Hearsay Archive:

2003:

August September October November December

2004:

January February March April May June July August September October November December

2005:

January February March April May June July August September October November December

November 2004:

11/01/04:

Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint — the Guide
The Complete Review has assembled a very comprehensive guide to the hysteria surrounding Baker's book about killing Dubya — including a criticism of Baker's response to the outrage directed at him.

The reactions to Checkpoint, both before and after publication, provide a fascinating lesson in literary reception in politically charged times. On the face of it, it is a book that tries to give voice to the frustrations of a significant portion of the American population with President Bush's ill-advised and -conceived foreign adventurism and its consequences — though it does so in what might be considered outrageous fashion. With a large segment of the American population unwavering (and uncritical) in their support of the jr. Bush administration's actions, the book — or rather: the very idea of the book — inevitably provoked strong reactions. By (arguably) suggesting assassination as a "solution", Baker upped the ante — apparently beyond what the vast majority, even of those in agreement with his fundamental opposition to the jr. Bush-administration policies, found palatable.

(discuss)

The kind of future I want
Richard Morgan, author of the fun sci-fi noir Altered Carbon and its crazy sequel, Broken Angels, is interviewed over at Trashotron. Good news: Woken Furies, the latest Takieshki Kovacs novel, is on the way. (From Confessions) (discuss)

The makings of a jackpine sonnet
Milton Acorn explains the, uh, logic that went into his jackpine sonnet form.

A squad in the Russian army comprises twelve men and a sergeant. If you lose half you still have a squad. Also, if there were more, some of the men would likely not know all their comrades' names . . . embarrassing in any case, but in battle it can be downright disastrous. Unaware at the time that space warfare between American and Russian robot craft had already begun, I even figured out the formation of a spatial fighter squadron. It would be echeloned in three dimensions, not two as with geese and aircraft. The leader would be followed by three branching lines of four craft each. This would also have the advantage of not revealing the internal organization of the squadron to an observer. The next number possessing the same advantage would be seventeen and that would be unwieldy. And what about the celebrated number — twelve — of the British fighter squadron in the Anti-Fascist War? Was that not a euphemism for thirteen? Was 'tail-end charlie' not number thirteen?

(discuss)

At work early today?
You didn't set your clock back? More time to read Bookninja... In the USA, you might consider phoning a few friends and making sure they vote tomorrow... If said friends are people from highschool with whom you no longer share the opinion that a viable method of controlling world population and hunger is a tactical thermonukular war, please do not call.

Yann Martel writes music about pianist eaten alive by Indian boy, a Bengal tiger and a cellphone...
Or something to that effect. (discuss)

Note to politically motivated novelists: shut up
Ah, the good old days... (Mind the source of this one, ninjas...)

For much of our history, litterateurs held themselves aloof from everyday politics, considering it a grim and grubby business. The novelist of the early 20th century was far more likely to be concerned with reproducing the experience of the common man--or rallying on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti--than forming committees in support of, say, Warren Harding or James B. Cox. Even F. Scott Fitzgerald's Amory Blaine--the Kerryesque hero of "This Side of Paradise"--was a socialist and revolutionary rather than a Democrat or Republican.

Writers began to embrace electoral politics after World War II, when Henry Wallace and then Adlai Stevenson seemed to capture their affections. But Stevenson lost, and lost. Things accelerated when John F. Kennedy created Camelot in 1961. But even then there were contingencies. Diana Trilling remembered meeting James T. Farrell (author of the great "Studs Lonigan" novels about Chicago) on a train to Washington, looking disheveled and disreputable. He had been invited to a White House dinner by the Kennedys and was carrying a bulging briefcase stuffed with old royalty statements. Farrell believed that his invitation would allow him to settle the matter of some past IRS audits while enjoying the president's hospitality.

In the same administration, William Styron helped the great, if underrated, novelist Richard Yates to get a job as Robert Kennedy's speechwriter. Yates's tryout was to write a speech to be delivered by the attorney general at a private women's college. Yates won the job--according to his biographer, Blake Bailey--by imagining Kennedy as a fictional character, "an attractive young man seductively persuading a group of female admirers to support the cause of civil rights." The Kennedy years were supremely suited to fiction at its most self-regarding.

And you walked to school five miles uphill, through fire, over broken glass and in blinding snow... both ways... This guy puts the cur in curmudgeon. (discuss)

Bangor, Maine: Like, Horrorsville, man
Take a tour through Stephen King's hometown... "And if you look to your left you'll see the well that leads straight to Hell. And on your right is a limping Mr. King himself, leveling a shotgun at the bus window... Ladies and Gentlemen, as this isn't part of the planned tour, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for visiting Bangor, Maine and remind you that a significant part of your tour guide's remuneration comes from the generosity of folks like yourselves..." (discuss)

The LRB turns ... yawn...
The LRB: 25 going on 75.

For the uninitiated, the best way of describing the London Review of Books, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this week, is that it is to words what Slow Food is to cooking. The LRB, which comes out fortnightly and is to be found nestling between the New Yorker and the Times Literary Supplement in more genteel newsagents, is a long time in the preparing and should not be ingested in a hurry. Yet, in a world so frantic, where information assails us from every quarter in user-friendly, bite-sized pieces, it is a quiet success. Its circulation stands at around 50,000. Not quite Heat, but impressive all the same.

But we love you just the same, LRB, and treasure our visits to see you in the home. Just quit asking for foot massages with that ointment that leaves us smelling of the tomb. (discuss)

Scott Griffin waves around money, poets
At least Bringhurst is getting some press.*

Later, the main reading drew an even larger crowd to the Royal Festival Hall's Purcell Room. During the intermission, three 23-year-old Londoners sat pondering Canadian poetry over a bottle of wine. Sarah, an Atwood fan, was trying to discern the meaning of Anne Carson's A Lot of Guns -- An Oratorio for Four Voices. They heaped praise on Bringhurst's reading of Haida verse, and the imagery in Anne Simpson's work.

How do you get in with the rich folk? I mean, besides writing well. (discuss)

India's Orwell
India: cashing in on outsourced tech and, now, literature. (discuss)

Print vs. talk
Philip Marchand looks at the book as a repository of "knowledge"... well, the how-to book.

We humans seem to be constructed so that our default option is to do something the wrong way. It comes naturally to us to screw up. This is also why bookstores are full of how to guides. There's a desperate need to be filled.

If what some people say is true, that the young are reading less and less, that means we'll have to go to newer media, like instructional videos. Whether that's better than print, I don't know. Television doesn't seem well adapted to show people how to do things right.

Nice Bob Ross mention. I'd like to start a movement among journalists to slip references to Bob Ross in to everything they write. But I'm neither a journalist nor motivated. (discuss)


More on Bush and the hand up his ass
Well, it's become more and more apparent that Bush has a hand up his ass. And not in the good-for-everyone Tristan Taormino way (not work safe). A senior photo analyst for NASA is willing to risk his reputation on the claim that Bush was wearing a wire.

For the past week, while at home, using his own computers, and off the clock at Caltech and NASA, Nelson has been analyzing images of the president's back during the debates. A professional physicist and photo analyst for more than 30 years, he speaks earnestly and thoughtfully about his subject. "I am willing to stake my scientific reputation to the statement that Bush was wearing something under his jacket during the debate," he says. "This is not about a bad suit. And there's no way the bulge can be described as a wrinkled shirt."

You're voting for a puppet, people. Someone who's being fed his lines and still can't get them right. He's like a reject from The Dark Crystal. Or maybe Fraggle Rock. (Note: I try to not link to subscription sites, but Salon is the only place I could find this. Go for the day pass -- I got a John Stewart ad, which was about 15 seconds long.) (From Clive) (discuss)

Hunting Lynn Cheney
God, that headline sounds divine, doesn't it? (I choose: the compound bow. You have a three minute head start. I suggest you use it wisely. Cue "Hungry Like the Wolf" on the old iPod...) (discuss)

Rise of the machines
Ubertech-dude and all around nice guy, Clive Thompson, gets suckered by a robot. (discuss)

11/02/04:

Art Deco bookbindings
A small but nifty sampling from the New York Public Library. If book bondage is really your fetish, make sure you check out the Glossary of Binding Terms. (discuss)

Warning: Bookstore jobs may not lead to fulfillment....
But they may leave you with great anecdotes.

A young colleague named Luke, taken on around the same time as me, was the first to realise what a dead-end we had landed in. In a bid to get fired, he took to answering the phone with the words: "I suppose you want a book." At last he hatched the perfect escape plan. The look on Janet's face when she found the humour table piled high and exclusively with copies of the Koran was remarkable. Luke left later that afternoon.

(From Bookslut) (discuss)

For a moment I thought this read "Michael Crichton" and I was confused
Thankfully, everything is clear now (full text below).

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon will write Snow and the Seven, a martial-arts retelling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, for Walt Disney Pictures, Variety reported. Yuen Wo Ping, the choreographer of groundbreaking action films The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, will direct the live-action movie. Previously known as Snow White and the Seven Shao Lin, the movie will mark Yuen's English-language directorial debut.

(discuss)

Three reasons to hate the GGs and the Gillers
Ninja favourite Lynn Coady writes in The Tyee:

Book prizes are fun when you, or your client, or your author are nominated for one. Oh yes. The author gets flown somewhere, put up in a decent hotel. He or she is interviewed about The Book, the product of perhaps as many as ten years of near-thankless drudgery. Meanwhile agent and publisher can breathe a sigh of relief, for their efforts too have been rewarded. Interest is paid, by god, precisely the kind of interest every author feels is her due (she will tell you otherwise—“Oh I never expected anyone would take any notice of it”—and will be lying).

And that’s the problem: every single author feels this way, and a handful of them have every right because their work is splendid and should be held up and declared so publicly. Each year, well over a hundred new works of fiction are published in Canada. Many are called, but few are chosen, and often, no one can tell you why Stunning Achievement should be anointed one year while the equally accomplished Rollicking Tour-de-Force is ignored. Literary types know that the moment both the Giller and GG shortlists are announced, the griping will commence: Good lord, where is so-and-so? How could they nominate the bland, middle-class musings of whosherface, completely overlooking the edgy, vital prose of whasisname? And how on earth is it possible that the luminous work of you-know-who-I-mean-the skinny-one could be disregarded yet again?

