where there's muck, there's money

From: The New Yorker

“The Marquis de Sade’s novel The 120 Days of Sodom — whose depravity earned it the label 'the Gospel of Evil' — has returned to France after a three-decade legal battle just in time for the 200th anniversary of the revolutionary politician’s death. A private collector recently bought the well-preserved scroll — considered a national treasure despite its deeply perverse and pornographic content — for €7 million, making it one of the most expensive manuscripts in France.

     Sade called it 'the most impure tale that has ever been told since our world began' and considered it his masterpiece.[…]
     When the Bastille was stormed in the 1789 Revolution, Sade wrote that he had 'wept tears of blood' over its loss. In fact, the parchment was later recovered from a crack in the cell wall, sold several times, and finally published by a German doctor in 1904.
     In 1929 the husband of Marie-Laure de Noailles, a direct descendant of Sade’s, bought the manuscript, passing it down to her daughter Nathalie. She then entrusted it to a friend who turned out to be a thief, smuggling it into Switzerland in 1982 where he sold it to Gérard Nordmann, a Swiss collector of erotica, for about £30,000.”
— Henry Samuel, The Telegraph
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Asylum

“[...] On August 28, the Army [Leonard Cohen's entourage and band] drove up to the Henderson Hospital, just south of London; 'it was all talking therapy,' a former nurse at the hospital told Cohen biographer Sylvie Simmons, 'no medication, no "zombies.”' Cohen was led up to the institution’s imposing and narrow tower, where his impromptu performance would take place.
     'Oh boy,' he told Johnston as they made their way in, 'I hope they like "So Long, Marianne.”' Most of those in attendance were young, and many were Leonard Cohen fans. The band quickly set up, and Cohen took his place at the front of the makeshift stage, underneath one of the 'tall, narrow windows that gave the room the feel of a chapel.' He looked at the audience. 'There was a fellow I spoke to last night,' he said, 'a doctor. I told him I was coming out here. He said, "They are a tough bunch of young nuts.”' There was some applause, and Cohen started playing 'Bird on the Wire.' But then he stopped. 'I feel like talking,' he said. 'Someone warned me downstairs that all you do here is talk. That’s psychotic, it’s contagious.'
     During 80 minutes, he played only 11 songs. The rest of the time, he told the audience about his relationship with Marianne and how it had dissipated, about how 'You Know Who I Am' was written after taking 300 acid trips and 'One of Us Cannot Be Wrong' was composed while coming down from amphetamine, about the Chelsea Hotel and life in New York and making love and sharing lovers and feeling inconsolably sad. Each time he finished a song or a speech, the audience applauded rapturously.
     And then it was time to leave. 'I really wanted to say that this is the audience that we’ve been looking for,' Cohen said as the Army was packing up to go. 'I’ve never felt so good playing before people.'
— Adapted from A Broken Hallelujah: Rock n Roll, Redemption and the Life of Leonard Cohen by Liel Leibovitz
via Salon
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Accolades all round...

A heartfelt round of applause goes out to former Elora Writers’ Festival committee member and dedicated writer Kelly Waterhouse! She won the "Humour Columnist of the Year" award.
     And congratulations to her co-worker at our local weekly newspaper The Wellington Advertiser, Chris Daponte, for placing third in the category of “Best Editorial.”
     Both were recognized last evening for their outstanding work in journalism at the "OCNA Awards" Gala.

 “OCNA [Ontario Community Newspaper Association] is proud to recognize the outstanding quality of work produced each week by our member newspapers and showcase it to readers and advertisers.
     The first, second and third place winners were announced during the Better Newspaper Awards Gala on Friday, April 4 at the Hilton Garden Inn. […]

Humour Columnist of the Year
1st: Fergus Wellington Advertiser - Kelly Waterhouse
2nd: Manotick Messenger - Jeff Morris
3rd: Markham Economist & Sun - Bernie O'Neill

Best Editorial (Circ. 10,000+)
1st: Sudbury Northern Life
2nd: Peterborough This Week
3rd: Fergus Wellington Advertiser"
— ocna
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“At a time when mainstream news media are hemorrhaging and doomsayers are predicting the death of journalism, take heart: the [US] First Amendment is alive and well in small towns across [North] America.
     In Emus Loose in Egnar, award-winning journalist Judy Muller takes the reader on a grassroots tour of rural American newspapers, from an Indian reservation in Montana to the Alaska tundra to Martha’s Vineyard, and discovers that many weeklies are not just surviving, but thriving.
     In these small towns, stories can range from club news to Klan news, from broken treaties to broken hearts, from banned books to escaped emus; they document the births, deaths, crimes, sports, and local shenanigans that might seem to matter only to those who live there.
     And yet, as this book shows us, these 'little' stories create a mosaic of American life that tells us a great deal about who we are—what moves us, angers us, amuses us.”
— University of Nebraska Press
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blessed be the soothsayer

