May 112011
 

It’s a good thing the world is ending in 10 days. That’s all I have to say about this. Thanks to Chad Post for putting this up at Three Percent.

dg

Digital Reviews are the same as print ForeWord reviews in many respects: the books must meet our quality standards; we use the same proficient reviewers; and the reviews are featured on our Web site and iPhone app and licensed for publication in the top title information databases used by booksellers and librarians: Baker & Taylor’s TitleSource III, Ingram’s iPage, Bowker’s Books in Print, and Gale’s licensed databases.

Digital Reviews are different from ForeWord reviews in that they are a fee-for-service review. A $99 fee covers the expense of writing and posting the review.

via Three Percent.

Apr 132011
 

 

Address unknown. – Cultivated philistines are wont to demand that the work of art should give them something. They are no longer outraged at what is radical, but draw back with the shamelessly modest assertion, that they just don’t understand. This latter clears away the resistance, the last negative relation to the truth, and the offending object is catalogued with a smile under under consumer goods between which one has a choice and which one can reject, without incurring any responsibility. One is just too dumb, too outmoded, one just can’t keep up, and the smaller one makes oneself out to be, the more reliably do they participate in the mighty unison of the vox inhumana populi [Latin: inhuman voice of the people], in the guiding force [Gewalt] of the petrified spirit of the age [Zeitgeist]. What is not comprehensible, from which no-one gets anything, turns from an outraging crime into mere foolishness, deserving of pity. They displace the temptation along with the spike. That someone is supposed to be given something, by all appearances the postulate of substantiality and fullness, cuts off these latter and impoverishes the giving. Therein however the relationship of human beings comes to resemble the aesthetic one. The reproach that someone gives nothing, is execrable. If the relation is sterile, then one should dissolve it. Those however who hold fast to it and nevertheless complain, always lack the organ of sensation: imagination. Both must give something, happiness as precisely what is not exchangeable, what cannot be complained about, but such giving is inseparable from taking. It is all over, if the other is no longer reachable by what one finds for them. There is no love, that would not be an echo. In myths, the guarantor of mercy was the acceptance of sacrifice; love, however, the after-image of the sacrificial act, pleads for the sake of this acceptance, if it is not to feel itself to be under a curse. The decline of gift-giving today goes hand in hand with the hardening against taking. It is tantamount however to that denial of happiness, which alone permits human beings to hold fast to their manner of happiness. The wall would be breached, where they received from others, what they themselves must reject with a sour grimace. That however is difficult for them due to the exertion which taking requires of them. Isolated in technics, they transfer the hatred of the superfluous exertion of their existence onto the energy expenditure, which pleasure requires as a moment of its being [Wesen] all the way into its sublimations. In spite of countless small moments of relief, their praxis remains an absurd toil; the squandering of energy in happiness, however, the latter’s secret, they do not tolerate. That is why things must go according to the English expression, “relax and take it easy” [in English in original], which comes from the language of nurses, not the one of exuberance. Happiness is outmoded: uneconomic. For its idea, sexual unification, is the opposite of being at loose ends, namely ecstatic tension, just as that of all subjugated labor is disastrous tension.

–Adorno, from Minima Moralia

Apr 082011
 

Intense global competition is laying low an industry dear to the heart of any Canadian who ever grabbed a hockey stick and laced up a pair of skates, or scrambled off the road when a buddy yelled “car.”

Sher-Wood Hockey Inc., Canada’s storied hockey stick manufacturer, is leaving home ice for good at the end of this year, moving the last of its stick production to China to slash costs.

Thursday’s decision by Sher-Wood is the latest blow to what little is left of Canada’s once-thriving hockey stick manufacturing industry and it underlines how vulnerable manufacturers are to the global forces of low-cost competition.

via Canadian icon Sher-Wood sets sail for China – The Globe and Mail.

Feb 252011
 

The Graveyard: Are the Great the Lucky?

by Court Merrigan

Put your birthday into the Birthday Bestsellers search engine to see a list of New York Times bestsellers the week you were born.  Here’s mine:

Are all of these Top 10 books from February 1976 exemplars of fine literature?  Surely not.  Are at least a couple?  Almost certainly.  How to know?

As for me, I recognize some of the names – Tennessee Williams, Agatha Christie, Saul Bellow, William F. Buckley, E.L. Doctrow.  I’ve read some of their books, but none of these.  That includes Humboldt’s Gift, which was part of the oeuvre that got Saul Bellow the Nobel Prize, or that American classic Ragtime.  Sadly, the work with which I am most “familiar” is Shogun – at least as it appeared as a TV miniseries years later.

And these are just the lucky 10 books that made the list, for one week during the disco era.  Thousands of others– some vastly superior, no doubt – remain totally unknown to me, because the search engine limits my enquiry to bestsellers only.
Read the rest of this entry

Feb 182011
 

Just to make myself ornery, I spent a little time this morning looking at this phenomenon. I found dozens of publishing houses and a whole support system of book pumping PR sites that sell you virtual “book tours.” And these books get on Amazon, often with, yes, dozens of puff customer reviews. Some people will be successful with this alternative to traditional publishing. Few, I suspect. Very few. But this is another sign of the (end) times and a spin-off of the digital publishing trend.

dg

 

Vanity presses have existed for decades, but technology has made it much easier for aspiring authors to publish without hefty upfront costs. Gone are the days when self-publishing meant paying a printer to produce hundreds of copies that then languished in a garage.

Now, for as little as $3, an author can upload a manuscript or collection of photos to a Web site, and order a printed book within an hour. Many books will appear for sale on Amazon.com or the Web site of Barnes & Noble; others are sold through the self-publishing companies’ Web sites. Authors and readers order subsequent copies as needed.

via Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab – NYTimes.com.

