I’ve been saying for years that it’s coming to the breaking point, and now it’s here. Reap what you have sown.

Faced with ongoing budget crises, underfunded schools nationwide are increasingly left with no option but to cut the past tense—a grammatical construction traditionally used to relate all actions, and states that have transpired at an earlier point in time—from their standard English and language arts programs.

A part of American school curricula for more than 200 years, the past tense was deemed by school administrators to be too expensive to keep in primary and secondary education.

Profiled at The Guardian.

Not everyone loves Pullman and his work. In Britain he is attacked by both the godly and the godless, by Christian groups as anti-religious and by the Secular Society for a sanitised film version. In America, Christian groups have threatened to picket cinemas. Bill Donohue, the president of the US Catholic League, last night accused Pullman of “a stealth campaign”, saying he allowed the studio to water down his “Catholic-bashing books”, to ensure the second and third films were made. He added: “An honest author would never allow a film studio to prostitute his work.”

Pullman’s deceptively mild response to the attacks is that he is “just a storyteller”.

Author tours are in decline because of the ease and proliferation of internet video. Thus spake the Frankenhand.

The author tour, with its accompanying readings and signings, has come to be the quintessential tool for promoting books. It is a chance for writers to charm their readers and for readers to glimpse the person behind the words. At its best, the meeting can be electric. (At worst, nobody shows up.)

But in the past five years or so, observers say the traditional author tour has been in decline: Fewer writers are being sent out, and those who do tour make fewer stops. Among the many reasons for this shift are marketing tools that have made it possible to orchestrate a virtual encounter, without the hassle or expense of travel. Publishers and authors are now touting books through podcasts, film tours, blog tours, book videos, and book trailers. In fact, it’s unusual for a book not to have some sort of Web presence. (Blue van Meer, the fictional main character in the 2006 novel “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” by Marisha Pessl, even has her own MySpace page.)

Publicity departments used to be places where wacky ideas originated but languished, says Carol Schneider, executive director of publicity for Random House. Now, with the Internet, she says, “they are really able to carry [those ideas] out.”

Each is a small experiment, an incremental move, as the publishing industry has begun to embrace the Internet and other new media. It’s hard not to wonder, though, whether their cumulative effect will one day render the face-to-face bookstore meeting between writer and reader obsolete.

Author of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, perhaps most famous for suing Dan Brown over The Da Vinci Code, dead at 67.

(Somewhere in the depths of his European compound, Dan Brown sits on a spotlit throne in a dark room. He adjusts his turtleneck collar and gently presses his fingertips together before lacing his hands to form a steeple with with his twinned index fingers… With heavy-lidded eyes and a dispassionately raised brow, he taps this fingersteeple against his lips three times as though completing a long blessing. He lowers his head in contemplation as a sibilant voice from the darkness whispers something that sounds like “Fffauuussssssst”.)

Juan Gelman, 77, takes home the biggest Spanish language prize in the world (more than double (triple?) the purse of the Griffin).

I’m not even sure what this kind of thing means anymore. I just want TV back on so more of the people I dislike will stay in at night at leave the coffee shops and pubs empty for me.

A federal appeals court on Thursday set aside a settlement between freelance writers and a group of publishers, including New York Times Co and Thomson Corp, in a copyright case involving work posted online or in databases.

The decision reopens an issue that was settled in 2005 after years of negotiations over claims by freelance writers that their contracts did not allow for publication of their work electronically.

I almost don’t know what to say….

In the novel, the main character, Oedipa Maas, discovers a symbol in a bar bathroom that later appears throughout the novel. It’s a muted trumpet that represents a shadowy organization called Trystero, which may or may not be an underground postal network. The “muted post horn” appears in about a third of the 15 to 20 occurrences of graffiti documented by nine police reports received so far, said Matthew Bowman, the community relations and training officer at the UCSB Police Department.

(The other two-thirds apparently delved into less literary territory through the depiction of male body parts, the F-word and references to the university and the police. For that reason, Bowman said, he doesn’t think the crime is necessarily or completely related to the book.)

Well, people are finally starting to mumble about the rather underwhelming GG awards, with hometown papers profiling the winners. Speaking of the poetry list, I was cheering for my list-mate Rob Winger, as you know, but I just CAN’T believe Dennis Lee didn’t win this thing. It just seemed like such a no-brainer.

• Alex Good brings us his fourth installment of The Runnaway Jury, a yearly recreation of the jury deliberations on the poetry shortlist (much of this article doesn’t show up well in Firefox…)
• The Globe points out that this win ties Michael O with Hugh MacLennan (!) for the most number of GG wins ever
• Halifax is happy with Domanski’s win — third time seems to be a charm
• Montreal massacre piece wins drama award

Jessa points to Tao Lin’s Stranger piece riffing on types of American writers, from lowest to highest….

$9.98 PETCO GERBIL: Anne Tyler/Carol Shields/Jane Smiley

Have won the Pulitzer Prize and other major awards but are thought of by most critics, writers, and journalists to be primarily romance authors or perhaps “self-help” authors, partly because all their books are bestsellers but mostly because they are women who write about human relationships and are not from a foreign country. Make enough money to not have blogs, MySpace pages, or their e-mail addresses on the internet. Will never be written about in Review of Contemporary Fiction. Secretly considered “unseemly in a wholesome way somehow” by serious literary critics; “I don’t know, is it okay to read these people?” by MFA students at Iowa Writers’ Workshop; and “I really, really want to stay away from those people and their books” by people who like Thomas Pynchon a lot.

The Times has a full section of articles and goodies on the Pullman books and movies. I’m used to being disappointed by other people’s visions of literary worlds, but this one particularly misses the imagery for me. I think I might have to take a pass.

Canadian writers are picketting in support of the Hollywood writers strike. This is like Microsoft janitors picketting in support of Bill Gates, but I see the point.

Britain is fretting about its literacy test scores as well, especially given that it’s a point BEHIND the U.S.! Canada has four provinces above them both. Ahem. But it’s not so much the rank that’s scary, as the change in rank. The UK went from 3rd to 19th. That’s like the Leafs post-Dougie and -’93, eh? What happened?

A generation of 10-year-olds are losing confidence in books, spending fewer hours a week reading at home and enjoying it less than five years ago, the study published yesterday found.

Ministers immediately announced a £5m scheme to make more books available in nurseries and promised more radical reforms to the controversial literacy strategy. They also called on parents to read with their children.

Headteachers said that the government’s literacy strategies – under fire after a series of critical reports – were to blame for taking the “buzz” out of reading and putting children off.

Nobel Doris has called in sick for dinner. She’s too ill with a bad back to make it to deliver her speech.

The 88-year-old author is unable to travel to the Swedish capital on 10 December because she is suffering from a bad back, the Nobel Foundation said.

Lessing, the oldest writer to win the award, will be presented with the $1.5m (£725,000) prize in London.

British playwright Harold Pinter was unable to attend the ceremony due to illness after winning in 2005.

Personally, I think it’s more likely she’s suffering from the literary superstar equivalent of the Friday Flu. She doesn’t care a whit and is just looking to get out of the frufraw. And I quote: “Oh Christ… I couldn’t care less…”

Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion has been published in Turkey? Isn’t this alone a cause for celebration? That’s like seeing an anti-soccer tract being published in Argentina. I’m surprised there haven’t been riots already.

A Turkish prosecutor is considering whether to prosecute the Turkish publisher of Richard Dawkins’ bestselling atheist polemic, The God Delusion, on the grounds that it incites religious hatred.

The publisher, Erol Karaaslan, said today that he expected to be questioned on Thursday by an Istanbul prosecutor as part of an official investigation, and faces prosecution both as its publisher and translator. The book has sold some 6,000 copies in Turkey since it was published by his Kuzey publishing house in June. The inquiry apparently began after one reader complained that passages in the book were an assault on “sacred values”.

Ah, Turkey: forever teetering between the Euro and bloody barbarism. Someone get a Starbucks negotiator in there to settle this.

Wait a minute!? Are you telling me a law forcing testing but ignoring the fundatmental lack of support for the education system across economic brackets, as well as the indifference toward intellectual development in the average home, ISN’T working out? But don’t these kids get it? It’s a TEST! It’s up to them to do better with the less we give them. Ungrateful little shits making us look bad…. You know what would teach these under-developed schools a lesson? Sanctions.

