Dear Councillor Vaughan,

I am writing you to express my concern that trees may be torn up in the downtown core as part of the security measures for the upcoming G20 Summit taking place here in Toronto. I am writing to you, in particular, because I am a resident of Trinity-Spadina, and because you were quoted in the National Post piece that brought the issue of the trees to my attention. The removal of the trees is an unnecessary and disgraceful addition to what has already become a shameful display of security theatre.

There are police officers in my family, and many close family friends are also officers, some serving as constables on the street, some in higher, supervisory or investigative roles at various police services across this country, including in the RCMP. I understand their professionalism, their commitment to public safety, and it is my most profound wish that everyone—ordinary citizens, visiting officials, protesters, and police and security officers alike—make it through the Summit safely. Unfortunately what I see in the news is not professionalism, but rather a show being put on, perhaps in response to considerable pressure and public scrutiny, not the least of which concerns the Summit's vastly inflated budget.

Professionalism demands balanced, reasonable preparations and responses in order to ensure the safety of citizens, visitors, and property. I and my fellow Torontonians have watched the announced security preparations slide from being professional and measured, to a wasteful farce, and now finally to a dangerous obscenity, a baroque and overblown theatre of the absurd.

The citizens of Toronto do not need a police state to keep us safe. We do not need our public transit infrastructure disrupted, our reporters harassed, our green spaces and other urban flora violated, our neighbourhood communities cordoned off from one another. We do not need checkpoints and credentials to enter or leave our own homes, to be safe. What we need is measured, responsible policing, that understands the city, that respects and works with its citizens. We need a city council that will stand up for these things, even against the Integrated Security Unit and the federal government. It seems that, for the coming Summit, we have too much of what we don't need, and precious little of what we do.

This most recent measure, the tearing down of trees to prevent their use as weapons, seems far more likely to provoke unwanted behaviour than to curtail it. It is, as Mark Calzavara put it, "insane." Your comments to the Post appear to justify this insanity, to give it your and the City Council's tacit approval. To give such approval is craven in the extreme, and does not, in my opinion, represent the best interests of your ward, or the city as a whole. I have seen comments you have made regarding financial compensation for businesses affected by the Summit, but no criticism at all of the security measures themselves. If you and the other councillors lack the fortitude to speak out against this absurdity, then I am ashamed to have you as my representatives, ashamed to live in a city that accepts such things. If the city is this willing to abandon the best interests of its citizens in the name of security—for what has been widely acknowledged as little more than a photo-op—what will happen if a real emergency, a genuine security crisis, ever comes to Toronto? What faith can I have that whoever is in charge will respond to an appropriate degree, now that you have shown us this total submission to paranoia? The answer is none.

I have lived in Toronto nearly four years now, the whole time in Trinity-Spadina. In that time, and in my travels around the city, though I have twice been mugged, I have never once been afraid to live in Toronto, to walk its streets. Until now. When the G20 Summit arrives, I will stay indoors, out of fear. But make no mistake: I am not afraid of any protesters. In the atmosphere of fear and mistrust that has been created, I am afraid that because of the stupidity the Integrated Security Unit has brought down on our city—the stupidity that you have allowed to go largely unchallenged—some poor, work-a-day police officer, infected by the paranoia and under tremendous pressure, will overreact to something innocuous, and I or someone I care about will suffer for it. All of this security has not made me feel safer, Mr Vaughan; it has made me more afraid than I have ever been.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

August C. Bourré

This past Saturday a bunch of local and not-so-local book folks got together for BookCamp Toronto 2010, an "unconference," which I think is a buzzword for conferences that have seminars rather than lectures or presentations. Most of the sessions were like that: lots of conversation around a particular topic with a moderator (or moderators) keeping things moving. I was a little rusty, but felt at home in almost no time at all. Most of my university courses followed that format, and I was very, very good at university (much better than at this whole grown-up, working-for-a-living thing—that's why I was so gung-ho about becoming a professor—some people can work a party, some people can work a phone line or a sales floor: I can work a classroom). But in all seriousness, I hope that I was able to add something to the discussion for others. I attended the following sessions:

• Literate Video Games, moderated by Tim Maly
• Literary Publications: the Grassroots, moderated by Stuart Woods and Clelia Scala
• The Book as Object, moderated by Neil Stewart and Aurelie Collings
• CBC's Canada Reads, moderated by Kimberly Walsh and Rosie Fernandez, featuring Jen Knoch, Kerry Clare and Steven Beattie
• Venturing Beyond the Text, moderated by Ian Barker
• Building and Sustaining a Community of Readers Online, moderated by Tan Light, Kimberly Walsh, and Meg Mathur

I hadn't originally planned to attend the Literate Video Games session, but I'm glad I did. Tim Maly turned out to be an enthusiastic, entertaining moderator (his blog is great too), and while I'm not entirely sure if anything practical was achieved, I feel like I learned quite a bit, and I know that my perspective on gaming has shifted (for the better). The takeaway soundbite was "games explore: books tour" (I'm still thinking about that one; it sounds like it should be right, but I'm not sure my relationships with books or games would always fit into either of those categories, never mind in that particular configuration), but I did take other notes. Probably more notes than in any other session, actually. Most of them were inside baseball ways of talking about gaming concepts (like hard limits and soft limits), different methods of forking narratives (I particularly liked the idea of making it appear as though the players could make extremely granular decisions, while making it functionally impossible to make those decisions alter the overall narrative), and the variety of narrative categories that most existing games fall into.

