Alice Munro wins Man Booker International
May 27, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
Alice Munro, whose new collection of stories, Too Much Happiness, is out this fall, has won the 2009 Man Booker International Prize. Munro becomes only the third writer to win the award, which is given out every two years. She follows Ismail Kadaré, who won the inaugural award in 2005, and Chinua Achebe, who won in 2007. Fourteen authors from 12 countries were in contention for this year’s award. Munro beat out a strong field of contenders, which also included such literary luminaries as Peter Carey, V.S. Naipaul, and Joyce Carol Oates.
The jury for this year’s prize was made up of novelist Jane Smiley, writer and musician Amit Chaudhuri, and screenwriter and essayist Andrey Kurkov. The jury citation reads:
Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels. To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before.
The prize comes with a £60,000 purse.
When poets do battle, no one wins
May 26, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
Backbiting. Character assassination. Accusations of personal and professional misconduct. It sounds like a Canadian federal election campaign, but it’s not. The dust-up over who will succeed Christopher Ricks as Oxford professor of poetry has now claimed not one, but two victims.
The first to fall was Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, who removed himself from the race after documents containing allegations of sexual harassment on the part of the poet were sent anonymously to Oxford academics who would vote on the position. Walcott dropped out of the race, at the time decrying the “low tactics” that had been used against him. Nicole Kelby, the woman who made the accusations against Walcott in 1996, came to the poet’s defence, saying that she was “appalled” by the “smear campaign” that had been marshalled against him.
Another woman who came to Walcott’s defence was Ruth Padel, one of the two others vying for the position of Oxford professor of poetry. On May 12, the Telegraph quoted Padel as saying:
This is dreadful. My proposers are devastated because they have bent over backwards to run a clean campaign. On the one hand sexual harassment is horrible, but he is a very good poet and he has been humiliated. As a poet, he’s a colleague and I don’t like to see poets be humiliated.
Padel went on to win the position over her one remaining rival, the Indian poet Arvind Khrishna Mehrotra. She was Ricks’ presumptive successor for a scant nine days, however, because it was subsequently revealed in the London Times that Padel had herself sent e-mails to two different newspapers alerting them to the charges against Walcott. As a result of that revelation, Padel resigned the post, and declared that she would not put her name forward again. She is quoted in the Guardian as saying:
People wouldn’t believe in me. … I’m not afraid of people, but I wouldn’t want a faculty or a university to be divided. I care about poetry in that university and I don’t think it would be helpful for me to stand.
Of course, the knives on both sides have come out in force. On the one side there is Clive James, who calls the whole episode a “disaster” and a “catastrophe.” James told the Guardian:
It sounds to me like a David Mamet play where you’ve got an imaginative girl, thinks she’s been approached, she may not have been. But who knows? It’s a very bad reason to stop a 79-year-old man who has all the qualifications, including [the fact that] he would write brilliant lectures. It means a whole generation’s going to miss out on his wisdom. For what? For a couple of cases that have been mouldering for 20-odd years.
On the other side is novelist Jeanette Winterson, who sees more than a little misogyny at work in Padel being prevented from serving as professor of poetry: “This is a way of reducing women; it wouldn’t have happened to a man. But then Oxford is a sexist little dump.”
She may have a point. In the 300-year history of the post, it has never once gone to a woman. And it doesn’t take much of an imagination to convince oneself that Oxford remains an old boys club at heart. However, this entire fiasco does a disservice to both sides, and calls the dignity of the post, and of those who wish to hold it, into disrepute. Sexual harassment is a serious charge, and should be treated as such. But dredging up allegations from the past (in addition to the 1996 allegation, the anonymous packages alleged similar misconduct from Walcott’s days teaching at Harvard in the 1980s) as a means of casting aspersions against a candidate for an elected post is questionable at best.
None of this has anything to do with poetry. In the end, everybody loses.
J.K. Rowling, Kenneth Oppel … Stephen Hawking?
May 21, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
Among the stranger books to cross my desk in the last little while is a title from Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers called George’s Cosmic Treasure Hunt. At first blush, it looks like fairly typical YA fare: a gaudy cover with the title in a large, futuristic font and an illustration of an intrepid red-haired tyke in a space suit jettisoning himself from a space shuttle. Flip the book open and the jacket copy is equally unsurprising:
George’s best friend, Annie, needs help. Her scientist father, Eric, is working on a space project – and it’s all going wrong. A robot has landed on Mars but is behaving very oddly. And now Annie has discovered something weird on her dad’s supercomputer.
Is it a message from an alien? Could there be life out there? How do you find a planet in outer space? And if you could talk to aliens, what would you say?
A quick flip through the book yields dialogue-heavy prose in a kid-friendly, large-sized typeface and plenty of energetic illustrations by Garry Parsons.
So why is yr. humble correspondent agog at this book? It’s the authors. George’s Cosmic Treasure Hunt was co-written by Lucy Hawking and her father, Stephen. Yes, that Stephen Hawking. The Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. The one who wrote A Brief History of Time, a slim bestseller that confounded minds far more brilliant than mine.
No wonder George’s Cosmic Treasure Hunt seems to evince a kind of split personality. Now, I’m all in favour of making science accessible to young readers, and books that can educate at the same time as they entertain are marvellous, even for adults. But ask yourself: What kind of writing is most likely to appeal to a young reader looking for a good, old-fashioned adventure yarn?
This:
When George had first met Annie, she’d wanted to be a ballerina, but now she’d changed her mind and decided on being a soccer player. Instead of spending her time after school in a pink-and-white tutu, she now charged around the backyard, hammering a soccer ball past George, who always had to be goalie. And yet she still seemed to know far more about science than he did.
Or this:
THE DRAKE EQUATION
The Drake Equation isn’t really an equation. It’s a series of questions that help us to work out how many intelligent civilizations with the ability to communicate there might be in our Galaxy. It was formulated in 1961 by Dr. Frank Drake of the SETI institute, and is still used by scientists today.
This is the Drake Equation:
N = N* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L
To be fair, the bit about the Drake Equation is contained in a sidebar, which readers can skip over if they like. Not so the bald didacticisms that are embedded within the text proper:
“Plasma blackout!” said the controller. “We have plasma blackout! Expect signal to resume after two minutes.”
Annie squeezed her dad’s hand.
He squeezed back. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We know this happens sometimes. It’s due to friction in the atmosphere.”
Maybe the most startling thing about George’s Cosmic Treasure Hunt is the fact that it’s a sequel to the authors’ earlier book, George’s Secret Key to the Universe, described by USA Today as “A briefer history of time – for a younger audience.” Perhaps I’ll give a copy of George’s Cosmic Treasure Hunt to my young niece. Maybe she could explain the Drake Equation to me.
Everybody owes, everybody pays
May 15, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
As long as there have been books, the saying goes, there have been book critics. And as long as there have been book critics, there have been pissed-off authors. If you’re an aggrieved author, not of a murderous disposition (see post below), and happen to live in Russia, it now appears you can successfully sue the author of a negative review.
From the Law Library of Congress’s Global Legal Monitor:
On April 23, 2009, a federal district court in the southern Russian province of Dagestan issued an unprecedented ruling, ordering a journalist of a local newspaper to pay compensation in an amount equal to US$1,000 to a writer who did not like a review of his book published in the newspaper.
The author of the book in question claimed that the negative review led to severe mental anguish for him and his family, and that his reputation was adversely affected.
The problems with this ruling are clear. If reviewers can be held financially liable for subjective opinions about imaginative works, legitimate criticism is not possible. Writers will (for obvious reasons) be unwilling to dispraise anything, for any reason, and readers will be unable to trust the praise that is dispensed, suspecting that it is merely a cover for the reviewer’s fear of retaliatory litigation.
