Wednesday's Writerly Happenings

Knut Hamsun gets His Stamp

One of the most invigorating feelings is being nowhere and everywhere. Parked on the side of the highway at midnight in the Badlands of South Dakota — reading a map by lighting strike — is being nowhere and everywhere. This is also true when online. Nothing competes with digital-based worldliness except — ahem — seeing the world. That’s why we say God bless the Interweb. It’s what keeps us frisky. Just look where we’ve visited today. It’s a veritable postcard spindle, spinning and bright with destinations and commentary from around the world. Norway knows how to forgive and forget — or remember. They’re doing both by issuing a stamp in honor of a Nazi-sympathizing Nobel Laureate. PEN has a new man at the helm, English booksellers are downright itchy with competition, and Jacket Copy says writing contests are a sham. But enter if you must, all ye swashbuckling writers. In our last leg, Slate has a special message: the radio came before computers. And from H-Net it’s good ole William Faulkner talking scratch about the Great Depression. Grab your hats, people. It’s a big world out there. — Kevin Murphy

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– Norway has honored the Nobel prizewinning writer Knut Hamsun, disgraced for his wartime Nazi sympathies, by issuing a stamp and opening a museum in his honor, the 150th anniversary of the birth. — Knut Hamsun in the Herald Sun

– PEN American Center has named Steven L. Isenberg executive director. Isenberg, who’s been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin for the past six years, has held numerous positions in academia, media and government, including president and chairman of the board of Adelphi University and publisher of Newsday. — Steven Isenberg in Publishers Weekly

– “Oxfam is the Tesco of the secondhand book world. It is destroying the industry. Half our business is rare old editions but in a recession people aren’t buying so many. So we pay our bills from the sale of £2 paperbacks or hardbacks for under £5, and Oxfam has destroyed that.” — Booksellers in the Guardian

The Radio says Newspapers are Doomed!

– The newspaper industry and its allies have many grievances against the Web. They say the Web is parasitic, that it copies newspaper content and steals its advertising. They claim that Web creators will never provide the deep reporting that democracy needs and that newspapers provided before the Web arrived and ruined the media neighborhood. — Web Trouble in Slate

– Writing contests are kind of a racket. On the one hand, they present a chance for glory: bragging rights, prime publication, a kind of gold star on your literary record, and cold hard cash. But on the other hand, they often require cash to enter. Twenty dollars here and twenty dollars there adds up for a struggling writer. — Writing Contests in Jacket Copy

– Since the publication of Malcolm Cowley’s career-salvaging collection The Portable Faulkner (1946) and the subsequent 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, William Faulkner has occupied a privileged position in the canon of southern writers, but how he came to occupy that position presents a bit of controversy. — Faulkner in H-Net

Video: Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Speech