Like every Chinese child, Li Hanwei spent her schooldays memorizing thousands of the intricate characters that make up the Chinese writing system.

Yet aged just 21 and now a university student in Hong Kong, Li already finds that when she picks up a pen to write, the characters for words as simple as “embarrassed” have slipped from her mind. “I can remember the shape, but I can’t remember the strokes that you need to write it,” she says. “It’s a bit of a problem.”

Surveys indicate the phenomenon, dubbed “character amnesia,” is widespread across China, causing young Chinese to fear for the future of their ancient writing system. Young Japanese people also report the problem, which is caused by the constant use of computers and mobile phones with alphabet-based input systems… A poll commissioned by the China Youth Daily in April found that 83 percent of the 2,072 respondents admitted having problems writing characters. …

“The idea that China is a country full of people who write beautiful, fluid literature in characters without a second thought is a romantic fantasy,” wrote the blogger and translator C. Custer on his Chinageeks blog. “Given the social and financial pressures that exist for most people in China… (and) given that nearly everyone has a cellphone, it really isn’t a problem at all.”

Still, both Li Hanwei and Zeng Ming have become so concerned about character amnesia that they keep handwritten diaries partly to ensure they don’t forget how to write.

There’s a whole “Fahrenheit 451″-type novel in a nutshell. The populace becomes dependent on a technology to perform a basic communication function; that technology is somehow taken away; only a remnant, who used an archaic form of the technology not dependent on high tech, is able to communicate anymore. Maybe a new “slow” movement, Slow Writing, will join the Slow Food and Slow Travel movements.

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I really like the micro-granting site Kickstarter, and I’ve supported several projects with ten or twenty dollars here and there. One of the cool things about it is that if a project fails to reach its fund-raising goal, no one’s donation goes through, so projects require a sort of consensus of support.

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Vicki Stewart claimed that Haywood Smith, a former childhood friend, used her as the basis for a character in her novel The Red Hat Club.

During the trial, Stewart’s lawyer brandished a piece of paper with the word SLUT written in large letters, saying, “This is what [Smith] did to the fabric of Vicki Stewart’s life… She made her into a slut, an atheist and an alcoholic. Ms. Smith’s irresponsible words have stained the fabric of Vicki Stewart’s life. These stains will never come out.”

Smith has indicated she will not appeal the verdict, saying “I hope this [verdict] is healing for Ms. Stewart.”

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When I went to take the dog out tonight, the elevator door opened and three teenage boys were huddled around something I imagined must be a joint until they moved apart to make room for Hector and me and I saw it was a book. They were hulking in that teenage boy way and they smelled of beer.

“No, listen, Crime and Punishment was published in 1866. There was so much going on then with him…”

“Just back from Siberia…”

“1866, man.”

They all shook their heads in grave agreement and held the door for me as I exited.

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Of course, this is why you have friends read your stuff just to look for typos that make you look like a lamebrain. But even several pairs of eyes can miss a painfully awful flub. When I was editing the sexzine Frighten the Horses in the early 90s, a writer submitted a story in which the narrator was a police officer. The first line of the story was supposed to be: “Six o’clock; still at the footpost.” Somewhere along the line this got changed to “Sex o’clock,” which sounds blindingly stupid and probably discouraged readers from reading a single line of the story. And that’s how it got published. I apologized profusely to the justifiably pissed-off author. It was 16 years ago and I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s still pissed off. It’s one thing to leave a clanger in your own work, but to sloppily introduce a typo to someone else’s work is unforgivable.

In other typo news, a federal judge got so irked at the errors in a lawyer’s filing that he not only denied the motion but ordered the lawyer to copy his client with the judge’s order, complete with his criticisms that that it was “riddled with unprofessional grammatical and typographical errors that nearly render the entire motion incomprehensible.”

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Van Booy, who lives in New York and is also the author of The Secret Lives of People in Love, receives €35,000.

This is the fifth time the Frank O’Connor prize — named for the Irish author — has been awarded. Previous winners include Yiyun Li, Haruki Murakami, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

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She calls this cheating, but defends the practice. After all, it is called “Choose Your Own Adventure,” not “Make a Choice and Suffer the Consequences.” Perhaps it teaches kids to mistrust authors, but I’d say that’s not a bad lesson to learn. It could form part of a foundation for healthy skepticism, which is an essential reading skill. And if it leads readers into a habit of peeking at the endings of more substantial books, I’d say that’s simply a challenge for writers to make the reading so involving and pleasurable that the reader, rather than skipping ahead, doesn’t want the book to end.

