Reinventing the literary journal

• Simon Garfield examines the history of Granta Magazine in The Guardian.

In truth, the first issue wasn't bad, with pieces from Joyce Carol Oates and Susan Sontag, and a superb foretaste of The Tunnel by William Gass. 'It was my way of discovering all these writers I hadn't read yet,' Buford says (he is American, and his first editorial wasted no time in dismissing all British writers in favour of his compatriots). 'I wrote to them all, basically promising them a whole issue of the magazine. My assumption was that no one would reply, and if anyone did I'd do anything, because we had nothing.'

Buford sounds calm and thoughtful, not at all the lunatic some writers had told me about. But the lunacy lay in the future. In the first weeks in which the two editors scrambled for material, others took to the streets in search of advertising. They got some: Woolworths, the Coffee Mill, Sweeney Todds restaurant, Laker Skytrain, Transalpino. One advert, from the Arts Cinema, listed film times: Picnic at Hanging Rock was playing on Sunday at 3pm.

The first issue had 208 pages, which was some improvement on the 32-page mimeographed journal that had previously been published sporadically and erratically by the University Society, and sold, in Buford's memory, 'to tourists by people wearing sandals'. Before its reinvention, Granta would often move as lazily as the river, but its 90-year history had been enriched by the thrusting young: Arthur Conan Doyle and AA Milne contributed, and in later years were joined by Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Michael Frayn and Stevie Smith. But the new Granta would not settle for juvenilia and the work of students; it wanted the best new writing in the English-speaking world.

Copyright gone mad

• David Edgar comments on the Olympic committee's copyright claims in The Guardian.

Copyright law just keeps getting nuttier and nuttier, and Edgar has choice words for those who try to push it too far.

See also: The dark side of copyright law (5/5/06) and More on copyright law (4/11/07).

When it discovered that Robert Ronson's children's science-fiction novel was to be published, the organising committee for the previously mentioned happening sent him an email asking that he should use neither the O-word nor the expressions "London 2012, or 2012 etc" in the title. The committee was able to do so under statutes passed in 1995 and 2006, which in effect turn all the elements of its title into a trademark.

In claiming copyright on a word, the organisation dedicated to the promotion of the competition to be held two years into the next decade is both following and extending a dangerous trend. ...

...The email to Robert Ronson was written by the Olympic organising committee's manager of brand protection, concerned to "ensure that there was no confusion" as to whether the novel was "an official licenced product", presumably in case the committee seeks to declare Ian McEwan or Martin Amis official novelist to the 2012 Olympics at some point.

Islam calling

• The Guardian reports on an intriguing new subculture: Islamic punk rock.

I so cannot wait to get my hands on some of this stuff.

The Taqwacores - a novel about a fictitious Muslim punk scene in the US - has spawned an actual movement that is being driven forward by young Muslims worldwide. Some bands - such as the Kominas - have a cult following. Others, such as Sabina, are virtually unknown. In a brief email exchange, she lays out some harsh truths.

You're a playwright. What do you write about?

"I write plays about fucked up people in fucked up situations, because we're all fucked up human beings that live in a fucked up society. People need to quit whining and shut up and realise that we're all freaks, whether we admit it or not."

...How her words would fare with Michael Muhammad Knight, author of The Taqwacores and an unwitting idol to the young and restless, is anyone's guess. Knight, who is 29 and lives in New York with his dog Sunny - "not as in Sunni Muslim" - downplays his achievement of single-handedly inspiring this subculture that has produced artists such as the Kominas, Secret Trial Five, Vote Hezbollah, Al-Thawra, 8-Bit and Diacritical.

"There was a scene already," says Knight modestly, whose next novel will be titled Osama Van Halen. "I just gave it a name. There were kids out there, doing their thing. I don't think of it as a movement, though, just a group of friends supporting each other."

More on copyright law

• John Lanchester examines copyright law in The Guardian.

Via Conversational Reading:

Copyright was born in the 16th century and, for the first couple of centuries of its existence, was a form of censorship. With the creation of the Stationers' Company in 1556, printers had to register their books, in order to make it easier for the monarchy to censor their "heresy, sedition and treason ... whereby not only God is dishonoured, but also an encouragement is given to disobey lawful princes and governors". It was a straightforward means of control: print something we don't like and you'll be punished, often by means such as having your nose slit or ears cut off. (Somewhere, a record company executive is reading those words and thinking, if only ... ) These laws had nothing to do with the needs of writers or the public, and everything to do with state control.

