reeling and writhing

god bless publishers, each and every one

I have seen something on ReadWriteWeb about FastPencil before. This will strike fear into the hearts of some publishers, though not all.

FastPencil certainly has a catchy name - the writer covering this also mentions a company called SmashWords, which he reports is mainly making its mark in the area of distribution of DRM-free e-books. Note, too, that ReadWriteWeb content has been syndicated by the New York Times' technology section since September this year - it is a very good news feed to follow if you are interested in web trends in publishing, along with other tech news.

read some Granta for free

That venerable UK literary organ, Granta, did a site rebuild recently and has announced via the monthly email newsletter that the online content on Granta.com has been refreshed.

New on Granta.com in May 2009:

'Rhyme and Reason' by Adam Gopnik: In conversation with the award-winning poet and essayist Katha Pollitt.

'Letter from Gaza' by Hisham Matar: The tragic life of Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani.

'Dragon Island' by Laura Fellowes: The most recent in our New Voices series.

'The Last Modernist' by Chris Petit: A consideration of the life and work of J.G. Ballard.

'A Vacation from Myself' by John Beckman: ‘What I gained, and lost, from antidepressants.’

'The Public Poet' by Lavinia Greenlaw: An appreciation of Carol Ann Duffy, Britain’s first female poet laureate.

'Getting Lost' by Heidi Julavits: One wintry weekend in the Berkshires.

It will be noted by the observant that online content is available via RSS in seven categories. I  may have seen this when I first visited this sexy looking new site about a month ago: for some reason it looked overwhelming and I plumped for the email newsletter.

So I guess if I really don't want to know about events I can't possibly attend, I could just subscribe to the half dozen other feeds on the online content page.

Or the email newsletter, which gave me the list above in a neat little bloggable text package. Hey, it's my choice.
Do note that it is also possible to subscribe to New Voices, which is definitely an exciting choice. Enjoy.

(belated) happy birthday to the Complete Review

Ten candles for the Complete Review.
Ten years old. My word.  Michael Orthofer muses on a decade, and resolves to sign his name to more reviews in future.

The Complete Review (founded in 1999) and its attendant blog, The Literary Saloon (around 2002), continue to set a very high benchmark for all literature blogs with an international readership. It's hard to believe one person is behind most of it - he does have a team of multilingual readers and reviewers, I know, but claims responsibility for the architecture and (gasp) the enduring URLS therein.
Then there's the eclectic news service - where else would I find a report like this straight from an Indian source on railway book stalls? (regrettably Outlook India has killed their own link within that story.)

Bravo, Michael and team, long may you run.

more of Lessing

Well, the Golden Notebook project is up and running.

I thought at first I had sixteen pages to read and catch up on, but upon examining the comments list at the bottom of the page it became obvious that some of the six seven selected authors are reading faster than others.

I hope they can wait a bit for the rest of us.

the whale has, thankfully, done a lazarus

What a golden project this will be.

Eddie Campbell has news of the Cisco Kid's shirt pattern, and of his origins as well - O.Henry, no less. Now that I did not know.

One of the original literature blogs (though it was more of a news site than a blog to my recollection) is back, now firmly attached to its founders' thriving press. (Via Three Percent.)

And from that venerable organ, I have been able to find Garrison Keillor on fire here at Salon, upset by Governor Palin:

She is a chatty sportscaster who lacks the guile to conceal her vacuity, and she was Mr. McCain's first major decision as nominee. This troubles independent voters, and now she is a major drag on his candidacy. She will get a nice book deal from Regnery and a new career making personal appearances for 40 grand a pop, and she'll become a trivia question, "What politician claimed foreign-policy expertise based on being able to see Russia from her house?" And the rest of us will have to pull ourselves out of the swamp of Republican economics.

Dennis at Mobylives has also located some very up to date commentary on Google's effortless sidle into digital publishing.

if this is not art...

From the National Young Writers Festival newsletter (and the website, on this page), there's been a callout for participation in the Interactive Narrative Workshop, to take place very soon in Newcastle and virtual spaces:

Electrofringe and the National Young Writers’ Festival are presenting an interactive narrative workshop at the 2008 TiNA festival. The session will be held in the Process Space on Friday 3rd October from 4-6pm, and is free and open to all. It will be the first meet up session to kick-start the process. Writers will be teamed up with interactive specialists and form groups for future collaboration. Following the initial workshop, the project will further organise frequent meet-ups in Sydney and Melbourne where collaborators can show their work and exchange ideas.