The irony of the Russian court’s ruling is that it satisfied neither the defendent nor the plaintiff, who had originally asked for compensation in the amount of U.S. $150,000. According to the Law Library of Congress, both parties in the suit intend to appeal. With luck, this asinine ruling will be overturned in short order.
Everyone’s a critic. Then they die.
May 15, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
Who’d want to kill a book critic? I mean, really.
This is actually kind of a nifty idea. The first post is up at Revenge Lit, and it’s a bit of a giggle:
Simon Lacerous’ column “The Last Word” routinely excoriated literary works: if realistic, they lacked imagination; if fantastic, they lacked veracity; if existential, they lacked moral compass; if moralistic, they were fascist.
And, what’s wrong with that, precisely?
I just hope that if anyone kills me off in print, someone will ensure that I’m properly avenged.
Seen Reading goes national
May 14, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
Julie Wilson, online content manager at House of Anansi Press and the brains behind the popular literary site Seen Reading, is expanding her blog’s focus to encompass the entire country. For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past two-and-a-half years, Seen Reading is a locus for what Wilson calls “literary voyeurism.” Wilson makes a note of what she sees people reading on her travels, goes to a bookstore and copies a passage from the book, then creates a short imaginative piece based on the book and her impression of the individual reading it. For her troubles, she and her site have appeared everywhere from the CBC to the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen, the Globe and Mail, and elsewhere.
Until now, Seen Reading has been pretty much a one-woman affair. Last year, Wilson instituted a “Readers Reading” section on her site, featuring podcasts of readers (including Rebecca Rosenblum, Mariko Tamaki, and Stacey May Fowles) reading short passages from some of their favourite books. But for the most part, the site has spotlighted readers Wilson noticed on her travels around her home city of Toronto.
Not anymore. Beginning this Victoria Day, Monday, May 18, Seen Reading is expanding its focus to include the entire country, from the East Coast to the West. Wilson has enlisted the help of three writers from different parts of Canada to provide installments for the site each week. The new national format will begin on Monday, with a post by Nova Scotia’s Ami McKay, author of The Birth House. Other new contributors to the site include Montreal’s Saleema Nawaz, author of the story collection Mother Superior, and Vancouver’s Monique Trottier, who runs Boxcar Marketing, an Internet consultancy firm.
Wilson initiated the idea of bringing other bloggers from around the country on board a few months ago:
It had been over two-and-a-half years of collecting sightings and responding to them, and I was unsure of the next step. I confided in Monique who, remarkably, offered to take care of Seen Reading if I wanted a break. Through Twitter, I had learned that Ami and Saleema were both supporters of the site. I simply took the plunge. I admire each of them as writers and their sense of community within the publishing industry. I had the utmost faith that they would be kind to the project, while offering a new perspective from different parts of the country.
The feeling of admiration is clearly mutual. McKay says that she’s been a fan of Seen Reading “from the start,” and was “thrilled” to be asked to participate. “I plan on bringing a quirky, curious, rural sensibility to my posts,” McKay says. “My sightings will largely be based in the day-to-day of Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley: pee-wee baseball practices, doctor’s offices, small-town coffee shops, and grocery store parking lots.”
For her part, Trottier says that she has long admired Seen Reading. “The structured format was fun and flexible and as a fellow blogger I wished that I’d thought of something similar.” And Nawaz admits to a similar strain of blogger envy where Seen Reading was concerned: “Just about every weekday on my way to work, I’d notice somebody reading something fantastic and I would be thrown back into the same wishful reverie of a Montreal Seen Reading.” Nawaz wants to bring Montrealers’ love of reading out into the open: “Montreal readers are keen and passionate. I can’t wait to find out more about them. I’ll be the one on the back of the bus, in the park, in the café, furiously scribbling notes while trying to look invisible.”
Wilson herself plans to continue posting from Toronto, but says that she envisions a time when her role begins to resemble that of an acquisitions editor. “There’s no reason why Seen Reading couldn’t evolve into a true community,” she says. “It will take a larger team, and funds, but the possibilities are exciting.”
