Rebecca Rosenblum 's short story Linh Lai, about a young Vietnamese girl who is sent by her parents to Canada so that she will learn English, and dreams of learning to fly on a skateboard, has been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award. First published last summer in The New Quarterly as part of their Metcalf-Rooke related feature, it can be found in her first collection of short stories, ONCE. Congrats to Rebecca and The New Quarterly.
Speaking of the Metcalf-Rooke award, we'll be getting the next installment underway in the next week or so. Last year's winner Amy Jones will be featured in the summer issue of TNQ, due to hit mailboxes in the next few months.
I've received word through the grapevine that at least two writers with short fiction collections forthcoming from Biblioasis will be included in this year's Journey Prize Anthology. Alexander MacLeod will be included for his story, published in The New Quarterly, Miracle Mile. This was also published last year as the premier story in Frog Hollow Press's Short Fiction Chapbook series, and can be purchased from their website. There's only 3 copies of the hardback left, certain to be a collector's item, so trust me: pick one up while you can. I've bought a couple of extras in the belief that I'll one day be able to retire upon them. It's a beautiful production, and a horrifying story about competitiveness and companionship.
Here's the first paragraph:
This was the day after Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear. You remember that. It was a moment in history - not like Kennedy or the planes flying into the World Trade Center – not up at that level. This was something lower, more like Ben Johnson, back when his eyes were that thick, yellow colour and he tested positive in Seoul after breaking the world-record in the hundred. You might not know exactly where you were standing or exactly what you were doing when you first heard about Tyson or about Ben, but when the news came down, I bet it stuck with you. When Tyson bit off Holyfield’s ear,that cut right through the everyday clutter. All the papers and the television news shows ran the same pictures of Tyson standing there in his black trunks with the blood in his mouth. It seemed like everything else that happened that day had to be related back to this, back to Mike and what he had done. You have to remember, this was before Tyson got the tattoo on his face and the rematch with Holyfield was supposed to be his big comeback, a chance to go straight and be legitimate again. Nobody thinks that now. Now, the only thing you see when you look back to that day is Mike moving in for the kill, the way his cheek brushes up almost intimately against Evander’s face before he breaks down completely and gives in to his rawest impulse. Then the tendons in his neck bulge out and his teeth come grinding down.
With any luck, we'll be releasing Alex's first collection of stories, titled Heavy Lifting, in Spring 2009. Trust me: it's going to be, quite literally, a knock out.
Adrian Michael Kelly's Lure, first published in Prairie Fire, is also up for a Journey Prize. I don't believe I've read this one, though I've read others from the collection, which is still in process. They are all fantastic. I intend to bug Adrian for the story as soon as I finish this post. I have no doubt, however, that this will be as good as everything else I've read from it.
An interesting article in the WSJ on the E-Book revolution.
Every genuinely revolutionary technology implants some kind of "aha" moment in your memory -- the moment where you flip a switch and something magical happens, something that tells you in an instant that the rules have changed forever.
I still have vivid memories of many such moments: clicking on my first Web hyperlink in 1994 and instantly transporting to a page hosted on a server in Australia; using Google Earth to zoom in from space directly to the satellite image of my house; watching my 14-month-old master the page-flipping gesture on the iPhone's touch interface.
The latest such moment came courtesy of the Kindle, Amazon.com Inc.'s e-book reader. A few weeks after I bought the device, I was sitting alone in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, dutifully working my way through an e-book about business and technology, when I was hit with a sudden desire to read a novel. After a few taps on the Kindle, I was browsing the Amazon store, and within a minute or two I'd bought and downloaded Zadie Smith's novel "On Beauty." By the time the check arrived, I'd finished the first chapter.
Aha.
I knew then that the book's migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways. It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.
There is great promise and opportunity in the digital-books revolution. The question is: Will we recognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course?
For the full article go here. There's also an interesting comparison between a Sony E-Reader, which I own, and the amazon Kindle, which is not available in Canada. Seems the Kindle wins.
Over at the Guardian, robert McCrum worries that the decline of newspapers may foreshadow similar crises in book publishing.
The internet revolution, which has brought low so many American newspapers, from Seattle to Chicago, must surely threaten conventional book publishing. Agreed: new books in copyright are very different animals from daily newspapers. Elsewhere, however, there are alarming parallels between newspapers and publishing. Both, essentially, have given away their all-important content for nothing: newspapers through online services, books through the mass digitisation of the contents of the world's greatest copyright libraries in the "Google initiative". Both have found it difficult to think laterally, or even creatively, about the immense power mobilised by organisations like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.
