Category: Round-up

Round-up, 13 November 2012: Ballot Design, Accents, Trends, Why British Students Can’t Write, Sendak

Among the many angles in the coverage of last week’s US election, the story that fascinated me the most was ‘Ballot Design With Todd Oldham’ from the New York Times. The experts say maybe millions of votes have been lost over the years because of poor ballot design. And I had no idea that the Florida ballots with the hanging chads were such a MESS (I love their comparison!). Wow, typography is THAT important. I still find it horrifying that the world’s superpower’s voting systems are so inconsistent; surely this is too important for such variation to be permitted in things such as voting machines (paper vs electronic), in the ballot design? If this happened in the developing world, the righteous West would be crying outrage. I’m all for decentralisation, but this is chaos. Makeover time!

Talking of typography, enjoy the pleasures of calligraphy in this short film about designer and artist Seb Lester.

I’m experimenting with dictation software (Dragon on my iPad), so I found this story about Midlands accents confounding an expensive phone system at Birmingham City Council quite amusing.

From the Guardian: is crime fiction the new fashion in young adult fiction?

And from a blog I stumbled across, a good overview of trends in horror fiction.

From the American Reader, one of the more thoughtful pieces of coverage of the Penguin/Random House merger.

Which we are told is necessary to balance out the ever increasing powers of Amazon. Which doesn’t pay much tax either. I have found myself shopping at Amazon less and less this year. Okay, I might have to(?!) do my ebook of short stories there, and I am sure could save on various titles I might instead buy, e.g., at the Open Book in Richmond. But at what price: my soul, for a couple of tight-fisted quid, and crappier royalties to the writers? In you have any doubts, just watch the BBC coverage of the parliamentary grilling of the man from Amazon (he say no).

Just happened to watch The Young Apprentice candidates create cookbooks last week. Fun to see a primetime take on publishing, and I thought the kids did well (among the squabbling – some of the young women were notably obnoxious). The funniest moment for me was when the Waterstone’s buyer got so defensive about a seventeen-year-old saying their customers were middle-class. Out of the mouths of babes. But also: if you want to publish, learn to spell, or at least find someone who can.

Talking of, an oldie I recently came across: Sarah Churchwell asks in the Independent why British students can’t write like Americans. Duh, because they’re not taught how to?! Just saying. Sarah, I share your outrage. A North American correspondent points out that Americans can’t write either. Well, you can’t make it learn, but you can at least take a horse to water.

But what if the wells of academia are dry? Universities are so concerned with learning outcomes and maximising impacts and institutional targets that sometimes you wonder where teaching fits in. In the Guardian Andrew Motion attacks the government’s mercantile attitude to universities, and it’s not before time. It’s not just the government; it’s often the universities themselves too that prize the values of the market over the ideals of learning. Also from the THE is the original article launching the Council for the Defence of British Universities. Good luck to them.

Finally, the Believer interview with Maurice Sendak is super. His cranky comments about the death of publishing and the evil of ebooks were taken out of context all over. Read at the source; any curmudgeonliness must be experienced in the larger space of that rich, intelligent, funny voice.

Round-up, 2 November 2012: Boulder, More Ebooks, Slow Books, and Fair Use

It was great to be in Boulder this last week. I caught up with many dear folk, including various former students and teachers who’re now just good friends. I also spoke on Bobbie Louise Hawkins and publishing in two different classes at Naropa, drank lots of tea, bought even more, read tarot cards, was driven through a snowstorm (eek!), beheld winter wonderland mountains, heard all about feeding baby squirrels from a chum who’s a volunteer at Greenwood Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, bought books at my spiritual home slash favourite bookshop in the whole wide world, and also acquired a super little brass deer (super heavy too) from an antique (junk) shop in gold town turned casino town Central City. The little brass deer, who’s currently lying on the mantelpiece (lazy slut), has a special name, but I’m saving that for a story. But best of all it was great to be around all those creative friends, and feel that here, thousands of miles away, we’re all still connected.

In other reports:

From Publishing Perspectives, Have We Already Reached ‘Peak E-Book?’ contains some interesting analysis of ebook readerships and consumption. (But I am worried: even in US style, aren’t those closing quotes supposed to go before the question mark?! Must check my Chicago Manual. Okay, I thought so – it should be … Reached ‘Peak E-book’? And myself, I prefer ebook over e-book. Ack.)

While I was at Publishing Perspectives (I love that site), I came across an older article that is well worth a read in this month of NaNoWriMo: Good Books Are Worth The Wait. But do NaNoWriMo anyway – it can really help with discipline and your writing process. But later, be realistic, and think about the value of sloooow.

