How About You Give Me 50 Cents per Poem...?

That way I can pay you back with my advance.



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This Guy Could Be One of Us

What's it like to be a mid-list author barely making ends meet? (LOL* from Bookslut) Um... we wouldn't know. Excuse me while I eat my diamond encrusted salad.



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John Robert Lennon, if you're out there, I'm going to buy one of your books. Thank Mark Egan from Reuters, his article brought your work to my attention. Love dark comedy. The darker the better.

But is His Book a Carpenter's Dream?

That is to say, flat as a board and without knots (that one got away from me).



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E-freaking-gad!

Death wears a turtleneck and beret, and it's looking for YOU!



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And here I thought it was the cigarettes, whisky and wild wild women that were doin me in!

I think the author of the article missed the point that poets are smart enough to die before they become infirm and incontinent. Except for Irving Layton. Poor old Irving.

Edited by author 12-14-2003 10:46 PM
I bet there's a bevy of female grad students from the 60's and 70's who aren't [saying] "Poor old Irving."

Or weren't saying it then...

"Poets die sooner than playwrights. Playwrights die sooner than novelists. And novelists die sooner than nonfiction writers."

Anyone notice the correlation to early death and average book sales? Studies of poverty and wealth have been producing similar results for years.

My son, you'd make some demographer, FK!

Hooch and the Muse

A link between writers and booze? Groundbreaking!



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"10 Signs That Your Professor Is Sleeping With You To Assuage Mid-Life Depression and Will Dump You Shortly Afterward."

Thanks also to Ryan for pointing out the London Review of Books Classifieds (scroll down to the personals). An article on selfsame, and on a related note.



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Pardon me for a dull procedural question, but I wasn't sure where else to ask this. How do I negotiate back from the discussion list to the article that spawned it? Sometimes I come across a neat article title (like the one below), but I can't seem to locate it on the home page. Is there an easy way to do this?

Check the date of the posting (Jan 4, 04) and if it's off the front page it's in our archive. The monthly archive can be accessed at the bottom of the hearsay column. Every week or so we move the last week's hearsay into the archive.

Unfortunately, many of the links degrade because papers either change URL's in archiving, or delete pages that have been up for more than a few weeks.

What Do Murakami, Jack London and One of the Spice Girls Have in Common?

Mmm, icing..



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File This Under: Tell Me About It

Being a young writer sucks. (But I can't imagine that it gets much better.)



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Newsflash: Drunk Poet Resists Arrest, Explains Actions through Poetry

I feel for this guy.



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"You have to think of poetry as an amateur pursuit"

Don Paterson on the life of a poet.



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I Am SO Buying This Book

Those of you who know me, know why.** Ha! I'm laughing already!



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Whenever I see a mentor-apprentice story now, all I can think about is how it is such a rip off of the Karate Kid.

Yeah, that or Plato's dialogues.

/m20 [sigh of all sighs] an in-joke?

Twink, I don't think it's an in-joke. The Karate Kid and Plato's dialogues are both available for public enjoyment.

:)

Edited by author 01-27-2004 01:52 PM
:)

Maybe This Will Balance Out All the Other Things I'm Doing...

"How spending 10 minutes a day with a simple pen and paper can dramatically boost your health." Um, how come I sometimes feel like it's killing me then?



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A Peak into the Future - And the 2092 Book of the Year is A Romantic History of Crack

Absinthe is just like so cool man. Especially when you don't have to watch people dying from it in a roach-infested asylum.



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Ten Long Years - One Long Novel

I love these It-took-me-ten-years-to-write-this stories... Don't ask me why.



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Apparently There are OTHER Good Reasons to Get With Zadie...

Zadie Smith's boyfriend gets £100G deal for two books. Suh-wheeeet. (From Maud)



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Watch for the Inevitable Chick Flick Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You...

Five struggling women writers hang out for support and hit it big within weeks of each other.



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The Original Poet-Spy

Of course, now there are many, mostly working in our vast network of shadowy intelligence gathering ninjas.



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To Live Among Books
Alberto Manguel moves to France because Toronto just isn't big enough for him and his books.
"Manguel's real country, it would appear, is his library. He doesn't own a car, and spends little money on furniture and clothes. 'The only thing I buy is books.' He now owns 30,000 of them, and there was never any hope of fitting them inside his tiny Toronto house. Nor was moving an option. With house prices rocketing out of sight, he realized that on a writer's thin revenues, he would never have such a place in the country's largest city."

