Atwood-bashing begins over “Fox News North”

Margaret Atwood is once again lending her name to a worthy cause, and like her support for the environment, brown-bag lunches, and stay-at-home book tours, the celebrated novelist’s actions have generated some mild controversy in the Canadian media.

The latest episode erupted on Tuesday when Atwood announced (via Twitter) that she had added her name to a petition protesting Sun Media’s efforts to launch a Fox TV-style news channel in Canada (the channel is being dubbed “Fox News North” and “Tory TV”). That immediately prompted a response, also via Twitter, from Sun Media national bureau chief David Akin accusing Atwood of supporting “an anti-free speech movement” and effectively accusing “me and my colleagues of hate speech.”

Atwood in turn replied that the issue isn’t about free speech per se, but rather Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s meddlesome involvement with the CRTC, which recently denied the network a top-tier broadcast licence. As Atwood puts it in fewer than 140 characters, “we shouldn’t B Forced to Pay for it, & CRTC chair should be arms’ length, not Harper tool. Fox free 2 set itself up.” She elaborates her position in The Globe and Mail:

“Of course Fox & Co. can set up a channel or whatever they want to do, if it’s legal etc.,” she told The Globe and Mail in an email. “But it shouldn’t happen this way. It’s like the head-of-census affair – gov’t direct meddling in affairs that are supposed to be arm’s length – so do what they say or they fire you.

“It’s part of the ‘I make the rules around here,’ Harper-is-a-king thing,” she wrote.

In today’s National Post, columnist Kelly McParland hits back with an editorial deriding Atwood for “sign[ing] onto this silliness.” Atwood, McParland writes, “stands for good stuff like freedom of speech and freedom of the press, except when it comes to the case of people who don’t agree with her…. Right Peggy? Because you can’t be a good Canadian if you’re a Conservative. Everyone at the CanLit festivals agrees, so it must be true.”

The Post‘s paranoid speculation about a left-leaning CanLit cabal is nothing new. Assuming that at least some of Quillblog’s readers will want to follow Atwood in rejecting Fox News North, you can do so by adding your name to the petition here.

The Internet, and other modern horrors

Perhaps in conjunction with the 10th anniversary of blogging, Guy Gavriel Kay has a piece in this past weekend’s Globe and Mail Books section about the perils facing authors in the digital age.

Gavriel Kay has a strong Web following himself and has been known to write blog-like diaries in conjunction with book tours, but that doesn’t mean he likes any of it. Overall, he believes the proliferation of chatter online has led to a decline in privacy.

For some of us, no context is “limited” any longer. That is the point I’m offering for consideration. And “some of us” can be pretty extensive. This isn’t about Brad Pitt or Amy Winehouse. Ask any high school student whose pratfall is recorded by a classmate’s camera phone and posted to YouTube. Or the microcelebrity (a nice term I first saw in Wired magazine) snapped while at a party looking less-than-sober, with the photo online immediately, to derision-inducing effect.

We are, in other words, always “on” now, at least potentially, always in a wider public than might appear to be the case, and it compels adjustments, and some regret.

Here, for example, is how he reacted when approached by four Yale students “with questions about other writers and their books”:

And I looked at them and “saw” four blogs, with links to a plenitude of others. Given the ease of searching blogs now – for my name, or those of the queried writers – it was suddenly impossible to treat this as a quiet exchange of thoughtful literary opinion. I was as careful as a politician in a scrum, all of us with teacups in hand in a beautiful room.

Now, Gavriel Kay may have a general point about the erosion of privacy in the wired world. But it’s difficult to understand his timid reaction given the students’ benign and unpersonal line of questioning. After all, a writer’s “thoughful literary opinion” is unlikely to come back to haunt him, even if it is circulated online. As Martin Amis pointed out in a recent essay, “What you say about something is never your last word on any subject.” Fear of being overheard certainly hasn’t kept Amis from running his mouth.

Lit on the radio

Geography of Hope author Chris Turner has recounted, on the Random House Canada blog, a humbling moment from his recent book tour. It was the morning after his official book launch, when he hauled his hungover self to the University of Toronto campus radio station for a live interview.

[...] no one really properly greets us on arrival, and I’m so bleary-eyed that you could walk me out a second-story window and I’d be picking gravel out of my chin before it occurred to me to ask where the hell we were going.

Anyway, so somehow I get ushered into this airless vault of a studio in the attic and seated in a folding chair off in a corner, and then I’m left alone in there until, presumably, the host sitting there begins our interview. Except he doesn’t even look up at me. He’s leaning in tight to the mike, an earnest undergrad in a hipster t-shirt, delivering a steady stream of words to the airwaves in a clipped monotone. For awhile I just sit there in a hungover haze, and then maybe five minutes in it occurs to me that he’s just reading a pile of news stories. Wire-service pieces about incidents of animal cruelty. One after another after another. In their entirety. Verbatim.

As it turned out, Turner had been ushered into the wrong studio. Luckily, someone noticed the screw-up in time and sent him to the right one. This didn’t stop Turner from claiming in his blog, however, that he’d have “killed the kid with his bare hands” if he’d been given the chance.

