Friday Photo: Harry and the Potters at the London Public Library

Friday photo returns! This week’s shot comes courtesy of the London Public Library, which hosted a concert on Aug. 1 featuring not only Harry and the Potters, but Draco and the Malfoys. The bands will be in Toronto this weekend for the big Potter geek-out, Prophecy 2007. Until then, Hey! Ho! Em-bar-go!!

Have you recently attended a book reading, library event, or author appearance? Have some interesting book-related pictures you want to share? If you’ve got photos of the Canadian book scene, we’d love to see them. Send them to us or sign up through Flickr and submit your images.

Friday Photo: Robert J. Sawyer e-reading

This week’s Friday photo comes courtesy of Gene Wilburn, who took this shot of Robert J. Sawyer reading a chapter from his new novel, Rollback, on his handheld computer at the book’s launch at Bakka Phoenix bookstore in Toronto on April 14.

Go to Q&Q‘s Flickr pool for more from the Sawyer launch.

The May issue of Q&Q, in stores now, contains a cover profile of Sawyer. Read a review of Rollback here.

Have you recently attended a book reading, library event, or author appearance? Have some interesting book-related pictures you want to share? If you’ve got photos of the Canadian book scene, we’d love to see them. Send them to us or sign up through Flickr and submit your images.

Flickr event roundup: McKay, McKay, and Dowling

Photographers from across the country have been contributing to our new Quill & Quire Flickr Pool. Below is just a sampling of recent additions.

Poet Don McKay – who was just nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize – took to the stage on March 27, 2007 as part of Ottawa’s long-standing Tree Reading Series. Photographed at the Library and Archives by John W. MacDonald.

On the same evening in Toronto, fellow McKay — this time the unrelated Ami — signed books at Knopf Canada’s New Face of Fiction event at the Gladstone Hotel. Also in attendance were this year’s New Faces, Neil Smith and Jen Sookfong Lee. A detailed and fascinating description of the night can be found on photographer Karen (Sassymonkey)’s own blog.

South of the border, Canadian poet Sarah Dowling reads in Philadelphia as part of the March 24 launch of arts journal EOAGH‘s third issue, dubbed “Queering Language.” This photograph was taken by fellow poet Sina Queyras, whose own Flickr account has a sizable collection of Canadian writer and poet portraits.

Have you recently attended a book reading, library event, or author appearance? Have some interesting book-related pictures you want to share? If you’ve got photos of the Canadian book scene, we’d love to see them. Send them to us or sign up through Flickr and submit your images.

Minor characters turn into the main story

Minor characters are often as intriguing as the main characters they are complementing. In an article from the Los Angeles Times, Julia Klein explores the genre of fiction that takes those minor characters and makes them the centre of a new story. The piece primarily discusses Finn, a spin-off of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which focuses on the life of Huck’s father. The author, Jon Clinch, a former English teacher, was always intrigued by the way Finn died.

Twain left Pap Finn surrounded by “old greasy cards,” “old whisky bottles,” black cloth masks, men’s and women’s clothing, a boy’s straw hat, and (in Huck’s colorful narration) “all over the walls, the ignorantest kind of words and pictures.” To Clinch, the effect was “so peculiar, so horrifying, so bizarre, it was almost like a scene from a thriller or a slasher movie.”

Scholars, he says, have generally identified the setting as a brothel. “But what if it’s not?” Clinch asked himself. “What if all these peculiar things are clues that Twain left for telling us the true secret history of this man?”

The article also points out previous successes in the genre such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a retelling of Jane Eyre, the retelling of Hamlet in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard, and more recently, in 2005, Geraldine Brook’s Pulitzer Prize-winning March, which tells the story of the absent father from Little Women.

Clinch and other authors explain their interest in telling the minor characters’ tales, and Klein briefly touches on why the genre has so much appeal to writers.

Thanks to Bookninja for the tip.

Book to film

In this image-obsessed age, promoting books with moving pictures is a tricky but intriguing idea, and as the CBC Arts website reminds us, a couple of Canadian players are leading the way. CBC writer Andre Mayer looks at the film-style trailers that HarperCollins Canada has been creating for new titles over the past few months — close to a dozen in all, including Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers and Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani. (Harper has the trailers up on its own website and has also been sending them on to litblogs.) And Mayer is impressed with what he’s seen: “Never before have I felt such a visceral urge to read a book,” he writes after viewing the Londonstani short.

Mayer’s piece also looks at Judith Keenan’s BookShorts initiative, which creates three-minute short films based on novels or non-fiction books, and at an American company, VidLit, which has been producing book trailers of its own for a couple of years. Mayer points in particular to a VidLit-created trailer for David Rakoff’s Don’t Get Too Comfortable: “While Rakoff’s narrative is inherently droll, the video also features animations of what the author would look like with the doctor’s proposed changes.”

Related links:
Click here for the CBC Arts story on book trailers
Click here to view HarperCollins Canada’s trailers
Click here for the BookShorts website
Click here for the VidLit website

Book Expo… Iraq

Macmillan UK chief executive Richard Charkin has been keeping a mostly Macmillan-related blog since late last year. On it, he discusses copyright issues and Google, outlines Macmilan’s expansion into Asia, and, um, posts pictures from his holidays.

Last week, however, Charkin posted a dispatch from Charles Jenkins, international sales manager at Palgrave Macmillan, who attended the International Book Fair held in Erbil, in Northern Iraq, the first to be held in that country in 30 years.

