Jimmy's House

Ah, the sweet sounds that stir the soul...

2011-11-10T13:45:00.001-08:00

Earlier today I was scrolling through my Google Reader, checking out the latest Dubai and UAE related items, when I came across a post by Geoff Pound on the Fujairah in Focus blog. Geoff is absolutely fabulous at dishing out details about what is going on in the distant Emirate, but his often dry tone can, at times, undercut the significance of what he is writing about.

Today, in particular, I came across a note about a new radio station opening up in Fujairah - 90.8FM. I scanned through the article, but it was only after a slow read that I was able to dig up one tiny mention of the format - rock.

His tone was so matter-of-fact that it was like he was announcing that there would be raspberry scones at the Piffle-and-Forth this coming Tuesday.

I'm betting most readers just scanned through the article, clicking through with either a shrug or a "That's nice." But for me, that one little word cut through all the verbiage, crystallizing in a singular reaction.

What!? Rock!?

I know what you're thinking - whoop-dee-doo. Another rock radio station. And isn't radio dead anyway? Killed by the internet?

If this were Toronto, or somewhere in the US, I might agree. But out here in the Gulf, your only choices for music in the English language are Hip-Hop or Euro-Pop. And if that doesn't suit your fancy, you better start loving the Bollywood stuff, because there really isn't anything else out there.

So this isn't just a rock station. It's the first ever rock radio station in the gulf!

Tonight, driving home, I tuned in. They haven't officially started yet, not until 11am.* But they did have a playlist on, and I tell you, just hearing bands like Def Leppard, Whitesnake, and Green Day...

I know this sounds a bit dramatic, but, man I felt like Jack Black in the School of Rock was my own personal guru, as a visceral sense of relief washed through me through successions of power chords and pounding drums in 4/4 time. It's #$%*@&^ RAWK, man!

Back home I'd vary the dial between new rock, classic rock, alt rock (and a bit of classical, but let's keep it real here, okay?). Not here, however. In this land the deserts have been both sand and sonic.

But not any more.

*Which is kind of an unfortunate time to celebrate an opening, for us Westerners that is... since the start time is the exact moment everyone in the western world will be observing a moment of silence - 11am on November 11th. Otherwise known as "Remembrance Day".

Reverse Halloween

2011-10-31T11:54:00.000-07:00

Seeing as I don't see our family leaving Dubai in the near future, I decided that it would be unfair to let another Halloween pass unheralded. Since we knew that nobody in our building was going to be standing by their door with a basket o' treats for passing little ones, we decided to reverse the process, and bring the treats to them.

So we loaded up our tray with little pumpkins packed with treats, and the girls embarked on their very first Halloween outing.

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There is More Than One Way Show a Cat Video

2011-10-26T13:03:00.000-07:00

There's a well known eLearning advocate I follow, named Scott McLeod (no relation to the comic book scholar...as far as I know!) who writes a blog called Dangerously Irrelevant. Scott has spoken at Tedx conferences, and regularly presents on eLearning related topics, and one of his main pet peeves, that I have noticed, is the tendency of administrators to try to restrict and block access to technologies and services they see as disruptive, like Facebook, or You Tube.

Today he put up a post expressing his sense of frustration with this sort of of behaviour.

Yesterday it was Facebook. Today it's YouTube. Here's an email exchange between two district technology coordinators...

TC1: I have recently completely blocked youtube in our network. Does everyone block youtube? As soon as I blocked it, teachers started complaining. What other websites can they go to that will serve the same purpose as youtube?

TC2: It is blocked here as well!!! I know there is some good to it BUT it is my responsibility to monitor, block, etc. I do not have time to monitor students all day long every day of every week. We have a product called LanSchool and it is awesome. You can view every student that is logged on at any given time and can take over their computer and shut it down as well BUT I cannot do that every day all day long. The teachers have the same capable to monitor as well BUT they are hired to teach. I will not take the responsibility for what they CAN GET IN TO THAT THEY DO NOT NEED TO!!!
It is very disheartening to read this stuff. The federal government is not asking us to do these sorts of things. So we could trust our teaching staff (and - gasp! - our students) but instead we resort to draconian measures that penalize everyone for the potential actions of a few. As I said three years ago, we need to view school organizations like these as ones that are desperately and inappropriately blocking the future

While normally I agree with a lot of what McLeod says, I found my demurring today, and posted this comment in response (I couldn't embed links in my response on his blog, but I have adde them below).

The school system I work for in Dubai also has this restriction, primarily for socio-cultural reasons.Personally, however, I don't mind this restriction, because it doesn't affect my ability to bring streaming video into the classroom.Administrators and IT departments are going to want to restrict access to technologies and services that they feel pose a possible liability risk. It's just their nature. My view is, instead of railing against that, it is better to find another way to accomplish your objectives.

Where I work, we created a linked system of blogs using Google's Blogger platform. And while Blogger is sure to be seen as a bit boring and old fashioned by some, I see it as being like the Ford F-150 of blogging services - a dependable tool that is surprisingly flexible, and comes with an amazing support network.

First, when we want to use video in the classroom, we will embed video in a post that contains all the elements of the lesson - instruction, practice activities, and an assessment. That one post is then used by all the teachers in the same grade and subject for that specific lesson. (Shares the load, promotes equality of instruction).

Since the nature of blogs is dynamic, and not all students or staff have the patience or the knowhow to poke into the blog archive, we also create static pages where videos are collected and embedded, and create links to those pages at the top of a blog.

This system has proven really versatile and useful for all our stakeholders. There's a place for student podcasts which includes student made tech help videos, a place for eLearning resources for staff, and the system is simple enough that even the most tech averse teachers can grasp the basics of how to use it, and in a short time feel comfortable enough to use it in their everyday teaching practice.

Get Video Into the Classroom Without YouTube

2011-10-26T07:25:00.000-07:00

A challenge that many teachers face today is how to bring video resources on the web, found in sites like YouTube, into the classroom at a time when administrators are clamping down on access to such sites.

The method I prefer is embedding videos or media enhanced presentations and resources on a blog via services like LongTail.tv, SlideRocket.com, and even Google Docs.

The method I use for video in particular is a three step process that involves encoding a video, uploading it, and then embedding it.

Rather than just write out the steps, I have created videos that will demonstrate the process

Putting Video on the Blog - Part 1 (Encoding)

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Putting Video on the Blog - Part 2 (Uploading)

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Putting Video on the Blog - Part 3 (Embedding)

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About Drive-Thru Coffee Culture

2011-09-19T07:16:00.000-07:00

A commenter, katCL, posed a very interesting question in the comments to my last post, and I thought I'd put up both the question, and my response to it here.

katCL said...

I don't quite understand the "no drive-through coffee culture here yet" though. When some drivers stop in front of the neighbourhood grocers and blare their horns for assistance, is that not vey similar to the drive-thru concept? Not done in Dubai? It's very common in Abudhabi.

My response...

You are right that there is a sort of drive-in/thru culture in the UAE. But it's of a different sort. There's drive-thru when it comes to a McDonalds or Hardees or Burger King, or drive-in (and Honk! Honk! Honk!) when it comes to a road-side cafeteria. But those are places where you're grabbing a bite to eat.

For fast food, drive thru works here. But when it comes to coffee, the situation is different.

Up until now, coffee in the UAE has been of a very European / Upper-crust American experience. People here are used to sitting down with a latte, or tall and expensive dessert type coffee drink, and spending time with friends. They chat, sip some very sweet caffeine, and while away an hour or two. It's a very social paradigm.

Drive-thru coffee, on the other hand, is a very utilitarian sort of experience. In Canada I would grab a cup on the way to work to help me get ready for the day. Or I'd make a run to Timmies for co-workers who were looking for their morning coffee fix. Generally speaking, however, Timmies was never a place to go to, it was a place to go by, on the way to somewhere else - a hockey game, work, etc. What makes it work in Canada is that we don't use coffee as the setting for socializing, but for the set-up to socializing. (There are some people you just do not talk to before their first cup in the morning.)

I do feel that the UAE is primed for the sort of drive-thru experience that Canadians know so well. And with Tim Hortons, there would be a viable alternative to the inescapable ubiquity of burgers and fries here. I think residents of the UAE would like to roll up in the morning on the way to work, and grab a bagel and cream cheese, or pass by at lunch for a freshly made sandwich. Unfortunately the Tim Hortons corporate people don't have that sense, and are setting up walk in locations only. I think the caution is understandable, from their perspective, after their experience in Ireland. But still, I do hold out hope.

Tim Hortons Invades Dubai

2011-09-18T11:42:00.000-07:00

I'm kind of proud of a sort of achievement of late. I was finally first at some thing.

Specifically, I was the "First Tim Hortons Customer in the UAE".

Yesterday evening the family and I went down to check out the new Timmies on Sheikh Zayed Road, only to learn that it was yet still closed. But, we saw from the sign on the door, it would be open on the morrow.

At that moment, two staff members leaned out the door for a bit of fresh air, and I had a chat with them. "Will Timmies be open at 6am?" I asked. "Do you know what a double-double is?" Yes, it seems. They would, and they did. Well, I thought, we'll see about that in the morning.

I set my alarm for 5:30 am, so that I could be there when the door opened. At 6:15 am, when I actually woke up, 45 minutes after my alarm (Dang you Nokia!), I was on my way.

Would I see a crowd? Would I see a line? There had been absolutely zero advertising about this opening, so I wasn't sure what I would find. Thus it was, at 6:55 am, when I got out of my car, it happened.

As I walked to the store, there were two men outside. One in grey slacks and a white dress shirt , hair slicked back like a Latter Day Saint - obviously a representative from head office - and an older South-Asian gentleman, who appeared to be either a manager or franchise owner. The men saw me and fixed their eyes on me. They looked first at me, then at the Starbucks next door, as if to ask silently "Which way is he going?" But as I passed by the Starbucks door, and tilted my frame towards theirs, it was all smiles, and a loud happy shout from the South Asian fellow.

Inside the store I was greeted by cheering, the entire staff overjoyed to see their very first customer. I came just in time, because shortly after I arrived, the people started wandering in, in twos and threes.

I hope they'll do well. I bought a breakfast, and spent some time grilling the corporate fellow with all the questions I had. Why the cup sizes were different (American sizing), why there were no "Everything" bagels (Can't import poppyseeds), and why there were no drive throughs planned (no drive-through coffee culture here yet). He smiled and answered all my questions, but after the first dozen or so, I bet his internal monologue was slightly less Sunday School-esque.

Yet for all the differences I saw, it still felt like home. The coffee tasted the same, the Sour Cream donut just as soft, and the herb and garlic cream cheese on my bagel was just like I remembered it.

Finally! I can get coffee at a sane price. Instead of paying a ghastly 12 to 20 AED every time I want a cup of coffee, I now only need to pay 7. And for a much better brew.

I'm happy Timmies is here, because now I can get a nice soup, bagel, and coffee for lunch. I can grab a pack of Timbits for my kids, or a French Vanilla for my wife, just like how we used to have it back home.

But as much as I am happy, I also wonder... will this be yet one more thing that makes me so comfortable, so complacent, that I end up not going back at all?

UPDATE: I came back, a day later. The place was absolutely overflowing. They literally could not keep stock on the shelves, and one of the managers I had met from the day before was sitting outside, around the corner from the front door, looking like he was ready to just collapse on the pavement. He recognized me, and as we shook hands, he said "Since you came, it hasn't stopped."

Can I Car?

2011-07-30T08:17:00.000-07:00

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Can I Car Published via LongTail.tv

I recently had the displeasure of being turned away the the Ford "Can a Car?" test drive event at the Dubai Autodrome. I was promised a personal test drive, so here's hoping!

Of Unicorns, Easter Bunnies and Independent Bookstores

2011-06-14T11:06:00.000-07:00

The National Post was channeling The Onion the other day. I love reading interviews with people who make Truthers seem cogent and thoughtful.

When I was reading the interview, I swear that Santa, the Tooth Fairy and even Bunny McEaster stopped by to add their two cents to the wonderfully concocted fantasy reality constructed therein.

Why I even found myself interjecting from time to time!

I thought I might note down a re-cap of the event:

Mark Leslie Lefebvre: I think that the shift and trend towards digital positions independent booksellers as more important than ever. After all, it’s one thing to find something to read, it’s quite another to find something good to read. More is not necessarily better. You can get to the world’s largest buffet but you might need help determining which of the dishes to sample, otherwise you fill your plate with a lot but enjoy little of it.

Moi: You're so right, Mark. The internet is just a bad dream, book bloggers are a figment of the imagination, and I always trust desperate sales staff to consider my wants and needs when buttering me up for a sale.

Mark Leslie Lefebvre: It makes sense that an online company that is all about the Internet and the virtual IS going to see huge successes in the digital/virtual realm.

Moi: I totally see why they made you the manager of a bookstore in Hamilton - You're a smart fella. A company with a market cap of $85 billion, with warehouses around the world, and 33,000 flesh and blood employees totally is all about the virtual.

Alana Wilcox: Most e-tailers offer only a Top 50 or theNew York Times bestsellers — useful if you already know what you’re looking for. But most of my best book finds have been accidental meetings on bookstore shelves, which is nearly [im]possible in the ebook world if you don’t have a search term.

Moi: You tell it! It absolutely is so much easier to discover new writers from disparate parts of the globe in a cramped little bookshop at the corner of Somewhere St. and Out-of-the-Way Dr. than through an e-tailer with worldwide publishing and distribution connections.

Alana Wilcox: We send books out to stores and never know whose bookshelves they end up on. But regular chats with our indie bookselling friends let us know who’s buying our books and why.

Moi: You make a solid point, Alana, Otherwise, how else in the world would a small, indie publishing house that specializes in experimental poetry and fiction know that their work generally appeals to a small group of well educated urbanites with an interest in the avant garde. Lacking this input, you probably would have spent countless hours loading copies of Eunoia on to the book racks at Shopper's Drug Mart.

Becky Toyne: I think indie bookstores will evolve...Daunt’s in London, England, has already started its own publishing imprint to capitalize on its brand. I don’t expect it to be the last to do so.

Moi: La la la! Can't hear you because my fingers are in my ears! Look, Becky, if you're just going to sit there and talk sense, we're not going to listen to you.

Mark Leslie Lefebvre: Even though the bookstore at McMaster has had the ability to print books on demand since 2008 with our Espresso Book Machine, I’ve never thought of Titles bookstore as a publisher – in my mind it has always been about selling books.

Moi: Don't beat yourself up about it, Mark. Absolutely anyone who spent every day for three years staring at the means through which they could profit greatly by cutting out the middle man, and controlling the production and distribution of a product they know intimately would be hard pressed to connect the dots.

Mark Leslie Lefebvre: I think there are huge opportunities for creative collaboration between publishers and booksellers in which both of them discover new wins and new successes.

Moi: And, to add to your point, when publishers soon start shipping books via unicorn, in baskets carefully packed by elves, publishers and booksellers will the see themselves as equals, holding hands, united in purpose, boldly walking forward into a future of harmony and co-prosperity.

The Internet Can't Compare to the Grand Custodians of Literature

2011-06-13T21:32:00.000-07:00

The ever media shy and elusive Margaret Atwood made an appearance in the Wall Street Journal, in a story about her appearance at Book Expo America. What with Book Expo Canada long dead and buried, it's one of the last venues where the books in all their forms and market tested glory are sprayed at an adoring audience.

The most memorable bit -

She described the “serendipitous experience” of walking into a store and picking up two or three unexpected books. She said that unlike the Internet, bookstores provide a filter for customers – they are a modern-day version of hand sellers (earlier, Atwood described how she sold her own first book by going from bookstore to bookstore). Bookstore employees read and make informed guesses as to what their customers would like.

She is so right. The internet is totally unfiltered, so it's just, like, totally impossible to get a personal book recommendation the way those grand old (*sniff*...sorry...nostalgia gets the better of me) librarians used to. Why, I will always remember that one time, in my entire life, when a librarian I knew recommended a book to me. It was such a good book. Yes it was. It was about incest, death, and the tragic loss of innocence of a 12 year old boy.

No, it's not like there are any book blogs, or reviewers out there who passionately engage with their readers about books that have caught their imaginations. I was so used to walking into a Chapters or Indigo and spending a good thirty minutes to an hour with a staff member, discussing my reading wants and needs, and standing there in awe as these noble $10 an hour curators of great literature went out of their way to find the books that were best suited to me.

Oh, wait. Check that. That's just my imagination getting too active. Come to think of it, outside of handwritten book recommendations on the shelves of the science fiction bookstore Bakka in Toronto, not in a single bookstore I have ever entered in my entire life (and I have indeed been known to haunt my share) has there been a friendly staff member who has come up to me to guide me deeper into the worlds of imagination. They'll happily guide my hand into my wallet, but that's where the interaction always begins and ends.

Like everyone else I know, I'd peek at the jacket, hear about a book from a friend, or maybe read about a book in the paper, or (later) online.

Atwood describes an idyllic fantasy that never was. I mean "bookstore employees read and make recommendations?" Since when?

Invariably, whenever I have gone to a clerk to ask something for a recommend, this is the conversation -

"Can you recommend any authors similar in style to (author x)?"
"What genre?"
"Fantasy, I think."
"Fantasy section is over there" Waves a hand vaguely toward the back of the store.
"Oh, uh, okay. How about authors comparable to (author y)?"
"Genre?"
"Mystery/Thriller"
"Mystery section is over there" Waves a hand vaguely towards the back of the store.

Sigh. This bullspit just never ends.

Using Piracy to Turn Your Book into a $$$ Machine

2011-06-12T21:31:00.000-07:00

There's some new thought turning up on the interwebs about the intersection of pirating and the book business, and while the mainstream line is that piracy is always bad, recent events may be adding a caveat on to that.

Sure, if you sell and e-book and someone pirates it, it's bad, because who wants to pay money for another e-copy? But if you are getting the digital copy of a book that can only be truly experienced in a more tactile form.... then pirating becomes marketing.

At least this was the case with the breakout best-selling kids title "Go the F--- to Sleep."

More Prizes Yay Happy Clapping

2011-06-11T21:16:00.000-07:00

John Barber had an interesting piece in the G&B recently, about how the overabundance of literary awards has perverted the course of publishing by creating twisted incentives. Due to this, nobody really reads or reviews books regularly any more.

B.C. native George Bowering, Canada’s first Parliamentary Poet Laureate, notes that he has published 40 books since the inauguration of the B.C. Book Prizes 28 years ago – and has yet to win. But the attention he most misses is different. Books he published as a young man would routinely garner dozens of reviews, according to Bowering. “Now that I am older and a better poet, my books will be lucky to get more than one or two reviews in the papers,” he laments. “How did I know that 1970 was the golden age for books in Canada?”

Absent reviews, publishers need to look to somewhere for validation, and awards are it, now.

Nor do prizes properly honour writers, according to Baird. “For a lot of writers, it’s total agony,” she says. “If your book doesn’t make the short list, you might as well fold up shop and forget about it.” The message is reinforced by publishers who rely heavily on past and hoped-for prizes to shape their lists, according to Baird, often including bonuses for nominations and wins in writers’ contracts and discounting future advances extended to “failures.”

So that's where it's at? If you don't get the blue ribbon, Mommy and Daddy don't love you no more?

Sigh...

Rick-rolling the professor

2011-06-10T22:51:00.000-07:00

This was just awesome.

To see whether his prof actually read his essay, a US Computer Science student, user name Mayniac 182, decided to Rick-Roll his prof in acrostic form.

I love acrostics.

Here's what he did -

Who said poetry wasn't practical?

Are video games the new novels?

2011-06-09T22:48:00.000-07:00

I been sayin' that since I got my first NES back in '89. Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, Zelda... they weren't games so much as stories. And the trend only continued on, moving out of the RPG realm, into RTS, FPS, and various Sim games.

Take a game like Halo... the latest derivation is actually a prequel, where you play the back story to the original three games. What's more, it's structured as a tragedy, as there is no way to win (the end is already known... the protagonists fail, Reach falls to the invasion), but the appeal is in the story, the details. It's no longer the "what" that is the concern, but the "why", the "how", the "who".

