How can prose poems compete with YouTube
Blake Butler posted a review at The Believer of Norman Lock’s Grim Tales, an ebook I published at elimae a few years ago. The novella is collected in Trio, a collection of three novellas by Norman Lock, published by Ravenna Press.
Norman Lock’s Grim Tales, in particular, is a wicked little beast, consisting of thirteen thousand words in 157 short, divided sections delivered in fine-tuned bursts. Somewhat like a prose-poem edition of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark for adults, Grim Tales is a mythological catalog of the peculiar, a string of strange, often murderous urban myths. The book’s slim paragraphs and tendency to divide itself into tiny snippets make it perfect for online consumption. It comes on fast and dirty, wasting no time in lunging at your throat: “When he was struck down by his wife’s lover, the scythe moaned in the wheat. In the kitchen, cutting open a loaf, she dropped her knife as the blood spilled out the bread’s fresh wounds.”
Entire Staff of “Canadian Oxford Dictionary” Laid Off
The company will publish future editions of the “Canadian Oxford Dictionary” with the assistance of freelancers and the lexicography department in Oxford, England, Stover said.
“We’re quite confident we’re going to be able to keep our finger on the pulse of Canadian English,” he said.
(source)
There are just so many different directions in which one could take this…
First we had some goiter to deal with…
But now we are one step closer to our goat.
First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry.
Now the textbook industry may start hating piratebay:
Textbook Torrents, a site that opened last year and was wholly dedicated to arranging peer-to-peer sharing of textbook files, closed without explanation this month. But other sites continue to rely upon similar technology for disseminating unauthorized copies of textbooks, facilitating the piece-by-piece movement of copies of files found on the computers of participants.
The Pirate Bay, which is based in Sweden, presents a devilishly fearless challenge to American textbook publishers. It describes itself as an “anticopyright organization” and offers music, movies, television shows and software, as well as e-books like textbooks — not a single item of which, it boasts, has ever been removed at the request of a copyright owner.
(hat tip to the Lone Gunman)
New website for designers reaching directors
The body of this post has been deleted. We don’t mind people promoting themselves, or even their products. We would prefer that if the Christopher Walken account is used for this purpose, some effort be made to engage the clusterflock audience and to come across as a person who values the site.
Copying and pasting marketing text isn’t what we would suggest.
Update: Savannah writes:
Hi there,
I’m Savannah, founder of veaux.org
I understand completely wanting to remove us due to the marketing of veaux. The last thing I would want is for people to feel that they are being bombarded with marketers or something that might seem like spam. In all honesty, I wasn’t sure what the protocol for blogging really meant. For that I really apologize. If I knew differently, I would have gone about it much differently.
Veaux is something that I created to want to help emerging artists become known in the marketplace and to connect with each other and get work in the process. It’s something I truly believe in and so does the veaux team. The team is very passionate to make Veaux a successful venue for these artists. I don’t want my mistake to take away from that.
If you look at the site and feel that it isn’t what clusterflock or any other blog site wants to post, I understand. If you like it, I would…well…we would like another chance.
My sincerest apologies,
Savannah
farting armpit girl has two daddies
I’m posting this article about whether two Swedish publishing houses are too politically correct simply because I enjoyed this paragraph.
Together the two small publishers have so far only released about a dozen titles, including a book about a boy who wears pink sandals, and a story about a girl who likes to make farting sounds using her armpits, who just happens to have two dads.
The Quarterly; Gordon Lish; Tables of Contents for issues 1–25
When I searched for this information recently I couldn’t find it, but I did encounter a number of people who expressed a desire for it. Perhaps it is out there somewhere and I just missed it. I decided to type these tables instead of scanning them (hence the slight differences in format) because I want to gradually add information. The original tables include the titles of individual works of fiction, but when two or more works by an author are presented the number of works is all that is given. I want to add those specific titles in brackets. Also, poets are represented by their names only, and I want to add the titles of their poems in brackets. After that is done–and it may take a while–I might try to provide a simple index comprised of authors’ names followed by the issue numbers in which their work appeared. If any of you see that this has been done elsewhere, please let me know and I’ll spend the time on something else. Also, if you see any errors at any point in this process, please let me know and I’ll make repairs.
No Colony — first issue
Blake Butler and Ken Bauman’s No Colony is about to release its first issue, including work from Kim Chinquee, Tao Lin, Brian Evenson, Robert Lopez, our fellow flocker Derek White, and more. Go buy a copy. They’re also reading for issue two, which will include a short piece by yours truly.
Proof print media is far from dead.
John Hendrix did a piece in the NYT Op-Ed that is just gorgeous. I am sorry I missed it until today (my usual Sunday NYT’s routine had been disrupted this weekend). Just compare the below picture with its online (red-headed, step-) brother.*
(click to enlarge)
*Apologies to red heads and step-brothers everywhere.