And finally, from Andrew Shaffer, links and round-up on the protectionist estate of William Faulkner: Faulkner Estate Suing Sony Over Use Of Single Quote. Extraordinary.

Round-up, 10 October 2012: honest responses, colourblind writing, Hilary Mantel, Camille Paglia, handwriting

Out of the mouths of babes … I really enjoyed reading this blog entry by Naropan and flash fiction journal editor Stacy Walsh: ‘My Kid Waxes Lyrical On ArtPrize’ (which is an open art prize in Michigan). Note the poetry of little Eli’s honest responses to shiny surfaces and ‘Song of Lift, a 5-minute long, fully automated, viewer sensitive opera’ of a kinetic sculpture slash quarter machine. This reminds me of the need to find that ‘level of enjoying what is in front of you in that moment’ (his mom’s wise words). This is painfully simple, but the best things often are, and it can be painful (or at least, less melodramatically, a challenge) to get there. Writers (adults) often have to relearn that honest response in order to discover the intuition that’s essential for good writing.

This story makes me think of that Ray Bradbury mantra: Don’t Think. And it also reminds me of one of the smartest things I ever heard anyone say at a Naropa Summer Writing Program: Edwin Torres’s statement that ‘Difficulty is not intelligence’. Why do we so often feel a need to complicate things, to intellectualise, to overinterpret texts or overegg our writing? Sometimes we just need to let things be, to be open to their experience and our experience of them.

Can literature be colour blind? The Independent discusses race and characters-who-just-happen-to-be. It invites us to consider the norms of our writing: what is normal there, and what might normal need to be? How might normal change?

A good profile of Hilary Mantel in the New Yorker on the US publication of Bring Up The Bodies. Have yet to read, but look forward to it. Wonder if it will win the Man Booker Prize?

I love reading anything by the brilliant Camille Paglia. Such energy in her writing. Here she is on Salon talking, among other things, about her new book on art, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars.

The New York Times reports on Art.sy, a ‘genome project for the world of art’, which aims to create ‘new pathways for discovering art through 800+ characteristics (we call them “genes”)’. It’s compared with the ‘musical recommendation engines’ of Pandora and other digital playlists. An elegant website, too.

I am not sure if I find it that attractive, when I compare it with the elegance of Garamond or Baskerville, but the font OpenDyslexic, described here by the BBC, could make life easier for many people with dyslexia: apparently, its ‘characters have been given “heavy-weighted bottoms” to prevent them from flipping and swapping around in the minds of their readers’. It’s now available for Instaper, and might come to Amazon and other devices. So: big bottoms are useful.

When I describe myself as a lovely writer, I am talking about my handwriting. Here’s a lovely piece from Philip Hensher in the Observer on the publication of his new book The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting. It includes a brief manifesto to restore handwriting ‘as something which is a pleasure, which is good for us, and which is human in ways not all communication systems manage to be’, as well as a sad, sweet tale on why handwriting is important. Ah! It justifies our stationery fetish, doesn’t it? Nothing really flows like ink.

Round-up, 5 October 2012: Nigella, Anna, Huck and covers

Look at these gorgeous book covers designed by 100 artists from 28 countries gathered together in the collective DoeDeMee by Belgian design studio beshart. Even better, buy one of their posters for that bare wall on your landing; five euros from each one goes towards fighting illiteracy.

If there’s anything more fabulous than beholding a truly great book cover, it’s the shock and awe of wondering how a truly atrocious one ever came to be. (But maybe you never sat through the tedious hivemind that can be a cover meeting …) The Caustic Cover Critic is a new find I shall be revisiting regularly. I was particularly thrilled by its caustic coverage of these horrors inflicted upon Henry James by Tutis Digital Publishing. Never heard of em. I am baffled as to what happened here – the images in many instances bear absolutely no relation to the book’s content. They look like some error in translation. Enjoy! (More gems here.)

While we’re romping through awesomeness, also stop to take a look at Flavorpill’s 10 Books To Restore Your Faith In Print. Oo, ah, don’t you wish the Internet did pop-up books?

This Guardian story on Mark Twain’s inspiration for Tom Sawyer took me back to studying Huckleberry Finn for O level. I downloaded an ebook version, because it’s one of those books I ought to be carrying with me at all times, and in doing so realised it’s one of the first times I’ve looked at the book since I’ve entered mondo creative writing, and this time round I really noticed the magic of that voice. Tom Sawyer he hunted me up and said he was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would go back to the widow and be respectable. Ah! Strange (or not so, I was well taught – thanks, Mrs Blakemore!) how lots of phrases were familiar. This was probably where the term dramatic irony was first explained to me, too, I reckon.

