18. May 2012 by admin.

Today I had occasion to go into a local middle school, so naturally I took the opportunity to take a peek at the library. And what did I see in the library? A big long room full of … nothing. There were tables, a big audiovisual screen (of course), there was a desk, a turnstile … but almost no books. Just a few tottering forlornly on some shelves looking high and dry (and old) in the middle of the room.

No wonder publishers and bookstores are going bankrupt - even schools don’t buy books any more. Is reading still part of education? (Looking things up on Google isn’t reading.) Sometimes it seems books have no value now, literature has no value, except as a specialty interest.

Soon there will be no school either — students will “study” from home … or from wherever their ipad is. They will send in assignments by email, confer by chat rooms, be graded by computers.  There will be information, but not knowledge. How do young people get knowledge of the world and themselves, if not through sustained reading, following plots and themes to denouements that illuminate ideas, minds and personalities?

And as for pre-schoolers’ books and primary picture books … they must be well-illustrated, tactile, and of different sizes. One-size-fits-all e-readers are no use, and tv cartoons are worse. You don’t remember what you saw on tv at the age of six like you remember turning the pages of your first big illustrated children’s books. What will today’s six year olds remember? Not the fleeting images on a flickering screen which turns the brain’s neurological patterns from active to passive.

In New York too, the famed Public Library is planning to move books off to an academic warehouse somewhere out of town where, says writer Petersen, only academics will get at them while “for the rest of you, there will be lovely sun-filled spots to check your email.”

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4. May 2012 by admin.

British bookselling industry stats show that e-book sales were almost five times in 2011 what they were in 2010, and that in the same time period loss in sales of paperback books roughly matched sales in e-book downloads. To some, this is merely a measure of reading what people would have read anyway, but in a different format. To others it is also about reading different material, in different quantities and with a different push-button, telescoped expectation. To what extent does format encourage or diminish content? Will there one day be no more lingering over long, discursive, multi-layered novels, or the rich literary creative-nonfiction forays into science, nature, history and psychology? The writing and publishing world internationally is in such ferment and change that it’s probably too soon to say.

There is however a definite closure of bookstores and library branches, here in Canada as well as in other countries, which is related both to e-publishing and to the decrease in general youth literacy. Terry Pratchett, well-loved author of youth fantasy fiction, says that new technology, texting and mobile phones are lowering kids’ vocabulary and their ability to express themselves in words. He, along with Dr. Kairin Cullen among other psychologists, sees this as related to the eruption of violence in recent riots in the UK, Europe and Vancouver. Whatever needs to be expressed – including primitive and inarticulate mass emotions — will come out. In crowded urban centres saturated with violent imagery from the entertainment industries, maybe recreational rampaging is predictable. What thoughtful reading and writing cannot transmute, certainly tweets and texts will not help. Pratchett (in The Telegraph) says parents should “consider restricting the use of mobile phones and websites,” and should encourage their children to engage in “old fashioned” (face to face) interaction. 

Barbara Julian

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6. March 2012 by admin.

Eyewitness Travel Ireland
By Dorling Kindersley
Dorling Kindersley Ltd, 2010
Pbk 416 pages

What could be more inspiring about St. Patrick’s Day then a book about a trip to Ireland? There are a variety of travel books to choose from. Eye Witness Travel Ireland is a convenient book because its organized format is easy to understand. It provides a color coded system with photographs about each of Ireland’s cities and towns; this also includes detailed 3 D photographs with maps, and churches, accommodation, restaurants, and shopping. The chapter on survival guide provides practical information on safety, visas, passports, customs, and insurance. There is a section on travelers’ needs that specify the cost of accommodation, restaurants, and cafes. Towards the back of the book lists the year’s entertainment guide of theaters, music, festivals, and sports. Directly at the back of the book’s cover are a list of signs for symbols to represent transportation, historical sites, guided tours, parks shopping and restaurants. This book is very thorough and can be a useful help to study and to take along on the trip to Ireland. It can even be a pleasure to just relax and enjoy reading without the sole purpose of travel.

