This is possibly the most offensive thing I have ever seen. I honestly thought it was a joke until I saw it from two reputable sources:

Jane too plain for publishers

Staff and agencies
Friday March 23, 2007

After being made over as a pin-up for the big screen, Jane Austen is has now being dolled up by a publisher. Becoming Jane, the recent quasi-biopic, saw her portrayed by the very glamorous Anne Hathaway. Now Wordsworth editions has decided the only fully authenticated image of Austen is “off-putting” and have Photoshopped her into something more appealing.Helen Trayler, the publisher’s managing director, said: “She was not much of a looker. Very, very plain. Jane Austen wasn’t very good looking. She’s the most inspiring, readable author, but to put her on the cover wouldn’t be very inspiring at all. It’s just a bit off-putting.

“I know you are not supposed to judge a book by its cover. Sadly people do. If you look more attractive, you just stand out more. Sadly, we do live in a very shallow world and people do judge by appearance.”

Publishers have traditionally used a portrait of Austen by her sister Cassandra, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. This portrait has been now been digitally adjusted to remove her nightcap, give her make-up and hair extensions for a new edition of a memoir by Austen’s nephew.

Ms Trayler has also commissioned a new watercolour of the author, now the subject of the film Becoming Jane, to feature on the cover of a “deluxe” collection of Austen’s novels.

Janeites seem resigned to the new look. Patrick Stokes, of the Jane Austen Society, told The Times: “She’s not a goddess. She has no copyright. It’s just what happens when someone is so popular, and if it brings her to a different readership then that’s good news.”

Story here and here.

What is wrong with the publishing industry? Does anyone there even care about words and books anymore? Let’s put aside the obvious problem of photoshopping a picture of a dead woman–Just the concept that Jane Austen’s looks should enter into whether a book about her would sell 190 years after her death is absurd. Austen’s books have not only survived all these years, they are avidly read today by a passionate following and are still being made into movies and plays, all with Jane Austen being “plain.” You know why? Because it doesn’t matter what Jane Austen looks like! It’s her words, the fruits of her mind, that interest people. No one wants to have sex with her (well, probably some people do, but you know…), they want to read her work!

How ridiculously offensive that publishers think they need to improve on Austen’s looks to sell books by and about her. It’s sexist and demeaning. If this were a male writer, no one would even be considering this option. Feminism has really failed if we live in an age where great women writers are actually being judged on their looks by book publishers 200 years after they have died.

Old, hideous, ugly, pimply, big-nosed, flat-chested original Jane

Jane after her sexy new make-over

Last night some of the Word Pirates and I went to a panel of nine literary journal editors at San Francisco State University. Did you know that the Bay Area has the highest concentration of literary journals in the United States? I didn’t.

The panel included editors from McSweeney’s, Zyzzyva, and Instant City. It was interesting to see the faces behind these magazines and hear their thoughts about publishing. Afterwards, we went out for drinks and talked about writing.

A couple of observations:

* We all liked Howard Junker, editor of Zyzzyva, the best. He was straightforward, funny, and insightful. He also wrote about the panel on his blog.

* I learned about Sidebrow, an online journal that “seeks fiction, poetry, art, essay, ephemera, found text, academic inquiries into mathematics, economics, & the sciences, political analysis, and literary, cultural, & art critique.” I find this site a little confusing, but also intriguing.

* I don’t like the word “community.” I realized last night that that word means nothing to me. It’s a big abstract word, and an ugly word to boot. When people use it, my eyes glaze over. This is a personal tick of mine.

* I do like Michelle Richmond. This is the second panel I’ve seen her on, and she is delightful!

* If Word Pirates ever do create a literary journal–and the idea has been thrown around–it will be online. Distribution sounds expensive and labor intensive.

* Speaking of that, Eli Horowitz talked about the packaging methods McSweeney’s uses. It is true that a journal shaped like a cigar box or that uses a magnet to hold three smaller books in place is more interesting to look at and handle. On the other hand, they must be so expensive to print and distribute. How does McSweeney’s do it?

* Awhile back, I submitted to Zoetrope and received some comments back with my rejection, which I took as a good sign. Apparently, I was kidding myself, because according to three separate accounts of people who have worked there, Zoetrope almost never publishes anything from the slush pile. For example, in the comments of this post, a former reader for Zoetrope shares how an editor who worked there for six years knew of only three occasions where they published stories from the slush pile. This particular site calls for a boycott of Zoetrope, which initially I was against (as you can see by my comment), but now I think it may be beyond boycotts: You are probably just wasting your time submitting there.

