A list of words that should be eradicated from our language for the sake of IQs of our children. Won’t somebody think of the children in this? And, of course, shouldn’t this list be about ten times longer than it is?

First Dude “Skateboard English is not the appropriate way to refer to the spouse of a high ranking public official,” says one commentator on the university’s website.

Maverick The word has been left so battered and bruised by the assaults perpetrated on it by John McCain and Sarah Palin that it might be a kindness to leave it in peace to recover for a while.

Bailout Because it only ever seems to apply to impossibly rich people and institutions who have screwed up, and never to the much poorer people they have screwed over.

Do you ever feel guilty for buying books used? I have a policy that I only get authors to sign either books I’ve bought new, or those that I’ve bought used because I either collect first editions (I’ll track you down one day, Geoffrey Hill…) or they’re out of print. I get so many books delivered to me through Bookninja that it would be easy to just pass these review copies off as new and have them signed. Mostly authors wouldn’t know. Some might not even care. But then I get this creepy feeling in my gut as Protestant guilt kicks into action and starts commingling with my new-found belief in karma. That said, I buy plenty of used books when I have no intention or chance of ever meeting the author or am not sure if I’ll like it or if I suspect I won’t find it at my local independent. Oh wait. I have no local independent. I guess that’s why I buy books used now. Plus, I like the smell. It’s like huffing someone else’s basement. But I NEVER buy used online through Amazon. The idea of used books beside new ones has always creeped me out. It breaks my heart that they own Abebooks now.

For readers and collectors, these resellers, as they are called, offer a great service. Lost in the hand-wringing over the state of the book industry is the fact that this is a golden age for those in love with old-fashioned printed volumes: more books are available for less effort and less money than ever before. A book search engine like ViaLibri.net can knit together 20,000 booksellers around the world offering tens of millions of nearly new, used or rare books.

One consequence has been to change the calculations involved in buying a book. Given the price, do I really want to read this? Now it’s become both an economic and a moral issue? How much do I want to pay, and where do I want that money to go? To my local community via a bookstore? To the publisher? To the author?

In theory, I want to support all of these fine folks. In practice, I decide to save a buck.

Here’s one example of how I casually wreak destruction. I was reading “Sylvia,” an account by the late short-story master Leonard Michaels of his unstable first wife. Looking for material about Mr. Michaels, I saw his friend Wendy Lesser had written a long essay about him in a book published last year by Pantheon. I could buy a new paperback edition of that book, “Room for Doubt,” for $13.95 plus tax in a bookstore. But there were dozens of copies from resellers available online for as little as one cent, plus shipping.

A penny felt a little chintzy, even for me, so I bought a hardcover copy for 25 cents from someone who called herself Heather Blue, plus a few bucks for shipping. Neither my local bookstore nor Pantheon — whose parent, Random House, announced this month it would cut costs by reducing five divisions to three — nor the author got a share. The book looked good as new.

A good overview of the history of, and problems with, literary awards.

While big-selling popular fiction can afford to take its awards with a pinch of salt, prizes such as the Booker are increasingly vital to the field that likes to think of itself as quality literature. Along with the book clubs—among which Richard and Judy are in Britain what Oprah is to America—their influence on booksellers can determine entire publishing house budgets. Which leads to a question that’s weighing increasingly heavily on the shoulders of critics and prize-judges alike: in an overcrowded field, over-reliant on its relatively few hits and sporadic PR injections, might ambitious literature lose the big audience, as poetry and classical music have done?

In practice, what all this means is intense competition between the competitions. It’s increasingly vital, for instance, for the judges as well as the judged to grab headlines. This year’s Booker jury was typical: chaired by an ex-cabinet minister turned broadcaster, it featured a literary journalist, a novelist, the founder of Ottakar’s bookshops and a television and radio broadcaster. The Orange went one better, inviting pop singer Lily Allen (complete with predictable controversy) into its jury. She eventually dropped out, but the point was made. These are the people’s prizes, not the province of some snobby elite. These are popular public figures of good taste, and you’re going to enjoy reading what they enjoy reading.

The problem is not that having Lily Allen judging a literary prize is a bad thing as such. It’s that the attention such manoeuvres command is ultimately exhausting, and speaks of exhaustion. Something can only be interesting, or shocking, a certain number of times before it gets old. And if a panel is too exquisitely tailored to match media and public expectations, the context of lasting literary value begins to look rather distant. At what point does a jury become a focus-group, or jury selection begin to look like a popularity contest? And just how significant is any award when there are so many of them that most literary CVs boast at least one gong? It’s an unwritten part of the contemporary media deal that, in exchange for PR and banter and sales, everyone is expected to be either a good sport or a calculated curmudgeon. But they cannot opt out of the game—and it’s a game in which even the joke awards now seem to have as much status as the real ones.

With the publishing industry swirling among other shit near the bottom of the economic toilet-bowl-flush we’re currently seeing (even ivory tower eggheads are getting pinched with lit and English enrolments way down) feeling people are casting about for those to point fingers at and looking for messiahs in the form of… editors? What, you mean you can’t publish your way out of this with a dumbed-down, over-advanced potboiler? Huh. Even Canadian mega-critic Phil Marchand has a list of resolutions for the publishing industry that might help your snowbound neighbours to the north deal with the Coming Abookalypse.

“They were oil and water,” says Galassi, Straus’s chosen successor. Giroux usually ate lunch at his desk—turkey sandwich and Jell-O for dessert—while Straus single-handedly made the Union Square Cafe a publishing cafeteria. In the early eighties, Giroux complained, “Editors used to be known by their authors; now some of them are known by their restaurants.” It was an easy thing to say when—especially in the days before frenzied auctions over next-big-things—top agents were giving him the right of first refusal on their best writers.

Giroux rose to chairman, but he never made the big decisions—something Straus reportedly reminded him of, telling him, “You still don’t know the difference between an editor and a publisher.” Giroux later responded, “There’s nothing great about the word publisher, per se.”

What Straus and Giroux did share were very similar tastes and a genuine love of authors, and they both tended, as old age and corporate consolidation advanced, toward cranky proclamations. Each in his own way, of course: Straus compared conglomerate publishers to spaghetti salesmen, publicly feuded with Simon & Schuster, and turned down offers to buy the house (before relenting in 1994). Giroux, conceding “I’m just an old fogey,” asked, “Who the hell would read a book by Nixon?” (What did he make of O.J., you wonder.) He railed against “ooks”—gimmicks that weren’t quite books—which account for the majority of what’s now published. He often said, “It is the publisher’s job, if he cannot find a masterpiece to print, at least to avoid publishing junk.”

Well, the new year has come and gone and my only resolution, to not blog during that time, has been fulfilled. I feel renewed and vindicated by the cosmos. I lie. It sucks to be back and I plan to inflict my misery on you all. I lie again. Nothing has changed. It’s just like it was before: one foot in front of the other on the ever-shortening march to death. Oh wait, apparently I didn’t lie. Let’s try that again. Welcome back.

Half of all Canadians unable to name a Canadian author… HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Harold Pinter obits (Guardian, NYT, LAT)

RIP: Donald Westlake, mystery writer, dead at 75

Poet and St. John’s resident Don McKay named to the Order of Canada

Canadians on Richard and Judy book club list, including the irascible, sour-natured Steven Galloway

Another Canadian has most popular paperback in Britain for 2008

Is Bush a closet reader?

Anti-American Nobel secretary quits

Recession proof book: The Bible

And speaking of bestsellers… How come so many books can claim it?

Can public libraries go private?

Eoin Colfer on his decision to write a sequel to Hitchhiker’s

Paging Mr Salinger…

Holocaust memoir of love over the fence discredited and books cancelled… What does the prevalence fake memoir say about our culture?

Stalking Melville — can an author’s path be traced?

Anne of Green Gables makes The Modern Library and wins the PanAmSub/Dom Society’s Leather Paddle for Literature at the same time!

The last year in publishing was a tough one… here an editor comments… and here someone offers a “modest proposal” of how to bail out the industry

“Amazon.com Recommendations Understand Area Woman Better Than Husband“

“Google Announces Plan to Destroy All Information It Can’t Index“

What a loss. Nobel laureate, and one of the world’s greatest playwrights, dead at 78.

“What’s generally meant as a ‘Pinter play’ in the purest sense usually revolves around one or more characters who are imposing on themselves a constricted, even deprived existence in order to hold off a presumed but uncertain threat,” Anderson wrote.

Pinter’s plays featured sparse dialogue, often spiced with paranoia or simple befuddlement. In “The Birthday Party,” a boardinghouse resident is accosted by two malevolent visitors who insist it’s his birthday; in “The Homecoming” — which won the Tony Award for best play when it premiered on Broadway in 1967 — a professor and his wife return to his working-class British family, where the wife becomes the center of attention.

Pinter credited Samuel Beckett, among others, as an influence. (He starred in a production of Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” in 2006.) In turn, writers such as David Mamet and Sam Shepard followed Pinter’s elliptical lead.

Last issue of the Globe Books section today. Get it as a souvenir of when the mainstream media in Canada cared about literature nearly as much as advertising revenue. Furthermore, looks like there’ll be another two week “hiatus”, but this time to “retool”. After the raging lie they told us in August, are you sure they’ll be back at all?

This issue of Books will be its last in stand-alone form.

Beginning Jan. 10, Books will have a new home, in print and on the web. We’ll be part of a Focus & Books section every Saturday with the same authoritative survey of the Canadian literary scene, along with descriptions of our new online content.

We’re taking the next two weeks off to retool so that we continue to bring you not only the sharp and insightful reviews and features you have come to expect, but some new and, we hope, exciting ones.

Well, it’s almost time I gathered the elves, put on my red suit, leather boots and big-assed belt, and start calling Ho ho ho! And you just KNOW that’s a sex allusion that has nothing to do with the holidays, right? Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, Joyous Kwanzaa, Happy belated Diwali, Festive Yule, and whatever else I’m supposed to say. I may post a few times over the holidays, so feel free to check in or set your rss feed, but I’m really really going to try to NOT post and set my blogging batteries back in the charger for a while.

The new Joy of Sex purportedly considers women to be “participants” in sex instead of “recipients” of sex… hm… Fascinating, Captain… What’s next? The vote?

