No, not what’s written by Mme Atwood on her Frankenhand Device, but rather neologisms jammed together from pieces of dismembered words like some creepy cybernetic geisha experiment in a Japanese gore flick. Except, you know, without stabbing someone’s eyes out with fried tempura. A small army of disgusted, likely virginal, linguists are in a constant state of lexicological apoplexy over this (lexoplexy?), but there’s no stopping the twin wheels of human inventiveness and laziness (invaziness?)

Will robots soon be researching and writing journalism? I thought they already were. Hi-YOOOOH!!!

Newly upgraded robot journalist, improvement from previous versions, including ambient anomaly detection ability for seeking of stories. Upgrade robot abilities including subject photographing and subject interviewing automatically. Further including abilities to publish stories to internet instantly.

(Note, the above was actually written by a robot.) I want to see one of these things interview Atwood through her Frankenhand device. At that point I will be able to say, Not only has the future arrived, it’s arrived just as I envisioned in 1978.

Seems like this cycle, everyone’s got an article on signing books. The bizarre Craigslist ad didn’t hurt the chances of every arts section hooking an article on it. So, is signing a pleasant task for authors or a chore? (There’s even a Frankenhand namecheck at the end.)

Umpteen authors can report the awfulness of the day nobody queued to buy their book, let alone have it signed. Abi Titmuss, the former nurse turned national sexpot, arrived for a signing in Manchester two weeks ago, to find a queue of three men in zip-fronted leisurewear waiting in WH Smith to inspect her memoirs. By contrast, the queues of people avid for signed copies of Katie Price’s new “novel,” Angel Uncovered, have broken records. Dozens of poets can recall poetry readings where no books arrived for sale, but where they were asked, as a kind of booby prize, to sign a member of the audience’s copy of Summoned by Bells.

Excessive success, however, can also be a burden. There’s a shocking story about Stephen King signing books in a Seattle shop. He signed for hours until his shoulder ached and a publicist had to apply an ice-pack. Then his fingers dried up; they cracked and began to bleed, and he asked for a bandage. Hearing this, a fan in the queue demanded to have some authentic Stephen King blood on his book. Others joined in and he signed in his own blood for hours. Chuck Palahniuk, the modern gross-out novelist, author of Fight Club, recalls a visit to a store in Austin, Texas, where the staff dished out free beer to the signing queue, and where an aggressive queuer, possibly not Chuck’s greatest fan, demanded of a quaking employee: “Why should I wait in this long line to get my books signed by that dickwad?”

Two articles betraying varying degrees of panic at the coming robot invasion: the dreaded book espresso machine and the cyborg socially networked robots our children are becoming. All we need is an article on the Frankenhand turning on its creators and running amok at BEA to round this out. The humanity! There are ink blots and signatures everywhere! And they’re Conrad Black’s!

Such is the kind of recklessly distracted impatience that makes Mark Bauerlein fear for his country. “As of 2008,” the 49-year-old professor of English at Emory University writes in “The Dumbest Generation,” “the intellectual future of the United States looks dim.”

The way Bauerlein sees it, something new and disastrous has happened to America’s youth with the arrival of the instant gratification go-go-go digital age. The result is, essentially, a collective loss of context and history, a neglect of “enduring ideas and conflicts.” Survey after painstakingly recounted survey reveals what most of us already suspect: that America’s youth know virtually nothing about history and politics. And no wonder. They have developed a “brazen disregard of books and reading.”

Things were not supposed to be this way. After all, “never have the opportunities for education, learning, political action, and cultural activity been greater,” writes Bauerlein, a former director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. But somehow, he contends, the much-ballyhooed advances of this brave new world have not only failed to materialize — they’ve actually made us dumber.

Um, “you”. You dumber. They’ve just made me less productive. (I’m a bit confused… I thought texting and web chatter were supposed be good for us now. Can’t these pundits get it straight and standardize their cranky opinions so I can get back to believing everything I read?)

