Wednesday
October 31
IN
BLURBS WE TRUST: Ever wonder about the recommendations of
books by bookstores? Can you trust them? Well... "The sums
involved are considerable: the leading high-street chain, W.H.
Smith, charges £10,000 to call a book ‘Read of the Week’. Books
etc.’s ‘Showcase’ and Borders’ ‘Best’ cost as much as £2,500,
and Amazon demands £6,000 for its ‘Book of the Month’ endorsement.
To have a book called ‘Latest Thing’ will set you back £15,000,
and ‘Fresh Talent’, an accolade recently won by Richard Littlejohn,
costs £2,850." The Spectator
10/20/01
ACADEMICS
QUIBBLE OVER ACADEMIC LIFE: Harvard English Professor Marjorie
Garber and Berkeley English Professor Frederick Crews both have
new books out about their work. "Garber believes that academic
jargon is actually 'language in action', marking 'the place where
thinking has been', while Crews believes that it is the inscription
on the tombstone of the place where thinking died."
London Review 10/31/01
BIG
BUCKS/LOW SALES: At a time when many serious writers have
difficulty even getting published, publishers are paying millions
of dollars to celebrities to pen books. But those books are rarely
successes - either critically or at the cash register. In fact,
they sell poorly. So why the big money? Poets
& Writers 10/01
Monday October 29
THE
GREAT NOVEMBER NOVEL: "National Novel Writing Month,
where the aim is to produce a 50,000 word novel in just 30 days,
starts on Wednesday. "What people need to do is just write and
write anything that comes into their heads and if they did 50,000
words I'd be thrilled." Sydney Morning
Herald 10/29/01
TAKING
ON OPRAH: Writer Jonathan Franzen's criticism of Oprah's book
club has brought him scorn from critics and other writers. "In
a sense, the episode underscored how right Mr. Franzen was about
the power of television and its transformation of literary culture.
But the aftermath also showed that if there was ever a time in
the book business when authors wrote to impress critics and their
peers without regard to book sales, getting caught in that posture
is now almost embarrassing." The
New York Times 10/29/01 (one-time
registration required for access)
Friday October 26
ANTHRAX
SCARE POSTPONES POET: New American poet laureate Billy Collins
"was to have read from his poetry Thursday night at the Library
of Congress, one of the main duties of the poet laureate. The
reading was canceled because of tests of the library buildings
for anthrax and was tentatively rescheduled for Dec. 6."
Nando Times (AP) 10/25/01
- POETRY
TO THE PEOPLE: America's new poet laureate Billy Collins
"begins his very public year in Washington tonight with
a reading at the Library of Congress. At age 60, he has become
famous, as poets go, by touching something untrivial in people,
without resorting to kitsch or pandering. He may be a poet of
a sort not seen in America since Robert Frost. Though his poems
are anything but ordinary, he manages to touch a large audience
by using ordinary language, and by writing in and out of the
dooryards of ordinary life." Boston
Globe 10/25/01
CAMPAIGNING
FOR OUR OWN: Columnist Noah Richler takes the Governor General
Awards leadership to task for not including a book by his dad
and that of a family friend for consideration for this year's
awards. National Post (Canada) 10/26/01
Thursday October
25
PISSING
OFF OPRAH: Jonathan Franzen's new book The Corrections
is the most-hyped publishing project of the year. Among the stars
aligning right for it was Oprah's decision to make it an Oprah
Book Club selection. But then Franzen dissed O and her fans not
once, but twice in the media. So Oprah withdrew the choice and
Franzen's scrambled to apologize. Too late. "One can only
wonder why Franzen went after her, and not once but twice, and
in such ugly fashion. All she offered Franzen was a significantly
increased readership. What's to not like? " Mobylives
10/24/01
- ALL
ABOUT THE STICKER: "Franzen didn't go so far as to
reject Oprah per se. The essence of his complaint, as he cast
it, was that the label signified not simply Oprah's endorsement
of the book, but the book's endorsement of Oprah. Franzen seems
to want us to believe that his anti-establishment sensibilities
have been trampled." The Plain
Dealer (Cleveland) 10/25/01
BOOKER
BOOST: Peter Carey's "True History of the Kelly Gang
has soared from 30th place to eighth in the British hardback fiction
bestsellers list following last week's Booker win - selling 3,348
last week, compared with 436 the week before the prize announcement."
