I’ll be headed off tomorrow to Windsor, ON, for BookFestWindsor, a positvely German log jam of words. While the pollution level there is pretty high, I’m not too sure how wired the town is, so we’ll see how much I write Thursday and Friday. But, in case the carbon count is so high the wireless signals can’t pass from server to computer, I thought I’d tease you with an upcoming Magazine posting: an audio interview with Giller nominee Alissa York. Look for it Monday or so. With the announcement of a winner only a week away, there must be some suspense around the outcome. York’s up against stiff competition in the form of established authors like Ondaatje, Vassanji and Hay. Can she take it?

• Young SK writer Chantell Cheekinew wins Native writing prize
• French poet Bonnefoy wins Kafka Prize
• Robert Hass profiled around NBA nomination
• Sherman Alexie also

Orhan Pamuk on the novel as a social force. I know some people thought him a political choice when he won the Nobel, and I know it’s about the books, not the politics, but it sure looks to me like he’s justifying that choice in his post-Nobel speaking alone.

Pamuk talked of the “literary globalization of the world” and outlined the way the novelist’s imagination — when employed to evoke “the other, the stranger, the enemy that resonates inside each of our heads” — can be a powerful, liberating force.
…
“Contrary to what most people assume,” he said, “one’s politics as a novelist have nothing to do with the societies, parties and groups to which one might belong, or even dedication to any political cause. A novelist’s politics arise from his imagination — his ability to imagine himself as someone else.” This “makes him a spokesman for those who cannot speak for themselves, whose anger is never heard and whose words are suppressed.”

OJ and his ilk are trying to profit from their crimes, but this Guardian blogger says that it’s worth picking through the genre for the occasional gem. (See my post from yesterday on how prose books give me the jibblies for my response).

But for every dozen blood-splattered books about bank heists, dirty protests, nonce-bashing and “never nicking off your own” – books which, at best, would make for a five-minute Channel 5 documentary – there are some true crime confessionals of worth. Their value lies not in their endless anecdotes, but in the stories of how their authors got beyond crime. Or perhaps just the fact that they’ve been written at all, given the circumstances. This seems particularly true of the violent career cons who have lived through long sentences and finally reached a world beyond the criminal sphere in which they have lived for much of their lives.

Doesn’t that sound like it should be his natural medium: YouTube? I think he was a YouTube celebrity before there was a YouTube.

Vancouver author Douglas Coupland has narrated a series of viral videos for YouTube to promote his latest novel, The Gum Thief.

Coupland reads excerpts from the book, which is written in journal entry form, to accompany images inside an office superstore or with animated segments.

A bunch of writers confess what books they haven’t read. I’m sure I’ve told this tale here before, but it’s my ball and bat, so I’ll does what I wants with ‘em.  Once at Michael Redhill’s house, I won Michael Ondaatje’s silk shirt by admitting to an incredulous Andre Alexis that I had never smoked a cigarette, been to Spain, or read Proust. Later that night, I sang with M. Ondaatje while Sean Dixon (yes, the one who suggested this link) played banjo. The best part of all this is: I’ve never actually spoken with Michael Ondaatje. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t even know who I am.

Amy Bloom
Alas, Moby-Dick. It’s not that I haven’t tried. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the brilliant use of actual events (the sinking of the whaling ship Essex in 1820 when repeatedly attacked by an 80-ton sperm whale, the mighty Mocha Dick), deft use of ghosts, allegorical doubloons, and symbolic what have you, or Melville’s Great Name Hall of Fame (including Starbuck, Daggoo, Tashtego, and Fedallah). I do appreciate it all … in theory. In practice, I have never gotten past the 100^th page. However, unlike some other books I’ve been happy, even gleeful, to give up on (Beowulf, The Faerie Queen), I plan to continue chasing this damned thing until I catch it.

I know an English prof who takes great pleasure in having taught, but never read Moby Dick. (Thanks, Sean)

Michael Chabon on his swashbuckling adventure story:

The original, working — and in my heart the true — title of my short novel Gentlemen of the Road was “Jews with Swords”.

When I was writing it, and happened to tell people the name of my work in progress, it made them want to laugh. I guess it seemed clear that I meant the title as a joke.

With the “Presidential Medal of Freedom“. There’s a “Presidential Medal of Freedom”? What, did she stop the Xqutpkl invasion with her laser pistol? This sounds like science fiction. Tell me this thing is an invention of the nutty Bush years, where it rests nicely alongside Freedom Fries, “Let’s Roll”, and tortured detainees in orange jumpsuits — not something they’ve been giving out since Ben Franklin first used a steampunk robotic suit to battle the Cthulu-like mosnters living under Capitol Hill. Oh, wait. Truman established it… okay, it’s all making sense now… I mean, within it’s own ridiculous framework.

The New Yorker surveys the scope of at the rush to digitize the world and tries to separate the predictions of doom, gloom and utopia, from what’s actually likely to happen:

In fact, the Internet will not bring us a universal library, much less an encyclopedic record of human experience. None of the firms now engaged in digitization projects claim that it will create anything of the kind. The hype and rhetoric make it hard to grasp what Google and Microsoft and their partner libraries are actually doing. We have clearly reached a new point in the history of text production. On many fronts, traditional periodicals and books are making way for blogs and other electronic formats. But magazines and books still sell a lot of copies. The rush to digitize the written record is one of a number of critical moments in the long saga of our drive to accumulate, store, and retrieve information efficiently. It will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.

