Perhaps you didn’t notice, but next month Soft Skull Press is releasing The Bad Life, the English translation of Frédéric Mitterrand’s “memoir” La mauvaise vie (2005). Over the last few months the author has become controversial, and in response Soft Skull published a defense of the book on its blog.

We’d just like to say that what is most surprising to us regarding the situation is that Mr. Mitterrand’s story has for quite some time been public knowledge to the French people, and in the most high-profile fashion. The Bad Life was published four years ago and became a bestseller in France. The controversial passages have been known to us all along and, among other things, it was the frankness and thoughtfulness with which Mr. Mitterrand discussed his life that drew us to the project. Whether you agree with Mr. Mitterrand’s story or habits, he approaches them with a compelling and thought-provoking honesty and we continue to stand behind this elegant and brave book in the same way we have since undertaking to publish it here. As a publisher, Soft Skull has always embraced controversial conversations.

So, then, who is Frédéric Mitterrand, and what did he do to cause such a scandal?

Monsieur Mitterrand is the nephew of the former French president François Mitterrand. In June 2009, after many years as a documentary maker, writer, and television presenter, he became the French minister of culture and communication under the current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, supposedly at the urging of Sarkozy’s wife, the singer and former model Carla Bruni. France is famous for looking the other way when politicians and other personalities transgress moral norms in their personal lives. Hardly anyone in France seemed to care when Mitterrand’s book appeared in French in 2005, even though what he says about paying for prostitutes in Thailand is hardly accepted behavior in France.

Tous ces rituels de foire aux éphèbes, de marché aux esclaves m’excitent énormément. La lumière est moche, la musique tape sur les nerfs, les shows sont sinistres et on pourrait juger qu’un tel spectacle, abominable d’un point de vue moral, est aussi d’une vulgarité repoussante. Mais il me plaît au-delà du raisonnable. La profusion de garçons très attrayants, et immédiatement disponibles, me met dans un état de désir que je n’ai plus besoin de refréner ou d’occulter. L’argent et le sexe, je suis au cœur de mon système ; celui qui fonctionne enfin car je sais qu’on ne me refusera pas.

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All the rituals of the market for young men, the slave market, excite me enormously. The light is awful, the music gets on your nerves, the shows are dreary, and such a spectacle, abominable from a moral standpoint, could also be judged as a hideous vulgarity. But it pleases me beyond reason. The profusion of boys, very attractive and immediately available, puts me in a state of desire I no longer need to restrain or hide. Money and sex, I am at the heart of my system, that which functions in the end because I know that no one will refuse me.

In France the book was critically acclaimed and sold well, but something changed in 2009. Mitterrand, now a politician, threw himself into an international controversy: the arrest in Switzerland of director Roman Polanski, a French citizen, who had fled the United States in 1978 after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a thirteen-year-old girl. Mitterrand called the arrest “frightening.” Unfortunately for Mitterrand, what he seemed to be admitting in his book—sex with underage boys—was immediately identified with Polanski’s crime, sex with an underage girl. Both French Socialists (the party of his uncle) and the ultra-right-wing Front National attacked him for pedophilia and “sex tourism.” It was left to President Sarkozy’s party, the right-wing UMP, to defend its minister of culture. The party’s spokesman, Xavier Bertrand, expressed his support in a typical French way. “On n’est pas obligé d’utiliser la vie privée des gens à des fins politiciennes” (“One is not obliged to use private life for political ends”).

Hardly surprising, the issue ended up being more complicated than it first seemed. Most importantly, the book is, as its French publisher (Éditions Robert Laffont) states, a roman d’inspiration autobiographique (“novel of autobiographical inspiration”). In other words, it’s a mixture of memory and imagination. The controversial material is found on only a few pages. The book covers a much longer period of his life and concerns something more general, as Mitterrand hints at here when referring to himself in the third person.

Autrefois on aurait dit qu’il s’agissait de la divulgation de sa part d’ombre ; aujourd’hui on parlerait de “coming out.” Il ne se reconnaît pas dans ce genre de définition. La mauvaise vie qu’il décrit est la seule qu’il a connue.

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In the past one would have said it was a matter of revealing his dark side; today one would speak of “coming out.” He doesn’t recognize himself in this type of definition. The bad life he describes is the only life he knew.