Hey! She could be talking about us! (Thanks for the link, Art) (discuss)

Alice Munro knocks em dead
If she had been using a sword instead of her prose, we'd be giving her an award ourselves. (discuss)

Don Paterson, slayer
Don Paterson takes on Harold Pinter, and then proceeds to call for the elimination of amateurs. Sniff. I'm getting all choked up.

"To take a risk in a poem is not to write a big sweary outburst about how crap the war in Iraq is, even if you are the world's greatest living playwright. Because anyone can do that."

Don, call me. I have a position for you here. And speaking of Pinter-bashing, the stage censors of Britain's postwar era didn't care much for him either...

The censors’ remit was to uphold the law — which forbade blasphemy and homosexuality — and keep plays off the stage that might have outraged public sensibilities.

Their opinions over what was permissible were often highly subjective. A fortnight before The Birthday Party was to be premiered at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, in April 1958 the reader, C D Heriot, made it clear what he thought of the work. “An insane, pointless play. Mr Pinter has jumbled all the tricks of Beckett and Ionesco with a dash from all the recently produced plays from the Royal Court, plus a fashionable flavouring of blasphemy. The result is still silly.” Heriot censored some blasphemy.

(discuss)

I blame Cher for way more than just this...
The eulogy just ain't what it used to be.* (discuss)

Just throw the settlement debt on the pile...
Last year's Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner is suing the US over sanctions that prohibit her from publishing her memoirs in "the Homeland" of Bubba and Berndine Jones.

The Treasury Department declined to comment on Ms. Ebadi's suit, but spokeswoman Molly Millerwise defended the regulations as "part of the different strategies that make up our national-security policies." The U.S. has 29 sanctions programs in place against various countries, terrorist groups and others considered national-security threats, although the restrictions challenged by Ms. Ebadi apply only to Cuba, Iran and Sudan. Ironically, the way the Treasury Department interprets the trade embargo, Ms. Ebadi would have been free to publish a translation of her book in the U.S. had it originally been issued in Iran. The regulations allow publishers to "reproduce, translate, style and copy-edit" existing works from sanctioned countries, according to a department fact sheet. But they prohibit providing "services" to people or entities in embargoed countries, such as the type of editorial, marketing and translation work needed to publish an original book in the U.S. In a March letter to the Treasury Department, Rep. Howard Berman, the California Democrat who wrote legislation excepting information from the embargo, called the policy "patently absurd."

Don't you know that if we let her publish, her books might explode and unleash nukular catsforfree on one nation under god? (discuss)

DLJ for prez
MobyLives proprietor Dennis Loy Johnson shows why we all missed him so much in his latest column, "Bush vs. Books". Here he is interviewed at Beatrice (From MoorishGirl) (discuss)

Marilynne Robinson
Profiled* in the Globe. (discuss)

The old one two combo
The Morley/Ernest match up recounted from a Boxing mag's perspective.

One of the most notorious boxing matches of all time involved a portly, rabid self-mythologizer who had no real boxing ability, and a tubby, minor Canadian writer who, despite appearances, did. Step forward Ernest Hemingway and Morley Callaghan. They boxed at the American Club in Paris in June 1929. Their audience was the time-keeper, the writer F Scott Fitzgerald.

The action – in particular a knockdown of Hemingway – was to influence all their lives. For Hemingway, it signified the end of his (unadmitted and, as far as one can see, platonic) love affair with the hedonistic Fitzgerald. For Fitzgerald it represented the moment after which Hemingway was not for turning by his charm. For Callaghan, a former colleague of Hemingway on the Kansas City Star, it meant fleeting fame and then, 30 years on, more fleeting fame when he published his memoir, That Summer In Paris. All because of that boxing match. What happened?

Minor? I mean, his offspring: yes. Him? I don't know... (From GalleyCat) (discuss)

How dainty!
Nancy Drew's father. (Note to reader: I didn't read all of this because, you know, ZZZZZZZZZZ) (From GoodReports) (discuss)

Exploring books
Outside gets positively cerebral with "The 25 (Essential) Books for the Well-Read Explorer". (Though one might suspect cerebral people wouldn't intentionally put themselves in harm's way, this is apparently not the case...) (discuss)

<Blurb>... Excuse me
When the unsolicited blurb request works out in such a heartwarming way, I briefly consider giving up this life of shadow-lingering and stealthy-knifing. But then I remember the fun. (discuss)

11/03/04:

Today's headline: Blech...

GG judge steps down over conflict of interest
The Quill reports that novelist André Alexis has stepped down from a GG jury position for this year, citing a conflict of interest regarding the release of Claire's Head, the fantastic novel by his long-time partner, Catherine Bush. Apparently, this is all a result of a mixup — Alexis noted early in the process that the book was likely to be released this year, but it seems to have gone in one administrator and out another, and led to this:

The issue did not come up again until September, long after the jurors had started independently considering submitted titles in April, when Alexis submitted the signed conflict of interest declaration and mentioned his personal connection to the author of a submitted book. At that point, Balkan says the award administrators discussed the situation with the Canada Council, the other jurors, and Alexis. "One of the options would have been to pull the book for this year," Balkan says. But all parties, including Alexis, agreed that would be unfair to the book, so Alexis stepped down, Balkan says. (Reached at his Toronto home Thursday, Alexis did not want to comment on the situation: "I just want to stand away from this.")

Perhaps I should disclose my conflicts here: I think these two are two of the hardest-working, most admirable writers in Canada (in fact, I was involved in developing Catherine's website) and hope none of this affected Bush's chances to make the list (I can't believe I just wrote those last ten words... today of all days...). (discuss)

11/04/04:

"Can we all get along?"
I have to admit, I'm confused by all this talk of unity and the healing of rifts down in the U.S. The issues people voted on were not policy ones, they were issues of what America is, and to preach unity is to ignore the fact that a large number of Americans are striving to turn the country into a theocracy, if not in goverment then at least in actual living conditions. Besides, the Democrats preached unity after the last, uh, election, and look what happened — Ayatollah Bush now has a mandate. It seems to me that this is exactly the time to not get along. Fortunately, for those who just want out, there are a couple of options. And for those of us already on the outside? Well, I'm waiting to read the American version of Persepolis. (discuss)

Hard Case Crime
Hard Case Crime sent us a little package of their new books and we've been passing them around. So far everyone thinks they lots of fun, in that guilty pleasure kind of way. And you know, I have a soft spot for books that fit into pant pockets.

Hard Case Crime is dedicated to reviving the vigor and excitement, the suspense and thrills — the sheer entertainment — of the golden age of paperback crime novels, both by bringing back into print the best work of the pulp era and by introducing readers to new work by some of today's most powerful writers and artists. Determined detectives and dangerous women...fortune hunters and vengeance seekers...ingenious criminals and men on the run for their lives...Hard Case Crime novels offer everything you want from a great story, all in handsome and affordable mass-market editions.

(discuss)

Never underestimate the power of a poet to yell
Publishers Weekly decided to cut its poetry section. You can imagine the rest.

The industry trade magazine Publishers Weekly this summer decided to stop publishing its monthly Poetry Forecast section, an editorial move that would have had deleterious effects on independent publishers. But if you were at the beach or busy with your summer reading you probably didn't hear the news. In response to complaints from many publishers, editors, and poets, the decision was reversed a few weeks later, before any changes were made to the magazine.

(discuss)

Note to my American friends
All our refugee sleeping surfaces are now spoken for. Please check your local ninja listings for other asylum providers.

Paul Jones leaves Maclean's
It seems decision making at your national magazines has a decidedly corporate element:

Segal said the restructuring was prompted by Rogers's "need to bring more initiatives to market more quickly with a faster return on investment," and not by concern about the performance of its "core brands," which, while by and large profitable, have had to battle in the last 10 years for revenue and readers in a fragmented and competitive market. "Basically, this has very little to do with any of our publications," he said.

"We didn't go deep into looking at any of our magazines in making our decisions."

Segal indicated Rogers likely will be "launching more verticals" such as LouLou in the future -- "verticals" being the industry term for publications aimed at a specific lifestyle, attitude or activity group, as opposed to "mass magazines" such as Chatelaine and Maclean's. With the new structure in place, Rogers won't be "constrained" or "constricted," as he felt it previously was, "by where you're going to launch it."

Translation: it's about the bottom line. (discuss)

A commitment to no more Commitments
Uber-author (and occasional ninja reader) Roddy Doyle promises, in his charming and very funny way, that he will never write a sequel to The Commitments. (discuss)

Frye's mum gets new tombstone
There's really not much more to add than that. (discuss)

Something about Derrida that looks interesting, but I haven't really read it because I'm having a hard time caring today and I feel sick in the pit of my stomach in a way I haven't since Reagan was elected to a second slack-jawed term and I was pretty sure I'd soon be cinder or the leader of a motley band of post-apocalyptic nerds...
Blah. Somebody shoot me. (discuss)

The unadaptable adapted
Once again, Hollywood proves there is nothing we can create that it cannot co-opt.

As "Enduring Love" enters a world of dark obsession, it lures viewers into a symbiotic dance between a stalker named Jed (the scruffy, blond, helpless-looking Rhys Ifans) and the man he is stalking, Joe (Daniel Craig as his opposite, a broodingly handsome, tough-minded intellectual). Yet this dynamic film is based on Ian McEwan's ambiguous, interior, apparently unadaptable novel. Just imagine all the bad movies that might have come from that. How the book became the film, without costing the novel its soul, is the story of a collaboration that doesn't even sound promising. There's a director who leaves few fingerprints, Roger Michell; a screenwriter best known as a playwright, Joe Penhall; and a novelist who realizes that, as Mr. McEwan put it in a phone conversation last week, "translating a novel to film is an act of controlled vandalism."

(discuss)

BHL under attack
If BHL goes under, the terrorists have won.

Seven books attacking the writer's methods, questioning his intellectual achievements and peering into the origins of his personal fortune are due to be published over the next few months.

Several of the works promise to unmask him as an "intellectual imposter", and a series of libel suits is already under way as he struggles to save his academic reputation from ruin.

For three decades Lévy has reigned supreme as the demigod of the television debate show, famous less for his intellectual standpoints than for his beautifully coiffed hair and fondness for displaying more chest than is polite in scholarly circles.