Even new titles are vulnerable to the Kindle and the ebook. You may say, as people often do, that you have never seen anyone reading an ebook on the tube or the bus. Fair enough. But in any big American city today, you will find hundreds of younger readers in bars and coffee shops happily immersed in their Kindle or its equivalent. No question: books are facing their "iPod moment".
In anticipation of the publication of Cynthia Flood's The English Stories -- set for May 1st -- I offer you one of the stories from the collection, the haunting and moving Religious Knowledge.
Norm Sibum's The Pangborn Defence marks a departure from his previous verse, and will be something of a surprise for those who have followed his career over the last thirty years. A suite of poems as letters to personages both real and imagined, there are political undertones to many rarely seen in Sibum's ouevre. But there is still the same attention to detail, the same craftsmanship, humour, love and originality.
Wayne Clifford's Jane Again arrived yesterday, and she looks fabulous. Though she's not at all courtly, and evidenced in this second poem from the collection CrazyJane Curses her Remaker.
Crazy Jane Curses her Remaker
Who thinks he knows a self that never was but song a man once used for shelf to rest his pretense on
has doubled breadth to Her Who Measures out the Fire thru which you call me here, so intent on answer.
You fail to see I’m bait the question’s set aslant. If you can’t see the back, my face convince you yet,
as Helen took in Faust, and, succubal temptress, so usered him the cost embalmed in each caress,
that once belief had spread through every of his senses, desire turned to dread to pinch his own pretenses.
May what fame be sudden as grass kindling; all you guess, hidden, endless riddling; may trust be rotten; vows piddling.
May beggar ghosts wheedle what god you surmise to bless your eye by needle camel-wise.
Bill Douglas, designer extraordinaire, has started a new blog, Cover Love Etcetera, which can be found here. He currently has a post on the cover, seen above, for this fall's Biblioasis Renditions reprint of Ray Robertson's great rock and roll novel Moody Food, pictured above. It's the third version of the book he's done, including the early Doubleday and the US edition. Go to his blog to see the others. I must say: I like ours best.
Also learned Bill publishes a mag, Coupe, experimental visual art and culture. Going to have to check it out.
First glimpses of the fabulous Artist Book How God Talks in His Sleep, a collection of fabulous fictions by Leon Rooke and equally as fabulous artwork by Tony Calzetta, including the above pop up. Can't wait to see it. Looks like there will be a sister production called Peculiar Practices as well.
Today marks the 254th anniversary of the publication of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary. In homage, and because I don't know what else I have to offer this day, as I work to put the finishing touches on two grants due this afternoon, I'll leave you with the preface to Johnson's Dictionary. (I tried to find a Google link to the whole things, assuming that surely, with its hundreds of thousands -- or millions -- of public domain titles, I'd be able to quickly find a scan of it, and failed. Went to Scribd instead.)
Derek Weiler, editor at Quill & Quire and friend of literary publishers everywhere, died this past weekend at the age of 40. I've had numerous conversations and exchanges with Derek over the last couple of years, and he was always generously thoughtful and supportive. We had him down to Windsor in 2007 to take part in Bookfest Windsor; he stocked up on the moleskines he found here more cheaply than almost anywhere else, and likely filled one of them with notes while he was here, taking them even in the middle of the panel discussion he was part of. We had some time at the AfterWords party to sit and chat.
He was a gentleman, with a quick smile and a generous sense of humour, who didn't let you get away with much, though he often let you off gently. We'll miss him. Our condolences to his wife, family, and all of his Q&Q co-workers.
It pains me to say that I received a call today to say that Kahn & Engelmann should arrive in hand by tomorrow morning. That Hans missed seeing the publication of the English edition of his novel by a mere few dozen hours. It was one of the things I most looked forward to this Spring: putting a copy of the book in his hands. He was so pleased by the initial responses to the book -- the starred Quill & Quire review, the Harbourfront launch, much else besides -- and we expected so much from this book ...
We still do, of course, and will be doing everything we can to put K&E out in front of as many readers as we possibly can.
As we did a week or so ago with Terry's forthcoming Thought You Were Dead, we offer here a sneak peak of Eichner's Kahn & Engelmann, and hope that you'll enjoy it as much as we have.
To a child, teachers seem coarse in their perceptions. Stupid, really. Can't they see that it's useless ordering a mean girl not to be mean? Do they seriously expect anyone to inform on a popular girl? Why do they smile and lean so close, showing their ugly gums and wrinkles to girls already scared witless by having to recite before the whole class?