Lish’s The Quarterly
We talked about this a few months ago, but can someone scan the table of contents of some of the issues? Or, rather, which are the best issues to purchase? I’d love to read the issues with Cooper and Daryl. And of course Diane Williams, etc. Thanks.
The Future of Magazines
The Magazineer talking about Magcloud:
The web has changed our thinking about media in ways we’re still figuring out. Now we can make media without the bother of putting ink to paper. We can distribute it planet-wide in an instant. And the content can be customized to your tastes, personalized for each reader. It’s so obvious now, but it’s important to remember what a revolution this has been.
But there’s still something about paper. It’s not just because screens suck to read on (they do, but that hasn’t kept us from doing it all day). There is an intimacy about a good book, a pleasure to the glossy pages of magazines, and, ironically, a permanence to paper. (How many times has a website you really loved simply disappeared?)
So what if we could combine the best parts of the web (no waste, personalized content, open to all) with the best parts of print (sexy print quality, permanence, no batteries required)?
For the last year, I’ve been working on a project with HP Labs called MagCloud. The idea is simple, really. MagCloud enables anyone to start a magazine - a real printed magazine - with no giant pile [of magazines].
The Associated Press vs. Everybody Else
Additionally, the AP made clear to all and sundry it would charge fees every time its copyrighted material is excerpted, alluded to, or dreamed about.
Bloggers around the world expressed their outrage about the AP’s action by using strong words, street-smart wisdom, and merciless quoting.
“Owning” vs. “licensing;” or, will e-bookworms gnaw our entrails?
Over at Crooked Timber, John Holbo has a post on some questions Kindle raises regarding “ownership.” First, he quotes from Kindle’s owner’s agreement:
You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.
And then . . .
I am annoyed to think that I might pay almost full price for a book that I don’t technically own. I’m just ‘licensing’.
1979: Annus Mirabilis
That does it. This is it. 1979 marked some kind of something, the likes of which we may never again witness.
Published in 1979: India’s brilliant How to Care for a Guinea Pig.
A Taxonomy of Lit
Brick Lit - Back-breaking tomes. (See Infinite Jest, Rising Up and Rising Down.)
. . .
Mick Lit - The literature of Ireland. (See Banville, John and Ruland, Jim.)
. . .
Hick Lit - The fiction of Richard Ford (See A Multitude of Sins)
. . .
Lick Lit - Sapphic fiction. (See Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.)
. . .
Vick Lit - Novels of animal cruelty. (See Julius Winsome.)
At The Elegant Variation
Read more
The World Resized Proportionally According to Books Published
There’s other renderings according to other stats here.
Weekly World News Killed By Aliens, Zombie Elvis, Declining Circulation
Now, buying food is the only reason to go to the grocery store.
Don’t judge a book by its cover
Kathy and I visited Books & Company yesterday and as I walked the aisles I remembered to look for some work by Cormac McCarthy. I have not yet read any of his books (yes, really) and the recent threads on clusterflock made me realize I had some catching-up to do.
Submit your work to “The Bush Years” Anthology
The Bush Years
A graphic literary anthology
Published fall/winter ‘07
So New Publishing
200 pages | 6×9 | black and white | paperback
Essay, Interview, Letter, Fiction, Diary, Poem, Graphic Art, Photography
Submit to: dlbarringer AT gmail DOT com
Deadline: Soft. Shoot for August 1
Editor & Designer: David Barringer
I WANT personal work exploring how you have been influenced by events/moods/trends over the course of the Bush years. Your piece does not have to literally address Bush/Cheney or Rice/Rummy, 9/11 or Afghanistan, Iraq or Abu Ghraib, Gitmo or Jon Stewart, Scooter Libby or Anna Nicole Smith. But it very well could, and it must at least be influenced by the past six years. The more directly your piece defines some mood or state of mind or tension set off by events of the Bush years, the more likely it will be accepted.
I WANT your personal experiences, not your rants and raves. I want to know how you in particular have absorbed, digested, and expressed any number of the big events of the past six years: terrorism, war, natural disaster, celebrities, corporate misconduct, new technologies. How does Iraq and Dubya, Katrina and Islam, American Idol and Apple iPods, Saddam’s execution and Osama’s evasion come out in your speech, your habits, your relationships, your emails, your artwork, your poems? It could be one paragraph from an email to a friend or an I.M. exchange with your mom or a note to yourself about how it’s hard to think about your own needs while so much is going on in the world.
Feel free to email me for clarification. I’ll post again when I put a page up about the project on my site.
John Scalzi talks to Google
John Scalzi, author of the critically acclaimed Old Man’s War, among many other books, went to speak at Googleland during his current book tour, and today he posted a link to the video. I clicked it thinking I’d watch the first a few minutes. Half an hour later (the talk is an hour long), still scraping out reserves of attention span I didn’t know I had, I thought maybe some of youse guys would also find it interesting.
