Bookmark This Post

The first convention for bookmark collectors will take place on February 20-21, 2010. It is an online event. You can get a brief overview of the event, here, or simply go to their Web site.

From the convention's page...

Why Bookmark Collectors?

Bookmarks have been in existence for as long as there have been books, and for the bookmark collector their meaning goes beyond their mundane purpose of marking a position within a book. Made out of materials that vary from paper to precious gems, they are pieces of art, souvenirs, craft samplers, time capsules, and cultural flotsam. Although their prices vary from free to thousands of dollars, collectors ascribe value based on personal meaning, judgment of beauty, and fit within a series.
Why a Bookmark Collectors Convention?

There are four general reasons any collector benefits from a convention:

* Education: learn history, craft, and technique
* Commerce: meet vendors, buy and sell items, swap, and order custom work
* Exposure: galleries, exhibits, and displays
* Social: meet fellow professionals and hobbyists, organize groups

My Summer of Debuts

Do you want to publish that debut novel? Do you want it to be a success? It'd be a good idea to heed the advice of Mark Sarvas on The Elegant Variation, who read a ton of debut novels for a literary prize last year.

From the piece...

They try to take on too much. I read too many overstuffed novels, books that seemed to be trying to record and solve every social problem or cultural phenomenon. But first-timers seldom have the chops to maintain control over this kind of material, and so one gets stuck with a book spinning frantically in a million directions at once. Lesson: Ambition is great; challenge yourself, push yourself – but don’t try to be Atlas the first time out.

They don’t take on enough. We are still living in the wake of the literary elevation of the micro, the attention to the small, quiet moment. Individually, these moments can carry great power, and the short story naturally fits this impulse. But too many of these first novels have taken the slenderest conceit imaginable and attempted to hang a novel on it. You can feel the spindly branches bending under the weight, almost to the point of breaking. And there comes a point in the story when the reader begins to wonder why the author felt there was a novel in this idea. Lesson: Tea towels do not a novel make.

Valentine's Day Special: The Love Poems of Pablo Neruda

Enjoy.

Valentine's Day Special: An Emotionally Devastating Analysis of Five Love Poems

The analysis is done by Tao Lin for the Poetry Foundation.

Valentine's Day Special: Don't Write Off Love Letters Yet

So says the Telegraph.

From the piece...

When I asked around among my acquaintances, I assumed that the results of my unscientific sampling of teenagers, twentysomethings and thirtysomethings would be overwhelmingly negative. The conventional wisdom is that almost no one writes letters, let alone love letters, today. Indeed, figures released earlier this week by Lindt Lindor chocolates show that while 78 per cent of the women surveyed said they’d like to receive a handwritten letter, only 50 per cent of the men admitted to ever having written one.

Happily, though, my research threw up different results. The teenagers I spoke to agree that texting, while perfect for flirting, and for saying you are on the train, is also great for jump-starting a new relationship. But they are unanimous that they would never, ever tell their love to someone by email: they would write it on a card instead. This explains why there is a card shop, or two, on every high street – and with Valentine’s Day coming up on Sunday, they’ll be busy.

It’s the same for the young grown-ups I spoke to. Emails, my informant Mark tells me, are just not cool for anything but the briefest tender message. Making love by email is “a faux pas” as well as being a security risk or even an insult: “Anyone who sends an e-Valentine really, really does not care.”

Valentine's Day Special: Slate's 2010 Valentine's Day Poetry Anthology

Find the poems, here, care of Slate's poetry editor Robert Pinsky.

Valentine's Day Special: A Brief History of Great Love Letters

The history, care of Mental Floss.

From the piece...

Tales of thwarted love capture the human imagination like nothing else. So it’s not surprising that the early 12th century story of Pierre Abelard and Héloïse has endured for generations.

Abelard was in his early 30s and one of the most promising philosophers and teachers in medieval Paris; young Héloïse was the clever and academic live-in niece of a respected churchman, Canon Fulbert. Claiming the upkeep of a home and the commute to Paris was too onerous, Abelard appealed to Fulbert: In exchange for room and board, he’d tutor bright Héloïse. Some claim that Abelard knew exactly what he was doing by securing a room with the Canon, but whether it was fate or the crafty work of a besotted suitor, it worked. They soon fell in love and, after a brief period of intense “study” sessions, Héloïse became pregnant. They married in secret and for a short time, it looked like things were going to turn out OK for the illicit pair. But that wouldn’t make it a tragedy: With wounded pride and a vengeful heart, Canon Fulbert hired some men to find Abelard and castrate him.

