reeling and writhing

news to me 27.05.10

Alice has been walking and taking photographs at her mother's command. The results are bewitching.

Writing at Desktop, Australian blogger Gerard Edelson calls Banksy's film, Exit Through The Gift Shop,

'that rarest of things in the internet age: a cinematic Trojan horse.'

His full review will be posted on his own blog, Celluloid Tongue, in good time, in good time.

One of my favourite short story writers is putting one up a month as a podcast, and selling the print version from her website as a zine (and Jen makes pretty ones.) We are lucky punters. Get over there and listen, and send off for a bundle when she has a few more up. I will be.

Polari's first issue features an interview with Edmund White, poetry by Pam Brown, the short fiction of Dallas Angguish and the writing of Staceyann Chin. This new international journal is is currently holding an open call for submissions from LGBT and queer writers for its second issue, with a publication date of October 1st 2010.

And finally this link from John Williams at The Second Pass, to an interview with US historian Jill Lepore, carries a very sweet tale of an inspiring letter with it. What an interesting idea for a teacher to have, taking letters every year from 15 year old pupils and posting them back five years later. I wonder if he ever got any of them mixed up...(yes, that would be me if I was that teacher.)

reading more and more and then some

The 'forthcoming publications' list is up at Giramondo. TASTY, especially the Gig Ryan collection and the short fiction collection from Jess Huon later in the year.

The last book I read from this press was Judith Beveridge's latest collection, Storm and Honey. I am pleased to see that it will not be long before I read another.

I have been enjoying an essay by Barry Hill in the latest HEAT mag on Pound and his pseudo-sinology, and am very pleased to see a fragment of it online:

...the paradox then was that Pound’s voice was not connected with ‘life’ in any direct way – not like Lawrence’s, for instance. It was still the product of a masking, an immersion in an act of projecting himself into something else. The Metro poem was an omen. It pointed to the extent to which Pound’s life and work, his angry heart and visionary yearnings, would be close to an enactment of Eastern aesthetics and philosophy, a translation voyage that would shape his modernism.

This paradox is deepened by the fact that Pound never travelled East: in 1914, he passed up a chance to go to China and was thereafter out of touch with crucial events as they unfolded. His China was a construction: what he got out of it was always literary and thus partially dead, even as he could breathe a life into it for aesthetic and political purposes. He hoped that China – or his Confucius, at least – would save Europe from itself, but it no more did that than his Chinese dictionary saved him from a crack-up when he was caged at Pisa in 1945.

A shame more of it is not there, as there are some penetrating remarks on the tone of Cathay, a book of translations from the Fenollosa archive which Pound published in 1915:

he sent a copy of two poems to his friend, the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska who was in the trenches. The 'Lament' begins:

By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,

Lonely from the beginning of time till now!

Trees fall, the grass grows yellow with autumn,

I climb the towers and towers

to watch out over the barbarous land;

Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert,

There is no wall left to this village

Bones white with a thousand frosts,

High leaps, covered with trees and grasses;

Who brought this to pass?

Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?

Who has brought the army with drums and kettle drums?

Barbarous kings...

and sorrow, sorrow like rain.

Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning...

'They depict our situation in a wonderful way,' Gaudier told him. The whole book was organised to do so.

Hill states that a recent biographer, Moody,

'rightly praises Cathay as brilliantly ahead of its time - anti-war poems that jumped the gun on Wilfred Owen and others. Pound, who never went to the front, did not out of respect for the soldiers attempt to render the war directly. Cathay is momentously strong partly because it provided a godsend of deflection for Pound, a grand way of making an impersonal art, its classical mode, matter.' I was surprised to learn that Pound could not read Chinese when he produced this collection.

HEAT 22: The Persistent Rabbit is in independent bookshops now.

publisher as platform: Cursor is nearly here

From Richard Nash's blog, on his publishing start-up, Cursor.

