The William Blake oak being planted on Peckham Rye

There's more. Hartley didn't just head down to the garden centre and pick out any old tree: rather, he went off and found one that was about to fall victim to coastal erosion. Take a look at his blog for a heartwarming photo-story of the rescue operation, complete with handy blue arrows and dramatic captions ("the eroding margins of England"; "Doomed oak").



William Blake oak being planted on Peckham Rye


Here's a cheering thing, passed on to me by the excellent Ben Myers. The latest work from an artist by the name of John Hartley is an oak sapling on Peckham Rye, planted this weekend in honour of William Blake, who claimed to have seen an oak "filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars" when he visited the place at the age of nine.

The whole thing was undertaken with the support of the Blake Society and the Forestry Commission; the tree was planted on Sunday by Linda Foster of Peckham Library; and another local, Carl Mesner Lyons, took copious pictures of the event, which you can look at here. All in all, a good day's work.

Twitter e scrittori

Oggi, 19 settembre, un altro TT letterario sbanca la classifica arrivando in poche ore al terzo posto e giocandosi la posizione addirittura con #sangennaro. Si tratta di calvino, un’hashtag ovviamente dedicata al grande Italo Calvino, strappatoci prematuramente da un ictus il 19 settembre del 1985. 26 anni dopo quel giorno i lettori appassionati di quello che molto probabilmente per i posteri sarà l’icona del Novecento italiano lo stanno ricordando al ritmo di due tweet al minuto a colpi di citazioni o di dichiarazioni di stima. L’inferno dei viventi non è qualcosa che sarà; se ce n’è uno, è quello che è già qui, l’inferno che abitiamo tutti i giorni, che formiamo stando insieme.

Due modi ci sono per non soffrirne. Il primo riesce facile a molti: accettare l’inferno e diventarne parte fino al punto di non vederlo più. Il secondo è rischioso ed esige attenzione e apprendimento continui: cercare e saper riconoscere chi e cosa, in mezzo all’inferno, non è inferno, e farlo durare, e dargli spazio.Per gli utenti navigati di twitter è semplicemente TT. E’ il Trend Topic, la classifica dei dieci argomenti più discussi su twitter, una classifica che oggi, per la seconda volta in una settimana, vede tra i primi tre topics un omaggio letterario.

"There's something to be said for what might be called the Woody Allen Method: Good times, bad times, you keep making art. Many of your productions will hit; some will miss; some will miss by a lot. But there's no time for the flatulent gas of pretension to seep into your construction's sheetrock. This is how Trollope, Balzac and Dickens worked. Each would have agreed with Gore Vidal, who once declared of those who moan about writer's block: "You're not meant to be doing this. Plenty more where you came from." Said him.

Hawaii Governor Neil Maui Store

To be honest, I'm personally biased on this subject. As a newly minted fiction writer (my Maui novel Small Island is now available in trade paperback form at Amazon.com for the low, low price of $14.95!) I'm very sensitive to any talk about how Americans just don't read very much anymore. The other day I walked by Borders Express in the Queen Kaahumanu Center and actually shuddered when I saw the now-shuttered bookstore—the last such Maui store dedicated to the selling of books left south of Lahaina.For those of you reading this online, either at Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie And Fitch Outlet or our news blog Mauifeed, I would just like to say thanks. Seriously, thank you. There is a lot online competing for your attention, and it's heartening to us here at the paper that you would take time to read us. I mention this because on Sept. 12 Nielsen—yes, the media analysis firm that gave us television ratings—released their State of the Media: The Social Media Report. Just 12 pages and packed with colorful infographs, it's nonetheless a sobering look at what people are doing online.

"Social networks and blogs continue to dominate Americans' time online, now accounting for nearly a quarter of total time spent on the Internet," states the report. "Americans spend more time on Facebook than they do on any other U.S. website."Social networks and blogs dwarf everything else online—including porn. According to the report, 23 percent of Americans' time online is spent at Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, MySpace and a host of other sites (exactly how much time is spent surfing Internet porn isn't made explicit in the report: "adult" matters fall into 35 percent that constitutes "other" on the breakdown of Internet time).
　　
As for "current events and global news"—you know, how people like me make a living—that takes up a mere 2.6 percent of Internet users' time. Meaning that if a person spends, say, five hours online in a day, a bit less than eight minutes of that time went to reading news.And who knows how much time is spent reading books online. Like porn, books fall into "other" on the time breakdown. Whereas porn is one of the more popular "other" Internet activities (just behind something called "multi-category entertainment"), books fall near the middle of the list, between "multi-category travel" and "multi-category home & fashion."
　　
Speaking of books, on Sunday, Sept. 11, The Maui News ran a front page story on that great disaster of our time: the publication of Maggie Goes on a Diet. I am—of course—being satirical: though the controversy over the book is now very much national news, Maggie is actually just a gentle tale (Self-published! By a guy in Paia!) of a girl who learns to love herself through the act of living healthy. Of course people are going to misconstrue it as an abomination, a cruel, heartless knife in the heart of all things good and God-fearing and American.I mean, you could just read the book and find out for yourself that it shows kids the value of hope and self-esteem, but where's the fun in that? It's much easier to go online and be a troll and send one of the thousand mostly negative emails author Paul Kramer said he's received. Because that's apparently what everyone's doing online these days.
　　