With Abelard a eunuch and her child entrusted to the care of her family, Héloïse was given little choice but to take the vows; she later became prioress of her abbey, while Abelard’s career as a philosopher thrived.

Abelard seems to have turned away from sensual love after the incident, but Héloïse continued to pour her romantic love for him into letters: “But if I lose you, what is left to hope for? What reason for continuing on the pilgrimage of life, for which I have no support but you and none in you except the knowledge that you are alive, now that I am forbidden all other pleasures in you and denied even the joy of your presence which from time to time could restore me to myself?”

In the more than 800 years since their deaths, the lovers’ story, now the stuff of paintings and poetry, has cemented their place in the pantheon of great lovers. Their letters also remain—although there is some scholarly debate as to whether the two even wrote them. The real question is, as the couple has already passed into legend, does it matter?

Valentine's Day Special: A Candy Box of History's Sappiest Literary Lovers

The list, care of A Journey Round My Skull.

Pictured above: Sappy lovers Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas.

Valentine's Day Special: My Illustrated Book Marriage Proposal

Well, not MINE, but Joel Kimmel's.

Do Schools Need Library Books?

Would it be harmful for kids to read on the computer rather than the printed word? The New York Times explores these questions.

John Wesley Powell's 2nd Expedition Down the Colorado

In 1871, John Wesley Powell appointed seventeen year-old Frederick Samuel Dellenbaugh as artist and assistant topographer for his second expedition down the Colorado River. Over 800 digital images have been selected at Yale's Beinecke Library from nearly 900 photographic prints, relief halftones, postcards, negatives, tintypes and pen and ink drawings in Dellenbaugh’s personal collection. Enjoy.

Self-Publishing: Good News for Budding Authors

Self-publishing doesn't have the stigma it used to with all the new ways one can get their words out to the reading world. The Telegraph examines the current state of self-publishing.

From the piece...

If you are prepared to design the book yourself, using software supplied to you by the publisher, and have a decent digital camera, you really can self-publish on a shoestring, ending up with a passable imitation of a glossy coffee-table book.

Most self-published books on the Blurb and Lulu websites are quite small. Wedding albums and holiday diaries are particularly popular. But there is no reason, theoretically, why the same publishing model should not throw up a David Copperfield or a War and Peace. Just don't expect many people to buy it.

That's the catch. You may think your collection of organic chocolate pudding recipes looks terrific, but how many bookshops will stock it when their shelves are already groaning under the weight of Nigella? How many papers will review it? In terms of achieving fame and fortune, you have got precisely nowhere.

"Whatever newfangled technologies are developed, publishers will always exploit them for their own ends," warns Johnathon Clifford, who has spent his life championing the cause of self-published authors.

Image: Gabriel Metsu's "Man Writing a Letter"

Friday's Poem

In honor of Black History Month, we'll continue with poetry done by African Americans. This week's offering - Countee Cullen's "Heritage":

Jon's Writing in Vintage Seattle

I had the pleasure about writing about a squatter village that was built during the Great Depression in Seattle recently for Vintage Seattle. You can read the piece, here.

Photo: Courtesy of the King County Archives.

Shouldn't There by More Sci-Fi on Stage?

The Guardian explores this question.

From the piece...

Playwrights who choose to stray into sci-fi territory often do so almost apologetically – creating plausible near-futures, recognisable worlds that differ from ours only in minor details. Steve Waters's double bill of plays about climate change, The Contingency Plan, did this particularly effectively, and Australian playwright Ben Ellis went down a similar path with GM crops in his Poet No 7. The term Atwood prefers is speculative fiction, and that feels apt in this instance.

Alan Ayckbourn ventures deeper into these waters: his play Comic Potential uses androids to explore what it means to be human. A similar device is used in Tamsin Oglesby's play Really Old, Like Forty Five, which recently opened at the National. While opinions about Oglesby's play have been divided – ranging from four stars in the Guardian to one dreg in the West End Whingers' new wine-based rating system, most agreed on the calibre of Michela Meazza's performance as Mimi, the robot nurse with the eerie crimson grin who purrs like a cat when she's stroked.

A delicate balance is required to combat the fact that what might be acceptable on screen or paper can look absurd on stage.

The Art of Poetry

From The Paris Review archives, there is a 1974 interview with poet W.H. Auden.

From the piece...

INTERVIEWER
You have always been a formalist. Today’s poets seem to prefer free verse. Do you think that’s an aversion to discipline?

