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.

Daily book biz round-up: e-reader pricing war; Stieg Larsson no feminist; and more

Tasty news bits:

• E-reader pricing madness! Nook goes down to $149! Kindle goes down to $189!
• Kooky inventor dude Ray Kurzweil invents e-reading software
• Stieg Larsson sorry excuse for a feminist, argues EW
• Geoffrey Hill wins Oxford professor of poetry position; no controversy ensues
• Why has the Google Book Search settlement stalled?
  

Macmillan U.K. admits to bribery

According to a report from Reuters, officials from the U.K. arm of Macmillan have admitted that they paid bribes to secure a potentially lucrative deal to print textbooks in southern Sudan.

Macmillan said it made “corrupt payments” in a bidding process for an education project supported by a World Bank-managed fund in the African region, the [World Bank] said in a statement.

“The World Bank Group has debarred Macmillan Limited … declaring the company ineligible to be awarded Bank-financed contracts for a period of six years in the wake of the company’s admission of bribery payments relating to a Trust Fund-supported education project in Southern Sudan,” read the statement.

As the article goes on to state, however, the six-year ineligibility period may be reduced to as little as three years in recognition of the fact that Macmillan has been quick to respond to the controversy.

Macmillan had agreed to roll out a “compliance monitoring program” and cooperate with the bank’s efforts to fight fraud and corruption, the World Bank statement read.

“Macmillan admitted engaging in bribes [...],” a World Bank official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters. “This happened during the bidding process and Macmillan did not get the contract.”

The official, based in Washington, said the payments were offered between 2008 and 2009.

Best of lists take a beating – but what about critical honesty?

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.

Steven Galloway to Barbara Kay: I’m a Canadian novelist and proud of it

Last week, National Post columnist Barbara Kay stirred up some controversy when she trashed Lisa Moore’s novel February for being both unmanly and unreadable – a symptom of what Kay describes as an overly feminized, government-coddled publishing industry. In today’s paper, author Steven Galloway offers a rebuttal, arguing that Kay’s literary sensibility just isn’t very, well, literary:

Ms. Kay’s complaint isn’t with Canadian literature, it’s with the lack of Canadian blockbuster commercial fiction. My suspicion is that Ms. Kay can’t tell the difference – how is it that she thinks the literature of our country differs from the literature of any other country? Most contemporary literature is overwhelmingly reflective, personal and not ripped from the headlines. And that’s the way it should be. Novels are not twitter, they are not sitcoms and they are not action movies, and the moment they are, literature ceases to exist.

On the issue of arts grants, which according to Kay create a culture of mediocrity and smug navel-gazing, Galloway has this to say:

Yes, Canadian literature is subsidized. So are tourism, mining, forestry, automobile production, small business and oil. In 2006 the petroleum industry alone received $1.4-billion in government subsidies in the form of tax breaks. I’ll apologize for our subsidies when they apologize for theirs, because what writers do is every bit as important and vital as putting together cars, docking cruise ships or cutting down trees.

Galloway’s response is a well-needed antidote to Kay’s over-heated polemics. But the tinge of elitism that creeps into his argument – he says the type of book Kay would like to see more of in Canada “may well be entertaining but it would be neither a novel nor literature” – is a little off-putting. Surely, if commercial fiction can’t aspire to literature, it at least qualifies as culturally meaningful. And many novels that subsequently earned a place in the canon were first conceived of as entertainments.

Another day, another literary award controversy

The winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, which is partially funded by the Booker foundation, has been announced. The majority of titles on the shortlist – Hunger, The Unfaithful Translator, The American Granddaughter, Time of White Horses, The Scents of Marie-Claire – read like standard lit-prize material.

Then there’s the winner, Egyptian author Youssef Ziedan’s Beelzebub, a work of historical fiction that “features a 5th century Egyptian monk in Alexandria and delves into the history of divisions among fathers of the church over the nature of Christ,” according to The L.A. Times. The title refers to the Devil, who “unlike in classical religious thought . . . is not cursed as the voice of evil but implicitly hailed as the voice of human reason, which pushes the protagonist throughout the novel to question the universe around him.” As The L.A. Times puts it:

[Ziedan's] critique goes beyond the role of religious institutions to the essence of monotheistic religions: “The substance is the same; it is based on the superiority of oneself over others under the pretext of possessing a god who owns the truth. This element of superiority is the same in all three religions, which gives rise to violence. As long as religions last, violence will persist.”

[...] The work sympathizes with sects that challenged the divine nature of Christ, and it quickly ignited fury within the Coptic Church, which has about 10 million followers in Egypt.

In the manner of all good journalism, this Quillblogger will refrain from commentary; however, he looks forward to the inevitable English translation and Da Vinci Code-like storm of protest.

Matthiessen takes National Book Award

Peter Matthiessen has won the U.S. National Book Award in the fiction category for Shadow Country (Modern Library/Random House) – the first NBA win in nearly 30 years for the octogenarian author. The book’s nomination inspired a mini-controversy, since it’s actually a revision of an earlier trilogy of novels, now condensed into a single volume. As Harold Augenbraum, the executive director of the National Book Foundation, told The New York Times:

“We allow collections of previously published material [...] Collected poems, collected essays, short-story collections – books like that. We don’t allow reprints, but we didn’t consider this a reprint. There’s a lot of new writing here.”

Other NBA winners last night:

• Non-fiction: The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed (W.W. Norton/Penguin Canada)
• Poetry: Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems by Mark Doty (HarperCollins)
• Young people’s literature: What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell (Scholastic)

Bookmarks: National Book Awards

Our neighbours to the south will be handing out The National Book Awards tonight. Before they do, here’s some handy links to get you up to speed on some of the nominees:

• The full list of nominees
• Controversy in the fiction category (The New York Times)
• Texans well-represented (The Dallas Morning News)
• Joan Wickersham on her nominated non-fiction work The Suicide Index (The Boston Globe)
• Teens schmooze with the YA nominees (School Library Journal)
• Reflections from an NBA juror (The Washington Post)
• A brief history of The National Book Awards (Time)

We should take this opportunity to point out that the jury has already perpetrated a grave critical injustice by failing to nominate the second volume in M.T. Anderson’s majestic, two-part The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation, which New York Times reviewer Jerry Griswold recently described thus:

It may be hard to conceive of making the claim about a young adult book, but I believe Octavian Nothing will someday be recognized as a novel of the first rank, the kind of monumental work Italo Calvino called “encyclopedic” in the way it sweeps up history into a comprehensive and deeply textured pattern.

The first volume won the National Book Award two years ago, so maybe the jurors just wanted to share the wealth?

Battle of the bloggers, IFOA edition

Toronto author Andrew Westoll has been doing a fine job as the official blogger for this year’s International Festival of Authors. In fact, it seems he’s been doing such a good job that National Post society columnist Shinan Govani has been ripping off his reporting – or so Westoll alleges.

The controversy (okay, the tiff) is concerning Westoll’s fly-on-the-wall account of a Friday night dinner conversation between novelist and critic Francine Prose and a handful of other IFOA authors (including Q&Q’s own Nathan Whitlock). On his blog, Westoll relates several telling details from the exchange, in which he observes Prose playing with her food (“I watched Francine pick the pepperoni off her pizza”) and overhears an anecdote concerning Laura Bush.

Govani’s write-up (scroll down) seems to draw from the same well of first-hand experience:

As the celebrated and perfectly-named Prose flicked pepperoni off her pizza, we hear, she told people about the “Laura Bush moment” she had some weeks back when she had an opportunity to visit the White House. Long story short: She kinda told the First Lady off.

The weasel word here is the vague “we hear” embedded in the first sentence. The verdict: while this isn’t an example of straight-up plagiarism, a hat-tip to Westoll would have been the gentlemanly thing to do.

Cellist vs. Cellist

Seems there’s a bit of controversy brewing around Steven Galloway’s novel The Cellist of Sarajevo, which was published a few months back by Knopf Canada. (Read Q&Q‘s review here.) According to the CBC, the real-life cellist Vedran Smailovic, who served as the inspiration for the book’s title character, is now demanding compensation for it, claiming that Galloway never contacted him to seek permission to be included in the novel.

With a stool and his cello, Smailovic once played on top of the rubble from a deadly mortar attack in Sarajevo. In plain view of snipers, he played for 22 days straight — one day for each person killed during the mortar attack.

So does the character in Steven Galloway’s book, published this year. It’s a war tale woven around three characters in Sarajevo and their reaction to a cellist character inspired by Smailovic, whose story has travelled around the globe.

[...]

Smailovic said that if people are making money off tales from his past, he is entitled to a share of it.

“They put my picture, my face, on the front, on the cover with no permission. They don’t ask me — they use my name advertising their product. I don’t care about fiction, I care about reality.”

Whichever way you look at it, this is a pretty sticky situation with no clear-cut answers. It’s hard not to sympathize with Smailovic, but based on the info in the CBC piece, it sounds as if Galloway only ever meant to pay homage to the man, and that he did so in a fairly respectful fashion. The Smailovic character is prominently featured only in the first five pages of the book, he never speaks, and he is mostly used as a thematic device to link the other three characters. Galloway even sent Smailovic an autographed copy of the book, which suggests that he expected Smailovic would like it.

Our guess is that Smailovic probably doesn’t have a very good understanding of how the publishing business works, and is under a false impression that there are Hollywood-style profits coming Galloway’s way. And we kind of wonder if maybe the CBC doesn’t have the best understanding of publishing either, as the piece implies at one point that Galloway should (or could) have offered compensation to Smailovic or the other 25 people he interviewed in researching the book. First of all, it was just background research for a work of fiction, not non-fiction, and second, the CBC would presumably be much more outraged if they discovered Galloway had paid people for the stories, which is one of the age-old ethical taboos of journalism.

As for Smailovic’s concern about being put on the book’s cover, he has more of a case there, but even that is not so cut-and-dried. The cover (which you can see here) is indeed a photo of him, but it’s oriented so that his face and most of his body are cut from the image, as if the cameraman was wandering away from the nominal subject to take in the devastated surroundings instead. In fact, it could be argued that the cover is attempting to show, in visual terms, that the cellist is not the book’s real subject at all, which only helps Galloway’s case.