TV memoirs are the big thing this season

The three best cities for booklovers

Lynne Cheney plans to write James Madison bio (husband Dick will retire to private ranch near the border where he can practice his evil all day in a fresh, open field)

Chicklit morphs into Cooklit

Interview with a book binder

Why publishing’s failing: no confidence in readers makes them dumb things down

British poet laureate sighs out a protest against library closures (man, he looks tired.. I can’t wait to get him back to writing real verse again instead of commenting on every literary story that comes down the… …. … … … … … … please, pass me that rope, and tell my family I love them…)

eBook reader on a treadmill?

Scientists (those clowns of the white coat world): Oliver Twist was a lying little manipulator

More bad layoffs news at Random

And for your viewing pleasure: John Denver and the Muppets perform his poem “Alfie the Christmas Tree” Man, I so wish I had those glasses. I’d just stare at people with wide eyes all the time and my lips slightly parted until they grew uncomfortable and left. It’d be the greatest social weapon of all time.

If my holidays were an arterial system, doing Bookninja would be a blockage slowly making it’s way to my brain. Running this blog has brought me to the overlap zone in a ven diagram showing the sets “habit” and “obsessive compulsion”. I had planned on taking December off, but here I am. Sigh. Somebody bring me my meds.

Conflicts of interest pervade the world—right to very top

Obama picks his poet—Elizabeth Alexander

Following the lead of the Pulitzer Prize, the Best American Short Stories series will now also allow web-based writing to compete

Some odd phrases and words

JK has fastest selling book once again

Publisher’s Association in US launches anti-piracy website

Top 10 Canadian arts newsmakers—the inclusion of Lawrence Hill being the only reason there isn’t a paranthetical *yawn* between “Canadian” and “arts”

Random gets a new editor, while Doubleday sees layoffs

What’s behind Rupert—besides big, heavily armed dudes?

Poets & Writers gets $2M donation…! Hardly a Lily’s worth, but a nice chunk-a-change

Newspapers—part of a long tradition of things killed by the computer

Typo in Prop 8 legislation may save lycanthropic marriage

Wind in the Willows at 100

We regret the error—best news corrections of 2008

Your CANYOUFUCKINGBELIEVEWESURVIVEDTHELASTEIGHTYEARSTOLIVEINTHESETIMES? news item of the day: Obama appointee quotes from Faulker…

John Updike likes hot ebook pr0n

Proust’s dirty letters up for sale

JK Rowling takes a lot of abuse around here (which glances harmlessly off the billion dollar force field erected around her), but she does do good work for charity—I like rich people who aren’t just idly rich

Some thoughts on John Banville as a white collar thug of supervillian proportions

Ottawa library offers free ebooks to “armchair” borrowers

John Betjeman: gay hero

New Oz centre for writing and books to be headed by former Sydney Writers Festival director, who is not only apparently an awesome director, but, if photos don’t lie, is also WAY hotter than Meg Ryan

Gadget time: allow me to coin some terms: the Screll Phone, the Notester, the Growlio (okay, that last one is stretching it… what about “the Growdex”? No. “The Leaflet”…? naw…)

More on the melting book industry down south

Your sickwithjealousy post of the day: a custom writing retreat (thanks, Roland, I think)… What I want to know is what the HELL is she writing that she can afford to have that studio designed and built by someone who employs a design philosophy? If my studio doesn’t come from the back lot at the Home Depot where they keep the chipboard sheds, I ain’t gettin’ one

In the early days of Bookninja, I started a one-year-only “tradition” where I gave out Golden Shuriken Awards for Ridiculous Behaviour. It’s been quite a few years since I’ve done it, but was wondering if people wanted to see it return. It’s a kind of anti-award, for literary/media people/organizations who/that did damaging, silly, stupid, unethical, or just plain bizarre things during the preceding year. If you’ve got a suggestion for who should be nominated and why, send to me at this link. Here’s the 2004 edition for reference. If you can mimic this form and send me your award title and winner, I’ll give it some consideration and see if we can’t build an entertaining list. As you can see, some of the entries are double-tongued and ironic, while others are pretty cutting. See what you can come up with. [NOTE: Your award should relate to a news story that we covered here in the last year and not just be a chance to promote yourself or attack your enemies. Contributions will remain anonymous unless otherwise requested.]

A bit more meaty a piece needs its own post in case you want to argue. Why does it appear that literary studies are falling by the wayside in our schools. I have two words for you: stem cells. If I had it all to do over again, I’d become a biologist and fucking REGROW PEOPLE’S BLOWN OFF LIMBS AND FAILED ORGANS! Legalize that shit, America! Regulate it to keep the horror novel clones out if you have to, but get it done! You have this giant pool of intellectual and monetary resources being held up by some bizarre moral/religious objection to saving people’s lives. But I digress. Please don’t forget about literature yadda yadda yadda….

Literary studies split off from reading in the early-to-mid-20th century as the result of science envy on the part of literature professors. Talking about books somehow didn’t seem substantial enough. Instead of reading literature, now we study “texts.” We’ve developed a discipline, with its jargon and its methodology, its insiders and its body of knowledge. What we analyze nowadays is seen neither as the mirror of nature nor the lamp of authorial inspiration. It just is — apparently produced in an airless room by machines working through permutations of keys on the computer.

