Elora Writers' Festival

"existential depreciation"

2012-02-26T08:39:00.000-08:00

"We get a lot of new novels at my office. I often pick up a couple and thumb through them just to keep up with what is on offer in the literary bourse. The delicate feeling of nausea that ensues as my eye wanders over these bijoux is as difficult to describe as it is predictable. The amazing thing is that it takes only a sentence or two before the feeling burgeons in the pit of the stomach and the upper lip grows moist with sweat.
   [...] It’s not just contemporary fiction that is suffering from this form of existential depreciation: The same thing, I believe, is happening, perhaps to a lesser extent, with the fiction of the past. The novel plays a different and a diminished role in our cultural life as compared with even the quite recent past.
   Matthew Arnold once described literature as 'a criticism of life.' He looked to literature, to culture generally, to provide the civilizing and spiritually invigorating function that religion had provided for earlier ages. And to a large extent, culture proved itself up to the task. Horace once said that the aim of poetry was to delight and instruct. For much of its history, literature has been content to stress the element of delight: to provide what Henry James, in an essay on the future of the novel, described as 'the great anodyne.' If a tale could beguile an idle hour, that was enough. [...]
   My point here is to suggest that changes in our culture have precipitated changes in the novel or, more to the point, changes in the reception and spiritual significance of the novel. It was before my time, but not I think much before my time, that a cultivated person would await the publication of an important new novel with an anticipation whose motivation was as much existential as diversionary. This, I believe, is mostly not the case now, and the reasons have only partly to do with the character and quality of the novels on offer. At least as important is the character and quality of our culture."
— Roger Kimball, The Weekly Standard
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"fractured into hundreds of pieces"

2012-02-25T12:48:00.001-08:00

"[...] Not that [Steve] Erickson has ever written for the faint of heart. Extolled by Pynchon, likened to Nabokov, DeLillo and Ballard, he has been deemed a surrealist, a visionary, a genius. His fictions play out among the shifting landscapes of sci-fi, fantasy, postmodernism and avant-pop. Occasionally, These Dreams of You reads less like a book than a prose contraption engineered to pry us loose from our bearings.
It opens, however, with something like narrative realism. I say 'something like' because the first three words, 'But years later,' hint that time will not be conforming to linear models. Still, we begin grounded in time and place: the night of Nov. 4, 2008, and the living room of a house on the edge of Los Angeles, where the Nordhoc family is watching the presidential election results on television. The four Nordhocs, who provide the messy, vibrant heart of the novel, make up a representative tableau for the new millennium: the American family as mash-up. [...]
But perhaps plot and even sentence structure are of secondary importance in a work where 'the arc of the imagination is forever "bending back to history,"' an idea that is thought by multiple characters in this book of multiple frames. Actions echo across time, continents and realities: historical, fictive and dreamed. Zan lectures on 'the narrative as sustained hallucination.' In the end, Erickson’s seemingly fractured novel turns out to be something else — the novel as fractal, a series of endless, astounding tessellations."
— Leah Hager Cohen, The New York Times
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Get all of Steve Erickson's books here...

A Rose By Any Other Name

2012-02-24T09:07:00.001-08:00

"Patricia O’Brien had five novels to her name when her agent, Esther Newberg, set out last year to shop her sixth one, a work of historical fiction called The Dressmaker.
   A cascade of painful rejections began. Ms. O’Brien’s longtime editor at Simon & Schuster passed on it, saying that her previous novel, Harriet and Isabella, hadn’t sold well enough.
   One by one, 12 more publishing houses saw the novel. They all said no.
   Just when Ms. O’Brien began to fear that The Dressmaker would be relegated to a bottom desk drawer like so many rejected novels, Ms. Newberg came up with a different proposal: Try to sell it under a pen name.
   Written by Kate Alcott, the pseudonym Ms. O’Brien dreamed up, it sold in three days."
— Julie Bosman, The New York Times
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Buy all the books by Patrica O'Brien/Kate Alcott here...

paper/back/lash

2012-02-23T07:45:00.003-08:00

"Amazon.com removed more than 4,000 e-books from its site this week after it tried and failed to get them more cheaply, a muscle-flexing move that is likely to have significant repercussions for the digital book market.
   Amazon is under pressure from Wall Street to improve its anemic margins. At the same time, it is committed to selling e-books as cheaply as possible as a way to preserve the dominance of its Kindle devices.
When the Kindle contract for one of the country’s largest book distributors, the Independent Publishers Group, came up for renewal, Amazon saw a chance to gain some ground at I.P.G.’s expense.
   'They decided they wanted me to change my terms,' said Mark Suchomel, president of the Chicago-based I.P.G. 'It wasn’t reasonable. There’s only so far we can go.' [...]
   I.P.G. told its publishers to immediately begin stressing that their books were available in other electronic formats, including from the Amazon rivals Barnes & Noble and Apple. It also told them to contact their local independent bookstores and point out that they could now sell something that Amazon would not."
— David Streitfeld, The New York Times/Bits
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Buy all the books Amazon doesn't have here...

"[...] staircase of wounds"

2012-02-23T07:26:00.000-08:00

"We know from Emily Dickinson that true poetry is painful. A real poem made her 'feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,' which by all evidence she took to be a good thing: 'I know that is poetry.' If it is, then so much the better for Harm, Hillary Gravendyk’s first book of poems, whose descriptions will disfigure sensitive readers much more than commonplace poetic lobotomy. Her book is full of pain: a 'skein of plastic braided into the mouth,' 'organs flat as mirrors,' a 'throat closed by what opens inside it,' '[t]he kind of hunger that swallows you,' '[b]reath, threading its tiny needles,' and a 'bright needle, punched through the neck.'
While at times she can be lightheartedly funny — 'I was promised only good things,' Gravendyk writes in 'Appetite' in the voice of Appetite itself, petulant and credulous like a child — mostly she is out to evoke serious pain. Gravendyk’s work isn’t dramatic, but it evokes drama; she doesn’t despair, but she offers few of the usual hopes."
— Adam Plunkett, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Buy this book here...

At Last, The First...

2012-02-22T07:00:00.000-08:00

From: Wikipedia

"Poisoning, hypnotists, kidnappers and a series of crimes 'In their nature and execution too horrible to contemplate': The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Felix [Charles Warren Adams], believed to be the first detective novel ever published, is back in print for the first time in a century-and-a-half.
   Although Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, published in 1868, and Emile Gaboriau's first Monsieur Lecoq novel L'Affaire Lerouge, released in 1866, have both been proposed as the first fictional outings for detectives, the British Library believes The Notting Hill Mystery 'can truly claim to be the first modern detective novel.'
   Serialised between 1862 and 1863 in the magazine Once a Week, the novel was published in its entirety in 1863 but has been out of print since the turn of the century. It stars the insurance investigator Ralph Henderson, as he works to bring the sinister Baron 'R___' to justice for murdering his wife to obtain a large life insurance payout. [...]
   The British Library's new edition has been produced using photographs of the original 1863 edition, which featured illustrations by George du Maurier, grandfather of Daphne."
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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"Who wrote the first detective novel? That question was answered recently in the New York Times Book Review. He was Charles Warren Adams (1833-1903), according to Paul Collins in his article 'Before Hercule or Sherlock, There Was Ralph' (Sunday, 7 January 2011). Adams’s novel was The Notting Hill Mystery, first published in eight parts in the journal Once a Week: An Illustrated Miscellany of Literature, Art, Science & Popular Information between November 29, 1862 and January 17, 1863."
— Rare Book Collections @ Princeton
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Young As You Read

2012-02-16T10:28:00.000-08:00

Every Girl's Story Book (The Avenue Press, circa 1938)

"With The Hunger Games movie coming out in March, the frenzy for young adult (YA) fiction has reached an all-time high. With series like Harry Potter and Twilight, young adult fiction has gained so much attention that those outside of the typical 'young adult' age group have taken notice.
For those of you who still haven't read young adult books, I have a few suggestions below to help ease you into this ever-growing genre."
— Lisa Parkin, Huffington Post
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The illustration from Every Girl's Story Book is by G.W. Goss.

A Journey

2012-02-14T07:20:00.000-08:00

Photo: Michael Hale (Nile by Faluka, 2011)

Getting started is the hardest part.
So you’re all set to turn up the creative heat and get going on that story or poem for the 2012 Elora Writers' Festival Writing Competition. Laptop turned on or pencils sharpened. Theme of “A Journey” firmly fixed in your head. Ready to roll, and then….

Thump. Where to begin?
If you’re one of those writers who has trouble getting started, consider doing some warm-up exercises first. Musicians do scales. Athletes do stretches. Writers need to prepare their writing muscles for action too.

Here are some suggestions.
Short Story: Write about a “Pet Tale” or a “Good Day” or “My Evil Boss” using words of four letters or fewer. Writing is all about word choice, and this exercise tests that ability, but you’ll be amazed at what a great story you can write even with these restrictions.
Person, Place, Thing: Under these headings, list six entries (eg. Person might include doctor, princess, Prime Minister, Jane Austen, me, teacher). When your lists are complete, roll a die to select a number from each category. You now have a person, in a place, with a thing. Get writing!
For additional writing prompts, check out these suggestions created for The Writer magazine by one of our contest judges, Heather Wright (her site has a wealth of information too...) go here...

The EWF Writing Competition:
Enter your short story (1500 words maximum) or poem (75 lines maximum) in the 2012 Elora Writers’ Festival Writing Competition by Friday, April 27. You can find entry details on the contest flyer here... and a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) here...

"[...] they never saw me writing."

2012-02-10T03:41:00.000-08:00

"Colm Tóibín’s new book is called New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and their Families (Penguin) but the key is in the subtitle. This collection of essays is by no means restricted to mothers. It is the entire family that needs to be destroyed, it seems, if an artist is to realise his vision. [...]
Tóibín quotes the Northern Irish novelist Brian Moore saying, 'I began to think of myself as someone who was concealing something.' In a way it becomes a guilty secret: this world you escape into, taking no one with you, not revealing it to anyone, partly out of fear their reaction might wreck it and partly because writing is like a photographer’s work in the darkroom. Expose the negative to light too soon and it will be ruined. Also, it is the world outside the darkroom that is your subject—yes, even your family, friends, home and shared experiences. I realise now what the looks from my family expressed: what is she going to make of it, of us, of what is ours? It was true: their lives provided me with my material, their experiences that nourished my work. Without them, what would I have—myself, alone, and emptiness?
What was lacking was any acknowledgement that I was a writer, any admission that it was a worthwhile pursuit. At the most I might encounter someone who had heard that I wrote and said to me 'What a nice hobby.' That was all it appeared to be—not a profession. I realised it would not be regarded as such until it was seen to earn something, which gave it its worth. And to begin with, my books had none."
— Anita Desai, Prospect
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Plots of Land

2012-02-09T12:10:00.002-08:00

From: The Awl

"The map of the Hundred Acre Wood appears in the first Winnie-the-Pooh book entitled, wait for it, Winnie-the-Pooh. Created by E.H. Shepard (who also illustrated The Wind in The Willows), the map is meant to appear drawn by Christopher Robin, with 'Drawn by me and Mr Shepard helpd' written at the bottom and the cardinal directions on the compass marked as P-O-O-H. The storybook woods are based on the actual Five Hundred Acre Wood in Ashdown Forest, near Milne’s country home in Sussex."
—Victoria Johnson, The Awl
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From: fanpop

"Tolkien prepared several maps of Middle-earth and of the regions of Middle-earth where his stories took place. Some were published in his lifetime, though some of the earliest maps were not published until after his death. The main maps were those published in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and Unfinished Tales. Most of the events of the First Age took place in the subcontinent Beleriand, which was later engulfed by the ocean at the end of the First Age; the Blue Mountains at the right edge of the map of Beleriand are the same Blue Mountains that appear on the extreme left of the map of Middle-earth in the Second and Third Ages. Tolkien's map of Middle-earth, however, shows only a small part of the world; most of the lands of Rhûn and Harad are not shown on the map, and there are also other continents.
— Wikipedia
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“The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” — Mary Heaton Vorse

2012-02-07T10:01:00.000-08:00

From: Emilialua

If you’re a writer – or you want to be – then the time has come to adopt 20th century American writer Mary Heaton Vorse’s credo as your own because, yes, it’s writing contest season.
Start thinking about this year’s contest theme: "A Journey." Let your imagination wander. Feel the creative energy start to flow. Then apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair, and write!
Enter your short story (1500 words maximum) or poem (75 lines maximum) in the 2012 Elora Writers’ Festival Writing Competition by Friday, April 27.

You can find entry details on the contest flyer here...
and a list of Frequently Asked Questions here...

Go to a related article here...

Questions? Contact Contest Chair, Jean Mills, at jrmills@rogers.com

Happy Birthday, Charles John Huffam Dickens...

2012-02-07T07:55:00.000-08:00

From: Mr. Rennaissance

The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall will be lead celebrations to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens.
   Events to be held across the country include a wreath-laying ceremony at Dickens's grave in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey and at the novelist's birthplace in Portsmouth, Hampshire.
   The congregation at Westminster Abbey will include the largest ever gathering of descendants of the Victorian novelist as well as representatives from the worlds of literature, film, theatre and the media. [...]
   Simon Callow, author of Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, will read from David Copperfield at a service being held at St Mary's Church, Portsmouth.
He said: "It's going to be a dangerously moving occasion. I really made the strong decision to come to the place where he was born rather than to Westminster Cathedral where he never wanted to be."
—Martin Chilton, The Telegraph
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"A couple of years ago, I played Charles Dickens in an episode of the British sci-fi series Doctor Who. As the doctor takes his leave of Earth, Dickens asks whether his books will still be read in the future. 'Yes,' the doctor replies. 'For how long?' Dickens wants to know. 'Forever,' says the doctor, disappearing into cyberspace. [...]

"Surprisingly, considering that Dickens is that unusual thing, a writer whose life was as riveting as his work, there has been no film biography. If there were one, a large part of it would surely center on his early years, and especially on one year of shame, humiliation and degradation, the memory of which was so painful to him that he hid it from view completely, allowing it to be revealed only after his death.
   Victorian England was profoundly shocked to discover that Dickens’s compassion for the poor and the disadvantaged sprang, not simply from Christian kindness, but from the bitter personal experience of toiling 10 hours a day, for 6 shillings a week, in a rat-infested shoe polish warehouse off the Strand from the ages of 12 to 13.
   It is of course this experience that placed children at the center of so much of his work, and inevitably and rightly it looms very large in the excellent crop of books for young people being released on the crest of the Dickens publishing tsunami which next year’s bicentenary has provoked."
— Simon Callow, The New York Times (December 16, 2011)
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Easy On the Adverbs; Hard On the Bad Guys

2012-02-06T08:36:00.000-08:00

"In an essay that appeared in The New York Times in 2001, 'Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle,' Elmore Leonard listed his 10 rules of writing. The final one — No. 11, actually — the 'most important rule . . . that sums up the 10,' is 'If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.'
It’s a terrific rule. In fact, I liked it so much that I passed it on to a creative-writing class I once taught. However, there’s more to it, which I didn’t pass on: 'Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.'
Jazzy prose that occasionally lets go of 'proper usage' is Leonard’s trademark. He’s a stylist of forward motion, placing narrative acceleration above inconveniences like pronouns and helping verbs. While this creates in most readers a heightened sense of excitement, newcomers may find the transition from complete sentences daunting; it may take a little time to accept Leonard’s prose before you allow it to do its work on you. I’ll admit to having to make such an adjustment when beginning Raylan. At the same time, I’m also a novelist who lives in fear of my copy editor; being such a coward, I can’t help respecting Leonard’s grammatical bravery."
— Olen Steinhauer, The New York Times
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Buy all of Elmore Leonard's books here...

Paper Backlash

2012-02-04T11:34:00.000-08:00

From Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English
Language (1755) Internet Archive

"Canada’s Indigo Books and Music has joined forces with U.S. bookstore chain Barnes & Noble in refusing to stock or sell any books published by online rival Amazon.com – including upcoming titles by James Franco, Deepak Chopra and Ian McEwan – with both chains now accusing the online giant of using predatory tactics that weaken an already struggling book industry. [...]
The three-chain defensive front is the first setback Amazon has experienced since it began its aggressive and highly publicized move into the business of producing as well as selling books last year. Among the other authors whose upcoming work will become inaccessible to the majority of North American book buyers as a result of the ban are actor/director Penny Marshall, self-help writer Timothy Ferris and politician Ron Paul."
— John Barber, The Globe and Mail
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"Kindle is an ingeniously sly name, because it’s designed to connote a variety of 'warm' feelings, including 'kin' (for cozy associations; Kindle’s one of the family—that cyborg cousin from your father’s side); 'kindred' (think of Anne Shirley and Diana Barry, kindred spirits!); 'kindling' (ahh—a natural reference: kindling wood to start a fire, and wood also makes paper); and 'kindle' itself (to illuminate [knowledge?]; to light)."
— Miss Cavendish
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"[...] the erosion of contemplation [...]"