Mitterrand eventually went on French television to discuss the controversy. He denied having sex with underage boys, saying gay men often call other men “boys.” He echoed misgivings expressed in the book, saying payment for sex was “an offence against the idea of dignity, human dignity.” And ultimately, as when the book first appeared in 2005, many (though not all) French people admired his honesty in discussing the issue. To this day he remains the minister of culture and communication.

Of course, I don’t know whether Mitterrand is telling the truth. But I give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s a smart man (if you understand French, see the video below), and it doesn’t seem bright to mention in a “memoir” that you committed what would be a serious crime in your own country. France, of course, prosecutes people who have sex with minors.

But what about the book itself, its quality and literary merit? As we have learned so many times before, art is not a reflection of the moral rectitude of the creator. Art, in this case an arrangement of words, stands on its own. On the back of the French edition, a blurb describes the work as “délicat, pudique jusque dans l’impudeur” (“delicate, discreet to the point of indiscretion”). In reading the book, I was absorbed by the author’s elegant style, his search for understanding, of himself and of things around him, whether real or imagined. I found it to be an impressive and moving confession of an unsettling and at times disturbing life.

People seem to have very strong feelings about digital media. It seems every day I read articles embracing digital media and articles dismissing it. And even within the differing camps there is discord—Kindle vs. iPad vs. whatever the e-readers from Sony and Barnes & Noble are called. Putting aside the nuts and bolts of publishing costs, I just don’t understand what the big deal is. If you want to read books on paper, then read books on paper. If you want to read ebooks, go right ahead. Can’t we all just get along?

One thing on which we can probably all agree is that the traditional publishing model is outdated and needs to be modernized. So, whichever tribe you belong to, you might find some humor in this tongue-in-cheek article from The Atlantic.

Tim Park, who blogs for the New York Review of Books, had an interesting post recently about the pressure that writers (particularly non-American writers) feel to reach an international audience and the way this is affecting what and how they write:

There is a growing sense that for an author to be considered “great,” he or she must be an international rather than a national phenomenon . . . [M]ore and more European, African, Asian and South American authors see themselves as having “failed” if they do not reach an international audience.

Park goes on to describe how this pressure has increased with the advent of electronic submissions, which enable an author to send a new work simultaneously to publishers all over the world, such that international rights may even be purchased before the writer has found a publisher in his or her own country:

An astute agent can then orchestrate the simultaneous launch of a work in many different countries using promotional strategies that we normally associate with multinational corporations. Thus a reader picking up a copy of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, or the latest Harry Potter, or indeed a work by Umberto Eco, or Haruki Murakami, or Ian McEwan, does so in the knowledge that this same work is being read now, all over the world . . . This perception adds to the book’s attraction.

The disturbing side effect of this global market consciousness, Park suggests, is that authors may be inclined to tailor their work for ease of translation and “remove obstacles to international comprehension,” particularly by keeping the language simple:

Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of the importance of avoiding word play and allusion to make things easy for the translator. Scandinavian writers I know tell me they avoid character names that would be difficult for an English reader . . . What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives.

It will be unfortunate if the proliferation of literature in translation can only happen through its homogenization.

I remember back when Giant Robot Magazine first started up. It was some 15 years ago and launched by two young UCLA graduates. The magazine focuses on Asian and Asian-American popular culture, and it introduced me to a brave new world of artists, designers, musicians, movies, trends, food, and more. The magazine has spawned several Giant Robot stores/galleries, as well as a restaurant, gr/eats, and it has launched the careers and boosted the visibility of a number of artists and musicians, including Japanese artists Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara.

As we all know, times are tough in the publishing industry. Independent publishers such as Giant Robot that already operate on a shoestring budget have been hit harder than others. Even though Giant Robot Magazine is a well-established organization that cranks out a professional product, it still operates like a start-up, with just two full-time employees (the founders, Eric Nakamura and Martin Wong) and two part-timers. The company is as streamlined as it can be. This is why it has decided to launch an online fundraising campaign. The publication hopes to raise $60,000 so it can continue, at least for another solid year, to produce an uncompromised, quality magazine. The online campaign began about a month ago, and so far it has raised just over $18,000. To read more about the magazine and to donate, go here.

Written in the aftermath of the 2005 riots in the Paris suburbs and published by La Fabrique in 2007, L’insurrection qui vient was denounced by the French government as a terrorist manual. The text first gained significant attention in 2008, following the arrest of its alleged authors, a group of youths now known as the Tarnac 9, on charges of sabotaging French train lines.