Science has its objective world, the entirety of what is. The world of texts is the objectivity of literary studies. Thus we can insist that there’s no objective world outside texts — as the impish Derrida claimed. (But how un-impishly he was echoed in the halls of American academe for so many decades!) And we can also get some mileage out of insisting that canons, the choice of what texts we take down from the library shelves to teach students, are merely “constructed.” Of course they are — every reading list is limited. What we really mean is that our own pet author was forgotten when the canon was formed. The door shut too soon. If our boy or girl were inside the door rather than out, the fact of “construction” would be trivial. Teach my author! we cry. Not that one! What if who’s taught, or isn’t, doesn’t end up mattering to the students, who don’t share professorial concerns? To us it matters, and we’re the ones in charge.

We’re not teaching literature, we’re teaching the professional study of literature: What we do is its own subject. Nowadays the academic study of literature has almost nothing to do with the living, breathing world outside. The further along you go in the degree ladder, and the more rarified a college you attend, the less literary studies relates to the world of the reader. The academic study of literature nowadays isn’t, by and large, about how literature can help students come to terms with love, and life, and death, and mistakes, and victories, and pettiness, and nobility of spirit, and the million other things that make us human and fill our lives. It’s, well, academic, about syllabi and hiring decisions, how works relate to each other, and how the author is oppressing whomever through the work. The literary critic Gerald Graff famously told us to “teach the conflicts”: We and our squabbles are what it’s all about. That’s how we made a discipline, after all.

I’m running behind on many things, namely snow tires and Santa duties, so I’m going to be doing roundups today and then blogging sporadically for the next couple weeks as family descend from far and wide on our little island paradise for the yule season. Ah, Quakers and humanists. We’re a match made in heaven-on-earth.

First, some rare good news: HC has somehow managed to get part of their products around the Borders return policy…. I wish I could write you a cartoon bunny triple take. Publishers might actually be able to survive under a system like this… hmm…

Happy birthday to the world’s best board game since chess

Rabbie’s got some new poems and rude letters to show

Is the Newberry Medal failing kids? Melts it down, Oi says, and makes us a Newnewberry, moi lovely!

Some links to critiques of the Nobel Prize via Jacket Copy (I think Carolyn might be getting paid to blog there, so if I disappear for a day, it’s a good place to go because she’s under the constant pressure of unreasonable bosses… but if you stay away, I’ll hunt you down, drag you back here and throw you down in the pit with Kathryn and Pete… yeah, that’s right… he TRIED to quit….)

Robert McCrum says literary Britain is a smallish place… sounds familiar…

On the ever-contentious, and international, nature of prizes and conflict of interest

Macmillan moves from wage freeze to lay offs of 4% of staff

FSG follows suit (no! Not FSG!!!)

Even bigger booksellers like Powells are feeling the pinch too …


… though Amazon bizarrely seems to have enough money to force its staff to work 7 days a week

Sun Media here in Canada cuts 600 jobs

Well, here’s something you don’t see everyday: the recession hitting a website. In this case, the much-lauded Torontoist. I guess when paycheques are involved, things change. Good thing I get, as the French say, Jacques Squatte for maintaining this leaky ship, or I’d be closing the doors, filing for bankruptcy and looking for bailout money. It’s sad to see Torontoist go, though, because in the tradition of the great -ist sites, it’s a valuable resource.

I’ve been the editor of Torontoist for two and a half of the site’s four years, first with Ron Nurwisah (until December 2006), and then with Marc Lostracco (from January to December 2007). During my time here—which has spanned seven thousand articles, thirty-six thousand comments, and ten million hits—I’ve seen Torontoist grow dramatically in number and breadth of readers and contributors. I’ve seen it take a spot in the margins of Toronto’s media, and prove that the relationship between vast media empires and small internet publications need not be a parasitic one where the latter feeds off the former but a symbiotic one where both use—and complement, and need—one another. I’ve seen it twist the “city blog” format into something greater than that, something that saw the quality of content, not its quantity or profitability, as the ultimate end. I’ve seen it lauded, slammed, copied, envied, loved, and overlooked. But most of all, I’ve seen the city and Torontoist change together, day after day, article after article. I am intensely proud of what Torontoist has done and what it has become, and I’m very hopeful for the future of the city that has always been its focus. But in 2009, as Toronto continues to move forward, I’m very sorry to announce that Torontoist will no longer be there to bear witness.

At the end of this month, I will be stepping down as Torontoist’s Editor-in-Chief. I’ve loved everything about this job since I started it, and my decision to leave was not an easy one to make, but it is, ultimately, the right one at the right time for the right reasons. Gothamist has decided, as a result of both my resignation and the recession, to close Torontoist on January 1, 2009 and concentrate on their more lucrative American sites. That decision is the right one, too: as it exists now, Torontoist can barely be sustained, let alone developed, and it has survived and thrived as long as it has, in spite of modest means, largely because of the ceaseless hard work of that aforementioned collective. Torontoist may return at some later date, if conditions are different; until then, it will remain in suspended animation, its content still public and searchable.

A poetic institution returns to the New Yorker in a triumph of late life creativity. Or something.

Longtime readers of The New Yorker will not, of course, need to be reminded who Mr. Angell is — an eminent baseball writer, an editor at the magazine since 1956 and the stepson of E. B. White. But they may wonder where “Greetings, Friends!,” an annual poem that was a New Yorker institution for nearly eight decades, has been. It was written by Frank Sullivan from 1932 until 1974, and by Mr. Angell starting in 1976. But “Greetings, Friends!” vanished after its 1998 iteration and has not been seen again until now.