AUDEN
Unfortunately that’s too often the case. But I can’t understand—strictly from a hedonistic point of view—how one can enjoy writing with no form at all. If one plays a game, one needs rules, otherwise there is no fun. The wildest poem has to have a firm basis in common sense, and this, I think, is the advantage of formal verse.

Top Ten Boxing Books

Markus Zusak's gives his top ten literary knock-outs.

Writing Off the UK's Last Palaeographer

Palaeographers study ancient writing. A London University just canned the last remaining palaeographer in the country. People are not pleased (particularly, I imagine, the palaeographer). John Crace, in The Guardian, writes about why studying ancient writing is important.

From the piece...

"Without a palaeography professor such as David Ganz, not only will King's be sorely deprived of a basis on which to teach almost every other university discipline," says Alexandra Maccarini, "but the study of humanities everywhere will suffer from the absence of a devoted specialist in the subject."

In its strictest sense, palaeography is the study of ancient manuscripts whereby scholars can read texts – often partial, as many exist only in fragments – and localise and date handwriting accurately. This may sound arcane, and to some extent it is. But it is also the building block of all classical and ­medieval scholarship. According to Ganz: "Anyone who goes into a ­university library will within a week find an ancient manuscript that no one has yet properly understood."

"It is academic forensic science," agrees Dr Irving Finkel, assistant keeper in the department of the ­Middle East at the British Museum. "Many of the printed texts we use today – be they the Bible, Livy's poems or Shakespeare's plays – do not come from a single text. They are a collation of various manuscripts that may have been altered by scribes over time. A palaeographer can help determine which is likely to be the most authentic.

"It's about understanding the codes, the signs and the ligatures [common abbreviations] that were in use at different periods of a language's evolution, so you can interpret words that may have been rubbed away and see what may have been added at a later date."

Profane, Offensive, and Great

The Philadelphia Inquirer has an interesting story about the censorship of certain books, most notably, due to J.D. Salinger's recent death, The Catcher in the Rye (the Russian published cover is pictured above). It talks about the evolution of banning Salinger's book. Originally, censors took umbrage with the language. That has since changed as the Christian right has grown.

The Three Musketeers NOT Written by Alexandre Dumas?

Yes, according to a leading authority on the subject.

Care to Read Hitler's "Mein Kampf" in Germany?

You'll get a chance in 2015 when it's republished there for the first time since WWII.

From the piece in The Telegraph...

Under the post-1945 German constitution, the dissemination of Nazi philosophy has been a crime punishable by fines and imprisonment.

But the copyright, held by the state of Bavaria where the Nazi movement began life in the 1920s, expires in 2015, 70 years after the death of its author in his Berlin bunker.

On Thursday the Munich-based Institute of Contemporary History (IfZ) pledged to publish an "annotated version" with historical notes that it hopes will see the book used in schools and colleges.

The finance ministry in Bavaria said it had still not decided whether to give its permission but it is understood that with the lapse in copyright, the IfZ will not need the green light from it. "Besides, we think our version, with sensible notes and comments pointing out the falsity of much of what he wrote, will be far better than neo-Nazis putting out their own versions," said the IfZ.

Jewish leaders in Germany have already pledged their support for the project, saying they believe it "would prevent neo-Nazi from profiteering from Mein Kampf. while an aggressive and enlightening engagement with the book would doubtless remove many of its false, persisting myths".

The Extraordinary World of Ex Libris Art

There's a great collection of "This book belongs to ____" art at Dark Roasted Blend. Enjoy.

Ralph Ellison's Endless Blues

The great Stanley Crouch, on The Daily Beast, discusses why the acclaimed author of the classic Invisible Man never publish another book, the tortured brilliance of Ellison’s unfinished work and how America failed to appreciate him.

From the piece...

Ellison did not join the furious black propagandists in believing that protest was right as long as the target was in the wrong. The writer believed in the craft of fiction and was dedicated to unraveling the snarls of cultural yarn that made it so hard for Americans to comprehend themselves, their interconnected national identity, and the deeper meanings of their shared history. So Ellison was hated by certain white people because he knew much more about America and much more about Western literature than they usually did; and he was also hated by leftist ethnic nationalists who brought their narrow ideologies to the circumstances of race and class, where anything almost always goes, from the academy to the media.