It's a lucrative, and viable option for writers... not only do these games require writing for the games themselves, but also for the novels, the cartoons, the movies, and the web series they spawn.

And as for lit-cred... not long ago the idea of a TV show being accorded the same respect as classic and contemporary literature was the stuff of mad men and fools. A complete nonsense idea.

Things change fast. And increasingly faster.

Head up #$% disease - a modern literary ailment

2011-06-08T22:50:00.000-07:00

Saw something in the HuffPo...

Writers of the literary sort tend to be isolated, introverted, yah-dee-yah. They also tend to disdain modern socializing technologies.

The problem is, however, that their potential readers don't, and these technologies have quickly become enormous elements in the discourse of modern life.

As Joanne MacNeil sees it:

The average fictional character is either so thoroughly disinterested in email, social media, and text messages he never thinks of it, or else hastily mentions electronic communications in the past tense. Sure, characters in fiction may own smart phones, but few have the urge to compulsively play with the device while waiting to meet a friend or catch a flight. This ever-present anachronism has made it so that almost all literary fiction is science fiction, a thought experiment as to what life might be like if we weren't so absorbed in our iPhones but instead watched and listened to the world around us at a moment's rest.

Are literary writers anachronizing (not a word, I know, but it works!) their characters by imbuing them with their own authorial techno-uselessness or disdain?

Contemporary readers of contemporary fiction are now running into the same problem that post-Colonial readers had with the all-white, all-male Great Books pantheon. The works don't speak to them, because they do not resemble them.

Now, the other side of the coin is that by imbuing a work with period specific references, it hampers the ability of a work to later be considered "timeless."

I believe there is a certain arrogance in thinking that your work is somehow fit for the ages. Anyone dispensing that advice really is putting the cart before the horse (an anachronistic idiom that is yet somehow still relevant in our hyper-cyber-age!).

But even if you receive the approval of these fuddery gatekeepers of eternal lit, what they think and feel has no bearing on what time will bring.

A few years ago, I met with Ross King, who wrote "The Judgment of Paris" and he spoke about Ernest Meissonier, who, in the 18th Century was perhaps the most famous and celebrated artist in the empire. Of all the artists whose work and fame would survive through the ages, all were certain Meissonier would be foremost of them all.

Within decades of his death, his work had been derided, his name forgotten, and his art, which had once commanded sums only kings and emperors could afford, barely drummed up a pauper's two-pence and ha'penny.

All of which has led me to think that there's little point in writing for the ages. Write for today, if history decides that your work is worth remembering, count it a blessing, happenstance, or luck. No more.

Career options for MFA graduates

2011-06-07T22:44:00.000-07:00

If you are wondering what use you could put your newfound MFA skills to, Michael Savitz's article in Slate "Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman" seems like a great place to start!

If I ever get back into the interviewing biz, I am so going to list all the excess books I get on Amazon, to at least defray the cost of bus fare.

Re-writing the real world

2011-06-06T22:32:00.000-07:00

This isn't really writing related, but I had to pass it on.

It is inspirational, for sure.

It's the story of Bharti Kumari, of Kusumbhara, Bihar.

Makes me feel kind of embarrassed that I'd think of myself as a teacher also.

Inspired me to inflict poetry on y'all.

(Using text from the article)

Bharti Kumari

Under a peepal tree,
her people.
Dalits , from four to ten.
For an hour or so, every day,
the air fills with
the steady rhythm of the alphabet.

Orphaned, found, adopted,
brought up as part of the family
until a loose wire, and fire
killed her new mother,
and brought her a new life.

She has had head lice for nine months
and this has provoked the fever,
but one of her teachers,
a smiling young woman, fondly
acknowledges that she is a middling student,
no more proficient at her studies than her peers.

Wearing her uniform, she eats her roti
in the small room that is a bedroom,
dining room, and living room, all in one.
Ill as she is, as soon as she recovers,
she will resume her role.

There is hope in the little school
under the peepal tree.

Should you still buy paper books?

2011-06-05T22:16:00.000-07:00

I still buy paper books...indeed I find myself drawn to the enormous Kinokuniya Book World in the Dubai Mall every time I pass by, and the new cherry wood writing desk I got for myself when we moved to a new flat is already a bit overfull with paperbacks.

This summer I've been thumbing through Aarvind Adiga, Stephen King, Joe Abercrombie, Diana Gabaldon, and a few more, and while I still enjoy the tactile sensation provided by these books, the rolling from side to side on the bed, trying to get the light to hit the page just right, and all the other rituals associated with paper books, when I finish the last page, my mood changes. Why? Because when I am done, I have this book, this now useless lump of paper and glue, which no longer holds any wonder and surprise for me, and has become merely another object always getting in my way.

I could lend these books to colleagues or friends, but too few of them read, and only one (that I know of) will read fiction from time to time. So that's not an option. I also can't throw them away. I'm physically able to, but can't bring myself to, can't overcome a lifetime of conditioning where books were sacred objects, to be treated with respect. So that's out. I could sell then to the used book store, but in these economic times, I'm lucky to get 5 cents on the dollar on the deal, and end up losing money on the deal when I factor in the cost of gas. So forget that.

What to do?

I have donated books to the library from time to time, but when I learned that not one donation I'd given had ever been read or even checked out a single time, it felt really depressing. I'll still keep donating my books when I am done, because I just don't want them cluttering up my place for no good reason. But it is hardly the ideal.

With my e-books, I can delete them when I am done, with no compunction whatsoever. When I am done, and I've gotten my money's worth, I can trash the file and go on to the next file with no fuss, and no muss.

The only thing that really keeps my from going fully into e-books is that I can't get a lot of my favorite authors easily. I can't buy Kindle books from out here, so I am left with either MobiPocket books for my Nokia (or titles from Fictionwise or Gutenberg), or buying from Kobobooks or iBooks for my iPod Touch. They have a good sized list of authors, but it is nowhere near comprehensive, and backlists are really wanting.

Worse... the prices are still way too high for new release fiction. I understand that hardcovers cost a lot to produce, which factored into that original pricing, but I can go see a movie for $10, a movie that cost $100 Million to make, yet a novel that only really cost the publisher pocket change and the time it took for the writer to hide from the world and pound it out does not seem like it is worth $27 to $40 when the cost of distribution and publishing is essentially zero.

Perhaps we'll just have to wait and see how it all plays out.

Goodbye cruel publishing world

2011-06-04T22:13:00.000-07:00

Seth Godin has sworn off heroin...err...traditional publishing, mostly because he's tired of hauling ass across the country into little bookstores nobody goes to, to see people who would rather crack open a Bud and check Facebook.

Seth has a way with words, but it is a sentiment I have heard expressed more and more often lately.

A lot of the authors I really like now have blogs (Neil Gaiman, C.J. Cherryh, David Brin, etc...) or twitter feeds, and they really do encourage their readership to interact with them and invest themselves into their fictional universes.

Yet when you encounter those same authors through their Publisher's website, you often find stale, outdated material, a site that is difficult to navigate, and pretty much zero in the way of interaction.

It's kind of like they can't be bothered by the distractions of the world around them. They are like a bad parent focused on something to such an extent that they not only not notice their kid tapping their shoulder, crying, wanting something to eat, but they swing at them absently while wishing that the little buzzing thing would go away and leave them be.

No, they are not stealing your stuff

2011-06-03T22:08:00.000-07:00

The list of the most pirated books came out a little while ago, and other than the Twilight books, no novels made the top ten.

Come to think of it, that means that no novels made the top ten.

:-)

So unless you are re-translating the Kama Sutra, or knee deep in a Secrets of Photoshop user guide, the internet is probably more your friend than enemy.

From Macleans:

According to BitTorrent’s tally of nefarious downloads, the literary pirates of the world are not interested in Dan Brown. The No. 1 illegal download of 2009 was the “Kama Sutra,” the ancient Indian manual for so many things sexual, which just managed to beat out number two: “Adobe Photoshop Secrets.” As commentators have noted, the two books may well have been downloaded by the same people for entirely related purposes. So too, perhaps was the number three finisher, “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Amazing Sex,” possibly stolen by those who found No. 1 too hard to follow. There’s no explaining number four, “The Lost Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci,” but the fifth-place finisher, “Solar House–A Guide for the Solar Designer,” may reflect a surge in pregnancies. More sex began the second half of the list, “Before Pornography–Erotic Writing In Early Modern England,” which edged out the entire sublimated-sex “Twilight” vampire trilogy at number seven. “How To Get Anyone To Say YES–The Science Of Influence” (number eight) and ninth-place finisher “Nude Photography–The Art And The Craft,” possibly reflect a desire to move on from sublimation. Rounding out the list, and possibly the average pirate’s real daily life, is “Fix It–How To Do All Those Little Repair Jobs Around The Home.”

Walking a Moment in Another Person's Thoughts

2011-06-02T22:06:00.000-07:00

It's like found art, or found poetry, but instead of coming away with an artifact, you come away with the barest hint of another person's consciousness.

Perhaps I overstate it a little, but try it out a bit, and you will see. It can be, at times, disheartening and disturbing, then by turns enlightening and surprising.

What is it? Why, it's Mystery Google. Where you type in a search query, but what it returns is not your query, but the query of the one who came before you.

The Decline of the English Department

2011-06-01T22:04:00.000-07:00

A while ago, William M. Chace posted a piece up at The American Scholar.org called The Decline of the English Department.

Chace bemoans the sorry state of English departments across the land, as the number of undergraduates studying English has roughly halved over the past thirty years.

As a story addict, who would love nothing more than to wallow in books for the rest of my days, I feel for the guy.

But I have to say that the fellow has a real Pollyanna streak in him.

What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself.

I swear, I fell off my chair.

The decline is due to students not seeing the study of literature as a human good?

Charity is a human good, but that has never resulted in Humanitarian Aid programs becoming oversubscribed.

If anything, the root of the decline of English as a major is the failure of departments of English across the country to show undergraduates how the study of English can make them filthy, stinking rich.

Or at least very well off.

It's not like 1 in 5 students go into the study of business because they find Johnson & Johnson and GE case studies to be enthralling, life changing experiences. They take business because they hope that, some fine day, they can whiz by in an S Series Mercedes, splashing mud from the previous evening's rainstorm all over the hunched line of English majors sitting on the sidewalk, panhandling for enough change to buy themselves a bite to eat.

It's about not having to choose between Royale and No Name Brand toilet paper, preferring instead to use hand stitched rolls of $100 dollar bills.

As Ice Cube says, "It's all about the Benjamins."

Truth in Fairy Tales

2011-05-31T22:03:00.000-07:00

There is an old Aesop fable "The Crow and the Pitcher," where a crow comes across a half empty pitcher, and begins to drop in pebbles until the water rises high enough for the crow to drink. The moral or lesson being that necessity is the mother of invention.

Well, that old child's tale may turn out to have been more fact than fiction.

The following was reported in the Independent on Sunday, about an experiment carried out by faculty from Cambridge and the University of London:

Scientists have found that rooks – a member of the crow family – were able to figure out how to raise the water level in a laboratory container by dropping stones inside to retrieve a tasty worm floating on the surface.

Four different rooks, called Cook, Fry, Connelly and Monroe, quickly discovered that they could raise the water level in a transparent container by adding stones, just like the mythical crow in the fable, which illustrates the virtue of ingenuity and how necessity is the mother of invention.
P.S. I thought this was a humorous side note - one of the experimenter's names is Jonathan Bird.

The History of History

2011-05-30T22:02:00.000-07:00

It appears that historians and archaeologists are going to have to re-evaluate everything they know about pre-historical man. A 35,000 year old bone flute has been discovered. As Bruce Sterling comments:

Quote:

I’d be betting good money that this Neanderthal-contemporary flute music not only existed: it had accompanying oral poetry, and it had *genres.*

The guy who buil[t] this flute was accompanying people singing, and they were singing something that, even to them, was very, very old.

The 100 Most Beautiful Words

2011-05-29T22:01:00.000-07:00

alphaDiction claims to have identified the 100 most beautiful words in the English language.

I dunno. Seems like beauty is correlated with sibilance. Quite an ethnocentric view of beauty in my opinion.

"Mellifluous" I can see. But "Onomatopoeia?" Dunno about that one.

And what is is with all those sibilant sounds? If we truly do find them beautiful, then no bloody wonder the serpent got those two fools in the garden to eat that apple!

A Book is a Book, No Matter the Form

2011-05-28T21:54:00.000-07:00

That's the question that Ann Kirschner poses in her article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The gist of the question is whether reading is important, the story or the ideas, or the format in which those stories or ideas come. Ten years ago this question would have been patently ridiculous, but today it is entirely pertinent.

It struck Kirschner, when she reached up for her old Penguin paperback copy of Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, that there were other ways she could experience the story. Were those ways better, or worse? That, she didn't know, so in the true spirit of scientific inquiry, she decided to try an experiment.

As Kirschner states, she "decided to read Little Dorrit four ways: paperback, audiobook, Kindle, and iPhone."

With the paperback version, Kirschner felt that flood of returning memories, a la Ratatouille, when something tangible comes into contact with the senses and sparks a cascade of old memories, locked away for so long. It brought her back to her graduate days, where she first fell in love with, as she says, "the Victorian novel."

To each their own, I guess.

But something she hints at, but doesn't directly state, is that the nostalgia fueled state actually distracts from the story itself. Those memories, those tactile reminders make reading in that manner as much about the reader as the story.

So it was on to the audiobook. I felt much the same way as she, though one particular insight struck me -
Audiobooks also impose a certain discipline. I think of this as real-time reading: The author and narrator control your pace, and it is impractical to skim ahead or thumb back to another section. For Dickens, so naturally cinematic and plot-driven, that can have a breathtaking effect.
By golly, what she is describing is the experience of the story as human beings had known it from the dawn of time. Sure we mostly read now, but I bet you that somewhere deep inside ourselves, programmed into our DNA over countless millenia, is a predisposition for engaging stories in this manner.

Kirschner loved the audiobook format so much that it was all she could to do force herself to the last half of the experiment. And this is where it really gets interesting.
I abandoned the Kindle edition of Little Dorrit almost as soon as I read one chapter on my iPhone. Kindle, shmindle. It does almost nothing that an iPhone can't do better — and most important, the iPhone is always with me. Woody Allen had it right: Seventy percent of success in life is showing up. Yes, the Kindle's reasonable imitation of a book is an advantage, but not enough to outweigh the necessity to carry an extra object and its power plugs

The only time I relied on my Kindle was on vacation last year. All the grown-ups on beach chairs seemed to have one, as if we all had obeyed some secret command to buy Kindles and wear sunscreen. In fact, readers 50 or older are the largest group of Kindle buyers. Therein lies the clue to Kindle's short life. Middle-aged readers think that the dimension of the screen is critical. It's not: The members of the generation that grew up playing Game Boys and telling time on their cellphones will have absolutely no problem reading from a small screen.
In the end, Kirschner's key observation was that while she loved books, she loves reading even more. As she says, it is "the sustained and individual encounter with ideas and stories that is so bewitching. If new formats allow us to have more of those, let us welcome and learn from them."

I couldn't agree more.

You know, while I am an unabashed technophile, I am also a cash strapped technophile. I love the idea of the Kindle, but have no experience with one myself, especially since they don't sell them in this part of the world. I'd love to try reading on an iPhone, but they do cost a pretty penny, and I am afraid to buy one if only because I have a tendency to regularly and forcefully drop my phones on hard surfaces. So I've forgone the pleasure and status bump that owning an iPhone brings, (but I did the second best thing and get an iPod Touch.)

Lack of cool gadgets aside, there are still ways to try out Kirschner's experiment. My own version included the normal book, the audiobook, the e-book in the form of a laser printed sheaf of paper, and the e-book on the computer screen.

Overall, when executed right, I love the audiobook format more than anything. But more often than not the execution is not right, the reading voice or cadence is off, and it is simply impossible to get through a longish short story, let alone a full on novel.

The book itself is still great. Hardcover, paperback, or trade paper back, all have their advantages and disadvantages. When you read massive books like I do, the hardcovers can be hard to read in bed, and hard to carry around. The trade paperbacks don't fit in a pocket easily, and are quite conspicuous when read in public. The paperbacks are my preferred option, but again, when reading those massive epics I face problems. Instead of heft, I have to deal with print size, tilting the book to catch the light since the pages flow into a dark canyon in the center of the book, and doing anything about that only ends up snapping the spine or creating myriad creases that scream "abuse!" This makes the paperback version ultimately disposable, since there is little point in keeping a broken and damaged book laying around for everyone to look at.

Then there is the laser printed sheaf of papers. I got to buying e-books from Baen, or downloading them from Gutenberg.org, and not wanting to lug around my laptop, stuck to a power outlet since the battery only lasts two hours, I would print them out. At first I printed them out one-sided, but quickly found that to be a waste of paper. Even double sided wasn't much better. But when I got to printing them two to a side of paper, I had hit the sweet spot. The text was the same size as that in a paperback novel, but there was more page area, and no dark crevasse in the center. Best of all, a 600 page novel ended up as a 150 page stack of paper, which cost, after ink and paper are added together, only a few bucks, really. Far less than the average $12 to $15 plus tax I was used to spending years ago. And, best of all, you can recycle the paper, which you cannot do for paperbacks.

But that's not all. I found that, when reading a sheaf of papers in public, it looks more like I'm reading a lawyerly brief than a work of fiction. Even at work, I can seem to be "working" when actually I am just kicking back and enjoying myself. To all and sundry it seems like I am reading for work and not for fun, which is an important distinction.

Though I know many avid readers where I work, they all forgo the pleasure of reading as to the many avid non-readers there, opening up a novel smacks of goofing off, and being seen to do so, on the job, can lead to expressions of concern from management. So the avid readers keep their books at home, and spend their time looking busy, and reading, where else, on the computer.

Of the colleagues I have spoken with, I am about the only one who actually does read novels and short stories on the computer. Of course I have a daily diet of gads of web pages, as the constant stream from news sites and blogs lands in my Google Reader account every moment of the day. Due to this, most of the reading I do on the computer is of short, to medium length articles, with a few magazine pieces, though I tend to print out the magazine pieces at home, later, if they go beyond 15 or so pages. There is something about staring, in a concentrated manner, into a constant light source that unnerves me. And while I have read many, many novels on this beat up old Dell, I've never felt physically good afterward. I've always felt a little queasy, with a bit of a headache on the side. Reading a novel is not like reading a blog post. With fiction, if you fall into a state of deep reading, your eyes are basically fixed on the screen for up to hours at a time. It's the visual equivalent cranking the cranking the volume on your iPod every time you wear it. Slowly, but surely, it causes irreparable damage.

So reading novels on the computer really is not something I prefer. Hardcovers are far to expensive and wasteful, since I don;t like rereading books, and I long ago lost my compulsion to display chunks of dead tree to guests who are not in the least interested. Trade paperbacks are the best from a tactile standpoint, but too conspicuous, and paperbacks, long the main for of book I bought, are wasteful. They are eminently disposable, and the only way I have to alleviate the waste that attends after I finish a paperback is to donate the book to my school library. Considering how much less it costs just to print the book off at home, it's like writing a big fat cheque to the library, and my bank account does not currently condone this practice.

So what's the best method I've found to enjoy e-books?

A stack of papers it is. Held together by a butterfly clip, with pages quietly placed disappearing as the story progresses. Until, with a page left, and one page in the hand, it is as if the story itself, now played out, has faded away into the mists.

Or... reading off my new iPod Touch, which is turning out to be a sublime experience in itself.

The Perversity of Copyright

2011-05-27T21:52:00.000-07:00

Cory Doctorow has gone and made some more sense in The Guardian a while back with an article where the title really tells us the whole story - When love is harder to show than hate.

[O]ne of the most perverse elements of copyright law [is] the reality that loving something doesn't confer any right to make it a part of your creative life.