What happened?

“I stopped writing ‘Greetings’ because I thought I couldn’t do it anymore,” said Mr. Angell, 88, who is less a pale and geezery presence than a pink and twinkly one in his tidy book and memento-packed New Yorker office on the 20th floor of the Condé Nast building in Midtown.

Conjuring up the perfect rhyming names, he explained, became harder with age. “There’s that great, huge, trashy mixture of pop names — from televisions, songs, movies — that we all have in the back of our heads,” he said. “And I began to think I didn’t have as much of that as I once had. I’d reach for something and it wasn’t there.”

“Greetings, Friends!” is back this year, Mr. Angell said, because he missed writing it and because he had a few flashes of inspiration while on vacation in Maine last summer. “I got a few lines down,” he said. “And once it gets going, it’s terrific fun to do.”

We should write more doggerel (well, on purpose, I mean). It’s kind of a precursor to the Simpson’s era ironic reference as a form of humour, and ever so much fun. Richard Outram, Canada’s best poet ever, used to do it occasionally. It was like reading witty, terrible jokes that made you groan and clap at the same time. Whatever happened to the tradition?

The Huffington Post asks what will happen when the current generation of “hybrid readers”, ie, those who were raised on books but are digiliterate (ie, us), dies out.

But what happens when we die out? Will the young’uns feel as we do about books? I’d like to think so, but I guess in twenty years or so, what I think won’t make a shred of difference, not to the young’uns, or the text they are reading.

I was thinking about this recently in relation to my boys. They’ve never known a world without computers and video games and TV. But they’re also buried in books. Will there be enough kids like them to keep books alive? Will this early education in books (and holding off on the tv and internet) pay off for them as adults or hobble them? Certainly in our little urban literary/academic biosphere of a social circle it will be an advantage, but what about the larger world? My son (almost six) has started drawing detailed replicas of Nintendo machines and controllers, and he walks around the house “playing” them and telling me about the game levels he’s created. I can’t hold back the flood waters much longer. I told him that when I was a kid we loved books because “stories” are better than “levels” and that if he could come up with some video games based on real narratives, I’d think about helping him design some levels for it, and all he said was, “So your parents wouldn’t let you buy a DS either?” (Also, when recently investigating how religious our elementary school’s curriculum is, I asked my eldest what he knew about “Jesus”, he said, “Jeezes? What are they?” I had a pang of Proddy guilt like you never felt, let me tell you.) Anyway, it doesn’t seem like it’s a winning battle. My kid will be literate and well-read if it kills us both. But will his peers? Will their kids?

I suppose if we had a Bulgakov or Gogol worth fighting over, we’d be scratching at the knees of our nearest culturally dominant neighbour as well. Oh wait…. I guess this is kind of generally the opposite of what we do. We take important people born elsewhere and claim them as our own because they once spent a few summers on the beach on one of our coasts (left or right… unlikely the upper coast). When someone who really WAS born in Canada does something great but is claimed by another country, think Saul Bellow (look at the opening text of this Wiki entry, right across from his birthplace) and that guy who invented basketball (though “great” is relative term with the latter), we take endless pleasure in pointing it out to those who claim them. But we’re not fighting over them. So why not?

The identity crisis arises it seems because although Bulgakov was born in what is now Ukraine’s capital, a city he immortalized in his first novel The White Guard, the playwright and novelist was ethnically Russian, wrote in Russian and moved to Moscow when he was 21. So, while in a recent poll of Russians, the author of The Master and the Margharita was named the country’s second greatest writer, in similar poll in Ukraine, he was claimed as Ukraine’s third best playwright.
…
The issue is, understandably, more politically fraught in Ukraine. As Malakhov said, “the problem is, that before 1990, we were all thought of as Russian”. I was reminded of this recently when Anton Chekhov’s dacha in Yalta, Ukraine hit the news. The playwright’s Crimean house, where he wrote both Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, is falling apart, but the governments of Ukraine and Russia have been in a stand-off over who should pay to fix it up.

It’s a cultural cold war with little sign of tensions easing; Nikolai Gogol is another playwright often pulled into the fray. Although Gogol wrote in Russian, ethnically he was Ukrainian and his comic stories drew extensively on his Ukrainian background. The war over Gogol’s nationality though, is fought everywhere from scholarly journals to Wikipedia. Alas, there are no government inspectors coming to town to rule on the subject.

Where stories I don’t want/care to comment on go to rot—news slumlord that I am…

Chicago factory sit-in to become book

Guardian’s top 10 Onion headlines (my two favourite papers, together at last!)

Thompson’s widow to turn his Owl Farm into writers’ retreat

Trove of lost Larkin recordings unearthed

Laura Albert still wringing wet dishtowel of her 15 minutes

9-year-old gets more tail, publications than you

UK library service near breaking point

Who will be Obama’s point person for poetry?

My headline today would be, “Onion staff stage suprise coup in CNN newsroom“…

The publishing industry has made a who’s-who video of famous people urging you to buy books as gifts. A noble cause. I mean, who better to go to in tough times for shopping advice than the world’s richest people? Yes, yes… Chuckle… And monsters, Elmo.