An interesting sounding bathroom book that explores words that other languages have that English doesn’t. I used to live with Germans, and they’ve got a word for everything. That sound a wet mouth makes when it chews? That time when the digital clock is displaying three of the same number (ie, 2:22pm)? They’ve got all the bases covered. I still use some of them.

You can understand why no native writer from Chaucer to Doris Lessing has come up with a single word to describe the difficulty of urinating after eating frogs before the rains have fallen. The very concept of “before the rains” is alien to these damp isles.

But you would think, given that most of us do it, that there might be a word to describe the time taken to eat a banana, or a noun to identify a person so miserly that, if a fly falls into his tea, he’ll fish it out and suck it dry before throwing it away.

Adam Jacot de Boinod, a former researcher on Stephen Fry’s BBC2 show Quite Interesting, has trawled dictionaries and websites around the world to produce his second compendium of unlikely but useful words that other languages enjoy but English does not.

Which do you think it is? You’re wrong. The answer is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot. Some years before the action begins, the protagonist hears the last birds passing over, “their half-muted crankings miles above where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a bowl”. McCarthy makes no claim that this is likely to occur, but merely speculates about the consequences.

All pre-existing social codes soon collapse and are replaced with organised butchery, then chaotic, blundering horror. What else are the survivors to do? The only remaining resource is human. It is hard to see how this could happen during humanity’s time on earth, even by means of the nuclear winter McCarthy proposes. But his thought experiment exposes the one terrible fact to which our technological hubris blinds us: our dependence on biological production remains absolute. Civilisation is just a russeting on the skin of the biosphere, never immune from being rubbed against the sleeve of environmental change. Six weeks after finishing The Road, I remain haunted by it.

The Road fits into my list of “should see/read” movies and books. I know it’s good, I know it’s probably good FOR me, I know I SHOULD read it, but I just don’t know that I can take the emotional equivalent of shaken baby syndrome. It’s like Schindler’s List: I still haven’t seen it. Why? I can’t seem find a day when I feel emotionally together enough to choose to get sucker punched in the heart. It’s even worse with fiction.

I was explaining to someone last week, when asked why work wasn’t coming quicker with my novel-in-progress, that at least with poetry I’m something of an insider and know the mechanics well. In some ways, I know too much. (Like with theatre, which I did for years before I started writing: I can’t see a show now and suspend my disbelief — I see the procenium, the running crew, the faint light of the stage manager’s lamp in the wings, the heads bobbing in the orchestra pit, but the magic is gone. I’ve lost the wonder. Same, to some extent, with poetry.) Mostly I’m unimpressed, but occasionally something comes along that knocks my socks and glasses off and suddenly I’m barefoot and blind, afloat in another world. The mystery is still there because I’ve forgotten the machine for a moment.
The problem is, fiction is still too often mysterious to me. When I read for pleasure, I have no internal novelist breaking scenes down into strategic tricks and techniques. I get so caught up, I can’t back away to see how the machine moves. So now that you know this, imagine me reading The Road. That’s a few dark days of cold sweats and panic attacks I just can’t afford to have.

I started picking around for news this morning and was disatisfied. So what’s the next best thing? Opinion! It’s being sold as news everywhere you look these days, so why not here? Let’s begin with a trio from the Guardian blogs:

• Do writers’ filthy opinions soil their books? Well do they Orson Scott Card?
• A brief survery of the short story, part 1: Anton Checkov. (Part One?! Ooo! This makes me want to sink deeper in the chair and stop breathing until next week. HP Lovecraft?! I’m turning blue already!)
• Fiction as a peer to fact in learning about history
• Maud’s regular bookstore appreciation column continues — now in Maine (30% less excitement!)
• Ed’s all twisted up about Queenan’s review of the toothpick book, posted here yesterday
• Ninja parade slips through town completely unnoticed (video)… Yes, we’re like that. You’ll note that I’m still standing in IFOA head office even as I type this… You should see the shenanigans that go on here

They’re everywhere these days, especially in Britain. And don’t think there won’t be a pop-up book from Bush in early ‘09, cause there will… Here in Canada though, tempers are flaring over a review given to former PM Jean Chrétien’s memoir. The publisher has taken the unusual step of buying advertising in the same books section to refute it.

In the ad, Dennys accused Newman, 78, of having a bias and of having made “no secret in his previous writings of his contempt for Mr. Chrétien.”

She also concludes that Newman likely did not read the book because the review claimed there were no explanations of Peppergate, Shawinigate and the sponsorship scandal.

Dennys says there are sections devoted to each of those situations.

I’m inclined to think any public response to any review is a bad thing. Rather, I confine my rebuttals to private moments of discussion between intellectual equals: say, open-handed slaps and gut shots in the alley behind the next lit party I see them at, or failing that, liquid Exlax dropped in unmonitored cups of coffee. It’s much more civilized this way of “continuing the discussion”.