Test results released Wednesday showed U.S. students, who took the test last year, scored about the same as they did in 2001, the last time the test was given — despite an increased emphasis on reading under the No Child Left Behind law.

Still, the U.S. average score on the Progress in International Reading Literacy test remained above the international average. Ten countries or jurisdictions, including Hong Kong and three Canadian provinces, were ahead of the United States this time. In 2001, only three countries were ahead of the United States.

The 2002 No Child Left Behind law requires schools to test students annually in reading and math, and imposes sanctions on schools that miss testing goals.

Canada Reads, a reality show on CBC radio, is gearing back up for a long argument about …something… between astronauts, rock stars, actors, and (shock!) some literary folk. It’d be interesting to get some stats on how many people actually follow through and read the book once the radio sniping is done.

Canada Reads is the annual on-air book discussion in which a panel tries to pick a single book that all of Canada would enjoy reading.

Jian Ghomeshi, host of cultural affairs show Q, will host the 2008 contest, scheduled for Feb. 25-29.

Author and lesbian activist, dead at 76.

A wide range of possible poetry collections either didn’t make the cut or aren’t considered by the NYT to constitute “books”.
I know Ninja K is working on something to do with the Bolaño book, so hopefully that will arrive this fall.

Apparently the g-men in the US were trying to get customer reading habit data from Amazon. A judge ruled against them and poof, it’s over. For now.

Federal prosecutors have withdrawn a subpoena seeking the identities of thousands of people who bought used books through online retailer Amazon.com Inc., newly unsealed court records show.

The withdrawal came after a judge ruled the customers have a First Amendment right to keep their reading habits from the government.

“The (subpoena’s) chilling effect on expressive e-commerce would frost keyboards across America,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker wrote in a June ruling.

“Well-founded or not, rumors of an Orwellian federal criminal investigation into the reading habits of Amazon’s customers could frighten countless potential customers into canceling planned online book purchases,” the judge wrote in a ruling he unsealed last week.

There’s only a thin, inky line between society and barbarism, and that line is held by writers. Perhaps in light of the strike and buoyed by the success of the Coen Bros adaptation of No Country for Old Men, John Freeman makes the claim that we are what keeps the lights running.

Sure, the old saw is writers don’t have the power in Hollywood – and they don’t – but where would the pictures be without them? Now we know. More than two dozen shows have had to stop production in the US, from 24 to The Office, since the strike began on November 5 over writers’ demands for a higher proportion of DVD revenue, among other things. All of our night-time talk shows have ceased. If it continues into next month the strike is going to cost the Los Angeles economy $21m a day. That’s a lot of lattes.

Some of this is down to contract dispute, and some has to do with new media, but a lot of it seems to be part of an increasing desire of our entertainment industry to deny its writerly roots. We listen to songs on the radio, but without songwriters they’d be pretty boring; we watch news on the television, but without writers it grinds to a standstill. No matter how many ways the world of the image tries to supersede the word, words and language continually reassert their primacy. One of the most obvious examples of this is in American print publications: as newspapers hollow out their coverage of just about everything, magazines like The New Yorker and The Nation have picked up more and more subscribers because they honour good writing.

The NBCC polled a bunch of famous types and its roster of member critics, including yours truly, to find out what the most commonly recommended books of 2007 are. None of mine made the top five. For the record, I chose only books published in the US, and came up with Dennis Bock, Shalom Auslander, and Albert Goldbarth.

Dave Eggers’ publicist (now there’s an easy job, one might suspect) is publishing her own book. And she’s pretty, says fluff piece! There’s virtually nothing substantive here about the writing. But being a likeable, pretty, well-placed publicist goes a long way towards making sure the buzz machine works in your favour.

EARLIER THIS MONTH at the Housing Works Gin Mingle, an annual event held at the roomy SoHo bookstore that brings together all manner of editors and literary types, Ms. Crosley did not have to introduce herself too many times. When she decided to go outside for a cigarette, it took fully six minutes and six conversations before she managed to get from the back of the store to the front door.

