A new twist on the Canada Reads spin-off trend

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the CBC must be feeling pretty good right now. Just in case you can’t get enough of the various spin-offs of the CBC’s Canada Reads competition – including the National Post’s Canada Also Reads and literary blog Pickle Me This’ Canada Reads Independently – the Keepin’ It Real Book Club has just announced their very own adaptation, called Civilians Read.

However, instead of offering yet another new booklist for readers to take on, Civilians Read uses the original CBC Canada Reads list, with lesser-known book lovers defending each title. The “civilian” panelists include:

• Erin Balser, senior editor for Books@Torontoist, defending Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony
• Nic Boshart, digital projects co-ordinator for the Association of Canadian Publishers, defending Nicholas Dickner’s Nikolski
• Sarah Labrie, project co-ordinator for the Association of Canadian Publishers, defending Marina Endicott’s Good to a Fault
• Ashleigh Gardner, manager of digital development for Dundurn Press, defending Douglas Coupland’s Generation X
• Natalie St. Pierre, freelance editor and assistant to a literary agent, defending Ann-Marie Macdonald’s Fall On Your Knees

From the Keepin’ It Real Book Club:

We don’t have any training on the radio. We don’t have professional equipment. It’s going to be a little rough and tumble — it’ll likely lack finesse, basic courtesy, and a catchy theme song. But hopefully we’ll also say some smart things, spark some interesting discussion, and determine how weighty the panelist-X factor is.

All discussions will be hosted by Jen Knoch, associate editor at ECW Press and the main blogger at the KIRBC website. The Civilians Read panelists will release one podcast per day starting March 1, leading up to the official Canada Reads debate itself, which runs March 8-12.

The publishing industry – this week in quotes

“We are not going to be stripped of our heritage for the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is. We are not going to be deprived of what generations and generations have produced in the French language just because we weren’t capable of funding our own digitisation project.” – Nikolas Sarkozy, on France vs. Google, in The London Telegraph

“Poets always react to one another’s work. One generator of great poetry is the response of one poet to a provocative poem by another. That’s how the conversation with the past and tradition occurs, but it’s also how the conversation with the present occurs.” – poet A.F. Moritz, on editing The Best Canadian Poetry (Tightrope Books) in the National Post

“Numerous books, which aren’t available electronically, end up pirated. Attempting to prevent piracy by not making a book electronically available won’t stop the book from showing up as a pirated material, but it will show a lack of willingness to meet the demands of a hungry audience.” – P. Bradley Robb, responding to Sherman Alexie’s appearance on the Colbert Report, on Fiction Matters

“Doug may not recall this, but I remember him strolling into our art department at St. Martin’s Press in New York, looking (aside from the preppy sweater) like any of the other young, jeans-clad designers there. He was quiet spoken and it was the most casual of exchanges, but seeing him added a slight electrical charge to the project: he was our age. One of us. Books quite like this – about, conceived and designed by twentysomethings – hadn’t come around very often. Let’s face it, ever. There was a moment of glee as I realized the possibilities. I could go to town with the design or deliberately underplay, knowing that the team would’”get’ whatever cultural references I toyed with.” – Book designer Judith Stagnitto Abbate on designing Generation X, from the CBC Canada Reads blog

Douglas Coupland reminisces about writing Generation X

This month, acclaimed author and zeitgeist-hound Douglas Coupland publishes his 11th novel, Generation A. In advance of the occasion, he took the opportunity in yesterday’s Guardian to jump into the Wayback Machine and talk about the book that made him famous two decades ago (which, in the hyper-jacked-up Coupland sensibility is tantamount to a couple of centuries….):

[I]t’s odd that Gen X was the thing that would change my life, because everything about the book reeked of disaster and bad decision-making. I’d only begun writing less than three years earlier – non-fiction for magazines in Canada – and I was soon hitting that point in life where poor decisions come back to bite one. I was at the end of my 20s and it was becoming clear to me that my 30s were going to be a continuing mix of rootlessness and poverty.

Thanks to an agent who was “a real huckster” (Coupland’s words), the author landed a sizable advance, which led to his own road-to-Damascus moment at (naturally) Davisville subway station in Toronto:

[O]ne afternoon in April of 1989, I was emerging from the Davisville subway station – there had just been a rainstorm and the sunset was cold and tangerine – and a wave swept over me, one of those waves that occur not too often in one’s lifetime. It was one of the few times I’ve ever heard “a voice” (whatever a voice really is), and the voice very clearly said to me: “OK, Doug. It appears that you’re going to be a full-time writer now. Good. But that means you have to write fiction rather than non-fiction, because fiction is purer. You’ll have to clear all your decks and you’re going to have to change the way you see both you and your future.”

And then the voice left, and I was just another guy standing on a wet sidewalk outside the Golden Griddle. But life was now different.

And the rest, as they say, is hipster history.

Coupland’s art takes cover

Douglas Coupland is opening an art exhibit, aptly named The Penguins, in Toronto tomorrow, which features collages he has created with old covers of Penguin paperbacks. The show is the first of several he is planning that examine the “relationship between books and visual culture,” according to an enthusiastic post on the Torontoist.

The new show takes moldy, dusty and yellowed mass-produced Penguin paperbacks, and attempts to imbue them with the sense of vitality and energy that they once possessed. In 1935, The Penguins were famously successful on all levels: they were academically revered and founder Allen Lane wanted the books sold alongside cigarettes, at the same price.

….

Coupland is a visual writer who excels at many arts; the myth says that he hasn’t mastered any one form. Bollocks! Artist/poet William Blake had the same image problem back in the eighteenth century.

Drawing parallels with William Blake is heading into high altitudes, but photos of a few of the works shown on the Torontoist site and Coupland’s own do look pretty cool. Maybe not as avant-garde as the pages of Generation X that he “hand-chewed” and formed into a wasps’ nest, but still pretty cool.

McJob: fun, well-regarded, much-desired employ?

A Guardian commentary column reports that McDonald’s is picking a fight with the dictionary. The fast-food chain doesn’t like the Oxford English Dictionary definition of “McJob,” which, in the Canadian version, is: “a low paying, low status, and usually unstimulating job with few benefits and little possibility of advancement.” The BBC credits Douglas Coupland with coining the term in 1991’s Generation X.

According to McDonald’s, however, its jobs are only awesome, so the chain wants the word eliminated. Last year, the Golden Arches launched a publicity campaign in the U.K. to redefine McJob and “set the record straight,” said an April 21, 2006, press release. Posters were splashed around that declared, “McProspects – over half our Executive Team started in our restaurants. Not bad for a McJob,” and “McOpportunity – two pay reviews in your first year. Not bad for a McJob.”

But, strangely enough, those clever taglines don’t seem to have been persuasive. And so the chain has locked its sights on the OED. You can sign a petition here to “change the current definition of McJob to better reflect the reality of service sector jobs.” Go now, to beat the rush!