early as March 19th and the Schweizer Buchhändler- und Verlegerverband (SBVV – Swiss Booksellers and Publishers Association) sees only a couple of drawbacks in the draft currently under consideration. For one thing, the National Council of Switzerland has spoken out in favor of the SBVV-supported plan allowing for book price increases of up to 20% over the price of a given book in its country of origin, but debates have arisen about who should have authority over price adjustments.
I guess a sufficient amount time has passed since the royal fubar of aught nine and now it’s time to elect a new poet to try to fill not only the size-xl shoes of both those gone before, but also the ridiculously large clown shoes of last year’s fiasco. Names popping up in the orgy of wild speculation include Andrew Motion and Geoffrey Hill. I don’t know how he’d be as an “ambassador” for poetry, given his notoriously prickly personality, but you couldn’t find a better poet than Hill—in part because there is no better poet in English… I’d be first in line to get his lectures book, too, when it came out. I can’t think of anyone I’d like to hear from more.
The university opened nominations today to find a new candidate for the 300-year-old position, seen as the most prestigious in poetry behind that of the poet laureate. Aspiring professors of poetry must be nominated by at least 12 Oxford graduates by 5 May. If there is more than one contender, then graduates will be able to vote for their favourite.
Former poet laureate Andrew Motion, whose name was put forward as a possible candidate, ruled himself out of the running, as did poet, critic and author Blake Morrison. “Geoffrey Hill would get my vote, if he can be persuaded to run,” said Motion. Morrison agreed. “I’ve not written enough poetry in recent years to remotely consider it [but] Geoffrey Hill, Andrew Motion and Lachlan MacKinnon are all possible – and all would be good,” he said.
The Paris Review needs a new Plimpton editor. Who’s in contention? Everybody. But Vanity Fair wonders about lame duck Harper’s editor Roger Hodge, and The Millions proposes Dave Eggers.
Finding the next Plimpton, however, is more than a matter of editorial acumen. The Plimptonian editor must be out in the world. She cuts a figure. She makes fireworks, and shoots them off, too. Tina Brown, now of The Daily Beast, and Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter have certainly learned a thing or two from Plimpton, but the only editor currently working in the world of little magazines who fulfills the polymathic model is Dave Eggers. And so, as absurd as it may sound prima facie, I’d like to propose that Eggers is the best candidate for editorship of The Paris Review. And, somewhat counterintuitively, that hiring him for the job might be as good for Eggers as for the magazine.
You got any bright ideas?
American libraries are seeing both funding cuts and rising attendance. Sounds like Canada. You people are sick socialist fucks, you know? What’s next? Death tribunals for your elderly? You can bet on it. If you’ll excuse me, I have to go to a hearing on whether or not we should pull the plug on Stuart McLean. (Unexpected introduction of compelling evidence aside, I’m voting yes.)
Preliminary figures from a new American Library Association survey of how libraries fared in 2009 show that nearly 75 percent of them were handed significant government budget cuts, forcing libraries to reduce services. Pennsylvania registered a 27 percent reduction in state library aid.
Only three states — New Mexico, North Dakota and Texas — increased funding.
At the same time, demand for services was growing, fueled in part by rising unemployment. The jobless were flocking to their public libraries to use their Internet services to look for work.
The Carnegie reported a steady increase in visits and circulation between 2004 and 2008 despite Pittsburgh’s ongoing drop in population.
The ALA study said that 76 percent of respondents reported increases in usage at computer work stations last year, while only 3 percent said usage was down.
Thesis: Biopics of authors are mostly concerned with mythologizing sex-mad, drunken escapades instead of actual life as a writer. Conclusion: Biopics of authors are mostly concerned with mythologizing sex-mad, drunken escapades instead of actual life as a writer.
When a film’s subject is a real writer, the truth must be bent into a cinematic structure; romantic intrigues are recreated or expanded into life-changing events. Becoming Jane, the recent Jane Austen biopic, was called a “speculative” biopic – a euphemism for “OK, we made it up”. The drama focuses on Austen’s romance with Irishman Thomas Lefroy. In reality, the relationship only lasted a few weeks, and from Austen’s letters you could argue it was only a flirtation. It’s certainly hard to believe that it inspired her novels about the conflicts between class and love. Austen’s books make great films, but her real life was no movie. She didn’t get out much; she sat in a country house and wrote.
