First a word of thanks to those of you who have read and responded to this blog over the past 3-4 years, your positive involvement has made the experience of writing it a very rewarding one.

As some of you may know, about a year ago I purchased a small publishing firm called the Book Hunter Press. From 1993-2004 it produced a series of guide books which together listed all of the used/antiquarian bookstores in North America. During the past year I, along with several others, have been busy updating the BHP list and adding many new literary destinations. In order to ‘consolidate’ efforts I have decided to house, at least for now, Nota Bene Books on the new www.literarytourist.com website. Focus will remain the same, but new post categories will be added to reflect the nature of the new site, and the interests of those who love visiting used bookstores and participating in literary activities and events .

Once again, I’d like to thank those of you who’ve followed Nota Bene, and to invite you all to participate in my new venture, either through membership, or by reviewing a few of your favourite bookstores (please search here), or both.

Laila Lalami has agreed to be the final judge for 3quarksdaily’s second annual prize for the best blog writing in the category of Arts & Literature. (Details of last year’s A&L prize, judged by Robert Pinsky, can be found here.) The nominating period is now open, and will end at 11:59 pm New York City Time (EST) on March 2, 2011

Glenn Greenwald, constitutional attorney and blogger at Salon.com, via Democracy Now.

After just having watched We Live in Public, a documentary on the life and times of Internet pioneer Josh Harris and his contention that a) we all desire 15 minutes of fame a day, and that in order to achieve this b) we will all willingly give up all or most of our claims to privacy, I’d say it’s appropriate to here post several pertinent sections of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities page:

1. Privacy

   Your privacy is very important to us. We designed our Privacy Policy to make important disclosures about how you can use Facebook to share with others and how we collect and can use your content and information.  We encourage you to read the Privacy Policy, and to use it to help make informed decisions.

2. Sharing Your Content and Information

   You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:

   1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos ("IP content"), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook ("IP License"). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.
   2. When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).
   3. When you use an application, your content and information is shared with the application.  We require applications to respect your privacy, and your agreement with that application will control how the application can use, store, and transfer that content and information.  (To learn more about Platform, read our Privacy Policy and Platform Page.)
   4. When you publish content or information using the "everyone" setting, it means that you are allowing everyone, including people off of Facebook, to access and use that information, and to associate it with you (i.e., your name and profile picture).
   5. We always appreciate your feedback or other suggestions about Facebook, but you understand that we may use them without any obligation to compensate you for them (just as you have no obligation to offer them).

1. About Advertisements and Other Commercial Content Served or Enhanced by Facebook

   Our goal is to deliver ads that are not only valuable to advertisers, but also valuable to you. In order to do that, you agree to the following:

   1. You can use your privacy settings to limit how your name and profile picture may be associated with commercial, sponsored, or related content (such as a brand you like) served or enhanced by us. You give us permission to use your name and profile picture in connection with that content, subject to the limits you place.
   2. We do not give your content or information to advertisers without your consent.
   3. You understand that we may not always identify paid services and communications as such.

…is the uneuphemistic moniker that George hangs on Steve Gibson, pictured here, [who] is trying to make a business out of suing bloggers who re-post articles from newspapers.

Watercolours by Kieron Williamson, aged six.

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida (1863 – 1923)

24 hours in pictures – Guardian

Ian McKellen in King Lear
 

All I might add is the obvious: that what is well written about should also be well conceived; should also contain stimulating ideas; should amuse, rough up, inform, contradict, enchant, infuriate, contain kick-ass links, and change and prompt comment from those who visit.

Lauren Elkin’s exquisite description of the blog post (instancing as she does Wyatt Mason on Beckett’s Letters):

there’s something about a blog post that print book reviews and essays can’t touch.  The sketch-like quality, the half-formed thought, the gesture toward one’s interlocutor to further the idea… it’s valuable not only for the blogger but for the reader.

…brings to mind the 8×10 boards that Tom Thompson and members of the Group of Seven painted on – plein air – capturing telescoped images of the colours and shapes they found in nature.

Algonquin Art Centre

And I second her lament. Wyatt Mason will apparently no longer be blogging for Harper’s. His posts will be missed. This passage from a Beckett letter he quotes:

It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used when most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping though–I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.

…reminds me of an image Deirdre Bair sketches in her biography of the game young Samuel used to play diving fearlessly from the tops of tall trees, crashing through branches to the ground.

aesopsfables.us

Leafing through Mortification (edited by Robin Robertson) last night, and this from James Wood:

"For those who make a living from writing, getting things wrong constitutes the formal, not to say canonical nightmare. To publicize error is to multiply it infinitely. And how much more acute is the embarrassment of error for one whose job, as a critic, is to correct others’ fallacies?…Like most writers, and certainly most journalists, I work, and work most happily, from memory. Memory is organic. The notorious fact-checkers of The New Yorker are irritating not only because they often prove how fallible are our memories, but because they seem to mechanize what ought to be a natural, unmediated, fast-moving process."

This, because I’ve been thinking about blogging lately, in part due to this pedantic assault, in part because of this charming retort, from which:

"An intellectual congratulates himself upon being centripetal, not meandering; he does not “come across” or “happen upon” something, he goes looking for it. A good part of being a hedgehog involves feeling superior to foxes…."It [the fox] borrows what is true and rejects what is false, and assembles the truths into a temporary dwelling. It looks with suspicion and disgust upon the sort of education in which a pupil submits to the authority of a recognized master, replacing it with a kind of serial discipleship—sitting at the feet of this one and that one. It licks the icing off books."

This clearly isn’t The New Yorker here. What ‘we’ are is, as plainly indicated at the top of this web page, a space which holds:

"Musings on the Book, Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the Arts, and Audio Interviews pertaining to same by a writer, broadcaster, bibliophile. In short, a commonplace book blog: A place to quote, abridge, and commonplace passages of rhetorical, dialectic and factual interest, mix them with comment and reflection, and index them to facilitate retrieval and use, notably in the composition of my own prose."

As D. G. Myers again, in referring to commonplace bloggers and Isaiah Berlin foxes, aptly and melodiously tells us:

"These are writers united not by doctrine or ideological commitment, but by an ambition to copiousness and eloquence—and the secret handshake that passes between those who have spent a life among books. They are proud to be foxes. They don’t avoid hedgehogs; they just don’t want to be one. They are happy knowing many small tricks. Or, rather, such knowledge brings them great happiness."

If in the reader this blog’s magpie collections and musings in any way stimulate thought, motivate response, result in pleasure – so much the better.

Whilst in Chicago recently I not only had a chance to spend time with The Bard, I also interviewed the appealingly caustic, Neil Gaiman-loving  Bookslut Jessa Crispin

about her role as a successful literary blogger, and how and why her site has become so popular. She even showed me her bedroom…where she stores these shelves

of signed, flatteringly inscribed, books written by writers she has encountered along the road to litblog stardom.

In addition to Jessa, I had the pleasure while in the windy city of interviewing, among others: the University of Chicago Press‘s Levi Stahl on his role as publicist, and Keith Fiels, Executive Director of the American Library Association on the noisiest concerns of librarians. Please stay tuned for the audio. Oh, and I also had time to take a few more of these: