Giller scandal ... and more

Nigel Beale responds to Susan Swan's accusations of insider trading by 2010 Giller jury member Ali Smith.


Alex Good shakes the dust off his feet and moderates a panel discussion of the GG shortlist for poetry, with Jacob McArthur Mooney and Brian Palmu.

Michel Lavoie - C'est ma seigneurie que je reclame [GG winner for non-fiction, French]

L'edition Boreal blog on Michel Lavoie, winner of the GG for non-fiction for C'est ma seigneurie qu je reclame.

Allan Casey Lakeland -- [GG non-fiction winner, English]

Winner of the GG for non-fiction, Lakeland by Allan Casey.

Dianne Warren - Cool Water [GG fiction winner, English]

At the lit-site Kevin From Canada, a review of English GG winner Cool Water, by Dianne Warren

Kim Thuy - Ru [GG fiction winner, French]

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.