Farewell to Reading Rainbow
Mood:  sad

I found out through the airwaves this afternoon that Reading Rainbow's going to be closing up shop. That makes me sad, partly because I loved the show so much as a kid - I especially loved, and still remember, the kids doing their own book reports.

What also worries me is this article, and the sense I get that the focus has changed for children's programming - that a show like Reading Rainbow, that shows you why you would want to read and even teaches you to think critically about books, would get canned in favor of a show that teaches technical things like phonetics. You can drill a child all you want on phonetics and letter recognition. That will NOT cause her to want to read, or to enjoy it. There's so much shit in children's programming - as there is in children's publishing - that it's particularly disheartening to see a really good show like this one go under. 

There's a Twitter hashtag to try and keep the show going on the web - #SaveReadingRainbow. If you're on The Twitter. I'm not personally, but the Writers Festival is (dragging me along with it naturally.)

The Writer's Almanac

Sorry, I've been busy with my other blog endeavour lately... but I did want to post this link. I found this - The Writer's Almanac, from National Public Radio - via a few scattered quotes and emails, and I've been getting their newsletter ever since. It's a very Garrison Keillor sort of way to start the day (and if you don't know who Garrison Keillor is, look him up: his show A Prairie Home Companion is one of the formative elements of my childhood.)

The nice thing about it is getting a poem a day, and a reminder that it's, say, the birthday of Ted Hughes or the anniversary of the publication of Ulysses or what have you. It's, um, genteel.

Where I Write. Dot Com.

Some more of the strangeness of the web - here's a page that simply shows you a series of photos of SF and fantasy authors in their creative spaces. 

There's something kind of interestingly - cohesive? - about these spaces, and I think I need to sit back and look through them to pin it down. (Samuel R. Delany, however, is a whole other ball of wax, but then that's to be expected. I'm also fascinated by Harry Harrison's tiny little exposed desk in what looks to be a main hallway. Odd.)

Agitate - OutWrite

I'm passing on the word because the last Agitate event I went to for Pride was awesome.

Agitate! presents...
OutWrite! - queer/trans/two-spirit writers of colour and indigenous writers refuse to be written out!

Thursday, August 20th, doors open at 6:30 pm, reading at 7 pm
Montgomery Legion Hall, 330 Kent St, near Somerset
wheelchair accessible
Tickets at the door: $10-20 sliding scale
all ticket proceeds to Migrants' Trade Union of South Korea

Agitate! presents an exciting reading event and panel of writers and poets in celebration of Pride. Often writers of marginalized identities face
challenges in presenting and publishing their own points of view coupled with the threat of their voices being tokenized and co-opted in the process. Featuring both emerging and established writers from Ottawa and beyond, this panel will explore issues of representation, intersectionality and how identity and experience are expressed in the writers' craft.

Panel:
Nalo Hopkinson
Trish Salah
Kalyani Pandya
Rob Friday

Additional reading performances by:
Salimah Valiani
Faye Estrella

This event will also be a fundraising effort for the Migrant Trade Union
(MTU) in South Korea. MTU is a union of documented and undocumented migrant workers in South Korea, the only union of its kind in the world today. The MTU has joined in the struggle of GLBT people in South Korea, including defending the needs of its own GLBT members. Agitate feels it is important to connect our work with the struggle of other racialized people in the world, especially as the rights of migrant workers in Canada continue to be largely ignored.

Agitate! is an Ottawa-based collective of queer indigenous women, mixed race women and women of colour. For more information, please contact agitate_ottawa@yahoo.ca

http://agitate.wordpress.com

...and my inner word nerd smiles...

... Cory Doctorow used the word "suasion" on Twitter today. In a post having to do with a parent who objected to his book Little Brother - not because of the teen protagonist's attempts to subvert homeland security, not because of the explicit descriptions of torture, no. Because of the off-camera loss of virginity. Then he couldn't respond to the parent because of a school firewall that blocked anything with the word 'sexual' in it.

So, yeah, all that too. But I was jazzed that he used the word 'suasion.' On Twitter. Which is usually so jammed with #s and shorthand it's bloody unreadable. 

Oh, yeah, and there's something kind of iffy about a school that won't allow the word 'sexual.' Isn't school supposed to be where we all get The Talk these days?

More on colour
This post on Alas, A Blog fires another salvo in the whole racefail argument I've been vaguely tracking, and does it in a really clear way. Reminds me of Ursula Le Guin's complaint when she spoke here in the spring, about the editions of A Wizard of Earthsea that made Ged (described in the book as a reddish sort of guy) blond and blue-eyed...

More on sequels

Following up on that earlier post about sequels to established classics - I've run across an interesting article about J.D. Salinger's lawsuit to try and block the publication of a book called 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye.

The description from the article: "There is no question that "60 Years Later," written by Swedish humorist Fredrik Colting under the pen name "John David California," is based on "Catcher in the Rye." The hero, Mr. C., is clearly the alienated teenager Holden Caulfield, now an old man (who leaves a retirement home to go to New York, echoing Holden's flight from boarding school). A few other characters from the Salinger novel also appear, along with original ones - and with Salinger himself. Indeed, on the copyright page, the book is described as 'An Unauthorized Fictional Examination of the Relationship Between J. D. Salinger and his Most Famous Character.'"

The article looks at what, if anything, is the point of some readings of copyright law - should you be able to block the publication of a book like Wide Sargasso Sea? - and also talks about the importance of borrowing in creativity (in much the same way as Cory Doctorow talks about inviting his readers to remix and remake his work: he says that art that's not meant to be transformed is just plain outdated in this century.)

AUGH!

It's official: The new "Canada Periodical Fund" will not be providing funding to magazines with less than 5,000 circulation, or to any literary or arts magazines. If you can hack it, read this post at the Quill & Quire, and the comment attached. Note the funding disparities even before this slash, in 2007-2008: Canadian Poetry, $56 in funding (yes, $56) - Chatelaine, about $2.5 million. Million.

Language, and other updates

(Erratum: The "Hobbit" sequel is apparently an Internet myth. I'll take the word of Kevin McKeever on this, who is the marketing guy from Harmony Gold who I saw at Otakuthon last weekend. What? Misinformation on the Interweb? Oh nos!)

I've had two Literary Landscape shows since the last post, and I meant to reflect on them. Maybe even post them. But somehow it didn't happen. 

I thought when I started hosting the show that 30 minutes would be just fine - more than enough. Now, I'm starting to think as I walk away from an interview that it would have been great to have another half hour to talk about stuff. 

For example: I spoke to Marie Bilodeau last night about her latest book, Warrior of Darkness, the second in a fantasy trilogy. I know Marie (we're friends) so interviewing her was a strange feeling, but we got into an interesting conversation about writing in a second language. Marie's first language (could you have guessed?) is French, and in fact she claims her English was terrible when she was in junior high and high school. Now, she writes her novels in English. I'm interested in that, and in how it affects your writing. I was interested in her process: I also wanted to talk longer about French genre writing, which seems to be quite different from English genre writing. And I didn't get to get into the ghettoization of genre. 

Ah well. Next time. 

Addendum to yesterday

Kate Heartfield (who will be hosting the Dune event on the 17th) just posted a short piece on her blog about the same subject - with the added mention of the *shudder* Jackson/del Toro "Hobbit" sequel (rumoured to be about the events between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - here is not the place to geek out about how weird that sounds.)

It does my little heart good to see, though, that she also loved Robin McKinley's Damar books. (Oh, and lor' bless Wikipedia: I didn't know Robin McKinley and Peter Dickinson were married! That explains so much about my childhood.)