Most reasonable people would agree that the manual labour required to shovel a parking spot free of snow earns the shoveller a de facto deed to that place for the duration. But when J & I came home one evening to find “our” spot occupied by an interloper, I had to plow the car into a virgin bank of snow, marooning it there — two feet from and at a 30-degree angle to the curb — until I could dig it free next morning. I realized then that our theoretical claim needed to be staked more concretely. My first attempt — a plastic bucket filled with snow and topped with a rock, placed in the centre of our spot — lasted just one day; why anyone would steal a plastic bucket full of snow during a snowstorm? An upended garbage can worked well, but I could never quite shake off the fear that it, too, would disappear one day, and that we’d come home to find our spot annexed by my neighbor for his SUV. The first thing to go in a guerilla war is trust.

Most of our snow has now been washed away by the January rains, and our neighborhood is in a state of uneasy peace once again. Confirmation that these skirmishes have ended came late last Thursday when I heard my neighbor revving his engine and spinning tires — forward, reverse, forward, reverse — to buck, plunge, and slalom his Explorer through the remnants of the Great Wall of Plowed Snow and pioneer a brand new parking spot beside the curb. No longer would J & I need to risk the theft of our garbage can when heading off to work.

And back into storage would go — a block away — another neighbor’s garden furniture: two plastic chairs which he’d arranged on either side of a matching end-table, a few simple props which transformed his snowdrift-walled patch of asphalt into a beachhead of domesticity beside — well, actually in — a public road. It was the dramatic potential of the setting that I loved; whether they made use of the furniture or not, the possibility was enough. I pictured him sitting with his wife on their plastic chairs each weekday afternoon at 3:00, a steaming teaput centered on the tabletop between them, each of them cupping a mug of rooibos in their hands and sharing a plate of Christmas shortbread, oblivious to the cars whizzing past them just a foot away…

While being a bookworm may not be a precondition for becoming a mass murderer, it’s certainly no impediment.

— from a New York Times review of Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life

A lot of people ask me how I can live in such opulence, given that I make my living writing award-winning literary fiction that nobody actually reads.

— Julian Gough gives a writer’s view of a proposed bailout of the US publishing industry

Members of the t&p editorial collective were jolted from their months-long lethargy recently by an article in the New York Times which detailed a bailout package for the US publishing industry. “Heck,” we thought, allowing an uncharacteristic coarseness to creep into our language. “If poets can once again expect to dine regularly on truffled partridge and champagne, perhaps it’s time to take up the pen again!”

The text of the proposal analyzes the “irresponsible writing and irresponsible reading” practices which got us all into this mess, practices which “simply put too many families into books they could not finish”:

We are seeing the impact on readers and neighborhoods, with 5 million readers now behind on their reading. Some are just walking away from novels they should never have been reading in the first place. What began as a sub-prime reading problem has spread to other, less-risky readers, and contributed to excess inventories. These troubled novels are now parked, or frozen, on the shelves of libraries, bookstores, and other reading institutions, preventing them from financing readable novels.

Write on!

For the past two and a half weeks J and I have poked about the backroads of Nova Scotia in a rented car, striking out towards the far extremities (aka Cape Breton) before allowing the gravitational well of Halifax to pull us slowly back. Our experience confirms that it is impossible to approach a large urban centre from one direction — Halifax from Truro, say, having watched the Fundy tidal bore complete its upstream pass on cue — hoping to deflect off the city’s periphery in a new direction — in our case: towards Lunenberg and Nova Scotia’s Southern Shore — without becoming completely lost in a maze of indistinguishable city streets (the confidence instilled by Google Maps is both false and cruel).

