"Of course," says the Times Online.

Billions of blue blistering barnacles, isn't it staring us in the face? Sometimes a thing's so obvious it's hard to see where the debate could start. What debate can there be when the evidence is so overwhelmingly one-way? A callow, androgynous blonde-quiffed youth in funny trousers and a scarf moving into the country mansion of his best friend, a middle-aged sailor? A sweet-faced lad devoted to a fluffy white toy terrier, whose other closest pals are an inseparable couple of detectives in bowler hats, and whose only serious female friend is an opera diva...

. . . And you're telling me Tintin isn't gay?

Be warned: Parts of the article have that weird, high-spirited British stereotyping of gay men that goes on over there: "His Belgian creator, Hergé, whose only and enigmatic reference to Tintin's origins was to describe him as having recently come out of the Boy Scouts." But it's an important point, since we're on the verge of having a (completely unnecessary, in my opinion) Tintin movie. Hopefully, they won't try to wedge a female love interest in there, just to appeal to some fictional publicist-invented demographic of women who won't go to movies unless there's kissin' and woo-pitchin' wedged in there somewhere. It's probably better to leave Tintin without any kind of romance, but a little bit of sassy innuendo never hurt anyone.

Thanks to our marvelous tech people, I have zippy internet again right here at my desk in the office. It's the early 2000s all over again! Let's celebrate by looking at who's reading tonight, shall we?

Michelle Kleisath reads at University Book Store tonight from Heavy Earth, Golden Sky: Tibetan Women Speak, a collection of life stories written by Tibetan women. It is probably inspiring, as these sorts of books usually are.

Up at Third Place Books, Sondra Kornblatt reads from Better Brain at Any Age, which is about how to improve your brain without resorting to risky scientific efforts like cloning or eating the brains of disinterred corpses down at the local graveyard.

And at Elliott Bay Book Company, Felicia Gonzalez, Susan Meyers, and Ghida Sinno, three authors who have worked with (and presumably stayed at) the female writers colony Hedgebrook, will read from new work.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.

The New York Times is reporting that Neale Donald Walsch, the author of the Conversations With God series of books, plagiarized a story by Candy Chand that appeared in many different places, including a Chicken Soup for the Soul book.

During a dress rehearsal, he wrote, a group of children spelled out the title of a song, “Christmas Love,” with each child holding up a letter. One girl held the “m” upside down, so that it appeared as a “w,” and it looked as if the group was spelling “Christ Was Love.” It was a heartwarming Christmas story from a writer known for his spiritual teachings.

Except it never happened — to him.

Ms. Chand said she originally wrote the piece about her son, Nicholas, and his kindergarten winter pageant and published it in Clarity in 1999. In his Dec. 28 blog posting, Mr. Walsch, who also has a son named Nicholas, said it happened at his son’s pageant 20 years ago.

Walsch said he's considering leaving Christian website Beliefnet. Many of the The New Agey Christians on Walsch's blog are ready to forgive and forget.

Wow! I mean wow!

Neale, you are so awesome and so real.

I don't see the big deal in what happened, and I mean no disrespect to Ms. Chand. Stuff like that happens to me, and all of us, all the time.

I have learned and been able to stretch my spirit so much with this blog.

Well , I for one am aghast....Neale, is this a rouse?...

If you have 9 or 10 children, how do you know it didn't happen?...maybe the 2 of you were at the same children's concert. No, I don't think Chand should be offended at all. Isn't that what the cosmic consciousness is all about? Minds and thoughts merging, even if it is a true story for one person, are we betting the odds that it could not have happened to thousands?.....geesh come on..!

I think there is something more behind this.

Neale, Someone once said,"I'm all in,I'm totally committed here,Even if the going gets rough,Especially then." Aging puts wrinkles on your face,Quitting puts wrinkles on your SOUL. YOU will not have to think but for a second as to why YOU received THIS message today. LOVE Your Friend, SEAN

And my favorite: Frankenstein's monster forgiving its creator:

Neale, I believe this is a beautiful story of creation. You've experienced Candy's story - twice - then and now! I don't think you stole it...it is a beautiful story of oneness! Empathy somehow. Am I going too far?

You two should unite and create something new...maybe a page that contains something like experienced stories. As you for instance being that girl in a story right now. And at the end everyone astonished! It would be a beautiful prove of oneness or love from all the people of the world!

What do you say?

Love,
Teja

This guest blogger on Maud says that regional writers suffer the most of all when books sections in alt-weeklies close down.