The English translation was published last year in the United States by Semiotext(e), a leftist California press known for publishing such household names in French cultural theory as Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Jean Beaudrillard. The Semiotext(e) edition had an initial print run of only 3,000 copies. Incidentally, too, the text is available for free online in both French and English. And yet the book is now in its sixth printing, and M.I.T. Press, its distributor, reports that it can barely keep enough copies in stock.

How has this fringe book become such a hot item? Some initial U.S. publicity for the book was generated by a guerrilla-style reading event in New York last June. But the real force behind sales appears to be the conservative commentator Glenn Beck, who launched a 7-minute diatribe against the book last July, which concluded with the inadvertent plug: “I am not calling for a ban on this book,” Beck explained. “It’s important that you read this book, [so] you know [what is coming] and be ready when it does.” Recently, Beck devoted an entire segment to the book, calling it “quite possibly the most evil thing I’ve ever read.” A Publishers Weekly article cites MIT Press associate publicist Diane Denner as saying that the book experiences a spike in sales every time Beck mentions it.

Ironically, while Michael Moore mentioned the book as his most recent read in an August 2009 interview with the Hollywood Reporter, his own “endorsement” had no such effect.

Inundated with a never-ending stream of tech news, it’s easy to confuse apples and oranges, so here’s a simple thing to keep in mind. The Amazon Kindle is an e-book reader. The iPad is a multipurpose tablet that can be used for many things, including reading.

In fact, the iPad doesn’t come with an e-reader app. If you want to read a book on it, you will have to download Apple’s iBooks app from its App Store. It will be interesting to see how many people will never bother to download the iBooks app and how many people will never use the iPad for book reading. It’s worth remembering this comment about the Kindle from Steve Jobs in the New York Times.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

It’s not that the iPad won’t be a serious threat to the Kindle and its competitors, such as Sony. It likely will. But the iPad represents a much different sensibility. If the iPad offers a sensual, color-seducing, multitasking heaven for the gadget lover, the Kindle reproduces something humbler. Its E-Ink screen tries to be as much like paper as possible, and as with a paper book, the hope is that you will become absorbed in the text, in the story, that you will, in the magic of reading, get lost in your mind’s imagination of the words.

Without worrying about e-mails or Facebook and Twitter updates, reading on a Kindle or reading a paper book is, by contrast, an intimate, quiet experience.

My own guess is that, even if most people opt for the colorful multitasker, there will still be a market for the intimate and quiet. And one of the most intriguing of the intimate, quiet e-book readers soon to come is the Orizon, made by the French company Bookeen. Its screen, though monochrome and paperlike, is easily guided by the finger, and according to CNET, it doesn’t have the problems with glare plaguing the Sony Reader touch screens. Here is a video of the Orizon at the 2010 International CES.

Two other distinguishing traits of the Amazon Kindle, the Sony Reader, and the Orizon are the technology of their displays, illuminated by the ambient light in the room (meaning no bright light shining in your face and perhaps less eye strain), and the resulting low power consumption (providing exceptionally long battery life and a simple way to help the environment). A color version of this type of low-energy, ambient-light screen, Mirasol (made by Qualcomm), will appear in e-readers later this year (important for books with color illustrations). Here is a video demo.

Over the past six months or so, I’ve read a number of e-books on my iPod Touch, trying out Stanza, Kindle for iPhone, and eReader. At this point the various annoyances (text that’s laid out with big distracting spaces between words, typos, boring covers, wading through the copyright info—and sometimes the “about the author” cover text—to get to the first pages of the book itself) are starting to outweigh the convenience of acquiring a new book immediately, portability, and reading in the dark. And the novelty of playing with a new toy has worn off for me.

So I’ve set aside the latest e-book I was reading, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s story collection There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, in favor of some paperbacks I received for Christmas. Not because I wasn’t enjoying the book itself, but because of the less-than-pleasant reading experience. I downloaded it for Kindle for iPhone, and there are no text settings I can adjust to improve the readability. You can choose the text size and color, but that doesn’t change the biggest problem: when the text is justified on both sides, there are big gaps between words. At least with eReader, you can set the text to justify only on the left, which eliminates that problem. eReader also gives you the option to change the font, margins, and line spacing. 