Book Cover - Crouch Ralph Ellison Three Days Before the Shooting…By Ralph Ellison. Edited by John Callahan and Adam Bradley. 1136 pages. Modern Library. $50. Ellison emerged when American literature had been bequeathed a large measure of formal possibilities by William Faulkner in particular, because the Southern novelist was more taken by the meanings and the epic complexities of ethnic conflict than anyone since Herman Melville or Mark Twain. Faulkner saw the peculiar aesthetic possibilities of ethnic conflict in our unavoidable democratic context, and attempted to make use of the turbulent history of the South, where so many Indian tribes had made their presence felt, where African slaves had lived as highly prized chattel who influenced the nation so indelibly, and where all of the great battles of the Civil War had been fought, with the exception of Gettysburg. Faulkner understood the hysterical blindness that came with the defeat of the Confederacy and recognized how it allowed white Southerners to dehumanize themselves, the white lower class, and the Negro.

There is never anything more unforgivable in the United States than good taste and imposing, undeniable talent. Ellison never lacked heat; he just had better judgment and more talent than any black writers of his generation and perhaps any since he came to power as a novelist. In conversation, following a memorial for the embattled writer, the great Joseph Frank and his wife, Marguerite Straus Frank, took the position that Ellison was superior to all of the writers who arrived after 1945 because his was actually what became known as a “world class talent.”

Newspaper Blackout Poetry

Take a newspaper story, blackout most of the words, leave a poem. See more, here.

The poem above: “Love Letter,” by Austin Kleon

J.D. Salinger's Women

Interesting stories continue to surface now that Salinger has died. Salon continues the trend by discussing Salinger's relationships with women. It wasn't good.

From the piece...

But I think there is another, more insidious reason that the literary establishment is so invested in the fictional, reclusive Salinger. It is a convenient cudgel with which to silence any discussion of Salinger's personal life, particularly any revelation of unsavory truths about one of America's most revered authors. Both Joyce Maynard and Salinger's daughter Margaret were vilified for violating the great man's privacy when they wrote about their own experiences with him and exposed his predatory, controlling relationships with women. Instead of exploring the insights these revelations might bring to readings of Salinger's work (not to mention the women's right to tell their own stories), critics dismissed their books as exploitative, attention-seeking stunts. When Maynard decided to sell some of the letters Salinger had written her -- letters that confirmed her story of their affair -- the response was even more bitter. A typical reaction was that of author Cynthia Ozick, who wrote that Maynard "has never been a real artist and has no real substance and has attached herself to the real artists in order to suck out his celebrity." This sort of backlash is not exclusive to Salinger -- when Pablo Picasso's former wives and lovers began to expose him as a physically and emotionally abusive man, they were subject to similar criticisms.

As feminists have long known, the personal is political, and women who tell unpleasant truths rarely find a receptive audience.

The Annual Oddest Book Title Prize

The Bookseller's annual Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year has drawn a record number of submissions for the 2009 award. Who will win? The Independent takes a look at a few entries, including the titles Advances in Potato Chemistry and Technology, Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich, and An Intellectual History of Cannibalism.

The Writing Career is Becoming Harder to Scale

Why? Because of money, of course. If you don't sell well, you won't be selling at all. The Los Angeles Times takes a look at the published writers struggling to stay published.

From the piece...

The 5,000 students graduating each year from creative writing programs (not to mention the thousands more who attend literary festivals and conferences) do not include insecurity, rejection and disappointment in their plans. I see it in their faces: the almost evangelical belief in the possibility of the instant score. And why not? They are, after all, the product of a moment that doesn't reward persistence, that doesn't see the value in delaying recognition, that doesn't trust in the process but only the outcome. As an acquaintance recently said to me: "So many crappy novels get published. Why not mine?"

The emphasis is on publishing, not on creating. On being a writer, not on writing itself. The publishing industry -- always the nerdy distant cousin of the rest of media -- has the same blockbuster-or-bust mentality of television networks and movie studios. There now exist only two possibilities: immediate and large-scale success, or none at all. There is no time to write in the cold, much less for 10 years.

Is Facebook the Real Global Newspaper?

That was the question posed recently by The Atlantic.

From the piece...

The emergence of Facebook as a real driver of news stories tells us something important about how news works. Getting our news from our friends is nothing new. It's as old as the concept of neighborhood gossip. But if Hitwise analytics are capturing a true trend in media, and the share of Facebook outbound links really doubled in the last six months, it paints the picture of an increasingly nichefied world of news readers. Friends are reading what their friends are reading, who are reading what their friends are reading, and so on. It presages the deterioration of top-down news, and the rise of news-reading groups whose news sources and opinions become a centripetal, self-perpetuated cycle of information -- or disinformation.

The Curious Case of the Evolving Apostrophe

MIT's Technology Review reviews the history of the apostrophe.

From the story...

