Leonard Cohen is interviewed at PBS.

LEONARD COHEN: I never thought of myself as a poet, to tell you the truth. I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It’s for others; it’s for others to use.

JEFFREY BROWN: But what were you doing when you started out? How did you see yourself?

LEONARD COHEN: You know, you scribble away for one reason or another. You’re touched by something that you read. You want to number yourself among these illustrious spirits for one advantage or another, some social, some spiritual.

It’s just ambition that tricks you into the enterprise, and then you discover whether you have any actual aptitude for it or not. I always thought of myself as a competent, minor poet. I know who I’m up against.

JEFFREY BROWN: You know who you’re up against?

LEONARD COHEN: Yes, you’re up against Dante, and Shakespeare, Isaiah, King David, Homer, you know. So I’ve always thought that I, you know, do my job OK.

Egoless. Entirely egoless.

Edward Forbes Smiley the third has pleaded guilty of stealing maps from the Yale University Library with an X-Acto knife. No blood was shed but a lot of sensitive types have had their feelings hurt. And Mr. Smiley is going down.

“Mr. Smiley gained the trust of these very trusting institutions,” Mr. Basbanes said. “He bartered on that trust, and so totally abused that trust. Not only did he steal, but he desecrated the books, he gathered [the maps] up and he sold them.

“He takes out a goddamn X-Acto knife, he damages documents and he sells them on the open market,” he said. “These are the world’s greatest map institutions. This is a dream team of repositories. And he goes and violates them. It’s really something.”

Mr. Smiley stole those maps from us all, apparently, so go ahead and get pissed. Say, things, like, “Rats” or “Col-darn that figure of a man.” Okay, he did a very bad thing and we’re all very very upset about it but I must admit to feeling the tiniest bit sorry for Mr. Smiley when I picture him in the big house next to some nasty homocidal rapist, head in hands, struggling to answer the question, “So, fella, what are you in for?”

Dakota Blue Richards will play Lyra Belacqua in The Dark Materials: the movie.

The film will start shooting in September, with a release date in autumn 2007. New Line was lured to Shepperton Studios by the chancellor’s new tax credit arrangements for film-making in the UK, after fears that the film would be shot in studios in Prague. According to a New Line spokesman, locations are being sought now, in Iceland and Greenland as well as the UK. The director, Chris Weitz, has also visited Worcester College, Oxford, as a potential location for Jordan, the fictional college where Lyra lives.

Muhammed Ali is coming out with a line of healthy snacks. Goat foods, yup. Greatest of all time! Go Ali go!!

His fruit-filled rolls and baked chips will bear names such as rumble, shuffle and jabs, though there are no plans as yet to introduce a rope-a-dope snack bar.

“It is time to pass on the values, beliefs and principles that made me a champ to the next generation of champions,” Ali said in a statement. “I believe that better nutrition and respect for the mind and body will give everybody today the opportunity to rise above and be the best they can be.”

When I first read this article, I thought the Parkinson’s must have really got to the guy, but upon reflection, it is pretty damn smart to target America’s soft belly. Ali is some kind of mystic genius, perhaps. Oh and if you haven’t seen Once We Were Kings, the Ali documentary, go now to your indie rental shop. It’s wonderful.

John R. MacArthur on what may be Graham Greene’s last interview, an interview about America, politics and Hollywood.

“Hollywood made a bad film of nearly every book I did,” he said. “They did a very bad one of The Quiet American, where they’re saving Vietnam from communism and so on. They completely reversed the plot and got permission from President Diem to shoot in Vietnam. I can’t remember who did the awful film of The End of the Affair. Fritz Lang made a bad film of The Ministry of Fear. And he apologized for it when I ran into him in a bar in Los Angeles. He was old, it was the end of his time, you know, and he’d been handed a script and had to stick to it. He cut out the whole central portion of the book and it lost all its point. You’d think that somebody of Fritz Lang’s reputation would have been able to do something.”

(Courtesy of Maud Newton)

German book publisher WBG has pulled its legal battle against Google.

WBG dropped its petition for a preliminary injunction against the Google Books Library Project after the Copyright Chamber of the Regional Court of Hamburg told the publisher that its legal action was unlikely to succeed, Google said.