The project’s online home will be the ABC’s new POOL platform (www.pool.org.au), which will permanently form the goto and exchange place for people to post ideas and work in progress, and discuss projects as they unfold.

It looks as though online participation is a goer if you can't get to Newcastle for the workshop (read further here). So email Elmar Trefz at elmar@suebo.com with the following details:

    * Name
    * Contact details
    * Artform(s) (fiction / playwriting / video / web development / flash development / interactive media / artist / etc)
    * Any projects or ideas you’re working on, concepts, scripts, proposals, areas of interest or obsession.

if you are a young writer this interests.

get your book into this soup

Thanks to the Speakeasy blog at Australian Writers' Marketplace Online for their tip off about the initiative being shown by a young agent and aspiring writer from L.Perkins in the States, Jenny Rappaport, who is inviting authors to submit 'book blocks' for publication on her blog.

See here for more information. Rappaport introduces her project thus:

This is an open invitation for any author who has a book coming out to write up a short piece about one of the building blocks of their upcoming book. It can be about the characters, the plot, the theme, the actual writing structure, the idea behind the novel (or non-fiction work), the worldbuilding, etc.

In 500 words or so, explain to the reader how you used that "book block" in your new book, and why it makes your book special. Your aim should be to both promote your book (the free publicity aspect) and to try to teach aspiring writers how to grow in their own writing (the passing it forward part of this). I get about 500 readers a day, many of them aspiring writers, who are also avid readers.

Rappaport hopes eventually to post 'book blocks' up to twice a week, aiming to get new books more widely discussed. It's an enterprise worth keeping an eye on.

megalogenius watch

At the Speakeasy at AWM Online, there is a lot happening as their bloggers take on the Byron Bay writers' festival once more.

I am very happy to report this report on the place of blogs and new media, chiefly because George Megalogenis was there, and his comments have been faithfully recorded by Jane.

I have subscribed to Mr. M.'s blog because he is one of the most articulate economists I have ever heard speak - so clear that even my resident 17 year old , watching ABC's Lateline on the teev a couple of years back, could take in  his lengthy yet precise and informative sentences, and get the drift. A genius with one letter missing, he had this to say at Byron about social media and the last Federal election:

Megalogenis...considers today’s media very fragmented; back in the day when everyone read the same five or six newspapers, to a large extent everyone got the same message. Now, with blogging and internet resources and the thousands of different media that assault us all daily, everyone receives different messages, or different parts of the same message.

He also commented on the fact that newspapers are still a source for news, but they aren’t the same gateway they used to be. Blogs talk directly to their audience, unlike the opinion columnists of 10-20 years ago. And with the Kevin 07 internet campaign, the Labor party bypassed the papers and spoke directly to the electorate on a massive scale, in a way that hadn’t really been done before.

AWM blogger Jane also noted a difference of opinion between audience member Mungo McCallum and Megalogenis and other panellists about the potential in political online forums for echo chamber effects. An informative report, and there is plenty more on the festival from the AWM team, so if you couldn't get to Byron, have a look.

manuscripts on the way at LiteraryMinded

Recently I have added Angela Meyer's blog, LiteraryMinded, to my roll down there on the right, but have not yet subscribed to her feed. That's due to change right now - Lisa Dempster from Locus has alerted me to Angela's series of posts there, The Best Unpublished Books, parts One, Two and Three, on books which she knows are in progress but which for all kinds of reasons have yet to find the right publisher.

This kind of news feature is something blogs are eminently suited to, and it's great to see someone as well informed as Angela delivering her tips on who's out there, and what they're working on.

Lisa posted recently on articles about book reviewing and a whole bundle of other interesting publishing news, with an emphasis on independent presses and fresh publishing ideas.

While a Google Reader of 120 odd feeds is the nicest customised news reading you could possibly have, especially if you have mates' news and thoughts scattered throughout,  I struggle sometimes to remember what I've read, and got a big shock at a family function a few weeks ago when I added ten years and a new identity onto a young relative, simply because she had changed her hair (very becoming, but the alteration was significant, and the rellies numerous and fast-growing): so some of the filtering service I offer here from time to time with these links posts will inevitably become recommendation and referral only.