This was an eating weekend. I had a big gourmet meal on Friday, St. Patrick’s Day celebrations on Saturday, and BBQ on Sunday. As such, there isn’t a lot to talk about except, “Boy, that food tasted good,” and “Ugh, I ate too much food,” and “Crap, now I have gained three pounds.” So, I will cut it down to the essentials:

Portabella Mushroom French Fries: Kyle and I had these on Friday at Willi’s Wine Bar in Santa Rosa. They confirmed my belief that almost any food cut into strips, coated in batter, and deep fried will end up delicious. But then, the Japanese have known this for ages.

Caterpillar Vomit: When transplanting the daisies that have grown wild in my garden into a neat and friendly border, I discovered a white caterpillar with a black head. I pick it up and it proceeded to expel a green toxic-waste-looking substance from its mouth onto my finger. As I was wearing gloves, I didn’t mind. I was mostly concerned something was wrong with the caterpillar, but it wasn’t bug-blood and it wasn’t pee. Some sort of self-defense mechanism?

St. Patrick’s Day at 5:30 P.M.: The upside of eating corned beef and cabbage this early is that you can get a table in the pub and no one is drunk yet. The downside is that it is still sunny outside and no one is drunk yet. I didn’t see one person fight or dance a drunken jig. Rip off!

Mashti Malone’s Rosewater Saffron Ice Cream with Pistachios: What an interesting ice cream. The saffron and rosewater give it a gentle, smooth flavor that is pleasantly interrupted with the crunch of pistachio and the chewiness of Arabian gum. I highly recommend.

Ladette to Lady: I discovered this English reality TV show this weekend and laughed and laughed and laughed at its silly concept, and then promptly watched the entire marathon. Do you see now why I need a TV Cozy? But it is a show where they take slutty girls from working class (?) parts of England and teach them to walk around with books on their head and not get puking drunk or take their shirts off in public. Complete with uptight British ladies acting shocked at every turn. Wow, I love this more than I can say.

The end.

I discovered the band Winterpills yesterday and I’m really into them right now. Not that that means that much. Sometimes I like a band immediately and then lose interest later on when the emotional reaction passes/I realize their faults. I hope this isn’t like that, but today, I can’t get enough of this song: Broken Arm by Winterpills.

I bought their new album too.

Last year, I asked for, and received, a subscription to The New Yorker. At first, I made a point of reading at least one article out of each issue, but over time, they started piling up. Soon enough, I was feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of issues. Then I started to resent the pile for making me feel overwhelmed. So, about a week ago, I went through and ripped out any article that looked interesting and threw the rest of the magazines out. That felt great, but now the pile of articles is making me feel guilty too.

I have started to blame The New Yorker for this problem. I want to like the magazine. I want to read the articles. But I am a short-attention-span girl in a short-attention-span world, and my goodness, The New Yorker can be boring sometimes.

Here are my problems with The New Yorker:

* It takes too long for me to figure out whether or not I want to read an article. The New Yorker publishes long articles and I am busy. Therefore, I need to know upfront a.) what this article is about and b.) if it is going to be interesting to me. However, The New Yorker headlines are vague and their intros can take three paragraphs before they get to the point of what the article is about (when you subscribe to The New Yorker, you don’t get that handy outside sheet that tells you what’s inside the issue). So I have to read quite far into the article before I can figure out whether I want to actually devote the time to reading it. Most of the time, then, I simply don’t read it at all.

* I am not The New Yorker’s target audience. So, I’ll start an article about, say, a technology trend and then realize that I have known about this trend for six months already. Clearly, the function of this article is to inform 70-year-olds about the ins-and-outs of this strange thing called the Internet. Conclusion: The New Yorker expects its audience to be old, and so they often write articles for old people. That is oddly alienating.

* The New Yorker’s fiction leaves me cold. Don’t get me wrong: When The New Yorker publishes good fiction, it’s really, really good. But other times, the fiction is leaden and plods along for pages and pages, and afterwards, I just feel tired. It also bothers me that they publish work by their staffers. I mean, I can understand publishing a short story by John Updike even if it’s not his best work, because, hey, it’s John Updike. But a short story by the magazine’s Editorial Assistant? In any case, The New Yorker fiction seems so important ! and official ! that it sucks the joy out of reading for me.

