reeling and writhing

news bombardment

Via Mobylives, here's a report on an interview with Faber CEO Stephen Page on their e-publishing program.

Sales aren't massive, but when you think about the actual footprint of the e-readers out there, it is encouraging, and encouraging me to think this will be a more significant part of our business within two or three years than I had imagined...There is some hesitancy with publishers fully embracing e-books. We have a ‘book love', the printed book is a gorgeous object. We need to communicate that love with e-books, and there is something shiny and new and mobile about them.

Ivan Southall died more than a week ago at the age of 87, a prolific Australian author for children. Ramona Koval reprised her 1997 interview with him on the Book Show on Radio National last Thursday. (Warning - this link may expire over time.)

The second issue of RMIT creative writing mag Harvest will be launched on December 5th from 6-9 pm at The Order of Melbourne, 401 Swanston Street, Melbourne. More about the second issue on their blog, here.

Laila Lalami has information that the latest biography of Naipaul is going to be a cracking good read, even if the subject matter is rather unattractive.

And this is hitting the to-read list (for which I will be taking a holiday break after Christmas, to knock it back to at least 150 items.) no man's land features translations into English of new German fiction and poetry. This link comes from the excellent blog on literature in translation based at the University of Rochester,Three Percent.

Can Haz podcasts from Oxford University? We Can Haz. Link via Maud. I am going for the Tolkien myself. ( As Maud memorably puts it, one can listen to Milton in the laundromat.)

See, this is why I love these guys.

and in time we will all be stars

Oh dear.

In last week's New York Times magazine, professor of creative writing David Gessner comes to grips with some of the more unhealthy realities of the writing life sandwich, including the fact that there is less time for the teachers to read good writing and connect to the greats, let alone time for the students to do the same:

What, other than a romantic conception of the writer as creative monomaniac, is lost by the fact that many of us now make salaries almost on par with entry-level accountants? I think it is legitimate to worry that writers pressed for time will produce work that is more hurried; that writers who hand in annual reports listing their number of publications might focus as much on quantity as quality; and that writers who depend on bosses for their employment might produce safer, less bold work.

Another thing that is undeniably lost is time spent reading great literature and communing with writers of the past. While the effect of teaching on writing may be a matter of debate, its effect on reading is undeniable. That is because there are only so many hours in the day, and those hours are used up reading our students’ work, which is, by definition, apprentice writing.

Energy is finite while college students seemingly are not, and after teaching for a while you begin to feel as if you are in a “Star Trek” episode, lost on a strange planet made up of a thousand pods of need, all of them beaming out at you, sucking your energy, and all of them, invariably, asking you to read something. Since the reading life feeds the writing life, since we are what we eat, this can wear you down, to say the least.

The novelist Mike Magnuson puts this sentiment more bluntly: “What teaching has done for me is make me not want to read anything, written by anybody, for the rest of my life.”

This is a toughminded little piece -  I agree wholeheartedly with the need for some contact with the 'real world', wherever it comes from and however much of it you take into yourself if you aim to make anything out of nothing, as Gessler suggests writers do.

There are some  intriguing remarks made on the anger involved in beginning your own work, echoing some of what I've read in Rachel Power's terrific collection of interviews, The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood. Nice work, Mr. G.

Link via Maud N. Note also this comes from the "College issue" of the New York Times mag, full of articles on education - contents page here.