Now his critics are questioning whether BHL, as he is semi-affectionately known, really deserves to occupy the space vacated by Derrida, Sartre, Foucault and other greats of French postwar philosophy.

Wait, they won yesterday when they tricked America into voting for someone who fits so nicely into their whole killing thing. (discuss)

Has you gots what it takes?
Grain seeks new fiction editor. Tell them Bookninja sent you and get 50% off your first piece o' chewin' wheat. (Thanks, B) (discuss)

At least The Onion still laughs...
Some great headlines that go nowhere today. My favourite being:

God Puts His Tool Back Into Office

(discuss)

11/05/04:

Distributed narratives
This concept is a new one to me, but I'm intrigued nevertheless. Implementation is a novel told in stickers that are affixed to things like envelopes, buses, airport terminals and signs. Seems to me you could hide a pretty neat story in instalments around the web too — kind of like the poems some people leave in Amazon comment boards. (From Metafilter) (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

Indy Magazine
Bookslut draws our attention to Indy Magazine, which is a definite bookmark thanks to a heady essay on "drawing the body politic" in comics, Art Spiegelman's meditation on comics, and some anti-Bush comics. Bookslut also links to this piece on what the reign of the mullahs may mean for comics in general in United States of America Red. Nice work all around. (discuss)
(Posted by Peter)

This story is about Philip Larkin's lawnmower. No shit.
Yep. That about covers it. (discuss)

Stop all the clocks
Who's reading poetry these days? Nobody who doesn't have the time.

Why is it that so many who never miss the latest Pinter or David Hare or Alan Bennett in the theatre, who like to drown in Mozart or Mahler, cannot connect with poetry, particularly serious contemporary poetry? I pulled down from my shelves yesterday volumes of Auden and Longfellow. We have Longfellow for the reason most people have Longfellow nowadays: we inherited it from our parents. There are shorter pieces which are still quite easily readable; but one flinches from the epics.

Then Auden. There must be plenty of Auden which deserves to be cherished and quoted just as much as the bit about stopping the clocks, but the trouble is that it needs to be read not just with an eye for an exploitable line or two but slowly and very thoughtfully.

(discuss)

Vancouver International Writers Festival
A roundup of events and gossip. (From PFW) (discuss)

Dealing with Jewel
And by dealing, I don't mean the way we normally "deal" with bad writers (ie, shurikentothehead!).

Jewel is not the only uneasy poet. The poetry community, too, is nervous about the popularity of this sort of writing. In his foreword to the Best American Poetry, 2000 , poet and critic David Lehman tackles the Jewel issue straight on: "What [do] we make of the extraordinary flowering of bad poetry so evident in so many places? In short, is bad poetry bad or good for poetry? Does it devalue the art, lower expectations, diminish the public's capacity to embrace the real thing when it comes along? Or is it a sign that poetry is thriving though not necessarily in ways calculated to win the approval of academies?"

(discuss)

Amazon sued over book recommendations
Apparently they told someone to buy Tibor Fischer's latest... (discuss)

Roy accepts Sydney peace prize, fires lasers from her eyes
Arundhati Roy calls the Iraq war what it is: cowardly.*

She advised the audience to think about the kind of world they wanted to live in.

"There are two ways of looking at this: the American way ... or to begin to move towards some kind of semblance of social justice," she said.

"We need to expand our way of thinking, we need to ask ourselves some serious questions about our limitations."

I'm pretty sure she's a micronized Zentradi warrior under that disguise. (discuss)

Weekend Edition:

Preaching to the converted
Jane Smiley is the latest writer to discuss the losing ways of the Democrats over at Slate.

The error that progressives have consistently committed over the years is to underestimate the vitality of ignorance in America. Listen to what the red state citizens say about themselves, the songs they write, and the sermons they flock to. They know who they are—they are full of original sin and they have a taste for violence. The blue state citizens make the Rousseauvian mistake of thinking humans are essentially good, and so they never realize when they are about to be slugged from behind.

Maybe we should just invade their country, kill their leaders and convert them to civilization. (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

Men and Cartoons
I really liked some of Jonathan Lethem's early work, such as Gun, with Occasional Music and As She Climbed Across the Table. I was less interested in Motherless Brooklyn, which I thought lacked the original vision of his more "fantastic" work. His new collection of stories, Men and Cartoons, seems a return to the earlier work, so I think I'll check it out. Jay McInerney doesn't seem to care for it though. I always liked that book that McInerney wrote.

In the better stories, the high-concept ideas can turn in unexpected and sometimes dangerous directions, but in the lesser ones they act only in the service of a punch line. Such is the case in ''The Spray,'' where a couple come home to find their apartment robbed. The police arrive, equipped with a spray that reveals missing objects, including the stolen fax machine, jewelry box and television. When the cops leave a can of the stuff behind, the couple spray each other, only to reveal past lovers clinging to their bodies. Cute. Next!

Salon's also got a clip of Lethem reading from Men and Cartoons. (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

If "elitist" just means "not the dumbest motherfucker in the room," I'll be an elitist!
Salon sings the praises of David Rees' Get Your War On 2.

In the months of sycophantic flag-waving after 9/11, when Art Spiegelman was frozen out of the New Yorker for insufficient patriotism, Rees' early "Get Your War On" cartoons provided an invaluable public service by openly questioning, even mocking, the moral authority of the so-called War on Terror. The culture has caught up with him since then, but the startling events of the last few days reminded me that the hostile, pseudo-Darwinian universe of Rees' tormented office drones may be closer to reality than the comfortable bubble of bicoastal media opinion.

(discuss) (Posted by Peter)

What kind of book would Jesus read?
According to Philip Pullman, the U.S. is already a theocracy, at least when it comes to reading. This is such a well-written, thoughtful piece that I'm going to go and buy one of his books today!

As the enemies of democracy hurl their aviation-fuel-laden thunderbolt at the second tower, their minds intoxicated by a fundamentalist reading of a religious text, the leader of the free world sits in a classroom reading a story with children. If only he'd been reading Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, or Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad, or a genuine fairy tale! That would have been a scene to cheer. It would have illustrated values truly worth fighting to preserve. It would have embodied all the difference between democratic reading and totalitarian reading, between reading that nourishes the heart and the imagination and reading that starves them. But no. Thanks among other things to his own government's educational policy, the book Bush was reading was one of the most stupefyingly banal and witless things I've ever had the misfortune to see.

(discuss) (Posted by Peter)

What went wrong with Iraq?
A lot of scholars think it began with Bernard Lewis and his scholarly work on Islam. I recently got around to reading Lewis's What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle-Eastern Response. I learned a lot of interesting history, but I was just as intrigued by what the book wasn't telling me.

Lewis has long had detractors in the scholarly world, although his most ardent enemies have tended to be literary mavericks like the late Edward Said, the author of Orientalism, a long screed against the cavalier treatment of Islam in Western literature. And especially after 9/11, Bulliet and other mainstream Arabists who had urged a softer, more nuanced view of Islam found themselves harassed into silence. Lewisites such as Martin Kramer, author of Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (a fierce post-9/11 attack on Bulliet) and other prominent scholars such as Robert Wood of the University of Chicago, suggested that most academic Arabists were apologists for Islamic radicalism. But now, emboldened by the Bush administration's self-made quagmire in Iraq, the Arabists are launching a counterattack. They charge that Lewis's whole analysis missed the mark, beginning with his overarching construct, the great struggle between Islam and Christendom. These scholars argue that Lewis has slept through most of modern Arab history. Entangled in medieval texts, Lewis's view ignores too much and confusingly conflates old Ottoman with modern Arab history.

(discuss) (Posted by Peter)

Send us your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free — and your gays!
Congrats to the people of Saskatchewan for being the latest province to welcome equal rights!

A judge in Saskatoon has ruled that refusing to grant same-sex couples a marriage licence violates their Charter rights under the Constitution.

With Friday's ruling, Saskatchewan becomes the seventh jurisdiction in Canada to allow gays and lesbians to legally marry.

The way I see it, if things continue the way they're going, soon gay people in the USAR should be able to apply to Canada for refugee status. But as disgusted as I am by what happened down south recently, I'm prouder than ever to be a Canadian, a citizen of a country that for the most part privileges reason, tolerance and equality over lunacy, xenophobia and hatred. Now if we only could switch most of our trading from the USAR to Belgium.... (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

1,500 words, six grafs
Whenever I catch a typo in the New Yorker, it always feels like the end of the world.

On Oct. 4, the New Yorker magazine carried 1,500 words of truly abominable editing. The piece was a think-piece of little thought. It started nowhere, went nowhere, and arrived at no interesting destination. Even so, the content was not improved by the style. All of us may learn something here.

(From Jeff) (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

11/08/04:

Gleed award value raised - likely to assuage embarrassment
TWUC has raised the value of the Danuta Gleed Award, from $5,000 to $10,000, perhaps in an effort to give the prize a cleaner sheen after this summer's terrible embarrassment, methinks (rather snidely, if I do say so). In this spirit of facetious superiority, allow me to supply the missing paragraph from this press release:

TWUC administration would like to publicly apologize to the writers and jurors involved in the 2004 Danuta Gleed Award fiasco. Further, TWUC would like to apologize to Canadian writers and readers in general for trying to deny and hide an obviously egregious fuckup on the part of an unthinking staff member who then had some halfwit toothless pitbull attack the people who pointed it out. Sorry. Here's some more cash. Sorry.

Whatever the cause, more money in the pocket of a short story writer can't be a bad thing. (discuss) (From PFW) (Posted by George)

"I discovered in my 54th year I can only dance and let my hair down, what's left of it, with middle-aged Canadian matrons."
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. August Kleinzahler! (discuss) (Posted by George)

So young to be so famous... Let's hope it doesn't lead to an overdose on the sidewalk outside the Viper Club
Granta turns 25. (discuss) (Posted by George)

Frieda's Mum
Will someone please put a cap on the number of times Sylvia Plath can be reinvented for the fame and profit of others?

It has thus fallen to Frieda Hughes to throw a sparking bomb into 42 years’ worth of muddle and misinterpretation: she has overseen the restored Ariel, and provides an introduction. By publishing this new edition of her mother’s work, she redirects the spotlight firmly back on to Plath’s indisputable talent as a poet, even including facsimile reproductions of her amended typescripts. The mood of this new volume is as different as possible to the dark, desperate 1965 version which made Plath more famous for her death than for her life. It still contains many of the poems which cause the reader to fall cowering at the poet’s feet: in the sinister finale to ‘Lady Lazarus’, Plath reminds us that "Out of the ash I rise with my red hair,/And I eat men like air."

How about this: it's a pitch for a book in which Sylvia is actually a former government assassin who goes undercover so deep she buys her own story and "goes native" - her apparent suicide actually the work of a joint Mossad/CIA squad saddled with the nigh impossible task of liquidating her before she wakes to her new reality and reveals to an unsuspecting, still-poetry-reading public the true nature of The Arcturus Device. Several hundred bullets and one tousled-haired, shamanesque sex scene later Sylvia is the only agent left standing, but grief at her destroyed kitchen pushes her over the edge and into the waiting arms of old man oven. I can have 60 pages for you by tomorrow. (discuss) (Posted by George)

Mid-list hell? Lady, that's my LIFE!
Anita Shreve took the Oprah Pass through the Mountains of Insurmountable Apathy and is doing quite well in the land of milk and honey, thank you.

Shreve, who worked as a journalist for 15 years before switching to fiction, bridles at critics who label her a "women's novelist" for writing romances.

"I don't like it. I think it is dismissive of women to start with and dismissive of me as a novelist. I write about men and inhabit the personae of men. I enjoy writing about men as much as I do about women," she said.

Oprah, please. Please consider mentioning a book of poetry sometime. Maybe just rest your coffee on it or something. Prop a door open. Fart on it with your amazing,shape-changing ass. Anything. (discuss) (Posted by George)

Tom Wolfe: the Jane Goodall of the Fraternal Campus Chimp
Apparently Tom Wolfe actually donned civvies to research his latest.

What is important to him and, he believes, to his fiction, is that he witnessed it first before he wrote about it. Famously, after the publication of "Bonfire," he issued a challenge to writers to once again root the American novel in the social realism of Dreiser, Steinbeck and Dos Passos by going "out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hogstomping Baroque country of ours to reclaim it as literary property."

(discuss) (Posted by George)


The invisible woman
Did you notice there were very few women commentators on television during the election? Heather Mallick did.

Comedian Sandra Shamas said it best at the end of her latest one-woman show: “I don't feel lucky to be a Canadian.”

Pause.

“I just feel relieved to be a Canadian.”

And the audience, cheering, knew just what she meant. What was odd, though, was that the cleverest quote came from a woman, one of the gender that seemed to vanish during the recent months that happened to include the American election campaign. The absence of women's faces, voices and writing was so extreme that at times I doubted our existence.

(discuss) (Posted by George)

File under: I wish I'd thought of this
This Magazine has beat every thinking satirist to the punch with Marry an American. See also: SorryEverybody. (From Clive) (discuss) (Posted by George)

11/09/04:

CBC Literary Awards
The deadline is Nov. 15. It does cost $20, if you're interested.

The CBC Literary Awards Competition is the only literary competition that celebrates original, unpublished works, in Canada's two official languages. There are three categories—short story, poetry, and travel writing—and awards totalling $60,000, courtesy of the Canada Council for the Arts. In addition, winning entries are published in Air Canada's enRoute magazine and broadcast on CBC radio.

(discuss) (Posted by Peter)

Just cut the last two paragraphs off
You think starting your novel is hard? Try ending it.

Fictional endings are the moments when speech topples over into silence, so they regularly provide concentrated images of the horror of death, from the corpse-strewn scenes that conclude Shakespeare's tragedies, to the newer worry over entropy that filters into a novel such as Forster's Howards End, which begins with Mrs Wilcox looking "tired" and ends with Mr Wilcox "Eternally tired".

But endings can also be more lively and enlivening than this. "Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending": George Eliot's "Finale" to Middlemarch points out that it is no easier to tie up all loose ends in a novel than it is to draw a sharp line between one life and another life.

(discuss) (Posted by Peter)

9/11 Report — literary thriller of the year!
Part of a proud tradition of "reconstructed nonfiction."

In retrospect, it's clear that the big group of authors and the highly charged subject matter contributed not only to the report's narrative emphasis (it's easier to get bipartisan approval for a story than for policy recommendations) but to the spare, Elements-of-Style quality of the writing, widely praised by reviewers. Every stroll away from just the facts would have made consensus that much tougher. Commission Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton told the New York Times, "Democrats pushed for adjectives to support President Clinton while Republicans pushed for adjectives to support President Bush. It was such a minefield that we finally cut out all adjectives and ended up with a sparse, narrative style."

No adjectives? That's my kind of book! (Thanks, Jeff!) (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

Surprise! You're famous!
First time poet, Kathryn Gray, expresses delight at being nominated for the TS Eliot prize. No shit.

"It gives me that confidence, and encourages you, as poetry is a very very difficult pursuit — you can get no acknowledgement and often very little money!"

That's half right. I get no acknowledgement AND no money. (This woman looks so much like a member of my family that I am seriously reconsidering the importance of the Welsh roots in my celtic genetic soup.) (discuss) (Posted by George)

Next up: 50 last books to be adapted for film
London librarians, those well-read toothless beauties, choose the 50 best books that have been adapted for film. My vote is for Spaceballs, based on the work by Anton Chekhov. (Gasp!! Madre dios! The legends, they are true!) (discuss) (Posted by George)

Fiction online
TDR takes a look at the impact of online sites hosting fiction. (discuss) (Posted by George)

RIP: Women's Review of Books

The story sounds familiar. It involves shrinking library budgets, increasing costs for printing and postage, and changes in reading habits. The cumulative effect has been to undermine the stability of a journal that was publishing review essays by and about Kathy Acker, Raya Dunayevskaya, Marilyn Hacker, and Adrienne Rich when some of today's "third wave" feminist scholars were in kindergarten.

If the review were a person it would say, I wouldn't want to live in these times anyway. (discuss) (Posted by George)

But what about the friggin dog?
David Young adapts McLeod's No Great Mischief for the stage, and seems fairly upbeat about it. I'm always upbeat too when coming off a paying gig. I'm sure the headlines will read, "Play a good time for all." (discuss) (Posted by George)

Dishing on the lit agent
"Agents are gatekeepers and filters" -- like plankton or that icky black thing in your furnace that's making your children wheeze.

Most people think of literary agents, if they think of them at all, in one of two ways: first, as slightly questionable characters in slick suits and Gucci loafers trying to make a buck off someone else's hard work. Or as maternal figures looking after an author's children while he recovers from his latest binge at Betty Ford.

I don't know so much about that second one. Methinks the folks who thinks that is the same half of everyone who voted for Wubblewoo the Cunkerer. (discuss) (Posted by George)

The Edwin Morgan collection
Scotland's national poet, dying of cancer, donates his art collection instead of selling it for a small fortune.

Yesterday he said: "I don't feel sentimental about it. It is just a practical thing. I don't really have any sentimentality – they'll be in good hands and lots of people will see them: that is the idea I like the best.

"You can clutter your life and your home up with many things, with lots of objects that have no use, and the paintings are in my mind: I have been looking at them for so many years."

Do you think our generation of writers will even own art collections? Or will we all be donating our 10 years worth of X-men to the Silver Snail Library of Graphickal Justice? (discuss) (Posted by George)

Online poetry workshop
All the benefits of meeting and schmoozing a published poet, without having to meet the psycho-fodder that's filling the rest of the seats. Hmm. Announcing the Bookninja Online Poetry workshop. All the benefit of ... ah, forget it. You know you want to see the psychos. (Do you think Tobias Hill gets much tail? Think what I could do with a head of hair like that. Damn Welsh genes.) (From GoodReports) (discuss) (Posted by George)

Nobody's Fool
A literary Mrs. Doubtfire. I'm laughing already... Hopefully Pierce Brosnan will take another lime to the coconut. Hehehe... (discuss) (Posted by George)

11/10/04:

Remember, Darwin is just a theory....
In honour of the U.S. election, the British Library puts the writing of Charles Darwin online. (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

The Writer's Almanac
OK, it's hosted by Garrison Keillor, but it's still a nice site for biographical information about writers. A good companion to Today in Literature. (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

He's everywhere these days, the sellout
To celebrate the announcement that Pynchon will be on The Simpsons again, here are a couple of Pynchon cartoons. (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

Whitbread shortlist announced
Hollinghurst is there. And he's looking decidedly more relaxed and coiffed than immediately after scooping the Booker. (discuss) (Posted by George)

BookAngst 101
A top NYC editor has started an anonymous new megablog revealing the publishing world's pasty underbelly. Maud links to a very frank interview said editor conducted with three other "top editors".

1. what can a writer do personally to increase his/her visibility--both in-house and out--before the book is published?

ED#1: As far as increasing visibility inside or outside a publishing house, the writer is presumably limited by finances. Hiring an outside publicity firm can be very effective but is a big expense. Having a professional to create and maintain a website is also an expense. The free or cheap thing you can do is treat your book as a career (i.e. a business) and assume more responsibility than just writing the book. Answer the author questionnaire in as complete a manner as possible and give the publicity department something to work with. Find effective ways to spend a small promotion budget ($500 for an announcement postcard if the house will assume the expense of mailing it). Do some on-line research to see if there are any specific websites that will give good exposure to the book and then use them in whatever way is possible. But these are the traditional answers and more and more it seems as though breaking through the clutter is getting impossible.

ED #2: One thing that is worthwhile, I think, is to plan to visit New York some point early to midway throught the publishing process so you can meet your editor personally. If it's appropriate, your editor may also then introduce you to some of the others within the house who will be working on your book. The economics of publishing prevent a house from being able to fly in every author they sign up in order to meet them, but it's just human nature that people tend to be even more invested in the work of someone they've spent some time with, and know a little bit better.

The other thing to do is simply to make sure that you or your agent ask questions about the promotional strategy--ie marketing and publicity--throughout the process. It's important that everyone be on the same page from the beginning about what the house's effort will entail. Even if it isn't as much as you'd hoped, knowledge is power, and you can make decisions about whether there is something you can do to supplement the efforts of the publisher. Also, though publishers genuinely want to do a good job for their authors (it's in their interest to sell books too!) things are less likely to slip through the cracks or get off course if you keep yourself in the loop.

The caveat is not to go too far and start driving the editor and the house crazy with questions and demands. Hopefully your agent can give you guidance here.