Tim (I got drunk with him and Mojgan Fay at the pub aftewards; I'm calling him "Tim") did a show and tell of a number of failed experiments fusing books and games, and a few that, though I haven't looked very closely at them, seem like perhaps had some limited success. Most of the rest of the session was spent discussing examples of books and games that seemed (to us generally less game-savvy participants) to cross boundaries and push the limits of how mature narrative and interactivity can coexist. I think there were a lot more places the discussion could have gone, especially on a philosophical/theoretical level, but it was simply too early in the morning. Later at the pub Tim said he had been hoping for a later slot for his session, so that folks who had spent the day talking about ebooks could be refreshed by a change of pace, and while I agree that it could have benefited from a later slot, it was one of my favourite sessions.

Taddle Creek editor Conan Tobias was supposed to be one of the moderators of the Literary Publications: the Grassroots session, but he was unable to attend. I was a little disappointed by this session, largely because it seemed to lack focus. I remember Stuart Woods and Clelia Scala spending so much time introducing themselves and their respective publications that I lost track of what the session was supposed to be about. (A quick glance at the official schedule tells me that it was about how (or if) changes in delivery methods and revenue streams are affecting the role of literary magazines and industry journals. There was a lot of anxiety about revenue streams and free or online-specific content, but aside from Clelia Scala (who works for an online-only publication) not everybody seemed to have a clear idea of what their digital presence was for, and I made a point of mentioning it. (You wouldn't publish a magazine without a clear idea of what you wanted to accomplish; why would you have a website or app or similar without being able to answer the same kinds of questions?)

There were some interesting comments about how certain kinds of magazines will have more success with different approaches, such as paywalls, if they have a built-in audience, such as professionals who require specific kinds of information for their jobs. I was also interested in the idea someone floated that literary journals might be intimidating to those who aren't "hardcore" book people, or writers themselves. I can certainly identify with this, as I was very intimidated by literary journals when I first discovered them (and to this day I find Brick incredibly condescending and cliquish), but it's something I haven't thought much about in a few years, and so have mostly ignored when thinking about how they project themselves online.

The Book as Object session started a little slow. The books—objects—that Stewart and Collings brought with them were beautiful, and I was fascinated by the inside baseball (a phrase I will use as much as possible in this post, expressly to irritate Mr. Beattie) quality of their discussions of paper and binding, but I didn't go to BookCamp for a show and tell. I went for discussion. But there was discussion! They handed out some lovely blank BookCamp-themed Nice Work notebooks, and we eventually got down to business.

I kinda wish that this session had been closer to the Beyond the Text session on the schedule, because in retrospect some of the ideas from this session would have applied there, and they had completely slipped my mind by then. There was talk of canonicity, the unity of presentation and form (a meta-textual issue), but what really mattered to me was when the issue of context was raised. Stewart and Collings made a point of saying that, despite coming from a pro-books-on-paper perspective, they weren't there to present an "us versus them" argument (and they didn't, though it was clear their hearts would never be in electronic books). But they raised the point that, while electronic books are capable of adding context to some experiences (I'm extrapolating quite a bit from what was said, but I'm thinking about things like integrated GPS in readers like iPhones triggering, say, updates and add-ons to travel guides), what they do is strip context away from certain kinds of texts. I see this quite a bit at my day job, actually. Every day I work with books that are decades, if not centuries old. The quality of the binding and the paper, the care that's been taken to preserve the book (or the evidence of frequent use) can say a lot not only about how the owner of the book felt about it, but how the publisher saw the book. Was it intended as ephemera, or was it some kind of prestige edition? If electronic books truly do come to dominate the marketplace, it will be much more difficult for scholars (or anyone else) to rely on meta-textual cues to determine the place a book has (or had) in society. This swings around to my arguments about tacit and selected knowledge from the other day, actually. What judgements will we be able to make about texts the longer they stay in the network, and what tools will be available for us to make them?

