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With thanks to tripu on Flickr for the photo.

Finally, the Kindle may have found its market: but perhaps not quite what Amazon expected - it may just be the the new must-have accessory for pornophiles.  That is, if a recent thread on FriendFeed is anything to go by… and yes folks, Litopia After Dark merits an explicit tag this week – you have been warned!

Raising our sights for a moment, Peter is convinced that, in a blinding flash of revelation, he has seen the future of the digital publishing business - and it’s Google, not Amazon, who look like being the clear winners.

“When we look back”, he says, “we may well decide that this was the week when the world changed for readers, writers and indeed the entire the publishing industry.”  It all hinges on the a settlement that has been reached between Google and authors and book publishers regarding Google’s massive book scanning and indexing project.

“The implications of the Google settlement are truly vast”, Peter believes.  “Let’s imagine that Google soon start to sell an e-reader –just as they’ve recently produced a phone.  With the new Google E-reader, you can have the text of just about every book ever written - the majority of them, being out of opyright, will be 100% free.

That’s an offer that is impossible to refuse!  And on the back of it, they will be able to sell frontlist books, too.  I really believe the promise of “all the world’s books in the palm of your hand” will be a game changer for the entire industry.”

The panel discuss the massive implications of this development.

A new book by Geoff Nicholson mourns The Lost Art of Walking – and since part of Nicholson’s walking talks place in Los Angeles, we can assume it is not just a lost art, but also a pretty dangerous one, too.  So, should writers walk – or stay in their rooms, famously like Marcel Proust?

A piece in this week’s Daily Telegraph by Tibor Fischer reviews Schulz and Peanuts: A biography by David Michaelis. Michaelis’s books reveals much about the man himself: the man behind the iconic cartoon strip had devotees that included Timothy Leary and the Grateful Dead, but also as Fischer points out, “grunts in Vietnam went into battle with Snoopy emblazoned on their fuselages or helmets. Schulz’s prodigious cartoon beagle was almost called Sniffy, before he remembered his dying mother’s suggestion that their next dog should be called Snoopy (a Norwegian term of endearment). We chat about the appeal of the puppy… what made Snoopy so popular?

Also, Daniel W. Drezner writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education review this week about the alleged disappearance of the intellectual as a public figure. The pessimism about public intellectuals is reflected in attitudes about how the rise of the internet in general, and blogs in particular, affects intellectual output. Alan Wolfe claims that “the way we argue now has been shaped by cable news and Weblogs. No emotion can be too angry and no exaggeration too incredible.” The panel give their views on whether the role of intellectual  is dead? We also ask whether intellectuals are actually necessary any more?

Finally, there’s something particularly evil and enduring about book burning – the very phrase conjures up nightmarish visions of Nazis and bonfires. People just don’t seem to get as excited about, say, the Great Firewall of China, which arguably has had a far more chilling effect on free speech than ever the Third Reich managed to have.  In the current New English Review, Theodore Dalyrmple writes: “Books have an almost sacred quality: it is necessary only to imagine someone ripping the pages out of a cheap and trashy airport novel one by one to prove to oneself that this is so. If we saw someone doing it, we should be shudder, and think him a barbarian, no matter the nature of the book. The horror aroused by book burnings is independent of the quality of the books actually burnt.”  So, what is going to happen when books are read electronically? Will the smell of burning plastic still conjure the same emotions?

And if all that wasn’t enough, we play all the games you love to listen to… Pitch the Nasty Agent, Toad Suck, Arkansas, Reverse Shuffle Six Card Strip Pokerette and Litopia’s Cry for Help (this week we get a letter from a rather strange contributor!).

To discuss all this and more is our erudite and entertaining panel… Dave Bartram, Donna Ballman and Richard Howse.  Joining them is our very special guest Dr Susan O’Doherty, writer, clinical psychologist and the author of Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: A Woman’s Guide to Unblocking Creativity.  Her popular advice column for writers, “The Doctor Is In”, appears every Friday on MJ Rose’s publishing blog, Buzz, Balls, & Hype.  The Ustream chatroom was a bit congested this week, but do join us there next week, and be part of the Litopia phenomenon!

Links mentioned in the show…

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Jonathan Yeardley on The Lost Art of Walking, in the Washington Post…

The gifted, resourceful Geoff Nicholson here conducts the reader on a leisurely, entirely delightful ramble through the history and lore of walking, an exercise that calls to my mind nothing so much as one of the few notable walking songs he fails to mention, the great New Orleans funeral march “Oh, Didn’t He Ramble,” as immortalized by Louis Armstrong and played by heaven knows how many other musicians, famous and obscure, from the Big Easy: “Didn’t he ramble, he rambled,/Rambled all around, in and out of town./Didn’t he ramble, he rambled,/He rambled ’til the butcher cut him down” — fit words to celebrate the life of a guy who forever rambled his way into trouble.