In the short term, Wilson plans a three-pronged approach to publicize the new, expanded Seen Reading. She is soliciting the assistance of litbloggers and booksellers to help get the word out, and has partnered with McNally Robinson in Toronto to give away two books per month on Twitter. “People are asked to submit 10 words to describe themselves. Using that biographical information, two winners a month will be picked to have their book needs met by Book Madam,” an alter ego Wilson created for the Twitter venture.
Secondly, Wilson wants to mount a charity event with an evening of readings by authors whose books have been “seen.” The proceeds would go to support a national literacy program.
And finally, Wilson is relying on word of mouth, through blogs (McKay’s Incidental Pieces, Trottier’s So Misguided, and Nawaz’s Metaphysical Conceit), as well as social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Linked In, to reach out to the online community. Calling this “connector publicity,” Trottier expects that the contributors’ various Web-based networks will form the “first line of promotion” for the beefed-up Seen Reading. “It’s very exciting to see how quickly interest in the project has surfaced.”
This focus on Web-based marketing is entirely appropriate for Seen Reading, of course, and each of the contributors to the site is a passionate advocate for the Internet’s potential to spur interest in, and discussion of, books. Says McKay:
Without a doubt, there’s a literary community out there [online] that is just as valid and valuable as the writing in publications such as The New York Review of Books or The Times Literary Supplement. Universal access is part of what makes the ‘Net such a brilliant place for sharing ideas. It makes room for conversation rather than striving to be the last word. I guess I’d say to the critics that I believe our words and our creative selves are like nature, they thrive on diversity.
Nawaz agrees, saying that “writers, readers, and publishers are generally delighted with the way the Internet can expand and enhance traditional coverage, as well as the opportunity it offers for bringing books to a wider audience.” And Trottier points to declining book coverage in traditional print media versus the volume of online coverage, which continues to grow. “Depending on whose numbers you cite,” she says, “60-80% of offline purchase decisions are made after online research or recommendations. In my mind, this signals a huge opportunity for literary blogs to reach an audience interested in books and reading.”
Wilson also points out the creative side of Seen Reading, and emphasizes its function as a repository of what could be termed “flash fiction”:
Seen Reading has most often been discussed as a project that notes reading habits, and less as an archive of creative writing. By bringing in more perspectives, and certainly authors such as Ami and Saleema, my hope is that the site will begin to function more visibly as a publisher, and that contributors will be viewed more apparently as writers.
THIS POST CONTAINS MATERIAL THAT HAS BEEN CORRECTED. Julie Wilson is no longer a publicist at House of Anansi, as was originally posted. Her current position is online content manager. TSR regrets the error.
Can’t we all just get along?
May 12, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
You see it again and again in the Canadian publishing industry: the suspicion and backbiting that accrues to a small (and inevitably somewhat incestuous) community whenever there’s the perception that some individual or group is trying to get a leg up unfairly. You see it in the knee-jerk assumptions of rampant conspiracies involving reciprocal back-scratching, even in instances where no such conspiracy theory could possibly be taken seriously. (“Oh look: two of the three books nominated for the Griffin Prize this year are published by the House of Anansi. Scott Griffin, who lends his name to the prize and puts up the money, owns Anansi. And Michael Redhill, one of the jurors, is published by Anansi. And Kevin Connolly, one of the nominated poets, edited Crabwise to the Hounds by Jeramy Dodds, another nominated title. The fix is in! Call out the inquisitors!”)
You also see it in the kind of suspicion that was voiced recently around The Globe and Mail Open House Festival, the inaugural iteration of which ran this past weekend and was apparently quite successful. According to Peter Scowen – who works for the Globe, and so clearly can’t be trusted – the festival raised $65,000 for PEN Canada and Frontier College. Not too shabby for a first-time book event.
