Jonathan Franzen doesn’t like e-books. I read Freedom on my Kindle. If he wants to defend printed matter, he should maybe not write a book that weighs a million pounds (KIDDING). Also, Franzen’s least favorite things (via The Millions). Franzen is angry in a placid, intellectual way.

At N Plus One, Molly Fischer discusses lady blogs. And then there’s this wonderful response.  I enjoy some lady blogs and especially The Hairpin but appreciated both perspectives.

Is anyone reading Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl Land? Fascinating, yes?

Barnes & Noble is taking a stand against Amazon’s encroachment on the publishing industry.

Speaking of people making Amazon-related decisions, Goodreads is transitioning to new data sources.

Also, Amazon’s earnings fell. Rough week for them, but like Drago in Rocky 4, they’ll muscle through until a Rocky rises out of the Siberian chill to put up a good fight.

At Largehearted Boy (celebrating its tenth anniversary), Hanne Blank shares her book notes from her recently released Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, which got a great review in The New York Times. There’s also an interesting interview with Blank at Salon.

John Scalzi is contributing the proceeds of his e-book sales from his titles at Subterranean Press to Planned Parenthood for the next week.

Here’s an interesting piece on how records are made, literally.

Erica Dreifus offers a list of places where you can submit your flash nonfiction.

Colossal, an art and design blog, always has really unique art to look at.

We’ll get started with the Literary Magazine Club of discussion of Versal on January 9th. Details, here, if you’re playing along. If you want to write something about Versal, and I hope you do, please get in touch with me at roxane at htmlgiant.com. There’s a lot to talk about. For starters, what do you think about the cover?

Over at the Paris Review blog which is always entertaining, Jason Diamond writes about, among other things, “books as objects of design in clothing stores.”

The Millions has a useful list of books we can look forward to in 2012.

James Franco* sold his novel to Amazon. It’s a scandal! Or something! I mean, he’s what? Congratulations? I don’t know! It’s going to be called Actors Anonymous, and yeah…. I, there are no words. Actually, there are words. I am going to make a plot prediction. Young, “handsome” and intelligent actor named Fames Danco takes Hollywood by storm, makes quirky choices, struggles to remain authentic amidst the hypocrisy of Hollywood. After taking a starring role in a big budget movie, say, Mission Impossible 14, he joins a support group, tongue in cheek, to cope with being torn between fame and being true to himself. In the end, he finds a happy compromise by making great independent film choices that lead to many critical accolades and magazine covers. When he wins his Oscar, he thanks the Academy and the nameless members of Actors Anonymous. He also finds love. I will take bets on the accuracy of my prediction.

At Full Stop, Maud Newton takes on the situation in American writing as part of an ongoing series. As always, she is savvy and insightful.

The Rumpus is starting a print publication, where four times a month, or so, they will send you a letter. I’m excited for this. I may be writing a letter. I love getting postal mail. You should consider subscribing.

A League of Their Own is a classic sports film.

Michiko Kakatuni, Twitter, fake account, this is the future.

This movie poster really exists.

Small towns are losing their post offices and it is a real shame.

*Is anyone else disturbed by the Franco storyline on GH right now?

PressBooks, a new way to make an ePub and print-ready PDF of a manuscript,  is open to the public. I haven’t used the service yet but it seems interesting, particular when so many small presses are trying to find affordable, uncomplicated ways to create e-books.

At The Millions, Edan Lepucki explains her reasons for not self-publishing. Both the essay and the comments are interesting.

In cool news, Ben Tanzer’s You Can Make Him Like You is the December selection for The Cult, Chuck Palahniuk’s book club. You can buy the book here.

This may be the best corporate apology ever.

I really enjoyed this interview with Dagoberto Gilb on the Zyzzyva blog (via Chris Arnold).

John Branch’s three-part series on the life and death of hockey player Derek Boogard is some of the finest long form journalism I’ve read in a while. Boogard’s story is at once infuriating, intriguing, and ultimately, heartbreaking. I learned that there are “enforcers” in hockey which makes the sport seem infinitely more menacing.

On the Paris Review blog, Avi Steinberg writes about the art of air travel crises.

A leaked memo from Hachette explains why publishers are still relevant.

