Bookninja

The Walrus has a neat piece on the making of Margaret Atwood, who has recently turned 80, as explored through anecdotes from those who have known her best, including friends, broadcasters, and other authors (Eleanor Wachtel, George Saunders, Tom King, Esi Edugyen, the douchey office of Jonathan Franzen, etc.)

It’s remarkable that Atwood, who turned eighty in November, has reached this crest after spending six decades writing into an ever-shifting cultural landscape. When she was starting out, writers, for the most part, didn’t get published in Canada. Canadian literature as a concept didn’t even exist. To understand how Atwood grew into the literary celebrity she is today, we reached out to some of the writers, publishers, and friends who know her, and her words, best.

Restoring the glory of the public library as a balm against the rampant stupidity that is current American life. Huh. Looks like it might check out. (Check out? Get it? …. No?…. Pfft. Philistines.)

Libraries are an example of what I call “social infrastructure”: the physical spaces and organizations that shape the way people interact. Libraries don’t just provide free access to books and other cultural materials, they also offer things like companionship for older adults, de facto child care for busy parents, language instruction for immigrants and welcoming public spaces for the poor, the homeless and young people.

Do you know the story of Blade Runner: A Movie? Probably not. Given that we now live in the actual month the original Blade Runner movie was set, I think it’s time we started having these conversations.

Have you read the book Blade Runner: A Movie? It’s not the book of the movie Blade Runner – the book of that movie is called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Blade Runner: A Movie isn’t even a movie. Though it was meant to be. The movie of a book called The Bladerunner. Another book, written by someone else entirely, unconnected to Blade Runner, the movie, or Blade Runner: A Movie, the book.

Did you know that Charlotte Brontë* used to make wee books when she was a teen?

At a Paris auction on Monday, the charity paid €600,000 (£512,000) plus auction costs to acquire the book, which measures just 35mm x 61mm. Written in 1830, when Charlotte was 14, it is part of a series of six produced by the author in her teens. Only five are known to have survived, with one missing since around 1930.

*Did you know Charlotte’s birthday is April 21, but a long long time ago? That makes her a Brontë-Taurus. I’ll be here all week, people.

Latin isn’t dead or useless, says essayist.

I would like to put the reader on guard against one more noxious cliché. Even among specialists one hears the term “dead language” thrown around. This characterization arises from a misconception of how languages live and die, and a hazy distinction between the written and the oral. Oral language is linked immediately with the idea of being alive. But this is a bias. Latin, even if it’s no longer spoken, is present in an astounding number of manuscripts—and writing, particularly literary writing, is a far more durable means of communication than any oral practice. If, therefore, Latin lives on in the most complex form of writing we’ve yet imagined, namely literature, is it not absurd to proclaim it dead?

Was there a reading or something somewhere? I didn’t really see much coverage. It’s like there MIGHT have been an event, but I can’t be sure because barely anyone was talking about it.

Congratulations, Ian Williams! Guy has to be on top of the world today. Griffin, Giller…. What’s next? GG for playwriting? While I was pulling for hometown heroes Michael Crummey and Megan Coles, I am glad to see a formally inventive novel (written by a poet, fuckers) win the prize!

“It’s an engrossing story of disparate people brought together and also a masterful unfolding of unexpected connections and collisions between and across lives otherwise separated by race, class, gender and geography. It’s a pointed and often playful plotting out of individual and shared stories in the close spaces of hospital rooms, garages, mansions and apartments, and a symphonic performance of resonant and dissonant voices, those of persons wanting to impress persuade, deny, or beguile others, and always trying again,” the jury said in a statement.

So, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this for a week or more now, but this nonsense with ChiZine just keeps getting crazier. Thankfully a generous tipster has sent me a bunch of links to try to make sense of it all. Besides his literary work, the other original Bookninja Peter Darbyshire writes dark fantasy under the name of Peter Roman, including the super-fun, fast-paced Cross series, and has been publishing these with ChiZine the last few years. Sadly, Peter is also affected by what’s gone on. I’m mad in part on Pete’s behalf and in part for those of us who won’t any time soon get a look at the fourth Cross book.

I’ll tell you something for free right now: given the state of this fuck up and the apparent length of time its been going on, if I were working at the Canada Council, I would be setting a speculum into an icebath in anticipation of a full exam up the buttholes of both the company itseld and all the key ChiZine leadership involved. And I think Rev Can and the Bank might want to get involved as well.

Outside Twitter chatter and the spec world news there seems to be very little reportage on this. Time to crack it open, non-blog journalists.

• Authors Break Silence with Complaints About ChiZine Publications
• Writers and Staffers Share More Bad Experiences with ChiZine Publications
• As Authors Share More ChiZine Experiences, Others Part Ways with CZP
• ChiZine Publications Announces Interim Publisher
• Statement from ChiZine
• SFWA Statement from the President on Chizine
• Staff Changes at ChiZine
• ChiZine Fucked Up (headline winner)
• Controversy Erupts Around ChiZine
• The Rise and Fall of ChiZine (audio)

Dang it, I’m not getting any work done today. Adam Cohen is interviewed on his father’s legacy and their last work together.

“I remember while we were getting all of these vocals, I asked him, ‘Dad, what is it that’s causing you to, one after the other, commit such incredibly compelling vocals with relative ease?’” Adam recalls. “It’s an area in which he had often struggled, or at least he felt he’d struggled. He would rattle these readings off almost joyfully from his medical chair, which I had installed in his living room.

“And he said to me, ‘I have never found it as easy to record vocals because I’m immobilised. I can’t move. I’m in such pain, I’ve been stuck in this house for months, and I’ve been doing nothing but singing these songs.’ He was so deeply familiar with the language, with where the beat falls, where the syllables fall within the beat, he was able to, with incredible conviction, believability, character and charisma, deliver these stories completely as himself. I was amazed. Many of these vocals were essentially first takes. They were birthed almost complete. A very rare thing.”

Basically this review of two books on Bowie (one analysing his top 100 books) is a thinly veiled chance for me to start heading down a Bowie Spotify rabbit hole today. Goodbye!

20th-century fiction, books that touched on dadaism and surrealism, two histories of soul music… There were plenty of titles that suggested a curator who had come of age in the early 60s (On the Road, Billy Liar, Colin Wilson’s The Outsider), though with the inclusion of every issue of Viz, Private Eye and the Beano alongside Dante and Homer, the list was democratic, and clearly intended to give pointers on how to live a good life as much as signal an iconoclastic education.

If I wrote a book about the struggles of being a writer, it would mostly centre on the availability snacks and coffee. These guys go in a different direction, which may also be valid. Who knows. To each their own.