reeling and writhing

the way we published then...

As noted at Spike, Ampersand Duck has written a splendid post about Richard Jermyn's Common Press launch in Pambula some weeks ago. Run, read it here  and a couple of other places. Thanks to &Duck for permission to publish photographs of the first printing from Richard's press, built with Australian timbers.

Duck's post includes a fascinating, accessible account of the history and working parts of the Common Press: read it all, it is wonderful.

...and the way we publish now

Jennifer Mills' cracker essay in The Reader, the first anthology from the Emerging Writers' Festival, is published in full on her blog. The trials of the festival circuit are discussed with complete frankness, something rare and precious these days.

People who are good at writing books (and I hope to one day count myself among them) are not necessarily also good at selling them. Or, indeed, talking about them. And yet, if you don't have a media-friendly persona, the publishing world doesn't seem to want to know you. They are looking for an angle to distinguish you in the crush of new books and new writers, but you know yourself to be a complex individual who is made up of more than just angles. You have curves and straight lines and scribbly bits. On the upside, journalists will sometimes recast you as the mythical, romantic figure you have always suspected yourself to be. But the process of being marketed is deeply compromising and can actually feel like some kind of identity fraud.

(Also noted by the Overland blog.)

new trouble in Paradise, says Stothard

One of the first reports has come in from the roundtable on book-reviewing at Princeton, and it's from Peter Stothard, of the TLS.

Participants included Stothard, Michael Dirda, Sam Tanenhaus, Jessa Crispin, and Steve Wasserman, who wrote this extensive summary in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2007 (which has now become a subscription-only publication. Good luck to 'em.)

It's a potent piece of blogging, book-ended by Stothard evocatively reading Fitzgerald's first novel in the hotel where some of its parties were set. Two useful paragraphs suggest a direction for the future, not a surprising one to hear from Stothard's quarters:

Sam Tanenhaus's vigorous defence of the serious and popular in his coverage - with all the hackles it raises from those who distrust popularity at all - took me back vividly to my days of editing The Times in London. The 'serious and popular' is seriously hard. The TLS, by a contrast that could only be explained here at the acute risk of smugness, can succeed - and does - by offering a mix of exclusively the serious and sometimes difficult to loyal subscibers who prize us precisely and only for doing just that.

 Loyal readers paying serious money for literary criticism in a paper which has never been as dependent on advertising as the general press is a winning formula in these days. The World Wide Web, which causes such trouble to newspaper economies, is for us a powerful tool to attract new subscribers in places around the world which we could never reach by mail.

Enjoy.

the book has a collaborative future, says Stein

While Bob Stein's address on the future of the book at the Capitol on Thursday night was riveting stuff, its delivery was not without some issues - it never ceases to amaze me how MWF administrators manage to program digital publishing events in venues with no Internet access. While two years ago anyone appearing with Net-dependent stuff should have come armed to the teeth with backup plans (including the ability to use a screen set up in a tent!) it's a tad surprising in 2009 that we still need to spell this kind of thing out to festival organisers.

Is it really that hard to let a presenter on digital issues know that there are digital issues with the venue well in advance? Not only that, but as with Germaine Greer's address in this venue a year ago (not part of MWF), it was apparently not possible to have stage lights dimmed, making it hard for Stein to see his own laptop screen while presenting. I doubt the magnificence of the venue made up to him for that, if indeed he could see the damn place at all (Greer could not, and complained she could not see us several times).

Rant over. In a rather large nutshell, early work with text and video at the Voyager Company showed Stein that 'a book is a medium where the user is in control of their experience', in other words, 'user-driven media'. In the early '80s, a book was also what he described as a 'random access device' - and in that sense, without the availability to the general public of recording and rewinding tools, television was not.

In his work on the Criterion series of films recorded on laser disc for Voyager, Stein watched films and 'read' movies the way he read books, turning back and forward, stopping, repeating bits he needed to see again, developing multimedia features now common on DVD, such as director commentary.

He left Voyager in the mid-90s but was coaxed back into publishing sometime in the 'noughties, eventuating in the development of the annotating tools and projects for which he is best known. 

just waiting for me to find it - bookshow of the century

...and it has no silly visuals, no annoying fake bookshelves, just pure refreshing chat. ONCE A WEEK at this stage, anyway, tune in not just to Lake Wobegon, but to Louise Swinn and Zoe Dattner's radical new take on conversation around books, the Twenty-First Century BookShow.

First seen on the Overland blog, where Jeff casts a sober eye on how we will continue to talk about books, and where.

I know where I'm going to be every week. In this instalment, listen to Zoe talk about YA novels and hiding in the library, and Louise discuss the problems of short story dissemination and the first Cutwater anthology. In one take, like Ella, including a sneeze. FAB.

See you next week sometime, as there's lots going on and I'm off to watch Episode 3 over lunch.

it remains to be seen

Apparently it's done and dusted now - but Seen Reading looks like it was fun, and was much appreciated in Canada while it lasted. Link via Richard Nash at books are social glue.

