Pocohontar

Which words would you banish?

Ben Okri is writing a poem celebrating 2010 on Twitter, to last all of January.

Avahontas. Pocohontar.

Enough with the Jane Austen mashups already.

Books have been banned from all flights by airline Transport Canada in the wake of the foiled Christmas Day attack.

100 years of literary noughtiness.

Book blurb of the week: “…the most pestilential book ever vomited, I think, from the jaws of hell.”

Once again, there is hope yet for the written word.

And to help get you through the first full week of 2010: Student brings a typewriter to class, professor asks him, “Can you mute the sound?” Read more »

Lucky Writer's Socks?

Baseball players are known to have strange pre-game rituals. Rob Murphy wore women’s underwear under his jock strap while pitching (honestly, can you think of anything less comfortable than a jock-strap-and-thong wedgie?), while Kevin Millar used to sprinkle his bats with doe pee when he was with the Florida Marlins. But as the phrase, “I’m going to write, so I’m taking the candle” left my mouth, I started wondering about the odd rituals of writers. Read more »

Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner SA for snagging a free copy of The Vows of Silence by Susan Hill.

This week, we are giving away a copy of The Alchemaster’s Apprentice by Walter Moers. The first three books set in Zamonia—the mythical land created by the genius of Moers, whose work has been compared to J.K. Rowling, Douglas Adams, and Shel Silverstein—have achieved raucous critical acclaim and created hundreds of thousands of die-hard fans here and all over the world. Now Moers returns with a fourth “relentlessly whimsical” fantasy (Library Journal). When Echo the Cat’s mistress dies, he is compelled to sign a contract with Ghoolion the Alchemaster. This fateful document gives Ghoolion the right to kill Echo at the next full moon and render his fat, which he hopes to brew into an immortality potion. But Ghoolion has not reckoned for Echo’s talent for survival and his vast ability to make new friends.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by The Overlook Press. Read more »

Ani DiFranco has this song called “Soft Shoulder” from her album To The Teeth.  I love that song.  The first verse is perpetually stuck in my head:

I don’t keep much stuff around
I value my portability
but I will say that I have saved
every letter you ever wrote to me

I want to be able to value my portability.  I’ve lived in four different cities and seven different apartments in the last six years, and sometimes I wish that moving was as easy as filling up a backpack and a little satchel and walking to the next destination.  That’s what I imagine Ani doing.

I’m no pack rat, but I do have a few boxes of letters, postcards, ticket stubs, mementos, school work, photos, and Xerox copies of interesting articles.  And books.  I’m not a collector — I think I have less than 150 books — but the books take up the most space each time I move. Read more »