Bookmarks: closing libraries, rewarding booksellers, and filming Chabon

Some book-related (but not Valentine’s Day-themed, alas) links:

• Victoria library locks out workers, shuts down all branches (Victoria Times Colonist)
• California bookseller gets $500k MacArthur grant (MSNBC)
• The Coen Brothers to filmify Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (Variety)
• Toronto, according to Michael Redhill’s Consolation – with spoilers! (Spacing)
• James Wolcott on Donald Barthelme (Bookforum)
• Borders unveils its first shiny new-style store* (Reuters)

* and it has its own Long Pen booth! (MLive.com)

Bookmarks: new Bond in Russia!, new Thunderbirds everywhere!, no new autobiographical characters in Salman Rushdie novels!

Some book-related links:

• New James Bond novel gets Russian publisher (MI6)
• New Thunderbirds novels after more than forty years (SWFA Pressbook)
• Salman Rushdie vows to stop creating autobiographical characters (The Canadian Press)
• Mold: the enemy of rare books (Chicago Tribune)
• Woman robs dirty bookshop (The San Diego Union-Tribune)
• John Updike on Flann O’Brien (The New Yorker)
• Deciphering authors’ handwriting (Slate)
• Leah McLaren: our own Paris Hilton? (Seven Oaks)

Toronto library cuts add up to next to no savings

The National Post is reporting that a settlement between the Toronto Public Library and its labour union is essentially reversing the savings from the Sunday closure of 16 of the city’s libraries, announced earlier this year.

The deal was reached after an arbitrator ruled in October that the closures were contrary to the collective agreement and constituted an illegal layoff.

The settlement provides a total of $150,651 in retroactive pay to 286 library employees denied Sunday hours between Sept. 9 and Oct. 21, according to Ana-Maria Critchley, a spokeswoman for the library.

Sunday hours recommenced on Oct. 28.

The library board expected to save $400,000 had the 16 branches stayed shut on Sundays until the end of the year.

That breaks down to a savings of $23,529.41 per Sunday or $164,705.87 for the seven Sundays the libraries were locked before an arbitrator’s ruling reversed the board’s decision.

All told, that means the closures saved the city roughly $14,000 or about $125 per library per Sunday.

Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, a well-known thorn in the side of Mayor David Miller, was quick to scold city council for failing to cut costs effectively.

“This is really disappointing,” said Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, an opponent of the Mayor. “So many families and kids were hurt by these cuts for absolutely no need. There was no benefit.”

But the Post piece fails to mention that Minnan-Wong was one of the most vocal opponents of last summer’s proposed tax increase, which would have obviated the need for the library closures in the first place.

Still, Toronto’s problems appear to be pretty minor beside the funding crisis faced by the Windsor Public Library. The Windsor Star reports:

Taxpayers, library staff and management have reacted with dismay to news that city council has ordered the Windsor Public Library Board to make $800,000 more in budget cuts next year, without reducing hours or eliminating any of 10 local branches.

Brian Bell, chief executive officer of the library, said management is at a loss on how to achieve the goal, stating that the directive gives the cash-strapped institution next to no room to maneuver. He noted that a half million dollar cut had to be absorbed in 2005 even as the system grew from nine to 10 branches.

According to the Star, Windsor libraries are already woefully understaffed, and cuts are likely to be made to the library’s acquisitions budget.

[Bell] noted that the system averages about $1.3 million in purchases each year. Cutting back, he said may mean that rather than 100 copies of the latest Harry Potter novel, they may purchase only 28. He predicted that such resource cuts would double the number of orders on hold from 6,000 a month to 12,000. and further job-cuts would be impossible. The only viable cuts would be for acquisitions.

Review Roundup: William Gibson’s Spook Country

Review Roundup is a new feature on Quillblog, wherein we compile some of the critical reaction to one of the season’s big books. For our inaugural edition, we look at the reviews for William Gibson’s new novel, Spook Country, upon which a lot of ink (real and virtual) was spilled over the past couple of weeks.
(more…)

Dion promises to restore public diplomacy funding

Liberal party leader Stephane Dion met with a few Canadian writers last week at the Drake Hotel in Toronto and promised that a Liberal government would restore the $11.8-million in public diplomacy funding cut from the Foreign Affairs budget by the Conservative government last fall, an article in The Globe and Mail reports.

The Writers’ Union of Canada has staged protests and sponsored a petition against the cuts, which have drastically limited the capacity of Canadian embassies to host events and assist with the promotion of Canadian culture and artists abroad.

“The meeting with Dion was a huge relief,” said Susan Swan, chair of the Writers Union of Canada. “We got a feeling of being on the same page with a politician after months of trying to have a dialogue with the Harper government.”
The Liberal leader is on a charm offensive with Canadian artists and arts leaders and has had face time with artists and leaders from the music industry, theatre, museums and dance in Montreal, Winnipeg and Toronto. He is gambling that culture matters to urban voters. Whether or not that’s true, “it’s a weak spot for this Conservative government,” says Peter C. Newman, one of the writers at the Drake. “With globalization, we’ve lost the battle for economic independence, but cultural nationalism is our saving grace.”

So, that should score some points with artists, but Stephen Harper is currently back at the ranch flipping burgers at the Calgary Stampede. How’s your barbequing, Stephane?

Laying out the welcome mat for author Stephen Harper

In an article posted on workopolis.com, author Susan Swan welcomes Stephen Harper to the world of publishing by offering him a few tips for his upcoming book on the history of hockey.

Swan uses Harper’s “day job” as prime minister to segue into criticisms of the government’s slashing of funding for cultural programs abroad and comments about the difficulties and limitations of obtaining grants and literary prizes.

You mentioned that the research for your book has slowed down since you became our 22nd prime minister. Naturally, I wasn’t surprised, and I thought of suggesting that you try for Ontario’s $1,500 emerging writers’ grant and hire your own researcher. Like all emerging writers in Ontario, you are entitled to apply, although this modest start-up will barely cover a researcher’s fee for any more than a month. Nor will it help much to offset some of your moving costs, Mr. Prime Minister, if, God forbid, you lose your day job in another election.

…

Alas, the funding that once helped Canadian writers reach their world audiences has vanished. Thanks to you slashing $11.8-million from our cultural programs abroad, 30 years of support has gone overnight. Alas again, our cultural diplomats who were once employed to promote our culture abroad now have no way to publicize anything, let alone our writing. And knowing the stock you place in short-term results, these hard-working folks may soon be out of a job altogether.

As covered in Q&Q Omni today, The Writer’s Union of Canada, of which Swan is vice-chair, held a demonstration on Parliament Hill yesterday to draw attention to the financial and cultural contributions the arts make to Canada.

Reading Art

In a column on Popmatters.com, Mikita Brottman takes a close look at The Garfunkel Library, “a chronological listing of every book [singer Art Garfunkel] has read over the last 38 years – almost a thousand of them – including the month and year of reading, the date of first publication, and the number of pages they contain.”

As if the very existence of such a listing weren’t odd enough, Brottman discovers some further oddities:

Most revealing, however, aren’t the books that are listed, but those that aren’t. According to the site’s author, “We are pleased to present a listing of every book Art has read over the last 30 years.” That’s right, every book, do you hear? This means that, although he’s a poet himself, Garfunkel has only ever read four or five volumes of poetry—one of which, read in October 1989, was his own (Still Water—Prose Poems by Art Garfunkel). It means that when his wife, Kim, was pregnant in 1990, he read nothing in preparation; no What to Expect when You’re Expecting, no Official Lamaze Guide.It means that, when he walked across America in 1984, and later on across Europe, he did so without the aid of travel books. It means he read nothing he could share with his son, born in 1991 (unless you count Louise Ames’s Your Five-Year Old in 1996.) It means he read no books about healing and forgiveness in the build-up to his much-vaunted re-union with Paul Simon (unless that explains Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand, in August 1996). Most recently, in January 2006, Art and his wife had a second son, born to a surrogate mother. You’d think he could have found something more pertinent to read in preparation for this emotion-laden event than Henri Pirenne’s Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe.

Though the list appears to be legit – it appears on Garfunkel’s own website, for one thing – we still can’t seem to get the phrase “elaborate prank” out of our heads.

Translator goes more speed than projectile from a gun

The Literary Saloon points us to a story in the Vietnamese newspaper Nhan Dan about a 64-year-old translator named Le Khanh Truong who is built for speed. Truong translated, among many other things, a 500-page Soviet novel in 10 days and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago in 60.

From 1970 to 1980, he translated 50 books on philosophy, history, sociology, literature, economics, diplomacy, and even archeology.

In 1983 alone, he managed to translate all 50 volumes on economics, which the Soviet Union donated to the Ho Chi Minh City government. This later served as a guideline for state economic policy at the time.

This just confirms what every editor and author feels: when it comes to translators, the most important asset is reckless, almost inhuman speed.

(NOTE: The article itself seems to have been translated in a bit of a hurry.)

This also can’t help but put Quillblog in mind of a cartoon from the late, great Spy magazine, in which a translator asks an author, “Do you not be happy with me as the translator of the books of you?”

Related links:
Read the article here

Turkish novelist faces trial

Turkish novelist Elif Shafak will again have to fend off charges that her book The Bastard of Istanbul, which describes the deaths of Armenians in 1915 as genocide, insults “Turkishness” in court on September 21 in Istanbul, The New York Times reports.

Previous charges against Shafak, an assistant professor on leave from the department of Near Eastern studies at the University of Arizona, were dismissed in June after she argued that the statements over which she was being sued were made by fictional characters who could not be prosecuted. However, the leader of a right-wing group opposed to European Union membership for Turkey filed a new complaint, and a higher court overturned the original ruling.

Well-known Turkish author Orhan Pamuk has been similarly charged in the past, but support and pressure from the West led to the charges being dropped in 1995. “Article 301 [of the Turkish penal code] has been used by ultranationalists as a weapon to silence political voices in Turkey,” Ms. Shafak said in The Times article. “In that sense, my case is not unusual. But for the first time, they are trying to bring a novel into court. The way they are trying to penetrate the domain of art and literature is quite new, and quite disturbing.”

And if the possibility of three years in a Turkish prison were not enough stress, Shafak is also due to give birth next week. Still, she says, “I am happy to be giving birth in Istanbul. This city is very dear to me, even though it suffers from a sort of collective amnesia.”

Tough woman, but now might be a good time for more pressure from the West.

Related links:
Click here for the full story in The New York Times

A loving goodbye

The Writers’ Union of Canada website has a lengthy tribute to founding member Pierre Berton. Throughout the remembrances, penned by many new and longtime Union members, Berton is praised for his hard work, talent, lack of pretension, and generosity to younger writers. Many of the writers also celebrate Berton’s knack for throwing a good party, as Iris Nowell recounts: “Pierre shone at parties, especially those he threw. At the Berton picnic, an annual summer gathering of friends around the swimming pool at Pierre and Janet’s Kleinberg home, Pierre could always be spotted towering above the crowd in his wildly-coloured summer shirt and big straw hat, encircled by smiling, laughing friends.”

Related links:
Read the Writers’ Union tribute to Pierre Berton