Last week the big news coming out of Cooper Square was that the once-venerable Village Voice had let go yet another of its legendary contributors, Nat Hentoff. But the ever-shrinking coffers of its parent company, Village Voice Media Holdings, also claimed a victim far away from downtown Manhattan: the book section at the Nashville Scene.

The Scene’s books section was one of the best in the South, willing to take risks on new reviewers and little-known books — in 2002, Margaret Renkl, the Scene’s literary editor, gave me my first freelance gig. The section lasted a long time, given the rate at which regional outlets for literature and serious criticism are rapidly dying off: Last year the Atlanta Journal-Constitution cut its full-time book editor, Teresa Weaver, and it seems every year brings a new, potentially fatal challenge to the Oxford American, now a quarterly run under the stewardship of the University of Central Arkansas.

My first thought, of course, is that I'm really glad I don't work for VVM. But I'm of two minds about regional book reporting. Two or three times a week, I'll get a book-shaped envelope in the mail that is stamped, in giant letters, right above the address: "LOCAL AUTHOR." And almost invariably, that book is utter crap. I think regional criticism is a dangerous thing: I don't think anyone walks into a bookstore, just looks at the Northwest section, and then leaves.

One of my favorite things about having a books section is that you can talk about just about everything, from politics to philosophy to the recipes of rock stars to booklets sold in the aisles of grocery stores. Some weeks, it's the national affairs desk. other weeks, it's about local poetry, or a Seattle readings series. Which is not to say that I think you should be able to read The Stranger's books section and not tell what city it's published in. One of the most important parts of the books section is the calendar with all the dozens of events happening in bookstores and libraries all over this city. And many of our national affairs books features are timed to local readings. But I do think that regional affairs should not get special treatment simply because they're regional. I've read too many lame interviews with authors of badly drawn kid's books about geoducks (or what the fuck ever) to say that local coverage is a purely good thing. So I guess what I'm saying is that good coverage of good local books is a welcome thing. If the Scene really provided that, I'm sad that it's gone, too.

Jacket Copy has a great story about how how government cutbacks might not be the end for the Providence Public Library System:

Rhode Island, which tied Michigan for the nation's highest unemployment rate in November, is facing state and municipal budget cutbacks. The Providence Public Library, a private nonprofit that has run the city library for 100 years, has proposed leaving open its central branch while closing five of its nine local branches.

Not so fast, a group said in a news conference Monday. Give them to us.

It looks like the The Providence Community Library, "a newly formed nonpfrofit of library and community leaders," is going to get the go-ahead to take over the lesser branches. This could turn into something that other communities will need to pay attention to as budgets get cut everywhere.

So the internet is fucked for a few people at the office, and has been all day. At first, this was delightful: I cleaned my desk and rearranged some of my books. But I went out for lunch and come back and it's still fucked and so here I am at the stately Constant home (a.k.a. Casa del Fuck), doing Reading Tonight extremely late for the first time in the year I've had this job. Apologies.

First and foremost, there is the kickoff event of Comixstravaganza at the Ballard branch of the Seattle Public Library. It's at 6:30 pm. David Lasky, who I love, will give a slide show presentation of comics artists who are here in the Pacific Northwest. Comixstravaganza is a monthlong celebration of comic books by the SPL, and you should take a look at the whole schedule here. There are lots of make-your-own-comic workshops featuring artists like Lasky and Greg Stump, who you may be familiar with. There are events for adults and kids. You should go to at least one.

However, there is also a very interesting-looking poetry reading up in Wallingford: Some of the Subtext folk are presenting something called The Ur Sonata, in which an actress and a visual artist come together to present "Kurt Schwitters' epic Dada sound poem, the Ur Sonata." There is much, much more information about the Ur Sonata here, and it's fascinating, challenging stuff.

Lastly (and, I hate to say, leastly) Thomas Aslin and Laurie Blauner read at Elliott Bay Book Company tonight, reading from their new books. A Moon Over Wings is a collection of poems about family. Wrong is a collection of poems about heartbreak. Together, that just about does it.

For more information and upcoming readings, please consult the readings calendar.

The kind of laughter I got from watching this report a moment ago...
...was identical with a much older laughter I got from reading Landolfi's novella "The Two Old Maids."

The Two Old Maids is a story about two aging sisters who live in shabby seclusion with their ancient housekeeper and a beloved pet—a mettlesome monkey named Tombo, who, "though a eunuch, was, after all, the male of the house." One day the Mother Superior of the neighboring convent brings alarming news: Tombo has been seen stealing into the chapel at night where he ate the consecrated hosts, tried to say Mass, and even urinated on the altar. It is clear to one sister that he must die.