• Britannica catches Wiki-fever, monocles worldwide simultaneously pop from eye sockets
• Austen-related crap continues to sell for ridiculous amounts
• Brazillian novel written by German
• Finally, the invention no one was waiting for: a digital pen (remember, Frankenhand isn’t a robotic pen so much as a robotic hand)
• Rowling’s Harvard speech, lauded by some, derided by others

After what was surely the first of forty days, I discovered my little yellow ark on Gower Street is leaking. By 11pm last night I was getting ready to start bailing. So while I deal with buckets and contractors today, I’ll leave you with a few links to tide you over.

• Some Commonwealth Prize shortlist coverage
• Top ten UK literary stars of 2008
• RIP: Mystery writer Phyllis A. Whitney, at 104
• New Borders has built in Frankenhand

Say it by writing it in your own blood. Or, more likely if history is any template, someone else’s. Seems like it must inevitably invite comparison to the Frankenhand, but mostly because I keep waiting for the Frankenhand to rise up and jab Conrad Black in the eye.

We’re fast approaching the day when this Ninja lord must return to the Shadow World of Wind and Ghosts from whence he came to recharge his chi — that well of soulful energy that leads to well-being, creativity, and grusomely shuriken-peppered enemies. I will consult with the other dark lords of awesome death and rampant silliness (Bookmuskateer, Bookblackknight, and Bookpirate) and imbibe the nectar of the Other Side, which will sustain me for the coming year of corporeal manifestation (but will first leave me dizzy and incapacitated on the couch of a stranger’s house on New Year’s Day). In the spirit of these end times that seem like death but are actually not and are only being trumped up to counteract the tinny Christmas musak on the speakers overhead, I give you several “end of the world” articles for your litschatological pleasure.

• A dismal year for books
• Twilight of the books
• England faces bloodiest arts cull in half century
• Near death experience still haunts author
• Leno heads back despite writers
• Google vs. Wikipedia
• Conrad Black loves the Frankenhand
• Googling oneself is growing in popularity (I’d like to see some stats on how much the average person finds…)
• Investigative reporting on the decline
• Former Defence Secretary to head Booker Prize jury…

Okay, a few of those aren’t quite end-of-the-world worthy, but you can see why I might have stuck them in there.

Author tours are in decline because of the ease and proliferation of internet video. Thus spake the Frankenhand.

The author tour, with its accompanying readings and signings, has come to be the quintessential tool for promoting books. It is a chance for writers to charm their readers and for readers to glimpse the person behind the words. At its best, the meeting can be electric. (At worst, nobody shows up.)

But in the past five years or so, observers say the traditional author tour has been in decline: Fewer writers are being sent out, and those who do tour make fewer stops. Among the many reasons for this shift are marketing tools that have made it possible to orchestrate a virtual encounter, without the hassle or expense of travel. Publishers and authors are now touting books through podcasts, film tours, blog tours, book videos, and book trailers. In fact, it’s unusual for a book not to have some sort of Web presence. (Blue van Meer, the fictional main character in the 2006 novel “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” by Marisha Pessl, even has her own MySpace page.)

Publicity departments used to be places where wacky ideas originated but languished, says Carol Schneider, executive director of publicity for Random House. Now, with the Internet, she says, “they are really able to carry [those ideas] out.”

Each is a small experiment, an incremental move, as the publishing industry has begun to embrace the Internet and other new media. It’s hard not to wonder, though, whether their cumulative effect will one day render the face-to-face bookstore meeting between writer and reader obsolete.