Such bewildering behaviour. When writing The English Stories I sometimes felt that bewilderment again, though as a (coarse and stupid) adult myself Icould now see better what those teachers, or mistresses as the English then said, were trying to do.
Still clearer, as the writing went on, was the fact of the two solitudes within the school: the girls, the adult women. They were so close, what with hours and hours and hours daily in the same rooms and at the same dining-tables and on the same playing fields -- yet separate, even speaking different Englishes.
That near/far relation turns up often in The English Stories, not only at the boarding school but also at the small residential hotel. There live the Talbot twins, Milly and Tilly, together for nearly eight decades, dressed always in not quite identical clothing. The two love and hate each other intensely, but neither knows the essential story of her sister's life.
Two other residents, the newly-married Bellands, both idealize the calm safety of domestic life after the horrors of World War II. Each is mystified, though, by the other's plans for attaining that place of peace. They speak but can't make sense of each other's words -- can hardly hear them, really. Each sees the other as lost in illusion. (I think they both are, but that's another matter.)
Gerald and Rachel Ellis, Amanda's parents, have been married far longer and have a quite baroquely developed public persona as a couple. They too, though, find their mates puzzling. They too can't make themselves clear, in spite of being highly literate and literary. Habits, tastes, pleasure, memories, the whole shared culture of a pair -- they're not enough to enable true understanding.
And of course they are both lovingly blind to their daughter. As she is blind to them. . . .
Below, information for this weekend's Cobourg Poetry Festival. Mike Barnes will be discussing his memoir The Lily Pond on Saturday afternoon, and Diane Kuprel and Marek Kubisa qill be doing a bi-lingual reading from their translation of Ryszard Kapuscinski's I Wrote Stone Saturday evening. On Sunday, I'll be there on a panel with fellow publishers Tim Inkster and Beth Follett on the state of the book.
POETRY'Z OWN WEEKEND Festival Thu Apr 16 - Sun Apr 19, 2009
With less than a month to go, Cobourg's inaugural 2009 POW! Festival - Poetry'z Own Weekend Festival - is moving into high gear. Some of Canada's finest poets are scheduled to read from their work over the 4-day event. POW! features poetry readings, lecture presentations, discussions exploring the world of poetry, a special session designed for kids, and a panel exploring the subject, "Whither the Book/Wither the Book.
Scheduled for April 17 thru 19, poets Mike Barnes, Jacqueline Larson, Paul Brown, Ted Amsden and Cobourg Poet Laureate Eric Winter are some of the poets signed up for the event. Professional actor David Calderisi will present the works of Robert Service, John Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridege in an evening of recitation from memory.
POW! celebrates National Poetry Month across Canada. The municipal council of the Town of Cobourg has officially designated April 16 thru 19 as "Poetry Weekend in Cobourg."
Conceived by Cobourg poet James Pickersgill, the idea for the festival was inspired by an annual weekend festival held in Cobalt, Ontario. "If they can have a successful festival way up there," he thought, "why not in Cobourg?", a town that has become a sought after venue for out-of-town poets to read their work through the auspices of the Cobourg Poetry Workshop which holds monthly public readings of the work of local poets. Such a CPW evening will precede the festival on Thursday April 16 with poets Edward Carson, Carla Johnson and Grahame Woods presenting their work at "Meet At 66 King East," where the POW! Fesitval will be held in the inviting surroundings of a unique bistro overlooking Victoria Park and, beyond that, Lake Ontario.
"Many out-of-town poets and publishers already view Cobourg as a poetry place," Pickersgill noted, "but they will be convinced of that now that Town Council has declared POW's Thursday to Sunday as Poetry Weekend in Cobourg."
Admission to the 6 festival events is $6 each or a Weekend Pass can be purchased for $30.00. Admission to the 6.30 pm Opening Reception on Friday April 17 is $10 which includes a glass of wine and hors d'oeuvres. All tickets can be purchased by going to Meet at 66 King East, by phoning (905) 372-7616 or by emailing poetryzownweekend@sympatico.ca
Other poets in the full weekend line-up are: Carmine Starnino, JonArno Lawson, Art Cockerill, Linda Hutsell-Manning, JoEllen Bogart, Diana Kuprel, Marek Kubisa, Karen Dukes, Roz Bound, Marta Cooper, Oana Avasilichioaei and Ronna Bloom.
Other participants include Juno-nominated children's singer Eddie Douglas and 3 book publishers, Tim Inkster (Porcupine's Quill), Beth Follett (Pedlar Press) and Dan Wells (Biblioasis).
POW! acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the League of Canadian Poets.