Hari Kunzru, in a letter to the Guardian expressing his displeasure with the kind of coverage given to Monica Ali’s unintentionally incendiary Brick Lane, settles once and for all any question about misappropriation of voice:

As a mixed-race novelist (hell, just as a novelist), I would like to say to your leader writer (The trouble with Brick Lane, October 27) that I reserve the right to imagine anyone and anything I damn well please. If I want to write about Jewish people, or paedophiles or Patagonians or witches in 12th-century Finland, then I will do so, despite being “authentically” none of these things. I also give notice that if I choose, I intend to imagine what your muddled writer quaintly terms “real people” living in “real communities”. My work may convince or it may not. However, I will not accept that I have any a priori responsibility to anyone – white, black or brown, let alone any “community” – to represent them in any particular way.

All rise and stand corrected.

There are times society must rise up and say NO. I agree. But where I thought this time was about 6 years ago this month, Joe Queenan says now’s the time to use society’s editorial voice to force authors to stop squeezing books out of trivial objects.

But now, with the publication of “The Toothpick: Technology and Culture” (Knopf, $27.95), Petroski is literally tossing in the kitchen sink he has previously only written about. Originally projected as a single chapter in an earlier book, in which the “engagingly simple device … would serve to illustrate some basic principles of engineering” and “help reveal the inevitable interrelationships between technology and culture,” “The Toothpick” swelled into a 443-page tome that (unlike the object it concerns) fills a need that does not exist, sealing up a void whose vacuity was a source of distress to no one. It is not so much a book as a threat: If you liked “The Toothpick,” wait till you get a load of “The Grommet.” If “The Pencil” was Petroski’s Sudetenland and “The Evolution of Useful Things” his Anschluss, then “The Toothpick” can only be characterized as his invasion of Poland. And just as France and England were compelled to belatedly intervene back then, literate, sane people must now step into the breach. This thing about things has gone far enough, Mr. Petroski. Knock it off.

The very existence of “The Toothpick” is a testimony to the perils of inhabiting a permissive society, for just as the unchastised teenage shoplifter, mistaking society’s indulgence for applause, will evolve into a bloodthirsty hired killer, it is inevitable that the author of “The Pencil” will one day morph into the author of “The Toothpick.” Quite rightly, he assumes that society is simply not paying attention anymore.

I’m sure you’re rivetted by the crisis that is apparently fighting for the minds of our youth — just like they’ll eventually be fighting for air at a Pride week circuit party as they’re squeezed pecs-to-pecs in a sweaty, throbbing, shirtless dance pit full of a-list hunks high on poppers. It’ll happen if they read Rowling. Mark my words. It’s got cooties, this Potter.

But it is possible that Ms. Rowling may be mistaken about her own character. She may have invented Hogwarts and all the wizards within it, she may have created the most influential fantasy books since J. R. R. Tolkien, and she may have woven her spell over thousands of pages and seven novels, but there seems to be no compelling reason within the books for her after-the-fact assertion. Of course it would not be inconsistent for Dumbledore to be gay, but the books’ accounts certainly don’t make it necessary. The question is distracting, which is why it never really emerges in the books themselves. Ms. Rowling may think of Dumbledore as gay, but there is no reason why anyone else should.

I mean, who didn’t see this coming? Wands? Broom sticks? Ian McKellan? Allow me to push my glasses up a moment and illuminate: “Albus Dumbledore” is, of course, an anagram for “A Dumbbell Roused”. Um, weight training, anyone? So painfully obvious. (Of course, it’s also an anagram for “Labored Bums Duel”, but we won’t go there.)

I’m poking fun here, but the only thing that truly sets me on edge is this: “she may have created the most influential fantasy books since J. R. R. Tolkien”. Either the writer is deluded or our world is in far graver danger than we ever imagined.

• Guardian world lit tour stops in China, a scene I know nothing about but keep promising myself I’ll research once they solve that pesky telomere end replication problem in my genes…
• Something about Shakespeare, who he was, blah blah blah — personally, I don’t care if he was a shaved marmoset with a pegleg, a nubbin, an outstanding balanace at the whorehouse and a collection jars housing young boys’ urine… Somebody wrote some damn fine plays and taught me a goodly bit about poetry. Nuff said. MEH!
• Tom Perrotta, profiled at the CBC
• Britney Spears mum to publish parenting book, tentatively titled: Hit Me Baby One More Time: A Cautionary Tale 
• NYC Japanese bookstore expands
• “Robot arm inscribes the Luther Bible around the clock“… when I saw this headline over at BoingBoing, I couldn’t help but think of Atwood’s Frankenhand, and then I got to thinking of title pages with God crossed out and an illegible signature underneath, maybe even with a personalized note above: “Dear Martin, Great to see you at the reading tonight, All props, love and random smiting, God”
• And also at BoingBoing is this bit on the Toronto Star running a paid anti-counterfitting advertisement section as news
• Wired for Books (an audio archive of interviews) (Thanks, Kevin’s dad)

Computer games are trying to kill The Story by coming to frag your children’s minds. Run for the hills! And switch from the crowbar to the rocket launcher. You’re going to need it.

Computer games are the devil’s work. But you knew that – it’s one of the reasons they’re so damned fun. The diabolical provenance may also explain why they’re not good, not if story is your business, as it is mine.

Seductive as they are, computer games are anti-story machines, and designed as such. And that matters because apart from that cunning opposable thumb gimmick one of the main features that distinguishes us from the other creatures on the planet is that we are story-telling animals. Story’s important, and it’s of no consequence how and where you get it – books, films, TV, theatre, bible, mosque, synagogue – it’s all story and it’s all crucial in explaining our nature to ourselves.