Plus, I missed out on the nice cover of the book, yet only saved 21 cents (my e-book version just uses the title page):

But I really want to love reading e-books! So I’m glad to see publishing professionals calling for higher standards of quality.  The Casual Optimist provides a helpful overview of the dialogue here. Liza Daly’s presentation “Getting Past ‘Good Enough’ Books” really resonates with my own experience as a somewhat frustrated reader of e-books.

Classroom Publishing is a revised second edition and focuses on introducing publishing in the classroom and using it as an educational tool. Ooligan has set up a dedicated website and blog for Classroom Publishing, a twitter feed, and an e-mail newsletter. The website is much more than a mere advertisement—it serves as a guide, offering educator resources, news, and links to helpful information and sites. It continues the dialogue introduced in the book.

Ooligan will be hosting a launch party for Classroom Publishing on Friday, February 19, at p:ear gallery in Portland, Oregon, from 7 to 9 pm. See you there!

Translation is a funny business. With a novel it’s important not only to maintain the meaning of the original text but to express that meaning in a way that can be understood and appreciated by people conditioned in another culture. For commercial publishers there’s another concern: how best to attract potential buyers.

In 1951 Catcher in the Rye became an instant best seller in the United States. Soon it started to spread across the globe, contorting itself into different languages. Although in some countries the title kept its literal referents (catcher, rye), elsewhere publishers chose titles that presumably better expressed the intended meaning, or would be more interesting or understandable to their readers, than a literal translation. In Swedish it became Raddaren i noden (”Savior in a Crisis”); in Hungarian, Zabhegyezõ (“A Sharpener of Oats”); and in Polish, Buszujący w zbożu (”Rummage Around in the Corn”).

In France J.D. Salinger’s classic became L’attrape-coeurs (”The Catcher of Hearts”). Why didn’t the French choose a more literal translation? I’ve read several explanations.

The English and French titles are both taken from a scene with Holden and his younger sister, Phoebe, with Holden starting off.

“You know what I’d like to be?” I said. “You know what I’d like to be? I mean if I had my goddam choice?”

“What? Stop swearing.”

“You know that song ‘If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye’? I’d like —”

It’s ‘If a body meet a body coming through the rye’!” old Phoebe said. “It’s a poem. By Robert Burns.”

Holden then says he imagines a field of rye next to a cliff, and in the field thousands of kids are running around. He is the only big person there to protect them from falling off the edge.

I mean if they’re running and don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.

In the French version of the book, Holden says something different.

Tu connais la chanson « Si un cœur attrape un cœur qui vient à travers les seigles » ? Je voudrais . . . (”You know the song ‘If a heart catches a heart coming through the rye’? I’d like . . .”)

When Phoebe corrects him, she uses the word “body” (corps), not “heart” (coeur), and the French is a literal translation from the English.

C’est « Si un corps rencontre un corps qui vient à travers les seigles ». C’est un poème de Robert Burns.

But when Holden continues his thought, he goes to back to using “heart.”

C’est ce que je ferais toute la journée. Je serais juste l’attrape-cœurs et tout. (”That’s what I would do all day. I would just be the catcher of hearts and all.”)

Why did the translator choose the French word for “heart” and not “body” here? One theory I read is that for an adolescent the body is often confused with the heart and with hormones energizing the body. For Holden, then, it would be normal for a teenager to mix up the two words.

But another idea is that a well-known book, Boris Vian’s L’arrache-coeur (English title: Heartsnatcher), was published not long before the French version of Catcher in the Rye and that the publisher wanted to make the connection. In fact, at a dinner in Nice recently, I asked people at the table why the book was called L’attrape-coeurs, and someone immediately thought of Vian.

So my best guess is that, while the translator and the publisher remained faithful to the original meaning in the scene of Holden and Phoebe, the use of coeur (”heart”)—and especially the turn of phrase “L’attrape-coeurs”—was at least in part a clever marketing strategy.

Bernie Little is the human face of Little Detective Agency, but Chet is an indispensible partner, not to mention the novel’s narrator. (No Chet doesn’t actually speak, he only thinks out loud.) As one who is constantly speculating about the interior monologue of my own most charismatic canine friend, I am curious to see how Quinn/Abrahams makes the leap from human to dog suspense. A visit to Chet’s blog will tell you that the author (”Spence,” as Chet calls him) has developed a credible, funny, and highly endearing voice. Here’s his very first post from 20 January of last year:

Inauguration Day. Don’t know what that means, exactly, but Bernie’s been glued to the TV all day. Bernie and I run the Little Detective Agency. I’ll get into that some other time. The only interesting thing I picked up from the TV is that those two little girls want one of my guys to join their family, my guys meaning a member of what Bernie calls the nation within the nation, namely dogs. Anyway, a great idea! I can’t join their family myself, of course – much too busy and besides, we’re a team, me and Bernie – but I’ve spent some time in the pound and know there are plenty of good candidates there. By the way, just in case you got the idea I can talk, I can’t (and wouldn’t even want to). But I can think, better believe it!