Nineteenth-century male writers had more freedom and, as a consequence of the self-imposed tedium their writing demanded, they tended to go mad every few months. Flaubert lived with his mother in provincial France, a life of sedate, disciplined, rustic penmanship. Occasionally he’d go to Paris and explode with the lustful decadence of a heavy metal rock star on tour.
The lives of popular writers such as Dan Brown and JK Rowling would make better movies.
I can just see it now: David Caruso in a tan jacket and black turtleneck and Sandra Bullock with a dye job and too much foundation and mascara on. Yeah, sounds great.
When I was a kid, it was mostly analog. In fact, it was hand written. In fact, it was spoken. In fact, we just used to just bang rocks together to get the news. Rocks were a luxury, actually. In fact, we used to smash our foreheads together in an effort to pass the news between people more directly. In some cases we scalped and ate the brains of those who knew more than us. Because that’s how it was. But here you are today in your fancy homes on your fancy computers having the news poured into your mouths like honey straight from the comb. Slack arses.
- White House adopts the ebook … probably not surprising to anyone already following Obama’s Twitter feed…
- iPad’s ibooks get iPadlocks
- Do ereaders cause iStrain? (Is there anything these days that DOESN’T cause eye strain?)
- Dear publishers and readers: resist ebooks at your own peril
- Iran blocks Goodreads site… next up: air
- iSeuss offers iNteractive eXperience
- Penguin catalogues go digital
- Gérard Depardieu dons beige-face to play Dumas, much to French consternation
Apparently when it’s “mixing” and matching. Like when I mixed and matched that story about the boy wizard who screwed Mary Magdelene and then went for a walk down a post-apocalyptic trail pushing a shopping cart with his dad? Yeah, like that.
For the obviously gifted Ms. Hegemann, who already had a play (written and staged) and a movie (written, directed and released in theaters) to her credit, it was an early ascension to the ranks of artistic stardom. That is, until a blogger last week uncovered material in the novel taken from the less-well-known novel “Strobo,” by an author writing under the nom de plume Airen. In one case, an entire page was lifted with few changes.
As other unattributed sources came to light, outsize praise quickly turned to a torrent of outrage, reminiscent of the uproar in 2006 over a Harvard sophomore, Kaavya Viswanathan, who was caught plagiarizing numerous passages in her much praised debut novel. But Ms. Hegemann’s story took a very different turn.
On Thursday, Ms. Hegemann’s book was announced as one of the finalists for the $20,000 prize of the Leipzig Book Fair in the fiction category. And a member of the jury said Thursday that the panel had been aware of the plagiarism charges before they made their final selection.
Ms. Hegemann finds herself in the middle of a collision — if not road kill exactly — between the staid, literary establishment in a country that venerates writers from Goethe to Mann to Grass, and the Berlin youth culture of D.J.’s and artists that sample freely and thereby breathe creativity into old forms. Or as one character, Edmond, puts it in the book, “Berlin is here to mix everything with everything.”
Awesome initiative Project Bookmark joins with Open Book Tronna and Humber College to launch Ontario: Read It Here, a series of sites featuring the work of Ontario writers in the setting they were writing about.
“This initiative will mark the places where Ontario’s real and imagined landscapes meet,” says Miranda Hill, Founder and Executive Director of Project Bookmark Canada. “Reading about a place gives you an added appreciation for it.”
“Ontario: Read It Here will entice readers to visit Ontario destinations and create new readers for Ontario literature as people encounter some of the many stories and poems that are set in this province,” Hill says.
The Ontario: Read It Here installations will follow the Project Bookmark Canada design of black text on a white ceramic background, under the Bookmark logo of a large, green “B” in the shape of a typewriter key. The plaques will be roughly the size of the average poster and will hold up to 500 words from the featured story or poem.
As you know, Terry Pratchett’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and has now become an advocate of assisted suicide. He’s profiled around all this at the SMH. Sorry to be a downer, but like the piece on loneliness below, the issue is only going to become more prevalent as the baby boomers reach the upper ordinals and start losing partners and/or facing grim futures. And with full grasp of the irony of what I’m about to say, I say you’ve got to be glad people as intelligent, eloquent, and classy as Pratchett and White are giving it all some thought before you have to.
”I have no desire to pop my clogs in the next few years,” he says from his home.