We also discussed Charlie Stross' idea that the 20^th Century will one day be seen as a kind of dark ages. Up until fairly recently (in relative terms), books were a millennial technology. If well made they could last for hundreds, if not thousands of years (when in Cairo in 1997 I saw codices made from papyrus that were thousands of years old), but the vast majority of the books printed in my lifetime will not survive much beyond me, if they make it that far. And I can guarantee you that other common forms of storage, like tape, optical discs, and magnetic hard drives won't last even that long. Stross predicts that there will be technologies, like memory diamonds, that will allow us to store an entire lifetime of data in absurdly small and impossibly robust artifacts, but we aren't even close to being there yet. Digital preservation is part of what I do for a living, and even I know that right now the best technology we have for long-term data storage is the printed book.

Though the future isn't entirely clear, and I'm slightly pessimistic about some of the larger publishers, I left this session feeling optimistic that there will still be a place for small-scale, bespoke printing presses and publishers.

The CBC's Canada Reads session was, despite the more structured format with a panel at the front, one of the most light and informal sessions. It was mostly a way to give face-to-face feedback to some of the folks behind Canada Reads' online presence, with the folks behind a couple of the homespun responses on the panel as well. The panel introduced themselves and each gave a spiel about who they were and what their roles were, with Jen, Kerry and Steven talking about the various reactionary projects. There were heartfelt stories shared about what Canada Reads means to listeners, families bonding over it, etc. All very pleasant. Some of us who run blogs spoke about what got us involved this year (I originally wanted to publicly trash Generation X because I promised Rebecca Rosenblum that I would explain what I thought was wrong with it, but the CBC's willingess to engage with feedback from the public—both positive and negative—is what made me decide to do the whole shebang), and my "direct, refreshing and a little curmudgeonly" comments, which included some not very flattering statements about the Ceeb's site layout, have caused Bronwyn Kienapple to wonder if I might be the next Steven Beattie. There was a lot of debate about the format of the show, which I think provided both useful and not so useful data to the folks from the Ceeb about what works and what doesn't. I enjoyed this session, but I don't think I got as much food for thought out of it as I did from some of the others.

One of my very favourite sessions of the day was Venturing Beyond the Text, moderated by Ian Barker. I wasn't sure what to expect based on the session description, but there was a lot of very interesting discussion on more theoretical/philosophical issues than most of the other sessions. I wish there had been a bigger turnout for this session, because it certainly deserved it. Barker talked about how the linearity of most content "infected" our concept of what an electronic book could—or should—be. I thought that was a very useful way to phrase it; ideas enter the networks that are our worldviews, and are either repelled, or absorbed and allowed to replicate to the network as a whole. It's how memes work; it's how we develop the individual biases that determine how we move through the world, and create the things that we leave behind us. Have we not, as readers as much as writers and publishers, failed to take advantage of the special properties of electronic books, such as their special potential for non-linearity? We're not capable of seeing past the concepts that have already taken root. It's why we're finding that simply transposing printed matter into ebook formats isn't working (at this point I'm hearing echoes of the complaints about Zinio and ebooks distributed as PDF in the Grassroots session).

Looking over my notes from this session I realize there's enough good ideas for a whole series of blog posts (and I already have one in the works for the class/access issues that were raised—I admit that I was disappointed that there was essentially zero class awareness at the conference in any of the sessions I attended but this one, and it only came up because I brought it up, but that in itself is a whole other post). There were even some useful things said about how publishers can adjust the way they fund projects internally to make electronic revenue streams more viable (see? you practical-minded people missed some good shit).

The biggest takeaway for me was that the "culture" of/around books is as much about what we do with them as it is about things like academic discourse, traditional booksellers, or the printing press and publishing process. Rather than asking ourselves, "what things are ubiquitous in the ebook space?" we have to ask "what things should be ubiquitous in the ebook space?" That means paying more attention to what the audience needs from ebooks than from what the publishers need, and I'm not really talking about the money problem. Electronic books need to be fast to access and move through. Tim Maly spoke at the pub later that night about how sluggish the Kobo felt when moving from page to page, and how agonizingly long it took to go from deciding to read a book to actually having the first page open to read. Those problems need to be solved. One of the best things I've read about over the last few days is that there are no ebook readers that allow you to have more than one book open at once, using something like a tabbing system. That kind of access to multiple texts is integral to how scholars and students work with books. In fact, when writing my last blog post, I at one point had six different documents open at once, some books, some downloaded research papers, some web pages. Sharing is currently integral to the culture of books. Also, we tend to think of reading as a kind of extension of speech, a kind of formalized oral culture (it's really the poets who tricked us into believing this nonsense), but it's a visual medium, which means that spatial awareness and sense memory come into play. Doing boolean seraches and what not is certainly handy, but it assumes that one always knows what what one is looking for in a given text, and long experience has taught me that straight up isn't true. Often as a student I would have to go back to a book knowing there was a passage in there somewhere—an idea I didn't think important enough to note my first time through—that was now essential to what I was working on, and all I could remember about it was where it was in the book. What side of the page it was on, how far down, and about yay far into the book. I ask you: how do I find that kind of information in ebooks? I've got certain tricks for finding web pages I've visited that way, but it's actually hugely time consuming and cumbersome. Barker asserted, and I agree entirely, that these basic, simple, bog-standard elements of book culture need to be made bulletproof before we move onto the bells and whistles in order to be sure that electronic books really do live up to their potential. Now don't you wish you'd been there?

