Norwegian novelist Finn Carling has passed on. Carling specialized in alienation and misfits ignored by mainstream society. Book & Writers has a profile on the man.

The film rights for Clive Woodall’s One for Sorrow: Two for Joy have been sold to Disney for $1 million. But the incredible thing is that Woodall still hasn’t quit his day job at the supermarket. What’s the matter, Clive? You can’t honestly tell me that there a shortage of supermarket managers in the UK.

The Times is on the ball this morning with those snappy headlines.

Shakespeare’s will is now available online (PDF). Unfortunately, there’s nothing left of his estate to distribute. However, fortune hunters hoping to score some loot are advised to pursue a bride-to-be in the Hamptons and, as a general practice, consider more recent family lineage.

An Arthur Conan Doyle archive has landed at a London law firm. There are 3,000 items, many of them previously disappeared into protracted legal disputes from forty years ago. But more importantly, there’s a treasure trove of manuscripts (80% of which have never been published), including an early sketch of A Study in Scarlet. Also making its appearance in the collection is the first known piece of Holmes/Watson slash fiction. Who knew that Doyle penned this himself?

HarperCollins has attacked Soft Skull‘s How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office. They claim the title’s too close to Michael Moore’s book. Meanwhile, the fate of the soon-to-be-published How to Prevent Stupid White Men (Who Are Also Quite Rich) from Selling Lots of Fulminating, Unreadable Political Books Clutched by Undergrads and Packed with Generalizations remains undetermined.

Franck Le Calvez has lost his Finding Nemo suit. The judge noted that the two disputed fictional fish have different smiles. Moreover, Le Calvez’s fish is French and, thus, frightening to American children.

Alex Beam revisits the myth of Deborah Skinner, B.F.’s daughter, who was, as the legend goes, purportedly locked in a box for several years. Lauren Slater has a new book, Opening Skinner’s Box, that attempted to determine the truth behind the abuse. Slater never found her. But Beam apparently did. And Skinner is now hopping mad with libel. Slater claims that “she didn’t have access to an electronic database.”

In 2000? Yeah, right.

Beyond that, there’s a little something called the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. Beyond that, even in the early 1990s, one could find CD-ROM archives of newspapers in such hicktowns as Sacramento. (And I say that from personal experience.)

Skinner herself responded in the Guardian last week, stating that she was not a lab rat.

Whatever the outcome of the Skinner imbroglio, the Beam story illustrates the importance of being thorough with the facts. And it’s advice that might be beneficial to blogs. If lit blogs are to grow and develeop, then this also demonstrates the importance of tracking sources, which means trying to acknowledge who first found the links whenever possible. Beyond simple courtesy, there’s also the consideration that the person genuinely interested in the topic might have done additional work or have additional expertise not publicly posted.

A Belgian museum is hosting an Alan Moore exhibition, but Moore won’t be going. The Independent has the usual Moore biographical background, but does have some additional news about Hollywood and future work.

And there’s more comparative info on the new Nancy Drew, addressed in letter and infographic.

How to Write Good: “If placed in a situation where you must quote another author, always write ‘[sic]’ after any word that may be misspelled or looks the least bit questionable in any way. If there are no misspellings or curious words, toss in a few ‘[sic]’s just to break up the flow. By doing this, you will appear to be knowledgeable and ‘on your toes,’ while the one quoted will seem suspect and vaguely discredited.”

(via Beautiful Stuff)

Back in the early 1990s, there was this really great thing called the mail. You wrote some words, had the entire day to reflect upon them, and then sent off your letter. And what was really nifty was that you got letters back from people.

But with the rise of email, the care and thought that people put into these letters disappeared, along with that small cushion of time. Communication became instantneous, which was certainly handy for getting feedback or immediate input. But something was lost in the haste.

Perhaps the biggest crime involved the transformation of the mailbox to a depository for bills and junk mail.

The time has come to take our mailboxes back. The time has come to recalibrate our expectations. No longer shall we lust after the latest Cosmopolitan or Netflix DVD. I call for a return to the mailboxes of lore, whereby lovely letters were nestled within their bastard brethren.

So here’s what I’d like to try.

The Snail Mail Experiment

I’m looking for 15 people who are dedicated to writing and sending letters to three people each. Doesn’t matter where you are or who you are.

The first 15 people to send an email to ed@edrants.com with their name, address and three separate sentences, and who intend to actually write and send letters, will become part of The Snail Mail Experiment.

I’ll mix the sentences up and assign each person three other people to write to, with a topical sentence in place to comment upon.

A bit like a mix CD swap, but the emphasis here is on the words, drawings and/or personal offerings that one can send by mail.

After all this, I’ll follow up with everyone, see how their assorted mailing went (possibly comparing it against communicating by email), and post their comments here.

But in order to make this work, I’m going to need fifteen hardy souls.

So if you’re interested in becoming part of this kooky sociological experiment, you know what to do.

As widely reported by almost everybody on the lit blog scene, authors have finally revealed that the blurb-quoting culture is one big circlejerk. “We really don’t get enough sex in our lives. We’re too busy writing, hoping to sell our books,” said one bestselling author, who refused to reveal his name. “But I know it gives me a thrill to stroke my peers. And we’re not just talking egos. Who needs to read a book when you can fantasize about an author?”

While the connection between authors and relentlessly cheery blurbs is nothing new, the connection between blurbs and the upsurge in sex (literal or imagined) has now come very close to addressing a long standing problem: namely, the lonely lives of writers which often go unobserved.

If the authors are pretending to read these books, hiding behind the modifier of “unreadable,” then I also suggest that readers are also pretending. In fact, chances are that nobody is reading these books at all, save only the irrecoverably dedicated or others of unsound mind. It is also likely that these book buyers and galley collectors are buying these books and stocking them away for a nuclear winter.

Furthermore, there is lots of sex going on, until now unmentioned, possibly with the blurbs written immediately after orgasm and cleanup.

This pretending has reached such a disgusting level of influence that the time has come to demand a chart which compares the timing and number of orgasms a writer has per year, against the timing and number of positive blurbs a writer gives to the world per annum. Are these writers really reading? Or are they reading these books while having sex? Or are these books a replacement for sex? Is finishing a book akin to a postcoital rush of relief that leaves the blurb quoter in a delicate, relaxed and unqualified position to write a blurb?

A shareware developer has tried to take advantage of this intricate problem by marketing BlurbMe 2.5 specifically to A-list writers. The application is available for Windows, Mac and Linux, and will generate a positive blurb in 9 seconds. Or roughly the amount of time it takes to peel off a Lifestyles. Here are some BlurbMe examples:

“Fascinating, compelling. I felt the urge to walk the dog.”

“Compelling, fasciating, a riveting read. I’ll walk the dog.”

“Compellingly fascinating and riveting. I felt the urge to walk the dog in a compelling way. Great read.”

Sven Gorgias, the developer and programmer of BlurbMe, reports that he hopes to expand the limited adjectives in future versions. Since Mr. Gorgias is an animal lover and walking his dog is his only respite from staring at code all day, he has tried to rid the database of references to his constitutionals.

But in light of the depravities unearthed by the Telegraph, Mr. Gorgias now knows that his work is going to be trickier than he thought.