The best way to enable them to get the word about our books, about our community, about our writers published and unpublished, out to all the readers and writers they talk to is by participating: by having our books sold into their stores, by having our books reviewed by their conventional media that helps librarians, booksellers, and yes, even readers make purchasing decisions, by having the books visible in those places most highly trafficked by avid book readers and writers, by making books available to readers’ advisory librarians. I admit, it freaks the investors out a wee bit, participating in this expensive and barely profitable part of the business. We’re not selling to the trade to make money, we’re selling to the trade because we owe it to the community. (Plus, we’ve other ways to make money.) But we wouldn’t be Cursor if we didn’t tweak this. And the tweak is pretty radical. It’s not really a tweak at all, it’s a complete break with publishing norms...

No more life-of-the-copyright contracts.

Instead: three year contracts.

Yup, from a contract that locks you in till seventy years after you’re dead, to a three year contract. Renewable annually thereafter. Which means after three years you can walk. Or stay, but stick it to us for better royalties because there’s gonna be a movie. Or stay with us because with all the additional formats and revenue opportunities we’re creating above and beyond what any publisher has to offer, you’re making more money than ever before.

Nash has been in publishing news recently, giving a talk in Canada that excited quite a few people. To keep informed of developments with his latest publishing venture, you can subscribe to news at thinkcursor.com. Richard Nash will be delivering a keynote address at the Australian Booksellers' Association conference in Brisbane in July.

it's news to me 10.05.10

At the recent W3 conference, self-publishing platform Lulu was not only a Gold Sponsor, but just look where their exhibition booth was.

Jane Ciabattari of the Critical Mass blog enjoyed Patti Smith's address at the PEN World Voices conference last week. There is a link to audio of the event at the end of her post.

As they say on Dumbfoundry, the seventeenth issue of Otoliths is...fresh.

Older news, but still worthy - last year a POD publisher issued 272,930 titles. Publishers' Weekly tells you how BiblioBazaar did it.

Last week Ramona Koval interviewed Nicholas Birns, the editor of the scholarly journal on American studies of Australian writing, Antipodes, and the podcast is here. 

Two remarkable collections of poetry are available this month at a reduced price at Giramondo Publishing. For a limited time you can purchase the latest collections by Jennifer Maiden and Judith Beveridge together, for $35, at a saving of 20%.

FInally - I really enjoyed watching Hanif Kureishi talking on the Guardian website last week to mark the publication of his Collected Stories (at 688 pages, I'd be wanting that in hardback). Some great photographs, and I never tire of listening to him. It is great, too, to hear him say that while the idea of a collection 'rather horrified' him at first, feeling it was 'some kind of tombstone', he also now feels moved to write more. YESSS.

A Peace Of Wall in Hosier Lane

Yes, I was critical of the lack of news feeds on the new Literary Magazines Australia site, because the following is the kind of news I like to pull down in my feeds.

Martin Hughes, publisher at Affirm Press, invites you to several events supporting the publication of Peace Of Wall, a book of street art from East Timor:

Our motivation for publishing Peace of Wall is to engage a new audience in their plight, to invite people to consider this tiny and fragile country wedged – in more ways than one – between the giants of Indonesia and Australia. I love the idea of a city like Melbourne, so savvy in its appreciation of street art, learning about East Timor in this light, and people have responded really enthusiastically.

We’re bringing over three young artists – Etson, Alfeo and Zito – from Dili this week, to participate in a week-long programme of events we hope will create enduring links between street artists here and in East Timor. (Etson’s visa was delayed while he awaited clearance for TB, which in itself paints a fairly vivid picture of the differences between these neighbouring nations.) The cultures are so different that putting them together in one medium is bound to create some fizz. I’m looking forward to seeing what they make of each other’s work – the stylised scene in Melbourne compared to the more rudimentary, descriptive and political-charged art from East Timor.

Events include:

Saturday 8 May at 5pm
Painting a wall in Hosier Lane, followed by the opening of Chris Parkinson’s Exhibition at the Until Never Gallery.

Tuesday 11 May at 7.30pm

official launch of Peace of Wall – Street Art from East Timor Southpaw Bar, 189 Gertrude St, Fitzroy (with a live painting by the lads and music by East Timorese musician, Gil Santos)

Thursday 20 May

Restoration of East Timorese Independence Day.

