Gatsby the man is a complete fiction, as he admits to narrator Nick Carraway: Just as the United States was carved from the wilderness, he fashioned himself an identity as a wealthy, Oxford-educated gentleman, sustaining it through sheer determination and bravado – that is, the willingness to tell bald-faced lies. He is the shadow of the American dream. Seen through Nick’s eyes, Gatsby is revealed early on as a shallow, self-conscious poseur. This means that the reader gets to play the knowing voyeur, as the sycophants and sybarites of New York and Long Island attend Gatsby’s lavish parties, drink his booze, behave in ways that only the debauched children of the Jazz Age could, and then abandon him. First it’s fun, then it’s boring, and finally it becomes sick.

When asked to comment on China’s curbs on the freedom of expression, from banning books to jailing writers, Enright spoke broadly of the prevailing power of literature in overcoming the debilitating effects of censorship on society.

“There was no way that when I was growing up that the tide of Irish writing was going to be stopped by something even as powerful as the Catholic Church,” she said, citing the uncompromising writing of Edna O’Brien and John McGahern.

“By conviction I’m against censorship in general and also in a pragmatic kind of way I think it doesn’t work,” she added.

The eyes of the world are on China ahead of the Olympic Games and a range of issues are of concern. Individuals with contrary opinions to the Chinese state are jailed, internet and media censorship is rife, and the ruthless suppression of Tibet continues.

The Icelandic singer Bjork shouted “Tibet! Tibet!” during a recent Shanghai concert, and the Chinese government immediately announced tighter controls over foreign singers and other performers. Film director Steven Spielberg resigned as artistic adviser to the Olympics due to Beijing’s policy toward Sudan’s Darfur.

The international writers’ association, PEN, is campaigning to free nearly 40 jailed Chinese writers before the Olympics, some of whom had been sentenced without trial.

But it seems that most western governments are so enamoured by the possibilities of the massive Chinese market, that their protests against the next super-power’s abuses of human rights are weak and ineffective.

Technology, often feared by the bookish world, is a growing friend. As the mass market has risen so has the reality of a technologically connected society. This doesn’t just mean Facebook. Global communities are gathering around common interests online, just as intellectuals gathered in cafés in 1900s Vienna. They are gloriously beyond corporate control and naturally antipathetic to the reductive mass market. We are only at the beginning of this social revolution. I am not an advocate of the life led online, but as broadband reaches all generations, genders and income brackets, so this will develop usefully. It won’t be all of life but it must be a place where niche interests can develop, robbing the mass market of a portion of its control. Literature can thrive in these places.

Rushdie’s parting advice to aspiring writers was simple: “You have to sit down and not get up until you’ve written some stuff.”
“I guess there are people who can walk around and write,” he said. “But they’re called poets.”

PhillyCom reports on Rushdie’s visit to Widener University

The words that matter most in any book, of course, are neither at the beginning nor the end, but on the front cover. Would great books have become great books had they been called something else? In 1924, a young writer sent his latest novel to his publisher with what he considered to be a catchy and intriguing title: Trimalchio in West Egg. His editor loved the book and hated the title. “Consider as quickly as you can a change,” he wrote. F. Scott Fitzgerald duly considered Trimalchio, Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires, Under the Red White and Blue, The High-Bouncing Lover (a good title, certainly, but perhaps not for this book), Trimalchio’s Banquet, On the Road to West Egg (which would have made Jack Kerouac’s life more difficult), and Incident at West Egg. Finally, he settled on The Great Gatsby, which was just as well for him, and for us.

Twirling your blue skirts, travelling the sward
Under the towers of your seminary,
Go listen to your teachers old and contrary
Without believing a word.

Tie the white fillets then about your hair
And think no more of what will come to pass
Than bluebirds that go walking on the grass
And chattering on the air.

Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;
And I will cry with my loud lips and publish
Beauty which all our power shall never establish,
It is so frail.

For I could tell you a story which is true;
I know a woman with a terrible tongue,
Blear eyes fallen from blue,
All her perfections tarnished – yet it is not long
Since she was lovelier than any of you.

John Crowe Ransom was born in 1888 in Pulaski, Tennessee; and he died in 1974 in Gambier, Ohio.

By the end of this story I will have broken the most sacred rules of modern authordom. I’ll tell you how much my publishers have paid me for the books I’ve written. I’ll tell you how many copies each of those books has sold. I’ll share with you some of the secrets, lies and euphemisms told to me by my publishers, editors, publicists and agents in their efforts to comfort, pacify and motivate me, and I’ll share some of the salient facts that make those secrets, lies and euphemisms such common industry currency.

John McCain, Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
Barack Obama, Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin – a biography of Lincoln
Mitt Romney, John Adams by David McCullough
Mick Huckabee, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? by Francis Schafer
John Edwards, The Trial of Socrates by I.F. Stone
Hillary Clinton, The Federalist Papers – the American constitution, etc.
Rudy Guiliani, The Federalist Papers – the American constitution, etc.

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CBS News also reported that Woolworths stores in Britain have stopped selling “Lolita” beds for young girls, after a parents’ organization complained because of the name’s association with Nabakov’s novel about a paedophile.
“There aren’t many people in the company, in the whole world, who know about the ‘Lolita’ book or films,” a Woolworths spokeswoman said.

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Amanda Eyre Ward writes about How Do You Become a Writer? on Cindy Bokma’s site:

I remember going to hear Joyce Carol Oates read when I was in college. I wanted desperately to be a writer, and I hung on her every word. When she mentioned that she wrote by a window, I noted write by a window. When she said she drank tea, I wrote tea. Whenever I met a real writer, I asked them where they wrote, how they wrote, and when. I wanted to know the rules, how to organize my life in order to succeed.

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The TimesOnline reports that a 37-year-old American businesswoman and married mother of three is seeking justice after she was thrown in jail by Saudi Arabia’s religious police for sitting with a male colleague at a Starbucks coffee shop in Riyadh.