2012-02-03T09:39:00.000-08:00

From: The Art of Science Fiction, Random House 1975)

"If you watch a person using the net, you see a kind of immersion: Often they are very oblivious to what is going on around them. But it is a very different kind of attentiveness than reading a book. In the case of a book, the technology of the printed page focuses our attention and encourages a linear type of thinking. In contrast, the internet seizes our attention only to scatter it. We are immersed because there’s a constant barrage of stimuli coming at us and we seem to be very much seduced by that kind of constantly changing patterns of visual and auditorial stimuli. When we become immersed in our gadgets, we are immersed in a series of distractions rather than a sustained, focused type of thinking. [...]

Scientists have documented how when we get a new piece of information, our brain releases a small bit of dopamine, conditioning us to repeat the action. [...]

It is important to realize that it is no longer just hyperlinks: You have to think of all aspects of using the internet. There are messages coming at us through email, instant messenger, SMS, tweets etc. We are distracted by everything on the page, the various windows, the many applications running. You have to see the entire picture of how we are being stimulated. If you compare that to the placidity of a printed page, it doesn’t take long to notice that the experience of taking information from a printed page is not only different but almost the opposite from taking in information from a network-connected screen. With a page, you are shielded from distraction. We underestimate how the page encourages focussed thinking – which I don’t think is normal for human beings – whereas the screen indulges our desire to be constantly distracted."
— Lars Mensel in conversation with Nicholas Carr, The European
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Be Here Now

2012-02-02T07:58:00.000-08:00

"'I found the material of the actual 21st century richer, stranger, more multiplex, than any imaginary 21st century could ever have been,' [William Gibson] writes. 'And it could be unpacked with the toolkit of science fiction. I don’t really see how it can be unpacked otherwise, as so much of it is so utterly akin to science fiction, complete with a workaday level of cognitive dissonance we now take utterly for granted.'
Gibson gets plenty of opportunities to use that same toolkit throughout Distrust That Particular Flavor, a smattering of articles for magazines such as Wired, Rolling Stone and Time, as well as introductions for other people’s books and more texts for talks. With the oldest selections here dating to the late 1980s, the book also charts a part of Gibson’s career that he has been somewhat reluctant to acknowledge, having been 'uncharacteristically strict' with himself about deviating from his mission as a writer of fiction. As Gibson explains in the introduction, these assignments represented a form of transgression, of 'doing something I secretly felt I probably shouldn’t quite be doing.'"
— Jason Anderson, The Globe and Mail
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Get this book and all of William Gibson's novels here...

Exotic Spices

2012-01-31T11:51:00.000-08:00

From: ABEbooks

"The great film director's [Erich von Stroheim] first book [1935], a novel about Hungarian Gypsy life, written when he was down on his luck, wearing out his welcome in Hollywood after several costly masterpieces which were nevertheless commercial flops.
This copy wonderfully Inscribed to fellow author Jim Tully, utilizing the entire front fly: 'Worldly goods which you possess — own you and destroy you! Love must be like the blowing wind — fresh and invigorating. Capture the mind within walls and it becomes stale. Open tents — open hearts. Let the wind blow! (Thus runs a Gypsy song.) To Jim Tully, From one bum to another! With affectionate regard, Erich von Stroheim. Please read it! Please like it! Please talk about it! Please write about it! And — please — ask your friends to buy it! (That mortgage comes due soon).'
Though they apparently never worked on a film together, Tully and von Stroheim clearly traveled in the same circles in Hollywood [...]"
— ABEbooks

Here's an edition (1952) of Paprika from Harlequin—back before the Winnipeg publisher hit pay dirt with its tried-and-true Romance formula.

For sample pages of the book, go here...

Paper Rocks

2012-01-30T12:17:00.000-08:00

"Last week Maurice Sendak visited The Colbert Report for a very entertaining two-part interview. After commenting on the complexity of children, the 'hopelessly vile' politician Newt Gingrich, and the abysmal current state of children’s literature, Sendak weighed in on e-books: 'Fuck them, is what I say,' griped Sendak. 'I hate those e-books. They cannot be the future. They may well be. I will be dead, I won’t give a shit.'
While the future is arguably already upon us when it comes to e-books, Sendak isn’t the only lauded author to speak out against the technology recently.
At the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts in Cartagena, Colombia, Jonathan Franzen spoke of his dislike of e-books as well. 'The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it’s pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model,' said Franzen."
—Carmel Lobello, Death+Taxes
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"Maurice Sendak looks like one of his own creations: beady eyes, pointy eyebrows, the odd monsterish tuft of hair and a reputation for fierceness that makes you tip-toe up the path of his beautiful house in Connecticut like a child in a fairytale. Sendak has lived here for 40 years – until recently with his partner Eugene, who died in 2007; and now alone with his dog, Herman (after Melville), a large alsatian who barges to the door to greet us. 'He's German,' says Sendak, getting up from the table where he is doing a jigsaw puzzle of a monster from his most famous book, Where the Wild Things Are. Sotto voce, he adds: 'He doesn't know I'm Jewish.'
At 83, Sendak is still enraged by almost everything that crosses his landscape. In the first 10 minutes of our meeting, he gets through: Ebooks: 'I hate them. It's like making believe there's another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of book! A book is a book is a book.'"
— Emma Brockes, The Guardian
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"Is that a broomstick between your legs — or just a flamingo?"

2012-01-26T08:33:00.000-08:00

"Alice trying to play croquet with a flamingo" from Lewis Carroll's
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) original illustration:
John Tenniel (from: Wikimedia Commons)

"Huddled together in the chill January wind, the players listened as a PPE fresher in a black cape read the rules of the game: a Quaffle through a hoop would score 10 points, capturing the Snitch would yield a bountiful 30, and under no circumstances was there to be any 'grabbing of broomsticks.' With that, they were off: two teams, with seven players each, racing round a playing field and trying to shoot a basketball through hula-hoops. [...]
Known as Muggle Quidditch to those for whom JK Rowling's lexicon is as familiar as any entry in the dictionary, the game was adapted for non-wizards around seven years ago in the US, where it has since caught on and become a familiar pastime for students at some of the country's best-known institutions, including Yale, Harvard and Tufts (Wipfler's college). Instead of flying, players run with broomsticks between their legs, and instead of a golden ball with wings attached, the Snitch is a person dressed in yellow. Although tackling is frequent and being hit by a volleyball, or 'bludger,' is likely, the 'spirit of Quidditch' is encouraged. As one player for the University college team put it: 'If you're massive and there's a little person, don't run into them.'
— Lizzie Davies, The Guardian
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For a list of games found in works of fiction, go here...

Buy books by Lewis Carroll and
J. K. Rowling here...

Virtual Shoplifting

2012-01-25T11:15:00.000-08:00

“'It’s never been easier to distribute creative work. At the same time, it’s never been harder to get paid for it,' according to former Billboard editor and New York Times writer Robert Levine. [...]
For those who think the Internet should remain a sprawling bazaar of free samples, a utopian clearing house for consumers who don’t pay, Levine has a harsh, well-researched wake-up call: 'It’s time to ask whether any significant professional media business can thrive in an environment where information can be taken so easily. When nearly a quarter of global Internet traffic consists of pirated content.'
In 2003, for example, NBC delivered an $800-million (U.S.) profit to its owner, General Electric. Just seven years later, the network was looking to lose more than $100-million. At the same time, Levine says, while viewers were busy downloading Saturday Night Live from the Internet, Google was poised to buy YouTube for $1.65-billion."
— Paula Todd, The Globe and Mail
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Buy this book here...
And see a related article here...

At Bloggerheads

2012-01-16T07:28:00.000-08:00

"A literary punch-up that had been brewing for a while finally erupted between a bunch of readers, authors and agents on Goodreads – the vast online site where millions of members discuss the world's books. In the same week that award-winning children's writer Anthony McGowan caused a stir with his 'scorching' Guardian review of Blood Red Road by Costa winner Moira Young, the Goodreads flame war flared across Twitter, sparked by writers and agents who seemed to be stamping on negative reviews.
It all started with a 'snarky' (or 'honest,' depending on who's side you're on) review of a much-hyped YA novel, Tempest by Julie Cross, just published in the UK by Macmillan Children's Books. A sarcastic response and put-downs of reader views on the Goodreads site by Cross's author friends, and comments by her agent, caused outrage. While Cross responded gracefully, other YA authors and agents took the fight to Twitter in a spectacularly misjudged bout of reader-bashing, 'sneering at the people who make their ****ing books reach the NYT bestseller list,' The Bookwurrm judged.
Things escalated further as authors and agents publicly discussed rigging the ratings on Goodreads and Amazon to push up the visibility of good reviews and 'hide' bad ones."
— Julie Bertagna, The Guardian
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Demanding Supply; Supplying Demand

2012-01-12T10:16:00.000-08:00

"In a typically razor-sharp exchange of dialogue which establishes – yet again – that The Simpsons provides the most coruscating illumination of contemporary mores, Lisa says to her grade school teacher that 'Good looks don't really matter,' to which Ms Hoover replies: 'Nonsense, that's just something ugly people tell their children.' Stripping away the layers of irony from this statement we can reveal the central premise of Catherine Hakim's book, which is that not only do looks matter, but that they should matter a great deal more. Furthermore, the people who tell young people – and in particular young women – that their beauty and sex appeal are of little importance are themselves ugly, if not physically then at least morally.
   For, as Hakim sees it, [in Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital] it is an 'unholy alliance' of wannabe patriarchs, religious fundamentalists and radical feminists who have – in Anglo-Saxon countries especially – acted to devalue what she terms 'erotic capital.' In Hakim's estimation, for all young women, and in particular those who are without other benefits – financial, intellectual, situational – an entirely legitimate form of self-advancement should consist in their getting the best out of – if you'll forgive the pun – their assets."
— Will Self, The Guardian
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"I THOUGHT THIS book would be a treat. I liked everything about it, in theory: its subject matter (erotic capital, such as charm, beauty, sexuality, charisma and social skills — what could be more fun?); its author, who has an interesting reputation as an academic willing to challenge orthodoxies about what is good for women (she is a senior research fellow of sociology at the London School of Economics); its promise of big ideas about how society works.
     Honey Money however, is an acute disappointment. It looks like a book. It has hard covers, 372 pages, chapter headings, dozens of sources and footnotes, a fat price ticket and a press release from its publishers. But looks are deceptive. There is no structured argument being worked through in its pages. Instead, bewildered readers find themselves presented with repetitious, rambling, contradictory, ill-argued assertions, without the faintest sense from the author that she has written these sentences before. It is as if Catherine Hakim wrote drafts of her chapters, hadn’t quite worked out the essence of her thoughts, and then gave up the struggle, leaving us to figure out what she means.
   I’ll spare you the details of the incoherence and the baffling asides — Hakim’s belief that discrimination against the overweight is justified by the human rights of everyone else; her admiration for Silvio Berlusconi’s smiles; her assertion that, on the whole, only young women like sex. Stripped down (where was her editor?), the selling point of her book is that erotic capital is as important to our success in life as our wealth, education or social networks.
   This insight is described by her publisher as ground-breaking. Well, not since I first heard the story of Cinderella has that been news to me, or I suspect to you. Hakim claims that it’s a revelation to sociology, where the theories about the power relations between men and women apparently pay no attention to the role of attraction and sexual desire."
—Jenni Russell, The Sunday Times (via The Hatchet Job of the Year)
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One Step, One Word at a Time...

2012-01-11T11:43:00.002-08:00

Photo: Tristan Mills (Tombstone Territorial Park, 2010)

Once more it's time to take advantage of the blank page we call the "New Year" and resolve to take all those scraps of thoughts and snippets of ideas that we know, deep in our souls, will one day turn into poems or short stories and commit them to paper.
   The 9th annual Elora Writers' Festival Writing Competition is up and running—so you now have a deadline to aim for: Friday, April 27, 2012. The theme of this year's competition is "A Journey."
   On your mark, get set, go...

   For more information, go here...
   And here...
   For tips on taking that first step go here...

   And if you have even more questions, contact our Competition Chair Jean Mills at jrmills@rogers.com

A New Eden

2012-01-11T09:44:00.000-08:00

"In 1919, Mabel Barltrop declared herself the child of [Joanna] Southcott’s prophecy, and convened a group of mostly unmarried white upper-middle-class British women to wait out the Second Coming with all the comforts of country life in Bedford. [...]
   More than a hundred years earlier, in the second decade of the 19th century, a domestic-servant-turned-prophet from Devon named Joanna Southcott declared herself the expectant mother of a new female messiah. As Southcott and her followers believed, this child (the half-sister of Jesus) would complete the unfinished project of redeeming mankind from original sin. Southcott died in 1814 without having given birth, but her writings and prophecies — some of which were sealed in a large wooden box, with instructions to be opened by 24 bishops of the Church of England in an unspecified time of 'grave national danger' — became the sacred texts of a small but determined 20th-century community that tended garden, as it were, religiously. [...]
   The transformation of Barltrop, the self-educated wife of a vicar and mother of four, into Octavia, daughter of God — the charismatic, exacting figure at the center of Jane Shaw’s group biography, Octavia, Daughter of God: The Story of a Female Messiah and Her Followers — is a remarkable one. Confined to a mental hospital for “nervousness” after the death of her husband, and suffering from what Shaw reads convincingly as a form of OCD, Barltrop found both consolation and community in Southcott’s writings. For Southcott had set forth a decidedly female-centered theology: woman, responsible for the world’s fall, would in turn be responsible for its restoration. Furthermore, the upheavals of the Great War — by any account a period of 'grave national danger' — made the time ripe for therapeutic revelation.
   The women who gathered around Octavia in Bedford in the early 1920s were not war widows (they were for the most part significantly older than the generation of women left husbandless by the war’s immense casualties). But they lived in a world of gender relations remade by women’s labor and ingenuity during the conflict. In becoming Octavia, as Shaw demonstrates, Barltrop brandished considerable charm and organizational savvy, situating herself as spiritual hub for a group of world-weary seekers."
— Lindsay Reckson, Los Angeles Review of Books
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"When [Mabel Barltrop] died, in 1934, there were 2,000 'sealed' (or signed-up) members of the society, many of whom lived in and around Albany Road, their homes backing on to a shared communal area, which they believed was the site of the original Garden of Eden. A further 75,000 followers worldwide were convinced that water and linen squares that Barltrop had breathed on, and which were then posted to them, contained miraculous healing powers.[...]
   Among those who endorsed her claim were many Southcottians and war widows, but there was also another constituency. For suffragettes, this female messiah had an obvious attraction as a way of discrediting what they perceived as the all-male ghetto of the church. Though there were small numbers of men in the society, its upper reaches – Barltrop anointed first her own 12 apostles, and then a 'Divine Mother' – were exclusively female. It was run by and for women – a rare and appealing thing, socially and spiritually, in the 1920s and 1930s"
—Peter Stanford, The Guardian
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"These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves." —Gilbert Highet

2012-01-10T10:57:00.000-08:00

"Ever wonder what happens to the books at the book store once all of the customers and workers are gone for the day? A friend posted this video on Facebook yesterday and it just blew me away. Sean Ohlenkamp (AKA crazedadman) and his wife plus a team of volunteers shelved and re-shelved hundreds of books night after night at Type book store in Toronto to make this whimsical stop motion piece."
— love and cupcakes
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The Ineffable Glenn Gould — Better than a Book

2012-01-10T09:48:00.000-08:00

From: Freshdl.me

In September of last year, on his 79th birthday, the CBC released a comprehensive DVD boxset: Glenn Gould on Television: The Complete CBC Broadcasts. It's not a book, but, with the transition to e-books and digital "volumes" of all kinds, this is just as good, or even better than a book. Needless to say, when it comes to an appreciation of what Glenn Gould was all about, mere words are not enough.

"A famous perfectionist, Glenn Gould would have been delighted with a new film series of his work [...]. Tim Page, a friend of Gould's in the last years of his life, contributed to the new collection [...].
   'He'd be delighted. Glenn was a very loyal Canadian and he loved his life in Canada,' Page, who wrote the liner notes for the DVD box set, told CBC News. 'I think he'd be thrilled that finally his film work will be presented in a way he wanted it to be, which hasn't been done before.'
   The 10-disc box Glenn Gould on Television: The Complete CBC Broadcasts will feature many of Gould's rare recordings, unreleased full-length programs and documentaries, interviews and nearly 30 years of archival footage."
— CBC News
Read more...
   Buy this collection, and books about Glenn Gould here...

   Budding Glenn Goulds and young Canadian classical musicians of all stripes can flex their chops here...