• Guardian world lit tour stops in China, a scene I know nothing about but keep promising myself I’ll research once they solve that pesky telomere end replication problem in my genes…
• Something about Shakespeare, who he was, blah blah blah — personally, I don’t care if he was a shaved marmoset with a pegleg, a nubbin, an outstanding balanace at the whorehouse and a collection jars housing young boys’ urine… Somebody wrote some damn fine plays and taught me a goodly bit about poetry. Nuff said. MEH!
• Tom Perrotta, profiled at the CBC
• Britney Spears mum to publish parenting book, tentatively titled: Hit Me Baby One More Time: A Cautionary Tale 
• NYC Japanese bookstore expands
• “Robot arm inscribes the Luther Bible around the clock“… when I saw this headline over at BoingBoing, I couldn’t help but think of Atwood’s Frankenhand, and then I got to thinking of title pages with God crossed out and an illegible signature underneath, maybe even with a personalized note above: “Dear Martin, Great to see you at the reading tonight, All props, love and random smiting, God”
• And also at BoingBoing is this bit on the Toronto Star running a paid anti-counterfitting advertisement section as news
• Wired for Books (an audio archive of interviews) (Thanks, Kevin’s dad)

Well, his image and his signature. Our beloved Margaret Atwood was on hand to personally download Conrad Black’s filthy little soul into the Frankenhand machine so he could once again sully Canadian shores with his oily presence. Hopefully once he was here in spirit, Atwood trapped his soul in a thumb drive, tied the lanyard to a big rock and headed for the Toronto Island ferry.

“We’re going shortly to connect to Florida where Conrad Black will be sitting in his study and that moment should be … now,” Atwood proclaimed, shortly after 7 p.m. The screen failed to respond. “This moment is not now,” Atwood said.

Suddenly Black appeared on the screen. “There we are,” Atwood said. “Hello, Conrad!”

“Hi, Margaret,” Black responded.

The spectators applauded, as the cameras swung around the room so Black could see his audience.

Somewhere in the background, a Ninja barfed slightly into the back of his mouth.

(For the record, I added that last line myself.) As Atwood has previously noted, I’m a convert on the machine. It’s oddly intimate and very accurate with the signature. But perhaps the most convincing data is the pollution savings. Now, now, I know, there’s probably a shitload of background evil in the electricity used and wires and signals strung and bouncing around the world, but you can’t deny the appeal of not dumping pounds and pounds of shit into the atmosphere to fly Conrad’s sorry ass up here for a love-fest he doesn’t deserve.

Note this piece is by Marchand but doesn’t seem to include any of his trademark analysis and commentary…. Was that an word count choice, Phil, a directive from above, or are you getting into reporting news?

Dear Ms. Atwood,

Long time listener, first time caller. But now that I know my posts on the LongPen reach your sharp ears, I need to ask you something: Please don’t let your device be used for evil. I know there’s this whole freemarket democracy thing, but I want to go on record as suggesting that you and your Device be exempt from it. First Conrad, next OJ. You shudder too, don’t you?

Thanks,
George

P.S. I once had a nightmare in which Offred was being chased by a pigoon.

Former media baron Conrad Black may not be able to travel, but he’s not going to miss a Toronto book signing for his Richard Nixon biography.

Black says he’ll be using Margaret Atwood’s invention, the LongPen, to sign autographs at a Toronto bookstore on Oct. 15.

Here’s a little fun bit: take a look at the URL for this article in your address bar… Someone in the web dept at the Ceeb was having a crack with Black’s name…

Okay, as I said, things are hectic. I’m going to have my handy dandy laptop with me, so I’ll be updating while away, assuming I’m not so hungover I can’t see the keyboard. Until then, life is crazy, so here you go:

• Book banning – it’s not just for the religious right anymore
• Are big publishing and creative writing programs hurting fiction in Canada?
• Susan Faludi – profiled at the NYT
• On reading – slow it down
• On the state of the short story, as told by a young unknown author name of “Stephen King”
• OJ book outsells Clinton – line up starts to my left for leprosy injections
• Margaret Atwood on the FrankenHand… you’ll note the Bookninja reference… I’m pickled tink
• Looking online for books
• Wikipedia’s growing pains
• Re-appreciating Redhill’s Booker-eliminated Consolation 
• Editorial on the importance of book reviews

The Frankenhand 2000 is featured heavily at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival with sold out shows of up to 700 people lining up to talk to and get books signed by a machine!! On the other end? Just some small fry writers like Alice Munro and Norman Mailer. It looks like the LongPen has finally come into its own. Ghosts in the machine!

