Open Letters: A Monthly Arts & Literature Review debuts with “among other things, a sharp, critical work by John Cotter on the reviews of Martin Amis’s “House of Meetings”; an involved examination of the writing of young first-time novelists; and our headliner, an unsparing assessment of ALL 20th literature by Steve Donoghue.”

Hearing Coleman Barks read at AWP Atlanta was the absolute highlight for me. I’ve read much of his translation of Rumi and only knew that of him. I was equally awed by his reading his own poetry that night – his non-Rumi poems. Not only is his delivery enough to carry you from the physical realm into the poetic ethereal, but his down-homey nature in his reading was like being wrapped in a cozy blanket on a cold winter’s eve. While reading, he would interject chuckles, amused by the memory of the line or the event therein reflected, and would add commentary, such as “This really happened,” as he talked the crowd of hundreds through his lines as though to a single friend over coffee. A smattering of his poetry with RealAudio recordings can be found on Courtland Review’s website. Coleman will be busy traveling this year, celebrating the 800th birthday of Rumi; if you’re lucky enough, you might be able to catch up with him.

Wheelhouse Magazine Online launches its debut issue, Vol. 1, with contributions from fiction writers Jim Ruland, Nahid Rachlin, Mimi Albert, Diane Lefer, Curtis Harnack, Lourdes Vasquez; poetry from Tung Hui Hu, Pat Falk, Natasha Saje, Marilyn Taylor, and Jared Carter; visual arts by Daniel Johnston, Tom Carey, and Marc Leuthold; essayists Steve Heller and Sheyene Foster Heller.

BENT PIN Quarterly, a new online journal is currently accepting poetry, essays, and flash fiction for its first issue, Spring 2007.

Poetry & Commitment by Adrienne Rich. Poets Against the War newsletter. “I’m both a poet and one of the ‘everybodies’ of my country. I live with manipulated fear, ignorance, cultural confusion and social antagonism huddling together on the faultline of an empire. I hope never to idealise poetry – it has suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry, anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong.”

To sing like a mockingbird: A conversation with Nathaniel Dorsky

Michelle Silva: First I want to ask about your recent book Devotional Cinema. I think it’s some of the most thoughtful and introspective writing on the human experience of cinema and the physical properties we share with the medium — such as our internal visual experience, metaphor, and the art of seeing. What’s great about the book is that it’s accessible to people who aren’t well versed in cinema, but who might be interested in a deeper understanding of their own senses.
Nathaniel Dorsky: The basic ideas for the book were originally formulated because I was hired to teach a course on avant-garde film at UC Berkeley for a semester. I didn’t want to teach a survey course on avant-garde cinema; I didn’t think I could do that with real enthusiasm, I thought it would be a little flat. I decided that what was most interesting to me about avant-garde film — or at least the avant-garde films that I found most interesting — was a search for a language which was purely a filmic language.

After reading the Webhost Study Group report prepared for us by some friends of my dad, and talking with advisors for and against our current situation, we have decided on a New Way Forward. The traffic to our site is too great for our current web host. So…

NewPages.com will be offline for a day or two near the 24th of December as we switch to a new web host. They say that’s the most we should be missing, but if it’s longer than that, keep trying & we’ll show back up. Those promises have been made.

NewPages receives a nice write-up and listing in the revamped “Online Poetry Resources” page on the website of the Academy of American Poets .

Novelist, Editor, Mother Balances the Writing Life. Robert Duffer interviews Gina Frangello, author of My Sister’s Continent, and Executive Editor of Other Voices magazine and its fiction book imprint OV Books.

Jason Boog asks Susan Henderson: “The art of writing is evolving as print publications struggle and blogs multiply like rabbits. Your career has crossed both these worlds in interesting ways. In your experience, what makes your web writing different from your paper writing? Any advice for new writers looking to write a blog or website?”

Kit Whitfield blogs from the UK on publishing “scams” and “fake publishing houses”, but the information is just as relevant in the US, as PublishAmerica is one company looked at. A big problem is that the majority of writers out there with their manuscript in one hand and their dreams of fame and riches in the other, will never read information such as this.

