On Litopia After Dark this week:- Celebrity auctions are big business, why do people buy this stuff? Robert McCrum gives a run down on the changes during his 10 years at The Observer. Is it mental to go on a Creative Writing course?  Computer games and the narrative drive.  The Scott McClellan “tell-all” and the legal dispute over the new Ian Fleming book.

What am I bid?

Charles Dickens’ desk goes under the hammer this week and Britney Spears’ used chewing gum fetched $14,000 on Ebay recently. Since it seems there’s money to be made from celebrity relics, Litopia After Dark has decided to auction off our host. So what are we bid for one Literary Agent, male, house trained, not particularly adept with the domestic chores but willing to learn? After a frenzied bidding session and some frantic squabbling, the hammer went down – tune in to find out who the lucky winner was and what they had to cough up.

Also on the show this week:

• An examination of how the literary world has changed over the past decade by Robert McCrum, who has just stepped down after 10 years as literary editor of The Observer.
• Creative writing courses are the new mental hospitals according to Hanif Kureishi.
• Computer games are changing the way we look at narrative.
• Scott McClellan, a former press secretary to President Bush, has released a “tell-all”
• A new book detailing the 1963 plagiarism case of James Bond creator Ian Fleming is itself the subject of a legal dispute.

If you have any comments about Litopia After Dark, please click the TAKE PART tab above and follow the link to our OPEN INBOX, we would be delighted to hear from you. Our new show Litopia Daily will be launched on June 9th and we’re looking for contributions from any listeners out there – so go on, give us your views!

On the show this week, our panelists are Donna Ballman, Dave Bartram, Richard Howse and we’re delighted to welcome back, Carolyn Soutar. The Ustream chatroom (7.30pm GMT) was as insane as ever. Please join us next week to bring some sanity to the proceedings.

Links mentioned in the show…

Robert McCrum in the Guardian…

When I joined The Observer in 1996, the world of books was in limbo between hot metal and cool word processing, but it would have been recognisable to many of our past contributors, from George Orwell and Cyril Connolly, to Anthony Burgess and Clive James. Everything smelled of the lamp. It was a world of ink and paper; of cigarettes, coffee and strong drink. Our distinguished critic George Steiner used to submit his copy in annotated typescript.

People will argue about the decisive milestones (I have come up with my own 10, which I have set out in chapters), but there will be general agreement that, in Britain, a decade of change starts with the election of New Labour in 1997. That was also the year Random House launched its website, John Updike published a short story online and Vintage started a series of reading guides to encourage new book clubs. As well as new readers, the millennium saw the emergence of a new literary generation, writers born in the Sixties and Seventies, and few of them more fascinating than Zadie Smith…

And here you can find the fabulous Vulpes Libris

Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian…

The celebrated novelist, screenwriter and playwright Hanif Kureishi has launched a withering attack on university creative writing courses, calling them “the new mental hospitals”.

Kureishi, himself a research associate on the creative writing course at Kingston University in London said, “One of the things you notice is that when you switch on the television and a student has gone mad with a machine gun on a campus in America, it’s always a writing student.

He said that creative writing courses set up false expectations among students that a literary career will inevitably follow. “The fantasy is that all the students will become successful writers – and no one will disabuse them of that.

“When you use the word creative and the word course there is something deceptive about it.”

In Prospect Magazine, Tom Chatfield…

Mogwai is cutting down the time he spends playing World of Warcraft. Twenty hours a week or less now, compared to a peak of over 70. It’s not that he has lost interest—just that he’s no longer working his way up the greasy pole. He’s got to the top. He heads his own guild, has 20,000 gold pieces in the bank and wields the Twin Blades of Azzinoth; weapons so powerful and difficult to acquire that other players often (virtually) follow Mogwai around just to look at them. In his own words, he’s “e-famous.” He was recently offered $8,000 for his Warcraft account, a sum he only briefly considered accepting. Given that he has clocked up over 4,500 hours of play, the prospective buyers were hardly making it worth his while. Plus, more sentimentally, he feels his character is not his alone to sell: “The strange thing about this character is that he doesn’t just belong to me. Every item he has he got through the hard work of 20 or more other people. Selling him would be a slap in their faces.” As in many modern online games, co-operation is the only way to progress, with the most challenging encounters manageable only with the collaboration of other experienced players. Hence the need for leaders, guilds—in-game collectives, sometimes containing hundreds of players—and online friendships measured in years. “When I started, I didn’t care about the other people. Now they are the only reason I continue.”

Clyde Haberman in the New York Times…

Invariably, books of this type are labeled “tell-all.” But “tell when” is more the issue.

AMERICANS have put up with a long string of government officials — George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, ran through the same routine a year ago — who forgot that they were but temporary custodians of vital information; its true owner was the public. They stayed silent about what they knew, or perceived, when they might have conceivably made a difference in policy had only they spoken up in a timely fashion.

Instead, what unsealed their lips were book deals. That, too, is part of the New York tradition.

Mr. McClellan, who left the White House in the spring of 2006 after three years as press secretary, says in his book that the president relied on “propaganda” to sell the war in Iraq, that the invasion was a “strategic blunder,” that Mr. Bush “convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment,” and that news organizations were too soft on the administration in the prewar buildup.

When did misgivings begin to gnaw at him?

In The Independent, Andrew Johnson…

Deighton, most famous for The Ipcress File, writes: “How Ian Fleming would have hated to know that this book had been censored … As a gentleman he would have felt that harassing a fellow author to be the ultimate demonstration of bad taste.”

The Battle for Bond, published by the small imprint Tomahawk, tells the story of how, in 1959, Fleming worked with two screenwriters called Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham on an original film script based on the Bond character.

When the plan came to nothing, Fleming took the scripts they had worked on and used them as the basis for his Bond novel Thunderball in 1961. McClory and Whittingham sued successfully and won the film rights for the novel.

Since then, James Bond films have been a separate enterprise to the novels, and Ian Fleming Publications, run by the surviving members of Fleming’s family, has no control over or copyright of the movies.

Wikipedia page about the James Bond novels.

From The Scotsman, 100 things you didn’t know about Ian Fleming…

10 At Sandhurst, Fleming was indeed ensnared by the ladies – he caught an STI from a prostitute, and was withdrawn from the college and sent to a finishing school in Austria.

28 He said he wanted 007 to have “the dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find … brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine”.

40 He liked to beat Ann – and she liked him beating her. “It’s very lonely not to be beaten and shouted at every five minutes,” she once wrote to him in 1948. “I must be perverse and masochistic to want you to whip me and contradict me, particularly as you are always wrong about everything.”

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Photo by jcbwalsh

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