This goes with that - Wolcott laments in Vanity Fair, as others also have, that it's hard to look sexy with an e-book (I reckon that could  change with the right tools, though):

It goes the other way as well. How can I impress strangers with the gem-like flame of my literary passion if it’s a digital slate I’m carrying around, trying not to get it all thumbprinty? Books not only furnish a room, to paraphrase the title of an Anthony Powell novel, but also accessorize our outfits. They help brand our identities. At the rate technology is progressing, however, we may eventually be traipsing around culturally nude in an urban rain forest, androids seamlessly integrated with our devices. 

(and came via Maud, also from Richard.)

As well as this story in the Guardian, finally, about bonding with books on an international scale.
Well, cross-Channel, anyway.

surfing the ephemera at Sheaff's

As noted recently by the wonderful Peacay at Bibliodyssey, and also Ampersand Duck. Oh my ephemera, my new-found land... This is for exploring.

There is a blog mentioned there to promote The Handy Book of Artistic Printing, a publication from Princeton Architectural Press which looks delicious - the Sheaff site says, 'This 2009 softcover book by Doug Clouse and Angela Voulangas very nicely covers many aspects of Artistic Printing, and shows examples.' 

I really should apologise for turning Peacay's links around the other way, but it's the way I travelled there. Via. How's those skating owls.

fifteen in fifteen minutes

From Carrie Frye, blogger in residence at Terry Teachout's blog on the arts in New York City, About Last Night. The rules are that one lists books that will stick with you, in fifteen minutes. No revising, and take no longer than fifteen minutes.

The Recognitions, William Gaddis.
Ruth Park's biography in 2 vols.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce.
Shakespeare - Complete works
Gray, Robert, The Land I Came Through Last
The Prelude, William Wordsworth
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
Collected Poems, T.S. Eliot
Selected Poems, Ezra Pound
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
The Great World, David Malouf
The Sportswriter, Richard Ford.
The Siege, Clara Claiborne Park
Collected Poems, W.B.Yeats.
I for Isobel, Amy Witting/Carpentaria, Alexis Wright tie for the finish.

("The Lord of the RIGNS?" my son says, incredulously, walking by.)

Did it in about six. Took another four to tidy it up. Obviously. Would love to do it again and slip Invisible But Enduring Lilacs by Gerald Murnane in, but rules are rules.
I think I could easily do a new one though. I'm going to pour a glass of wine and do this again. My husband is quietly enjoying watching Collingwood while our son is at a drive-in, for God's sake - the carers had only been to the drive-in once before, so they took the Interchange group again. Such a novelty!

My time starts - now.

Defying Hitler, by Sebastian Haffner.
Travelling to Freedom, edited Tony Stone and Peter Stone (I'll post on that one day, actually).
Invisible But Enduring Lilacs, Gerald Murnane.
Winton, Tim. The Riders.
Kureishi, Hanif. The Black Album.
Toibin, Colm. The Master
Chatwin, Bruce. The Songlines.
Garner, Helen. The Children's Bach.
Fitzgerald, Penelope. The Blue Flower.
Ingalls Wilder, Laura. The Long Winter.
Hyland, M.J. Carry Me Down.
Nehamas, Alexander. A Promise Of Happiness.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment.
The first half of Roy Foster's History of Ireland, 1600-1970. ( I intend to read it all. I have to buy it first.)
Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy.

I freely admit to doing the first fifteen earlier, like they do on cooking shows. I suppose they do things like this on LibraryThing all the time, do they?

beanie season at Artisan Books

Artisan Books, one of my favourite stops on the way into the CBD, advises that their annual Beanie Exhibition is open now.

Do click on their other exhibition invites to the right of the homepage to see what other beautiful things are able to be viewed there, apart from a constantly magnificent selection of books on art, textiles, photography, design, gardens and all manner of crafts

The lovely piece on the invitation is the work of Margaret Lanne.

the concrete islander is no more

R.I.P., and three cheers for the man who, like Elizabeth Jolley after him, was told his writing was fully sick.
Via Martin Edmond at Luca Antara, this 1997 article for Salon on William Burroughs, where J.G. Ballard famously wrote that:

'The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters.'

Touchingly, Neil Gaiman (he of #Neil Webfail fame) writes that he felt if he said nothing on his blog, it might keep Ballard alive a little longer.
 And speaks feelingly of how terrifyingly ordinary the man was:

"... I don't know what or who I had been expecting, but Jim Ballard, then, and whenever I met him after that, was terrifying in his ordinariness, like the protagonists of his high-rises and drowned worlds, like the man on the motorway island."

The Guardian is all over it, demonstrating with minimal effort how an online newspaper space can do all the book news work if it really wants to. Stories I enjoyed included this one, where Ballard describes his writing space, which included a painting he looked at nearly every day,(fittingly, a copy of a destroyed original), and a chair he probably sat on as a child.
Here he tells how the pram in the hall saved his writing.