The WBG objected to Google’s initiative to scan copyrighted library books and display snippets in search results. Google argues that there’s no copyright infringement, since the snippets shown are no more than what’s available in the usual search results. People looking for the whole work are directed to retailers.

Big fish eat little fish.

Joanne Ibarra got pulled over in Baytown Texas for traffic violations and ended up arrested for an overdue library book. I don’t know how many of you have ever been in the face of a Texan cop, but let me tell you it ain’t pretty, especially when you factor in the emotional agenda of the sanctity of the library; I wouldn’t want to even imagine how enraged that police officer must have been.

Ibarra laughs it off, but it was a serious situation that all started Tuesday when a Baytown officer pulled her over for a traffic violation near Commerce and West Texas Avenue. The officer issued three traffic citations for disregarding a traffic sign, no insurance, and no driver’s license. But then he found a warrant and the cuffs came out.

Gwinnett backpedals on decision to cut the budget for Spanish books. I guess they had to when they realised more than half their clientele would drop away.

Babar must be one of the most surreal children’s books going. It’s the sort of book that would never make it out of the slushpile these days, along with, I suggest, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (with its turtle crossing the road chapter) or Huck Finn (all those racial slurs, only not, but still…)

Babar was created one evening in 1931 when Cecile de Brunhoff, a piano teacher, told her two small sons the story of an elephant whose mother is killed by hunters and who flees to a town where he learns to dress as a human.

“My brother and I loved the story and we rushed into my father’s studio — he was a painter — to tell him about it,” Laurent de Brunhoff, who was six when his mother made the tale up, told Reuters.

“He drew some images in a big sketch book and he developed the idea. He gave Babar his name, because my mother hadn’t given him one,” he said.

The boys’ father, Jean de Brunhoff, showed the sketches to a relative who worked in magazines and the story was published as a book, becoming an instant success and leading to a series of others, telling how Babar returns home to become king and of his subsequent adventures.

We are glad you survived, Babar, so that we can tell our children of better times when elephants dressed nicely.

The Independent quotes snippets of the Lee letter here.

“Do you remember when you learned to read, or like me, can you not even remember a time when you didn’t know how?” Lee begins her handwritten letter. “I must have learnt to read from having been read to by my family.”

I wonder if the reclusive behaviour of writer celebrities like Lee and Salinger has made people more attentive to their work. It seems to me that in some way, their unwillingness to be in the spotlight has succeeded in this way, while simultaneously making them even more famous.

Toronto Star meets up with Monica Ali to speak to her about her second novel Alentejo Blue and how you can please some of the people some of the time.

The novel is really a series of short stories (a chapter appeared in the New Yorker as the story “Sundowners” ) about the lives of the obese local barkeep Vasco, an ambitious young girl Teresa eager to leave for an au pair job in London, a gnarled old man Joao who remembers the repressive days under the dictator Salazar, as well as a vivid collection of the English expat drunks, failures and tourists seeking solace in the sun for their assorted disappointments.

“I first thought I’d do it from the perspective of Stanton (a blocked English writer character) but I realized that the impetus is the place itself. How do you give voice to a place?” she says.

Melissa A. Rosati outlines how to woe a publisher without resorting to diamonds and promises of fidelity. What slightly (okay, more than slightly) bugs me about this article is the fact that of her five key ‘questions’ outlined here, only one is an actual question. The rest are statements.

“Working in the publishing industry comes with a high expectation, especially from complete strangers. After the causal ‘hello’ progresses to ‘what do you do,’ and my answer is ‘I am a publisher,’ the words, like fairy dust, work magic; and in the eyes of my conversation partner, I’m transformed into a glamorous Advice Goddess—would I mind reading this stranger’s book proposal?

Cornered in frozen foods at the grocery, black-tie events or at the bus stop, I’ve been ‘pitched’ as we say in the business, with such book proposals as: A Cat’s Tale of Christmas; Old Testament Aphrodisiacs; Break Out (after being committed to a mental institution by jealous relatives, the story of one man’s quest for revenge); and Suck it and See: A Guide to Tropical Fruits.

I hope she bought the Old Testament Aphrodisiacs idea; come on…

Everything about this story is perfect. So naturally I don’t believe any of it but you judge for yourselves.