I was exhausted by the time we came around to the last panel (Building and Sustaining a Community of Readers Online), though it was the one that attracted me to this year's lineup in the first place (well, okay, so did reading last year's twitter feed and roundup blog posts). The best assessment I've seen of this session so far is this one by Charlotte Ashley, so definitely read that, but I do have a few thoughts. First: nobody was ever really able to give a clear definition of what they meant when they used the word "community". I've been doing this whole online community thing for at least a decade now, and in my opinion Facebook and Twitter are networks, not communities. All three panelists seemed to be using the word "community" as a catch-all for several different levels of online social interaction, with no clear idea of what made those layers distinctive (or at least, none were presented when I asked about it). I did my best to keep my questions focused on the professional/marketing implications, because most of the folks there seemed to be in the industry, and that's the level that appeared to be interesting them the most (not necessarily what interested them the most as people, but in terms of why they were at BookCamp to begin with), but I really just wanted to scream out that we'd been having the debates of what community meant online and how to keep them functioning for years, and largely the secret is that the ties that bind must be human rather than economic; it doesn't matter that you brought them all together to sell them things. They won't stay together if they can't make human bonds with each other independently of what you want from the community, and those reasons must be their own, and not part of an agenda, or there will be tremendous resistance. I have seen so many communities fall apart because the folks who pay the bills weren't able to let go of their agenda for five minutes. But at the same time, I'm still an industry outsider, and as curmudgeonly as I am, even I can find the idea of tromping through somebody else's livelihood with my size twelve combat boots more than a little daunting. I got the impression from the Canada Reads panel that Kimberly Walsh would have gotten it, but I wasn't getting that vibe from Tan Light, and to be honest, Meg Mathur is a little intimidating. But anyway, read Charlotte Ashley's post about the session.

The gathering at the pub was pretty great. I had some excellent French fries, far too many whiskey sours, and a lot of great conversations, especially with Mojgan Fay and Tim Maly. I guarantee you more than one blog post will come out of those conversations. For anyone interested in going to next year's, do it. I met some amazing folks. Many thanks to those who put in all the hard work making this thing happen.

For further reading: Mark Bertils has collected links to the post-BCTO10 coverage all in one post.

re: recent changes to Facebook Connect/Open Graph

I am concerned that I had to 'opt out' rather than 'opt in' to letting Facebook and my friends on Facebook release my private information to third parties not of my choosing. This is a disturbing trend, and it's clearly not in keeping with the spirit (nor perhaps the letter) of your agreement with the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. Frankly, it feels like Beacon all over again, with OpenID grafted on top of it. I will continue to tighten my privacy settings and scale back my use of Facebook until such time as you have default settings and policies/practices that treat my privacy with respect, rather than making me feel like you'd sell my information to anyone and everyone, and just hope I won't notice.

best,
August C. Bourré

I've been running vestige.org for just a touch over a decade now, and one thing that I have always, always, always said, is that I didn't want the site to be about making money. No advertising, no affiliate links, no donations or sponsored posts or any of that nonsense. What you do on your site is your business, but I didn't want any of that here. Most of my current readership was not around back when I used to be vocal about this sort of thing, so it probably won't matter to you folks, but I remember it quite clearly, and it matters to me.

But.

This site isn't very expensive to maintain, if you define "not very expensive" in relation to some kind of objective measure, like the average income for a thirty-something, university-educated white male living in Toronto. The thing is, I don't make the average income for a thirty-something, university-educated white male living in Toronto, despite the fact that I am, well, blah blah blah, you get the picture. What I actually make (and I want to be clear I'm not complaining about my employer here, because my employer is pretty awesome) is considerably less than that. Enough less than that to make any purchase over $25 something that has to be budgeted for in advance. At that point running this site, yeah, isn't hugely expensive, but it's expensive enough that I feel it come budget time.