Obviously, this is a venerable, important magazine that often publishes brilliant work. I can sincerely say that some of my all-time favorite reads have come from The New Yorker. That said, I loved this article by David Orr in the New York Times taking issue with this article in The New Yorker by staffer Dana Goodyear (who also publishes poetry in the magazine) about the $200 million grant a rich lady gave the Poetry Foundation. An excerpt from Orr’s article:

Indeed, The New Yorker now treats poetry almost exactly as Goodyear suggests the Poetry Foundation does — as a brand-enhancing commodity. Rather than actual discussions of poetry as an art, The New Yorker offers “profiles” of poets, which are distinguishable from profiles of, say, United States senators only in that the poets’ stories potentially include more references to bongs. That’s not to knock the authors of those profiles — often they’re a pleasure to read. They just have nothing to do with poetry.

And then there’s the question of the poems the magazine chooses to run. Granted, picking poems for a national publication is nearly impossible, and The New Yorker’s poetry editor, Alice Quinn, probably does it as well as anyone could. (Quinn is also liked personally, and rightly so, by many poets.) But there are two ways in which The New Yorker’s poem selection indicates the tension between reinforcing the “literariness” of the magazine’s brand and actually saying something interesting about poetry. First, The New Yorker tends to run bad poems by excellent poets. This occurs in part because the magazine has to take Big Names, but many Big Names don’t work in ways that are palatable to The New Yorker’s vast audience (in addition, many well-known poets don’t write what’s known in the poetry world as “the New Yorker poem” — basically an epiphany-centered lyric heavy on words like “water” and “light”). As a result, you get fine writers trying on a style that doesn’t suit them. The Irish poet Michael Longley writes powerful, earthy yet cerebral lines, but you wouldn’t know it from his New Yorker poem “For My Grandson”: “Did you hear the wind in the fluffy chimney?” Yes, the fluffy chimney.

You see? This is the kind of thing that bugs me. But if I read “For My Grandson,” I would probably feel guilty for not liking it, just as I felt guilty for reading only half of Goodyear’s rambly article about the Poetry Foundation. But no more! Dear The New Yorker… I like you, but you shall have this strange power over me no longer.

On Sunday, Marcia took me to the Artisan Cheese Festival, which she had free tickets to. It is one of many festivals we have here focusing on a particular kind of food. Throughout the year, there are festivals about oranges, apples, berries, olive oil, mustard, and seafood, etc. I don’t know who goes to these festivals because they are usually expensive. In this case, it would have cost $60 to go. However, since it was free, it was well worth checking out.

The part of the festival we went to was in the Hotel Sheraton, where a conference room was full of tables of cheese and wine samples. We circled the room toting our complimentary bags and sampling cheese, mostly goat cheese and white cheddar. It was very good but unfortunately, within 15 minutes we were starting to get full and a little sick of cheese. Plus, it was gorgeous outside, so we decided to have an adventure. We got in my car and drove to the coast.

Eventually, we decided I should take Marcia to the secret beach to look at tide pools. Kyle and I discovered the secret beach six years ago. It’s hard to find and you have to climb down a steep cliff to get to it. Because of this, there are usually interesting things on the beach. I have seen a naked man, a seal, gorgeous abalone shells, three dead crabs propped up on a log, and other interesting things.

Anyway, I have lived by Northern California beaches all my life, and I can tell you: It is very rare to have a day that is not too hot, not too cold, not foggy, not windy. That’s how Sunday was. The sea was glittering and the hills were green with purple bushes. No one was on the secret beach and the tide was out. We walked around on rocks covered with black wooly seaweed, sidestepping sea anemones with slick pink centers like tiny vaginas (gross!) and crouching over pools of water to look at the sea life.