We have learned that:

• lobster is king in Nova Scotia; it is simultaneously the province’s official crustacean, its mascot, and the requisite souvenir (the airport duty-free sells it packed for travel, fresh or cooked). Every dish from chow mein to chowder has its lobster variant, and most towns offer some form of Community Lobster Supper (typically: a whole cooked lobster, accompanied by soft drink, coleslaw and potato salad, a roll with butter, and strawberry shortcake) where visitors are humiliated by being forced to wear silly plastic bibs which do absolutely nothing to pervent one’s being squirted by lobster viscera and other fishy liquids.
• every inhabitant of Cape Breton has mastered at least one of: the fiddle, the mandolin, the piano, the accordian, the guitar. At the Red Shoe Pub in Mabou we caught Eddie Cummings & Stephen Gillis one night, and Jerry Holland (flddle) & Marion Dewar (piano) the next (the pub offers excellent food to boot).
• pockets of the province persist in behaving as if the present still lay a century or more ahead. Visitors to the fortress at Louisbourg mingle with inhabitants dressed in period costume, who completely inhabit their characters: colonial French citizens about to be attacked by British forces later in this, the spring of 1745. As an alternative, Sherbrooke offers a complete village which carries on as if it were the late 1800s.

It was wonderful to get away from the responsibilities and routines of “normal” life for a while, and take the time to read:

• The Bookshop (Penelope Fitzgerald)
• Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)
• The Inheritance of Loss (Kiran Desai)
• Late Nights on Air (Elizabeth Hay)
• Lyubka the Cossack and other stories (Isaac Babel)

$86 profit isn’t bad when you consider that prices started at 25¢, with the average price hovering around 50¢ per item. J’s oatmeal chocolate chip and raisin cookies were a profit centre of their own at 25¢ each, and our day’s take would have been significantly higher if we hadn’t dipped into the cookie jar whenever business slowed. Which was pretty often, as things turned out; evidentally Sundays are not the best day to hold a yard sale. Or we could have blamed the weather: according to received wisdom, sunny days are not the best day for yard sales (although I should note that received wisdom is simultaneously of the opposite opinion: yard sales and rain do not mix well either).

The four of us (J and I and two friends) found ourselves on the receiving end of a lot of unsolicited wisdom during our joint yard sale a week ago. Browsers seem to become unsettled with four pairs of eyes fixed intently between their shoulder blades (their every hesitation noted and extrapolated—willed!—towards a sale). They react to this intense attention by reflexively throwing off bits of unsolicited advice like the aluminum chaff deployed by military aircraft under fire. Whenever a fresh face appeared at the end of the driveway we began our silent yard sale voodoo: “Make us an offer, any offer”; and “Please, oh benevolent God: don’t make us pack this stuff back into boxes.”

The largest single sale was a pair of shoes (“Brand new,” J emphasizes as she turns the shoes to catch the light. “I’ve never worn them.”) — priced hopefully at $35 but knocked down to $25 after vigorous negotiations. From this windfall a vertiginous descent: the director’s chair at $8 (“A steal! Complete with a spare set of canvas!!”); via the clay garlic baker-oven (“It’s priced at $4 but you can have it for a toonie. Better yet: make that a dollar. It’s brand new!”); to rock bottom: a mind-numbing assortment of 25¢ bric-a-brac, displayed on a sheet of plywood, their every scratch, chip and nick exposed beneath the glare of a noontime sun.

What did we learn? We learned that we had to employ all possible means of fanning the faintest spark of interest into flame. Which is why exclamation marks are de rigeur on yard sale signage; ours sported a crop of exclamation marks as vigorous and ubiquitous as crabgrass. You must read your signage as if you were a potential buyer: unadorned, the word “Cheap” is lustreless and unappealing; the eye slides off it without feeling any need to bring it to the attention of the brain. “Cheap!!!”, on the other hand, instantly sparks the synapses into action; a reflexive reaching for the wallet follows nanoseconds later.

We learned that children are the weak link in any family’s armour; you can be virtually guaranteed to divest yourself of the most god-awful bit of kitsch — as long as you can point out its cuteness quotient to a child before the parent intervenes. “Have you ever seen such a cute little fuzzy bunny?!!” you might exclaim; or “Isn’t this the cutest papier maché box you’ve ever seen? Wouldn’t it make a perfect treasure chest / jewelry box?!”

