Litopia After Dark : The Influence of Writers
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photo credit: Howie_Berlin
On Litopia After Dark this week we are delighted to welcome as our special guest Martin Toseland, former publisher at both Penguin and HarperCollins, and now an author himself. Martin’s book A Steroid Hit The Earth: The Catastrophic World of Misprints
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In the week that Gwyneth Paltrow launches GOOP, a website designed for her to tell us how to live better, we ask… why? A disturbing article in the current American Scholar describes precisely how muzzled both authors and publishers really are in China - will we end up changing them - or will they change us? Sony has hired a speed reader to promote their new e-reader: we ask… yeah, but what’s the point? Finally, this week The Telegraph reported that a poet, dead for 200 years, has been sent a demand to pay his TV licence – we tell you about our own officialdom-gone-mad stories. All this and the hilarious Pitch the Nasty Agent, the tense suspense of Toad Suck, Arkansas, Reverse Shuffle Six Card Strip Pokerette and the heart-wrenching Cry For Help.
Joining Martin Toseland on the panel this week are Dave Bartram, Donna Ballman and Eve Harvey. In the Ustream Chatroom, (8pm GMT) the discussion was sensible and profound, join us next week to make it less so.
Links mentioned in the show…
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In the Globe and Mail, Elizabeth Renzetti…
In the old days, ladies would turn on the television set and find Donna Reed singing the praises of soup, with the idea that purchasing this soup would make your house tidy and your hair glossy and your children upstanding heterosexuals. Who wouldn’t want that life?…
In essence, Gwyneth would like to reach down from her aerie in north London and show you how to live, and shop, meaningfully. Except that the point is completely moot: You and I will never be six-foot tall blonde goddesses constructed entirely of lentils and self-righteousness.
These people are different than us, not because they’re better or more interesting, but because they are held aloft, much like Marie Antoinette’s hair, by a team of dedicated professionals. They never have to swallow a dirty aspirin found at the bottom of their purse, nor do they look in the fridge on a school morning and realize all that’s left for the kids’ lunch is a can of cat food and a red cabbage.
They have staff. They have staff to find their shoes and write the content of the websites we are meant to emulate. Should we really take beauty advice from Gwyneth Paltrow, who is the face of Estée Lauder and as such probably has a team of technicians delivering vials of age-retarding whales’ tears to her door every night?
Briefly, after spending time with Goop, I thought I might respond with my own lifestyle website - low-budget, practical advice for you and your kids and your misaligned chakras. I think I’ll call it Poop (Gwyneth must be kicking herself for not thinking of it first!) On Poop, for example, you might pick up these nifty hints:
Scavenge last night’s cake crumbs from the folds of your bra or stomach, put them on a pretty plate, and treat yourself to a picnic in the park.
On The American Scholar.com, Ha Jin…
Censorship in China is a powerful field of force; it affects anyone who gets close to it. Four years ago, I signed five book contracts with a Shanghai publisher who planned to bring out four volumes of my fiction and a collection of my poems. The editor in charge of the project told me that he couldn’t possibly consider publishing two of my novels, The Crazed and War Trash, owing to the sensitive subject matter. The former touches on the Tiananmen tragedy, and the latter deals with the Korean War…
…Rigid censorship not only chokes artistic talent but also weakens the Chinese populace, who are forced to be less imaginative and less inventive. The crisis in education has been a hot topic in China for years. Why are so many Chinese students good at taking tests but poor at analytical thinking? Why are many Chinese college graduates less creative and innovative than college graduates in the West? Besides the commercialization of education, the absence of a free, tolerant environment has stunted the intellectual growth of students and teachers. People often ask how many great original thinkers and artists modern China has contributed to the world, and how many original products China has created on its own. Very few, considering that the country has 1.3 billion people. True, China is richer than before, but its wealth relies on duplicating and emulating foreign products. Such wealth is temporary and will dwindle away. Without its own original cultural and material products, a country can never stay rich and strong. In other words, the real wealth a country has is the talent of its people. In the case of China, the way to nurture that talent is to lift the yoke of censorship.
On I4U News.com, Luigi Lugmayr…
Sony launches a nation-wide campaign dubbed Reader Revolution to promote their eBook reader.
Spearheading the effort is two-time world record-holder Dave Farrow, who will be reading digital books on the Reader around the clock for 30 days at a Manhattan storefront…
For each page Dave Farrow reads, Sony will provide an eBook library of 100 classic titles to a school or learning institution. The goal is to give 15 million eBook titles by the end of the program. The first 100 schools to start downloading their selected classic titles will also receive and education pack of five Reader Digital Book.
Dave Farrow is a speed reader and a two-time world record-holder in memory. He once memorized 59 decks of playing cards and recalled them, one card at a time, for more than eight hours to secure his memory title.
In The Telegraph, Jon Swaine…
Two notices were delivered by GEZ, a licence-collecting agency, which threatened to mount legal action against the literary hero, who is best known for his poem Ode to Joy, which was put to music by Beethoven, unless he quickly settled his monthly €17 (£14) bill…
The second came despite the school’s headteacher sending the agency a letter informing them that “the addressee is no longer in a position to listen to the radio or watch television”.
GEZ replied saying Schiller would only be exempt if he could prove he did not own television or radio sets.
After the confusion was settled, a spokesman for the agency apologised. “We have to deal with such a huge amount of data, that something like this can happen, and the name Friedrich Schiller is not so unusual that it stood out as strange,” she told The Guardian. “We will now alter his status in our computer system.”