"The 2012 TD Canada Trust Festival Competition is open to musicians in the following categories: voice, piano, strings, woodwind and brass. Competitors must be born in, reside in, or study in Canada and be between the ages of 17 and 27 as of April 2, 2012.
The Grand Prize, $3,000.00; Second Prize, $2,000.00; Third Prize, $1,000.00; and the Kathleen Deters Audience Favourite award is $500.00. [...]

'Twenty-two years ago I saw an opportunity to give young artists a chance to perform at a first-class event and also offer financial support towards their artistic education. I have always felt that students need encouragement, especially students in the arts.
   Each year at the Elora Festival, with the generous support of TD Canada Trust, we proudly present the final-round concert. It is truly memorable and rewarding to see and hear these young competitors with various musical disciplines on the threshold of a professional career. The audience has its favorites and the judges have theirs. And this year’s competition will once again boast an internationally recognized jury panel.
   I invite all young artists to apply. You could very well be one of the finalists who launch their career in a dazzling performance on July 18, 2012 at the
Elora Festival!' — Noel Edison, Artistic Director of the Elora Festival"

A downloadable PDF of the Competition Brochure can be found here...

Incandescent

2012-01-09T10:09:00.000-08:00

"We live high up in the hills in the Scottish Borders, so when the lights flickered and then failed this week, we were well prepared. The wood burner was stuffed with logs, a pot of water was put to boil on top of it and I set off for a confab with the neighbours. As dusk fell, just after three, I lit the candles in the front room and settled back down to read. [...]
It struck me that this was how people had read for almost all of the time that people have been reading: in darkness, slowly, concentrating, and more sensitive to the subtle interplay between what was on the page and what appeared to be on the page. In a sense, this was reading normally; reading with ample, white light was the exception."
— BOOKSBLOG, The Guardian
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"A LUMEN is a unit of measurement of light. It measures light much the same way. Remember, a foot-candle is how bright the light is one foot away from the source. A lumen is a way of measuring how much light gets to what you want to light! A LUMEN is equal to one foot-candle falling on one square foot of area.
So, if we take your candle and ruler, lets place a book at the opposite end from the candle. We'd have a bit of a light up if we put the book right next to the candle, you know. If that book happens to be one foot by one foot, it's one square foot. OK, got the math done there. Now, all the light falling on that book, one foot away from your candle equals both…….1 foot candle AND one LUMEN!"
—TheLEDLight.com
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"I was so much older then/ I'm younger than that now" — Bob Dylan

2012-01-08T11:06:00.000-08:00

UNIVAC I (1951) from: Lazy Desis

"The editor of Punch [September, 1867] sniffed out a deeper deal in the typewriter than simple legibility:
   'Every author his own printer! What a happy state of things! No more struggles to write legibly with nibless tavern-pens: no more labour in deciphering the hieroglyphs of hasty writers. Literary work will be in future merely play—on the piano. The future Locke may write his essays by a touch upon the keys.'
   But the disappointments of the possible future wouldn't stop there, and would or could or should go screaming into the dark night, the invention marking time in the brain of the writer, making able for him or her to compose without thinking, pillows taking over for the mind:
   'In this inventive age there really is no saying where discovery will stop. Now that authors are to put their thoughts in print with twice the pace that they can write them, perhaps ere long they will be able to put their works in type without so much as taking the trouble to compose them. A thought-hatching easy chair may very likely be invented, by the help of which an author may sit down at his ease before his thought-printing piano, and play away ad libitum whatever may occur to him. Different cushions may be used for different kinds of composition, some stuffed with serious thoughts, fit for sermons or reviews, and others with light fancies, fit for works of fiction, poetry, or fun. By a judicious choice of cushions an author will be able to sit down to his piano, and play a novel in three volumes twice or thrice a week, besides knocking off a leader every morning for a newspaper, anil issuing every fortnight a bulky epic poem, or a whole encyclopaedia complete within a month.' "
— JF Ptak Science Books LLC
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Nobel Prize Winner, 1961 - Ivo Andrić

2012-01-06T08:27:00.000-08:00

"J. R. R. Tolkien may have won over millions of devoted fans across the globe with The Lord of the Rings, but to a small committee in Sweden known as the Nobel prize jury, his epic tale of Middle Earth just wasn't up to scratch.
Newly declassified documents showing the inner workings of the world's most prestigious literary prize have revealed that, 50 years ago, Tolkien was rejected because The Lord Of The Rings had 'not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality'.
Nominated by his friend C S Lewis - author of The Chronicles Of Narnia - in 1961, Tolkien was swiftly dismissed by the committee along with other lauded figures such as Graham Greene and EM Forster as they awarded that year's prize to Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andrić instead."
— Huffington Post
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"At the beginning of the book [The Bridge on the Drina] Andrić focuses on a small Serbian boy taken from his mother as part of the levy of Christian subjects of the Sultan (devshirme). Andrić describes how the mothers of these children follow their sons wailing, until they reach a river where the children are taken across by ferry and the mothers can no longer follow. That child becomes a Muslim and, taking a Turkish name (Mehmed, later Mehmed pasha Sokolović), is promoted quickly and around the age of 60 becomes Grand Vizier. Yet, that moment of separation still haunts him and he decides to order the building of a bridge at a point on the river where he was parted from his mother."
— Wikipedia
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Get books by all the authors mentioned in this article here...

Don't buy a ticket to the Elora Writers' Festival 2012; spend the money here.

2012-01-05T07:37:00.000-08:00

See earlier article here...

Read more about Worldreader here...

Charles Dickens Helps Himself

2012-01-04T11:29:00.000-08:00

Source images: RealBeauty and Netherlands Wikipedia

As February 7 fast approaches, Charles Dickens himself has been called in to lend a hand (or two) at copyediting his own work. The 30,000 digitized pages of his weekly magazine Household Words (later changed to All Year Round) need to be cleaned up in time for the bicentenary of his birth.

Go here to help with the project; or make a donation here...

Go to a related article here...

Recovered and Uncovered

2012-01-02T10:25:00.000-08:00

From: RareList Rare Books

"From the famous theft of Ernest Hemingway’s novels to the loss of William Faulkner’s novel four times, manuscripts have had a way of getting lost. It is no less than a eureka moment when they’re found many years later.
   This year has been quite eventful in terms of discovering lost literary treasures. Here’s a look at the famous manuscripts which were found in 2011."
— Hindustan Times
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"An unpublished and previously unknown Enid Blyton novel is believed to have turned up in an archive of the late children's author's work.
Mr Tumpy's Caravan is a 180-page fantasy story about a magical caravan.
It was in a collection of manuscripts that was auctioned by the family of Blyton's eldest daughter in September.
   'I think it's unique,' said Tony Summerfield, head of the Enid Blyton Society. 'I don't know of any full-length unpublished Blyton work.'
   The collection was bought by the Seven Stories children's book centre in Newcastle.
Blyton, who died in 1968, remains a children's favourite and a publishing phenomenon thanks to such characters as the Famous Five, the Secret Seven and Noddy.
An estimated 500 million copies of her books have been sold around the world, with updated and reprinted versions of her most popular stories still selling eight million copies a year."
— Ian Youngs, BBC
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"It's quite surreal," says Hannah Green, archivist at the Seven Stories centre for children's books in Newcastle and one of the few to have read the story in recent years. "It's about a caravan on legs which gets up and walks around," she continues.
   In the caravan with Mr Tumpy are his two friends, Muffin and Puffin, and a dog called Bun-Dorg.
"They live in this caravan and go off on adventures," she explains. "They don't really control it - it decides where it's going to go and when it's going to stay somewhere."
— Hannah Green, in an interview with Ian Youngs (BBC)
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"In 2008, Enid Blyton was voted the UK's best loved writer, beating JK Rowling, Austen and even Shakespeare. Yet, although characters like Noddy and the Famous Five still have devoted fans, Blyton has become a controversial figure, dogged by criticisms of her writing style and accusations of sexism and racism."
— BBC Archive
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Get all the books mentioned in these articles here...

Slow Food. For Thought

2012-01-01T13:10:00.000-08:00

"In her new book, “The Republic of Noise,” New York City public school educator and curriculum advisor Diana Senechal argues that one reason for this problem [academic failure] is the students’ loss of solitude: the ability to think and reflect independently on a given topic. Schools have become more concerned with the business of keeping students busy in what Senechal deems is a flawed attempt to ensure student engagement. But as a result, students are not given the time and space to devote themselves completely to the study and understanding of one specific thing. It’s a need she finds reflected in our culture as a whole: We are a nation glued to smartphones and computer screens, checking email and Twitter feeds in our need to stay in some loop by reading and responding to rolling updates. [...]
Solitude is not about being in a hut out in the woods or being out in the desert or living without other people around. I define solitude as a certain apartness that we always have, whether we’re among others or not. It is something that can be practiced — maybe to think just on one’s own, even when in a meeting or in a group and so forth — but that also has been nurtured by time alone. So there’s an ongoing solitude that’s always there, and there’s also a shaped or practiced solitude, which requires both time alone with things, to be thinking about things and working on things, and time among others when you nonetheless think independently. [...]
'What I see is people having great difficulty sitting with a book for a long time, or with a pad of paper,' [says Ms. Senechal]. 'They want to have the stimulus right nearby – they want access to their email, they want access to their text messages no matter what they’re doing. You see people walking down the street with their phones and just staring at their phones; and you see people holding their phones in all situations – at a concert or when having dinner with a friend – so they can check that they don’t miss anything. Yes, there is a loss of ability to just sit with something.'"
— Alice Karekezi, Salon
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"[...] he has been very naughty."

2011-12-31T06:38:00.000-08:00

From: The Daily Mirror (Katrina Zanhak holding Good Words for 1888)

"The National Trust is always turning up odd things in its many properties whose contents defy rapid archiving. Last time I was at Nunnington Hall – one of the pleasantest days out in Yorkshire – they had a display of family bits and bobs found under the floorboards of just one small room.
   They had slipped through cracks or possibly been stuffed there by children; small toys, buttons and the like. Nothing dramatic but a curious addition to the fascination of such ancient places.
   Now the staff at Townend House in Troutbeck have made a good discovery: a library book which is overdue for return by 123 years. A check on the fireside shelves in the lovely old Lake District farmhouse has turned up a copy of Good Words for 1888 which was borrowed in that same year. [...]
   'George Browne, who lived at the house with his wife and three daughters at the time, was an extremely keen reader. I would not expect them to forget to take something back but if it was him, he has been very naughty,' [says Katrina Zanhak, the trust's custodian at Townend]
   He might have been distracted by other naughty things, mind. Two years ago, the trust discovered a stash of saucy 'chapbook' pamphlets, gently erotic stories sold by travelling pedlars, tucked behind more respectable tomes on another shelf. Doggerel accounts of seductions, they included such lines (from one called The Crafty Chambermaid's Garland) as:

He stript of his clothes and leaped into bed
Saying: Now, lovely creature, for thy maidenhead. [...]

   [Katrina] Zanhak wonders if the overdue loan is the longest ever, but sadly this is not the case. In April 2010, the New York Society library did an audit of its records and found that a book on the Law of Nations and a volume of House of Commons debate had been taken out on 5 October 1789 and never returned.
   The borrower was George Washington who famously never told a lie but clearly had other faults. He theoretically owes the library, the oldest in New York, over $300,000 (£195,000) in fines. Worse, the books have disappeared."
— Guardian
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"Hal Lindsey has called this unique event 'The Great Snatch.'" (from: raptureready.com)

2011-12-30T10:04:00.000-08:00

"The two most moving scenes in Tom Perrotta's sixth novel, The Leftovers, come late in the book. In the first, Kevin Garvey — abandoned husband, distracted father, mayor of the affluent suburb of Mapleton — tells a woman he's been dating that he's just heard from his college-age son for the first time in months. 'Were you close?' she asks, herself a bit distracted. 'He was my little boy, I was always so proud of him,' Kevin answers and bursts into tears. A few pages later, Perrotta elaborates: 'It was the phrase little boy that had done it, the sudden memory of an easy weight on his shoulders, Tom perched up there like a king on a throne, gazing down upon the world, one delicate hand resting on top of his father's head, the heels of his Velcro-fastened sneakers knocking softly against Kevin's chest as they walked.'
   In the second, Kevin's companion, 'a pretty but fragile-looking woman named Nora Durst,' writes a letter detailing how her family (husband Doug, 6-year-old son Jeremy, 4-year-old daughter Erin) disappeared.
   What makes these moments resonate is the role of disappearance in The Leftovers, which unfolds in the wake of an event very much like the Christian belief in the Rapture and revolves around those left behind. That this Rapture — the simultaneous evaporation of millions of people — appears to have nothing to do with faith or goodness only adds another layer of uncertainty to the world Perrotta describes. 'As far as anyone could tell,' he writes, 'it was a random harvest, and the one thing the Rapture couldn't be was random. … An indiscriminate Rapture was no Rapture at all.'
   The idea of a Rapture that may not be the Rapture is vintage Perrotta; he's a satirist who likes to poke fun at the vagaries of contemporary life. His best-known efforts, Election and Little Children, take a jaundiced look at high school hierarchies and the quiet desperation of suburban parenthood, respectively, but if The Leftovers has an antecedent, it may be his 2007 novel The Abstinence Teacher, in which a high school sex-ed instructor comes up against evangelicals."
— David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
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For more information about the Rapture, go here...

You can purchase books by Tom Perrotta (and Hal Lindsey) here...

Tension and Compression

2011-12-29T10:10:00.000-08:00

"The short story is an amuse-bouche: luscious, glittering, to be consumed in a single bite. It should be artfully conceived, but not so dainty that you can’t sink your teeth into it. It should restrain itself to the confines of its setup rather than spilling out messily over the edge of the page. Most important, it should satisfy the reader’s immediate appetites while making him or her hope for more. What it is not, in other words, is a shrunken novel. The story seizes a moment of emotion and captures it under a bell jar. The novel takes the long view, working extended magic through patterning and repetition, more like a multi-course meal: formal or informal, paced leisurely or at a rapid clip, but always exhaustive.
Chefs, painters, and jewellers all attest to how hard it is to work in miniature. Yet the short story is often mistakenly thought of as a beginner’s form—a literary way-station en route to bigger endeavours. Get your first story collection out of the way quickly, one imagines creative writing students are told, so you can move on to the novel as soon as possible. From John Cheever and Philip Roth to Ian McEwan and Jhumpa Lahiri, writers typically use the short story to cut their teeth before trying their hand at longer fiction.
But not always. In November Don DeLillo, at the age of 74, published his firstever short story collection. Adam Ross has followed his well-regarded first novel, Mr. Peanut, with a book of short fiction rather than a second novel. And at least half the writers in 2011’s Best American Short Stories anthology—among them Joyce Carol Oates and Richard Powers—are better known for their novels, often significant ones. Many of the contributors’ notes mention that the stories were years or even decades in gestation. Rebecca Makkai writes that her story of an actor whose life is derailed by stage fright took five years to finish. Sam Lipsyte’s contribution took him 20."
— Ruth Franklin, Prospect Magazine
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A Thousand Pictures; Worth A Thousand Pages

2011-12-29T08:13:00.000-08:00

"In their magisterial new biography, Van Gogh: The Life, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith provide a guided tour through the personal world and the work of that Dutch painter, shining a bright light on the evolution of his art while articulating what is sure to be a controversial theory of his death at the age of 37."
— Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
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"Moody, bookish, given to sudden enthusiasms and bouts of self-delusion, [Vincent Van Gogh] made several false starts in young adult life. Initially he was set to take advantage of family connections, but a spell working for Uncle Cent, the leading art dealer, in The Hague, Paris and London, wasn't a success and Uncle Vice-Admiral Van Gogh hadn't anything to offer so unseaworthy a school leaver. Striking out as a teacher, he spent a couple of months in the Nicholas Nickleby role at a Dotheboys Hall-type school in Ramsgate ('a resort community on the English coast,' N&S tell us). Then, inspired by Pilgrim's Progress, he turned evangelical but lost the plot.
   From a family point of view Vincent was impossible, emulating the Prodigal Son one moment, or collecting birds' nests, or sloping off to dedicate himself to poverty and taking in a pregnant prostitute whom he threatened to marry. 'She knows how to quiet me,' he wrote, knowing full well that every extreme move he made provoked the family on whom he still depended to righteous despair. And then, daftest whim of all, there was the sudden fixation on drawing.
   He was in his late 20s when, with what he himself described as 'passion augmented by temperament,' he took to art and began making extravagant demands on his younger brother Theo, who (thanks to Uncle Cent) was by then an up-and-coming dealer. [...]
   In 1956, following the publicity around the release of [the movie] Lust for Life, an elderly businessman called Rene Secretan came forward with an account of summer holidays in Auvers when he was 16. In July 1890 he and his brother Gaston kept bumping into this weird Dutchman. Bearding the tramp was something to do instead of just idling or fishing or playing cowboys around the place. (Buffalo Bill's Wild West show had been a hit not long before in Paris.) They put salt in his coffee and chilli on his brushes to watch him splutter, and paraded girls from the Moulin Rouge to get him going.
   Secretan the juvenile sharpshooter in his buckskin tunic didn't actually confess to what would have been no doubt an accident, but he indicated that behind a farmyard dungheap in the Rue Boucher, a mile or so from the famous cornfields, a shot was fired and Van Gogh was hit: it was (apart from the grievous outcome) the sort of mishap that a generation or so later occurred on an average Just William afternoon. That the pistol, the painter's easel and his final canvases were never found suggests a cover-up. They were dumped maybe in the nearby river Oise. The Secretan brothers left the village that day."
— William Feaver, Guardian
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Buy this book here...

Alone Together

2011-12-29T05:30:00.000-08:00

"In prose at once evocative and restrained, the seven stories in Jess Row's debut collection, The Train to Lo Wu (2005), gave rich, full life to Hong Kong in the years just after the British handover to the Chinese. Having spent some time in Hong Kong myself, it was my belief that Row's quietly desperate characters—natives, mainland Chinese, ex-pat artists, and the global business class—were simply attuned to the loneliness of the fast-moving, atomized megalopolis. (The Mongkok district, for example, boasts the world's highest population density, but you can spend an entire day there without speaking a word, or even catching another person's eye.) Now I see that his inimitable solitude is not local, but universal. The stories in Row's new book, Nobody Ever Gets Lost, take us from Thailand to the Punjab to New York City (and elsewhere around the Northeast), but wherever they touch down we find the same thing: psychically wounded people stunned by a world at once too vast and too small. Feeling both isolated and trapped, they seize or manufacture opportunities to connect with family, friends, or even strangers. The trouble is, self-consciously questing for a [Raymond] Carverian small, good thing is the best guarantee against ever finding one. [...]
Nobody Ever Gets Lost is that rare work which can boast both focus and scope. It is a powerful book, raw and shrewd and brave. If the categorical assertion of the title is true, it must be because the world only ever moves in one direction: forward. Visions of purity—ethnic, religious, national, or other—are always reactionary and will always fail. Restoration of the past is impossible, and calling for it merely exposes the weak soul's fear of the future. This goes for well-to-do Korean ladies anxious about dating black guys no less than for Islamist fanatics trying to dismantle modernity or narcissistic art-brats who don't treat their girlfriends like they should."
— Justin Taylor, Book Forum
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Buy Jess Row's books here...

“So this is the little lady who started this great war?” — Abraham Lincoln, on meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe

2011-12-26T07:57:00.000-08:00

"[...] Originating as a serial, Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in book form in the spring of 1852. By mid-October, 120,000 copies had been sold; by the following spring, 310,000. In England it was even more successful, with sales of a million within a year. Michael Winship has called it 'the world’s first true blockbuster.' It may also have been the first bestseller to produce spin-offs-which came to be known as 'Tomitudes': engravings, games, puzzles, songs and sheet music, dramatizations—in Europe as well as the United States. The book was a phenomenon, in its popularity and its influence.
Yet by the early twentieth century it was out of print and would remain so for decades. 'Uncle Tom' became an epithet, representing not the admirable saintliness and sacrifice with which Stowe had sought to imbue her protagonist, but—in the eyes of African Americans such as W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin—an embarrassing embodiment of black obsequiousness and self-loathing. In the white segregated South, scorn for Stowe’s book claimed different origins: it was seen as part of a long tradition of Northern meddling in Southern racial arrangements. In South Carolina in 1900, a teacher might well make his students raise their right hands and swear never to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin—an unwitting nod to the book’s power as well as an affirmation of the white South’s racial solidarity. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was certainly never taught as literature in the North or the South, because it was seen by critics and scholars as sentimental and overwrought—less art than propaganda. Hawthorne dismissed Stowe as one of his era’s 'scribbling women.' [...]

For [David S.] Reynolds, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was 'central to redefining American democracy on a more egalitarian basis'; it made the Bible 'relevant to contemporary life,' and it 'replaced the venal religion of the churches with a new, abolitionist Christianity.' It also 'established a whole new school of popular antislavery literature,' and at the same time gave rise to the pro-slavery argument, which is customarily seen as emerging in force in the 1830s but in Reynolds’s portrayal does not substantially appear until prompted by Stowe’s novel more than twenty years later."
— Drew Gilpin Faust, The New Republic
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"This is dedicated to the one I love." — Lowman Pauling and Ralph Bass

2011-12-23T11:54:00.000-08:00

"CDs, DVDS, and e-reads are all well and good when it comes to gift-giving at Christmas, but as far as I'm concerned, for sheer emotional wallop, the old-fashioned physical book is hard to beat. After all, it's the ideal opportunity to foist a well-loved novel onto someone who is now morally obliged to read the thing (and, indeed, profess to like it). Furthermore, there is generous scope / enough rope to let a carefully-chosen book speak volumes about how you feel about the receiver. [...]"
— Wayne Gooderham, Guardian
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Dear Neil
“Lie on the couch with your hands behind your head & think of the closing chapters of your favourite work of fiction. The rest may be left to me.”
Leaving me to say -
enjoy every word & don’t shut your eyes & don’t think of England.
All my love,
Naomi xx

— BOOKDEDICATIONS

Copyrights and Wrongs

2011-12-21T12:21:00.000-08:00

From: The Philip K. Dick Bookshelf
(where Adjustment Team first appeared in 1954)

"Plot outline for a Philip K. Dick story:
   Hollywood buys film rights to obscure short story by famous author. Makes movie. Movie makes money. Producers then claim they never needed to buy rights in the first place. Demand their money back.
Emblematic Philip K. Dick story elements: Attempt to turn back time and murkiness of reality. Extra mind-bending plot twist: Author of original story is named Philip K. Dick.
   As Laura Dick Coelho, one of the late author's daughters, told me: 'Everything in the Philip K. Dick world is complicated.'
   She was talking specifically about the personal life of her father — she's the offspring of the third of his five marriages. But her observation applies well to the dispute over the 2011 Matt Damon film The Adjustment Bureau, which was based on Adjustment Team, a short story Dick wrote in the 1950s.
   If you haven't heard of Philip K. Dick, you're at least familiar with his work. He produced a huge corpus of visionary fiction before his death in 1982, including stories that became the basis for the films Blade Runner, Minority Report and Total Recall.
   The Dick estate, which is managed by Coelho, 51, and her half-sister Isa Dick Hackett, 44, optioned the film rights to Adjustment Team to writer/director George Nolfi in 2001 for $25,000. Nolfi, who subsequently wrote the screenplay and directed the retitled film version, had transferred the rights to Media Rights Capital, an independent studio. The producers exercised the option by paying the estate $1.4 million, with at least $500,000 more due once the film achieved its break-even point.
   But the rest was never paid. Media Rights Capital says it has learned that Adjustment Team first appeared in a cheap pulp sci-fi mag in 1954 and that the copyright was never renewed. That means the story has been in the public domain since 1982 and is available for anyone to exploit for free, like a play by Shakespeare.
   Along with refusing to pay the remaining $500,000, Media Rights is demanding return of the money it already laid out, according to the sisters."
— Michael Hiltzig, Los Angeles Times
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"An award-winning Spanish novelist claims that the illegal downloading of ebooks has forced her to give up writing and start looking for a new job.
   'Given that I have today discovered that more illegal copies of my book have been downloaded than I have sold, I am announcing officially that I will not publish another book for a long time,' Lucía Etxebarria announced on her Facebook page.
   Etxebarria told the Guardian that Spanish authors faced a difficult future as online piracy spreads from music and film to literature.
   She pointed to Spain's position at the top of the world rankings for per capita illegal downloads. 'We come after China and Russia in the total number of illegal downloads but, obviously, there are a lot more of them so we win on a per capita measure,' she said. [...]
   Etxebarria, who has won several of Spain's best-known literary prizes, said she could no longer justify devoting three years of her working life to producing a book.
   Her latest novel, The Contents of Silence, was published in October and although previous books have been bestsellers, this one is ranked low down the sales list on Amazon's Spanish site.
   It is not available as a legal ebook but can be downloaded in pdf format from numerous websites. The print edition costs more than €20.
   'We decided against publishing it as an ebook because that is easy to pirate. It would have been like throwing it straight to the lions,' Etxebarria said."
— Giles Tremlett, Guardian
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Books, Bücher, Bøker, књига

2011-12-20T09:47:00.000-08:00

"The biggest literary mystery in Scandinavia is not the fate of Stieg Larsson’s last manuscript. It’s not even how many dead bodies will pile up by the end of the latest bestseller by Jo Nesbo, the Norwegian crime-writing king who recently sold the film rights for his international bestseller, The Snowman, to Martin Scorsese.
   The real mystery is how a 10-year-old first novel by little-known Canadian writer Lori Lansens ended up as the second-best-selling work of fiction in Norway last year. Even many Norwegians are mystified by the success of Rush Home Road, a historical drama set in a Southwestern Ontario community founded by runaway slaves. 'I’ve spoken with many, many journalists there and they all ask me why,' Lansens said in an interview from her current home in southern California. 'I wish I had an answer.'[...]

   More recent beneficiaries of success abroad include Toronto mystery writer Linwood Barclay, who managed to forgo an apprenticeship in the domestic market to become an instant star on the international scene with his crime books; and former Saskatchewan technologist Alan Bradley, whose Flavia de Luce mystery novels (named for their 10-year-old heroine) currently epitomize life in a cozy English village for hundreds of thousands of non-English-speaking readers.

While Bradley made a triumphant press tour of Germany following last fall’s Frankfurt Book Fair, fellow Canadian writer Annabel Lyon watched her image gleam from a six-metre banner touting a new Serbian edition of her award-winning novel, The Golden Mean, at the Belgrade Book Fair."
— John Barber, The Globe and Mail
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"a book by any other name..."

2011-12-19T03:58:00.000-08:00

From Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the
English Language (1755) Internet Archive

"Justin Pollard, one of the founders of Unbound, first got the idea for a radical new model for book publishing while sitting in the pub with his friend and fellow author Dan Kieran. 'In the way that writers do, we were having a good old moan about publishers and how they don't get any publicity for their books, and how advances are getting ever smaller,' he recalls. 'I mean, friends of ours, established authors, were getting advances of £4,000. That's a nice amount for a hobby, but not for a proper job.'
   Yet at the same time, Pollard and Kieran observed that book sales were hardly in freefall. More books were being published than ever. People were still reading. 'And so we decided to ask: where is the money going? And what we realised is that the problem isn't to do with middle men taking it all. It's to do with the traditional model of publishing, where you have to pay advances that are non-returnable. Because most books don't earn out their advances, publishers have a huge exposure up front. That's where an awful lot of the money goes.'
   Pollard and Kieran (by now working with the company's third co-founder, John Mitchinson) decided that there had to be another way of doing things. For inspiration, they looked partly to the music industry, and bands like Marillion who, after they were dropped by their record label, asked their fans directly to put up enough money for a recording session and printing. At the same time, they looked back to a much older model of book publishing. 'Subscription publishing is extremely old when it comes to books, Pollard says. 'It's how Johnson's dictionary was published, as well as a large number of 18th- and 19th-century novels.' [...]
   Hybrid books take the best of both formats by giving each printed book a body of extra digital material, known as 'Illuminations.' These are accessed via smartphone or iPad by scanning a QR code (a bit like a barcode) printed within its pages, although the smartphone-less or QR-shy can access the same material via an emailed PDF. Marketing manager Paul Oliver describes the Illuminations as 'an anthology of readings and illustrations that explain the cultural milieu and legacy of the particular novella.' And they've been scrupulously curated, says Johnson, to 'resonate with a real honest reading experience.' "
— William Skidelsky, Guardian
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No Stein Unturned

2011-12-17T12:57:00.000-08:00

From: BOOKFORUM
Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, Culoz, France (1944)

"[Gertude] Stein and her long-time partner Alice Toklas held out in the French countryside while France was occupied by the Nazis. So why weren’t they deported like other American enemies, Jews, and lesbians? Stein was apparently protected by a close friend of hers, Bernard Faÿ, an official in the Vichy Government who turned out to be a fascist and Nazi collaborator. Her collection of 'degenerate' art, all of those pieces by Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne left behind in Paris, were saved as well.
Questions about Stein’s wartime survival have been addressed in many books. A few years ago they were raised again, more aggressively, by Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007). When Malcolm’s book came out nobody seemed to care, but now that Stein has had a comeback, the controversy has gained urgency. It was triggered by an article in the Bay Area Jewish Weekly that accused the Contemporary Jewish Museum of using Stalinist methods to preserve an idealized image of Stein. At the same time, Barbara Will’s new book, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ and the Vichy Dilemma (2011) tries to show the 'real' Stein in just one color: black. Visitors and bloggers who had never before read or studied Stein became enraged by certain details snapped up from the agitation: What? Stein had a Nazi friend? Stein said Hitler ought to get the Nobel Peace Prize? Stein a collaborator! Worse, Stein a Nazi! The scandal recently got to the Washington Post, prompting critic Phil Kennicott to review Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories and openly declare his 'hatred' for her."
— Renate Stendhal, Los Angeles Review of Books
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"If being a genius is hard work, so is creating one’s biography. In September 1944, journalist and newscaster Eric Sevareid reached the French village of Culoz and met with its most famous resident, and in his 1946 book, Not So Wild a Dream, he reports that 'with all the difficulties, the isolation from lifelong friends, these had been the happiest years of her life.' In her new Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, a collection of essays and reportage on Stein, Toklas, their lives together and apart, and the autobiographical fictions they jointly created (as all of us must) for themselves and for the reader, Janet Malcolm quotes the Sevareid passage and remarks, 'It was a point of pride with Stein never to appear unhappy.' What Malcolm calls Stein’s 'preternatural cheerfulness' is perhaps the most accomplished of all the self-fashioning she attempted."
— Eric Banks, BOOKFORUM
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Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011)

2011-12-16T08:26:00.000-08:00

"'In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist,' Mr. Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair, for which he was a contributing editor.
   He took pains to emphasize that he had not revised his position on atheism, articulated in his best-selling 2007 book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, although he did express amused appreciation at the hope, among some concerned Christians, that he might undergo a late-life conversion.
   He also professed to have no regrets for a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking. 'Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me,' he told Charlie Rose in a television interview in 2010, adding that it was 'impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.'”
— William Grimes, The New York Times
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"Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer, and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well, he was a gift from, dare I say it, God. He died today at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, after a punishing battle with esophageal cancer, the same disease that killed his father.
   He was a man of insatiable appetites—for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation. That he had an output to equal what he took in was the miracle in the man. You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who could match the volume of exquisitely crafted columns, essays, articles, and books he produced over the past four decades. He wrote often—constantly, in fact, and right up to the end—and he wrote fast; frequently without the benefit of a second draft or even corrections. I can recall a lunch in 1991, when I was editing The New York Observer, and he and Aimée Bell, his longtime editor, and I got together for a quick bite at a restaurant on Madison, no longer there. Christopher’s copy was due early that afternoon. Pre-lunch canisters of scotch were followed by a couple of glasses of wine during the meal and a similar quantity of post-meal cognac. That was just his intake. After stumbling back to the office, we set him up at a rickety table and with an old Olivetti, and in a symphony of clacking he produced a 1,000-word column of near perfection in under half an hour."
— Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair
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Look Inside

2011-12-15T13:31:00.000-08:00

“'When I was born, my parents and my mother’s parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood,' wrote John Updike. 'This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age, was, in a sense, me.' Updike might now be gone, but the dogwood tree is still outside his boyhood home in Shillington, Pennsylvania, and the house where the author spent his first 13 years is now for sale on Ebay. It now has wall-to-wall carpeting and an addition, and it appears to have been converted into office space. Bidding starts at $249,000. Nobody has bid on it yet."
— Emily Witt, The New York Observer
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As Ray Gustini pointed out on the Atlantic Wire earlier this afternoon, John Updike’s childhood home in Shillington, Pa. has been put up for sale on eBay, of all places. Why use the auction site for the sale? Is it because the owners hope to get more for the property on account of its Pulitzer Prize-winning former resident?
— David Haglund, Slate
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Local Food (For Thought) Movement

