The American textbook publisher will be bought by Ireland’s Riverdeep Holdings, an educational software firm that sells such well-known series as Reader Rabbit and Oregon Trail.

There is a lot of very bad writing advice out there. The best piece that I have received is to write two pages a day, no matter what happens. That advice has been repeated so often that its origins are misty and trotting it out in writing circles seems tired. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Jay Parini explains what is so magical about that particular quota. It also has some tidbits on elder statesman Updike’s writing habits.

The Poets and Writers Speakeasy (registration required) has an interesting and up-to-date thread on choosing an MFA program.

The Washington Post is running a review of I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg.

The Los Angeles Times has an article on Pablo Fenjves, O. J. Simpson’s ghostwriter.

The Guardian is hosting an interview with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance author Robert Pirsig, who claims that the interview will be his last.

In an article on the aftermath of the cancellation of O. J. Simpson’s book, the Associated Press (by way of the New York Times) reveals that Simpson was well aware of the tasteless nature of the work and that his only motivation for participating was grabbing some of that good “blood money” (for his children, you see).

The National Archives, that is. National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation has an interview with the editors of Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment. The editors, while doing research, were surprised that these photographs, commissioned by the government of the United States and long available in the Archives, had never been presented in a book.

As a New York Times article on the cancellation of O. J. Simpson’s “confession” states:

The rights to the book could still be sold to another publisher, said the News Corporation executive involved in the negotiations.

There is precedent for a recalled book to be sold to another publisher and then to the public. In 1990, Vintage Books, a division of Random House, bought the rights to “American Psycho,” a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, after the original publisher, Simon & Schuster, withdrew from publishing it because of the novel’s graphically violent content.

As flawed as that reference is, I think it quite wise to take the position of the cynic regarding the burial of this book.

The Globe and Mail is carrying a very grim article about the number of sales required for a book of poetry to be considered a runaway success.

Sometimes astronomers lament that the public simply cannot understand their work because the immensity of the numbers involved is difficult for the human mind to fully grasp; those who track the sales of books of poetry shuffle on in their labor gloriously free of this burden.

We all know that there are far superior (and far more interesting) measures of success for a work of art than the scale on which it moves around monetary units.

The Washington Post is running a review of Against the Day, reclusive author Thomas Pynchon’s new novel.

National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition has an interview with Kate Atkinson, the most interesting portion of which covers her becoming a novelist later in life.

Recommended with reservations.

Paul Auster is at it again, writing about writing. The Times Literary Supplement has a review of Travels in the Scriptorium.

Fiction that calls attention to its own artifice, critiquing its own methods as it moves along, congratulating itself on its own success, always risks accusations of narcissism and self-indulgence.

Indeed it does, and Auster remains more susceptible to these accusations than most.

The New York Times has a story about O. J. Simpson’s forthcoming book (ghost written, no doubt), which is tentatively titled If I Did It, Here’s How It Happened. My fervent wish is that people will know better than to buy into such a calculated cash grab, but I am prepared to be disappointed on that count. The sleazy tell-all has long been a trash publishing staple. This level of crass exploitation is something new, however, and hopefully does not signal a trend.

I have been well aware for some time that the sections of newspapers devoted to the arts (and especially to fiction) have been shrinking. Somehow I missed September’s poignant farewell from critic Jerome Weeks, who chose to accept a buyout from The Dallas Morning News rather than work in an arts section cut to the bone.

An AP article (by way of CNN) again airs Bill Gates’s views on education.

[Gates] spoke of some creative school programs–particularly charter schools run by private companies–that should be a model for innovation in the nation’s schools.

Yes, just as in the past his primary objection to American education is that it is more than a corporate training ground.

After reading a few lackluster descriptions of Stranger Than Fiction, I thought that nothing could persuade me to view the film. Enter Roger Ebert, whose skillful review put the Marc Forster work back on my radar. I am very happy that Ebert has recovered sufficiently to write criticism. I lament that critics have lost sway, for their erudite navigation of complex subjects has been replaced by a million anonymous one-line assessments: 1t sukk3d, dud3.

Haaretz has a curious letter from Günter Grass to a senior adviser at Netanya Academic College in Israel. While I accept Grass’s contrition at face value, his continued insistence that as an SS member he was unaware of “the dimensions of the crime that we Germans committed” is both baffling and insulting. His blind spot may not be the size of Traudl Junge’s, but it is certainly present.

Apparently Crown Publishers has been taken by surprise by the market success of Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope.

National Public Radio’s Morning Edition has an interview with Isabel Allende about her latest novel, Ines of My Soul.

Americans, today is the day. Those of you using touch screens may want to read Ars Technica’s e-voting news round-up.

The Washington Post is running a review of Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land that, while mostly positive, touches on a few of the strangely anachronistic quirks of a Ford novel.

It’s probably time we all just accepted that Ford isn’t going to do anything about certain tics, such as his jarring references to “Negroes” and “Chinamen” (as if he were writing in 1961), or the manner in which his interlocutors constantly address each other by name when conversing. (Does anybody really do that outside of novels and infomercials?)

Peter Aspden at the Financial Times writes of C. P. Snow’s imagined cultural divide:

Snow’s thesis, on which he was to elaborate three years later when he gave his memorable Rede lecture at Cambridge, made no attempt to be even-handed. His view was that the literary intellectuals were inhabiting an amoral world, and fatally lacked the purposeful instincts of the scientists, whose sole ambition was to be concerned with the collective future and welfare of humanity.

Fiction is making a comeback, at least on the Guardian First Book award’s shortlist.

Canada’s Globe and Mail has an article on the woes of author Nancy Huston. Her French-language novel, Lignes de faille, recently won the Prix Femina and was expected to be published in English in North America. Her publishers apparently want her to change or remove passages about George W. Bush, Jesus, and the war in Iraq. They seem to think that the passages, as they stand, might offend Americans, leading to poor sales (all they really care about, of course).

Another day, another writer on trial in Turkey. This time the defendant was a 92-year-old academic. At issue was a satirical piece in which Muazzez Ilmiye Cig mocked the practice of wearing a head scarf. The charge was the familiar “insulting Turkishness,” with a side of “inciting religious hatred.” As in other recent cases, Ms. Cig was acquitted, but one must infer that the purpose of these suits is harassment.

The New York Times has an article on the trial.

I rarely read, listen to, or watch “featurettes” on Hollywood actors, so today’s New York Times article about Viggo Mortensen’s small press was news to me.