Which is not to say she is a social butterfly of indiscriminate taste. Though she claims to like everybody “unless they do some damage” to her, she does worry that life in this city has made some of the characters she interacts with a little, well, soulless.

“The really scary thing about New York is not the fear that everyone is hiding their true self,” she said. “The really frightening thing is that they’re not—that that’s it. That they’ve become whatever person they’ve built up.”

Ms. Crosley calls this the “empty mask” syndrome, and as you watch her move about at a publishing party, you can see that for all the energy and enthusiasm she projects, she maintains a strict, quiet skepticism as she works the floor.

At Housing Works, everyone wanted to say hi to her: Older women—agents, editors, etc.—spoke to her with a conspiratorial sort of excitement; young men approached her one after another and behaved very transparently.

“She’s very charming, isn’t she?” one of them said, looking over with appreciation at Ms. Crosley. “She’s kind of irresistible.”

Well, she is kind of pretty, in a non-Lisa Loeb way…. hm…. ooo…. mmm… … … … … … !!snorkbluk!!–What the?! WAIT! Don’t anybody let me fall asleep again in this fluffy field full of poppies!!!

• Kennedy memoirs go for $7,999,954 more than I have to my name
• What makes great sports writing? I can’t answer that, but I can speculate on what makes great Sports video on teh YouTubes: the Theismann break
• Norman Mailer finally wins award in death for all the bad sex he had in life
• JK Rowling entertainer of the year (Kanye West flips out: HELLL NO!)
• David Cronenberg to write novel, perhaps incorporating new biotechnology designed to enter the brain via razor blade insertion in the retina, then act as a parasitic implant delivering horrifically unexpected and alternating doses of adrenaline and endorphins
• Publishers aim for greener future

Magazine writer profiled at SFGate. (From Jessa)

According to his editors in New York, Langewiesche’s job is to find and report stories that illustrate ways in which the world is changing. At 52 he spends months squatting in remote, sometimes dangerous places, from the jungles of Ecuador to the frontlines of Iraq. He walks around. He talks to people. And he gathers the information he needs to construct a narrative path; so readers won’t have to suffer through the same confusion he did.

“He’s got brass balls and infinite patience,” said Graydon Carter, executive editor of Vanity Fair. “He doesn’t even take notes during the first weeks on a story. It seeps into him.”

Why is Alice Munro so popular with European head mechanics?

The line-up struck me as ambitious bordering on insane: 18 speakers on topics that included everything from Munro and the domestic hearth to female genitalia, sonatas and finally death. An owlish man from the mayor’s office delivered the intro with staccato gusto. He emphasized the “exploration of the meaning of death and life” and “multi-disciplinarily nature” in the work of Munro — or “Alee-chay Man’-rrro,” as she’s called by Italians. I might have agreed, had the man not admitted to me two seconds before taking the podium that he’d never opened a Munro story in his life.
…
Here were people who clearly knew their Munro, who delighted in the richness of her stories, in the different layers of meaning and who above all were grateful to her giving them, as psychoanalysts, greater understanding into the disjointed, ever-shifting way women often experience reality. As Parisian psychoanalyst Denise Sauget later put it, “Alice Munro is testimony to how much more literature gives to psychoanalysis than theories. And I’d go so far as to ask if the survival of psychoanalysis is not dependent on this kind of literature.”

I suspect in the coming years this will become its own category of post on Bookninja. “Onlibrary Update” or “Miscallaneous library news, much of which may be online“…

An international consortium of universities and libraries announced Tuesday they have digitized more than 1.5 million books and made them available through a single website.

The Million Book Project, also known as the Universal Digital Library, said the collection includes books in more than 20 languages, with titles ranging from Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to The Analects of Confucius.

Two-thirds of the books scanned so far are written in Chinese script, with most of the remainder of the titles written in English. The bulk of the scanning, digitization and cataloguing for the project has been performed in China and India.

Outsourced!? This deeply disturbs me. How can we be sure these foreign librarians meet international standards such as the Lisa Loeb Sexiness Quotient? The world is falling to pieces around me!

Philip Pullman, the embattled author of what he originally claimed was a take down of Catholic authority and dogma, but now that millions of movie dollars are involved claims is a broader story subject to focus group tweaking and marketing exec vetoes, is now back to calling rubbish on the Catholic church. But this time it seemst he battle is more about protecting the upcoming movie than the books.

