Apologies for the extended absence—a blown transformer and, later, downed cable lines have prevented me from doing much of import on Bookster in the last few days.
With that in mind, I’ll try to catch up on some of the literary news that has happened in the days I’ve been “incapicatated, as it were.
23 Year-Old Serial Killer Itzcoatl Ocampo | Police Photo
- Apropos of the Salman Rushdie row at India’s premiere Jaipur literary festival, in which protests and threats of violence prevented Rushdie from attending, even his contingency plan—a speaking engagement by video conference—was nixed after further threats of violence. Says the DailyMail:
The Muslim organisations opposed to him, though, made it clear they would regard the ‘very image of Salman on screen’ as ‘intolerable’. Their stand was articulated by the hawkish Paker Farooq, an advocate who heads the Association for Protection of Civil Rights. In his televised statement, the Diggi Palace owner said: ‘I have been informed that people who are averse to the video link have gathered on this property and threatened violence. ‘It is unfortunate but necessary to cancel the video link to avoid harm to this property, to all of you.
‘Rushdie responded to the blackout by tweeting, ‘Threat of violence by Muslim groups stifled free speech today. In a true democracy all get to speak, not just the ones making threats.’
- British author Neil Gaiman predicts traditional publishing will be extinct within 5 to 10 years, adding at the Guardian:
The music industry shows a possible future for publishing, he continued. “There are fewer rock stars travelling the world in their private jets than there were in the old days, but there’s a lot more good music.”
- The US isn’t the only country whose freedom-of-information act(s) (FOIA) have added to the public dialogue: one such request in Britain has yielded the information that authors Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), Roald Dahl (Matilda), and CS Lewis (Chronicles of Narnia), among others, privately turned down offers of CBEs and OBEs from the Queen of England during their lifetimes.
- As a followup to another previous story, publisher Peter McGee was warring with the Bavarian government over his intention to publish excerpts of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but has now agreed “to black out the pages containing the excerpts in order to avoid legal problems, according to the CSMonitor.
- The LA Times reports that an Orange County, California serial killer—an ex-Marine who stalked homeless with his Ka-Bar blade—was found to have a Life Magazine book called The Most Notorious Crimes in American History in his possession, along with a knife sharpener. The Marine Corps Times has more on the killer and his story.
- 83 year-old Where the Wild Things Are Maurice Sendak made a splash on Stephen Colbert’s show The Colbert Report earlier in the week, decrying e-books and expounding on “rumpus” in his curmudgeonly way. See the first seconds of each video below:
