Year: 2020

It’s a thing I often have to put the kibosh on in intro poetry classes. I tell them, if you’re writing this for eventual publication then it’s inadvisable to try to write about “capital-I IMPORTANT” things as they are happening. The worst poetry on 9/11 happened right after 9/11. It’s a great document of how people were feeling at the time, but mostly doesn’t make for good poetry except when it is allusive and oblique. If you NEED to write about whatever’s happening to process your feelings, just keep a journal. Let it eat those sins. Then in a few years, when your brain and heart have had time to process the whole thing, go back and mine that journal for ideas and write something of value. More such advice below.

Don’t feel as though you need to write about COVID-19. Not directly, not yet. Neither you, nor me, nor any of us have perspective on this thing—the crisis and the feelings around it are only just beginning to crawl down the well of our subconscious. Once they’re settled, clacking in the dark there, they will be a part of the water when we pull buckets up for years to come. We’ll set out, 20 years from now, to write a book about model trains and we’ll drink from that well and wind up writing about the feeling we have this afternoon. Art does not traffic in straight lines. Instant gratification is anathema. Art is done in the dark.

The best writing is not a reaction to each day’s news as it happens (what ages faster than front-page stories?). The best writing is the stuff we haul up in that bucket, years and perhaps decades later, mixed with all the pre- and post-crisis moments in our life, all the anxiety and relief, not segregated by timeframe or motif, the way childhood merges with the day before yesterday in dreams. Folks these days are sharing Katherine Ann Porter’s novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a story of the 1918 pandemic. What’s shared less often is the date of the story’s composition: 1939, 20 years after the pandemic had passed. Twenty years it took that crisis to settle deep enough in Porter’s mind that the particulars of her lived experience could be stripped off or alloyed with other impressions, people she met later, the weather.

Well, right now our calendar is a bunch of scratches on the livingroom wall that I made with a dried tibia bone I found in the corner and sharpened by rubbing on the rough floor. It’s over there, right next to the manacles hanging from the damp stone and the piss hole by the bars. But if my calculations of are correct, we have reached another Friday, and have therefore survived another week of apocalypse. Only about 52 more to go, I would hazard to guess.

• The corporate entity known as James Patterson is helping indies out;
• Bertrams closing;
• This “Which Fictional Character Are You?” quiz is a nice distraction, and seems a little more functional than the usual clickbait… Plus, I got Dr. Ian Malcolm….that’s right, ladies;
• Great new LGBTQ middle grade books;
• First Book is trying to ship out 1million books to low income families;
• Ireland gets new poetry podcast;
• A spoonful of podcast helps the pandemic go down;
• On the value of reading detective fiction during high stress situations (like having a pregnant wife);
• Barbara Taylor Bradford forced to change Irish nickname?;
• A B&N store manager saves people during a tornado;
• Noted TERF and children’s author JK Rowling releases Harry Portal;
• Shakespeare’s plague diary;
• We shall rise again, says Bookseller’s Association head in UK;

If you have a book coming out this year (and maybe even next?), you’re probably shitting your work-pajama-pants right about now. But if you’re the sort of person who deals best with their own dread by hearing about others who had it worse, relax! This dude has you covered.

In 1939 Irish satirist Brian O’Nolan aka Flann O’Brien, who died on this day in 1962, published what is now considered to be one of the greatest English-language novels of the 20th Century: At Swim Two Birds. Unfortunately for Flann, the world was a little distracted at the time. By the outbreak of WWII, the book had sold less than 300 copies (despite having received ringing endorsements from James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, and Graham Greene). To compound Flann’s misery, in 1940 his publisher’s premises were destroyed during a bombing raid by the Luftwaffe and almost all the unsold copies of At Swim Two Birds were incinerated.

C’mon, man, don’t be a square. Everyone’s doing it. You want to be cool? Then get out that black beret and turtleneck, yo. Cory Booker, the president of Ireland, your schmuck next door neighbour with the combover, probably Bono. This funny bit on LitHub got me blud all hetted up. Both fun and an important public service: a flow chart on whether you should take up writing poetry during your pandemic isolation. Real talk here, people: go ahead. Write as much as you want. But, please, for the love of god, if you’re going to release it into the wild, put in at least the tiniest bit of research into how to actually do it. I have seen so much bad poetry lately that I’ve been half-tempted to record and release for free on YouTube my intro poetry lectures… If we can’t sandbag against the flood, maybe we can add some Kool-Aid powder so the water will taste better. And most of all, when all this is over and you go back to your job in sales, please remember that you turned to art in your time of crisis and stop whinging every time the gubment spends a penny on the sector.

What scares me almost as much as the pandemic itself is the idea that gun owner background checks are up over 40% in the US (where Cheeto in Chief has declared guns sellers an essential service — and this isn’t even including the people stockpiling illegal weapons.) Imagine: a population dumb enough to elect that clueless shit stain of a con man, but also armed to the teeth. Can’t they just stress eat like everyone else instead of prepping for their never-ending civil war?

• International Booker shortlist lead by women, including a 28 year-old debut novelist;
• NAC launches #canadaperforms with Margaret Atwood;
• This list of what your quarantine reading says about you has a great DFW burn at the end;
• Read the John Boyne kid-story-contest winners;
• Some writing prompts to get the rugrats prepped for the next contest;
• Did you want to know more about Thomas Hardy’s second marriage? Finally, your dreams have come true;
• Google map of bookstores willing to deliver;
• Goodnight with Dolly — bedtime stories by everyone’s cool aunt;

Instead of, you know, a real job, as my dad would say. This essay, which gets a little noodly and poetic for my taste, examines the neurological and psychological reasons behind the pain/pleasure divide of writing/having written.

The Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize for his pioneering work in the field of behavioral economics. His research is far-reaching, with many implications about how humans apportion their time and resources, and how they might make different decisions with a different understanding of the mechanisms of happiness. In particular, he divides happiness into two types: experiential happiness and reflective happiness.

These types are what they sound like, more or less. Experiential happiness is the pleasure we take in the moment-to-moment experience of living—moments that, according to neuroscience, last about three seconds and are more or less gone forever. Nonetheless, in aggregate, they constitute the fabric and texture of a life. Reflective—or, variously, in Kahneman’s research, “remembered”—happiness is the pleasure we take in thinking about our lives. This is the happiness that on vacation drives us to visit the Louvre when we would really rather sit at a café drinking red wine. We sacrifice that existential happiness for the prospect of remembering the museum in the future and deriving pleasure from that.

This mechanism also accounts for why we pursue many of our ambitions, and, arguably, for the fact of ambition itself. Ambition, very often, if not always, sacrifices existential happiness at the altar of reflected happiness. What, after all, is something like law school, but a three-year exercise in not having fun, for the sake of living a presumably better life afterward? Paraphrasing Kahneman, for various reasons, some of them neurological and some of them learned, we don’t intuit future experienced happiness as being as meaningful as future remembered/reflected happiness.

Bookstores and libraries have both tried to handle this by promoting a socially-distanced strategy of online engagement, through e-commerce and phone orders for stores and through ebook check outs and other programs for libraries. But it looks like libraries in the States are doing a little more in terms of public engagement. Not sure it’s wise to keep them open, but how do you shut them down given that they act as part of a safety net for a country that doesn’t seem to believe in safety nets? Lots of things being revealed with the rug pulled back, eh? Mostly roaches.

America’s public libraries have led the ranks of “second responders,” stepping up for their communities in times of natural or manmade disasters, like hurricanes, floods, shootings, fires, and big downturns in individual lives.

Throughout all these events, libraries have stayed open, filling in for the kids when their schools closed; offering therapeutic sessions in art or conversation or writing after losses of life; bringing in nurses or social workers when services were unavailable to people; and hiring life-counselors for the homeless, whom they offer shelter and safety during the day.

Today, interventions like those have a ring of simpler days. But libraries have learned from their experience and attention to these previous, pre-pandemic efforts. They are pivoting quickly to new ways of offering services to the public—the core of their mission. When libraries closed their doors abruptly, they immediately opened their digital communications, collaborations, and creative activity to reach their public in ways as novel as the virus that forced them into it.

You can be sure that this is just the beginning. Today libraries are already acting and improvising. Later, they’ll be figuring out what the experience means to their future operations and their role in American communities.

• COVID has heightened racism against Asians;
• Best translated book awards;
• Baek Heena wins the Astrid Lindgren award for kit lit;
• Virtual kidlit event listing;
• Book buddies vs loneliness? No offence, but books are for escaping buddies, etc.;
• Similarly: the rise of the online book club;
• LAT asks the tough questions: if pot dispensaries are considered essential services, why aren’t bookstores?
• Cory Booker wrote a Corona poema;
• Toronto poet laureate, and Bookninja pal Al Moritz, also wrote about COVID, but perhaps in a slightly more considered way;
• What’s your reading horoscope?;

The Internet Archive launched the “National Emergency Archive” last week, uploading 1.4 million titles online for free, ostensibly to help encourage people to stay home and read (newsflash: people who read already want to stay home because a) they enjoy their chairs, and b) they are smarter than the people who are going out all the time right now… Maybe there should be a “National Emergency Beer Fridge” to scoop up the rest?) But some people, namely authors and their allied tradespeople who rely on making money from the books in question, aren’t pleased. Thoughts?

Founded in 1996 to archive web pages, the IA began digitising books in 2005. It has long been at loggerheads with writers’ organisations who have accused it of uploading books that are not in the public domain, and denying authors potential income from sales and public library borrowing.

On 24 March, the IA announced it was suspending waitlists, meaning it can lend books to anyone in the world at the same time – instead of the one-in, one-out ebook borrowing system used by most public libraries. The move was pitched as addressing “our unprecedented global and immediate need for access to reading and research material” during the Covid-19 outbreak.

Several authors condemned the decision, including Pulitzer-winner Colson Whitehead, who tweeted: “They scan books illegally and put them online. It’s not a library.”

In a fiery statement, the Authors Guild in the US called the decision appalling and said it was “shocked that the IA would use the Covid-19 epidemic as an excuse to push copyright law further out to the edges, and in doing so, harm authors, many of whom are already struggling”. Writers around the world have faced cancelled book tours and loss of freelance work during the crisis, while many bookshops have been forced to close.

The Canadian literary landscape is currently adapting as best it can to its second pandemic in recent years (the first being terrible men) — but, as Adam Pottle points out, we are just really experiencing now what so many people in the the disabled community experience every day: being uninvited by circumstance. Good food for thought and cause for action here.

The pandemic has exposed certain flaws and strengths in our society – our over-reliance on capitalistic models being first and foremost – and it is no different for the Canadian literary industry. COVID-19 has forced the general population into the same isolation that many Deaf, disabled, and chronically ill people have long experienced. Advocates for accessibility are gritting their teeth, for they know that we have always had the capacity for positive change. We have always had the ability to make the world more accessible; it just took a pandemic to get us to realize it. It proves an old disability adage: no change happens until able people feel the same pain.