Jan 272011
 

As a fledgling novelist and BookNet virgin, I became seriously depressed by dg’s recent NC post (“When Sales Data Drive Publishing Decisions: The BookNet Dictatorship by Stephen Henighan at Geist”).  Just thinking about a ‘literature sales data program’ squeezed the creative juice out of my whole day.  I couldn’t write a word.  Then I stumbled across a hopeful voice offering: “New Rules for Writers: Ignore Publicity, Shun Crowds, Refuse Recognition and More,” by Anis Shivani* published in the Huffington Post.  His new rules are based on the premise that “writers aren’t forged in social harmony and peer input and obedient fellowship, but in a region where madmen and insomniacs find no comfort.”

“These “rules” totally go against every prescription for writing success you’ll hear as a young writer from all quarters: the conformity-driven MFA system, the publishing industry’s hype-machine, successful writers who act either like prima donnas or untouchable mystics, the marketing experts who seek to impose advertising rules on the writing product. Overpaid editors, illiterate agents, arrogant gatekeepers, and stupid reviewers want you to bargain away your soul for a pittance — the bids in the market escalate downward, a reverse auction where you compete with the lowest of the low to be acknowledged as an entity that counts.”

Shivani lists ten rules.  Many go against the typical advice given to emerging fiction writers like myself, but somehow feel truer.  Others I can’t exactly abide, like “Converse Only with the Classics.”  Ignore Shivani’s hyperbole and glean what you can. I intend to follow rule number four: Seek Unemployment.

—Wendy Voorsanger

* Anis Shivani is the author of the short story collection, Anatolia and Other Stories, published by Black Lawrence Press. Booklist describes the collection as “extraordinary” and “caustically funny.” The collection has been long listed for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award and one of the stories–”Dubai”–was awarded Special Mention for the Pushcart Prize.

Jan 222011
 

Prognosticators and pundits always mention the music industry as a harbinger of what’s to come/what’s happening in the publishing industry. But an equally valid parallel might be found in the porn industry.

BTW, dg is having a high-quality full-size heated silicone replica of himself built. It will be marketed under the name NC Seminars—Writing to the Max.

dg

Five hundred years ago, while Martin Luther was using the printing press to disseminate his 95 Theses, Italian author Pietro Aretino was using the new invention to get his “School of Whoredom” on bookshelves. “When new media offer new markets, porn spies them quickly and rushes to fill them, like an amoeba extruding a new pseudopod where its skin is thinnest,” wrote legal scholar Peter Johnson in a mid-1990s essay.

If video sales aren’t going to be the cash cow they once were, a growing number of adult stars are hedging their bets by moving into the piracy-proof realm of sex toys. As one industry insider quipped, “you can’t download a dildo.” Fleshlight, a Texas-based producer of male masturbators has contracted with several adult models to produce silicone replicas of their most intimate parts. Other stars have taken it a step further by sponsoring full-size, heated silicone reproductions. For $7,000, hardcore porn fans can pick up an eerily lifelike Doppelganger of their favourite stars.

Doomsayers continue to herald the end of the adult industry. Lifestyle blog AskMen.com even likened this year’s Adult Entertainment Expo to “one big party on the Titanic.”

via Nobody pays for porn anymore: A tale of a sad-sack expo | Features | National Post.

Nov 142010
 

At a certain level this is a false argument. Had the Giller Prize marketing types thought ahead, they could have informed Gaspereau Press well ahead of time and the books could have been available and thus the clash between hand-bound cottage industry publishing and the frenzy of capitalism could have been muted. (I seem to recall that this was the way the Canada Council handled the Governor-General’s Award when I won; my publisher had plenty of books ready when the prize was announced.)

The other thing to remember is that winning a prize like this is next thing to an economic disaster for medium and small publishing houses. They have to print more books at a huge expense and send them off to distributors and bookstores that don’t have to pay the publisher for the books for at a minimum 90 days (usually more). If the books don’t sell, they come back to the publisher who still has to pay for them.

The Giller Prize has often been criticized for not considering small press books (the book pool for the Giller is much smaller than the book pool for the Governor-General’s Award). The paranoid side of my brain thinks: this could be a setup meant to discredit small presses in general and drive a wedge between them and their authors (as has happened in this case).

dg

But there’s method in their madness, the guys want people to know. It has to do with vaunting culture over profit, of matching the greatness of the word with the greatness of the page it’s printed on — a concept probably few Canadians have considered when buying a book.

Sitting in his print shop in this Annapolis Valley town 100 kilometres northwest of Halifax, Steeves is sensitive to the criticism.

But if there’s one character trait in which the Gaspereau co-founder isn’t lacking, it’s conviction. He may look a bit bookish, nerdy even in his dust-tinged glasses. But wiry frame and penchant for plaid flannel belie a village lumberjack.

He frequently cites American writer Henry David Thoreau, who famously documented his simple life at the cabin he built on Walden Pond in Massachusetts.

via Don’t be pressing this publisher – thestar.com.

 

May 022010
 

Just following my thoughts earlier begun on the way the c(v)ulture industry skews our experience of war (“our” meaning those of us who haven’t actually experienced war). Here is a link to the beginning of an ongoing series of reviews of episodes of the The Pacific by a Marine veteran who did fight in some of the battles portrayed. Why does this man buy the HBO/Spielberg version of war while my student Ross Canton, a thrice wounded Vietnam veteran, doesn’t? Does this man want to remember his life as a made-for-TV movie? Is that what happens to memory and the imagination?

See also.

dg