American monkids are descendants of Tombo.

Slog Tipper Tim points out this video:

It's really beautiful. Thank you, Tim.

In yesterday's Book Club of the Damned post, I mocked Christian horror author Travis Thrasher for changing tenses seemingly without explanation in his Shining knock-off Isolation.

Thrasher wrote back in the comments thread:

So hey, Paul. I won't comment on your criticism—everybody has an opinion. But I did deliberately go from past to present tense in the book. I'm honored to be chosen and lambasted.

If Mr. Thrasher is reading this via Google Alert: Firstly, thanks for being a good sport. Secondly, please send me an e-mail. I'd like to find out why you changed tense, because I went back and re-read parts of Isolation last night after I read your comment, and even knowing that you did it on purpose, it still seems like a mistake.

In other Book Club of the Damned news:The lady behind Bookshelves of Doom is going to read 11 V.C. Andrews novels in 2009 as part of this challenge:

Cheers to you, BoD lady. You're a braver blogger than I.

We have a UW creative writing class group reading at the Hugo House and much more tonight.

At Seattle Mystery Bookshop, Jayne Ann Krentz, who has written like a billion cheesy mysteries, reads from Running Hot, in which a man reluctantly finds himself in the position of being a bodyguard to an aura-reading librarian who is key to a murder case. That actually sounds kind of fun.

At University Book Store, Jay Spenser reads from The Airplane: How Ideas Gave Us Wings. He has read in many other Seattle bookstores before Christmas, and he will read at other Seattle bookstores next week. Some local authors take this blunderbuss approach, getting booked everywhere. I wonder if it really results in more book sales?

Up in the U Village Barnes & Noble, Scott Sigler reads from and signs Contagious, about average Americans join forces to fight a horrific pathogenic foe. God bless America!

And at Elliott Bay Book Company, Nami Mun reads from her debut novel, Miles from Nowhere. This is a novel about a girl who moves from Korea to New York and falls into a life of heroin addiction and prostitution, as all New York girls do. I have gotten many e-mails from friends and fans of Mun over the last week telling me I should review this book for the reading. Unfortunately, those e-mails came far too late for me to actually read the book in time to review it for the reading. Also, I don't have a copy of the book, which is a bit of a problem with reviewing the book, too. Regardless, this is clearly the reading of the night. The book looks really interesting.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.

On New Year's Day, Popeye became a public domain character in the European Union.

Copyright laws in the European Union have not seen the massive (and usually corporately-fueled) revisions those in the United States have, meaning that the rights of the creator to their property/character are protected for 70 years after their death. Elzie Segar, who created Popeye, died in 1938, according to The Telegraph. Segar's relatively early death at age 43, allows Popeye's copyright to be tested before his more famous contemporaries.

...anyone can use the character of Popeye in new comics, clothing, and other media without the need to seek authorization from the Popeye rights holders (King Features) or pay royalties for the use. As always, it’s a fine line — the Segar drawings themselves are out of copyright, so derivative work can use and be based on them, but not on later material that was built upon Segar’s material. Additionally, the expiration only covers the copyright, not the trademark.

American copyright laws are ridiculous, and getting worse by the decade. I can't wait to see what happens when Walt Disney's 70 years are up in 2036 and everybody in the EU is making Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck stuff. The internet—or whatever we have in 2036—means that all that stuff will be readily available in the United States.

Here's a list of people whose work is now open use in certain countries this year. In Canada, it appears that Zorro is now in the public domain, and in Europe, Clarence Darrow and the writer of the lyrics to "Hava Nagila" have both passed the 70 year mark.

Slog tipper Maggie directs us to NPR, which has an interview with Victoria Blake, the publisher of Underland Press, which is publishing a web novel.

While she was working as an editor at Dark Horse Comics, Victoria Blake used breaks from work to surf the Web. "I noticed that I was using my random 10 minutes in between tasks to go to gawker.com, which is my favorite media gossip site," she says. "I realized that if I provided prose — fiction — that I would want to read, myself ... that I would use those 10 minutes to read prose, not gossip."

They're calling them "wovels," which to me sounds like a derogatory slang term for a Transylvanian prostitute, but is actually a name for The World's Safest Snow Shovel™. The reader can also decide which way the plots go. If Underland provided an RSS feed for their wovels, I'd love to follow them. Unfortunately, the NPR story also says there will be new installments every Monday, but the last installment of the current wovel was on December 5th. If you're gonna go serial, you've gotta keep up the schedule.

