Answer: have richer parents. Or don’t go to school. Or take advantage of the lockdown. Or something. Ah, so THOSE are the things I did wrong… Will have to remember that for next time. Full disclosure: I was 14 in 1985.
I am used to working and living precariously. There is a numbing sensation that comes gradually with scaling one’s living standards down and down until the basic elements of roof, roughage, bicycle and broadband come to seem like wins. It’s possible to live like this for brief period when working intensely; otherwise, it’s not. A person, especially as they age, needs security. But entrapment in eternal adolescence has long been a condition of making art, and is now also a condition of having been born after 1985.
An author in the UK bought 400 copies of his own book to push it onto the bestseller list. Brilliant idea or dirty pool? I’m asking this question sincerely. I went to a literary festival many years ago and had a killer reading of my book of aphorisms that resulted in hundreds of sales that night (and into the rest of the week) and an unexpected appearance on a bestseller list was my reward. Seriously. Poetry on the fiction best seller list because there was nowhere else to put it. So I my publisher now calls me a “bestselling poet”. Debatable, but sounds great. But could I crow so easily if I (or hell, if my rich family/the Republican Party) were the one who bought them? Personally, I couldn’t sleep at night. But bestseller lists don’t make or break poetry books. I mean, because, you know, they’re all pre-broken, in terms of sales. Any takes on this?
Mark Dawson, a British writer who just over a week ago hit No 8 on the Sunday Times hardback list with his thriller The Cleaner, released by the independent publisher Welbeck at the end of June. This is a great achievement for any author or small publishing house, but Dawson had done something remarkable: he bought 400 copies of his own book, at a cost of £3,600, to push his sales high enough to make the top 10.
Quelle surprise. Canada Reads is a shitshow of uneducated opinion and polarized ideology (which are, I believe, the base ingredients for a whole host of reality programming recipes). For those of you keeping score: OF COURSE the men, including one who wears a hat from 200 years ago, don’t get/believe Megan Coles’ book and immediately tried to vote it off the island…It’s like a masterclass in frat boy denialism… “Nope. That chick is CRAZY, man! Didn’t happen like that! Lalalalala! I can’t hear youuuuuu!”
What happens when you can’t find a publisher for your book? You make it into a podcast and everyone who doesn’t want to spend a moment alone inside their own head listens to it to distract them from the Doppler-effect/approaching-klaxonscream that is awareness of their eventual death;
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We collect dictionaries in this house. Actually, Ms. Ninja collects them and my job is to sort through other books to give away to make room. Ms. Ninja likes to argue that she is multi-lingual and may need them for writing in other languages, and I’m all like, Well, then how multi-lingual are you, fancypants? But then she swears at me in Hungarian, German, French, Spanish, etc. and I just respond in English.
I love that it’s a tradition in dictionaries to have a fake entry. It’s right in my wheelhouse. And in turn, I also love entirely fake dictionaries like The Meaning of Lif, by Douglas Adams, and The Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce. I have even been keeping a list of my own neologisms for possible publication one day (I think I might be the one who invented the term “Douché”. I can’t find any use of it from before my use back when. It’s “what one says when one has been bested in an argument by an asshole.” It was on Bookninja decades ago. Now its on t-shirts. Poets are shitty businessfolk.)
Eley Williams has always loved dictionaries. That love shone throughout her dazzling, acrobatic 2017 collection, Attrib. and Other Stories, which savoured words and wordplay with an irresistible enthusiasm. The debut catapulted its tiny publisher, Influx, on to prize lists and heralded the arrival of a singular new voice.
It all dates back to her childhood, when Williams’s family kept a pile of dictionaries by the kitchen table. “Once you start looking words up it’s very easy to ricochet from column to column, falling down a rabbit hole … I got ‘precocious’ in a school report and I wasn’t quite sure what it meant. I thought it was probably a very good thing.” She continued to ricochet around the columns throughout her school years, even starting her own dictionary of neologisms as a teenager, inspired by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd’s The Meaning of Liff. As time went on, she became more and more fascinated by the idiosyncrasies of a branch of knowledge that sets out to fix and codify meaning. “The concept is so ambitious … there’s something humane and sympathetic in the fact that we’ll always fall short, but something extraordinary in that we’d ever attempt it.” She wrote a PhD about fictitious entries in dictionaries, part of which has become her eagerly awaited debut novel, The Liar’s Dictionary, out this month.
Here’s another one of those articles that gives you permission to dump a book like a mediocre boyfriend. I feel like this is useful advice for many things in life: if you’re not enjoying something, cast it from your life into the fire like Isildur should have done with the One Ring. Books, drinks, jobs, marriages, “friends”, JK Rowlings, trips to that one grocery store that is local but is always stocked like its Romania in 1984, etc.
I love reading books I hate. I used to hate it (which you’d think is the normal way of things) because I was one of those people who would force myself to finish a book, even if every turn of the page filled me with unmitigated dread. Even if each sentence made my brain wince. For some reason, I placed moral value on not giving up until I had reached the back cover.
I no longer do that. I learned that life is too short to indulge in things that do not give a great return on my energy, emotion or time. So you might say I enjoy tossing a book I am disliking across a room (though I’m not cavalier enough to do that: I just snap it shut in a decisive way). The relief of calling time on something one is not enjoying, and which is not enriching, brings a warmth and lightness.
It’s Friday. You are here. What happened, happened. Let it go for a brief moment and inhale your 5pm freedom. Three deep breaths. I mean, once you finish the commute and aren’t on a carbon monoxide saturated superhighway full of other dead-eyed people waiting to do something they actually want to. If you’re Priding this weekend, enjoy and stay 7 more feet apart than usual at Pride events.
Happy Pridetimes! I always imagined that people working on Rowling’s books would just wander around the office pantomiming homerun swings and high-fiving each other while doing very little actual editing of her words… How’d that work out in the end? Her sales are dropping;
Poets versus the police… in Toronto… in the 60s… but, let’s not forget that poetry activism aside, Acorn was no hero, by any stretch of the imagination;
This Cosmo writer says yes. And she says that women of colour are much more likely to get you hyped up for that nooner quickie than anything by men. I’m inclined to agree in many ways. Mostly around the porn thing, which I believe is destroying young men, sexually. The talks I have to have in this house full of boys are uncomfortable, but I think a necessary antidote to whateverthefrig they get up to when the door is locked. Mainstream porn isn’t about sex, it’s about the performance of extreme sexual stunts in the service of further entrenching positions of male power and dominance. Just like Avengers isn’t about heroes and anything with Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler is probably not about romance. It’s all just a set of extremes and circus-like performance designed to impress. Like the difference between someone commuting to work on rollerblades vs. the X-Games, or the difference between juggling and Cirque du Soleil. Just because the body CAN do those things, doesn’t mean most people WANT to do them. Anyway, what were we talking about again? Oh, right: bad sex scenes.
Allow me to vent for a second: Male authors have mastered the art of turning literary work into something that makes my libido want to go full-on MIA.
Maybe it’s just me or because of what I’ve read most recently, but if I see another male write “bulging member” and/or “throbbing penis” used as a dick descriptor in an erotic scene, I might scream.
Now don’t get me wrong, I recognize that many women writers fall into this trap too, as there are only so many ways to say “penis” without saying “penis.” But from what I’ve experienced, many women possess the skills to write around the word “cock” instead of blatantly using it… over and over and over again, until it’s actually nauseating.
And personally, I have a couple theories on why men are like this when writing sex scenes: One is that years of watching porn, where all it takes to get women to orgasm are a few weak strokes and unattractive grunts, have permanently damaged their perception of what real sex should look like.
Bookninja 