reeling and writhing

Random House Australia to allow publishing at random

Australian Bookseller and Publisher Online announced this afternoon that Random House Australia (RHA) has launched a print on demand (POD) program that will allow it to produce single copies of out-of-print titles:

The program, which has been 18 months in the planning, is in partnership with Sydney-based SOS Print+Media and will cover out-of-print in-copyright Random House titles that sell nine or less copies per year. (Books which sell in small quantities of 10 or more fall into the publisher's short-run program.)

Random House sales director Gavin Schwarcz told WBN the program would ensure the publisher's books stayed in print, but that it was as much about meeting customer expectations as making a profit.

‘It's a reduced margin for us,' he admitted. ‘The author will make the same [royalties on these books], but it's all about service. I think with the world the way it is, the consumer nowadays just thinks if they want something they don't understand why they can't get it.'

Schwarcz said the POD initiative would mean booksellers could satisfy customer requests and added that such a program could even help to promote some out-of-print titles.

countdown

The Millions has a nifty countdown of post-millenium best reads on, compiled after extensive consultation with a large and impressive panel of writers/bloggers/writer-bloggers, with thoughtful reviews of each title provided. Via John Williams at Second Pass.

review: The Ghost Poetry Project by Nathan Curnow

Curnow, Nathan. The Ghost Poetry Project (Puncher and Wattmann).
 
Nathan Curnow took himself across Australia to spend a total of ten nights in the most haunted places he could find, an innovative approach to post-colonial interrogation of historical space if there ever was one. Places visited included Fremantle Arts Centre, once a lunatic asylum, Monte Cristo, the most haunted house in Australia, a parsonage at Port Arthur and an old store on Norfolk Island (one of the book’s most beautiful poems, 'Whaling Song', comes from this part of the book).

This poetry collection has not one, but two narrative frames, the most obvious being the travelogue through these spaces to collect raw material, crossbarred throughout by Curnow’s own history with childhood insomnia, night panics and hauntings, and his young daughter’s fear of bunyips.  As Kevin Brophy writes, “this book must have the strangest ever provenance of any collection of poetry in Australia. Only a vampire or a Nathan Curnow could have done this…these poems come drenched with the bloody and violent deaths central to the history of European occupation in this country. But they are not ghoulish or sensational. They are the real thing, ‘both transparent and completely solid.”

(Update: Kevin Brophy's launch speech can be read here at Famous Reporter.)

Highlights of this collection for me included the section on Picton, containing a ghastly incident with a ghost train in a tunnel, the Monte Cristo group and several poems from the lunatic asylum, including one about a love letter thrown over the wall.

The poems about the Richmond Bridge are evocative, the first a picture postcard, complete with ducks, lunches and cameras released from buses. This idyllic entry point, reminiscent of more famous poems about bridges, dissolves quickly to night inspections of the oldest bridge in Australia which may contain a body in its arches, with a passing, ghastly nod to Billy Joe McAllister. The haunted hearse from Sydney, Elvira the Cadillac, has only been slept in once before, by a ghost investigator: the poems in this section are cheekily underlined by Curnow’s claim that he fell asleep.

what, no science fiction? please, we're Bookerish

Now that I've found the Blog It button on Typepad, and stuck it on my busy little toolbar - you might still get some news from time to time.

Here, Kim Stanley Robinson quotes a letter from Virginia Woolf to a science fiction writer, while criticising the Booker judges for failing to include any science fiction in the shortlist.

Robinson believes that Stapledon's "strange novels" made a "real impact on Woolf", changing her writing. "Her final novel, Between the Acts ... ends with Stapledonian imagery, describing our species steeped in the eons. Woolf's last pages were a kind of science fiction," he wrote in his article for the New Scientist. "When it came to literature, she had no prejudices. She read widely and her judgment was superb. And so I am confident that if she were reading today, she would be reading science fiction along with everything else. And she would still be 'greatly interested, and elated too' – because British science fiction is now in a golden age."

only connect

This is another reason I did the tinkering and am trying to read fewer feeds - so I can return to the odd spot of browsing and happen upon people like Lisa, a friend of George Dunford's  who is studying journalism in Paris.

Her views on the difference between zines and blogs are news to me, and fascinating  - she says in an earlier post, "Among the ex-pats here, zines are a rarity, with blogs the main way of keeping touch with people back home. And yet, most blogs do not have the same kind of sincerity or passion that's found in a zine. There's a real love for the zine making process which gets lost when sharing your thoughts becomes as easy as clicking the "Publish" button. "

One of my Facebook friends uploaded photos of his favourite zine front covers. Oddly, I was thankful that none of my zines were among the list. Every now and then there are discussions about digitising zines – but to do so would to lose its meaning. I love reading back on my old zines because it reminds me of who I was at a particular time in my life, and how much I’ve changed (or haven’t changed) since that zine was made. There is an honesty in these early zines, an intimacy between myself and the 50 other people who managed to get a copy. Many things shared in the zines are things that I would not tell an online audience, where strangers from all over the world could find and read it without its original context. Rather than trying to get as many web hits as possible or having an eternal presence on the World Wide Web, I want my personal zines to remain ephemeral. Perhaps the same could be said about squats.

Posted at her blog, Colours of Bohemia, and also published in the Sticky newsletter early this year.

Via the Sticky Institute, someone else discusses these issues at Barnard, Columbia, no less - Jenna
Freedman. Lovely.

tinkering - as done as it will ever be

Well, I like the look of this for now. I tried out the whole new navbar thing on a sample blog over the past couple of weeks and I think this will help with a number of things,

one: reading too many feeds and not enough books (believe me, a wider page is a frightening thing to a linkster);

two: trying to write occasional posts in a quieter vein;

three: still reviewing the odd new title here and there, but taking time for the 370-odd articles I have bookmarked to read, as well as rereading other books, and pasting in quotations from things I like here and there;

four: Reeling and Writhing keeps its name and URL - there was a brief flirtation with a new blog, and it's over.

Thanks for your patience with my self-indulgence and hopefully temporary insanity. If I could get at the code on the 'Browse' page and put those lists into columns, believe me, I would. I won't be here quite as often in the future, but I will be here, while I am spared.

you can love the life you're living

This meme requires me to attempt to describe my life, by title, in the books I've read so far in 2009. (Via Gwenda Bond.)

Strikes me as something best attempted in the last quarter of the year. For sure.

Describe yourself:
The Night Parrot
How do you feel?
Will It Be Funny Tomorrow, Billy?
Describe where you currently live:
The World Beneath
If you could go anywhere, where would you go?
Brooklyn
Your favorite form of transport:
The Pages
Your best friend is . . . ?
The TV President
You and your friends are . . .?
The Ghost Poetry Project (or The Content Makers, depending on who you talk to).
What’s the weather like?
(A) Disgrace

Favourite time of day?
The Time We Have Taken
What is life to you?
A House Of Air

Your fear?
The Hunter ( in another year this would be Oblomov)
What is the best advice you have to give?
An Imaginary Life
Thought for the Day?
Indignation
How I would like to die:
Things We Didn't See Coming
My soul’s present condition?
Look Who's Morphing

just messing around

Some design issues going today - but all should be resolved in an hour or two.