BookRiot has a neat piece on things overheard in local bookshops. I once had a long discussion with Janet Inksetter at Annex Books about her choice to have a shelf tag that read “Canadian Literature Ends / Poetry Begins”. Then I published just that as a found poem in one of the early issues of the groovy zine “dig.”
Bookshops are wonderful places. Obviously, they’re full of books, which is enough to make them wonderful, but they’re also full of interesting people who love books. Our kind of people, in other words. And it’s always fun to eavesdrop on those people.
This writerly critical tradition continues to flourish, both in and outside the academy. Of course, nowadays even nonacademic literary criticism (I mean criticism written for a general audience) has been shaped and influenced by formal literary study. Many writers have studied literature at university, academics and writers teach together, attend conferences and festivals together, and sometimes almost speak the same language (think of Coetzee’s fiction and academic post-colonialist discourse, Don DeLillo’s fiction and academic postmodern critique, Toni Morrison’s fiction and academic critiques of race). The rise and steady institutionalisation of academic literary criticism means that the long tradition of literary criticism is now really two traditions, the academic (Stakes¹) and the literary-journalistic (Stakes²), which sometimes flow into each other but more often away from each other. Too often, Stakes¹ imagines itself in competition with, disdainful of, or simply inhabiting a different realm from Stakes², and vice versa.
This is a great story. Indie bookseller posts pics on Twitter of the first day in 100 years of service that the store didn’t get any paying customers at all, and it trends on Twitter, resulting in £1,000 of new orders and 1100 new followers. We should make this a rotating event. Once a week, Twitter invades an indie bookseller.
…Tumbleweed…
Not a single book sold today…
£0.00…
We think think this maybe the first time ever…
We know its miserable out but if you'd like to help us out please find our Abebooks offering below, all at 25% off at the moment…. pic.twitter.com/Cn5uhYWw88
An independent bookshop that failed to sell a single book on a rainy day this week has been inundated with customers after publishing pictures of its empty aisles on social media.
The Petersfield Bookshop in Hampshire sent a melancholy tweet revealing that it had not welcomed one paying customer, probably for the first time in its 100-year history.
Within a few hours, the fantasy and science fiction author Neil Gaiman retweeted the post to his millions of followers and, as if by magic, orders came flooding in from across the globe.
“Reading changed me,” said Watson, who now works as a clerk in the prison library at Jessup Correctional Institution, “and when it did, it began to change other people’s perceptions of me.”
He hopes that a recent $100,000 grant from the Maryland State Library to purchase thousands of books for prison libraries will provide a similar morale boost for his fellow inmates.
Department of Correction officials celebrated the donation in December by leading visitors on a tour of Jessup’s library, an unimposing, carpeted room with shelves that hold roughly 6,000 books and with a circulation desk at the front. The only signs that this wasn’t a branch library were the barred windows and the customers’ gray prison garb.
Lift Every Voice is designed to enhance Americans’ understanding and appreciation of the African American poetic tradition and its imaginative range and richness. Its principal objective is to engage participants in a multifaceted exploration of the tradition, the perspectives it offers on American history and the struggle for racial justice and the universality of the power, music, and precision of its language.
I am on the side of people who live in precarious conditions wherein they might be forced to one day chew off their own arm to avoid dying under the pile of books that fell on them and pinned them to the stairwell wall. Of course, I would be very careful to not get any blood on the actual books. The arm we can get rid of. Books? Pfft. Besides joy, my litter of books might also spark a fire, but that’s how I likes it, Shelf-Nazi. (Okay, I’m not as bad as the image below, but this site doesn’t deal in subtleties.)
My office is just books everywhere. There is no order. There is no rhyme or reason. They’re every which way. There are picture books, an old Scrabble board, cookbooks, typewriters, newspapers that have stories that I’m inspired by, fan art that I’ve framed, stickers and finger puppets that kids have given me. I’ve got Spider-Man toys given to me by Marvel, my own books. I should be more organised, but I’m not an organised person. It’s a good example of how my mind works.
The only time I get rid of books is when I have multiples. I send them to schools and to people who need them. I know people say, “What’s the point in keeping them if you’ve already read them?” But they’re reference. This is my craft. These are my tools. That would be like the construction worker saying he has too many hammers.
Speaking as the NYPL’s most checked out patron of all time (aw yeah), I was interested to find out that Snowy Day, a book still on our shelves, tops the list after 125 years of loaning books and sleeping spaces to the good people and CHUDs of New York. (They also harbour librarian ghosts, but that’s a side gig.)
A: not all that much. I remember when this fan-fiction-turned-bestseller came out and people told me there was contract negotiation than decent sex in it and I thought, Oh, this will disappear quickly. So young. So naive.
Immediately, attempts were made to measure its impact. Science was involved. Experts variously claimed that Fifty Shades was a sexual turn-off (among college-age women); a measure of women’s self-esteem (fans aged between 18 and 24 were more likely to binge drink, have eating disorders and end up in abusive relationships); responsible for increasing sexually transmitted diseases among the over-50s (anecdotal); and covered in herpes and cocaine (according to two Belgian professors who studied the surfaces of library copies). Sociologists predicted a boom in babies that could never be causally linked. Anecdotally, women on mum forums talked about their incumbent “Fifty Shades baby”, while retailers cashed in on knockoff “Generation Grey” onesies.
These days, with fourth-wave feminism, the ubiquity of hardcore pornography and the politics of the #MeToo movement, when millennials cheerfully joke about “eating ass” and choking has been normalised, Fifty Shades has been left looking a little naff. Yes, there are butt plugs and handcuffs, but the books feel very conservative now, with many of Grey and Steele’s simultaneous orgasms achieved in missionary as they gaze into each other’s eyes. Reading all 1,500 pages of the trilogy left me thinking, more than once: “I’ve had weirder sex than this on a Tuesday.”
An old (as in longtime; though increasingly for both of us, also as in middle-aged) Bookninja reader said yesterday that he missed the “news dump” type posts I used to do back in the day–wherein I’d post a bunch of snappy headlines and you had to click through to find out what the article was about. So here’s one:
Stephen King, whose Twitter is generally a bastion of forward-thinking, progressive thought, said something that revealed some white privilege and Twitter is calling him out on it.
He said that diversity is not a consideration for him when he votes as a member of the Academy. “I would never consider diversity in matters of art. Only quality. It seems to me that to do otherwise would be wrong,” he said on Twitter.
He has since been criticized by leading Hollywood names and authors saying his argument centers on the idea that quality and diversity are mutually exclusive.
Bookninja 