"all things arise from a swerve"

"Books. They have an almost alarming corporeality. Stephen Greenblatt, esteemed Harvard professor and founder of New Historicism, tells us that between the eras of papyrus and paper, books were often made of the pumice-smoothed skins of sheep, goats, deer, or, most luxuriously, of an aborted calf.
     The act of writing required rulers, awls, fine pens, and weights to keep the surfaces flat. Ink was a mix of soot, water, and tree gum; it was revised with knives, razors, brushes, rags, and page-restoring mixtures of milk, cheese, and lime. Squirming black creatures called bookworms liked to eat these pages, along with wool blankets and cream cheese. In the silence of monastery libraries, even the books’ contents were indicated by bodily gestures. Monks copying pagan books requested them by scratching their ears like dogs with fleas, or, if the book were particularly offensive, shoving two fingers in their mouths, as if gagging. In Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, these objects, offensive or sacred, are the primary players. [...]
     The book’s central character is a six-volume, two-millennia-old poem, Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, that imagines a world made of crashing, combining atoms, denies life after death, prescribes the pursuit of pleasure as the rational goal of individuals and societies, and suggests that all things arise from a swerve — a slight and random deviation from course. [...]
     On the Nature of Things was, and is, brilliant. Lucretius, who intended the poetry to be the coat of sugar on the medicine of his philosophy, writes with astonishing grace about a world made of atoms, the ordinariness of humans, and the delusion of religion. Despite being a fundamentally atheistic text — Lucretius only allows a god or gods who couldn’t care less for people and our lonely prayers and sins — the text imagines the world as a poem to Venus. Lucretius imagines all those couplings and decouplings of atoms, as endlessly and wonderfully erotic. [...]"
— Swati Pandey, Los Angeles Review of Books
Read more...

Diagnosing Literature

"Plucky, ailing Tiny Tim is one of the most enduring characters to come out of Charles Dickens' 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. But Dickens never explains why Tiny Tim wears leg braces and uses a crutch, nor does he make clear what will kill the young boy if the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge doesn't change his ways. [...]
     Tiny Tim's life in cramped, polluted London would have set him up for both rickets and tuberculosis, [Dr. Russell] Chesney said. At the time, 60 percent of children of working-class London families had rickets, brought on by poor nutrition and lack of sunlight. (London's coal-choked skies blocked the sun's ultraviolet light that helps the body synthesize vitamin D.)
     At the same time, half of working-class kids had signs of tuberculosis, Chesney reported Monday (March 5) in the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. Tiny Tim's rickets could have been reversed — and his tuberculosis improved — by sunshine, a better diet and cod liver oil, a supplement rich in vitamin D, Chesney said."
— Huffington Post
Read more...

"It's tough to pin down the exact personality traits of Sherlock Holmes, since his story has been recycled in so many incarnations. He's the most-portrayed fictional character in the world, running the gamut from Basil Rathbone playing a jolly English gentleman who fights Nazis to Robert Downey Jr.'s Victorian Rain Man/MMA fighter. But there are some key characteristics in the original Arthur Conan Doyle version that tend to crop up again and again, and they all indicate a severe case of Asperger's. [...]
     The first thing to keep in mind is that the character isn't just portrayed as being really smart -- he is obsessed with certain subjects and totally excludes all others. In one of the Holmes stories, A Study in Scarlet, he doesn't know that the Earth revolves around the sun (because, he says, the information doesn't have any effect on his everyday life). These uneven obsessions with random topics -- in Holmes' case, things like tobacco ashes and regional soil consistency -- are not signs of an enthusiast; they are symptoms of a disorder. Or, as the Yale Child Study Center puts it, Asperger's sufferers show '...a narrow range of capacities for memorizing lists or trivial information, calendar calculation, visual-spatial skills such as drawing, or musical skills involving a perfect pitch or playing a piece of music after hearing it only once.'"
— Chris Radomile, Amanda Miller, Cracked.com
Read more...