2011-12-14T12:37:00.000-08:00

From: WeHeartIt

"If, like us, your Twitter feed is on fire today with more colorful versions of the sentiment, 'Screw you, Slate,' allow us to explain what’s going on: Slate’s technology columnist, Farhad Manjoo, has published a piece in which he argues that we should all abandon independent bookstores for Amazon. The column is response to Richard Russo’s New York Times op-ed, in which the author criticizes a particularly disgusting promotion that had the online retailer rewarding shoppers for finding a copy of a book they wanted to buy in a local bookstore, scanning the barcode, and buying it on Amazon instead.
While Manjoo concedes that this particularly customer-poaching strategy was a poor idea, he doesn’t agree that consumers should support independent bookstores — which he calls 'cultish, moldering institutions' — over the Internet giant. Aside from being cheaper (because they can afford to buy books in bulk and don’t have to pay overhead on retail space) and boasting a wider selection (because Amazon’s warehouses are more spacious than any individual store), Manjoo believes that independent book sellers just aren’t very user-friendly, suffering from 'no customer reviews, no reliable way to find what you’re looking for, and a dubious recommendations engine.'
I find it sad, actually, that Manjoo — a generally sharp and smart technology writer — finds clicking around on Amazon to be more fun than browsing the shelves of a real-life bookstore where (gasp!) one might actually interact with other book lovers."
— Judy Berman, FlavorWire
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Immersion Therapy

2011-12-13T07:45:00.000-08:00

Most people can’t, or at least don’t, read a 925-page book in a couple of nights. In fact, if you happen to have any of the following: (i) a television, (ii) access to the Internet, (iii) one or more children, (iv) regular bathing habits, or (v) gainful employment in a job where your responsibilities do not include getting paid to read books, it would probably be difficult to finish a book this long in a week, or even two. Life just gets in the way. For argument’s sake, let’s assume it would be closer to a month, a month in which a typical person might take 30 showers, eat 90 meals, spend maybe 200 hours at work. [...]
This kind of world-shifting is possible with Haruki Murakami’s new novel [1Q84] (originally published in Japan in serial form as three books), which opens with Aomame, a young woman living in Tokyo, stuck in traffic, in a taxi, on the highway. The year is 1984, and Aomame is very late for work, which is a big deal, given that Aomame is no accountant or lawyer, but rather a contract killer specializing in the murder of men who abuse their wives. On the advice of the cab driver, Aomame decides that it would be a good idea to walk along the shoulder of the highway, and climb down an emergency stairway in order to get down into the subway station and to her assignment on time. Only, when Aomame emerges from the stairway, she picks up on subtle hints (the cut of a policeman’s uniform is slightly different, the firearm he is carrying is a different model) that her shortcut may have been an exit in more ways than one. The world has shifted, or perhaps she has shifted between worlds. In the words of Aomame’s cryptic cab driver, 'things are not what they seem.' [...]
The novel is strongest when it sticks to its most powerful idea, the one implied by its title: the world as a kind of question. Early on in the book, Tengo thinks to himself that the role of a story is, 'in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form.' Murakami starts with the problem, what is real? and he transposes it into another form, an entire world, slightly revised. Murakami’s 925-page novel seems to be suggesting that, when you get down to it, the key to the question is love.”
— Charles Yu, Los Angeles Review of Books
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The Full Treatment

2011-12-11T20:49:00.000-08:00

From: DIY Gadgets

"The news last week that HBO had optioned the works of William Faulkner for adaptation by Deadwood creator David Milch was treated in some press reports as incongruous. It shouldn’t have been. The mindless take on Deadwood is that it had a lot of swearing in it (which it did, but so what? — get over it, for cryin’ out loud!), yet viewers not mesmerized by the four-letter words noticed the Shakespearean and King Jamesian cadences of Milch’s dialogue from the start. Those influences are evident in Faulkner’s fiction, as well. (Also, let’s not forget we’re talking about a man who wrote a novel in which a woman is raped with a corncob — this isn’t Merchant-Ivory territory.) Milch and Faulkner is, in fact, an inspired pairing. [...]
   Television and the novel, while not exactly soul mates, have a lot more in common than the novel and theatrical film. Yet any novelist can testify that the second most common question he or she hears from readers (after 'Where do you get your ideas?') is 'Who would you like to see playing [main character] in the movie?' Fantasizing about the film version of a favorite book seems to be very common, but you have to wonder why. Rarely are a book’s most devoted admirers satisfied by the film, although when they are — as with the Harry Potter, Twilight and The Lord of the Rings franchises — popular enthusiasm can certainly be enormous.
   Far more often, however, the results are disappointing — let the recent adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go stand as a case in point. Much of a novel has to be cut to fit a 90- to 120-minute dramatization, and this can mean more than just the loss of supporting characters or scenes. Most movies conform to a three-act structure (some screenwriters will insist that it’s actually a four-act structure), a form with a proven ability to hold audiences’ interest through a single viewing. Novels, meant to be read over multiple sittings, have more freedom. Trimming a novel like Bleak House to fit the three-act format alters the fundamental shape of the work, often subtracting from the novel the very roominess and complication that made you love it in the first place.
   A television series, however, has the time to spread out and explore the byways and textures of a novel’s imagined world. Furthermore, while theatrical film is a medium in which the director reigns, in television, as Rushdie told the Observer, 'the writer is the primary creative artist. You have control in a way that you never have in the cinema. The Sopranos was David Chase, The West Wing was Aaron Sorkin.' "
— Laura Miller, Salon
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Conscience Raising

2011-12-11T09:12:00.000-08:00

"Alice Oswald was seen as a strong contender for the TS Eliot prize, so her withdrawal from the shortlist this week (followed by that of John Kinsella) was a significant sacrifice. She did so in protest against the long-standing poetry award's new sponsor Aurum, which manages the investments of hedge funds, stating that 'poetry should be questioning not endorsing such institutions.'
   Like Hari Kunzru's rejection of the Mail on Sunday-backed John Llewellyn Rhys prize in 2003 (saying the paper was 'xenophobic'), Oswald's stance was unusual in being political, not personal; today's writers with qualms turn up but criticise the prize-givers, as Ian McEwan did this year in controversially accepting the Jerusalem prize."
— Guardian
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"[...] But this year has seen something of a trend developing in dropping out from potential literary honours. In March, the master of spy thrillers John le Carré asked to be removed from the Man Booker International shortlist, stating that 'I do not compete for literary prizes' Now two poets, Alice Oswald and John Kinsella, are the latest to object to being nominated for a literary honour – this time, the TS Eliot Prize awarded by the Poetry Book Society."
— Emma Hogan, The Telegraph
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"A year ago today [December 10], on International Human Rights Day, our colleague Liu Xiaobo, former president of the Independent Chinese PEN Centre (ICPC) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. One year on, he and over thirty other writers remain in prison in China. PEN International demands their immediate and unconditional release, and calls upon its members to take action to publicise the deteriorating human rights climate in the People’s Republic of China.
   John Ralston Saul, President of PEN International, says: ‘Liu Xiaobo’s words will not disappear whether he is isolated in prison or released. These are Chinese ideas that will continue to spread of their own volition. However, by keeping him in jail, the Chinese authorities are putting a loud speaker to his words. They should free him and let ideas take their natural course.’
   Liu Xiaobo was arrested on 8 December 2008 and held under ‘residential surveillance,’ a form of pre-trial detention, at an undisclosed location in Beijing until he was formally charged on 23 June 2009 with ‘spreading rumours and defaming the government, aimed at subversion of the state and overthrowing the socialism system in recent years.’ He was sentenced to eleven years in prison on 25 December 2009 for his critical writings and his role in launching Charter 08, a declaration calling for political reforms and human rights published on 9 December 2008, which now has over 10,000 signatories from throughout China. Since 22 October 2010, two weeks after the Nobel announcement was made, his wife Liu Xia, a poet and photographer, has been held incommunicado under strict house arrest at her home in Beijing and is denied any contact with the outside world. At the December 2010 Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony in Oslo, Liu Xiaobo’s medal and diploma were presented to an empty chair."
— PEN International
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Imitating Art

2011-12-10T21:18:00.000-08:00

From: Cover Browser

"Everette Howard Hunt, Jr. (October 9, 1918 – January 23, 2007) was an American intelligence officer and writer. Hunt served for many years as a CIA officer. Hunt, with G. Gordon Liddy and others, was one of the Nixon White House 'plumbers' — a secret team of operatives charged with fixing 'leaks.' Hunt, along with Liddy, engineered the first Watergate burglary, and other undercover operations for Nixon. In the ensuing Watergate Scandal, Hunt was convicted of burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping, eventually serving 33 months in prison.
   Hunt was born in Hamburg, New York, United States, of English and Welsh descent. An alumnus of Nichols School in Buffalo, New York and a 1940 graduate of Brown University, Hunt during World War II served in the U.S. Navy on the destroyer USS Mayo, United States Army Air Forces, and finally, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which he worked for in China. During and after the war, he also wrote several novels under his own name — East of Farewell (1942), Limit of Darkness (1944), Stranger in Town (1947), Bimini Run (1949) (with a hero named 'Hank Sturgis'), and The Violent Ones (1950) — and, more famously, several spy and hardboiled novels under an array of pseudonyms, including Robert Dietrich, Gordon Davis and David St. John. Hunt won a Guggenheim Fellowship for his writing in 1946.
   Warner Bros. had just bought rights to Hunt's novel Bimini Run when he joined the CIA in October 1949 as a political action specialist, in what came to be called their Special Activities Division. The CIA was the successor organization of the OSS. Hunt became station chief in Mexico City in 1950, and supervised William F. Buckley, Jr., who worked for the CIA in Mexico during the period 1951–1952. Buckley and Hunt remained lifelong friends.
   In Mexico, Hunt helped devise Operation PBSUCCESS, the covert plan to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz, the elected president of Guatemala. Following assignments in Japan and as station chief in Uruguay, Hunt was given the assignment of forging Cuban exile leaders in the United States into a broadly representative government-in-exile that would, after the Bay of Pigs Invasion, form a provisional government to take over Cuba. The failure of the invasion damaged his career.
   After the Bay of Pigs, Hunt became a personal assistant to Allen Dulles. Tad Szulc states that Hunt was asked to assist Dulles in writing a book, The Craft of Intelligence, that Dulles wrote following his involuntary retirement as CIA head in 1961. The book was published in 1963." — Wikipedia
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Big Voice; Short Song

2011-12-09T10:36:00.000-08:00

From: 1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die

"Little Willie John was a small man with a big voice, an outsized talent who could croon and growl, sing ballads and rhythm and blues, dig deep into his lower register and hit high notes that took the wind out of lesser tenors. He was also a fierce performer; not even James Brown, the Hardest Working Man in Show Business, wanted to follow Little Willie John on a bill.
In the late 1950s, before Motown and the British Invasion, Little Willie John owned rhythm and blues. In Susan Whitall’s authorized biography (written with John’s older son, Kevin, and the cooperation of his widow, Darlynn John), he emerges as a 'singer’s singer,' admired by the likes of Solomon Burke, Little Richard, Sam Cooke, and Stevie Wonder, who wrote a foreword for the book. But his promising career — which took off in 1955 when a teenaged Little Willie released his first hit record, 'All Around the World,' on Syd Nathan’s independent King label — was cut short by a series of disasters that left him broke, indebted to King, and convicted of second-degree murder. When he died in May 1968, authorities at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, where Willie John was serving an eight- to 20-year sentence for manslaughter, attributed it to a heart attack. But friends and family, who have never obtained the prison report of a purported autopsy, doubted that Willie John had died of 'natural' causes. [...]
Given the circumstances of Little Willie John’s last years, it is difficult to come up with a narrative of his career that does not in some ways frame it in tragic terms. Yet Whitall sets herself the task of writing Willie John’s story in a manner that avoids the formulaic nature of 'so many mawkish online biographies' of the singer, which focus on his 'doomed and violent' temperament. In Fever [: Little Willie John: A Fast Life, Mysterious Death and the Birth of Soul] she has succeeded in doing this, breathing life into the story of Willie’s rapid ascent in the mid and late 1950s as one of R & B’s most respected and influential singers, a voice of such power that it blasts through the ensuing decades, demanding to be heard. She does this without the benefit of much, if any, preserved film footage of Little Willie’s performances, relying instead on the sonic and print archive and the memories of family members, music industry veterans, and fellow musicians, who struggle to find the superlatives to represent Little Willie’s charismatic stage presence and virtuoso talent."
— Gayl Wald, The Los Angeles Review of Books
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Bad Bard

2011-12-07T09:11:00.000-08:00

Source image: Tax Lawyer's Blog

"According to [Leslie] Hotson’s researches, Shakespeare was an energetic, quick-witted but only sketchily educated country boy—perfect qualifications for someone trying to make his way in the bohemian and morally dubious world of the theater. That world was far from respectable in those days; that is why London’s playhouses were clustered on the south bank of the Thames, in the borough of Southwark, outside the jurisdiction of the City of London–and why the document Hotson discovered lies with the Surrey writs and not among those dealing with London proper.
As a newcomer to the big city, Hotson realized, Shakespeare was obliged to begin his career on a lowly rung, working for disreputable theater people—which, at that time, was generally regarded as akin to working in a brothel. Theaters were meeting places for people whose interest in the opposite sex did not extend to marriage; they were also infested with crooks, pimps and prostitutes, and attracted an audience whose interest in the performance on stage was often minimal. This, of course, explains why the Puritans were so quick to ban public entertainments when they got the chance. [...]
There is plenty of evidence elsewhere that Shakespeare was somewhat less than a sensitive poet and entirely honest citizen. Legal records show that him dodging from rented room to rented room while defaulting on a few shillings’ worth of tax payments in 1596, 1598 and 1599—though why he went to so much trouble remains obscure, since the totals demanded were tiny compared to the sums that other records suggest he was spending on property at the same time. He also sued at least three men for equally insignificant sums. Nor was Will’s reputation among other literary men too good; when a rival playwright, Robert Greene, was on his deathbed, he condemned Shakespeare for having “purloined his plumes”—that is, cheated him out of his literary property—and warned others not to fall into the hands of this 'upstart crow.' "
— Smithsonian
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"[...] the old environment is upgraded into an art form while the new conditions are regarded as corrupt and degrading." — Marshall McLuhan

2011-12-05T03:44:00.000-08:00

From: BookOasis

"Even as more readers switch to the convenience of e-books, publishers are giving old-fashioned print books a makeover.
   Many new releases have design elements usually reserved for special occasions — deckle edges, colored endpapers, high-quality paper and exquisite jackets that push the creative boundaries of bookmaking. If e-books are about ease and expedience, the publishers reason, then print books need to be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning, not just reading.
   'When people do beautiful books, they’re noticed more,' said Robert S. Miller, the publisher of Workman Publishing. 'It’s like sending a thank-you note written on nice paper when we’re in an era of e-mail correspondence.'
   The eagerly anticipated 925-page novel by Haruki Murakami, 1Q84, arrived in bookstores in October wrapped in a translucent jacket with the arresting gaze of a young woman peering through. A new novel by Stephen King about the Kennedy assassination, 11/22/63, has an intricate book jacket and, unusual for fiction, photographs inside. The paperback edition of Jay-Z’s memoir Decoded features a shiny gold Rorschach on the cover, and in March the front of The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller will bear an embossed helmet sculpted with punctures, cracks and texture, giving the image a 3-D effect."— Julie Bossman, The New York Times
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Unstuck

2011-12-04T11:07:00.000-08:00

From: Manhattan Rare Book Company

"A new biography [And So It Goes, by Charles Shields] of acclaimed American author Kurt Vonnegut, beloved by fans worldwide for his work's warm humour and homespun Midwestern wisdom, has shocked many with a portrayal of a bitter, angry man prone to depression and fits of temper. [...]
   'It is a little naive to be surprised by this,' said Gregory Sumner of the University of Detroit Mercy, who recently wrote a book exploring Vonnegut's work, called Unstuck In Time. 'Personal relationships were difficult for him. He had a lot of survivor's guilt.'
   Vonnegut definitely had survived a lot. His once wealthy family was impoverished by the Great Depression, causing grim strains in his parents' marriage. His mother committed suicide. His beloved sister died of breast cancer, a day after her husband was killed in a train accident. But the defining horror of Vonnegut's life was his wartime experience and surviving the Dresden bombing, only to be sent into the ruins as prison labour in order to collect and burn the corpses. The ordeal cropped up continually in his work, but most notably formed the basis of Slaughterhouse-Five, the book that made Vonnegut famous.
   But there was more to it than just coping with such traumatic situations. In later life, despite being hailed by so many as an American genius, Vonnegut felt that the literary establishment never took him seriously. They interpreted his simplistic style, love of science fiction and Midwestern values as being beneath serious study." — Paul Harris, Guardian
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Get And So It Goes, Unstuck In Time, and all of Kurt Vonnegut's books here...