An intriguing take from The Week on Nigella’s new show Nigellissima, in which someone doing her PhD on sadomasochism and romantic love comments on the Nigella-baiting by mostly male critics. It’s a welcome take that goes delightfully too far in making a claim for her work as performance art. Nigella is one of my idols; I admired her for a long time, but then fully converted when, discussing guilty pleasures, she stated that ‘I don’t believe anything pleasurable should feel guilty’. Back off, haters. (Remember, Love not Envy.)

I forgot last week to mention that I’d seen and enjoyed Anna Karenina. It’s a sumptuous production, with some rich touches that I shan’t describe in case you have not seen yourself, or know nothing about its take (you should only read these articles from a Guardian supplement if you have already seen it). Have to admit that Anna has always reminded me of one of those annoying heroines from opera (not sure that’s a spoiler … not sure spoilers apply, do they?!), but Keira is very well cast and does a good job here. I am sure we could quibble about any number of things (some of the commentariat was griping that the actors had Russian accent; what did they want, for them to talk like meerkats?). But I just surrendered to it; sometimes I think it’s simply good to decide you’ll like a film, and I loved the central conceit and execution of this version. Enjoy the trailer below (note: spoiler-ish, though I had seen this without realising that that central conceit was revealed in it – but then I am sometimes really dumb).

But first: on a related topic, you might want to join some of my weekend reading: an old article by David Remnick from the New Yorker on translation, including various whys and wherefores of translating some of the Russian classics.

Round-up, 28 September 2012: Rejected Manuscripts, Ghosts, Britishisation, J.K. Rowling, and Indexers

Apparently Penguin is asking some writers to return advances for manuscripts that were never delivered. Too right! (More for those who can deliver.) Some of the Guardian commentariat reveals a certain ignorance of what an advance really is. The posts by cstross usefully clarify things such as contracts and advances usually being broken down into payments on signature of contract, delivery of manuscript, hardback publication, and paperback publication. One agent quoted in the article refers to books rejected for editorial reasons, though the works referred to here seem to be books that were simply not delivered (which suggests the agent seems to be stirring things, as one comment suggests).

But it makes me think of the time when Joan Collins was taken to court for delivering an ‘unreadable’ manuscript. I remember seeing a super documentary on the trial, where ghostwriter Lucianne Goldberg, called as expert witness, wrily dismissed the manuscript’s inconsistencies as things that are fixed as a matter of course during the editorial process. (‘It’s a miracle’ was one explanation for, I think, someone returning from the dead – I thought the judge was going to say she was in contempt of court … but this was fiction, your honour.) If anyone knows where to find that documentary, let me know! But meanwhile enjoy Lucianne Goldberg discussing the trial and celebrity publishing with Judith Regan (e.g., note some fascinating arguments about fiction vs nonfiction writers using/needing ghost writers). I guess one major issue was that the perceived value of a Joan Collins novel, even if expertly rewritten/doctored, was diminished in the eyes of the publisher between the time the book was signed up and the time it was delivered. Writers: take note …

A good interview with Jeffrey Eugenides appeared in Salon this week. I enjoyed the discussion of his first sentences. It occurs to me they work as wonderful little elevator pitches.

Neologism alert! The BBC reports on the Britishisation of American English (and with an -ise ending at that).

A brief feature in Forbes on a boutique publisher using a subscription model, a form of underwriting production that’s also used successfully (to some degree or other) by, e.g., the wonderful Peirene Press and And Other Stories.

Apparently, there were some problems with the formatting of the ebook of J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy. Ow!

Following my own post earlier this week, more on the value of book bloggers in the Guardian. (You know, the more I think about it, I’m more likely to read – and trust – a books blog than a conventional book review.)

Also from the Guardian: John Sutherland on one of the great unsung heroes of publishing: the indexer. (Or should I say unsung heroines, as so often they are women. I never know whether women prefer to be heroes or heroines, actors or actresses, and whether it’s right/wrong to use either.)

And yay, the Kerouac Scroll is coming to the British Library! Next week, at that.

Final comment, amid all the coverage this week of The Casual Vacancy (which I’ve yet to read): aren’t we glad that J.K. Rowling 1. took pen to paper, and has 2. such a public profile, and 3. a voice that she uses to good purpose? I gather from those in the know that 4. she is a truly lovely person, too. Which just goes to show. (Haters: remember what Zadie said – we have to write from Love, not Envy.)