"It was not until the 1970s and 1980s, in two essays, that any attempt was made to account for Holden [Caulfield, the 16-year-old protagonist of author J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye] in primarily psychological terms. E. H. Miller wrote in 1982 that 'most critics have tended to accept Holden's evaluation of the world as phony, when in fact his attitudes are symptomatic of a serious psychological problem.' Miller, 'instead of treating the novel as a commentary by an innocent young man rebelling against an insensitive world or as a study of a youth's moral growth,' tries to show that Holden's 'rebelliousness is his only means of dealing with his inability to come to terms with the death of his brother.'
     In contrast, the other psychoanalytic critic, James Bryan—who theorizes that Holden is ruled by a suppressed incest wish directed toward his ten-year-old sister, Phoebe—does not conclude that Holden's insights are undermined by his having psychological difficulties. The psychological approach, then, though it insists on a fairly serious diagnosis of Holden, does not definitively establish the grounds either for dismissal or endorsement of his social critique. What it does establish is that Holden's observations and his mental state are manifestly related to one another. [...]"
— Peter Shaw, Literature Resources Center
Read more...

epulp fiction

"Jim 'Lucky' Peters was in Jamaica getting a colonoscopy from a Rastafarian proctologist, when his cell phone started buzzing"
— first words of Vegas Moon by John Locke
Read more...

"Kentucky novelist John Locke is the first self-published author to sell more than a million digital books on Amazon.com. His 'Donovan Creed' series, about a former CIA assassin, has captivated an audience largely comprised of women over age 45, who eagerly shell out 99 cents per book. Call him a best-selling late bloomer: Locke, 61, published his first novel three years ago. [...]
     Locke is an author that readers either adore or detest, judging by the comments on amazon.com, which range from: 'sassy, irreverent and totally captivating!' to 'preposterous, juvenile, appallingly bad.' Locke shrugs it off: 'You have to polarize people to develop serious fans,' he said. '(My books) are not for everybody; but the people who love one book read all the books.' As for those critics: 'I sold insurance door to door for a living. What are you going to say to me that hurts my feelings?'
     By Locke's unofficial count, 70 percent of his readers are women, and three-quarters are 45 or older. Why? 'Donovan Creed is enormously flawed,' he said. 'I think the reason women like this character is because they feel with the right influence he's utterly salvageable—like the big dog you find at the pound. He tears up your house and your yard and just when you're about to take him back, he saves your life.'
— Laura Rowley, Huffington Post
Read more..

"Three of the books on the List were written by the same author, John Locke. Locke’s book, Saving Rachel, was the first Indie book in history to hit #1 on Amazon/Kindle. In total, he has sold more than 875,000 downloads since January. March book sales of 369,115 on Kindle alone means that approximately every 7 seconds, 24 hours a day, a John Locke book was downloaded somewhere in the world. Locke expects to pass the one million sales mark for Kindle by the end of May, something only three other authors in history have achieved: Stieg Larsson, James Patterson, and Nora Roberts."
— IndieReader
Read more...

Peripatetic

Wallace Stevens (circa 1931) from: 4umi.com

"Hartford [Connecticut] is the place where the poet Wallace Stevens spent a substantial portion of his life, and he composed many of his verses — bizarrely exquisite blossoms unlike anything else in the canon of American literature — while migrating back and forth on foot between his comfortable house on Westerly Terrace and his office at an insurance company. [...]
     This particular perambulation, though, is, like Hartford itself, quite modest. There are no tour guides; in keeping with the private enterprise of creating poetry, you’re on your own. Along the walk there are pale slabs of Connecticut granite engraved with verses from one of Wallace Stevens’s most indelible poems, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
     That’s about it.
     Nevertheless, I found the walk to be deeply moving. After all, how often do we get to explore the cranial machinery of a literary titan by slipping into the groove of his daily commute?
     Stevens never learned to drive. Even though many of his neighbors had no idea what he was up to, he would amble along Asylum Avenue methodically measuring the pace of his steps and murmuring phrases to himself — phrases that would become some of the most haunting lines in the English language."
— Jeff Gordinier, The New York Times
Read more...

"After a year, brain scans showed that among the walkers, the hippocampus had increased in volume by about 2 percent on average; in the others, it had declined by about 1.4 percent. Since such a decline is normal in older adults, 'a 2 percent increase is fairly significant,' said the lead author, Kirk Erickson, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh. Both groups also improved on a test of spatial memory, but the walkers improved more."
— Paula Span, The New York Times
Read more...

Sounds Fabulous... Announcing the Lineup of Authors for This Year's Elora Writers' Festival

“There’s something about being read to that goes much deeper than—just reading the words off the page,” she said. “Does that make any sense?” I nodded, because it did make sense. I was chatting with one of our audience members and I took her words to heart—our audience is a very thoughtful crowd. She had tapped into something that is fundamental to the success of Writers’ Festivals everywhere—and especially the Elora Writers’ Festival.
     Being read to, say, on a warm, late spring afternoon by some of the most entertaining writers in the country, then plied with wine and appetizers and gentle jazz; then joining the authors in a relaxing yet stimulating few hours of dining and more drinking—a sumptuous meal provided by Frabert’s of Fergus—all of it garnished with rollicking conversation… it must have something going for it.
     The Elora Writers’ Festival has been celebrating fine Canadian writing in this way since 1994. In the past eighteen years the festival has presented authors (novelists, poets, biographers, journalists, screenwriters and playwrights) such as Alison Pick, Thomas King, Nino Ricci, Di Brandt, Andrew Pyper, Johanne Skibsrud, Linwood Barclay, Louise Penny, Paul Quarrington, Bonnie Burnard, Leon Rooke, Susan Coyne and Linden MacIntyre. Award winners and losers, veterans and novices—all of them with wonderful stories to tell.
     The Elora Writers’ Festival’s 19th season will again feature six outstanding Canadian authors reading from their works. The Festival will return once more to the Aboyne Hall of the Wellington County Museum, on Sunday, May 27, 2011, 1 - 4 p.m. with dinner to follow. Tickets for the Readings are: $15 in advance, $17.50 at the door, and $70 for the Readings and Dinner with the authors. All tickets are available from Roxanne’s Reflections Book and Card Shop, Fergus (519-843-4391).
     The exciting 2012 Festival lineup includes a 2011 TD Canadian Children's Literature Award winner, a Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award winner (two years in a row), two CBC Literary Contest winners, an acclaimed scriptwriter turned novelist and a historian who has turned our Canadian past into the stuff of bestsellers.

ERIN BOW was born in Des Moines and raised in Omaha. She began her professional life as a particle physicist, working briefly at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN), before trading science in for writing. She began as a poet and has published two volumes of poetry and a memoir. Ghost Maps is a biography in verse about a man who survived the Battle of the Bulge. Seal up the Thunder is a collection stories drawn from untold Bible stories. Her poetry won a CBC Literary Award.
     Erin has a lifelong love of fantasy and science fiction novels, and now writes them for young adults: her debut novel Plain Kate was shortlisted for The Canadian Library Association book of the year, the Sunburst Award for literature of the fantastic, and the Rocky Mountain Book award. It won one of Canada’s top prizes, the 2011 TD Canadian Children's Literary Award. She lives in Kitchener, Ontario with her husband, novelist James Bow, and their two children.
"Erin Bow is a published poet [...] and it comes through in her prose, which on occasion is nearly elegaic."
— Ariel Kroon, Blog404
Read more about Erin Bow here...

ROBERT HOUGH knew he wanted to become a writer back in high school. After graduating from Queen's University Hough worked briefly in advertising before becoming a journalist. He has written for such magazines as Toronto Life and Saturday Night. Hough's first novel,The Final Confession of Mabel Stark (2001), was originally intended to be merely a biography about a ribald 1920s lion tamer for Ringling Brothers Circus. Along with his subsequent novels, The Stowaway (2004) and The Culprits (2007), it has garnered accolades and awards from around the world. His most recent book Dr. Brinkley's Tower was published in February.
"Hough is a master storyteller, and he works here with a practised hand [...] "
— Steven Hayward, The Globe and Mail
"[...] this exuberant, freshly detailed story [The Stowaway] of globalized love and disorder is a bravura performance, one part literary ventriloquism and one part ripping narrative.”
— The Globe and Mail


KEN McGOOGAN is the author of four Canadian bestsellers about the search for the Northwest Passage, all of which have been published internationally. His awards include the Pierre Berton Award for History, the Writers’ Trust of Canada Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize and the Canadian Authors’ Association History Award.