Open House, which was based on The New Yorker‘s successful annual October event in Manhattan, is the brainchild of Scott Sellers, a vice president in the marketing department at Random House Canada. As James Adams wrote in the Globe last week:
Wholly owned by the German conglomerate Bertelsmann, Random House ranks as Canada’s largest trade publisher, home to such imprints as Knopf, Doubleday, Anchor, Vintage and Dell. It began to work on the Open House concept last year, driven by two impulses: a belief that the annual BookExpo trade show (and its predecessor, the Canadian Booksellers Association convention) was, after 50 years, on its last legs; and a need to have its roster of authors engage more directly and vibrantly with readers.
It’s the Random House connection, and the fact that the vast majority of authors appearing at this year’s Open House Festival – including Zoë Heller, Naomi Klein, and Adam Gopnik – are Random House authors, that have left a bad taste in some mouths.
Sellers has stated that the event will be repeated in 2010 in an expanded form, and has extended an invitation to other publishers to participate – an invitation that has been spurned by at least one figure within the Canadian publishing industry. Adams quotes House of Anansi president Sarah MacLachlan as saying that she doesn’t understand why Random House would “want to be generous” by sharing the spotlight at future Open House events with other publishers, “unless they want to buy pieces of all of us and run the world.”
“I don’t know how it serves Anansi as a company to say, ‘Sure, Random, take my writers and put them in a program with your writers,’” she said this week. “It just doesn’t feel great. I want to be able to show my writers that we can do things with them and for them. Why give our writers to another publisher to show them what they can do?”
This reaction doesn’t say much about the confidence MacLachlan has in her own publishing program, and it bespeaks a kind of institutional paranoia that is utterly deleterious to the promotion of literature and literacy, which is what we’re all supposed to be advocating (unless I’m missing something terribly significant).
True, publishing is a business, and individual houses need to make a profit in order to survive. And a certain amount of competition is healthy. No one wants a situation in which a single publisher holds sway over the entire industry. But this doesn’t appear to be the motivation behind Sellers’ enterprise. (He has even gone so far as to suggest an advisory board for future Open Houses, which would be composed of individuals from throughout the literary community.) MacLachlan doesn’t seem to realize that the only people who care about which house publishes which author are publishers. When Jane Q. Public ponies up her $15 for an Open House event, she couldn’t care less whether the author she’s seeing is published by Random House, Anansi, Turnstone, or Breakwater.
The bottom line is that Sellers had a good idea, one that, by all accounts, was a success, and raised a substantial amount of money for a couple of worthy causes. Why would any publisher not want to be associated with that?
Colson Whitehead and the problem of categories
May 11, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
Colson Whitehead’s on a tear. Okay, that may be overstating the case, but according to the blog A Lil’ Sumpin’ Sumpin’, the author of Apex Hides the Hurt and The Intuitionist became “huffy” when asked whether his new novel, Sag Harbor, could be considered a young adult book. The novel was described in the New York Times review as “a coming-of-age story about the Colsonesque 15-year-old Benji,” and is written in the first person. This would certainly seem to qualify it for YA accreditation. Nevertheless, when presented with this possibility, Whitehead apparently became rather defensive:
He had no idea who I was or why I was asking and probably didn’t even realize the New School, where he was speaking, had an MFA in Writing for Children, but he went right ahead and said something about how he wouldn’t let it be classified as Young Adult because it clearly isn’t for young adults and God help him if it was sold as such. Um, right, a coming of age story about a teenage boy, written in the first person, could never be considered Young Adult. Please. Get over yourself.