(If you’re wondering whether there’s a market for this, just check out some of the comments posted by Chet’s growing list of friends.)

A while back I mentioned the popularity of cell phone novels in Japan, the land of the tiny and compact. Well, now the rage seems to be the Twitter novel. It’s probably not really possible to write an entire novel in 140 characters, even if they do happen to be information-packed Chinese characters, but it is certainly an interesting concept, and bully for the Japanese for trying! It is likely that most Twitter novelists serialize their novels.

The web site Japan Trends reports that by the end of 2009 there were more than 30,000 Japanese Twitter novels. In addition to novels, Japanese forms of poetry have also appeared on Twitter. Some novels have been anthologized into print versions as well.

To find examples of Twitter novels, just search for #twnovel on Twitter, and you will get your fill. I wonder what the next “literature” trend in Japan will be?

My copy of Franny and Zooey is a 1961 Little, Brown hardback (fifth printing, mind you), stamped “discarded” and sold to me for less than a dollar by the Missoula Public Library. Still covered in protective cellophane, the dust jacket contains this note from the author about the project he had undertaken:

Both stories are early, critical entries in a narrative series I’m doing about a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York, the Glasses. It is a long-term project, patently an ambitious one, and there is a real-enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I’ll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I’m very hopeful. I love working on these Glass stories, I’ve been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill . . . I have a great deal of thoroughly unscheduled material on paper . . . but I expect to be fussing with it . . . for some time to come . . . I work like greased lightning, myself, but my alter-ego and collaborator, Buddy Glass, is insufferably slow.

As a writer, I am inspired by the intimacy of Salinger’s relationship with the fictional Glass family, by his own particular immersion in the character of Buddy, and by the notion of his having found (or received, somehow, finally) his true material. As a reader, Franny and Zooey is brilliant to me in its portrait of the profound loyalty and understanding that exists between siblings who share “the exact same goddam freakish upbringing,” as Zooey says. I consider the long scene where Zooey is smoking in the bathtub and talking to his mother as one of the most wonderful I’ve read. But I’m by no means a Salinger buff, and I was unaware (before reading the New York Times obituary) of the critical disdain that greeted the book at the time of its publication. Apparently many—from Joan Didion to John Updike—found the Glass children insufferable and excoriated Salinger for what they saw as his self-indulgent and over-wrought devotion to them.

Janet Malcolm details and refutes these criticisms in her excellent article “Justice to Salinger” (New York Review of Books, 2001), claiming that critical antipathy toward the Glass characters in fact signals the genius of Salinger’s creations. Here’s an excerpt:

Throughout the Glass stories—as well as in Catcher—Salinger presents his abnormal heroes in the context of the normal world’s dislike and fear of them. These works are fables of otherness—versions of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” However, Salinger’s design is not as easy to make out as Kafka’s. His Gregor Samsas are not overtly disgusting and threatening; they have retained their human shape and speech and are even, in the case of Franny and Zooey, preternaturally good-looking. Nor is his vision unrelentingly tragic; it characteristically oscillates between the tragic and the comic. But with the possible exception of the older daughter, Boo Boo, who grew up to become a suburban wife and mother, none of the Glass children is able to live comfortably in the world. They are out of place. They might as well be large insects. The critics’ aversion points us toward their underlying freakishness, and toward Salinger’s own literary deviance and irony.

If you’re a fan of Salinger and mourning his loss, Malcolm’s article is well worth the read.

Steve Almond, author of Candyfreak and My Life in Heavy Metal, among others, has taken publishing matters into his own hands. Though Almond is still a hot commodity (his Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life will be availble April 13, 2010), he found that one of his book ideas was not generating much interest with publishers. His idea was a book that could be flipped over and read in two directions. One side would offer short stories, and the other side would contain essays about writing. The title? This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey.