Twelve years ago, Henrietta, an Old English Bantam hen, strolled through the front door of a wheel alignment business Morris owned in Olympia, Wash. She soon made the garage her home, greeting customers with a squawk, punching numbers on the calculator, and sitting on Morris’ head when he talked on the phone.

It just seems like a practical yolk, no? Eggsactly.

So grumpist customers do make a difference, I see.

Most publishers have already made pricing changes with new books, or reprints, that have been printed recently, reducing the difference between the U.S. and Canadian price to about 20 per cent. Book sellers say that markup is reasonable because of the higher costs of distributing books in Canada. Still, it can take up to a year for a newly priced book to work its way into a store.

More significantly, some publishers have promised to change pricing on their backlists — effectively altering the retail cost for books printed over a year ago, where there is the biggest price discrepancy because of the exchange rate.

Random House of Canada, for example, which distributes U.S. books in Canada, will give book stores an extra discount on its backlist U.S. books that are older than 12 months, allowing the retailer to reduce the selling cost to consumers.

What I want to know now is whether I can get a rebate on the Random House novel I bought a couple of months ago at a whopping $35. It’s a novel by a friend else I never woulda shilled. (Thanks, Franklin)

Polk County, Florida, has hit two birds with one stone; they’ve found a use for snail mail and a way to get books to housebound residents. Books by mail!

There is no cost to have the books mailed to a residence. People are responsible for returning the book either to any county library or to the bookmobile. Residents can mail the books back, but must pay for the return shipping themselves, unless they are medically disabled and have a doctor’s note to verify that. Then there is no charge.

Clare Milne, the granddaughter of AA has lost an attempt to regain copyright of her grandfather’s stories and characters.

The Supreme Court in San Francisco has rejected an appeal by Clare Milne, who is believed to have joined forces with her co-plaintiff Disney in a challenge to licensing arrangements in place since the books were written in the 1920s.

In 1983 the long-time owner – the estate of the literary agent Stephen Slesinger – signed a deal blocking AA Milne’s family from ever regaining control over the publications.

I’ve always wondered why Milne signed over the rights; anyone?

Peter Darbyshire, novelist of the wonderful Please, and founding editor with George of Bookninja.com, has started a new litblog for his newspaper, The Province. Check it out.

I’m so relieved by this you can’t imagine. I hope he dies while listening to bad prose, or better, by eating his creator’s words; I seem to remember a scene like that in a Greenaway movie.

When asked whether the characters were “much loved”, she replied: “A price has to be paid, we are dealing with pure evil here.

“They don’t target extras do they? They go for the main characters. Well I do.” In a phrase sure to be closely analysed by the legions of visitors to Harry Potter fansites that deconstruct the author’s every word, she said she empathised with Agatha Christie, who killed off her detective Hercule Poirot so that other writers would not be able to continue his stories after her death.

Thanks for doing the right thing, Ms Rowling.

Sophie and Nathaniel have been buried together. I must admit to finding this terribly gruesome but I’m sure they are very happy, wha?

One of the most passionate couples in American literary history were reunited yesterday when the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of The Scarlet Letter, was laid to rest alongside him in New Hampshire after an extended British detour lasting nearly 150 years.

The remains of Sophia Hawthorne and one of the couple’s children, Una, were driven through Concord, their home town, in a horse-driven 19th-century hearse which was almost certainly used for her husband’s funeral in 1864, to the town’s Sleepy Hollow cemetery.

This sounds great. Winterson has writen a childrens’ book, Tanglewreck, which I must go and buy immediately. Here she is, profiled in her organic grocery shop in London, where one supposes oranges are not the only…oh, shut up.

‘I grew up in public. If you are 24 when you publish your first book, you’re doomed.’ She laughs but is not altogether joking. But you weren’t doomed, I say. ‘No – I returned, like something in a sci-fi novel, I came crawling back over the rooftops.’ And she is laughing so hard as she says this that I only just catch ‘rooftops’. She entertains herself heartily – and makes me laugh, too. Suppose, I say, we were to publish an errata column with this interview, what would she hope to see in it? ‘There have been so many stories,’ she says. The ‘houseful of adoring handmaidens’ (she wishes that were true). And the ’sex for saucepans’ story. (In her impecunious twenties, she was reported to have regularly swapped sex for saucepans with married women from the home counties.) That made her laugh, but it upset her, too: ‘It made it sound as though I was some sort of gay prostitute.’ At least it gave ’sexpot’ a new meaning, I suggest. ‘These things are entertaining, but I have to block them out,’ she replies.

I haven’t heard about this. It looks and smells like Google’s digitizing books project but it’s the benign Canadian version so probably no one will pay it any attention whatsoever. Certianly, this article makes it seem as if there is no copyright infringement issue on the table. Come on Canucks; let’s get grumpy!

The project, which is expected to create an online resource connecting to millions of digitized books and images, is being led by a consortium called Alouette Canada. Participants include several libraries of many post-secondary institutions, the Canadian Council of Archives and the Canadian Museum Association. Discussions have been underway since late last year and the group hopes to have the portal launched by January of 2007.

Another reason to hate the man.

A young, handsome New York City firefighter had it all, including a loving fiancee whose daughter from a previous relationship adored him and his Pontiac Solstice GXP. Then, tragedy struck. He lost his job and the two people he cared most about to a deadly fire — but he still had his car. So, he became an action hero and tricked out his Solstice with shotguns and other gadgets to save the lives of others. If this sounds like a story ripped from the comics, it is. However, Time Warner’s DC Comics created this series as a paid product placement for General Motors Corp.’s Pontiac brand.

Is there no escaping advertising? Please, let Archie be clean. Please.

Who woulda thunk? Well, folks, I guess I’m buying a copy of the July issue of O Magazine. I’m still a virgin so I’m hoping Oprah is gentle.

Harper Lee, author of the novel “To Kill A Mockingbird,” has written a rare published item – a letter for Oprah Winfrey’s magazine on how she became a reader as a child in a rural, Depression-era Alabama town.

The 80-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner quit giving interviews about 40 years ago and, other than a 1983 review of an Alabama history book, has published nothing of significance in some four decades. That makes her article for O, The Oprah Magazine, something of a literary coup for the television talk show celebrity.

Okay, not just me but you too and you and you and how damn crappy it makes him feel.

It might have been a generous gesture to have published her last piece, however bad. Or would it? Gellhorn’s own estimation of the piece comes in the final letter in Moorehead’s collection. To Victoria Glendinning, June 8, 1996: “I have just finished a 42 page article, my last and very worst. It has driven me into exhaustion and despair … There is not one sentence in it that is worth anything as writing. It is flat banal writing, a sad way to end one’s writing life. I am not sure Ian Jack will take it because of the dullness of the writing which kills the subject. I am not going to try ever again, no need to suffer like that to produce work that shames me.”

Last week, when I read that letter for the first time, a guilt lasting 10 years was lightened. At least I hadn’t made her ashamed.

O thank you, Mr Jack, for saving me too from the shame of too early publication in what in those days was the best literary magazine in the world. But really thanks for the handwritten rejection; it was, for me, a talisman through more isolated days.

Now you can stock up on essentials through Amazon.com; no ice cream. Yet.

Amazon’s advantage may come in its delivery platform, which is the same for its non-perishable groceries as it would be for any of its other products. The company, facing increasing competition, is second only to eBay in online retailing, according to Nielson/NetRatings, and is the largest Web retailer with its own distribution network.

Besides its books and gifts store, Amazon began rolling out new product lines in 2002. It has since added clothes, sports equipment, jewelry and gourmet food. Most recently, it added an emergency-preparedness product store this year.

Handy. Isn’t emergency-preparedness a euphemism for scented candles? (courtesy of Bookslut)

Brilliant Israeli novelist profiled here.

The writer AB Yehoshua was 50 pages into a new novel, about an unclaimed corpse in a Jerusalem suicide bombing, when a friend was killed by a bomb at the Hebrew university in 2002. Though shocked, he says, her death “persuaded me that I was writing something real”. He was further spurred by the targeting of a seashore restaurant he frequented in Haifa. “Two Arab waiters I used to have conversations with were killed in a terrible bomb, with a whole [Jewish] family,” he says. “I went to their funeral at an Arab village in the north.”

Thank God this man exists.

The residents of Marquez’s hometown have very intelligently decided not to name the town after the fictional One Hundred Years of Solitude town, Macondo. Why would anyone want to live in a fictional town? What a postmodern idea!

To capitalize on the author’s fame and bring much-needed tourist dollars to the depressed town, the mayor last year proposed a referendum to change the town’s name to Aracataca-Macondo.

”We want to exploit García Márquez’s name in the best sense of the word,” Sánchez told The Associated Press on Sunday. “In honoring the maestro, the community will perceive tangible benefits.”

Oh, that’s why. Now, it all makes sense.

The Famous Five has been sanitized for the femisnist generation and for the pocketbooks of the estateholders.

“Sexism” in the Famous Five and Secret Seven books has been toned down with girls and boys expected to share CHORES. And in the Magic Faraway Tree stories, the names of characters Fanny and Dick have been altered to Frannie and Rick. Dame Slap has become Dame Snap, who now scolds children rather than smacking them. And Bessie, a black character with a name associated with slavery, is now a white girl called Beth.

Uhm, Bessie is a name associated with those lovely doe-eyed dairy cows, isn’t it?

We thought there was no more hidden treasure, that old joe Smith found the last of it. We were wrong. Entrepeneur, and ‘author’ Michael Stadther has figured out what Americans like and is making a bundle from this reckoning.

“At my last company, which went from zero to $100 million in revenue in about five or six years, it was tremendously successful. We’re moving about 10 times the speed as that last company. In the space of the last 12 months,
we’ve completed seven new books from me, three books from other authors, formed two corporations, done two Web sites, we’ve built a complete game site, we’ve done the interactive book plus all the publicity and coordinated a speaking tour, which keeps me busy three to four days a week; that’s a lot of work.” It has cut into his retirement substantially, leaving the 12-handicap golfer little time for his favorite sport.

His company, Treasure Trove Inc. of New Canaan, is named after his highly successful first book, “A Treasure’s Trove,” which contained clues to finding 12 gold tokens hidden across the continental United States. As of February, all of the original 12 gold tokens, as well as two additional ones were found. The token were turned in for original works of jewelry that had a combined value of more than $1 million.

It’s amazing how someone can parlay a simple idea like greed into a successful business construct. I can’t stand this analysis of books earning money=good books.

Woody Allen on a lost recipe masterpiece.

On a recent trip to Heidelberg to procure some rare nineteenth-century duelling scars, I happened upon just such a treasure  Who would have thought that “Friedrich Nietzsche’s Diet Book” existed? While its authenticity might appear to be a soupçon dicey to the niggling, most who have studied the  work agree that no other Western thinker has come so close to reconciling Plato with Pritikin.

Funny, not everyone finds this funny. Here’s one site that seems to think Nietzsche would make good diet counsel. This, of course, is further proof that people who overfocus on the body are lacking in humour.

Comic books will be freely distributed to the American troops this July 4th. This the third exclusive free comic to be distributed.

The comics have also been hot items among those not in the military, with the previous two issues selling for anywhere between $3 and $10 on the online trading site eBay. Copies of the latest one, “Time Trouble”, were supposed to be kept under wraps until July 4 but are also up for sale on the site.

I guess this is pretty exciting, huh?

New York Public Library is running a show on artist/writer collaboration from the 19th and 20th century. (Thanks Maud Newton)

Although better known for their works on canvas, artists such as Picasso, Henri Matisse, and René Magritte collaborated with poets such as Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Gide, and others to pioneer the concept of the artist’s book, in which words and pictures come together in a unique fashion, ushering in a new mode of expression.

Bookslut interviews Anthony Bourdain about his new book The Nasty Bits.

You have a very hedonist approach to food.

It’s the death of pleasure when your waiter takes ten minutes to tell you the bloodline of your tomato. I don’t care. I’m already having a bad time. Is it good? It speaks for itself. It’s nonsense. Excess description, excess information. The truth’s in the dining experience. It’s as primeval as it gets, or it should be. That’s the way chefs eat.

No, Anthony, the death of pleasure is more when the waiter comes around, just when you are in the middle of an intimate conversation, just as you are about to cut into the best duck breast you’ve ever been served, comes with a huge phallic pepper mill and asks if you’d like him to ceremonially spice your food. Gack!

Jane Urquhart has lent her voice to a group trying to save a bridge that features in The Stone Carvers.

Since the Stone Carvers was published in 2001, hundreds, if not thousands, of people have visited the bridge, Urquhart acknowledges, including a bus tour organized in conjunction with the 2003 Waterloo Region One Book, One Community public reading campaign.

“We all have the right to beauty in nature,” Urquhart contends. “It’s part of what determines happiness.”

I love the old bridges, too. Even better, though, was the ferryman of The Leie in Latem, Belgium, who punted me across the river when I went bicycling with my mother-in-law a couple of years ago. If they tear the bridge down they should build a barge and hire this guy; I think his name was Charon.

The Porter County Library board has rescinded a decision to disallow homeless children library borrowing priveleges.

“Yes, we did jump and made conclusions,” library board President Scott Falk said. ”We’re willing to look at these things.”

Library officials said they established the restrictions last month after losing more than $4,000 worth of books and audiovisual materials over four to five years because of temporary shelter residents who failed to return them.

In other American library and homelessness news, a misguided, pregnant, homeless woman, who recently set fire to a gay and lesbian section in a Chicago library admitted she had nothing against gay and lesbians per se but was protesting the fact that the library staff won’t let her sleep there. Makes perfect sense to me.

Hey y’all. I likely won’t be posting anything until late next week or early the next. Kathryn will be here though all next week. I’ve chained her to her desk and left bowls of water and ninja kibble, so she should be fine. Not like that time I left her in the car with the windows up. But let’s not revisit our chequered pasts. Now is a time for looking to the future.

On Monday I take off in my little overloaded Toyota Matrix for Newfoundland and I need the time between now and then to get ready. Should be an interesting 20 hour drive/14 hour ferry ride. I expect to be sore at the end. Plus, I’m driving with my dad. Can you say, “long silences”? I love the guy, but our interests intersect only at the twin junctions of Hank Williams and Dwight Yokum, so… (My dad once told me he tried to read a review of mine the Globe and Mail, but stopped in the first few paragraphs on encountering the word “intertextuality”… It actually changed the way I write reviews, so thanks for that, pa.) Lady and Baby ninja will follow in a week or so, once I’ve set up the house a bit.

I’d like to bid a fond farewell to Toronto, the city I keep leaving, and returning to. We’re like shitty lovers, TO. I’ve abandonned your smoggy gridlock for rural Italy, New York City, and Guelph, all of which failed to live up to my expectations (especially Guelph), and I’ve come back each time. I’m hoping this will be different. We’ve bought a nice house and have good jobs and even some friends waiting. We’re hoping our kid’s allergies will clear up once this chemical cocktail of carbon monoxide and carcenogenic goop is blown from his lungs. Lady ninja is hoping to expand minds and write papers that change the world. I’m hoping the pace of life will slow down and I’ll get more writing of any kind done. We’ll see.

If you’re a Ninja-philic publisher, you’ll need to update your address books to reflect the change. Email me at editors*at*bookninja*dot*com to get the new info. If you’re a reader, nothing will appear different. There might be a tang of salt air in the posts, but that’s it. Moving, for me, has become a matter of plugging my wires in to different walls, sad as that is. The site is coming up on three years old and I have no plans to stop doing this, for a while, at least.

Oscar Wilde said, “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.” I hope to live up to both ends of that one. We’ll be back quite often, so perhaps we can spread the happiness around a few times a year. So long, Toronto! May your phallic tower never go limp and may your populace never suffocate on the exhaust of a million Woodbridge SUVs! I’ll miss you, but in the way one misses the really good sex of a really bad relationship. Oh, chin up. We’ll laugh about this one day. You’ll see. Time will heal. And I’ll be with my down east lass, drunk on sea air, Atlantic culture and kind people. Oh, and beer.

Kathryn (and some other folk) was shortlisted a while back for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award — a big deal prize up here. Many big names have come through this prize, including Nino Ricci and Rohinton Mistry. This is the first Canadian press I’ve seen around it. Strange.

The library of Pierre Beres, a legendary Paris book dealer, was auctioned on Tuesday.

