Signs the world is coming to an end, #10,135

One of the most tragic aspects of the publishing industry is recognizing the years of labour, research, networking, and luck that go into getting something onto shelves – and then watching an idiot like this get handed a publishing contract.

That’s right – ousted Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, recently impeached for allegedly selling Barack Obama’s vacant senate seat, has signed a six-figure book deal.

Paying writers not to write

What do you call 500 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? An excellent start. Okay, that’s an old joke, but it’s indicative of a feeling in the general populace that folks in the legal profession are overpaid blowhards.

Lawyers tend to resent jokes like that. Imagine the horror a writer must feel to discover that practitioners of Chaucer’s “crafte so longe to lerne” aren’t immune to the same kind of ribbing. At least, that’s the impression one gets from reading Paul Greenberg’s recent New York Times piece entitled “Bail Out the Writers!” Greenberg, having been told a “depressing” joke by his daughter, the punchline of which acknowledges the meagre incomes most writers can expect to recoup from their prose, launches into an impassioned cri de coeur based on his discovery of “a national problem of respect where being a writer has become so widely associated with being a loser that we have become the stuff of common jokes.”

Actually, the piece is a humorous screed in the mode of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” but, like Swift, Greenberg conceals a serious point beneath the ironic veil. He suggests that in a world in which Ann Beattie must compete with a self-published author named Ann Rothrock Beattie, there may be a problem of overcapacity in written output. His solution is for the government to buy out half the writers currently pumping out books at the rate of two years’ average annual income, or $72,000 U.S.

Paying writers not to write sounds ridiculous, but it actually addresses a key problem that has been plaguing North American publishing for some time now (and that is coming into dramatic relief thanks to the recent economic downturn). It may be anathema to say it – and this Quillblogger is well aware of the hackles that are likely to be raised by those who have long benefitted from publishers’ profligacy – but perhaps it’s time to recognize that people are acutally publishing too much.

Publisher of controversial Mohammed novel firebombed

As previously noted on Quillblog, publication of the novel The Jewel of Medina was canceled by Random House U.S. due to the possibility that it might offend Muslims and perhaps initiate attacks by those at the radical end of the faith. It was a dumb move – to pre-emptively censor oneself – but one dumb move always engenders another, and now the offices of the book’s U.K. publisher have been firebombed. And it gets worse.

From The Telegraph:

Hardline clerics said that further attacks would be “inevitable” if publication of the novel, The Jewel of Medina, goes ahead as planned next month.

Police moved in to arrest three men moments after a fire broke out at the London home and office of Martin Rynja in the early hours of Saturday.

The attack came days after Mr Rynja’s company, Gibson Square, bought the rights to the book by the American writer Sherry Jones, which has already been likened to Sir Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

Islam’s radical fringe has clearly decided once again  that the “dangerous Muslim” stereotype is better propagated from within. They’re like the drunken frat boys at a party who are determined to wreck it for everyone, or the former child stars who keep getting pulled over high on meth.

Shinan Govani takes on Bennett’s blue bloods

Gadfly and gossip-hound Shinan Govani takes novelist Jonathan Bennett to task in the pages of today’s National Post, suggesting that Bennett’s portrayal of the well-heeled, monied classes in his new book, Entitlement, misses the mark. The novel, set in a fictional Toronto boys’ school called Lower Simcoe College – which bears a striking resemblance to Upper Canada College, the private boys’ school that boasts Michael Ignatieff and Conrad Black as alumni – includes passages stating that wealth “doesn’t matter” in Canada, and that, when it comes to success, Canadians of all classes either “disregard it or do not recognize it.”

Bollocks, declaims Govani:

Speaking as someone whose job, over the years, has involved tangling with the rich and the boldface-able, and observing these species up close, Bennett crafts an interesting point here. Too bad he’s off. It’s true that the Canadian scene when it comes to wealth and fame is markedly different – Canadian socialites are a distinct breed, for sure! – the world that the book reflects is a fading one, and Entitlement reads a little like a period piece.

In a post-Conrad Black-in-jail scene, in a country that has the well last-named only too happy to be covered in our own Hello! mag, and where some of these same elites cajole hard to get social column inches (believe me, I would know), the scene has changed. We’re not as pious as we think.

Glad that Govani – the Perez Hilton of the North – had the decency to use the first-person plural in that last sentence. Whatever the faults in Bennett’s novel, piety has never been high on Govani’s list of attributes.

Lytton’s had enough!

The winner of the 26th annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for the worst opening line of an imaginary novel was announced last week (the winner wrote something about passion in a New York City taxi).

However, in a letter to the editor in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, Chris O’Connor, mayor of Lytton, B.C. (Bulwer-Lytton’s namesake), announced the town will host a debate on the merits of Bulwer-Lytton’s prose.

For years, Professor Scott Rice has been making sport of Lord Edward George Bulwer Lytton, with his Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

Lord Lytton was both a statesman and an author. As colonial secretary, he helped create the Crown Colony of British Columbia in 1858.

Prof. Rice has accepted our challenge to debate Lord Lytton’s writing prowess in our village this Labour Day weekend, with the Hon. Henry Cobbald-Lytton, his great-great-great-grandson.

The Guardian covered this story as well, publishing the entire ridiculed first sentence of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, Paul Clifford, showing there’s more to “It was a dark and stormy night” than Rice suggests.

The debate will take place on Aug 30 and, as O’Connor says, “It won’t be a ‘dark and stormy night’; the debate is at 3:00 p.m.”