Last year, grammatical tragedy struck in the heart of England when Birmingham City Council decreed that apostrophes were to be forever banished from public addresses. To the horror of purists and pedants alike, place names such as St Paul's Square were banned and unceremoniously replaced with an apostrophe-free version: St Pauls Square.

The council's reasoning was that nobody understands apostrophes and their misuse was so common in public signs that they were a hindrance to effective navigation. Anecdotes abounded of ambulance drivers puzzling over how to enter St James's Street into a GPS navigation system while victims of heart attacks, strokes and hit 'n' run drivers passed from this world into the (presumably apostrophe-free) next.

Why the confusion? Part of the reason is that apostrophes are not particularly common in the English language: In French they occur at a rate of more than once per sentence on average. In English, they occur about once in every 20 sentences. So English speakers get less practice.

But the rules governing apostrophes are also more complex in English. In both French and English, apostrophes indicate a missing letter, such as the missing i in that's or the v in e'er. But in English, apostrophes also indicate the possessive (or genitive) case. They are used to show that one noun owns another: St James's Street is the street belonging to St James.

Behind the Cover of The New Yorker

Charles Dickens "Gave Characters a Secret Queer Side"

This, according to an academic discussed in a recent story in The Telegraph.

From the piece...

Pip and Herbert from Great Expectations are among those who really have homosexual leanings, the study by Dr Holly Furneaux of Leicester University claimed.

Often Dickens' male characters "conveniently" fall in love with the sister of their best friend, which she read as further evidence that he had woven the suggestion of homosexual relationships into his plots.

She said there were a "raft of prejudices" about supposedly strait-laced Victorians and Dickens in particular that stopped such writing being seen for what she thought it was.

"We have positioned him as this figure of respectability," said Dr Furneaux, a lecturer in Victorian Studies.

Top Ten Book Burnings

The list, care of Mental Floss.

From the piece...

1. The bonfire of the vanities, 1497.

These days the phrase refers to any time a mass burning of literature and the arts takes place, but this is the one that really gave birth to the term. A Dominican priest by the name of Girolamo Savonarola declared a long laundry list of items immoral and sinful: cosmetics, mirrors, games, paintings, pagan books, sculptures, fancy clothing, instruments and much, much more. He and his followers rallied the public to rid themselves of all things, and on February 7, 1497, they burned a massive pile of stuff, sending swirls of smoke across Florence for days. It’s been said that we lost many Botticelli paintings to this particular fire, possibly at the hands of Botticelli himself. The tables had turned by 1498, though, and Savonarola was executed in a particularly gruesome but fitting way: he was burned to death on the same spot where his famed bonfire of the vanities had taken place a little more than a year earlier.

Super Bowl Sunday Reading: The Best Football Books

The Chicago Tribune hikes to readers some reading suggestions today on game day. So does the Examiner. So does sportspectator.com.

Go Saints!

Gloomy Literature for Dreary Days

The Utne Reader offers some terrifically depressing literature to make your day heavier than it is!

From the piece...

Here in the dreary depths of midwinter, a mood of melancholic gloom often prevails—and so, James Kidd chirpily announces in The Independent, “there has never been a more appropriate moment to explore the darkest corners of your bookshelves and wallow in some truly miserable literature to enhance those winter blues.”

Kidd pronounces Cormac McCarthy’s The Road a titan of doom lit, “a bona fide contender for the title of Saddest Novel Ever Written. … In a shade over 300 pages, he conjures environmental desolation and physical deprivation and human degradation, not to mention the most poignant father-son relationship committed to paper.”

Mark Twain's Letter to Walt Whitman

A podcast of said letter is available, care of Yale's Beinecke Library.

My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors

The Oldest Book from the Americas

It's the Dresden Codex and BibliOdyssey has images of it.

Effluence of Engagement

Is writing in the margins defacing the book? The Guardian has a story about marginalia.

From the piece...

I am, of course, talking about defacing books – a much maligned practice of which I am a passionate disciple. My flirtation with textual mutilation started off at school with primly creased corners and pencilled underlinings, but I soon progressed to cocksure highlighting and full-blown ink-on-paper action – the effluence of engagement, the living, livid trace of dialogue. If, as the poststructuralists have suggested, the act of reading is an act of violence, then scrawling across the page in cheap biro must be its logical corollary.

I'm not just talking about highbrow jottings: notes and queries, references and witticisms, the literary art of "marginalia" (a term coined in 1832 by that keenest of annotators, Samuel Taylor Coleridge). No, in my library anything goes: doodles, numbers, addresses, lists, recipes and the ensuing food stains. Personalising my books is an intrinsic part of the interaction (which is why I tend to be neurotic about holding on to what I've read).