We saw:

• Tiny purple shore crabs ranging from one-inch to four-inches long
• Purple and orange starfish
• Pale green sea anemones that didn’t look like vaginas
• A bottom-feeder fish with whiskers
• Lots of hermit crabs, including one with tiny tiny blue pinchers
• Snails
• A red crab with yellow hairs that hung off its body like moss
• Buoys that washed off of boats
• A large piece of driftwood that looked like the torso of a man
• The biggest abalone shell I have ever seen
• A starfish that a bird had torn in half
• A purple crab with iridescent green streaks on its back

I enjoy nature situations where you are pulled out of yourself and become unaware of how much you are exercising or whether or not you are bored. The tide pools made me feel like I used my pretty day to the fullest. That, in turn, made this whole stupid early daylight savings thing more bearable. And so I say: Hooray for nature!

Check it out! The Polish Translation of Kyle’s book Linux Multimedia Hacks.

In Poland, Linux makes women swoon in ecstasy.

By the way, lately I have had articles in Hispanic, North Bay Biz, Pacific Sun, and the North Bay Bohemian. And today, I sold my piano, a huge weight off my back. Lots of good news!

ETA: Hey look! Peter Orner, my thesis adviser from SFSU, has been nominated for the Los Angeles Book Prize for his novel The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. Neato.

Last night, I had to re-do the bodice of a dress I’m sewing three times before it looked right. It was annoying and frustrating, but in the end, satisfying. I was glad I took the trouble to make the dress hang well on my body.

This morning, I tried to remind myself about that while working on a particularly difficult section of my novel. I’m just re-doing the bodice until it fits with the rest of dress.

This takes a considerable amount of faith. You have to see past the momentary irritation and despair and believe that it will all come together in the end. But even more, you have to believe that the finished dress will look good enough to make all the trouble it took to sew it worthwhile.

About six months ago, I decided to get TV again after years of not having it. For the first time in ages, I watched daytime talk shows and Cosby Show re-runs and E! rundowns of celebrity gossip. It was fun for awhile, but now I’m experiencing the problems I originally had with TV. For one thing, it is boring 75% of the time. For another, I am getting what I call TV dread–a creeping, vaguely sickish feeling that comes over me when watching a show, a sense that this just doesn’t represent me. It’s like the emotional equivalent of eating too much junk food–you just don’t feel well after overindulging.

That said, when I like TV, I really like it. I love The Office and Heroes. Both shows are clever, well-written, and watching them is a valid use of my time. And while I have access to those shows without paying for cable, there is a host of other shows I like, ranging from Project Runway to American Idol to Gilmore Girls, that make keeping TV worthwhile, at least for now.

Still, I was irritated enough to call and get my cable package reduced. And I’m considering another option: The TV Cozy.

The worst problem with TV is how easily it becomes a habit. It’s such a convenient way to unwind that I find myself watching it almost without thinking about it. So, I had this idea awhile back–a decorative cover for your TV that makes watching it more deliberate. If you have a TV Cozy, you have to get up and take it off before watching TV, which means you also have to consciously think about whether or not to watch.

The only other person I know of who had this idea was Stephanie at the Little Birds Handmade blog. This is her version of the TV Cozy, which I think is pretty cool:

Unfortunately, Kyle is not into the idea of my making a TV Cozy. He seems to think it would be a big frou-frou craft project, a TV version of this:

And maybe he’s right. Maybe instead of making an elaborate cover for the TV I should just exercise a little more self-control. But still, I think the TV Cozy is a good idea for someone, somewhere.

UPDATE: There is a pattern for the TV Cozy in the current issue of Blueprint Magazine, which you can look at here. I don’t know if I like how they did it (looks too much like a pillowcase), but with the right fabric or some embroidery, it could be cool.

I helped my parents move this weekend… in the snow. They are moving to the Sierra Mountains, up by Yosemite. So we dragged my mom’s paintings and my dad’s tools through the muddy paths lined with three feet of snow. It was unpleasant, dirty, cold, and did I mention unpleasant? I do not recommend moving in the snow if you can help it.

To get to their new house, I took a three-hour drive through California farmlands, through Stockton and Escalon and Oakdale and other rural parts of California. On the way, I passed fields of fruit trees all ruffled and frothy in their spring blossoms. That was the best part of the weekend.

On Sunday, I planted some spinach. It’s probably too early, but the back of the package says to plant in early spring, and everywhere I look, it seems to be spring. The daisies I planted last year seeded and my garden is full of baby daisy blossoms, along with crocus and stock and sorrel. After that, I spent hours pruning the rose bushes in the backyard while listening to an audiobook by DH Lawrence on my iPod. There’s something so satisfying about snipping away dead branches to make room for new growth.