We few, we happy few … bloggers vs. The Guardian (which has a lesson to learn from computer geeks)

Dear Comrades, including those of you who once blogged with me on the books site of The Guardian – whether or not we’re still on speaking terms,
…The signs point to a victory over Goliath. . . Yes, we few, we happy band of bloggers … have won, by refusing to let that newspaper shut us [...]

A serendipitous postscript to: Bruce Chatwin, blogging pioneer

A good reporter thinking in what couldn’t be deemed his finest hour was complaining the other day that the net has killed serendipity. To that I say, stuff and nonsense. The fact is, it’s alive and well and has only done a bit of shape-shifting — just as Serendip, the inspiration for that gorgeous word, [...]

As goes blogging, so goes literature … or, … Bruce Chatwin, blogging pioneer

Mary Roach on Bill Streever’s Cold in last Sunday’s lead review in The New York Times:

Streever himself is a scientist, both by degree and paycheck, but writing for journals hasn’t muddied his style. Phalaropes, he writes, “swim in tight circles, their heads bobbing as if connected to their feet.” […] He sculptures lucid [...]

Interactive – and shallow? — fiction spells contentious Vookworm

Let’s say that you’re a novelist a bit bored with yourself and by the usual plots, who feels like trying to put two characters into a gravity-smashing relationship with each other.
Why not, say, a woman who allows herself to be seduced by a much younger man? Would she necessarily have to look like Demi [...]

Do (real) writers lack a marketing gene?

O comrades, dear comrades, thank you for keeping this meeting-place alive in my absence – with special thanks to gentle @Suzan Abrams for her encouragement, and for the reappearance of two of you I’d given up for lost, @Captain Ned and @Hazlitt, with wonderfully thoughtful posts that set my head skipping.
I found those comments [...]

Editors, editing and infant mortality

Earlier this week, three closely related subjects swam into focus together, on my mental screen:
* Complaints about unedited or poorly edited books, a species of moan that has begun to be an anachronistic cliché — in this case, by a New York Times reviewer grumbling about the autobiography of someone called Russell Brand:
In the [...]

On books as Bondmobiles . . . and a translation web site

When books become Bondmobiles, I expect that writers will be trans-textual getaway artists cobbling together scribbles, recorded music, spoken words, . . . moving and still pictures – some of all that newly minted, and the rest borrowed, licensed or filched.
Bondmobiles – who dat? You’ll know exactly what I mean if, like me, you hadn’t [...]

Pixels in the wind: traditional publishing vs. the blogosphere (part 3)

[ for new readers, here are part 1 and part 2 ]
John Updike’s obituary made the front page in his country’s paper of record late last month, and that master-architect of sensuous American sentences in English deserved no less. Who else would thought of saying that ‘the average book [...]

Book promotion: fanfare for one of our makers

A toast to our very own comrade, Sean Murray. After years of an exceptionally brave struggle with the financial obstacles in writers’ lives, he is – not a moment too soon — beginning to get some of the recognition his creativity deserves.
Read all about it in the Irish Sunday Tribune: ‘More like John, the [...]

Acciaccature heard elsewhere

Not every acciaccatura originates in this spot . . . (ahem).
Tuesday’s posting, Pixels in the wind: traditional publishing vs. the blogosphere (part 2), mentions attempts in certain quarters to blame the financial crisis for the commercialisation of book publishing. This isn’t just untrue but unnecessary. See the quotations of writers and publishers at the bottom [...]