Responding to the charge of huffiness on Ed Champion’s Filthy Habits blog, Whitehead says that what got him exasperated was being questioned about the marketing of a book, which is not, according to him, what a writer should be talking about. He then goes on to say that labels “bug” him and that if he had his way “there wouldn’t be any categories at all.” Whitehead continues:
For me, it’s all just “writing.” Is The Colossus of New York non-fiction? Not strictly, but it has to go somewhere in the bookstore, and if it’s in Essays or in the About New York section, I don’t care. I’m just glad that it’s getting out there. But we need classifications, I guess, and this has to go here and that has to go there. If Sag Harbor is in YA tomorrow, I wouldn’t care, as long as people who want to read it can pick it up. In some bookstores, I’m in African American as opposed to Fiction; this is a category failure, but it’s out of my control and in the end I’m glad that I’m in the store at all, and hopefully the savvy consumer who is looking for me will find me. What I’m saying is that we write, and then the world categorizes us, and the next day we get up and start writing again.
While I am sympathetic to any writer’s desire not to be put into a box, particularly a box of someone else’s choosing, Whitehead’s comments seem a bit disingenuous. The distinction between fiction and non-fiction certainly seemed to matter to all those who got riled up by James Frey’s embellishments in his memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Moreover, it’s fine for an established writer to decry categorization, but a first-time author shopping around a manuscript had better have a solid answer to the question, “Where will this book sit in a bookstore?” It’s clichéd to point out the volume of books that gets published in a given year; in an environment where hundreds of different titles are competing for limited shelf space, publishers will inevitably want to know how to position a title before signing it. And yes, this is a marketing consideration, but it’s one that the aspiring author had best be well aware of.
Having said that, there is a certain arbitrariness to the distinction between YA and adult fiction. Many readers of books such as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, and The Catcher in the Rye are young people, yet these books are routinely shelved in the adult fiction or literature sections of bookstores. Similarly, there’s much for an adult to appreciate in titles like Francis Chalifour’s funny and sensitive Call Me Mimi, a putatively “young adult” novel. (Following the runaway success of the Harry Potter novels, when publishers and authors alike realized there is a huge, and largely untapped, audience of young readers out there, a flurry of authors such as Joyce Carol Oates and Carl Hiassen began releasing YA novels.)
Notwithstanding his acknowledgement that there is a “need” for classification where literature is concerned, Whitehead’s stated desire for the wholesale elimination of categorization recapitulates John Gardner’s idea that every book is – or should be approached as being – sui generis. “The good reader never knows in advance what he wants from literature,” Gardner writes. “Nevertheless, categories help in art as in love, if only because, in seeing our neat, ordered boundaries break down, we learn new facts about the jungle they meant to make orderly.” While it is very clear that describing Whitehead as an African American novelist is an example of a category failure – how often do you hear John Updike described as a Caucasian novelist? – the use of generic categories such as mystery, chick lit, and, yes, even YA, is valuable as a rough guide for readers who use past experience as an indicator of potential future enjoyment, or for bookstore buyers, librarians, and others who need to make decisions about the suitablility of particular works for different groups of readers.
But generic categories should not be impermeable, and there remains a perceived stigma to being branded a young adult author – as though YA books are too lightweight or insubstantial to be considered capital-L Literature. Working to counteract this perception is helpful; arguing for the complete dissolution of categorization where writing is concerned is a recipe for chaos.
Welcome to my nightmare: UPDATED
May 9, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 10 Comments
Rome wasn’t built in a day, as the saying goes. However, the destruction of Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD occurred in an almost instantaneous onslaught of molten lava and ash. Building things is difficult; tearing them down is a breeze.
The catastrophe that befell yr. humble correspondent on this dreary, drizzly morning in May was not natural – to the contrary, it was entirely manmade. It being spring, the season of renewal and rejuvenation, I thought it might be a good time to clear out the cobwebs, dust off the shelves, and make some much-needed updates to my working environment. This included trading in my ancient Speadstream modem for a fancy new one with wireless capability and – here’s where a combination of hubris and ignorance led to my inevitable downfall – upgrading my WordPress blogging software.