     "How the Scots Invented Canada provides a pleasurable way to get to know many of the most colourful men and women in our history. [...] and your name doesn’t have to begin with Mc or Mac to savour this book."

— The Globe and Mail

KEITH ROSS LECKIE has worked in the film and television business as a dramatic scriptwriter for more than 30 years. His credits include CBC miniseries such as Everest!, Shattered City, Milgaard, The Arrow, and Lost in the Barrens. Coppermine (Penguin Books) is his second novel.
     "Part epic adventure, part romance, and part true-crime thriller, Coppermine is a character-driven story set in 1917 in the extremes of Canada's far north and the boom town of Edmonton."
— Penguin Books
     "[...] his scriptwriting craft show[s] in sure pacing and brisk scenes ending with snap! crackle! pop! buttons."
— Andrew Pyper, The Globe and Mail

HOWARD SHRIER was born and raised in Montreal. His critically acclaimed first novel, Buffalo Jump (introducing PI Jonah Geller) won the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel. The sequel, High Chicago, won the Arthur Ellis for Best Novel of 2009, making Howard the first author in the history of the awards to win both back to back. Both books have been optioned for television.

     "The third Jonah Geller novel [Boston Cream] is the best so far. Shrier has a great eye for location and a good ear for dialogue. Add those to solid characters and an intriguing plot and you have a winning combination for any mystery lover."
— Margaret Cannon, The Globe and Mail

CAROLYN SMART was born in England. She has lived in Ottawa, Winnipeg, Toronto, and for the last 25 years near Kingston. She is the author of five collections of poetry and a memoir. Her recent collection of poetry, Hooked - Seven Poems (Brick Books, 2009) has become a performance piece.
She is the founder of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and teaches Contemporary Canadian Poetry and Creative Writing at Queen's University.
     "[...] Hooked expresses the heart of darkness with an astonishing concision and acuity [... Smart] writes with a clarity and compassion that is powerfully
affecting."
— Anne Michaels


The EWF Writing Contest
The ninth annual Elora Writers’ Festival Writing Competition welcomes entries in its prose and poetry categories. Enter a short story (1500 words maximum) or poem (75 lines maximum) by April 27, 2012.
The contest is divided into four age categories: Category 1 (20 and older); Category 2 (15-19); Category 3 (12-14); and Category 4 (11 and under).
     Cash prizes will be awarded for first, second and third place in each category. The winners will be announced on the Festival blogsite on Saturday, May 26 at noon, and prizes will be presented to any winners attending the Elora Writers’ Festival on Sunday, May 27, 2012. Attendance at the Elora Writers’ Festival is not required in order to win a prize.
     The deadline for submission is Friday, April 27, 2012, and adult (Category 1) submissions should include a $15 entry fee (cheques can be made out to the Elora Writers’ Festival).
     Contact Contest Chair Jean Mills at jrmills@rogers.com for more information.
     For links to the contest flyer and answers to Frequently Asked Questions go here...

     Come prepared... buy and read all the books mentioned in this article here... 

The Albatros Automatic Bookmark

Albatros bookmarks from Oscar Lhermitte on Vimeo.

Writers En Bloc

From: Parker Pens

"Since when did being a writer become a career choice, with appropriate degree courses and pecking orders? Does this state of affairs make any difference to what gets written? [...]
     One of the myths about creative writing courses is that students go there to learn how to write. Such learning, when and if it takes place, is a felicitous by-product that may or may not have to do with the teaching; the process of settling down to write for a year would very probably yield results even without teachers. No, the student goes to the course to show himself to teachers who as writers are well placed (he imagines!) to help him present himself to the publishers. Most creative writing courses now offer classes on approaching agents and publishers and promoting one’s work. In short, preparing for the job.
     At the same time the perceived need for an expensive year-long creative writing course on the part of thousands of would-be writers affords paid employment to those older writers who have trouble making ends meet but are nevertheless determined to keep at it."
— Tim Parks, The New York Review of Books
Read more...