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Or as Bud Parr has said, read now (or never).

The publishers of this anthology of Latin American writing wanted to draw attention to the very short life of new writing in our times. Using vanishing ink seemed like a fine way to do it.

The buyers of the first print run were clearly in agreement, but one wonders, what were they buying? A novelty, a talking point - or a journal? would they leave it closed on the bookshelf for fear of losing the book?

The editors remark that most first books vanish anyway. They are currently investigating further publications in the same format:

'we think that this is a magical and poetic way of confronting a real problem,' explains javier campopiano, regional general creative director of draftFCB.
'we wanted to make a book that was a message in itself, that encourages us to read those authors, before their stories disappear for real, right before our eyes.'

while potential purchasers are likely to object to the impermanence of the object-- which defies being returned to months or years later for a second reading--
the project highlights both the difficulties that face emerging contemporary authors, as well as our often-neglected enjoyment of text, and the perhaps overly
confident opinions we hold about the permanence of written material. as the video documentation of the project suggests:

'books are very patient objects. we buy them, and then they wait for us to read them. days, months, even years. that’s OK for books, but not for new authors.
if people don’t read their first books, they’ll never make it to a second.'

Read more at Design Boom. (Noted also at Wired, Gizmodo, the Independent and the Boston Globe, among others.)

Over at Cordite, Adam Ford tells us why he would like to have Thirty More Australian Poets.

Margaret Atwood is sharing her writing online at Wattpad, a social writing site.

"I didn't think they were going to disapprove," said Atwood. "I've already looked at quite a bit [of writing] on the site but haven't commented yet. I think it would be too crushing for me to comment. Out of millions of users, how am I going to single somebody out? It's enough to judge the poems."

She will, she said, be listening to feedback from her readers, however. "I think any feedback is interesting, and this is not your usual poetry reading group," she said. "This is nothing new. [It's] simply being reinvented by the internet ... The Pickwick Papers was published serially and people would respond to the chapters by letter. That's why Sam Weller became such a big part of the book." (The Guardian)

Something marvellous the Guardian has offered over the past couple of months: a series of posts on John Donne's life and work by Roz Kaveney.

Kevin Murphy reports at the Melville House blog that Seth Godin's selfpublishing venture is over.

Also from Melville House comes the news that the Folger Library is releasing its New Folger Library editions of Shakespeare as e-books.

An  illustrated  review of a cartoon-artist's view of New York in the twenties at The Ember, by Nick Terrell.

And finally, an update on Susan Johnson's blog on the progress of the reloaded Queensland Literary Awards.

I promised James Bradley I would post this when he twittered in disbelief earlier this week that there are Twitter novels.  I'm quoting from the first chapter of Alexandra Johnson's Leaving A Trace: On Keeping A Journal, the first chapter of which can be found here.

This is the excerpt I've printed out and stuck in a commonplace book - James, N.B. the bolded section, which for some reason made me think of your raised eyebrows. I also like Mansfield's quoted remark at the end.

Ten million blank journals are sold annually in stationery stores alone. Two million in specialty stores. Thanks to secret passwords and specialized software, an estimated four million scribblers keep some form of journal on a computer. If the information age has spawned a hunger for connection (and privacy), so, too, a need for the quickest way to access interior life. Web sites pop up daily. Our accelerated global age has left little time to slow down and reflect. In Japan, for example, those too busy to keep journals phone in their entries. At the end of the month, a company sends a bound transcript.

Familiar with the statistics, I also know how hard it is for many to keep journals. Yet when I ask people, as I often do, who they wish had kept a diary, a torrent of names is unleashed — my mother, my husband, my sister, the uncle whom I'm named after, the father I never knew. Why then the resistance to keeping them ourselves? Virginia Woolf put her finger on it best perhaps, when she asked her own diary: "Whom do I tell when I tell a blank page?"; Whom does one write for? Oneself, of course. "True to oneself — which self" asked Woolf's friend and archrival, Katherine Mansfield. (In her journal, she confessed that a single day's "thousands of selves" made her feel like a hotel clerk busy handing keys to the psyche's "willful guests.")

This meme requires me to attempt to describe my life, by title, in the books I've read so far in 2009. (Via Gwenda Bond.)

Strikes me as something best attempted in the last quarter of the year. For sure.

Describe yourself:
The Night Parrot
How do you feel?
Will It Be Funny Tomorrow, Billy?
Describe where you currently live:
The World Beneath
If you could go anywhere, where would you go?
Brooklyn
Your favorite form of transport:
The Pages
Your best friend is . . . ?
The TV President
You and your friends are . . .?
The Ghost Poetry Project (or The Content Makers, depending on who you talk to).
What’s the weather like?
(A) Disgrace

Favourite time of day?
The Time We Have Taken
What is life to you?
A House Of Air

Your fear?
The Hunter ( in another year this would be Oblomov)
What is the best advice you have to give?
An Imaginary Life
Thought for the Day?
Indignation
How I would like to die:
Things We Didn't See Coming
My soul’s present condition?
Look Who's Morphing

'Bill always said examine the writer, not the man. But I am emotional and I can’t help examining both.'

