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

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.

Last June I followed all of the BookCampToronto posts on Twitter, and read as many of the follow-ups and round-ups and blog posts dissecting it afterward as I could. Most of them focused on e-books and social media and various technologies (though I'm sure there were other things discussed at the "uncoference"—is it okay that I don't like terms like "unconference?" 'cause I really don't), which are still the hot topics in the publishing industry. Ever since then I've wanted to collect all my thoughts and opinions about e-books into a single coherent post. The problem is that even after almost ten months of turning them over in my head, I'm still not sure I really know what all my thoughts and opinions are. Clearly it's time to start writing.

I'm going to try to have something for you by the end of next week, but there's been so much written about digital books that I'm just not going to be able to cover everything. One of the things I really don't want to cover (in part because I have no first-hand experience of it) is what goes into making a book "the old-fashioned way." Luckily, science-fiction author Charlie Stross has already done it for me, with considerably better results than even my best efforts would produce. Charlie sorts his blog by date rather than category, so here are links to all seven parts of his ongoing series, Common Misconceptions About Publishing: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, and Part Seven. Even if you don't care at all for science fiction, or any other kind of commercial genre fiction, the series is a must read for anyone interested in books or publishing. Hell, his whole blog is. I don't know why you aren't reading it. In fact, why don't you fix that now. While you're playing with Charlie, I'll get to work on The Post About E-Books.

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.

There is this thing out there called Goodreads, which appears to be a kind of Facebook for books and book people. I signed up today to see what it's all about. I only have one friend so far, so it's not very "social" for me yet. If you're the sort of person who's into that kind of thing, we should be friends. I've added a little under half of my books to the account already, and will be adding more as the week progresses.

I've been reading through the Caustic Cover Critic's archives at work (hey, I have that kind of job), and I just noticed this evening that David Drummond, the book designer I mentioned in a post this weekend, actually has a blog, where he looks at some of the approaches he takes to designing covers. His comments aren't as in-depth as I would like (they tend to be limited to only a sentence or two), but it's still a pretty cool "inside baseball" kind of thing for those of us, like myself, who geek out over both books and graphic design.

I've mentioned this on Twitter, but since I know most of you aren't following me there, I thought I'd mention it here. A.L. Kennedy on Writing is seriously the best writing column on the Web. I know you aren't reading it (I know you aren't, don't give me that look), but you really should be. Kennedy is a goddamn treasure, and we need to encourage more of this sort of thing.

I read this morning on the Quill and Quire blog that a school board in California is banning the Mirriam-Webster Dictionary because it contains a "sexually graphic" definition of "oral sex". The stupidity of this boggles the mind; why someone would want to deprive children of a valuable, bog-standard reference text just because it has a couple dirty words in it is beyond me. But then I find it ridiculous that grownups are afraid of words at all. I wonder if Latin's not on the curriculum so the kids won't learn what irrumatio means.

It's been quite some time since I posted an entry; no doubt those of you who don't follow me on Twitter will have simply assumed that I've been eaten by dragons, or abducted by aliens, or sequestered in some dungeon by shadowy men in black Ray-Bans. None of these things are true, but they're rather more interesting than the truth, the truth being that I've been struggling with a pretty severe bout of depression for most of the last year and a half (for reasons I have more than once alluded to, but will not go deeper into today), and have done little more than stare glassy-eyed at television and video games. I don't vilifiy these things the way some do, but I've certainly let them take up more of my free time than I should have. Well, to be fair, I've also taken up running, but that's a far more recent development.

Right now I'm seven book reviews behind, and I also owe my man Josh Ellis of Red State Sound System an album review, something I've never done before here on vestige.org. I'm going to do my level best to get caught up on those things, starting this weekend. In the meantime, I'd like to share with you some bits of news, and a couple of sites that have recently captured my attention.