The point is, I'd like to apply for an affiliate program to help mitigate the cost of running this place, but I want to make sure that it's cool with you folks first. I say apply, because that's how it works over at McNally Robinson; you have to apply for membership in their program. That's right, not Amazon.com, but McNally Robinson. There's a few reasons why I chose their program as the one I want to apply for. I like their stores. I've visited the flagship store in Winnipeg, and their short-lived store here in Toronto, and every time the staff was courteous, knowledgeable, and not only did I find the (sometimes rare) books I was looking for, I often found books I didn't know I was looking for. Also, they are a Canadian indie retailer, and supporting our independent booksellers matters to me. In addition, they do customer service really well. I was given a McNally Robinson gift certificate for Christmas, but was unable to redeem it before their Toronto location was closed, so I placed my order online. Before shipping my book, one of their staff noticed that I was using a gift certificate that, at the time it was given to me, should have been redeemable locally. So, without my asking for it, they picked up the tab for the shipping, and I didn't have to pay a dime more than I would have if I'd walked into their store. They didn't have to do that, but it was pretty awesome of them, and I'd like to see them succeed in the future. I also feel that linking to a retailer instead of directly to the publisher is good for the publishing/bookselling ecosystem here in Canada. If you buy from someone like McNally Robinson, not only are you supporting an independent retailer who is (in my opinion, anyway) worth keeping in business, but the publisher and the author will still get their cut. And the last reason why I'm choosing their affiliate program over someone like Amazon's, is because Jeff Bezos eats kittens (not really, read the link).

If you folks give me the go-ahead, McNally Robinson accepts me, and I find the terms of their program agreeable, here's what will change: almost nothing. When I mention a book, I'll link to McNally Robinson. I'll go back through the archives and add links to the books I've already reviewed. And I might, might add a small banner advertisement to the navigation menu on the right of the page, where my AugustBourré.com banner is now, if I can find one that I like (I am insanely picky about the aesthetics of this site, which is another reason I don't like the idea of running ads). I would also add a text link to McNally Robinson in the menu bar. And that's it. It would in no way affect the content of this site, or my editorial direction, or whatever you want to call what I do here. It will just mean a handful more text links, a single banner ad (no more than one per page), and maybe it will be a little easier for you to buy the books I talk about, if you're so inclined. If it helps me out a little by dropping some silver in the coffers, then so much the better.

So is applying for an affiliate program okay with you? Let me know what you think in the comments, and thanks for reading and for contributing to the discussion.

Oh, P.S.: research and writing for The E-Books Post is going well, but it's going to take more time than I thought. While you wait, I invite you to read The Sea As Hypertext, my first attempt at addressing electronic literature and the work of art in the age of digital reproduction (well, technically my third; I'd written two previous variations of that essay, both of which have been lost to the sands of time).

The behaviour of those suffering from Doctorow's Syndrome is characterized by the obsessive need to share information—regardless of the value of that information or the utility of sharing it—for the purpose of asserting their moral superiority.

Though rarely contagious, frequent exposure to patients suffering from Doctorow's Syndrome may result in a reaction known as The Hobbes Effect.

Treatment consists of regular aural or written applications of the phrase, "shut the fuck up already, Cory."

If there's anything folks love to do on the Internet, it's talk and argue, argue and talk. Anyone who spends enough time online will, whether they know it or not, eventually run into Godwin's Law:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.

There are numerous variations and corollaries, and after eleven years of talking about books and with Book People, both in person and online (including an absolutely epic party last night, thrown by the one and only Julie Wilson), I've come up with a corollary of my own*. I hereby present you with August's Corollary to Godwin's Law:

As an English-language literary discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving William Shakespeare, James Joyce, or Ulysses approaches 1.

*What finally tipped the scales for formulating the Corollary was Perdita Felicien's appearance on Canada Reads.

You can ignore the rest of this post, because the bits that I'm about to quote are the only bits that are relevant to what I want to talk about. Adam Greenfield writes:

The reason people keep blogs – let me be more straightforward: the reason I keep a blog – is to express opinions. Precisely to not, always, have to be consistent or sensible or bound by a duty to the truth. To not, always, have to be responsible. To not, always, answer to the same standards I'd expect of (say) a writer for the New York Times or the Guardian. To be full of shit, if I feel like it. And, what's more (and this goes to the bozo who whined about my ostensible tone of "world-weary superiority"), to be full of shit in whatever style I feel like adopting.

This is nearly identical to something I wrote back in early 2000, when I was keeping a (very) personal journal on a site that no longer exists. Blogs were a pretty new thing then, and there was still a fair bit of dispute about what kind of a website that word should refer to. Vestige.org had been around for a few months by then, and looked dramatically different from what it is today (and was closer to the kind of sites I'd been building since I came online in late 1998), but the site my journal was on was most definitely what would become knows as a blog. I updated and archived everything by hand, because content management systems like Wordpress either didn't exist, were expensive, or were difficult to customize or coax genuinely useful behaviours out of. It was just easier to manage everything by hand. Most of us were still using FONT tags for fuck's sake. I wasn't even writing about books.

These days it sometimes feels like keeping a personal website—now a blog by default, rather than them being the exception—has to be about developing a personal brand, about marketing yourself or your interests in some way. In 1998 the Internet didn't feel like a marketplace, it felt like a frontier, the closest someone like me would ever get to lighting out for new territory, planting some stakes in the ground and calling whatever was between them my new home. I was lucky enough to find a community of people I could respect and learn from, programmers and web designers, illustrators, sysadmins, UI architects, writers and Flash gurus. Some of them, like Adam Greenfield (who I doubt would remember me today) would become influential in building the Web as we know it now. The businessmen were already setting up shop by then, and we were on the cusp of the boom. They knew there was gold in them thar hills. A lot of us would make our careers that way (my path was different, though the Internet will always play a role), but most of us were, and still are, driven by what can be done, how far things can be pushed, not just by how many more and better ways we can sell shit. I came here for the adventure, and while it's true that now even I am using things like my Twitter feed to "network" and make connections, to advance my interests, most days the adventure is still why I'm here. It's a place where I get to be full of shit, and full of shit in whatever way I want.

What's crazy, though, what I didn't expect, is that the things I've been doing over the last little while to "market" myself (a term I use loosely), are turning out to be a hell of a lot of fun, and they've helped me—especially over the last two months, thanks in particular to things like Kerry Clare's Canada Reads: Independently, and Twitter, which I've already mentioned—start to find a place in a whole new community, one where we aren't building the Web, but maybe something just as exciting, if a little smaller. A niche frontier, if you will.

Anyway, thanks for letting me come out and play.

Apart from being dark, musty and having ceilings so low tall folks bump their heads, my apartment is notorious for two things: first, it's quite messy, as I am an atrocious housekeeper, and second, it contains a lot of books. And by a lot, I mean a whole lot. Folks tend to not believe me when I tell them how many books I have, so I went around and took some photos tonight (don't worry, the apartment is cleaner than it looks from the photos). Bear in mind that I left quite a few behind in Dryden, and still have some packed away in boxes and such here in the apartment that I wasn't able to get photos of, nor did I make a survey of my various magazines. Behold:

The homemade bookcase in my living room:

The tall bookcase, also in my living room:

Books on the desk:

Books near the television:

Books on the chair:

Books on the black hole that is my homemade coffee table:

Books stacked on random things in a corner:

The third bookcase in the living room:

Books on and about the chest, also in the living room (yes, that's a Ziploc bag full of Smurfs):

Books by the couch:

Books amongst the DVDs (yes, that's The Imitation of Christ below Stephen King's Four Past Midnight:

Books on the cat:

Books in the bathroom:

Books near the bed:

Books in boxes:

Books on the dresser:

Books in the dresser:

I don't believe in guilty pleasures. Six years of studying literature at the university level taught me many things, and perhaps the most important thing it taught me is something that seems obvious in retrospect, but that most people have difficulty applying in their daily lives: not everything you like is good, and not everything you dislike is bad. We don't need to feel guilty or ashamed because we like something we know is not necessarily of the highest quality. Still, most of us, myself included, fall into that trap from time to time.

For literary folks, especially here in Canada, guilty pleasures often come in the form of genre fiction, like romance, science fiction, or fantasy (though, strangely, mysteries tend to be pretty accepted). When our writers produce works that would fall into those categories, our inner snobs emerge to label them "dystopias" or "magic realist" or some other such bullshit. Code words for the literati, for the most part. We don't want to be mistaken for the kind of people who read books with airbrushed paintings of dragons on the covers, do we? Hell no. Some of my best friends read books with airbrushed dragons on their covers. I'm not sure how this plays out in other jurisdictions—perhaps its a matter of geek community politics; I'm okay with being a book geek, but I don't want to qualify for Beauty and the Geek—but I think here in Canada it has a lot to do with wanting to be taken seriously. Being taken seriously is a national obsession for us even outside the book world, and as Brian Busby has noted, we've been pretty good about deliberately marginalizing pulp and genre publishing in this country, Harlequin being among the few notable exceptions. Why we think this makes us look good is beyond me, but then so many things are.

I'm not falling into that trap anymore. Here it is, for all the world to see: I read books by David Eddings, China Miéville, Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. Le Guin, R. Scott Bakker, Phyllis Gotlieb, Raymond Chandler, Ian Fleming, Bernard Cornwell, Patrick O'Brian, Phillip K. Dick, William Gibson, Alan Furst, Guy Gavriel Kay, H.P. Lovecraft, Douglas Adams, Neal Stephenson, John MacLachlan Gray, Simon Scarrow, Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke, Jack McKinney, Robert E. Howard, Robert A. Heinlein and Harlan Ellison, and I enjoy them, even with the odd airbrushed cover. But, you say, with newspapers now covering comic books (oops, sorry, graphic novels—can't actually call the damned things by their true name), an admission like this, that includes some pretty famous, respected names, isn't so big a deal. You're probably right. Let's talk TV.

I watch a lot of television, and if you're keeping track of folks in Canadian publishing via Twitter, you'll know that so do a lot of "book people". From what I can tell, the programmes they watch tend to come in two categories. They either watch the new breed of high-budget, critically acclaimed dramas like True Blood, Mad Men and Dexter, or trashy, low-budget reality television like American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, and Canada's Next Top Model. I suppose this is progress. A few years ago, before programmes like The Sopranos and The Wire brought television drama to a new level of quality (or, rather, got it more attention—there were a handful of shows before them that came very close to the same quality), I think you'd have been hard-pressed to get a lot of die-hard book people to talk TV around the water cooler. I can't imagine them being excited to talk about last night's episode of Fraiser, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, or LA Law.

What I wonder about is why there's so little discussion of trashy television drama. There are a number of shows on right now (Legend of the Seeker, Spartacus: Blood & Sand, Burn Notice, Leverage, White Collar, Castle, Eureka) that may sometimes have decent budgets, but where the writing and acting aren't quite up to the level of something like Deadwood. (And then there's shows like Supernatural, which started out as a monster-of-the-week dramedy, but over the last four and a half years has morphed into one of the smartest, funniest, and best-executed things on TV, though nobody seems to be watching it.) There's still some folks who don't watch television at all (like Rebecca Rosenblum, who seems to be one of the few people who can say that without sounding like a hipster snob—which I can assure you she is not), but what really interests me is why there are so few people who watch—or will admit to watching—those trashier dramas. Is there a stigma attached to them? Does watching trashy reality TV seem so much like a guilty pleasure that it's excusable, while watching, say, Spartacus (like Legend of the Seeker, it's from Sam Raimi, the man behind Hercules and Xena) might be mistaken for something you would watch for genuine, non-ironic enjoyment?

I think that it's good people are more open about the television they watch these days, because the medium has come a very long way in the last decade, to the point where I think a lot of the lower-quality dramas are now as good or better than many of the higher-quality dramas from only fifteen or twenty years ago. So to give some love to the trashy dramas, I will admit: I watch Legend of the Seeker (and apparently so does Amy Jones; the leather, it creaks), Burn Notice, Eureka, Leverage, and pretty much every show I've mentioned in this post (except the reality TV; for some reason the closest I can come to watching reality television is Mythbusters and Top Gear, which don't really count).

Step out into the light, Book People. There's no such thing as a guilty pleasure, no matter how many people deny that The Year of the Flood is science fiction. You don't need to hide anymore! Now that I've opened the floodgates, you can expect posts about television programmes in this blog's future.

This is the one post I never wanted to write. People who know me, and regular readers of this site, will already know that I am not a feminist. I am, in fact, quite critical of feminist theory at times. I resist making this a big issue on this site for two reasons: first, emotions can often run high when it comes to identity politics (of which feminism and feminist theory can play a significant part), making it very easy for a poorly-worded sentence to cause a colossal misunderstanding, and second, feminism remains a useful movement, and feminist theory a useful set of tools for a variety of fields; I don't like limiting my tools, and criticizing something too much on the Internet can do that. But this thing, this stupid, stupid, embarrassing disgrace brought to us by the Editorial Board at the National Post has left me no choice but to articulate my position as clearly as I can, because the absolute last thing I want is to be grouped with those ignorant jackasses.

There are legitimate arguments to be made criticizing Women's Studies programmes. Lack of rigor is a complaint I've heard from serious scholars, both male and female, from other disciplines. I've even seen examples of it myself, when a former partner of mine was taking Women's Studies courses and became extremely frustrated by what she felt were academic standards well below what she was used to in her primary field. Most importantly to me, however, is that such programmes, while admirably dealing with an extremely broad set of social and theoretical issues, quite clearly privilege a particular theoretical framework and point of view. This isn't a problem in the hard sciences or certain professional schools, but it's more than a problem in the arts, social sciences, and interdisciplinary studies. Degrees are for fields of study, not points of view. I think folding Women's Studies into something more inclusive, like Gender Studies, would allow for a more diverse and therefore robust programme, a diversity that feminist theory helped bring to my own field, English Literature.

I think the above paragraph constitutes a reasonable critique of some of the problems (or perceived problems) with Women's Studies programmes as they now exist.

This bullshit from the National Post does not:

The radical feminism behind these courses has done untold damage to families, our court systems, labour laws, constitutional freedoms and even the ordinary relations between men and women.

Women's Studies courses have taught that all women — or nearly all — are victims and nearly all men are victimizers.

[...]

Divorcing men find they lose their homes and access to their children, and must pay much of their income to their former spouses (then pay tax on the income they no longer have) largely because Women's Studies activists convinced politicians that family law was too forgiving of men. So now a man entering court against a woman finds the deck stacked against him, thanks mostly to the radical feminist jurisprudence that found it roots and nurture in Women's Studies.

[...]

Over the years, Women's Studies scholars have argued all heterosexual sex is oppression because its "penetrative nature" amounts to "occupation." They have insisted that no male author had any business writing novels from women's perspectives; although, interestingly, they have not often argued the converse — that female writers must avoid telling men's stories.

I'd be curious to see the Post's research into how judgements in family court have changed with respect to husbands and fathers, or how patterns have shifted with regard to awarding custody in various jurisdictions across Canada. It would be equally interesting to see how—or even if—those number correlate with the growth of Women's Studies programmes in those same jurisdictions. The Post has cited no numbers, no Stats Canada documents, no independent surveys, not even any anecdotal evidence. Surely if there is a clear culture of "radical feminist jurisprudence that found it roots and nurture in Women's Studies," then Canada's most obsessive-compulsive bureaucratic wing must have data on it somewhere, and no doubt the Post's crack Editorial Board has ferreted it out. Perhaps they simply forgot to cite it.

It would also be interesting to find out what educators they spoke to about the pedagogy involved in teaching Women's Studies, and what course materials they perused, and from which courses and institutions, that led them to describe the programmes as courses deliniating women as victimized and men as victimizers. Unfortunately, the Editorial Board doesn't see fit to tell its readers. The course material I have first hand experience with, from Laurentian University, is far from being so cut-and-dried, and though I did not always agree with the approaches or conclusions, offered a highly nuanced set of theories about human interactions that presents ethical and intellectual challenges (in many senses of the word) to both men and women. Perhaps the Post felt their readers would not be interested in this information.

I know I've been hard on the Post in the past for having less than stellar Books coverage, but lately they've improved tremendously with The Afterword, matching and often even surpassing coverage at the Globe & Mail. They seem to have no trouble covering Russell Smith with little apparent controversy, an author who has more than once used female protagonists or written from a woman's point of view (including a pornographic novel, under a female pseudonym). But of course the Editorial Board is talking about the academic world. Well, that's something I happen to know a little bit about. You see, before I ran out of money, I was actually an English Literature student, training to become a university professor. You don't see much of it coming out here in this blog, but I like to wade hip-deep in hardcore theory and academic criticism. Academics love gender reversals in protagonists; there is a tremendous amount of work to be done studying not only the standard literary techniques, cultural and theoretical implications, but also issues of gender identification, authenticity of voice or even appropriation of voice, basically a truckload of the fun things that keep academics writing papers and teaching interesting, though-provoking classes. George Elliott Clarke's libretto Beatrice Chancy focuses on the experiences of a young black woman in 19^th Century Nova Scotia, and is a favourite teaching text of feminist and non-feminist professors alike. Not only is it not frowned upon for this acclaimed poet to be writing in the voice of a female protagonist (well, partly, at any rate), the book is among the most lauded on the many curricula that use it.

(And as for the sex as "occupation" bit, let's just say that the women I know, feminists or otherwise, make their own choices based on knowing they have the power and freedom to explore their sexual identities, and have control over their own pleasure, over their own sexual relationships and destinies. The ladies I know are fierce, and I can't help but wonder how the Post's Editorial Board has gotten these notions stuck in their heads. Perhaps they're projecting. The world may never know.)

In short, the Editorial Board of the National Post has apparently done no research into their claims (or none it wishes to share), and frankly doesn't know shit about literature and how it is studied or taught in Canadian classrooms, regardless of the ideological leanings of the professor or the programme. So what are they on about? Here are a few other quotations from the screed—er, editorial—that might shed some light:

Their professors have argued, with some success, that rights should be granted not to individuals alone, but to whole classes of people, too. This has led to employment equity—hiring quotas based on one's gender or race rather than on an objective assessment of individual talents.

Executives, judges and university students must now sit through mandatory diversity training.

[...]

They have pushed for universal daycare and mandatory government-run kindergarten, advocated higher taxes to pay for vast new social entitlements and even put forward the notion that the only differences between males and females are "relatively insignificant, external features."

So this, really, is what's got the Post hot under the collar. Most of this seems like pretty good ideas to me. What it looks like is incremental (and in the case of employment quotas—something I actually believe undermines equality—hopefully temporary) steps toward finally enacting the equality promised on paper in the Charter. The Post is pissed off, it seems, that women are being recognized as people. It's no wonder the National Post Editorial Board doesn't sign their names to these pieces. I too would be ashamed if I'd contributed to this poorly conceived mess. There is a difference between disagreeing with aspects of feminism, and outright misogyny. The Post's editors are clearly incapable of recognizing it.

My challenge to the Editorial Board of the National Post: sign your names to this document and face the public shaming that is your due, or shut the fuck up entirely, you smarmy fucking cowards.

I apologize if this post has been a bit rough, unpolished, or emotional; I'm not a professional journalist. But then, judging by this editorial, neither are the members of the Editorial Board at the Post.