But British readers evidently prefer runner-up Ian McEwan's Atonement,
which was No.1 last week "selling 8,232 copies last week,
about four times as many as the previous week." The
Age (AAP) 10/25/01
BILLYBALL:
When Billy Collins was named America's new poet laureate earlier
this year, critics couldn't help but note that he was one of the
few poets who actually makes decent money at his craft. "All
of this man-bites-dog astonishment condescends to poetry, where
such small sums count as fortunes. Yet the very existence of a
'popular poet' is reassuring for an art seemingly doomed to ivory-tower
irrelevance." So what is so appealing about Collins' work
that makes him stand out? The
New Republic 10/23/01
HAS THE LITERARY SCENE
CHANGED IN 20 YEARS? Let's see. Twenty years ago "Philip
Roth was happily living with Claire Bloom. Salman Rushdie was
just a mild-mannered lapsed Muslim with one novel under his belt.
Allen Ginsberg was still alive and wandering the East Village.
Zadie Smith turned five." Yep, things have changed.
Village Voice Literary Supplement October
2001
AGAINST
LOVE POETRY: It's the title of Irish poet Eavan Boland's new
volume. "So much of European love poetry is court poetry,
coming out of the glamorous traditions of the court. Love poetry,
from the troubadours on, is traditionally about that romantic
lyric moment. There's little about the ordinariness of love, the
dailiness of love, or the steadfastness of love."
The New Yorker 10/29/01
Wednesday October
24
GOVERNOR
GENERAL'S SHORT LIST: Canada's Governor General Award for
fiction announces its shortlist. Jane Urquhart and Richard B.
Wright picked up nominations after earlier this month being named
to the Giller fiction short list. "The other English fiction
nominees for the GG awards, announced by the Canada Council for
the Arts, are Yann Martel of Montreal for Life of Pi, Tessa
McWatt of Toronto for Dragons Cry and Thomas Wharton of
Edmonton for Salamander." Toronto
Star 10/23/01
PUBLISHING-NOT-SO-ON-DEMAND:
An on-demand publisher tries to put out a book of essays about
September 11 in New York, with proceeds going to the Red Cross.
But it turns out that "on-demand" is at the mercy of
traditional distribution systems. Getting big distributors like
Amazon to carry the book proves...how shall we say...a demanding
proposition? Salon
10/20/01
OVERCOMING
AGE: "Who has it worse: young writers or old? Ageism,
it would appear, is a double-edged sword. In columns littering
the opinion pages from London to New York to Toronto, the Old
Guard and the Young Turks are lining up. Not, as one might have
expected, to say who is best. As Robert Hughes has it, ours is
a culture of complaint. The most important thing our artists have
to establish is their victim credentials."
GoodReports 10/24/01
Monday October 22
THE
LITTLE MAGAZINE WITH BIG FANS: At its peak, Lingua Franca
magazine had a circulation of only 15,000. Newstand sales never
topped 2000. But its fans in academe were many - far beyond its
circulation base, even as it announced it would shut down last
week. "This can't work as a conventional business. It can only
work as something dynamic and risky. It can only work for an investor
who wants to do something dazzling and sexy to get attention."
Chicago Tribune 10/22/01
THE
HUNDRED YEARS WAR: Think America's war in Afghanistan is anything
new? A hundred years ago the British were embroiled in the region.