As for the ability to peek ahead, one wishes that the members of the Bush Administration could have somehow done this before starting a war in Iraq. Then, faced with the choice of, say, whether or not to disband the defeated Iraqi army, they might have been informed in advance: “Sorry, your choice has led to anarchy, looting, a huge pool of unemployed, frustrated and armed men who will do pretty much anything for money, and the ingredients for years of factional conflict.” Hmm, better not do it then. Oops, too late!

Great literary novels make skipping ahead irrelevant — but only if you are willing to suspend appreciation of the basic plot in favor of a book’s other virtures. (Cf. Peanuts: Lucy: “What are you reading?” Linus: “Anna Karenina.” Lucy, leaving the room: “She dies in the end.” Linus: “Aauugghhh!”) One’s appreciation for, say, The Savage Detectives isn’t spoiled by the fact that the author never informs us of the ultimate fate of its main character, Arturo Belano. And yet the reader’s moral judgment of the Belano character hangs on the final glimpse of him, and on his choice — foolish, or grace-filled? — to go with some Liberian soldiers to what the narrator describes as certain death. It’s almost as if Belano had his own Choose Your Own Adventures book, which was really his life, and makes an existentialist’s choice to embrace his own fate. He could anticipate the “ending,” which would be disastrous when seen from a certain point of view (including that of the narrator of the section) but essential from his own.

Let’s say there are two kinds of readers: One kind, like Alison Flood, Linus, and the narrator of the African section of TSD, is concerned with avoiding risk. These are the same kinds of people for whom the warning “SPOILERS!” was invented. If they know Anna Karenina dies in the end — and who, picking up the novel for the first time, is not aware of its heroine’s fate? — it not only colors their appreciation of the book but might even make them avoid it. The other kind of reader is willing to take the whole work as a sort of multi-course meal that works (in a great book) on many levels, so that a narrative ending, a resolution to the plot — the dessert, if you will — is an almost unnecessary indulgence.

When “The Sopranos” ended its run, many viewers protested that the final episode’s sudden blackout at a seemingly random moment in a quotidian family dinner scene represented either a failure of nerve on the part of the producers and writers or a nose-thumbing at viewers (while industry pros loved it.) Pressed on the matter, series auteur David Chase simply kept mum. Those who demanded to know what the ending represented, and “what happened” to the characters after the blackout, had already missed the point. The series ended, despite the “Don’t stop” pleas on the soundtrack, because the characters had been developed as much as they could be.

In The Savage Detectives, the main characters Belano and Lima actually pass from one kind of reader to the other. In January 1976 they are obsessed with “what happened” to Cesaréa Tinajero, and they don’t stop til they find her. I think the reason this sequence is presented as the book’s ending — although the main characters’ lives for the next twenty years are also accounted for, out of order with this sequence — is that the action is rooted in the urge to find the answer, to see the story through to the ending, to uncover the mystery. It’s almost as if Bolaño is saying, to the characters and readers both, you want to see your mystery solved, fine. Here it is. But chronologically, after they return from Sonora, they no longer get to be characters in an action movie. The whole idea of neat endings, of plot arcs, of resolutions, goes out the window. Belano and Lima’s lives become more aimless, impossible to explain, and sloppy — which is to say, more real — while their characters continue to develop. It’s when their characters can’t develop any more (Lima completely defeated by life, Belano disappearing into the jungle having made his final, fateful choice) that even chronological time ends for the characters.

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Del Toro and Hogan’s essay suggests the appeal of the vampire myth rests on the “blood alchemy” accomplished when a vampire bites, as human life is exchanged for a more sinister one: “For as his contagion bestows its nocturnal gift, the vampire transforms our vile, mortal selves into the gold of eternal youth, and instills in us something that every social construct seeks to quash: primal lust. If youth is desire married with unending possibility, then vampire lust creates within us a delicious void, one we long to fulfill.”

Perhaps that has something to do with the weird “swine flu parties” that cropped up in the UK this summer. Social fun combined with deadly risk — what could be sexier?

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