Stories do this by having beginnings and middles and ends, and protagonists who make significant journeys during which they grow and change and learn and make meaningful sacrifices. Computer games have many distracting and attractive bells and whistles, but other than developing good twitch skills, they don’t really do any of that. And, to be fair, they’re not structured to: they’re play – not story.

I wonder what my friend Clive, who writes about video games in the same way literary critics write about literature, would have to say about this.

Thirteen percent of the Library of Congress is missing. I’d like to know three things, 1) is this roughly equal to the percentage of missing congresspeople during any given day of work? 2) what’s the average rate of unaccounted for materials at libraries across the country? and 3) are all these volumes about the connections between Bush, big oil, 9/11, the ruling Saudi families, and elephant walk/soggy cracker initiations at Skull and Bones?

The problems with keeping track of materials can’t be traced to a single source. The problems start at the front desk, where the public still uses paper call slips, a method the inspector general called “outdated and inefficient.” That creates a problem because when the paper request is filled, and the item is off the shelves, it does not show up on the automated system as “charged out.” Then when the employee goes to the shelves, it is technically missing.

Ah, “technically”.

Lear is my favourite Shakespeare for quite a few reasons, but here it’s considered from a base assumption that it sucks royally, so to speak. I include the teaser paragraph because you should know that there are still papers left in the world that run stories and series like this one at the LA Times (if you’re Canadian, you might not know that news papers aren’t just column after column of blowhard pop culture opinion and rampant political editorializing).

With this piece, we introduce a series of occasional articles in which contemporary writers look back at classic works of literature. Here, Jack Lynch, the author of “Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife That Turned a Provincial Playwright Into the Bard” revisits “King Lear,” which continues its run this week at UCLA with Ian McKellen in the title role.

It’s not an easy play to like. The novelist William Makepeace Thackeray found “King Lear” a “bore” when he saw it in 1847. “It is almost blasphemy to say a play of Shakespeare is bad,” he admitted, but “I can’t help it if I think so.” Since “Lear” first appeared around 1605, many have made similar accusations.

• American novel about jet crash in NS wins US award (are we so desperate for attention from our older sibling in the bottom bunk that we’re willing to make this a news story?)
• French teen novel wins Quebec prize (now THAT’s a Canadian news story)
• Burmese author “escapes” censorship to be nominated for prize.. small victories are still victories, I guess

• Knights templar book selling “briskly”, claims Vatican… at least that’s what they WANT you to think…
• Random to publish Blair memoirs
• First Potter sells for over 40K
• Scariest characters in literature? Listen, if the character doesn’t pronounce w’s as v’s, then it’s just not spine-tingly enough for me…
• Sex and the City meets the publishing industry? Ew. Squishy.
• Architecture based on the poetry of Emily Dickinson… Imagine, dashes sticking out everywhere like unsunk nails (from Maud)

Sad news for some, harsh justice for others, I’m sure. “What good can reading do anyone?! Our business here isn’t to entertain!  At the very least, we’re engaged in human storage. If we can, we hope to bore them straight!”

The people who run the jail took Darlene’s room away from her a while ago; she found this out, not from jail officials, but from a maintenance man who told her she would have to move the prison library into a glorified broom closet, perhaps 6 metres long and a mere 100 centimetres wide. Darlene is claustrophobic.

Officials eventually said they wanted to use the library room to store protective vests. Guards tried to intervene; they offered a variety of alternatives, and asked to be present when the issue was discussed in management meetings. They were ignored.

Darlene said there is an empty room built for the use of prison psychologists; it was never used and remains unused.

She quit.

On a side note, whenever I see those big, usually orange, windowless buildings that read “SELF STORAGE” on the side, I always imagine a guy standing in a broom closet with his his arms at his sides, sighing occasionally.

One of the idiots in government, the Finance Minister, in fact, steps in gingerly to interject something completely stupid into the conversation:

Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty says he got ripped off when he bought the latest Harry Potter book, paying 20 per cent more at an Ottawa retailer than the price listed at a Washington, D.C. store he visited last weekend.

“Now, is that a fair price differential?” he asked yesterday at a news conference, holding up a book he said cost him $36 before tax in Canada but sold for only $29.74 (U.S.) south of the border.

He’d hoped to use the Potter prop to increase pressure on retailers, whom he met with yesterday in hopes of goading them to cut prices to reflect the increasing strength of the Canadian dollar.

But Mr. Flaherty might want to work on his shopping skills, because the book is available to Ottawa consumers for less than the U.S. price he quoted.

I wish there were an emoticon for that sound used in cheap television comedies to denote a bone-headed move. Wa, wa, waaaaaaaa. Sometimes it feels like sound effects are the only weapon we have. Like a documentary of North American foreign and domestic policy that shows a montage of dying and crippled soldiers, burning forests, flooded costal cities and spreading disease, but with a keystone cops soundtrack.

Appreciated at a Guardian blog.

Who is Britain’s greatest living novelist? If pressed, I would have to say JG Ballard. No other contemporary writer, in my opinion, has engaged with modernity and our urban environment quite like Ballard. And with Crash, his startling novel of 1973, he tackles the evident intersection of our prevailing psychological, philosophical, sexual and technological violence – so engrained is it in our modern age – in a way that nobody else has managed.