I’ve been doing a lot of research this month on indie publishers, and I’ve been finding a much larger number of companies that are will to help you “publish” your book than I realized existed. It is becoming a large marketplace, and there are fistsfull of cash to be extracted from naive authors.

So now we have some of the companies that will sell you the chance to win a meaningless book award (Yippie!) — that’s a whole ‘nuther scam to talk about someday — offering to help you “publish” your book with promises of promoting it to huge sales. Slick, ethics-free, websites make it all sound so simple.

1st Day of Christmas – Books for the Aspiring Writer Colleen Mondor has some interesting ideas. I especially like the idea of giving subscriptions to literary magazines. We have some great candidates for that at www.newpages.com/litmags.

More from Tayari Jones: “It has been carefully documented on this blog and on my own, that publishing houses often neglect to publicize the books that they have agreed to publish. It becomes pretty clear to an author that she is going to have to get out there and hustle if she wants her book to reach readers, reviewers, prize committees, etc. Many articles have been written by editors and publicists urging more authors to get out there and HUSTLE.

I’ve done it. I’ll admit it. Many authors of literary fiction feel demeaned by the dirty-hands work of hawking their book. And, though we seldom admit it, it is also pretty depressing work. Literary fiction does not exactly lend itself to the same techniques that work well for urban lit, romance, and mystery novels. One writer friend of mine told me of her dismay at sitting at a book festival next to a romance author who had brought along a troupe of bare-chested policemen to draw attention to her steamy novel.”

This from Tayari Jones: “There is something resembling an obituary to Bebe Moore Campbell in the newest Newsweek. The Newsweek piece, called Will Sleaze Dominate Black Publishing, laments that writers like Campbell are less popular than authors of non-fiction tell-alls such as Karrine Stephans.

I have to say that I have had enough of this particular narrative.

I am not disputing that racy, celebrity laden books like Confessions of a Video Vixen outsell literary novels. Instead, I am getting sick of the way that commercial writers are set up as the antagonists of literary novelists. I don’t think that I’m going to far in left field to wonder why this seems to be a discussion waged far more often when it comes to African American literature.”

A new posting in the NewPages Literary News Blog.

Long list of books received, new literary magazines received in the mail, couple new contests, some news…

The NewPages blog. I don’t know where it went, but we had to pay a huge sum of money to track it down. Hired the best in the business. And apparently she used this tool that only those “in the know” are familiar with. Something called “Google.”

That’s why she gets paid the big bucks. To know about obscure search engines that nobody else ever hears about…

So, what? Are we back now?

All lit all the time. New feature at NewPages.com. Features: New print lit mags received :: New online lit mags posted :: Contests and lit prizes :: News & announcements from lit blogs and the the web

The Regulator Is on a Roll. As suburban sprawl threatens to overcome more and more communities, independent booksellers are facing battles on many fronts, from fighting proposed chain store developments in their communities to competing with online giants. It is a market landscape that is very familiar to Tom Campbell of Durham, North Carolina’s The Regulator Bookshop. However, Campbell has been proactive to ensure that these economic forces do not undermine his business: He recently helped to dissuade Duke University from opening a huge bookstore right down the street from his store, and in May, he launched an online promotion that has dramatically increased his store’s Internet sales.

Ogden Publications Acquires Utne Magazine. “Utne is one of the most respected publications in America and we feel deeply honored to make it part of Ogden,” said Bryan Welch, publisher of Ogden Publications, Inc. “This makes us the largest and most influential media company in the conscientious lifestyles and environmental awareness fields. Public interest in living more sustainably is growing faster than ever and we expect to grow with it, creating an important resource for today’s consumer.”

Uh-oh. Note the last sentence. “…an important resource for today’s consumer.”

I don’t quite know what to say about that, but it settles in my stomach with a thud.

I’m sure that is why a corporate publisher would latch on to a publication like Utne — because they can now sell a lot more advertising pages aimed at us “conscientious” and “environmentally aware,” uh, consumers. (I almost wrote “readers.”)