Philip Pullman dismissed as “absolute rubbish” accusations by the US-based Catholic League that the film promotes atheism and denigrates Christianity.

“I am a story teller,” he said. “If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.”

Um, Phil… Listen, long time supporter here. That last book…? A sermon. A good, exciting, a wee-bit too hastily-ended sermon. Don’t be a self-hating preacher. Testify, brother. A range of bannings and school board challenges keep him in the news.

Poet, novelist, ‘Ninja reader, uber-dad, and occasional PWAC executive director, John Degen, has a great long post on his blog in which he throws down on copyright. Is it like water, as one wag says: too little we die, too much we drown, or is it more like oxygen, as John opines? An either/or, life or death situation? Quoth the Degen:

A friend of mine, copyfighter Russell McOrmond, is fond of the analogy that copyright law is like water — too little of it and we die of thirst; too much of it and we drown. As analogies go, this one is very tidy, but I prefer to think of my copyright as oxygen. For the professional practice of a working writer, copyright is not a too much/too little proposition. It’s an either/or. Provided with my oxygen, I get to keep breathing and keep writing. Deprived of it, well…

Russell’s commitment to what he sees as fair copyright is profound, and I respect him even as I often disagree with the particulars of his position. I think our disagreements stem mostly from the fact that we work in very different areas and very different ways. Russell is a software developer and consultant deeply integrated into the open source ethos of that particular field. I write very traditional texts — poems, novels, essays and articles. It is possible that we need very different things from a copyright law, and I would hope that Canada’s legislators are subtle and smart enough to provide for both of us. You heard me.

The Governor General’s Awards have been announced.  Ondaatje for fiction and Domanski for poetry.

You might have missed it if you were out last Friday when it was posted, so remember to have a listen to the latest Magazine installment — an audio interview with novelist Michael Winter, conducted by Catherine Bush.

Mokoto Rich in the NYT looks at what makes a reader.

At a time when books appear to be waging a Sisyphean battle against the forces of MySpace, YouTube and “American Idol,” the notion that someone could move so quickly from literary indifference to devouring passion seems, sadly, far-fetched.

The problem was underscored last week when the National Endowment for the Arts delivered the sobering news that Americans — particularly teenagers and young adults — are reading less for fun. At the same time, reading scores among those who read less are declining, and employers are proclaiming workers deficient in basic reading comprehension skills.

So that’s the bad news. But is all hope gone, or will people still be drawn to the literary landscape? And what is it, exactly, that turns someone into a book lover who keeps coming back for more?

Apparently it has to do with elves, magnets, and the blood of a virgin reader (ie, no Dan Brown) cut with a gold knife, caught in a silver bowl and splattered on holly leaves during a winter solstice moon rising over the bestseller wall at Barnes and Noble.

Once the ebook has wreaked Regan-cum-Bush-level nukular harm on the ecosystem of literature, what will writing and publishing be like? Turns out the paper and cloth book may become a morlock offshoot species.

The effect this will have on publishing will be enormous. The job of today’s publisher is essentially to edit, pay and arrange for the printing, distribution of books, and market them. In an ebook world, printing goes out the window and readers essentially act as their own distributors. This leaves publishing companies with only their editorial and marketing wings. Freed from the crippling costs of book manufacture, storage, and distribution, it is easy to imagine a situation in which small publishers can compete with larger houses on the basis of the quality of their work, instead of the size of their cash reserves.

Or perhaps writers will simply avoid these gatekeepers no matter what their size and publish their own work, either as individuals or in publishing co-ops of their own making, thus ending publishing as we know it. Or maybe none of this will happen, because early in this book revolution, large companies will have grabbed control of the reading devices and databases so that everyone still has to play by the rules they set down.

With regard to the concept of the book itself, the changes could be even more sweeping. People seem to forget that the idea of a book being bound pieces of paper is a fairly new one – and there is absolutely no reason to think that it is the evolutionary endpoint for storing the written word. It is also easy to overlook how this format has affected the way humans write. Most of today’s forms of written storytelling – the novel, the poem, the short story, and the essay – have evolved in lock-step with the bound-paper book.