We learned that a “Free!” box is indespensible. Ours was positioned at the head of the driveway with a notice on it in black felt pen: “Every sale — no matter how small!! — earns you the right to select one item from our “Free” box!!” At noon the phrase “earns you the right” was vigorously crossed out and replaced by “comes with an obligation.” One boy was thrilled to find a Lord of the Rings keychain in the “Free” box; this treasure caused his older brother to rummage desperately in search of something even better. I’d almost sold him on the merits of our vintage answering machine (starting price: $4; knocked down to $2 during the Great Noontime Discouragement; consigned to the “Free” box at 1:00): “I’m sure a young man-about-town such as yourself must receive a lot of calls” — but his mother vetoed the idea before his hope could properly take root; evidently she knows junk when she sees it.

J and I had spent Saturday evening preparing the house for Sunday visitors. A cake had been baked and iced; plates, cutlery and napkins had been deployed; a fire had been laid in the fireplace and sat awaiting the invocation of a match — for spring here is still taking its own sweet time to ripen, with the first magnolia blossoms opening to an April which is still more lion-like than lamb.

J had chosen a morning swim as her reward for completing our advance preparations; my reward was to roll over and consider the bookshelf close at hand — from which I eventually selected the revised edition of The Letters of E. B. White.

I love to dip into a volume of collected letters, hoping to find one written on the same calendar day. I consider this a gentle form of bibliomancy, and the selected letter often resonates with the day to come. What, then, might my day have in common with that described by E. B. White in his letter dated the 6th of April, 1952?

Writing to James Thurber from his office at The New Yorker, White gives Thurber advice on what to do when attending the birth of a lamb (apparently one chops off the lamb’s tail with an ax) and shares news of a party which the Whites had given in honor of William Shawn’s being named editor of The New Yorker.

132 people! With “dancing of a sort” and a “contrapuntal literary and emotional atmosphere, […] the kind of goings on that made you feel that the door would presently open and in would walk Scott and Zelda.” J and I had planned a more modest gathering for our own Sunday afternoon, but maybe with the right kind of music a “contrapuntal literary and emotional atmosphere” was still within reach.

White’s letter closes with a lovely run of sentences which helped align his North Brooklin, Maine of 1952 with my own stormy Deep Cove day in 2008:

Spring is making litle sashays about coming to town, but it has been a fairly unconvincing demonstration so far. It’s what Maine people call “crow weather.” I still think Maine speech is about the most satisfactory.

“Crow weather” — a most satisfactory Maine term indeed; well suited for this stormy Deep Cove day with friends just beginning, which will end with us all sharing a Reine de Saba cake before a crackling fire.

1. none of the above
2. We’d worn out the nib of our Montblanc Marcel Proust fountain pen
3. Our accountant had assured us that the $719.56 in our RRSP would allow us to quit our day job and retire to the south of France
4. We were determined to set a new record for Sloth
5. No one told us that the writers’ strike had ended
6. Someone had to read all the stuff that the other bloggers have been writing
7. That “life” thing kept interfering; persistant and very annoying

I must confess that I suffer from a form of identity confusion when writing (sporadically! but we’ll get to that later) entries for this blog. Am I the collective noun referred to in these pages as “the t&p editorial collective”? Or am I a single member of that same august group? (because there are times when it is a royal pain to maintain the royal “we”). Or am I an anonymous flesh and blood figure lurking behind the scene, with a keen (and perhaps obsessive) interest in books and all aspects of the bookish world?

Confused or not, all of my identities agree that it is important to draw attention to the recently announced BC Book Prizes short lists for 2008. For weeks the teams of judges have been pouring over the — 300-plus! — submitted books to find the ones which they feel represent the best of this past year’s crop. An unenviable job, but the results are in, and you can review the shortlisted titles on the brand-spanking-new BC Book Prizes website.