Soft Boiled

2011-12-03T07:16:00.000-08:00

From: Folksy

"Of all the thousands of sleazy, trashy PG-rated paperback books published in the 1960's, those with the extraordinary covers produced by Eugene Bilbrew, Eric Stanton, Bill Ward and Bill Alexander stand out and stand above. This quartet of illustrators with interlocking lives and complicated connections produced an abundance of work. All were bright, light-hearted depictions of the darker-side of sexuality. All were also in the employ of a mobster. The work produced by 'The Fun Fetish Four' was aimed at baser instincts and somewhat abhorrent taste, but for the most part were harmless if a bit strange.
   In addition to the artists, a fascinating gaggle of gangsters, smutsters, peddlers and speed-driven writers are involved in this story. This site collects and reproduces a series of posts placed on Dull Tool Dim Bulb during 2009. It will be obvious I have not edited or corrected much.
   The publishers of these soft-core novels were hounded by moral crusaders and ultimately put out of business. The owners didn't comply with rules and regulations to begin with (using phony addresses, avoiding tax laws and featuring questionable content) Larger publishers who used 'better' illustrators and 'real' authors garner the most attention from legitimate collectors and aficionados. More accomplished (that is, more 'painterly') illustrators have had their work better documented, detailed and appreciated. As the books here were mob-commissioned, distributed in darkness and displayed under the counter more often than in racks, they are today scarcer than more legitimate and more often seen mainstream paperbacks, even those which fall into the broad 'vintage sleaze' category. Printed in editions of around 10,000 copies (a guess) they were fugitive literature, undocumented and born outside more established channels of publication. In fact, more traditional scholars and collectors sneered at them until several folks thanked below brought them back to life.[...]
   I also found the fact that two of these artists were African-American quite curious and worthy of study. Black artists in general, and historically, have been neglected by the mainstream art and publishing world. In fact, dozens of the most important artists of the 20th century are African-Americans who existed on the outside of our understanding of art. That they would find themselves producing work for an underground certainly isn't unusual...Jazz and Blues arose from somewhat dicey circumstances after all, so why shouldn't the illustrators. Additionally, the story of how these young comic book artists hooked up with the Jewish Mafia and the fellows who photographed Bettie Page is remarkable indeed." — Jim Linderman, Vintage Sleaze
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Squids in Space

2011-12-02T08:52:00.000-08:00

From: Good Show Sir

"Many of her casual readers, and most critics of her work, are aware by now that Margaret Atwood got herself into a spot of bother after the publication of her pulpish dystopia Oryx and Crake (2003), when she disassociated her text from the conversation of SF, the underlying megatext of conventions, phrases, solutions, tags and cliches which honest Science Fiction writers both acknowledge and make new in their works, and which has evolved enormously over the years.
   Despite her conspicuous use of SF topoi copied holus-bolus as they existed half a century ago — i.e., the Superman Mad Scientist who Ends the World while Simultaneously Creating a New Species to Inhabit the Remains — she claimed in 2003 that what she wrote was not Science Fiction at all, because Science Fiction was all about squids in space. [...]
   In 2003, Ursula K. Le Guin — a writer of singular importance to the field not only for her fiction but for her critical work — made it clear that the squids-in-space bon mot was genuinely discourteous. But her measured rebuke seems to have made little difference. Atwood has now reiterated her claim almost unmodified, in her latest book, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination [New York: Doubleday/Nan A Talese, 2011. 255 pp.]. It may be that like a lobster in a trap who cannot find the exit door, Atwood cannot work her way out of the perplex of ill-judged subjectivity in which she had trapped herself: perhaps because, as with any statement of belief as opposed to argument, her 'definition' of SF is as unfalsifiable as any sermon. [...]
   When she genuinely relaxes, though, it is not all bad. The [Richard Ellmann Lectures presented in 2010 at Emory University] themselves give us, in three sections combining memoir and excursus, an attractive picture of the young Atwood discovering fantastika in general, SF in particular. Her early reading was clearly intense, and she conveys a sense of that sensual intensity here through some dextrous narrative passagework, though without giving any large number of specific textual referents. Indeed — to return to the main burden of complaint about the failure of In Other Worlds to argue its case — it is noticeable that, utopias and dystopias excepted, almost no SF novels published after the early 1950s are either mentioned explicitly or by inference, with the exception of William Gibson (but stopping short at , which is treated as both utopian and dystopian, but not as an SF prayer to the Gods Inside Tomorrow), Ursula Le Guin (inescapable chider and presider) and Bruce Sterling (for his Slipstream riff) [see more here]. I may be failing to remember others, but the book (or at least my advance review copy) contains no index. As far as “SF and the Human Imagination,” we are left with teen encounters with pulp, and the extremities of the utopian mind (which mainly, I think wrongly, are extrinsic to the line and structure of SF itself). As far as the megatext is concerned, nought. There is no there there."
— John Clute, Los Angeles Review of Books
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The Whole Story...

2011-12-01T15:37:00.000-08:00

"[E-books] smell like burned fuel."—Ray Bradbury

2011-12-01T12:19:00.000-08:00

Source photo from: Wikipedia

"At age 91, Ray Bradbury is making peace with the future he helped predict.
   The science fiction/fantasy author and long-time enemy of the e-book has finally allowed his dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451 to be published in digital format. Simon & Schuster released the electronic edition Tuesday.
   First published in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 has sold more than 10 million copies and has been translated into 33 languages. It imagined a world in which the appetite for new and faster media leads to a decline in reading, and books are banned and burned.
   Bradbury himself has been an emphatic defender of traditional paper texts, saying that e-books 'smell like burned fuel' and calling the Internet nothing but 'a big distraction.' "
— The Globe and Mail
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"Scientists may not be able to tell a good book by its cover, but they now can tell the condition of an old book by its smell. In a report in ACS' Analytical Chemistry, a semi-monthly journal, they describe development of a new test that can measure the degradation of old books and precious historical documents based on their smell. The nondestructive 'sniff' test could help libraries and museums preserve a range of prized paper-based objects, some of which are degrading rapidly due to advancing age, the scientists say. [...]
   The new technique, called 'material degradomics,' analyzes the gases emitted by old books and documents without altering the documents themselves. They used it to 'sniff' 72 historical papers from the 19th and 20th centuries, including papers containing rosin (pine tar) and wood fiber, which are the most rapidly degrading paper types in old books. The scientists identified 15 VOCs [volatile organic compounds] that seem good candidates as markers to track the degradation of paper in order to optimize their preservation. The method also could help preserve other historic artifacts, they add."
— Michael Berstein, EurekAlert
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From: Breathing Books

“Can images reproduce the unimaginable?” [Marco Sonzogni] asks. “And how are those images to be interpreted?”

2011-12-01T04:22:00.000-08:00

Winning design: Anna Zysko (Poland)

There is no right or final answer with a book cover. Where music albums are forever identified with the artwork that clad them on release, book covers change and change again. Over time a much-reprinted novel or short story collection will generate scores of different cover designs around the world. While the visual interpretation of any book’s contents can be taxing, with some books the stakes are especially high.
Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen is that kind of publication. Los Angeles architect and book lover John Bertram has organized a series of cover design competitions in which he asks designers to interpret a demanding work of fiction. In 2010, with the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Los Angeles as co-sponsor, Bertram set the challenge of designing a cover for Borowski’s harrowingly bleak collection of 12 stories based on the writer’s experiences in Auschwitz. These speculative covers later became the starting point for a fascinating visual and literary study — This Way: Covering/Uncovering Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen — edited by Marco Sonzogni, with Bertram’s help, and published in April this year.
I read Borowski’s book, available in the U.S. as a Penguin Classic, a few years ago. I had never heard of it until I happened to see it in a bookstore. From the author’s Polish name and the ferocious irony of the title, it was obvious what it was about and the cover photograph of something fiery and blackened (burnt metal, though the subject is unclear) clinched my desire to read it. The image played menacingly against the title — it could be interpreted as a deadly miasma — and had great metaphorical power without stating anything specific."
— Rick Poynor, The Design Observer Group
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Grudging Witnesses

2011-11-30T19:51:00.000-08:00

"Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman served as nurses and eyewitness reporters in the hideous Union hospitals in Washington, D. C. Alcott contracted typhoid in the septic wards and wrote Little Women, about the daughters of a father wounded in the war, while treating herself with mercury. Whitman ministered to the needs of wounded soldiers while also keeping a careful visual record of everything he saw, 'this other freight of helpless worn and wounded youth,' as he wrote to Emerson. 'Doctors sawed arms & legs off from morning till night,' he reported in his journal. He was dismayed to see 'a heap of feet, arms, legs, etc., under a tree in front of a hospital.' As he moved from bed to bed in the overcrowded wards, he was shocked by the youth of the victims. 'Charles Miller, bed 19, company D, 53rd Pennsylvania, is only sixteen years of age, very bright, courageous boy, left leg amputated below the knee.'
The remarkable medical photographs of the Civil War surgeon-photographer Reed Bontecou—now published in their entirety for the first time [Shooting Soldiers: Civil War Medical Photography By R.b. Bontecou by Stanley B. Burns] and recently shown at The Robert Anderson gallery in New York—bring us closer still. Bontecou, from Troy, New York, was a classifier of seashells and an ornithologist who had traveled in the Amazon before the war collecting specimens. A pioneer in surgical procedures known for the dexterity and speed of his operations, he was also a photographer of genius. His iconic image, 'A Morning’s Work,' shows a pile of amputated legs he himself had sawed off earlier that day."
— Christopher Benfey, The New York Review of Books
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"A remarkable number of well known authors were ambulance drivers during World War I. Among them were Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, and Somerset Maugham. Robert Service, the writer of Yukon poetry including The Shooting of Dan McGrew, and Charles Nordhoff, co-author of Mutiny On the Bounty, drove ambulances in the Great War. [...]
If the list were expanded to include those working in medically related fields during the war, such names as Gertrude Stein, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and E.M. Forster could be added."
— firstworldwar.com
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Strokes Of The Pen: Faust, The Devil, And "Cultivating Literary Friendships"

2011-11-30T08:54:00.000-08:00

From: The Manhattan Rare Book Company

"It’s hard to explain to writing students that there are pods of very friendly, arguably moral authors who treat each other as if the literary life is led on a firing range. They meet you alertly, brightly drawing from natty holsters their own signs of power, rank and aid, and then requesting that you do the same. They aren’t evil, really, and the impulse behind it is so close to camaraderie it almost smells right. We all need help, and we all want to help each other, which makes the nuances of the transaction murky. Some people never see the problem at all and others treat every request like you’re asking for a toe of which they are particularly fond. In the end, parsing the aspirational nature of literary friendship is as much of a longshot as sexing the yeti. [...]
But I thought I’d give it a shot, and luckily I had help. Because I’m a collector of art and old books, I get email notifications of auctions, and the day I was to lecture my students, an old autographed letter appeared on the Ira & Larry Goldberg auction site. It illustrated the nature of 'transactional' so beautifully I read it aloud that night.
It’s a one-page, single-spaced TLS (as they say) [Typed Letter Signed]
from William Faulkner. He is reacting to a request for a blurb in this, 1961, his final full year of life. To summarize the career until then: he’d struggled, his work had gone out of print, he’d almost drunk himself to death in Hollywood, where he was a failure. In 1946, washed up, spit out, he’d had his forgotten work reissued in The Portable Faulkner. This was the lightning and the thunder that changed his life. Seemingly overnight, he made an entire region of America a viable place to pan for talent and story, he won the Nobel Prize, he won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award too, and by January 1961, he’d spent about 15 years taking what comforts he could as a celebrated, revered, and golden writer.

From: AllStarPics

The addressee is named Joan Williams. She is 30 years old, and she’s written the manuscript for a first novel called The Morning and the Evening. I mention this because Faulkner doesn’t begin it with 'Dear Miss Williams.' [...]"
— Glen David Gold, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Scribo Ergo Sum

2011-11-28T09:10:00.000-08:00

"Franz Kafka was a legal secretary at the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague (later: In the Czech Lands), where he wrote reports like 'Accident Prevention in Quarries,' and rose to a top office position, Obersekretär. Though his bureaucratic labors bore literary fruit—providing context and imagery for his fiction writing—Kafka came to feel bogged down by the daily grind. 'Writing and office cannot be reconciled, since writing has its center of gravity in depth, whereas the office is on the surface of life,' he wrote to his fiancée in 1913. 'So it goes up and down, and one is bound to be torn asunder in the process.'
   T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, was inclined to keep his day job even after it was financially necessary. When the Bloomsbury group offered to set up a fund that would allow him sufficient funding to become a full-time writer, the poet turned them down. 'This idea that Eliot should be freed from the drudgery of work misses the point that he was actually very interested in the minutiae of everyday life—he was a commentator on the quotidian,' British Library curator Rachel Foss told The Guardian. [...]
   Says Von Arbin Ahlander, 'We're kidding ourselves if we think we can make a living on writing.' As for the romantic ideal of the leisurely writer life, slowly crafting one's masterpiece in the calm solitude of a big, empty house: 'I mean, that's over,' she added, 'Unless you're a trust fund baby.'
   Though it's rare to make a living on writing, it's becoming increasingly easy to call yourself one. Without any money at all, anyone can publish digitally with the click of a button or, for a price, self-publish a print manuscript. The ecology of authorship has changed dramatically since, say March 1845, when Charlotte Brontë was working as a governess, miserable, and wrote in a letter, 'I shall soon be 30 and I have done nothing yet.' "— Betsy Morais, The Atlantic
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"Patience is the companion of wisdom." – St. Augustine

2011-11-26T23:47:00.000-08:00

From: eBay

"Speaking through a Ouija board operated by Pearl Lenore Curran, a St. Louis housewife of limited education, Patience Worth was nothing short of a national phenomenon in the early years of the 20th century. Though her works are virtually forgotten today, the prestigious Braithwaite anthology listed five of her poems among the nation’s best published in 1917, and the New York Times hailed her first novel as a 'feat of literary composition.' Her output was stunning. In addition to seven books, she produced voluminous poetry, short stories, plays and reams of sparkling conversation—nearly four million words between 1913 and 1937. Some evenings she worked on a novel, a poem and a play simultaneously, alternating her dictation from one to another without missing a beat. 'What is extraordinary about this case is the fluidity, versatility, virtuosity and literary quality of Patience’s writings, which are unprecedented in the history of automatic writing by mediums,' says Stephen Braude, a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and a past president of the American Parapsychological Association, who has written widely on paranormal phenomena.
Almost overnight, Patience transformed Pearl Curran from a restless homemaker plagued by nervous ailments into a busy celebrity who traveled the country giving performances starring Patience. Night after night Pearl, a tall, blue-eyed woman in a fashionable dress, would sit with her Ouija board while her husband, John, recorded Patience’s utterances in shorthand. Those who witnessed the performances, some of them leading scholars, feminists, politicians and writers, believed they’d seen a miracle. 'I still confess myself completely baffled by the experience,' Otto Heller, dean of the Graduate School at Washington University in St. Louis, recalled years later.
Through Pearl, Patience claimed to be an unmarried Englishwoman who had emigrated to Nantucket Island in the late 1600s and been killed in an Indian raid. For three centuries, she said, she’d searched for an earthly 'crannie' (as in 'cranium') to help her fulfill a burning literary ambition. She’d found it at last in Pearl." — Gioia Diliberto, Smithsonian
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"How many ways can you say that Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809?" — Jay Parini

2011-11-26T08:44:00.000-08:00

"American author Lenore Hart has rejected accusations of plagiarism on Facebook, after allegations she used material from a 55-year-old book by Cothburn O'Neal in writing her fictionalised life of Edgar Allan Poe's cousin and wife, The Raven's Bride.
Both Hart's novel, published this year, and O'Neal's The Very Young Mrs Poe, published in 1956, tell the story of Virginia Clemm, who married her cousin Poe when she was just 13 years old. Hart's is told in the first person, while O'Neal, who died in 2001, writes in the third person. A host of similarities between the two books have been alleged online, with the charge led by the spy novelist Jeremy Duns – who called this case 'absolutely shocking' – and by the blog The World of Edgar Allan Poe. [...]
Asking if TS Eliot could have written The Waste Land 'if he worried about quoting without attribution,' [Jay] Parini said that 'the problem with historical fiction, of course, is that history is full of nuggets of knowledge. How many ways can you say that Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809? If you're describing a certain river, the descriptions of that river will often sound like other descriptions of that river, and so forth. And it's important to remember that literature is a tissue of allusion. We all participate in the language, its writing and thinking; we do so unconsciously more than consciously. It's hard to find a sentence that hasn't been written by someone, somewhere: Isn't that a point made by Borges over and over?' [...]

