“We’re excited about opening but also worried about how we’re going to make it work and how we can keep ourselves and our customers safe,” Davies says. She continues to work full time in customer service, and to write (her first poetry collection, Pineapples in the Pool, was published by Unbound in 2018). “We’ll be opening with reduced hours for a few weeks to see how things go. We’re so nervous about it though. Who opens a bookshop in a pandemic?”
Welp, you made it again. Celebrate with some news from around the industry and maybe treat yourself to something nice after work today. It’s a rare sunny June weekend here, so I will be outside trying to not die of solar radiation. If you live, like I do, in a place with a small BIPOC population and very few protesting opportunities, consider getting yourself some books by black and indigenous authors and consider buying them from black- and indigenous-owned bookstores. Vote with your wallet if you can’t vote with your body and voice.
I’ve been handcrafting miniature scenery for years now, and wee insert scenes for bookshelves are quite popular, but if you can’t don’t want to get out the Xacto and glue gun, you can buy these prefab kits;
Internet Archive is ending its program of offering free, unrestricted copies of e-books because of a lawsuit from publishers, which said lending out books without compensation for authors or publishing houses was “willful mass copyright infringement.”
Since March, Internet Archive, a nonprofit, has made more than 1.3 million books available online without restriction, calling them a National Emergency Library. It said the program was in place “to serve the nation’s displaced learners” during the coronavirus pandemic, and that it would keep the library open until June 30 or the end of the U.S. national emergency, whichever came later.
Do you feel JK Rowling has basically ruined everything she ever created with her anti-Trans ranting? Well, she would like you to know that she has reasons. Here she is trying to give some context for her TERF-enabling, biological essentialist stance on Trans rights: sexual and physical trauma is the main point. Terrible. I get it. I get that trauma can make you suspicious of others, and can take you to dark places in your head. And I’m not even sure how to best comment on it, except to say I think that she handles it all so poorly. The supposed difference between us and animals is that we can work to rise above acting on baser impulses, regardless of how difficult that may sometimes be, including both what’s supposedly bred in the bone and what’s learned. Further, I don’t really see her dealing with the pain this has caused to people who have admired her for years, along with the wider societal damage caused by trying to legitimize anti-Trans ideologies, except in saying: what about poor me? In the end, as with other justifications for bad behaviour and the abuse of others that we see from writers (from upbringing to social status/expectations to mental illness), it’s really only an explanation, not an excuse. I had the shit knocked out of me every day as a kid, but do I hate angry mothers and 12-year-olds named Danny? (Note: only linking to news stories and not her statement because I don’t want to give her the tiny slice of traffic.)
JK Rowling has revealed her experience of domestic abuse and sexual assault for the first time, in a lengthy and highly personal essay written in response to criticism of her public comments on transgender issues.
In a 3,600-word statement published on her website on Wednesday, Rowling described in more detail than ever how she became involved in an increasingly bitter and polarised debate around the concept of gender identity.
The author revealed she was “a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor”, citing this alongside her belief in freedom of speech and experience as a teacher as reasons behind her position.
“I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces,” she wrote.
Big news in the ever-tumultuous world of poetry: Chicago’s storied Poetry Foundation saw its board leaders resign yesterday after an enormous campaign by American poets calling for positive change within the organization to better reflect the ethnic makeup of Chicago itself. I’m a big fan of Poetry and the last few years have really seen it be reinvigorated with a wider range of styles and poets than ever before, but it is truly past time for some POC presence among the leadership. Being on a NFP board is generally a thankless job, and a difficult one, if the org is underfunded and requires a working board to function. But the two dudes who resigned are named “Henry Bienen” and “Willard Bunn III”, which makes me feel they probably will be just fine. And frankly, getting a guy who feels it necessary to add “III” to the end of his name to resign from anything is a victory in and of itself.
The Board of Directors of the Poetry Foundation has accepted the resignation of Foundation President Henry Bienen with gratitude for his years of service; it is effective immediately. In addition, Willard Bunn III is stepping down as Board chair.
This is a fascinating article about a book I’m going to have to get about animal culture. Not animals in culture, but culture in non-human animals. I’ve been reading a lot lately about the link between complexity in matter and energy, and how that creates and affects consciousness, and it’s some remarkably mind-melting stuff. This article is lit-related mostly in how it basically outlines that animals are conscious too and talking all the time. Bizarrely, I wrote my first poem in a month or so a couple days back and it was about this. Universal translators can’t come soon enough.
I was taught at school that animals have instinct but humans have learning. Later that got more refined: animals can only ever pass on things through their genes, but we humans can pass things on by example and by teaching — in short, by culture. Culture is why we’re humans and they’re not.
But like all adamantine barriers we have drawn up between human and non-human life, even the most cursory examination reveals a million leaks and porosities. Of course non-human animals have culture.
What does the worldwide pandemic mean for freelancers in the publishing industry? An illustrator, a typesetter, and an editor from India give personal accounts of how their lives and livelihoods are changing. I’m sure there’s overlap over here. I know that freelance work has dried up for me in three areas: journalism/reviewing (though that was well on the way before all this), writing for private enterprise (everyone is relying on staff and putting expenses on hold during the uncertainty), and teaching (I’ve been teaching online for over 10 years and there’s nothing out there right now for sessionals… The unionized and tenured folk are being made to take on our jobs, which they didn’t want before, so …. bye bye paycheques). Here’s hoping whatever new system rises up out of this mess will have room for us mercenary types.
Bookninja 