President’s Day, a sleepless baby, and software testing have all conspired to keep me away from the blogosphere lo these past four days. I know the news cycle has probably already pretty much ended on the controversy regarding the use of the word scrotum in Susan Patron’s Newbery-winning The Higher Power of Lucky, but I can’t help it, I just have to add my two cents. For those who did somehow miss it, Julie Bosman covered the story for the New York Times (”With One Word, Children’s Book Sets Off Uproar“):

The word "scrotum" does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children’s literature, for that matter.

Yet there it is on the first page of "The Higher Power of Lucky," by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature. The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

"Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much," the book continues. "It sounded medical and secret, but also important."

The inclusion of the word has shocked some school librarians, who have pledged to ban the book from elementary schools, and reopened the debate over what constitutes acceptable content in children’s books. The controversy was first reported by Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine.

This kind of stuff — censorship spurred by the use of a clinically appropriate word – just makes me want to crawl under my bed and stay there until our country grows up. It’s not surprising that other nations are confused by our behavior when we consider ourselves grown-up enough to wage war and yet are too terrified to discuss certain parts of our bodies just because they happen to normally be hidden by underwear.

What word would these prudes prefer? (I heard one cheeky wag suggest the euphemism Balzac.) Or should the rattlesnake simply bite the dog on the leg and spare us all the anguish of acknowledging the terrifying existence of the scrotum? In a work of fiction, couldn’t a rattlesnake pause to consider the societal discomfort resulting from an ill-targeted chomp? Maybe we could include a nice, moral lesson for the rattlesnake!

Further down in the article, a bookseller strays even farther from common sense:

Carol Chittenden, the owner of Eight Cousins, a bookstore in Falmouth, Mass., said she once horrified a customer with "The Adventures of Blue Avenger" by Norma Howe, a novel aimed at junior high school students. "I remember one time showing the book to a grandmother and enthusing about it," she said. "There’s a chapter in there that’s very funny and the word ‘condom’ comes up. And of course, she opens the book right to the page that said ‘condom.’ "

The horror — that a grandmother should be aware of the existence of condoms! I hope no one explains the birds and the bees to her. She should be permitted to live out her golden years without having to consider such filthy thoughts.

While I disagree with Ms. Patron’s assertion that the sound of the word scrotum is “delicious” (let’s cut her some slack and assume she hadn’t had time to organize her thoughts) I share her disbelief at the furor. At a time when our country is engaging in some awfully grown-up behavior around the world, it’s a shame that we prefer to hide our children from the very words that help them understand their bodies (and dogs’ bodies) and the world around them.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go hide under the bed. I hear Europe laughing.

In The New Leader (”The Real Pynchon and Mailer Stand Up,” p.15), Brooke Allen writes that, “as we age we become more distinctly ourselves.” In the case of certain literary lions, she asserts, this self-caricature isn’t as amusing as the way your great-grand-uncle starts every sentence with, “Now, when I was young…”:

Two new books this season are prime examples of such late-period self-indulgence: Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (Penguin, 1,085 pp., $35.00) and Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest (Random House, 496 pp., $27.95). Pynchon, at 69, can now be considered as entering into his late period; Mailer, at 83, is already far into his. Both of these books display traits long associated with their authors, and have now been allowed to spiral wholly out of control.

After considering the proposition that these works are “nasty practical joke[s]” on readers, Allen prescribes action of shocking temerity: editing. 

If older writers with a long career of success and fame behind them feel they can get away with anything, they should not be abetted by the craven passivity of the publishing industry. Publishers do, after all, owe their readers the same respect they give their writers, and in the long run they are not doing any good for their authors’ reputations. The act of producing a book has traditionally been a collaboration between writer and editor, and there is no writer so good that he can do without an editor. But until editors once again assume the responsibilities they once took as a matter of course, more and more rogue authors will undoubtedly inflict their ill-considered work on the public.

Discuss amongst yourselves. Personally, I think that cutting almost always improves the work — although, who knows, maybe the first drafts were 2,000 pages long.

There’s a nice new site for the Edgars — stare at that word for a minute, it will stop looking like it’s even a word — but if they really want to be a one-stop-shop for all things Edgar, they should include year-by-year lists of past winners, not just the 2007 nominees. Maybe they’re still planning to get around to it.