Ivan Sutherland wearing his Virtual Reality device (1968)
From: yahoo

"[…] Digital books are still painfully ugly and weirdly irritating to interact with. They look like copies of paper, but they can't be designed or typeset in the same way as paper, and however splendid the cover images may look on a hi-res screen, they're still images rather than physical things. To my irritation, you still can't flick through an ebook properly; you can't riffle the pages, you can't look at more than one page at once. And the advantages of having a book in digital form (easy scrolling text, proper shareability, a global text search of your library, synchronisation with audiobooks, links to television adaptations, person-to-person sales) have been ignored in favour of a weak simulacrum of paper. Better, a lot of the time, to shove a paperback in your pocket. And for when you forget, well, there's still your phone.

     Until a digital book is a magical object which physically transforms from 50 Shades into the new James Smythe novel according to your whim; until you can walk through a digital library and open books at random; until the technology becomes as satisfying to the physical senses as the text is to the cognitive self, there's still a need for shiny, gorgeous, satisfying books. And when those things happen, if they do, we will have lost nothing in the transition.”
— Nick Harkaway, The Guardian
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rising from the grave

From: GravestonesLiverpool

“Stop carving that gravestone. Brick-and-mortar bookstores aren’t dead, yet. On the contrary, independently owned bookstores are growing in number. According to the American Booksellers Association, since hitting a nadir in 2009, the number of indie bookstores in the U.S. has grown 19.3 percent, from 1,651 to 1,971. The current total is less than half the 1990s peak of around 4,000. But it still serves as a rebuke to the conventional wisdom that equates Amazon’s relentless rise with the inevitable death of the physical bookstore.

     What explains this renaissance? The collapse of Borders in 2011 is one big piece of the puzzle. (Removing a dominant carnivore from the savannah gives all the other animals a little more breathing room.) The end of the recession also contributed to a more nurturing economic environment.
     But there’s more to the story. There is increasing evidence that the same digital transformation that has so dramatically reshaped the publishing industry, and driven millions of consumers online, also paradoxically rewards locally rooted authenticity. Our digital tools are steering us toward brick-and-mortar stores that promise a more satisfactory consumer experience than either chain stores or online emporiums can provide.”
— Andrew Leonard, Salon
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100 Years of America’s Best… Sellers

From: imgsave

“When Matthew Kahn, a creative writing student at California State University at Northridge, learned from one of his professors that the bestselling book of 1926 was The Private Life of Helen of Troy by John Erskine, he was struck. The class wasn’t reading it, but the book they were reading, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, was published the same year. 'I thought that was interesting,' Kahn told me. 'When we think of the books of 1926, we think modernists. We don’t think about the books that most people were actually reading at that time.'

     So Kahn decided to read them, 100 years of No. 1 bestsellers, from 1913 to 2013, and post reviews on his blog, Kahn’s Corner. As of the time of this writing, he’s up to 1966 and Jacqueline Susann’s The Valley of the Dolls — decidedly not a hit with this reader. But Kahn has come across a few surprises and can offer an unusual perspective on what Americans have liked in a book since the First World War. I called him up to get his impressions. […]
     One thing about the massive shift in the 1960s is that it’s partly about a changing perspective on books. They’re more seen as a part of the entertainment industry. In the first half of this list, there are about 10 years where the bestseller was also a Pulitzer Prize winner. There were a few years where the bestseller was written by a Nobel Prize winner. With Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent, in 1960, that was the last time either of those things were true. It’s the last book on the list to win the Pulitzer Prize.”
— Laura Miller, Salon
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Wake up! The EWF Short Story Contest deadline has been extended!

Source images: Wallpaper-Zoom and photos-of

If you’re just coming out of hibernation and are worried that the 2014 EWF Short Story Contest deadline is too tight – relax!
     Spring has been so long in coming, our internal calendars are fried... or maybe frozen. It still feels like winter and the thought of getting something written in time for the Short Story Contest deadline was probably way down on your list of things to do -- somewhere closer to getting the lawnmower out; or going outside without a hat and gloves...
     So here's your second chance!
     As long as your entry is in the mail by Thursday, April 17, you can still submit your story on the theme “Home” to our annual contest. The judges are ready, and our wonderful sponsors – the Elora Arts Council, the Community Resource Centre of North and Centre Wellington, and the Writer’s Life blog – are waiting to award prizes to the best short stories in the Adult, Teen and Youth categories.

Check out the Elora Writers’ Festival blog site for details.

Coming soon...

A word from our judges. Four of our contest judges share what they look for in a story.
Questions? Feel free to contact Contest Chair, Jean Mills at: ewfwritingcontest@gmail.com