Former Toronto Star book critic Philip Marchand was transferred to the paper’s film beat almost five months ago, and based on the preponderance of negative reviews he’s written since then, one might assume he’s eager to have his old job back. But his latest review, of the film Emotional Arithmetic, calls that assumption into question. Here’s the opening lines:

A piece of advice for Canadian filmmakers – don’t make movies out of dreary CanLit novels. They’re easy enough to spot.

The late Matt Cohen’s 1990 novel, Emotional Arithmetic, was full of people haunted by memories of the Holocaust, and in Canadian fiction that’s a sure tip-off we’re in for plenty of wintry blasts from the intellectual fog machine.

And here’s the last line:

As for the movie’s own recipe, it consists of pungent slices of tragic European history, reflected in the troubled faces of the characters who drift around the professor’s farmhouse, marinated and then simmered in a sauce of sombre piano chords and yearning violins. Eat it if you have the taste for it.

Poor guy. Caught between two worlds, both of them filled with disappointments.

The Litblog Co-op, a collaborative website partly designed to spotlight worthy but under-noticed books, has evidently folded after three years.

Founder Dan Green writes on his own blog that “many of its members have become so preoccupied with their own blogs, as well as other literary endeavors that in some cases their blogs helped to make possible, that they could not devote the kind of time and attention required to keep a loosely-affiliated group like the LBC functioning adequately.” In a thoughtful post-mortem, Green assesses the mixed success of the venture and ruminates on the growth of the litblog community:

Several books that received little or no attention in the mainstream review pages did get some exposure as LBC nominees. Some of these were books by first-time authors, while others were by more veteran authors (some in translation) whose previous work had not gotten them the recognition they might have deserved. However, I don’t think the LBC was ultimately able to establish itself as an authoritative guide to small-press books and overlooked fiction, judging by the degree of notice taken of our selections by blogs not themselves part of the LBC or by the literary community more generally, as well as by the number of comments most of the postings on the LBC blog received. The LBC’s Read This! selections just never seemed to achieve the status with readers of current fiction that they were originally meant to achieve.

I believe that one explanation for this failure is that the LBC never really recovered from the disappointment spawned by its very first selection,* a more or less mainstream work of “literary fiction” that had already been widely reviewed and whose selection seemed to many (including me) to be inconsistent with the LBC’s stated mission. This selection perhaps indicated that the LBC was going to be business as usual, choosing the same old books published by the same old publishers and reviewed in the same old high-profile book reviews. Our subsequent selections mostly demonstrated that this was not the case, but it may be that an impression was left that the LBC wasn’t quite the champion of unduly neglected fiction it was claiming to be.

It may also be that, eventually at least, the Litblog Co-op was perceived as a too narrowly-constituted, “clubbish” sort of group. When the LBC was formed, it could plausibly claim to represent the “leading” literary weblogs, but the litblogosphere has so dramatically expanded, both in sheer numbers of blogs and in the quality of the posting to be found there, that it really could no longer assert itself as the collective voice of the preeminent litbloggers. The LBC did enlarge its membership, and continued to invite new members when places became available, but this only made the process of nominating titles, choosing a favorite, and posting on the ultimate selection increasingly unwieldy, and it would have only gotten worse if we’d expanded the membership once again. When the litblogosphere was a fairly self-contained space, populated by bloggers united by a desire to identify worthy books and confer a kind of “indie” credential to these books, it was still possible for the member bloggers of the LBC to consider themselves the vanguard of a new online literary movement, but by now such a claim just isn’t credible.

* That would be Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories.

In their ongoing war against cliche, the folks at Paper Cuts, the New York Times book blog, have come up with a list of the seven deadly words of book reviewing – words that aren’t bad in themselves, but which crop up with “wearying regularity” in book reviews.

And the mortal offenders are: poignant; compelling; intriguing; eschew; craft (used as a verb); muse (used as a verb); and lyrical.

In the comments section, the peanut gallery has come up with dozens more, among them “nuanced,” “subtle,” “searing,” “readable,” “masterful,” “magisterial,” “engaging,” “luminous,” “taut,” “epic,” “mordant,” “trenchant,” “poignant,” and “chthonic.”

Clearly we’re sinners, all of us.

New books are not particularly fragile. Everyone knows that. In fact, that’s one of the big reasons why paper-and-ink texts are still preferred by such a wide margin over breakable, expensive-to-replace e-books and e-readers.

So it’s a bit of a mystery why the vast majority of publishers choose to send out review copies and sample copies of books in bubble envelopes.

Here at Q&Q, we try, as much as we can, to re-use these envelopes, but there’s only so much we can do. Here’s a shot of just some of the envelopes that infest our offices:

We re-use them and give them away, but they just keep piling up. They’re like Tribbles. We’re certain the situation is the same, if not much worse, at other media outlets. The most likely result is that the majority of these envelopes – which are NOT recyclable – just end up in landfill.

And so we’re asking – pleading, really – that publishers switch to using strong paper or cardboard envelopes for review and sample copies. Most warehouses do this already. It’s the most sensible, economic, and eco-friendly thing to do.

David Leonard, the book campaigner for Markets Initiative, agrees. “Obviously, the biggest environmental footprint from the publishing industry comes from the paper that the books are printed on,” Leonard told Q&Q in an an e-mail, “but environmental action with integrity should incorporate all aspects of a company’s practices. A simple shift from non-recyclable bubble wrap envelopes to recycled and recyclable cardboard packaging is a fast and easy way for a publisher to reduce their footprint, and help reduce pressure on our forests.”

So please, if you won’t do it for your bottom line, or for the environment, do it for us. Trust us: the books won’t break.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day comes a new book from author, Globe and Mail columnist, and self-appointed fashion pundit Russell Smith. Diana, published by Biblioasis Press, is an erotic novella in diary form.