The shortlist announcement got a bit of press — the Vancouver Sun and the Georgia Straight — which I’m pleased about. And I hope to see more coverage when the awards themselves are presented at the annual Gala dinner (April 26 in Vancouver).

The new BC Book Prizes website is great by the way, thanks to the efforts of Monique Trottier and Work Industries (check out Monique’s blog at www.somisguided.com). In addition to the Book Prize shortlists you’ll find detailed information on BC Book Prizes on Tour, and on the annual BC Book Prizes Soirée event, which will take place Saturday, April 19 this year, between 7 and 9 pm at the Metropolitan Hotel. The Soirée is an excellent opportunity to mingle with some of the nominated authors; there will be music, as well as food by Diva at the Met. And it’s free!

To close this long-overdue entry I want to take a moment and indulge my own enthusiasms (because what else is a web log for if not self-indulgence?) by drawing your attention (upper left) to one of the five titles shortlisted for this year’s Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize: Theresa Kishkan’s Phantom Limb.

This is a lovely collection of personal essays, many of them rooted in BC’s Sechelt Peninsula, as Kishkan reads the stories that reside in her local landscape. My dear friend A has reviewed Phantom Limb on her own blog (to which I now direct you). There is a richness of feeling in Kishkan’s writing, a blend of clear-eyed observation and reflection which makes this book a pleasure, and a worthy companion to Red Laredo Boots, the essay collection which first brought this fine writer — poet, novelist, and essayist — to my attention.

So what are you waiting for? Buy it! Read!

“I had a ticket that I’d bought at a Vélib stand, which wasn’t working,” said Sylvia Whitman, manager of a bookstore in the Latin Quarter. “When I found a stand that was working, there was a queue of people waiting to buy their ticket, but no queue for those who already had one. Yet when I went to get a bike everyone started shouting at me, yelling that they’d been waiting for an hour. What are you supposed to do?”

— from a November 22 story on the Paris transit strike in the International Herald Tribune

J and I spent three days in Paris at the end of our summer trip to France, and tried out a pair of Vélib bikes for fun. They’re clunky things, but perfectly suited for trundling around Paris; and you can’t beat the price: for transients such as ourselves there’s a 1 € registration fee for a single day’s subscription. The first 30 minutes of any rental period are free; an hour’s ride will cost you a measly euro: peanuts! The majority of the bike stands (which hold a dozen bicycles or so) are located near the standard tourist draws: the Eiffel Tower; Notre Dame; the Place des Vosges etc. Rental instructions are straight-forward, and are available in several languages on the Vélib kiosk’s display screen. When you’ve finished your ride, you need to find an open slot at one of the stands, and your rental period ends as soon as you’ve clicked your bicycle back into place.

The problem, of course, is what to do if you can’t find an open slot, and when we were there there were rumors of perpetually empty Vélib stands — the ones atop Montmartre, for example — and others — those at the foot of Montmartre — perpetually full. The Vélib system allegedly makes allowances for this kind of usage pattern, with trailers of Vélib bicycles being towed from “have” to “have not” stations behind the scenes. But the usage pattern for summer tourism is quite different from the needs of Parisian commuters, which leads (predictably) to the kinds of confrontations reported on above.

J and I picked our Vélib bikes from a stand on the Rue André Mazet, a quiet side-street where we could get a feel for the clunkers before we braved the Latin Quarter crowds. We managed to execute a few trial runs without flattening any pedestrians, wheeling in a series of slow, tight ovals between the curbs, and then set out tentatively along the Rue Saint-André des Arts, crossing the busy Boul Mich and Rue Saint-Jacques towards our hotel in the Marais—with a brief, reverential pause before Shakespeare and Company, the “bookstore in the Latin Quarter” referred to by the Herald Tribune.