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The Life of a Sex Writer
It's not all cunniligus and blowjobs. Well, actually it is, but that doesn't mean they enjoy it.
"The trouble with writing on a topic that frequently requires a 'try it, you might like it!' approach is that there are some things people just expect you to dig. Cunnilingus, for one. Being a sex writer who doesn't go ga-ga for oral pleasure is apparently more controversial than being a movie critic who dismisses Fellini as a hack. Invariably, the guy in question thinks you're just making excuses to avoid hurting his feelings about his poor technical skills. You feel an occupational responsibility to reassure him."

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"I've dubbed this the 'Sylvia Plath Effect.'"

Apparently poets die earlier than other writers. "It could be because poets are tortured and prone to self-destruction, or it could be that poets become famous young, so their early deaths are noticed." Worse still, it could be that poets don't become famous ever and still die young. Between this and these lesbian mice, I'm not feeling particularly secure...



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Poets die early deaths and we wonder why?

How about this simple logic:

Poets = poor people > poor people = early death

Or is that just to simple?

CBC radio had a report last month that poets are more likely to kill themselves. Something like 1 in 5 poets take their own lives. Someone did a survey of writers back a number of centuries and came to the conclusions poets have more mental illness than other scribblers. Too simple? Poets are anything but simple.

I wonder which is the cart and which is the horse. Is there something about people who are more likely to commit suicide that also makes them more likely to become poets, or is there something about a being a poet that is just so horrible that it makes people want to kill themselves?

Depression aside, novels requires a certain maturing of experience, and can easily take eight or ten years to write. So novelists are rarely prominent before they're in their forties or fifties, and poets can make a name for themselves in their twenties or, exceptionally, in their teens (Rimbaud). If you've made it to your forties, you're just more likely to continue to make it.

I suddenly feel awful for not having bought one of those long pointy implements in that antique/junk shop most recently. Remorse. How stupid of me. Javelin? Javelin? Will you ever forgive me?

As for suicide, isn't it, in general, the writer's job to be fascinated with his own morose inclinations? Maybe it is an over-examination of such darkness that leads to hopelessness. And maybe the lengthy gestation of a novel is only less hopeless in that it is one long glance instead of the hundreds a poet might make in the same time frame. In this way perhaps desperation is a depressing accumulation of misery rather than an acknowledgement of it. As a writer friend of mine is fond of saying, Who wants to read about joy? Name one memorable book about joy, name one book of note that ends happily. So what of the readers? Perhaps we are all just rubberneckers fascinated and afraid of the inevitable.

Edited by author 04-24-2004 12:34 PM
It's the critics!! The critics are killing the poets with cruelty!! Killing them savagely with their song, killing them tartarly with THEIR song!

The Joy of Sex.

The Joy of Cooking.

A Wild Peculiar Joy.

Surprised by Joy
by C.S. Lewis
who married Joy in 1956
Joy Davidman Gresham that is

Joy Luck Club.

Zelda, I think the left one is bigger than the right; hope you didn't pay yet...

That's a carryover; a metonymic substitution, if you will...

Isn't 'metonymic substitution' a tautology? Well, frankly, there's a problem with the tautology too, Zel. You paid for that, man woman; get thee to a lawyer...

"It’s never been clear whether having children (and this applies to both males and females of the species) marks just a change in outward circumstance and responsibility or represents a fundamental change in the way we’re hard-wired. Having a new baby does change the way we look at the world, in that every speeding car is aimed like a bullet at our very own perambulator, every toxic waste and terrorist atrocity a direct threat to our nestlings. But does it change us beyond that?"

Eeep!



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Good Ol' Nick

Nick Hornby to donate the money he makes from an upcoming film sale to a school for autistic children.
"I simply feel that film money is like free money." Yer swell, Nick.



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I can't seem to send messages out of my home account so I'll say it here.

Happy National Nurses Month!

"Nurses are experts in life."
        Kathleen Connors, RN
Former President of the National Federation of Nurses Unions

Writing is Bad for Your Health

Um, and? That and old age. I can feel myself disintegrating by the moment.

Things could be worse, I suppose. I could be a poet - they only make it to the grand old age of 62. I suppose spending a lifetime trying to think up rhyming couplets is a pressure you could do without. Then there are the poets who do not write rhyming anything, poor lambs. They must wonder if everyone is laughing at them, pointing and jeering. The stress must take its toll.

