Mark Twain: dead and kicking

As willed by the author, the first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography was released for the first time on Monday, 100 years after his death. Yet even before its release, the Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1, landed on the Los Angeles Times, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble bestseller lists. The Globe and Mail review of the book says:

Twain hit upon a unique method for writing an autobiography: He dictated to a stenographer whatever was on his mind at the moment, sometimes responding to the morning’s paper or the morning’s mail, sometimes following seemingly random trains of thought wherever they led him, often interleaving relevant newspaper clippings along the way.

Twain’s publisher, University of California Press, planned to release 50,000 copies of the book, but has since increased the number to 75,000, reports another Globe article.

Daily book biz round-up: Giller scandal edition

There’s a lot of outraged buzz in online book circles this morning about whether Scotiabank Giller Prize juror Ali Smith broke jury protocol and engaged in a form of literary insider trading by arranging for her U.K. agent, Tracy Bohan, to sign winner Johanna Skibsrud before the longlist was even announced. As Q&Q reported earlier this month, Bohan then went and brokered a healthy deal for U.K. and Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) with William Heinemann editor Jason Arthur (who we’ve since learned is Bohan’s boyfriend). The question now is: did Smith inform her fellow jurors that she was involved in promoting one of the authors in contention?

• Critic Nigel Beale blogs about author Susan Swan accusing Smith of conflict of interest
• Elana Rabinovitch calls it poor judgment, not conflict of interest, in The Globe and Mail

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.

Tony Blair to donate proceeds from memoir to charity

This may be as close as we ever come to getting an admission that joining the war in Iraq was a mistake from one of its prime instigators. The Globe and Mail is reporting that Tony Blair, the British prime minister responsible for signing on to George W. Bush’s war on terror and committing thousands of British troops to a misguided (and possibly even illegal) war in Iraq, has agreed to donate the proceeds from his forthcoming memoir to a new charity that will support British soldiers who have been injured in battle.

From the Globe:

The Royal British Legion said Monday that the former prime minister has agreed to give all proceeds from A Journey to its Battle Back Challenge Center. The center opens in 2012 and will provide state of the art sports facilities and rehabilitation services for seriously wounded personnel.

Publisher Random House paid an estimated $7.5 million (U.S.) for Blair’s personal account of his time in power, due to be published next month.

Blair spokesman Matthew Doyle said Monday that Blair’s donation includes the advance and all royalties.

Martel’s musical flight of fancy

Yann Martel is no doubt a busy man: not only is the Man Booker Prize–winning author of Life of Pi a new father, he’s also promoting his latest novel, Beatrice & Virgil, and fending off a slew of negative reviews. Yet the Montreal native has also found time to engage in a bit of classical music–inspired whimsy. On Tuesday, at a performance by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Martel supplied an original text to accompany some ballet music by Beethoven. The piece, called The Parole Hearing of Prometheus, took the form of a courtroom drama and was performed in French by Quebec actor Michel Dumont.

From The Gazette:

Trial-by-jury is not an original motif, but it got the piece up and running. Prometheus stood accused not simply of stealing fire and giving it to mankind but of enabling the despoliation of a planet the gods had been treating rather well. “Even Lord Hephaestus, the divine blacksmith, says he does not need so much heat and fire,” thundered Dumont the prosecutor in one of Martel’s more inspired flights.

According to Gazette classical music critic Arthur Kaptainis, the evening was “mostly good fun” despite the “earnest Al Gore undercurrent” of Martel’s accompanying script. Still, following the lead of book critics in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, Kaptainis couldn’t help taking a dig at Martel:

Dumont’s delivery, comic and robust, was entirely in French. Undoubtedly the language of Molière is well suited to courtroom grandiloquence. The English as printed seemed less witty and less literary. This is a significant observation: Martel wrote the text in English and had his parents prepare a translation.

Meanwhile, The Globe and Mail described Martel’s text as a “mere bagatelle compared with the grandeur” of the music, complaining that the story, which touched on melting ice caps and oil spills, was “a tad preachy.”

Martel fans can make up their own minds: a recording of the performance will eventually be released on CD.

Orlando Figes admits writing anonymous Amazon reviews

Earlier this week, Quillblog reported on a British contretemps about an academic’s wife who apparently posted a series of vitriolic reviews of her husband’s rivals on Amazon using the moniker “Historian.” As we noted this morning, The Guardian is now reporting that the reviews were actually written by Orlando Figes, the academic himself, who misled his lawyer and allowed his wife to take the blame for the scandal. The Globe and Mail has also picked up on the story:

“I take full responsibility for posting anonymous reviews on Amazon,” he said in a statement released Friday. “I have made some foolish errors and apologize wholeheartedly to all concerned.”

Figes specifically apologized to his wife, his lawyer — who was misled about the source of the reviews — and to the authors he trashed on Amazon, including Rachel Polonsky, Robert Service and Kate Summerscale.

Figes goes on to state that his behaviour might have been tied into unspecified health problems:

“I am ashamed of my behavior, and don’t entirely understand why I acted as I did,” he said. “It was stupid — some of the reviews I now see were small-minded and ungenerous but they were not intended to harm. This crisis has exposed some health problems, though I offer that more as explanation than excuse. I need some time now to reflect on what I have done and the consequences of my actions with medical help.”

The old saw about reaping and sowing comes to mind, but Quillblog would like to point out that this whole farrago is yet another nail in the coffin of anonymous online reviews. Surely it’s time for Amazon to change its policy and require that reviewers to identify themselves by name.

Lady links: this week in women writers

• Vancouver’s Amber Dawn profiled on the Shameless blog about debut novel Sub Rosa published by Arsenal Pulp Press
• Novelist Anne Fleming recommends Jane Rule in Capital Xtra‘s new literary column
• Brooklyn-based, Canadian-born novelist Emily St. John Mandel discusses structure on The Millions
• The Gazette profiles three poets: Kate Hall, Priscila Uppal, and Robyn Sarah
• Susan Carpenter reviews controversial Oprah bio by Kitty Kelley
• New book by beloved Canadian poet Anne Carson reviewed in The Globe and Mail

The changing face of DIY

In a recent column in The Globe and Mail, Russell Smith makes an excellent case for dismantling the stereotype of traditional publishers as obstinate elitists resistant to change:

Of course, everyone wants to get into selling e-books. No one is resisting this idea. The problem is that not everyone wants to buy them yet. Furthermore, no one has yet agreed on who will be in control of these sales, and in particular of how much each of these books is going to cost. Both the publishers and the booksellers want to set the prices, and the booksellers will want to set the prices much lower than the publishers will.

Smith goes on to discuss how e-books are helping change the face of self-publishing; he thinks that, in the age of PayPal, vanity presses may not be considered inferior to traditional publishing, despite continued lack of support from arts councils and awards juries:

Some of the most popular writers on the Internet are unpaid and unpublished in print. Furthermore, even successful published authors are beginning to experiment with putting their own works up for sale online. In this case, it’s not a lack of renown that causes authors to self-publish, but the opposite: If an author is a really big name, she knows she already has the following to generate sales without the help of a publisher’s marketing and sales departments.

The National Post examined the phenomenon of DIY publishing in a recent article:

It’s a curiosity of modern culture that an indie CD or film is cool, while a self-published book still carries a whiff of stigma. Don’t believe it? Just try to get your indie book reviewed in most publications that habitually fawn over indie music and film.

Michael Geist’s covert ties to Amazon

[This post has been updated]

The debate surrounding Amazon’s planned Canadian expansion has produced many arguments both for (the editorial boards at The Globe and Mail and National Post) and against (the Canadian Booksellers Association, the Association of Canadian Publishers). While such polarized opinions are to be expected, one of the most surprising voices to come out in support of Amazon is copyright activist and University of Ottawa academic Michael Geist, known for his anti-corporate stance on many copyright issues in the digital age.