Unable to secure a large publisher, Almond decided to self-publish the book on demand using the Espresso Book Machine. His first reading was at Harvard Bookstore, which has an Espresso Book Machine that pumped out copies of the book as Almond read.

Almond isn’t ready to overthrow the corporate publishing model, but he does delight in the innovations that make such self-publishing possible. This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey is available only at Almond’s readings. Read more about Almond’s experience here (it’s entertaining!).

Like many people in France last week, I went to the opening of Gainsbourg (vie héroïque), a film about Serge Gainsbourg (1928-91), the French songwriter, provocateur, and cultural icon. It’s hard to imagine the American equivalent of Gainsbourg, who is as famous in his own country as Elvis Presley is in the United States. To describe his personality and public presence, I thought about combining Bob Dylan, Abby Hoffman, and Charles Bukowski, but any mélange of American personalities would lack the French sensibility of Gainsbourg and the French culture that he both embodied and challenged.

That Gainsbourg, an inventive and disturbing cultural force, was virtually unknown in the United States even during his lifetime reflects the cocooning effect of language. Gainsbourg sang literary and sometimes shocking lyrics and provoked traditional French citizens into a fury, but Americans, deaf to the French language, were left undisturbed and unaffected.

The French book blog Cafebook has a good review of the film from a French perspective. When the film finally makes its way to the United States, Americans will get a chance to see a bit of why he was one of the strongest cultural forces in France during the second half of the twentieth century (and will not see anything from his last decade, when he was older and often drunk and sometimes less than impressive). Americans will also understand how he is now summarized: representing a strain of French Jewish identity after Nazi-controlled France; leading a dissolute life of drinking and smoking that eventually killed him; dating among the most beautiful women of his era, including Brigitte Bardot; and writing songs with sophisticated lyrics (often interpreted by other French singers), some of which trespassed the accepted borders of French society. When in 1979 Gainsbourg recorded a reggae version of “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem, he provoked a riot.

Although Gainsbourg had relations with many women, he is best known for his marriage to Jane Birkin, who, despite being British, sang and continues to sing in French. Their daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg, is an actor and singer whose most recent album, IRM, was reviewed last week in the New York Times.

Here is the movie’s trailer. It seems at times more appropriate for a film called “The Sex Life of Serge.” The actual film is more subtle, artistic, and surrealistic, but alas, such is marketing.

For a glimpse of Gainsbourg in the 1960s, below is a video of “La Javanaise,” which he initially wrote for the singer Juliette Gréco.

Congratulations to The Rumpus, which just celebrated its one-year anniversary and, therewith, its “fitness for survival in the age of the interwebs.” Founded in San Francisco by Stephen Elliott, author of the much-acclaimed Adderall Diaries, The Rumpus is a relatively edgy magazine seeking to offer fresh coverage of books, music, art, comics, politics, film . . . and sex. From their statement of purpose:

We’re focused on culture but not “People Magazine culture.” We want to introduce readers to things they might not have heard of yet. The Web was supposed to diversify content and so far it hasn’t. If anything, the Internet has amplified the echo chamber so all the big online magazines are focusing on the same stories.

One of the things I like about The Rumpus is its effort to bring attention to books that would otherwise fall by the wayside in the unforgiving world of Dan Brown novels and Sarah Palin memoirs.

For more on the origins of the magazine and its editorial philosophy, see Elliott’s interview with Jacket Copy in April of last year. Not only has Elliott created in The Rumpus a vibrant new forum for cultural commentary on the web, but he is also rethinking the standard author book tour in ways that seem more rewarding for the author, both in terms of meeting the reading public and in terms of book sales. See his recent essay, The D.I.Y. Book Tour, in the New York Times.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy; image by guillaumepaumier via Flickr

Imagine the plight of the French. They want to protect their language and culture. They have what many consider to be one of the most beautiful languages, and their literary history is rich. From Molière to Flaubert to Sartre, the French have given much to the world.

Unfortunately for those who think literature is more than mere Internet “content” to attract advertising dollars, the times are changing quickly. Google is in the process of digitizing every book it can (admittedly to the great benefit of people who don’t have the resources otherwise to obtain certain texts), and soon Google and other American companies, such as Amazon and Apple, might dictate the publishing terms of books both old and new worldwide.