It does. It does.



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What Good is a Writer's Liver Anyway...?

You are not going to believe this. One writer gives a piece of his liver to another writer he barely knows. I can understand giving someone a piece of your mind, but this is... what? Insurance on a place in Heaven? He has significiantly shortened his own life so that someone else might live a little longer. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I want to cry, but I don't know why.


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That's Michael Healey for you--the nicest guy in Toronto.

I Hear You
The Curse of the Second Novel strikes again! I knew I should have listened to that shrunken, twisted man when he told me not to enter the cave and search for treasure... oh wait, that was grad school, and the shrunken, twisted man was my t.a. Anyway, you're all doomed!


Jenny Minton, who worked as an editor for Knopf for 10 years, has seen the problem afflict her writers over and again. She identifies several reasons why second novels are particularly tough -- as compared to the first. "Some writers have been living for years with a story they need to tell, and once that story has been told it is difficult to start over from scratch."

Minton also observed that the pressures of the literary marketplace can take a toll. "A writer works on his first novel, in privacy, for years," she says. "If it is well-received, his agent may shop the second novel-to-be around. With a new, and usually expensive, contract under his belt, there can be an enormous amount of pressure on the writer to come up with the sort of book that will earn the money out and to write it in a timely fashion, give or take a year or two."

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Bohemians Inherit the Earth (as Well as a Dose of the Clap)

Virginia Nicholson, the author of Among the Bohemians, told the 600-strong audience that when the performance takes place on July 7 the London crowds will nearly all be the heirs of Bohemia in their lifestyle, morals and ideas.

"We're all Bohemians now," she said.

Mrs Nicholson is the great-niece of Virginia Woolf, whose Bloomsbury group of artists was only part of a tradition of Bohemian "experiments in living" which flourished in Britain from 1900-1950. Some of their lives ended in suicide, fatal illness, alcoholism, drug addiction or the despair of late middle age, fates that befell artists including Woolf herself, Katherine Mansfield, who caught gonorrhoea and died of tuberculosis, the poets Roy Campbell and Dylan Thomas, and the painter Augustus John.

Just great. Now that I'm Bohemian, I'm going to die drunk, on the nod, and riddled with crotch crickets. Nice. And I was trying to have a family here.



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Tales from the Crypt
When I die, I'm not going to channel myself into some silly, poverty-stricken writer. I'm going to take over Usher and make him translate my work into hip-hop. Why Usher, you ask? Did you see his place on MTV's Cribs?


Death was a similar creative catalyst for V.C. Andrews, the writer of dark teenage thrillers who passed away in 1986 but has written ever since with the help of one Andrew Niederman. Mr. Niederman once said he believed he was channeling Andrews, a belief he seems to take literally--in fact, he even makes appearances at writers conferences as V.C. Andrews.

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Vegan?

The Griffins meet the Powerballers in Toronto's one good gossip night outside the Film Festival... And still nothing interesting happened except some sweaty dancing, which I could get into...



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Sweet Story About Kunitz and Pears

I hope I make it 98. Hell, I already did. It's 2004 and I could go any time.



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Ba-bum ba-bum ba-bum ba-bum... the Libraries Grow...

Joyce Carole Oates, the woman who writes at the speed of a heartbeat, profiled. (120 books and counting...) (From Rake's Progress)



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The Writer's Life

There is a common myth about writers - namely, that we can do what we do anywhere, anytime, without having to worry about the kinds of things that the rest of you worry about: health and safety, air conditioning, overtime, childcare, the photocopier, the boss with the evil eye. It is widely believed that all we need is something to write with, something to write on, and a reasonable relationship with that sentimental disorder known as inspiration. That we can move home in an instant, drift in and out of different cities and cultures like elegant spores, flowering every so often with a nice new novel.

Personally, I think of myself more as a virus than a spore.



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Hill and Billy

How to survive the two writer household blues.*



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Amazing that someone with such a faulty memory can spew out a 957 page memoir.

Hill and Billy; that's great BN.

Dirty But Clean (Slate)?

DBC Pierre gives us, his collective parole officer, an update on what restitution he's made from his literary windfall.

Exposed as a swindler, drug addict and car smuggler, D B C Pierre vowed to use the proceeds from his Man Booker prize to right his past wrongs.

Eight months later, he has fulfilled his unlikely pledge. The friend who was conned out of his £30,000 home to fuel the author's drink and cocaine habit has been repaid and a host of family members and associates have been reimbursed.