There are quite a few people out there doing this web-monitoring thing much better than I am currently, 'specially with my computer doing the Dying Swan like it is at present.

So I'm offering my strong recommendation for Angela's LiteraryMinded and for Locus, where Lisa Dempster and Emily Clarke of Vignette and Aduki presses write regularly on Oz publishing and writing, and read far more widely than I can on my lonesome here.

Check these blogs out: if you are a writer with published work you would like reviewed, think about whether Angela is someone you might send it to (see the bottom right hand corner of the homepage for details); and check out the eclectic and growing blogroll at Locus while you are there.

say a prayer for the dying

Peter Rose's ABR review of Helen Garner's first novel for fifteen years, The Spare Room, is online and (as a less refined person might say) SMMMMOKING.

This is probably the toughest review Garner's story about caring for a dying friend has had so far, opening as it does with the tart observation that this novella could easily have been written as nonfiction.

Hel’s pride is easily stung. As long as she has practical tasks – beds to strip and change, ‘straightforward tasks of love and order’ – she is composed, but soon she is worn out, anxious, resentful. There is no acknowledgment of her literary obligations or of her solitary nature. Hel seems most alive when she is on her own. The best writing in the book depicts sentience in solitude. A violent thrill runs down her arms and ‘seethes’ in her fingertips. Night noises lull her: ‘Something tiptoed across the leaf mulch outside my open window and paused there, breathing: to groom itself.’

Hel is almost professionally observant. Like Isabel Archer, she is ‘constantly staring and wondering’. Nothing escapes her: the neurosurgeon’s fat, penile Mont Blanc pen; the sort of men who can crack their spine and ‘make it crackle all the way down’...

When Nicola’s niece and her boyfriend pay a visit, the young woman is appalled by Nicola’s presumptuousness and her lengthy stay. Hel wants to sob with gratitude: ‘They were young, they were sane, and they were in my corner.’ While Nicola sleeps, the three of them laugh at her demands and swap stories about the inconvenience of it all. Not all readers – not all carers – will relish this Hobbesian pugilism.'

These are tough words for an uncompromising book which I am yet to read (doing that tidy thing that some of us do of getting my review reading out of the way first and saving TSR for 'afters'). Intriguingly, Rose seems to be looking for some respite himself from Garner's somewhat relentless evocation of anger as the enervating emotion it can so easily become, noting that this does not dissipate or evolve towards the novel's end.

Which makes for a powerful review from one of our best critical readers, and increases the pull of the unread book even more at my end.

(And yes, I'm also leaving it on the kids' shopping list for you-know-what day. Why do the bookshops parade all those pastel coloured books around for the day of buying big for female progenitors? Sussann's has BLACK japonaise-patterned flannel pyjamas this year. Get with the program, folks, get The Lost Dog out there for starters.)

Finally I must congratulate ABR for having such a sterling piece of criticism online for us linking folk. Luminous and numerous gold stars for you.

Scheherazade in Sydney

This project came to its culmination in a symposium at the Performance Space in Sydney recently, and was the subject of a review on Arts Hub by Talya Rubin:

'The impetus for the work came out of the sudden death of Barbara Campbell’s husband. The opening screen of her website reads: “In a faraway land a gentle man dies. His bride is bereft. She travels across continents looking for a reason to keep living. Every night at sunset she is greeted by a stranger who gives her a story to heal her heart and continue with her journey. She does so for 1001 nights.” As a way of coping with grief, Campbell undertook a period of enforced public mourning and used as her tools the daily paper, focusing on stories about the conflict in the Middle East.'

Rubin's review is available to Arts Hub subscribers here. Campbell is a member of the  Electronic Literature Organisation, and the text archive of the stories, which are otherwise only available at the time of performance online, is here. At GrandTextAuto she was taken to task for her rather severe approach to presentation, but nonetheless the frame concept and performance aspect of the project, as well as its duration over nearly three years, is remarkable.

on your ABC, and UTS

I wonder if this kind of thing approaches what the ABC has in mind for its new Compendium project, which I read about here in the Austlit newsletter of June-July '07. (That's right, I'm backdated.)

