The debate on the role of foreign ownership in Canadian book publishing never seems to go away. Publishing reporter John Barber of The Globe and Mail weighs in today with a long article urging changes in our foreign investment rules to allow foreign publishers to invest in — or buy out — Canadian publishers.
The whole issue of foreign investment in publishing is under review now by Conservative culture minister James Moore.
Barber concedes current rules “helped produce a spectacular literary flowering.” And while allowing that small presses are doing a good job, he laments their lack of financial heft to properly promote their writers.
More Canadian writers are published by the smaller Canadian-owned publishers. But the best sellers usually come from the branch plants of multi national publishers. They have the money to sign — and then promote — the best-known Canadian names. Barber’s argument, shared by some small presses, is that foreign investment in their operations would enable them to better compete with the big branch plants — all to the benefit of both writers and readers.
Facing the digital-only future
Newspapers as well as books are migrating to electronic sales. Montreal’s La Presse, long considered the top daily of French Canada, may be getting ready to phase out its print edition. Its Sunday edition already gone, the paper has assembled a digital team that could move it totally into the digital world.
” … there is a strong possibility that there will no longer be a print edition of a La Presse within three to seven years,’ says the head of the Quebec journalist’s union.
The Montreal daily wouldn’t be the first. Several American papers, including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, have shut their print editions and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has launched the first all electronic newspaper designed for Apple’s iPad — The Daily.
My own E-Book – Boy in the Picture
So maybe now’s the time to mention that my recent book, The Boy in the Picture, is now available as an eBook from Chapters Indigo, among other online retailers. A bargain at $7.79. Thanks, Dundurn Press, for opening up this wider market for me.
A young man burns himself to death, the result of bitter frustration and humiliation. A distinguished but little known American scholar writes a book on how to organize a non-violent revolution.
Of themselves, events of no great importance. Taken together, they’ve played a big part in the uprisings now shaking the Arab world.
The death by self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit and vegetable seller working the streets of the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, was the spark that set off revolt in that country. (The main square in Tunis has been renamed in his honor). The spirit of revolt spread quickly to Egypt, Libya, Yeman and other countries.
But the techniques of many of the leaders of those uprisings have been borrowed from the writings of Gene Sharp, emeritus professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts and founder of the Albert Einstein Institute.
Sharp is the author of numerous books, the most important being From Dictatorship to Democracy, which he wrote for the Burmese democratic movement in 1993. It outlines 198 non-violent methods to bring down an oppressive government, and has been translated into more than thirty languages.
According to filmmaker Ruridh Arow, whose film, Gene Sharp: How to Start a Revolution, will be released this spring, Sharp’s methods of popular non-violent resistance have been put to use in Serbia, the Ukraine, Egypt, Libya, Iran and Burma.
His central message is that the power of dictatorships comes from the willing obedience of the people they govern – and that if the people can develop techniques of withholding their consent, a regime will crumble.”
There’s an interesting debate raging — again — over the role of public opinion polls in shaping political views. Michael Adams of the Environics Group weighs in on the subject today in the Globe and Mail.
Adams makes the point that sophisticated pollsters are fully able to factor into their polling the effects of changing demographics. He disagrees, for example, with Alan Gregg who argues that younger voters are not fairly represented in polls. Gregg said on the CBC that people who have abandoned land lines and use only cell phones are being left out of pollsters’ calculations.
All this comes just a day after a new poll showing a big drop in support for the Harper Conservatives. It reminds me that Rex Murphy made a prophetic comment on air last week when he observed that whenever the Harperites nudge into majority territory, they screw up. The latest example, of course, being the Bev Oda saga. Sure enough, that dust-up is being blamed for the drop of a dozen points in support for the Conservative government.