Dirty (But Clean) Pierre, real name Peter Finlay, stepped up to collect the £50,000 winner's cheque last October for Vernon God Little, his story of an American high school massacre. Since then he has found himself settling old scores - an experience he likens to having a stroke in reverse.

Sounds like all is forgiven and the credits are ready to roll... Ha ha ha (knowing laugh of 1960s nature film narrator who has just watched an black bear cub get a nose full of quills from a porcupine piglet - but in this case it was a snout full of coke). Oh, that scoundrel. It looks he's learned the hard way to his nose out of trouble!



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Oh no! It's K-K-Ken come to k-k-kill me!

Stammering in literature.

However, for the stammerer who wishes to express himself without the risks inherent in speech, there is an obvious alternative: writing. On the page, even the most unruly words can be brought into line, so it may be no coincidence that many of the finest writers have suffered from a stammer: Lewis Carroll, Arnold Bennett, Somerset Maugham, Aldous Huxley, Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Larkin, Henry James, Charles Kingsley, Leigh Hunt, Margaret Drabble, and many more."

Sometimes the writer's stammer produces clear literary side-effects. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, for instance, introduces a mournful private joke with the appearance of the Dodo, because the stammering author Charles Dodgson, who used "Lewis Carroll" as his pen name, also enjoyed, or endured, "Dodo" as his nickname ("Do-Do-Dodgson"). Other side-effects are more elusive, such as Henry James's snaking sentences, full of measured subclauses and self-qualifications, which may or may not have emerged from the way that stammerers learn to avoid words likely to snag their voices, nimbly sidestepping danger with an alternative word, a new direction.

Note: not the same as waffling in literature. (P.S. I can never quote from A Fish Called Wanda without snorting at least once at the thought of those ketchupy french fries up Michael Palin's nose... hee hee... funny.... ) (From TEV)



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The Late Style

I got something to say... Maybe you can both burn out and fade away...

Each of us can supply evidence of how it is that late works crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavour. Rembrandt and Matisse, Bach and Wagner. But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and contradiction? What if age and ill health don't produce serenity at all?

Actually, Edward Said had something to say in this, his final article. (Or he had something he wanted "said", as the case may be.) (From ALDaily)



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Gore Vidal in tough bind

And he's not enjoying it. He's selling his Amalfi hut* for a few bucks and can't find anywhere to keep his modest library. (I have virtually this same picture in my Italy collection, taken from the cliffside road, only my shot was through a bus window and it was a day trip in the town. They don't let the likes of me stay there unless my mouth is attached to someone rich's genitals. A highly unlikely scenario these days.)



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Are you saying I don't make enough money?

Loneliness and writing

The good news is, many bad books die of loneliness* too.



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Ebony and Ivory

Sol Stein reflects* on his literary friendship with James Baldwin.

Mr. Stein, a courtly man with a twinkling smile, suggested that part of his kinship with Baldwin came from their outsider perspectives; Baldwin "assumed his ancestors came to America in chains" while Mr. Stein's parents made their way illegally from Russia. But he was also drawn to Baldwin, he said, because he was exceptionally smart.



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Those darned preachers... They just can't stop burning books!

Even when they wrote them.



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File under: cry me a river!

Um, are you sure you didn't write poetry instead of novels....?

Sir Antony Sher, the actor, writer and artist, yesterday launched a bitter critique of the exclusivity of the literary world. Sir Antony, who voiced his concerns on stage during the Cheltenham Festival, described how he had struggled in vain for wider publicity surrounding the publication of his four novels.

The actor attributed the apparently limited reviews and commercial success to what he perceived as the "closed doors" of an elitist literary club.

"The literary world is a sort of club that lets some people in and some not," he complained, "and for some reason I wasn't let in. The way that they let you know you're not going to be let in is they don't review your book. Or they review it so slowly it dies at birth and the publishers don't want to publish your books any more."

Actor, eh? Hm...



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Reviving the Algonquin

The son of the former Algonquin Hotel owner is trying to recapture some of the storied building's faded past.*

The new management, while proud to have installed plasma television screens and wireless Internet, has also been trying to rekindle the hotel's literary past. It has hired the president of the Dorothy Parker Society as a consultant and established relationships with the sons of such Round Table fixtures as Robert Benchley. Recalling the days when the owner Frank Case sent plates of olives, popovers and celery sticks to the poor scribes at the Round Table, the hotel now offers lunch discounts for struggling writers.