Sweet. I can’t wait to unleash my hideous subterranean poetry on the blue-eyed robe-wearers above. Of course, I plan on preserving their culture after I destroy it, perhaps by pressing them like leaves between the pages of my barbaric idea-storage devices.

Are publishers are weasling their way into Hollywood in a way that benefits or harms literature? Who cares! Let’s jump in this pile of money and then snort coke off hookers’ asses!

Literary writers have gone west in search of greater fame and fortune at least since the days of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and books have long inspired films. But today, some publishers are going directly into the movie business themselves. Last month, HarperCollins, a division of News Corp., announced a partnership with Sharp Independent to develop movies based on HarperCollins books. Meanwhile, Random House Inc. has teamed up with Focus Features to co-produce two to three movies a year based on fiction and nonfiction from its dozen imprints. Its first collaboration, “Reservation Road,” directed by Terry George and based on John Burnham Schwartz’s 1998 novel, played in theaters this fall.

These partnerships give publishers a bigger piece of the action than traditional film rights deals, which generally bring them little more than a publicity boost for tie-in editions. Now, Random House and HarperCollins will get a cut of the box office sales, as well as revenue from DVDs, cable TV and other media. And the authors involved will get more say in choosing screenwriters, actors and directors.

Ireland’s Independent on the worth of independents.

Think of the word “independent” in the book world, and you imagine young fogeys in tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, earnestly proclaiming the merits of obscure novels by Japanese octogenarians which sell precisely three copies before being remaindered.

However, the best-seller lists of recent years tell quite a different story. Eats, Shoots and Leaves, The Life of Pi, Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves, the Booker-longlisted What Was Lost, by Catherine O’Flynn, all demonstrate that the current crop of independents are energetic go-getters, unearthing treasures that would be lost in bigger houses, and publishing them with focus and a positivity that would put their bigger counterparts to shame.

But are these successes simply one-offs, or part of a larger sea-change in which the flat-footed behemoths that are the conglomerates are being outstripped by nimbler, smaller rivals? Do independent publishers really make a difference?

• Striking writers back in talks
• A shorter OED
• Wonder Woman finally controlled by a … get this … woman
• The shortlist of bad sex award passages (warning… yeesh)
• Cometh the Christmas lists

After being accused of insulting Muslims.

The exiled Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin went into hiding in the Indian capital last night after being hounded across the country accused of insulting Muslims – highlighting the difficulty of reconciling the right to free expression with respect for religious belief in the world’s largest democracy.

Nasrin, who has been living on a tourist visa in Kolkata since 2004, was bundled from her home last week after protests from Muslim groups led to riots – which were only quelled by army units.

A book bound in human skin has developed an image of the dead man’s face. The proper authoraties and Stephen King have been notified.

Hm. Society goes through a phase of renewed interest in religion and the numbers and frequency of challenged/banned books rises. Jinkies! There’s just GOT to be a connection in here somewhere, Scoob.

The American Library Association and Canada’s Freedom to Read, both organizations that monitor challenges against books, are noting an increase, said Pearce Carefoote, author of Forbidden Fruit: Banned, Censored and Challenged Books from Dante to Harry Potter.

“It’s far easier for an authority to just shut down discussion than to enter into an argument,” he told CBC Radio’s Q cultural affairs program.

“When you think about the history of education, going back to Socrates, it’s all been about asking questions, arguing over ideas, raising objections and then coming to some kind of resolution. That takes time, effort and hard work. It’s much easier to say ‘I don’t like this book.’”

The British Library is saving stuff. What stuff? Everything. 12.5km of shelf space per year… Now to store it all. But what’s actually worth storing? Sounds a macro version of the situation Casa del Ninja.

The warehouse is extraordinary because, unlike all those monstrous Tesco and Amazon depositories that litter the fringes of the motorways of the Midlands, it is being meticulously constructed to house things that no one wants. When it is complete next year, this warehouse will be state-of-the-art, containing 262 linear kilometres of high-density, fully automated storage in a low-oxygen environment. It will house books, journals and magazines that many of us have forgotten about or have never heard of in the first place.