Now, anyone acquainted with me even slightly will realize that the depths of my technical ineptitude know no bounds: when it comes to computers, I can turn them on, and perform a few basic data-entry tasks, but that’s about it. So, this whole project was likely doomed to failure from the jump. Still, I managed to convince myself that I was a fairly smart – or, at least, basically literate – individual, and could learn what I needed to know by reading relevant documentation about the ins and outs of upgrading from an outdated version of WordPress to the much fancier, more streamlined version 2.7. (By that rationale, of course, I should be able to perform brain surgery simply by reading a textbook on the subject, but clearly logic deserted me on this particular spring day.)
So, I diligently Googled “upgrading WordPress to 2.7,” or some equally vague series of search terms, and read what appeared to be the most reliable pages dealing with this subject, every one of which assured me that, although it was a fairly serious upgrade, it was also relatively painless and user-friendly. I even found a page indicating that the theme I was using – Barthelme – was compatible with the new version of WordPress.
All of which might be true, but what I didn’t count on was that the download would overwrite my old files, effectively erasing everything I’ve posted here since this site jumped ship from the earlier Blogger version in June 2007. I felt supremely confident pressing that download button, only gradually coming to the realization that the distant rumbling outside my window was getting louder and that there was a river of cascading lava heading straight for me.
Nor did I do the prudent thing and back up the site before making the switch. Fools rush in, and all that.
In short, I seem to have lost almost two years’ worth of data. Gone in the stroke of a key. (Whoever said that anything posted online was there forever can bite me.) To those of you who have been reading this site over the past two years, and especially all those kind enough to link to me during that time – links that will now lead you nowhere – I offer my sincere and profound apologies for this most dunderheaded of moves. Pride goeth before the fall, so they say, and pride combined with ignorance can be a truly deadly combination.
Still, in the spirit of spring, of rebirth and renewal, I’ll try to look on the bright side. This unfortunate turn of events has offered me the opportunity to give the site an overhaul, which includes a new look, and the implementation of an in-house style guide, something I’ve been meaning to put together for two years now. I’ll rebuild the links page and have that up in the next few days. The categories list will grow with the site, hopefully in a more logical and targeted way than was the case previously, allowing for easier navigation (once there is a site with content to navigate).
I’ve also clarified the site’s comments policy and its copyright, both of which can be found on the About TSR page in the navbar at the top.
Going forward, I hope to provide a greater number of substantial posts, with fewer quick links and brief asides, which in the past were used mostly as filler on days when content proved scanty, or when I was focusing on other projects. A certain amount of this will likely appear in the future – I do have a day job, after all, which puts food on the table (blogging is notoriously underpaid), and there are a number of writing projects, panels, and conferences that I’ve already signed on for. Nevertheless, my ambition for this site has always been for it to exist as a locus of intelligent, argumentative, and thoughtful responses to literature, writing, and publishing, and I hope that I’ve achieved something of that to this point. In any event, my goal moving forward is to make TSR an entertaining and illuminating (and, no doubt, occasionally aggravating) destination for readers with a yen for literary criticism and book chat. I hope you’ll let me know whether I’m succeeding, and as always, comments and suggestions are welcome.
A note about the site’s title: Regular readers will note that I’ve capitulated to the popular tendency to elide T.S. Eliot’s idiosyncratic spelling of “Shakespeherian” from his poem The Waste Land, and have reverted to the more conventional spelling of the word. I do this for craven reasons of being easier to locate in search engines, and apologize to any literary purists in the audience.
UPDATE: Many thanks to Carleton (in the comments section) and to Erin Goodman and James Patrick Mullins, who alerted me that Google’s cache contains records of web pages, so the work of the past two years is not completely lost. Now I’m on the horns of a dilemma: Do I rail against the blatant and arrogant copyright violation Google is perpetrating by using my content without permission, or do I fall at its feet in veneration for ensuring that all my work has not simply vanished into the ether of cyberspace? At this point, I think I’ll split the difference, and fall at the feet of Carleton, Erin, and James, with thanks.
The Google URL for TSR is here. I may try to rescue some of this content at some future date, but it’s doubtful that I’ll have the time to copy it all to the new site. However, it is comforting to know that it hasn’t all disappeared irretrievably.