At one time—during those distant Shakespeare and Company days—I considered myself part of an exclusive set: a tumbleweed! practically a Paris resident!; tourists were “the other”, and I one of the fortunate few allowed to sit behind the shop counter, looking past them through the open doorway—my open doorway—across the Seine to Notre Dame. George Whitman will be 94 years old this December; his cycle-commuting daughter Sylvia is now at the bookstore’s helm, and my infrequent visits to the shop have a distinctly nostalgic air.

I noticed, during this most recent trip to France, that a change seems to have come over me; I appear to have crossed an invisible threshold to another stage in life: I no longer deliberately avoid the standard “Paris tourist” activities as in days gone by.

I spent quite some time on one of our September afternoons, browsing at the bouquiniste stalls along the Quai François Mitterand, with the Eiffel Tower silhouetted against the skyline just downstream. It was not the books which drew me (although I did leaf through the antique postcards, translating fading messages with a voyeur’s eye); my main purpose was to examine the miniature models of the Eiffel Tower, offered in a wide range of sizes, materials and styles. These things, more than any other object, have for me always symbolized the cattle-like crowds of Paris tourists; I had avoided them—both tourists and Eiffel models—like the plague. This time, though, I found myself looking on the Eiffel miniatures quite fondly: was this an admission of defeat? capitulation? Or was it merely a new-found equanimity? I still don’t know…

One of those who caught my ear at the 2007 Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival was Irish author Claire Keegan. Claire read at several Festival events including Grand Openings on October 17th. It was mesmerizing. She has a wonderful reading voice, but it was the prose itself which stood out: lovely language free of cliché and not an ounce of excess in her sentences, the story advanced with a confidence and skill that is all too rare. She read the opening section from “The Forester’s Daughter,” one of seven stories in Walk The Blue Fields, her second collection of short fiction. I bought the book and had her sign it after the reading; I can recommend it highly.

Here’s one excerpt from “The Forester’s Daughter” to illustrate. Martha has bought some roses from a salesman, “a big blade of a man with a thick moustache,” who’d stopped by the farmhouse while her husband Deegan was away. When Deegan learns what she’s spent his money on, he rages, calling her a fool. Watch how Keegan, in just over a paragraph, sweeps the narrative forward without a single false note, taking the reader with her:

That summer her roses bloomed scarlet but long before the wind could blow their heads asunder, Martha realised she had made a mistake. All she had was a husband who hardly spoke now that he’d married her, an empty house and no income of her own. She had married a man she did not love. What had she expected? She had expected it would grow and deepen into love. And now she craved intimacy and the type of conversation that would surpass misunderstanding. She thought of finding a job but it was too late: a child was near ready for the cradle.

The children Martha bore she reared casually, never threatening them with anything sharper than a wooden spoon. When her first-born was placed in her arms her laughter was like a pheasant rising out of the bushes. The boy, a shrill young fellow, grew tall but it soon became apparent that he had no grá for farming; […]

How wonderfully confident it feels! The roses blooming and blown asunder in a single sentence and there we have the summer summarized. At the end of the paragraph and the summer a child is anticipated, and two words into the subsequent paragraph the child is children; another pair of sentences and each child is distinct, with different genders and individual characteristics and then they are grown themselves.

The story is a compact marvel, and there are others in the collection that feel just as assured. The book is not without a few missteps: later in “The Forester’s Daughter” we are abruptly inside the thoughts of a dog who has been adopted by the family: it jars to have this sudden shift of point of view. But by and large these stories are among the best I’ve read in ages. A writer to watch—and read—with pleasure.

Remembrance Day
Sunday, November 11, 2007, 1 to 4 pm
Listel Hotel, 1300 Robson Street, Vancouver

“What is a Memory Festival?” we hear you ask. It’s “an ongoing inquiry into public and private memory” (to quote from the Memory Festival’s website). And rather than repeat and rephrase information which is already online we simply direct interested parties there (www.geist.com/memoryfestival) for a better answer.