Um, I've been there quite a few times during the time I was stationed at a government meeting hall across the street. Luckily I was always with lawyers and rich friends who could buy. I can't imagine any discount will be enough. Especially to draw anyone remotely cool to midtown. Ew.



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Is it just me or does $23,500 actually look pretty good to you?

There are more artists in Canada today than in previous years, but on average we are earning less than before.

Funded by the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, the study reports that between 1991 and 2001, the number of artists in Canada grew by 29 per cent, or almost three times the growth rate of the overall labour force (which increased by 10 per cent during the same period).

However, artists are earning even less, when compared to the overall average of all occupation groups, than they did in 1991.

I wish a bunch of you would quit so I could haul my ass above the poverty line.



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Um, uh-huh, yeah, BECAUSE there are more artists, artists are making less. Why on earth should more funds be made available simply because more people claim to be artists??? Wah wah wah, the world owes me a living, boohoo. Has anyone seen my cape and tam?

why on earth should more funds be made available to health care because more people claim to be sick?

No one asked for more public funding, that's not what the article was about. If you want to argue that point, you'd probably lose, math wiz.

wa wa wa

Plus, it's talking about averages not means, MW. Something your average whiz should know about.

Pierre Berton: pass the nachos

How in the name of all that's holy did I miss this until today? (From GoodReports)



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Mid-list hell? Lady, that's my LIFE!

Anita Shreve took the Oprah Pass through the Mountains of Insurmountable Apathy and is doing quite well, thank you.

Shreve, who worked as a journalist for 15 years before switching to fiction, bridles at critics who label her a "women's novelist" for writing romances.

"I don't like it. I think it is dismissive of women to start with and dismissive of me as a novelist. I write about men and inhabit the personae of men. I enjoy writing about men as much as I do about women," she said.

Oprah, please. Please consider mentioning a book of poetry sometime. Maybe just rest your coffee on it or something. Prop a door open. Fart on it with your amazing,shape-changing ass. Anything.



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The Edwin Morgan collection

Scotland's national poet, dying of cancer, donates his art collection instead of selling it for a small fortune.

Yesterday he said: "I don't feel sentimental about it. It is just a practical thing. I don't really have any sentimentality – they'll be in good hands and lots of people will see them: that is the idea I like the best.

"You can clutter your life and your home up with many things, with lots of objects that have no use, and the paintings are in my mind: I have been looking at them for so many years."

Do you think our generation of writers will even own art collections? Or will we all be donating our 10 years worth of Xmen to the Silver Snail Library of Graphickal Justice?



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The Writer's Almanac
OK, it's hosted by Garrison Keillor, but it's still a nice site for biographical information about writers. A good companion to Today in Literature.

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Whatever happened to Desmond Hogan?

Well, a whole bunch of crazy shit.

The quest for solitude has come at a high price. He spent his first Christmas back home in the company of two labradors. Later, evicted from a seaside lodging, he hid on the beach. He confirms that he had indeed lived in a rotting caravan by the roadside. 'There were people who would come and honk their horns outside six times a night and wake you up. But it was also very interesting because I had just candlelight for over a year... I came to know how the travellers lived. What I find really interesting about the travellers is their sense of story; they were the first people St Patrick preached to.' When his caravan eventually disintegrated, he lost many of his papers and was forced to live in an old car in a field with a herd of cows. He says that 'the cows were kind company compared to the road', but his books got damp, so he moved to the west coast.



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British book columnists getting all weepy for people who disappeared...

Can we call two articles a trend? Well, I am.



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British book press brought to knees with weeping over lost souls

It IS a trend! What's happening? This is all Wubblewoo shock, isn't it? A kind of political shell shock that's forced them to go back to a happier time, when things weren't so disturbing.

Everybody seems agreed that market forces dictate what is getting published. Unlike most other kinds of artist, authors have to rely on businesses if enough people are going to experience their work. Market forces can, however, be hard to interpret. It's easy to see why promoting a book is so important, but less simple, for example, to assess the effect inexpert booksellers can have on shaping demand.

(From PFW)



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Which books can you live without?
I live in a very small apartment, and one book coming in often means another has to leave. Every day is agony for me.