Norman Mailer, pleading age, will be signing books in Edinburgh via Margaret Atwood’s ingenious Frankenhand Device (which I still partially believe will be revealed in the future as some sort of bizarre performance art piece by Peggy). Colloquially known as the “LongPen”, a rather unimaginative but servicable name, the Roboscrawl 2000 is capable of exactly duplicating every wobble and shake in an ageing signature, and with its video hookup, easily recreates the air of unfocussed indifference all-star authors can radiate during mile-long book signings. Whether or not exasperated sighs at literary speculators and shady antiquarians in line with multiple rare editions are audible has yet to be proven.

Mailer will use an internet-based technique devised by the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood for remotely signing books called LongPen.

Catherine Lockerbie, who unveiled this year’s festival programme yesterday, said Mailer had written to her saying he was “a member of the ‘Triple As’, age, asthma and arthritis.” His health was in “no way imperilled,” he continued, but “voyaging is hell”. So, reluctantly, he had to cancel his trip to the “great luminous grey city” Edinburgh.

Instead, the festival, which has attracted 650 authors and speakers this year, has decided to use his cancellation as an opportunity to showcase the LongPen system, organising a video-linked transatlantic interview with Mailer by the Glasgow-born writer Andrew O’Hagan.

Mailer will be at his home in Provincetown on the east coast near New York, while his audience will be in the tented city which is built in a Georgian square in Edinburgh’s New Town each year for the festival.

Atwood will also take part, interviewing her Canadian compatriot Alice Munro and also coordinating a trans-oceanic book signing using LongPen of the short-story writer’s works.

I still treasure my little Frankenhand signature that I sent to myself a couple years back. It’s alive! Aliiiiive!

Author films may one day replace live appearances. And so it begins. Eventually Peggy’s Frankenhand will gain sentience, run rampant over the planet stabbing author’s eyes out with a felt tip pen and then broadcast it’s cyborg visage on giant movie screens a la 1984. I just knew this was going to happen. I knew it.

The British author Ian McEwan is the star of the first film, which is planned to run 23 minutes and will feature snippets from an on-camera interview with Mr. McEwan, as well as commentary from peers, fans and critics.

Such films could eventually take the place of in-store book readings, which attract fewer attendees all the time, many booksellers say. “Some authors go to events and are really captivating personalities,” said Dave Weich, the marketing manager at Powell’s Books. “That does not describe most of them.”

For Mr. McEwan, the film will virtually replace his standard book tour, since he has declined to do traditional bookstore appearances to promote his new novel in the United States.

And here I’m stuck doing a lousy tour: partying with my friends and sleeping in. God, I can’t wait to upload it all to digital.

This Guardian blogger thinks hearing writers’ voices is invaluable, but wonders what the actual fascination with authors is.

Another thing I’ve been wondering about is just why, exactly, I find Vonnegut et al. such compelling listening. What is it about a flesh-and-blood author that’s so fascinating? Is it that, knowing (and loving) the works, we want to know the person behind them? Or is it less the writer per se than the writer as a biographical cipher – are we less interested in their lives for their own sake than for the literary “clues” that their various histories (and, in talks, off-the-cuff remarks) might impart?

For myself, I tend to plump for the latter. At least, I’d like to think that my curiosity is entirely academic – attributable to an interest to the books, and nothing to do with any Heat-reading, curtain-twitching propensities on my part.

If I’m honest, I’m not sure that this is entirely true, however. Yes, the fact that the younger Doctorow loved adventure stories fits in nicely with the older Doctorow’s plot-tight offerings of, say, Billy Bathgate and Waterworks. And yes, Vonnegut’s seemingly tangential waffling – and the way his careering ideas finally tie so beautifully together – mirror his prose style.

