But, er, is the book any good?

(Emphasis added)

In case you thought that you had enough stock of THE COLLAPSE OF GLOBALISM, by John Ralston Saul (0670063673), this is just some advance notice of The kind of exposure we will be getting for this book!!!

We will kick off the launch with an excerpt in the Focus section of the Globe and Mail on the 21st May, followed by almost complete weekend book section review coverage, and trade, magazine and columnist coverage, the week of the 26th May. All of this will be complemented by a Globe and Mail ad, radio advertising with Jazz FM in Toronto, and a Walrus ad. To round off the mediums, we are targeting fifteen Canadian websites with information about this book, in order to reach our student market.

The following interviews will be pre-taped for airing 26th May, publication day...

CBC The Current, Macleans, Hamilton Spectator, ROB TV, CBC Newsworld, Calgary Herald, TVO-Allan Gregg and Company, Fine Print, Book TV, TVO's Big Ideas, CBC Ideas, Canadian Press, Ottawa Citizen, Embassy, Hill Times.

Combine this with a nine-city tour with media in each city -- Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton, Victoria, Vancouver and Whitehorse -- and we have a bestseller!!

So sure are we, that the first five people to respond to this email with their thoughts on when this book will appear on the Globe and Mail bestseller list, (staff and freelancers excluded), and are proved accurate, will receive an extra ten free copies to sell in their store!!!

Onwards, upwards!!!!

PenguinGroup Canada

Romenesko Rules!

I could not agree more about the value and importance of the Romenesko newsletter I receive five days a week via email.

Dobozy Doozy

The Globe and Mail
Saturday, April 9, 2005
Page D9

Fiction
Exiled to Canada

Last Notes: And Other Stories
By Tamas Dobozy
HarperCollins, 179 pages, $24.95

Reviewed by Antanas Sileika

In this remarkable debut collection of short stories –

Woah. Stop. Cut. Cut. People, that was horrible. A mistake in the fourth word of the review? That is simply unacceptable for Canada’s newspaper of record. Dobozy is the author of the very excellent collection of short stories When X Equals Marylou that appeared in 2002. He also wrote a novel called Doggone.

As a freelance writer, I cannot entirely blame Sileika, as I know what it is to make mistakes. But surely the editors of the books section would catch this mistake, given that When X Equals Marylou was reviewed in the Globe two years ago. (January 25, 2003, by Vivian Moreau.) The entire books section has been on autopilot for the past year (if not longer), so why I have even a molecule of outrage is beyond me.

Knit One, Perl Two

I'm in ComCult, doing my Master's. The program is sponsoring a conference this weekend. I was left speechless by the following:

The Viral Knitting Project
Kirsty Robertson, Department of Art, Queen's University

Picking up on some of the issues raised in my paper, and using the relation between the embodied experience of the actual protester, and the virtual/viral spread of the issues of protest across a variety of networks, the "The Viral Knitting Project," is an (as yet unfinished) collaborative work that combines the networking potential of the internet with the tactile and embodied act of knitting. Taking the binary code of the Code Red computer virus, and transforming it into the "code" of knitting (0=P; 1=K), this project knits the code of the virus into a series of colour-coded "scarves," each in proportion to the number of days since September 11th that the United States has been on red, orange, yellow, or green terrorism alert. The idea is that on the one hand there is created an actual knitted garment – comforting, yet ultimately dangerous as it can be "read" as the code red virus – on the other that through a series of interventions in the virtual space of the internet, the knitting code can spread virally, allowing the project to unfold through and across a variety of networks. Though the goal of the "Viral Knitting Project" is to make a statement of protest, it is also to explore the juncture of new and old technologies, and to establish the efficacy of internet networks as spaces of potential for protest movements. In this performance, a video is broadcast onto the wall, showing a loop of unending knitting – it is comforting, yet at the same time insufficient – the knitting never actually goes anywhere, nothing is actually created. A slide projector projects the code of the virus on top of the video – contained within the walls of the image, untranslatable into functioning code without human action, it is harmless. In front, any number of knitters sit knitting the virus into scarf-like garments in a silent yet resonant environment – the sound of knitting needles, the soundtrack of the video, the whirr of the slide projector. Performable in any number of venues and sites, the "Viral Knitting Project" undermines the aestheticism of politics in the gallery, it refuses the stillness and two-dimensionality of the image, it offers the potential of a tactile critique.