Chris Fletcher, the warehouse’s project manager for the past 11 months, is extremely proud of it. “Normal atmosphere consists 20% oxygen. This will regulate oxygen in the warehouse to between 15.8 and 16.2%, with a mean of 16%, which will ensure minimal damage to the books in store. The air-conditioning will ensure 52.5% humidity plus or minus 5%. It will ensure a steady state temperature. The whole building will be sealed to protect the contents. It will,” he says puffing his chest a little, “comply with British Standard 5454. Amazing, isn’t it?”

Nothing like a bit of movie publicity to get people looking at the books as possibilities for bannin’. But now Peterborough Ontario, with its pretty downtown and encircling hub-burb of vaguely concrete bunker-like Conservative voter storage units, is throwing it’s tuque in the ring for the title of most ignorant town in Canada. Way to go, Peterborough! Yer just toolin’ along, ain’t yuh? Maybe youse guys can set up a good ol’ fashioned burnin’ down by Belleville way, eh? Yuh-huh.

A poetry reading series for the homeless in Toronto.

The event was part of a writers series at the Meeting Place, paid for by Canada Council for the Arts funding, with the aim of bringing culture to a segment of society without the means to attend concerts or other ticketed events. It featured St. George and his rhythmic style of performance poetry as headliner, but also included poetry readings by members of the Meeting Place community.

Jenny Thivierge, 41, is a recovering crack addict who started visiting the friendly, spacious centre while she was living on the streets. She now has an apartment, but is on a shoestring budget that doesn’t allow her many luxuries, and often attends community kitchen meals and social events at the centre.

“This is important because it’s feeding the mind, too,” said Thivierge, who is hoping to attend the culinary management program at George Brown College next fall. “Sometimes you look around and you think ‘remember when you used to go to the theatre, remember when you had money for a movie?’”

“Now I have no cable and I live in a bachelor. Sometimes you’re just looking at four walls and watching them suck in on you.”

She clearly wasn’t the only person who appreciated the evening’s performances. The group of about 40 people, which included many still living on the street or in squats, played an active role in the night’s affair – whether it was through their own performances, by singing along, or in one case, joining a performer onstage to tap a coffee mug to the rhythm.

• Dave Margoshes is a two-timer
• BC gears up for lucrative non-fiction prize
• O’Neill wins Hugh MacLennan Prize for first novel
• Soldiers to write their way out of Iraq — this of course assumes they still have their fingers, hands and arms
• Bad sex awards heating up like his pulsing plutonium rod aching for the heavy water of her reactor core
• GG’s announced tomorrow… Go Rob Winger!!
• Toronto journo wins PEN award

• Walk on role for Potter contest winner
• Pay the WRITER! (A video of Harlan Ellison flipping out paying writers… I love it.)
• Random culture: Oliver Sacks on music and your brain
• Zine fair in Montreal
• Finally, a technology that works for us — software that writes your book FOR you…
• “JK Rowling is a lily-livered chicken“

No posts today, because I’m engaged in a hectic battle with the plumbing in my house. (Gosh, I could really use a Zero-Point Energy Field Manipulator for this job — if you know what that is, you’re almost a big enough nerd to be in my gang). The war has spread to the drywall, which I’ve beaten into submission with a hammer and must now make whole again. (Did you know that the chalky stuff in drywall makes a great glue when it combines on your floor with spilled pipe water?)

Ironically, home repair would be just about the only reason for missing a day novelist and house renovator Michael Winter might accept, so I am taking this opportunity to post his new audio interview with novelist colleague and regular ‘Ninja contributor Catherine Bush. Bush sat down with Winter in Toronto to grill him on his use of truth and lies, as well as his process for creating and writing dialogue.

Happy Thanksgiving to our American readers.

Welcome to Texas…. er… Toronto? Well, Yanks, have your knowing laugh. You deserve it. You take a lot of shit from me and when it’s time to throw it back, I promise I won’t duck or dodge. Splat. A Toronto-area school board has pulled Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy because someone complained they promote aetheism.

“(The complaint) came out of interviews that Philip Pullman had done, where he stated that he is an atheist and that he supports that,” said Scott Millard, the board’s manager of library services.