Ironically, she likes the Frankenhand’s Atwood best.

We were obliquely talking about the possibility of author-stalkers yesterday in our Alice Munro-meets-The-Frankenhand post, but this takes the cake. Maud points to a piece of an old documentary on Pynchon in which some bizarre little troll over-examines about 30 frames of grainy footage (that CNN caught when they ambushed the famous recluse in 97) for clues about Pynchon’s personality. It’s like watching an apartment-bound pervert describe how he spies on people in the next building with binoculars. Creepy. I feel like I need a shower. Oh, wait. I really just need a shower.

Alice Munro requests a shot at using the Roboscrawl2000, so she can sign books from her hometown of Clinton, ON. 

Munro will be present in all but body, as she video conferences with fans and spectators while autographing copies of The View from Castle Rock via the wizardry of the Long Pen. As is protocol with the device, fans can request customized signings, which Munro will scratch out onto a touch pad from afar. The personalized message will travel across the province as soon as she hits "send."

This might seem a curious experiment for Munro. While Atwood has often meditated on progress and cyberculture in her work, Munro's fiction has generally been more earthy and homegrown.

But University of Toronto professor Magdalene Redekop says that just because Munro tends not to write about cities, doesn't mean she is merely a nostalgic, rural writer.

"Even if other Canadian readers might not, Margaret Atwood would certainly understand that there are countless readers in urban centres all over the world who would pay to hear Munro read or to have her autograph their books," says Redekop.

What's most intriguing to me is the little gem at the end of this that doesn't really reveal anything, yet says so much. What do you mean by "quite aggressive"? Examples, please. Seriously, if anyone is getting in Alice's face, we need to know about it so we can form a paramilitary unit of Ninjas to perform security duties at her readings. 

As I mentioned on Sunday, I tried out the Frankenhand device at Word on the Street. It’s alive. Aliiiiiiive! Of course, I was only signing to the other side of the tent, but it was still nerfty. Here’s a Globe story on the device that somehow manages to leave out the grass roots WotS event at which the device was displayed.

Dudes! I was just at Word on the Street here in Toronto and I totally used the Frankenhand! I’ll try to get the image scanned in the next couple of days and get it up here. One of the demo people asked me if I wanted to try it and I said, “No thanks… I call it the Frankenhand and it kind of creeps me out.” He said, “That’s not original, I’ve heard that before.” I said, “Oh, where?” He said, “A website.” I said, “Bookninja?” He said, “Yeah.” So I told him I was Bookninja and he cajoled and I acquiesced and next thing I know I was writing away. Then he interviewed me for a documentary he was doing and I really couldn’t find anything bad to say. It’s quite an invention. I was surprised to find the user interface so simple. It’s like it’s fool proof….. (wait a minute!?!) More when I get back to St. John’s. I’m not really getting enough oxygen to blog properly in this urban pea soup air, so I’ll try to post tomorrow, but it might have to wait until Tuesday when I hope to get a scan of my Frankenhand signature up.

The Frankenhand is back, and this time it’s not taking any prisoners…if they remember to plug it in. Margaret Atwood and her crew of merry techniscienticians will take another stab at getting the Frankenhand up and running. Well, writing. I guess we’ll have to wait for the one designed with legs to allow runners to compete in marathons they can’t attend before we see one up and running.

For Sunday’s event at Queen’s Park Circle, Atwood has enlisted the participation of two other writers, London adventure novelist Kate Mosse and New York historian Thomas Cahill. Atwood herself will be appearing live from Edinburgh, reading from her latest, Moral Disorder, and signing copies via LongPen, starting at 1 p.m. Mosse will be using her LongPen in London to sign paperback copies of her bestseller Labyrinth, beginning at 11 a.m., while at 3 p.m., Cahill will do the same with his newest, Mysteries of the Middle Ages, from the offices of Random House in New York. It’s being billed as “the world’s first transatlantic signing” and “the first transborder signing.”