First the news:

As you're all by now aware, Canadian novelist and musician Paul Quarrington passed away Thursday morning after a much-publicized battle with cancer. I was not fortunate enough to meet Mr. Quarrington, nor have I yet read any of his works, though the much-acclaimed Whale Music is lined up for later in the year. I direct you to Mr. Beattie for a better sense of the man and his impact on Canadian letters, and links to the various tributes that are being gathered around the Web.

Respected Canadian poet P.K. Page also died earlier this week, at the age of 93. New Quarterly editor Kim Jernigan remembers her.

Blogger Ed Champion has an excellent piece on the recent San Francisco Panorama issue of McSweeney's. Definitely worth reading.

The Canadian Periodical Fund guidelines have at last been finalized and presented to the public, and the results are grim. There are no exceptions for literary journals or other small arts magazines. I have no doubt this means a great many fine journals will not be able to survive. You can find more of my (rather quickly dashed-off) thoughts on the matter in the comments for this article at the Quill and Quire blog.

Brian Joseph Davis kept things classy over at the Globe and Mail today with this piece on one of the rumored names for the tablet computer that Apple is expected to unveil next week.

Finally, Kerry Clare of Pickle Me This is doing an independent alternative to this year's Canada Reads lineup, called Canada Reads: Independently. It features an exciting list of panelists and, to this blogger anyway, a much more exciting list of books.

And now the sites:

The first is The Dusty Bookcase, "A Very Casual Exploration of the Dominion's Suppressed, Ignored and Forgotten" (no Oxford commas for Mr. Busby, apparently). It's a remarkably fun look at books and writers from Canada's past that have more or less been lost to all but those troubled few who rummage through the scrapheap of literary history. What I thought I knew about the history of Canadian publishing has been completely turned on its head by this blog, and it only makes the outright snobbishness of our literary lights (we don't produce mass market pulp here, no sir, our publishing stars are all Literary writers, with a capital "L") all the more disgraceful. The Dusty Bookcase is a must read for anyone interested in what has come before us—the entries on Harlequin alone make digging through the archives more than worth it. I should point out that this blog was brought to my attention by a post Daniel Wells made on the CNQ blog.

The second blog I discovered by way of The Dusty Bookcase. Caustic Cover Critic is maintained (if I understand things right) by Australian writer/editor/book designer (?) JRS Morrison. The blog not only features book covers from a variety of countries in an astonishing array of styles and genres, but Morrison also provides great, meaty histories and commentary regarding the evolution of cover art and the work of specific designers. He's also managed to get some book designers to speak about their work and process, including David Drummond, who designed Dead Man's Float by Nicholas Maes, a book I wrote about back in January 2008, and originally only picked up because of its cover.

Speaking of book covers, if anyone over at Capuchin Classics wants to send me some review copies of their absolutely gorgeous books, I'd be more than happy to write about them. Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. Knowhatimean, saynomore, saynomore.

Well, it's official: I've decided to relaunch Wooden Fish. All that's up right now is a placeholder until I figure out the specifics of how I'm going to organize it, how I'll accept submissions, the new look, and so on. Hopefully the more important bits will be figured out in the next week or two, though I think that it could be several months until it launches officially with its first issue. Any and all queries regarding Wooden Fish can and should be directed to august@woodenfish.ca. Thanks for your time, your input, and your support!

A long-time acquaintance of mine, graphic designer Ben Pieratt (known for, among other things, being the guy behind the FWIS book cover site), has left his old agency—and the old book cover site—behind, and launched The Book Cover Archive. It's an amazing site that not only highlights well-designed book covers but also cross references those covers using a pretty comprehensive selection of meta-data, including not only the obvious things like author, publisher, and designer, but also art director, photographer, illustrator and genre. For those of my readers who might decry the lack of Canadian titles, they do accept recommendations to be added to the Archive. And of course there's the obligatory blog, which actually debuted some time ago, and which I've been following with interest. I hope that you all get as much enjoyment from exploring the Archive as I have.