Actually, this new book is an old one – it was originally published by the now-defunct Gutter Press five years ago. In an interview with Eye Weekly, Smith lays out the twin urges – sex and money – that lay behind his initial interest in writing porn.

“I started it as an exercise,” Smith recalls. “I found that in all my fiction I was not writing the sex scenes. I was doing the stereotypical pan to a window when a couple fell onto a bed. Why was I avoiding it? Part of it was that sex is difficult to write. There’s such a lack of a vocabulary and in the vocabulary that exists, you have a choice between the clinical and the euphemistic. So I felt I had to practice to get better.” With a full manuscript (made wholly from solicited scenarios contributed by his female friends) Smith also became enamoured of pulling off a literary hoax by hiding behind a distaff pseudonym — a time-honoured tradition in the world of blue books.

Beyond the fun of a hoax, Smith also points out that the pseudonym, Diana Savage, was to be his way of skirting the realities of demographics. “Women are the market you want for any work of fiction. They are pretty much the only readers of fiction left, and particularly of erotic fiction, of which they, statistically, are the only readers.” Diana was initially accepted by Black Lace, the UK publisher of erotica quickies, but Black Lace confronted Smith’s agent at the last minute and demanded proof that Diana Savage was a woman. Not wanting to turn his hoax hobby into professional fraud, Smith put aside his dreams of a second, lucrative career as Diana Savage, chronicler of infernal passions.

The article also mentions the critical pasting that the original edition of the book – and its author – got from Noah Richler, who was then the book columnist for the National Post. Smith lays this all out in detail in the book’s introduction:

I remember seeing Noah Richler … [at the 2003 launch party], and warmly shaking his hand and asking him if he would like a beer. He seemed friendly enough. I left him to go and chat up a tall and very pretty woman who turned out to have a Polish accent. She later said that I seemed obnoxious and full of myself. I must have been in a good mood.

Fast-forward to the next day, when the book receives its drubbing in the Post.

Richler was disgusted by this book. I think he was disgusted by pornography generally, by the idea of pornography. Basically, he was embarrassed.

I was, let’s say, surprised. Had I not seen Noah at the launch party? Had he not enjoyed the free beer and the attendant tall Polish girls? I seemed to recall him listening to the reading at least. And, wait a minute – when did he have time to write the article?

None of which is particularly erotic – unless the petty politics of Toronto launch parties are your thing.

Lest he kill the mood entirely, Smith does end the intro on a note more befitting the overall aim of the book:

It’s that simple, dear reader: this book is pornography. Its purpose is to titillate. It exists solely to arouse you. It is telling you to position yourself at a window where you can be seen, unbutton your jeans and slip a hand inside the waistband. Now await further instructions.

Unless you happen to be reading the book on the subway or on a plane, of course.

Lest anyone think Smith has given himself completely over to the realm of stroke-lit, we should point out that the book’s full title is Diana: A Diary in the Second Person.

Everyone knows that narrative POV is just so hot.

(But really: jeans? How déclassé.)

[Russell Smith launches Diana tonight at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel as part of This Is Not A Reading Series.]

The New York Times reports that a new online book show is due to hit the Web in March.

The program will be hosted by Daniel Menaker, former editor-in-chief of Random House.

The show, to be called “Titlepage,” will feature a round-table discussion between Mr. Menaker, 66, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker, and a group of four authors. The first episode will be streamed online at titlepage.tv on March 3. The idea is to take advantage of the fact that it’s much easier to post video online than to get a show on television.

“Titlepage” will combine elements of “Apostrophes,” a popular French literary program; “The Charlie Rose Show” on public television; and “Dinner for Five,” in which a group of actors discussed their craft, on the Independent Film Channel.

Created by documentary filmmakers Odile Isralson and Lina Matta, the program is set to feature authors Richard Price (Clockers), Susan Choi (A Person of Interest), and debut novelist Charles Bock (Beautiful Children) in its premiere episode, followed two weeks later by the second episode, on first-time authors.

Preliminary reviews of CBC TV’s jPod are in, and so far critical reception of the new hour-long comedy-drama series – based on the novel by Douglas Coupland – is decidedly mixed.

The only wholeheartedly favourable review is by Toronto Star critic Vinay Menon, who says the series’ premiere episode, which airs tonight at 9 pm, left him “craving” the second. At the other end of the spectrum is fusty National Post columnist Robert Cushman, who confesses his befuddlement regarding the series’ title (“You might guess that a jPod would be the next thing up from an iPod. Guess again.”) and offers a wholesale rejection of its premise, which unites a rag-tag group of eccentric video game producers on the basis of a random computer glitch. As Cushman puts it:

I mean, by my simple arithmetic the show’s co-workers, employees of a huge Vancouver company called Neotronic Arts, have been herded now for seven years, time enough for even the most intransigent organization to have acknowledged that its computer had bungled and to have done something to put it right.

In the past, the CBC’s attempts to appeal to the under-30 demographic have often been disastrous (Freestyle, here’s looking at you), so producers are clearly looking to the series for big things. If it catches on, it could benefit Canadian publishing as well, by directing TV viewers to Coupland’s novels and even promoting an image of CanLit as urban and contemporary – a view that’s not exactly widespread.

That trickle-down effect might be too much to hope for, however, if an interview with actor Alan Thicke is anything to go by. Thicke, who is most famous for playing Jason Seaver on Growing Pains and has a supporting role on jPod, says that he hasn’t read the book and isn’t planning to either. “Nothing against Douglas – I don’t read books,” he tells the Post.

A fitting coda to the media’s handwringing this year over all things literary is Caleb Crain’s piece in The New Yorker, ominously titled “Twilight of the Books,” which looks at how declining literacy is affecting not just the publishing industry – it’s changing the very structure of the human mind, most likely for the worse.

The article begins by corralling a long list of facts that describes the slow decline of literacy in the U.S. Here are a couple of zingers, excerpted from the text:

In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002.

The Book Industry Study Group estimates that sales fell from 8.27 books per person in 2001 to 7.93 in 2006. According to the Department of Labor, American households spent an average of a hundred and sixty-three dollars on reading in 1995 and a hundred and twenty-six dollars in 2005.

According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult’s skill in reading prose slipped one point on a five-hundred-point scale, and the proportion who were proficient – capable of such tasks as “comparing viewpoints in two editorials” – declined from fifteen per cent to thirteen.

Between 1982 and 2002, the percentage of Americans who read literature declined not only in every age group but in every generation – even in those moving from youth into middle age, which is often considered the most fertile time of life for reading. We are reading less as we age, and we are reading less than people who were our age ten or twenty years ago.

And on and on. Crain then offers a lengthy primer on the neurological basis of literacy skills and concludes that reading, as opposed to watching TV, provides a better “cognitive workout.” The bad news, of course, is that in the “antagonism between words and moving images” the latter is winning hands down.

Given the decline of books, it’s not surprising that the Guardian is reporting on the death of book criticism. John Crace’s article profiles English academic Ronan McDonald, whose new book (titled The Death of the Critic) contains some very old-school ideas. (The central argument boils down to this: “It’s tough being a serious critic in these relativist times.”) The author even invokes the ghost of F.R. Leavis, the admittedly “rebarbative and prescriptive”critic of a bygone era.

Ironically, the very existence of Crain’s lengthy piece and McDonald’s lively polemic point to the health of both literacy and criticism. Here’s  hoping that coverage of both topics becomes a little less morbid in the new year.

A handwritten book of fairy tales by J.K. Rowling was auctioned off for more than $4-million (Cdn) yesterday, and U.K. newspapers were full of speculation this morning as to who the deep-pocketed buyer was.

As The Times Online reported:

An anonymous collector, bidding through a dealer who usually specialises in Old Masters, paid £1.95 million for The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a 160-page Potter spin-off of five “wizarding fairytales” that relate to his final adventure. The proceeds will go to the charity Children’s Voice. […] The Tales was estimated to go for between £30,000 and £50,000.

[…]

As the Sotheby’s auctioneer opened the bidding, a white-gloved porter held up the book at the front of the room. There were five or six players, all concealing their identity by bidding through someone in the room or through a member of Sotheby’s staff on the phone. At £1 million, there was applause from the room, and murmurings of astonishment as six-figure increases were tossed around the rooms.

A few children in the saleroom jumped with excitement as the hammer came down on the final bid, but the man at the back who bought it could not have looked more miserable as he scurried off into the street muttering “no comment”.

After most of the U.K. papers went to press, however, the buyer was revealed as none other than Amazon.com. As the CBC reports:

Amazon revealed later on Thursday that it had crossed over from the sales side to become buyer for the rare tome, with a spokesman saying the company is planning to take The Tales of Beedle the Bard on tour through libraries and schools.

The company has also posted on its website a host of large, close-up photos of and from the book — for which Rowling also created the illustrations — as well as staff reviews of the tales inside. Staffers will also answer questions fans have about the book via an online discussion board.

You can see the Amazon reviews here, but if you think they’re going to have anything remotely critical to say, you’ve got another thing coming. Just a sample:

So how do you review one of the most remarkable tomes you’ve ever had the pleasure of opening? You just turn each page and allow yourself to be swept away by each story. You soak up the simple tales that read like Aesop’s fables and echo the themes of the series; you follow every dip and curve of Rowling’s handwriting and revel in every detail that makes the book unique – a slight darkening of a letter here, a place where the writing nearly runs off the page there. You take all that and you try and bring it to life, knowing that you will never be able to do it justice.

Geography of Hope author Chris Turner has recounted, on the Random House Canada blog, a humbling moment from his recent book tour. It was the morning after his official book launch, when he hauled his hungover self to the University of Toronto campus radio station for a live interview.

[…] no one really properly greets us on arrival, and I’m so bleary-eyed that you could walk me out a second-story window and I’d be picking gravel out of my chin before it occurred to me to ask where the hell we were going.

Anyway, so somehow I get ushered into this airless vault of a studio in the attic and seated in a folding chair off in a corner, and then I’m left alone in there until, presumably, the host sitting there begins our interview. Except he doesn’t even look up at me. He’s leaning in tight to the mike, an earnest undergrad in a hipster t-shirt, delivering a steady stream of words to the airwaves in a clipped monotone. For awhile I just sit there in a hungover haze, and then maybe five minutes in it occurs to me that he’s just reading a pile of news stories. Wire-service pieces about incidents of animal cruelty. One after another after another. In their entirety. Verbatim.

As it turned out, Turner had been ushered into the wrong studio. Luckily, someone noticed the screw-up in time and sent him to the right one. This didn’t stop Turner from claiming in his blog, however, that he’d have “killed the kid with his bare hands” if he’d been given the chance.

Dude, it’s campus radio … be thankful for the folding chair.

So The New York Times has just unveiled its annual “100 Notable Books of the Year” list, and there ain’t a lot of Cancon on it. The only Canadian author we spotted was (surprise!) Alice Munro, for The View from Castle Rock, which, having been released here in 2006, just seems sooo yesterday. Meanwhile, another likely contender – Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero – is nowhere to be seen.

The Guardian’s Stuart Jeffries has nothing good to say about British MP Boris Johnson’s debut book of poetry The Perils of the Pushy Parents (HarperCollins), but in the book’s defence, it could be said that it at least inspired a thoroughly entertaining review.

