Noteworthy

Kerry Clare talks to Zoe Whittall, who most recently has written a short novel for Orca Press's Fast Reads.


Gaspereau Press subs a best seller.

Korean houses

Venerable Korean publishing house Jimoondang -- responsible for the excellent Portable Library of Korean Literature -- releases THE FOG OF WAR.

A Brief History of Time at Work 2

Dan Wells refers to the recent James Grainger review of Alexander MacLeod's collection, Light Lifting.


In and Out of the Working Class by Michael D. Yates, Arbeiter Ring Publishing.

Green Thang, Red Thang

Books go eco-friendly ... I mean, more eco-friendly than they already are.


Nathan Whitlock on Mordecai Richler.


Jacob Russell on Afghanistan.


Zach Wells reads two for Remembrance Day. Incidentally, one of my German co-workers told me that the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month is the beginning of Carnival in Germany. This isn't merely an example of cultural difference, it is, to my mind, an example of cultural difference crying out for semiotic/sociologic/psychoanalytic meta-analysis. On the one hand, a war in which a nation-state whose foreign policy was still beholden to an imperial power managed to prove [add irony quotes] itself on the battlefield, and thus, more or less in time for the next global conflagration, establish itself as truly sovereign, while another nation state, eager to prove its mettle/anxious to build an empire of its own/confused as to how to disentangle itself from a world-historical policy blunder, launched into a war that chewed up an entire generation of its young men (along with same for the war's other belligerents), lost, and ... set the stage for the political fanaticism that would trigger the next major war.


Remembrance Day is celebrated in Canada as a rather solemn event honoured primarily by school-kids led into gymnasiums where they are read "In Flanders Fields". World War One, not World War Two, remains the ceremony's focus (at least, that's how it was for me in grade school). In Germany, apparently, it is the beginning of a beer-centric bacchanalia whose purpose is a forgetful fun. Neither national culture quite wants to face the post-millennial reality: militarism is alive and well, and all the poppies and all the Becks cannot neutralize that fact that treating history as a museum piece or just obliterating it altogether with litres and litres of top-quality brew don't alter that one of war's main roots is cultural acceptance of militarism.


Round three, anyone?


  

Recently Read

Shelley Shaver's Rain: A Dust Bowl Story 


James of Workblogging on being canned by text.


Kanneth J. Harvey's  Walmart Sucks

A Brief History of Time at Work 1

Above is one of the less iconic photos from the Great Depression. Of course, while the style -- from the fashions people wore to the method by which employment agencies marketed themselves -- has changed, a lot remains the same. I remember first getting work through an employment agency, located around the corner from my shared house on Callandar Street, when I was spending my first years in Toronto. It was a small storefront that managed to exude a hopeless quality far out of proportion to its size. 

One goes to an emploment agency for obvious reasons, but one also goes out of a sense of desperation -- the uneasy feeling that while others have it all figured out and know how to land the really plum jobs, one is missing something, is a bit clued out, is de-looped. The rationalizing thought that occurs is this: at least one is doing something. But this something is being performed in a feckless, inefficient manner.


The agency is the one making the real money. The man or woman who works for it for a few days -- or weeks, or months -- is the vehicle that supplies profit; a profit that goes primarily to the organizers of the agency, not the one who does the daily labour ... not the worker.

John Reed

My interview with John Reed on TALES OF WOE is now up at Literary Kicks.

Loveography: Inside Haemi Fortress

EXT. A SMALL KOREAN VILLAGE. AN EARLY SUMMER EVENING, MID-WEEK.

A WESTERN MAN is walking down the city's main street. To his left is Haemi Fortress, a medieval Korean fort. Its wall is built of unevenly-matched stones, each lightened by age to a gentle ochre, as if the stone itself has softened.

Adam Bellow - publisher, writer [part one]

Adam Bellow of the New Pamphleteer and HarperCollins:

Note: This is the first part of a longer interview which I previously posted. An abridged version of it appeared at The Brooklyn Rail.

Truth Marathon

Added

The following publishers have been added to my links section, after having conducted interviews with them. (I began interviewing francophones earlier this summer; I hope to branch out to Korean publishers as well.) Given the cultural divide that exists between English and French literatures in Canada, their sites are well worth checking out:

Marcel Broquet, La Nouvelle Edition

Guy Saint-Jean, Editeur

Kerry Clare -- critic, lit-blogger

Kerry Clare of Pickle Me This

1. When I started this interview series it was already clear that publishing -- especially of literary fiction -- was in dire straits. At that time, one explanation that was fashionable was 9/11 was the reason people weren't reading as much literature (or as much anything) as they used to. Now we are living in a time when the long-term repercussions of 9/11 are still with us. But using 9/11 as a primary explanation for what ails literary publishing simply doesn't work. For one thing, we are now in the midst of a particularly serious recession, and for another, it is clear the general decline in reading is a widespread -- and possibly unstoppable -- phenomenon that has roots which go back decades.