The Ogden website states that they publish magazines and books “for people interested in self-sufficiency, sustainability, rural lifestyles and farm memorabilia.” I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem like how I would ever have defined Utne magazine.

Ogden is headquartered in Topeka, Kansas — home base of the “Charles Darwin is the devil — God did it all in six days” mindset.

They publish Grit magazine. One of their other magazines, Cappers, has been “striving to enlighten and entertain while concentrating on traditional American values.”

Read the last of that sentence again: “traditional American values.”

Thud.

Although it appears Utne will remain based in Minneapolis, I have a strong feeling that we won’t be seeing anything too radical or controversial in their pages after this. Or maybe it will feel like the same magazine for a while, and then “evolve” more into the Ogden mold.

Utne grew quickly to become a wonderful and vital publication, giving important coverage to lesser known alternative magazines. Their coverage of smaller mags makes a difference in our culture, and I wonder how much longer we’ll see that. They currently have on staff one of the smartest and most dedicated persons around to the cause of finding, reviewing and promoting the best — and often amazingly obscure — alt mags and zines.

But the focus off of the alternative *press* has been going on for a while. The January 2005 issue carried the subtitle: “A Different Read on Life.”

The November 2005 issue has the new subtitle: “Understanding the next evolution.”

Now I cringed when I first saw that. A bit too “new-agey” for my tastes. And too cute, by far, the way they were able to come up with something using the letters U T N E…

And is it not priceless that the magazine of the “next evolution” is now headquartered in the state where the “first evolution” is being
banished from school textbooks?

Mark my words. This is not a good thing for alternative media.

Going beyond God. Historian and former nun Karen Armstrong says the afterlife is a “red herring,” hating religion is a pathology and that many Westerners cling to infantile ideas of God. By Steve Paulson. Salon.com.

Well, explain that. What is religion?

Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn’t necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept. The sages were all extremely concerned with transcendence, with going beyond the self and discovering a realm, a reality, that could not be defined in words. Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God.

Interview with Michael Pollan. Los Angeles City Beat. In Michael Pollan’s recently released book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, the author delves into America’s twisted nutritional zeitgeist and discovers that we need to retrace our culinary steps. Then he does the legwork for us by investigating the origins of four separate meals, from a drive-thru McDonald’s dinner to one for which he himself has – not kidding – hunted and foraged. Another interview here: Austinist Interviews Michael Pollan.

A conference with ghosts. Writings by and about our disenfranchised prison population. By Daniel Burton-Rose. San Francisco Bay Guardian. Two new books by bright young writers delve into the impact of America’s criminal justice system on society at large. In Conned: How Millions Went to Prison, Lost the Vote, and Helped Send George W. Bush to the White House, Sacramento-based investigative journalist Sasha Abramsky documents the way in which the widespread practice of stripping convicted felons of the right to vote has dramatically contracted the country’s pool of eligible voters.

. . . Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime, by UC Riverside ethnic studies professor Dylan Rodr

Censorship is xxxx xx xxx. A new anthology looks at how we silence others and ourselves. By David Moisl. San Francisco Bay Guardian. “The ultimate dream of censorship is to do away with the censor,” says Svetlana Mintcheva in Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression, a collection of essays, interviews, and roundtable discussions whose contributors range from Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig and hacker-culture explicator Douglas Thomas to fiction writers J.M. Coetzee and Judy Blume.

. . . In “Market Censorship,” New Press founder André Schiffrin discusses the situation of booksellers: “The market, it is argued, is a sort of ideal democracy. It is not up to the elite to impose their values on readers, publishers claim, it is up to the public to choose what it wants — and if what it wants is increasingly downmarket and limited in scope, so be it. The higher profits are proof that the market is working like it should.”

