Whitmore Press is delighted to announce that Lucy Todd’s debut poetry collection, Listening to the Mopokes Go, will be launched in Melbourne on 16th August. The details:
The Alderman (upstairs)
134 Lygon St, Brunswick East
Friday 16th August, from 6.30pm
Launch by Cassandra Atherton – poet, novelist, critic and academic.
Lucy was the winner of the 2012 Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize. All welcome.
Melville House's marketing director for the UK, Zeljka Marosevic, has reported at the Melville House blog on the call from independent booksellers in the UK for government support to combat the rise and rise of Amazon.
She notes that the French minister for culture, Aurélie Filippetti, is investigating ways to support French independent booksellers to the tune of a 9-million-euro joint plan, and wonders why the Brits won't do the same:
While Filippetti has been working on plans which will invest money into modernising bookshops and helping them set up online platforms, considering whether to ban Amazon from offering free postage and packaging (which disadvantages bookshops) and generally showing how she will protect French literary and cultural life, Boris Johnson has been celebrating Amazon’s announcement to establish offices in London, Amazon has been earning more money from UK government grants than it has paid in taxes, and our culture minister Maria Miller has been…well, aside from patronising the arts world, it isn’t clear what Miller has been doing.
But UK bookshops continue to speak out. Jane Howe, owner of the wondrous Broadway Books in East London (check them out here) said:
”We really need the government to do something to protect independent bookshops. We are the heart of the community – sometimes you are the only person that a customer has spoken to all week. If the government want to keep any type of integrity in any high street they’ve got to support small businesses. It would be really wonderful if they took notice of what France is trying.”
I enjoyed reading Zoe Dattner's conference report a couple of weeks ago in Bookseller and Publisher magazine (now known as Books and Publishing, thanks!) Zoe was present at the eighth Tools of Change conference, convened recently in New York by O'Reilly Media.
While commenting on the depth and breadth of the US book market, she noted some things that she felt were pertinent to the Australian market, in particular the scope for greater support to book events from booksellers, and a better understanding in Australia of the potential of POD (print on demand).
At some length she reported on a session with GoodReads, discussing a survey of 1000 users they conducted recently (I would have loved to know if they have presented at TOC before).
For discovery, Twitter and Facebook score very low. Friends’ recommendations (word of mouth) is the highest. (It is not known, unfortunately, if the word of mouth people refer to comes from social media or person-to-person. My guess is that Twitter and Facebook are actually far more influential, but people consider this the same as word of mouth.) Following this, the best discovery comes from Goodreads itself, and then from media (presumably reviews and media discussion). Discovery via bookstore and the library ‘hold list’ is also very good. (A separate session that gave some fantastic data about libraries made the brilliant point that a library is really a showroom, and one that publishers and booksellers should advocate for.) On the question of why someone buys the book after hearing about it, the top answers were: friends telling you to buy it, general hype, and book clubs. Over 50% of readers said Goodreads reviews helped to convince readers to buy the book.
One of the most valuable points I took away from the Goodreads session was the statistic that 69% of people want to discuss the book with friends after they’ve read it, making me think how much better the industry could get at providing special deals on multiple copies (specifically ebooks) and that there should be better, and stronger, calls to action at the end of the book. Considering the technology available to us—particularly with ePub 3—the possibilities for a ‘What should I read next?’ page at the end of a book are vast.
A last interesting thought from this session was that 49% say they’d be interested in reading a book in serial form instead of waiting six months for the release, but only with an established author, or someone they like, not at all with an unknown author.
Zoe has kindly supplied the link to the keynote library session she mentions, 'The Library as Ebook Discovery Zone: More Lessons from *Library Journal's* Public Library Patron Research' delivered by Meredith Schwartz. A video link is supplied.
Apologies for not broadcasting this sooner,
but Alan Wearne's new book of poems,
will be launched tonight at Collected Works bookshop by Owen Richardson.
6pm-8.30pm.
1st Floor, Nicholas Building,
37 Swanston St, Melbourne.
Giramondo & Collected Works Bookshop invite you to the launch of Alan Wearne's new collection of poems, PREPARE THE CABIN FOR LANDING. The launcher will be esteemed Melbourne book reviewer Owen Richardson.
We quote from Giramondo's blurb :
"Wearne is Australia’s poet-moralist, a master of its idioms, the recorder of its pretensions, and the scourge of its big-noters, con-artists and crooks. In ‘The Vanity of Australian Wishes’ he pays tribute to Samuel Johnson and Juvenal, ‘who knew that combination of bemusement, annoyance, anger and despair to which your country can drive you, though always aware of its entertainment value and dramatic potential’.The collection includes an affectionate portrait of three Melbourne high school teachers in the early 1960s, and a saga which records the destinies of their pupils, satires on the world of finance and drug-dealing, literary academics and the libertinism of baby-boomers, and seven new poems based on Australian pop songs.
Alan Wearne’s verse novels The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers received major literary awards; his recent collection, The Australian Popular Songbook, won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry. He is the publisher of Grand Parade Poets, and teaches poetry at the University of Wollongong."
For further information do not hesitate to contact Kris Hemensley at Collected Works on 9654 8873.
Stay informed of further events and new stock at this brilliant, unique poetry bookshop by following it on Facebook.
Kris Hemensley, the bookshop's founder, also writes about poetry,his work and life here.
I know, I know. It's only the third of December.
Traditionally (a tradition of 24 years standing this year), we have four birthdays in January. So I am preparing about ten days earlier than everyone else. (Who else saw that hilarious Kikki K insert in The Age on Saturday? that calendar had NO TIME FOR SHOPPING in it. Just 'list' seguing effortlessly into 'wrapping'.)
Some of these are quite old. So forgive me if you have seen them already.
If you are feeling the pull to slow down over this busy time of year, the ABC has been running a program introducing meditation over the past six weeks. I heard about it through the Melbourne Meditation Centre, but it may well have been bruited elsewhere. Here's the toolkit. (You can easily trawl down the page to week 1 and begin at the beginning.)
I was interested to see this app, Flipboard, mentioned on the Killings blog by publishing researcher Caroline Hamilton, as I follow one of its developers on Twitter. And it looks to be a very pretty way of aggregating all your stuff on your iPad, too.
Caroline also mentions a 2010 article by Craig Mod that I really thought I'd read already. As it's not in my bookmarks, then I guess I will have to read it now, but it sure looks familiar...Books In The Age Of The iPad.
It's probably a bit late for Australians to order these and have them by Christmas, but this gorgeous Swiss toymaker's website is fun to look at, and I dare you not to order something one day. Via Things magazine. (Being the non-starting quilter I am, I have this on the wishlist.)
Something else I still haven't read - Terry Eagleton's review of a new bio of Derrida, from The Guardian.
Robert Crum, a couple of weeks back, had things to say about book marketing, coming up as a result with a list of lit-labels of his own which included the rather clumsy 'lit-lit':
The development of the literary marketplace in the past 30-something years has been echoed by a new, and acute, sensitivity to the place of genre within the trade. In a market-savvy creative economy, you could say that genre has become everything. I have been able to identify 15 contemporary shades of "literature".
I'll leave it to you to decide if his colours of writing are to your taste. Happy Christmas - if Typepad is listening, I want a better clipping tool, please. Like the one I have already on this blog, where, regrettably, you will be more likely to find me in the lazy, hazy days of summer. Thanks for reading the very intermittent postings here this year.
I know, I know. It's only the third of December.
Traditionally (a tradition of 24 years standing this year), we have four birthdays in January. So I am preparing about ten days earlier than everyone else. (Who else saw that hilarious Kikki K insert in The Age on Saturday? that calendar had NO TIME FOR SHOPPING in it. Just 'list' seguing effortlessly into 'wrapping'.)
Some of these are quite old. So forgive me if you have seen them already.
If you are feeling the pull to slow down over this busy time of year, the ABC has been running a program introducing meditation over the past six weeks. I heard about it through the Melbourne Meditation Centre, but it may well have been bruited elsewhere. Here's the toolkit. (You can easily trawl down the page to week 1 and begin at the beginning.)
I was interested to see this app, Flipboard, mentioned on the Killings blog by publishing researcher Caroline Hamilton, as I follow one of its developers on Twitter. And it looks to be a very pretty way of aggregating all your stuff on your iPad, too.