For more information, drop Affirm Press at line at info[at]affirmpress.com.au.

it's (all) news to me 27.04.10

The Emerging Writers' Festival program for 2010 is up and at 'em, so go and see what you will be attending towards the end of this month. Thanks to a website revamp under the eagle eye of new director Lisa Dempster, it's a lot easier to see what's going on this year at this incredibly well-priced festival, and I will be posting later on the week on events that have caught my eye.

This is now fairly old news, but... the graffiti artist Banksy had a film opening in the US on the 16th of this month. 

Fresher news comes via Bob Stein of a new article by CraigMod on e-readers, Embracing The Digital Book, following up on his widely read piece on books and the iPad last month.

Most of the news this Tuesday centres on that celebrated member of the linkerati, George Dunford. George has very graciously blogged his Big Issue profile of Anna Dusk at Hackpacker, and has a few remarks on the future of graphic novels up at Readings, where I found out that Paul Auster's City Of Glass also exists as a graphic novel. By the time this is posted I reckon a copy will be on its way to me, thanks to Visa.

George ran a couple of panels at the Wheeler Centre's graphic novels events on the weekend. And introduced me to Oslo Davis last Thursday at the Emerging Writers' Festival launch, to which I swear I went to support my blog friend-the-director, not to meet graphic arts heroes. It is not news, either, that Oslo's Sunday cartoon for the Age, Overheard, will soon appear as a book. One of the finest Christmas presents you could buy.

The calendar at the Wheeler Centre now includes full details of the Deakin Lectures for 2010, focussed fairly and squarely on climate change (there was a splendid two -page spread on this in the Saturday paper as well):

Curated by Professor Tim Flannery, we’ve gathered 30 of the best people addressing the climate problem now. These aren’t the usual suspects spouting fixed positions. At the Deakins you’ll hear from practitioners, from fresh informed voices with practical experience of achieving emissions reduction. These are people working to innovate in policy, business, finance and new technologies to help create a brave, new, low emissions world.

Finally, for those of us who haven't already seen Curious Pages,  here's what John Williams at the Second Pass had to say about the blog on 'recommended inappropriate children's books' earlier and later this year.

symptoms of change: Ron Silliman for the Poetry Foundation

Poets blogging is just a symptom. The decline of indie bookstores, including the closure of such stalwarts as Cody’s & Shaman Drum, is just a symptom. The slow, painful death of newspapers, most of which have already tossed their book review sections and literary critics overboard, is itself just a symptom. The collapse of academic literary journals—viz. TriQuarterly, Southern Review, and Poetry Northwest, three of my first publishers—is just a symptom. Trade publishers openly speculate that they may be next, and even universities are starting to fear that their turn may be coming. They’re right.

Just as MFA programs have pumped the number of poets writing and publishing in the United States up from a few hundred a half-century ago to tens of thousands today, the major institutions that not only embodied all of this activity but served an important (if hotly contested) gate-keeping function are now all being undermined or transformed by the ongoing revolution in communications technology. The poet’s relationship to his or her audience is undergoing a profound transformation. The poet’s relationship to the institutions and even to the tools of her or his practice is doing likewise. Everything is up for grabs.

Some poets have chosen to embrace the new with everything from flarf to technology-based visual poetries. Others have decided that the “timeless” values of tradition will outlast even this. They recall and sometimes reiterate the archaeologist’s maxim that ultimately, hard copy is truth. If you can’t dig it up in 5,000 years, did it ever exist? Ian Hamilton Finlay, with his stone-carved minimal texts, may outlast us all.

What’s apparent is that (a) this joyride isn’t over, and (b) we’re all in this together. When I realize that any chapbook publisher with a Blogspot page and PayPal account can sell directly to readers worldwide, I feel hopeful. I just hope we can find time to read & enjoy this great bounty. 