And "Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim – as well as his
1888 short story, The Man Who Would Be King – provide lessons
on the risks the country now faces, even lessons on the quagmires
of nation-building." Dallas Morning
News 10/21/01
THE
ESSENCE OF WRITING: "Literature is amoral, like biology,
like physics, like the universe itself and like the letters
of the alphabet we use. Literature is an energy, an imaginative
energy, which reflects all aspects of human nature. It is not
part of our schoolmastering, but part of our learning in a wider
and more imaginative sense. It teaches us to refute simplicities,
simplicities which neatly separate good and evil. Above all, it
is not just a set of cautionary or exemplary tales, but unpredictable,
awkwardly shaped, not leading directly to bigger salaries and
wages." The
Independent (UK) 10/22/01
Sunday October 21
THE
WRITER AS CELEBRITY: "In the 19th century and the first
half of the 20th century many successful and much-admired authors
were unknown to the general public and to their readers - unknown
in the sense that their appearance, their personalities, their
habits, and their private lives were indeed private." How
different from today, when writers have become performing animals
and every aspect of their lives is open to scrutiny in the press.
The Guardian (UK) 10/20/01
Friday October 19
ALL
ABOUT BOOK(ER) SALES: The honor's nice, but Peter Carey's
Booker Prize win will sell a lot of his books. "When Peter won
in 1988 with Oscar and Lucinda, we released the paperback edition
on the day that it was announced. We printed 20,000 and didn't
know if it was going to be the stock for a day or a year. We sold
them in an hour, and in the next six months sold 200,000 copies."
The Age (Melbourne) 10/19/01
Thursday October
18
CAREY
TAKES BOOKER: Australian writer Peter Carey has won this year's
Booker Prize. "Carey, 58, is only the second writer in the
Booker's 32-year history, after JM Coetzee, to win twice."
The Guardian (UK) 10/18/01
LINGUA
FRANCA SUSPENDS PUBLICATION: The current issue is coming out,
but work on the next has stopped. "While Lingua Franca never
turned a profit and its circulation hovered around 15,000, news
of its apparent demise elicited exclamations of dismay in the
world of letters." The
New York Times 10/16/01 (one-time registration
required for access)
- BRILL'S
CONTENT
FOLDS:
"Yesterday, after sputtering for years, Brill's Content
magazine suspended publication, ending a three-year run of dissecting
the personalities, obsessions and machinations of news organizations."
The
New York Times 10/16/01 (one-time registration
required for access)
Wednesday October
17
LOOKING
FOR SHAKESPEARE: Who was William Shakespeare? Some say he
was the "17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. Oxford was
eminently equipped to tackle the range and scope evident in Shakespeare's
work: because of his education (arts, law, sciences), his renowned
excellence in letters, his prowess at sports and arms, his travels
in Italy and France, his patronage of literary and scientific
contemporaries." Sydney Morning
Herald 10/17/01
- BUT
NOT THAT THEORY:
"The Oxfordian case is founded in snobbery, the idea that
a non-aristocratic lad from the country could never have had
the talent or insight to write such masterpieces."
Sydney Morning Herald 10/17/01
EXPECT
A RUN ON PIPES AND WEIRD HATS: "For devotees of Sherlock
Holmes, arguably the world's most famous detective, and his creator
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the game will be afoot in Toronto this
weekend. About 250 fans from around the world are expected at
a conference celebrating the 100th anniversary of the publication
of the most famous Holmes work, The Hound of the Baskervilles."
National Post (CP) 10/17/01
Tuesday October 16
BAILING
ON THE BOOKER: Booker Prize sponsor Iceland, a frozen food
producer, is announcing it is withdrawing from sponsoring Britain's
top literary prize. The company says that "new sponsors should
be found for the literary competition as it sees 'no commercial
link' between its supermarket business and the literary award.
