Month: November 2019

When Bookninja was founded in 2003, the blogging and social media landscape was very different from today. The news sources we found were established papers still, most not behind paywalls or riddled with opt-ins and advertising. If I woke up early and saw something had happened overnight, I was seeing this on The New York Times, the Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald, or even the much destroyed Globe and Mail. Now, much of this reliable news is locked away behind paywalls and news aggregators like Bookninja rely on alternative sources for free links. Thankfully, sources like CBC, BBC, Guardian*, etc. remain open and largely free (but for how long?), but they are often slower in terms of posting the news than places like Twitter and FB. Why? Because they do research to verify their news. So, yeah, it takes a moment for things to appear. Turns out, I am an old man who has missed years of on-the-job social media-journalism training, and yesterday I got caught (along with many others) on the Alice Munro hoax by that douchebag Italian journalist who makes this sort of false news his infamy bread and butter. Once I found out it was a prank I updated the various platform posts with corrections and apologies, and then later in the day pulled it all down. But the damage was done on Twitter where the news spread quickly, like a fire in a poetry shop, and soon enough Alice Munro was trending worldwide. I was pissed off, mostly on her behalf (I’m used to looking the fool by now). Imagine being an elder who people are using their age and the not-unlikely prospect of their coming end to prove a point. That’s shitty. But all that said, the guy has a point. I woke up bleary eyed and saw people I trusted posting that Munro had passed and I went to Twitter and saw what looked like an M&S account (logo and some believable groundwork back posts) tweeting that the news had been confirmed by her daughter (who I am also pissed on behalf of), and while I hadn’t planned to post on Remembrance Day, I thought, Damn, this is big news, so I fired off a post, embedding the tweet. Anyway, I didn’t do due diligence because I was interested in speed, not accuracy. Not something I’m going to do again. So in a way, this asshole’s asshole stunt HAS improved things. I just wish people like him (IE, people who think they’re doing good on a societal level but are really in it for their own notoriety and have no actual moral compass when it comes to how their actions impact individuals) could find another way to shake us out of our social media stupor. We all need to do better, even the trolls.

*FTR, I donate occasionally to the Guardian to help keep it open and free, but sites like this one are a losing game when it comes to money (and time!) and I can’t sustain that forever.

Libraries are great public spaces (especially when they don’t have people speaking hate in them, amirite, TPL?) while museums feel less…. public. Why?

I have spent a great deal of time thinking about the relationship between museums and public libraries, to understand what makes libraries feel different from museums. Why do they have a public spirit that most museums don’t? Why are there lines around the block at some NYC library branches at 9 am? I’ve been reading about the roots of both institutions in the United States, and they have evolved in similar ways; so how do they diverge? And is this divergence relevant to the ways in which a stunningly broad swath of society feels welcome within a public library and not a museum?

I only recognize three or four names on this list, and that’s a good thing. It means the hope machine is still churning out new widgets for the economy of disappointment. Oh, don’t listen to me, kids. I’m old and broken down, like a ’71 Chevy Nova found rusting in the back 40 of the mind. Go kick this world in the nuts and be awesome!

Michelle Tea muses about the trainwrecks memoir causes.

Examining the need to record her experiences in the title essay, she writes: “Personal narrative is a mental illness, but you don’t want to be well.” She tells me how the compulsion to write is similar to the craving to drink: “In the way that people in the throes of alcoholism tend to be selfish and in pursuit of one thing, memoir writing is a very selfish act. When you get sober, you have to step back and look at the effects that your drinking may have on the people around you. So I did that for a moment [with writing] and there’s wreckage behind me. It’s complicated and it’s always my hope that if I’m writing about somebody they can at least see that what I’m saying is true, but the reality is that truth is subjective.”

This was a question I asked myself every day–not before writing, but after. I’d look at what I produced and blanch at the fact that it didn’t turn out like I wanted and think, Why am I doing this? Then I realized that if I only ask the question afterward, then the reason I do it is simply because that’s what I tend to do when I’m not actively trying to do other things. This essay though offers a wider range of reasons.