And there's the rub, eh. Like those little kids who loved all things Harry Potter, who probably bought every book, paid full admission for every theatre ticket, and even paid for official Harry Potter (TM) merchandise, who were then treated like base thieves for writing about what they love and trying to be more a part of that universe themselves.

How sick is that?

I myself have paid some $250 on the books, and close to that on theatre admission, and then I paid a further $200 for the DVDs. All told, Rowling Enterprises has pulled a good $600 out of my pocket. I can pay that for a Playstation 3 and go online and go hog wild writing about how great the system is, designing my perfect imaginary game, and no one would blink. I could buy $600 worth of Coca-Cola, give it to all and sundry, write Coca-Cola themed stories and blog about Coca-Cola themed recipes, and all that would happen is the company giving me a thumbs up for helping out brand awareness. Yet were I to wax rhapsodic on Harry and 'is chums, and maybe pen a little piece about the place they put that thing that time, and 'ol J.K's pitbulls would be feasting on my kneecaps in no time.

That's some seriously messed up stuff.

Better Book Titles

2011-05-26T21:50:00.000-07:00

Have you ever thought that a book's title could be re-written to better evoke the story?

I'm sure a few of you have seen this already, but in case you haven't, check out Better Book Titles.

Here are a few of my favorites.

John Milton: Paradise Lost

Richard Ford: The Sportswriter

Herman Melville: Moby Dick

William Shakespeare: Hamlet

J.K Rowling: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

And, perhaps my favorite...Not from the Better Book Titles site, but was mentioned in reference to the site on Language Log

Strunk & White: The Elements of Style

Uncomfortable Plot Summaries

2011-05-25T21:46:00.000-07:00

Postmodernbarney has written a longish list of re-evaluated plot summaries of iconic movies and television shows.

My favorite, thus far, are the ones for Titanic and Deadwood.

Has anyone done this for iconic novels?

Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let You Go "Cloned children learn about life, love, and donating all their organs to their owners."

On Found Poetry

2011-05-24T21:24:00.000-07:00

I really like found poetry. Perhaps that is because I find myself more able as an editor than as a writer.

My old Prof, Richard Telecky, told me I'd make a great editor. As an aspiring writer, I took it as a backhanded compliment at the time (which it probably was, he was just that sort of guy...), but have come to see that in a different light.

When writing a found poem, you should cite the source first, to clearly establish where the material came from.

I'd also add one rule.... for poems that are put online, it would be prudent to add hyperlinks to the source material.

Anyhow... my found poem of the day, discovered while reading the paper on the pot after work this afternoon.

One caveat (my big mouth) the link I have is a link to the online article, which seems to have been changed and differs from the print article (which I could link to on the ePaper version... but first I'd have to sign up, and oh, it's too much bother now! ). This poem is based on the print version.

The article:

Cook turned burglar lands in police net
The Gulf News
December 1, 2010

The found poem I took from the article:

Cultural Niceties

An Asian cook
attacked housewives
with a knife
attempted
to rape them
before robbing their houses

He stalked his victims for days
to make sure they were alone
in the house when he struck

Once the victim opened the door
he would attack her
attempt
to rape her and
rob the house before leaving

How podcasting works

2011-05-23T22:19:00.000-07:00

For the listener:

For listeners, podcasts are like radio shows recorded on a DVR. They don't have to listen to them when they happen, but download them to listen to them later, at their own convenience.

For the maker:

Everyday entertainment used to be entirely broadcast, but due to technology, broadcasting is being replaced by podcasting. The reason, simply put, is cost. It costs a ton to have a studio, to create content, and to broadcast it either through the air, or via cable. But podcasting doesn't have this capital heavy drawback.

It costs nothing for the software to make podcasts, there are many places where you can upload your files for free, and you can distribute them at no cost through iTunes, or various feed readers.

Making a podcast is super. You can do it in bits and pieces and stitch it together. For example, you might record your poems, and send the audio file to me. I might record an interview, and someone else sends me a recording of heir short story. I take these files, pop them into the show template in my audio program, then I write a little monologue to go with the bits, record that, and voila! A podcast is done.

Podcasts are actually perfect for people who are creative and engaged, but have busy, disparate schedules that would make ever meeting in the same time and place impossible.

My New Podcast

2011-05-23T21:50:00.000-07:00

Recently I started up a podcast for my Masters program at UBC. I am working towards an MFA in Creative Writing (so eminently useful and practical, I know...), and there had been a discussion going on in the program for some time about starting a journal, or a magazine, and while there had been slight mention about podcasting, it wasn't until this year when a couple of students got going on the discussion boards, with some serious intent, about really starting a podcast.

Well, I had spent a few years in radio, and had been podcasting as far back as 2001, before the term podcasting had been coined, and before, in fact, the iPod had even been introduced!

I'd taken a hiatus for a couple of years from 2007 to 2009, but in 2010, at the request of my boss, I got back into podcasting in a serious way.

So when the call came for starting a podcast, I was ready to go. I contact the principals in that discussion, all full of vim and vigor, and immediately got back a response, which in essence was - "I appreciate your enthusiasm, but we need to form a committee, discuss what a podcast might be like, form an editorial board, gather a larger group of people to take part in the communal decision making..." and it went on.

Nothing, nothing like a podcast ever happens by committee. There always needs to be a driving force. A center. A focus. Other people are brought in, encouraged to contribute, but you always need someone with their foot on the gas.

So after few more e-mails where I tried to persuade them to just start the ball rolling, at least, I got nowhere. Why, these folks even felt the need to go on the boards and obliquely mock me ("We need to build something that will last...not just be some guy who will flame out").

You know, that's cool. That's fine. I let them know that I was sorry they felt this way, and that I'd be going ahead and getting a show going, and that I was looking forward to listening to their podcast when it got rolling. But, that said, I wanted to get a move on, and I did.

That same week, the podcast was up and running.

I made a website, a comments wall, an email address, set up the online storage, and produced the first episode. I've recently submitted the podcast to iTunes for consideration, and I am waiting to hear back from them. From what I read, I may have jumped the gun, because they like to see at least three episodes in the can before they consider it.

Episode 2 came out last week, and I am working on number three as we speak. So maybe I'll just have to resubmit it later!

It's a funny thing when you tell people you are going to do something, then you go do it. More often than not, those same people are "caught off guard" or "surprised." I got word from my program administrator that a few people were upset. Luckily, there were far, far more people who were eager and enthusiastic about taking part.

So now it's "On with the Show!"

Thoughts on Copyright

2011-05-23T21:16:00.000-07:00

I you look at the origins of copyright, and go back to the Statute of Ann, the actual purpose of this first copyright law was in the title of the statute - An Act for the Encouragement of Learning.

The idea was to compensate content creators enough that they had reason to continued to add new work to the commons. The intent and purpose being the overall education and enrichment of culture and society. That is, it was about helping to preserve and extend a public good.

Today copyright has gone far beyond that. It has drifted away from it's roots as something which seeks to create a balance between interests in order to create a public good, and has become a way to entrench the economic interests of creators and distributors at the expense of consumers.

Take the provisions regarding photographers, at least in Canada... right now if you commission a photographer to take pictures of your wedding or bar mitzvah, those pictures are yours, as in, you have the copyright to them. You can take them, put them online, make copies, whatever you want. But under the proposed new act, those pictures no longer belong to you. If you put them up on your Facebook page, the photographer has the legal right to then sue you for copyright infringement, unless you pay him a fee for the right to share "your" photos with others.

Avoiding Trouble

2011-05-22T23:15:00.000-07:00

Following up on yesterday's story about how a UAE Naval Officer ended up in the Uncle Slammer in Rhode Island, The National has an article out today about an awareness campaign aimed at helping Emiratis navigate the laws of other countries, to avoid getting in trouble.

I find this somewhat refreshing, as generally the articles I have read are about how foreigners should know and respect the laws of the UAE. Which they should. No argument there. But reciprocity is always a good thing.

The article, however, seems to be rife with subtext that is as humorous as it is enlightening. Why, for example, did Ambassador Issa Masoud, the director of Emirati affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs feel the need to say this? -

And when you treat people, you have to not be arrogant, especially at the borders and at government buildings," he said. "Don't forget you are not in your country."

Is this an issue that has come up in the past? Like with the Italians at the World Cup in Japan in 2003?

It's a prudent warning. Don't be an Ugly American, or British Yob. Be humble. Be respectful. I think this is a necessary caution not just for Emiratis, but for anybody, anywhere.

Like I said, it's good advice, but it's not what the article is about. The article wasn't written to address courtesy in general, but to address a more specific point. The core of the article is what comes next, and it directly relates to yesterday's story. The Ambassador goes on to say:

Families travelling with a housemaid should also exercise caution, he said.

The ministry advises employers to pay their maids salaries in line with the host country's minimum wage while abroad, particularly when travelling in Europe. This would "avoid trouble from them running away to human rights".

In light of the current climate, I will forgo any and all comment on this beyond that of a wry smile.

It is always best to avoid trouble.

E-book or Not to E-book

2011-05-22T21:00:00.000-07:00

I got this from a professor in my program - Zsuzsi Gartner. It's sort of a survey writers.

1.) Let's say you have a finished manuscript (any genre) and a publisher makes you the following offer for an advance against royalties:
-$15,000 for hardcover (or top quality tradepaper with french flaps) original and e-book.
OR
-$20,000 is only published as e-book.

Industry standard royalty rates apply after the advance has been paid off.

Which would you accept?

My response...

Let's do a rundown on the economics of publishing.

COSTS OF BOOKS

Physical Books

Take an average Trade Paperback and set the price at $20. The cost of printing accounts for 10% of the price ($2) leaving the remainder for the Distributor (10%... $2), the Retailer (40% - $8), the Publisher (45% - $9) and YOU (15% - $3).*

e-Books

The average e-Book costs $10 a copy. There is no print cost or distribution cost. The costs are Retailer (30% - $3), Publisher (55% - $5.50) and YOU (15% - $1.50)**

The goal line I'll establish is a modest yearly salary - $30,000.***

For TP and eBook simultaneous release ($20 per copy - most publishers match these prices for the initial sales period)

TP/eB - 10,000 copies
HC - 5,000 copies

For e-Book only

eB - 20,000 copies

What to do? The easy, quick money is to do the e-Book. You need sales of 3300 copies (HC) or 6600 (TP) to earn the $20,000 the e-Book deal gets you. But will that many copies of your books fly off the shelves? Sales of 3300 hardcovers is a lot more than most Canadian authors usually achieve.

However, if you knock it out of the park, and your book starts going an extra print run or two, and you hit 10,000 copies sold, your earnings will hit $60,000. To do the same with an e-Book, sales would have to hit 40,000 copies.

10,000 is a lot easier to hit than 40,000.****

What would you do? Before you decide, here is a little background info...

In Canada, sales of 5,000 copies makes a book a "bestseller", but it can takes months or even years to reach that amount.

Also, the key issue for e-books is the date at which an author regains control of their back list. Control of titles allows for control of price point, which is where authors can really start to reap financial rewards. But publishers are very reluctant to give this to authors.

*Industry standard is between 8% - 15%, so you could be getting as little as $1.60 per book. Even less if the publisher has to slash prices at the request of the distributor or the merchant.

**If your publisher is a jerk, and gave you 8%, if you foolishly accepted the offer instead spitting in his face and self-publishing with a full 70% royalty, you'd get $0.80 a copy.

***15% of your earning go to your agent (Can't forget them!), so you would need to increase your sales figures by that amount to hit $30,000.

****This is the true crux of the issue. Do you take the lower advance in order to have a hardcover or two, and legit author creds before going it alone, or do you just go it alone form the get go. Earning $30,000 only requires sales of 4,285 copies at $10 each if you are getting the full 70% royalty. When you add in the agent fees to hardcover sales, to get $60,000, you would only need to sell 8,570 copies of e-Books, compared to the 11,764 hardcovers you would need to sell. It is a LOT easier to sell a $10 book than a $40 book.

It's Not Really About the Money

2011-05-21T21:37:00.001-07:00

In The National today, there is a story about a UAE Naval Officer in court in the US over a civil and criminal matter. The charge is that he held an unpaid Filipina worker in the United States.

At some point the maid escaped, reached the authorities, and brought a civil suit against her former employer. At the same time, US authorities have levied a criminal charge of lying to government authorities, and visa fraud.

What is interesting about this case is the perception of it on both sides of the cultural divide.

The maid in question had worked for the family for three years, and when they went to the US, her employer took her passport and forbid her from leaving the house without an escort.

In the Middle East they call that a sensible precaution to keep the maid from running away. In the US they call that imprisonment and (if the charges of not being paid are true) enslavement.

Here is the key part of the article:

Prosecutors said he brought a woman from the Philippines to the United States to work as a maid, then took her passport and did not pay her or allow her to leave the home without an escort.

Mr Corrente said Mr al Ali employed the woman as a babysitter in Abu Dhabi for more than three years before moving the family to the United States last July.
They had entered into an employment contract before the move and the woman was paid $19,000 (Dh69,700) in full for the year, he said. But, he said, the woman disappeared after three months and "now claims she never received any of the money".

Though the situation is not all that funny for those involved, for third parties like myself, the hilarious thing here is that the defendant and lawyer think this issue is only about the money, that resolving the money issue would make it all go away.

But the issue is not really the money at all. The issue is freedom. To the Americans, this officer basically imprisoned a free human being in his house, making them a slave, and denied them their human rights as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. That's the way the Americans see it.

Not paying wages? That's a civil matter. Unlawful imprisonment? That's a much bigger deal.

According the US customs law, the officer can legally bring a domestic employee with him, and there is a special visa for that, but there are also special rules, namely that in the United States, the employer has to pay at least the prevailing minimum wage for the state they are visiting.

The officer in question stated that he paid $19,000 up front, before coming to the US. But the maid claims to have received none of that. Whatever the case may be, the prevailing minimum wage in Rhode Island is $7.40 an hour, and the custom for domestic labour in the Middle East is that they are on duty 24 hours a day, with a day off every two weeks (if they are lucky). Using this as a guide, then the officer would have to have paid his maid over $60,000 to comply with state and federal laws.

Thus the visa fraud charge.

But even though that is the actual criminal charge, what motivates it is in fact the breach of rights committed, and this is where the culture clash can cause difficulty.

In the Middle East, many families keep a tight rein on their domestic employees not because they are mean or evil, but because they are legally responsible for what their employee does. If that employee breaks laws, the employer's neck is on the line as well. In many countries in the Middle East, where sex outside of marriage is a criminal offense, there is indeed a powerful incentive for employers to ensure that their employees do not have the chance to get entangled in some sort of romantic dalliance.

In the US, however, the situation is different. There are no laws like those in the Middle East, and if an employee committed a crime, the employer is not liable.

The naval officer was really only acting as he felt was right and proper, and being in the land of opportunity where there is a much stronger chance that his maid would run off to find work elsewhere, I am sure he felt he was acting in a prudent, and responsible manner. They signed a contract, he needed her services, end of story on his part.

But Americans see it differently. They see a woman trapped, unpaid, and with the seizure of her passport, almost literally chained.

That's the real issue. Not the money.

Transforming Libraries

2011-05-21T20:54:00.000-07:00

Recently I've been coming across stories about famous authors trying to save libraries, or just whingeing about how libraries are fading away.

But what is happening to libraries... perhaps it is inevitable in some respects.

What function do libraries really serve anymore? If Armageddon hit tomorrow, and all electronic communications were wiped out... libraries sure would come in handy. But outside of that?

Yes, libraries have served their purpose for centuries. Our modern civil society would not have been possible without libraries standing as the backbone, supporting education and the common good.

But the time has come to ask a simple question - why would people go to a library today?

To take out books? Okay, but books are quite cheap, and millions of titles are freely available online. What else? To use the internet? In some rural communities, libraries still serve as useful access points for the internet. But beyond that, what?

I think a revolution in thought about what constitutes a library is needed.

For an analogy, I'll use mobile phones. Today when you buy a mobile, it is not just a phone, it is also a camera, a voice recorder, and a basic to advanced computer. Phone manufacturers would never dream of trying to sell us on plain old "no bells and whistles, only makes calls" phones today, because they probably would not sell.

In his grumpy rant, Phillip Pullman unintentionally hints at a way libraries could be saved - by transforming.

The cost of a stand-alone library is huge. But what if the library was also a day-care? What if it was also a place where meeting rooms could be rented out for presentations or night classes? What if they had tutoring businesses attached to them?

The problem with libraries is not a problem of funding. It is a problem of imagination.

There is just something so odd in how our society takes this view that certain institutions, like libraries, or schools, have to be a certain way. The average classroom looks no different than classrooms of two hundred years ago. Students sitting at desks, in rows, looking at a teacher who will "fill them" with knowledge.

It's garbage.

It was fine for the time, but times have changed. The economic underpinnings of our society (developed, western) has completely changed several times over the past two hundred years. We went from agrarian to industrial to information to service and creativity.

Everything about our society has changed and evolved continuously, except for those institutions that are the bedrock of our common good. Police departments have changed and evolved. Fire departments have changed and evolved. But our schools and libraries are sinking rocks in a sea of change.

It's time for them to smarten up.

Reflections in the Half-Sleep Before Waking

2011-05-20T10:54:00.000-07:00

the beer and your hockey sweater, as you drank in anger
and let out rage
because the toys had been left in the hallway again
but I can never seem to remember what came after

the sound of a footstep at the door
inside the locked bathroom, I explored
and your chilling words
"what are you doing in there?"

laughing, looking left, right,
then down at your back tire my front one touched it
I never knew, never thought, blood
could flow so freely

the party, near midnight, the ball on TV
you, everyone, were drinking, laughing, arguing
and I sat on the couch, reading
because only the books would talk to me

the look of pure rage, hate
baseball bat in hand as you hollered and chased me
the egg still visible on your bay window through the bushes
as I got away

a beloved cousin, trusted, looked up to
inviting me up a hill pointing to the distance
then pissing on my leg as I turned to look
and seeing the multitude of fists seeking my company

becoming a super-hero one summer aboard ship
running to the wheelhouse, not seeing the hole in the deck
and becoming "Captain Gravity"
down-to-Earth kind of guy

a picture of my Australian great-grandfather
surrounded by his fourteen children, fifty-three great grandchildren
great great grandchildren, and their children as well
he was 95, successful in a way I can only dream of being

Breaking the Pattern

2011-05-19T10:51:00.000-07:00

The spine is mathematic.
A hand touched the cleft of her chin,
a glacial train moving across the face,
to escape along a sinuous path,
adrenalin courses
as fingertips slide
along an undulating funhouse,
advancing ever downward.

Escape is mathematic.
Trapped, in a funhouse frenzy,
face west, east, north, south, up, down,
adrenalin rises with every move,
every shift, but with a show of spine
the moment cleft,
a train of motion stops.

Her glacial gaze stares back with purpose.
She would be touched no more.

Teachable Moment

2011-05-18T10:50:00.000-07:00

I'm a teacher, an instructor,
but I can't instruct my wife.
God love her, I love her,
but as for teaching,
well, I'm her husband.

She's usually the one instructing me.

I told her, one night, and another, and another,
on course nights, please don't cook,
please just be with the children,
relax, watch TV, call a friend,
let me order a pizza for us all.

Above all, most importantly, don't cook.

You see, when Indians cook, they cook.
They cut, they grind, they fry, they stir, they mix,
and then the cooking starts.
This is not food you pop in a microwave oven,
or heat up in a pan on the stove.

This, you see, is real, good, wife cooked food.

Tonight, course night, the smell entices me,
mutton, frying onions, garam masala.
So lost in a poem, and thoughts of dinner later,
I failed to notice two sets of naked legs, and naked arms
walk up to my chair, ready for their bath.

I could hear the sound of the grinder in the kitchen.
I could smell the roasting meat, and stewing potatoes.
I could see the end of poetry, for now, at least.

My wife just spoke to me a moment ago.
Pizza, it seems, will be a good idea next week.