This year, an estimated 170,000 books will be published and, if I suggest that this is only the 169,999th least worth reading, that is only because I am hedging my bets. A worse book might appear this year. It is a possibility.

The pushy parents in question are the Albacores, who rail against their children’s desire to watch television.

When Mr Albacore sees the pair watching TV, he takes action rendered thus by Johnson: “He’d zap the programme off and holler/ ‘Go and read some Emile Zola.’”

As you will notice, Johnson has a gift for assonance not heard since Alexander Pope wrote the Rape of the Lock (this will be the quote they use on the paperback edition – just see if it isn’t). By which I mean, there are lots of duff rhymes.

In an attempt to destroy the television and video-game console, the parents accidentally brain each other, and Jeffries offers this example of Johnson’s verse:

Behold them, reader, and despair:
their lolling eyes, their glassy stare,
this formerly dynamic pair
In a double-seat wheelchair.

Despair is the word. But enough about me. There is worse to come. The runaway wheelchair plunges over a cliff (as it will). But Molly and Jim (along with a taxi driver called Reg, who will be played by Ray Winstone – Johnson and his family will play the other leading roles) save their parents by forming a dangling human chain over the cliff – something they learned from watching Hollywood movies On The Telly.

There’s more to enjoy in Jeffries’ full review, but here’s one last parting shot:

Some charge that Johnson (alleged MP, purported journo, father of four) spreads himself too thinly. That is not the problem. He spreads himself too thickly, larding his unworthy crust with things that make it even more indigestible. By which I mean, he not only writes duff verse, he illustrates it too with inept drawings.

Peter C. Newman has had a long and storied career, but he continues to rack up new achievements. His latest? Getting Robert Fulford and Conrad Black on Jean Chretien’s side.

It all stems from Newman’s now-infamous Globe and Mail review of Chretien’s memoir, My Years As Prime Minister. That slam prompted the former PM’s publisher, Louise Dennys of Knopf Canada, to take out a pricey rebuttal ad in the Globe.

Then Fulford came out in support of Dennys and Chretien in his National Post column.

She made excellent points. Newman reviewed not the book but the Chrétien era, and discussed that subject in eccentric terms. He called it an “interregnum,” an odd term for a period lasting a decade. Against all evidence, he considers Chretien a Joe Clark-like figure on the margins of history.

Dennys hinted that Newman didn’t read the book, and his review, on the face of it, supports that idea. Naturally, Chretien boasts of bringing a dangerous deficit under control. A hostile critic might claim this was achieved by careless and harmful budget-cutting or perhaps should be credited to Paul Martin, Chretien’s finance minister and eventual usurper. But Newman doesn’t even mention the word “deficit.” He neglects many of the book’s other major topics but focuses on Chretien’s mangled English, not an issue in the book. His review is less than adequate.

(In passing, Fulford also mentions that Chretien ghostwriter Ron Graham helped Dennys write her ad.)

An even more unlikely defender, also writing in the National Post, is Conrad Black. Of course, Black has a long history with Newman – capped by the latter’s recent Toronto Life story on the Black trial – so there may be an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend feeling at work.

It is well-known that for some years there has been a lack of rapport between Jean Chretien and me. I have not read his recently published memoirs, and if there are references to me in them, I doubt if they are complimentary or even accurate. But Newman reviewed this book for The Globe and Mail so acidulously that the book’s publisher, the gracious and equable Louise Dennys, took a paid advertisement in that newspaper debunking Newman’s review.

Newman confers credit on Chretien for the Clarity Act, which contributed importantly to the resolution of Canada’s greatest problem in the preceding 30 years, Quebec separatism. Yet he fails to comment on Chretien’s 40-year battle against the separatists, not from a safe constituency as a parachuted notable, like Pierre Trudeau, but in the trenches of St. Maurice. He dismisses Chretien’s 10 years as prime minister as a “baleful interregnum” between Mulroney and Stephen Harper.

“Banal” perhaps, but the primary meanings of “baleful” are evil or calamitous or extremely sad. Chretien’s time wasn’t baleful and wasn’t an interregnum. Newman is often reckless with words, as he is with the truth.

And Black kicks it up a notch, going after Newman’s fashion choices. (Oh, and he’s also really old!)

Now 78, shambling about in his ridiculous sailor’s cap, bilious and at least verbally incontinent, Newman is pitiful, but not at all sympathetic. Canada and Canadian letters and journalism would benefit from his subsidence.

That led to more fighting, with Newman responding and Black responding again. Now all that’s left is for Brian Mulroney to weigh in and trash the offending review. But as much as there’s no love lost between Mulroney and Newman, that does seem like a longshot.

* (Yes, we’re aware that 1995 just called and wants its Seinfeld gag back.)

In an unusual move, Knopf Canada bought a quarter-page ad in Saturday’s Globe and Mail to dispute Peter C. Newman’s review of Jean Chretien’s recently published memoir, which ran in the Globe on Oct. 20. (The online version of the review has been put behind the Globe’s pay wall.)

The ad ran as an open letter from Knopf’s executive publisher, Louise Dennys. “Mr. Newman’s review was a lazy piece of work,” the ad states. “He has made no secret in his previous writings of his contempt for Mr. Chretien and in fact here recycles a significant number of lines from his own 2004 memoir.” (That would be Newman’s Here Be Dragons, which, interestingly enough, was published by McClelland & Stewart, which is partly owned by Random House of Canada*.)

No word on what the exact cost to Knopf was, but the standard rate for a full-page ad in the Globe is upwards of around $75,000.