“Since we are an educational institution, we want to be able to evaluate the material; we want to make sure we have the best material for students.”

Following a recent Star story about the series, an internal memo was sent to elementary principals that said “the book is apparently written by an atheist where the characters and text are anti-God, anti-Catholic and anti-religion.”

Millard said if students want the books, they can ask librarians for them but the series won’t be on display until a committee review is complete.

ITEM! We can be as ignorant and paranoid as the worst slackjawed counties of the US of A. There, I said it.

Should you read every poem in a book back to back in one sitting? Should you read more than one book at a time this way? Interesting riffing on how to read poems. Personally, if I didn’t books and poems read back to back, I’d never get through the stack that’s building daily on my desk. Keep them coming though, I loves ‘em.

Is there a proper way to read a volume of poetry? The question has vexed generations of readers since at least the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, and will continue to do so as long as Carcanet and Bloodaxe keep obliging us.

Reading a poetry book from cover to cover, with breaks every dozen or so, as though one were taking in another couple of chapters of a novel, just feels wrong. Dipping into a cherished volume for the odd one can be richly rewarding – I can’t be the only devotee who does this at intervals with The Whitsun Weddings, The Colossus, early Hughes. But how to read a new volume?

Regardless of what I thought of this, he had me at the word “Ashbery”.

A plethora of western greats will be translated into Arabic as part of a program that appears to be a mental version of the planting of Scots in Ireland to breed out the locals. Sadly, or perhaps triumphantly, depending on your point of view, this is probably the only real way to win (eventually) against radical ideology. Get to them when they’re developing and change the way they’re taught to think. Hit them with our giant mind blender and frappe all the discrete bits into one big thought smoothie. They did it in Japan and look how well that went. On one hand, yes, we have tentacle rape, cell phone novels, and bad businessman karaoke — but think of all the cool dancing robots and electronics!

In 2002 a highly critical UN Development Programme report, compiled by Arabs, bracketed this cultural void alongside absent democracy and poor levels of female empowerment as a primary reason why the Arab world was developing slower than comparable regions.

Kalima, seeded by a generous grant from the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, will fund the translation, publication and distribution throughout the Arab world of classic and contemporary writing.

The project has been hailed as one of the boldest and most significant cultural initiatives to come out of the Arab world in years: one also that will help the West repay a big historical debt to the region.

I mourn the loss of culture, and celebration of homogeneity, that will follow this.

An interesting essay on the origins and importance of having a literary canon, set, in part, against the assertion that said canon need come from high culture.

Sacks is right, in turn, to say that a society needs shared references and resonances, but there is no inherent reason for these to be high cultural ones. It is surely vain to suppose that poorly educated and disaffected young Asians can be brought to a stronger sense of belonging in Britain by a diet of Hamlet, Middlemarch and the Psalms. The truth is that shared references and resonances mostly need to evolve naturally, that most of them derive from popular culture, and that many of them are like family jokes. Television has had enormous power as a unifier; this power is now declining with the proliferation of channels and new media, but in their time Morecambe and Wise did more than Milton and Wordsworth to make us feel one people.

To understand how a canon is formed and how it can be socially useful, we might look to another kind of canonisation, that of individual men and women. The earliest and most durable saints were not created by the Pope: they were canonised by a process in which church and people somehow shared. Similarly, it is an obscure collaboration between the clerisy and the people that has canonised the great writers.

I guess it’s a holiday in the US. They’re giving thanks for the wars that keep the economy so robust and cripple their children’s futures. But this means Newsville is slow down there, and since our papers are increasingly stuffed with wire stories generated down there, I’ll just post a few things in a roundup format.

• A letter from Edith Wharton reopens a mystery you didn’t even know existed
• NYT’s 100 notable books of the year
• Once more into the breach for the tube warriors
• Canadian wunderkind Sheila Heti has put her entire first volume of short stories (The Middle Stories) up for free at her website
• Now it’s the ageing and/or old who write better

Apparently Kindle will sell subscribers access to various blogs. What do the bloggers get out of this? Ed has several extensive reports on this and I’ll list them in order: one, two, three, four. I think even Ed would agree he can come off as crazy sometimes, but he’s damn thorough when he gets a bee in his bonnet.