A Crowdsourced Villanelle

2011-05-17T10:45:00.000-07:00

Vision blurs amidst the sounds and life of night
moods lift and bear us somewhere we can't foretell
take what comes, be alert, be ready, forthright

Rein down the moon. Bring sanity to the light
in the darkest hour, our eyes lift up from Hell
vision blurs amidst the sounds and life of night

we walk city blocks and hope to share our plight
with nameless strangers whose gazes repel
take what comes, be alert, be ready, forthright

when strangers press, foreswear the urge to flight
let inner focus, memory cast their spell
Vision blurs amidst the sounds and life of night

While those memories wrap and hold us tight,
we can feel our confidence pulse and swell.
take what comes, be alert, be ready, forthright

The ship keens in the wind, the waves froth white,
and long and loud, rings the deep throated bell
Vision blurs amidst the sounds and life of night
take what comes, be alert, be ready, forthright.

* This villanelle was constructed line by line, by different poets in a UBC Creative Writing workshop - thus the "crowdsourced" in the title.

A Found Poem

2011-05-16T10:42:00.000-07:00

This is prose, but it is so poetic...It hit me as a found poem.

Tony Woodlief remembers the birthday of a daughter who died 12 years ago, at the age of three

I suppose we all of us have shadowed places in our lives,
places where reside only the ill-formed shapes of what might have been,
never clear and untouchable and framed only by their absence of light.

But we have what has yielded those shadows as well,
or at least the memories of them. I can’t know
how her voice would sound today, but I can
recall her singing ABCs; I can’t know
what it’s like for her head to reach my shoulder, but I can
remember carrying her on my shoulders.

In every life there are the things we have
and the shadows that haunt us,
and which we call
could have been.

Maybe part of enduring is
looking where the light is,
rather than where it is
not.

----

When I read this, and the story behind it. I sobbed for days.

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan

Eff the TO-Leafs - A Canadian Ghazal

2011-05-15T10:36:00.000-07:00

It’s just a bunch of bullspit Cherry said last night, eh?
Keep Kaberle? Someone’s had a puck in the head, eh?

I frickin' can’t stand it down at the ACC these days
It’s not like the old Leaf Gardens up on Carlton, eh?

Only people who can afford to buy seats wear suits
I took the last tie I bought off after I got married, eh

Even down at the beer store, it’s like fifty bucks a case
Beer is starting to cost more than one of those lattes, eh

Then the HST bullspit? At least I can still go to Timmies
eh, somewhere my coffee won’t need an effin’ loan, eh

What Small Thing is Man

2011-05-14T10:35:00.000-07:00

Teardrop in the lake, our insignificance to the divine.
As darkness falls, your intentions, Lord, I can’t divine.

I used to flee the world, my place, my life, my fate
My only faith, my hope, was in redemption divine

As her heartbeat fades, her life ripped from my arms
I raged, unbelieving, anymore, that YOU were divine

Then the fires came, ripping through my soul, my life
what was left, gone, destroyed, by vengeance divine

See, it’s the wrath of Lord thy God, old testament style
Jimmy - rage, hate, hope and love are equally divine

My Poetry Prof vs. The Sonnet Form

2011-05-13T10:30:00.001-07:00

Her sonnet presentation was today
It’s a pleasant beginning to term 2
She used to think sonnets were just okay
But now, she knows, they’re really fun to do

The form is characterized by a turn
Or volta, a change of perspective, tone
But, as Professor says, with some concern
Good sonnets fall within a certain zone

What’s good about sonnets, says Stephen Fry
Is that they’re just right – the Goldilocks form
Size enough for a thought, flexible, spry
Sonnets can both entertain and inform

The difficulty in sonnets is not
in the writing, but in how they are wrought

Of Cures, Fixes, and Multi-Billion Dollar Ideas

2011-05-11T20:52:00.000-07:00

In Ottawa, they recently held the National Research Council's 2011 Biotalent Challenge Awards. In essence, it's an ordinary high school science competition, but the competitors in this particular competition were anything but ordinary.

Here's what the top 5 competitors did:

1st Place - Found a cure for cystic fibrosis. Did this on his off time after finishing homework, by logging in to the SCINET supercomputer to run simulations. Even tested the cure on real cell cultures. What do you know! It worked.

2nd Place - Developed a food additive that will be worth billions of dollars. They found a way to take gelatin out of sorbet, replacing it with a compound that is a) cheaper, and b) opens the up the market for sorbet to vegetarians around the world who avoid gelatin as it is derived from animals.

3rd Place - Discovered a bacteria that inhibits the growth of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Basically, it boils down to a way of helping the prevent the death of millions when our antibiotics start failing to deal with super-bacteria that laughs at our paltry medicine.

4th Place - Discovered how pregnancy hormones can help prevent multiple sclerosis. It seems these hormones protect neurons from iron accumulation.

5th Place - Discovered a better way to treat cancers like leukemia. So... basically this high school student found a better cancer cure. I guess they needed something to do while waiting for the next Twilight movie to come out.

All of this, from high schoolers in Canada. High schoolers. You know, the twitter-headed computer addicts who are supposedly the leading edge in the dumbing down of the human race.

Workshopping Long Form Fiction

2011-05-11T09:59:00.000-07:00

I think long form fiction can be workshopped successfully, but it depends on the nature of the workshop and the structure of the class. In an opt-res program, where people have jobs, this may not work so well. But in a normal residency program, why not? I used to have to read a novel a week for some of my lit classes, and when I sit down to read, 300 pages is the work of an afternoon at a coffee shop, really.

In a full workshop setting, it may be a bit much to go novel by novel, week after week. But if you broke a 20 person workshop into five groups of four, you could workshop five pieces simultaneously, and what's more, you could do task oriented editing sessions. Say one month is spent on overall structure, or plot. The next month on characterization. The next on dialogue. The next... etc...

By the time the year is over, each long form work has had five or six close reads, with all the editing and polishing that comes along with that.

You can keep the groups the same, or change them up. There are pluses and minuses to both. By keeping groups together, they become intimately familiar with each others work, and can better comment on each. By switching up the groups, you keep things fresh, and prevent small-group-think from setting in.

All that is required is that students have a long form work already prepared before the workshop begins, which can be ascertained at the time of registration. Call it a pre-requisite, if you will.

A Damascene Conversion

2011-05-10T09:47:00.000-07:00

Lee Goldberg is a prolific blogger, TV Writer, and author. In Sara Graefe's TV Writing class, his work and thoughts on TV writing are (or were...are they still?) part of the syllabus.

Tiring of the TV writing game, Goldberg fell into novelizations, continuing his work on shows like Monk and Diagnosis Murder by writing novels that carried on the stories after the shows had ended.

He does modestly well. No blockbusters, but enough to pay the bills. And he has also been a known, vociferous critic of the concept of self-publishing.

Until now.

Before June 5, 2009, he'd earned a grand total of $0 on his out-of-print work, Then he published them on the Kindle. As he states:

...out-of-print books that I wrote years ago [] were earning me nothing before June 2009.

If those sales hold for the rest of the year, I will earn $77,615 in Kindle royalties, and that’s not counting the far less substantial royalties coming in from Amazon UK, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble and CreateSpace.

Even if my sales plummet tomorrow by fifty percent, I’ll still earn about $38,000 in royalties this year…and I’d be very, very happy with that.

My most profitable title, in terms of hours worked and pages written, is THREE WAYS TO DIE, a collection of three previously published short stories. In print, it’s a mere fifty-six pages long, but it’s selling 24 copies-a-day on the Kindle, earning me about $1500-a-month. That means I could potentially earn $18,000 this year just from those three short stories alone.

That is insane.

So far, so sensible, but then he drinks the Kool-Aid with a smile.

But what would be more insane is if I took my next, standalone, non-MONK book to a publisher instead of “publishing” it myself on the Kindle.

That’s right. I’d rather self-publish. This from a guy who for years has been an out-spoken, and much-reviled, critic of self-publishing. But that was before the Kindle came along and changed everything. I was absolutely right then…but I’d be wrong now.

The Kindle offers mid-list writers a real option to consider before they sign their next, shitty contract extension with their publisher…and it has given new opportunity to every mid-list author who has been dropped…and it has dramatically re-energized the earnings potential of every published author’s out-of-print back-list.

That’s incredibly exciting. I believe that any midlist author who isn’t self-publishing, either their back list or new work, is making a costly mistake.

And then there's a caveat for new authors.

If you’ve never been in print before, I believe you’d be a fool not to take a mid-list paperback or a hardcover deal…even a terrible one…over self-publishing on the Kindle. Financially, you might make less (either in failure or modest success)...but the difference will be more than made up for in editing, marketing, wider readership, wider name recognition, and professional prestige (and that prestige does mean something, whether you want to admit it or not).

You can always go back to self-publishing... and when you do, you will be bring that wider readership, name recognition, and professional prestige with you. But a book deal doesn't come along every day, and that's still going to mean something for a long time yet...and I suspect it still will even if half the bookstores in America close tomorrow.

Read the whole post here.

Game Over, Paper Books!

2011-05-09T09:05:00.000-07:00

You know, there's an irony floating about out there, or maybe "cognitive dissonance" might be the better term, if you will, but what it is is that it seems to me that of the people I meet, chat, or message with, the ones who are the hottest and botheredest about the environment, who grit their teeth every time a Ford Explorer drives by, and who have (or totally-would-have-if-they-could-have) chained themselves to a majestic redwood to face down armies of ravenous bulldozers intent on raping mother nature, are the very same people who feel that it is far far better to fill their homes with paper books, which are essentially lumps of dead tree - that had to be cut, transported, processed, bleached, shipped, packaged, shipped, printed on, bound, shipped, stocked, bought, and then transported into a home library - than to download an e-book and read it on something non-organic.

Odd, that.

But no fear, the end of dead tree media is here!

A few months ago, the NY Times finally, belatedly bowed to plain common sense, and is factoring in sales of e-books into their lists.

I think the picture below illustrates the effect pretty clearly.

Now I've heard a few objections to my hypothesis over the past few months, which I'll list out below.

#1 - Promoting e-books only serves to promote e-readers which are often made from "conflict minerals" and from other materials that are both non-biodegradable and toxic to the environment. E-books, then hurt Mother Earth.

It's tru that e-readers aren't made of air, hope, rainbows, or flowers. But the thing is that you only need one.

Every single book that is bought has to go through that long production and distribution chain. If one the making of one book has less of an impact on the environment than the making of one e-reader, the making of ten, fifty, one hundred books does not.

As for electricity, if you were in a mind to be green, the amount of electricity it takes to transfer and read an e-book would take about 10 minutes of turning a hand crank to generate. But if you wanted to make your own hardcover... well that process is s little more involved! :-)

#2 - People prefer the physicality of books. There is no substitute to the feel of the page.

Well, when Armageddon, or the singularity arrive, they will either help us rebuild civilization, or defeat the army of robots attempting to rule the earth.

But seriously...

I used to think I would never stop loving the feel of paper beneath my fingertips, or the heft of a good novel as I lay on my side on the couch, elbow propped up, my thumb nimbly flicking pages in rapid succession.

But like any marriage or partnership that has grown too close, with too little space, for too long, I started noticing the little things - the tiny paper cuts, the unending weekly dusting, the fatigue in the arm and wrist, the social stigma of reading in the workplace (oh, and just forget about bringing one along to the relatives, friends), and to top it all off, when the book was done, it became dead weight in my hand, it's part over, offering no further solace, consolation, intimacy, or joy. It...it just lays there! Ugh! Like it doesn't even know I'm there any more!

So I knew it was time for a divorce, to send 1.0 packing, and ring up 2.0 - bringing in the shiny and the new.

I tell you, my sweet little iPod Touch 4G and I, we shall be together forever.

#3 - Using e-books in schools is difficult because the expense factor prevents widespread adoption of e-readers. Ordinary folk just can't afford to lose an e-reader.

I live in a part of the world where the poorest Canadian would seem almost middle class by comparison, yet somehow even the poorest of the poor here have access to mobiles.

This is an older article (2008) but it illuminates the trajectory in the developing world, and the impact that mobiles are having on everything from commerce, to education, to entertainment.

As the OLPC initiative has shown, where there is a will, there is a way. That said, from a school perspective, schools that issue out e-readers to their students, or laptops in 1-to-1 Districts (New Brunswick has a big program along these lines) can send students their allotment of textbooks wirelessly as they are added or connected to courses they are registered in.

No more textbook shortage, no more "I forgot my book" excuses, no more ratty outdated texts, no more torn or vandalized pages. All of these can be romanticized, but as a teacher who has been on both sides of this issue, I am so very glad I don't have to deal with the headaches that hardcopy school texts bring along with them.

Plus, the advantages for teachers are enormous. Instead of literally cutting, pasting, photocopying, and distributing supplementary materials in class (all of which takes enormous amounts of time), in a soft-copy system, all you need to do is insert excerpts from the textbook into a Word document, add in your exercises, save and send as an attachment (or upload, or put in a public folder, etc).

I've reduced my prep time by 80% by abandoning paper, and I have been able to ensure (literally, and measurably) more engagement with texts, including objective assessments of comprehension. One thing a textbook cannot do is record video of a student reading a text or doing an oral exercise. But in a 1-to-1 environment, you can record and store every stage of a student's progress, over years if need be, that can be instantly accessed when consulting with students, parents, or school admin.

All of this is to the benefit of students, especially those of fewer means.

#4 - Fewer paper books means fewer future yard sales where you can stumble across an old, forgotten treasure. You can't sell e-books at a yard sale.

Well I sure didn't find the entire archive of Chekov's short stories in a garage sale.

I am a lover of garage sales, and nothing draws me like a sale of used books. I used to line up at every library sale in the area. Every year I made a trip to Kemptville to see my grandad and go to "Hey! Day" where there would be a massive three day sale of used books (and everything else) in support of the local hospital.

But more often than not, I notice that, table after table of used books I pass by (and still do, if only out of sheer stubborn habit) there is little I would want to read there.

I remember when my neighbour invited me to go through her basement, through the many boxes of books, and take whatever I wanted. She wanted to clean out her old books. But out of the endless boxes and stacks, I think I found six books I wanted to read. The rest were throwaway romances or Danielle Steele type hardcovers. This kindly old lady was not an atypical member of the general public.

Honestly, I'd prefer not to wade through a sea of Dan Browns or James Pattersons anymore.

To sum it up, I'd say there are certainly books that I will keep, and not give away... My hardcover special edition of Lord of the Rings, my Norton Anthologies, the rare school texts I dug up in the bins of used books stores that date from the turn of the century, etc. These are books that I value for reasons beyond just wanting to read them - they are objets d'art, windows into the past.

Personally, I love digging up old science fiction, pulp paper backs from the forties and fifties that you can still find floating around, with the cheap yellowed paper and the smell of countless sweaty hands all over them. But once I've read them, the moment has gone, the little one night stand is done, and few people I know would really want to pick up my old copy of Olaf Stapeldon or E.E. Doc Smith. On a whim, I decided to read some old Heinlein in e-Book form and I found myself drawn in and absorbed in the same way I had with the old yellowing paperbacks. It turned out that it wasn't the book - the object - that was the needed thing, it was the story itself.

Perhaps I flog the e-book thing because when it comes to paper books, I'm like a recovering heroin junkie, and when I walk into a bookstore all I can see is sweet fine China in every direction, just filling my ear with promises of ecstasy, and all I need do is swipe the credit card one more time to keep on chasing that dragon.

That siren song seduced me every time, until I realized, at a later date, that my addiction to books, my compulsion to hit an Indigo, or Chapters, or Bakka, or any of the innumerable used bookstores I would frequent a couple times a week, and leave with yet another pile of paperbacks or trade paperbacks had put me in a deep financial hole.

I think that writers, especially, reserve a special place for books, a place they do not, and perhaps can not question. It's hard to see books as things, as objects. To us they are invested with a tiny spark of the divine, and thus beyond question or reproach.

But like Po learned at the end of Kung Fu Panda, it's not the dragon scroll that matters, it's the lesson the scroll represents.

Magic and the Fantastic

2011-05-08T09:02:00.000-07:00

First published by the New Yorker in 1998, and subsequently included in the collection Pastoralia, “Sea Oak” is a tale of the bottom rung of contemporary American life, but with a twist.

There is a story that when Ben Stiller read “Sea Oak”, he laughed his ass off, and wanted to secure the rights to the story for a film treatment. Indeed, the humour, subtle and otherwise, in this story is one the most praised elements of the tale. A number of reviewers, having taken to “Sea Oak”, saw within it a biting satire of contemporary American life, especially in the way that Saunders takes on and mocks corporate brands. At times it felt that Sea Oak was placed alongside Dawn of the Dead in it’s attack on consumerist society.

Or so they say. Personally, I didn’t really read it the same way. For me, “Sea Oak” represents a different message, a different ethos which can only be properly summed up by the decrepit, dissolving Bernie – to succeed in life, you have to show your cock.

Now, before we get too carried away here, and before you get to wondering why I seem to be reviewing one short story rather than getting on with the presentation, I want you to know that there is a point, and though the road may be long and winding, there is a destination.

So, where were we?... Ah yes, that’s right. Show your cock.

In “Sea Oak”, Saunders creates a world that is just different enough from our own that we readers can effectively step outside the fictive universe and look down on the events as spectators who recognize the symbols, but are otherwise removed from the world of the story. A key reason for creating this distinct environment is that it better facilitates what the author needs for the story to function – the smooth and willing suspension of disbelief. As readers, when reading stories set in our own, known reality, we tend to notice and unfairly focus on the smallest details that intrude upon our sense of veritas, and in the real world, characters as breathtakingly stupid as Jade and Min would come across as caricatures (or as a misogynist projection), which would make the reader’s ability to understand and assimilate the author’s message much more difficult.

But in a world that is not our world, a world that is just slightly off enough to seem somewhat like our own, but clearly distinct and different, then the author has far more leeway to establish norms of behaviour and the rules of the environment, and, conversely, the reader has more leeway to accept those norms and rules.*

A very powerful and literarily awarded example of this is Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let You Go,” where the unreality of the world is enough to keep the reader from being frightened off by the concept, yet enough like our world that the pathos and tragedy can flow through the soul.

All this is well and good, but the question still begs – why? Why would a writer dip into magic and the fantastic? Generally, or at least the reason I have found, is that they do so because they got something to say. That is, they have a message.

All stories contain themes or overarching messages. The difference is the focus. Where in literature a story might address broader themes such as “growing up gay in southwestern Wisconsin”, or “nostalgia, loss, and sisterhood,” stories that delve into magic and the fantastic tend to have far more focused themes. In the case of “Sea Oak” the message is not “corporate/consumerist America sucks, dude” but “dude, corporate/consumerist America sucks, so what are you going to do about it?”

In “Sea Oak”, Saunders elicits the fantastic by slightly caricaturizing every aspect of the story. The characters are extreme (a bit too stupid, a bit too passive, a bit too timid), and the actions and events likewise. At the beginning of the story, in the club “Joysticks”, a worker, with a family and limited prospects, is summarily fired with a callousness that is rare in the western world. In the real world there would be labour laws, or even a sense of decency to draw upon. By opening up with this symbolic summary execution, Saunders is able to illustrate that we’re not in Kansas City anymore, Chief.

Saunders peppers the text with brand names that are clearly made up, but generic enough that what they represent is recognizable. This adds depth to the slight feeling of otherness the text evokes as the story progresses. At first glance, the message that seems to be developing is that this world (which is a lot like our world) traps the people in it (as, I suppose, our world is supposed to also do). Jade and Min are uneducated and stuck at home, too ignorant to care for their kids, too unskilled to have any hope of bettering their lives. Bernice is a caregiver and a doormat, she takes things as they come, and has let life just piss all over her, and did it with a smile. Then there is the narrator, who’s very timidity traps him in perpetual mediocrity. But then something changes.