I have been clearing my shelves of novels over the past 10 years and survivors are those I wish to reread. That means Dickens, though I shall be confining myself to my favourites (including Great Expectations, which I read every November, for reasons I have yet to fathom). Richardson's Clarissa and James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner get better with each reading, as does Herman Melville's novella Bartleby. I shall hold on to the short stories of Nikolai Leskov, Isaac Babel and the virtually forgotten Ivan Bunin, whose "Kasimir Stanislavovitch" conveys more knowledge of the complex workings of the human heart in a mere 12 pages than most novelists can manage in door-stoppers.

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My favourite weapon is a debit card
Raymond Chandler was a big influence on me, and there are little nods to him and his style throughout Please. While I'd love to have his literary success, I sure don't want my life to follow the path his did.

Chandler's last years without her were spent more or less in breakdown, the drunken suicide attempts of the months after Cissy's funeral turning to five, eventually fatal, years of alcoholism. In his last months he was having desperate, disinterested affairs and drinking gimlets again, now all too much like Marlowe in The Long Goodbye: "Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off." In this state he proposed to three different women-one from Australia, one from England, and one sent to California by the one from England to check into what the one from Australia was up to.

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"Chandler had a similar warning to those who looked for the literary craftsman in the writing: "It just happens, like red hair.""

Crap. My hair is brown.

That is pretty weird
Sci-fi writer China Mieville sums up his life in a few short, sweet anecdotes.

The weirdest thing I ever saw was in Hyde Park. There was a crowd, I joined them, and for the next 10 minutes we stood aghast and fascinated watching a pelican eating a pigeon.

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Sure, every writer has horror stories about the publishing biz
But how many have to pay back their advance?

I explained to my editor what I wanted to write in advance -- a novel about a personal chef for a weirdo super celebrity, in lieu of the novel I'd proposed long ago in a single paragraph. She agreed. I wrote that book. But when I sent the manuscript, Serving Monster, to my editor, she informed me that, unbeknownst to me, I had violated my contract -- that it was late and it wasn't the book they'd wanted anyway. I knew then that I was going to get gotted. That this big-ass publishing house was going to come down on me.

Sure enough, Atria, subsidiary of that monster conglomerate Viacom, asked me to pay back the $41,000 they advanced me.

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In Canada, we feel bad about fighting back when people rob us
Poet Ryan Knighton was mugged by a crackhead in Vancouver and seems to feel the B.C. government is at least partially responsible, especially when it comes to its Safe Streets legislation.

I can live with the outcome. I mean, sure she probably needed the food more than I did and all that, and it's true, more than any other motive, I'd simply been lazy about sharing. I can't begrudge her the Fig Newtons. Really.

Besides, stealing a blind man's cookies is about as reliable a report on how successfully municipal and provincial action plans are working on poverty and addiction in my neighbourhood as anyone could deliver.

I don't know... I can't help but think if you steal Fig Newtons from a nearly blind poet, some of your problems may in fact originate with you.

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What did you do/will you do with your first book?
Not many writers are proud of their first efforts.

My first novel, thank God, was never published. The typescript still lies at the bottom of some drawer box, its pages no doubt yellow and impregnated with dust. I have not destroyed it because, even though ashamed, I am grateful to it.

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The bookphrodesiac

The writer, the groupie, and you.

And yet I have to concede that, as anyone who has earned an M.F.A. or attended a writing conference already knows, a surprising number of those over-the-top rumors about writers and their torrid affairs are actually true. If books aren't aphrodisiacs, then what else can account for a guest opening the coat closet at a post-reading party a few years ago in Greensboro, N.C., to find Mr. Very Famous 60-Something Poet and a young blonde, with whom he was not, apparently, discussing ''Ode on a Grecian Urn.''

Do you know how many friends I've lost (okay, given up) because of their groupie crushes on flaccid old men? Ew. And where in the name of god are my groupies? Am I just not old and disgusting enough yet? I'm getting there, I swear! Give me some time! I'm letting myself go to pot! I'll even grow jowls so big I can't shave in the folds! Will that do it for you? Ear hair? I'm dying here!



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If ear hair is the key, then I'm poised to get more pussy than Sinatra. All I need is a book...

that is hilarious

He's big in Japan
The Rake sobers up long enough to post about the meeting of Raymond Carver and Haruki Murakami.

In the waning of that quiet afternoon, I remember with what distaste he was sipping black tea. Holding the teacup in his hand, he looked as though he was doing the wrong thing in the wrong place. Sometimes he would get up from his seat and go outside to smoke.

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<b>Quoth the Huey: that's the power of love
The poetic power couple.



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They're so cute!