Friday's Poem

In honor of Black History Month, the poems on Friday will have been written by African Americans. First up, Lucille Clifton reading "won't you celebrate with me":

Fiction Fetish

The New Yorker has a post about Book Club Burlesque.

From the story...

On a recent Tuesday night at the Parkside Lounge, on the Lower East Side, the dancer Lydia Ransom opened the show dressed as a proper librarian (tweed and argyle), and cheekily shushed the audience. “This is a library,” Ransom winked, before removing her cardigan and skirt. She pulled David McCullough’s “John Adams” out of a Strand shopping bag. “Good role model, very good role model,” she said, and rubbed the cover down her body. (Would you do that with an iPad?)

burlesque3.jpgThe evening was the eleventh of Book Club Burlesque’s happenings; this one was dedicated to the subversive eroticism of Edward Gorey’s “The Curious Sofa.” The artists, loosely assembled as the Inbred Hybrid Collective, have also performed “Folklore for. . . Whores” inspired by the Brothers Grimm, and plan to dedicate shows to Amy Sedaris and Chuck Palahniuk.

Answering J.D. Salinger's Mail

Someone had to do it. That someone was Joanna Smith Rakoff. She relays her experiences about it on Slate.

From the piece...

My naiveté didn't last long at Ober. Every day, a bundle of mail was dropped on my desk by the office secretary, much of which consisted of letters addressed to Salinger. The letters came from Sri Lanka or the Netherlands or Arizona. They included deeply personal admissions—cancer diagnoses, bankruptcy, divorce—and were often written in Salinger's own brash style or, at the very least, incorporated the slang of the period he chronicled. "Dear Jerry, you old bastard," they tended to start. "I gotta tell you. The Catcher in the Rye is one helluva goddamn book."

Some of these letter writers wanted something specific from Salinger—his permission to make a film version of one story or another, often—but most simply wanted a letter back from him. For the most part, they knew that Salinger didn't read his fan mail—in fact, he'd insisted that nothing, not one letter, be passed on to him—but each was convinced that his letter was going to be the one that was so moving, so brilliant, so funny, so perfectly aligned with Salinger's interests and sensibilities, that we, at Ober, would pass it on to him. And that Salinger would then, of course, recognize the writer—the teenage girl from Japan, the World War II veteran in Kansas—as a kindred spirit and write back. Though the authors of these letters varied in age and nationality, there was a theme common to nearly all the letters: Salinger was the only person who understood them.

Using Sheep to Create Poetry

A writer has been given a grant of £2,000 to use sheep to create random poems, which also utilise the deepest workings of the universe. This report, care of the BBC.

From the piece...

The exercise is not just an attempt to create living poems, it is also, according to the poet, an exercise in quantum mechanics.

The animals being sprayed belong to farmer Donald Slater of Whitehouse Farm Centre, Morpeth, in Northumberland.

Mrs Laws, 48, said: "I like the idea of using living sheep to create a living poem, and creating new work as they move around."

Dante's Inferno - The Video Game

The New York Times has a piece, "Abandon All Poetry, but Enter Hell With an Attitude," about the new video game based on Dante's Divine Comedy.

From the piece...

Mr. Knight, of the company’s Visceral Games studio, first contemplated a game based on hell — rich with gothic scenery and nasty denizens to attract young male gamers — three years ago, and quickly realized that Dante’s detailed imagining of the netherworld provided an ideal blueprint.

“It’s almost like the original Dungeons & Dragons map,” Mr. Knight said. “You’ve got this big King Minos as the judge of the damned. You’ve got Cerberus the three-headed dog guarding gluttony. And then, obviously, the big guy in the ninth circle.”

What the company’s marketing research turned up, said Phil Marineau, a senior product manager, was confusion. In a survey of 800 people, Mr. Marineau said, 83 percent said they had heard of Dante’s “Inferno,” the first book of his “Divine Comedy,” but fewer than 20 percent could explain its contents.

To keep its vision of hell fresh in players’ minds, the company has given the game a substantial promotional push: a fake religious protest held outside the gaming industry’s annual E3 Expo last year; a Dante’s Inferno comic-book series produced by DC Comics; an action figure and animated DVD; a Facebook application that invites users to send their friends to hell; and Electronic Arts’s first Super Bowl spot.

Entertainment Weekly also weighs in, offering up other suggestions for literary-minded video games.

Book Banning at Prison

The Austin Statesman takes note of what books can and can't be read at Texas prisons.