So far we have the fantastic, the otherness that sets the scene. In “Sea Oak” the fantastic manifests in the oddness of the world. But the other factor, which is what will drive the story forward and the point home, is magic. In stories of magic and the fantastic, magic is the deus ex machina, the big dumb object, the macguffin. In every fairy tale or folk tale with a magical element, magic is what brings about the resolution, it is what allows for the change needed for the story to resolve, or for the point to be made. In “Sea Oak,” Bernie coming home for one last weekend is the magic that drives the story to its conclusion. Bernie’s rage and shame at letting life walk all over her has propelled her from the grave and briefly into the arms of her family, her poor, useless, stupid, deluded family, with a singular purpose in mind – to tell them to get off their asses and get a move on.

The message that Bernie so colorfully and emphatically communicates is that the world is as it is, and nothing is going to change that. But how you take on the world can, and must, change. This very Ayn Randish exhortation is accompanied by decisive action. She shows them how their inaction will directly result in the death of Troy, and in their slow living death in the Sea Oak tenements.

When Bernie sends her thumbprints onto patrons ho would be willing to pay for “extra services” from the narrator at his job at Joysticks, the intent is to show the narrator that the world is full of all kinds, and that there is no upside to being timid when you are stuck on the bottom.

Though the narrator does not follow Bernie’s instructions, by the time Bernie crumbles into mush pushed into a hefty bag and dumped into the back of a K-car, the narrator has his epiphany and finally understands.

Had this story been set in our real, known world, it would have come off like an after school special, or a Sunday sermon - something you would nod your head to, but otherwise not listen to. However, by anchoring this story in magic and the fantastic, Saunders is able to pull us up close and whisper something in our ear -

The moral, the message in this tale of magic and the fantastic is that in life, even if you don’t have much, you have to use what you have. Or, as Bernie would say, you have to show your cock.

* It is a very common, and very effective technique that is most often employed by literary writers who want to go slumming in the genre district, yet be able to hold their heads up high and claim they have done no such thing.

Students Today?

2011-04-10T15:39:00.000-07:00

An old Harvard entrance exam is circulating around the interwebs lately, and curious as I always am to peek into the schoolroom of the past, I thought I'd take a look. After reading through it, I found I had learned something, or at least come to alter my way of thinking about a topic that is well trod and well accepted - the idea that each generation is slightly less intelligent than the one preceding it.

Even though the exam is much harder than any test I have ever had to take, I found that it was not a sign that our current generations had a diminished academic/intellectual capacity, but that past generations had an extremely limited and focused education. You'll note that in the exam there are pretty much only two topics - classics (language and literature) and mathematics. The section "History and Geography" was a bit of a misnomer, because most of the history mentioned was classical Greek or Roman history, with three questions about rivers thrown in for good measure. There was nothing of physics, biology, chemistry, English literature, American history (or even any history around the world beyond pre-Byzantium). Let us also not forget the absence of social science, non-classical languages, comparative religion, music, economics, psychology, civics, political science, or art.

The thing I note from this exam is that a) students of today would fail this exam in the most spectacular fashion, and that b) the knowledge base of a modern student is so very broad that the students of yesteryear, who might have done well on an exam like this, would have seemed of limited education, parochial even, in comparison.

Forget Smartboards

2011-02-18T22:39:00.000-08:00

I came across a post by Jacob Gutnicki on Lisa Nielsen's The Innovative Educator, where she argues that interactive whiteboards, or Smartboards as they are more popularly known, are both a tool many educators love, and perhaps one of the most significant blocks to effective teaching in the modern classroom.

I couldn't agree more.

Technology is supposed to bring about the promise of the 1-to-1 classroom, where the focus is on the learning, and the teacher steps back from being the source and font of all knowledge to being but a lowly facilitator, a mere guide as students progress down the path of independent learning.

Currently, I work in a school equipped with Smartboards, and other than being a blank white screen for the projector, I find no use for them, whatsoever.

In my school, the students are all equipped with MacBook Pros, and a FAR better way to utilize technology in the classroom, I have found, is to prepare recordings of lessons before hand (allowing you to nicely edit and touch them up), then deliver those lessons, and the accompanying materials and follow-up tasks wirelessly when the class begins.*

In this way, the focus is never on the teacher at the front of the room, the students are engaged directly in the lesson, have immediate access to resources that assist them with questions and concerns (which facilitates independent learning), students of differing abilities can take the material at their own pace, the students get to literally, virtually "take" the teacher home with them for extra help and revision later on down the line, and the teacher is free to roam the room and facilitate learning.

It is the true student centered model of teaching.

*Mac is superb for this... I have not found a better way to transfer data in the classroom than through the Public Folder/Drop Box system on Macs.

A Few More Russell Peters

2010-08-10T23:21:00.000-07:00

Jamie Weinman, Macleans TV Critic, and a writer I often read and agree with, has me shaking my head in disagreement this morning, in a post where he roots for the demise of NBC's Outsourced, which is set to premiere this fall.

I really enjoyed the movie, and when I heard it was being turned into a TV show, I thought it was about time that we got a few South Asians on a show in North America. There have been sprinkles so far, with Anil Kapoor on the last season of 24, Kal Penn on House before he was hit by the politics bug, Reshma Shetty on Royal Pains, Aziz Ansari on P&R, and Archie Panjabi on The Good Wife, but the roles like that are few and far between for South Asian actors in North America, and especially in Canada.

At least in the UK there have been shows like Goodness Gracious Me, and The Kumars at No. 42. Toronto itself has a huge Bollywood scene (next year one of the major Indian movie awards shows will take place in Toronto), and yet when it comes to TV, as my South Asian actor friends tell me, it is a desert out there.

Personally I would like to see something like Outsourced turn that ship around and start to click. Amy Pohler is just fine and dandy, but I think I'd prefer to see more Russell Peters out there.

Exercising Prudence is a Lost Art

2010-08-10T02:18:00.000-07:00

I came across this excerpt from the Toronto Star, via Macleans.

Toronto office administrator Sherry Good is now the face of a G20 class-action lawsuit filed Thursday against the Toronto Police Services Board and the federal attorney general, who represents the RCMP... Good said she was walking home from work on the evening of June 27 when she decided to join an informal demonstration. She was caught by a police technique known as “kettling” when about 250 people were encircled by a wall of police officers at the intersection of Queen St. W. and Spadina Ave. Good was released without charge, but said she suffered from stress and panic attacks as a result of the incident.

Stress and panic attacks? Too bad this wasn't prevented earlier by an attack of common sense.

Jump into a demonstration, on a whim, I can see. But during the G20, with the downtown full of police officers, and trouble makers, and after the press spent weeks obsessing over the possibility of violence, and the how the police were set to engage protesters, and you'd think that perhaps this woman might have, just for the tiniest moment, decided that prudence may be the better part of valor in this situation.

And yes, being arrested may be traumatic, but she was quickly cleared and let go, as any innocent person rounded up in a group engagement would be. You'd think she'd count herself lucky, having learned a lesson.

But no, that's not how things go, I guess.

Hopefully the courts won't reward her stupidity.

Undercover Boss

2010-04-04T02:13:00.000-07:00

I've found myself, against my better judgment, becoming addicted to CBS's new show Undercover Boss. Even though there are so many points that diverge from my usual viewing standards, in that each episode is exactly the same as the last, the stories come across as self-congratulatory as far as the companies are concerned, and the undercover bosses stand at the end of every episode to enact their noblesse oblige for the bien peasants gathered before them, still, I can't stop watching.

Every story of hardship battled with hard work and determination gets to me. I start balling like a little girl. The everyday struggles of everyday people, what they go through and how their determination to battle back against all the misfortunes cast their way - what can I say? I find myself seeing myself in them, and them in me.

Though it irritates me to see multi-millionaire CEO's dish out tiny rewards and little trinkets like they are Santa Claus reborn, if you leave out the bosses, and focus on the ordinary working men and women in each episode, there really is a powerful and uplifting core to this show. Perhaps that is what keeps me watching.

A Royal Flush

2010-03-24T11:09:00.000-07:00

What can I say?

I was so busy with a project that I only got there in time to see Theron get the boot.

The Kings XI Punjab were all out, short by 31 runs at 19.1 overs. Rajasthan didn't just beat them. They crushed them. Knocked them down and stomped all over them like they were cockroaches in the kitchen.

The best part?

That look of utter despair and frustration on Yuvraj Singh's face.

Christmas done come early!

Chennai Super Weenies

2010-03-21T11:42:00.000-07:00

It's as the old saying goes, they pulled defeat from the jaws of victory.

The Chennai Super Kings put on a master class tonight, in how to squander a brilliant defense that had resulted in the Kings XI Punjab squeaking out a bare 136 runs.

About 10 overs into Chennai's innings, it wasn't just that you sensed that the Kings XI had lost, but that this was going to be an absolutely crushing defeat, a defeat that would have been the crown jewel in their winless record.

Yet somehow, that defeat didn't materialize. Dot ball after dot ball, that niggling sense that Chennai might not be able to pull it off, began to grow.

And that sense was right. Somehow, someway, the Doni-less Super Kings lost the plot and forgot they were playing cricket. They managed to tie the Kings XI, forcing a super innings, but as Matthew Hayden walked onto the field with his Mongoose in hand, the match was a foregone conclusion.

While I don't feel too bad about the whole affair, as Rajathastan was, is, and always will be my team in the IPL, Chennai, like the Deccan Chargers, are a secondary team for me, one I cheer when there is no blue and gold out on the pitch.

What I do feel bad about, and absolutely curse Chennai for, is the sight of that legendary fathead Yuvraj Singh winning the game in the Super Over, with a sweeping hit that seemed to just nudge Muralidaran's spinner gently into the boundary. As the camera closed in on Yuvi's open mouthed, spittle expelling, celebrating face (Complete with non-stop fist pump action), I was mighty tempted to throw my remote right through the screen. But only tempted, mind you, as I had wisely put the remotes up on the shelf earlier, just to forestall that very possibility.

That, and I'm a bit broke, and not up for TV shopping at the moment.

Thanks Chennai. Now it's not just Madrasi food that gives me indigestion.

Yes, But is it Attested?

2010-03-19T22:02:00.000-07:00

Just in the Gulf News this morning, out of that den of tolerance and wisdom known as Ras Al Khamiah, a couple has been arrested for having sex in their car. A Bangladeshi man and an Indian woman have been sentenced to a year in jail followed by deportation.

So far, so normal for the UAE, but there are a few niggling details that should give pause.

The first is that the car was covered, as in, you could not see into it at all.

The "witness" never actually saw the offense, but claims to have "heard some noises" coming from the car. At first blush that sounds plausible, except that unless the windows were open, how could anything be heard at all? Once I close the door to my car, I can't hear a peep from anyone inside, so unless this "concerned citizen" had their ear pressed right up the glass, I can't see how they would have heard anything at all.

So our concerned citizen did what "anyone" would do, they ran to the nearest police officer, flagged him down, and led him to the scene of the crime, where the illicit pair was caught "red-handed."

So far, so normal. It is the UAE, and illicit affairs are a no, no... Except that this was not an illicit affair.

The man and woman were married. They even produced a marriage certificate for the courts.

So to recap, a married man and woman have sex in a covered car, completely hidden from public view (Something I very much doubt is unheard of, if only going by the number of Landcruisers and Patrols with midnight-black tinted windows I see parked in the unlit sections of various beaches at night). Then they are arrested, go to court, prove the relationship was not illicit, only to have the judge notice that the couple hadn't paid the 150 AED to have their marriage certificate attested. So the judge ruled them unmarried, and sentenced them.

That's it. They didn't have the right stamp.

In the UAE no birth, no marriage, no education is officially recognized unless you fork over a handful of cash and get a wee little stamp recognizing the validity of the certificate.

The problem this case poses is for potential tourists.

It is doubtful that any tourist couple would line up to get a stamp on their marriage certificates after coming to the UAE, if they even brought them. And while it is RAK we are talking about here, and not Dubai, it is a distinction without a difference for most of the world.

After the spate of recent, tourist unfriendly incidents in the past little while, you have to wonder if we are seeing the beginnings of a real trend.

What is Stephen Harper Reading

2010-03-10T14:56:00.000-08:00

In case you haven't heard (and chances are you haven't), there has been a pretty popular meme in the CanLit world for the past couple years regarding Stephen Harper. One day, Booker Prize winning author Yann Martel decided that the Prime Minister of Canada was not a sufficiently educated man, and endeavoured to correct that deficiency. To that end, he started mailing a book a week to the Prime Minister, accompanied by a long winded letter about how that book would help correct some or other fault Martel felt the Prime Minister possessed.

I was never a fan of Martel's stunt. It reeked of arrogance and condescension when he started it, and now that he has a book out detailing his years long bibliostalking, it just seems sad and tired.

Just to pick a book selection at random, take Martel's choice of Christian Bok's Eunoia. The opening of the letter says it all.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Have you ever felt limited by language? I’m sure you have....

And it gets better.

Look, Bok is a nice guy. I had him for a professor, and when we plied him with enough beer, he told us all about reading the dictionary from cover to cover numerous times, and spending eight years building a database that allowed him to separate words by vowel usage. It was an admirable feat, and Eunoia will certainly long have a place in the canon of language poetry, but what it has to do with running a country?... Sorry, but I just don't buy Martel's arguments.

I think John Ivison said it best back in 2007....

Can't judge a reader by his books
John Ivison , National Post
Saturday, Oct. 27, 2007

OTTAWA -Yann Martel is outraged. The Life of Pi author has been sending classic novels to Prime Minister Stephen Harper every two weeks since April, in an act of guerrilla arts advocacy aimed at securing more funding for the world of letters, and has been getting no response.

Mr. Martel would have us believe that by working his way through the prescribed reading list, Mr. Harper would undergo a New Testament-style conversion and boost public arts spending overnight.

Quite how the author thinks reading Animal Farm by George Orwell, a savage attack on statism, would induce anyone to increase state subsidies for the book industry is beyond me. But never mind. In reality, Mr. Martell knows this won't happen, so he is happy to convey to Canadians the impression that the barbarians have breached the gates of 24 Sussex Drive and are now using Pierre Trudeau's old swimming pool. Mr. Harper is left looking like someone who thinks Mr. Martel's excellent Man Booker Prize-winning opus is a study of either mathematics or Greek linguistics.

"I got a feel for a man who has no sense of the arts," Mr. Martel told the Carleton University student newspaper.

But it is Mr. Harper who should be outraged. Provided you take a pretty broad definition of "the arts," the Prime Minister is an avid patron. He is a keen movie-goer, a competent pianist and is currently learning a third language (Spanish). If further culture vulture credentials are required, he once named AC/DC's lilting ballad, Thunderstruck, as his favourite rock song.

That is being facetious -- but no more so than Mr. Martel's public relations campaign. Mr. Martel says he is trying to make suggestions to Mr. Harper's "stillness -- those quiet moments of reflecting on daily struggles and the purpose of life." I don't know about Mr. Martel, but after a day reading fiscal reference tables until my brain ached, I think I'd forgo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych (the reflections of a man dying a slow, agonizing death) or Francoise Sagan's tale of rich French people who have lots of sex but still aren't very happy, Bonjour Tristesse.

Small wonder that when the Prime Minister ditches his briefing books, he picks up Harry Potter or Artemis Fowl to read to the kids (which he does every night, apparently, regardless of workload), in preference to Mr. Martel's recommended reading. Other Harper favourites are said to include mystery novels, thrillers by such writers as Robert Ludlum and Total Hockey -- the Ultimate Hockey Encyclopedia by Dan Diamond. The Prime Ministerial nightstand is also said to contain the obligatory political biographies, such as Alan Greenspan's Air of Turbulence and Peter C. Newman's Secret Mulroney Tapes.

The Prime Minister is probably like a lot of us when confronted with a novel by August Strindberg or Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- we admire it, lay it aside making a mental note to read it at some point in the future and then never pick it up again (though I did labour through Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is about how long it took to read the damn thing).

Do we know Harper doesn't read that many books? Or a sizeable amount? He is an educated fellow, after all.

The issue here is Martel's hubris in prescribing a canon, with the unspoken corollary that only a philistine would read something other than these approved books.

What are Martel's thoughts on the "Great Books" canon, or the push to force students to study those relics white male-dom? It's the same arrogance.

If, say, Harper had agreed to a challenge, and they shared and compared reading lists, that would be one thing. But here, Martel unilaterally decided that Harper was a stupid man who needed some proper education, and he was going to provide it.

Would Martel have done the same for Le petit gars de Shawinigan? He had far less education, and far less of a reputation as a scholar. In fact, old Jean-ny boy had a real reputation as one who preferred to settle disputes with knuckle and skin rather than pen and ink.

Unintentional Poetry

2010-02-28T01:15:00.000-08:00

From time to time a student hands over something that, unintentionally, is mindblowingly awesome. in this case, while practicing an IELTS Task Type 2 essay, a paragraph stood out, not as an example of incredible prose, but of, if not incredible, at least notable poetry. What follows is what was handed to me today, written by the student, with my input solely being limited to breaking up the lines and organizing the paragraph into stanzas.

The Internet
(There are a people how use it)

There are a people how
use the internet
in a bad way
like a hackers
and a virus made

There are a people how
use the internet
want to be famous
so they do a bad virus
that destroy a computer

There are a people how
use the internet
want to destroy
police security
to be famous

There are a people how
use the internet
to get bad things
from the internet
to steal the program
from the internet

There are a people how
use the internet
in a bad way

Data Transfer in the Classroom

2010-02-23T20:37:00.000-08:00

One interesting issue that has arisen, which was never an issue in a traditional classroom, is the issue of data transfer. As educators shift more and more towards a true 1:1 eLearning model, there will be an ever increasing need to transfer large amounts of data to each and every student. We're not just talking sending e-mails with .docs or .pdfs, or the odd You Tube .flv. We're talking bandwidth hogging HD videos, lengthy audio files, and picture libraries used for creating presentations. Even 100 MB of data, which is a trivial amount for an individual, poses significant logistical problems for the educator.

Do you transfer via USB key? That's slow and cumbersome, and unless you buy multiple keys, creates a significant bottleneck.

Do you burn the data onto DVDs? If it is a one off activity, this method is time consuming and expensive. To make it worthwhile, you would need to burn a term or a semester worth of material onto disks to give your students. But the amount of data you might use over that length of time could easily outstrip the capacity of a DVD, requiring you to burn two, or even three per student. Again, cumbersome and expensive.

Do you upload it and have students download the file? That bypasses the one-at-a-time issue faced by USB keys, but then you and your students are dependent on the vagaries of network performance. Is the network busy that day? At what rate can that file be downloaded from where you are hosting it. Do you have to pay to have the file hosted online? Are there bandwidth limits on your account? Throw in the odd 1GB file, and over the course of a month, you could be facing a large bill.

What about the Public Folder system? Macbooks come equipped with Public Folders which your students can access at any time over the network. In theory this system is perfect for the classroom. The problem is that only 10 students can connect to your Public Folder at one time, and if any forget to properly disconnect, others will be blocked out. In addition, even a file as small as 100 MB will suddenly create a classroom management situation, as during busy network periods, the average download time could top 20 to 30 minutes. What do the students do while they are downloading? How do you keep track of who has fully downloaded the file, and who's downloads were interrupted?

Personally, I prefer using an adapted Public Folder method, where I go to one students at each table, directly connect my Macbook to theirs with a regular ethernet cable, and transfer the data. With the direct connection, transfer speeds are blazing fast, and a 100 MB file takes a few seconds to transfer. To over come the bottleneck issue, I have my students in groups of three, and I employ the Give and Get system. After I "Give" the file to one student, the other two direct connect to the first, and they "Get" the file from them. In practice, when done right, I have found that you can transfer 500 MB to 1 GB of data to each student in your classroom in between 5 to 7 minutes.

It's not a perfect system, and requires both technical knowledge, and specific tools (6+ small ethernet cables for student use), but I have found it to be the most efficient system to date.

Each method brings certain upsides and downsides. Which method works best for you?

One Final Indignity

2009-12-10T09:24:00.000-08:00

This news story is old new by now, but for some reason I just couldn't bring myself to close the tab on my browser holding this story.

A little over two weeks ago, there was a bit of an incident in International City. International City is Dubai's attempt to create a multicultural gated(ish) community where professionals would go to love and commute into the city for work. For some time now International City has attracted more than a few expats of my acquaintance, mostly because the rents were dirt cheap (by Dubai standards) and the location seemed safely remote and out of the hustle of the city proper. Unfortunately, what most of these penny-pinching expats did not realize was that the entire development was created with a sewage system that could only handle, at best, 30% to 40% of the full population of the development. This led to a situation where, for a good period of time last year, large swathes of International City, especially the English area, were literally bathing in exposed sewage that had spilled out of the overtaxed pipes.

As if the constant stink and threat of cholera were not enough, the residents awoke recenbtly to discover that their area had been flooded by another form of sewage - organized crime.

It seems the ethnic gangs gave taken up root here in Dubai, which somewhat reminds me of Vancouver and Toronto back in Canada. There you can find Chinese gangs, Vietnamese gangs, you name it. Now you can find the same in Dubai. As the Gulf News told it -

"A police officer was moderately injured on Saturday evening during police raids on flats that were operating as brothels in International City.

Dubai Police managed to arrest members of Asian gangs, mainly Vietnamese, who were involved in running brothels in the development. They were also involved in inciting violent incidents among their competitors including, murdering an Indian man and seriously injuring another at the China cluster on Friday. Both men were among the competitors involved in the same illegal operations."

The police action, as the article states, was prompted by an escalation of violence where 20 gang members broke into an apartment, most likely stash house, for a shakedown. In the process they killed an Indian man, and subsequently attracted the attention of the police who, in their raid, discovered that at least 52 units in the International City Chinese sector were being used as brothels.

52. Not 5 or 2. 52.

It's not a sign that a problem is starting, it's a sign that a problem is well established and growing. Thankfully the police seem to be on top of the problem and dealing with it with alacrity.

As Time Slips Past at the Afternoon PD

2009-12-08T23:04:00.000-08:00

some are dependent
some are independent

the technique will change
across a varied range

to incorporate flexibility
with mixed ability

pay attention
to retention

matching implementation
to execution

enhancing invention
which all,
of course,
goes without mention

The View from Festival City

2009-12-03T16:18:00.000-08:00

I was in Festival City on Tuesday, the day before UAE Day, but it felt as if the celebrations had already begun.

It's not the best photo ever, but I was pretty darn proud of it. I thought of sending it in to the Khaleej Times or Gulf News, but thought better of it when I realized that do so would probably entail more effort than I was willing to undertake. So there it sits above, on this lonely blog.

As we walked along outside, however, we found that things had started to really come together at Festival City.

People were out in force, and the Disney Princess stage show brought huge crowds into the mall. We only caught the tail end of the 4pm show.

Luckily we there were a few attractions outside to keep us occupied until 6pm, or at least 5:30pm.

Eventually it was time for the stage show. I had managed, even arriving a half hour early, only to get a spot about eighty feet from the stage, but luckily a kind local offered to let my oldest daughter sit with his wife and children in the pit in front of the stage.

I can't say I understood what the story was supposed to be, but the singing and dancing Disney characters were a revelation for my daughter, who has not been able to talk of anything else since.

I think Disney hit it out of the park with their Princesses brand.

Is Dubai Too Big to Fail?

2009-11-30T14:08:00.000-08:00

Is Dubai too big to fail?...

I liked Daniel Gross's Lehman analogy, only I find it a bit off, by a few orders of magnitude. Dubai is not Lehman Brothers, Nakheel is Lehman Brothers (And only metaphorically... Nakheel's debts amount to a high single digit percentage of what Lehman's were at the time of their collapse).

Yes, Dubai World and Nakheel are large companies, but in comparison to the size, not just of Dubai's economy, but of the large merchant families in Dubai (Futtaim, Galadari, Gargash, etc), they'd be like a sub-section of a department of a division were Dubai seen as a single corporate entity.

Yes, Dubai has seemed a bit flashy in recent years, but deceptively so, the way a sumo wrestler seems fat. There actually is a lot of substance underneath. As someone on the ground out here, I can tell you that the malls are jam packed (even the brand new mega malls), the roads are still clogged, the new metro is seeing increasing ridership every month, and major Dubai corporations like Dubal (7th largest aluminum producer in the world), Ducab (largest cable manufacturer in the middle east), DP World (Which, while a subsidiary of Dubai World, was excluded from DW's debt restructuring), and Emirates Airlines are all making money hand over fist.

The National's Wayne Arnold notes a few things the international media seems to have missed in their rubbernecking rush:

Dubai has never defaulted on or missed a debt (loan or bond) payment

Dubai is not a sovereign entity

Nakheel is a private company. (Nakheel's sukuk was never backed by the Dubai government and never even had a credit rating)

Dubai's traditional economic backbone has, and always will be trade facilitating infrastructure. This includes the Dubai Creek dredging, the Jebel Ali port development, the airport expansions, and now the Dubai Metro.

The money is there, but there are politics involved. Abu Dhabi's SWF alone has aver a trillion US$ in assets. The whole of Dubai's debts are a rounding error in the Abu Dhabi portfolio. The issue with Dubai World and Nakheel is not a lack of funds, on the part of either the Dubai government or the Abu Dhabi government. The issue is... something else.

Update: Ezra Klein gives a hat tip to an elightening graph that kind of garrotes the Dubai-Lehman analogy.

Moving Smoothly Along

2009-11-10T02:22:00.000-08:00

I've been remiss lately, but mostly due to a sustained flurry of activity at work that reached it's final, climactic crescendo today. Our school has bee pursuing accreditation with one of the largest accrediting bodies in the United States, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), and today was the big visit/assessment/interrogation.

It will be a while before the results filter down to us, but regardless of the outcome, the process itself seems to effected an enormous amount of change already. As a colleague of mine noted, just the act of delving deeply into the practices of the school, and evaluating those practices with an objective standard, has forced a number of departments to really up their game, and look seriously not just at what is being done, but why.

This accreditation process really began about a year ago, and I was intimately involved with the drafting and editing of the initial assessment reports, which gave me a perspective on the school I had not had before.

Before this, I could look at a new initiative, or a current process, and see it cynically. I can't seem to do that anymore. Which is, perhaps, for the better.

In any event, there was actually something else on my mind today, something I noticed in class as I was teaching, or, more specifically, not teaching.

A week ago each student was finally given their shiny new MacBook Pros. Unfortunately for the students, the process was a little bit "nature red in tooth and claw," since there are a gand total of two IT guys who had previously served about a 100 and change admin and teaching staff. Throw on the implementation of an entirely new system, server architecture, plus 1000 new customers, and you have yourself a couple cases of cardiac arrest. Just to keep from being trampled to death by a constant stampede of flummoxed students, the IT boys had to basically show everyone the hand, and limit themselves to a small set list of specific tasks. The students, then, were left to their own devices.

As a long-time Mac user, and a more than a bit of a geek, I was able to get my students configured and running without a hitch. Unfortunately the transition has not been so smooth for most other staff, if only because OS X is entirely alien to them, and because of this, the entire process has been frustrating and bewildering.

Bit by bit, through workshops and informal chats, I, and a very few other colleagues, hope to help those digital immigrants among the staff who are having difficulty adjusting to the new landscape. Lucky for all of us, the students seem to have taken their difficulties in stride, and pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps.

Today was a real case in point.

I had prepared a vocabulary lesson, which usually works moderately well in the classroom, but during those vocabulary lessons, there is always a non-stop torrent of requests to "tell" what a word means, or "give just one example" of how to use such a word in a sentence. When you are working wih the sheer number of words that these students need to, just to get their vocabulary up to a semi-acceptable level, those requests quickly become overwhelming.

But today, using their new Macs, and the slick (and beautiful, oh praise the Lord, it is!) Dictionary program that comes with the system, combined with Google's translate service, it was like I had become a mute accessory in the room.

They didn't even need me.

FInding the definition, writing down the Arabic translation, the part of speech, and creating a sample sentence for each word, now that they had the right tools, became doable tasks that kept them entirely engaged, and quiet.

It felt like I was in the Twilight Zone, for sure, but the truth is that, as long as ways can be found to use these new tools properly, the classrooms in thsi school will be unlike anything else in the UAE.

A Bumper Crop Year

2009-10-20T14:03:00.000-07:00

Most years, when the fall premiere season arrives, it is a safe bet that a majority of the shows will land with a thud. For some reason, only one or two shows will stick in a given year, but then along come these bumper crop years where the small screen is suddenly awash with brilliance.

This year is one of those years.

For some time now, TV pundits have spoken at length about the death of the sitcom. One of my favorite TV critics, Jamie J Weinman, whose blog Something Old, Something New gained enough of a following that Macleans Magazine snapped him up as their TV guy, made a very prescient prediction back in 2004.

In a nutshell, he posited that the single camera comedy was going to replace the traditional multi-camera format.

For some time, this prediction seemed like the yammerings of a yahoo, as networks kept on cranking out the multi-cam shows, like According to Jim, Til' Death, two failed Kelsey Grammer projects (Back to You, Hank), and any number of other, unmemorable wastes of time.

In the past several years, only two multi-camera shows have reached the level of hit status - Two and a Half Men, and The Big Bang Theory. And while these shows are definitely hits with audiences, creatively they are somewhat hit and miss.

But this year we hit the jackpot. Shows like Community, Modern Family, The Middle, Glee (Not a sitcom, but pretty darn funny), and Seth McFarlane's latest franchise "The Cleveland Show" have been hitting all their marks, breathing life into what had appeared, for some time, to be a dying, or even dead, genre. All of these shows, as it happens, are single camera shows, with no laugh track, not shot in front of a live studio audience. Kind of like Corner Gas... Actually, exactly like Corner Gas.

I'm not sure if Corner Gas had any influence on this trend (and it's a long shot that it would have), but just as Corner Gas recharged Canadian TV, especially Canadian comedy, shows with the exact same format, such as 30 Rock (which is probably what sparked this trend in the US) have done the same in the US.

WHatever happens, it will be interesting to see how this trend grows and develops.

Mac to the Future

2009-10-19T12:19:00.000-07:00

At a school in Dubai, where I spend my days banging out the rent, an educational experiment has begun that will have interesting, and perhaps long term effects on education in the region.

You see, I'm tapping out this post tonight on a new computer. When I first joined my school, I was told that every teacher was given a laptop, which turned out to be the case, and I became the (proud?) holder of a Dell something or other. To be fair, while I never stopped grousing about the Dell, and casting a covetous glance on all the nicer byte candy out there, I had been using and and abusing that Dell for three years. I had it on almost 24 hours a day, every single day, using it to make documents, create movies, edit and produce audio, you name it. I filled it to the brim with free, open source software that let me do thing only people with much deeper pockets usually could. I burned out two power adapters during the course of my stewardship, and two weeks ago I had to finally bow to the inevitable...

It was time to get my grubbers on a new MacBook Pro.

That's right. That sweet, grey bit of byte candy became mine. I had been eyeing such a purchase for years, dreaming about the day when I would own a Mac again, but always aware that the price was a little too stiff for my family-man means.

It is a good thing I did not buy one in the end, because over the summer vacation, I learned that my school had given up their contract with Dell, and had signed a deal with Apple. Every teacher at my school system's five high schools and multiple tertiary institutes was being supplied with a MacBook Pro 13.1", loaded with a kings ransom in software - Microsoft Office 2008, Final Cut Pro, and iWork. In addition, these machines were given dual boot capability, so in addition to Mac, we retained Windows, and the suite of software we used there.

Some lucky few, or so I hear, are also getting the Adobe Creative Suite, professional version.

Yes we teachers are being spoiled by getting these fancy new machines. But so, it turns out, are the students.

Every student at my school is getting a shiny new MacBook Pro. What that will mean in the classroom remains to be seen, especially considering the powerful multimedia recording capabilities of these machines.

A few high schools in the US and Europe have already implemented a laptop-per-student policy, but usually that means a generic Windows laptop. I don't think I've heard of a similar program where students received top of the line MacBooks usually only used by creative professionals and pretty much every actor on television.

Is it overkill? Will the power and possibilities of these machines be put to good use? How will it affect the on the ground situation in the classroom?

The money being thrown at this program is staggering, and the deal itself was high profile enough to make the national news. The no.2 man at Apple himself flew down to Abu Dhabi to seal the deal.

Whatever the cae may be, I'm just happy that I finally got my own little bit of byte candy. Whatever else is whatever else.

Interlude: Those Winter Sundays

2009-10-18T13:24:00.001-07:00

In addition to the poetry I write, I think I am going to start posting poems I come across that really have something to offer. I came across this poem, by Robert Hayden, on Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached from labor
in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze.

No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm,
he'd call, and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

I read the news today...

2009-10-18T12:16:00.001-07:00

I read the news today, oh boy.

A few items that popped out at me today. The first was when I opened my copy of the Khaleej Times this morning and saw the gratis copy of PC "Magazine." The one thing I love about this part of the world is how generous they are when naming things, ascribing virtues that they simply do not possess. Flipping through, I soon saw that the magazine was just an advert for Gitex, the large tech expo. What I soon noticed, however, was not the plethora of manufacturers and software developers hawking their wares, but the relative paucity of such. I don't know if this is true or not, but apparently there are only two peripheral makers at Gitex. If it is true, then I'd find a greater variety of tech vendors at the Emarat on the corner than I would a Gitex.

It says something. I'm not sure what. But something.

And on to other news. Two fascinating items of note.

The Germans have stumbled on a new way to "raise" environmental consciousness. Apparently, if you ride a bike or take the bus to Berlin's "The Maison d’Envie," one of Germany's many, legal, brothels, you get a 5 Euro discount on services.

In other news, an interesting item from Britain. You see, I'm a loyal follower of the BBC Radio 4 Friday Night Comedy Podcast. It's usually very good, and most of the shows are well done. A good portion of thw humor seems to stem from taking potshots at the BNP -

"The BNP is forming an alliance with the Green Party. They want to ring the island with windmills, which they hope will also blow away the immigrants" Ba-ding-cha!

I figured that the BNP was a conservative party akin to Canada's Reform party from the late 90s and early 00s, and that the cheap shots were just that - a somewhat unfair tarring of what is a legitimate and serious political party.

And then I read this -

The ultra-right-wing British National Party has agreed to amend its constitution to allow the very people it loathes—visible minorities—to join. The UK Equality and Human Rights Commission had launched court proceedings against BNP leader Nick Griffin and two of his deputies, arguing it had a statutory duty, under the Equality Act 2006, to prevent discrimination by political parties. In a plea deal, Griffin has agreed to present his all-white membership with a revised constitution at a general meeting next month. Then they will sing Kumbaya.

Awesome. Really. It's 2009, and they're taking a serious look at desegregation. Do they still use computers the size of a bus? How are Brylcreem sales doing in BNP strongholds?

Boy Howdy

2009-10-17T12:36:00.000-07:00

It's about time to get back on this thing and get some writing done. Some time about the end of the summer, and during the first bit of the school year, I felt a bit of a fugue come over me, some sort of lazy unwillingness to get back on the wagon again.

I think it was the poetry. Perhaps I'll have to be a bit more sporadic on that. I'll still try to keep it up, but my one a day goal is probably a mite unsustainable considering my current circumstances.

Which brings me to the good news. There's a new O'Hearn in the world, and I've officially become candidate for King Lear-ship. We've had three daughters in four years, which means they'll all be teenagers at the same time at some point, which also means that I'm going to have to move to a district that let's me own a shotgun, and doesn't get too fussy about me using on my own private property.

But enough of that. I had something to show you. A bit of joy to share.

Leah Melissa O'Hearn

Moments after birth...

Cleaned up, seeing the sun for the first time...

Endless Translation Fun

2009-08-13T16:38:00.000-07:00

In case you're late to the party, here is Translation Party!.

Enter a phrase in English. The phrase is then translated into Japanese, then back to English, then back to Japanese, over and over until the phrase no longer changes from one translation until the next. That is, until equilibrium is found.

I decided to run a well known poem through the matrix. The changes are interesting, but what is more interesting, I find, are the phrases that glide perfectly from one language to the next, with nothing lost in translation.

Anyhow, here is -

W.B. Yeats - The Second Coming

Enlarge vortex
Can not hear the falconer's hawk.
If you, or you can move the distance to the center?
In the world of anarchy, loosed is
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed?
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
Belief, all the best for the worst.
Are full of passionate intensity.

The revelation of several cars.
It has been revealed.
February 2! , Most of these words
Mundi in the case of multiple ethanol of the code
My first problem: the waste of desert sand;
Body of a lion and the head of the human form,
This is in the sky, flying like a cruel sun
The slow-footed, back to the top of all
Birds of the desert, cross the wind shadow.
Dark again, I know now reduced
Centuries of stony sleep 20
Consider the nightmare of the birthplace of rock
And the rough beast, the final round, the following
What Slouches born in Bethlehem?

Words

2009-08-13T16:30:00.000-07:00

Should you shut your ears to anything else I may speak
should you shut your eyes to anything else I may write
if nothing else at the very least
heed these words
let them find a home within you
a safe place to stay until they are needed
when they can be called upon in your time of need

Words
mere words
bind all things earthly or not
within the realm of human imagination
what is love death pain
without one word to hold in all the
understandings and perceptions each carries
they are unknowable
the power of a word manifests itself
making the incomprehensible tangible

Words
mere words
are everything of import
they bind us to courses of thought and action
dictating out lives
oppressing or liberating
used to define the worth of a person
whether they are to be locked in a cage
or to command the loyalty of millions

Words
mere words
Can make your spirit exult
hearing those things which your heart longs for
or reading what appears to be a dream given form
you dance you laugh
your whole world grows
to include anyone within reach of your smile

Words
mere words
can break your heart
leaving your tattered soul soiled
unrecognizable upon the ground and you
struggling to find a way
to begin to stand to try again

Words
mere words
in them lay the very essence of humanity
for what they have the power to do
they also have the power to undo
and I have some words for you

In any of your endeavors in the light of day or dark of night
when that insidious quiet descends upon you
threatening to consume you
taking you away from yourself
I want you to look in that same place
no matter the day or hour
and pull out these words

In a quiet place
where a soft wind blows
rustling leaves and grass
under a tree
you will find me
smiling
waiting

Going to the Library

2009-08-05T15:22:00.000-07:00

Or will be, soon, for some people.

The Toronto Public Library now allows members to check out books online, as in e-books, audiobooks, music, and movies.

Makes me wish I still had my library card handy. Then again, I'd have to be a tax-paying citizen of Canada to enjoy that privilege, whereas I'm currently a tax-avoiding resident of Dubai.

I could always go to a local library... (wait, now, don't laugh too hard!)

Actually, I am pretty pumped about the opening a new library just down the road from where I live. When it opens, it will be the first Dubai library I will have entered. I know there are a few branches out there, but I haven't had the time to search for them.

Here's hoping the Dubai library system gets on the e-book bandwagon also.

Priorities

2009-08-05T15:18:00.000-07:00

So you say you
shouldn't be so high
on my list of priorities

there's work
there's friends
there's life

So you say you
shouldn't be so high
on my list of priorities

I say you are wrong

For when I wake
there is only ever one item
on that list

Gratis-nomics

2009-08-04T15:17:00.000-07:00

I'm kind of liking that word right now, seeing as how Chris Anderson already took the other cool variation.

Some interesting news.

Ever heard of The Guild? It is an independently written, and produced webshow about a bunch of geeks who love World of Warcraft.

Season one was givjavascript:void(0)en away free, as will season 2 be. But quality work speaks for itself, and loudly enough that The Guild is now being sponsored by Microsoft and Sprint.

In the new creative economy, I'm thinking that talent, effort, and quality work are going to be the main factor determining success.