Iceland inherited the prize only because of a merger with food
group Booker in 2000." BBC 10/16/01
DEFINING
AMERICAN HIGHBROW OF THE 50s: "The concept of a highbrow
culture, the culture of great books and the like, depends on the
concept of a lowbrow, or popular, culture, whose characteristics
highbrow culture defines itself against. Of course, there have
always been good books and bad books, serious music and easy listening,
coterie art and poster art. Making those distinctions is easy
if you just put everything on a continuum, and rank things from
worst to best. The mid-century notion of highbrow culture required
something different—it required a rupture between the high and
the low, an absolute difference, not a relative one." The
New Yorker 10/15/01
THE NOBEL FOR LITERATURE:
There is second-guessing almost every year; still, most winners
since World War Two have been substantial literary figures. Much
better choices, in fact, than "the bewildering early choices
of the Nobel Committee, so obscure as to appear now wilfully blind.
They were not the choices of Nobel himself, of course, but of
the members of the Swedish Academy trying to guess what the repentant
merchant of death would like." Boston Review 10/01
- Previously:
NAIPAUL WINS
NOBEL IN LITERATURE: "The Nobel Prize in Literature
for 2001 is awarded to the British writer, born in Trinidad,
V.S. Naipaul 'for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible
scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed
histories'. V.S. Naipaul is a literary circumnavigator, only
ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice."
Nobel Institute (Sweden) 10/11/01
REMEMBERING
HOW YOU GOT THERE: Joyce Carol Oates says she writes all the
time - and she must, considering her prodigious output. But she
remembers how and where she started. "She still sends short
stories into The Prairie Schooner, a literary magazine
at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, one of the first places
that published her work. And she spoke Saturday at the magazine's
75th anniversary celebration." Washington
Times (AP) 10/16/01
Monday October 15
BRAVE
CHOICE: V.S. Naipaul is the Nobel Institute's bravest choice
in years for the literature prize. "In choosing him as this
year's laureate for literature, the Nobel committee has allowed
the controversial Naipaul's influence - his aura - to accrue to
the prize as much as the other way around."
Salon 10/14/01
AWARDS
TOM CLANCY WILL NEVER WIN: "A German philosopher and
sociologist who has captured - and at times defined - the Zeitgeist
of postwar Germany was honored Sunday with the Frankfurt Book
Fair's Peace Prize, the event's highest honor. Juergen Habermas
is renowned for his talent of pointing out deficits in the values
held by Western society, including democracy and equality. His
writings have been translated into dozens of languages and he
has been compared to the late philosophers Bertrand Russell and
Jean-Paul Sartre." Nando Times
(AP) 10/14/01
THE
NON-FICTION SQUEEZE: "Nonfiction, or nonfiction that
masquerades as fiction, nonfiction that aspires to be fiction,
nonfiction that wants to be fiction when it grows up, is in sudden,
best-selling vogue." It's squeezing out fiction. This is
not a good thing. San Francisco Bay
Guardian 10/12/01
THE
WEAKEST 'LINK' EXCUSE: "Frozen food retailer Iceland
will announce on Wednesday that it intends to withdraw from sponsorship
of the Booker prize. The current sponsor will say that new sponsors
should be found for the literary competition as it sees 'no commercial
link' between its supermarket business and the literary award."
BBC 10/15/01
THE
VAGARIES OF FACT OR FICTION: A Toronto politician trying to
get elected is haunted by a book he wrote years ago that contains
unsavory details of his life. He claims the book was fiction,
but the book was marketed as a true story. "The non-fiction
novel and gonzo journalism have blurred the line between fact
and fiction, and a controversy like this highlights the difficulty
in keeping them apart." Good
Reports 10/15/01
E-BOOK
SPUTTER: "Electronic publishing has turned its focus
to niche markets at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair as the industry
admits most readers would still rather curl up with a book than
a bulky screen. In contrast with the euphoria of last year, when
some electronic publishers predicted paper books would become
museum pieces within a generation, the industry has scaled back
its ambitions since the crisis that struck the new economy."
National Post (Canada) 10/15/01
Sunday October 14
LANGUAGE
BARRIER: One of the greatest challenges confronting European
publishers is successfully translating foreign books into the
local language without losing any of the style, meaning, or minutiae
of the original. A mediocre translation can mean the difference
between a success and a failure on the market, and many publishers
are loath to take the risk. Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung 10/12/01
CHASING
THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN NOVEL: Once upon a time, Australian writers
loved to tackle big, global ideas and wide-ranging philosophical
subtexts in their work. But these days, it seems that every new
novel to hit the bestseller list is narrowly focused, specifically
targeted, and just so gosh-darned local. Whatever happened
to collective experience? Sydney Morning
Herald 10/13/01
GOLDIE
WON'T BE STARRING IN IT, WILL SHE? "Film rights to a
newly published Mark Twain novelette have been sold by the Buffalo
library to the Hollywood production company owned by movie stars
Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. Cosmic Entertainment will have exclusive
rights to "A Murder, A Mystery and a Marriage," written by Twain
in 1876 but published for the first time this year, Buffalo &
Erie County Public Library executives said Thursday."
Baltimore Sun (AP) 10/12/01
IMMODEST,
MAYBE, BUT STILL NOBEL: This year's winner of the Nobel Prize
for Literature, V.S. Naipaul, is nothing if not aware of his own
accomplishments. He claims, among other things, to have helped
bring India into modern times through his writing, and to have
helped "educate" the country's population. Not everyone
appreciated the help: "The trouble with people like me writing
about societies where there is no intellectual life is that if
you write about it, people are angry." BBC
10/12/01
Friday October 12
SOME
E-BOOKS MAKE MONEY: Prize money, that is. Indian novelist
Amitav Ghosh won the $50,000 Grand Prize for Fiction, and American
journalist Steven Levy won the Grand Prize for non-fiction at
the Frankfurt Book Fair. To be eligible for the competition, "entrants
must include technical enhancements that distinguish the ebook
from its printed version." The Guardian
(UK) 11/12/01
COMING
TO TERMS WITH AN OLD FRIEND/ENEMY: Think of Ödön von Horváth
as Germany's answer to Garrison Keillor - a much-beloved writer
and teller of tales about his hometown that make locals distinctly
uncomfortable. But unlike Keillor's fictional town of Lake Wobegon,
Horváth's Murnau really does exist, and his airing of the burg's
dirty laundry for his own literary gain has not sat well with
the natives. Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung 10/11/01
Thursday October
11
NATIONAL
BOOK AWARD NOMINEES: The two most widely (some might say flagrantly)
publicized books of the past year were Jonathan Franzen's novel
The Corrections, and David McCullough's literary biography
John Adams. Nominees for the National Book Awards have
been announced; Franzen made the list, McCullough didn't. The
National
Book Foundation has its own website, listing all nominees
in all categories. Nando Times 10/11/01
MAYBE
IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE EASY: James Joyce's Ulysses
may be the best and surely is one of the most complex novels of
the twentieth century. Four years ago Macmillan published a new
edition, inserting material from the author's unused manuscript
material to produce an easier-to-read version. Now the trustees
of the Joyce estate are suing for copyright infringement because
the Macmillan edition "altered some of the author's original punctuation,
spelling and name places." The Guardian
(UK) 10/10/01
A
NEW GOLDEN AGE OF PHILOSOPHY? If the Frankfurt Book Fair is
any indication, Europe is about to be hit with a wave of high-minded
philosophy tomes and arts books that address the more abstract,
existential elements of art. Such books had fallen out of fashion
for a time, but publishers apparently think the public is ready
to embrace them again. Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung 10/10/01
NAIPAUL
WINS NOBEL IN LITERATURE: "The Nobel Prize in Literature for
2001 is awarded to the British writer, born in Trinidad, V.S.