More information on the internet: http://www.inkbottlepress.com/POW/pow_open.htm
Above a portrait of Rebecca Rosenblum, recently completed by Alan Dayton. It is part of a series -- his second, as he did one of these in the 90s (I have the catalogue, and it is excellent) -- on Canadian writers. Others in the series will include, from what I gather, Russell Smith and Sharon English, among many others. I look forward to seeing other portraits in the series.
For Rebecca's thoughts on this portrait check out her own blog post here.
I returned home last evening to learn that Hans Eichner, the author of the forthcoming Kahn & Engelmann, passed away early Friday morning from pneumonia. Though I'd only met Hans once, a year and a half ago, I found him quite charming, and was looking forward to getting to know him better over the coming months. He'd waited near a dozen years to see K&E brought out in English, and worked closely with translator Jean Snook to ensure that it worked as well in English as it had in the German; it is quite obvious that he was a gentle man, of deep wisdom, intelligence, humility and humour. Our deepest sympathies go out to his wife Kari and his family.
Despite my best efforts to encourage book-love and -kindness, it seems there are still a multitude of ways to wrong our lovely literature. Ever vigilant, I have captured on film (well, on memory card) some of the most egregious mis-endeavours I could find, and posted them here with some better ideas for those who wish, as I know all Thirsty readers do, to be true friends to books everywhere.
Books are not currency.
Incorrect: paying the tab with prose.
Correct: paying with some sort of paper that has limited text, but elegant illustrations of British monarchs.
Books are not delicious.
Incorrect: devouring the Journey anothology.
Correct: order the chocolate lava cake.
Books are not a prison.
Incorrect: book barricade.
Correct: smothering love.
Books will never love you back.
Incorrect: blowing kisses at CanLit.
Correct: blowing kisses at Canadian writers.
Life is difficult, and books can help...but in return, we have to make sure not to put our books in situations they don't belong, where they might be abused, clawed, or gnawed. Books do so much for us, and it is easy to return the favour--read them!
Rebecca
PS--Thanks awfully to the beautiful and bookish models: Claudia, Shannon, Mindy, Penny, Dani, Julie, Alice, the Journey gang, and the baffled but kindly staff at Circle Thai restaurant.
This past weekend, I was a (small) part of the wonderful Hamilton literary festival, GritLit. Held at the Art Gallery of Hamilton and the Sky Dragon Centre, GritLit is four days of amazing writers reading and amazing audiences appreciating (and asking good questions.
I am completely ill-equipped to give you a report on the proceedings, because I was ill with laryngitis for the weekend, and only barely made it to my own reading, let alone anyone else's. I missed Andrew Pyper, Maggie Helwig, Ray Robertson, and tonnes more amazing folks (that is the saddest name-drop ever, isn't it--people I didn't see or talk to). But I still managed to get the sense of the fest from my Short Story Afternoon reading with Lien Chao and Pamela Stewart, which covered immigration, cunnilingus, and cognitive behaviour therapy in three brief readings and a really stellar Q&A. I was really thrilled by the engagement and enthusiasm of our listeners, and thrilled to be able to answer in an audible voice (Sunday was my first day of real speaking this weekend and I was pretty excited about it).
Here, for no real reason, is a picture of my pre-reading freak-out with my dear friend Kim. I was very very worried, but the inability to hold up my head is not related.
In a post-reading mood of celebration that was probably ill-advised but much enjoyed, I wandered the streets of Hamilton in sunshine and good company and eventually turned up at the Bread and Roses Cafe for the author dinner. Which was delicious, and included both soup and tea, so I was able to stay more or less audible throughout. Although I had to leave before the evening's poetry reading, because I was about to keel over. At least I got to *meet* the poets whose reading I was missing, including Biblioasis brother-in-arms Mike Barnes, pictured below at Bread and Roses with his wife, Heather.
I hear from my spies in the trees that the evening went well, and I have no doubt that this was so. I went home and immersed myself in cough suppressant.
Don't worry, Dan will be back next week with more cogent entries than this!
Well, I'm out of here for a week at day's end, building castles in the sand -- pretty much what I do as a publisher -- and relaxing with the fam. Things might be a bit quiet around these parts while I'm away, there'll be a reprieve, no more ceaseless chatter. Though there's always the slight chance that a Rebecca or Mike or Cynthia or Shane might take over the controls. And if I bring my laptop, perhaps I might torture you with snapshots of a publisher at leisure (a rare sighting). Though, then again, perhaps it would be better if I did not: don't want to spoil the illusion.