Caroline also mentions a 2010 article by Craig Mod that I really thought I'd read already. As it's not in my bookmarks, then I guess I will have to read it now, but it sure looks familiar...Books In The Age Of The iPad.
It's probably a bit late for Australians to order these and have them by Christmas, but this gorgeous Swiss toymaker's website is fun to look at, and I dare you not to order something one day. Via Things magazine. (Being the non-starting quilter I am, I have this on the wishlist.)
Something else I still haven't read - Terry Eagleton's review of a new bio of Derrida, from The Guardian.
Robert Crum, a couple of weeks back, had things to say about book marketing, coming up as a result with a list of lit-labels of his own which included the rather clumsy 'lit-lit':
The development of the literary marketplace in the past 30-something years has been echoed by a new, and acute, sensitivity to the place of genre within the trade. In a market-savvy creative economy, you could say that genre has become everything. I have been able to identify 15 contemporary shades of "literature".
I'll leave it to you to decide if his colours of writing are to your taste. Happy Christmas - if Typepad is listening, I want a better clipping tool, please. Like the one I have already on this blog, where, regrettably, you will be more likely to find me in the lazy, hazy days of summer. Thanks for reading the very intermittent postings here this year.
At Jacket2, John Tranter has posted an excerpt from his recent article in the JASAL journal on the Internet and the history of Jacket magazine. Here's the abstract.
Australian poet John Tranter trained in all aspects of publishing, from hand-lettering to editing, from litho platemaking to screen printing, and developed an early familiarity with computers. The development of the Internet in the 1990s found him armed with a formidable array of skills. He published the first issue of the free international Internet-only magazine «Jacket» single-handed in 1997. «Jacket» quickly grew to become the most widely read and highly respected literary magazine ever published from Australia. In late 2010 John Tranter gave it to the University of Pennsylvania, where it continues to flourish. This memoir traces John Tranter’s publication of literary materials on the Internet including the technical and literary problems faced by «Jacket», and outlines the many other projects he embarked on that resulted in the Internet publication of over fifty thousand mostly Australian poems, articles, reviews, interviews and photographs.You can read more, and download the full article, here.
Via Margaret Atwood on Twitter, Flavorwire presents a slideshow of twelve strikingly designed literary magazines.
We’ve been hearing that print is dead for years now. It obviously isn’t true: look at the beautiful food magazine Lucky Peach, or any issue of McSweeney’s, or the excitement around reissues of old classics with fresh cover designs (Peter Mendelsund’s Kafka editions, anyone?), or any other print book with striking presentation (the paperbacks of Bolaño’s 2666 or Murakami’s 1Q84, to name just a couple). Yet the Web has grown into an equally great place for lovely presentation of lovely writing. Long-established journalism outlets have moved their book coverage online, or revamped it— check out the Slate Book Review, or the New Yorker’s renamed Page-Turner blog — but scores of literary magazines have been killing it online for years.
We’d like to present just a few that have particularly nice design online.
(Metazen, Paper Darts and Zyzzyva are new to me, so I'll enjoy checking those out.)
Melbourne Writers Festival would not be complete without a lavish and swinging event from prominent multimedia journal GoingDownSwinging, a Melbourne institution of over thirty years' standing of avant-gardedness:
TICKETS HERE - $25 gets you in, gets you a copy of the journal.
Issue #33 features a full-colour collaboration between Cate Kennedy and artist Simon McEwan, a stunning commissioned essay from straight-talking theorist Briohny Doyle, and a radical new design from Santangelo and Hall. It will take you from Thailand to rundown apartments in Minneapolis to the depths of the ocean to a run-in with Czech border guards. Andre Dao contemplates Catholicism and mourning, Paul Adkin looks at 9/11 translated by Edgar Allan Poe, and Michael Trudeau leaves you speechless with his take on aimless masculinity.
Highlights of the accompanying CD include Tom Waits' iconic theme from The Wire, covered by Darwin soul stars Sietta; alongside hip-hop artist Mantra and a spellbinding performance from Felix Nobis; as well as new work from Joe Dolce, PiO, Emilie Zoey Baker, and The Bedroom Philosopher.