Seven year-old girl publishes book about the death of her father. Oh my god. … … … Look at me! … … I’m a wreck.

Brits apparently need a court order to bother telling their kids a bedtime story.

Having a bedtime story should be as much of a ritual for children as brushing their teeth, Ed Balls the Schools Secretary said today.

He called for a national revolution in children’s reading habits at home, as well as school.

Mr Balls wants all parents to read to their children for at least ten minutes a day and encourage their interest in books.

His announcement heralds the Government’s ‘national year of reading’ in 2008.

Um, people don’t do this already? It’s a practically a fight in my house to STOP the reading. Day or night. Sometimes I feel like I’ve been sent into the Bengal Tiger cage at the zoo holding a steak. I come out with shredded clothes and facial lacerations. We have to buy new shelves. FOR THE BOY. Every night the deal is one long story (ie, a Frog and Toad-type book or Pooh or Stuart Little or even something like The Boy Who Loved Words) and one short story (something full of pictures and a bit lighter on text). Now its evolved to one long, one short and a “telling” story, which usually ends up being about Camelot, Sherwood Forest or the secret land of teddy bears that lives in the closet. The whole sequence can take 45 minutes. I have to regain control here! I once seriously considered scrapping Bookninja and starting a kids reading blog based on Boy Ninja’s predilections. But then I thought, Do I have the energy?

Not getting quite the shock and awe rise it had hoped for out of the bruised US war machine, Iran has turned its focus to threatening to nuke the coffee shop crowd.

They have become a haven for modern bookworms everywhere – a place to combine a love of the written word with the pleasures of cafe society.

But now the trend of opening coffee shops inside bookstores has fallen foul of the authorities amid a general clampdown on social and intellectual freedoms.

Four bookshops in Tehran this week closed their coffee shops after receiving a 72-hour ultimatum from Amaken-e Omoomi, a state body governing the retail trade. The order has led to the closure of the cafe in one of the city’s best-known bookshops, Nashr-e Sales, which has hosted reading sessions by writers, including the Nobel prize-winning Turkish author, Orhan Pamuk, and become a popular meeting point for literary types.

I can just picture scores of couch-bound, over-caffinated poets jumping to their feet and racing in circles like startled cats. Somehow I wish that would happen here. The startling, not the closing of nutra-centres. I mean, coffee shops.

A mystery writer gets to know his characters — by cruising the red light districts of Bangkok. Yes, there’s an “s” on “district”.

There are plenty of johns around — this is Soi Cowboy after all, one of the better-attended red-light districts in Bangkok — but the bar girls are waving to John with a capital J, their author friend and confidant. Mr. Burdett waves back.

Mr. Burdett, a 56-year-old former lawyer turned novelist, has spent the past seven years chatting up hundreds of bar girls as inspiration for his trilogy, soon to be a quartet, of detective thrillers set in Bangkok’s netherworld.

Where I live the red light district is the west end of town at sunset. It’s more like a red clapboard district. Or a red head district. If you’re lucky you might find a red snapper district, depending on what boat is in at the time…

A writer discovers a new appreciation for appreciating the view. Next up, stopping to smell roses and taking roads less travelled.

The home of my early childhood overlooked a newsagent’s; that of my teenage years, an unofficial dump behind a broken wall. A wasteground hoaching with nettles, exhausted bramble bushes and dandelions was, apparently, just too tempting not to hurl burst sofas into – but at least I could watch wild flowers in comfort. Since, I have enjoyed vistas including a garage forecourt, a late-night Chinese takeaway, a rank of sari fabric shops, the inside of a bald, vest-clad neighbour’s bedroom and the M73 to Carlisle. Each had their charms, but wow factor wasn’t one of them. It never much bothered me. Views were fine in their place (generally on the other side of a car window) but not crucial. The Great Outdoors was an inconvenience on the way back to the Great Indoors, not much more. I knew there were people who climbed mountains just to look, but whatever connections they were making with patches of earth, unresponsive vegetation and rocks were lost on me. Whatever they saw, their eyes made theirs. Whatever they saw wasn’t mine.

MySpace and HarperCollins are teaming up for a new book on the environment, of all things. It will be written by Rupert Murdoch himself and is tentatively titled, “Pave It All, I Need the Parking”.

Popular online social network MySpace is teaming up with HarperCollins to make its first foray into book publishing, with a title that will feature user-generated content.

MySpace and Bowen Press have announced their plans to collaborate on an environmental title targeting youth to be called MySpace/Our Planet: Change is Possible, set for release April 22, Earth Day.

It’s a good thing for the environment that The Environment is so lucrative a subject these days.

A translator of the Quran comes under heavy fire for saying that Mohammed never intended one five letter word in a passage about disciplining wives to be interpreted as a command to beat your spouse.

Most translations of the Qur’an, which Muslims believe to be the word of God revealed to Muhammad, say the woman should first be admonished, then left alone in her bed and then beaten, albeit lightly.

“When I got to chapter four I had to really look at this carefully,” says Bakhtiar, a Chicago Islamic scholar who is the featured speaker at the 25th annual conference of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, which opens on Saturday at Toronto’s Noor Cultural Centre. “It took a lot of research time to see what it means.