But why not drop by the Listel Hotel at some point on Remembrance Day afternoon where you can find out more, and share your own ideas about memory and the Memory Festival. Admission is free, and you’ll have an opportunity to contribute to salubrious conversations about memory, while pondering a rich selection of readings, slide shows, photo & quilt exhibits. See you there; tell ‘em the t&p editorial collective sent you…

J and I just back from an evening in the lower reaches of the CBC bunker down on Cambie Street, where we posed as “Members of Our Studio Audience” during a taping of the Studio One Book Club, with Alberto Manguel—who describes himself as “a Canadian writer, born in Argentina and living in France”—as the featured guest of hosts Sheryl MacKay and John Burns (Books editor of The Georgia Straight). Those who missed the taping will have a second chance when the evening’s conversations and discussion are broadcast by North by Northwest on CBC Radio One 690, on Saturday, October 27th between 8 and 9 am.

Manguel is a strikingly erudite polymath who seems able, in support of his answer to a question from the audience, to instantly extract a perfectly apropos passage from any one of the many books that he has read, no matter how long ago the reading, no matter how obscure the book. It is an impressive feat to witness Manguel construct his carefully considered responses (and he is the only one I can think of who, while apparently speaking off the cuff, speaks not simply in well-formed sentences, but in polished paragraphs, with every punctuation mark in place). He speaks deliberately—and I think this point is key—giving the listener’s ear sufficient time to gather up the idea being expressed without the loss of a single clause. It is as if a spinner and skein-winder were in perfect synchrony, and it is deeply satisfying for listeners, particularly in an era when conversations are more often characterized by people talking over each other and interrupting; as if each participant in such a “conversation” had lost all hope of being listened to attentively and is now determined to at least have his say at any cost (the volume of his voice leap-frogging over that of his conversational opponent) whether he be heard or not.

Manguel gave two readings during the CBC taping session, the first an extract from his new book The City of Words (the published version of this year’s series of Massey lectures, which are even now in progress). Manguel later read a section from The Library at Night, which he prefaced by describing the pleasure of finally having sufficient space in the library of his new home in France to have all 35000 of his books on shelves; or almost all of them: there was also an aphoristic comment to the effect that “every library is always too small for the number of books you own.”

The main problem I have with this evening’s event is that, despite the name—the Studio One Book Club—it bore not the slightest resemblance to any book club gathering that I have ever been a part of. Discussions at our book club are much closer to the “conversations” described above, and I think it grossly unfair of Mssrs MacKay, Burns, and Manguel to have colluded in the fantastic deception which was this evening’s taping; in so doing they have raised unrealistic hopes—of civilized conversations, wide-ranging discussions which connect contemporary issues to a rich and literate past—which I am fairly certain I will never see fulfilled.

Record Stores
Camera film manufacturing
Crop-dusting
Gay bars
Newspapers
Pay phones
Used bookstores
Piggy banks
Telemarketing
Coin-operated arcades

“What on earth,” I hear you ask, “do crop-dusters have in common with telemarketers? Or pay phones with piggybanks?”¹

Whatever the common thread (we refer our loyal readers to the article itself) it is the presence of used bookstores² on the list that concerns us most. What kind of meagre future do they imagine for us all, devoid of used bookstores? Even Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was not so bleak…

There was a time when I pictured myself as the proprietor of a used bookstore; I could not imagine a more suitable career. I know better now; the hours are long, dust gradually invades the lungs, and revenues have been in steep decline (for which the Internet is reportedly to blame).

According to the bookseller quoted in the Sun, the younger generation is equally at fault: 18-to-28-year-olds apparently have better things to do than browse. Several years ago I tried to introduce the pleasures of used bookstores to two eighteen-year olds, the children of a friend. But they mislaid their birthday gift certificates before they could cash them in. What else can a concerned book-lover do (he asks rhetorically) but try singlehandedly to make up for their indifference?

