Category: publishing

“It would be invidious to suggest that Louise Glück, who last week replaced Billy Collins in the office down Library of Congress way, is the finer poet; better noted is how much more thoroughly she fits the moment. History gets the poets it deserves, and though Ms. Glück isn’t as grim as the newspapers of late, nor as rapaciously bellicose as the administration, she’s no good-time guy. Her poetry is no stranger to difficulty, and has shadows aplenty.”

Defenders of Chuck Palahniuk’s “Diary,” which recently got a bad review in Salon, suggest that the critic was predisposed to not liking the book and therefore ought not to have reviewed it. Alex Good begs to differ: “This reaction struck me as bizarre. As Auden pointed out, every critic is at heart a polemicist. If you think a book is representative of something that is wrong with our literary culture you have a duty to take it on. There is nothing personal about it. Alas, in a celebrity culture everything is personal.”

San Francisco’s City Lights is one of the world’s most famous bookstores. “The shop and publishing house were founded by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the publisher Peter Martin in 1953. It became famous as the home of the beats in the 50s and 60s – the place where you bought Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady – and it has never lost its countercultural image, although tour buses no longer pause outside to show visitors the ‘beatniks’, as they did 40 years ago. Situated in the North Beach area, surrounded by cafes, Chinese restaurants and strip clubs, City Lights has managed to survive despite the growth of the big chains and internet bookshops.”

Since the publication of The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion has been celebrated as one of America’s leading practitioners of a new kind of highly wrought personal journalism. In the New York Observer, Susan Faludi claimed that Didion taught a generation of writers how to make journalism “a personal expression.” And Martin Amis characterized her style as “self-revealing” in an essay in which he went on to call her “a human being who managed to gauge another book out of herself rather than a writer who gets her living done on the side.” But has her writing ever been that immediate, that personal, that raw? Has her confessional style ever been much more than just that—a style?”

Lester Bangs “died in 1982 at 33, the victim of an accidental Darvon overdose. In the generation since, he has come to occupy his own corner of the pop-culture pantheon, been mentioned in songs by R.E.M. and the Ramones, and even portrayed, in a bit of fact-meets-fiction reinvention, by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the film Almost Famous. The more iconified he’s become, the greater the distance between his image and his writing, between the myth of Bangs as gonzo genius and the reality of what he had to say.”

Looking for clues as to the next Harry Potter installments? “Harry Potter and the Chariots of Light, Harry Potter and the Mudblood Revolt, Harry Potter and the Alchemist’s Cell and Harry Potter and the Quest of the Centaur have all been registered as trademarks with the UK Patent Office.”

Two writers under one roof inevitably leads to friction. “In the nature of things, one partner usually succeeds more than the other. Or they may succeed at different times, so that literary reputation shifts within the marriage.”

“One of the mysteries of the Spanish civil war may soon be solved by the excavation of the communal grave in which the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca is believed to have been thrown after his execution by one of Franco’s death squads in August 1936. Considered by many the greatest poet and playwright of 20th-century Spain, the author of Blood Wedding and Poet in New York was killed by members of the Escuadra Negra (Black Squadron) for his left-wing sympathies and homosexuality.”

A new computer program is said to reveal whether a piece of writing is by a man or by a woman. Authors of the software claim “the simple scan of key words and syntax is around 80% accurate on both fiction and non-fiction.” But let it be noted that an ArtsJournal editor testing the program was able to consistently leave the computer gender-confused…(that means wrong!).

A new edition of the Bible in the form of a magazine? It’s a hit with kids. “Although 82 percent of America’s teenagers say that they are Christians, only 32 percent say that they read the Bible. And we decided we needed to give it to them in a format they know how to use, which is magazines.”