Things haven’t been looking good for US publishing lately, and so with untypical team spirit, most of the major publishers have teamed up to create an online advertising campaign which attempts to persuade Christmas shoppers that books make great presents.

They’ve got their authors on board, so if you fancy watching writers from Dean Koontz to Dan Brown, Jonathan Lethem, Deepak Chopra and Maya Angelou come up with a raft of bizarre reasons why you should be buying books this Christmas, then give it a whirl.

Listen, you want to do this right, you ask some poets. Tip 1: The regift — only attend New Year’s parties and present “belated” gifts you received from your family to your friends. Tip 2: The savvy decorator — save the labels from your tins of tuna and catfood and use them to decorate the envelopes you’ll be handing out, because love coupons make great gifts (get those massaging-fingers/instruments of artistic genius ready!). Tip 3: The valid excuse — there are plenty of cars going way too fast on your street, so avoid the shame of Giftmas altogether by throwing yourself in front of one and hope for a broken leg or arm, holiday avoision gold!

Neither. I’m a kitty cat. Do I get in? Oxford and Cambridge have some weird-assed questions on their entrance exams.

You might expect Oxford and Cambridge universities to ask prospective students to compare the works of Chaucer to Boccaccio or to explain the theory of relativity.

Instead, Oxford wants to know: “Would you rather be a novel or a poem?”

Cambridge asks applicants: “What would you do if you were a magpie?”

Probably drop a turd on this page, pass some lice on to my neighbour, and then snatch that shiny broach off the exam adjudicator’s breast.

Hey man, it’s not just the US that’s shitting bricks, it’s also the UK and Canada. Might I suggest a name for this new trend in books: misery publishing. Where all books that see print are tinged with hints of abuse, regret, envy and hatred.

While some in Canadian publishing circles believe that business will not be as bad in that country as in the U.S., others have already taken belt-tightening measures. Last week, Corus Entertainment, the parent company of Kids Can Press, made staffing changes that included the departure of v-p of sales and marketing Judy Brunsek. According to Sally Tindal, director of communications for Corus, a review of KCP’s operations resulted in shifted job responsibilities and the elimination of three positions—one in sales and marketing, one in editorial and one in production. With the changes, Lisa Lyons, president of KCP, will add sales and marketing to her responsibilities, with the director of sales and the director of marketing reporting directly to her.

Additionally, Thomas Allen Publishers, part of Thomas Allen & Son, is “postponing” the release of most books on their spring 2009 list until next fall. Requests for comments on this change were not returned by the company. Over at HarperCollins Canada, CEO David Kent confirmed that they “have a corporate-wide freeze on salaries announced last week,” but added, “Other than the obvious belt-tightening objectives, we haven’t made any draconian steps.”

Australian poet, dead at 54.

My dad. I’m pretty sure of that. That guy knows more about town council meetings and zoning changes than anyone I ever met. But it’s tough times for newspapers and magazines, competing with the internet and, you know, economics. In the end, does it really matter if they disappear?

They say that journalists prefer bad news to good news. There is plenty of that close to home.

This is becoming a terrible week for the US newspaper industry. On Monday, the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, filed for bankruptcy. The New York Times Company followed by saying it might mortgage its Renzo Piano-designed headquarters building by Times Square to reduce debt.

The recession has turned the long, slow decline of newspapers into a brisk fall. On Tuesday, I dropped into a UBS investor conference in New York to catch Gary Pruitt, chief executive of the McClatchy newspaper chain, calling its results “lousy”. At this rate, US newspapers will be lucky to make it to the weekend.

Many American journalists, facing job losses and the death of an industry they loved, regard it as a tragedy not just for them but for society. They fear that television, radio and blogs can never replace what newspapers provided for readers.

Shortlist for BC Non-fiction prize ($40G!) includes ‘Ninja favourite Russell Wangersky

Library kickstools as home decor: I’ll take two! But only if they come with saucy librarians with scratchy wool skirts and pointy glasses

Christian group can’t stop march of poetic anti-Christ

James Frey extends his 15 minutes to a solid 17 with an internship at Gawker

McCain’s Christmas letter to family

Solzhenitsyn rulez teh intertubes

Celebrity memoirs hit the remainder bins as readers tire of being reminded they’re not rich and careless

Maud asks how Google’s searchable magazine archive will affect paid services like Lexis/Nexis…. good question

California’s new poet laureate, Carol Muske-Dukes asks, What the hell have I done?

Could there be an honorific less American-sounding than poet laureate? The title conjures images of a laurel wreath askew on the pale brow of a loitering bard — scribbling couplets beside a throne (”I am his Highness’ dog at Kew; / Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?”) British poets laureate write occasional verse to celebrate royal birthdays, ship christenings and Tube station openings. As California’s new poet laureate, I haven’t been asked to write a sonnet or triolet in honor of Gov. Schwarzenegger, who appointed me last month, nor a pantoum in honor of Maria Shriver — and I don’t expect to have to honor such a request. The governor and first lady clearly admire the idea of the poet laureate without insisting on a job description or the odd panegyric.

In Britain, the poet laureate remains a half-jester, half-noble figure. In the U.S., we remain “half-cracked,” as Emily Dickinson said. We have a poetry tradition — a “Body Electric” anarchic romance — which gives rise to our present poetry polyglot: neo-formalist, plain style, abstract, imagist, l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e, ethnic, feminist, mystical, abcderian, post-colonial, lyric-narrative or minimalist, William-Carlos-Williams-take-the-damn-refrigerator-note-down-and-mix-me-a-plum-daiquiri schools of poetry.