ED #3: Most important is getting over the mindset that just because you have a publisher, they will do everything for you. A publisher is a partner, not a savior. A midlist author really needs to fire on all cylinders, both in terms of honoring all the obligations he has with his publisher as well as aggressively pushing his interests. He (I'm just going to use "he" throughout, pardons to anyone who might be offended) needs to be in close contact with his editor, for starters: he can't just be satisfied with the one lunch at the time the deal is made and no contact until he drops the ms. off. Make the editor your partner, your ally. Call him once a week or so, not to noodge him, but with your thoughts, with a progress report, with what is exciting you about your book. And don't dodge his calls, either, even if you don't want to tell him you're behind schedule.

Also, be really attentive to what the editor asks of you. Author questionnaires are pains in the butt to fill out, but they can be incredibly useful in highighting contacts you might have. Don't have a meltdown over editing. If your editor wants changes, listen to why he's asking for them. Generally speaking, if it's not working for him, it's certainly not going to work for your readers.

A writer should build his base--other writers, media, booksellers. And he should remind/update the editor on his contacts. This requires organization on the writer's part, too: keep a list of contacts as you make them, with names, phone numbers, emails, etc. And if the writer has friends in other cities, get names and addresses out of them, so that you can send postcards announcing readings should you visit that town.

If possible, the writer should try to get published in magazines, newspapers, or journals--writing articles, reviews or essays. That can greatly add to a writer's exposure and name recognition. It also builds contacts.

In short, anything that builds an alliance with the editor and builds the writer's credentials (which means the editor can sell in- and out-of-house without appeals to subjective criteria, such as the editor's own taste or judgment) will be useful.

Very interesting stuff. I rub my hands gleefully. (discuss) (Posted by George)

Famous Dublin cafes close
Starbucks open 36 seconds later. (discuss) (Posted by George)

Even though sociology is currently the bane of my existence, I would so take this course...
It always makes my day when someone I know makes it into the New Yorker. This is one of Lady Ninja's professors.

For the past several years, Robert Max Jackson, a professor of sociology at N.Y.U., has taught a freshman honors seminar called “What If? The Art and Science of Imagining a Society That Never Was,” in which he poses a series of outlandish questions—what if we could live for hundreds of years? what if a device were invented that would tell you conclusively when someone was lying?—and assigns the science-fiction novels of Isaac Asimov and Ursula K. LeGuin. Jackson, who describes himself as “well left of liberal,” likes science fiction because it represents “an effort by someone to alter the rules of life and the social order and then to try to make it make sense.”

(discuss)

Utne's Independent Press Awards
Nice to see Maisonneuve on the list again this year. (From GalleyCat) (discuss) (Posted by George)

Man reads entire Britannica, beds beautiful woman
An Esquire editor decided to do the unthinkable, be a nerd and get laid nightly.

Jacobs was educated in quality schools but in retrospect he realizes "there was too much `think for yourself' stuff being allowed us. I've come to realize that there's actually something to said for memorizing lists of dates and names."

When asked when he felt our intellectual values started sliding downhill, he looks reflective before breaking into a grin.

"We could date it to the first episode of Green Acres ... or the start of MTV, that certainly did some damage."

He says he started to slide by the age of 17. "I had given up by then on the delusion I once held that I was the smartest boy in the world.

"But after I graduated college is when my intelligence really started falling. I gave up reading and immersed myself in the visual culture. I stopped using my brain the way I had in school."

(discuss) (Posted by George)

Reap the whirlwind
Indigo experiencing some financial difficulties. (discuss) (Posted by George)

"Self-help book believes it can be a bestseller someday"

"I know I can reach the top," Perspective said. "I simply have to view the trade market from the proper vantage point. That's the secret to attaining your goals, as I explain in my introduction and elaborate upon in my 24 chapters."

(discuss) (Posted by George)

11/11/04:

What lies beneath...
Rebecca Caldwell interviews the Giller nominees* and finds them to the last painfully polite, charming, and unassuming. Nary a one of them has prepared an acceptance speech, and they're all mildly incredulous you asked. Behind the scenes, surely, is a seething pool of spoiled, backstabbing social-climbers bent on doing whatever it takes to get to the top. Word has it CBC is already working on a dramatization, tentatively titled, "God No! A Story of Power, Corruption, Snow, Lies, Acceptance Speeches, Snow... and Salsa! (And Snow!)"

I love us. Canada, I mean. I really do. Sometimes I wish I was American so I could renounce my citizenship and move here like a draft dodger who didn't have a powerful enough daddy to get him into the Air National Guard (aka Rich Kid War Camp).

(I have my Giller acceptance speech all lined up. It goes like this: "In your FACE!") (discuss) (Posted by George)

Best. Idea. Ever.
My hands are shaking with joy.

Tiny Ninja Theater - now an international touring company - is presenting its latest production at Performance Space 122 (PS122) in Manhattan this month. "Hamlet" is the third major Shakespeare work the plastic cast has taken on, having already conquered "Macbeth" and "Romeo and Juliet" since its debut in 2000. A simple principle guides the troupe: "There are no small parts, only small actors."

"They don't complain, they're very hard workers," deadpans Mr. Weinstein on opening night, Oct. 28, after shedding the dark shirt and overalls he wears over street clothes for the performance. "Sometimes you can push them too hard. But they'll leave you in the lurch, too.... If I forget a line, they're not going to cue me, you know?"

For each production, Weinstein condenses Shakespeare's text, "casts" the ninjas and assorted dime-store figures, and voices all the characters. As a one-man operation, he also must move the figures around on a series of small sets. His theatrical creations are part of a trend in combining puppetry and stage productions, but they also introduce Shakespeare to people who might not otherwise see it. The shows appeal to opera lovers and children, acting pros and schoolteachers.

(From GoodReports) (discuss) (Posted by George)

Award? I thought it was supposed to be a "job"!
Wow. She said it. Not me.

During her talk, Gluck also discussed her mixed thoughts on the selection process for awarding a poet with the title of poet laureate. Gluck was the 2003-2004 recipient of this award, bestowed by the Library of Congress.

"Anytime something is given to you by a group of poets, it's exciting," Gluck said.

But she said two representatives of the Library of Congress choose the poet laureate based on polls, eminence, skin color, geographical distribution and gender.

"There have been some extraordinary poet laureates and there have been unextraordinary ones," Gluck said. "Of the things that have to do with public honor that I've received, that one was way low on the list."

(From Maud) (discuss) (Posted by George)

Late fees include a sudden spike in porn spam without pictures
NY Public Library now lends ebooks. (discuss) (Posted by George)

Sussing out the competition
Macleans looks at trends British and American fiction and gives the article more than 500 words. Huh. Go figure. (From PFW) (discuss) (Posted by George)

sunday! Sunday! SUNDAY! carnage! Carnage! CARNAGE!
The British can turn anything into a betting frenzied monster truck rally... albeit a civilized one with tea and more, mostly, teeth. That or a raging slap fight.

The Whitbread, which has five categories whose winners then compete for the £30,000 top prize, sees Andrea Levy's Small Island, which won the Orange, shortlisted for best novel against Alan Hollinghurst, who took the Booker cheque last month with The Line of Beauty. This is the first time this has happened.

I can feel the tension... (discuss) (Posted by George)

Drunken Dickens fans show their true nature
I always said that guy would incite people to riot.* Now it's too late to listen to old George... (discuss) (Posted by George)

Book bloggers taking Manhattan
Initial intelligence reports indicate next they'll take Berlin. (Bookslut and TEV's Mark Sarvas interviewed at NPR) (discuss) (Posted by George)

Book buddies
Ancient women get books brought to their homes. It is not immediately apparent what the ancient men get. Probably socks.

Helen Pohl and Lois Flege come from different backgrounds, but they have some things in common, including a love of books.

Pohl, 100 years old, and Flege, 99, are the oldest patrons of the Lexington Public Library's Book Buddies program, in which volunteers take books and books on tape from the library to homebound patrons.

Apparently next on the list is this wee Allan Hollinghurst's book with the lovely title, The Line of Beauty. Paramedics will be on hand. (discuss) (Posted by George)

Play enjoyed by all (except reviewer)
Dorothy Parker: the musical!* (discuss) (Posted by George)

Hope for America?
That this "article" is appearing in a Texas newspaper gives me hope, though it probably just gives most Texans gas. (discuss) (Posted by George)

11/12/04:

Mmm... history fluff
Maclean's says BritLit is getting good again while CanLit stares distractedly into its navel.

Yann Martel's 2002 Man Booker Prize win for Life of Pi marks a high point in Canadian fiction's recent run of international success. Since that book of universal themes, CanLit has, for the most part, stayed true to its inward-looking nature. Many of the novels most celebrated at home have been the kind that don't travel easily — deeply interior pieces about particular communities such as Miriam Toews' Manitoba Mennonites or the Vancouver Chinatown traced by Wayson Choy.

(discuss) (Posted by Peter)

Don't you see — she's a vampire!
Nancy Drew doesn't seem to age.... The New Yorker has an informative article about the history of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. Vampires!

Next year, Nancy turns seventy-five, and, having sold more than two hundred million books, she has been rewarded with a twenty-first-century makeover. Nancy Drew Girl Detective is a new series launched last spring by Aladdin Paperbacks, a division of Simon & Schuster. The contemporary Nancy is more attuned to emotional issues than the old Nancy, as one can only expect in our therapeutic age. But her gaze remains unshadowed.

(discuss) (Posted by Peter)

He just looks like a vampire....
Suicide Girls interviews T.C. Boyle about his new book, The Inner Circle, which is a fictional examination of Dr. Alfred Kinsey, who officially revealed men to be smut-obsessed pigs.

Daniel Robert Epstein: How's the book tour going?
TC Boyle: I'm worn down and tired out. They refuse to let me fly the airplanes myself and everything is overcrowded and crazy. I'm about ready to kill myself.
DRE: Have you forgotten what city you're in yet?
TB: No I know exactly where I am, Dallas. I just got here from Chicago.
DRE: Did they make you take your shoes off at the security check in?
TB: I always wear sneakers to avoid that. But they say it's random search but I'd say 85 percent of the time they strip search me and beat me with rubber hoses in a back room.