“It’s a command in the Qur’an, an imperative and the point is the Prophet never did it, it meant something else to him,” continues Bakhtiar, 68, one of seven children of an American nurse and Iranian doctor. She concluded that the word idrib, which she found could have 26 different meanings, was best translated as “to go away” or “to leave,” not some form of “to beat.”

“Why choose the word to harm somebody, when that’s not what the Prophet did? He was a model for humanity.”

For those of you who were at Shalom Auslander’s interview at IFOA: I can only assume this also has to do with Phil.

Toronto mystery writer Maureen Jennings was swimming in Florida when she got caught up in a riptide. A bystander tried to save her and drowned in the process. The shaken writer speaks of being saved.

Ah, Texas: the loud, borderline-retarded uncle of the American family…. You’re always interrupting the conversation with gunshots, aren’t you? I know this should have gone in the stupid news pile, but it’s important things like this get noticed and not buried. While the parents and administration involved in this school decision are indeed stupid, unlike some other stupid moves below their stupidity has far reaching implications that can destroy lives.

Kaleb Tierce, 25, is being investigated for allegedly distributing harmful material to a minor after the student selected Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy’s “Child of God” off the list and read it.

Tierce, a third-year teacher and assistant football coach at Jim Ned High School, has not been arrested, but his case has caused an uproar in this West Texas town of 700 people. Last week, more than 120 parents and students crowded into a meeting where the school board voted to keep Tierce on paid leave.

Ninja favourite Gil Adamson charmingly writing about how her book got to the front table at Crapters.

There, on a table by the door, with a recommendation, was my book The Outlander (House of Anansi, 2007). Of course, I figured the book would be in there somewhere, spine out, up by the A’s. But on a table? What the..!? I pretended to browse for a few minutes, but I was too excited to think. I thoroughly enjoyed the moment, and then I skittered out of there with my cheeks aflame. I wonder if “established” writers feel that way too? Maybe once in a while?

My preference is for independent bookstores. Used bookstores. Small places with off-the-wall staff and books you can’t get anywhere else. Once you find one you like, it’s like your own fridge—open it up and see what’s yummy in there. My poetry books (Primitive, 1991, Coach House Press and Ashland, 2003, ECW Press) and my book of linked short stories (Help Me, Jacques Cousteau, 1995, The Porcupine’s Quill) all had very happy lives in bookstores like that.

I’m sure some authors don’t see the difference. Big, small, it’s all the same to them. (And I will admit to spending some happy afternoons with my Dad, and his scooter, and his Australian digger’s hat, the two of us having lunch at Chapters and then cruising the aisles. That’s okay too.) But small is what I’m used to. It’s where I come from.

A big, white, pusy head. Penguin plans to pop said pimple by bringing pricing close to par in the new year.

Penguin Group (Canada) is planning to sell U.S. books to Canadian retailers at as close to par as possible in the new year, a company spokesperson said yesterday.

The Canadian publisher is working toward bringing its pricing to within 1.1 per cent of par by January.

“We’re trying to get to par,” Yvonne Hunter, Penguin’s director of publicity and marketing, said yesterday from Toronto. “We’re absorbing (losses) directly off our bottom line and working with our retailers through shared markdowns and sales promotions.”

Since the Nobel announcement Doris Lessing has been getting some serious press and is saying all sorts of things sure to send people into fits of apoplexy. This makes me happy.

Lessing has been making notes for her Nobel acceptance speech, in which she plans to explore the odd see-saw of literacy that seems to be seeping from her current world, Europe, back into her past one, Africa.

“You know, of course, that serious writers sell a fraction of what we used to sell,” she says. “When I went to the States last, it was about four or five years ago, where I used to sell automatically 40 or 50 hardbacks, I was sitting in Barnes & Noble and there were queues actually going down the street, but we didn’t sell any books.

“So my publisher said, ‘Oh, well, it’s 9/11.’ Well, whether it was 9/11 or not, the fact was that whereas before I sold books well, I wasn’t then.” This led her to realize, she says, that people just aren’t hungry for books the way they used to be, and still are, in much of the undeveloped world.

Are readings audiences getting TOO informal?

Literary readings are not the stuffy, uptight affairs that some people think they are. Sure, there’s usually a little formality to them — respectful, attentive audiences that are quiet and, if some nod off, they keep the snoring at a minimum.

Lately, though, the behavior at several readings has reached the anarchy of the multiplex movie crowd.

Maybe it started at the George Saunders’ reading Oct. 1 with the guy in front of me eating french fries and passing them around to his friends while the author read on earnestly.

The scene was the Frick Fine Arts auditorium for Pitt’s Contemporary Writers Series, so we give the kid a pass because he’s a college student and he don’t know no better.

It went from fries to a little black dog at the Heinz Fiction Prize ceremony Oct. 17 at the Frick. After I sat down for winner Kirk Nesset’s reading, I heard a muffled yip behind me and, sure enough, two women had brought Fifi along for the festivities.

I’m not sure if the pooch was fed from the reception table after the talk.

Now, in a long career of hearing authors, I can say I got to hear a dog, too.

I once read at a series in a Toronto bar that was frequented, post-reading, by a very young rave-type crowd. As the curator fired up the readings introduction, three obviously stunned rave kids on a couch right in front of the “stage” got these big saucer eyes and looked at each other as though just realizing they were trapped in an old house with a killer on the loose. As I took the stage and started to read, they were in the midst of what might possibly be the slowest slo-mo donning of jackets you’ve ever seen. It was like a mime routine, but with real props.