So many of the famous statements of intent have to do with a sense of outrage at the world. George Orwell put it like this: “I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” Here’s William H. Gass: “I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.” But anger doesn’t always carry the muse. Flannery O’Connor: “I don’t know what I think till it is written, which is as good as the answer, the writing itself.” Certainly John McPhee doesn’t write out of a sense of outrage, but rather a hope for new discoveries and by not being bored by anything in the world. But if you poll writers not as accomplished as these—those struggling, or even struggling to wring royalty checks out of their small press publishers—many reasons fog up the glass containing them, but the underlying reason they write is a desire for attention. People want to be heard. One writes to be counted, even to be counted higher than others. Outside of gabbing, writing is the most respected and inflammatory pastime, though certainly less well compensated—it generates a conversation between ourselves and others without the need for another person to be there. And if we are writing to be counted, it is inevitable that there is a lot of discounting going on. Society is uneven, a few have too much, and too many have too little. How do we square this? Everyone knows life is unfair, but bringing a little beauty into the world is a small progressive step.

While I could personally never participate in or even be around this sort of thing, mostly because I don’t like talking to people and feel good work generally needs more than 10 minutes to come together, I do applaud this young man’s big dumb poetry balls. He’s never going to get another paycheque like that, but he stuck to his guns and went down in flames.

“I’d like my poem to be about, ‘How to help people’—it’s for my boss,” a cheery young woman tells me, an hour before we close up shop on the final day of the conference. This assignment moves me profoundly—after a thousand poems about anniversaries and dense explications of maverick approaches to data analysis, someone seems sincerely interested in the human condition—an embodiment of the benevolent side of the tech industry. Despite my rage at companies like Facebook for their complicity in the election of a psychopathic demagogue, among many other sins—Silicon Valley aspires to a fervent streak of altruism that falls squarely into the tradition of idealism going back to the 1800s.

The subject for her poem is a question philosophers have wrestled with for centuries, leading to Marx’s indictment of capitalism as a virus which will ultimately eat itself, unless it’s eradicated by a system which doesn’t require exponential profit at the expense of workers and the environment. I don’t say any of this, because not even Marxists enjoy the mansplaining of Marx—instead, I say, “That’s so beautiful, it makes me think of the roots of idealism.”

Is fiction a mirror held up to the world? For the love of god, I hope not. Cause I’ve seen this face and no one wants to read it.

As a writer, I—like all other responsible citizens—agree that we need to be socially engaged. But something feels wrong about the aforementioned demand: first the words “typical,” and “social forces.” These terms suggest the life of an individual is unimportant unless it is tied to social movements, and that the artistic elements of fiction are only a vehicle for the work’s larger societal message. Second, the word “fidelity.” I never really liked that word. In her essay “Erasing the Signs of Labor under the Signs of Happiness: ‘Joy’ and ‘Fidelity’ as Bromides in Literary Translation,” poet and translator Sophie Collins discusses the feminine connotation of the word fidelity—women are required to be faithful to men. Fidelity implies a subordinate nature: Translations are asked to be the handmaids of the original texts, fiction that of reality, society, and nation.

I can see why the mirror analogy persists. The reflection of a mirror is objective, dehumanized, and thus faithful. But that doesn’t work in fiction writing (or in nonfiction writing). Art is a selective process, and selection is inherently subjective. If we require writers to exactly follow the orthodoxy, to record the “typical” in a “faithful” fashion, then we are done with fiction.

The NYT has a rundown of some picture books, most of which I will not get to read until I have grandchildren around–which part of me wants and another part is deathly afraid of, on behalf of my many children.

Okay, mofos, this guy did. GoT meets Gladiator? 100% will read.

Described as a mix of Game of Thrones and Gladiator, The Rage of Dragons follows Tau as he attempts to get revenge and become the greatest swordsman to ever live.

Collins dictionary has named “climate strike” their word-of-the-year. There’s also a few other en vogue terms here, to bring those of you who have been living under a rock up to speed.

Climate strike was first registered in November 2015 when the first event to be so named took place to coincide with the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, but it is over the last year that climate strikes have spread and become a frequent reality in many of the world’s largest cities. Collins’ lexicographers observed a hundred-fold increase in its usage in 2019, the largest increase noted of any word on the list.