I haven't checked yet, but this interview with music writer Simon Reynolds at Ballardian in 2007 may have assisted Reynolds in compiling his recent article for Salon.
Here's a fine excursion from some time ago by our very own David Tiley into Ballardian landscapes - don't forget to look at the Detroit Blog link.

And finally, let the true believers speak. Here's the opening of Simon Sellars' interview for Ballardian in 2006.

Here’s a man who admits he doesn’t read novels; instead he devours ‘invisible literature’: marginalia, copywriting, medical journals, psychiatric reports, Ikea catalogues. He’s influenced by Freud, film noir, science fiction and Surrealist paintings; film, more than anything. To compare him with some literary type who practices the art of ‘tight plotting’ and ‘well-rounded protagonists’ is woefully inadequate. Reviewing KC in the Telegraph, David Robson wrote: ‘The plotting is clumsy … and the violence, integral to the whole design, belongs to the world of comic-strips’. Well, yes. Precisely. Honestly, do we still live in an age where popular culture is considered second-rate to the almighty ‘novel’? Funnily enough, it’s Robson rather than Ballard who puts me in mind of my 78-year-old father, who refuses to watch The Simpsons because ‘cartoons are for kids’.

The whole of the Ballardian site is a treasure trove, enjoy.

news flash: Readings shop to open at State Library of Victoria

This news, just to hand.

And this as well - I've read three of them, for once, and loved The Pages and Breath as well as this. Might just pick up Ice anyway, because 'I'm worth it'.

(If you'd like a chance to win them all, enter the Readings competition.)

digital Montaigne will arrive very soon

At if:book, there is a thoughtful article by Sebastian Mary on reading and paper, and why the iPod for reading high quality Web content really should be only a moment away.

I read books, read blogs, I twitter compulsively. I use these different formats for different kinds of experience. I see no contradiction: what I'm getting at here is that the e-reader is being treated as though it is a viable vehicle for long-form writing, in a way that ignores the essential fact that long-form writing and reading is rooted in paper, and book manufacturing...

...I would welcome a device designed for downloading and archiving essays I think are important, a virtual library device for the belles lettres of today.

Armed with such a device, creating playlists, mashups, collages of our favourite short works, we might become a generation of digital Montaignes, annotating and expanding our collective discourse. Blogging is already, in effect, the re-emergence of belles lettres; and while blog posts are typically written for the moment, a device that could earn the blogger a small sum (and the cachet of being considered worthy of archiving) for every essay downloaded might well inspire a renaissance in short work written for a longer lifespan.

While I get a small headache thinking about the business model for that, he has noted that it already exists and is called iTunes.
So, why not have a bookshelf AND an e-reader, hey.

The first commenter on this post is a guy called Aaron Pressman who refers us to an online service called Instapaper - he blogged it here.

Note also that the Australian e-reader, the iLiad, available through Dymocks (no, I'm not being sponsored to say that), allows annotation.

Time for a shower - I'll leave it to you to embrace the rest of the discussion there, but note that Bob Stein, the founder of The Institute for the Future of the Book (where the if:book blog lives), is speaking in Brisbane this week. I am making inquiries and will let you know if he is coming south at all. (News of that event via Angela at LiteraryMinded.)

link circus

Newspapers will cope in the online environment, you know. If they really want to.

If you didn't see this a few weeks back, take a look now. Link via Amanda at Confessions Of An Author.

I will be seeing this coming in my letterbox soon, I hope.

As you can see, much better to check with Jessamyn first about the libraries' special collections than rely on the Smithsonian. Ask a librarian! specially a rarin' one.

And here is a new tool from Arc90 Lab to enhance the readability of anything you find online that's a bit messy. Works like a charm and is very easy to use - I have found you can print from it, too (that is, from the view it provides of stripped back text.) I am impressed.
Link via if:book.

Susan Wyndham thinks this Perth Writers' Festival adventure, borrowed from New York, would go down a treat in Sydney. (Has to be an improvement on the cabaret at Byron, I think.)

And finally, something completely different from Design Sponge. (Link via Catherine Campbell, who has recently provided illustrations to Lisa Dempster's brilliant Death Mook, on sale at Sticky, Readings and MagNation now.) Something there is that doesn't love an artist's blog roll...

observing a respectful and awe-filled distance...

From a link on her blog comes this story of M.J. Hyland's in October's Manchester Review. It reminds me of something Tobias Wolff might write, if he was in a flinty mood and inclined to be a little less lapidary. I long for her memoirs - or do I? perhaps she is taking the more interesting road, after all.

And best of all, a NEW BOOK IN 2009. Thrilling.

an old prize for a new year

Here can be found a poem from the T.S. Eliot prizewinner for 2009, Jen Hadfield, whose second collection has snared her the gong. Shetland, where she works, is well pleased.

There seemed to be quite a lot of Scottish poets in the lineup - here's a poem from Robert Crawford. Here, too, is one by US poet Mark Doty, just for people who are a bit thingy about clipping their nails.

And here is something else from the Guardian website that at first I was completely horrified by, then realised it's not as bad as I thought. This link better be permanent, though.