The Brow Beat blog over at Slate looked at every poem in the New Yorker over the last few years and found that 27 percent of them were about writing poetry. How meta! Is it furtive pandering, since it’s likely that only poets read the poems in the New Yorker? (Ugh, why does criticizing the New Yorker make me feel guilty? Damn you, venerable magazine, for making me feel this way!)

I like poetry that evokes an emotional response, plays with language and challenges how I see things by showing me a unique vision. It’s possible that a poem about words and writing could do that, of course. But I think this figure, if true, points to an insular poetry editor.

To be fair, I can be a bit churlish about writers writing about writing in their fiction writing. I did, after all, throw “The Human Stain” across the room and yell “Whhhhy?” as soon as I realized someone in the book was writing a book about the characters I was reading a book about. (Criticizing Philip Roth to make a disclaimer about criticizing the New Yorker … that has to require at least a a dozen Hail Marys.)

Bonus: How to win the New Yorker cartoon caption contest

My short story “End of the Line” is in the 2010 issue of So to Speak. Published by George Mason University, So to Speak is a feminist journal of language of art. “End of the Line” is about an old woman, Mrs. Dumas, who accidentally takes the wrong bus and gets lost in the city she has lived in all her life. If you get a chance, order a copy and take a look!

With all those technology types talking about carrying around all our books in one little piece of plastic, it’s kind of refreshing to the contrarian in me to see this enormous book that takes six people just to lift it.The 350-year-old Klencke, the world’s largest book, will be on display in the British Library this summer.

It is almost absurdly huge – 1.75 metres (5ft) tall and 1.9 metres (6ft) wide – and was given to the king by Dutch merchants and placed in his cabinet of curiosities.

“It is going to be quite a spectacle,” said Tom Harper, head of antiquarian maps. “Even standing beside it is quite unnerving.”

As a contrast, one of the smallest maps in the world, a fingernail-sized German coin from 1773 showing a bird’s eye view of Nuremberg, will be exhibited close by.

Link – Guardian UK

Yes. Hilarious. True.

A publishing trend that I think is dying is the snarky, single-topic blog being turned into a book. I plan to dance on the grave of this trend. I don’t know how it started, if it actually made any money, or who decided it was a good idea. And I don’t care. I only care that it dies a horrible death.Books with bad photos and no editorial concept beyond a one-note joke … you’re time is over!

Now there is a site mocking these mockeries: Look At This Idea For A Blog-to-Book Deal

Of course, perhaps they hope to actually publish a book of stuff from their Tumblr blog  mocking people trying to turn their Tumblr blog into a book. I’ve decided to ignore that Ouroboros. (Read on …)

I’m reading The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates right now. After a bad review for one of her books, she wrote the following:

If younger writers could anticipate what lies ahead after their years of arduous labor and their hopes and fantasies and sacrifices (if anyone still “sacrifices” anything for their art) … would they believe the effort was worth it? If it weren’t for the satisfaction of writing as an end in itself, apart even from the money involved, I wouldn’t advise anyone to write. Not at all. Therefore I’m at a loss about advising writers who are modestly gifted but who find writing very hard work, not really enjoyable. I really don’t know what to say. I look at them and think, But why do you want to writer if, in fact, you suffer so …? The rewards won’t compensate for the suffering. The “rewards” are so mixed, so ironic. Why do you want to write if you really don’t want to write?

This strikes me as true. Publishing is hard. Always has been, always will be. So the act of writing has to be important and enjoyable to the writer to make it worth it. I have seen other writers struggle like she is describing and I often wonder why they are forcing it. Why write if it is such a struggle? There are a lot of easier pursuits out there, that’s for sure.

Word Pirate Morgan Elliott has a new website up featuring his illustrated novel Guilt World. You can browse the first two chapters as well as his illustrations. Great job, Morgan.

Hey Word Pirates, my short-short “Pie Man” is in the current issue of Rumble Magazine. Check out “Pie Man” here and then read the rest of the issue.

I love this picture of three little girls looking at “a heavily marked-up manuscript for “A Christmas Carol” that Charles Dickens wrote, and rewrote, in 1843.” It’s from a NYTimes piece about Dickens editing the famous Christmas tale, focusing on some of the smaller changes of the manuscript and its publishing history.

The NYTimes was also allowed to scan 66 pages from the book for their readers to view on the web, although I found them hard to access.

It shows how much a book can change, even up to the last minute. For example:

At least one change did not occur until the book was at the printer. You will note that the manuscript is silent on whether Tiny Tim lives. But before the first editions went out the door, a line was curiously inserted on page 65 noting that “and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father.”

Citing a 2004 book by Michael Patrick Hearn, “The Annotated Christmas Carol,” Mr. Kiely said Dickens added that line as “an afterthought.”

Aren’t we glad he put that in?

“Yes little Bobby and Suzy, when Grandma was 18 years old, there was this series of books called Twilight about a sparkly vampire who falls in love with a teenager. No one reads these books anymore but they were quite a to-do in my time, let me tell you. What? No, he was sparkly because his skin shown like diamonds in the sun. I don’t know why. Anyway, children, that is why I show you this tattoo. Take it as a cautionary tale of why you should not get a tattoo at a young age. I mean, did you read this thing? It’s not even punctuated properly. What was I thinking?”

More here.