(Here's last week's Book Club of the Damned entry, outlining the awfulness of the first half of Travis Thrasher's Christian horror novel Isolation.)

Is the second half of Isolation better than the first?
No.

Is there any redeeming value to the second half of the book?
At least Thrasher admits he's basically ripped off the plot from Stephen King. At one point, the hero, who has already tossed out the previous owner's Playboy collection, ruminates on the horrors that are unfolding:

And that was before—before everything started happening.

Before this house turned into The Amityville Horror, he thought. Or The Shining. All I need to do is get an ax and start wielding it around like Jack Nicholson. The image wasn't amusing.

And then in the acknowledgments, Thrasher steps from behind the curtain:

And finally, a big thanks to an author who has influenced my writing more than any other—Stephen King. During those months of living on top of that mountain and discovering I was a writer, I read a lot of your stories. Thanks for sleepless nights and for helping inspire my love of writing.

What happens to the plot?
Well, the heroes, who were missionaries, start to realize that the house they're staying in is evil:

It was one thing to see Satan's power over a small village in the middle of Papua New Guinea, but this was a hilltop in North Carolina, a state where churches were plentiful and people didn't hesitate to say they believed in God.

And then the wife's brother, Paul, comes to visit. Paul is an unbeliever. So naturally HE TURNS OUT TO BE A SERIAL KILLER. (Remember that Paul and the wife's parents were Satanists who bathed their children in tubsful of blood.) Paul throws the dad off a cliff. He kidnaps the son and tries to get him to renounce God. That doesn't work, and so he kills the boy. Then he becomes a primary narrator, as you can tell from the awful italicized passages that are obviously the voice of madness because it lacks things like punctuation:

That's right if you can't kill them then you burn it you burn this house and the rest and you can burn yourself it doesn't matter it's good to feel something and you can burn it all you can burn all of this to the ground

The tense switches to present tense for a chapter or two, and then back to past tense. I don't think that's supposed to be madness, I think it's just a mistake that never got fixed.

Wow, but the son dies? That's heavy for a Christian horror novel.
Nope. God brings the boy back to life.

Wait, what?
You can tell it's God because he talks in ALL CAPS and tells the boy he has a lot of work to do and a long life to live. He saves the dad from dying when he's tossed off the cliff, too. And that's the biggest problem here: You know that God is going to resolve everything, and so there's no tension at all. The two other people who live in the house die and aren't brought back to life because they're extras, but because our main characters are the main characters, God cares implicitly about them and will come down to Earth to help the father beat his brother-in-law to death with a blunt object. It's almost literally a deus ex machina. It's awful.

So do you recommend this book to anyone?
No. It's awful.

Not even for laughs?
No. It's not funny. It's scary the way things like destroying books for their exotic-ness are celebrated. The way editorial comments like "Pictures of men and women—vile, disgusting pictures posing as art" are thrown about the novel, you realize that the author is exactly the kind of Christian who gives all Christians a bad name.

You're sure it's not funny even a little—
No.

(Sigh.) So what next for Book Club of the Damned?
I've got an idea. A Seattle used bookseller held this book for me simply because it looked so atrocious. I'll probably have it up on Slog by the end of this month.

Now that Laura Bush has sold her memoirs to Scribners (for maybe close to 10 million dollars, and with assurances that almost nothing interesting will be included), this call for publishers to ignore Bush memoirs seems sad and quaint. Expecting publishers to not pay profound amounts of cash to the Bush Administration for their books is useless; we just have to hope that people will ignore the books once they've been published.

Borders CEO George Jones has been replaced in what this publisher is calling a coup.

The press release covers all the upper management changes and then tucks the company's awful financial Christmas news at the end:

Borders Group also released its sales results for the nine-week holiday period ended Jan. 3, 2009. Total consolidated sales were $868.8 million, an 11.7% decline compared to the same period last year. Within the Borders superstore segment, total sales for the holiday period were $652.6 million, which is a 13.6% decrease compared to 2007. Comparable store sales at Borders superstores declined by 14.4% compared to the same period a year ago. On a same-store sales basis, the book category at Borders declined by 11.0% for the period. Borders.com sales for the nine-week holiday period were $20.3 million. Overall, holiday sales started slow and improved during the latter part of the season.

Within the Waldenbooks Specialty Retail segment, total sales for the holiday period were $161.7 million, a 16.4% decrease compared to the same period one year ago. Comparable store sales for Waldenbooks declined by 8.0% compared to holiday 2007.

So long, George Jones.

It's the first real reading of 2009 tonight!