The ad makes a number of claims of deficiency on Newman’s part. While these are necessarily subjective, the complaint that Newman ignored Chretien’s explanations of his role in the Peppergate, Shawinigate, and the sponsorship crisis comes closest to gaining traction. Newman wrote that Chretien gives “no explanations, no apologies” for these scandals. Though apologies are not always forthcoming, Chretien does give lengthy explanations of his role in each, and Newman notes this later on in his review, meaning that his earlier claim of “no explanations” was more of a rhetorical device than an exaggeration of the facts. Newman could certainly have been more careful with his wording, but the ad is equally slippery.

All in all, publishers and authors rarely come off looking good by responding to negative reviews, even when the book’s author is a former prime minister.

However, if you are a major Canadian publisher looking to take out a large ad in Q&Q disputing one of our reviews, please contact our advertising department. You’ll find our “rant rates” very reasonable.

*Even more interesting is the fact that Newman’s 2005 book, The Secret Mulroney Tapes, was published by… Random House Canada.

***

UPDATE: In response to a query from Q&Q about his thoughts on the ad – and its possible effect on future Newman-Random relations – Newman sent this e-mail:

I am always proud of publishers who defend their authors, as Cynthia Good when she was Chief Editor at Penguin and defended me against an unfair review. However, I do believe my comments were fair and in fact reflect most of the other reviews of the book that I’ve seen. My last book was with Random House Canada and I would be very happy to work with Anne Collins again.

The U.S. publishing house Dutton is about to release a memoir by James Lipton – host of Bravo’s Inside the Actors Studio – and the folks at Gawker have already proclaimed it possibly the “most gloriously horrendous book ever written”:

You have to love a man who starts the memoir of his middle-brow career with an epigraph by Chaucer, from The Canterbury Tales: “And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.”

For anyone who isn’t familiar with him, Lipton is that celebrity interviewer with the pretentiously pointy beard and irksomely wire-rimmed glasses, the one who sits on a New York theatre stage with, say, Sally Field, asking her to elucidate the socio-political meanings of The Flying Nun. According to Amazon, Lipton’s other major book is a 1968 reference title called An Exaltation of Larks, which pretty much says it all. For a more trenchant critique of Lipton’s peculiarly irritating manner, however, see this Saturday Night Live sketch featuring Will Farrell.

Readers of this space will know that a favourite hobby of book reviewers is publicly agonizing over the apparent decline of their craft. One of the most keen proponents of this view is former Los Angeles Times editor Steve Wasserman, who presided over a panel this weekend in New York that shared his dour perspective, reports The New York Observer. The event was reportedly as dreary as it sounds – that is, until a surprise appearance by a bona fide literary star.

Then, just as the post-discussion wine and cheese party was getting underway, a heavy-set, distinguished-looking man walked in the front door of the bookstore and strode towards the stage. “Is that Salman Rushdie?” someone said, eyeing the back of the man’s bald head. “Yes,” came the answer. And it was!

Here’s what Rushdie had to say about the newspaper review, more or less echoing Wasserman’s opinion that shorter reviews are proportional to their declining quality:

“It’s difficult if you just look at the newspapers now,” he said, “and remember how much more attention, how much more space was given to books in the very recent past. Many newspapers used to give three, four times the amount of space to books than they now do.”

But unlike Wasserman, Rushdie sees salvation in “the new media” – i.e., blogs:

“I think it’s rather unfortunate that some of the coverage tries to pitch print reviewing against the new media. I think they complement each other very well.”

The negative coverage Rushdie is referring to might be the media blitz surrounding the new book by Andrew Keen, a failed Internet entrepreneur and author of The Cult of the Amateur, a vituperative screed best summed up by its subtitle: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture. In it, Keen describes the blogosphere – and more generally, all facets of the digital age – as a forum where “ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”

What’s peculiar is how the book came across this Quillblogger’s desk: It was handed out to journalists last week at a press conference hosted by Indigo, which launched a social networking community on its website on Sunday.

Apparently, Indigo isn’t afraid of acknowledging its critics.

According to The Guardian, the venerable but somewhat fusty New Yorker magazine has appointed a new poetry editor, for the first time in 20 years. The new guy is Irish-born Pulitzer-winner Paul Muldoon, who takes over from Alice Quinn starting this November.

The editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, explained that it was not only Muldoon’s skill as a prize-winning poet which had made him ideal for the post, but also his wider appreciation of contemporary poetry.

“It’s not just a matter of picking the best poet you can think of,” he told The New York Times. “It’s also somebody who would know how to be in touch with an enormous range of poets, and that narrows it down a little bit more. And also somebody who’s not in Alaska.”

Though new blood is surely a good thing, we have to ask: wouldn’t it have behooved Remnick to appoint a new cartoons editor first? Those things are godawful.

Following up on Steve Wasserman’s recent essay calling for longer book reviews (previously mentioned on Quillblog), Michael O’Donnell says less is more. In an essay on the book reviewing blog Critical Mass, O’Donnell argues that 800 words or so should be plenty, thanks.

I’ll take a lean review, spare as a runner headed round a quarter-mile track. I know I can’t be alone in disagreeing with the notion that it takes 2500 words to express an idea, or in feeling a little impatient with those writers who are too grand to pick the important things, say them, and then stop. Full stop.

Any reader thoughts on the ideal length of a book review are welcome; let us know what you think in the comments field.

In the latest o tempora, o mores-type essay about the endangered species known as the newspaper book review, Steve Wasserman writes a (very) long essay for the Columbia Journalism Review. Wasserman is well-placed to comment on the decline of the book review, having served as the Los Angeles Times‘ book editor for almost 10 years, ending in 2005.

Wasserman does not spend the essay tearing his hair out or rending his shirt over our book-hostile times – in fact, he suggests that the erosion of the book review section is neither new nor, in some senses, unwelcome, given how mediocre so many printed reviews can be. He also puts paid to the notion that it is a book section’s unprofitability that dooms it. Book sections have always been unprofitable. What is at least partly to blame for the decline is the anti-intellectual bias firmly in place at most (North) American newspapers. In disdaining book culture, Wasserman writes, newspapers are not only neglecting a solemn cultural duty, etc., but missing an opportunity.

