Rachel Johnson, Bad Sex Award-winner

I’m aware that Dennis doesn’t want this to be the kind of blog that publishes posts of the “Last night I got drunk and went to a book reading” variety. I agree with him absolutely — Mobylives is better than that. So, with that in mind, this evening I went to a literary prize giving and didn’t get drunk. And I’m not going to give a nepotistic plug here. The Literary Review Bad Sex Award would just be another excuse for champagne and merriment, if it weren’t for the intention behind it. In his opening speech, master of ceremonies Alexander Waugh (author of several brilliant books including The House of Wittgenstein) described the great effect that the prize has had on modern literature: Sebastian Faulks apparently became so bitter that he wrote a Bond novel without any sex in it at all, while many authors have started including awful sex scenes in their books in the hope of being shortlisted and thereby adding 50,000 to their sales. This was not the desired result and writers are kindly asked to desist immediately.

John Updike, winner of a Bad Sex lifetime achievement award, revealing the source of his best ideas

Two character actresses read out the seven scenes on the shortlist. If laughter alone had cast the vote, the winner would have been either John Updike, for his blowjob, or Kathy Lette, who coined the immortal phrase “it was as big as a monument in a small village”. The eventual winner, however, was Rachel Johnson, sister of the London Mayor and writer of Shire Hell, whose use of animal imagery swung it. She professed pride and a great deal of interest in the man chosen to present the award, Dominic West, better known as Detective McNulty from The Wire. He stayed in character and spent the rest of the ceremony checking out Nancy Dell’Olio, who accepted a lifetime achievement award on behalf of John Updike, the only author yet to have received four nominations in a row. He’s probably at home working on number five – but perhaps the rest of us could take a gentle hint and lay off the lust. Otherwise it might be you being howled at this time next year.

Borders Group Inc. released its third quarter earnings statement yesterday and reported revenue dropped to $693.4 million — down from $765.2 million in the same quarter last year, and significantly less that the $726.5 million for the quarter analysts had predicted. Overall, sales fell 12.8% at Borders Superstores and 7.7% at its Waldenbooks stores, making for a net loss of $175.4 million, compared with $161.1 million in the same quarter of last year. So how will this impact the country’s second largest chain bookstore? Well, as Sarah Skidmore tells us in her AP wire report on the statement, “Borders has been in the midst of a turnaround for more than year. During that time it has sold off portions of its business, cut jobs, revamped some stores and limited its debt.” But the spiraling financial crisis has meant “vastly lower traffic and sales as consumers limit their spending in the bleak economy.” The company’s key plan to avoid bankruptcy — selling off its core US business as part of a larger financial restructuring — is now, apparently, no longer an option. Skidmore reports, “The company said Tuesday that management is ‘no longer contemplating a transaction.’”

The last few days have seen a quickening increase in stories reflecting a rapidly and drastically worsening situation for the American book industry, combined with stories of some working hard to innovate their way out of it, and interspersed with possible instances of a more naked opportunism that seems unique to American capitalism. In short it’s become clearer and clearer that the American book business is going to be a very different place in a very short period of time. For now, examples from what seem bits and pieces of a falling sky: Yesterday’s MobyLives story about Random House freezing employee benefits was followed by the company’s announcement later the same day that it’s boosting its efforts to build up its ebook library and expects to have some 15,000 titles — including books by major authors such as John Updike and Harlen Coben — available within just a few months. Following Friday’s MobyLives story about Barnes & Noble’s historically bad third quarter earnings report, there’s yesterday’s Wall Street Journal story by Jeffrey Trachtenberg about the even worse earnings statement expected today from Borders Group Inc. Then there’s this story from blogger Ed Champion: it seems Borders has told the Independent Publishers Group — the country’s largest independent book distributor — that it won’t be paying them for two months, a devastating development for IPG’s client publishers, and a potential signal that Borders is on its last legs. Then, late yesterday afternoon came the report that was most stunning of them all: A Publishers Weekly alert that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has told its editors to stop acquiring new books for an indeterminate period. According to PW’s Rachel Deahl, HMH’s vice president of communications Josef Blumenfeld confirmed the story after it was leaked to PW, although he said it was “not a permanent change.” Nonetheless Blumenfeld “hedged on when the ban might be lifted,” says Deahl. Instead, he insisted “it’s a symbol of doing things smarter; it’s not an indicator of the end of literature.”

Artist: Ron Barrett

It is, says Joe Queenan, “the least-discussed subject in the world of belles-lettres: book reviews that any author worth his salt knows are unjustifiably enthusiastic.” In an essay for The New York Times, he asks “how often does an author ever come out and admit that the praise showered on his book was excessive, inappropriate, ill-considered, unseemly or flat-out wrong? That’s the sort of thing that takes real moral fiber, real guts.” But he manages to find a few: Dave Barry complains that, “I once had a review in The New York Times in which a nice reviewer described me as ‘the funniest man in America.’ This is a ridiculous assertion; I am not the funniest man in my neighborhood. . . . People introduce me to audiences by saying, ‘The New York Times has called him the funniest man in America,’ as if the Times editorial board decided this after painstakingly considering all the other American men. The worst was when I was on a book tour in England, where the BBC radio hosts would read the Times quote in such a way as to suggest: Funniest man in America, eh? As if that means anything.”

