Canadian literary event round-up: July 22-28

Here are just a few of the literary events happening across the country in the next week:

• Melancthon (7 Directions & the African Reparations Fund) poetry reading with NourbeSe Philip, Jumari Giles, Truth Is, Zainab Amadahy, Sonny Be, and Sedina Fiati, Blue Moon, Toronto (July 22, 9 p.m., $10 or pwyc)
• Don Banting signs Two Shadows Have I, Indigo South Edmonton Common (July 23, 1 p.m., free)
• Dorothy Ellen Palmer, author of When Fenelon Falls, reads with Chad Pelley, The Ship, St. John’s (July 24, 7:30 p.m., free)
• Alison Uitti reads from First Days Night Movies, McNally Robinson, Saskatoon (July 25, 7:30 p.m., free)
• Chevy Stevens signs Never Knowing, Chapters Granville, Vancouver (July 25, 7 p.m., free)
• Farzana Doctor reads from Six Metres of Pavement, Little Sister’s Book & Art Emporium, Vancouver (July 26, 7 p.m., free)
• Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti launch The Chairs Are Where the People Go, The Garrison, Toronto (July 27, 7 p.m., free)

Regina’s Book and Briar Patch to close

John Cress, owner of Regina’s largest independent bookstore, the 33-year-old Book and Briar Patch, announced this week that he’ll be closing shop on July 31. The store is part of a growing list of Canadian indies pulling the plug.

In an interview with the Regina Leader-Post, Cress blamed the store’s demise on big-box chains and the growing popularity of e-books – technology he didn’t  believe would be a threat until recently. Sounding rather defeated, he said:

Any bookseller that thinks there is a hope is dreaming. I watch a lot of trends and things are going to get really tough… If we signed another five-year lease, I’d say we’d have one year left.

[…]

There’s so much competition for the reader’s time with Facebook, YouTube, cellphones and computers. They can text, they can play games, watch movies — and that means a steady drop in readers.

The book industry: this week in quotes

“We’ve had the ‘woe is me, alas’ memoir, the ‘feeling orgasmic over the touch of linen on my toes alone in bed in Italy on Tuesday’ memoir, the ‘Thank Christ she wasn’t my mother’ memoir, the ‘I got rid of my husband and everything makes sense’ memoir, and now, in the case of Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story, we arrive at the “nothing in particular, on me holidays with me mum, we might be having a crisis but you’ll need a magnifying glass to find it” memoir. Publishers trot this tripe out because of the chance it might be lifted by the winds of marketing and carried to every middle-class dinner table.” – Anakana Schofield, from The Globe and Mail‘s Daily Review for Jan. 12

“A new independent study, conducted by the online monitoring and enforcement service Attributor, found that ‘nine million illegal downloads of copyright-protected books were documented during the closing months of 2009,’ according to the [Association of American Publisher's] release….Indeed, those are staggering numbers – and something that must be contended with. And yet they’re kind of perversely encouraging in a way: That many people want to read that many books, and are willing to steal to do so…. At least that goes against the ‘nobody reads anymore’ and ‘it’s the death of publishing’ story we’ve been hearing so much of. And that glass of rare Chateau Lafite 1787 is half full.“  - Mobylives

“How surreally wonderful to discover that an entire exhibition devoted to the ‘works’ of David Foster Wallace’s fictional creation James Incandenza is set to open later this month. A cult filmmaker, Incandenza is the star of Wallace’s seminal novel Infinite Jest… As was his wont, Wallace included a footnote in the novel about the filmography of Incandenza, and now using the author’s ‘detailed list of over 70 industrial, documentary, conceptual, advertorial, technical, parodic, dramatic non-commercial, and non-dramatic commercial works’, Columbia University’s Neiman Centre has commissioned artists and filmmakers to make the movies.”- The Guardian

“Three weeks after Highsmith’s arrival, a new resident appeared at Yaddo: Flannery O’Connor. Does your imagination not crackle at the idea of Highsmith and O’Connor living under the same set of roofs? As Highsmith drafted Strangers on a Train, O’Connor worked on Wise Blood…. Highsmith did not think much of O’Connor, who was disinclined to join the other colonists on their treks to the taverns of Saratoga Springs” – The New Yorker

January is SUAWOYN month … according to Colson Whitehead.

“Canada’s literary scene does not financially support more than a handful of authors, so don’t limit your work to Canada if your goal is to make a living as a novelist. You will either starve or die of frustration. It’s hard enough trying to make it as a writer without adding obstacles in your path.” – author Jeffrey Round on Open Book Toronto

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.

Tintin, The Hobbit and Goosebumps: coming soon to a theatre near you: UPDATED

The imminent end of the Harry Potter film franchise – the final film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II is scheduled for release in 2011 – has Hollywood types scurrying to secure other family friendly literary properties to fill the looming void . Steven Spielberg is working on a film version of the popular Tintin books, and Peter Jackson Guillermo del Toro is directing an adaptation of Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Other YA fare currently on Hollywood’s radar include R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series of ’tween horror stories and Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times.

The Times reports:

All the movie studios are hunting for existing properties with tested concepts — at least as books — that can be turned into films, though none exist on the scale of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter,” with its more than 400 million copies in print and vast cultural footprint.

But the films must hit a sweet spot that is deceptively difficult to find: They can’t skew too young or too old. And the marketing must clearly tell parents what to expect, studio executives say.

That elusive crossover appeal is what the studios most crave according to Alan Horn of Warner Bros., also quoted in the Times article: “There’s an attraction to having global interest and appeal to as many quadrants as possible, male and female, young and old.”

Quillblog isn’t sure which is more distressing: the ongoing infantalization of our culture, or the fact that, as audiences, we’re now being slotted into “quadrants.”

There’s no word yet about an adaptation of One True Bear, which might make for an interesting property should Eli Roth ever decide to branch out into children’s movies.

UPDATE: Quillblog’s nerd-o-meter apparently failed with the above post. It has been pointed out that Guillermo del Toro is directing the film version of The Hobbit, and Peter Jackson is producing. Quillblog regrets the error.

Twilight sequel script found in trash

It was a blunder worthy of CSIS. In 1999, Canada’s spy agency had egg on its face after top-secret documents were stolen off the back seat of a parked car while the car’s owner attended a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game. Then, in 2008, top-secret counter-terrorist documents were discovered in a trash can in downtown Ottawa. Now, in what has to be an equivalent threat to national security (this time in the U.S.), the top-secret script for New Moon, the film sequel to last year’s Twilight adaptation, along with a treatment for the third film in the series, were left in a trash can outside of a St. Louis hotel, where they were summarily discovered by salon owner Casey Ray.

Okay, maybe it’s not as serious as a CSIS security breach (Twilight fanatics are welcome to disagree), but one has to wonder who thought it would be a good idea to dispose of the hottest property in Hollywood by dumping it in a public trash bin.

Fortunately for the sanctity of the film series, Ray ignored her initial impulse to sell the scripts to a tabloid and instead returned them to Summit Entertainment, the production company for the movies. For her honesty, Ray has been invited to attend the premieres of both films.

This is not the first time a Stephenie Meyer property has been inadvertently leaked. Fans may remember the incident last year, in which a partial manuscript for a novel called Midnight Sun was released online, prompting the author to cancel plans to publish the book. The 12-chapter draft was later posted on Meyer’s website.

Fun with movie trailers

A couple of literary-themed movie trailers hit the Internet recently.

The preview for the adaptation of Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh can be seen here. Directed by Dodgeball auteur Rawson Thurber, the film looks to have, ah, streamlined some of the themes of Chabon’s novel. In the trailer, at least, there’s only a blink-and-you-miss-it reference to the narrator’s struggle with his sexual identity, which is the crux of the novel. To be fair, though, trailers don’t always represent movies with scrupulous accuracy.

Also looming is Away We Go, a film scripted by author/McSweeney‘s founder Dave Eggers and his wife, novelist Vendela Vida, and directed by Sam Mendes. According to the IMDB, the film is about a couple expecting their first child who, obviously being too special to live just anywhere, travel the country in search of the place that will best nurture their uniquely beautiful souls. To be fair, though, Quillblog is paraphrasing. The trailer is here.

Interview: Tony Burgess talks about Pontypool

Open Book Toronto has posted this video interview with Ontario author Tony Burgess, whose 1998 novel, Pontypool Changes Everything, was recently turned into a movie.

Look for a story on Pontypool director Bruce McDonald – and his love of adapting CanLit – in the March issue of Q&Q.

Bookmarks: Ben McNally, Al Purdy, and Britney

• Toronto bookseller Ben McNally is profiled at blogTO.
• The League of Canadian Poets has “declared” April 21 to be National Al Purdy Day. Says their release (which doesn’t seem to be online): “We invite all Canadian poets, and lovers of Canadian poetry to host a Purdy Party to raise funds to preserve this important cultural and heritage property.” (More on the “Let’s save Al Purdy’s house” movement here.)
• From the sublime to the etc., etc.: U.K. paper claims Britney Spears has signed deal to write series (!) of memoirs. No further comment.
• Some info on Q and A (the novel on which Best Picture Oscar nominee Slumdog Millionaire is based).

Bookmarks: retro covers, home renovations, and more

Notes from far and wide:

• Penguin’s campaign of standardized, retro covers was a hit with book buyers Down Under.
• Two brave and hardy souls have set out to read every book in the New Canadian Library.
• Hey, Westwood agent Hilary McMahon had her home featured on one of those decorating TV shows!
• Russell Smith marvels at the enduring popularity of reading, and then suggests it’s because movies like The Dark Knight are so terrible. Not sure that theory holds up under scrutiny, but nonetheless, he’s right about The Dark Knight.
• That phony Holocaust memoir might get released after all – as a novel.