Quillblog was on the fritz on Friday, so here is what you missed:

“At the end of the day, people need to have the courage to speak out. The predatory pricing practice by Amazon has pulled the industry along, and the Federal Trade Commission should have paid attention. Ultimately the authors will pay out of their income. This is an attack on literature so Amazon can capture control of the industry. They think they will be the iTunes of literature. It’s a monopolistic play that has nothing to do with value for the consumer. It’s an interesting scam by a very large corporation and I think we should wake up. It hasn’t helped grow the market – it has concentrated the market in Amazon. It’s been 70 years since people got away with [such actions] because the anti-trust laws used to be enforced, but we didn’t have enforcement for eight years.” -   Bob Livolsi, founder of the ebookstore Books on Board, at a panel discussion at Mediabistro’s eBook Summit (via Mobylives)

“And don’t remind me of the conversation I once had with a prominent academic, who intended the phrase ‘But it’s so effortless …’ as an adverse comment on a novel. I simply couldn’t rant convincingly enough to ensure that particular book could win a small but useful prize. The narrative’s illusion of ease – and just you try creating an illusion of ease, matey – was too convincing. A parallel idiocy might involve refusing to applaud Derek Jacobi at the end of a performance, because he looked as if he wasn’t acting.” – A.L. Kennedy, on the Guardian’s blog

“My waitress tonight was a Trillium nominated novelist — what’s wrong with this picture?” – the OAC’s literature officer John Degen on Twitter

“As the debate progressed, it became clear that, although both poets know something of the current Canadian poetry landscape, both are conservative in conception and approach. Bok, who did not challenge the moderator’s depiction of him as an ‘experimental poet’ (in fact, he embraced it), is interested in equivalencies between poetic and scientific methodological composition, while the diffident Starnino prefers a poetry where emotion is to the garment what syntax is to the clothesline. Neither question the ideological construction of the structures they inhabit, and only barely did Starnino refer to Eunoia’s ’success’ as defined not by critique but by the market.” – Michael Turner on the Christian Bök/Carmine Starnino Cage Match of Canadian poetry

“I don’t for a second buy Bök/Starnino as the major critical dialectic in Canadian poetry. While one, generally, comes from a traditionalist mindset and the other is avant-garde, what matters is that both men are formalists at their core. The fact that Bök wants to write in genomic code and Starnino is into sonnets is secondary to the fact that the great professional theme for both is the use of constraint as a path to artistic freedom. A more representative conversation would be between the constrainers and the free-versers. But maybe the free-versers don’t have a spokesperson who’s talented or persuasive enough to hang with these two at an intellectual level.” – Jacob McArthur Mooney on his blog Vox Populism

• Richard Lea at the Guardian blog: If you can’t get Roth, Palin, or Rowling on the Kindle, what can you get?
• David Suzuki’s garbage gets combed through for incriminating Kraft Dinner boxes, and now archeologists are looking at what the Bard may have tossed away
• The L.A. Times picks their 25 favourite books of the year and actually selects some – gasp – poetry! That provoked a hearty booyah from this cubicle
• Web 2.0 marketing guru and Bookmadam Julie Wilson has teamed up with Books on the Radio’s Sean Cranbury to offer the Advent Book Blog: Great Books Recommended by Great People
• Those funny book blog dudes at the National Post noted this year’s Canada Reads pics and wondered, what should Canada also read? Get your answers in by 5:00 p.m. this afternoon and maybe you’ll be able to participate in the alterna-reads version of the popular CBC book debate show

On Salon.com, Laura Miller talks about the controversy over PW’s best ten books of 2009 being 100% male:

What’s at issue isn’t sales or even access to readers; this is an argument about prestige and critical recognition, an argument best articulated by the novelist and critic Francine Prose in a 1998 article for Harper’s magazine. Prose detected a greater reverence for books by men among the nation’s literary and critical establishment, which includes reviewers, prize committees and the institutions that bestow grants. She blamed this on a widespread if seldom-stated assumption that “women writers will not write about anything important – anything truly serious or necessary, revelatory or wise.”

Miller goes on to admit that anyone who’s had to compile a list – will feel an “awkward sympathy for the PW team”:

But every year we do face a ticklish question: Is it the right thing to gerrymander your list in order to counteract real, long-standing cultural biases, even if that means lying to your readers? What is a 10-best list, after all, if not a record of the books we enjoyed most over the past 12 months? If you insist on a list that’s ideally representative of gender, race, class, nationality (i.e., including at least one translation), publisher size (small as well as large), fame, length (short story collections as well as novels), region, genre and so on, you can easily wind up with, say, a list of nine books you kinda like and maybe one you truly love. That’s a tepid dish to serve up to readers, and not likely to inspire much enthusiasm, either.

On Nov 14th, the Toronto Women’s Bookstore will host the Written in Colour Writers’ Symposium, a full-day event geared toward emerging indigenous writers and writers of colour.

Workshops range from grant writing to getting your play produced to memoir and erotic writing. Facilitators include writers Tamai Kobayashi, Lee Maracle and Mariko Tamaki, as well as industry players like Cormorant Books publisher Marc Côté from Cormorant Books and John Degen from the Ontario Arts Council.

Tamaki, author of several books including the award-winning graphic novel Skim (with illustrator Jillian Tamaki), will be giving a workshop entitled You Are All Talk! about voice and writing.

“The idea is to get writers to think about writing and talk, what providing our characters with a voice means,” says Tamaki

Tamaki, who is Japanese-Canadian, thinks the symposium is relevant because culture and race are as important in the socio-political landscape as they are in the literary-arts landscape. “I think that representation is something everyone should be concerned about. People want to see themselves reflected back in the literary works that they love and so we should all have a vested interest in making sure that all different identities, readers and writers get supported.”

Tamaki notes that “colour” is a complex issue. “I write about Japanese people but I don’t like this idea that people feel beholden to put that element in their works. Like, if I don’t write about someone who’s Asian, have I messed up? Committed less of a service as an Asian feminist?”

The Written in Colour symposium will  be held at 918 Bathurst Street. Call 4-6.922-8744 to pre-register. Tickets are $15 to $30 sliding scale in advance and $30 to $50 sliding scale at the door.

As mentioned previously on Quillblog, Nimbus Publishing will be releasing Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books this month. The editors are currently running a contest to see if you can guess the top five.

Neil Peart weighs in on his own personal top ten:

Barometer Rising by Hugh MacLennan
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston
The Custodian of Paradise by Wayne Johnston
Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie Macdonald
The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie Macdonald
The Republic of Nothing by Lesley Choyce
An Avalanche of Ocean by Lesley Choyce
The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
The Architects Are Here by Michael Winter
The Wreckage by Michael Crummey

• The new October writer-in-residence at Open Book Toronto is former Eye Weekly arts editor and new poet,  Damien Rogers

• It’s happened to every author – you plan a reading and two people show up. Author Tao Lin shows us how to take it like a champ

• Short stories sent straight to your cell phone

• Paul Auster and Salman Rushdie have signed the petition to free Polanski.  Salon.com keeps perspective.

• Today’s Amazon irony alert: Amazon settles with student for breaking into his Kindle, and stealing his e-copy of 1984
  

• Cory Doctorow and Richard Nash discuss the future of the novel

• Dionne Brand is Toronto’s  new poet laureate

If you were planning to write a My Year of Doing Something Singularly Weird or Stupid or Virtuous memoir, you better get those pitches in soon. The LA Times claims the trend is soon to be played out:

They’re not professional pranksters, exactly, but the authors of what might be called gimmick books — memoirs with premises so high-concept they could come from Hollywood pitch meetings: This year, I will take all of my instruction from self-help gurus. Or, this month, I will be radically honest with everyone I meet. Or, today I will try to behave exactly like George Washington, genteel bow, Dudley Do-Right walk and all.

The last few years have also seen many green-themed gimmick books, including Colin Beavan’s new No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process. Gimmicky or not, some have been fabulously successful, and as it gets harder to break into print, the category remains one that publishers invest in.

The article goes on to explore the king of the gimmick genre, A.J. Jacobs. The title of his next book is The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment. He spent 2004 on a quest to become the smartest man, and 2007 taking the Bible literally.

Scott Timberg posits that these stunt books may be the result of the industry’s earlier slew of poor-me suckfest memoirs, the more harrowing the childhood the better. Timberg quotes industry observer Sara Nelson:

“Poor Frank McCourt wouldn’t get published today, I’d bet.” says Nelson, “The dreary Irish childhood recounted in Angela’s Ashes, from 1996, “was pretty horrific, but in an old-fashioned way. Readers have been desensitized to that.”

Author and critic Lev Grossman, writing in the Wall Street Journal, claims that “difficult” novels have had their day, and we are witnessing the rebirth of old skool storytelling and books that everyone can get into:

All of this is changing. The revolution is under way. The novel is getting entertaining again. Writers like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt, Kelly Link, Audrey Niffenegger, Richard Price, Kate Atkinson, Neil Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke, to name just a few, are busily grafting the sophisticated, intensely aware literary language of Modernism onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction: fantasy, science fiction, detective fiction, romance. They’re forging connections between literary spheres that have been hermetically sealed off from one another for a century.

[...]

This is the future of fiction. The novel is finally waking up from its 100-year carbonite nap. Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing. The balance of power is swinging from the writer back to the reader, and compromises with the public taste are being struck all over the place. Lyricism is on the wane, and suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas and taking their place as the core literary technologies of the 21st century

There’s nothing wrong with arguing for more populist, less hermetic literary fiction, and it’s true that even some of our thornier authors are writing books that would, with all due respect, make for a good movie. (And have.) But Grossman tips his hand with repeated references to the harsh economic realities of literary fiction, noting the relatively poor sales for Nam Le’s The Boat, which received rapturous critical praise. He also admits that all those obscurantist modernist authors writing difficult books ended up producing “a full century’s worth of masterpieces before it was half over.”

In other words, yeah, you might get some masterpieces of literature, but forget about paying off your mortgage with royalty cheques.

As well, Grossman’s repeated insistence on “plot” as the single defining feature of non-difficult fiction seems to ignore what it is that really makes difficult fiction so difficult.

After all, if you were told that a novel was about a licentious older man who moves in with and marries a widower because he is obsessed with her daughter, plots to kill the new mother before he is run over by a car, takes off with the girl and is chased across the country by a smooth-talking pornographer whom he eventually murders, whom would you guess had written it?

Poet Jacob McArthur Mooney is the latest writer-in-residence to pepper Open Book: Toronto’s pages with witty first-person anecdotes about the writing life. His first topic is not the Munro-Giller debate, thankfully, but another much-twittered topic: the demise of Toronto’s Pages Books and Magazines.What starts as a nostalgic entry about his first visit to the Queen Street West store develops into an interesting rumination on west-end gentrification:

As of this morning, the city has lost a thriving, Canadian-focused business, thrown out of its location not because sales are down but because members of the neighbourhood it helped create have made an executive decision to be a different kind of neighbourhood. This isn’t the grassroots evolution of taste it’s been made out to be. Sure, there’s a Club Monaco and a Starbucks on the block, but Pages’ two closest neighbours are still a basement-bred used clothing store and a mid-level sushi place. Rumours of the death of Queen West have been somewhat exaggerated for commercial effect.

Somewhere along this error chain, there simply must be a handful of people who went out of their way, or who inconvenienced themselves, to see to it that there was no longer room on Queen West for Pages Bookstore, and it wouldn’t be at all childish to call these people “enemies.” Enemies to literature, to art, even enemies to the city. It’s possible that one of those enemies is Pinedale Properties, Pages’s landlord, though as of this January CBC.ca article, the store’s owner, Marc Glassman, seemed to think they were trying their best to keep the store in its home. Maybe one of the enemies is around the corner, at the Chapters location south of Queen and John, though whereas sales volume was not among the key reasons listed for the store’s demise (given only as “skyrocketing rents”), possibly not. I’m just a new arrival who liked the bookstore. I can’t know these things for certain.

New York Times columnist Ross Douhat (who does not look at all like David Brent … well, maybe just a little) believes that Dan Brown’s novels are successful not just because the books are cheesy page-turners, or because the notion that the Vatican conceals nasty little secrets is inherently interesting (especially to many Catholics), or even because, well, corny thrillers often sell huge, but because The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons (the film of which just opened to big numbers) present an alternative vision of faith, one more attuned to modern life:

Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He’s writing thrillers, but he’s selling a theology.

[...]

For millions of readers, Brown’s novels have helped smooth over the tension between ancient Christianity and modern American faith. But the tension endures. You can have Jesus or Dan Brown. But you can’t have both.

Jesus and Dan Brown, then, are kind of like cake and cookies – you can only pick one.