I have extracted this from a much longer article - it is Silliman's contribution to 2000-2009: The Decade in Poetry, published at the Poetry Foundation's website at the end of last year. Have a peek at Eileen Myles' contribution, where she speaks with anticipation of the possibilities of new alchemical combinations/partnerships for poetry.

I will be rifling my hoard of older online material over the coming months for snippets like this - I have over 400 articles bookmarked 'to:read'. Often I just go to the end of the list and knock a few off, but from time to time, I do read a couple. Like today. He does have a point about reading, I must confess.

the iPad container for a new kind of book, says Stein

As readers of if:book know, i've often referred to books as the principal vehicle humans have used to move ideas around time and space. Thanks in large part to the internet, over the past fifteen years that function is increasingly being supplanted by the internet/computer/screen combo. I know many people are disappointed in the iPad because they see it as a crippled computer (e.g. Cory Doctorow's recent rant in Boing Boing). Perhaps, if Cory and other critics would stop thinking of the iPad as a computer, but rather think of it as the container for a new kind of book, they might see its potential in a different light. Although a book (in technology terms) is a closed system and certainly not a platform for creativity in the sense that a computer (or a typewriter is), that hasn't stopped books from being invaluable to humanity. For me, the iPad is a an exciting baby step on the way to realizing Neal Stephenson's astonishing conception of the future of the book as described in Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Well worth the read.

[NOTE: Having said all this, I am still very disappointed in all the ways that Apple limits that potential by insisting that the iPad live within the tightly controlled garden walls it has constructed.]

via www.futureofthebook.org

Bob Stein being his usual idiosyncratic self, or is he on the money here?

On the other hand, Cory D certainly is very cross about a lot of things, not many of them to do directly with the transformation of content by instruments and more to do with distribution, creativity and shared culture. The comments on his (sometimes theatrical) post are instructive too.

Book Reviews: How The Web Reads 'Em, via ReadWriteWeb

Why Google and Other Humans Don't Read Your Book Reviews

The book and media industries are going through interesting times, to put it mildly. As physical books prepare for their demise, the confusion around pricing of digital ones grows. Yet, whether physical or digital, to sell books you need marketing. People need to hear about a book before they buy it.

Alex Iskold of ReadWriteWeb haz most of teh bomb on online book reviews.

In short, most reviews published online as part of large media outlets' contribution to book reviewing ARE NOT TAGGED SO THAT GOOGLE CAN FIND THEM (and I want to shout this from the rooftops, I do). Which partly explains, as you'll see if you read further into that post, why all the reviews I ran here last year carrying 'review' in the title did quite well in search results, thanks.

A Simple Way to Please Google

So how should the book reviews be tagged?

To start with, the title needs to make it clear, that this is a book review. Of course humans may find a more subtle title more enticing, but for the sake of machine: Book Review: Manhood by Mels has to be present. It would be even better to mark up that this is a book review, and here is the book title and here is the author.

Next, the post needs to be adorned with the right tags and keywords. L.A. Times' reviews are certainly very clever, but again, Google does not get humor. A better tag would the title of the book, the name of the author and the non-conspicuous phrase "book review".

Iskold obligingly runs through how this important task might be done better through the use of structured formats or markup, of which there are now quite a few breeds around. This is of course so damn important I had to stop my self-imposed Internet weaning exercises to tell you all.

I'm assuming you've looked at Iskold's example of tagging, but I will go further and tell you why Zadie Smith's review of E.M. Forster's radio show scripts in the New York Review of Books, the link to which I fluffed a while back, can be easily found online, even without review in the title: because the NYRB in their wisdom used a structured markup known to all good cataloguers and digital archivists as Dublin Core, a subset of RDF (see the comments in Iskold's post for further technical discussion on these matters.) This is an EVEN BETTER WAY, particularly if your subbies don't want to see a page full of titles screaming REVIEW. It works well, however my little reviews also work with none of this fancy metadata (to play with that I have to pay Typepad more dollars), only with review in the title.

(If you want to see the tags, go to View in the browser toolbar, and click on Page Source for a similar view to that shown in Iskold's post. Typepad doesn't like the long lines of markup text, so I won't waste time producing it here.)