There’s an encouraging endorsement from the Globe and Mail about why books will always be with us. In an editorial about Wikileaker Julian Assange’s plans to write a book on his trials and tribulations, the Globe says:
The release of hundreds of thousands of U.S. embassy cables through WikiLeaks has provided an incredibly detailed look at the inner workings of the U.S. diplomacy. But such a massive dump of information without context is entirely meaningless. Information requires order. Books – in whatever format readers prefer – serve the valuable purpose of sorting through large swaths of information, retrieving what is relevant and putting it in manageable form. This is a need that transcends technology. And it is because of this that readers will be prepared to pay to read Mr. Assange’s book, even if the raw material exists for free on the Internet.
Whether he wants to admit it or not, Mr. Assange’s seven-figure deal stands as tangible proof that books will be with us for a long time to come, and that they’re still worth paying for.”
Bravo!
MORDECAI RICHLER AS SOCIAL HISTORIAN
I spent much of the Holidays plowing through Charles Foran’s excellent biography of Mordecai Richler — The Life and Times (Knopf Canada). It is a formidable book although its 800 pages contain so much detail that I found myself scanning parts of it. I had the pleasure of meeting up with Richler in one of his favorite haunts, the Maritime Bar of the Ritz Carleton Hotel in Montreal. Our five o’clock date was the prelude to an uproarious evening during which he managed to get thoroughly drunk and insult the client whose affair I’d arranged for Richler to speak at that night.
It’s said that Canadian universities are neglecting Richler in their Canadian lit reading lists (report here). If they don’t want him in the English department, I suggest his Duddy Kravetz and St. Urbain’s Horseman be made required reading in History studies. Like all great novelists, Richler was a social historian as well as a story-teller. Reading Foran reminds me that Richler drew on a rich treasury of social history reposing in his Montreal Jewish community. He wrote of what he knew, capturing his society from an era that has now largely passed away. His books are a form of contemporary history rooted in his 40s and 50s upbringing. In fact, his writing was so concentrated within that genre that one critic, according to Foran, remarked: “I love his book. I buy it every time he writes it.”
Foran points out that Richler, of course, delighted in pricking the academy. He wonders if this is why “little scholarship has been devoted to Richler’s fiction in recent years, an absence all the more striking given that his two greatest novels may also have been his last: Soloman Gursky Was Here and Barney’s Version.”
Foran’s book is so fact-filled it’s inevitable he got a few things wrong. He cites the ban on U.S. comic books in Canada during World War II (which created a temporary bonanza for Canadian comics) as an effort to conserve paper. Wrong: it was a foreign exchange decision, one of many measures to stem currency outflow. Also, he has Richler writing for Maclean’s as a weekly when it was still being published semi-monthly.
REASONS FOR FIXING THE COPYRIGHT ACT
Toronto author Bill Freeman, chair of the Creators’ Copyright coalition, makes a good argument in the Georgia Strait for fixing the Copyright Act when Parliament resumes study of Bill C-342 in February. It’s here.
I’ve always viewed copyright as a rather arcane subject, but the issue here is whether educational institutions should be allowed to do wholesale copying without compensation to the creator. As Bill says:
Bill C-32 will allow universities, colleges, and school boards to copy works and distribute them to students without payment to writers and publishers. Just how much we don’t know. The legislation is imprecise and so the courts will have to decide. With this legislation a school board or university could scan parts of text books, trade books, or journals and distribute them without payment.”
I understand there’s an Opposition motion to pin down the lawful copying section more precisely. That could help.
Here’s an offbeat subject that I think would make a great book topic for 2011:
LAST DAYS OF THE NEANDERTHALS
I’ve been reading of new discoveries about the Neanderthals. For some reason, these ancient pre-human types, whose time span interlaps with humans, have always intrigued me. We once thought of this specie as a crude, non-verbal, animal-like character, way below homo sapiens capabilities. No more.
The latest evidence, from a cave in Spain, suggests Neanderthals were, among other things, cannibals. A very human quality, I’d say. This report tells of the findings of broken and apparently gnawed upon bones of a family, suggesting they were attacked by another tribe. There’s also new evidence — taken from plaque in Neanderthal tooth fragments, that they had fire and cooked their food.