Touche

From the April 2005 issue of Toro -- an interview with Tom Brown, a graphic designer who moved from New York to Vancouver in 1997:

Q: What did you like about living in New York?
A: Living in a country that supported the magazine industry was refreshing. Heck, if you left one job you could even go into another one.

Radio Radio (Radio)

Dear CBC,

Thanks for canceling Radio3. Your inability to appreciate and nurture innovation helps further the brain-drain southward.

Yours,
Bigge

What chafes even worse about R3 disappearing is that the new cbc.ca/arts page is so ugly. Hey, CBC arts -- 1995 called, and it wants its html template back. The site looks like a disheveled lungfish who has just managed to heave itself onto land and take its first tentative breath of unmediated oxygen. Cough, hack, cough.

The Drake's Progress

This gem comes from "The Drake e_AKE," February Vol.010. It requires no further comment:

1. DRAKE SAYS
+DRAKE TURNS ON(E) ANNIVERSARY MONTH!
It's been kind of wild, hasn't it? It's been a year of, sigh, us laughing together at the bar, or watching crazy black and white films up on the roof sprawled on the mattresses under the sky, or being swept up in a performance as actors came dancing down the stairs, or just glimpsing musicians sitting chatting before their gigs. I guess no one can know me as intimately as you do - you've been inside every part of me. I have so much more I want to show you, so many more things i want to do with you .I want to watch you at the bar, sucking back Jack. I want to watch some poet breathing fire, some sweating guitarist tossing his mad hair, the way we've done all year. I probably didn't understand half the stuff we saw down there, the videos, the performances, the machines that talked and jerked, the musicians, the authors - you probably understood all of it, knowing you - Thanks for helping me be what I am.

XXX DRAKE (ps - thanks to russel smith for penning this piece).

Please visit out happenings page to check out our anniversary programming: http://www.thedrakehotel.ca/happenigs.asp

But Somehow Not Surprised

* From the January 2005 issue of Toronto Life, specifically the David Macfarlane profile of David Miller (which Lynn Crosbie yesterday described as a "hot-oil massage"):

When the teachers and students of Lakefield voted for head boy, the results were by no means as predictable as they might seem to a retrospective observer now….. There were other candidates who appeared to have a more obvious claim to the position. But when the tally was made, Miller had won overwhelmingly."We were all somehow surprised," recalls his friend and former classmate Nick Lewis, now a Toronto investment banker, "but somehow not surprised."

Toronto Life employs many talented editors. How did that unquote slip past every last one of them?

* Remember last year, when Robert Fulford attacked Edward Greenspon’s Saturday ramblings? ("Greenspon’s ‘Letter from the Editor,’ which appears in a prominent position on Page Two, may be the most spectacular example in current Canadian journalism of a bad idea badly executed…. Editorial problems may excite him … but they’re no fun to read about. They’re dreary, even for people in the business.") Well, Greenspon has been MIA from the Globe for the last two Saturdays. I was somehow surprised to see that Greenspon decided to retreat, but somehow not surprised.

* A more serious MIA is the entire Review & Books section of the Saturday Post. I was somehow surprised to learn about the latest cost-cutting measure, but somehow not surprised. I am disappointed, not only because books editor Liza Cooperman was doing a great job, but because this means the Globe now has even less reason to innovate within the dreary little pages of LevinLand.

* Two articles about Bright Eyes in less than a week from Carl Wilson in the Globe. Wilson has a phenomenally sharp mind and an excellent blog. The repurposing seemed strange, since Carl is not someone to fax in his column. Granted, the article in Seven was a preview of the Bright Eyes show, while yesterday’s column was a reconsideration of the indier-than-thou economy of indie rock. So the articles were different but yet fairly similar. Still, I was somehow surprised to see this happen, but somehow not surprised.

