Ordinary working people in the arts community who were miffed by the Conservative government’s $45-million cuts to a broad array of arts programs may have reason to breathe a bit easier today. Josée Verner, the Heritage Minister in place when those cuts were announced, has been bounced from her portfolio by newly re-elected Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who announced his new cabinet today. Verner takes over the Intergovernmental Affairs portfolio, while James Moore, MP for Port Moody-Westwood-Port Coquitlam, takes over the Heritage post.

Celebrations within the arts community may prove short-lived, however. According to his official website, the only arts-related experience Moore has had comes from working as a radio broadcaster in Vancouver and Prince George, where he hosted a talk show called “Behind the Headlines.” He has held several positions in the Conservative government, including parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Public Works and, most recently, Secretary of State for the 2010 Olympics, Official Languages, and the Asia-Pacific Gateway.

His website bio reads in part:

In his first term in office, through Private Members’ bills, James proposed legislation that would offer relief to victims of the leaky condo tragedy, toughen laws against date-rape drugs, force the Prime Minister to appoint elected Senators, impose consecutive rather than concurrent sentencing for violent criminals, ban gun ownership for violent criminals, toughen penalties for the illegal trafficking of prohibited weapons and ammunition, and toughen penalties for the trafficking of child pornography online.

It remains to be seen whether this tough-on-crime crusader will be a successful advocate for Canadian arts organizations. This Quillblogger has his suspicions, but will refrain from voicing them at this time.

Also of note in Harper’s newly constituted cabinet is the presence of veteran television broadcaster Peter Kent, who takes over as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs (Americas).

The winner of the 26th annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for the worst opening line of an imaginary novel was announced last week (the winner wrote something about passion in a New York City taxi).

However, in a letter to the editor in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, Chris O’Connor, mayor of Lytton, B.C. (Bulwer-Lytton’s namesake), announced the town will host a debate on the merits of Bulwer-Lytton’s prose.

For years, Professor Scott Rice has been making sport of Lord Edward George Bulwer Lytton, with his Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

Lord Lytton was both a statesman and an author. As colonial secretary, he helped create the Crown Colony of British Columbia in 1858.

Prof. Rice has accepted our challenge to debate Lord Lytton’s writing prowess in our village this Labour Day weekend, with the Hon. Henry Cobbald-Lytton, his great-great-great-grandson.

The Guardian covered this story as well, publishing the entire ridiculed first sentence of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, Paul Clifford, showing there’s more to “It was a dark and stormy night” than Rice suggests.

The debate will take place on Aug 30 and, as O’Connor says, “It won’t be a ‘dark and stormy night’; the debate is at 3:00 p.m.”

News broke this morning that Amazon intends to buy Abebooks.com, the Victoria-based online bookselling network. From the official release:

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals, and is expected to close before the end of the fourth quarter of 2008.

AbeBooks will continue to function as a stand-alone operation based in Victoria, British Columbia. AbeBooks will maintain all of its websites, including its Canadian website with Canada-specific content, such as reviews of Canadian-authored books and interviews of Canadian writers.

For Canadian observers, that reference to “regulatory approvals” will of course jump out. The question is whether Abebooks would be considered a bookseller, and thus subject to Investment Canada rules prohibiting foreign ownership. Watch Q&Q Omni early next week for a full story.

Anvil Press’s current anthology Imagining British Columbia: Land, Memory and Place includes an essay by Harbour Publishing owner Howard White about, among other things, the role of culture and literature in society. The Tyee has posted White’s essay, which recounts his meeting with Palestinian poet Fawaz Turki.

I met Fawaz at a big Amnesty International jamboree of oppressed writers in Toronto a few years ago, and one of the things that intrigued me about him was a rumour that he might be reduced to chopped liver by a Mossad hit squad at any time. I found it invigorating to think that I was sharing the planet with people who cared enough about poetry to shoot anybody over it.

I made use of a bar break to ask Fawaz if his notoriety wasn’t maybe to do with something besides versifying, like bombing buses. Fawaz was a bit piqued by this suggestion. Any damn fool can chuck a bomb while it takes brains to write a poem, and the Palestinian people understand this, he pointed out.

Back in Jordan it was nothing to have a crowd of several thousand gather on a few hours notice to hear him at an open-air reading. When he appeared in public, throngs of grown women followed him around ululating and fluttering their hands like leaves, chanting his name. His broadsheets outsold the newspapers. Poets like him and his buddies Mahmoud Darweesh and Fawazi el Asmar were far more important to the Palestinian cause than bomb-throwers, and far more worrisome to the authorities, and this was because of their ability to express the feelings of their people, Turki said. That is why so many of the poets known to Amnesty were behind bars, not only in Palestine but around the world.

I tried to picture this in Canadian terms. Prime Minister Harper is pacing around his desk ranting at General Hillier, “General, you and I will have no rest until we silence that traitorous menace Fred Wah, the Man Whose Name Is Breath!” Or: “I’m sure you know why you’re here, General. At 15:31 yesterday the l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poets declared war on conventional imperialist grammar. I want our fighting men to spare no effort until this sinister challenge is stamped out to the last slash and hyphen!” It didn’t quite click.

John Meier wants to own every English-language first edition book that has ever won the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction. (You may remember him from a Quillblog post back in November.)