From the story...

But ask how many of those books and magazines have been rejected because prison reviewers decided they contain inappropriate content, and prison officials will tell you that information is unavailable: "There's just no way to break that out," said Tammy Shelby, a program specialist for the prison agency's Mail System Coordinators Panel.

But after the Statesman reviewed five years' worth of publications — about 5,000 titles — whose rejections were appealed by inmates to the agency's headquarters in Huntsville and obtained through open records requests, one thing is clear: Texas prisoners are missing out on some fine reading.

Novels by National Book Award winners Pete Dexter, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx and William T. Vollmann have been banned in recent years. Award finalists Katherine Dunn and Barry Hannah are on the Texas no-read list, too, as are Pulitzer Prize winners Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren and John Updike.

Prisoners can't peruse certain books by Pablo Neruda and Andre Gide, both Nobel laureates. "Krik? Krak!" by Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat, who last year won a MacArthur "genius" grant, is prohibited behind Lone Star bars. Books of paintings by some of the world's greatest artists — da Vinci, Picasso, Botticelli, Michelangelo — have been ordered out of state correctional facilities.

And just because a book is a best-seller in the free world doesn't mean it's available on the inside. Harold Robbins, Pat Conroy, Hunter S. Thompson, Dave Barry and James Patterson belong to the don't-read fraternity. Mystery writer Carl Hiaasen does, too, as do Kinky Friedman and Janet Fitch, whose "White Oleander" was an Oprah's Book Club selection.

John Grisham has had four blockbusters banned since 2005. And inmates will have to wait for parole before diving into "Precious," the book by Sapphire that last year was turned into a critically acclaimed movie.

Dancing with My Shelf

Peter Bognanni, on the Huffington Post, makes a case for book soundtracks.

From the piece...

I'll admit, when I first thought about creating book soundtracks, I was sure I had invented the concept. It was one of those two-in-the-morning revelations that seem completely game-changing at the time, like my idea for pre-sliced watermelon (already available at Whole Foods) or recreational space travel (already available to Paris Hilton).

I had recently created a musical playlist for my first novel, "The House of Tomorrow," for the New York Times Paper Cuts blog, when the next logical question came to mind: what if this collection of songs was a real CD or a series of downloads that came with the actual book? What if readers could listen to these tunes in between chapters, or after they finished the novel? What if I am some kind of genius for inventing this?

I still think the idea is good one, but it wasn't mine. As it turns out, authors have been playing around with this direct intersection of music and literature for quite some time. Nick Hornby immediately jumps to mind as the godfather of this phenomenon. Even though "High Fidelity" didn't get an official soundtrack until it was made into a movie, the whole book reads as a kind of novel-as-ultimate-playlist, complete with musical references from Wham! to the Jesus and Mary Chain. It's hard to imagine the ensuing explosion of author playlists without Hornby's bittersweet taxonomy of rock.

Philip K. Dick - The Book Cover Art Gallery

Wow. 650 Philip K. Dick book covers from around the world can be found here.

Pictured above: Dick's A Scanner Darkly, published in Netherlands in 1979.

Writers, Plain and Simple

Claire Messud, in Guernica, wonders why women make up 80 percent of the fiction reading audience in this country yet women authors are frequently left off the best-of lists and out of prestigious book prizes.

From the piece...

Just over ten years ago, the Modern Library compiled a list of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century: only nine of them were by women, and Edith Wharton accounted for two books. Were there really only eight women writers of major significance in those 100 years? Not in my personal canon, at least. When, in 2006, the New York Times ran a list of the best American fiction of the past twenty-five years, Toni Morrison’s Beloved was pronounced the winner; but she and Marilynne Robinson (for Housekeeping) were the only women out of twenty-two titles (and that’s counting Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy and McCarthy’s Border trilogy as a single book each). Just last September, when the international literary magazine Wasafiri solicited responses from twenty-five global writers about the work that has most shaped world literature over the past quarter century, just four women—Elizabeth Bishop, Mildred Taylor, Toni Morrison, and Quarratulain Hyder—were on the list. And this is in a world where women account for 80 percent of fiction readers. See “Why Women Read More Than Men,” by Eric Weiner.

Here’s the deal: men, without thinking, will almost without fail select men. And women, without thinking, will too often select men. It’s a known fact that among children, girls will happily read stories with male protagonists, but boys refuse to read stories with female protagonists. J.K. Rowling was aware of this: if Harry Potter had been Harriet Potter, none of us would know about her.