What, then, are newspaper owners thinking while they skinny up our Saturday papers and threaten to lock up their book reviews behind paywalls, all for the lack of a little measly markup? "Hooray, no more book reviews, nobody has complained so they obviously weren't reading them anyway"??? Don't know why = don't want to know....!!

Do they care? One has to wonder, seriously. The small amount of research I have done into this across several sites, including Book Forum (where not all metadata in reviews is equal) and Flavorwire (which often has 'review' in titles, though they do lose some findability in a 'Daily Dose' reviews segment) suggest that the very simple act of including book review or review in the title can make all the difference, and structured markup is teh bomb.

The first of these two practices is very common web knowledge, and surely known to most sub-editors by now - or are we finding out the hard way, watching book reviews in papers die online so that media bosses can pretend they could never afford them anyway?

Bear in mind that the search online for a review does not take into account the browsing aspect of review reading which is such an inviting aspect of  the 'paper' newspaper (although a featured reviews webpage could assist with that).

The Age has it right, for the reviews that are put online anyway, following Iskold's suggestion that Book Review be in the title tag:

<title>A Woman of Seville - Book Reviews - Books - Entertainment - theage.com.au</title>

returns Carmel Bird's recent review of Sallie Muirden's A Woman Of Seville at the top of world and Oz searches.

The Australian failed this test on one example I tested - consequently the review of Lenny Bartulin's The Black Russian which was put online on the weekend is practically invisible. Here's its metadata:

<title>The art of being a bad luck magnet | The Australian</title>

<meta name="description" content="The Black Russian By Lenny Bartulin Scribe, 261pp, $27.95" />

<meta name="keywords" content=" crime thriller, Phillip Marlowe" />

Venero Armanno's November 2008 review of The Slap, which did have 'Book Review' in the keywords tag, though not the crucial title tag, has disappeared without trace, while my review still rides the Google waves and continues to draw traffic. This is a great pity, and I have linked to it from my review today.

If you're a reviewer or an editor, get thee to the IT department, go, go, and get it sorted. While you're there, tell them to put all the weekend reviews online very early on Saturday morning, too (this, the Australian does, and the Age dawdles unconscionably over). So bloggers can link to those fine examples of reviewing in the print pubs and go on doing what we prefer to do, engaging in conversation and chatty recommendation, hopefully a la Forster, instead of being blamed unfairly for the nonfindability of newspaper reviews. You have librarians, guys - clearly The Age is using theirs.

As you were. Transmission will probably resume in June. May not talk much more about this in the comments as there is a lot of stuff going on here. But I did want to share these words of vindication.

you will be distracted by all the dazzling activity, and buy books

SOOOO much going on in the City of Books that my head reels. I told my son I wasn't buying any more books, except for him, and it was an awful lie.  For just look at these nice new things:

1. Puncher and Wattman's latest anthology of poetry, Out Of The Box, a contemporary collection by gay and lesbian writers edited by Michael Farrell and Jill Jones, is to be launched at Hares and Hyenas on February 2 by Christos Tsiolkas and Kathleen Fallon. Jill has details on her blog, Ruby Street, and links to an interview with Scott Patrick Mitchell at OutinPerth.

The new anthology Out of the Box is the brainchild of Michael Farrell and Jill Jones, arguably two of our nation’s most exciting queer voices. Together this poetic duo have brought together an impressive number of poets, among them the likes of David Malouf and Dorothy Porter.

‘We wanted a book that presented poetry being written now which is why, by-and-large, the poets are represented by relatively recent work, explained Jones of the process behind creating Out of the Box. ‘It is quite consciously not historical, nor even a survey of the last 20 or 30 years. We hope much of it is fresh, with just a dash of older work.

You can buy Out Of The Box at bookshops, or online here and here.

2. Karen Andrews is busy putting the finishing touches to a fine anthology of blog writing over at Miscellaneous Press, with a stellar lineup of contributors. That makes three, not two, books I will soon buy (see no.6). I am indeed a God-awful liar about my bookbuying.