Naipaul 'for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible
scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed
histories'. V.S. Naipaul is a literary circumnavigator, only ever
really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice." Nobel
Institute (Sweden) 10/11/01
Wednesday October
10
POOH
BEAR AT 75: Yes, it's true. Winnie-ther-Pooh (don't
you know what "ther" means?) turns 75 years old
this week, and A.A. Milne's classic tales of childhood, imagination,
and the Hundred Acre Wood are as popular as they ever were. Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette 10/10/01
SEX,
BOOZE, AND SCHMOOZING: Is the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference
really all that it's cracked up to be? "What I believe is that
you can make people better writers," says its director. On the
other hand, says a (now former) faculty member, "This place is
the shocking culmination of all that is foolish and ill-conceived
in the writing programs. The boosterism, the childishness, the
prolonged collegiate atmosphere. It's like a fucking parody."
The New Yorker 10/15/01
TO
DISCUSS A MOCKINGBIRD: For the past couple weeks, everyone
(well, nearly) in Chicago has been reading To Kill a Mockingbird,
and this is the week they're supposed to gather and discuss the
book. So, what are they saying? One of the city's papers assembled
a not-quite typical panel to find out. Chicago
Sun-Times 10/09/01
TAKING
ON THE BIG BOYS: In Germany, small and medium-sized presses
struggle daily against the larger corporate publishing houses
to maintain their small share of the market. But "[u]nlike
the United States, where 80 percent of the publishing industry
is dominated by just five companies, more than 90 percent of the
roughly 2,000 German book publishers remain independent."
In fact, in the battle between the many Davids and the few Goliaths,
the little guys have been winning more than they're losing. Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung 10/09/01
THE
POEM, THE TEMPLE, THE PEOPLE: The temple at Angkor Wat incorporates
a poem which has never been translated into English, and never
before been the subject of academic study. Now it is being studied,
and translated; it's expected to reveal much about the history
and culture of the Khmer people, going back to the twelfth century.
Humanities (NEH) October 01
Tuesday October 9
CAREY
COLLECTION SNUBBED: "The National Library of Australia
has declined to buy a collection of the early personal archives
of Australian author Peter Carey, prompting a claim that they
are likely to be sold overseas." Carey is one of the country's
most prominent and outspoken authors, and is considered a favorite
to win his second Booker prize this month. The
Age (Melbourne) 10/09/01
MONEY
ISN'T EVERYTHING: In fact, if your book sells only eight copies,
it's just about nothing. Still, that could be enough to get you
noticed. It got one book nominated for Wednesday's Frankfurt eBook
Awards. Wired 10/09/01
Monday October 8
WRITERLY
ATTACK: B.R. Myers provoked the biggest literary debate of
the year this summer when he wrote in The Atlantic that much of
contemporary fiction was not worthy of attention, then attacked
critics and the literary establishment for maintaining the status
quo. The counterattacks came predictably, but the most bizarre
might have been by Judith Shulevitz in The New York Times... Mobylives
10/07/01
TODAY'S
LIT GOING CRIT? Is contemporary literature doomed to be forgotten?
"Philip Roth . . . said this: Literature 'will probably more or
less disappear except in a cultic way over the next 25 years.
. . . The screen did it, didn't it? . . . The human mind prefers
the screen to the page. There's nothing we can do about it.' Then
Naipaul was quoted in the Guardian of London this month as saying
this: 'Nearly everything written in the last century will crumble
away to dust - all the novels. In every novel written now, there's
an element of mimicry.' " Washington
Post 10/08/01
Friday October 5
WINNING
THE HARD WAY: Later this month Peter Carey could be only the
second writer to win the Booker Prize twice. He just won Australia's
top literary prize, but it was a peculiar win. Frank Moorhouse
had been announced as the winner, but two hours later Moorhouse
was told there had been a mistake and that Carey had won. Sydney
Morning Herald 10/05/01
CANADIAN
BOOK PRIZE FINALISTS: Canadian literature is hot these days.