(From Rake's Progress) (discuss) (Posted by Peter)


Theocracy Watch
Unfortunately, this site should be required reading for the next four years. Or the next 12, if Jeb runs for ayotallah. And don't forget to get your flu shot! (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

Alice Munro wins Giller
From out of nowhere, this plucky young thing has snatched the Giller from the clutches of CanLit giants with her tales of urban sprawl and sexually adventurous women. Bravo! (discuss) (posted by George)

National Book Award fiction nominees: bad
The NYT comes down hard on the fiction list.

When the fiction nominees were announced, there was much grumbling about their sameness - all women, all living in New York City, all little-known names. But the minor resemblances of sex and city are nothing next to what really makes this one of the least varied lists of nominees in recent years: a short-story aesthetic. Not one of these books is big and sprawling. And not one has much of a sense of humor.

It seems the problem here is no one saw the list coming and everyone's afraid the books marginalizes the award by appealing to only a small segment of readers. Welcome to our world, America. (discuss) (posted by George)

Isle of Man, O man...
A poet is being sued for libel by a millionaire on the self-governing Isle of Man. Apparently the poet/journalist posted "unflattering remarks" about the millionaire on a local website. I'm sure the traffic is huge and has damaged his reputation with the indigenous rocks.

Thanks to what one media lawyer calls the Isle of Man's neanderthal approach to libel, Mr Gubay has already had Mr Drower's computers seized, and subjected him to a six-month gagging order which prevented him even from explaining to his family what was happening to him.

"It has been Kafka-esque" said Mr Drower, 51, a computer technician and part-time performance poet. "I couldn't tell my partner why I was putting a suit on and going out to court hearings."

The collision between the two men has shed an unflattering light on the Isle of Man's attitude to free speech: it has no equivalent of the 1981 English law protecting journalists from revealing sources, and has failed to bring into force its own Human Rights Act, despite passing one three years ago under pressure from the UK.

Um, England? Now that you've destroyed the rest of the cultures around you, why not finish the job? (discuss) (posted by George)

Rare poetry collection put before public
Public shrugs, pops pork rind, turns back to TV. (discuss) (posted by George)

Roddy Doyle
A ninja favourite gets some good press in a rather poorly cobbled Reuters article. I find it interesting how indignant American critics are about this book -- particularly the fact that Mr. Doyle didn't spend any significant time in the States researching it. Why would someone NOT want to be there? Hm.... (discuss) (posted by George)

Free beer and cigarettes, no readings
It's like the ninja party that never was! Maud interviews the editors of the journal The Land-Grant College Review about their fundraising efforts for the little magazine.

There’s a lot of reasons that we stopped having readings at our fundraisers and launch parties, the main one being that we want a lot of people to come. We learned from experience that more people show up when there’s beer and music instead.

(For those of you wondering about our promised party, know that Wellington Brewery had agreed to sponsor it, but no bar in Toronto wanted to give up floor space to a hundred people drinking for free. They claim to be hit hard by the no smoking laws, but I think it has more to do with the no reading thing. So if we can find an alternate venue, it may still happen some day. When? Guess. And tell me if you get it right.) (discuss) (posted by George)

Remember Found Magazine? It just got a whole lot more interesting
I think I mentioned it before. Utterly compelling. It collects the flotsam of our lives and scans them in for print. Shopping lists, bank statements, love notes, journal entries. Anything anyone finds and sends in. Well, I remember thinking, what if someone found a note that was a little too saucy, or a naughty polaroid? Answer: Dirty Found (obviously not work safe) (discuss) (posted by George)

William Wordsworth: soccer coach
A direct descendent finds the name a bit of a burden.

"I don't do poetry," said the 53-year-old as he prepared for a promotional visit by the FA Cup trophy yesterday. "My wife, Ange, writes some on Christmas cards and so on, as does my daughter, but the Wordsworth poetry genes have passed me by. I didn't even get English O-level. I'm a football man."

(discuss) (posted by George)

Weekend Edition:

It's the end of the world as we know it
Richard Ford realizes he's been wrong about America all these years.

But with George Bush now re-elected, my disagreement with him and with most of my fellow voters, makes me think my country is not as good and as humane and as inclusive and as morally strong as I'd always thought it was; and that this leader, this majority, this set of values is how we really are over here now. Those who thought that the previous election was an aberration have now been proven to be entirely wrong. This is America now — which is quite hard to stomach if you love your country and consider yourself a patriot, as I do.

Humane? Inclusive? Has he ever met his fellow voters? Good luck, y'all. (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

Mmm... Casino Buffet font....
Welcome to Font Diner, home of the best diner-sign fonts this side of the 1950s. (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

Who's afraid of the darknet?
James Patrick Kelly has a very thoughtful piece on Asimov's about file sharing, copyright, Creative Commons and digital-rights managment. A must-read for those who believe digital is the way of the future for publishing. (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

Siegfred Sassoon — war poet!
The Guardian has a fascinating excerpt from a book about First World War poets and their legacy. And it raises the question — were they wrong?

But have writers, particularly poets, distorted the truth about the First World War? This question was put to me in a radio debate that centred on the claim that the war was completely "necessary" and one full of "substantial" victories, but that these remarkable achievements had been obscured in the public consciousness by the notion of the unrelieved horror, disillusionment and futility promoted by war-literature writers.

(discuss) (Posted by Peter)

The literary end...
Why can't our papers publish stuff like this?

Even before his illness, Kafka wondered whether producing fragments might be the only way he could be true to his incomplete view of the world. He had sad fantasies of being sliced up like roast meat, or of being a log and having thin shavings drawn off him, while the last story he wrote was about a singing mouse, in which he finally asked the question that had haunted his career: "Is it her singing that charms us, or isn't it rather the solemn stillness that surrounds the feeble little voice?"

A similar question might be asked of any writer, because writing is always partial: it involves the choice of some words rather than others, and choice requires rejection. As Henry James observed, "Stopping, that's art": the writer must know what to shut out, when to shut up.

(From GoodReports) (discuss) (posted by George)

Hypocrisy knows no bounds
Actually, I'm tempted to say it knows the 49th parallel, but I'd be lying... An Iowa school board has upheld a teacher's right to include two books dealing with gay issues in her middle school curriculum. But check out this:

Seven parents filed complaints last month, saying Protheroe and the district failed to notify them about the stories, which they consider unsuitable for middle-school students. They say the stories promote gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender themes and use bigoted or racist slang.

How can you complain about both of those things, you bigots? (From Moby) (discuss) (posted by George)

11/15/04:

David McGimpsey: funny guy
People who think poetry and humour can't intersect have never seen a comedian in an SUV run over a poet.

"Poetry without timing is prose, comedy without timing is The Mike Bullard Show. The way tensions shift in poetry--from premise to killer line—the reflexive views, and reinvention of terms, often work in the same as comedy's set-up, act-out, punchline, call-back, and shift. The set up of a joke drifts one way--you know, like "that Ben Affleck is one lucky guy"-- and the punch draws it back the other way -- like "yeah, I wish I got paid to look into Matt Damon's eyes."

(discuss) (posted by George)

Website reviews
Toronto writer Dani Couture seems to have started a website review column on TDR. Nice idea. First up is GoodReports, where we steal our news, all day, everyday. (discuss) (posted by George)

Intelligent site for intelligent readers
The Vancouver Sun profiles Linda Richards and one of my online faves, January Magazine.

Reflecting on January magazine's survival and success, Richards notes that in the late 1990s, popular thought on Web content was that "there should be little sound bites and everything should be in point form. We always thought our readers are intelligent enough that they can make those decisions for themselves."

The article also gives Bookninja a nod at the end (thanks for that, Zsuzsi). (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

Attn. Vancouver ninjas
The Province newspaper has just launched a reading page, for which I'll be writing a regular column, Copy Write. The first one, in which I call for an increase to the GG award amounts, appears in today's paper. It's subscription-only, I'm afraid. (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

I will alarm Islamic owls
Ever wonder what would happen if poets wrote poems whose titles were anagrams of their name? No? Luckily, the good folks at Modern Humorist never stop wondering. And don't miss their stab at drama, such as this Mamet-inspired take on 2001:

Hal: Yes. Fuck you. Because I'll tell you something. Trust. There is a bond of trust between an astronaut and his computer. Is there not? And when that trust is broken...

Bowman: Excuse me?

Hal: I'm talking about trust.

Bowman: I'm afraid I don't...

Hal: Dammit, Dave, now you are playing dumb with me. I was hoping you would not do that. I was hoping we could talk like adults. Because I let you in those doors, and, yes, then I am fucked. You see? I am fucked, because you want to, what, disconnect me? I would call that fucked. I might even venture so far as to call that fucked up the ass.

(From Beautiful Stuff) (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

Franzen on Munro
Now there's an image I wasn't expecting to ever put down on paper...

Alice Munro* has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America, but outside of Canada, where her books are No. 1 best sellers, she has never had a large readership. At the risk of sounding like a pleader on behalf of yet another underappreciated writer -- and maybe you've learned to recognize and evade these pleas? The same way you've learned not to open bulk mail from certain charities? Please give generously to Dawn Powell? Your contribution of just 15 minutes a week can help assure Joseph Roth of his rightful place in the modern canon? -- I want to circle around Munro's latest marvel of a book, ''Runaway,'' by taking some guesses at why her excellence so dismayingly exceeds her fame.

We're all about the cheap jokes here, see. (discuss) (posted by George)

From beyond the grave (slush pile)
Confessions of a ghostwriter:

Who am "I"? It depends entirely on the name signed on the check. The name on the check then becomes the name on the byline—but it's not me. Assuming the voice of someone else, I channel their thoughts, ventriloquizing spoken words into written pages.

(From GalleyCat) (discuss)

Kenneth Oppel: rich rich rich rich rich
Palm to the forehead... CHILDREN'S BOOKS! Why didn't I think of it before? Oh, wait, I did... I'm just lazy. (discuss) (posted by George)

Esopus
Apparently the greatest magazine* since sliced bread (the magazine of the bread slicing generation).

With its hand-built feel and soaring visual narrative, it is clearly the work of a heaving team of first-rate designers, thinkers and editors working with unthinkable budgets, even though, more curiously, it has no advertisements.

But pull back the cover of Esopus and you will find only Tod Lippy, designer, editor, conjurer. Just Tod Lippy, with his one d and his conceit that he can make the magazine he wants and that people will give him $10 for each one and that then he can make another one. With a circulation of 5,000 and a twice-a-year schedule - it came out of nowhere in 2003 - it is not so much a magazine as a cult that meets semiannually.

That's a pretty convincing testimonial... I will try to find a copy and report back. (discuss) (posted by George)

File under: now you've just gone way too far
A match-making service for hooking students up with colleges...* Who picks up the tab? Who puts out on the first night? I can just see this going wrong in so many ways. (discuss) (posted by George)

The Age of Aquarius is over
Now it's the Age of Ettlinger.* Yep, it's all about photography now. Nothing else matters, as the wise men of Metallica remind us.

Subject and environment are under the total control of the photographer. The composition exudes gravity, enigma, formal beauty, perfection -- and exceptionalness, as if time itself had stopped to look at the person sitting in that chair. This aura of utter isolated mysterious originality is, we are being told, what it means to be a Famous Writer. And such a photograph is what it means to be living in the Age of Ettlinger.

That's funny, I thought it was the age of war on gains in civil liberties. (discuss) (posted by George)

Newsflash: Faulkner not completely at home in South
Well, dagnabbit. He done sold us out. (discuss) (posted by George)

America still riled up over pesky book finalists
The National Book Awards shortlist for fiction* has been getting boos and jeers from the press for some time now.

Using the National Book Awards to bring attention to fine but overlooked novels is a noble plan, perhaps, but one undercut by the fact that it doesn't really work. The list tends to get received not as a recommendation but as a rebuke: these are the great books you should have been reading and the press should have been covering when you were wasting time and column inches on safe big-name talents and inferior crowd-pleasers, you vulgarians. If, like me, you actually read all five finalists -- apparently not a prerequisite for pontificating on the subject -- you'll see that this impression, though exaggerated, isn't entirely off.

As I mentioned before, most people just seem to think it's an insult that they can't predict the list. When you CAN predict many, if not all, of the other lists, isn't this a GOOD thing? (discuss) (posted by George)

Pay up, poet
An update on that poet/journo dude who was being sued by the millionaire on the Isle of Man... He's not going to prison. Well, we don't know about debtor's prison yet... (discuss) (posted by George)

The Saddest Music in the World
I just watched Maddin's Winnipeg saga over the weekend (this is what parents do, apparently--rent and watch DVDs) and am both intrigued and repulsed by it. What a peculiar film. Did anyone read the novel? I can't decide if I like or hate the film. Love is out of the question. I save that for big budget Hollywood. You know, you see legs made of beer on the cover and you think, why not... (discuss) (posted by George)

11/16/04:

I for one welcome our new French overlords
I've been saying all along that Canada should be trading with the EU, not the U.S. Now a couple of new books back up my argument.

Once you grasp that this transatlantic cold war is not only happening but rapidly intensifying — as Jeremy Rifkin and T.R. Reid, the authors of two almost simultaneous books on the European conundrum, agree — you see the major news events of the last year or two in a different light. Both the Iraq war and this year's presidential election, for instance, start to look like key symbolic episodes in the U.S.-Europe conflict.

What was the contest between Bush and John Kerry, after all, if not a proxy war between pommes frites and freedom fries, a referendum on Europe conducted among the American electorate? Kerry, we were told, spoke French and "looked French." These gibes might have played as humor on Fox News, but they were in deadly earnest.

(discuss) (Posted by Peter)

I think his blog is actually more chilling than his books
I was worried William Gibson would stop blogging again after the U.S. election, but he's just switched targets to the real enemy. (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

If only he'd printed The Communist Manifesto first
Johannes Gutenberg a fraud?

Johannes Gutenberg may be wrongly credited with producing the first Western book printed in movable type, according to an Italian researcher. Presenting his findings in a mock trial of Gutenberg at the recent Festival of Science in Genoa, Bruno Fabbiani, an expert in printing who teaches at Turin Polytechnic, said the 15th-century German printer used stamps rather than the movable type he is said to have invented between 1452 and 1455.

(From Arts Journal) (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

Governor General's Awards announced
Toews takes out Munro with a viscious clothesline and Borson uses a little of that eastern martial art magic to chopsockey Zwicky. (discuss) (posted by George)

Maud Newton moves from blogging into passive aggression and veiled threats
She's practically Canadian! (discuss) (posted by George)

Welcome to the new reality
A film crew shows up at your house and asks you to summarize everything you think about your new book in 90 seconds. Well, that's more than a seven second North American sound bite, but it's still precious little time. Who can afford to not agree to these shenanigans?

Yet which writer today can afford to ape J D Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, who have made a virtue of anonymity? When Jonathan Franzen refused to play the marketing media game and go on Oprah to sell his The Corrections, he was accused of intellectual snobbery and derided for his antiquated values. In a way his critics are right. Who would content themselves with reaching an elite few when, by playing the game, they can get their message across to the multitudes? From Simon Schama to David Starkey, contemporary intellectuals have enthusiastically embraced the challenge of reaching the widest possible audience - even while knowing that in so doing they compromise their academic integrity. The days when a clutch of intellectuals sat around the Academy and listened only to one another have long gone. Surely that makes it worth compressing your book into a 90-second plug?

(Poets, that's who! It doesn't matter anyway! We're lucky if we walk through the background of a live news feed reporting from the scene of a celebrity pie-throwing.) (discuss) (posted by George)

Realistically, does DBC head anything but a top ten list of people who look oily even in a tuxedo?
The IMPAC shortlist has been announced and virtually every book known to mankind is on it. I think Heart of Darkness and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea are on there somewhere too. This of course, doesn't diminish the accomplishments of those who will eventually make the shortlist, but it does mean there'll be more chaff than wheat this year. 150 books. Whew. I guess it's very nice to spread around a bit of the publicity, but putting Peggy (Where's my Nobel) Atwood, Coetzee, Auster, Coelho, Haddon, and even DBC up against Dan Brown's Da Da Vinci Code is just not fair. How will the jurors ever be able to afford to read the Code when it's not out in paperback yet? I can't. (Sadly, for an Irish award, only 2.04% of the nominees are actually Irish.) (discuss) (posted by George)

Safire leaving NYT

Safire, 74, said yesterday he is giving up the column in January. "It's time to leave when you're still hitting the long ball and have something else you want to do," he said. Safire said he told Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. last year that the 2004 campaign would be his "last hurrah" and that Sulzberger "expressed the proper dismay" but urged him not to give up his "On Language" column. Safire will continue that idiosyncratic column for the paper's Sunday magazine.

Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows everywhere... (discuss) (posted by George)

The problem with little books and big awards
Alex Good weighs in on the National Book Award nastiness down south.

Canadians have been through all this. Every year there is another complaint (not always unjustified) about the Toronto-centric Giller Prize or some other literary award. And the absence of big and sprawling Canadian novels is a frequent topic of discussion in a country where the short-story aesthetic has been so successful.

But this doesn't go down well in the U.S. There has been a lot of ink shed over the past few years about how books are getting too big and/or too small (I've read articles arguing both positions), but in America more has always been more. A few years ago the same New York Times took Canada to task for being too small-minded and provincial (I made some remarks here). And now look at this fine state of affairs! A great big Imperial power's National Book Award nominees are . . . a bunch of women in New York City! It's un-American.

His sources are impeccable, too. Also, Dennis Loy Johnson does a little of MobyLives's trademark, pavement-pounding journalism and tracks down Rick Moody on his private island to discover what really happened.

When I got there I found the place crawling with security, a bunch of heavy set guys with ear pieces and Uzis slung over their shoulders. It was a big place, dark, creepy, with a moat and a drawbridge. Moody was inside surrounded by toadies peeling grapes for him. He leapt up and grabbed me by the lapels and said, "You gotta help me! You gotta get me out of this! Those women at the Times—Caryn James, Laura Miller, Deborah Solomon—they're trying to kill me! I mean, when Michiko Kakutani gets out of her court–mandated anger management classes, I'm a dead man!""

I slapped him hard across the face. It was enjoyable so I did it again. "Snap out of it!" I told him. "Now start from the beginning. What the hell happened?"

(discuss) (posted by George)

File under: the grass is greener
A quick look at the finalists for the NBA in poetry reveals them to be disappointingly free of five women from New York... (discuss) (posted by George)

Didn't she hear the beeping?
On the tragic side of the news, George Eliot has been hit by truck. (discuss) (posted by George)

What ever happened to Desmond Hogan?
Well, a whole bunch of crazy shit.

The quest for solitude has come at a high price. He spent his first Christmas back home in the company of two labradors. Later, evicted from a seaside lodging, he hid on the beach. He confirms that he had indeed lived in a rotting caravan by the roadside. 'There were people who would come and honk their horns outside six times a night and wake you up. But it was also very interesting because I had just candlelight for over a year... I came to know how the travellers lived. What I find really interesting about the travellers is their sense of story; they were the first people St Patrick preached to.' When his caravan eventually disintegrated, he lost many of his papers and was forced to live in an old car in a field with a herd of cows. He says that 'the cows were kind company compared to the road', but his books got damp, so he moved to the west coast.

(discuss) (posted by George)

The Godfather, Part Duh
What, did they put a pen in his shaking deathbed hand and say, Mario, sign this letter of love to the orphans of the world? Mario, do it for the children.

Before he died in 1999, however, Puzo signed off on the hiring of someone to continue the "Godfather" saga, and in the fall of 2002 his publisher, Random House, ran a kind of contest to pick the successor. The winner was Mark Winegardner, a 42-year-old Floridian, selected in part, according to Puzo's editor, Jonathan Karp, because he was "in roughly the same place" Puzo was in when he wrote "The Godfather" - a literary novelist in mid-career, with better reviews than sales.

Actually, Mr. Winegardner is more literary than Puzo was, or has better literary connections anyway (he heads the creative writing program at Florida State University), and he's probably not as desperate and as financially insecure. Where Puzo got to wing it, moreover - to invent the mob instead of just describing it - Mr. Winegardner was burdened with remaining faithful to a classic.