Anyway, as I was reading, they completed their dressing act and ever-so-slowly started to rise. I continued reading, but held up a finger and interjected, “Hang on.” They froze, mid-rising. They looked like at tableau of crouching WWI soldiers climbing out of a trench. But young and stupid. I left my don’t-you-dare-move finger hanging in the air for the entire poem. As soon as I finished, I said, “Now scram” or something to that effect, and they beat a hasty, grateful retreat to the door. Whippersnappers.

I guess that’s one way of handling things. If I ever encounter the cell phone problem, I’ll look here for guidance.

Here’s a bit of the less important news in bite-size bits before I get to the juicier stuff.

• More on Dumbledore’s rendition, and subsequent demonstration, of It’s Raining Men
• News about the publishing industry’s attempt to create an award for the last demographic to not have their own dedicated award: idiot lit
• FLASH: Kids love Rowling… even in person!
• Surprise winner for the Samuel Pepys award! I think we all know the real surprise here is actually twofold: 1) there’s such a thing as a Pepys award? and 2) this is what passes for newsworthy?
• Nepotism in the magazine world? Shock! Disbelief! No way!
• Germany vs. Switzerland bookselling cage match (my money is on the Germans if it’s clothed, the Swiss if they’re nekkid and fighting in chocolate syrup)

I’m in the Toronto airport waiting for my plane and for the sun to rise. I can’t wait to be home. One more festival/reading to go in my fall tour and then I can just enjoy the chill and rain in St. John’s. My problem with book parties, particularly of the enormoid variety, is that aside from getting to hang with/see/meet some nice people, I kind of feel like an invisible anthropologist conducting ethnographic research on a culture so different that it’s bordering on a new species. The observations are too painful to record in a field notebook… “Where Koko initially displayed interest, generosity and a propensity for social one-on-one interaction, he grows fawning, reticent and skittish when Zeus lumbers in with his prominent silver back and threatening alpha status…” I fear I’m nearing the very end of my ability to stomach it all. Sigh. It was a good ride. See you in the nursing home. Anyway, here are some links to get you through your morning.

• Compelling arguments for why Carver stories shouldn’t be Frankensteined back together
• Libraries eschewing Google scans
• Dumbledore is gay? Have your say!
• Rankin talks to Ceeb about the end of Buddy Whatshisface
• Kundera wins Czech prize
• Poetry ignored by award shortlist… hm, says I… hmmmm…..
• Following that: why you shouldn’t ignore poetry (from Bookslut)
• War, no peace
• Rage, rage against the dying of the gently dappled light “Setting is everything in Canadian fiction. Plots don’t matter much. There are only a few plots anyway: recovering from historical or familial trauma through the healing power of whatever (most common); uncovering historical or family secrets and thereby achieving redemption (close second); coming of age (distant third place).The characters are mostly the same: The only thing that changes is the location of the massacred grandmother, what kind of booze the alcoholic father drinks himself into fits with, what particular creed is being revealed, in deft and daring ways, as both beautifully transcendent and oppressive.”

Horror writer and son of Stephen King talks about inheriting the family business (I wonder if he’s going to fire the old staff and start clean?)

At first, he avoided the genre his father made his own. Last year, Hill landed a publishing deal. This spring, as his debut novel, the horror story Heart-Shaped Box, received rave reviews and climbed the bestseller lists, Variety blew his cover.

“The thing is, I didn’t want to have special consideration,” says Hill, between mouthfuls of chicken wings and beer.

He talks about his last unpublished book: a “huge, slobbering, 900-page” tome called “The Fear Tree”, a “domestic fantasy”, part Tolkien, part John Irving. When it was rejected by publishers in North America and Britain, he felt that his instincts to conceal his identity were correct.

“I didn’t want someone to publish my book because of who my dad was or what my last name was. And in that sense I feel like getting turned down was actually a case of my pen name doing its job.

‘Cause a lot of people said they kinda liked ‘The Fear Tree’ but it wasn’t quite good enough. And I think it was important to have something that was better than just ‘pretty good’. To write a story that people wanted to publish because they just thought it was a great story.”

An opinion piece in the Guardian asks why the suit-happy RIAA hasn’t yet sued the public libraries.

Why hasn’t the Recording Industry Association of America sued a library yet? As a means of getting music to rip, the local library is hard to beat. It’s free, or very cheap. It will lend CDs for a fortnight, from a fairly wide range which can be browsed in a comfortable and convenient place; and if it does not have a particular CD, or even DVD, it will make an effort to find it. If I wanted to build a collection of published music for which I did not pay, the local public library would be more useful than the whole internet.

Public libraries are invisible in most debates about copyright as it affects mass consumption. Perhaps American public libraries are less splendid than ours? Or maybe the good public libraries are in affluent areas where people make private provision for everything. Still, they are the institutions which have the longest experience of making copyright goods available fairly to people who have not paid directly for them; and in all the time libraries have been around, no one has come up with a better model.

It’s not a tuuumuh! A new theory posits Poe’s death by brain tumour. Damn science, spoiling the romance! A great man once said, “Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins the movie by telling you how it ends. Well, I say there are some things we don’t want to know. Important things!” And I’m inclined to agree. Meh!