After 80 years in the book trade, Beres, 93, has accumulated an enormous collection of sought-after editions and signed albums that constituted a virtual history of French literature from the mediaeval poet Francois Villon onwards. Inside the crowded Drouot auction hall in central Paris, the scene resembled an updated version of one of Balzac’s novels of money and avarice as a sleek auctioneer dispatched one treasure after another to a floor of impassive bidders. A sale originally expected to raise some 6 million euros ($7.56 million), finally raised around twice that amount, not including fees, with the most expensive item, a 16th century collection of bird paintings fetching over $1.5 million.

I’m so envious. More than 20 children’s authors will be celebrating the Queen’s 80th birthday at the children’s party.

The writers appearing at the palace include some of the biggest names in children’s literature. Philip Pullman, Michael Morpurgo, Eric Hill and Raymond Briggs will be among them, as will Michael Bond, the 80-year-old creator of Paddington, the bear with the very hard stare who, coincidentally, has two birthdays like the Queen, one of which falls on Sunday.

Michael Bond! Michael Morpurgo! Pullman will need to lighten up, though. Sheesh:

“We’ve each got five minutes. The trouble is I write such long books. A poet can come on, do a couple of poems and off they go.

“But I have to choose something that is just five minutes long from several thousands of pages.”

First Narnia bashing and now this. So tiresome.

We’re just a bunch of socially awkward addicts looking for our next fix. Getting smart makes you want to get smarter and it’s free!

Lead researcher Irving Biederman admits that “trying to understand a difficult theorem…is not fun,” but says, “Once you get it, you just feel fabulous.” This “A-ha!” moment – when a complicated concept finally makes sense – releases a natural biochemical cascade in your brain similar to that released by opiate drugs. Once you’ve experienced this pleasure, your brain is motivated to maximize the rate at which it absorbs knowledge. Perhaps, at this point the learning spirals “out of control.” You’re lost to the library and the influences of other scholars and information – addicts trying to feed the need to understand increasingly complex theorems.

I once read an interview with Richard Ford in which he admitted to feeling fraudulant until he won the Pulitzer. Maybe, insecurity is what makes writers write and not only that but what makes writers write their best. Updike profiled on ego, 9/11 and the internet.

You gotta love a man who has won nearly every prize the literary world has to offer and who can still angst like an insecure debutante. This was a man after my own heart, that most well-known of contradictory writer personalities: a mix of self-doubt and ego, all rolled into one endearing package.

“I feel awkward about any award,” he says. “(These polls turn) literature into a kind of track meet, where you can judge first, second and third … I wonder if the discontent it breeds doesn’t offset the joy of the winners.”

That’s the sort of thing you can only say if you’ve won a bunch, of course.

Evolutionary biologist Blair Hedges, not satisfied with merely collecting old books, has begun dating them. “Let people stare,” he quiped recently when asked about his strange passion, “I just love my oldies.”

Bibliographers can make an educated guess about a document’s age based on the accumulation of visible grime and damage. They can also try to match the watermark on the page of an undated document to a watermark with a known date, but the odds of making such a match are slim. Hoping to find a better way, Hedges, based at Pennsylvania State University in State College, reasoned that just as genes steadily accumulate mutations over time, the woodblocks and copperplates used in early printmaking probably deteriorated at a relatively constant rate.

To test this hunch, he digitized and examined 2674 Renaissance prints. In prints made from woodblocks, Hedges found that although early editions had clean, continuous lines, editions printed from the same block decades later had more gaps, presumably as a result of tiny cracks that built up as the wood aged. Copperplate prints became more faded with time at a rate that matches the corrosion of copper, Hedges reports in a paper published online 20 June in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.

Take note, I’ll be moving to The Rock on Monday, so if you’re planning to send me something for the site, you should update your databases with a new Bookninja address. Write to me at editors*at*bookninja*dot*com (sorry, I got almost 1000 spam messages yesterday, so I’m trying everything to cut back) to get the new 411. That’s what you kids are saying these days, 411, right? Make sure you use the word “Bookninja” in the subject line so my spammed eyes can pick you out of the pile.

Ouch! They said it, not me. But I did laugh. How I laughed. God, I hope my little trolls see this one.