Reading an article in the Los Angeles Times (”Trust them, it’s a hit,” by Josh Getlin) about the publishing industry’s arcane accounting of copies sold, I was flabbergasted and dismayed by one statistic in particular. I love books, but this is just overwhelming:

Greco estimated that more than 200,000 titles were published last year, which averages out to 22 new books every hour. This is in addition to about 3.5 million already in print.

And they say that poets are doomed to a life of canned soup, three-speed bicycles, and broadcast television. Rodney Jones, an English professor at Southern Illinois University (Go Salukis!), has won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems, 1985-2005 (Houghton). It’s an honor just to win, of course, but in the event that the honor needs burnishing, he will also receive $100,000.

From the New York Times:

One of the richest prizes in poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, has gone to Rodney Jones, a professor of English at Southern Illinois University. Mr. Jones, the author of a collection titled "Salvation Blues" (Houghton Mifflin), will receive $100,000 from Claremont Graduate University, which selects the winner. Claremont chose Eric McHenry, a Seattle poet, as the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for his book "Potscrubber Lullabies," published by the Waywiser Press. He will receive $10,000. JULIE BOSMAN

Granted, Salvation Blues compiles six volumes and comprises 100 poems, but I’d still be interested to run a word count against the award sum just to see what we came up with.

It suddenly occurs to me that I neglected to announce the winner of the Whitbread Award. Wonder why that slipped my mind. Maybe because they changed the name to the Costa?

Somebody’s got to sponsor the awards, but it sure takes away some of the gravitas when the naming rights get sold. Can we please leave that kind of ridiculousness to the world of sports? (I’m sure I’ll be watching Cubs games at Motorola Park one of these years.)

Anyway, enough grumbling. The winner? Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves. From the official site:

Stef beat novelist William Boyd, biographer Brian Thompson, poet John Haynes and childrens writer Linda Newbery to take the first-ever Costa Book of the Year award for her debut novel The Tenderness of Wolves - a murder mystery set in the snowy landscapes of Canada, a country she has never visited. 

The way the Whit — I mean, Costa — works is that shortlists are announced in five categories: First Novel, Novel, Children’s Book, Poetry, and Biography. Then winners are announced in each of the categories. Then the overall winner — the Book of the Year — is chosen from that group. It’s kind of like chosing the Pope but without the smoking chimney.

The category winners are:

First Novel

The Tenderness of Wolves, by Stef Penney (Simon & Schuster)

Novel

Restless, by William Boyd (Bloomsbury)

Children’s Book 

Set in Stone, by Linda Newbery (Random/David Fickling)

Poetry 

Letter to Patience, by John Haynes (Seren)

Biography

Keeping Mum, by Brian Thompson (Down the Shore)

The announcement was made February 7 at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London. (Between you and me, I hear the hotel’s not what it once was.) You can read the full press release here.

Update: Forgot to mention that The Tenderness of Wolves has not been published in the U.S. by Simon & Schuster yet — that will happen in July.

I spent my whole lunch hour reading Jonathan Lethem’s brilliant essay in Harper’s, “The Ecstasy of Influence.” Well worth a week’s worth of lunch hours, I daresay.

(Do people still say “daresay”? Anyone mind if I do?)

I copied out far too many quotes for fair use, and while the author wouldn’t mind if I reproduced them, I think I’ll take pity on those who are reading this blog not on their lunch hour but on a hurried coffee break:

In the contemporary world, though, the act of "copying" is in no meaningful sense equivalent to an infringement - we make a copy every time we accept an emailed text, or send or forward one - and is impossible anymore to regulate or even describe.

And, from the final courtroom scene, the defense’s dramatic summation:

The kernel, the soul - let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances - is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves, might we not forgive it of our artworks? 

At Publishers Weekly, Rachel Deahl did a quick Q&A with Lethem (”Lethem on Plagiarism“). Not too insightful (and can we please abolish the term “think piece”?), but this question-mark-free question is at least amusing:

PW: …This makes it sound like you’re, well, okay with piracy.

And if you want to listen to a free copy of Lethem speaking about the issue with some other bright folks (including Mark Hosler of the brilliant Negativland, a band that knows a thing or two about the fine line between satire and restraining orders), visit Open Source. I haven’t listened yet — maybe lunch hour tomorrow.