Mr. Scalzi originally published Old Man’s War by serializing it on his website, for free. Then Tor offered to buy it, and it’s sold extremely well. The book was then nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in March 2006 and was a finalist for the 2006 Locus Award for Best First Novel; and for it, Mr. Scalzi won the Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. Since then he’s sold several novels in this way, and he has thing or two to say about the benefits of giving stuff away, the future of books, e-books, and so forth.
I have not actually read any of Mr. Scalzi’s books (though I did write up the typesetting order for one of them), but I’ve just been a skimmer of his blog Whatever for three years or so. He’s totally not dumb.
“Beyond the Techno-Cave”
Harold Jaffe, in his latest book “Beyond the Techno-Cave,” expands his critical commentary to include artist’s role in an anesthetized society and does so in style that has a rich, evocative clarity. The writing, purposefully lacking of fashionable literary pyrotechnics, makes up by employing a very particular rhythm, language and provocative narrative. Fourteen brutally honest texts, full of acute observations and calculated speculations, transmit Mr. Jaffe’s own brand of social anthropology. He calls these texts “docufictions.”
NYTBR
In a talk at Harvard on Tuesday, Barry Gewen, an editor at the New York Times Book Review since the early 90’s, revealed a steaming heap of heretofore unknown and as-of-yet unreported details about the Book Review’s inner workings. The reason for his trip, he said, was to correct some misconceptions among the largely academic audience about how the Review is assembled. “We’re thought to have agendas, we’re thought to be out to get people,” he said. “I hope by the end of this talk I’ll have persuaded you that none of that is the case.”
Xlibris/Alibris Conspiracy Against Authors?
I suspect, with only anecdotal evidence to back me up, that Xlibris is selling the books of their self-published authors to Alibris at a severe discount, whereupon Alibris sells the books online to their customers, with neither Xlibris nor Alibris paying a royalty to the author of the self-published work.
1. I believe this happened to me. My book, The Leap and Other Mistakes (2000), sold on Xlibris in softcover for about $18. If I, as author, wanted a copy, I’d have to pay $12 to Xlibris. On Alibris, however, I have purchased copies of my own book, The Leap, for only $3 to $4. They were clearly brand new, never opened, spines unbroken, etc. I bought at least 4 or 5 copies this way, and they were both hardcover and softcover. I never received a royalty from Xlibris or Alibris from these sales. I should have received a royalty from Xlibris when the copy was sold to or through Alibris. I suspected that this was infringing on my copyright, and so I withdrew my book from Xlibris. After I withdrew it, the $3 and $4 copies of my book disappeared from the Alibris website.
2-4. I then checked out the books of other Xlibris authors and found that their books, too, are selling on Alibris at discounted rates. (I am not counting books being sold by used-bookstores on Alibris; I’m only looking at those books that Alibris itself sells.) Black Wax, by Benjamin Watson, for example, sells for $18 on Xlibris; on Alibris, there are 13 copies for sale, each for $2.95. There are “>10″ copies of Dead Cat with Firelighter, by Francis Day, on sale at Alibris; same goes for Deadstream by Bradley T. Platt.
Now, most Xlibris books that I looked up on Alibris were not being sold online by Alibris. They were being sold by used bookstores. So this is not something happening to every author. But, I warn ye Xlibris authors to check your titles on Alibris and then check your royalty statements on Xlibris.
Meta-blogging
Kieran Healy of Crooked Timber muses:
Henry remarks that “my mental model of Tyler [Cowen] often sit[s] on my shoulder while I blog, making polite and well reasoned libertarian criticisms of my arguments.” This follows on from Tyler’s own advice to his grad students:
You have a model of me, a pretty good one, and you know what I will object to and what will delight me. The Phantom Tyler Cowen objects, in your head, before the real Tyler Cowen has much of a chance. That is why the real Tyler Cowen is sometimes so silent.
My mental model of Tyler Cowen says, “This sounds like a rationalization to me.” Meanwhile, Brad DeLong asks,
Is Henry Farrell especially sane or especially insane?
for having a model of Tyler sitting on his shoulder making comments. My mental model of Brad DeLong says to my mental model of Tyler Cowen, “Why oh why are we ruled by this idiot?” My mental model of Eugene Volokh says, “This is much worth reading.” But my mental model of Orin Kerr replies, “My sense is that this is much ado about nothing.” My mental model of Bitch, Ph.D begins to object that she is not a brain on a stick before realizing that, being a mental model, in fact she is. Uniquely, my mental model of Dan Drezner has his own mental model of himself, which he refers to as “Ed.” Finally, my model of Cosma Shalizi has the unusual property of being smarter than I am. This ought to be impossible, but of course I can’t understand its explanation of how this could be the case.
Does this also describe any of you?
People
Thousands of years ago, people didn’t read tabloid magazines. Or so say archeologists.