And there's more, as they say when selling steak knives, though not all of it for sale.

3. The Wheeler Centre has put more programming online, some of it as far ahead as May.

4. Submissions are being accepted for the sixth Sleepers Almanac, until February 12. And it will also be released as an iPhone app.!

5. There is an impressive stream of independent publishing news from the Australian small press cooperative, SPUNC, whose membership is growing steadily. Their RSS feed is a very good thing to be keeping your eye on, you know you want to.

6. The latest Lifted Brow, no. 6, which looks fabulous, was launched with a themed party last week at the Bella Bar at Trades Hall. I didn't quite make it there, but I believe it was a hoot.

On top of this, it is nice to know, isn't it, that Tom Keneally thinks it is just as well that the new writers' stamps are self adhesive or else he would be licking David Malouf's and Peter Carey's arses. I feel much wiser now, myself. (Going to buy the stamps too, for sure. The early Carey one has a great retro feel about it.)

All a bit too much for this blogger - I am looking forward to quieter distractions, but more anon.

a little news for the not so new year

Some writing news: the Queensland Writers' Centre has moved into the State Library of Queensland, joining a hub of writerly organisations which will also house the Queensland branch of the Institute for the Future of the Book when it opens. Details here.

It's official (and reworded, yes, thanks for the correction): the Emerging Writers' Festival  director for 2010 is Lisa Dempster. Hearty congratulations to editor, publisher and author Lisa, whose travel book Neon Pilgrim  I wrote about last year.

Richard Nash has been writing on what publishing will look like in 10 years time, for Galleycat.

From writing, to film - we all got our fill of 2009 lists I'm sure, over the break - however Mr Celluloid Tongue has more, probably some lists you will like. Good to see Spotless Mind and The Proposition up there - the much-praised film of Sweeney Todd I have yet to see, though I saw a bloodcurdling amateur production in 2008. Gore in operas I can handle, but I do not like my musicals steeped in it, I'm afraid.

Finally, thanks to John Williams of The Second Pass for this site, which he says is updated 'far too infrequently for my taste, but it's always worth the wait'.

subscribing all over the land

...just in case you did not know, there is a subscription drive at the literary journal Overland - and the fancy button below will take you to that esteemed journal's blog to read guest posts around and about good Australian writing (as well as occasionally urging you to read the current issue and SUBSCRIBE).

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Abbotts and Bishops, it's an

                        

and I am supporting it because its editorial team have their eyes (and get their hands) firmly on well-written, readable essays on public issues, in short it's worthy of your attention, and above all, EXTREMELY good value for money - the cheapest literary mag around. I don't know how they do it for the price - essays, fiction, poetry, reviews. Incredible.

(There's also some very attractive subscription packages with other Oz mags - package deals with Island, Griffith Review, Wet Ink and Meanjin.)

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.

all the news that's left before Santa comes

This story is astonishing. Some entrepreneurs are just whitewater rafters, through and through, aren't they?

Ramona snaffled Peter Stothard, the editor of the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) and had a chat to him about newspaper book reviews a couple of weeks ago.

Lynne is a brave, brave person and I hope podcasting will enable me to listen to her broadcast on teh Beeb when it happens in a week or so, and drink champagne.
If there is anyone out there who wouldn't mind translating that Latin from the BBC's head office in the picture for me, I'd be most grateful.

As Jessamyn West says, will these books get all messed up? Via librarian.net, from Vogue Italia.

And if there are librarians out there looking for a testdrive of things to do with the library's new Kindle before it's released to the users, Kathryn Greenhill has a ripper list here.

Finally - Anne Beilby reports on the Text website that the French rights to Gerald Murnane's The Plains were sold to P.O.L. just before he won the Melbourne Prize. One more country besides Sweden in which Murnane can be enjoyed.

hardest working Barry in OzLit has a film deal

Grracious. The hardest working man in online serialisation has already had his work 'in development' signed for a film deal.

Max Barry is the author of traditional fiction titles Syrup, Jennifer Government (which comes with its own online game, downloaded by thousands), Company and Machine Man, which he is publishing online as a feed which carries a fee past a certain number of pages.

I first heard a chirp about this on Twitter a couple of weeks ago - and now it's in the open, and has been written about in Variety and on the Wall Street Journal books blog to boot. Looks like MM is now on my holiday reading list. He has some thanks for a mentor and friend on the latest post on his website:

I have to mention (again) my Machine Man muse/tormentor M.I. Minter, the guy who essentially provoked me into doing this, because his response to this latest development was:

It’s amazing the fantastic things that happen when you regularly produce work.

Three hearty virtual cheers!!! I look forward to seeing this solidify.

other reading, other writing

At the Varuna blog, Cate Kennedy talks about the need for feedback during the writing process from other writers and editors, and her appreciation for readers' remarks on her work.

It’s one thing for a critic to praise your deftness with imagery or whatever, but when someone feels moved to write that they’re planning on staying alive to read what you might come up with next…well,  that’ll get you back to the desk – elated and close to mysterious tears, not sure whether to laugh or cry.

There's a review of Judith Beveridge's latest collection, Storm and Honey, by Libby Hart up at Cordite.

Here's another beautiful bit of writing from Ampersand Duck, this time on some of her own work. What a fine photo-essay this is, on the story and making of pillow books. Get her into Black Inc tout de suite.

Looking for something silly? John Williams' personal collection of personals from the LRB is a hoot.

And here is something rather gorgeous I will get in my letterbox at some point, as a subscriber. John Williams comments that "It looks stunning. Not sure how it’s supposed to make the newspaper business feel any better, though. Not exactly a feasible model . . ."

Finally here's a great post by Alec Patric about the latest issue of Page Seventeen, and the life of small mags in general.

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.

from my email...

For it is true, some of us live in an Internet world. And isn't "Internet Tendency" just the best name ever for a service delivering an i-Phone app from indie publishers? How 'hubbly jubbly'.

Mc Sweeney's email newsletter promises great things for its new iPhone app, The Small Chair:

No longer will T-Pain be your only salvation on trains, during lunch, and through all the other empty gaps in a day. Allow McSweeney's to fill your moments of solitude, moments of togetherness, moments of intolerable boredom.'

Und so weiter. There's a review making extravagant claims about sales of The Small Chair, here at Boldtype.

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.

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.

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. 

so click through now

Now online, at a blog near you: George Dunford's terrific article on litblogs, for the Big Issue of two weeks ago (that would be number 335, with the shot of the King on the front.)

Very pleased to see that one accessible - in a short space, George has captured not just the atmosphere of Michael Williams' drinkies a few weeks back, but also some useful conclusions, and given a few of us some nice nods along the way. (Angela was required to be in two places at once on that occasion. Not even Ange can do that yet...) Thanks, Mr HP.

books, spelling, e-readers, ghosts galore

Just In. A simply smashing post on early writing from Penni Russon.

My other top selection for the week is this stupendous post about Venice and Tintoretto, from Fiona's exceptional Strange Fruit blog on painting, photography and writing.

It is time to thank poet and writer George Dunford, of Hackpacker, for his great article on litblogs in last week's Big Issue, which I fortunately got into town to buy late in the week while attending to some panel discussion and the launch of Nathan Curnow's  Ghost Poetry Project, which was a very moving occasion (photos from Sean M. Whelan there). More of that anon. (Update: the article is now available to read on George's blog.)

Feel bad that others can't see what you are reading when you carry your Kindle/iPhone/iLiad/whatsit around? (Not really an Australian problem yet, is it?) Etsy may have the solution. Via Three Percent.

In Readings in Hawthorn this morning, saw a very attractive display of Faber Firsts - enjoy those retro covers for the modern era if you haven't seen them already. (Let's face it, I saw mine in the shop, so I'm last to the party.) They are rather fine, and for some reason I think I like them better than what I've seen so far of the poetry. A little overdone? I just don't know.