Partisan publishing

Slate columnist Timothy Noah takes on a new book by right-wing journalist Jerome R. Corsi, calling it an unambiguous smear-job against presidential hopeful Barack Obama. The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, which will top The New York Times bestsellers list this weekend, is marred by “multiple errors,” Noah claims – for instance, Corsi’s suggestion that the Illinois senator may have continued to experiment with drugs past college. The book is no doubt a fitting companion to Corsi’s previous work of, er, political reporting, titled Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry.

Why did Corsi write The Obama Nation? Was it in disinterested pursuit of scholarly truth? Er, not exactly. “The goal is to defeat Obama,” he told the Times. “I don’t want Obama to be in office.”

Of course, overheated polemics are nothing new to U.S. readers, especially during election season. Noah’s real scorn is reserved for Corsi’s publisher, Republican strategist Mary Matalin, whose eponymous imprint is backed by Simon & Schuster.

All this raises the question of whether the world of “conservative” publishing, which includes not only Matalin’s imprint at Simon & Schuster but also Random House’s Crown Forum and Penguin Group USA’s Sentinel, aspires even to the standards of the nonideological (or what conservatives call the “liberal”) publishing establishment, which are nothing to write home about. What I’ve learned about The Obama Nation suggests it does not. What the hell is Mary Matalin doing running a publishing imprint in the first place?

The answer is depressingly obvious – runaway sales, regardless of the cost to truth (or American political culture, for that matter). Noah ends his piece with another rhetorical question:

The conservative movement has won the publishing houses’ attention but not their respect. Does it even care?

Bellow’s regrets

Slate’s political columnist Timothy Noah takes umbrage with author and book editor Adam Bellow’s response to a two-year-old column about the Coulter-ization of conservative-leaning books in the U.S. Bellow, who edited two of the books cited in the column, hits back in a piece in the summer issue of World Affairs. But it’s not quite the riposte it might have been – while shrugging off Noah’s criticisms that the current crop of conservative tomes borrow too liberally (pun intended) from right-wing commentator Ann Coulter’s shrill style, Bellow also concedes that the contemporary conservative dialogue ain’t what it used to be.

Granted, Bellow’s piece is about more than just Noah’s column, but regardless, it seems Noah comes out on top in this battle of wits:

Whether Bellow will go to hell for publishing either work is not a question that interests me. I’ve interviewed him by phone a couple of times—we’ve never met face to face—and I found him congenial and intelligent. (Also—full disclosure—when I first started writing this column, he sent a complimentary “if you ever want to write a book” note.) Unlike [...] Bellow, I experience no distress when I contemplate conservatism’s intellectual bankruptcy. Not my religion, and therefore not my problem. But I’m not too fine a person to enjoy Bellow’s torment and vacillation in reaction to something I wrote. Yup, it sucks to be a conservative today. Have a Maalox on me, pal.

CNN commentator calls books for boys “emasculating”

Glenn Beck, a conservative political commentator who appears regularly on CNN Headline News, recently welcomed U.S. children’s book author Ted Bell to his show, in order to sing the praises of Bell’s new adventure title, Nick of Time. However, it seems clear from the lack of interest Beck shows in Bell that the whole point of the interview is simply to expound on the need for more manly books for boys.

“Try to find a book today that’s aimed at young male readers – they are emasculating!” says Beck. “They’re no longer about values, or virtue, or the spirit of adventure, or sticking up for your little sister or yourself. [...] When was the last time the heroine did not save the brother, but the brother stood up and saved the girl? It doesn’t happen anymore.”

You can see the full, inane interview here.

As an aside, at one point Bell observes that, when he was growing up, “we had Treasure Island, Captain Blood – all those wonderful adventures. We don’t have them anymore.” To which we respond: what the %#*&^? Those books were published in the late 1800s. They weren’t remotely his generation’s books. And last time we checked, those books are still around, and still being read by appreciative youngsters.

Malcolm Gladwell: for or against?

A mild controversy may be brewing around Malcolm Gladwell, the Canadian journalist and bestselling author of Blink and The Tipping Point, and a New Yorker staff writer.

The dispute arose after The New Republic‘s cantankerous literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, passingly referred to Gladwell as an “idiot” on his blog. Basically, Gladwell’s popularity rubs Wieseltier the wrong way, and he ascribes it to a general decline in American ideas: “The language of business is now the smart language. This society is surrendering not to economics but to economicism, which is what happens when economics settles where it does not belong,” he writes.

In response, New York Times blogger Barry Gewen hesitantly stepped up in Gladwell’s defence:

Now, Malcolm Gladwell’s books can certainly be criticized for a superficial and homiletic sheen, but their author is anything but an “idiot.” Gladwell has ferreted out some fascinating research and translated it into language that makes it accessible to millions of readers. He is a very capable popularizer.

Here’s what Gewen has to say about Wieseltier:

The chattering classes have long complained about how talk radio and the shouting contests that pass for political commentary on television have lowered the tone of discourse in America…. So it’s dismaying when [Wieseltier] takes the same kind of bullying cheap shot, and in one of our leading intellectual publications, that one expects from, and dislikes in, a Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly.

The First Annual Hooker Prize

Who says booksellers are the last guardians of good taste in an ever-more tawdry world?

From AbeBooks:

Welcome to the Hooker Prize – in honor of Elliot Spitzer and his fall from grace in a New York minute, AbeBooks.com has compiled a list of 10 recommended non-fiction reads about hookers, madams, high-class callgirls and prostitutes. Prostitution, of course, is the oldest profession in the world and has fascinated readers for centuries. Since the 1970s, there has been a wealth of memoirs from ‘ladies of the night’ so here’s the literary lowdown on the callgirl culture.

Yes, The Happy Hooker by Xavier Hollander is #1.