And we don’t change our spots when we grow up. Last year, I was one of nine judges awarding an international literary prize for a writer’s body of work. Each of us nominated a candidate, and five of us were women; but only one of our nominees—only one out of nine—was female. (I myself enthusiastically nominated a man.) Our cultural prejudices are so deeply engrained that we aren’t even aware of them: arguably, it’s not that we think men are better, it’s that we don’t think of women at all. The absence of women from lists and prizes leads, then, to the future absence of women from lists and prizes. Now, lists and prizes mean nothing, of course; except that they inform curious readers about who and what to read.

Pictured above: Anna Brassey (1839-1887, author of the bestselling book A Voyage in the Sunbeam, our Home on the Ocean for Eleven Months, published in 1878.

Fine Books Magazine Back to Print

Book collectors rejoice! Fine Books & Collections Magazine is back in print.

From the press release...

In announcing its plans, the magazine said it would continue its monthly e-letter online and its very popular blog. According to associate publisher Kim Draper, the web site has grown tremendously in the past year, having just topped 50,000 monthly visitors.

"We don't hope to achieve as much readership in print, but we do think print has a certain charm and value that is impossible to obtain online," says Draper. "It remains a conundrum why collectors of print love reading online, but we are delighted to be able to serve both needs."

The online editor, Rebecca Rego Barry, will also serve as editor of the print edition. According to Barry, the content of the magazine will be a collection of some material used online as well as new features, columns, and resources that will not appear online. "We are intrigued with the idea of archiving some of our best online stories in a print format, but we will also be offering readers new content in each issue."

I look forward to reading, and hopefully writing for, the print publication going forward.

Bill Watterson Interview

Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, is a bit of a recluse. He hasn't granted an interview in a couple decades. That is until the other day. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer caught up with the man to discuss his comic strip. And how did the reporter land the interview in the first place? The Washington Post investigates.

Famous Literary Drunks & Addicts

Life Magazine has a slideshow of literary stars befallen with alcohol problems, speed problems, opium problems, or worse.

Pictured above: Dorothy Parker, Pix Inc./Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Welcome to Cornish - Home of J.D. Salinger

The New York Times travels to Cornish, New Hampshire, to see what it was like in Salinger's hometown. Also, City Arts tries to dig (it doesn't get far), into a top secret mammoth biography being written. And, don't forget about the top secret documentary about Salinger either.

How J.D. Salinger Created the Original Rock Star

The Guardian's music blog, argues that Holden Caulfield inspired the modern idea of the rock'n'roll rebel.

From the piece...

It's often said that the character of Holden Caulfield invented the teenager. I'd argue that, in some sense, Caulfield also set the mould for our modern notion of the rock star – damaged, hyper-sensitive, infinitely cool, creative, hungry for sensation, an authentic voice in a world of phonies. Kurt Cobain, Nebraska-era Bruce Springsteen, Richey Manic, Gerard Way are all Holden Caulfields in their own way. Even Thom Yorke, with his "lost child" shtick, on songs such as Street Spirit (Fade Out) – the thin-skinned loner wandering the streets at night, adrift in a sea of heartless modernity.

The power of The Catcher in the Rye is its ability to make the reader feel Holden Caulfield is speaking exclusively to them. This, of course, has its downsides, as it's sometimes used as lazy lyrical shorthand for outsider status by the kind of American pop-punks who, you suspect, haven't really read many other books. To be "like Holden Caulfield" is in fact a cliche of that genre, invoked to lend literary weight to what would otherwise be mere navel-gazing angst (see The Offspring's Get It Right).

Photo by Matt Lew

A Response By An Aspiring Screenwriter Whose Screenplay Was Turned Down Because It Was Exactly Like Robocop

Funny stuff, care of McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

From the piece...

First, my screenplay, Cyber Policeman: Operation CrimeKill, is not just about some robot cop. It is about a cyborg policeman caught between gangs and corrupt corporations in a dystopian Detroit where criminals have overrun the city. It is a an epic tale about the war on crime, corporate control of America, and mankind's increasing reliance on technology.

Just because Cyber Policeman and Robocop are both set in a dystopian Detroit and involve robots, it does not mean they are the same movie. Plenty of movies have robots and dystopias in them. And many are set in Detroit. Dreamgirls was set in Detroit, but I doubt you would see similarities there even if it had a robot in it or was set near, during, or after an apocalypse.

The Scraps of Lost Roman Law

The Guardian reports of a find - scraps of a lost Roman law code, which survived because they were chopped up and used as packing in the cover of a medieval book. They have been identified for the first time and translated by academics in London.