In an effort to offset, confound, and sell books, Rowling has made a followup announcement to her Harry-was-Jesus stupidity: Harry’s teacher was gay. Apparently also in the works are revelations that Hermione was actually an Ojibwe performance artist, Ron was a disenfranchised inner-city black youth, and Hagrid was a crippled Viet Nam vet living in a world he never made. Lady, it’s a book about priviledged white kids navigating power relations in a private school. You can’t rewrite them in by chatting that away.

• O’Neill on Quebec shortlist
• Circus around Enright’s win (Enright is opinionated, and is receiving much flack for said opinions…)
• Robert McCrum on the need to scrap our prize culture (specifically the Booker) and re-envision the entire endeavour from scratch:

  It is amazing what one speech can do. On the way into London’s Guildhall last week I was: a) rather in favour of the Man Booker prize; and b) only half persuaded by Robert Harris’s magnificent assault on its ‘evils’ in the Evening Standard. Three hours later, the only good news was that Anne Enright had won. After one of the most embarrassing Booker speeches in living memory, from prize chairman Sir Howard Davies, backed up by complacent, regional sales conference-style remarks from Booker boss Jonathan Taylor and Man stooge Peter Clarke, it was hard, if not impossible, to suppress the thought that our premier literary trophy should be subjected to a root-and-branch reform.

Text messaging. Shoot me now. Better yet, shoot anyone who texts me a book advert.

Independent publisher Dan Wells, producer of the strikingly beautiful Biblioasis books, riffs on why he hates Amazon.ca more than Indigent.

No: the “bookseller” who has caused me the most frustration and stress is not Chindigo, but amazon.ca. Their bureaucracy makes Indigo’s seem positively customer-oriented. Their bibliographic information is consistently messed up; we have to fight with them to get our books in stock. They regularly, and seemingly for no reason, list our books as out of print, or not currently available, or not yet available, even months after the book’s release. One day the book is listed as available, with a couple of copies in stock; the next it is no longer in print. Twice in the last six months they have stopped listing our books as available the week immediately following a glowing Globe Review, the time when we are most likely to receive direct orders for our titles. I know for a fact that our distributor and sales force have repeatedly addressed this with amazon, with absolutely no success: go online today, the week after a positive Toronto Star review, 2 weeks after a rave of a Globe review, for John Metcalf’s Shut Up He Explained, and you will find it unavailable for anything but pre-order, a month after it’s official release, and after numerous bibliographic updates which should have remedied the problem. There is not a doubt in my mind that this has cost us at least several sales, and maybe more. And anyone who knows anything about small press publishing in Canada knows that every single sale counts.

Rowling makes her publicists’ wildest dreams come true by “revealing” that the Harry Potter series is really a Christian allegory in which Harry Potter is a wand-weilding, broom-riding Christ. Um, yeah.

“The truth is that, like Graham Greene, my faith is sometimes that my faith will return. It’s something I struggle with a lot,” she revealed. “On any given moment if you asked me [if] I believe in life after death, I think if you polled me regularly through the week, I think I would come down on the side of yes — that I do believe in life after death. [But] it’s something that I wrestle with a lot. It preoccupies me a lot, and I think that’s very obvious within the books.”

Anti-spin read: Please ignore the demons and witches behind the curtain! I am interested in courting your lucrative demographic. You think Philip Pullman can flip-flop? You haven’t seen anything yet. I’m like a fish out of water. People, I’m ready to do whatever it takes to get you to buy this book.

Well, his image and his signature. Our beloved Margaret Atwood was on hand to personally download Conrad Black’s filthy little soul into the Frankenhand machine so he could once again sully Canadian shores with his oily presence. Hopefully once he was here in spirit, Atwood trapped his soul in a thumb drive, tied the lanyard to a big rock and headed for the Toronto Island ferry.

“We’re going shortly to connect to Florida where Conrad Black will be sitting in his study and that moment should be … now,” Atwood proclaimed, shortly after 7 p.m. The screen failed to respond. “This moment is not now,” Atwood said.

Suddenly Black appeared on the screen. “There we are,” Atwood said. “Hello, Conrad!”

“Hi, Margaret,” Black responded.

The spectators applauded, as the cameras swung around the room so Black could see his audience.

Somewhere in the background, a Ninja barfed slightly into the back of his mouth.

(For the record, I added that last line myself.) As Atwood has previously noted, I’m a convert on the machine. It’s oddly intimate and very accurate with the signature. But perhaps the most convincing data is the pollution savings. Now, now, I know, there’s probably a shitload of background evil in the electricity used and wires and signals strung and bouncing around the world, but you can’t deny the appeal of not dumping pounds and pounds of shit into the atmosphere to fly Conrad’s sorry ass up here for a love-fest he doesn’t deserve.

Note this piece is by Marchand but doesn’t seem to include any of his trademark analysis and commentary…. Was that an word count choice, Phil, a directive from above, or are you getting into reporting news?

Reader Frankie the C sends this video of Margaret Atwood interviewing Ian Rankin. At least I assume it’s that. I can’t tell because Ninja K’s MAC can’t play the file. Must not be an “intuitive”-enough video. Anyways, if you hear a sax riff start up and it opens on a sweaty chest, scream and run away and blame it on Frankie.