Poetry is, like prayer, spun from the imagination — from ultimate contradiction — like the idea of a democratic crown. Who’s lucky or brazen enough to wear this headgear?

LAT’s blog points out a blog called Daily Routines which looks at various artists’ … um … daily routines. There’s also Desk Space, which had asked me to photograph and write about my desk space, but I couldn’t get a fish eye lens on camera to encompass the entire scope of the mess, so I declined. You’ll notice Ninja K’s desk in there, but I happen to know it never looks like that. She must have cleared away her mail order sex toy business inventory.

Is there a zeigeist of hate mounting against Jonathan Safran Foer? At first it was just jealous wannabes, but now it seems to be gaining a popular foothold. Aw, but he seems like such a nice guy.

Jonathan Safran Foer is a young, rich and successful literary writer, an oxymoronic state that arose at the moment his debut novel Everything Is Illuminated was published in 2002. As a result Foer has become that rare bird: a bona fide celebrity whose seven-figure advances, choice of dwelling in the pricey Brooklyn neighbourhood of Park Slope, marriage to fellow writer Nicole Krauss, crusade against kosher butchering practices, family ties and awards have been scrutinised and criticised by those on the lower rungs of the literary ladder.

It got to the point where Nicole Aragi, Foer’s agent, complained to the New York Times magazine that the jealous frenzy “had me ripping my hair out”. Lately, though, it seems like Foer-bashing has moved out of the domain of catharsis-seeking wannabes on to a larger, more public stage.

Margaret Trudeau to write book about bipolar disease, an idea that makes me both happy and sad

Christians incensed at profane book of poetry want to jam the jagged fuckstick of divine justice up shit-eating poet’s ass

American publishing in (almost?) peril updates, daily… daily…

Do you know how many times lying that I’ve read Finnegan’s Wake has gotten me laid? That’s right. Exactly zero. Well, let’s say .5…

Jane Austen meets Facebook (from paper tiger)

MLK documents up-for-auction not up for auction

Note to publishers: hire some fact checkers — respectable science magazine looking for Chinese text for their cover print “classic poem”, which turns out to actually be a menu from a brothel in Macau… Bookninja covered this story years ago, of course… (There was a guy a few years ago who was keeping a blog of tattoos with bad kanji translations, but I’ve lost the link)

US award for first-time YA authors

Coming in this weekend’s NYT is this essay on a bailout plan for the scribbling set.

A little while back my daughter told me the following depressing joke:

Woman: What do you do?

Man: Me? Oh, I write books.

Woman: How interesting! Have you sold anything recently?

Man: Why, yes. My couch, my car and my flat-screen television.

A snarkier writer-father might have added, “and I sold those things to pay for your private school tuition!” But instead it got me thinking that there was a real problem here. Not just a small problem involving issues of respect between one writer and one teenager, but rather a national problem of respect where being a writer has become so widely associated with being a loser that we have become the stuff of common jokes.

My friends (as the nation’s most famous loser, John McCain, likes to begin his appeals), in these times of plummeting consumer confidence and evaporating labor markets, it is time to address the problem head on. We must now go boldly forward and bail out the writers.

Robert McCrum gives his top 10 books of the year, but with full disclosure of his relationships to those involved. Now you can take it or leave it and decide for yourself when and where his opinion might have been influenced by wine. Plus, this represents a great new way to name drop.

Simpsons up for Writers’ Guild awards…

One last DFW book, compiled from a 2005 lecture

Book sales up in Canada because of weak dollar… In related news: dollar down in Canada because of weak leadership

For those about to “Meh”: Gabriel García Márquez working on new book

Turkish writers risk it all by apologizing

MLK documents up for sale

Pulitzer Prize dips toe in web-writing water

Tina Brown takes print medias tired, poor, huddle masses. So lovely. So selfless.

On the day the perennially troubled Radar magazine folded, its editor Maer Roshan got an email from an old friend, Tina Brown, with whom he’d worked at her own sunken ship, Talk.

“Maer my darling, I’m grieving so terribly,” she wrote in her Masterpiece Theatre trill. “I’m running into a meeting, but do nothing either yourself or with your staff until you’ve spoken to us. I will call you as soon as I can.”

Maybe Barry Diller’s mammoth IAC Corporation, with whom Ms. Brown launched her aggregator Web site, the Daily Beast, was prepping a bailout plan for the magazine!

Or was she looking for spiked pieces she could use to add original content to her own online magazine?

If there was ever any doubt that eBooks are finally making it big, you can pretty much throw them out the window. A video game platform will now accept eBooks. I can only imagine the rush to chuck the Pokemon games out the window and grab for the latest Ishiguro.

The creator of Donkey Kong and Super Mario is hoping that Austen and Dickens will prove as great a pull to computer game fanatics. It has worked with HarperCollins to select 100 titles - from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to Gulliver’s Travels, Pride and Prejudice, A Tale of Two Cities and Treasure Island – which will be available in a single software package for the Nintendo DS costing around £20.