In the New York Times, Stacy Schiff (”Ulysses” Without Guilt“) uses Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read as the starting point for yet another discussion of information overload. I was too busy to read it, but that won’t stop me from passing on two choice paragraphs:

Say what you will about Professor Bayard, he forces us to confront a paradox of our age. By one estimate, 27 novels are published every day in America. A new blog is created every second. We would appear to be in the midst of a full-blown epidemic of graphomania. Surely we have never read, or written, so many words a day. Yet increasingly we deal in atomized bits of information, the hors d’oeuvres of education. We read not in continuous narratives but by linkage, the movable type of the 21st century. Our appetites are gargantuan, our attention spans anorectic. Small wonder trivia is enjoying a renaissance. We are very good on questions like why men fall asleep after sex and why penguins’ feet don’t freeze.

Recently Cathleen Black, president of Hearst Magazines, urged a group of publishing executives to think of their audience as consumers rather than readers. She’s onto something: arguably the very definition of reading has changed. So Google asserts in defending its right to scan copyrighted materials. The process of digitizing books transforms them, the company contends, into something else; our engagement with a text is different when we call it up online. We are no longer reading. We’re searching - a function that conveniently did not exist when the concept of copyright was established.

I was going to link this to some old blog posts — on Google and compact classics — but who has time? I’m rushing on to the next nugget of info.

In the Guardian, in her volunteer review of Will Alsop’s Peckham Library (”Flashy libraries? I prefer to get my adventure out of the books not the building“), Germaine Greer reveals what her favorite word would be, if she were the sort of person who chose favorite words: library.

Every now and then a writer will be asked to nominate a favourite word, and out will come “magenta” or “elfin” or “thrash” or whatever else floats up through the murk. Writers cannot have favourite words because every word in its proper place is perfect, but, if there were to be a word that remains lovable for me, even when set adrift on meaninglessness, it would be “library”.

She also offers a sentence that I hope to see on T-shirts at the 2007 ALA Annual Conference this summer:

Libraries are places where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.

Note her informed use of the word can.

A news item from Times Online (”Fake bloggers soon to be ‘named and shamed’,” by Sam Coates), brought to my attention by the ever-attentive Frank Sennett, promises an end to a time-honored practice, at least in Europe:

Hotels, restaurants and online shops that post glowing reviews about themselves under false identities could face criminal prosecution under new rules that come into force next year.

Businesses which write fake blog entries or create whole wesbites purporting to be from customers will fall foul of a European directive banning them from "falsely representing oneself as a consumer".

From December 31, when the change becomes law in the UK, they can be named and shamed by trading standards or taken to court.

The Times has learnt that the new regulations also will apply to authors who praise their own books under a fake identity on websites such as Amazon.

It reminded me of the brouhaha in 2004, when Amazon.ca accidentally outed Dave Eggers as “a reader from St. Louis” (”Amazon reviewers brought to book,” by David Smith, The Observer International):

Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, also admitted writing a review last year praising the work of his friend Heidi Julavits as ‘one of the best books of the year’. He posted it as ‘a reader from St Louis’. But the review appeared under ‘David K Eggers’ on Amazon’s Canadian site last week.

Yeah, it’s kind of a sleazy practice, I suppose, but anyone who expects the customer reviews to be fair, impartial, and professional is missing the point. Hell, a lot of professional reviews aren’t fair and impartial — but because professional reviewers can be held more accountable (at least those of us who sign our reviews), that’s why there’s a distinction made between them. On Amazon.com, you’ll find Booklist reviews under “Editorial Reviews.”

Under “Customer Reviews,” even if it’s not Dave Eggers defending his friend’s book, the reviewers may have uncountable causes, grudges, or friendships informing their opinions. But that’s kind of the point. A customer review should be written by anyone who calls himself a customer. And if you let average people hide behind fake names, why hold writers to a different standard? And even then, what’s to keep Eggers from recruiting the McSweeney’s gang — or even those adorable kids at 826 Valencia – to review on his buccaneering behalf?

Now that I think of it, this new law doesn’t go nearly far enough. I hope that, when U.S. lawmakers find themselves considering similar legislation, they go for the jugular, eliminating the scourge of the customer review altogether. Only when all reviews are written by professionals will we find ourselves safe from the dreaded scourge of bias.

Seriously, I do think that pseudonymously praising your own work or friends’ work is kind of lame, but it hardly seems worth policing. It puts a curious amount of worth on reader feedback options — treating them the same as editorially vetted content just seems misguided.

Ultimately, it would have been cooler if Eggers would have just plugged Julavits’ book under his own name. Not only would he have been safe from future prosecution, I think the bias angle would have been overcome by the “Wow, Dave Eggers writes customer reviews!” angle.

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