”But I don’t particularly want to spend a lot of time in bed being fed through a tube. That’s what my father said, too. He didn’t want to die that way but then he had to.”
Pratchett presented his argument for assisted suicide last week, while delivering a lecture for the BBC, saying: ”I would like to die peacefully before the disease takes me over.
”If I knew that I could die at any time I wanted then suddenly every day would be as precious as a million pounds. If I knew that I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice.”
They were dignified, considered words. Even so, Pratchett expected all hell to break loose. To his surprise, it didn’t. ”Some archbishops have said nasty things but I look on that as a plus,” he says, lucidly and softly.
”Apart from that, not a single person has thumbed their nose at me. People are saying, ‘How can we join in?
Newfoundland author White writes in the National Post about her new book, Lonely. A timely work on how to cope with life alone, and undoubtedly an article held to the Valentine’s Day weekend for a reason.
I don’t actually talk that much about my life before loneliness hit in the book, because it’s not what the book is about: No one really cares about what I was doing when I was 27, right? But I had a very big social circle. It was quite gregarious. I kept very busy. I maintained a large social circle, which I think is easier to do in your twenties than it is when you get older and people start having kids and jobs and you’ve got responsibilities of your own. And when those things started to fall away, I just couldn’t keep it at bay anymore.
What loneliness does is, instead of clinging to relationships and trying to nurture them, you can end up retreating. And that’s what happened to me. That’s what makes loneliness such a problem: It can alter the way you look at the world in a really fundamental way, and make the social world harder to navigate.
There’s this taboo: We’re not supposed to talk about it. I think one of the things that not talking about loneliness does is it allows the ideal — the sort of thing you see on Friends or The L Word — to remain unchallenged. And I think we have to start challenging it.
If you’re 25 and you’ve just broken up with your girlfriend, it’s socially acceptable to say, “I feel lonely tonight.” If you’re 30, and you’ve been struggling with loneliness for six years, it’s not socially acceptable to say that. So we tend to think that long-term loneliness doesn’t exist. But it does exist, and people aren’t talking about it.
Robert McCrum says that while it seems like all the e-challenges have changed the game, they’re really just part of a bigger battle being fought across the ages… Undoubtedly by those little people from Time Bandits. If you forced me to guess. Or Jean Claude Van Damme. He’s always involved with some sort of time travel. Or is that heroin? I can never remember. No, no. Auto-erotic asphyxiation. That’s it.
It’s tempting – Google certainly encourages this – to see the age of MicrAmazoogle as revolutionary, a thrilling new era in which the civilised world can airbrush the imperfections of the past and march into a new dawn. Thus Google recapitulates the American dream, and that was the tone of a Google vice-president writing last week in the Guardian. “If you love books and care about the knowledge they contain,” trumpeted David Drummond, “there is a problem that needs to be solved… Imagine if it were possible to bring these [out of print, copyright] books back to life… Imagine if that information could be made available to everyone, everywhere, at the click of a mouse.”
Leaving aside the inconvenient facts ignored by this argument, the big picture is sorrier, murkier and more time-hallowed than you might imagine. From print culture’s beginnings to the rise of the internet, there has been a succession of intellectual property wars for which the English language has just one word: piracy.
The Yanks are celebrating Presidents Day today, which if I remember correctly is the day all the living ex-Presidents have to “run the gauntlet”—which essentially means they line up in one of the White House corridors and crawl through the legs of the current administration staffers and get paddled with rolled up copies of old budgets. They are a strange and exotic people, our neighbours to the south, but we love them despite their backward ways.
- RIP: Dick Francis, author, dead at 89
- According to BoingBoing, they used to advertise reading to soldiers in WWI… FAKE! The internet wasn’t inVENTed then, people… so how could they have downloaded books to their phones? Next!
- How the brain perceives quiet and subtle movements… Post-Olympic orgy of nationalistic shouting and gesticulating, I suppose this will have no more relevance for my beloved poetry…
- How to “write” a bodice ripper for Mills and Boon
- Simon & Schuster’s new site has some marketing tips for authors… nice public service to collect the info
Hunter S. Thompson’s call to an AV shop from which he’d just bought and had a home theatre installed. He’s not happy. Don’t turn the speakers up if you’re still at work or around kids: it’s Thompson, people.
And while we’re on the NBA and literary aspirations…. I love how it took a critical mass of foreign players to spur the first lockerroom book club… Look at the size of that paperback in his hands. I bet he could palm a hard cover.
Russian forward Andrei Kirilenko of the Utah Jazz and his Ukranian teammate, Kyrylo Fesenko, don’t always get along. In fact, they can often be heard screaming at each other in the locker room.
But the nature of these arguments isn’t what you’d expect from a pair of millionaire athletes: Their fights usually center around the boxloads of science-fiction books and classic Russian novels Mr. Kirilenko’s family ships to him from Moscow. “It’s always, ‘who’s got the new one?’ and ‘why did you start that one—I’m supposed to finish it,’ ” Mr. Kirilenko says.
As the NBA prepares for Sunday’s All-Star Game, international players are becoming an increasingly prominent force on the court. The number of players born outside the U.S. who have cracked the top 40 in scoring and minutes played this season is more than double the number a decade ago. This season, foreign-born players have nabbed five of the top 15 spots on the NBA’s highest-paid list.
As their numbers grow, these players are also bringing a different sensibility to the locker room. While many of their American-born counterparts fill their down time with laptops, phones, DVD players, videogame consoles and iPods, these NBA imports like to kick it old school. They don’t just read books, they often read the sorts of weighty tomes you may not associate with professional athletes.
Do school libraries need books anymore? Hm. Let me think. Wouldn’t that room be better served as a media centre or shopping district? Maybe we could have the kids participate in product testing or snack item focus groups there? Or maybe let’s make it a giant model of a big box store and do dual training for a range retail consumption and service roles, from bargain hunting to price tag stickering and mopping protein spills in the toy aisle? How about we make it a crematorium for everything I hold dear? How about that, huh? ARE YOU PEOPLE TRYING TO KILL ME?!?!
Keeping traditional school libraries up to date is costly, with the constant need to acquire new books and to find space to store them. Yet for all that trouble, students roam the stacks less and less because they find it so much more efficient to work online. One school, Cushing Academy, made news last fall when it announced that it would give away most of its 20,000 books and transform its library into a digital center.
Do schools need to maintain traditional libraries? What are the educational consequences of having students read less on the printed page and more on the Web?
Not a poet? Sound like Gilbert Godfried? Send your love (though I don’t know how you have one if either or both of the preceding are true) a real poem by a real author read by someone with a sexy voice… Like Alan Rickman or Judi Dench… Droooool … Now THIS is what makes the internet worthwhile.
Sample of list:
How do I love thee?
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning, read by Judi Dench
Sonnet 18
By William Shakespeare, read by Ian McKellen
She walks in beauty
By Lord Byron, read by Jude Law
Remember
By Christina Rossetti, read by Rosamund Pike
Upon Julia’s clothes
By Robert Herrick, read by Alan Rickman
Love not me for comely grace …
By John Wilby, read by James Earl Jones
Fuckin’ Vader reading a Wilby. Niiiiiiice. I hope he ends it with, “Who’s your daddy?”
- Random House has decided to go hand bully Amazon a tissue to wipe up its bloody nose
- Faulkner diary makes Faulkner scholars wet their Faulkner pants
- Salinger letters make Salinger scholars wet their god damn Salinger pants
- S&S launches site for booksellers, etc.
- Find Alice in the British Library (is it just me, or the BL rocking lately?)
- James Patterson UK’s most borrowed authors (see what I did there?)
Respected Irish writer Julian Gough claims on his blog that while Ireland may no longer be at the mercy of the clergy, it has replaced their rule with a hermetically sealed cadre of novelists who aren’t open to change.
I hardly read Irish writers any more, I’ve been disappointed so often. I mean, what the FECK are writers in their 20s and 30s doing, copying the very great John McGahern, his style, his subject matter, in the 21st century? To revive a useful old Celtic literary-critical expression: I puke my ring. And the older, more sophisticated Irish writers that want to be Nabokov give me the yellow squirts and a scaldy hole. If there is a movement in Ireland, it is backwards. Novel after novel set in the nineteen seventies, sixties, fifties. Reading award-winning Irish literary fiction, you wouldn’t know television had been invented. Indeed, they seem apologetic about acknowledging electricity (or “the new Mechanikal Galvinism” as they like to call it.)
I do read the odd new, young writer, and it’s usually intensely disappointing. Mostly it’s grittily realistic, slightly depressing descriptions of events that aren’t very interesting. Though, to be fair, sometimes it’s sub-Joycean, slightly depressing descriptions of events that aren’t very interesting. I don’t get the impression many Irish writers have played Grand Theft Auto, or bought an X-Box, or watched Youporn. (And if there is good stuff coming up, for God’s sake someone, contact me, pass it on.) Really, Irish literary writers have become a priestly caste, scribbling by candlelight, cut off from the electric current of the culture. We’ve abolished the Catholic clergy, and replaced them with novelists. They wear black, they preach, they are concerned for our souls. Feck off.
And Gough even claims he’s pulling his punches because he does in fact have great respect for some of those implicated in his rant. The Guardian picked it up and got commentary from other Irish novelists here.
New, young writers mostly produce “grittily realistic, slightly depressing descriptions of events that aren’t very interesting”, he wrote in what he described as an “intemperate rant”, posted on his website.
“Though, to be fair, sometimes it’s sub-Joycean, slightly depressing descriptions of events that aren’t very interesting,” he added. And it wasn’t only the new generation of Irish authors which came under attack from Gough. “The older, more sophisticated Irish writers that want to be Nabokov give me the yellow squirts and a scaldy hole,” he said. “If there is a movement in Ireland, it is backwards. Novel after novel set in the nineteen seventies, sixties, fifties. Reading award-winning Irish literary fiction, you wouldn’t know television had been invented. Indeed, they seem apologetic about acknowledging electricity … The only area where Irish writing is thriving in Ireland itself is on the internet, because it’s a direct connection, writer-to-reader. Blogs captured, and capture, Ireland in a way literature no longer does.”
Sebastian Barry, the Irish author who won the 2009 Costa book of the year award for his novel The Secret Scripture, said that Gough was both “completely right and completely wrong” about Irish writing – but added that he himself would have said the same thing “word for word” 30 years ago. “There is a feeling you want to clear out everything, and that’s what I’m getting from it,” he said of Gough’s opinion, describing the author as “a very wonderful writer”.
“The piece is more about his state of mind – he wants to start building afresh, which is what he’s doing,” said Barry. “If he’s in any way referring to me with his darker words, then so be it – next time I’m in Berlin, he and I will have to sit down and have an Irish whiskey and an arm wrestle.”
I can’t imagine why he paints with such a wide brush, other than the rage necessary to sustain this kind of rant, especially when I look at a guy like Roddy Doyle, who when he does write of the past does so with a distinctly contemporary eye. Don’t worry, Ireland. This happens in Canada about every other week. Tall poppies, and all. It’s good for clearing the artistic sinuses. And there’s definitely something to learn from it, especially for the younger targets. But it will sure make parties awkward for the next few months.
You ever try to tinker around in your source code and think, WTF is all this shit? It’s confusing and devilishly intricate? Sometimes when I’m trying to make something work, I go look at a site that has it right and learn from there. But apparently even some of those sites have the demonic code thing way worse than me. Turns out viral ASCII image ads for the Dante’s Inferno video game we linked to recently are popping up in the source code of prominent nerd and gamer sites. Talk about targeting your demographic. (Ganked from Darren Wershler’s news feed… In related news, Darren has just agreed to join Bookninja to do a regular column on video games and literature… Watch for it!)
The Dante’s Inferno promotional campaign has had its share of ups and downs (”acts of lust,” anyone?) but this latest effort is absolutely sublime: Someone – my money’s on Lucifer – has been making additions to the source code of some of the most popular sites on the internet, adding twisted ASCII art, passwords and a link: hellisnigh.com.
Ars Technica says the first image was discovered at Digg.com and was quickly acknowledged by publisher Chas Edwards. “Since Digg’s early days, ASCII art has been ingrained in our site’s culture,” he said. “We’re thrilled with the opportunity presented by our partnership with Electronic Arts and the Dante’s Inferno team – incorporating ASCII art into advertising on Digg, while providing the 40 million users in the Digg Community first access to the promotion code.”
Other sites that have discovered this mysterious infernal infestation include GameSpot, IGN, GamesRadar, Kotaku, Dailymotion and WWE.com. Are there more?
