Bookmarks: Sarah Palin’s book-tour blunder, Rick Moody’s Twitter fiasco, and Sky Gilbert goes back in the closet

Sundry links from around the Web:

• Sarah Palin’s publicist admits it was a mistake to try barring foreign journalists from a book-signing event
• Poet, playwright, and activist Sky Gilbert comes out as “no longer gay“
• Rick Moody’s Tweeted short story is deemed an utter failure
• Amazon’s bid to scrap amended Google settlement is thrown out of court
• The Wall Street Journal advises Christmas shoppers to beware of e-readers, which may be going through “an eight-track moment”

Beach reads

It’s one of our culture’s most cherished beliefs that since people don’t want to think too hard or get too bummed out in the sunshine, mass-market commercial fiction will hold sway in the summertime. So as we leave spring behind, Slate is right on time with “Pulp Fiction week,” which includes stories about true crime, the history of pulp, and the work of Donald Westlake and Patricia Highsmith. (It would be nice to see some discussion of how the pulp form has basically migrated to TV with CSI & Order and the like, but perhaps that’s still to come.)

Slate also does the obligatory summer reading poll, asking a number of authors about their favourite “beach reads.” Canadian author Lori Lansens, for example, picks Anita Shreve’s All He Ever Wanted, while Rick Moody goes for the Motley Crue autobiography, The Dirt. At the other end of the scale, Francine Prose recommends Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, while Random House bigwig Daniel Menaker has on his agenda Daniel M. Wegner’s The Illusion of Conscious Will. “It’s a brilliant dismantling of the idea that conscious mental decisions cause physical actions – which I have been trying to finish for four months now.”

Related links:
Click here for the Slate article about authors’ summer reading choices
Click here for a listing of other articles in Slate’s Pulp Fiction week

The school of rocklit

It may be true, as Michael Hearst claims, that “all writers want to be rock stars.” But do they truly have rock within them? That’s one question posed by this Carl Wilson feature in the weekend Globe and Mail. The new album by Hearst’s band, One Ring Zero, features lyrics by a variety of fiction writers, including Rick Moody, Paul Auster, Jonathan Lethem, A. M. Homes, Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), and our own Margaret Atwood. Although accusations of dilettantism can surely run both ways, Wilson’s piece largely avoids the phenomenon of rock stars who want to be writers, thus sparing us the unpleasant task of contemplating novels like Bob Dylan’s Tarantula or Nick Cave’s And the Ass Saw the Angel.

Related links:
Carl Wilson on singing writers in The Globe and Mail