Biblio Tuesday

Tuesday’s report takes a peek at the harrowing sides of the literary world. Conflict abounds. The business of writing battles against the technology grain. Vandals sack Rome again. Are workshops necessary? And if Harold Bloom ends up dead in a grisly gangster murder, look to Martina Cole. Yet, if William Faulkner refused to accept the decline of man, then we can end on a good note in the “in case you missed it” department: we still read.

– It’s not easy to follow the bouncing keyboard of John August, the Web-savvy Hollywood screenwriter whose credits include “Big Fish” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Things have not gotten simpler.  — John August in The New York Times

– Vandals threw paint-filled balloons at a controversial museum designed by U.S. architect Richard Meier overnight, splashing the red and green colors of the Italian flag against the outside white wall, police said.  The vandals also left a porcelain toilet and two packs of toilet paper next to the Ara Pacis museum, which sits on a fascist-era piazza in central Rome, police said. — Art Vandals in the AP

– Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers. People who take creative-writing workshops get course credit and can, ultimately, receive an academic degree in the subject; but a workshop is not a course in the normal sense—a scene of instruction in which some body of knowledge is transmitted by means of a curricular script. The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart.  – Critic At Large in The New Yorker

– There’s a huge amount of snobbery towards commercial fiction in literary circles and although you’ll see Ian Rankin on Newsnight these days, Martina Cole still finds herself at the receiving end of a certain amount of patronising comments. A well-known female writer once came up to her at a party and said, “Well, with the books you write, you can’t expect to win any awards.” Martina’s reply? “That’s all right, love. The Booker prize money wouldn’t even keep me in cigarettes.” — Martina Cole in The Guardian

– For the first time in more than 25 years, American adults are reading more literature, according to a new study by the National Endowment for the Arts. Reading on the Rise documents a definitive increase in rates and numbers of American adults who read literature, with the biggest increases among young adults, ages 18-24. This new growth reverses two decades of downward trends cited previously in NEA reports such as Reading at Risk and To Read or Not To Read. — More Americans Reading at NEA

Short Film by Thomas Nordanstad