Transhuman?

Paul Coehlo, not much younger than our grand dame, has made the trek to Siberia, all in the name of selling books. Publicists world-wide bow to him.

Paulo Coelho, the best-selling Brazilian author, took book promotion to a new level yesterday when he completed a two-week, 5,770-mile train journey across Russia.

Senhor Coelho, 59, arrived in the far eastern port of Vladivostok on board a specially adapted train, complete with showers, personal chefs and a retinue of publishers and bodyguards. Huge crowds had turned out to see him on his stopovers in Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk, highlighting the growing appeal of popular Western literature in Russia.

I’ll tell you what: give me a personal chef and I’ll go anywhere in the world you tell me to. … … … What? Where? Um, technically, that’s not so much in the world as under it…

Margaret makes a personal appearance at Hay Festival, leaving the Frankenhand behind, presumably to clear up the dishes and write books while she’s gone.

Things have been quiet on the LongPen because tests have shown it doesn’t work on people.

And this is where Atwood’s creation failed.

It doesn’t work on body parts.

Maybe, eventually, it will sign all the flat pages you want. But it won’t sign a breast.

Atwood and her team realized this flaw too late, according to corporate sources.

The usual excited screams of autograph seekers became terrifyingly different sorts of screams when tests resulted in a series of extremely severe puncture wounds. Those people got off easy. One individual — it happened while the stylus was executing the author’s trademark flourish with the “w” in “Atwood” — saw his kidney bayonetted out. Another, even more dismayed, wound up, not to put too fine a point on it, singing soprano.

That sounds to me like it works on people just fine….

Geist’s cranky cricket, Stephen Henighan, with whom I more and more often find myself agreeing (making me a cranky cockroach, I think), takes on Margaret Atwood’s LongPen remote booksigning device, fondly known in these here parts as “The Frankenhand”.

Virtual culture exerts a wide appeal when it brings us into contact with those who are far away. Westerners who read the blogs of young people living under the mullahs of Iran, or young Iranians tapping into Western newspapers, feel that they have broken through the boundaries that confine them. They have expanded their humanity by connecting with those whose views are normally mediated for them by authority. Atwood, it seems to me, has forgotten that literature is already a mediated form: the words written in the author’s room of her own are refined, rewritten, edited, printed, bound, packaged, fitted with an alluring cover. The reader who is intrigued by the author’s books attends a reading or signing in order to glimpse who the author is behind the screen erected by the publishing process. Watching the author’s hand moving across the page, we are privileged, for a second, to see the writer writing. We witness the act that created the book that enthralled us. It is this promise of authenticity, however fleeting, that brings crowds to readings and signings: the brief return to the oral roots of storytelling, followed by the tantalizing mirage of witnessing the instant of literary creation and carrying away a sample of “original” writing.

See, I don’t usually start out agreeing with Henighan, nor do I agree with everything he’s on about, but he’s a smart one and wily too, dagnabit. But I still think one day we’ll see a happy bunch of Inuit getting books signed by their favourite Australian authors. (From Quill)

I mean, until it becomes old news. Like, tomorrow. But seriously, despite everyone moaning about the death of the book tour (and would that really be a bad thing?), I can’t wait to see people shut their yaps when a bunch of Inuit kids get their books signed by their favourite author. Assuming it’s a non-Inuit author, of course. That’s how Margaret should be marketing this thing. Don’t sign across the convention hall, or even across the pond, for a bunch of people who could have lined up for you anyway. Sign books for a remote, yet presumably hyper-literate, village in Peru. Show how it will be of USE to people wanting contact with authors, not how it will be of use to authors wanting to avoid contact with people.

End?! It’s only just begun!!! Bwahahahaha! Atwood’s Frankenhand2000 creeps a finger’s-breadth closer to reality.  (Thanks, J)