The Wednesday Westie

Let-sleeping-dogs-lie-on-a-rainy-day edition.

Blue Monday (Business Edition)

I’m getting ready to open a bookstore later this month, and along with the minutiae of daily operations — where to get credit-card processing, what kind of coffee-makers to get, LLC or INC — there is one overwhelmingly crucial matter: what should be the first song I play on the sound system? Since irony and black humor are my default setting, my first thought was “Busted” by Ray Charles.

On the other hand, as a child of the Seventies I retain a great deal of fondness for Bachman-Turner Overdrive and its chunka-chunka meatball anthem “Takin’ Care of Business.”

Interesting to think that Neil Young cites Randy Bachman as an early role model for his guitar playing.

Speaking of the Seventies, this Pink Floyd number comes to mind:

Heard it before? Kind of an obscure tune, I know.

Actually, I’m pretty sure the first song will be “Step Right Up” by Tom Waits. When it comes to Waits I tend to prefer the weirder, more recent stuff, but I still love this cut off his fourth record, Small Change:

“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.” The guy has so many great lines, Bartlett’s should print a special Tom Waits edition.

Chiefly, I hope to avoid ever having to play this song:

Friday finds

A fascinating and rather spooky exploration of Chairman Mao’s underground city: a network of tunnels built beneath Beijing in 1969 to protect the city’s inhabitants from the ravages of nuclear war. The tunnels, which were never used and are unknown to most Beijing residents, are now essentially rat-infested sewers, but portions are inhabited — a testament to the city’s growing housing problem.

A hilarious look ahead to the fourth and final Twilight movie.

A scathing review of Cornel West’s new memoir.

Hip-hop star 50 Cent offers four rules of fan engagement.

The new issue of The Biographer’s Craft is here.

Farewell, autumn

What with the rain, wind, and recent cold snap, this tree is now bare. But two weeks ago, it looked like this.

The Wednesday Westie

Bennie, a frequent visitor here at Villa Villekulla, takes a well-earned rest after a hard day on squirrel-patrol duty.

Repent, Harlequin!

Vanity publishing houses are nothing new, but I was pretty severely taken aback by a vanity operation called Harlequin Horizons that generously offers romance writers a chance to pay to get their manuscripts published in exchange for a vague possibility of the vanity book getting picked up for the mainline Harlequin imprint if its sales are good.

Even if you’re not big on romance novels, you have to recognize the outrageousness of a legitimate publisher resorting to such a scam, which generated so much criticism that Harlequin renamed the scam-imprint Dellarte Press to protect the credibility of its mainline romance novels. Self-publishing is one thing, but this kind of “assisted self publishing” is quite another, and I can only applaud the writers’ organizations that raised hell over it.

If I were a Harlequin author, or an agent with Harlequin authors in my clientele, I’m not sure what would would scare me most: that Harlequin would so carelessly endanger its brand credibility, or that the publishing house executives appear genuinely surprised by the uproar. Either way, it’s a safe bet that a lot of publishing contracts have been quietly slipped out of the file cabinets for some close scrutiny.