* This is good, I mean really good Walrus-bashing. As critical as I am of the magazine, I was somehow surprised to see this happen, but somehow not surprised.

Does This Help?

I’m holding in my hand issue #12 of Trucker magazine (Winter 2003). Flip to page 44 and you’ll find an entire page devoted to the anti-manifesto of the Dark Movement. ("Dark Movement is more than anyone can imagine, it has no definition, rather only questions that can be asked of it…") The highlight of this jumble of napkin prose is "you be cool man-dingo" and "the soup is in the pudding."

I’m telling you all this, however, because on that very same page (44), Steve Adams (a.k.a Ogi), the self-proclaimed leader of Dark Movement, proceeds to explain his fascination with Val Kilmer. And you guessed it, there are four different photos of Val Kilmer graffiti. (Trucker magazine was a Toronto publication that I was involved with, a kinda of Vice-meets-Might that disappeared an issue later with unlucky #13.)

To be honest, Trucker ran plenty of spoofs and satirical articles. This, however, represents the founding document, such that it is, regarding the whole Val Kilmer tagging thing in Toronto. (In other words, it is the closest we might get to the truth of the matter.) In the Trucker article, the movement was so nascent that putting paper photocopies of his head on walls had yet to develop.

Unfortunately, Trucker is no longer online, but I can throw a PDF of the page in question onto biggeworld.com if anyone wants proof I’m adding signal, not more noise to l'affair Kilmer. Bored reporters looking for the final word on the Kilmer business might want to give Daniel Borins a ring. Borins was one of the members of Trucker's design team, and the co-conspirator behind the infamous Art System. Ogi/Steve Adams was tightly connected to Art System and Borins championed the Dark Movement, as its empty pomo posturing was sympatico with his particular worldview.

(And yeah, I was busy for the last many weeks with school. I still am. Sorry for the silence. But don’t worry, Russell. You’re up next in the queue.)

Whoops, Wrong One

Daniel Richler, as you might already have heard, is moving to England. That is a shame. At the risk of relating everything to a television cartoon, the first thing I thought of was this:

Deprogrammer: Mr. and Mrs. Simpson, your son has clearly been brainwashed by the evil and charismatic Mr. Burns.

Marge: Are you sure you can get him back for us?

Deprogrammer: Absolutely. I'm the one who successfully deprogrammed Jane Fonda, you know.

Marge: What about Peter Fonda?

Deprogrammer: Oh, that was a heartbreaker. But I did get Paul McCartney out of Wings.

Homer: You idiot! He was the most talented one.

In other news, Michael Kinsley, ex of Slate, wrote in the Los Angeles Times (where he is an editor) about his idea for CNN: "Cease-Fire" instead of Crossfire. But world where nobody is nobody else’s monkey might be too much to ask, methinks.

I’m sure I’m the 97th person to think of this, but isn’t the word TORSO a great way to parody TORO magazine? Then I stuck TORSO into google. Nevermind.

Finally, I began with a Richler, so it seems only fair to conclude with one. My good close personal friend Noah recently had an article in

Now weekly?

A seasoned veteran like Richler does not strike me as Now material. But even stranger than Noah slumming around in a poorly paying alt-weekly is the fact that his article defending the Walrus refers extensively to a Robert Fulford article that ran in the July issue of Toronto Life. Noah’s article was published at the end of October. For those without a calendar handy, that was four months ago.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say this article was his final dispatch for the Toronto Star books section. Richler was a replacement columnist for Philip Marchand during the spring and summer, and it strikes me that Richler’s final column would have synchronized with Fulford’s Toronto Life article about how the Walrus is tuskless. Did Richler get his Toronto Star column spiked for blatant toadying and conflict of interest (i.e. Noah has been published by the Walrus and not Toronto Life?) We may never know. But I was thinking that if blogger Christopher Allbritton can raise money so as to fly to Iraq to cover the war, why can’t the Toronto blogosphere try and scrape up enough money to send Noah to the UK? The only, er, problem is that with finances being as they are, we might only be able to buy him a one-way ticket.