Imitation Chandler-Flattery-Slumming... or something

“In 1986 Irish critic Seamus Deane wrote that with the appearance of John Banville’s first few novels, 'It was obvious that an important new writer had arrived, although in what his importance consisted was not clear.' Today, after 24 novels, six plays and five screenplays, it still isn’t clear. After decades of being compared to Nabokov and comparing himself to Henry James, it now seems that the greatest living high-art novelist in the English language has set his sights a bit lower. With The TBlack-Eyed Blonde, Benjamin Black – Mr. Hyde to Banville’s Dr. Jekyll — seems to have completely taken over his personality. Black has now written eight of Banville’s last 10 novels. [...]

     How good is Banville’s impersonation of [Raymond] Chandler?  See for yourself: 'Her hair was blonde and her eyes were black, black and deep as a mountain lake, the lids exquisitely tapered at their outer corners. A blonde with black eyes – that’s not a combination you get very often.'
     Rhythm, cadence, punctuation perfect.
     'Sometimes I think I should lay off cigarettes for good, but if I did that, I’d have no hobbies except chess, and I keep beating myself at chess.'
      Sardonic, not too cynical, just fine.."
— Allen Barra, Salon
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“You just have to walk down Fifth Avenue to see what New York has become — it’s become an outlet mall for rich people.”

“Store window of Gotham Book Mart in New York which was decorated by
Marcel Duchamp in 1945 to promote Andre Breton’s book ‘Arcane 17′.”
From: vedenina

“When Sarah McNally, the owner of McNally Jackson bookstore in Lower Manhattan, set out to open a second location, she went to a neighborhood with a sterling literary reputation, the home turf of writers from Edgar Allan Poe to Nora Ephron: the Upper West Side.

     She was stopped by the skyscraper-high rents.
     'They were unsustainable,' Ms. McNally said. 'Small spaces for $40,000 or more each month. It was so disheartening.'
     Rising rents in Manhattan have forced out many retailers, from pizza joints to flower shops. But the rapidly escalating cost of doing business there is also driving out bookstores, threatening the city’s sense of self as the center of the literary universe, the home of the publishing industry and a place that lures and nurtures authors and avid readers.
     'Sometimes I feel as if I’m working in a field that’s disappearing right under my feet,' said the biographer and historian Robert Caro, who is a lifelong New Yorker.”
— Julia Bosman, The New York Times
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"Jarvis and Dundas—the epicentre of skid row"

“Hugh Garner’s second novel, Waste No Tears, hit drug store and train station spinner racks in July of 1950—then disappeared, never to see print again… until now. This is the latest release from Ricochet Books, a series of vintage noir mysteries edited by Brian Busby.

     The book's introduction, by Amy Lavender Harris, appears below:

Toronto the Good—the straitlaced 'City of Churches' where public drinking was prohibited and playground swings padlocked on Sundays—receives a far darker rendering in Hugh Garner’s Waste No Tears, a novel set in the bars, bedrooms and abortion clinics of Toronto’s skid row district. Pitched as 'The Novel about the Abortion Racket,' Waste No Tears peels back the city’s thin veneer of respectable civility to reveal a far seamier underside—albeit one with its own covert morality.”
— Kerry Clare, 49th Shelf
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EWF Short Story Contest – Deadline nearly here!

The submission deadline is fast approaching for the 2014 EWF Short Story Contest – it’s April 4, April 17 a much earlier deadline than our previous writing competitions – so we encourage local writers to follow the advice of Mary Heaton Vorse, who said:
“The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”

The link EWF Short Story Contest 2014 will give you all the details, but in brief, here’s what you need to know:

• Three categories (Adult 20+, Teen 15-19, Youth 14-under)

• One entry fee (Adults only, $15)

• Local writers (Wellington, Waterloo, Dufferin, Grey-Bruce, Halton, Hamilton-Wentworth counties/regions) 

•  Theme: Home (whatever that means to you – a place? a person? the name of your cat…?)

• And finally - Prizes! 

Send your submissions to:

EWF Short Story Contest

c/o Elora Arts Council

 Box 3084

 Elora ON N0B 1S0 

... by April 4, 2014.

Need more information?

Feel free to contact the Contest Chair, Jean Mills, at:

 EWFwritingcontest@gmail.com

“a mixture between David Beckham’s ‘Instinct’ and Ralph Lauren’s Polo Blue"

From: Etsy

“A very interesting study has recently taken place at the University of Liverpool where they got 450 mice and put them near different male and female urine samples. The result? They have found out that there is a certain chemical, or pheromone, found in male mouse urine that determines the preference of them to female mice over time, as in, it attracts them.
     And the Open Source Journal ‘BMC biology’ researchers have named the substance (in what has been called a 'bizarre homage') ’Darcin’ after Mr. Darcy himself, because of his power to draw in the women.
     But what would our Mr. Darcy smell like?”
— The Bennet Sisters
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Recidivism is a ten-letter word...

From: Omnilexica

“New rules introduced by the [UK] justice secretary ban anyone sending in books to prisoners. From now on, any man, woman or child in prison will not be able to receive a book from outside. This is part of an increasingly irrational punishment regime orchestrated by Chris Grayling that grabs headlines but restricts education or rehabilitation. The rules governing possessions of [UK] prisoners are arcane and not consistently applied by every prison. These new restrictions relate to a downgrading of the system of rewards and punishments, ostensibly designed to encourage prisoners to comply with prison rules. Yet the ban on receiving books is a blanket decision, so no matter how compliant and well behaved you are, no prisoner will be allowed to receive books from the outside.

     Last November new rules were introduced so that families are no longer permitted to send in small items to prisoners. Children are not allowed to send a homemade birthday card. Prisoners with a particular expertise or interests cannot receive magazines, no matter how innocuous it might be to want to know about bird watching or steam trains.”
— Frances Crook, politics.co.uk
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From Moldy Books to Bit Rot

From: GreatBigCanvas

“As man has progressed from prehistoric times to today, the fact of historic documentation has determined implicitly our sense of history and advancement. Prehistoric times were by definition prior to man's ability to record in any way what went on so that future generations could learn from the experiences and mistakes of the prior generations. Advancement went slowly because what little knowledge was generated was passed on verbally or in ways that obviously did not survive for very long.

     Only with the development of the ability to record facts and thoughts (thought to be best noted by the cuneiform writings of scribes tracking goods in early Mesopotamia if my history teacher's work serves me correctly) did information survive easily from generation to generation.
     What we are talking about is blandly called 'bit rot' in the digital world. This describes the loss of data due to any one of a number of phenomena but is typified by the inability of today's generation of computer systems to read the product of yesterday's and the extension of this to anything digital, including recordings of audio and video.”
— Richard Pitt, The Digital Rag
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“Somewhere in a cobwebby corner of my computer's hard disk are a few manuscripts I wrote 15 years ago on my first PC. The word-processing software I used then was grandly named The Final Word. It was anything but. I've gone through a dozen word processors since then, and nearly as many computers. To keep older documents accessible, I've had to transfer and transform them repeatedly, from one disk to the next and from one file format to another. […]
     One cause for worry among archivists is the impermanence of digital storage media. In this respect civilization has been going downhill ever since Mesopotamia. Paper documents cannot match the longevity of the Sumerians' clay tablets, and magnetic media seem to be even more evanescent than paper. That's disturbing news, and yet I suspect that relatively few disks or tapes have yet died of old age. Long before the disk wears out or succumbs to bit rot, the machine that reads the disk has become a museum piece. So the immediate challenge is not preserving the information but preserving the means to get at it.”
— Brian Hayes, American Scientist
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