Issue #33 will be launched on the closing night of the Melbourne Writers Festival. The launch will showcase some of Melbourne’s best spoken-word artists; introducing brand new performances from the acclaimed Cate Kennedy, blues-soaked Benezra and Frente singer Angie Hart, who responds to a special performance from spoken-word legend Adam Gibson.
Giramondo Publishingwarmly invites youto the launch of thenew poetry collection byMichael Farrellopen sesame
to be launched by Alan Loneypoet and bookmaker
on Thursday 2 August6 for 6.30 pmCollected Works Bookshop
Level 1, 37 Swanston StreetMelbourne
Michael Farrell is highly regarded for the unique rhythms, and the gestural and comic qualities of his poetry. His poems set language, syntax and punctuation in motion, heightening the expression of wonder, drama, attitude: or simply relishing the richness and resonance of each new word situation. His new collection, open sesame, includes sonnets derived from Edna St Vincent Millay (‘saints & or’) and from the British police drama The Bill, a sestina on John F. Kennedy set in a laundry, an improvised parody (‘et tu supermarket’), an Oulipo poem (‘debit of a pirate kino’), and four long poems on friendship. The book concludes with a series of collage poems, including one which takes its cue from the legendary Phar Lap.
Michael Farrell is the winner of the 2012 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. An earlier version of open sesame won the Barrett Reid award for a radical poetry manuscript.
Enquiries: aliceg@giramondopublishing.com
I did hope to get to this but I will not be spared, unfortunately.
The launches at Kris Hemensley's Collected Works are inviting affairs. Take another poetry lover along, and be prepared to succumb to the temptation of purchasing something special - there are some amazing books there.
Michael Orthofer reports from the Complete Review that Milan Kundera refuses to sign contracts to release his titles to e-publishing:
...for several years, he's insisted on a clause in his contracts stipulating that his books only appear in 'traditional' (i.e. printed) form -- no e-book versions. And, indeed, you won't find any Kundera titles on Kindle (etc.).
Not many authors are still holding out from e-formats -- and, indeed, presumably few have enough clout to be able to do so. Kundera can afford to -- though one has to wonder: to what end ?
Or as Bud Parr has said, read now (or never).
The publishers of this anthology of Latin American writing wanted to draw attention to the very short life of new writing in our times. Using vanishing ink seemed like a fine way to do it.
The buyers of the first print run were clearly in agreement, but one wonders, what were they buying? A novelty, a talking point - or a journal? would they leave it closed on the bookshelf for fear of losing the book?
The editors remark that most first books vanish anyway. They are currently investigating further publications in the same format:
'we think that this is a magical and poetic way of confronting a real problem,' explains javier campopiano, regional general creative director of draftFCB.
'we wanted to make a book that was a message in itself, that encourages us to read those authors, before their stories disappear for real, right before our eyes.'
while potential purchasers are likely to object to the impermanence of the object-- which defies being returned to months or years later for a second reading--
the project highlights both the difficulties that face emerging contemporary authors, as well as our often-neglected enjoyment of text, and the perhaps overly
confident opinions we hold about the permanence of written material. as the video documentation of the project suggests:
'books are very patient objects. we buy them, and then they wait for us to read them. days, months, even years. that’s OK for books, but not for new authors.
if people don’t read their first books, they’ll never make it to a second.'Read more at Design Boom. (Noted also at Wired, Gizmodo, the Independent and the Boston Globe, among others.)
According to Helena Nelson of Happenstance Poetry Pamphlets, purveyors of cakes and publishers of poetry have a great deal in common.
This is a clever little satire that grows on you very satisfactorily and delivers some fine jabs around the middle:
You spend more and more time advertising. You need to get new customers into the shop somehow. It’s hard work though, and several things happen.
1. You turn down nearly all the offers of new products. You really do have enough cake to be going on with. The wouldbe bakers are hurt. They take the rejection personally. They stop buying things in your shop.
2. You hardly ever bake yourself: you haven’t the energy. Besides, you’re surrounded by cake. Why bake more?
Have a browse of the catalogue while you're there. Link via the dumbfoundry blog.
Barbara Temperton reports from Cordite on poetic activity in her new neighbourhood, and includes a shot of a beautiful new book to be launched at the end of August:
Graham Kershaw (Hallowell Press) has been working for some time now on the production of the poetry anthology: Dark Diamonds: poems from the south coast of Western Australia. Dark Diamonds has been printed on a treadle platen press – an Arab, designed in the 1870s – using traditional letterpress techniques, with Centaur metal type imported from a foundry still operating in California. The books are hand-bound, as cloth-lined hardbacks. Alison Kershaw’s illustrations are copper relief etchings printed on the Arab. Dark Diamonds will be launched at 3pm on Saturday, August 25th, at the Butter Factory Studios, 8/12 Mt Shadforth Road, Denmark.
Notes from Narrogin and the Great Southern | Cordite Poetry Review
(see Mulberry Road for the other 25, if you will.)
At Granta Online, six poets are interviewed about Poetry Parnassus, an enormous poetry love-in happening at Southbank in London this week.
Susan Hawthorne reviews Robyn Rowland's Seasons of doubt and burning: New and Selected Poems at Cordite.
Jerry Seinfeld's new web comedy, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, premieres online on July 19.
How to sort out Facebook and those tiresome not-so-new email addresses they have lumbered some of us with. (Apparently they may have synced with your friends' email on your phone as well! Who knew?) From ReadWriteWeb.
Finally, a 76-strong booklist of upcoming titles for the second half of the year from The Millions.
And the Complete Review reports on the rentrée littéraire in France. Not the Tour. Just for a change.
"But Margaret," you can hear them whispering. "You're a literary icon at the height of your powers; it says so on your book covers. Why are you sneaking out with an online story-sharing site heavy on romance, vampires and werewolves? You should be endorsing Literature, capital L. Get back up on that pedestal! Strike a serious pose! Turn to stone!"
Maybe my dates with Wattpad are a bit undignified. But at my age you can afford to be undignified. You're free to explore, and to guinea-pig yourself, and to stretch the boundaries.
On www.wattpad.com – using your computer, tablet or phone – you can post your own writing. No one need know how old you are, what your social background is, or where you live. Your readers can be anywhere. And if you're worried about adverse reactions from your teachers, your grandmother, or others who might not like you writing about slavering zombies or your relatives, you can use a pseudonym. You can be FlamingLeprechaun and represent yourself with a picture of a bat or a spoon: the internet lends itself to surrealism. Then you can post stories about Pod People or affairs with smouldering hunks undead for 2,000 years, which beats "My Summer Holiday" every time. Not only that, you'll have readers who leave encouraging comments on your message board, thus boosting your morale.
Ah she is a fine and crazy diamond. Book covers never lie!! Go you good thing.
Part II of a recent essay by Kyle Schlesinger is up at Jacket2:
Although entirely worthy of study, I’m the first to admit that descriptive bibliography is obsolete. Working closely with librarians and archivists at UVA, [Johanna] Drucker’s Artists’ Books Online set in place an important, revolutionary, framework for the future of bibliography. The ability to see, retrieve, print, document, and describe artists’ books that often exist in relative obscurity is nothing short of the Gutenberg Revolution all over again, only different. Many of the books featured on the site were produced in small editions for one reason or another, making it difficult for readers to obtain or even visit with these titles in a public or private library. The digitalization of the book has decentralized critical bibliographic information, spreading the seeds far and wide—one need only invoke the Library of Alexandria to convey the advantages of doing so, yet some librarians and artists feel threatened by the move and its implications on the status of a work’s originality and value. Yet time has proven the opposite to be true: the more people know about a particular book though online exhibition, analysis, and discussion, the more likely it is to be understood and valued.
I am wondering if this essay would have been easier to read in one go. Here's Part I again.
Kyle Schlesinger is a poet who writes and lectures on typography and artists’ books. He is proprietor of Cuneiform Press and co-director of the Graduate Program in Publishing at the University of Houston-Virginia.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 MayRestoration of East Timorese Independence Day.
For more information, drop Affirm Press at line at info[at]affirmpress.com.au.
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.
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.
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.]
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.
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