Bella Pagan, senior commissioning editor at Tor UK, Pan Macmillan, said that books receive 'a huge degree of scrutiny' before they are published. 'Commissioning editors will have read widely and deeply in their field, and are likely to spot it if something comes up which has been done before,' she said. 'But we can't possibly police everything, and we need to be very vigilant.' Although Pagan does not believe plagiarism has become more rife, she says it is more likely to be uncovered these days. 'Bloggers can police as much as anyone,' she said. 'I don't think there is more plagiarism than there has been historically, but it is probably easier to discover, and easier to publicise.'" — Alison Flood, Guardian
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Palp Fiction

2011-11-25T10:39:00.000-08:00

1st edition of TROPIC OF CANCER (1934)
From: Banned Novels

"The first thing that arises out of the nominations for this year's bad sex awards – the excruciating writing highlighted by the Literary Review each year – is just how fecund their writers' imaginations are. If they have done half the things they have ascribed to their characters, their spectacles must have steamed up.
There are agile tongues, rooms that begin to shake, warm wet caves, volcanic releases, moist meat, bottomless swamps of dead fish and yellow lilies in bloom and cellars filled with a heady store of wines and spirits emitting wafts of gaseous bouquets. And that is before you get to massaging, kneading, stretching, rubbing, pinching, flicking, feathering, licking, kissing and gently biting – which occurs in just one sentence thanks to David Guterson.
Now in their 19th year, the awards have shortlisted 12 authors before the presentation next month, among them some of the most distinguished – or at least bestselling – authors in the world. They come from Britain, the US, Hungary, Japan and Australia." — Stephen Bates, Guardian
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Market Positioning

2011-11-24T09:10:00.000-08:00

"Helen DeWitt’s first novel, The Last Samurai, was published in 2000 to almost universally rapturous praise. It sold a hundred thousand copies in English. If literary publishing were a rational enterprise, even along narrowly capitalistic lines, DeWitt would have no trouble finding a permanent home at a major house. After all, whatever else we might say about her excellence as a writer, DeWitt sells.
   But publishing is far from rational, and so we have had to wait eleven years for her second novel, Lightning Rods. Adding to the absurdity of this long wait, DeWitt completed a draft of this book in 1999, before she even sold The Last Samurai, but was unable to publish it until it was released from its contract with Miramax Books, which had the option to publish it, chose not to, and yet would not allow the book to be released elsewhere. [...]
   Whereas DeWitt often talks about fiction as if it were a vehicle for presenting exciting ideas, the tendency of American culture is toward relaxation. Since the sixties, Americans have systematically de-formalized themselves, on the tacit theory that formality is equivalent to authority, and that authority is, more or less, equivalent to authoritarian oppression. [...]
   We can already see why the good folks at Miramax Books might not have known what to do with Lightning Rods. After all, if the typical American reader doesn’t want to be forced to learn about Greek, Japanese, or Arabic on the beach, it seems quite unlikely that she — and overwhelmingly the American reader is female — will want to read about the frankly bizarre sexual fantasies of a loser who lives in a trailer park. Which is a shame, because Joe’s fantasies — and what his fantasies inspire — get uproariously funny.
   In short order, Joe derives a scheme, inspired by his fetish, to help solve the problem of workplace sexual harassment. Joe will hire women to pose as regular workers — he calls these women Lightning Rods — who will make themselves available for anonymous intercourse according to a computer-determined algorithm. To ensure their anonymity, Joe’s Lightning Rods place their lower bodies through a hole knocked out of a wall separating the disability toilet cubicles in adjoining restrooms. After developing the system, hiring his first few Lightning Rods, and finding his first client — the description of this process takes considerable narrative space — Lightning Rods proceeds to describe in meticulous detail the way Joe transforms his sexual fantasy into a massively profitable business. Joe must conquer reluctant clients, emotionally distraught Lightning Rods, conservative Christians, and, in time, the FBI. All predictably fall to Joe’s entrepreneurial verve, his infallibly optimistic belief that he is making the world a better place."
— Lee Konstantinou, Los Angeles Review of Books
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What Child Is This?

2011-11-23T09:07:00.000-08:00

"[Beverly Lyon] Clark [in her book Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America (2003)] argues, and demonstrates, that our [...] fairly firm distinction between adult literature and children’s literature did not exist in 19th century America (probably not in the UK either). Writers would write for both children and adults, the reviewers would review (what we now think of as) children’s books as well as (what we now think of as) adult books. And magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly assumed their audience included children as well as adults. As one case study, Clark considers Mark Twain, in particular, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. These days we think of Huckleberry Finn as an adult book and Tom Sawyer as a boy’s book. But that distinction was not a firm one for Twain and his contemporaries. In his own statements on both books Twain vacillated in his sense of his audience and so did his reviewers. Similarly, Louisa May Alcott and her audience did not think of Little Women as a specifically girl’s book. It was a book that could be read with pleasure and edification by both children and adults. In fact, at the time, some considered it a mark of excellence that a book was accessible to children as well as to adults.
The move to differentiate the adult from the children’s audience came in the first and second quarters of the 20th century and succeeded so well that we now assume it without question. And children’s literature has been, for the most part, marginalized.
Clark devotes her final chapter to Disney. She makes the point that prior to the 40s Disney and his work was quite highly regarded in intellectual circles. Some even thought his cartoons were more aesthetically significant than contemporary live-action films. She also points out that anyone going to the movies assumed they would see cartoons before the feature. It didn’t make any difference whether the feature was a light-hearted comedy or a serious drama, you’d see cartoons first. Cartoons became children’s fare, she argues, after WWII and as a side-effect of TV, which made it easier to develop niche audiences." — Bill Benzon, The Valve
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"[...] Now, if you look at some of our most famous cartoon characters--such as Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse--you'll see that they have characteristics that the minstrel had: white gloves, wide eyes and a huge painted-on mouth, and a complete lack of respect for authority. (This was truer of early Mickey of the late 1920s and early 1930s than it was of later Mickey.)"— Nicholas Sammond, author of Babes in Tomorrowland, in conversation with Henry Jenkins, Confessions of an Aca-Fan
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"Who made the normal American child? In Babes in Tomorrowland [: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 (2005)] Nicholas Sammond traces a path back to the sources of that child—one that links Margaret Mead to the Mickey Mouse Club and behaviorism to Bambi—to demonstrate that the production of a generically normal American child in the early twentieth century was as much the work of popular media as it was of developmental science. To locate that child, Sammond draws on popular child-rearing manuals and periodicals, mainstream sociological texts, and advertisements that targeted a burgeoning youth market. He also examines the films, TV programs, and ancillary products—everything from milk bottles, to school supplies, to wristwatches—of Walt Disney Productions, and the publicity Disney used to pitch its products. Sammond delineates the institutional and discursive ties that bound industry to science to the home, revealing a child that was as much the creature of popular media as the victim of its excesses." — University of Toronto Faculty Bookshelf
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"China Miéville is perhaps the current generation's finest writer of science fantasy [...]" — Michael Moorcock

2011-11-22T03:11:00.000-08:00

"[...] Míeville has become renown for the deft manner in which he uses the fantastic to explore such real world concerns as abuses of government power, international relations (not always with human beings), and the role of the subaltern in industrialized society. Míeville is no apologist for his love of genre fiction and much of the pleasure in his work comes from his engagement with familiar topoi of pulp tradition, his subversions of certain clichés, and his willingness to blur the perceived boundaries between various modes of genre fiction. The Scar weaved monsters and quantum theory into the maritime adventure story, while his Hugo award-winning The City and The City fused Hammett-style roman noir with Phildickian weirdness to explore the ways in which city dwellers can be trained to studiously ignore other communities. The recent novel Kraken is an affectionate parody of Lovecraftian apocalypse narratives. In his newest work, Embassytown, Míeville eschews the generic hybridity that has become his calling card in favor of tackling what is arguably the most traditional of science fiction subgenres: the Space Opera. Unsurprisingly, he makes it his own – crafting a narrative that is at once intellectually rigorous and intoxicatingly strange.[...]
The Ariekei also are a truly marvelous invention, precisely because they feel so alien to the human reader. Their Language, their morphology, their conception of the world around them seems so foreign that it takes a concentrated effort for the reader to get his or her mind around it initially. To create a race of extraterrestrials that doesn’t feel like a thinly disguised caricature of an Earth culture is a significant accomplishment and, in this case, a virtuoso feat of imaginative prowess." — Andre Shephard, The New Inquiry
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“Beat Poets, not beat poets.”

2011-11-21T07:21:00.000-08:00

From: Museum of American Poetics Store

"[...] Once the cordon formed, the deputy sheriffs pointed their truncheons toward the crowd. It looked like the oldest of military maneuvers, a phalanx out of the Trojan War, but with billy clubs instead of spears. The students were wearing scarves for the first time that year, their cheeks rosy with the first bite of real cold after the long Californian Indian summer. The billy clubs were about the size of a boy’s Little League baseball bat. My wife was speaking to the young deputies about the importance of nonviolence and explaining why they should be at home reading to their children, when one of the deputies reached out, shoved my wife in the chest and knocked her down. [...]
   My wife [Brenda Hillman, b. 1951] bounced nimbly to her feet. I tripped and almost fell over her trying to help her up, and at that moment the deputies in the cordon surged forward and, using their clubs as battering rams, began to hammer at the bodies of the line of students. It was stunning to see. They swung hard into their chests and bellies. Particularly shocking to me — it must be a generational reaction — was that they assaulted both the young men and the young women with the same indiscriminate force. If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines. [...]
   NONE of the police officers invited us to disperse or gave any warning. We couldn’t have dispersed if we’d wanted to because the crowd behind us was pushing forward to see what was going on. The descriptor for what I tried to do is 'remonstrate.' I screamed at the deputy who had knocked down my wife, 'You just knocked down my wife, for Christ’s sake!' A couple of students had pushed forward in the excitement and the deputies grabbed them, pulled them to the ground and cudgeled them, raising the clubs above their heads and swinging. The line surged. I got whacked hard in the ribs twice and once across the forearm. [...] — Robert Haas, The New York Times
   "Robert Hass [b. 1941] is a professor of poetry and poetics at the University of California, Berkeley, and former poet laureate of the United States. [His wife Brenda Hillman is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at Saint Mary's College in Moraga, California.]"
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"[...] Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood." — Gawker
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Book Mavens Everywhere…

2011-11-19T11:28:00.000-08:00

"Living the Dream." Several boxes of books commemorating Martin Luther
King Jr. found in the Detroit Public Schools’ Roosevelt Warehouse, where tens
of thousands of other textbooks and countless other supplies have sat rotting
for more than two decades. — Text & photos: James Griffioen, Vice

"On Monday, November 7, 2011 Mayor Michael Bloomberg was in attendance at one of New York City’s top cultural and social events: The New York Public Library’s Library Lions gala. The individuals honored as Library Lions are, according to nypl.org, 'distinguished individuals who have made significant cultural and educational achievements to increase our understanding of the world around us.' The 2011 honorees included such literary luminaries as Tony Kushner, Isabel Wilkerson, Jonathan Franzen, Stacy Schiff, Ian McEwan, and the songwriter Natalie Merchant.
On Monday, November 15, 2011 the books of many of those Library Lions mingled with broken shelves, ripped tents, and smashed computers in the aftermath of the raid on Zuccotti Park. The raid, authorized by Mayor Bloomberg, saw, among other things, the OWS People’s Library thrown in the trash. Perhaps, as Mayor Bloomberg enjoyed the library festivities on the 7th he was already planning the action that would destroy a different library on the 15th, or perhaps he was just enjoying the photo opportunity as he exchanged pleasantries with the authors who he held in high enough esteem as to have their works tossed into garbage trucks."
— Xeni Jardin, bOING bOING
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Jesmyn Ward's "Salvage The Bones" Wins National Book Award

2011-11-18T08:22:00.000-08:00

"The story of a poor black family struggling to weather the horrors of Hurricane Katrina has won the National Book Award for fiction.
   Jesmyn Ward's second novel Salvage the Bones beat books including Téa Obrecht's Orange prize-winning title The Tiger's Wife to win the prestigious US prize, worth $10,000 (£6,300) and won in the past by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon. Set in Mississippi, in the coastal town of Bois Sauvage just before Katrina hits, Salvage the Bones tells of Esch, 15 and pregnant, and her three brothers as they search for food and try to protect each other.

   Ward, who was in Mississippi herself when Katrina hit, wanted to write 'about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South,' the Associated Press reported. Her own experience of the hurricane was 'traumatic … to say the least,' she added. 'We went out into the storm, sheltered in our cars for hours, were denied shelter by a white family who told us we could sit outside in their field but couldn't shelter in their house, and then made our way to an intersection where another family, again white, took us in,' she said." — Alison Flood, Guardian
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"Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve, a dramatic account of the Renaissance era rediscovery of the Latin poet Lucretius, won for nonfiction Wednesday. The poetry prize went to Nikki Finney's Head Off & Split, summation of African-American history from slavery to Katrina, while Thanhhai Lai's Inside Out & Back Again, the story of a Vietnamese family in Alabama, won for young people's literature at a time when the state is reconsidering sweeping anti-immigration laws that went into effect in September." — Huffington Post
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Divine Comedy

2011-11-17T15:39:00.000-08:00

From: Cover Browser

"Germany's biggest Catholic-owned publishing house has been rocked by disclosures that it has been selling thousands of pornographic novels with titles such as Sluts Boarding School and Lawyer's Whore with the full assent of the country's leading bishops.
   The revelations made in the publishing-industry newsletter Buchreport concern Weltbild, a company with an annual €1.7bn (£1.5bn) turnover and 6,400 employees. It is Germany's largest bookseller after Amazon and wholly owned by the Catholic Church.
   Buchreport revealed that Weltbild's massive assortment of titles available to customers online includes some 2,500 'erotic' books with unmistakably lewd titles including Call Me Slut!, Take Me Here, Take Me Now! and Lawyer's Whore, to name a few. The publisher's website also pictures the titles' lascivious dust jackets that feature colour photographs of scantily clad women in high heels and erotic underwear."— Tony Paterson, The Independent
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"PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island (AP) The ballad 'Danny Boy' has long been played at funerals, wakes and memorial services, its mournful strains conjuring up images of Ireland’s green pastures and wind-swept hills. New York Fire Chief Peter Ganci, killed in the World Trade Center attack, actor Carroll O’Connor and John F. Kennedy Jr. all were laid to rest with the plaintive melody.
   So when the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence banned 'Danny Boy' and other secular songs from funeral Masses, it raised the ire of Irish-Americans. 'I want Danny Boy sung at my funeral Mass and, if it isn’t, I’m going to get up and walk out,' retired Pawtucket police officer Charlie McKenna wrote in April to The Providence Visitor" — Anorak
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Genre-slumming

2011-11-17T08:53:00.000-08:00

"A literary novelist writing a genre novel is like an intellectual dating a porn star. It invites forgivable prurience: What is that relationship like? Granted the intellectual’s hit hanky-panky pay dirt, but what’s in it for the porn star? Conversation? Ideas? Deconstruction?
With the human odd couples, the answer stays behind closed doors (until divorce yields the tremulous interview or hemorrhaging memoir), but with their novelistic analogues, it’s all ours for less than $30.
   [...] The novel is set chiefly in Manhattan, some time after a plague has turned a majority of the world’s population into zombies (or, as Whitehead calls them, 'skels,' short for 'skeletons'). Skels are of two kinds. They’re either dozily rabid predators reduced to a monolithic imperative — eat living flesh — or they’re 'stragglers,' harmless catatonics piteously stuck at their former posts.
   Geographically, 'Zone One' is everything south of Canal Street, a barriered region largely cleared of the undead by the military. Local authority is the brass at 'Fort 'Wonton' in Chinatown, while national administrative power lies with the new provisional government in Buffalo. Civilization is attempting a comeback. According to propaganda, the 'American Phoenix' is rising, thanks to frail corporate sponsorship and therapy for those suffering from P.A.S.D. (post-apocalyptic stress disorder). There’s an Orwellian slogan, 'We Make Tomorrow!' (which I heartily wish didn’t remind me of 'Yes We Can') and a new morale-boosting anthem: “Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar? (Theme From ‘Reconstruction’).” There are also 'sweepers' teams of quasi-military volunteers who go in after the Marines to pick off any stragglers the primary purge might have missed.
   [...] There will be grumbling from self-appointed aficionados of the undead (Sir, I think the author will find that zombies actually . . .) and we’ll have to listen for another season or two to critics batting around the notion that genre-slumming is a recent trend, but none of that will hurt Zone One, which is a cool, thoughtful and, for all its ludic violence, strangely tender novel, a celebration of modernity and a pre-emptive wake for its demise. If this is the intellectual and the porn star, they look pretty good together. For my money, they have a long and happy life ahead of them."
— Glen Duncan, The New York Times (Sunday Book Review)

Pilfered Not Stirred

2011-11-16T11:39:00.000-08:00

In 2007, [Quentin] Rowan self-published a collection of short stories. Using this presumably as his calling card, he signed a book deal with Little, Brown for a series of spy novels starring a James Bond-like hero, Jonathan Chase. He used the pseudonym QR Markham.
   In retrospect, that was a warning - the name had been copied from the pseudonym used by Kingsley Amis for his own James Bond novel.
   The first book in the series, The Assassin of Secrets (sic), appeared at the beginning of November this year. It had a print run of 6,500, plus a deal to publish an edition in the UK. It was launched at a spy-themed party at [Brooklyn bookstore] Spoonbill & Sugartown. The book received a starred review from Kirkus (a 'dazzling, deftly controlled debut'), while Publishers Weekly said that while it 'strays far enough into James Bond territory to border on parody," the book was praised for its 'fine writing. [...] The obvious Ian Fleming influence just adds to the appeal,' it concluded.
   A week later, The Assassin of Secrets (sic) was dramatically pulled from bookstores after a James Bond forum spotted that passages in the book were copied word-for-word from prominent spy novels. The forum discussion was seen by the author Jeremy Duns, who was quoted praising the work on the back of the book. He immediately contacted the book's publishers.
   The book's withdrawal led to a brief spike in sales, and an in-depth confirmation of the charges by Edward Champion on the website Reluctant Habits, who found copied passages in the text from several spy novels including The Tears of Autumn [by Charles McCarry], and James Bond novels License Renewed and For Special Services.
   Champion also discovered that Rowan's stories for BOMB, The Paris Review, and a piece he wrote for us all contained heavily plagiarized material.