“The Iraqi government had budgeted about £700,000 for the purchase of books relating to Higher Education in the English Language,” Jenkins writes. “Cash sales were brisk, and in the purchasing frenzy one could witness the unusual sight of boxes of books being hauled away in supermarket trolleys by librarians, academics, students and private individuals, under the watchful eye of the ubiquitous, gun-toting Peshmerga soldiers…. theft was not a problem at this Fair!”

Clearly, the book market in Iraq is not quite in its last throes.

Related links:
Read Richard Charkin’s blog post

On photography

There are a couple of photo-related items to point out today.

The CBC Arts website has a photo gallery of stills from Carte Blanche, a brand-new collection of the work of various Canadian photographers and the debut title from MaryAnn Camilleri’s new house, Magenta Publishing.

And Good Reports webmaster Alex Good is looking to launch a “CanLit photo album” on his site next fall, and he wants shots from amateur shutterbugs. “What I’m looking for are pictures of locations that have been made famous (or maybe that should have been made famous but which, in any event, have at least been mentioned) in books by Canadian authors. From Green Gables House to Stanley Park to King William Island. Old or new, poetry or prose, classic or underground. Anything that inspires you.”

So if you see a lot of English majors with cameras hanging around the Bloor Viaduct over the next few weeks, you’ll know why.

Related links:
Click here for the CBC Arts photo gallery from Carte Blanche
Click here for a May 2005 Q&Q story about Camilleri and Magenta
Click here for Alex Good’s call for CanLit photography

Band of brothers

Should you find yourself in the American Midwest in the next few weeks or on the eastern seaboard in the month of May, be sure to check out a book-themed indie rock band named Harry and the Potters. Want to know what their schtick is or what their songs are about? It’s probably exactly what you think. Formed in 2002, the band comprises two brothers, Paul and Joe DeGeorge, who write songs based on events in J.K. Rowling’s books. According to their website, “The idea is that the Harry Potter from Year 7 and the Harry Potter from Year 4 started a rock band.” Playing in “sheds … libraries, bookstores, basements, art galleries, theatres, hot dog jamborees, and living rooms,” the mop-haired band members normally take to the stage in Potteresque garb: grey V-neck sweaters over white shirts and ties with Hogwarts stripes.

Please note that, though In Other Media finds amusement in the presence of such a band, she does not necessarily endorse the music that they play.

Related links:
Click here for the official website for Harry and the Potters
Click here for the band’s My Space page, complete with pictures and their Song-A-Day archive

To bind or not to bind

Jeanette Winterson considers the future of the book in a piece for The Times. Inspired by a visit to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum to see the St John’s Bible, the first handwritten illuminated manuscript created in Britain in the last 500 years, Winterson posits a number of future scenarios for the book as we know it, including its relegation to the status of handcrafted art object. But even with all the competition from high-tech gadgets and information providers, Winterson does not forsee an end to the traditional book. What we may see happen, she speculates, is the transfer of certain book categories onto purely digital technology platforms, including the ubiquitous celebrity bio. “People who don’t really read don’t really need books,” Winterson writes, “so let them have Jordan and Beckham in lots of other ways. Audio, animated-audio, that is, audio with pictures — is just about right for most celebrity publications.”

Related links:
Read Jeanette Winterson’s piece in The Times

Bulte and sold

A number of bloggers who watch both politics and cultural matters closely have taken a keen interest in a fundraiser for Toronto Liberal MP Sarmite (Sam) Bulte, who has chaired the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage and the Interim Report on Copyright Reform. The $250-per-person event (which features a performance by Cowboy Junkies singer Margo Timmins) at Toronto’s Drake Hotel on Jan. 19 is being sponsored by a group that includes Canadian Publishers’ Council executive director Jackie Hushion. (Many of the other names, like Doug Firth, who heads the Canadian Motion Pictures Distributors Association, are similarly involved in cultural industry associations.)

Not surprisingly, some people have taken exception to this rather blatant endorsement. On his blog, University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, who has criticized Bulte before for accepting donations from groups with a keen interest in the copyright issue, points out that everyone is acting within the rules of the Election Act and then lets her have it: “[W]ith the public’s cynicism about elected officials at an all-time high and Canadians increasingly frustrated by a copyright policy process that is seemingly solely about satisfying rights holder demands, is it possible to send a worse signal about the impartiality of the copyright reform process? At $250 a person, I have my doubts that many of the artists that Ms. Bulte claims to represent will be present. Instead, it will lobbyists and lobby groups, eagerly handing over their money with the expectation that the real value of the evening will come long after Margo Timmins has finished her set.”

In 2004, as Geist points out, Bulte’s riding association received donations from the CPC, the Association of Canadian Publishers, and Access Copyright. A couple of publishers, McArthur & Company and McGraw-Hill Ryerson, also chipped in some cash. The riding association for the Conservative Party’s Canadian Heritage critic, Bev Oda, also shows donations from the likes of Ted Rogers and Leonard Asper.

None of this is surprising, but it’s still problematic. Jack Kapica, blogging for The Globe and Mail – one of an increasing number of mainstream outlets, including the Hollywood Reporter, of all things, to write about this – offers a solution: “Should the outcome of the election be favourable for the morally besieged Liberal Party, perhaps leader Paul Martin should consider rewarding Ms. Bulte’s hard work and loyalty with a different portfolio entirely, if only to show that Canadians won’t dance to every tune the Americans wish to play and charge us for.”

Related links:
Click here for all of Michael Geist’s posts on this topic
Click here for a brief on this issue in the Hollywood Reporter
Click here for Jack Kapica’s blog (scroll down for item)