Welcome, to a hopefully weekly blog which will take a wide global view of the books and information worlds. Rather than impose my thoughts on the on-line readership, I'll usually try and sift through and then annotate key interesting trends and events which would be of interest to a Canberra Times readership and beyond.
First, however, a slight retrospective. I've recently returned from 5 weeks overseas and, while in Britain, the biggest literary festival in the world, the Guardian Hay Literary Festival took place. Details of this can be found here, which also includes audio podcasts of the sessions.
Sydney Writers' Festival has also recently finished. Apparently more than 450 writers were present and the new venues, at Pier 2/3 brought in an additional 13,000 people to the Festival. Over 73,000 people attended events in Sydney, compared with 60,000 in 2007. Overall attendances at the Festival were 80,000. Book sales were also the highest ever recorded, which again puts a lie to the thesis that the book is dead.
Author podcasts and other details are available here.
Jeanette Winterson was a busy author, attending both Hay and Sydney Writers' Festivals, although it would have been difficult for Sydney to have had worst weather than at Hay-on-Wye. This must have been one of the wettest Hay festivals on record with lots of UK press comments about making literary hay while the rain falls! Winterson commented "This year's Hay Festival turned into a book-rockers version of Glastonbury, with more mud on the ground than ever was flung by the critics. For writers, for whom a regular mud-bath at the hands of reviewers, is part of the job, festival audiences are an affirmation".
Click here for full version.
Winterson also commented in this article "I have just come back from opening the Sydney Writers Festival, where around nine hundred people turned up to the opera house to hear about the connecting power of books in our lives. The festival drew in different and diverse audiences for writers of every kind. The city was buzzing with words. It is the same wherever you go - people want books, and they want to make time for books. What is obvious is that writing continues as a serious force in the world, and that real books about real thing haven't been eclipsed by the media-machine of manufactured 'popular' culture".
A number of UK commentators, however, wondered if the Hay Festival was indeed morphing into a celebrity festival. Nonetheless,there was an impressive turnout of literary names at Hay including Ian McEwan, who repeated some of his Adelaide Festival foreshadowing of his next novel, Gore Vidal and Salman Rushdie.
McEwan added some new material to the speech he delivered at Adelaide. McEwan denied that his new novel, due to be published in a couple of years time, was a comedy, even though it had "extended comic stretches". McEwan said that he still had hope about human efforts to address climate change? "I'm not a fatalist."
Gore mauls critics
Gore Vidal was one of the main stars at Hay even if his responses in his session were largely monosyllabic. John Walsh commented in The Independent newspaper that "from his wheelchair, Gore Vidal glowered indignantly, like a man who had been exhumed against his will". To another commentator, Vidal reminded him of Peter Sellers character of Chance the Gardener whose "odd banality" was greeted as profound insights.
Deborah Solomon managed to gain some extra yard with Vidal in an interview she had with him in The New York Times on June 15. The whole interview is here.
A couple of Q&As are below.
Q: At the age of 82, you will be publishing your new collection of essays this week, which seems likely to confirm your reputation as one of America's last public intellectuals. Why do you think that critics have traditionally praised your essays more than your fiction, which includes "Burr," "Myra Breckinridge" and 20 other novels?
A: That's because they don't know how to read. I can't name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I'm told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don't print them in The New York Times .
Q: Are you saying your novels have been critically neglected?
A: I don't even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view. I've never had much attention paid by critics - nor has anybody else in the United States of America, as Mr. Obama likes to call it.
Hay Festival
Derek Addyman, owner of Addyman Books, Hay-on-Wye, commented on his Hay Festival bookselling week in the UK Daily Telegraph here.
"Thi s year, we stocked up on Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Gore Vidal. Customers love the contact they get in our shops - the internet may have revolutionised book-selling, but it's very sterile.
Festival-goers started flowing into town from London - it's funny seeing them try to negotiate wet fields in their "Chelsea tractors", but locals don't mind them so long as they treat us like human beings.
We had a lot of interest in a first edition of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy, priced at £1,500. Thrillingly, we also have a first edition of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, which should go for £300.
Jimmy Carter gave his headline speech this evening. At £50 a ticket it was too pricey for many local folk, but it's quite a coup attracting former American presidents to our small Welsh town - in 2001, Bill Clinton spoke. That same year Paul McCartney appeared. He was so boring.