Today, Meier, 51, was profiled in the The Globe and Mail. Marsha Lederman describes the Ikea Billy bookcases where Meier houses his collection on the ground floor of his parent’s house. He uses blackout curtains to protect the books and sometimes even shelves them backwards so as not to expose colours prone to fading, such as the Day-Glo orange on his four copies of Brian Moore’s The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960).

Meier is currently trying to raise $500, 000 to display his collection at the Cultural Olympiad, which will coincide with the 2010 Winter Olympics. After the Olympics, Meier hopes to take his books on a cross-country tour of Canada. The Canada Council will not fund the project because it “constitutes privileged treatment” of the English-language Governor General winners for fiction.

Read the article here. For more on Meier read this story about the National Book-Collecting Contest published in Q&Q last month.

Vancouver is gunning to be named the second UNESCO City of Literature, after Edinburgh was named as the first in 2005. It’ll have to beat out competition from Amsterdam, Alexandria, and Krakow.

Alma Lee, founder of the Vancouver International Writers Festival, is spearheading the campaign, with the help of representatives from the Association of Book Publishers of B.C., the University of B.C., Simon Fraser University, Tourism B.C., and, naturally, Douglas Coupland.

From the Vancouver Sun:

“I decided the best way to present us as a city was as new; you know, we’re new, we’re young, we’re vibrant, we’re part of a new world,” said Lee, who has been talking to representatives of the Paris-based United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization since 2004

…

Lee said application to UNESCO must be made by the City of Vancouver. She said the bid already has the support of Mayor Sam Sullivan, Coun. Elizabeth Ball and Coun. Peter Ladner.

“Personally, I don’t see how [city council] can say no — you never know, of course — and I certainly don’t see how UNESCO can say no.”

“One Book, One Vancouver” has picked Karen X. Tulchinsky’s 2003 novel The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky (Raincoast Books) as this year’s selection in the city-wide book club.

More info here, at the One Book, One Vancouver website.

Click here to read Q&Q’s review of The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky.

Miriam Toews has accepted a short writer-in-residence gig at the University of British Columbia, and this week Toews’ agent, Carolyn Swayze, held a soiree at Christianne’s Lyceum of Art & Literature in Kitsilano to welcome the author to Vancouver. Below, Swayze and Toews chat; visible in the background (right) is Bill Richardson. (Photo by kc dyer.)

(More photos after the jump.)

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A Vancouver bookstore with a long history of pricey court battles is seeking a buyer. According to Xtra West, Little Sister’s Book and Art Emporium owners Jim Deva and Bruce Smyth are looking to move on after 25 years of fighting the good fight. The store is probably best known for pursuing a case against Canada Customs (now Canada Border Services Agency) – which had seized erotic literature bound for the store on the grounds of obscenity – all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Here’s Deva on the kind of candidate they’re looking for:

The challenge now, says Deva, is finding someone who’s going to “proceed and continue with what we’re doing.” There’s no one on a short list just yet, he notes.

“I just want somebody that will carry on, not with everything that we’re doing, but certainly [who can] appeal to a broad section of our community….”

Apart from that, he says, the only other condition of sale is keeping Janine Fuller on as manager — a position she’s held for 12 of the 18 years she’s been at the store.

For more on Little Sister’s previous legal woes (or triumphs, depending on how you look at it), see here (or here or here).

Monday was the deadline for former students of native residential schools to opt out of a $2-billion compensation package offered by the federal government for abuses they suffered while attending the schools. (Accepting compensation means they agree not to sue the government or the churches that ran the schools.) The Tyee provides some related reading with a review of two books: Good Intentions Gone Awry: Emma Crosby and the Methodist Mission on the Northwest Coast by Jan Hare and Jean Barman (UBC Press) and The Letters of Margaret Butcher: Missionary-Imperialism on the North Pacific Coast, edited by Mary-Ellen Kelm (University of Calgary).

Tyee reviewer Crawford Kilian says the books provide some insight into what those schools were like, the mindset of the people running them, and ways that the students suffered even when they weren’t subjected to the worst types of physical and sexual abuse that have been documented.

Apart from chronicling an almost forgotten era in B.C. history, these books introduce us to two remarkable women. Both were highly intelligent, immensely competent, and profoundly toxic to the people they were trying to save.
…
For modern readers, however, it’s striking to see that Emma expressed zero interest in the people the Crosbys were trying to convert. She never discusses the Tsimshians’ culture or history. (One photograph, from 1876, shows Thomas Crosby in Tsimshian regalia; he looks painfully embarrassed.) She refers in passing to the dirt and disease of the natives, but doesn’t even mention the catastrophic smallpox pandemic that a decade earlier had killed a third of the native population on the B.C. coast.

Margaret Butcher made similar remarks: “They are a slow, indolent, dirty people,” she writes, “bound very strongly by custom and superstition.” But Kilian makes particular note of her attitudes toward the Kitamaat people’s language.

“I suppose in a few years time Kitamaat speech will be extinct for the young folks learn to speak Eng. in the schools & one of our senior girls told me they cannot understand all the Kitamaat of the old folk.”

Butcher clearly considered this progress.

It’s very difficult to compensate for this kind of suffering and loss in dollars, but the costs to native people across the country are clearly evident and profound.