BLACK FRIDAY* EDITION

Filip Marinovich’s  Wolfman Librarian and the Trembling Pair of Actor Hands (online chapbook from EOAGH), appended last week, is wow:

I walked down Wall Street tonight and it felt
As if someone was walking inside me
Another person taking steps for me
Fuck you who told me I couldn't write
September Eleventh Poetry I'm moving
To Eleventh Street I'm breathing again
The world will become a new City
People will hug in the street Elizabethanly
We will invent a new language together
Queen Elizabeth will return from her coven
Covent Garden and will sing opera LA Boheme
on the steps of the Federal Building joining hands
Why are there trains rumbling beneath this grass
The Love Interest Woman will not die of T.B. at the end
of La Boheme the snow will go away
and we will find it again in our pencilcases
when we awake firstgraders sweating the first day of
first grade and Happy Birthday William Carlos Williams
September Seventeenth Two Thousand and Ten
How old would you be today what would you say
about the towers would you believe me if I told you
the unburied dead of Wall Street one of them
walked in me took my steps is this my flesh
peripheral vision greenery wolverines gnawing at me
and vomiting me up a new man with powers to heal
Wolfman Librarian Wolfman Wolfman Librarian Wolfman

http://occupywriters.com/ contains multitudes:

• Ana Božičević: And is the world
  your world, peace and war yours, and are
  you leaving some building arc as
  an up-combed lady into a fated date night,
  like it was the time for keening,
  magic string, like the divide
  between word and thing just up
  and flew, and you just knew to live?
• Joshua Cohen on Bloomberg’s visit to Zuccotti Park: “This fall, every day Downtown has felt like the first day at a strange new school—where “We” have to solve for plural pronoun before attacking the darker math.” (cf. Cathy Wagner’s new math in last week’s WSJ) (Marinovich: “when we awake firstgraders sweating the first day of / first grade”
• Eileen Myles on the mic
• Matthew Zapruder, “Poem for Plutocrats”
•  Jonathan Lethem, “Tickling the Dead or Six Jokes About Cognitive Dissonance”
• Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance 
• Francine Prose: “As far as I can understand it myself, here’s why I burst into tears at the Occupy Wall Street camp.”
• Ursula K. Le Guin
• D.A. Powell, “The Great Unrest
• Alice Walker, Anne Waldman, et al

William Scott, an English professor from the University of Pittsburgh spending his sabbatical working at the OWS Library, in The Nation: “The People’s Library of Occupy Wall Street Lives On”

The People’s Library holds a press conference documenting the destruction of 3,000 books (including a book which Philip Levine, Poet Laureate of the United States, donated to the Library when he visited the day before the raid and Ariana Reines’ one-day-old Mercury) and demanding that the Bloomberg Administration replace them.

Luc Sante writes a Letter to the Public Editor of the New York Times (not published)

Robert Hass in the NYT: “Poet Bashing Police”

HTMLGIANT on UC-Davis:

• Roxane Gay, We Can’t Sit This One Out
• Jimmy Chen, Angles

Thanks to Gracie who commented on the last post: “Whiskey & Fox’s “Parks & Occupation” series can be found here: http://www.whiskeyandfox.org/” (I confess that I thought this was a Parks & Recreation parody, a response to Eric Tegethoff’s call, also in the comments, for OWS comedy)

Also in last week’s comments: Donald Breckenridge points us toward an excerpt from a new translation (by Donald Nicholson-Smith) of Raoul Vaneigen’s The Revolution Of Everyday Life in The Brooklyn Rail.

*since it now starts on Thursday

(via Damn the Caesars)

This will be a newspaper. Please leave leads for future editions in the comments.

• Frank Sherlock’s “Love Letter November 15″ (via Thom Donovan)
• Melissa Broder’s “I Don’t See No Riots Here”
• Susan Bernofsky’s “Who Has Rights?” & “PEN Deplores Occupy Wall Street Press Freedom Violations”
• Ian Dreiblatt’s “A Counterviction”
• Debbie Hu’s “To Heartbreak Hotel” (via Anne Boyer)
• Stephen Boyer and the OWS Librarians (Betsy Fagin, Filip Marinovich–see also his chapbook, added below–et al): OWS Poetry Anthology, Boyer on the (first) raid of the OWS Library, at Harriet, Corina Copp catalogs reactions to OWS Library seizure, this should be its own post, shout out to Adam Tobin’s Unnameable Books for helping OWS library re-up
• Feliz L. Molina’s “We Are Unstoppable, Another World is Possible” (via CA Conrad)
• Cami G’s “Why I got arrested at Oscar Grant Plaza” (via Sara Larsen)
• October at the Poetic Labor Project (w/ Lindsey Boldt, Jackqueline Frost, Bill Luoma, Melissa Mack, Sean Labrador y Manzano, Michael Nicoloff, Jill Richards, Wendy Trevino, Brian Whitener, Ida Yoshinaga, and Stephanie Young)
• Montevidayo: Dan Hoy’s “Crash the Heavens” (Part 1) (Part 2) (via Ariana Reines) + links to Steve Evans’ “Free (Market) Verse” (read the whole thing at Evans’ Third Factory) and Salon.com on the Croatoan Poetic Cell’s occupation of The Poetry Foundation (with a promise of a letter from Prynne by Kent Johnson in the comments)
• Aviezer Coppe’s A Fiery Flying Roule: to all the inhabitants of the earth; specially to the rich ones. 10. Lauren Berlant on the genre of the situation, Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s words spoken at Sproul Plaza 9. William Fuller, Jennifer Moxley, Emma Goldman 8. Keston Sutherland on The Clearance of Trafalgar Square, 26 March 2011 7. Walter Benn Michaels on unemployment (reprinted from The Brooklyn Rail) 6. Avital Ronnell, Rosa Luxemburg, Adam Phillips, Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover, Annie McClanahan 5. Alice Notley, Steven Zultanski, Letters from a student 4. Lauren Berlant’s 4 paragraphs on the popular and populism, new math from Catherine Wagner, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I’m probably at work.”–Brandon Brown 3. A Love Letter from Rosa Luxemburg, Susan Howe, Adam Weg’s On the People’s Microphone: A Letter from Chicago 2. Sean Bonney’s Letter on Riots and Doubt, Jackson Mac Low, David Graeber, Hannah Arendt 1. Gertrude Stein, Robert Duncan, Stanley Cavell, Eric White, oikos, kairos, megaphone, stethoscope (via Lewis)
• This just in: Catherine Lacey’s “On Place Memory, The Other Side and Yelp as a Forum for Political Debate”
• Breaking news from Ana Božičević: You can read Filip Marinovich’s EOAGH chapbook Wolfman Librarian and the Trembling Pair of Actor Hands online

The Dzanc Sessions, coordinated by Anna Leigh Clark, look pretty interesting. Session One classes begin the week of October 16. Each class spans eight or ten weeks. The content of the class is the same regardless of the time span; it is merely accelerated in the eight-week version. Eight-week Session One classes run through the week of December 4. Ten-week classes run through the week of December 18. Session Two will begin the first week of January 2012 with another eclectic line-up of workshop opportunities. The price for workshops is $325 Cost includes a three-month membership to the Dzanc Books eBook Club. (Or, if you do not have an e-reader, you can select a free copy of any print title from Dzanc Books.) The bulk of your registration fee supports the non-profit work of Dzanc Books. A portion of it supports the work of your instructor and the administration of the Dzanc Sessions.

Anna also has a great roundup of literary things here.

Don’t forget that the new Literary Magazine Club discussion begins on November 1. You can find details on ordering the magazine we’ll be reading, Beecher’s here.

Emily Books. What do you guys think of the concept? I’ve talked about how we’re inundated by books these days and it’s hard to know what to read. I’ve also talked about Vouched Books, where Chris Newgent personally vouches for the books he sells and is both able and willing to talk about any title he caries (from a limited, curated selection). That intimacy makes it easy to get on board with taking a chance on writers we’re not familiar with and I’ve enjoyed learning about books I wouldn’t ordinarily come across at his table. Emily Books seems to do something similar. They feature one title a month, selling only e-books. There’s also a book club… if you live in NYC. A bookstore that only sells one book at any given time is intriguing. This has kind of been done before but I’m interested in future selections and seeing if other people adopt similar approaches to bookselling.

Does Timothy McSweeney have a white savior complex? I found this essay really thought provoking and it introduces interesting questions about cultural representation and the consequences of getting “it” wrong or right (via Jackson Nieuwland).

The Occupy Wall Street library has a blog worth checking out (via Bookslut).

Writer’s Relief is having a contest to support literary magazines.

The new TV season is kind of disappointing, right? I haven’t seen anything yet that I must watch.

The last two books I enjoyed: Blueprints for Building Better Girls by Elissa Schappell (not perfect but very immersive and more complex than I initially realized) and Reality Bites Back by Jennifer Pozner (very incisive). Don’t read that latter book unless you want your enjoyment of reality television to be ruined forever (I kid, mostly).

There is an encyclopedia of science fiction. I wonder what an encyclopedia of literary fiction would look like. Divorce: In literary parlance, the dissolution of a marriage as a narrative catalyst to explain character motivations such as drinking, promiscuity, bitterness, and tear-stained arguments. See also: the children.

Anna Clark offers a reading list for narrative nonfiction. Along those lines, longform nonfiction might be enjoying a surge in popularity.

At The New Republic, Ruth Franklin talks about writing about captivity.

Did you know Colson Whitehead is writing about The World Series of Poker for Grantland?

The Atlantic’s Fiction 2011 issue is now online.

More reading: Sarah Malone at the Good Men Project and Gabe Durham at Route 9.

By the way, you can take a free online class in artificial intelligence at Stanford this fall.