Faced with the possibility of losing control of its literary heritage, the French are mulling over possibilities. Even the conservative French president Nicolas Sarkozy—who has been called “Sarko l’Américain” for his pro-American sentiments—is concerned. He recently said of Google, “We won’t let ourselves be stripped of our heritage to the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is.” He said France would finance its own book digitization program.

Amazon is also causing concern in France. Amazon has already battled France over the country’s prix unique du livre, which allows publishers, not booksellers, to set the price of a book. Because of this law, Amazon sells books for the same price as a small bookstore in Paris. Now five of France’s largest booksellers, including Fnac and Virgin, have proposed a nationalized ebook “hub.” There French publishers and booksellers would work together to sell ebooks online at a price determined by the publishers, preventing Amazon and other sites from competing with lower prices.

Guillaume Decitre, CEO of the French bookseller Decitre, said, “If we don’t manage to do this, what’s going to happen? We will find ourselves in front of a platform, or hub, already made by a private company . . . whether Amazon, Google or Apple.” In order to establish a nationalized ebook platform, the booksellers would have to persuade not only the French government but also French publishers, who don’t necessarily have the same interests. In fact, French publishers are thinking about creating their own single ebook platform without the booksellers.

Americans are often mystified by the French approach to politics, and many love to mock it. But if we are entering what comes to be called the Chinese century, it will be interesting to see how Americans react to their own declining empire, their own experience of being a small part of an economic world, this time dominated by Asia.

Fisher poets are people who write poetry and are involved with the fishing industry.

The Newport gathering featured such fisher poets as Gene Red Hawk Davenport of Reedsport, who specializes in Native American storytelling, and Jon Broderick, a high school teacher who fishes in Alaska every summer and who cofounded the Fisher Poets Gathering in Astoria. FisherPoets on the Edge also hosted a poetry writing workshop, films, open-mic poetry, and music.

The Astoria gathering for 2010 is still in the works, but the 2009 event brought together more than 70 fisher poets, with readings and workshops in several venues in downtown Astoria. The gathering is open to the general public, so mark your calendars!

Everything must pass, but in publishing things are dying off at an uncomfortable rate. I was just getting used to the idea of the world without Gourmet magazine. Now there’s an obituary on the Stanford publishing program website.

The Stanford Publishing Course for Professionals has closed, a victim of both the economy and larger transitions in the program’s core fields. This move comes amidst broad cost-cutting at Stanford University. University Librarian Michael Keller writes: “It is deeply troubling to all of us who have been involved in the SPPC over the years, but the recession is affecting the publishing industries and higher education, as it has all other sectors of the global economy.”

The Stanford publishing program was the industry’s most prestigious. Publishing professionals, many from outside the United States, would spend a week living “among talented publishing colleagues in the heart of Silicon Valley, where U.S. innovation is born.” According to the website,

You’ll step away from the day-to-day demands of your job to study your business, immerse yourself in new ideas, and rethink your strategies. You will reinvent the way you work.

Oddly, the website also says, “This year has told the story: innovate—or die in the old paradigm.” I guess Stanford forgot to innovate. The program, which also included Web and digital publishing courses, is hoping to find a way to reopen one day. It will try to determine if a “revised pattern of revenue and a different programmatic governance structure might yield an SPPC that is self-sustaining.”

In case you want to see what you missed, here’s the promotional video.

Let’s say you’re a small, independent bookseller that unfortunately happens to be down the street from some giant megastore chain that offers deep discounts on the same books you’re trying to sell at full retail price. You’re probably out of luck and better off opening a hot dog stand, right? Well, maybe not. I just read an article about such a case in England.

Linghams is an independent bookstore in Wirral, England, located across the road from mega supermarket and retail chain Tesco. Tesco sells new releases at steeply discounted prices, and Linghams’ sales were negatively impacted by the competition. After reading an article about Tesco CEO Sir Terry Leahy in which Leahy indicated he felt bad about wiping out small businesses, Linghams manager Eleanor Davies contacted Leahy. Davies explained how the discounted books were affecting sales at Linghams but also noted that Linghams was a specialty bookseller and thus offered a different service than Tesco. Leahy suggested that Tesco could send customers over to Linghams if they were unable to find the desired books at Tesco. Guess what? It worked! The Tesco near Linghams began displaying signs pointing customers to visit Linghams if they needed a broader or more specialized book selection.

It’s nice that the voice of the independent bookseller was heard, but this will probably not become a trend. Still, it can’t hurt to ask, since if you don’t ask, the answer is always “no.”