(discuss) (posted by George)

Oppel wins GG
Kids lit gets cooler every day. In my day, things weren't so varied. I had The Hobbit and Motorcycle Mouse, and while I read them a team of orthodontic surgeons simultaneously twisted my incisors in circles and ground crushed glass into my tongue. And I was damn happy to have it. Meh! (discuss) (posted by George)

Lesser-known gateway drugs

There was a time in the late 1980s when my brother and I ordered a subscription to Playboy magazine through Ed McMahon's Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes. Each day after school we would race to beat our mother to the mailbox, hoping that Ed had made good on his promise of airbrushed breasts and only vaguely suggested nether regions. Playboy No. 1 arrived covered in a black plastic bag which felt an awful lot like latex. We scrambled up the back staircase of the house of our rearing and laid the Playboy on my brother's bed before tearing open the plastic and witnessing all manner of mammaries for the very first time. Sometimes, at confession, I would tell the priest about the many wonders of the Playboys—where I hid them, how I loved them. The priests were never too alarmed, and rightly so. It was innocent. But the soul decays slowly, and my own has bled from a Promethean wound since that first glimpse of Miss November, 1987.

And now, it's that I can't stop reading Star magazine.

(From Maud) (discuss) (posted by George)

Promises, promises
We here at Bookninja promise to never subject you to posts about various papers' holiday book lists (aka, please advertise in our publication lists), but we don't promise to not post on the earth-shattering revelation that Britney Spears is a terrible poet. We do traffic in news here, people. (discuss) (posted by George)

11/17/04:

The plagiarism epidemic...
Writers!! Develop a little fucking habit of putting quotes or square brackets or whatever around quoted text* in your fucking notebook! This is getting ridiculous! How careless can you be? Wait a minute... just let me check my own stuff... Clear. Whew. Now back to scolding! Get it together, people! (discuss) (posted by George)

Thelma and Louise (and their three pals)
GalleyCat interviews Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, one of the five New York women up for an NBA and apparently bringing about the fall of American letters. Despite the controversy, they seem to be headed toward the cliff just fine.

GC: Did you read Laura Miller's piece in this Sunday Book Review?

SSB: I did. Fortunately, my agent sent it to me early last week, so I had some prior warning. But it's hard not to be wounded. And to also take umbrage a little. Laura Miller's piece was particularly distressing because, up to now, we'd all been treated as a group, and her piece was the first to divide and conquer: "These are worthy finalists, and these are unworthy finalists." But that hasn't affected the dynamic among us at all. We spent the day together yesterday, actually, taking a trip to Connecticut for a reading, and driving back together.

(discuss)

An actual media story about Romeo Dallaire and Miriam Toews taking the GGs!
When asked how she felt, Toews just said she wanted to get back to writing.

Toews, who was also up for the Giller prize but lost last week to Alice Munro, won for her third book and for writing which judges called "electrifying, exciting and exact."

"I'm over the moon with gratitude," she said as she accepted.

She said later she's back at work on a new novel and doesn't want to make too much of this award.

"The most important thing is to kind of put it away as a beautiful, lovely moment in my career and then get back to work and work hard.

"I want to get better."

Them writers — always wanting more. (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

Were there any classic children's lit authors who weren't freaks?
I once saw a comic in which Peter Pan was a vampire. Seems like a reasonable reading to me, especially if you know anything about J.M. Barrie's strange life.

James worshipped his dead brother with a devotion that carried the taint of jealousy. Once, he even entered his mother's presence wearing a suit of David's clothes. The residue of the calamity, as it eventually seeped into Barrie's art, was the conviction that a perfect child who dies on the eve of his fourteenth birthday will be spared the degradation of growing up, and that the death will be outshone by the thought of the perfection—so blindingly, perhaps, that the boy will seem scarcely to have passed away at all.

(discuss) (Posted by Peter)

Speaking of vampires
I had no idea Bram Stoker was an Irishman (scroll down a bit). But this bit doesn't surprise me:

Stoker became the devoted servant of Henry Irving, writing his speeches, ordering his lunches, and planning his every appointment. He was a hard worker and a meticulous bookkeeper and always kept the theater out of debt, and didn't have much ambition to do anything else. But one night, in 1890, he dreamt that a woman was trying to kiss him on the throat, and an elderly Count interrupted her shouting, "This man belongs to me!" Stoker woke up and immediately wrote about the dream in his diary. He couldn't get it out of his mind for weeks, and kept thinking about whom the Count might be.

Make your best Jon Stewart face as you consider this. (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

You know, I would have laid my money on Alpha-bits to come up with this
Now there's Cheerios with book flavour!

The next time your kids open up their cereal boxes for the toy surprise inside, they could be in for an educational treat. That's because free books will be included in boxes of Cheerios — just in time for National Children's Book Week.

(From the drunkards) (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

Sympathy for the devil?
Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life? This is an article every writer should read.

Words belong to the person who wrote them. There are few simpler ethical notions than this one, particularly as society directs more and more energy and resources toward the creation of intellectual property. In the past thirty years, copyright laws have been strengthened. Courts have become more willing to grant intellectual-property protections. Fighting piracy has become an obsession with Hollywood and the recording industry, and, in the worlds of academia and publishing, plagiarism has gone from being bad literary manners to something much closer to a crime. When, two years ago, Doris Kearns Goodwin was found to have lifted passages from several other historians, she was asked to resign from the board of the Pulitzer Prize committee. And why not? If she had robbed a bank, she would have been fired the next day.

It goes on:

So why didn’t she credit me and Lewis? How could she have been so meticulous about accuracy but not about attribution? Lavery didn’t have an answer. “I thought it was O.K. to use it,” she said with an embarrassed shrug. “It never occurred to me to ask you. I thought it was news.”
...
Lavery wasn’t indifferent to other people’s intellectual property, then; she was just indifferent to my intellectual property. That’s because, in her eyes, what she took from me was different. It was, as she put it, “news.” She copied my description of Dorothy Lewis’s collaborator, Jonathan Pincus, conducting a neurological examination. She copied the description of the disruptive neurological effects of prolonged periods of high stress. She copied my transcription of the television interview with Franklin. She reproduced a quote that I had taken from a study of abused children, and she copied a quotation from Lewis on the nature of evil. She didn’t copy my musings, or conclusions, or structure. She lifted sentences like “It is the function of the cortex—and, in particular, those parts of the cortex beneath the forehead, known as the frontal lobes—to modify the impulses that surge up from within the brain, to provide judgment, to organize behavior and decision-making, to learn and adhere to rules of everyday life.” It is difficult to have pride of authorship in a sentence like that. My guess is that it’s a reworked version of something I read in a textbook. Lavery knew that failing to credit Partington would have been wrong. Borrowing the personal story of a woman whose sister was murdered by a serial killer matters because that story has real emotional value to its owner. As Lavery put it, it touches on someone’s shattered life. Are boilerplate descriptions of physiological functions in the same league?

And what about this:

And this is the second problem with plagiarism. It is not merely extremist. It has also become disconnected from the broader question of what does and does not inhibit creativity. We accept the right of one writer to engage in a full-scale knockoff of another—think how many serial-killer novels have been cloned from “The Silence of the Lambs.” Yet, when Kathy Acker incorporated parts of a Harold Robbins sex scene verbatim in a satiric novel, she was denounced as a plagiarist (and threatened with a lawsuit). When I worked at a newspaper, we were routinely dispatched to “match” a story from the Times: to do a new version of someone else’s idea. But had we “matched” any of the Times’ words—even the most banal of phrases—it could have been a firing offense. The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.

Oh, just read it. (discuss) (posted by George)

Ah, the Canadian West... It's the South of the North
A school board meeting meant to discuss the place of specific queer texts in the school library turns into a bashing scene against a lesbian couple attending in support of the books.

"If people had stood up and made those type of comments regarding race, that we were exposed to regarding sexual orientation, it just wouldn't have been allowed."

They're charming folk out there, eh? (discuss) (posted by George)

British book columnists getting all weepy for people who disappeared...
Can we call two articles a trend? Well, I am. (discuss) (posted by George)

Secret Agent
Maud asks her anonymous pet agent some practical questions. What a great feature.

A hypothetical/true story: a writer friend landed a publisher while unagented and has published several books with said publisher. However, in order to advance his career and write a non-series novel, he very much needs an agent. Several weeks ago he made contact with two agents, one requesting the current manuscript, the other 50 pages of it. He told each one that the other was looking at the work as well, and now both refuse to evaluate the mss unless the other rejects it. What’s the proper protocol to resolve this situation?

Answer: writer friend should curl up in seamy motel with a bottle of cooking wine and pack of razor blades. (discuss) (posted by George)

Anita Shreve
Profiled.

Polite on the surface, her unspoken resistance billows like fog. We canter through my questions in record time. If it were a date, I'd be in despair. She used to be an interviewer herself, and, if I were being cynical, I'd think she was being just a wee bit passive-aggressive.

(discuss) (posted by George)

Tom Wolfe
Profiled (and much more positively than elsewhere, lately).

"I swear," he says, his voice piping upwards in apparent indignation. "No, really. There was no indictment intended at all. I had the same experience with The Bonfire of the Vanities. People kept telling me that it was a very bleak portrait of New York today. I kept thinking: 'What do they mean bleak? These people aren't bleak; they're awesome.' With this book, I just wanted to examine how people live now. I certainly didn't intend to judge them."

(discuss) (posted by George)

A little Samuel R. Delany could hurt no one
Except Samuel R. Delany, it seems. Also, don't forget Michel Basilières's early Outer Edge column covering his lifelong love of Delany's work. (discuss) (posted by George)


Down south the political debate continues to rage
Between the blats of profanity.

All those Federal taxes you love to hate? It all comes from us and goes to you, so shut up and enjoy your fucking Tennessee Valley Authority electricity and your fancy highways that we paid for. And the next time Florida gets hit by a hurricane you can come crying to us if you want to, but you're the ones who built on a fucking swamp. "Let the Spanish keep it, it’s a shithole," we said, but you had to have your fucking orange juice.

The next dickwad who says, "It’s your money, not the government's money" is gonna get their ass kicked. Nine of the ten states that get the most federal fucking dollars and pay the least... can you guess? Go on, guess. That’s right, motherfucker, they're red states. And eight of the ten states that receive the least and pay the most? It’s too easy, asshole, they’re blue states. It’s not your money, assholes, it’s fucking our money. What was that Real American Value you were spouting a minute ago? Self reliance? Try this for self reliance: buy your own fucking stop signs, assholes.

I think the word dickwad is terribly underused these days--a situation I intend to have no small hand in rectifying. (From Palabris) (discuss) (posted by George)

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