Though since I care so much for my three dedicated followers, I'll leave you with a small gift: the first chapter of Terry Griggs's marvellous Thought You Were Dead. To whet your appetite, so to speak. And if you get lonely, you can always return and read it again: it merits a revisit or two.
PS: Click on the button in the upper corner and it will come up as a full screen.
This is certainly one take on the subject, and one I have a lot of sympathy for.
No one elected these "class representatives" to represent America's tens of thousands of authors and publishers to convey their digital rights to Google. Nor are the interests of this so-called class identical. There is nothing more individual in the world than a book, an author, a publisher, and the value of a contract. The aging baby boomers now flacking the settlement don't seem to understand that PDF scanning (how Google and everyone else digitizes books) isn't rocket science; it's cheap and easy. Books will be digitized without Google. But the Google settlement sets in amber today's overhyped role of the Internet, ruled by that great and magnificent Oz -- Google.
Sound like hyperbole? Consider this: Under the settlement, every rights-owner in America is supposed to hand over all their private contract data, on everyedition of every work they ever wrote -- and every excerpt permission ever granted to others -- at the peril of losing the money Google will be making on their backs. This is a massive burden on everyone in the book industry, making us all, in effect, Google's data-entry slaves. Indeed, in most cases such information about every permission ever granted is unlocatable. It opens a Pandora's box of disputes and mistaken claims about who actually owns what.
Selling off author rights -- and publisher rights, for that matter -- so cheaply does seem to open a possible pandora's box. And once you've done so, there's no stepping back again. It also legitimizes blatantly illegal activity. Scribd.com might be home to a small but increasing amount of illegal downloading at the moment, put up there by individuals with little regards for copyright (most of it is hardly usable, outside of reading on one's computer; it has been scanned by amateurs who have not formatted it for a proper e-book reading experience, and is therefore unlikely to cannibalize any real sales, at least at this point. Nor can you trust that a lot of the content up there is complete or unaltered. Scanning a text adequately, formatting it for proper reading on the variety of hand-held devices now out there, is a lot harder than putting up an MP3 of a song, which means I do believe we have less to fear from this than is generally assumed.); but Google consciously decided that they would ignore copyright and use their wealth and power to bully writers and publishers into submission. At the very least there seems to me to be a principal of some sort in not agreeing that this is okay, in reserving our rights for future legal action, either individually or collectively, once we figure out how this will develop. I've a lot more thinking and reading to do about this before the May 5th deadline, but that's where I am at the moment.
There are those out there -- The Writers' Union, for one -- who believe we should accept/not opt out of the Google Settlement. Perhaps they are right here. Don't know.
Working away this eve gathering everything together for CNQ 76. Our first general issue in a year -- following the translation issue, Salon des Refuses, and 75th/40th Anniversary -- it's starting to really shape up. Not everything is set yet, but it should include Adam Getty's first installment in our Lives of the Poets series, entitled Poetry in the Slaughterhouse, Steven Beattie's tale of disillusion, Fuck Books, David Solway on Kavaris and translation, an interview with Rabindranath Maharaj, Mike Barnes's Portrait of a Portrait Painter, a memoir by Ron Shuebrook (pictured above), as well as reviews by Kerry Clare, Rebecca Rosenblum, Alex Good and many others. I'll give you the full list once we settle on it.
In other CNQ news, I met with a couple of fab designers when I was in Toronto, Aleks and Sean at Sobule Design, who will have a completely new, attractive and easily updatable CNQ website up by the next issue's launch (set for late May). I know, I know: we've said this before. But this time, cross my heart, t'is true. I'm quite excited at the prospect of getting that part of the CNQ program finally going.
Back from Toronto, a quick stop to tie up what loose ends I can before heading down tomorrow to the Magic Kingdom. Over at Julie Wilson's magnificent Seen Reading she's started her 30 in 30 celebrations, and the archive is up, which promises to be at least as good as the official program.
The whole archive is worth taking a look at, but I'll highlight two: Wayne Clifford, reading from Crazy Jane, and from W.B. Yeats, and Zach Wells's Winter from this fall's Track & Trace, a collection I've just finished reading in ms form, and a damn fine one it'll be.
More to follow over the course of April. But if I were you I'd be bookmarking this one, and checking back daily for what looks set to be a wonderful, wonderful series. My thanks to Julie for doing it.
Rebecca Rosenblum 's short story Linh Lai, about a young Vietnamese girl who is sent by her parents to Canada so that she will learn English, and dreams of learning to fly on a skateboard, has been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award. First published last summer in The New Quarterly as part of their Metcalf-Rooke related feature, it can be found in her first collection of short stories, ONCE. Congrats to Rebecca and The New Quarterly.
