Loudpoet has an interview with former Soft Skull Press publisher Richard Nash about his new social publishing venture Cursor. ““Social” is taking the book and making it much easier to have a conversation with the book and its writer, and have conversations around the book and its writer.” Is this a way forward for beleaguered publishers? (via The Lone Gunman)
Is Social Publishing the Future?
Ted Hughes’ Lost Poem
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#LitBeat gets weird in a basement.
The latest installment of #LitBeat involves musings on puritanical projection, the phrases "ass-banging" and "mucus flaps" and a least one instance of the word "boner." Our correspondent was there for The New Inquiry read along of Millions contributor Mike Thomsen's new book, Levitate the Primate: Handjobs, Internet Dating, and Other Issues for Men.
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Howard?
“Writing on a computer can be terribly distracting, so sometimes I like to use a pencil and paper to jot down ideas. I always end up drawing a cartoon duck. Inevitably, the duck is holding a notepad, and I can read the ideas that he wrote down.” At Clickhole, six writers explain how they overcome writer’s block.
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The Dynamism of Duos
Is "the two-person collaboration... the essential creative act"? Joshua Wolf Shenk thinks so, and he's written a book defending his position, aptly titled The Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs. While John Lennon and Paul McCartney are his primary examples and the root of his argument, famous author duos are also referenced - C.S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, for one. Shenk even "works to transform even famously lonely figures — Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King Jr. — into one side of a duet." Consider us skeptical but intrigued.
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iLRB
Well, there goes your Sunday. The London Review of Books has uploaded a whole batch of podcasts to iTunes. And they're free!
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Stein Squared: Object Lessons
Paris Review editor Lorin Stein was interviewed for Days of Yore. Topics include: the “perverse power” of editing your parents’ work; his rise through the ranks of NYC publishing; and the new story collection, Object Lessons. Elsewhere you can check out his “five favorite short story collections.” And, in case you missed it, be sure to check out our own Bill Morris’s interview with Paris Review deputy editor Sadie Stein (no relation) about the Object Lessons collection as well.
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Nash appeared on a panel titled “The Future of the Book” at the Decatur Book Festival over Labor Day weekend, 2009. The other two panelists were former Atlanta Journal-Constitution book section editor Teresa Weaver and University of Georgia Press sales and marketing director John McLeod. He was the only one to discuss new options for internet book marketing, and received the most questions from the audience. Will enough people pay to make social writing clubs viable? What will he charge and how many subscribers will it take to make it worthwhile? Will his business model then be adopted by other now-free sites (folks like Max)? Could Nash be the internet equivalent of the guy who invented barbed wire (and tamed the wild west)? At the time he was still wooing investors (he told the audience). (Photos of panel here: http://tiny.cc/H3c4S or search http://www.flickr.com/groups/dbf09/).