Dude, it’s campus radio … be thankful for the folding chair.

Conrad Black: he haunts us still

Former media baron and author Conrad Black has not been allowed to return to Canada following his conviction on fraud and obstruction of justice charges in the U.S., but he is finding other ways to reach out and touch the citizens of the country he once renounced.

Last night, Black appeared on CBC’s Rick Mercer Report doing a Martha Stewart-style celebrity tip on the proper techniques for waxing brightly coloured fall maple leaves. In the sketch filmed at his home in Palm Beach, Florida, he wryly suggested that it is necessary to press the leaves in books first, using weighty volumes such as his biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt or his latest of Richard Nixon, The Invincible Quest, for instance.

Showing off the results of his efforts, he added:

Here we have a perfectly waxed maple leaf, a great solace to everyone and especially to those who, for complicated reasons, can’t at first-hand observe the changing of the seasons this autumn in Canada. (Canadian Press)

Black is scheduled to make another appearance in Canada via Margaret Atwood’s LongPen at Toronto’s World’s Biggest Bookstore on the evening of Oct. 15 to autograph copies of The Invincible Quest.

Depending on how many books Black might write if he is incarcerated, the LongPen may be a useful tool for any future book tours.

Mean people suck

Newsflash: sometimes bloggers say mean things. Seems Canadian author Hal Niedzviecki has been Googling himself and finding some unflattering comments floating around the blogosphere, and he’s worked out how he feels about this in a Globe and Mail essay.

For example, one San Francisco blogger, “Christina,” who apparently went to high school with Niezdviecki, calls him “a self-styled Canadian Chuck Klosterman” and notes that “apparently it’s possible to call oneself a ‘pop culture explorer’ with an entirely straight face and get away with it.” Niedzviecki doesn’t quote that bit in the Globe piece, but he does quote this one:

It’s the Chucks and Hals and David Sedarises that get me, because they give the impression that they just sat down one day and blurted out whatever they happened to be thinking at the time, and next thing you know they’re on book tours and doing interviews for major media outlets.

Happily, this little attack gives rise to some thought-provoking Niedzviecki meditations on the changing shape of discourse in the digital age:

Should I thank her for grouping me with guys like Chuck Klosterman and Sedaris? Should I ask her if she found me at all attractive in high school? Should I debunk her impression that my random ideas automatically end up on the bestseller list?

Well, at least the “attractive in high school” question only leapt to mind second.

Still, Niedzviecki does reach some general conclusions. Mainly that bloggers should, well, be nicer, because unkind words might actually affect someone’s career or even their party invitations. (Yeah, that position should resonate out there in webland.)

And Hal, if you’re reading this, to answer one of your pressing questions: you’re cute and all, but Quillblog just doesn’t think of you that way.

Related links:
Click here for the Globe and Mail story
Click here for Christina on Hal

Co-operation makes it happen

The current issue of Fast Company magazine reports the story of Berrett-Koehler, a press with an innovative approach to publishing. Based in San Francisco, the 13-year-old publishing house operates on the principle of collaboration. In addition to full-time in-house editors, BK’s managing editor, Jeevan Sivasubramaniam, employs a small team of freelance readers guaranteed to hold differing views of a book, each of whom writes a report. Also, the author’s input on design and marketing is encouraged via an interactive blog. “For each new book, editors and designers will come up with several titles and cover options, posting them online. Authors love the result — a buffet of distinct type fonts, rejiggered subtitles, and contrasting color schemes that evolve as new comments are posted. To help inform authors’ marketing decisions, everyone at BK — from the senior editors to sales managers to, literally, Kathy in accounting — is invited to share his or her suggestions on the blog and elsewhere.”

BK has also hosted author retreats and conferences “where … writers come together to share ideas, suggest speaking opportunities, and offer advice and contacts for book tours,” as well as “a marketing workshop, where some 60 authors and key outsiders, such as booksellers, shared experiences.” The company is also known to cede to the requests of its authors, granting one permission to publish his book for free online and another his choice of three copy editors.

Although BK’s co-operative strategy lengthens the process of publishing books, the apparent results of BK’s approach may serve as evidence for the benefits of collaboration. Attracting to its roster such writers as David Korten and the author of the bestselling One Minute Manager series, BK saw a growth in revenue of 25% last year, to $7-million US, and is projected to grow another 50% in 2005, according to Fast Company‘s Lucas Conley. Conley adds that the average BK author sells some 15,000 copies, 27% more than the American industry average.

Thanks to BookNinja.com for the link.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from Fast Company

Halkin to authors: take a 100-year break

On his return from a book tour in America, author Hillel Halkin explores his nightmares of insignificance in The Jerusalem Post, wondering whether writing books — much less going on book tours — is even worth it anymore. “Why anyone continues to write books at all under such conditions is a good question. Presumably, it’s just a habit we can’t break. Indeed, it might be best at this point to declare a 100-year moratorium on all book writing so that readers can be given the opportunity to catch up with what’s already on the shelves.”

Thanks to BookNinja.com for the link.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from The Jerusalem Post