Anne Cookson 

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31. October 2011 by admin.

 How Texting Is Fueling Illiteracy   (this post first appeared on http://suddenpublishing.blogspot.com)

Anyone who loves a good book and reads regularly may find the following statistic disturbing. According to the most recent U.S. survey by the National Endowment for the Arts, the proportion of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 who read a book not required at school or at work is now 50.7 percent, down from 59 percent 20 years ago.

And that trend isn’t likely to change. Why? Texting. That’s right. Today’s youth caught in a flurry of LOLs, TTYLs and OMGs aren’t expected to muster enough sit-and-stay to consume more than a tweet at a time and that’s leading to illiteracy.

In fact, according to an article in Newsweek last month written by Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson, Americans between the ages of 13 and 17 send and receive an average of 3,339 texts per month. Teenage girls send and receive more than 4,000.

What does it all mean? It means the U.S. (and Canada) is producing a generation of illiterates who won’t be able to compete against their global rivals. And that’s bad.

  Find the Newsweek article here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/09/11/how-will-today-s-texting-teenagers-compete.html

– by Kevin Watt

Why does this matter? For one thing, the votes of these uninformed automatons will bring in the governments we get over the next few decades; but here’s another reason, from another of Kevin Watt’s posts:

Reading Fiction You Evolve

A new essay by UofT professor Keith Oatley on the Literary Review of Canada’s website argues that fiction allows readers to improve and evolve by subconsciously connecting with the lives, decisions and conflicts of fictional characters. From the essay:

“Stories were the very first simulations, designed to run on minds thousands of years before computers were invented. If we are right, then just as pilots’ skills dealing with unanticipated events improve when they spend time in a flight simulator, so people’s skills understanding themselves and others should improve when they spend time reading fiction.”

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25. October 2011 by admin.

 (by Heather Loewen)

 Whether you have yet to begin your first novel or are languishing between projects, there is nothing quite like National Novel Writing Month to squash procrastination.

If, like me, you work best under pressure, or just need an excuse to get that book off the ground, go straight to http://nanowrimo.org and sign up. The challenge is to write a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. I’ve done this twice. In 2007 I wrote Entrails of a Con Artist (that’s probably a working title), which clocked in at 55,000 words and gets polished and added to when the urge strikes. In 2010, I cranked out 52,000 words of City Girl, Cabin Life (also probably a working title) in just two weeks, since I managed to procrastinate until the 15^th. That book may get ditched for a whole new version this year – I haven’t quite decided yet what to write. I did this in spite of working full time in 2007 and part-time in 2010. Of course, aside from walking the dog and the occasional social outing, I didn’t do much else.

When I tell people that I do this, non-writers look at me as though I’m insane and writers/would-be writers usually respond with a look of wistfulness or fear. Then comes the inevitable question, “What do you get at the end?” I get a book! One that I wrote! And a printable winner’s certificate, a badge for my website/facebook page and whatever other goodies they’ve planned for the year. Last year a demand print company offered us a free printed copy of our NaNo.

In 2010, 200,530 people from around the world participated in NaNoWriMo, with 37,479 of us breaking the 50,000-word barrier. With coffee shop write-ins, online forums and pep talks from the founders and famous people, there is enough support to keep you going, even if those in your immediate surroundings think you’re a lunatic.

Try it. You’ll like it!

– Heather Loewen (author of 101 Reasons To Be … Yourself)

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14. October 2011 by admin.

If you’ve ever worked in bookselling, you’ve probably seen some strange book-buying behavior. My favourite is the woman who decided which book to buy by laying some out on the counter, taking out a pendulum on a chain and hanging it over each in turn to see which one made it circle. Unfortunately the thing stayed pretty still throughout the exercise and she bought nothing. The way the pendulum works is by extracting information from the unconscious, pulling present into future, abstract into material movement. So maybe she really (i.e. unconsciously) intended to buy nothing all along. 

Pundits talk about the pendulum of the economy which swings from growth to recession, bullish to bearish, and may turn in circles in times like the present when consumers are told simultaneously to get out of debt and save for retirement, and to get out and shop so as to get the economy going again. How big is your book-buying budget? How do you choose what to spend it on? Most self-publishers don’t think much about asking people these questions — often they write because they’ve just got to – but I suppose that’s what smart market research would include.

 BJ

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14. October 2011 by admin.

Who said the book is dead? Look at this wonderful headline from England: ”Families form human shields to stop libraries being shut down”.  Municipal Councils in London are closing down public library branches as cost-cutting measures, but authors, readers, rock groups and families (mostly moms and kids) currently surounding the branch at Kensal Rise have have so far physically prevented workers from boarding up the windows. The protest is being led by a 60 year old woman. Hasn’t literacy and civilization always been led by 60 year old women?? Who else formed the core that ended slavery, spread literacy, saved woodland, housed homeless dogs …  and everything else that put the “green” and “pleasant” in “England’s green and pleasant land.”

But to get to our own situation: in B.C. public libraries have long been underfunded (we fund then at one of the lowest provincial levels), and the Victoria Public Library is talking ominously about “customers” rather than patrons, which heralds selling rather than freely giving without better access to more “products” for those who are better off. The honourable, historic ideal at the soul of the public library is that it should be completely free for all comers. What price literacy? And we writers, readers, self-publishers need to be vigilant to protect it in this age of government cutbacks. Is anyone asking would-be council candidates about libraries in the run-up to the municipal elections?

BJ

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30. August 2011 by admin.

Today I sent a message to an old friend who’s going to Edinburgh to visit another old friend on her birthday … say happy birthday from me too, I say.  We all went to the same high school many years ago and have long since scattered. “And say hi to Isabel Dalhousie” I joke, since they were going to be in Edinburgh.

The thing is, Alexander McCall Smith’s character Isabel Dalhouse is much more clear in my mind than is my image of my old high school friend. McCall Smith is the kind of novelist who can make you think you know his characters personally. “What would Isabel Dalhousie say about that?” you might ask at odd moments, since she is a professional academic ethicist, who also gets into muddles around moral niceties in her relationships with her friends. She is McCall Smith’s way of getting to air his own moral musings, in other words: she is one of his authorial selves. Although she thus has a job to do in the literary conversation about values, he manages to make her a three-dimensional character as well, novel-wise. 

The characters embroiled in the fictional plots that make an impression on readers are often as powerful as agents in the real world as are flesh and blood people. The latter may be unnoticed, “flowers born to blush unseen …” but literary characters (Dorothea Brooke, Holden Caulfield, Pi, Wilbur the pig) may literally change readers’ thinking and behaviour.

Where do fictional characters come from? How biographical or autobiographical is it okay for them to be without it being something of a cheat? Good storytellers’ heads are full of voices which need to body forth in fully fleshed out character.  Says reviewer Rick Gekoski:

” … what (must it) be like to be inhabited by many competing voices, ceaselessly reconsidering the flow of a narrative, charting the development of character, juxtaposing one thing with another. It’s astonishing that novelists have any social life at all.”

Maybe that’s just as well, unless they are the kind of author who only writes about people’s social lives …  Send us your own thoughts on characters. Which are you favourites? Do you know any notable ones created by local authors?

BJ

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14. August 2011 by admin.

It has been noted that in the recent riots and lootings in England, bookshops were not targets. I remember that the last time I was in London the Piccadilly Boots outlet was like an armed fortress, bristling with security cameras and many bulky security men in black, while the Piccadilly Waterstones, a couple of blocks away, was a multi-floored oasis of peace and wide carpeted empty space. Staff stayed discreetly behind their desks, shoppers had lots of elbow room. Too much maybe: the small population of customers looked worrying from a business point of view. 