[In an interview with Jeremy Duns, Quentin Rowan says:]
"[...] things really got out of hand for me. I just didn't feel capable of writing the kinds of scenes and situations that were asked of me in the time allotted and rather than saying I couldn't do it, or wasn't capable, I started stealing again. I didn't want to be seen as anything other than a writing machine, I guess." [...]
   I rarely slept and mostly felt like an actor on a stage in my day to day life. Signing books made me feel deathly ashamed, around so many good people, but I'd already thrown the dice so long ago by that point I felt there was nothing I could do but play the out the awful pantomime... I can only compare it to other kinds of obsession or addictive behavior like gambling or smoking: in that there was no need to do it initially, but once I'd started I couldn't stop and my mind kept finding ways to rationalize the behavior. Even though, somewhere deep in the chasms of my thick brain, I knew it would destroy me."
— Andrew Losowsky, Huffington Post
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"[Quentin Rowan as Q.R.] Markham, Page 13 [of Assassin of Secrets] : 'The boxy, sprawling Munitions Building which sat near the Washington Monument and quietly served as I-Division’s base of operations was a study in monotony. Endless corridors connecting to endless corridors. Walls a shade of green common to bad cheese and fruit. Forests of oak desks separated down the middle by rows of tall columns, like concrete redwoods, each with a number designating a particular work space.'

Taken from [James] Bamford, Page 1 [of Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency] : 'In June 1930, the boxy, sprawling Munitions Building, near the Washington Monument, was a study in monotony. Endless corridors connecting to endless corridors. Walls a shade of green common to bad cheese and fruit. Forests of oak desks separated down the middle by rows of tall columns, like concrete redwoods, each with a number designating a particular work space.' ”
— Edward Champion, Reluctant Habits
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“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” ― Ray Bradbury

2011-11-15T12:34:00.000-08:00

There is something viscerally disturbing about the destruction of books; especially when it is perpetrated by people wearing uniforms. Read about it here...

"I ran into the library and let the handful of people sleeping in there know what was happening, then unlocked and pulled the OWS POETRY ANTHOLOGY from the shelves and strapped them to my body, then climbed atop a table in the park and read poems from the anthology. Immediately, the people of Liberty Plaza launched into action, a group of about a hundred protesters took to the kitchen and U-Locked/tied themselves down. After reading the third poem, the cops began to enter the park and I realized that I would most likely lose all of my possessions so I quickly grabbed a bag of my personal stuff, ran into the library and dumped a bunch of boxes of books onto the floor to make the cleaning up more difficult for the cops then ran my personal stuff and a few amazing books to a friends house around the corner." — Stephen Boyer, Occupy Wall Street Library Worker (in the Huffington Post)
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From: Encyclopedia Britannica Blog

"Over my desk hangs a large print of a photograph [see above] taken in London during World War II. It is of the library of Holland House [...] One night in September 1940 the house was largely destroyed by German bombs. But the library – perhaps fortified by the weight of those books, perhaps (let us imagine) defiant of the book-burning Nazi regime – stood. The roof fell in, great beams hung precariously, but the shelves were mostly intact and the books remained quietly and neatly arranged in their proper order.
In the photograph, three men stand quietly at those shelves, seemingly oblivious of the rubble all about them. They are hatted, of course – two homburgs and a fedora – which brings home to the viewer the ambiguity of their situation: Are they indoors or out? One of the men is looking into a book; a second is just about to pull one from its shelf; and the third is simply scanning the spines arrayed before him.
[...] it is an image of respect, all the more remarkable for the circumstance. It is respect for learning, for what man has achieved since moving out of the trees and the caves, expressed all the more poignantly amidst the evidence of the fragility of that achievement." — Robert McHenry, Encyclopedia Britannica Blog
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Estrangement in a Strange Land

2011-11-15T09:01:00.000-08:00

"I was up in Cheltenham this weekend at the Literature festival, where I chaired several events – including one with SF legend Brian Aldiss, still going strong at 86, and calling to mind in voice and appearance a benign, left-wing John Cleese. When asked by an audience member why he'd tackled the subject of state-endorsed torture in his 2007 novel, Harm, he explained the novel's political charge on the grounds that 'I really do believe that the people in charge at the minute are - well, shits.' Amen to that.
Anyway, my final event on Saturday was with SF-legend-in-the-making China Miéville, to discuss his latest novel, Embassytown. We talked about the novel for about half an hour (read it: it's excellent) before the conversation veered onto the evergreen territory of the Booker prize's wilful neglect of science fiction. It's a well-rehearsed argument (I went to an event at Cheltenham last year in which Miéville and John Mullan squared off entertainingly over it), but we ran down the familiar points: SF novels are generally sold not on their literary credentials but on the ideas they explore; the Booker is a genre (litfic) award itself, but just doesn't admit it; SF novels DO make it onto Booker shortlists (Never Let Me Go, Oryx and Crake) but once shortlisted they're not called science fiction any more (cf Kingsley Amis's oft-quoted distich: ' "SF's no good!" they bellow till we're deaf./ "But this looks good … Well, then, it's not SF!" ')."
— Sarah Crown, Guardian
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Out of Time, Out of Place

2011-11-15T08:32:00.000-08:00

"Irma Voth, the narrator of the Canadian writer Miriam Toews’s new novel, has a name that sounds as if she’s a plucky 19th-century heroine, and she has a life imported from another century as well. Irma is a Mennonite living on an isolated farm near the city of Chihuahua, Mexico, where her family fled from Canada after the death of Irma’s older sister.
'We live like ghosts,' Irma says of the Mennonites. This strict Christian sect has a history of abrupt departures after persecution by governments that grow tired of their quest to live, as Irma puts it, 'purely but somewhat out of context.' Nineteen-year-old Irma herself is now living completely out of context, having been expelled by her father for marrying a Mexican, who promptly disappeared. She lives alone in a house near her family, discouraged from talking to them, not quite sure how everything went so wrong. [...]
This is Toews’s fifth novel, and I wonder if she would be marketed as a writer of young adult fiction if she were to begin her career today, when that category has finally been recognized for its literary merit and appeal, even to adult readers. She writes with an instinctive grasp of the adolescent point of view, in which concepts like personal freedom and self- determination have the highest emotional charge and adults are powerful but slightly irrelevant beings. Her most celebrated novel, A Complicated Kindness, is narrated by another Mennonite teenager, who also rejects her repressive heritage and is forced to live by her own considerable wits. Like Irma Voth, it’s a sly, humorous but still distressing evocation of a young Mennonite’s predicament, which is your standard small-town adolescent crisis magnified by a thousand — depression thick in the air, attempts to navigate any aspect of one’s life systematically quashed, shame heaped upon any nonconformist behavior."
— Maria Russo, The New York Times
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Spineless Books

2011-11-14T13:01:00.000-08:00

"This cultural recession mirrors the economic downturn. Last month, on a visit to the US, I got a rare glimpse into the desperate conditions in which the contemporary writer must operate. Apparently, for at least one prominent literary agent, there is now only one rule, which can be expressed mathematically as 1/10, thus: 'A new novel should be summarised in a single sentence, and should stop dinner conversation for at least 10 minutes.' [...] It's the Ikea novel, shaped by the logic of 1/10. Ikea novels are the kind of fiction that comes direct from the factory, with no intercession of craftsmanship or artistry en route to the consumer. They are created by often talented writers, frantic to make a career, who have acquired a boxed-up fiction kit at a suburban outlet and assembled it in their spare time on the living room floor, with a construction manual in one hand, The Writers' & Artists' Yearbook in the other. [...]
The Ikea novel has all the things that fiction is supposed to have. It is competently written in a simulacrum of fine writing. It has character and situation, conflict and resolution. Somewhere you will find the 'arc of the narrative.' Under its highly painted metalwork there's probably an 'inciting incident' or two. Ikea-fiction writers know all about 'first-' or 'third-person' and 'unreliable' narrators. The latter are fashionable just now, because they can be used to explain away narrative cock-ups.
The thing that Ikea culture manufactures looks like fiction, sounds like fiction and even reads like fiction. There's just one problem: Ikea fiction is not original, and not distinctive, with no inner vision or humanity. It comes from a kit. It's a fake and can never be a work of art. How could it be? It was invented to please a market, and to make money. No wonder so many erstwhile novelists are turning to film and television." — Robert McCrum, Guardian
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Pulped Fiction

2011-11-14T08:32:00.000-08:00

From: Cover Browser

"In the spring of 1935, the famous novelist Maxwell Bodenheim crashed the New York City welfare office and begged for relief after five years of the Great Depression. His career had stalled, and Bodenheim hadn’t earned a dime since his final novels had flopped. He was working on a manuscript called Clear Deep Fusion, but he would never finish it. His visit to the relief office was his last stand before he was edited out of literary history.
   The New York Herald Tribune mocked Bodenheim’s ragged demonstration: 'he wore high shoes without laces, his shirt was dirty and the rest of his clothes needed cleaning and pressing. He was unshaven, very pale and his hair was mussed.' He brought along five Writers Union activists and a squad of reporters in an effort to inspire other writers to go public with their struggles to survive. One activist waved a sign that read 'starvation standards of Home Relief make real ghost writers.' During the thirties, the rate of newspaper closings rose to 48 percent and magazine advertising plunged 30 percent. Publishers Weekly noted book production had been slashed from nearly 211 million to 154 million books during that period: 57 million books evaporated into thin air.
   Bodenheim’s Slow Vision explored a miserable relationship during the Great Depression, showing the effects of unemployment on a young couple. I paid more than $50 for a copy at a rare books site; not because Bodenheim’s work is highly valued, but because it is nearly extinct. I’ve checked out every single Bodenheim book I could find at my local libraries. At the Los Angeles Public Library, the checkout sleeve for his poetry collection still held an obsolete computer punch card, the brittle cardboard only stamped once since 1930: May 15, 1981. I found more of his poetry in a rare archive of the New Masses magazine, whose 75-year-old pages crumble when you touch them. [...]
   The loss of these radical works is part of a larger loss for print culture, of course. In his book Double Fold, Nicholson Baker investigated the destruction of thousands of newspapers by libraries in a bid to create microfilm archives. In 1997, the San Francisco Library pulped 250,000 forgotten books to make room for computers and reading spaces, consigning works by authors like Bodenheim to oblivion. A group of rogue librarians bucked these orders, stashing books in safe nooks and stamping them with imaginary checkouts to keep them in circulation. They called it 'guerrilla librarianship.' In 1997, The Atlantic Monthly defined the term as 'the use of surreptitious measures by librarians determined to resist the large-scale "deaccessioning" of rarely used books … [It] can also involve such tactics as transferring endangered books from one department to another and hiding books in lockers, to be reintroduced to the collection.' "
— Jason Boog, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Read more about Maxwell Bodenheim here...
and here...

2011-11-13T08:03:00.000-08:00

From: Cynical-C

"After some 30 years of proselytizing about evolution to Christian believers, [Francisco J. Ayala] the esteemed evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, has honed his arguments to a fine point. He has stories and examples at the ready, even a shock tactic or two at his fingertips. One out of five pregnancies ends in spontaneous miscarriage, he often reminds audiences. Next he will pointedly ask, as in an interview with U.S. Catholic magazine last year, 'If God explicitly designed the human reproductive system, is God the biggest abortionist of them all?'; Through such examples, he explains, 'I want to turn around their arguments.' [...]

From: AbeBooks

But Ayala thinks that scientists who attack religion and ridicule the faithful—most notably, Richard Dawkins of the University of Oxford—are making a mistake. It is destructive and gives fodder to the preachers who insist followers must choose either Darwin or God. Often students in Ayala’s introductory biology class tell him that they will answer test questions as he wishes, but in truth they reject evolution because of their Christian beliefs. Then, a couple of years later, when they have learned more science, they decide to abandon their religion. The two, students seem to think, are incompatible.[...]"
— Sally Lehrman, Scientific American
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"Layers of Tissue"

2011-11-12T11:33:00.000-08:00

"Alice Munro is so routinely called one of the greatest living short story writers that the accolade risks dulling the brilliance of her work, and certainly obscures its strangeness. While the typical setting of her stories is her native small-town southwestern Ontario – although numerous exceptions can be found among her 12 collections and one sort-of-novel – their content is anything but prosaic. Munro slices through domestic surfaces into the emotional and psychological turmoil beneath. As one of her narrators says of her hometown, 'People's lives in Jubilee, as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable, deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.'

Munro is, in Coral Ann Howells's description, an artist of indeterminacy, a trait on which she pins her inability to write novels. She explained to the Paris Review in 1994 that, 'I have all these disconnected realities in my own life, and I see them in other people's lives. That was one of the problems – why I couldn't write novels, I never saw things hanging together any too well.' She actively resists definite conclusions in her fiction, telling Brick in 1991 that 'I want the story to exist somewhere so that in a way it's still happening, or happening over and over again. I don't want it to be shut up in the book and put away – oh well, that's what happened.' "— Chris Power, Guardian
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Buy Alice Munro books here...

2011-11-11T09:24:00.000-08:00

From: Wikipedia; The Canadian Encyclopedia; Postal History Corner

"[John] McCrae was born in McCrae House in Guelph, Ontario [Canada] to Lieutenant-Colonel David McCrae and Janet Simpson Eckford; he was the grandson of Scottish immigrants. He attended the Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute and became a member of the Guelph militia regiment.[...]
   When the United Kingdom declared war on Germany at the start of World War I, Canada, as a Dominion within the British Empire, declared war as well. McCrae was appointed as a field surgeon in the Canadian artillery and was in charge of a field hospital during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915.
   McCrea's friend and former student, Lt. Alexis Helmer, was killed in the battle, and his burial inspired the poem, In Flanders Fields, which was written on May 3, 1915 and first published in the magazine Punch.[...]
   From June 1, 1915 McCrae was ordered away from the artillery to set up No. 3 Canadian General Hospital at Dannes-Camiers near Boulogne-sur-Mer, northern France. C.L.C. Allinson reported that McCrae 'most unmilitarily told [me] what he thought of being transferred to the medicals and being pulled away from his beloved guns. His last words to me were: "Allinson, all the goddamn doctors in the world will not win this bloody war: what we need is more and more fighting men." '
   In Flanders Fields appeared anonymously in Punch on December 8, 1915, but in the index to that year McCrae was named as the author. The verses swiftly became one of the most popular poems of the war, used in countless fund-raising campaigns and frequently translated (a Latin version begins In agro belgico...). In Flanders Fields was also extensively printed in the United States, which was contemplating joining the war [...] " —Wikipedia

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields, the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; wait and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead, short days ago,
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields!

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands, we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields!

- John McCrea (May 3, 1915)

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Smoking Jackets

2011-11-10T11:50:00.000-08:00

More unfortunate cover choices here...
and here...

Amazon is not just a river. Neither is denial.

2011-11-10T07:02:00.000-08:00

From: Wikia Brazil

"The news that Amazon is preparing to release more than 100 books this fall was predictably greeted in doomsday tones. 'Amazon.com has taught readers that they do not need bookstores. Now it is encouraging writers to cast aside their publishers,' lamented the Times. The mood was summed up by Richard Curtis, an agent and e-book publisher who was one of the few publishing professionals willing to speak on the record. 'Everyone’s afraid of Amazon,' he said. 'If you’re a publisher, one day you wake up and Amazon is competing with you too. And if you’re an agent, Amazon may be stealing your lunch because it is offering authors the opportunity to publish directly and cut you out.' The trouble isn’t just that Amazon is stealing some money-making authors. It’s that 'the company is gnawing away at the services that publishers, critics and agents used to provide.'
Note the past tense. If traditional book publishing is failing to provide services that once were standard, someone will inevitably step in to fill the vacuum. There are three major steps in publishing and selling a book, and in each of them Amazon is offering a service that has been neglected by the mainstream: [...]"
— Ruth Franklin, The New Republic
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