In Monday’s Toronto Star, Geist went after the Canadian Booksellers Association, arguing that the “CBA’s attempt to cloak the issue as a matter of Canadian culture is unsurprising, but [Heritage Minister James] Moore should recognize this for what it is – a transparent attempt to hamstring a tough competitor that ultimately hurts the Canadian culture sector.” Geist went on to suggest that Amazon’s (theoretically) unlimited selection of books is a good thing for Canadian culture and that the “scarcity of space in brick-and-mortar stores has long been a key concern for Canadian authors and publishers, who fear that their titles might get squeezed off the shelves.”

In the wake of Geist’s op-ed, U.S. blogger Christian L. Castle, described on his blog as a Los Angeles–based journalist, has unearthed ties between Amazon and an Internet think tank headed co-created by Geist:

First of all, it should not be overlooked that Geist’s U.S.-backed Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, the Alcan of IP with its almost 100% American board, “was established in 2003 with the aid of a start-up grant from an Amazon.com Cy Pres fund, received by Prof. Michael Geist.” Now I’m sure that Geist would deny that he personally received any money, but if that’s true, they might want to revise that sentence on the SG-CIPPIC website.

It’s entirely possible that Geist, in his ignorance of book retailing and the publishing sector, truly believes that independent booksellers are a threat to Canadian culture. If that’s the case, however, he should have been above-board about his past dealings with Amazon.

[Update] Michael Geist responds: “The Amazon grant was money that came via a court order through a class action settlement. It was used to establish the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic in 2003. Being part of a Cy Pres Fund, Amazon did not oversee or make the award. A court did. There is no conflict and nothing hidden. In fact, look back at my earlier columns criticizing them for the Kindle to see how much influence they have over what I say. None.”

Fear of poetry waning, and the Globe opens the Bök on lipograms

The Huffington Post has taught Quillblog a new word. “Metrophobia” is not an aversion to riding the Paris subway or to well-coiffed men; it refers to a fear of poetry. And apparently, this affliction is on the decline in America. Kim Rosen writes that after a few generations in which the American public retreated from poetry, the tide seems to be turning:

Finally, it seems, we are rising from the sick-bed of Metrophobia, and returning to poetry. Signs of health begin to accrue. Hundreds of thousands of teens throughout the U.S. choose to learn classical and modern poems by heart and practice together for Poetry Out Loud, a national recitation competition. Slam, jam, Def, Hip Hop and rap poets tell it like it is on TV, YouTube, radio waves, and the stages of basement coffeehouses and national theaters. A major Hollywood release of the 2009 holiday season, Invictus, is about Nelson Mandela and how he was saved by a poem. Even our own president is reported to turn to Urdu poetry for sustenance.

Granted, this is still nowhere near the popular acceptance poetry enjoys in the Middle East – where Rosen points out that the most popular television show, an American Idol-style poetry competition called The Million’s Poet, has become such a sensation that it launched a television station exclusively devoted to poetry – but it’s an encouraging sign nonetheless.

Here in Canada, metrophobia has not seemed to affect the sales of Christian Bök’s experimental poem Euonia, which Coach House Books re-released at the end of last year in an expanded edition. In The Globe and Mail, resident logophile Warren Clemens uses the reissue of Bök’s volume as an opportunity to examine the literary tradition of employing lipograms in writing:

Bök, inspired by earlier writers who operated with severe, self-imposed formal restraints, set himself the challenge of using only one of the vowels in each chapter. Pieces from which certain letters are excluded are called lipograms, which has nothing to do with the great Chinese poet Li Po but derives from the Greek lipogrammatis (lacking a letter), blending leipein (leave) and gramma (letter).

Wordsmith Robert Hendrickson, a fount of information on the subject, says the first creator of lipograms was the Greek lyric poet Lasus in 548 BC, but the text that really knocked everyone’s socks off was Odyssey of Tryphiodorus, a Greek work containing 26 books, each of which left out one letter from A to Z. In 1969, French author Georges Perec wrote La Disparition (translated by Gilbert Adair as A Void), which contained no “e” in the text. Ernest Vincent Wright had achieved the same result in his 1939 book, Gadsby: Champion of Youth.