The Boots store seemed sinister with in-your-face security, but I guess what happened last weekend was what they were waiting for: an eruption of crowds gone mad, gangs egging each other on with the take-what-you-want, violently, message. Plainly they don’t want to read. It’s not that no bookshop ever suffered shoplifting (any of us in the business has experienced that), but no hordes ever burst through our windows to seize hold of the treasures we harbour. Such hordes, we surmise, don’t consider literature, ideas, disinterested information and the universe of written communication, to be treasure.

It is worth asking how populated an urban area can safely be, for sanity to be maintained. There must BE a limit (we know from Calhoun’s overcrowded rat experiments what happens when mammals are forced to live on top of one another), but in modern models of urban growth, we ignore the question. Psychotherapists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan have postulated that the “reasonable person” is reasonable because certain conditions of social life are maintained. Rioting, road rage, violence, looting, property damage, muggings are all displays of the non-reasonable person. The Kaplans prescribe space and quiet natural surroundings as an antidote - they call this “nature restoration therapy.” Most of the human race in the 21st century need it, since most now live in growing cities.

In her memoir about tutoring Iranian girls in western literature, Reading Lolita in Tehren, Azar Nafisi postulates that reading novels changes not only individuals but society, because novel-reading opens up a rich private inner world, a space shared by reader and writer which nourishes not only the mind but also future communications with other readers, writers and fellow citizens. The novel as a literary form, she suggests, makes democracy possible, for democracy depends on judicious voters who can think for themselves. The rioters of last week, burning and looting en mass, were not that.

Why are so many young people not? This raises questions about the cutting of funds for education and public libraries  over past years of belt-tightening governments, in both the UK and here in Canada. Forgiving the wealthiest and the corporations the taxes they used to pay, only comes back on them as expense (and fear) of another kind – the cost we all bear of nurturing an undereducated, disaffected rioting class. A society (and a school system) ignores the place of full-on marathon book reading (classics, not comics) at its cost. A stuffy out-of-date view? Maybe, but it can’t hurt for us writers to consider the place our work has in the world around us. Interestingly, although short slogans and text messages fuel riots, whole books don’t. Reading doesn’t induce rioting, but no doubt the riots will appear in lots of books in the years ahead.

Barbara

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2. August 2011 by admin.

Does it sound a bit pretentious to call a writer a “wordsmith”? What’s wrong with plain “writer” or “author”? “Wordsmith” manages to sound both fussy and fuzzy, but for a writer-misnomer, nothing beats “content-provider.” Websites advertise for content providers, but books are written by writers (but — please — never “authored” by them). Books have content, but to label the content’s source a ”provider” is to ignore something about the alchemy of literary creation, and the power of words and stories.

“The impact that words have upon us is baffling,” says language-analyst Richard Lederer. “Sound and meaning work their dual magic … in ways that ear and mind alone cannot always analyze.” If the power of words is baffling, the power of story is formidable: Susan Quilliam for instance says that a diet of escapist idealized romance fiction leads its readers so far from reality and into fantasy that many end up in counsellors’ consulting rooms.  And on top of that: “… there was a clear correlation between the frequency of romance reading and the level of negative attitude towards condoms,” she says in The Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care (37, 2011). That’s powerful. Policy makers and speech writers would love to have the power of novelists. But promoters, agitators, lobbyists, apologists and analysts are not storytellers. Narratives with classic setting, plot, sub-plots, climax and denouement have a reach into consciousness like nothing else does: we have narrative minds.

Novelists take us into imaginative worlds in ways that enrich the real one, and make us more empathic. George Eliot said that novels expand the sympathies. They teach us to hold different points of view in our minds at once: they stretch them. Certainly they ignite deep feelings for fictional characters. When Sherlock Holmes died, for instance (because his creator wanted to write about something else), people in Britain wore black armbands in mourning, and angrily accused his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, of murder.

From end to end Vancouver Island is pulsing and humming every day with writers at their keyboards, creating fictional worlds. Some of these will burst like soap bubbles as soon as they emerge, leaving no trace, but others will worm their way into readers’ consciousness. All the tale-spinners in our midst are playing with powerful magic.

Barbara Julian

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