Walking can do that to you: take you to places you don’t expect to go, people you don’t expect to meet, entanglements you hadn’t planned on. To be sure, walking is usually simply to get you from Point A to Point B, but it can be serendipitous as well. Just walking the dachshunds around the block can lead to chance encounters both pleasant (meeting up with a couple of other dachshunds from a few blocks away) and unpleasant (being attacked, fortunately without serious consequences, by two large, unleashed dogs). For many years I walked for exercise, as much as a dozen miles a day, and I still go everywhere on foot unless transporting large objects. The District of Columbia can be a terrific place to walk, with varied topography as well as many lovely natural and man-made vistas, but its motorists too often are utterly disdainful of pedestrians; in a crosswalk you take your life in your hands.

Tibor Fischer in The Telegraph looks at Schultz and Peanuts: A Biography by David Michaelis…

The word genius is so misused, so liberally misapplied that it really has been stripped of status, but if there’s one man who in my opinion deserves some title of supreme creative ability, a garland to denote almost divine talent, it is Charles M. Schulz.

And certainly if there is one man who fits the Comte de Buffon’s notion of genius as the capacity for taking pains it’s Schulz. One of the endearing things for me about the universe of Peanuts, the most successful strip cartoon of all, is how you can see it develop. The early work from its first days in the 1950s is stiff and frankly pedestrian, indeed not much good (something the perfectionist Schulz himself quickly was aware of), both in terms of the drawing and the writing. Then, suddenly, it all takes off in the Sixties into unaccountable brilliance (and sadly diminishes into inconsequentiality in the Nineties).

Like many great artists, Schulz was both a reflector of his times and a creator of it. The backdrop of Peanuts (a name that was imposed on Schulz and one he loathed) always remained the largely stable, cushioned world of the small-town backyard where the worst thing that could happen to you would be to lose a baseball match or to suffer a cutting remark. Yet, a lot of Peanuts was (is) deeply weird. Consider Snoopy’s adventures as a First World War flyboy. This isn’t a beagle being a fighter ace (a quite permissible phenomenon in the world of cartoons). No, this is a beagle pretending to be a First World War fighter ace, on top of a doghouse.

In the Chronicle Review, Daniel W Drezner on Public Intellectual 2.0…

Disquisitions about public intellectuals usually conclude that they ain’t what they used to be. Subtitles from recent books on the topic include A Study of Decline and An Endangered Species? Indeed, the major point of debate is dating the precise start of the decline and fall. For some critics, Götterdämmerung started in the 1950s; for others, the 1930s. More-curmudgeonly writers place the date earlier, stretching back to the heyday of John Stuart Mill or even the death of Socrates.

The pessimism about public intellectuals is reflected in attitudes about how the rise of the Internet in general, and blogs in particular, affects intellectual output. Alan Wolfe claims that “the way we argue now has been shaped by cable news and Weblogs; it’s all ‘gotcha’ commentary and attributions of bad faith. No emotion can be too angry and no exaggeration too incredible.” David Frum complains that “the blogosphere takes on the scale and reality of an alternative world whose controversies and feuds are … absorbing.” David Brooks laments, “People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers.”

But these critics fail to recognize how the growth of blogs and other forms of online writing has partially reversed a trend that many cultural critics have decried — what Russell Jacoby called the “professionalization and academization” of public intellectuals. In fact, the growth of the blogosphere breaks down — or at least erodes — the barriers erected by a professionalized academy.

In the New English Review, and article by Theodore Dalrymple called Of Bibliophilia and Biblioclasm…

In 1936, George Orwell published a little essay entitled Bookshop Memories. In it, he recalled his time as an assistant in a second-hand bookshop, a time that was happy only when viewed through the soft-focus lens of nostalgia. Irony might be defined as disgust recalled in tranquillity, and Orwell’s essay is nothing if not full of irony. He was glad to have had the experience, no doubt, but more glad that it was over.

Not much has changed in the three quarters of a century that have elapsed since Orwell’s experience as a bookseller. Second-hand bookshops the world over still tend to be inadequately heated places, Orwell says because the owners fear condensation in the windows, but also because profits are small and heating bills would be large. There is a peculiar chill, quite unlike any other, to be experienced between the stacks of second-hand bookshops.

Orwell says that the tops of books in such bookshops are the place ‘where every bluebottle prefers to die,’ and this preference, being biological in origin, has not changed in the meantime. The dust of old books, and ‘the sweet smell of decaying paper’, still have a peculiarly choking quality that catch one in the back of the throat. And second-hand bookshops are still one of the few indoor public places where a person may loiter for hours without being suspected of any serious ulterior motive.

Orwell did not have a high regard for the customers, who struck him as awkward and mainly suffering from psychological problems. As a long-time habitué of second-hand bookshops, I should say that this is a fairly typical attitude of booksellers to buyers, whom they regard largely with contempt. This contempt arises not only from the character of book-buyers, but from their tastes. I knew a bookseller, a communist of the Enver Hoxha faction, who was constantly frustrated and irritated that the elderly black ladies of the area in which he had his shop were always asking for Bibles rather than for revolutionary literature that he thought that they, as the most downtrodden of the downtrodden, ought to have been reading. Another bookshop owner of my acquaintance so hated his customers that he would sometimes play Schoenberg very loudly to clear the shop of them. It was a very effective technique.

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