Road to Nowhere. Al Gore scares the living hell out of Sam Adams. Philadelphia City Paper. I’ve been trying to tell this story for 30 years, and I’ve felt that I failed in it. But I think I’m making progress, and that’s one reason I’m so happy that these moviemakers convinced me. They came to one of my slide shows and asked if they could make a movie out of it, and I was skeptical, but they convinced me, and I’m so glad now, because they’ve made a really entertaining movie that stays true to the science. I think when people connect all those dots, you will see a sense of urgency that goes up to the levels that match the awareness. And then the country will move past a tipping point and start taking action.

Justice, Love, Death & Literature An Interview with Sandy Taylor, Publisher, Curbstone Press. Interviewed by Jessica Powers. Sandy Taylor is co-director of Curbstone Press, which recently celebrated 30 years of publishing. Curbstone Press was started because Sandy and Judy Doyle “wanted to present literature that promoted human rights and civil liberties and promoted cultural understanding.”

NP: The question is which came first, the love of human rights or books?

Taylor: Who remembers for sure? I’m not sure I ever separated the two. The hunger for justice is every bit a part of our experience as love or death. We’ve always believed literature has an effect on people’s lives.

Along with discussing his philosophy of publishing and life, Sandy gives would-be literary publishers many tips from his long career–advice on finding a distributor, getting into bookstores, the academic market, getting reviews, conferences to attend, and the importance of promotion. “…all kinds of factors involved in keeping the ‘culture of the book’ alive.”

Battle Cry for Theocracy. By Sunsara Taylor, Truth Dig. BattleCry is a part of the evangelical organization Teen Mania, and you can learn a lot about the kind of society that Teen Mania is fighting for by reading up on its Honor Academy, a non-accredited educational institution that offers directed internships to 700 undergraduate and graduate youth each year. Among the academy’s tenets: Homosexuality and masturbation are sins. Interns are forbidden to listen to secular music, watch R-rated movies or date; men can’t use the Internet unsupervised; the length of women’s skirts is regulated. The logic behind this—that men must be protected from the sin of sexual temptation—is what drives Islamic fundamentalists to shroud women in burkhas!

New Book Lays Out Impeachment Crimes and Impeachment Roadmap. The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office. By Dave Lindorff & Barbara Olshansky, SF Indymedia. The authors believe that just as the president’s many impeachable crimes are political in nature, they demand a political response. What is required is that the public rise up this November, throw off years of lethargy and cynicism, and elect to Congress representatives who are committed to standing up for the Constitution, for the tradition of three co-equal branches of government, and for the civil liberties that hundreds of thousands of Americans have died defending…

Why Go Independent? But friends, every time you put a dollar into amazon.com’s already overflowing coffers – into Big Corporate Store’s already overflowing coffers – you are robbing the small store in your community. You are sending your dollars to Seattle or Chicago or New York. And you’re taking tax dollars out of your community – and tax dollars, as you know, represent much more than a new book or CD or gewgaw. They represent road repair, police salaries, city parks and on and on. And by hurting the small business owner – who lives and is trying to make his living in your community – you are taking him out of the economic equation.

Ann Arbor Book Festival. Dan Wickett of Emerging Writers Network blogs the cold, rainy book fair.

Saturday was best summed up by Orchid Co-Executive Editor Keith Hood at about 3:45 p.m., just before the Literary Journal Panel. Responding to somebody who asked how the day had been going, Keith replied:

“It hasn’t sucked as much as I thought it would.”

And a bit more…

Attended this weekend – Asian American Writers Congress (Los Angeles). The Hermit Poet. I had a great time at the first annual Asian American Writers Congress held at UCLA. The program began with the keynote speaker, Shawn Wong who addressed the where have we been and where are we going aspects of Asian American literature.

Generation Xerox. Youth may not be an excuse for plagiarism. But it is an explanation. And then there’s Kaavya herself. All the reasons an unknown girl got such a large advance for a slight novel—her promotability: extreme youth, voguish ethnicity, good looks, public poise, and Harvard imprimatur, as well as the book’s autobiographical verisimilitude—are the same reasons her downfall is so riveting. The story also has a crossover appeal, pleasing both young people envious of their mega-successful peer and older people who enjoy imputing moral inferiority and too-clever-by-half stupidity to the younger generation.