He said he'd been influenced by the poets of San Francisco, and when someone asked if he visited City Lights, its famous poetry shop, he said, "I've never heard of it". At the end of his talk, he upped and went, leaving behind 1,000 people who'd each paid £15 and wanted books signed.
Hanif Kureishi came into the main shop. We attract lots of famous authors and other celebrities, especially during the festival. PD James, Iris Murdoch and Philip Pullman have popped in over recent years. In 2005, Patrick Stewart came in looking for Beckett plays, and was so charming. He paid £400 for a first edition of Waiting for Godot, and said: "My dear boy, this is one my favourite plays. I can't wait to get back to the hotel and read it." This year we have a cardboard cut-out of him in the shop. Today some American girls asked its price and looked very disappointed when I said it wasn't for sale".
More on book collecting and Jane Austen
I'll try and cover book collecting both at the top end and the bottom end of the financial spectrum in these blogs. This week a rare presentation copy of a first edition of Emma will be sold for an estimated £50,000 at Bonhams on 24 June. The three-volume set of Emma by Jane Austen is inscribed on behalf of Austen to her friend and governess Anne Sharp. The British seller, who wishes to remain anonymous, says: "The novel had been sitting in my family library for at least three generations and it remains a mystery as to how the book first got there. Jane Austen's publisher was asked by the author to send out twelve presentation copies to friends and family. The copy to be sold by Bonhams was the last on Austen's list, and was sent to Anne Sharp, who, initially, had been governess to the children of Jane Austen's brother Edward, and later had remained her good friend".
Those who have been watching the ITV trilogy of Austen's novels in recent weeks should look out for the BBC drama Miss Austen Regrets, which was shown in Britain in late April and is an extremely moving depiction of Austen, based on her life and letters. This feature-length drama, available on DVD from Britain, tells of the novelist's final years, "examining why, despite setting the standard for romantic fiction, she died having never married or met her own Mr Darcy".
Hopefully the ABC will show it soon.
Future of the book
The question of what is the future of the book and libraries in the digital world and the impacy of the net in reading is a recurrent issue. I will also be covering this subject in a future review for the Saturday book pages of Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night. A very stimulating article has just appeared in The Atlantic Monthly by Nicholas Carr, entitled 'What the Internet is doing to our brains. Is Google Making Us Stupid?'. This is available
here.
Opening and closing paras state "Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going-so far as I can tell-but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I've got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I'm not working, I'm as likely as not to be foraging in the Web's info-thickets-reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.
(Unlike footnotes, to which they're sometimes likened, hyperlinks don't merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)"
Carr concludes with references to Arthur C. Clarke's 2001. "Thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they're following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That's the essence of Kubrick's dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence".
Another example of science fiction and reality coming together!
Professor Robert Darnton of Harvard University examines 'The Library in the New Age' in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books
His opening and closing words also link back into Carr's article. "Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?
How to make sense of it all? I have no answer to that problem, but I can suggest an approach to it: look at the history of the ways information has been communicated....
Meanwhile, I say: shore up the library. Stock it with printed matter. Reinforce its reading rooms. But don't think of it as a warehouse or a museum. While dispensing books, most research libraries operate as nerve centers for transmitting electronic impulses. They acquire data sets, maintain digital re-positories, provide access to e-journals, and orchestrate information systems that reach deep into laboratories as well as studies. Many of them are sharing their intellectual wealth with the rest of the world by permitting Google to digitize their printed collections. Therefore, I also say: long live Google, but don't count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns. As a citadel of learning and as a platform for adventure on the Internet, the research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future".
In the meantime, an increasing number of books are available on the web, either for downloading or printing out. Many research studies show that reading on the screen is fragmentary, which is why cheap print on demand machines (POD) will surely become ubiquitous in the future. The Edmonton Sun is the latest to cover Project Gutenberg with the title Text treasure hunters hope to save books from extinction
Their subtitle is 'Project Gutenberg offers a digital fountain of youth to books' as the "treasure hunters" save important and orphaned public domain titles, although comparing them to literary Indiana Jones might
be a little fanciful! The article states that the Gutenberg providers are "The thinking man's library raiders with computers instead of wooden crates to store their prized finds". The Project Gutenberg website is here.
QUOTE FOR THE WEEK FROM GORE VIDAL
How did you feel when you heard that William Buckley died this year?
"I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred".