After years of monarchist Upper Canada bluebloods doing their whole derivative British thing, it’s nice to see some Brits recycling Canadian ideas — in this case, recycling. The UK’s Independent recently ran a laudatory piece about Canada (and specifically B.C.’s Raincoast Books) — printing books on recycled paper.
“It is the country that gave the literary world Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields. Now it is at the vanguard of green publishing.” Pretty nice. Nicer still — if we stick to the conventional wisdom that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery — is the news that UK writers are following suit, including big names like “Helen Fielding, Philip Pullman and Ian Rankin” who “have signed up” to the effort.
The two novels posted on The Tyee were not flipped like hotcakes between computer screens across Canada. You’d think that (as in Bushes) and might have excited more imaginations. Hey, sex occured.
Now, however, Japan is embracing something even more unlikely — novels for cell phones. , they’re generally downloadable for about $10. One author, Chaco, has written five in the last 14 months, and one of them has sold one million copies.
In North America, at least audio books for iPods are taking off, as the last week. ’s George Murray, who as usual is ahead of The Tyee on all this news, notes that Canada’s is one good source of audio books content.
Two Tyee stories — Charles Demers’ “Will They Ever Stop ‘Hijacking’ Jesus?” and Deborah Campbell’s “What to Read While the Cradle of Civilization Burns” — were among the on the U.S.-based website Alternet. The Tyee shares stories with Alternet, which often picks up Tyee stories with an international slant.
Pro-Palestine activists in Toronto and Montreal have announced — and begun — a campaign to boycott Chapters/Indigo because of a foundation pioneered by majority owners Heather Reisman and Gerry Schwartz.
offers support such as scholarships to “lone soldiers” — foreign nationals without family in Israel who join the Israeli military. The Heseg website describes the ways in they work to ease former soliders into civilian life in Israel.
The leaflet handed out during the Christmas holidays at the campaign’s first picket, outside a Toronto Indigo location on Bloor street, states that Heseg foundation’s board of directors “is stacked with active and retired high level Israeli military personnel,” and goes on to state that by “rewarding and supporting Lone Soldiers who have served in the Israeli military, Reisman and Schwartz provide support for Israel’s military effort”. The leaflet is available from the website.
According to — who says he will now support Chapters/Indigo all the more, despite his anger of their refusal to sell the issue of Alberta’s ultra-conservative Western Standard that reprinted the infamous Danish cartoons — Chapters staff told him “a lie” when they claimed that “extra security” on site was meant to handle the busier holiday season, rather than the picket outside.