Non-sequitur graffiti has been the rage in Toronto for a while – the Val Kilmer faces that showed up a couple of years ago being the most notable example – but someone recently gave the fad a literary spin, as reported by Torontoist.com:

It seems that some Toronto taggers are no longer content to scrawl their own names on blank concrete canvases around the city and are trying instead to make more of a cultural statement. Last year, references to composer Gustav Mahler popped up in several places around town. This year, a more cryptic stencil has appeared on the Humber Bay Arch Bridge, boldly proclaiming “ISBN 486-28495-6″ for all to see and ponder. This International Standard Book Number turns out to be a paperback edition of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; Or, Life in the Woods.

Making it a reference to the Dover paperback edition is a nice, democratic touch. Even when book nerds go bad, they’re still nerds.

(And being nerds ourselves, we have to note that the ISBN is actually 0-486-28495-6.)

From The Los Angeles Times:

Warner Bros. Pictures and the producers behind the $4.5-billion film franchise featuring the beloved boy wizard will split the seventh and final novel in the J.K. Rowling series into two films.

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I” will hit theaters in November 2010, followed by “Part II” in May 2011, a decision that is being met around the world with fans’ cheers but also plenty of cynical smirks.

“Cynical smirks”? I can’t imagine why, when everyone involved says the split “would be to serve the story, not the bottom line.” Why would Hollywood producers lie to us?

Though won’t those kids be in their forties by the time this thing is finally over?

From The Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Seattle police are looking for a man who attempted to mail to Paris a box full of books packed with handgun parts and ammunition.

An alert clerk at a Wallingford UPS Store was preparing to ship the plastic-wrapped books on Jan. 31 when she noticed that one of the hardbacks rattled, according to police reports. The woman shook the book and spotted a gun part slipping through the pages.

The clerk phoned police Monday, after attempting to contact the sender. Searching the books, officers found a disassembled Beretta handgun, three loaded magazines and two boxes of 9mm ammunition hidden in hollowed copies of Richard Tarnas’ Cosmos and Psyche, Isaac Asimov’s Chronology of the World, and a communications text.

The folks at Véhicule Press have posted a story from Wednesday’s Montreal Gazette on their web page, about a high-speed car chase that took place on the highway between Longueuil and Montreal and involved police and an Oldsmobile Cutlass. Though it’s not apparent from the story why Véhicule would want to post it, their reasons become clearer in the follow-up commentary:

While poet Asa Boxer was in Toronto on a Signal reading tour, his 1994 Oldsmobile Cutlass was being pursued by police across the Champlain Bridge. It did not end well, and our hearts go out to Asa, who as of today will be using public transportation.

Apparently, some dude stole Boxer’s car, and the chase ended after the thief collided with an SQ Cruiser. The perp was arrested and charged for fleeing police and car theft.

All we could think after hearing this was: poets can afford cars?

If you’re like us, you’re probably getting real sick of hearing about O.J. Simpson’s quasi-confessional If I Did It, but attention must be paid when the queen herself, Oprah, thrusts it back into the limelight. Yesterday, she invited the Goldman family onto her show to discuss the book and their decision to publish it, a choice for which they have been criticized. According to MSNBC, which has posted a good summation of the show’s highlights, Oprah said it was a “moral, ethical dilemma” for her to give more publicity to the book:

Winfrey acknowledged that her program often promotes books and authors, yet, she said, “I don’t want to be in the position to promote this book, because I, too, think it’s despicable.”

The MSNBC piece ends by stating that, as of yesterday, If I Did It was No. 8 in sales at Barnes and Noble and No. 52 on Amazon.com. According to a more recently updated piece on The Book Standard website, however, the book has subsequently shot up to No. 1 at Barnes and Noble and No. 2 on Amazon.com. Way to go Oprah…

Last month, if you’ll recall, we blogged a story in The Guardian about Polish pulp fiction author Krystian Bala, whom police had arrested for a seven-year-old murder. They were tipped off, it seems, by the author’s own novel, Amok, which featured a killing that was much too similar to the real-world one. When last we checked in, the case against Bala seemed somewhat circumstantial, but it appears to have been good enough for the courts. According to The Washington Post, Bala has now been convicted and sentenced.

The killer in Bala’s alcohol- and sex-fueled “Amok” gets away with his grisly crime. But on Wednesday, a court in Wroclaw sentenced Bala to 25 years in prison for planning and directing the murder of Dariusz Janiszewski.

“The evidence gathered gives sufficient basis to say that Krystian Bala committed the crime of leading the killing of Dariusz Janiszewski,” Judge Lidia Hojenska said. “He was the initiator of the murder; his role was leading and planning it.”

Hojenska said it was not clear who actually did the killing and who might have aided Bala in the crime, but the evidence overwhelmingly pointed to Bala’s involvement in the events that led to Janiszewski’s disappearance.

The judge’s seeming tendency to conflate Bala’s own personality with that of his fictional protagonist is a bit troubling, but in any event, Bala sounds like such an ultra-creep that it’s hard to feel that justice wasn’t served. Incidentally, anyone out there know how his novel is selling now?