Mo Yan ("The wild man of Chinese fiction") appears at the Seattle Public Library's Central Branch tonight, on his first tour of the US, with his new novel, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. It's a novel that satirizes Chairman Mao's policy and legacy. Mo Yan has written other novels, including the great Big Breasts & Wide Hips, which is readily available in paperback if you want to give him a shot. This will be a bilingual reading. How is a Chinese novelist able to satirize China and stay a Chinese novelist? "Mo Yan" is a pseudonym, roughly translated to "Don't Speak." Which gets this stuck in my head:

Also, Melissa Rossi reads at Town Hall from What Every American Should Know About the Middle East. Rossi is a former Seattle Weekly writer, but she wrote for the Weekly back in the early 90s, so this book might be all right.

There are also two open mics.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.

There are no readings today, besides one lonely open mic. Instead, you should read "The Curse of Yig," a short story by H.P. Lovecraft.

Yig was a great god. He was bad medicine. He did not forget things. In the autumn his children were hungry and wild, and Yig was hungry and wild, too. All the tribes made medicine against Yig when the corn harvest came. They gave him some corn, and danced in proper regalia to the sound of whistle, rattle, and drum.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.

There's a reading tonight! It's been so long due to this Christmas-inspired readings break, I barely know what to say or do.

Let's see—*ahem*—Michael Schein reads at Third Place Books tonight from Just Deceits, a historical mystery. I was hoping it was about time-traveling lawyers, but it's not. Also, there's a discussion up at the Greenlake branch of the Seattle Public Library titled "Poetry, Prose or Public Issue." The discussion is sponsored by the folks at Poets West.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.

The mystery novelist (whose Parker novels I have recently written about on Slog) died at the very end of 2008.

You can't really go wrong with a Westlake novel, especially if it's one of the Parker series written under the pseudonym Richard Stark. I suggest hitting up a used bookstore tonight and spending a little bit of your weekend with one of his books. I'm glad he lived to see his work appreciated in a broader context than 'dime store thriller.'

As you know, we've started a weekly poetry feature here on Slog. Last week's poet was Nico Vassilakis. For this week's poet, Nico has chosen Crystal Curry.

His reasons for choosing Curry are as follows:

when a behoover steps up to the dais there are dense shifts. and there are sinister schemas that curtail. the cocktail of dactylic tetrameter up on its upper bleacher. a distinct twang assault. humming her logic, her taunt of - poetry should do nothing. this is crystal curry, a found appetizer, drifting through sheets of emulsified paper.

seattle poetry would do well to deny its unauthentic past and create a new vocabulary of itself.

bring it on, bring it here. i double dare you.

And she has. Curry's most recent book is titled Logotherapy Pant, and you can read more about it here. She also has poems here, here, and 5 more here. She's a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop.

Here is Crystal Curry's poem:

Many thanks to (the delightfully named) Crystal Curry. Tune in next Friday at noon to see who she has chosen to be the next link in the Seattle Poetry Chain.

From the preface:

Death, as we may call that unreality, is the most terrible thing, and to keep and hold fast what is dead demands the greatest force of all. Beauty, powerless and helpless, hates understanding, because the latter exacts from it what it cannot perform.

Proof of beauty's hate can be found here:

There are no readings tonight.

Instead, you should read A Tale of a Tub, by Jonathan Swift. Swift was awesome, and Gulliver's Travels, even without the proper historical perspective, is hilarious.

Tub is about three brothers, each representing a different type of Christianity. It goes on from there.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.

A couple days ago, we received a copy of Firmin, a novel by Sam Savage in the mail. I read Firmin a few years back, and I liked it okay. It's about a rat who lives in a bookstores in Boston's Scollay Square district. The rat learns how to read.

It's a charming enough fable, and the writing about the seedy neighborhood known as Scollay Square, which was notoriously torn down to make room for Boston's hideous Government Center complex, is beautiful. But the marketers and designers of this book fucked up in a huge way. Here's the book:

That's not just part of the illustration: They have die-cut the book to make it look and feel as though a giant rat has nibbled on the side of the book. This is annoying enough, but the rat-hole is exactly where one's thumbs go when you're holding the book, meaning that if you try to hold it the traditional way, your thumbs wind up covering up text of the book when you're trying to read it. This is one of the dumbest book designs I've ever seen. Dear publishers: Next time, if you must die-cut a book for the sake of a little bit of browsing attention, at least cut the hole out of the top of the book, where it's less likely to annoy readers.

Luckily, the original edition of Firmin is available, in hardcover and hopefully without any rat bites, at many used bookstores around town.