What happened to the Neanderthals is of course a question for the ages. My private theory is that we homos wiped them out. Surely some great dramatist could create a marvellous story of the interaction of humans and Neanderthals – potential for lots of conflict, suspense, and moralizing. Just remember where you got the idea!
WORDS THAT SHOULD BE BANISHED
An obscure little university in Michigan — Lake Superior University – has made a bit of a name for itself with its annual list of words that should be banished. Its nominees for 2011:
Viral, epic, fail, wow factor, a-ha moment, back story, BFF (best friends forever) man up, refudiate and mama grizzly (both courtesy Sarah Palin), the American People, I’m just sayin’, Facebook/Google as verbs, and Live Life to the Fullest.
I’d also give the heave-ho to NDP leader Jack Layton’s “ordinary Canadians” and new Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s “Just call me!”
THE LAST WORD
It’s Never Over was the title of one of Morley Callaghan’s first novels (1929). Anyone who’s written any kind of long form literature knows it’s never over until the last carefully marked proof is sent back to the printer. So I’m celebrating the completion of the first draft of my historical novel, Vandeleur. Put the finishing touches to it on New Year’s Eve. It goes in now for a professional edit. Maybe this time next year?
It’s the biggest challenge of the Internet Age and governments around the world — spurred by a nervous Obama administration — have declared a virtual war on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.
The assault has become ferocious. The first move came when Amazon denied WikiLeaks access to its servers. Since then, the web site has been chased all over Europe. It’s now resident in Switzerland but it is uncertain how long it will be safe there.
WikiLeaks has been denied access to Paypal, the Internet payments service. People will no longer be able to contribute money via that handy and reliable web site.
Swedish police have issued an arrest warrant for Assange, variously on a charge of sexual assault but also for apparently illegal disclosure of government documents.
The documents revealed by WikiLeaks are of U.S. diplomatic exchanges. But because many incriminate foreign officials in the furtherance of American foreign policy, the outrage is not confined to the Pentagon or the State Department.
The reason the WikiLeaks disclosure have aroused such intense criticism is that they reveal devastating failures in American foreign policy.
We now know that the European Union no longer believes in success in Afghanistan. European troops are there “out of deference to the United States,” according to a leaked diplomatic memo quoting EU president Herman Van Rompey.
If the current American surge there doesn’t work, “that will be it,” he’s quoted by U.S. ambassador Howard Gutman. “No one believes in Afghanistan any more.”
The brutal fact of such leaks is that they expose American policy as incoherent and incapable of achieving their goals.
In a secret visit to Afghanistan last week, President Obama told troops there that a new phase will open in the war next year — “The beginning of a transition to Afghan responsibility.”
Meanwhile, documents revealed by WikiLeaks demonstrate that the country struggles under a corrupt administration whose leaders, from president Hamid Karzai on down, seem more interested in filling their pockets than in improving the lot of their people. It all sounds more and more like Vietnam all over again.
It was last April that WikiLeaks first captured worldwide attention with its release of a video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in Baghdad (including two Reuters news staff) by a U.S. Apache helicopter gunship. You can see the video here:
One can dismiss as a stupid quip the remark by Tom Flanagan, a former advisor to Prime Minister Harper, that Julian Assange should be assassinated and that “Obama should put out a contract.”
However, it demonstrates the mindset of many people who believe that government actions should never be questioned.
Sober minds knew all along that George Bush’s war on Iraq — which has cost 4,000 American and 100,000 Iraqi lives — was a fraudulent undertaking.
Sober minds have also long realized that Barack Obama’s war on the Taliban, considering the allies available to the West in Afghanistan, is doomed to failure.
The governments of the United States, Britain and Canada continue to deny these facts.
It’s takes disclosures of the order of those orchestrated by WikiLeaks to bring the truth into public light.
Perhaps we should look at the WikiLeaks in a historic context.
Imagine how the world might have changed had the secret plans of Hitler and Company for dealing with the Jews of Europe been exposed in the 1930s?