When the first real copyright law came, it was by accident. The laws controlling printing lapsed in 1694, and for the next 16 years a form of anarchy reigned: anyone could print anything. The effect for publishers was disastrous; they came to realise how important their monopoly was, and in turn how important it was to have a means of not just censoring the press, but controlling who owned what - in short, an idea of copyright. Out of that was born the copyright act of 1710, or, as it was significantly called, "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning". The act said that:

Whereas printers, booksellers, and other persons have of late frequently taken the liberty of printing, reprinting, and publishing, or causing to be printed, reprinted, and published, books and other writings, without the consent of the authors or proprietors of such books and writings, to their very great detriment, and too often to the ruin of them and their families: for preventing therefore such practices for the future, and for the encouragement of learned men to compose and write useful books ...

It created a copyright term of 21 years, after which the rights would revert to the author. And there you have it: the world's first system of copyright. As those words make clear, the act was explicitly based on one idea: that it was in the public interest to create an intellectually fruitful culture, and that the way to do that was to make it possible for writers to earn money from their work.

Even the best need help

• Michelle Pauli interviews Uzodinma Iweala in The Guardian.

When I first read Beasts of No Nation, I had a feeling Iweala was either a) a prodigy or b) blessed with a lot of smart mentors. Looks like it may be the latter, after all -- not that that changes anything.

Initially the tale was Iweala's senior thesis for his English literature degree at Harvard - in contrast to most of the writers on the American Granta list, he did not attend a creative writing course. Ian Jack, editor of Granta, observed on the publication of the list that writing fiction is "increasingly seen as a career choice by Americans in their early 20s, who attend universities to learn it". It's a notion that Iweala dismisses, saying that writing for him is a calling and a "career choice" would be something entirely different.

"I fundamentally believe that no one can teach you how to write - finding out how to write a story is part of the process of creating a story - but you can really learn through exposure to different writing, to different art forms, to different modes of storytelling, and with mentors who are able to get you to step outside your comfort zone."

One mentor who gets particular mention is Jamaica Kincaid, his senior thesis adviser who helped to edit Beasts of No Nation into publishable shape.

"She was always saying, read, read, read, read, read and she would recommend books that I thought had nothing to do with what I was writing. But I think the lesson there was that it's through reading and exposure that you really begin to understand what writing is and how to write."

Chuck Norris' calendar goes directly from March 31st to April 2nd. Nobody fools Chuck Norris.

• Martin Wainwright details some of history's best April Fools jokes in The Guardian.

"The Financial Times was always doing special reports on little countries I'd never heard of," says former Guardian advertising rep Philip Davies. "I was thinking about April Fool's Day 1977 and I thought, why don't we just make a country up?" Special reports editor Stuart St Clair Legge suggested the title that was to become a legend: San Serriffe, part typographic pun, part credible name for a tropical isle.

It also had the special appropriateness for the Guardian of challenging spelling. During its long relationship with San Serriffe, starting with the original supplement itself, the paper has printed the name with carefree inconsistency, using every possible variation of "r"s and "f"s, and, on one occasion, two "e"s.

Picking up Legge's theme, staffer Geoffrey Taylor designed a shrunken semicolon-shaped version of New Zealand's twin islands and based everything on the rich vocabulary of print. Leading islanders, such as the dictator General Pica, and places like the capital, Bodoni, were named after fonts of type and their measurements: he even got away with a wilderness area on the north island called Wodj of Type.

The islands were positioned off the Canaries and with just over three days to go, the final shape of the major, seven-broadsheet-page supplement was drawn up. Then, in the late afternoon of March 27, two jumbo jets collided at Tenerife airport, causing the worst aviation disaster in the world, in which 583 people died. The delicate web of April Fool fantasy suddenly seemed marginal. The editor, Peter Preston, teetered on the edge of pulling San Serriffe, but fortunately it was not abandoned. With a Herculean effort, the islands were relocated in the Indian Ocean, their history, flora and fauna completely revised.

So San Serriffe indelibly joined the map of the world. Next morning, the phone calls started early, the letters followed later. Thousands of readers were taken in; spin-offs soon included "I've been to San Serriffe" car stickers and a T-shirt from the islands, which sold a record 12,000 to readers.

Scientist versus comedian

• The Guardian Unlimited reports on the dust-up between Richard Dawkins and Peter Kay.

A celebrity scandal that's kinda-sorta-halfway interesting for a change, if only for the reliably amusing sight of Dawkins turning into an atheist pitbull at the drop of a hat:

The comedian and the scientist are rivals in the Galaxy British Book Awards, in which Dawkins is a frontrunner for his bestselling atheist diatribe The God Delusion, and Kay is nominated for his popular memoirs The Sound of Laughter.

The controversy erupted after Dawkins read an excerpt from Kay's autobiography, in which he wrote: "I believe in a God of some kind, in some sort of higher being. Personally I find it very comforting."

The believer-baiting academic responded with contempt. "How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it 'comforting'?" he said.