Pen Canada’s fundraiser book launch last night failed in my eyes only in the sense that they didn’t invite me to the pre-event wetbar so I spent the hour and half thirsty and wishing I was more famous and wetbar worthy. Ah, well. The upside was that it was a room full of writers and writer types which, of course, always pleases. The highlight, naturally, was Alice Munro whose kindness and professionalism never ceases to awe and inspire. Yes, she did quit writing last night, but insofar as all writers – as Michael Helm posited and Joseph Boyden proved – are liars, we didn’t believe her even one little bit. Writing Life is a book every writer should have on his/her shelf if only for the swell essay titles: “Five Visits to the Word Hoard”, “Writing. Or Giving up Writing”, “On Behaving Badly”. I’ve only had time for Andre Alexis’s stunning and vulnerable essay on how he discovered he was a writer. Wow. The event was also in support of writer and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi; you can find out more information about the fundraiser, the book and Aung San Suu Kyi on Pen Canada’s website.

An interview with Ariel Levy, the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs. Well, we wanted to be like men; as far as I’m concerned it’s been downhill ever since the power suit. I have a corporate lawyer friend who weighs a hundred pounds soaking wet and routinely tells her subordinate male underlings to stop acting like girls.

Levy isn’t a prude or a scold, arguing for women to be less sexual – in fact, quite the opposite. Her point is that the single form of sexuality on offer to women – “this spring-break variety of thongs-and-implants exhibitionism” – is largely unfulfilling. And that buying into this, either by stripping yourself, or by ogling strippers, is a way of currying male approval and propping up male culture and power. (The obvious problem being that, by doing so, you undermine women, and, implicitly, yourself.)

“When it comes to raunch culture, a lot of people say: ‘Well, we’re living in a post-feminist age, women have won the [sex] war, and so it’s OK for all this to happen. It doesn’t actually threaten women’s social position.’ But when did we win the war? We don’t have equal pay for equal work, we don’t have equal representation in government … so when exactly did we win?”

Yes, what?

Disenfranchising gays and lesbians, the homeless, and Spanish-speaking citizens. The worst thing about this is that it isn’t all that surprising or news worthy.

This made my day.

Francesca Simon’s 15 books about “Horrid Henry,” an English brat who throws food, terrorizes teachers and tries to sell his little brother, are published in 25 countries and have sold 5.5 million copies in the U.K. alone. They’re not printed in the U.S., even though Simon herself is an American.

“They thought he was just a bit too naughty, a bad example for the kids in the school,” says Simon, 51, sipping on a cappuccino in the newly renovated kitchen of her otherwise cluttered Victorian home in north London.

I love it that the American publishers are concerned about Harry’s bad manners. That’s too rich. And Francesca Simon just became a minor hero in my eyes; she won’t cow to the American market. Long live Francesca!

Now you won’t have to bypass the church of smelly candles, wicker waste baskets and greeting cards to buy a book. Not only that, but the store might even have a copy or two of the book you are looking for. Further you won’t have to endure three to five smiling happy people asking you if they can help you even though really they can’t because they themselves have only read Tolkien. And wait, it gets better.

For the company to gain the edge on Amazon.ca, the primary competitor in Canadian online book, music and movie sales, Indigo must ensure its new website is equally user-friendly, he said.

The easier a website is to use, the more likely customers are to purchase more than just the items they are looking for, Khorsand said.”major investment” in “sexier, user-friendly” hardware and software at their kiosks, which are used by more than half of shoppers.

Sexier? We can’t wait.

Is it me, or does Rausing come off as an insipid scrabble-playing, billionaire, yoga-bag-toting fool? I read somewhere lately (maybe here; God knows it’s about all I read lately) that she’s a control freak wrt Granta, something no one on staff expected. It’s so annoying when the philanthropists have ideas.

Rausing: The feel of the book has moved far away from the magazine. It’s now almost all nonfiction, with some exceptions. I want to bring fiction back into the list, and have the list be more in line with the magazine because I think it’s more interesting than the list. I want to bring Granta Books back to what I think Granta Books should be, i.e. highly literary, very interesting, fiction and nonfiction, and very high quality.

Nayeri: What do you do besides philanthropy and reading manuscripts?

Rausing: I play Scrabble with my husband Eric Abraham. That’s something we do constantly.

Incessant scrabble playing. Imagine how nice that could be.