Would Stalin have been able to carry out his mass starvation of Ukrainian peasants if Russia and the world had known what was planned?
Would there have been a war in the Pacific had the secret attack plans of the Japanese Empire been exposed before December 7, 1941?
Apologists will of course say that the current revelations by WikiLeaks point to no such dastardly aims as those cited above.
There is a pattern, however, of wilful deception and deceit that has characterized American foreign policy throughout the Cold War and since.
In a massive work, Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Weiner has documented the secret history of the Central Intelligence Agency, chronicling its many fiascos and missteps.
His 2008 book, Legacy of Ashes (Anchor Books) reveals how ineptly the U.S. and its allies have been served by the American intelligence apparatus. His 848 pages extend from the beginnings of the agency in World War II to its failures to either intercept the plotters of September 11, or capture their masters, including Osama bin Laden.
Now, more than nine years after the attack on the World Trade Center, it is incredible that bin Laden continues to operate apparently unfettered and untouched, somewhere in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
Remember when George Bush boasted of the old Western tradition of putting out a poster on a wanted man: “Wanted – Dead or Alive.” Apparently no one’s been reading it.
Now, the wanted poster is out for Julian Assange.
WikiLeaks boasts the following quote from Time Magazine on its web site:
“Could become as important a journalistic tool as the Freedom of Information Act.”
As I watched Bravo TV’s broadcast last night on the Scotiabank Giller Prize for Canadian fiction, I tried to guess the winner among five nominated books that most Canadians — including me — have not yet read.
One of the nice things about the show is the short introductions of the contending books by celebrity presenters, followed by brief video bios of the authors.
I listened carefully to these briefs. I thought I’d most enjoy Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists, so I was pulling for this 30-year-old first novel author to win.
By the time we got to Jack Rabinovitch’s presentation of the winning $50,000 check in the last thirty seconds of the show, I was feeling a real sense of shared suspense with each of the nominees.
You can imagine the delight I felt when The Sentimentalists took the big prize.
The story is set in the mythical town of Casablanca, Ontario, where the narrator struggles to understand her relationship with her father, whose life is complicated by the bitter memories he carries from atrocities he witnessed in the Vietnam war.
But it makes me wonder how wise an author is to go with a small press. The Sentimentalists was published by Gaspereau Press, of Kentville, Nova Scotia. It’s the first small press ever to cop the Giller.
That’s great. But it’s been a disappointment to read of the refusal — so far, at any rate — of Gaspereau’s principals to accept much-needed assistance in printing and distributing their prize winner.
When the book’s inclusion on the Giller short list was announced, Gaspereau had cranked out only eight hundred copies on a 1960s offset press. The publisher vowed that anybody who buys a book in Canada will buy a copy that’s come off their press. According to the Gaspereau blog, they ran two proof presses “straight through” the night to print jackets for books being sent to the International Festival of Authors in Toronto.
Toronto book store owner Ben McNally, official seller at IFA, says he got 40 copies on the last day.
It’s said that Giller winners usually sell 60,000 to 80,000 copies. You’d think Gaspereau would feel an obligation to their author to make arrangements to meet this kind of demand.
Jack Illingworth, writing in the National Post, thinks Gaspereau is following “a commitment to a thoughtful, rigorous, refined mode of publishing.” He says their lists are “cultural products embodying a few individuals’ ideas of what literature can be.”
There’s clearly a cultural clash here. Writers work hard to produce their books. They want people to read their stories. And among the writers I’ve met, they’d all like to get paid for their effort.
With the exception of Ben McNally, not a single major book seller across Canada has The Sentimentalists on the shelves right now, when interest in the book is at its peak. It is available at Indigo on Kobo, at $9.89. Internationally, William Heinemann, an imprint of Random House, has bought UK and Commonwealth rights outside Canada. No word on a U.S. publisher.
Gary Dunfield, a co-founder of Gaspereau, told Quill & Quire that the publisher won’t be supplying Indigo with the bulk quantities it usually requires. He says:
“The chains want you to send 2,000 to 3,000 copies, and then they’ll return 80% of them.”
Hello, Gary. You’ve got a Giller winner! Congratulations to Ms. Skibsrud. I wish her a productive and lengthy writing life.
The Harper cabinet is facing a decision that will go a long way toward revealing how serious the government is about balancing environmental protection with economic growth.
It is about to make a decision on an application by Taseko Mines Ltd. to mine a copper-gold find near Fish Lake in British Columbia’s Chilcotin district.
The good news is the mine would create several hundred jobs over the next 20 years. The bad news is the company’s plan to use Fish Lake as a toxic dump for mine wastes. The company promises to dig another, smaller lake nearby for the trout that would be doomed by the mine’s operation. The story’s here.
I’ve been enchanted by the Chilcotin district most of my life. I first learned about this magnificent inland empire when I read Rich Hobson’s book, Grass Beyond the Mountains. It chronicles the ranch life in this B.C. outback of Hobson, son of a wealthy American, and his sidekick Pan Phillips. They found their way up to the Chilcotin, which is part of the Cariboo region, in the 1930s.
That book set off a series of titles, some by Hobson and some by his daughter, as well as by other writers. The latest volume, Beyond the Chilcotin by Pan’s youngest daughter Diane, is coming out in paperback this month.
The proposed mine at Fish Lake is bitterly opposed by the Tsilhqot’in Nation Government, representing six bands in the area. Their opposition – they’re ready to “fight to the death” to prevent the mine — recalls the blood-spilling of the Chilcotin War back in 1864.
That was fought over a roughshod attempt by whites to push a road through native lands to feed the gold mines of the Cariboo.
The B.C. government approved the Taseko mine project after carrying out an environmental assessment.
A federal panel has since found that the mine would have “significant adverse environmental effects” on the area. Hence, a decision has been handed over to the Harper cabinet.
I have fished Fish Lake and I know of no other place where the sublime beauty of nature is so grand. I don’t want to see it corrupted with mine tailings.
But I also see the benefit of the jobs that would be created, many of which would hopefully go to First Nations residents.
So instead of building a new lake for the fish, why not a new lake for the mine tailings?
Unless some innovative thinking is done here, there’s going to be big trouble in the Chilcotin before the snow flies.
Former British prime minister Tony Blair is getting a lot of press — much of it favourable — for his newly-published memoir, A Journey (Knopf Canada).
I’ve decided not to read it. I’m tired of self-serving, predictable, and highly selective accounts of the supposed ordeals and triumphs of political leaders.
As I’ve not read the book, this piece is not a review. Rather, it is a commentary based in part on media extracts (see the link to The Guardian above) and in part on watching the arc of Blair’s career since the 1990s.
For Tony Blair to say, as he does in A Journey, that he and George Bush had simply “failed to anticipate” the nightmare that unfolded after the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, is a colossal dodging of responsibility for the war crimes and crimes against humanity that followed their attack on that poor country.
Strange, millions of us knew — and said — what would happen back in 2003. We knew that the Anglo-American invasion would, in the long run, take more lives by far that would have been victims of the detestable Saddam Hussein regime.
We also recognized, as did Barack Obama, that the attack on Iraq (while virtually ignoring Afghanistan) would destabilize the Middle East, give rise to a more powerful and threatening Iran , and ensure the resurgence of the Taliban.
Canadians will find it surprising that Blair expresses such admiration for the Canadian prime minister of that time, John Chretien. It was Chretien who steadfastly resisted the Blair-Bush blandishments, and courageously kept Canada out of that pointless conflict.
(Stephen Harper, meanwhile, was all for backing up the U.S. with arm, and men.)
It’s historic fact that Iraq never had weapons of mass destruction, and that Hussein had no connection with al-Qaeda. In fact, the dictator was one of the main targets of the terrorist groups.
Tony Blair’s parade of myths and distortions is highly reminiscent of the memoir of the Vietnam-era U.S. Secretary of Defense, James McNamara. Years after, he told us how Vietnam was so wrong, and how he was trapped in the inevitable chain of misdeeds that led to 50,000 American deaths in that sorry nation.
The revulsion I and many others feel for the Bush-Blair policies and Blair’s blind self-justification and rationalization stems not from idealistic pacificism but from a realistic understanding of the limits of power and a desire to see the West avoid foreign policies that come back to harm us.
Blair and Bush have left us with a legacy which ensures we are less secure and less safe, more subject to terrorist attack, and more hated in more parts of the world than ever before. No contribution of Blair’s royalties to veterans’ causes will cha nge that.
Wed., Aug. 11 - We fly from Toronto to Kelowna to begin a British Columbia book tour for my Young Adult bio of “Last Spiker” Edward Mallandaine – The Boy in the Picture.
Aug. 12 - An enjoyable stay at the English Rose Garden B&B where host Mina Muench greets us with a glass of homemade wine (good, too!). The car Budget rents us is such a lemon we take it back and opt for a Ford Mustang convertible. A week of glorious B.C. sunshine ahead of us!
Aug. 13-14. We drive to Revelstoke via the pretty lake town of Salmon Arm, stopping first to visit Barb Britton of the Monahan agency in Vernon, who run the big Bookland store there. In Sicamous, on the shore of Shuswap Lake, we look for the site where the steamer Rainbow would have brought Edward ashore. At the Chamber of Commerce we’re told that’s in Old Town but we can’t go there — it’s now a gated condo community. So much for history!
Aug. 15 – After attending the Last Spike dinner of the Railway Days festival, an enthusiastic crowd gathers at the Museum for the book launch. Lots of questions and keen interest. Guide George Hopkins tells us every tour he conducts produces questions about “the boy in the picture.” Curator Jennifer Dickerson leads a q&a and lots of books are sold.
Aug. 16 - We get our first daily newspaper review, in the Victoria Times-Colonist, and it’s a good one: Dave Obee writes:
“It’s aimed at younger readers, but don’t let that sway you. It is highly readable, and it will help to shed new light on the construction of the railway 125 years ago.”
Aug. 17 - We head for Creston, my home town and the town that Edward Mallandaine helped found. Tammy Hardwick is waiting for us at the Creston Museum where we’re given a beautiful setting in the garden for a signing session. This is one of the finest small town museums in Canada. Two of my classmates from Grade 1, Phyllis Vigne and Russell Tompkins, put in a surprise appearance. How wonderful to see them! The museum sells out!
Aug. 18 – On to Nelson, buddy Chris Moore’s home town. He blogs: “I know a writer named Ray Argyle. When Ray Argyle was a kid in Creston, BC, he knew an old gent named Edward Mallendaine. When Edward Mallendaine was a kid, he squeezed himself in behind an old gent named Donald Smith for what has been called the most famous photo in Canadian history…”
Aug. 20 - We arrive in Vancouver and are put up by Genni Guinn and Frank Hooke at their wonderful South Granville St. home. Her new novel, Solitariawill be out next month. There’s an evening boccie party with lots of interesting guests, including Vancouver Writers’ Festival artistic director Hal Wake.
Aug. 21 - It’s a bonus when I drive out to Abbotsford to meet April Bell, who I’ve been emailing for the past year. April is a fount of knowledge on a major miscarriage of justice when the wrong man was hanged for the murder of her great great aunt back in Ontario. It’s the topic of an article I have coming up in the December issue of Canada’s History.
Aug. 22-24. We get two days off from interviews and signings for a weekend in Whistler where partner Deborah Windsor’s son Damien is with Fairmont Whistler Resort. They go skydiving – jumping out of a plane at 10,000 feet! I’m grounded, mercifully.
Aug. 26 - Back home, ready for the Toronto launch of The Boy in the Picture at Roundhouse Park Sunday at 4 p.m. Details on the web site of the Railway Historical Association, here. Hope to see you!
