reeling and writhing

something ingenious and lovely...

...to enjoy.
And remixing will be provided (see the Made tab for details).

Bless good ship Cordite and all who sail in her. This will be my main online reading for the next week or so.

the Notificator...makes for a great post title

Ooh. Mr Nash finds cool stuff for us on Twitter.
If you are not on there, or like me find it a bit hard on the eyes sometimes, you can subscribe to his RSS feed.

Meanwhile here's a blast from the past on asynchronous messaging. (Thanks, Mr. N.)

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.

tweet renga

This has been driving huge amounts of commenting traffic to Cordite, so go have a look. The slowly maturing result is magnificent, too.

Remember book trailers? and how awful they were? Apparently they are improving. (It looks like Sloane Crosley, of eating cake fame, put a lot of work into hers too.) Via Boldtype.

People are never satisfied, are they?

Here is a fine swag of Queensland writers, via the Empty Pages blog at the Queensland Writers' Centre.

Posted this mainly because I just like the name of the feature (and our shed is in need of a Howards Storage World makeover). I like the Cloffice, too, mainly because I have half a room...and it's a real mess right now.

This book has a foxy cover, as Kath might say - but even more impressive is its author's completely silly rider.

This is such an impressive use of technology. Flick on the slide show and enjoy your own West Wing.

Here's another amazing local cover, coming in October to a shop near you.

And finally, why did I not know about this till I got an OzBallet newsletter? It's already been going for a month: check out David McAllister's post on the So You Think You Can Dance final (and note he was not given a seat in the house on the night, tssskk.)

we are the slow bloggers

There be a Meanjin blog, with name Spike, where high-quality content is just pouring in, including editor Sophie Cunningham's top-notch travelogue pieces. Google Reader has discovered its feed - just look at that! how pretty! so I can kill the Twitter feed now.(Well, I might...and I might not.)

Recently George Dunford has posted there on blogged novels (I hear also that Max Barry is publishing his latest online in serial format; the indefatigable Angela Meyer of the fabulous LiteraryMinded site at Crikey has interviewed him here. Links via Matilda.)

At the Overland blog it is business as usual, with a spirited post from Jeff Sparrow about writers being ...well, generally boring folk.

In other Australian blog news, Perry is going to work through Jamie Grant's 100 Australian Poems on a weekly basis, which will make for some excellent reading. Go, you good thing. And Sarsaparilla Lite is well and truly in place pending the resurrection of that original flavour of cultural commentary.

And at Ragged Claws, comme d'habitude, there's plenty to talk about. Not always strickly Orstralian, but lots of commenters and a great new talking space. I am grateful to James Bradley who first alerted me to its presence at his excellent blog, City Of Tongues (word is on the street that it's having a makeover, so watch that space for a possible name change.)

With all of this sparkling, nay, champagne blogging going on (including everything on The Rachel Papers), it makes me wonder, in a Bex-and-a- lie-down context of course, what could I possibly be missing about Australian books and writing on Twitter?

It does feel funny to be old media in a twinkling like that.

(ReadWriteWeb says Twitter has grown faster in Oz than - well, anywhere, recently. Just look at that graph. I assure you, my brain is way too small and wizened, and I am no part of it.)

if it ain't broke...

At nine minutes to midnight, please consider the arguments against lifting copyright restrictions to the parallel importation of books in Australia, currently being proposed by the Productivity Commission. The impact upon authors is described persuasively by Alison Croggon (with links to others), here at Sarsaparilla Lite.

There is a small but significant fact that is being glossed by booksellers’ blithe claims that authors “still earn their royalties”. I earn a significantly higher percentage of royalties from books sold in Australia than from those sold overseas. Books that are published and sold here earn me the full 10 per cent royalty of the cover price. Books that are sold in overseas markets often have a smaller royalty – ranging from 6 to 8 per cent – and after that, under the agreements from my original publisher, I lose from 25 to 50 per cent of the gross royalty to the original publisher. This is a standard agreement which publishers all over the world use to ensure that their initial investment in an author is financially recognised....
Territorial copyright is a right for all authors in the United Kingdom and America. Neither of those countries, for good reason, is considering abolishing this protection for their own authors.

This is a clear and incisive post which lays out the case against lifting the copyright restrictions after 12 months, as proposed by the Productivity Commission, very clearly indeed.
The Empty Pages blog at Queensland Writers' Centre reports that there will be a demonstration outside Dymocks in Brisbane by children's authors tomorrow in response to the unusual step taken by Dymocks last week in asking its customers to sign a petition in favour of the changes proposed by the Productivity Commission.

A recent update from Bookseller and Publisher magazine here provides a link to a petition form online for the public's use at the Australians for Australian Books website, in response to the Dymocks customer petition. The AusBooks petition will form part of the APA's final submission to the Productivity Commission.  Most of this news from B&P is freely available. Read on.

subversion on the cover

Europeana reports that its interactive features are now fully functional. If you haven't yet checked out this mammoth digital project with search tentacles reaching across Europe's museums and archives, maybe it's time.

Beautiful writing from this lady, as always. Not as frequent as she was, but Dervala Hanley is still close to the best of my web in the life writing category.

As Ron Hogan noted last week, it was Helen Sweetstory's birthday and she is 59. That would have been a swell party.

Haven't been reading Mr Rosen for a while, but hey, he's sure been busy.

I do not think we will be able to ignore this book when it comes out. Talk of putting colour back into your life (or your books)!!

Finally, more of Waugh from Picador. Amazing.

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...

blogs all over every day

From Creative Economy Online comes a link to this story from the New York Times about a Chicago news publisher who has decided to hand out blog stories as free newspapers, splitting profits from advertising between himself and the bloggers. Claire Cain Miller suggests that some (though not all) free dailies are still in a good position as print news battles to stay afloat across the globe, thanks to the relatively constant value of local advertising:

'Ads from local businesses are one reason that free dailies have been a rare bright spot in the newspaper industry. Unlike struggling car companies and department stores, which are mainstay advertisers of metropolitan dailies, small businesses have increased their ad spending during the recession, several publishers said.

“All growth in the newspaper industry for the last 20 years has been in free papers, and the fastest-growing segment of that for the last five years has been in free dailies,” said H. Harrison Cochran, publisher of The Aurora Sentinel in Colorado and past president of Suburban Newspapers of America.'

And the name of this new paper? Oddly enough, The Printed Blog.