Mr. Today

2009-08-04T15:06:00.000-07:00

I’m Mr. Today
I used to have another name but
that was someone else
I can’t remember him anymore

About myself there isn’t much to
tell but I’ll tell
the little I do know one thing
I am really good at is sticking my
head through an open door seeing
someone inside then entering their life

Some things last have
permanence though I wouldn't
know enough about that to say change
is the only constant I know

How could they give you up?
she said in a soft voice still heavily
breathing in the afterglow I don't
know what to say all I can think
is because they can

Anything goes for me really I'm
not scared of being knocked down
as they say all I have to do is stand up

Falling in love is easy I do it all
the time cats have nine lives and I
have nine hearts but sometimes
I wonder if falling is only a habit

Remember Biz Markie well I
never have been the
just a friend
he is always someone I later meet

Before God I swear I will give every
new her all until she says goodbye

Per ardua surgo and all that I just
hope I made a few smiles laughs
singing illigitimi non carborundum
all that matters really the
categorical imperative

I'm Mr. Today can't remember
yesterday don't know about tomorrow
every new today I am just as
surprised that I am still here so
certain that chances are like
the Littlest Hobo tomorrow
I'll be gone

Dining in Dubai vs. Dining in Toronto

2009-08-03T12:49:00.001-07:00

I came home today and saw an interesting new comment on my post on blandness.

The commenter, Ah pois, seemed taken aback by my apparent preference for food in Canada over food in the Middle East. The issue is a little more complicated than that, but overall, I do prefer a great deal of food in Canada to what's available in the Middle East.

Why that is, is simple - variety.

You could be reductive, and hold that Canadian food consists of pemmican, maple syrup, beavertails, and maybe moose meat. But in truth, Canada has a much more varied cuisine than most people know.

In Dubai, I can get Arabic food, great Arabic food, incredible Arabic food. I love it to death, and I will miss it terribly when I am gone. But Arabic food really is not very varied, consisting of a combination of meat (kebabs, chicken legs), hummous, bread (pita bread), yogurt, and salad (fattoush, or tabouleh).

Like I said, the food is good, but you can tire of it quickly. So then what do you eat? Good Italian is hard to find in Dubai for a decent price. Greek food? Sorry, no gyros, since few restaurants use pork. Chinese? Nope, all you can find is either Indian-Chinese or Asian-Fusion. If hakka noodles and chicken lollipops suit your fancy, then power to you, but good luck finding any hot pot, or congee. Caribbean? Forget it. Mexican? Second rate Tex-Mex is all there is. Thai? To date I have found only one or two restaurants that can make a passable pad thai, and forget about masaman beef. Korean? Sorry, but you are not going to find good bibimbap or kimchee around these parts. Japanese? Perhaps. There are a few good sushi joints, but forget about finding decent ramen or gyoza. Vietnamese? Nowhere to be found around here.

Better yet, how about a place that serves roast beef with gravy, roast potatoes, with freshly picked steamed carrots, broccoli, and green beans, with a pile of cobs of peaches and cream corn on the side? Sorry, but you are totally out of luck. How about mashed turnip, butternut squash, or mashed potatoes? What passes for those here is not usually edible.

Dubai is great if you love Arabic food, South Asian food, or fast food, but for anything else, you are generally out of luck. And of those three, Arabic food usually sits in your stomach like a brick, most Indian (and pretty much ALL South Indian) food leaves you looking for the Pepto-Bismol, and fast food? No explanation needed.

Wait, I forgot. You can also get good Filipino food in Dubai, but other than pancit, I don't know many non-Filipinos who got out of their way for that cuisine.

But in Toronto...

Want Bún bò Huế or Banh Mi? Head on down Spadina, and while you are there, pick up some awesome Baozi, or the best freshly made pan fried dumplings you will find anywhere. Feel like a legendary gyro? Pop on over to the Danforth and head to Alexandros. Want Thai? There are countless places with excellent pad thai, and fresh spring rolls. Go over to Bloor and Christie, and take in some honest to god real Korean food. Head on up to Jane and Finch where you find some of the best curry goat and roti or jerk chicken you have ever tasted. In North York and Woodbridge there are numerous excellent Italian restaurants, and if you feel like hot pot or congee, then hurry on over to Markham or Vaughan.

But it doesn't end there. You also have every European cuisine available, in addition to French-Canadian cuisine (Poutine, anyone?, and even a few decent Mexican joints.

And as always, the ubiquitous selection of Canadian blandness - corn, carrots, peas, beans, cauliflower, potatoes, squash, turnip, beets, roast beef, baked ham, roast turkey, cod fillets, salmon steaks, gravy, yorkshire pudding, butter biscuits, buns, and numrous breads. On the side, you will fine any number of clear broth soups with different fresh ingredients, a plethora of different types of salads. And then there is dessert.

What I wouldn't give to have a freshly baked apple pie made with fresh apples, or peach cobbler, strawberry shortcake, or...you get the idea.

All of it wholesome, savory, sweet, and satisfying.

Sure there are fewer excellent Indian restaurants in Toronto than Dubai, but that doesn't mean they're not there.

Oh, and before I forget, there is the subject of sanitation. Do you know how many people have gotten seriously ill or died here from food poisoning this year? More than a few. In fact, government inspections have found that a surprising number of joints here, especially in Sharjah, have not only been found to be unsanitary, but engage in unsanitary practices, turn the freezers and fridges off at night to save on electricity, change expiration dates, and knowingly sell expired food.

So in all, yes, I do definitely prefer the food situation back in Canada over what I can find here.

After the Bath

2009-08-03T01:38:00.000-07:00

I'm finished!
I'm finished!
I'm finished the bath!

Come here!
Hurry!
I'm wearing my slippers,
from the bath.

You have to put on cream
on my tummy,
not my hands,
my tummy.
I don't have a baby in my tummy,
but Mumma has a tummy
Mumma has a brother in her tummy,
or a sister in her tummy,
maybe a brother,
but I don't have a sister,
I have Kathleen,
she's not a sister,
she's Kathleen!

Let's go here!
Look! I have the paper!
I have the paper!
I have the paper that shows the shopping,
it shows how to get to the shopping,
and how to go to the place,
to buy the shopping,
and buy the birthday cake,
the big birthday cake,
for Mackenzie,
for Mackenzie's birthday,
because it's Mackenzie's birthday soon.

Kathleen's birthday is over,
and Mumma's birthday is over,
and Grandma's birthday is over,
and Grandpa's birthday is over,
but Dadda's birthday is,
Dadda's birthday is coming.

You have to take the paper
to get the money from the bank,
it shows how to go to the bank,
and you take the paper,
and it gives you the money,
and you buy the cake,
the big birthday cake,
for Mackenzie,
and then you take the paper,
and Dadda's birthday will come,
it will come,
in two hours,
and then,
and then you have to,
you have to go to the poo-poo.

Okay, Dadda?
Okay?

The Future of Publishing

2009-08-02T14:54:00.000-07:00

You know, for an awful long time, the business of publishing has boiled down to taking a book, throwing it on a shelf in a bookstore, and hoping readers will find it, and buy it.

Oh sure, there are also marketing campaigns, book tours, interviews and reviews that help out, but for the most part publishers relied on third parties to get people to buy their books. And the system worked, until it didn't, and instead of changing, most publishers seem to just keep on like nothing has happened.

Well one publisher decided to buck that trend. What's more, when faced with the bleak harshness of the open market after their Arts Council funding was withdrawn, instead of laying down and dying an elegaic death, they performed an epic act of innovation, and have begun to thrive.

As The Bookseller.com reports, "Independent poetry publisher Salt has raised enough money to get through the rest of 2009."

Instead of just chucking books on a store shelf, they made direct contact with their past customers. They reached out, got names, emails, and began their "Just One Book" campaign, where they urged people to buy one, just one, book. Not the same book, but just one book by them.

And it worked, by golly. Instead of relying on handouts and bemoaning the disinterest of the modern reader, and waiting for some media panjandrum to raise an approving eyebrow, they put boots up arses, stirred up some interest themselves, and to top it off are now diversifying into other genres.

Amazing, isn't it? What publishers can do when they use their heads?

Unrepentant

2009-08-02T03:33:00.000-07:00

She weas really offended
by the things he said.

They really hurt her,
and she didn’t know if
she could forgive him.

"Don't worry," he replied.

"I don’t want you to forgive me."

Those words which hurt
so much
only struck hard
with the force of truth

All he wanted her to say was not
"I forgive you."

All he wanted her to say is
"I understand."

If Not For the Editing

2009-08-01T12:56:00.000-07:00

Back when I studied creative writing at York University, one of my profs, Richard Teleky, told us that he felt Nino Ricci was a good writer, but not necessarily a great writer*. The reason why he felt this was that Ricci's debut novel, "Lives of the Saints" was by far and away better then the next two books in the trilogy, mostly because the first book was the beneficiary of a great deal of sublime editing. Ricci had written the novel while earning an MFA at Concordia, and as happens to any MFA student, their major work in a program is never only a singular effort - each student is surrounded by a number of like-minded, intelligent and perceptive writers and editors who all pitch in with helpful suggestions and critiques.

The point of my old professor's illustration was to drive home the point that it was not a great writer who made a work great, but a great editor, and that without the second part of the equation, even the most talented writer would quickly slip into mediocrity. A case in point being J.K. Rowling (bear with me, here), whose first three Harry Potter novels, all heavily edited, polished and slimmed down volumes, were far better then the latter four. When it came time for "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," Rowling's sales and recognition were already a world-wide phenomenon, and she was able to resist much of the editorial control she had put up with in the beginning. When it came time for the seventh book, you have to wonder if the editors were even allowed in the same room as the manuscript.

As far as Rowling was concerned, that didn't really matter much. She was a popular writer, the bucks were rolling in, and literary merit, "good writing" and "bad writing" all became moot points. If her name was on the front, people bought it, just as the buy Tom Clancy, James Patterson, Stephen King, Danielle Stelle, et al.

But, if you are the sort of writer whose popularity is derived from the literary merit of your work, as opposed to a character, genre, or place, that sort of slide into mediocrity often quickly translates into a one-way ticket back into obscurity. This is why literary writers often take so very long to complete a novel, and why the editing process is often so drawn out. Great literary writers almost always have a great, and usually a specific editor to work with. In Canada, that meant someone like Ellen Seligman, who, as the National Post declared, [I]"has edited more Giller Prize winners than anyone."[/I]

As Patrick Lane put it "Hands-on doesn't even begin to describe what Ellen does. Ellen inhabited my manuscript. That's the only way I can describe it. She entered into the novel in a way that just stunned me. I was not prepared for the way she climbed inside the novel." As Lane described it, he worked with Ellen for three hours every day when editing his first novel, and at times up to nine hours at a stretch.

When you look at a list of who Seligman has edited, it's a veritable who's who of CanLit - Margaret Atwood, Rohinton Mistry, David Bergen, Leonard Cohen, Elizabeth Hay, Jane Urquhart, Michael Ondaatje, and Anne Michaels.

All of which begs the question - if each of these writers is considered to be a "great writer," yet the common element between them all is the same, doesn't that beg the question as to who, truly, brings that touch of greatness to their works? Is it the editor? According to Seligman "[e]ditors, certainly in Canada, we don't change things. Our job is to make recommendations." So, in other words, no. It's not the editor, it is the author. Case closed, end of discussion, next subject please.

Still, you would have to wonder whether such a statement was true, or editorial boilerplate, a way of obfuscating the process the way a magician does their tricks. Ask any editor, and they would probably say the same thing. Admitting to being a co-author of a work, for editors, would be a breach of ethics on par with a psychologist passing around a highlight reel of their sessions with clients. So the question as to how complicit an editor is in the creation of a work is one that will go unanswered. If the author is successful, they're not going to blab, and even if the author bombed and decided to blab, who would listen? Who would care? Sour grapes from a failed writer are about the last item on anyone's to-do list.

One way for the truth to surface, however, is if the story is told from beyond the grave. This, as it turns out, recently happened in regards to Raymond Carver. As the Times of London has shown, Raymond Carver reputation as a master stylist is about as deserved as Bernie Madoff's reputation as a master investor. As time has told, it was all, in the end, a lie.

Which brings me back to my old prof, Richard Teleky, and the sermon he told his class of half asleep poseurs, most of whom, like myself, allowed words like "craft," "editor," and "editing" to splash off of them and dissipate into the air, deflected by the impenetrable shields named "the muse," "my art," and "talent." Maybe trying the be the best writer the world has seen is not the best use of my time. Perhaps I should start looking for a good editor instead.

-----

[I]*Keep in mind that Ricci has won TWO Governor General's Awards and a Trillium Award. Which means that any aspersions should not be taken at face value.[/I]

Question

2009-08-01T12:55:00.000-07:00

Curiosity seems
always
to fill me.

One question
burns
or, at least,
niggles.

Have I done anything to offend?

If I had,
would you tell me?

A First Glimpse of the Kindled Future

2009-07-31T14:58:00.000-07:00

You ever hear of Boyd Morrison? Probably not, but his story is more than a little pertinent for anyone looking to make a living as a writer.

It seems that old Boyd went and wrote a novel, but instead of going the usual route of sending it off to sit on a slush pile, or futilely begging an agent to look at it, he self-published it on Amazon as a Kindle book.

And it sold.

Not Harry Potter levels, but more than enough that Simon and Schuster kicked down his door and stuck a two book deal in his face.

This Kindle thing may not only be a way for to get noticed by readers, but for the publishers to notice writers. Instead of looking into a crystal ball to predict what might sell, they only have to see what does sell, then lock that writer in tight.

Reports of the publishing industry's death may soon be proven to be exaggerated.

Another First Last

2009-07-31T03:46:00.000-07:00

I saw King Canute today,
half formed, translucent
on the restaurant window.

With every new word,
attempt at a gesture,
the initiative moved
farther from view.

What spark there was,
or interest
shifted red while I sat,
halfway amused,
as the night moved on
until
it was time to say goodbye.

Kindle Takedown?

2009-07-30T14:55:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't read it already, here's Nicholson Baker's semi-takedown of the Kindle 2 in the New Yorker.

I found that many of his criticisms were no more than esoteric nitpicking (few people get in a snit about fonts), and the epic snobbery that only New Yorker writers can truly effect ([P]ost-Gutenbergian revalorization? GMAFB!). Also, he never touches on what's to come. He comes across like one of those old curmudgeons who used to kick the wheels of horseless carriages, and spit out of the sides of their mouths, saying "ain't nothing special."

Although, I will agree that books look nicer on an iPod, with the added benefit of being able to read at night, while listening to music, and being able to check your email...

Then again, maybe that defeats the purpose.

But as for the Kindle, time will tell, or the Apple Tablet (Tapplet) will.

Hello My Friend

2009-07-30T03:39:00.000-07:00

His friend yelled
with unchecked anger
even some hate
in his words.

At first he accepted them
listened
and understood
forgave
and smiled.

When the friend did the same thing
time and again
and he grew tired
but patience held
listening, wishing
they could would move on
to something else.

But when he moved
it was from anger
forgivable
to anger
unequivocal

Words were said,
that cannot be unsaid,
for which I am sorry
is not accepted,
words which brought
patience to an end.

Pent up thoughts exploded
in an angry rush ending
pushing past self-control
into an anger not known before or felt
and to his friend he said
"I hate you."

He told his friend he would be happy
if he kindly went away
and did not bother to come back
again.

It is only now,
much later on
I begin to understand why
as he said those hateful words,
he smiled,
seeming at peace.

If Every Weekend was a Long Weekend

2009-07-29T15:02:00.001-07:00

In North America, quite a great deal of fun is made of France, and Europe in general, especially in regards to how they structure their business hours. Four day work weeks, flex time, and more. It's as if, the joke goes, the Europeans work harder than anyone else, at finding ways not to work.

In Dubai, it is more than common for businessmen, even those with jobs labeled as "executive" positions, to work twelve to fourteen hours, six days a week, and sometimes seven. Mind you, I used quotations with the word executive, because as happens in this country, mislabeling is a common phenomenon, where little hole-in-the-wall corner stores are called "supermarkets" without anyone batting an eye. For too many expatriates, especially those from South Asia, while the job may have "executive" in the title, the pay is anything but. Yet regardless of the less than spectacular compensation, these sorts of jobs are clung to with a ferocious tenacity, and rarely will you hear these "executives" complain about sixty-plus hour work weeks without end.

Why? In a word, money. Those "executives," often have goals, and a plan to achieve those goals, and working hard is just part of the deal. They don't plan on staying in the position forever, ten, maybe twenty years at most, after which they return home to a life of relative redolence and luxury. I've known more than a few NRIs (non-resident Indians) who have massive houses in India, rental properties they derive income from, and even a bevy of servants. These NRIs can afford this because their low salaries (to my estimation) translate to serious coin back home.

So for NRI's, and by extension most expatriate workers in the Gulf region, the crazy work hours are temporary, with a light at the end of the tunnel.

When I lived in Japan, I also found the same sort of crazy work hours. However, there it was more a matter of culture than money, which is completely understandable in the land that literally coined the term for death by overwork - karoshi.

North America has long appeared to have this sort of mentality, and in the early 2000's, this mentality seemed to be increasing. Unlike the Netherlands, where citizens are given six weeks of paid vacation, and on top of that are even given a cheque from the government every year that literally pays for travel to wherever the whim strikes, workers in North America got their two weeks a year, and that's it. But there seems to be some hope, at long last.

Back when I was single, I lived to work. I worked as many jobs as I could, as long as I could, and I often bristled at regulations limiting the hours I could work. I especially hated how the government seemed to tax overtime so exorbitantly.

Now, as a family man, I work to put bread on the table, but that's about it. If I didn't have to work, I wouldn't. I would rather spend my days at home, with my children, and with my wife, doing whatever. I'd love to have the time to walk to the public library twice a week, spend hours in parks playing pick up ball or just tossing a frisbee, go swimming every day if the mood hit. That, in a word, would be my dream.

But dreams are not reality, and in this world, unless you live in Europe, work is king. Until now.

Like I said, there seems to be hope that, in North America at least, the non-stop work mentality might be revisited sooner rather than later. An article just published by Scientific American looks at how Utah has changed from a four day, eight hours a day work week, to a four day, ten hours a day work week.

The crux of the argument is that working hours remain the same, but overall costs for energy are greatly reduced. The electricity is off one more day a week, and cars are off the roads for an extra day. And the ancillary benefits are legion.

Working ten hours is not a big deal, especially for office work. What's more, that extra day really changes things. In the traditional 9 - 5 week, with a two day weekend, you have one day to do errands (shop, mow the lawn, etc) and one day to rest. Sadly, that rest day is usually eaten up by more errands, travel, or family commitments. With a three day weekend, you really do have more time to relax, and enjoy life. You can spread your errands around a bit more, and take things easier. With every weekend being a three day weekend, you don't have to wait for a a long weekend before heading out to the cottage, or going camping, because every weekend is now a long weekend.

Unless you hate being with your family, there's nothing but good to be had from a four day work week.

Here's hoping that this idea finds wings, and when I return to North America, one day, I won't have to dread the five day grind any more.

To Live

2009-07-29T14:58:00.000-07:00

Being the smartest or
craftiest person

strong
swift
honorable

or not

matters little, really.

It's the stubborn
the obstinate
the pigheaded

who seem always to find
some way

Google Gets Some Love

2009-07-28T15:00:00.000-07:00

These days any news about Google seems to be bad news, and always along the line of no good intention ever going unpunished.

The good deed they've been getting the most flack for these days has been their bold, unprecedented attempt to digitize the world's books.

When I first heard about this initiative, I loved it unreservedly, because I had wanted to do something similar myself.

Indeed, a lifelong ambition of mine has been to build a house somewhere with a lot of space, and add on a big circular library. You know, one of those tower like structures that's three storeys high, the shelves rise up to dizzying heights, with a massive stained glass window on the top. It would be like my own little wizard's enclave, a place where Raistlin would feel at home.

But could I hold the world's books? And for what purpose? In the event of Armageddon, or some sort of nuclear holocaust, it would be a place that could help the world rebuild. It would be the center of a brand new civilization, and oasis of knowledge and learning in the midst of ignorance and savagery.

But when was the last time the whole world ended?

Maybe one day I will build a library like that, but it would only be an ornament, really. Not something that could enrich the lives of others, unless I wanted to turn my home into a public space, and I'm sure the wife would have reservations about such a plan.

Besides, what I imagined doing was and still lay firmly in the realm of my own imagination. In practice, I seem to have gone in reverse, as I have become one of those people who now sheds books after using them. But Google isn't talking about a cool idea, or a grand notion, they're in the business of making it happen.

And that's where I get mystified by the response Google has gotten. A huge number of the books they have been dealing with are out of print, the author has died but no copyright owner can be found, or their is no indication of the clear holder of the copyright. In other words, these are books existing in a form of purgatory, of no real use to society at large, yet representing a massive amount of intellectual capital.

What Google found was a gold mine that nobody wanted, and nobody had ever bothered to even look at. So when Google staked their claim on all that empty territory, put a ton of resources into making something out of what had been abandoned as nothing, why only then did the howls begin. Accusations of monopoly where flung with abandon. Google was said to have vile, nefarious plans for locking up all the world's information, and leaving mankind in the dark.

All because they began digging up books that had been left to rot.

The whole thing struck me as the rawest of hypocrisy. Let's say I found a book they had dug up, and I had to pay a fee to access it. Well, the very fact that I found out about the existence of that book was due to Google, and the fact that I could actually obtain access to a copy was due to Google. So why they heck shouldn't they be allowed to charge me? They did all the work, and I am reaping the benefit of that work.

As usual, what strikes me as common sense, often seems to be less than common, and I find myself on the thin edge of an argument wedge. Which is why is was gratifying to see Slate.com come to the rescue with an argument that puts paid to all that nonsense sprayed about by all those howling nincompoops out there.

Now if only a way can be found to make digital storage and retrieval permanent, then worries about the loss of information can be put to rest.

Crystalline storage, anyone?

Finding

2009-07-28T03:37:00.000-07:00

Around about this place that
time scanning the crowd eyes
pausing imperceptibly each
person given a moment’s consideration
looking for something in them a
sign opening suggestion momentary
vulnerability something at least which is
preferable to butting heads against a greater
ego a self-confidence that shatters
any attempt at contact with the exception
of that lucky few whose luck rests
on a whim

Who would prefer
chance
or blind luck
even if the odds
can be improved
with a hastened effort
one time or fifty
until success

What really is gained by
setting onerself up for
a predictable fall?

Where would you go or
even could you after
getting past hello followed
by an uncomfortable silence?

Why bother making
an effort beyond the necessary
the least possible amount of work
for an intended gain?

There are easier ways
paths of gentler rejection

Most likely you will hear a combination of
words at once banal resigned apathetic
which yet ring a soft sweet melody to
ears that usually only ever hear much worse

Wise men know there is untold praise
in the words
you’ll do

Differing Perceptions of Time (Cont'd)

2009-07-27T15:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I put up a post about perceptions of time. I'd cross posted this on the bulletin board at my MFA program, and quickly received a somewhat negative response. Basically, I was told that while my point could be understood, and sympathized with, I was still "a shit" anyways.

When the gloves get thrown down like that, you just have to respond.

One element that was at the back of mind, but which I forgot to mention previously was that of the short term vs. the long term. When you are on call 100% of the time, then I think the only way you can write is to write like a manager, and not a maker. But this is hard to do. Or, conversely, you need to find the right type of job, one that allows time to work on your writing. When I was doing my BA, one of my jobs was as a parking attendant.

During rush periods, you were busy, but on evenings, weekends, and afternoons, there were always long stretches without any interruptions. My coworkers and I thought of it as like being paid to study. In fact, a good friend of mine who is in her late sixties and retired, has been doing degree after degree (she never had the chance earlier in life), while supporting herself and finding the time to read and write while at work.

As for being "a shit" (In all honesty, I don't think I disagree!), I actually do understand the urgency of little ones. This is why I inevitably leap up and take care of whatever needs doing, right then and there. If I was a single parent, or a parent in a two income household, there would never be a question about this. Priorities are priorities. But, you see, I'm in a different situation, not worse, or even close to as bad by a long shot, just different.

There are four adults in this house, three of whom do not work, and do not study. And it's not that I think that because I bring home the bacon, I can sit in a chair and do nothing every evening, because I actually love being with the kids. In this house, Daddy changes the diapers, makes the milk, dresses the kids after a bath, submits himself to an hour or two of being used as a jungle gym, and puts the kids to sleep. All of which, I want to stress, I love doing. I love changing their diapers, I love playing with them, and putting them to sleep. In fact, I would prefer to do all that over sitting on the computer and writing, any day of the week. In that way, I like to think of myself as being similar to Ray Bradbury.

You see, Ray Bradbury, in the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451, spoke of facing a similar dilemma. He would write in the garage, but then his daughters would come by, and without fail he would put down the pen and go play with them. But the family had to eat and he had to pay the bills, so he ended up taking off to the library every day, where he paid 10 cents an hour to use their typewriter, working as fast as he possibly could in order to keep costs down.

The thing is, I'm not doing an MFA as a lark. If I just wanted to write as a hobby, for the enjoyment of creating something, I could have joined a group of bloggers, or hung out on fanfic bulletin boards. But that's not my intent. That's not why I am taking this MFA. I'm doing it as part of a plan, a plan to open up earning opportunities my family otherwise would not have. Right now I teach high school in Dubai. But our family has no wish to stay in Dubai permanently, which means that I have to upgrade my education and credentials so that when we leave, I will have a better chance of landing a decent job. A secure, professional, and salaried job. One of the jobs we have in mind is the possibility that some day I might secure a tertiary teaching position.

This means that even though I would prefer to just take care of the kids every evening, and give my wife a break, which is beneficial to her, and enjoyable to me in the short term, in regards to the long term, I would not be acting in our best interests.

If I am to get through this MFA, but also develop as a writer, build a profile, and eventually get published and/or hired into a better job, I need to go through the daily grind as every writer must. Just as anyone good at what they do must also do. It would be no different if I wanted to be a pro ball player, or a cutting edge computer programmer. To gain mastery of something, you have to put in a whole lot of time.

On some level, my family knows this. But what I have found is the same as what many writers I know have found - it is impossibly difficult to impress upon your family why it would be good to perhaps structure activities such that, at least on a couple nights a week, you could have a stretch of time to work. Even when they agree, and even when they understand the reasoning, when something pops up, their first thought isn't "let's not disturb him, he needs to work, let's find another way to deal with this" but "he's only sitting there, it will only take a minute, and then he can go back to work."

This is where the problem is, and why I liked Graham's "Makers vs Manager" article so much. I have always felt the problem, but was never able to articulate it.

Back when I was doing author interviews on the radio, I lived on manager time. I would schedule an interview at Random House for 10, one at McClelland & Stewart for 11, and (optimistically) one at Penguin for 12 (so long as I could catch the right train). If I had a spare hour, I could add something in, and while riding the train, or waiting in the lobby somewhere, I would take care of other tasks. I would multi-task, or compartmentalize tasks and complete them in discrete units of time, and this always worked for whatever I needed to do, except for writing.

I found that when I had to write something long form, I always underestimated the time I needed by a massive factor. Though I could and still can type at a relatively fast pace, all that other mental stuff related to writing always slows me down. The reading, planning, editing, revising, and polishing. And it is not just the time as an absolute that is the problem. A project that may take five hours to see through, will not take five hours if there are interruptions, it will take ten, or fifteen hours. Taking out the amount of time lost during a disruption will only account for a fraction of the lost time. The rest of the lost time is lost trying to retrace mental footsteps, get back into a flow, remembering how A was supposed to get to Z.

The same thing happened to my grandfather when he made furniture in his workshop. He and my grandmother, when would get in arguments until they both worked out an arrangement where he would have long stretches of time to work, and other times he would be available to take her somewhere, or help her around the house. If not for those long stretches, he would never have been able to make the many bookshelves, tables, chairs, dressers and more that grace the homes of all of his children and grandchildren.

Dreams

2009-07-27T03:30:00.000-07:00

You say when you dream your dreams
they are
not simply vivid
they are
more intense
more
real than the real

When speaking we use this word
dream
often we say we chase them
live in them
try to live them
always looking to them
as something better
worthier than what we have
or
what we are

I can only smile
without much understanding
listening to you
talk of and about dreams
when in any dream my imagination fails
to surpass my real
not so much in what I have but
what you are

Differing Perceptions of Time

2009-07-26T15:04:00.000-07:00

You know, I find it really hard to explain to my wife exactly why I not only need time to write, but that our separate understandings of what "time" means, are very different. To her forty five minutes means I've been writing for long enough. "Isn't that enough time?" To me, forty five minutes means I've just gotten started. "Enough? Are you crazy?"

It's an endless argument that circles about ad infinitum, always leaving me angry, yet hopelessly unable to articulate how I view things. If I say "I need a few hours, uninterrupted," it translates as "Go away, I don't want to be with you." The invariable result of these exchanges is hurt feelings on one side, guilt on the other, with anger, and frustration for both.

It is not that either side is right or wrong, but that the two sides are mutually incomprehensible to each other. What is needed, I think, is an advocate who can articulate the differences in a way that is easily understood, and reasonable.

Today, as luck would have it, I came across "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule," by Paul Graham.

The crux of his argument is that there are two types of people when it comes to time - Manager types and Maker types.

Manager types break down the day into discrete blocks or sets of activities, and are always used to both multi-tasking, and fitting additional stuff in. They are kind of like my wife, who, when faced with a moment of respite, will decide that a certain cupboard needs reorganizing, or the laundry that was going to be done tomorrow could just as well be done right now, while she is cooking dinner, and chatting with a friend on the phone.

Maker types don't break down the day into discrete blocks of time, because that often impedes their ability to get a workflow going, to go about the business of making. Interruptions break the concentration, stop a making in it's tracks, and every time this reoccurs, the maker is starting at the beginning again. Makers avoid interruptions, and try to suspend their awareness of time. This is kind of like me, who will sit down, start tapping out an idea, exploring it, organizing it, adding to it, revising it, and polishing it. Time will flow without my knowledge until the task is done.

The problem comes when the Manager and the Maker conflict. I'll be in a flow, getting something straight in my head, and all of a sudden a holler from out of the room will break my concentration. My wonderful, lovely wife will inform me that I have to come, now, this instant, and see to the children. Why? Because she can;t do everything, you see, and she is already cooking, doing the laundry and currently talking to her friend! At first I would point out that if perhaps she did one thing at a time, then she wouldn't need to me to run out and deal with something that swift motherly hand and a corrective word could take care of.

The response, after omitting the unprintable string of words that immediately follow, usually relates to a strongly worded question as to why can't I just "help out?"

And it's true. Why can't I just help out? Why can't I just pause my brain, and hop back into it without a hitch? By not helping out, I'd only be proving what a cad I am. But on the other hand...

And that's just the problem. For this, can there even be an "other hand?"

I'm thinking I'll have to delve more deeply into the "Writing and Parenthood" subject. Hopefully something helpful will pop up.

One Night

2009-07-26T03:26:00.000-07:00

On a hill talking of the stars,
she sat next to him,
talking of sadness
that no matter what you did
wouldn't let you alone.

He wanted to say words
that would fix it –
He wanted to say "I’m sorry,
I don’t know what to do,"
when he realised
all he need say
was "thank you."

In her sharing,
he didn’t know his troubles anymore,
couldn’t name them.
The only thing he could think
was how glad he was
that he left had seat earlier that day,
and asked her not to go.

Worldwide Bestselling Authors

2009-07-25T15:16:00.000-07:00

Abebooks put together a list of the Top 20 bestselling authors worldwide. The list draws from the bestseller lists of English titles from 9 countries that keep national data.

Pretty eye opening.

Number 13 is a kid who, only a few years ago, was traveling around the US, hawking his self-published book at science fiction and fantasy conventions.

Number one is a dude who has only written two novels, the first of which was virtually ignored for a year or more after its initial release, and then became an international sensation - Khaled Hosseini.

I interviewed Khaled Hosseini when The Kite Runner first came out. He was a nice guy, but I was pretty sure he was headed for mid-list status.

Boy was I wrong.

What I didn't see was that outside Canada, and even the US, his novel, and his second novel, sold incredibly well. Out in the middle east, he is prominently displayed at the front of pretty much every store.

As for Harry Potter... I am sure the list would be different for 2007, which is when book 7 came out. This list is just for 2008, and Stephanie Meyer got a real boost with Twilight being released in theaters..

1 Khaled Hosseini
2 Stieg Larsson
3 Ken Follett
4 Stephenie Meyer
5 Muriel Barbery
6 Carlos Ruiz Zafón
7 Anna Gavalda
8 John Grisham
9 J K Rowling
10 Henning Mankell
11 Alan Bennett
12 Jodi Picoult
13 Christopher Paolini
14 David Baldacci
15 Nicholas Sparks
16 Elizabeth George
17 Lauren Weisberger
18 Michael Connelly
19 Patricia D. Cornwell
20 Paulo Coelho

A Correction

2009-07-25T03:22:00.000-07:00

A problem
one could not solve
and one for which
nobody even knew
how it began.

So who goes?

One, or the other?

Silence is not a solution.

As the problem grows,
all they can do is
talk about it.

If they ever feel like it

How Short Stories Could Be Revived

2009-07-24T17:09:00.000-07:00

I've gone into this in the past, but basically, I think short stories could be revived using an iTunes approach. The writer sells directly to the reader, or through a short story site, for a low, low price. Say $0.25. If a thousand people buy your story, that's $250. Not a fortune, but it is something.

But that sort of approach is not ready for prime time yet, because online micro-payments has not really hit the mainstream yet. People have to have Paypal, or use their credit card currently, and while most people would be okay with linking these up with Apple, most people may not feel comfortable or be willing to do so for a tiny short story site.

Right now, I think the only viable model is to a) build a readership by giving it away, and aggressively marketing what you offer, and b) using an established reader base (as newspapers and magazines use circulation figures) to sell sponsorship. Not ads, but sponsorships, and this is an important point.

Looking at the state of short fiction these days, the declining readership may appear to signal a waning of interest in the form of short fiction, but the truth is that the interest is there so long as the delivery medium is convenient. Which is where podcasts come in.

A lot of magazines and newspapers have been including podcasts with other content online. The New Yorker even produces a fiction podcast. But a magazine like the New Yorker has deep pockets, and this sort of production would be peanuts to them.

One short story magazine that started from nothing and grew is "Escape Pod," with 209 episodes (issues) thus far. It's a Science Fiction Audio Magazine. If you want to check out an episode, a good example is Episode 158, both because the story is fun, and the episode is sponsored by the musician Jonathan Coulton. His song "The Future Soon" (an excellent track) is at the end of the podcast.

An interesting side note...lyrics from that song inspired the Cory Doctorow short story "The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away."

Escape Pod pays contributors about $100 a story, and $20 for flash fiction. Not a grand sum, but it makes them a legitimate publisher, and allows them to legally secure rights (nonexclusive rights) to the stories they buy. Since their launch a few years ago, they have become one of the largest markets for short science fiction on the web.

Even Garrison Keillor's "News from Lake Wobegon" podcast is sponsored. Usually by Cheerios. You can find that podcast on iTunes

The reason I feel sponsorship is the way to go is because you can sell exclusivity. The problem with selling "ads" is that you end up having to sell as many as possible, crowding them in the smallest space possible to maximize revenue. It worked great for magazines until it didn't anymore. For audio magazines, nobody is going to listen to ten minutes of commercials, free podcast or not. But a sponsorship is perfect for the form, because podcasts are a recreation of the theatre of the mind of the old days of radio. It is a very intimate and engaging experience, and in that format, sponsorships are much more effective because the announcer incorporates the sponsors message smoothly into the episode.

I know the whole money issue seems a mere piffle, a distraction from the real business of literature and good writing, but it is what allows the literature and good writing the opportunity to find an audience.

The idea is to use the revenue stream generated through the podcast sponsorships to pay for everything else. On the site you can post the story text, put a link to the audio version, and you can even carry over the sponsorship if you want, or not if you prefer the make the site look as un-commercial as possible.

Starting from scratch, however, unless you want to end up broke after 11 issues and unable to continue, like Farrago's Wainscot, which was a pretty cool online experimental fiction magazine, there has to be some way of generating a revenue stream.

Of course you could just do a free thing, and offer no payment to authors (which means you probably couldn't secure rights to their story), and hope word of the site spreads like wildfire. Unfortunately you would then face the problem of how to attract quality writing, and how to get taken seriously.

Desire

2009-07-24T16:56:00.000-07:00

He wanted this.

He wanted it
with an absoluteness,
standing there amidst
angry words,
as one in front,
four behind,
step in.

Hands shaking
he stares at them
waiting, wanting
one hand touches his arm
"Forget them."

One a.m. the phone rang.
Her voice hysterical,
he could see her tears
she couldn't take it
the noise and people
her brother so good at twisting words
manipulating guilt like soft dough
knowing full well his power
of history and remembered emotions
please come

Two hours after midnight on a
road with no lights
his legs couldn't move any faster
the roar of passing traffic
was muted by his breath.

Three times, angry heads stuck out
of passing window, shrilling
a drunken siren's call
hoping for the slightest pretext.
He almost,
but he didn't -
he couldn't afford that.

"Just come upstairs don't worry.
If they try anything I'll call the cops.
Forget them."

He shouted into the phone
to meet him outside.
He was almost there.

Five men stood outside
liquor in hand.
He tried to ignore them
tried to pass by
but when they stepped up
so did he.

He wanted this.

Until,
one hand touches his arm.
"Forget them."

Three hours pass,
the words had faded,
the tears were gone,
and the soft sound of sleep,
fills the air with peace.

He wanted this.

Resurrecting the Short Story

2009-07-23T16:51:00.000-07:00

I know, the titles is a tad hyperbolic, but I've been thinking a lot about this issue lately, and I'll probably be posting on it more and more as time goes on.

As you know, markets for short stories have been shrinking drastically in recent years. Science Fiction and Fantasy have been hard hit, and a number of great magazines have disappeared in the past two decades. While a few online 'zines have popped up, nothing seemed to really halt this overall decline. Literary fiction has had and even rougher time, with few literary fiction magazines able to survive without government funding, or private donations, and even then having a rough time making a go of it.

If you wanted to start up your own magazine, off the bat, you're jumping into a market that is seen as not only dying, but perhaps long dead. It's a grim scenario, for sure, but in recent years a teeny, tiny bright light has appeared.

This bright light comes in the form of "audio magazines?" You see, I don't often have time to "read" short stories, but I do "listen" to them. Every day I listen to podcasts like EscapePod, which is a science fiction audio magazine that has already produced over 200 episodes. In fact, the creators of this podcast were so successful that they have branched out into other genres, with PodCastle (Fantasy) and PseudoPod (Horror). They actually pay their writers ($100 a story) and have built up a listener base in the tens of thousands. In fact, because of the size of their listener base, other writers, publishers, and even musicians often pay them to "sponsor" an episode, which allows these programs to run at a slight profit.

There are other audio magazines like EscapePod, but as far as I know, thus far there is no CanLit version. Being Canadian, this could represent a market opportunity, even if it is a tiny one.

Along side the the print material, the can be stories recorded as podcasts. You can put them up on iTunes, offer them for free, and post them on the website alongside the source material. You can even do the same thing with the reviews of short story collections. If you can build up an audience, even a modest one, after a year or so your initiative might be eligible (in Canada, at least) for Canada Council funding. Based on the size of the listenership, you might even be able to hit up the publishing companies for a few bucks.

I know it is not about the money, but this way you could actually pay your writers for their work, which would be something to boast about, considering the state of the CanLit short story market. And even if that didn't come to pass, you'd still be doing something needful, and filling a currently unfilled niche.

Mr. Today

2009-07-23T16:45:00.000-07:00