What happens when you’re a black bookstore and all the black people start moving out of the neighbourhood? Apparently more than half of the black population has left San Francisco (my favourite American city! No! Don’t go!) in the last few years, and coupled with the recession, this reduced customer base is making it impossible for one independent bookstore to stay open. Why couldn’t this happen instead to a redneck bookstore in Texas instead? Or a Republican bookstore in Florida? Or a Scientology bookstore in America?
San Francisco’s Marcus Books has long been a gathering place for African-American authors such as Maya Angelou. But last year, manager Blanche Richardson faced the realization that the 50-year-old bookstore might have to close, the victim of a mix of demographics and economics.
“To even have to contemplate closing this place, with all of its history, is painful to think about,” she says.
While many independent bookstores nationwide have shut over the years, Marcus Books’ travails are rooted in a double-whammy specific to the Bay Area: the recession coupled with a long-term exodus of African-Americans from San Francisco. In the past two years, says Ms. Richardson, both trends have caused Marcus Books’ sales to plunge nearly 40%. In contrast, Barnes & Noble Inc. reported a 4% year-over-year sales increase in its most recently reported quarter.
Ms. Richardson says if sales don’t pick up, the San Francisco store and its Oakland branch—which together showcase about 6,000 books, mostly by African-American authors—could shut by early fall. To preserve the location and avoid foreclosure she has petitioned San Francisco to designate the city’s store as a historic landmark; officials say they are considering the proposal.
Undeniably they do good work around the world but, here at home, are they bullies in the book world? Someone call Macmillan!!!
Author Susan Hill has launched a scathing attack on Oxfam Bookshops, which she has accused of “bullying” tactics and “aggressive expansion” with the chain “spreading faster than Tesco once did”.
The Bookseller reported yesterday that booksellers in South London were concerned over the arrival of another offshoot of the charity bookshop business.
Responding to the report on her Spectator blog today, Hill wrote: “These people are, unsurprisingly, concerned that small bookshops and antiquarian booksellers are being bullied by Oxfam Bookshops and their aggressive expansion. Because Oxfam Bookshops are big business. They are now reportedly the third biggest bookseller in the country, which is a surprise. I daresay their profits have paid for all those ads about global warming.”
- Will the increase in Kindle book prices stir up the wrath of the sleeping consumer giant? What’s that? Early adopters just do what they’re told…? Oh right. Idiots. Excuse me, I have to go check my Buzz feed…
- The LAT writes a funny opinion piece on the war of the price buttons from the authors’ POV
- The British Library’s ambitious program to lend ebooks might breathe some new life into old gems (now THAT’s a mixed metaphor)
- Ingram digithisandthat with the whosiewhatsit on the e-functionality paradigmigimmigem
- The Pac Man bookshelf… coming soon to a nerd’s home near you
Brad Cran, the poet laureate for the city of Vancouver, has declined an invite to appear at the Olympics (pdf) for a variety of reasons, but first and foremost among them is censorship. Second is because he rocks.
While the Cultural Olympiad is surely impressive: of the 193 events listed on the VANOC website only 6 of them are labelled literary events and only two of them actually are literary events that include local writers: The Vancouver International Writers Festival’s Spoken World and Candahar, a recreation of a Belfast pub that will host readings and performances as curated by Michael Turner, and may turn out to be one of the most inspired creations of the Olympiad.
There are Canadian writers involved in a few of the other 193 listed events but when it comes to the celebration stages our writers are not just neglected, they are totally ignored. As Poet Laureate I was offered time on one of the celebration stages where I would be allowed to read poems that corresponded to themes as provided to me by an Olympic bureaucrat. One of the themes was “equality” but since VANOC had blown the chance of making these Olympics the first gender inclusive Olympics in history by including a female ski jumping event I didn’t think they would appreciate a reading of the one Olympic poem I had written on equality: “In Praise of Female Athletes Who Were Told No: For the 14 female ski jumpers petitioning to be included in the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.”
In fact a reading of this poem would violate a clause in the contracts that Vancouver artists signed in order to participate in the Cultural Olympiad:
“The artist shall at all times refrain from making any negative or derogatory remarks respecting VANOC, the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Olympic movement generally, Bell and/or other sponsors associated with VANOC.”
I do find this to be an unjust attack on free speech but more importantly it shows that VANOC is misrepresenting Vancouver.
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