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.

Michael Crichton dies

Online news outlets are buzzing this afternoon with the news that Michael Crichton has died. According to the Toronto Star, the 66-year-old author of mega-sellers like Jurassic Park and Timeline passed away yesterday after a lengthy battle with cancer.

Crichton was a brand-name author, known for his stories of disaster and systematic breakdown, such as the rampant microbe of The Andromeda Strain or dinosaurs running amok in Jurassic Park, one of his many books that became major Hollywood movies.

“Through his books, Michael Crichton served as an inspiration to students of all ages, challenged scientists in many fields, and illuminated the mysteries of the world in a way we could all understand,” his family said in a statement.

The piece also states that a new novel was tentatively scheduled to come out next month from HarperCollins, but that it had been postponed indefinitely because of his illness.

Twilight filmmakers have a stake in sticking closely to the book

There’s an old saw that says never judge a book by its movie. For the makers of Twilight, the upcoming film based on the first book in the gajillion-selling series of teen vampire novels by Stephenie Meyer, the hope is that cinemagoers will connect the screen adaptation with its literary progenitor.

In yesterday’s New York Times, Twilight‘s director Catherine Hardwicke — yes, that Catherine Hardwicke — said that while the original script she was handed differed markedly from Meyer’s book, she convinced the film’s producers that they should closely adhere to the source material: “I read the novel myself and I thought, let’s get back to this story, it’s just so much better.”

According to Terrence Rafferty, the author of the Times article, there’s a specific reason why the movie’s creative team might not want to diverge from Meyer’s story:

A particular hazard with books like Ms. Meyer’s — or like J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels — is that younger readers, unlike their more jaded elders, tend to like their stories just so, with as little variation as possible. And as any adult who has ever read bedtime stories to children understands, when youngsters really go for a story, they’ll insist on hearing it again and again, which is why movies aimed at children, tweens and teenagers can have such a huge payoff for producers and distributors. Two words: repeat business.

One of the side-effects of this attempt to attract a PG-13 crowd is toning down the eroticism, which is usually an inextricable element of vampire lore. Unlike the prototypical teenage male, Edward (the vampire) remains resolutely in control of his (super)natural impulses when it comes to Bella, his virginal teen love interest in both the novel and the film. In addition to being a preposterous representation of teenagers’ actual experience, at least one vampire-novel author claims that this betrays an essential aspect of the mythology of the undead.

“The truth,” said the writer Sarah Langan, whose novel “The Missing” won this year’s Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association, “is that sex can be terrifying at that age, even when you’re in college.” But Ms. Langan, who considers “Twilight” “more romance than horror,” isn’t entirely persuaded by the fear-of-sex model here.

“Abstinence is a perfectly valid point of view,” she said. “‘Twilight,’ though, struck me as kind of a strange, wrong version of what teenagers are like, especially Edward, who doesn’t even seem to want sex all that much. It made me long for Judy Blume.”

Whether the two will be allowed to consummate their relationship in a later, more age-appropriate installment of the movie franchise remains to be seen; in the meantime, filmgoers will have to content themselves with Hardwicke’s version of puppy love, with teeth.

Watching Watchmen

Earlier this week, in New York, filmmaker Zack Snyder presented the first lengthy sneak preview of Watchmen, his adaptation of Alan Moore’s landmark graphic novel. The preview was organized for a select group of media and internet geeks, and Guardian blogger Ben Walters was one of them.  Here’s part of his lengthy account:

After the screening, Snyder and Gibbons took questions. The first was from a large, balding man in the fourth row. “On behalf of the obese, obsessive geek community,” he began, “does the ending puss out?” The story’s conclusion is both cataclysmic and morally muddy. “The ending does not puss out,” Snyder replied, “To me that’s the point of the graphic novel.” Gibbons noted that the movie’s production is “very timely. It stands in relation to the [recent cycle of] superhero movies as the graphic novel did to comic books at the time.” And Snyder reported that he’d suggested the studio use a line of dialogue about Dr Manhattan – “God exists, and he’s American” – as the movie’s tagline. “They weren’t into that, by the way.”

When asked to describe the specific benefits of turning the story into a movie, however, Snyder offered a Sarah Palin-esque free association ramble. He concluded, defensively, that “there’s a rabid and vocal fan base for the graphic novel that support the graphic novel and are maybe against the movie. No Country for Old Men changed [its source material, the novel by Cormac McCarthy] three times as much as we have but I guarantee you there’s no rabid fan base who are going to kill the Coens!”

Phil Marchand lands at the National Post

Longtime Toronto Star book critic Phil Marchand, who switched jobs with former Star film critic Geoff Pevere at the beginning of this year, has now begun what is being promised as a weekly books column in the Saturday edition of the National Post.

The film beat never quite suited Marchand – as he himself admitted in a first-person piece in a recent issue of Q&Q. If nothing else, it was always a head-scratcher to see his byline, which had previously come at the end of long, thoughtful reviews of new books by Joseph Boyden, Alice Munro, Ian McEwan and the like, now accompanying bemused takes on movies like Troll 2, The Happening, and Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns.

It’s also good to see more original book content in the Post, which tends to fill out its review section with work taken from British newspapers and its fellow CanWest publications.

Paul Quarrington’s new venture: cinéaste

Here’s a slug this Quillblogger didn’t expect to see: “A short film by writer/director Paul Quarrington.”

But, according to Open Book Toronto, (and as reported by Quill & Quire Omni this past summer) the acclaimed author of the Governor General’s Award-winner Whale Music and this year’s Canada Reads champ King Leary has ventured behind the camera to shoot his first short feature, Pavane, based on his latest novel, The Ravine.

Open Book reports:

In Paul Quarrington’s short film, Pavane, Phil and Jay share more than a family bond — failed careers, failed relationships, bottomless drinks, and a debilitating memory of a shocking encounter in a ravine one childhood day.

The film will screen as part of the Book Shorts Moving Stories Film Festival, which will tour across the country beginning with a stop at the Winnipeg International Writers Festival on September 28, followed by stops in Ottawa and Vancouver in October, and Toronto in November. The festival also features work by W. Bruce Pirrie (adapting Douglas Coupland’s JPod), Bert Kish (adapting Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle), and Irene Duma (adapting Patrick Watson’s This Hour Has Seven Decades). The festival’s advisers include filmmakers Sarah Polley and Robert Lantos, writer Nino Ricci, and Random House Canada publisher Anne Collins.

Open Book has posted a trailer for the Quarrington film, and there are full profiles of the fimmakers and advisers at the Moving Stories site.

Books are every bit as exciting as movies, say scientists

The next time someone tries to tell you that movies are a more visceral, exciting medium than literature, you can counter their arguments by pointing to a new scientific study that has just been released in the Netherlands.

According to Science Daily, three scientists at the University of Groningen decided to compare what happens in our brains when we view the facial expressions of other people with what happens in our brains when we read about emotional experiences. The scientist they quote, Christian Keysers, sounds like a very intense fellow, and we like to imagine that he looks and sounds something like the German filmmaker Werner Herzog:

“We placed our participants in an fMRI scanner to measure their brain activity while we first showed our subject short [...] movie clips of an actor sipping from a cup and then looking disgusted,” said Christian Keysers. “Later on, we asked them to read and imagine short emotional scenarios; for instance, walking along a street, bumping into a reeking, drunken man, who then starts to retch, and realizing that some of his vomit had ended up in your own mouth. Finally, we measured their brain activity while the participants tasted unpleasant solutions in the scanner.”

“Our striking result,” said Keysers, “is that in all three cases, the same location of the anterior insula lit up. The anterior insula is the part of the brain that is the heart of our feeling of disgust. Patients who have damage to the insula, because of a brain infection for instance, lose this capacity to feel disgusted. If you give them sour milk, they would drink it happily and say it tastes like soda.”

Prof. Keysers continued, “What this means is that whether we see a movie or read a story, the same thing happens: we activate our bodily representations of what it feels like to be disgusted – and that is why reading a book and viewing a movie can both make us feel as if we literally feel what the protagonist is going through.”

Teacher suspended over Freedom Writers

A teacher in Indiana has been suspended without pay for 18 months for using The Freedom Writers Diary, a widely lauded collection of biographical stories written by inner-city teenagers, as part of her curriculum. For some reason, the two most detailed reports on this story are from U.K. newspapers, The Guardian and The Telegraph. According to The Guardian:

Connie Heermann, a teacher for 27 years, sought permission to introduce the book to her students last autumn after attending a training workshop held by the Freedom Writers Foundation. [...] Her head agreed and Heermann got written permission from nearly 150 parents, but the Perry Meridian high school board urged her to wait for its decision. Teachers’ union officials say that a single board member objected to swearing in the book. The school board member allegedly persuaded the other six officials to ban Heermann from teaching the book.

Having got wind of the story, Hollywood screenwriter Richard Lagravenese – who wrote and directed an adaptation of the book starring Hilary Swank – has written a piece for The Huffington Post defending Heermann. It’s a good defense, and in it, he relates this particularly damning anecdote, which sheds light on the school board’s real concerns:

When CNN reporter Gary Tuchman remarked to School Board President Barbara Thompson how he couldn’t believe that the students would be worse off for reading the book – and questioned, is it possible the book could actually make them better for reading it, Thompson responded: “What worries me is that Connie Heermann [...] sent a poor message to our children. If you’re told no, do it [...] it if feels good, do it anyway.” She gave no response to the question of the book’s value to a student’s education.

Bytes and pieces

The Economist‘s blog takes a look at how the same market forces that led to the digitization – and ensuing fragmentation – of the music industry could eventually come to bear on the book biz. Writer Daniel Hall suggests that technology has shifted the balance for both books and music, with music consumption becoming increasingly individualistic (given the advent of the iPod), while book consumption is heading towards a more collective experience, given the rise of book blogs and other online promotions. He notes that the fragmentation caused by technology can often lead to more choice for consumers of art and media:

If this is so, it is interesting to consider the likely impacts on other cultural forms. For movies, while it is hard to imagine the summer blockbuster ever entirely disappearing, I think the net effect is likely to be increasing fragmentation. Museum art is harder to predict. Will global branding allow a few artists to attain rock star status? Or will niche artists flourish by using the internet to raise awareness and create alternative art experiences? I find myself hoping it’s the latter. In my experience the areas where technology is causing significant fragmentation—not only music but areas like news media—have become far richer and more interesting to me as a result.