Never before in the whole of human history has more good literature, attractively presented, sold for still reasonably low prices, been available to so many people. You would need several lifetimes over doing nothing but lying prone in a semi-darkened room with only a lamp for illumination just to make your way through the good books that are on offer.

This is, strangely, a story that has not received near the attention it deserves. And yet its implications are large, especially if papers are to have a prayer of retaining readers and expanding circulation. There is money to be made in culture, if only newspapers were nimble and imaginative enough to take advantage of the opportunities that lie all around them.

The whole thing is well worth reading.

This week’s Maclean’s has an interview with Latin American author Mario Vargas Llosa, who has a new novel (The Bad Girl) out this fall. The article is an entertaining read, mostly because interviewer Isabel Vincent expends a considerable amount of effort trying (and failing) to get the author to call Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez the worst thing that ever happened to the region.

Llosa is reasonably chatty and forthcoming throughout, sharing his opinions on authoritarianism, Latin American politics, and the writing life, at least until Vincent’s final question:

What about Gabriel García Márquez, who is, like you, a literary giant in Latin America? You used to be good friends until you punched him out in a Mexican theatre in 1976. Neither you nor he have ever spoken about the feud, which has become one of the legendary battles of contemporary literature. Although you haven’t spoken for more than 30 years, you share the same agent [the legendary Carmen Balcells in Barcelona], and you recently agreed to allow part of your own book on García Márquez to be used as the introduction to a new edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is being re-released in Spain and throughout Latin America. Does this mean that there is a rapprochement with García Márquez on the horizon?

I don’t answer questions about that.

(Photo courtesy of the author’s official website, http://www.mvargasllosa.com/)

The New York Observer has more on literary critic James Wood’s defection from The New Republic to The New Yorker. The angle: will Wood have to tone down his hard-hitting approach to criticism, since The New Yorker publishes so many big-name writers in its fiction pages?

Wood says no, New Yorker editor David Remnick says no, and ever-charming New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier says that, well, it’s not his place to say, before proceeding to drop every YES-YES-YES hint he can come up with.

Mr. Wieseltier did not want to speculate about whether the New Yorker editor would keep his word. He pointed, instead, to remarks Mr. Remnick made in The New York Times when news of Mr. Wood’s move first broke. At that time, Mr. Remnick said that Mr. Wood was not a “slam artist,” and that despite what people say about him, he is “also capable of passionate praise.”

“When he keeps insisting on James’ ability to praise,” Mr. Wieseltier said, “David is apologizing for one of James’ greatest strengths.”

In another choice bit, Wieseltier says, “It would be hard to comment on the difference between The New Republic’s audience and The New Yorker’s audience without sounding vain and snobbish.” Yes, apparently it would.

Wood, for his part, says he’s looking forward to the chance to write some shorter reviews. For year one at The New Yorker, he’s agreed to turn in “five or six long pieces totaling about 5,000 words and five or six shorter ones at 2,500.”

Christopher Hitchens on Harry Potter in The New York Times:

For all this apparently staunch secularism, it is ontology that ultimately slackens the tension that ought to have kept these tales vivid and alive. Theologians have never been able to answer the challenge that contrasts God’s claims to simultaneous omnipotence and benevolence: whence then cometh evil? The question is the same if inverted in a Manichean form: how can Voldemort and his wicked forces have such power and yet be unable to destroy a mild-mannered and rather disorganized schoolboy? In a short story this discrepancy might be handled and also swiftly resolved in favor of one outcome or another, but over the course of seven full-length books the mystery, at least for this reader, loses its ability to compel, and in this culminating episode the enterprise actually becomes tedious. Is there really no Death Eater or dementor who is able to grasp the simple advantage of surprise?

Stephen King on same in Entertainment Weekly:

One last thing: The bighead academics seem to think that Harry’s magic will not be strong enough to make a generation of non-readers (especially the male half) into bookworms … but they wouldn’t be the first to underestimate Harry’s magic; just look at what happened to Lord Voldemort. And, of course, the bigheads would never have credited Harry’s influence in the first place, if the evidence hadn’t come in the form of bestseller lists. A literary hero as big as the Beatles? ”Never happen!” the bigheads would have cried. ”The traditional novel is as dead as Jacob Marley! Ask anyone who knows! Ask us, in other words!”

Um, let’s call it a draw….

There should be a word for a book review that exists only as a venue for the reviewer’s own particular hobbyhorse – religion in Hitchens’ case, “bigheads” in King’s.

The me-view?

Quillblog would like to congratulate the Toronto Star’s Cathal Kelly for possibly being the first sportswriter ever to work an Oulipo reference into a soccer-game recap. Covering the Toronto club’s game against the L.A. Galaxy on the weekend, Kelly wrote:

The French prankster Georges Perec once wrote a 300-page novel without using the letter “e.”

The book – A Void in English translation – is a nifty detective story. But despite its literary merits, most of your time as a reader is spent going backward over each page making sure that missing letter really is missing.

Let’s call you-know-who the absent vowel of last night’s Toronto FC-L.A. Galaxy game. Everyone knew he wasn’t going to play. Wouldn’t even dress. But they were still falling all over themselves for a look at him.

Now if the lead story in the “Wheels” section would just open with an allusion to Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, Quillblog could die happy.

In case you haven’t heard, leading literary critic James Wood has left The New Republic to join The New Yorker as a staff writer. Leon Wieseltier, Wood’s former editor, is classy in defeat: “The New Republic plays many significant roles in American culture, and one of them is to find and to develop writers with whom The New Yorker can eventually staff itself,” he told the Times.

Reports that Wieseltier then stamped his feet and held his breath until he turned blue are unconfirmed.

In today’s obligatory Harry Potter update, CNET News (via Reuters) is reporting that a 16-year-old in France has been arrested for posting three chapters of a French version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on the Internet more than two months before the official translation will be released. The French-language book will come out on Oct. 26; in the meantime, while French bookstores are free to sell the English version, this kid will be fighting the law.

The lesson: keep your hack translations to yourself; Harry Potter will have only one official French word for “hallows.” Bungling the translation of that term is definitely an arrest-worthy offense.

The Canadian Magazines blog is keeping track of the battle between Maclean’s and the Canadian Bar Association in the wake of last week’s interview with Lawyers Gone Bad author Philip Slayton and the subsequent heated reply from the CBA. An editorial in the Aug. 13 edition of Maclean’s (which was also publicized with a press release) maintains that while the editors had some misgivings about the splashy “Lawyers are rats” cover headline, they stand behind it and the issues raised in the story, because (they say) other legal experts have brought them up before.

In an introductory note to the editorial, they also accuse the CBA of leaning on the magazine’s financial backers to force an apology.

Furthermore, the CBA has repeatedly attempted to apply financial pressure to our parent companies, Rogers Publishing and Rogers Communications Inc., in order to force an apology from Maclean’s.

Ken Whyte, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Maclean’s, made the following comments: “That the CBA would refuse to debate the serious issues raised by our piece and instead try to — let’s put the best face on this — use its financial muscle to purchase an apology from us rather confirms the sentiment of our cover line.”

Ouch. Lawyers, back to you.

Meanwhile, in Sunday’s Toronto Star, regular crime fiction reviewer Jack Batten looks at Slayton’s book through the lens of Batten’s own time at the University of Toronto Law School. Batten says he’s seen some legal rats himself, and deems the book “smart and lively.”

In the Boston Globe, Sven Birkets considers an age-old (OK, it just feels age-old) question: what do blogs and newspaper reviews, respectively, contribute to our literary culture? His piece boils down to an argument that without some gatekeepers to sort everything out for us, things are just too complicated.

For as exciting as the blogosphere is as a supplement, as a place of provocation and response, it is too fluid in its nature ever to focus our widely diverging cultural energies. A hopscotch through the referential enormity of argument and opinion cannot settle the ground under our feet. To have a sense of where we stand, and to hold not just a number of ideas in common, but also some shared way of presenting those ideas, we continue to need, among many others, The New York Times, the Globe, the Tribune, the LA Times, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Thanks to Steven Beattie for the link.

The most recent edition of The Times Literary Supplement contains a review of a book/essay entitled (in French) “How to discuss books one hasn’t read.” Written by French literature professor and practising psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard, the book tackles what must surely be a common problem: having to fake one’s way through conversations or writing about great lit one hasn’t read. Don’t feel guilty, Bayard says – you aren’t alone, and society shouldn’t be pressuring you like that anyway.

During a discussion of “literary embarrassment,” Bayard himself confesses to referencing Joyce repeatedly in his teaching, though he hasn’t read Ulysses, and he isn’t alone in his chutzpah, the review says:

Bayard focuses on a scene in Lodge’s novel Changing Places, in which the English academic Philip Swallow initiates his students and fellow academics into a “game of Humiliation,” according to whose rules players have to give the names of great works they have not read: the head of the English department who hasn’t read Paradise Regained is bested by the American academic, Howard Ringbaum, who, in a moment of professional recklessness, confesses to not having read Hamlet. Ringbaum’s mistake, according to Bayard, was to have made this unambiguous confession, for Hamlet is part of what Bayard terms our “virtual” library – works we cannot help but be familiar with. There was simply no need for Ringbaum to be so rash.

As discussed in the review, Bayard focuses on the question of reviewing without reading the works in question:

The most enjoyable chapter is on Balzac’s novel Illusions perdues … in which the hero, Lucien de Rubempré, who has come to Paris to find literary fame and fortune, receives a brisk lesson in the cynical conventions of Parisian literary journalism.… Rubempré, who is full of foolish notions about “la sainte critique,” learns from his more worldly friends that … to read a volume for review would be considered humiliating – it’s a task best left to one’s mistress: the reviewer’s job is to express general opinions about the author in question, opinions that comply with the wishes of one’s editor. Bayard would see this approach to literary journalism as “transgressive”: all opinions, no matter how ill-founded, are valid, and the book has ceased to have importance, “has ceased to exist.” Balzac’s chancers are free to construct their own virtual libraries.

The practice of reviewing a book without having read it inevitably brings Oscar Wilde into the discussion: Wilde (the patron saint of non-readers) recommended six minutes as the proper time to spend reading a book for review, and advocated reviewing as a good way of talking about oneself.

Quillblog should state, for the record, that Q&Q’s reviewers never try this at home.

The Good Ship Harry Potter Information Lockdown continues to spring holes and take on water; now U.S. customers and media outlets have obtained actual physical copies of the book, and a couple — such as The New York Times and the Baltimore Sun – have already posted reviews. It’s worth noting here that neither review contained anything in the way of spoiler content. Nonetheless, as Reuters reports, J.K. Rowling is furious and her British publisher, Bloomsbury, is “very sad.” Aw. And here’s the latest from Canada’s own Raincoast Books:

IMPORTANT NEWS FROM RAINCOAST BOOKS

(Vancouver , July 19, 2007) It has now been confirmed by Scholastic Inc, the U.S. publisher of Harry Potter that there have been early sales in the United States of a small number of copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

In light of this highly regrettable situation, Raincoast Books, the Canadian publisher, would like to take this opportunity to assure Canadian fans that books in Canada remain strictly embargoed. We at Raincoast, along with our partners in 93 other countries, re-affirm our commitment to robustly support the embargo time of one minute past midnight local time on July 21, in order to preserve the magic for the children and adult readers of Harry Potter.

We would like to thank our customers and suppliers again for their full support given in so many different ways. We would also like to thank the media for their own observance of, and strict policing of, the embargo to preserve the secrecy of the plot for the readers of Harry Potter.

JK Rowling said today, ‘I am staggered that some American newspapers have decided to publish purported spoilers in the form of reviews in complete disregard of the wishes of literally millions of readers, particularly children, who wanted to reach Harry’s final destination by themselves, in their own time. I am incredibly grateful to all those newspapers, booksellers and others who have chosen not to attempt to spoil Harry’s last adventure for fans.”

Jamie Broadhurst
VP Marketing, Raincoast Books

Maybe it’s just Quillblog, but the line thanking us media types for our own “strict policing of the embargo” gives us the willies. We happen not to be interested in posting spoilers, but we don’t remember being deputized.

Journalist Alan Weisman has just published The World Without Us, a non-fiction tome based on an intriguing premise: how would the Earth change if the human population disappeared overnight? The book has already drawn some press, including this piece in Newsweek. And the Newsweek piece in turn has drawn the notice of shock jock Rush Limbaugh, who castigated both the book and the “Drive-By Media” (look alive, folks, he’s talking to us) on his radio show.

Quillblog is currently in the midst of reading The World Without Us, and can testify that it’s essentially a curious and dispassionate look at various aspects of ecology and biology, free of value judgments. But Limbaugh, who has clearly never so much as glanced at the book and apparently reached the limits of his comprehension skills just struggling through the Newsweek story, blusters that the article’s “about how great the planet could be again if we were just all wiped out, and it focuses on a guy who’s trying to accomplish that.” This shouldn’t need repeating, but just in case: Weisman is not some eco-terrorist.

Limbaugh froths on:

How does a guy write a story like this? Writing about some clown that wants to kill him, wipe him off the face the earth — and this Weisman guy, the subject of the story, acts like he’s not even part of the human race. “They,” “you,” but never “us,” in his words.

Actually, Weisman uses the first-person plural throughout the book. Starting with, um, the title.

In the unlikely event that you missed it, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows appears to have been leaked online. (Note: neither of the stories linked to in the previous sentence actually contain spoilers.) All 759 pages of the book have been photographed and posted to various illegal or quasi-legal file-sharing sites. Potter publishers, including Raincoast here in Canada, are stressing that this could be a forgery, which, frankly, seems highly unlikely. As Motoko Rich writes in The New York Times:

Doris Herrmann, an English teacher in Clear Lake, Tex., who is also a project coordinator for the Leaky Cauldron (leakynews.com), another big fan site, said: “I hate to say it, but it really does look authentic.” She said that while it was possible to work wonders with Photoshop or other programs, it would be difficult to write a whole manuscript, typeset it like the originals and then photograph the whole thing.

Yes, yes it would. Common sense, surely, though Rich got an English teacher to say it, just in case anyone needed convincing.

Publishers are also appealing to media and hackers to think of the marketing, er, the children. Again, from the Times:

Lisa Holton, president of Scholastic’s trade and book fairs division, said the company was asking various Web site hosts to take the photos down. “We’re not confirming if anything is real,” she said. “But in the spirit of getting to midnight magic without a lot of hoo-ha, can you just take some of this stuff down.”

And here’s today’s press release from Raincoast marketing vice-president Jamie Broadhurst:

Dear Member of the Media,

We are only a few days away from the July 21, 2007 publication date for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and I wanted to write you to thank you for your continued help in respecting the wishes of both the author and her legion of fans in preserving the secrets contained within the final book in the series until one minute after midnight on that day.

As the excitement builds there is a great deal of speculation as to the outcome of the series, and several unauthenticated ‘versions’ of the last book have been posted to internet sites. It remains to be seen until July 21 what really happens to Harry and his friends and there is no confirmation as to whether the posted versions are real or elaborate fakes. The legal framework in Canada recognizes and protects the confidentiality of the book and its content until the release date chosen by the Author and the publishers as holders of the copyright, notwithstanding attempts at spoilers or other breaches of the embargo.

In the meantime, Raincoast Books calls upon the media to respect the embargo on publishing content whether validated or not, until that time.

For now, let’s forego the question of how, say, a one-sentence sum-up of whether Harry lives or dies could be considered a copyright infringement. Instead, let’s note that if publishers did exercise their legal rights “as holders of the copyright,” that would seem to be a tacit admission that the online material is genuine. (After all, they’ve apparently been allowing this Harry Potter fan fiction site to flourish uninjunctioned.)

In any case, Quillblog can’t help thinking that years of treating Potter plot details like nuclear-launch codes are now coming home to roost.

Quillblog assumes you’ve heard about that Conrad Black fellow by now; it seems he’s somewhat guilty. But amid the deluge of media coverage, we missed a little morsel from Barbara Amiel that the New York media and gossip blog Gawker has kindly highlighted for everyone. Because we had to think about it, you must too.

The Times, which carried a fairly solid timeline/analysis piece this weekend, wonders if Lady Black’s imperious image may have hurt her husband with the jury and contains this absolutely horrifying passage:

“In her last column written before the verdict, Ms. Amiel wrote about her pending move out of her temporary Chicago home – a five-room suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. She noted that her husband was already well into a manuscript for a new book, having just published a biography of Richard M. Nixon, but that she had not used her spare time during the four-month trial productively.

‘Give him another four months – and fewer nights of love – and he’ll have two finished manuscripts,’ she noted.”

Please excuse this Quillblogger; she has to go scrub her brain with steel wool.