FF Mister K Pro

The eccentric handwriting of Franz Kafka so impressed Finnish graphic and type designer Julia Sysmäläinen that she decided to create FF Mister K Pro, a font based on his “rather eccentric letter forms,” reports a blog post on The Font Feed. More precisely, the post says Sysmäläinen decided to “convert his handwriting with its unusually strong calligraphic characteristics into a digital script,” with “numerous alternate characters to avoid successions of repeating shapes,” in order for users to experience a more genuine simulation of Kafka’s handwriting.

A couple of people I know have been complaining about the death of the short story in the broadsheets. In the good old days, they say, the Books sections regularly included short stories from new and established writers and — here’s the rub — they weren’t necessarily topical. While it’s tempting to dismiss such talk as utopian nostalgia, it’s hard to recall any fiction published recently in a newspaper that wasn’t to do with current affairs or extracted from a well-known writer’s forthcoming book. As a nice editor at The Independent used to tell me when I worked in publicity and tried to hawk people’s stories to him, “It doesn’t put the ‘news’ in newspaper”.

Shame, that. On the other hand, it’s pleasing to observe the return of the serial novel, which reached its peak with Balzac and Dickens in the 19th century but seemed to have died its final death in the 1940s. The internet has revitalised it: Stephen King was the first to try putting his work on the web, back in 2000 (as this CNN story reminds us) and since then horror and sci-fi sites have popped up all over the place. More literary, Alexander McCall Smith has been writing a novel online for The Telegraph, adding a chapter a day for 20 weeks. It’s now at chapter 51, and you can read from the beginning here. The Guardian pre-empted them, publishing a weekly serial by Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, AM Homes and Jackie Kay. On her website, Winterson says, “We will swap weeks and we aren’t saying who is when….”

The cover of London Mayor Boris Johnson's "Cultural Metropolis" report. Note the teeny tiny British people in and on the elephant --- yes, it's a Trojan elephant.

British people are very grumpy about a lot of things. It’s part of our charm. One thing we’re especially worked up about is the 2012 London Olympics: surveys keep showing that increasing numbers of us don’t want the Olympics, resent the enormous costs, spit about the forcible closing of small businesses and would be quite happy if they were given to Paris even at this late stage. We’re all too lazy to benefit from improved sports facilities and too cynical to believe that such facilities will be open to anyone other than the already sleek athletes who are supposed to represent us. Perhaps that’s why Boris Johnson has just announced a palliative three year plan to enhance arts and culture in London. The BBC reports on the paper published today, “Cultural Metropolis”, in which we are promised a series of events in 2009 to celebrate London’s history, a “London Film Day” and additional funding for the London Jazz Festival to enable performances in outer boroughs. Johnson says: “Art and culture are how civilisations define themselves. They are what we leave behind — or what we hope to leave behind.” So really, unless we want future generations to think we were ignorant jocks, even more should be spent on culture than the £9 billion that the Olympics are currently estimated to cost. Forgive my scepticism….

A video blast from the past, courtesy of the terrific Los Angeles Times book blog Jacket Copy and its star blogger Carolyn Kellogg: In what looks like mid-sixties Manhattan, Susan Sontag visits the architectural wonder the Seagram’s Building with its architect Philip Johnson, and with a swinging but invisible jazz combo blowing hot behind her with-it-daddy narration.

Jose Saramago

Jose Saramago is unstoppable. After a severe illness last year, when the local hospital was so worried that he might die that they didn’t want to admit him, the 86-year-old author has come back with gusto, finishing a new novel, The Elephant’s Journey as well as approving the film of Blindness and pushing his Jose Saramago Foundation, which is intended to “bring a new dynamic to cultural life in Portugal”. He’s even started a blog. Maya Jaggi did an excellent interview with him about all of the above for The Guardian, which you can read here.

Police say Farhad Hakimzadeh used a scalpel to remove a map by Hans Holbein the Younger from this 16th century book

A prominent Iranian scholar who is head of the UK’s Iran Heritage Foundation — “a charity he formed in 1995 to promote and perserve the history, languages and culture of Iran” — has pleaded guilty to mutilating at least 150 priceless books in the British Library. According to a report in the Guardian by crime reporter Sandra Laville, authorities in London say Farhad Hakimzadeh, 60, “a Harvard-educated businessman, publisher and intellectual, took a scalpel to the leaves of 150 books that have been in the nation’s collection for centuries.” The books were from the library’s collection “charting how Europeans travelled to Mesopotamia, Persia and the Mogul empire from the 16th century onwards” and Hakimzadeh’s vandalism could go back to 1998, when he first visited the collection. Dr. Kristian Jensen, head of the library’s early printed collections, said, “You cannot undo what he has done and it has compromised a piece of historical evidence which charts the early engagement of Europeans with what we now know as the Middle East and China. It makes me extremely angry. This is someone who is extremely rich who has damaged and destroyed something that belongs to everybody.” He added, “Hakimzadeh is eminently characteristic of our traditional groups of readers: he has a profound knowledge of the field. From my point of view, that makes it worse because he actually knew the importance of what he was damaging. What he did was use the cover of serious scholarly purpose to steal historic pieces and abuse our trust.”