The device, said Nintendo, can be held horizontally, “just like a book”, with pages turned using a stylus. Additional features include an electronic bookmark, adjustable text sizes, and a “story synopsis mode” which details the story and themes of each title “without giving away any of twists and turns of the plot”.

Perhaps aware that it’s catering to an audience with a short attention span, Nintendo is also offering the option, for those “stuck for somewhere to start”, of telling the software your mood, upon which it will present you with a range of options. Bleak House, for example, would be a bad option for those pushed for time, while King Lear might not suit those in need of a pick-me-up.

Publisher’s Weekly person of the year? The Beez

A summation of my bit on Q yesterday

Beedle Bard digested… what do you think?

Brain cells for learning discovered, Murray places order for replacement set

A reality show like Idol, for writers… (warning, terrible music on page, so turn your speakers down…)

Who wrote the Koran?

Let’s admit it: things are in the shitter. So, how do we get the publishing world moving? Well, when you’re in the shitter the options are usually to pull something out or push it through, right? Someone’s got to clean up, and this guy is taking a stab at laying out a future for publishing that involves e-publishing and works toward some level of sustainability outside the mega-publisher. What do you think?

There are many people and blogs doing an obsessively thorough job thinking about and writing about the effects of e-books on publishing, so I’m not going to try to recreate their work.  But my recent posts on the Google Book Search controversy and the Amazon Kindle have gotten me thinking about what the book publishing world might look like in the not-too-distant future.  More specifically, I’ve been wondering if and how writers will get published and make money under whatever new model takes hold.

I suppose I’ll be making some predictions here, but this is more of attempt to envision a viable future of book publishing that is better, although not perfect:

Print Is Dead Shrinking:  Some people think that true readers will always prefer a bound paper copy to hold, smell, fondle (the descriptive terms tend to get kind of gross).  These people are wrong.  Some others think that print books are dead, that they’re just going to go away.  These people are also wrong, I believe.

Okay get this: BoingBoing points to a story about a US school district that has ripped pages from the middle of a book to “protect” students from the content. That’s answer! To every problem! Mutilation! I think I’m going to answer every question with that today and see how it works out. George, how are ya? Mutilation. Do you have change for a five? Mutilation. What do you think about this whole proroguing of parailment business? Mutilation. It’s just endlessly useful.

Students at New Rochelle School High School are going to find it difficult to complete their next assignment: comparing the film adaptation of “Girl, Interrupted” to the best-selling book. In the book, Kaysen recounts her confinement at a Massachussets mental hospital in the 1960’s.

Pages from the middle of the book have been torn out by the school district after having been deemed “inappropriate” by school officials due to sexual content and strong language. Removed is a scene where the rebellious Lisa (played by Angela Jolie in the movie) encourages Susanna (played by Winona Ryder) to circumvent hospital rules against sexual intercourse by engaging in oral sex instead.

“The material was of a sexual nature that we deemed inappropriate for teachers to present to their students,” said English Department Chariperson Leslie Altschul, “since the book has other redeeming features, we took the liberty of bowdlerizing.”

Debt’s a popular subject right now. But writers have been thinking about it for years.

The relationship between literature and debt, though, is not just a matter of impoverished novelists scribbling to keep themselves out of the clink. The business of lending has also generated literary riches. John Milton was the son of a scrivener, who (like most members of his profession) regularly made loans for interest. This income supported his unemployed son through his early periods of study at Hammersmith and Horton, and enabled him to become the most learned poet of any age. Debt also shaped Milton’s personal life: his first unhappy marriage was to Mary Powell, whose father owed the elder Milton £300, which he never repaid.

Until quite recently debt was not regarded as a purely financial matter. Money was generally lent to people whom you knew, and financial ties between households could be sealed by marriages. You lent to people whose social status encouraged belief (hence “credit”) that they were reliable. This complex idea of credit - part financial, part moral, part social - goes back a long way. In Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale the merchant states a general truth that we can only borrow “while we have a name” (ie a good reputation). And because lending money was linked with social and erotic relationships, a financial debt could be repaid in any number of ways. So in the Shipman’s Tale the merchant lends money to his “cousin”, a friar, which the friar lends in turn to the merchant’s wife. She sleeps with the friar and then with her husband to repay the debts. For most of our ancestors, debt was not simply what we think of as debt. A metaphorical economy of status, friendship, sexual favours and trust existed in parallel to the monetary economy of financial exchange, profit and loss.

These parallel economies were vital to English writing. It meant that stories about debt could touch on almost any aspect of human relationships, from friendship to commerce. What would happen if someone of good credit (in the moral sense) borrowed money from someone who had lots of money but not much social standing? What sort of bonds and conflicts would result?

Forrest J Ackerman, uberfan, dead at 92.

Be careful what you join. It might end up like the comments section here at Bookninja. Except dumber. Considering I can’t wade through the books I  WANT to read, it’s unlikely I’ll ever join a group that tells me WHAT to read.

Today there are perhaps four million to five million book groups in the United States, and the number is thought to be rising, said Ann Kent, the founder of Book Group Expo, an annual gathering of readers and authors.

“I firmly believe there was an uptick in the number of book groups after 9/11, and I’m expecting another increase in these difficult economic times,” she said. “We’re looking to stay connected and to have a form of entertainment that’s affordable, and book groups are an easy avenue for that.”

Most groups