Bukowski, unplugged. Oh, man, it's good. Hurray for Maud Newton and her mighty blog. There are a couple more excerpts from the source, here.

This has to be one of the nicest posts in this series that I have read so far, along with Philip Hensher's, who may have sympathised with Kipling on the uses and abuses of a designated writing space.

"We've been in this house over 40 years and I'm 79 years old, so this room is full of my past. ". Alvarez issues a warning about helpful cleaners, and admits to playing poker online if his work is not going well.

Those of you who have been keeping up with the series will of course have seen this, and this (which you will no doubt remember next time you see a crowded desk.)

They are coming out my ears. This one, from Mark, is the 'open the book nearest to you at page 123 and write down the fifth sentence' meme.

"Verstehe nicht, she said."

Now if I was a really tough individual, I'd say, 'guess what it's from, HAHA, HAHA!'

But no. It's from Tim Parks' Cleaver, which I am ashamed to say I picked up for a song from the Melbourne University professional bookshop's sinbin on Monday, along with a copy of Gail Jones' Sixty Lights, A.L. Kennedy's Day and a book by David Malouf which I was going to use for this meme before dinner, but which my son has decided belongs elsewhere. I can't remember the name of it, and now I can't even see it. I loved The Great World so much when I read it earlier this year that the Malouf came easily into my hand - and has gone walkies, but the point of this activity being that the book must be close to you has to be maintained. So, Cleaver, from the new bargain books pile, it is. (He tried to swipe Cleaver while I was typing this, too, but I said "OI." )

Tim Parks is someone I became interested in after reading a profile that described him as a writer who has managed to build a reputation without appearing at festivals or being interviewed for (ahem) profiles. He eschews giving bits of himself away, arguing that they distract from the books, which include 'narrative' and other essays, a study of Italian translations of the English modernists, many English translations from Italian and three other books of non-fiction. There is some information on his website about five of his eleven novels (where are the others? one wonders), including this from the Irish Times about Cleaver:

' Never has the need to empty one's mind been as convincingly, or as brilliantly, illustrated as in Tim Parks's full-blooded Cleaver. In a career spanning more than 20 years, and 13 novels, this most deliberate and underrated of English writers has consistently entered the more unattractive corners of human consciousness, with increasingly sophisticated and mature results. Never overly concerned with style, he is instead a no-nonsense writer who invariably has something to say and tends to say it with robust candour, few apologies and a mastery of controlled indignation.'

There's also news that he is preparing a new translation of Machiavelli's Prince for Penguin, due for publication in 2009. What an intriguing fellow. I am excited, it's almost as good as Brian Moore coming back to life. I can hope so, anyway. The mise-en-scene of Cleaver has more than a sniff of the peerless Moore about it.

I have only read 35 pages of Cleaver, as I am still finishing Hanif Kureishi's Something To Tell You. So I have not read the rest of page 123. But if the next 87 88 pages are as terse and compelling as the first 35, I will get there very speedily indeed.
(The Malouf is Child's Play. I've just found it in a completely different spot - maybe it was me?) Do consider yourself tagged, if this is your fancy.

I went and commented on this post when I first saw it in my reader, then revisited after Maud linked to it. There are now 350-odd comments, and they make for good reading for anyone who was interested in the State Library's Text Appeal literary speed-dating events in early 2007.

I have managed to find Marieke Hardy's fabulous article about this too - no surprise that our royal Ms Fits has cracked an International Bloggie, either. About bloody time. And what a funny blog awards page, no permalinks??? that freaking page goes on forever.

Anyway. Rachel Donadio's NY Times article, which she refers to in her post, is also quite funny:

For most people, love conquers literary taste. “Most of my friends are indeed quite shallow, but not so shallow as to break up with someone over a literary difference,” said Ben Karlin, a former executive producer of “The Daily Show” and the editor of the new anthology “Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me.” “If that person slept with the novelist in question, that would probably be a deal breaker — more than, ‘I don’t like Don DeLillo, therefore we’re not dating anymore.’”

All important material to consider, if you feel a row over The Corrections is brewing between you and a loved one sometime soon. (And I'm not suggesting that's the subject of the last link, either - it's just a damn good post on that book, and other matters.)

I'm posting this just because I can. I heard about this on NPR--monks protesting in Myanmar (Burma) about the repressive government, protests triggered by a raise in fuel prices.



I think it's a protest against an insensitive government that ignores the poverty of its people. And to my mind, it's beautiful.