What Are Independent Bookstores Really Good For? Not much. By Tyler Cowen, Slate. NewPages.com does not share the statement made in the title of this article, but I think it’s only fair to read and reflect on it.

“Our attachment to independent bookshops is, in part, affectation—a self-conscious desire to belong a particular community (or to seem to). Patronizing indies helps us think we are more literary or more offbeat than is often the case. “

Cody’s Books on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley to close its doors. In 1989, after a minor firebombing, the store announced that it would continue to sell Salman Rushdie’s controversial “Satanic Verses” — a decision that Ross called “our finest hour.”

“Rushdie came to the store once, a surprise visit when he was still in hiding,” Ross said. The author gave the bookstore 5-minutes notice to announce that he was in the store and would sign books. “There’s a hole above the information desk from the bombing. Someone scribbled ‘Salman Rushdie memorial hole.’ When Rushdie was here, he looked up and said, ‘Some people get statues, others get holes.’ “

Jhumpa Lahiri on PEN’s World Voices. Interview by Suzanne Dottino, KGBBarLit. SD: One of PEN’s principle missions is to defend free expression, something that’s not only relevant but also crucial in today’s global state of affairs. “Faith and Reason” is a provocative theme for PEN International New Voices Festival. What’s to be learned in its exploration and perhaps more practically speaking, what impact can writers truly have to make inroads in cultures where free speech has never been valued? What can literature do to ensure that that freedom isn’t eroded in others?

JL: The fundamental impact any writer can have on the world is to write honestly and well. And in order to aspire to write in such a way, the writer must be able to express himself or herself in an absolutely uncensored, unhindered environment, and to obey no authority other than what the work demands. This is true in any culture, and for all literary traditions.

Soft Skull Press According to Richard Nash & Richard Nash According to Susan Chi. By Susan Chi, KGBBarLit. “What we’re trying to do with fiction is kind of a three pronged model, the first of which is obviously to find new writers, and the second of which is to breakout lower mid-list writers. There’s essentially two kinds of mid-list writers, the ones the big publishers want to publish and the ones the big publishers don’t want to publish…There’s a whole cohort of writers, tending to be on the younger end, the 35-50 age group, who have published a few books and despite a far amount of critical appreciation, they’re not selling in numbers that allow the editor to show up at the editorial meeting and say this can sell 15,000 copies, because they’ve only sold 2000 copies each time round.”

Rustbelt Roethke: A Professional Writers’ Workshop. July 9-15, 2006. “Recharge your batteries, pick up new ideas and techniques, make friends and influence people, write and work with a discerning group of peers at Rustbelt Roethke, a professional-level writers’ workshop with a comfortable, egalitarian atmosphere at a modest cost.”

Hollywood Star Robbins Blasts US Media Ignorance of ‘High Crimes’ in Iraq. By Tim Harper, Common Dreams. Acclaimed American actor/director Tim Robbins blasted the US government’s policy on terrorism — and the US media’s failure to examine it critically — at a news conference in Athens promoting his stage version of George Orwell’s “1984”.

Interview with George Saunders. Boldtype 31. BT: You pick up on a sort of campy but unsettling beauty in the way we all agree to talk in conversation, in meetings, on TV. How do you go about making that literary?

GS: I never had a sense of what literary language should be like, and when I tried to do it, it always came out like Thomas Wolfe on quaaludes — where you describe the same thing three times. …Even when I overhear somebody on their cell phone up here on campus. If you forget the phone, and just think of it as a poem, it’s unbelievable: “Mom, I told this fucking guy I was too hungover! What are you talking about, Mom? I was too wasted, I couldn’t call you.” The idea is that you have to listen, and then you purify it a little bit.

Human Rights Tribune – Special Issue on Migration Introducing the new format and layout for the Human Rights Tribune. This issue of the online publication is a special focus on migration. Each issue of the Tribune features timely articles about important events and issues affecting human rights, as well as the people and organizations involved in the promotion and protection of these rights.