Nightshade - lettrici americane di letteratura soprannaturale YA

Nightshade, a detta delle lettrici americane di letteratura soprannaturale YA, si distacca dalla media dei romanzi appartenenti al genere per ricchezza e originalità del world-building e della mitologia e per complessità della storia. Esso racconta, con un gran bel ritmo narrativo, la storia della determinata diciassettenne Calla Tor, un lupo mannaro Alpha (aspetto assai raro nei personaggi femminili paranormal romance). Calla appartiene al branco Nightshade, composto, come il vicino, non da semplici lupi mannari, ma da tostissimi guardiani che hanno il compito di proteggere i misteriosi maghi “buoni” - che governano i mannari -, dai maghi “cattivi” (Keepers e Searcherers in inglese). Ogni guardiano deve conformarsi al proprio ruolo e rispettare precise regole, alcune delle quali a base di sangue.

Nightshade, di Andrea Cremer, è il primo volume di una serie paranormal romance YA in corso di pubblicazione in 25 Paesi e l’apprezzato romanzo d’esordio dell’autrice statunitense.

Calla “kick-ass” Tor è destinata, sin dalla nascita, a Ren Laroche, affascinante lupo-guardiano di un altro branco. I due ragazzi si uniranno al loro diciottesimo compleanno e creeranno un terzo branco locale. Così fu deciso dai maghi a suo tempo e così sarà. Ma un giorno la ragazza s’imbatte in un umano, Shay Doran, nuovo della città e della scuola che frequenta, e qualcosa di assolutamente imprevisto e inaccettabile scatta (d’altronde gli ormoni adolescenziali…). Di lì a poco nascerà un triangolo amoroso che, a differenza dei molti di cui abbiamo letto, sarà ben costruito e ricco di “vibrazioni”. Attraverso Shay - che, si scoprirà, non è un ragazzo qualsiasi (i maghi “cattivi”, infatti, cercheranno di rapirlo) - la ragazza comincerà a capire che qualcosa, nel tipo di vita imposto dai maghi, davvero non va.

50 Cent, multimillion-selling rapper

Either way, 50 Cent might take comfort from the fact that he's not alone. Just last week – on this very blog, ladies and gentleman – our own John Dugdale brought the current rash of recycled titles to our attention. Apparently they're all doing it: Richard Holmes, Jeremy Paxman, the lot. As John says, "the sheer number of titles now layered in the collective memory makes novelty ever harder". Perhaps Mr Achebe might therefore be a little more forgiving next time.This week saw the conclusion of what it pleases me to term an unexpected title-fight.

In the red corner: 50 Cent, multimillion-selling rapper, actor, and entrepreneur. In the blue corner: Chinua Achebe, Nigerian novelist, poet and critic, widely hailed as the father of modern African literature. 50 Cent spent much of the last year making a film about an American football player diagnosed with cancer, entitled Things Fall Apart. At least it was – until Achebe got wind of it and instructed his legal team to contest it. According to Nigerian news website Naijan.com, 50 Cent offered Achebe $1m for the right to use the title, only to have his offer firmly declined. "The novel ... was produced in 1958 (17 years before rapper 50 Cent was born)," a spokesperson said. "[It is] listed as the most-read book in modern African literature, and won't be sold for even $1bn". K.O.!

It's a neat story, but in the end, I confess, I can't help feeling Mr Cent has been a little hard done by. Achebe, after all, lifted the phrase from the astonishing opening stanza of WB Yeats' evisceration of the post-first world war socio-political landscape, The Second Coming ("Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned ..." ). It seems hawkish, at best, to hound someone else for using a phrase you yourself borrowed (going back further, as one smart cookie on Facebook pointed out, "Come to think of it, did Yeats have to pay Jesus for use of the phrase "The Second Coming"?)