Links round-up: Atwood circa 1975, Rumsfeld, and more

Today’s links round-up, video edition:

• TVO launched its digital archive this week. Check out Mike McManus’s 1975 interview with Margaret Atwood about her book Lady Oracle. An Atwoodian gem from the video: “Remember I’m old. I’m 36”
• Donald Rumsfeld was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to talk about his new memoir, Known and Unknown. Things got awkward, sidestepping ensued
• MacMillan has made this promo to show how their enhanced textbooks work in the Inkling app
• Remember The Great Gatsby Nintendo game? Check out its sister, Waiting for Godot: The Video Game
• Warning: if you watch “organizing the bookshelf” you’ll want, nay need, a dance break

Two views of Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize–winning author of The God of Small Things, has been in the news recently for her outspoken comments about Kashmiri secession from India. Last week, rumours began circulating that the author might be charged with sedition for a speech in which she said, in part, “Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. It is a historical fact.”

Although the Indian government appears to have backed away from charging Roy with sedition, on Sunday a mob gathered at the author’s Delhi home to demand she retract her statements. From the Guardian:

Around 150 members of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s women’s organisation surrounded the house chanting slogans such as: “Take back your statement, else leave India.” The BJP is fiercely opposed to Kashmiri independence.

Although Roy has received support from left-leaning commentators at the Guardian and on other websites (notably that of fellow author Hari Kunzru), Leo Mirani, also writing in the Guardian, feels the author’s overheated rhetoric has made her statements “irrelevant in Indian public discourse.” Mirani writes:

Who would want to live in Arundhati Roy’s India? Who would even want to read about Arundhati Roy’s India? The government of India has many faults, but even Roy has to admit that living in this country isn’t entirely intolerable. Confronted with the relentlessly bleak picture she paints, one in which the only good guys are murderers and mercenaries, who can blame middle India for retreating into their iPods and tabloid newspapers?

Roy has important things to say, but her tone and bluster ensure the only people listening are those who already agree with her. She is preaching to the converted. To the left-leaning publications of the west, she is an articulate, intelligent voice explaining the problems with 21st-century India. For the university lefties in India, she confirms their worst fears of a nation falling apart. But to any intelligent readers who may be sitting on the fence or for anyone from middle-class India taking their first tentative steps towards greater political involvement, her polemic serves to terrify and alienate.

Clearly, the 150 people who stormed Roy’s house on Sunday don’t feel that her statements are irrelevant. As for Roy herself, she has issued a press release in which she insinuates possible collusion between the protestors and the media (TV vans had appeared in the neighbourhood prior to the demonstrators descending upon her house):

What is the nature of the agreement between these sections of the media and mobs and criminals in search of spectacle? Does the media which positions itself at the “scene” in advance have a guarantee that the attacks and demonstrations will be non-violent? What happens if there is criminal trespass (as there was today) or even something worse? Does the media then become accessory to the crime?

CTV launches Giller reading initiative

As part of its efforts to promote the upcoming Scotiabank Giller Prize broadcast, CTV has launched an online reading initiative that encourages the public to pledge to read one or more of the Giller nominees in advance of the awards gala. According to the “One Country, Five Books” press release:

After pledging to the Book Club, readers can then share their choices with friends online, observe which books are most popular with fans, and monitor which regions of Canada have the highest number of pledges…. Expanding on the One City, One Book initiative that began in Seattle in 1998 and has taken off around the world, One Country, Five Books is a social and traditional media campaign intended to bring Canada together around the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Will Newfoundland pledge to read Annabel by Kathleen Winter? Will Winnipeg band together to read David Bergen’s The Matter With Morris? Which of the five books will prove most-pledged among Canadians?

Daily book biz round-up: Jonathan Franzen sells better with Oprah; Stephen King acts; and more

Today’s book news:

• First authorized book on U.K.’s MI6 says that James Bonds existed
• Oprah-stamped Freedom takes Stieg Larsson’s place atop Amazon bestsellers list
• Stephen King guest stars in a TV series
• Toronto mayor David Miller discusses his new book
• Cultural critic, activist, and author Jill Johnston dies

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.

Daily book biz round-up: battle over The Shack; FOX News attacked; and more

Check these out:

• The bitter legal battle over proceeds from The Shack
• Kitty Kelley’s Oprah to be turned into TV movie
• A Chicago librarian rips into FOX News library exposé
• Seth brings new look to CNQ
• A secret writer’s retreat, right in the middle of NYC
• B.C. author John Vaillant talks to PW about The Tiger
• Video: first look at an upcoming doc about children’s books

Daily book biz round-up, May 19

Your mid-week round-up:

• Amazon launches imprint to publish translated works
• You’re in the jungle, baby, and you’ve got a vook?
• “The Situation” of TV offshoot publishing is so much more dire
• Fans will love Robert Munsch forever
• Short fiction website Joyland launches e-book imprint

Vancouver librarians told to cover up non-Olympic logos

According to CTV, librarians in Vancouver have been warned by city officials to use only approved Olympic sponsors in any Games-themed events they host next month, and to conceal the logos of any non-Olympic companies that may pass in front of patrons’ eyeballs.

The memo, written by marketing and communications manager Jean Kavanagh, tells staff to avoid such companies as Pepsi or Dairy Queen – neither of which is an official sponsor, unlike, say Coca-Cola or McDonald’s. And she suggests taking unusual steps to avoid displaying the logos of non-sponsors, writing: “If you have a speaker/guest who happens to work for Telus, ensure he/she is not wearing their Telus jacket, as Bell is the official sponsor.”

She also writes that any rented sound equipment have its brand name covered by cloth or tape – if it’s not a machine from sponsor Panasonic.

Though Kavanagh goes on to say that her list of Olympic dos and don’ts doesn’t constitute censorship, Alex Youngberg, president of the local library union, disagrees:

“There’s something in my library to offend everybody,” [Youngberg] said. “And that’s our job. Our job as library staff is to not ever censor any information.”

Bookmarks: the best book title of the year, Kim Echlin’s favourite tunes, and more

Sundry links from around the Web:

• The Los Angeles Times calls Judy Wearing’s Edison’s Concrete Piano: Flying Tanks, Six-Nippled Sheep, Walk-on-Water Shoes and 12 Other Flops from Great Inventors (published this month by ECW Press) the best book title of the year
• Former Giller contender Kim Echlin gives The New York Times a playlist to accompany The Disappeared
• Newfoundland author Chad Pelley launches Salty Ink, a website devoted to Atlantic Canadian writing
  
• The BBC is planning to adapt Martin Amis’s novel Money for TV, and the broadcaster has already decided on a male lead
• The Australian government has rejected a proposal that would have allowed parallel importation of foreign books, MobyLives reports
• Blogger Mark Bertils points to something on every designer and book lover’s Christmas wish list: a wall calendar that displays a different type face for every month

Bookmarks: Blackberry-hating, Harry Potterland, and flying a kite with Khaled Hosseini

Some book-related links:

• Black Swan author not a fan of Blackberries, black president
• The Harry Potter theme park opening next year – finally, ordinary children get a glimpse of the fictional educational institution they would be barred from attending due to highly discriminatory admissions policies
• The Kite Runner author flies a kite
• Patrick Swayze memoir coming soon (talk about Ghost-writing! Ba-da-boom!!)
• Damian Tarnopolsky on Nabokov’s first novel
• Does the Google logo mystery lead to H.G. Wells? (Or does it just lead to more publicity for Google?)