Welcome to our podcast! Looks like this is your first time here - you may want to subscribe to ourRSS feed - it'll keep you up to date with our latest shows. Thanks for dropping by - and don't be a stranger!

photo credit: WIlly Volk

In the week when Damien Hirst made $198 million selling pickled animals, famed art critic Robert Hughes all but crucified Hirst and his “dull witted” patrons in an outspoken attack published in The Guardian.  On Litopia After Dark we discuss whether Hirst is a pioneer - or a pirate, as Hughes maintains.  Also, British children’s authors who visit schools and libraries more than once a month will need to register with the Independent Safeguarding Authority as of October 2009.  Is this opening the door to a world where the State decides whose ideas are acceptable - and whose aren’t?

British author Sam Jordison writes a piece in The Independent taking a sardonic view of all those books – and in particular, all those interminable Channel Four programs – that are comprised entirely of lists. Bucket lists, Jordison calls them.  The panel add their own ideas to his anti-list of things not to do before you die - and improve it immeasurably.  We also play Pitch the Nasty Agent and Toad Suck, Arkansas, Reverse Shuffle Six Card Strip Pokerette (another win for the panel!) and in our Cry For Help this week, a certain DH from North Devon can’t help but be impressed at our problem solving skills.

On the panel this week we are delighted to welcome Brian Clegg author of Upgrade Me – Our amazing journey to Human 2.0 and Amanda Lees, author of Kumari, Goddess of Gotham.  Add to this our stalwart panelists Dave Bartram and Donna Ballman and you have a veritable witches’ brew of intoxicating intellects.  The Ustream Chatroom (8pm GMT) was open for business as usual.  Come along next week and give us your views live on the show.

Links mentioned in the show…

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

In The Guardian, Robert Hughes…

Day of the dead

Amid the controversy surrounding the Sotheby’s auction, Robert Hughes explains why he has taken a stand against Damien Hirst’s ’simple-minded’ works, and an art world where prices bear no relation to talent…

By now, with the enormous hype that has been spun around it, there probably isn’t an earthworm between John O’Groats and Land’s End that hasn’t heard about the auction of Damien Hirst’s work at Sotheby’s on Monday and Tuesday - the special character of the event being that the artist is offering the work directly for sale, not through a dealer. This, of course, is persiflage. Christie’s and Sotheby’s are now scarcely distinguishable from private dealers anyway: they in effect manage and represent living artists, and the Hirst auction is merely another step in cutting gallery dealers out of the loop.

If there is anything special about this event, it lies in the extreme disproportion between Hirst’s expected prices and his actual talent. Hirst is basically a pirate, and his skill is shown by the way in which he has managed to bluff so many art-related people, from museum personnel such as Tate’s Nicholas Serota to billionaires in the New York real-estate trade, into giving credence to his originality and the importance of his “ideas”. This skill at manipulation is his real success as an artist. He has manoeuvred himself into the sweet spot where wannabe collectors, no matter how dumb (indeed, the dumber the better), feel somehow ignorable without a Hirst or two.

In The Bookseller, Caroline Horn…

Children’s authors who visit schools and libraries more than once a month will need to register with a new body responsible for safeguarding children as of October 2009, according to new regulations…

A new organisation, the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA), will take on responsibility for vetting and barring unsuitable people from working with children from autumn 2009. These checks are currently handled by the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB), which in future will work alongside the ISA to check the records of all those working with children.

The Society of Authors says its members are increasingly asked to provide Criminal Records Bureau certificates when they visit schools as a result of demands from Ofsted for better record-keeping by schools. Ofsted itself states that authors visiting schools “do not need to have a CRB check but they should not be left alone with the children”.

In future, authors will need to be registered with the ISA even if they are supervised “because there is a chance for authors to build up a trusting relationship with the child”, said a spokesperson for the organisation. Many authors also now communicate with their readers online, following events in schools and libraries or via their own websites.

In The Independent…

The day I got a life: Things not to do before you die

After writing a book ridiculing ‘Things to do before you die’ lists, Sam Jordison investigated if extreme experiences really are ‘liberating’ – or just plain silly…

Bucket lists are a blight on modern culture. About a year ago I got so fed up with all those Channel 4 shows, Sunday supplement articles, self-help books and websites telling me the books I had to read, places I had to go and activities I had to undertake, that I decided to respond in kind with my own anti-list. The result was a book: Sod That! 103 Things Not to Do Before You Die.

Writing Sod That! was a lot of fun, but it didn’t provide the catharsis I expected. Spending time finding out about all the things I didn’t want to be doing actually proved an uncomfortable reminder of my own mortality. I’d just turned 30, just started a family and just spotted my first white hairs. I was aware that I probably wouldn’t be able to complete all those lists even if I wanted to and began to worry that maybe I was wrong.

On Joe Wikert’s kindleville.blogspot.com…

The Challenge of Unsubscribing

Have you ever tried to cancel a Kindle subscription? I originally signed up for the AP U.S. News feed as a couple of other Kindle owners told me it’s worth the $1.99 per month. (This was before the advent of Kindlefeeder, of course.) I used it for several weeks but because disappointed because much of the “news” it sent me wasn’t exactly news…

I figured I’d drop that subscription and switch to the Latest News from The New York Times, also $1.99 per month. Switching to the Times feed was a breeze, of course, but how do you stop an existing feed? You’d think there would be a simple way to cancel a feed right from your Kindle. Nope. As with so many services these days, it’s easy to sign up but the provider often makes it difficult to stop. It’s not as bad as the old horror stories of canceling an AOL subscription or, more recently, XM Radio, but it’s still more of a hassle than it should be.

Tags: authors, kindle, literary agents, publishers