Happening this week in San Francisco. Wired’s article focuses on the connection between the alternative print scene and publishing on the web:

While the Web was very much in evidence this past weekend at the Alternative Press Expo, a yearly gathering of independent and underground comics artists, it was clear that the Web is still nowhere near replacing print as the preferred medium for comic art.

To the contrary, the printed page still has a cachet that the Web can’t hope to match.

The author of The Beauty Myth has alleged that literary scholar Harold Bloom sexually harassed her while she was an undergraduate 20 years ago, says the New York Observer.

Man. I’m no Bloom fan but I think this is all way too remote for her to making these allegations now. There is no way for him to defend himself, he’s old and reportedly in poor health, and it’s not like Wolf has spent the last twenty years as a shrinking violet who couldn’t have spoken up before.

I find it really disheartening when our strongest women act like such chickenshits. If the allegations are true, then this woman put herself out as a feminist, sold her feminist books, and didn’t bother to speak out while this man taught two more generations of female students? I don’t know what that is, but it’s not feminism.

When I was reading my DARs this week (that’s “daily appellate report,” the daily listing of recently decided cases) I ran across a Ninth Circuit opinion in a case in which Harlan Ellison is suing a bunch of folks because some of his short stories were scanned and placed on USENET. The opinion (warning: PDF) upholds his right to sue AOL because the USENET postings wound up on AOL servers and AOL users were able to access those postings through AOL. I am no AOL fan, but why them and not all the smaller providers who also provide access to USENET? I guess it’s just luck that they aren’t being sued as well?

(And why does this stupid opinion call it “[i]the[/i] USENET” ? They also call USENET “a peer-to-peer file sharing network,” which is sort of an interesting definition. At least we know those justices aren’t hanging out on alt.sex.algore.lick.the.wet.toad, which I suppose should make us all sleep better at night. It’s almost as bad as a California Court of Appeal opinion I read today, which included this sentence:

Defendant’s job was developing software for “boards” that “support” “MPEG chip sets.”

And the random quotation marks continue throughout the entire opinion; every vaguely technical term is “emphasized” with quotation marks as if it were the “special” on the board down at the “lunch” counter.)

Anyway, this is not my area; I know jack about copyright law and who can sue whom on the internet. I just don’t see how any provider, no matter how large, can be expected to control USENET in any way other than blocking newsgroup access entirely. More information on the case is available from this site, apparently maintained by one of Ellison’s lawyers. His weblog contains a much more detailed summary of the holding.

Three organizations began a signature campaign yesterday, urging the amendment of a federal law that allows the FBI to inspect library and book store records surreptitiously:

The American Booksellers Association, the American Library Association, and the writer’s group PEN American Center launched the “Campaign for Reader Privacy” to amend Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. Passed in October 2001, the law allows the FBI, with authorization from a special court, to inspect the book-buying or -borrowing histories of individuals. The library or bookstore would be forbidden to inform customers of the inspection.

More information is available at the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. But really, you don’t have to worry: the Justice Department says that only terrorists need to worry about this law.

The Scotsman is reporting that James Joyce’s grandson will sue for copyright infringement if any public readings of Joyce’s work take place during the Bloomsbury festival this summer. Apparently this grandson has aggressively protected the copyrights (and become very rich in the process), so organizers are taking his threats seriously.

Joyce’s works originally fell out of copyright protection in Ireland in 1991, fifty years after his death, but “new EU regulations revived copyright in these works from July 1, 1995, as the rules extended the lifetime of copyright to 70 years.”

Says the New York Times. Apparently reviews submitted anonymously at the U.S. site were displayed with names for a brief time at the Canadian site, and “provided a rare glimpse at how writers and readers are wielding the online reviews as a tool to promote or pan a book — when they think no one is watching.” The glitch revealed a number of authors giving themselves five-star anonymous reviews, and others using the anonymous review feature to trash other writers.

Just in case you care what John Le Carré and Antonia Fraser think about weapons of mass destruction.

A German talk show host, discussing Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend, dismissed the book on the air, telling viewers not to bother and confessing that she had tossed it aside after 500 pages. Don’t you wish American talk shows would feature that kind of honesty? Since all the original accounts are in German, I will link to this summary of the story in the Literary Saloon.

I liked The Little Friend more than I liked The Secret History, but I put them both on the level of Anne Rice if she had a better editor. And I still think that Selila’s comment on The Little Friend over at TUS is the best two-line book review ever written:

personally, i think if you are going to kill someone on page three, you ought to tell the reader who did it by page 703.

it’s polite.

A new feature in Salon will round up indie publishing news and reviews. This week they offer, among other things, a brief review of a new non-fiction collection from Flann O’Brien (possibly my favorite Irish author since I haven’t read Ulysses yet). The collection is called At War and it is a collection of O’Brien’s pseudonymous columns for Irish Times.

I guess the idea is to encourage kids to study ancient Greek. Think it will work?

Roddy Doyle says yes. John Sutherland says no. Other critics weigh in.

Beth says she hasn’t read Ulysses yet because she’s still hoping that her school will offer a Joyce seminar again before she is forced to give up and just graduate already, but she does think that Roddy Doyle is kind of overrated, for whatever that’s worth.

Frances Partridge is dead at 103.

An interview in the Guardian.

I just can’t make myself care about whether there will be a sequel to The Nanny Diaries (which I haven’t read and have no plans to read), but this NY Times article about how the authors got dumped by their publisher is kind of entertaining.

Probably good advice for Nanowrimo participants everywhere.