What is the right way to capitalize headlines? This;
Dear candidate for leadership of the largest unstable powderkeg in the political world, what was the last book you read? Basically, this should be a softball for Dems, but you can see them hedge here and there. Listen, if it’s not Hop on Pop or their own ghostwritten book of business lies, well, I imagine they look pretty good.
Libraries are reporting a spike in interest in Indignenous stories. Who would have thought: it turns out when you give Indigenous authors the same front table exposure as everyone else, the books move. I want to say that the Canadian people are interested in the Indigenous perspective, but the cynic in me says it’s not Canadians, but Canadians who read. And that in turn makes illustrates how much of this is an education issue. The critical thinker wants to learn more about what it doesn’t understand. The non-critical thinker wants to leave awful comments on CBC articles. Hey, Justin, do you hear this? Who’s going to vote for you in the next election? The commentors or the readers? Perhaps neither if you keep choking the life out of our Indigenous brothers’ and sisters’ lands.
from CBC
At the Toronto Public Library, collections manager Michele Melady says she has noticed a spike in interest for books like The Marrow Thieves by Métis author Cherie Dimaline and Seven Fallen Feathers by Anishinaabe writer Tanya Talaga.
Anna Comfort O’Keeffe, publisher at Douglas & McIntyre, says eight of her company’s top 10 books are written by Indigenous authors like Richard Wagamese.
“That’s what people want to read right now,” she said.
O’Keeffe says there has been such a proliferation of Indigenous writing that BookNet Canada, which serves the book industry, is revising international standards to include new classifications like Indigenous poetry.
If writer Eric Walters has his way — and there’s every indication he will — schoolchildren across the country will be picking up a book written by a Canadian on Feb. 19, and helping to celebrate a brand new national day.
The idea is simple: encourage families, kids, teachers to take 15 minutes out of their day to read a Canadian book. To help make it easy, schools, libraries and bookstores are hosting activities and events to put Canadian books in their hands. What sparked the idea is a bit more complicated: a shocking drop in the sales of Canadian books.
In December 2018, the More Canada report had just been published. It found that Canadian-authored books then represented just 15 per cent of book purchases — they used to represent 26 per cent. It also found that there were fewer publishers publishing Canadian books and that sales of Canadian books had declined by 44 per cent over the previous ten years — and that Canadians weren’t even sure if they were reading a Canadian book, partly because of online retailing.
In an interview for a new PBS Frontline documentary about Amazon viewed by Recode, which airs February 18, Kaphan said the company’s rise to power has left him conflicted.
“On one hand I’m proud of what it became,” Kaphan told the documentary’s host, James Jacoby. “But it also scares me.”
“I think not all of the effects of the company on the world are the best,” he added. “And I wish it wasn’t so, but I had something to do with bringing it into existence; it’s partly on me.”
Oulipo turns 60, but given how much we hear about it these days, it feels more like 150 (hey, some of my best friends fuck around with vowels, so I’m allow to say this);
And I mean that in less of a Celine Dion way and more in a Huey Lewis and the News way. Listen, I dislike this retail-buying-cycle-focal-point-disguised-as-a-holiday, not because I dislike love (I’ve learned all about it the last 10 years and it’s pretty dece, let me tell you), but because I hate being lied to. I also hate demonstrably participating in things. It makes my inner mohawk ache. So who should we blame for this yearly nonsense called Valentine’s Day? A goddamn poet. Of course. Chaucer, you fuckwit, look what you’ve wrought.
So, story time: back in the aughts, I sat on a national poetry award jury and tried to champion Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip. I was dismissed out of hand. I mean, we barely discussed it. I came to the table with a list that comprised both traditional and experimental forms, and I honestly thought that if any of my “experimental” choices were going to make it on the shortlist, Zong! would be the one. It was a difficult read for people brought up more traditional work, no doubt, but once you got the music of it, it was utterly compelling. You just couldn’t expect to get that music first time, with an untrained ear unused to the cadences and language flexibility within. So, no dice. Don’t get me wrong, the list ended up with some great names on it, but the jury arguing seemed to be between an entrenched establishment deal of poetry and me (and the gods know I’m but an armchair champion for any school at the best of times.) So, I’m glad to read this Walrus piece that explains a bit of why, and then to find this CBC article on Philip cleaning up, internationally. Also a Puritan essay linked in the quote below. High time.
Philip describes herself as a “disappeared” writer who has paid the price for her activism with her erasure from Canadian literature. In a recent essay published in The Puritan, Kate Siklosi expertly demonstrates this disappearance and the “archive of silence around Philip and her work in Canada.” While many of her contemporaries have taken up comfortable positions as creative-writing instructors or editors in publishing houses, Philip has yet to find prominent footing in the larger CanLit scene. Outside the country, she has been given the Casas de las Américas prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship among other international honours, but she has never received any major national literary award at home. Her 2008 collection, Zong!—about the 1781 murder of Africans thrown overboard on the orders of a slave-ship captain—was mostly ignored by Canadian critics despite being praised around the world.
Given Philip’s polemicism and her poly-vocal experiments with form, it might not be surprising that she would be seen as an outsider to the tonier CanLit communities. What is surprising is the extent to which she is also missing from the contemporary debates that have transformed CanLit. Philip’s history of disruption is directly relevant to our current discussions over cultural appropriation, antiblack racism, and exploitation in Canadian literature and publishing. Yet it’s hard to find major essays on the current state of CanLit that make reference to her work, she has been notably absent from panels discussing the topic, and isn’t a contributor to Refuse: CanLit in Ruins, the new anthology of criticism on the “raging dumpster fire” that has consumed the Canadian writing scene.
Tomorrow is St. Valentine’s Day, which I call “Halloween for Lovers”. It’s a religious day that was coopted by big business to sell you more shit because January and February suck in retail post-Xmas. Regardless, people seem to go in for it, so half the articles out there right now are blabbering about romance, etc. My concession to you all is one article: this woman was courted by a smoothie who made his move through her favourite novel. Aw, isn’t it …lovely… how closely courting and stalking are? It’s like a Sting song.
This sort of thing was still in circulation when I was a kid, and yet some people still argue about the existence of the patriarchy
“Hello, I’m Mark,” he said warmly, extending his hand with (I came to learn) characteristic frankness. “Who are you?”
“Not now,” I replied, batting the hand away with (I must insist on this) uncharacteristic curtness. I was tired. I was wary. I had recently been dumped by a man to whom I had devoted considerable attention, and I wasn’t ready for a new entanglement, let alone conversation, with a stranger.
The encounter would have ended there had Mark not demonstrated unusual and, given the circumstances, inexplicable persistence. He obtained my email address from a mutual friend and energetically deployed it. Eventually I found myself having lunch with him, and of course we talked about books — terrain we’d already established as common ground. We exchanged the names of our favorite novels and joked about the fact that he had not read mine, nor I his.
The next day, a copy of his arrived in the mail: “Vineland,” by Thomas Pynchon. And then, a few days later, came a crisp handwritten card containing a passage from mine, Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady”: “There was such a thrill even in the preliminary hovering.”
When that card was followed by an invitation to brunch, I didn’t hesitate to say yes. There were more meals after that, along with, at crucial intervals, handwritten cards featuring lines from my favorite novel.
Former editors of big glossies dish on what a shitshow that place is. The magazine is dead, long live the magazine, etc. Lots of gossipy drug stuff etc in here. I kind of skimmed it to be honest, but the parts I read were sort of fascinating. My favourite quote is somewhere at the top where they call it the place that puts “the loss in glossy.”
Editors of glossy magazines had status then because their products seemed important. People went to newsstands or physical mailboxes to find bound pieces of paper dropped by postal workers that would tell them who and what was cool, giving them topics for cocktail-party and water-cooler chatter.
Portable phones were these whiz-bang things that folded shut and were tucked away in pockets and expensive “It” bags.
The early and mid-aughts were the Roaring ’20s of magazines, with the looming economic recession not yet imaginable and the disruption of digital media not considered by publishing executives, so infatuated with their pretty print pages and the huge margins that print advertising delivered. No matter that their one real job was to have their fingers on the pulse of What’s Next.
Bookninja 