Six first time authors write about launching their books.



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My only concern in pleasing my dad is remembering how to tell the difference between the left- and right-handed hammers...

I'm what they call a "first-generation writer", so I wouldn't know, but it seems being the child of a famous writer ain't as easy as it looks.

The publishing world is seemingly witnessing a boom in the population of writers whose parents made their living in literature, and not just in America. In Canada, Anne Giardini, daughter of Carol Shields, is making the bestseller list with her first novel, The Sad Truth About Happiness; Emma Richler, daughter of Canada's legendary Mordecai, releases her first proper novel, Feed My Dear Dogs, this month; and David Layton, son of Irving Layton, releases his first work of fiction, The Bird Factory, after his memoir Motion Sickness.

Okay, so it is.


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Oedipal thing gets more complex

Mother and son release books on the same day. In my family that means I have a new book coming out and my mother has just finally passed out and let her latest Dean Koontz fall to the floor.


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Drunken poet penned 250,000 copy bestseller

This sounds about right.

For almost 30 years from 1757, Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies was the essential gentleman's accessory for a night on the town. Historian Hallie Rubenhold estimates it sold at least 250,000 copies.

It offered very particular advice, guiding clients to the doorstep of Miss Smith, of Duke's Court in Bow Street, "a well made lass, something under the middle size, with dark brown hair and a good complexion"; warning them off Miss Robinson, at the Jelly Shops, "a slim and genteel made girl - but rather too flat"; and kindly including Mrs Hamblin, No 1 Naked-Boy Court in the Strand - "The young lady in question is not above 56 ... we know she must be particularly useful to elderly gentlemen who are very nice in having their linen got up".

Oi! Shoin yeh shoes, guvnah? Ow's about sumfin else ven?


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The curse of the prolific author

Can one write too much? (You know, I had said a whole bunch of eloquent stuff too, about the well of creative energy and public perception of the work of the artist, but apparently the hotdog metaphor was just too good to resist. Much like hotdogs themselves.)


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i thought the hot dog metaphor was incredibly profound

you're up with Atwood now

Wakka wakka.

It's like getting screwed at the drive thru... once you're gone, you can't really do anything about it...

Perhaps A Death in the Family isn't what it would have been, had there been no death... in the family. Like I always say, once you're dead, you're so fucked.


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Chicago: writers' town

Chicago newspaper highlights Chicago. And just in time, too. Dr Von Moribund! Halt the DestructoRay's countdown and reposition. Coordinates: Boise, Idaho.


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In a North Bay state of mind...

A gritty gumshoe New York writer can't get rid of his native North Bay, Ontario. It's kind of like herpes, in that regard. I had a similar reaction to living in New York, and began work while there on a novel set against the backdrop of Bradford, Ontario: Harley Davidson painters caps, slack-jawed yuppies-cum-yokels in SUVs, bottle toke bottles strewn in the highschool parking lot, 40-something dye-blonde divorcees at the Village Inn, the occasional carrot festival, and acid wash denim as far as the eye can see. Then I moved home and the spell was broken. The pages have been burnt, rest assured. (From PFW)


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What's in a name?

If you're a writer, about this much. (From Maud)


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So this is why everyone hates you...

Funny how topical this is, at least in my little life. It's like this little troll at a bookstore I go to quite regularly. Every time I go in he spews quiet hatred and ugliness at me. I'm as friendly as I can be, but nada. Other customers he seems fine with. Me, he's fuming. I asked a colleague of his whether I had done something to offend and he said, "Oh no, he just hates you because you're a writer." I said, "He hates writers?" "No, he's a writer too. He just hates ones more successful than himself." Ding ding ding. Truth bell.


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Can we run a contest: guess that bookstore? Name that troll? I have my guesses ready to go. Maybe, to avoid poking the troll (there's a ready-made euphemism), or antagonising bookselling bystanders, we could arrange confidential contest entries. I don't begrudge independent booksellers their attitudes these days, though. The now-endangered knowledgable staff are themselves victims of having their talents undervalued.

Send me your guesses. george @AT@ bookninja .DOT. com

The winner gets to share in my revulsion. (Lunchtime: I'm headed to said bookstore right now.)

G

Sure, she has money, but... well, that's a lot of money
What happens to teen literary stars?

a youthful sensation doesn't always translate into a distinguished literary career. For many teen authors, that first book proves a hard act to follow. Some never again meet with the kind of praise critics heaped upon their first offerings.
Perhaps that should not come as a surprise. Writing a great book before the age of 20 is an accomplishment so extraordinary that some adults struggle to understand how it's even possible. They wonder how one so young can manage to write with authority in an original voice.

