CruelestMonth.com

Project Corpus Callosum - winning essay of the first-ever Nation Student Writing Contest.

Modigliani lived and died - pregnant women jump from windows, rats visit bedroom, bedbugs nest in ear.  Oh, the life of an artiste.

Leonard Cohen, still alive, talks about living.

Last two links courtesy of The Poetry Hut

Some Links

In another effort to distance myself from previous posts, here's the news today:

The Dalkey Archive Press has caught the eye not only of Budd from Chekhov's Mistress, but also EJ from The Olive Reader (I can't find the specific post but, trust me, he's interested).  When EJs and Budds align, there must be something right.  Simply put, "It's like an alternative to the Western Canon" --Chekhov's Mistress.

Reminder: today's Thursday.  That means the Poetry Thursday blog is kicking.

What Travels with Us by Darnell Arnoult (published by Louisiana State University Press) wins the poetry book of the year award from the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance.  (via The Poetry Hut)

If you haven't recently, visit Words Without Borders.

Here's a link.  A young Patrick Leigh Fermor trudges through the Rhineland and Holland in the 1930s.  He's met by inestimable hospitality and foreboding of the Holocaust to come.  I'm currently making my way through.  The prose is highly stylized and exquisitely imagined--at times, to such high points of eloquence that I barely know what's going on.  However, an open-hearted enthusiasm pervades the whole and I've been willing to plod carefully through every tough stretch.  I've also caught the traveling bug--not the dyspepsia kind, but the see-the-world kind.  Highly recommended.

Unitize for the Nazgul

Hello.  It's quiet now in the office.  I've done my mailings.  I've read and responded to the morass of emails.  I'm alone and only the quiet typing of some unseen co-worker keeps me company.  This is the good part of the day--the quiet; though, it would be infinitely better if I wasn't still at work, but alas, I am here.  Let's try to make the best of it.

Today was especially brutal.  There is a little known and increasingly rare step of the book publishing process called unitizing.  To unitize is to ensure the singularity of each page of a book, to ensure that each page counts as one (or two, numerically), and is not, in any way, stuck to or connected to pages fore or aft.  The only way to guarantee this, according to the sixteen dubious Nazgul that compose my supervisory body, is to slide the edge of each page along the webbing of one's feet.  Considering that each employee has only eight webspans to dedicate to the process (Finger webspans may not be substitued--they're used for something far worse), that many books exceed five hundred pages, and that HarperCollins publishes thousands of books a year, it is no wonder that the unitizing department is the largest in the company.  Or, one might say, the biggest kept secret in the publishing industry (perhaps because the walls are sound proof).  Though, it is clearly not a secret since I am telling you about it this instant.  So for ten straight hours, at the behest of Nazgul #9, I sat unitizing.

Anyway, the whole point of this was to tell you that Bukowski's Ham On Rye gets a close look on Boldtype.  Be sure to check it out.

Leonard Cohen covered in the Boston Globe.

Podcasts

We've been hearing about these podcast thingies for quite some time now.  In fact, many of our colleagues have been involved in the creation of a few.  So in keeping with the times and in an effort to support the work of our peers, here are podcasts:

Josh Kilmer-Purcell

Rene Steinke and David Laskin

John Baxter

Bryan Charles

Beatrice has a nice two-part interview with Carol Burke and Hazel Rowley (author of Tete-a-Tete)

Oracle

Ah, the week is again upon us and I cannot imagine what madness it holds for me.  I wish my Outlook would merely say: "good," or even "ask again later," but instead it spits back "Mailbox Full!  Mailbox Full!"  Perhaps they can't tell me what's really in store, but the clever kids at The Exquisite Corpse have found a way to access some of the other dark mysteries of the unknown.  Check out their "Oracular Reviewer" in which, "ONE HUNDRED new books answer questions posed by the Corpse."  (By the by, there's some brilliant material on this site, and I happen to like it very much, so do futz about while you're there.) 

But if you don't find your answer there, though, perhaps Mr. Heaney can at least assuage your Monday pain.

The Oracle

Hide in the hollow trunk
of the willow tree,
its listening familiar,
until, as usual, they
cuckoo your name
across the fields.
You can hear them
draw the poles of stiles
as they approach
calling you out:
small mouth and ear
in a woody cleft,
lobe and larynx
of the mossy places.

State of the Union

For more than 4 years now, I haven't been able to sit through an entire State of the Union address without feeling sick to my stomach or having to pace around angrily.  Even the daily state of affairs has become a challenge.  But I am pleased to announce that the State of the Union of poetry (or at least what may be read as such) is significantly more uplifting.  Although the exact number is debatable, Americans are reading poetry, and they're liking it.  The hope is that "the larger the number of poetry users—even if those users consider Dr. Seuss a poetic master—the greater the number of people who might one day wander into the poetry section at Barnes & Noble, pick up a book by Emily Dickinson or Frank O'Hara or Wallace Stevens, and be mesmerized by what they read...And that, most everyone can agree, would be something to celebrate." 

Check out Sarah Davis's "The Poetic Appraisal" in the July/August issue of Poets and Writers, and as a toast to an ever-growing audience for poetry, a personal favorite:

the mississippi river enters into the gulf

and the gulf enters the sea and so forth,
none of them emptying anything,
all of them carrying yesterday
forever on their white tipped backs,
all of them dragging forward tomorrow.
it is the great circulation
of the earth's body, like the blood
of the gods, this river in which the past
is always flowing. every water
is the same water coming round.
everyday someone is standing on the edge
of this river, staring into time,
whispering mistakenly:
only here. only now.

-Lucille Clifton

50th Anniversary of IBF

The International Booksellers Federation celebrates its 50th Anniversary with a gem of a slideshow, featuring 50 bookshops from around the world.  Highly recommended.  Music courtesy of the California Raisins.  (Link courtesy of Carl from the Publishing Insider)

All Sorts of Reasons Behind Closed Doors

As big fans of the independent booksellers here at Ecco, it was with a heavy heart that we received the news that Cody's will be closing its famous Telegraph Avenue store in Berkeley next month.  The book store is a landmark, where Rushdie came out of hiding unannounced in the early nineties, and where Mario Savio, the Free Speech Movement leader, worked.  As Jesse McKinley wrote in Sunday's New York Times, "Depending on whom you ask, the reason Cody's Books is going out of business is either because of the City of Berkeley, the homeless, the University of California, the war in Iraq, Ronald Reagan, the Internet or the lack of short-term parking. Or, of course, all of the above."  It seems like the most unfortunate kind of time warp settled on that street, preserving some of the more unfortunate aspects of the Cody's neighborhood while its primary customer population changed, moved on and away from the store's illustrious past.  The market moved on as well, and with the rise of big chains, business for all independents became more difficult.  For Cody's, though, the collective effect of these factors has meant a gradual financial downfall.   It seems, however, that the closing of Cody's has sparked a renewed attempt to save Telegraph Avenue. But I have to say it's a high price for initiative that may never pan out, and it's a shame that Cody's was the one to pay it.