Rosa B is a bilingual online arts and design journal published in multimedia format - so there are filmed interviews along with articles and essays. It is very beautiful to look at, and a good place to practise your French if you are so inclined. (Over at if:book there is a profile of something else like this, called Issue - and yes, I read about Rosa B there first.) Issue has built more interactivity with the audience into its site by enabling comments, though I think the layout is a bit busy. There is not as much interactivity in the Rosa B site, which is perhaps where it diverges from a new Australian project in the works.

The Australian Literature Compendium, for which the ABC and UTS have received a $150,000 grant, will include an e-journal, podcasts and documentary features on one site, along with teaching resources.

Banyule chicken calls election

Oh my word. As the man says, please don't sue him.
Link via Christy Dena, who also provides a link to the list of the films included by its creator, Alonzo Mosely. I AM peeved I didn't pick the Blues Brothers the first time around.

There's a great review here from ReadWriteWeb of a movie recommendations site, giving you the lowdown on how to check the recommendations ghost in the machine.
And also from RWW, it seems that social networking has been part of the BBC's enterprise solutions for at least eight years.

John Freeman has a good post at Critical Mass this week introducing Sign and Sight, Europe's answer to the Complete Review, and has also been talking to people from Eurozine, a collaborative site for more than 60 cultural journals, while he's been at the Frankfurt Book Fair (all his posts from Frankfurt are worth a look).

Ho hum. Tomorrow I write (or at least start) a post without a single link in it. Treely ruly. I don't have a Caladrius bird in my yard, unfortunately, but I'll think of something.

things you will not find on Wikipedia (or elsewhere for that matter)

Recent additions to the Literary Encyclopedia include this entry on F.S. Flint, the Imagist poet, by Michael Copp from Cambridge University.
I thought I knew quite a bit about Aldington, Pound, Hilda Doolittle and Ford Madox Ford, but know absolutely zip about Flint, who was the second eldest of twelve children, left school at 13 and did not discover his exceptional language skills until he learned French and Latin at night school at the age of 19:

'Flint was a complex and contradictory character. The writer Richard Church, a colleague in the Ministry of Labour, underlined one side of Flint’s character when he described him as someone who was a “furnace of nervous passion”, an “unrestrainable companion”, and an “inflammatory creature”. Church witnessed at first hand the effects of Flint’s childhood of extreme poverty, and said he could see “that Flint’s wounds were still bleeding. This extravagant self-pity was the result. So were the recoil, the loud and aggressive histrionics. . . . Flint never found serenity. . . . He never lost his resentment at the miseries of his childhood”. John Gould Fletcher, a fellow-Imagist poet, saw Flint’s character as much more passive and submissive: “His dominating characteristic was a pathetic sincerity. . . . Regarding himself as a badly educated man, ashamed of his own cockney antecedents, he could easily be talked down by Ezra [Pound], or by anyone who appeared to be better educated, and who was capable of making flat, dogmatic assertions”.'

I like the layout of the Encyclopedia, and it only costs $15 a year to subscribe, as it is  aimed at students. It's populated by entries from scholars from all over the world, the editors for entries on Australian writing being Chris Wallace Crabbe, Amanda Nettlebeck, Peter Pierce and Paul Sharrad.

While some Australian writers are not yet represented, upcoming articles and profiles include Deleuze, Terry Eagleton and Lewis Carroll, among 809 entries in progress. (Miles Franklin's entry is being written by The Editors, possibly reflecting the regular dribble of search queries across the 'Net for her work and her prize.)

from the google reader

How Henry James would have hated hypertext, says Matt Christie. But 'he might have liked Hegel'. (now where did that bit go I wonder?)

Stephen Mitchelmore links to an interview over at the Harper Collins poetry weblog, Cruelest Month, with Gabriel Josipovici about his new novel and his lack of affection for historical novels: 'I don't believe in them or think they are a viable road for the modern writer to go down.'

I told everyone at the Library Uncon that Stephen Mitchelmore was good - I don't know if this is, but it certainly has curiosity value and I thank him for the link.

And Simon Sellars has noticed that Baudrillard died - but did anyone else in Oz blogging?

This probably is hard to swallow, but apparently AWP was top of the pops on Technorati t'other day. Link via Laurel Snyder, poet (and occasional prose-writer) of Jewishy-Irishy.

Lastly:
Tsk, not even in a handbag.