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Speaking of trolls...

What happens to teen literary stars? Hopefully, years of obscurity followed by a long, lingering painful death in a SOR hotel somewhere.

Ever spot someone reading your book?
Just keep your mouth shut.


A well-known writer found himself sitting on a train opposite a woman reading the novel (his first) which he'd recently had published. Unable to contain his excitement, he leaned across the table, gave a small cough and told the woman that she was reading his book. She immediately lowered it and said how sorry she was, explaining that she didn't know the book belonged to anyone, and that she'd just found it lying on the table. Before the writer could correct her misapprehension, the woman slid the book across the table towards him. "It doesn't matter," she said. "I wasn't really enjoying it anyway."

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They're gone!!

Breathe, you lucky old folk with school-age kids. Enjoy! Get that book written. You've got until June. Go!


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Edited by author 09-10-2005 05:35 PM
Can you really trust writers...
... when they're talking about themselves?

The writer too shy to be named has become a cliche, and a marketing tool. The Traveller, a first novel by the thumpingly pseudonymous John Twelve Hawks, is shooting up the bestseller lists, in part because the author has declined to be identified.
Yet there is also something deeply admirable, in the age of the ubiquitous author interview, in a writer who refuses to tell all, who deliberately obscures or distorts the past, or heads for the privacy of the hills. Writers like Salinger, Lee, Traven and Charriere are among the very few who managed to escape seeing their work banalised by public scrutiny of their own lives. They went on the literary lam, and got clean away.

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I do it for the groupies
Are writers the new rock stars? Minus the money and relevance, of course.

NO LONGER IS IT JUST ROCK stars who go on tour, attract groupies and perform live. Britain has gone crazy over writers and readings at literary festivals. There are now 207 UK festivals, from 20-seater village affairs to big-tent international events.
The key literary pit-stops are Hay-on-Wye, Cheltenham and Edinburgh. But there are scores more, as well as many abroad. The newest hotspot is Marrakesh, where Arts in Morocco (AiM) has invited some of the best British writers to provide a weekend of highbrow entertainment this month. Esther Freud, Hari Kunzru, Meera Syal and publishers and literary agents are descending on North Africa to talk up Eng lit.

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"Are writers the new rock stars?"

I suppose that makes me the seedy bar band.

Heinlein's lady trouble

Apparently he started out as a bra-burning feminist. Who knew? It was only that whole pesky thing called "the 70s" that ruined him. That fucking decade has a whole lot to answer for (WHERE'S MY SPACE STATION GARDEN, YOU SCHOLASTIC MOFO LIARS?? WHERE'S MY PERSONAL ROBOT?)


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The fabulous life of James Patterson
The NY Times business section has an interesting piece on bestselling author James Patterson (who apparently made $40 million last year) and his investments. It contains the interesting revelation that Patterson doesn't always write his books:

Mr. Patterson said he often worked with co-authors because he believed that he was more proficient at creating the story line than at executing it.

"I found that it is rare that you get a craftsman and an idea person in the same body," Mr. Patterson said. "With me, I struggle like crazy. I can do the craft at an acceptable level, but the ideas are what I like." He said the co-authors received a flat fee and, most often, credit on the book cover.

That irritated me at first, but then I figured what the hell. If you like his books, you like his books. At least you're reading. And he also plans to give away half his fortune to education. We all have those plans, don't we?

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Sex, Lies and Paperweights

The lies that writers tell themselves, and how Americans are better at self-deception than Canadians.


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Yo mama!

Proofing reading your mother's graphic sexcapades. Um, please, just cover me with spikey caterpillars and stuff my mouth with slugs. Luckily, my own personal DNA donor can barely read the words "Bud Light" on her Zippo, much less write a book, so I'm okay here.


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I hate to drop in and just leave this, but I noticed that there was no place for announcements for members.

I've built a new place for writers called Writer's Create. We have challenges each week that put the winner on the front page, a private critique group, games, and writing discussions.

We're still very new, but be have a growing list of members. If you're interested feel free to stop by and take a look. The best part about it is its completely free. So it certain wouldn't hurt to take peek.

http://s13.invisionfree.com/Writers_Create/index.php?act=site

Good luck everyone in your writing career.