"If evidence were found for a supreme being I would change my mind instantly -with pride and with great surprise. Would I find it comforting? What matters is what is true, and we discover truth by evidence, not what we would 'like'." Kay, at present appearing in "The Producers" at the Palace theatre in Manchester, was unavailable for comment last night and his publicist declined to respond on his behalf.

Telling the truth

• Zadie Smith writes about writing in The Guardian.

Good stuff:

What is a cliche except language passed down by Das Mann, used and shop-soiled by so many before you, and in no way the correct jumble of language for the intimate part of your vision you meant to express? With a cliche you have pandered to a shared understanding, you have taken a short-cut, you have re-presented what was pleasing and familiar rather than risked what was true and strange. It is an aesthetic and an ethical failure: to put it very simply, you have not told the truth. When writers admit to failures they like to admit to the smallest ones - for example, in each of my novels somebody "rummages in their purse" for something because I was too lazy and thoughtless and unawake to separate "purse" from its old, persistent friend "rummage". To rummage through a purse is to sleepwalk through a sentence - a small enough betrayal of self, but a betrayal all the same. To speak personally, the very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life. But it is easy to admit that a sentence makes you wince; less easy to confront the fact that for many writers there will be paragraphs, whole characters, whole books through which one sleepwalks and for which "inauthentic" is truly the correct term.

Gonzo loves company

• Todd McEwen reviews Ralph Steadman's autobiography Bruised Memories: Gonzo, Hunter Thompson and Me in The Guardian.

There's always room for a good Raoul Duke anecdote:

Thompson and Steadman were first thrown together in Louisville to cover the Kentucky Derby of 1970. Steadman had a nervous breakdown from trying to keep up with Thompson's levels of substance abuse, and because halfway through the week Hunter rounded on him, accusing him of insulting (ie, drawing) his "friends" in this, the town where he grew up, which he actually hated. There is a portentous description of how Thompson drove, juggling iced whiskey, can of beer, and cigarettes - "he was the sort of driver who could never be a passenger".

This was Steadman's first confrontation with America in all its rotund, aggravated bonhomie, its "screaming lifestyle". As an artist, it was a nightmare to find himself so deranged: "The drawings told me everything. I was out of control. They were the scribbles of some raving drunk. This would not do at all." At times, Steadman sounds too much like Thompson, but what do you expect from the surviving half of the Chang and Eng of the frayed side of the 70s? For the next 30 years they rubbed along, producing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, books on marathons, Watergate and the strangeness of the world. Their friendship was like that of a comedy team, though Abbott never attacked Costello with chemical mace. Twice.

The need for stories

• Paul Auster talks about writing in The Guardian.

From Auster's acceptance speech for Spain's Prince of Asturias Prize for Letters:

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next. For years, in every country of the Western world, article after article has been published bemoaning the fact that fewer and fewer people are reading books, that we have entered what some have called the 'post-literate age'. That may well be true, but at the same time, this has not diminished the universal craving for stories.

Novels are not the only source, after all. Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories. They need them almost as desperately as they need food and however the stories might be presented - whether on a printed page or on a television screen - it would be impossible to imagine life without them.

Pay attention to that man behind the curtain

• New Yorker editor David Remnick is interviewed in The Guardian.

Remnick pauses for a moment to tell a story about the glorious predictability of journalism. 'There was a wonderful thing Slate did years ago, when it was just getting started, called the Hackathlon. It was Michael Specter, Malcolm Gladwell and I forget who else.' (Specter and Gladwell are both old friends of Remnick's from the Washington Post, and both now colleagues at the New Yorker.) 'Each day there would be an event. You had to write a 500-word lede [an American term for an article's opening paragraph] in the Vanity Fair style to a Richard Gere profile: Ready, begin. Then you had to do an Economist situationer on Tanzania - first 400 words. Then maybe a Rolling Stone lede to a ... you know: Mick Jagger is angry. Period. Paragraph. Very Angry. Period. The limo is late. You know, one of those. And then maybe a New Yorker thing on the history of sand. I don't remember the specifics.'

Remnick leans in with a smile of utter glee, and goes on: 'Specter beat Gladwell. He came from behind, but his lede on the Richard Gere, comparing the colour of his hair to his grey cashmere sweater, was just so brilliant that he overwhelmed him in the Hackathlon. I mean, he could do nothing else in his career and his New York Times obituary would read: "Michael Specter, winner of the 1997 Slate Hackathlon, died today of complications of a hernia operation. He was 98."'

Amis does Atta

• A new short story by Martin Amis in The Guardian takes a fictional look at the last days of 9/11 hijacker Muhammed Atta.

Good, strong stuff from Amis:

The worst was yet to come: shaving. Shaving was the worst because it necessarily involved him in the contemplation of his own face. He looked downwards while he lathered his cheeks, but then the chin came up and there it was, revealed in vertical strips: the face of Muhammad Atta. Two years ago he had said goodbye to his beard, after Afghanistan. Tangled and oblong and slightly off-centre, it had had the effect of softening the disgusted lineaments of the mouth, and it had wholly concealed the frank animus of the underbite. His insides were seized, but his face was somehow incontinent, or so Muhammad Atta felt. The detestation, the detestation of everything, was being sculpted on it, from within. He was amazed that he was still allowed to walk the streets, let alone enter a building or board a plane. Another day, one more day, and they wouldn't let him. Why didn't everybody point, why didn't they cringe, why didn't they run? And yet this face, by now almost comically malevolent, would soon be smiled at, and perfunctorily fussed over (his ticket was Business Class), by the doomed stewardess.

Dropping in on Didion

• Killian Fox interviews Joan Didion in The Guardian.

She began writing The Year of Magical Thinking in the autumn of 2004, setting herself the task of finishing it by the first anniversary of her husband's death. In the end, it took her 88 days to complete, which, in itself, is an incredible achievement given the circumstances and the fact that this was a writer who once confessed that it often took her a morning to complete a single paragraph to her satisfaction.

In the book, she refers to the early stage of grief as a kind of derangement. I ask if the actual writing of the book, in all its frantic haste, had helped her stay sane.

'Well, the very act of writing did me some good. For sure. And the act of living through it again by putting down what I felt. It made me express what I thought and I wouldn't have done that otherwise. I wouldn't have admitted it.'

Did she have to force herself to write this book? 'Well, I walked around the block a lot,' she says. 'When you're walking, you can distract yourself. You can put certain thoughts out of your mind. If you do that sitting down at your desk, though, that's just typewriting. As a writer, you have a responsibility to be honest with yourself. In this instance, it helped to do it quickly insofar as I wanted to get the rawness of how I felt across, somehow to put it directly onto the page'.

Saunders strikes again

• George Saunders details his first trip to England in The Guardian.

Hah-larious. Then again, it's Saunders, and you already knew that.

One of the principles of science is that one can, by the careful study of a small data set, form generalised conclusions about a larger population. Based on my observation of the British at Hay, I concluded that the British: 1) are all from London, 2) are extremely literate, and 3) are almost always drunk. It was hard to find a Briton at Hay who was not from London and was not either reading or drunk, or both - ie, reading while drunk. Also, the British in Hay are extremely smart. Based on the quality of my conversations with the British at the Hay Festival, I was forced to conclude that the British are even more intelligent, literary and articulate than us Americans! I know my American readers will find this hard to believe, if they have even made it this far, due to all my big words I have been using. However, my fellow Americans, do not feel bad about our relative stupidity; I have concluded that the British are more intelligent, literary and articulate than us simply because they spend more time reading and studying and reflecting on the world than we do. No doubt if we Americans spent as much time reading, studying and thoughtfully reflecting as the British, we would be every bit as intelligent, literary and articulate as them. But we have better things to do, such as getting more money, and calling in our votes for American's Sexiest Food-Obsessed Midgets, and keeping the world safe from democracy. Or, should I say, safe for democracy. Whatever. What am I, some kind of language scientist or wordologist or whatnot?

Is that an encyclopedia in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

• Ebook technology is slowly getting there.

It's true, these things come in threes... this is the third Guardian piece in a row I've spotlighted.

Anyway, the story's interesting. Mention is not made, however, of the refusal of both Barnes & Noble and Amazon to carry the Sony Reader. According to that story, "'We have sold e-readers before and they haven't done particularly well,' Barnes & Noble spokeswoman Mary Ellen Keating said Tuesday in response to a query from The Associated Press."

Personally, I think ebooks will eventually catch on, if only because it's practical. You use less paper, it takes up far less space, and you can theoretically carry lots and lots of books with you at any given time. The Guardian piece makes the good point that ebooks would be especially beneficial for educational use: it's more cost-effective and it prevents students from having to lug around huge textbooks that could double as barbells.

There are multiple hurdles, however. First is the physical feel of printed and bound books themselves, which for book lovers hold an especially romantic quality. There's nothing in the world like the musty smell of an old bookstore, and the feel of the pages turning in your hands; whenever I buy a brand-new book, at some point I almost always hold the book up to my nose and breathe in deep. Another hurdle is designing typefaces that will read well on a small computer screen; print typography is an art in itself, and it will be a shame to see it fade away. The flipside, however, is that ebooks could open a whole new arena for digital typography; it could be the start of a new art form.

With a lot of legwork and a spot of luck, ebooks could become a new standard, a la DVD. Audio books, for example, have gotten a big boost by the popularity of MP3 podcasts, and it stands to reason that a digital presentation of a new book by your favorite author could have its own unique perks.