So paying attention to the Giller Prize, Canada's top literary
award, is a good idea. The list of previous winners includes a
Who's Who of Canadian writers. But this year, the six finalists
are relative unknowns, including a first-time novelist. National
Post (Canada) 10/05/01
Thursday October
4
THE
GILLER SHORT LIST: Six finalists have been chosen from among
78 books for the $25,000 Giller Prize, one of Canada's most prestigious
literary awards. The winner will be announced next month at an
awards dinner which "has become the social event of the season
for the Canadian literary crowd." The
Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/04/01
TAKING
BACK THE PRIZE: Frank Moorhouse was told he had won the Victorian
Premiere's Literary Prize for his first novel. He'd even started
spending the $20,000 prize in his head. Then came a call from
his agent. "Although the State Library, which administers
the awards, earlier that day had confirmed his win in calls to
the media, it had subsequently retracted his name, saying a 'typo'
had been made." The Age (Melbourne)
10/04/01
READERS
DEMAND BOOK COVERAGE: Last spring, the San Francisco Chronicle
cut back its books section to save money, incorporating it into
another section of the paper. But so many readers complained that
"on Sunday, the Chronicle's readers will get what they want
- and more - when the newspaper debuts its new Book Review, a
broadsheet-size, stand-alone section that will wrap around Datebook."
Los Angeles Times 10/04/01
UNFILTERED
ACCESS: New federal regulations say that public libraries
will lose federal funding if they don't filter out objectionable
material from computers in the libraries. "There are over
160,000 school and public libraries in the United States; Many
stand to lose much-needed federal funding if they don't follow
requirements." Now the San Francisco Board of Supervisors
has voted unanimously to keep filters off library computers. Wired
10/04/01
Wednesday October
3
THE
SCIENCE OF LIT PRIZES: Okay, so this year's crop of Canadian
novels isn't so captivating as last year's. But there's still
a Giller Prize to be handed out, and there's no reason we can't
come up with a fairly scientific formula for how to choose the
short list... isn't there? National
Post 10/03/01
Tuesday October 2
AN OLD
ORDER PASSES: With thirty miles of shelving, Foyles in London
is generally regarded as the world's biggest bookshop. And until
recently, it was one of the most old-fashioned. Traditions have
been changing, however, and it may no longer be the gathering
spot for "women wearing big hats who live in Knightsbridge
and Kensington." The
Guardian (UK) 10/01/01
LITERARY
LIST: Robert Belknap has written a dissertation that looks
at "the list" as a literary construct. "Lists are
deliberate structures, built with care and craft, and perfectly
suited to rigorous analysis. They compile a history, gather evidence,
order and organize phenomena, present an agenda of apparent formlessness,
and express a multiplicity of voices and experiences." It's an
original idea - so why can't he get a teaching job or get his
dissertation published? Chronicle
of Higher Education 10/01/01
Monday October 1
THE
END OF WRITING (IN SF)? A San Francisco writer leaves town
feeling unappreciated. "Outside of academia, nobody seems
interested in reading anymore. I'm saying this not to generate
pity but to present a tough fact: technology and entertainment
are leading the way to a sort of glossy, cushy dark age. When
people say they want 'the arts' in San Francisco, what they really
mean is they want Entertainment – yummy restaurants, Frappuccinos,
road companies of Broadway shows, virtual bowling, clubs."
San Francisco Bay Guardian 10/01/01
TEACHING
WRITING: Can you teach good writing? "What you can't
teach, it seems to me, is the right kind of observation or the
right kind of interpretation of what has been observed. It worries
me to think of all those earnest pupils who have diligently mastered
the mechanics, wondering with varying degrees of misery and rage
why the finished recipe just hasn't somehow worked. Washington
Post 09/30/01
POWER
OF POETRY: Many have chosen poetry as a way to express their
feelings after September 11. "Almost immediately after the
event, improvised memorials often conceived around poems sprang
up all over the city, in store windows, at bus stops, in Washington
Square Park, Brooklyn Heights and elsewhere. And poems flew through
cyberspace across the country in e-mails from friend to friend."
The New York Times 10/01/01 (one-time
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