An attitude which leads to: two hours of browsing this afternoon in Sorensen Books on Cook Street near Fort in Victoria, and the wonderful Bubby Rose’s Bakery and Café (croissants! free wireless!) across the street to contemplate my finds: a copy of Theresa Kishkan’s lovely novella Inishbream to send to an Irish friend; and W. M. Spackman’s An Armful of Warm Girl, with a title and a narrative voice that I could not resist.

In my opinion, two books shows an unprecedented restraint. For those of you with doubts, consider the tens of thousands that I left behind.

• • •

¹ One bright young member of our editorial collective points out that “both pay phones and piggybanks have slots where coins might be inserted” — which could also explain the threat to coin-operated arcades: a coinage cataclysm on the near horizon forseen by none but Entrepreneur.com, that renders all metallic money null and void. But surely coin-operated gay bars are few and far between?

² The pedant in me questions this spelling, since it is not the bookstore which is used, but the books contained therein.

Words appearing in the novel without an apostrophe: arent, couldnt, didnt, doesnt, dont, hadnt, hasnt, isnt, oclock, shouldnt, theyre, wasnt, werent, wouldnt, youre, youve. This is intentional by the author. Please dont send letters to the copy editor, Shaun Oakey.

— from the acknowledgements in Michael Winter’s The Architects Are Here

Burt Cummerbund, a spokesperson for Canadians for the Removal of Asinine Punctuation, hailed author Michael Winter for continuing his courageous crusade to liberate the apostrophe in his latest novel, The Architects Are Here.

“It takes a brave man to stand up to the copy-editing Gestapo,” said Cummerbund, sporting one of CRAP’s Free the apostrophe! T-shirts. “And I’m here to testify that Michael Winter is a brave man.”

Cummerbund continued by noting that,

as a British immigrant and a Newfoundlander, Michael identifies with the oppressed in Canadian society. Which is why he has taken on the CRAP cause. Many people fail to realize that punctuation marks have emotions too; but Michael can sense into that. He really feels the pain of all the periods who have been forced to the rear of their sentences—like second-class citizens of the literary world. And Michael understands the anguish of exclamation marks, who are contactually obliged to put on their happy faces—even though their hearts be breaking.

We here at CRAP have adopted the apostrophe as our poster boy; we’re using it to “brand” our campaign against asinine punctuation: the apostrophe will become our “swoosh.” For far too long authors have used the apostrophe divisively, forcing words apart which long to be united. If you press your ear against the cover of a typical Canadian novel you’ll hear the keening of all the sundered Ns and the Ts in words like “can’t” and “don’t”; but press your ear against the cover of The Architects Are Here and you’ll hear these gentle little murmers of contentment, as all those lonely consonants get to know each other once again.

In a two year old blog posting Michael Winter describes the epiphany which caused him to start stripping apostrophes from his manuscripts:

I just decided one day, what’s up with this symbol that tells the reader of a contraction. That two words have been sandwiched and a letter or two left out. Why do I have to remind the reader of this grammatical omission.

Those who wish to support Michael Winter and CRAP in their fight against asanine punctuation are encouraged to send donations directly to t&p. A $5 contribution covers the cost of training out-of-work apostrophes to rewarding new careers as part-time commas; $20 pays for the castration surgery which allows transgendered apostrophes to fully express their inner period.

Umbrellas and gumboots were the order of the day at Sunday’s Word on the Street Book and Magazine Festival. Festival organizers were hit by a double whammy this year: the gloomy weather undoubtedly reduced the number of participants (and who could blame them? Rain and printed matter have never mingled all that well); combine this with Vancouver’s civic strike (now in its 11th week) which prevented Word on the Street from making use of any part of the VPL plaza (striking CUPE members and their supporters used the opportunity to present their side of the labour dispute, with information tables and posters offering the “Word on the Strike”).

It was difficult to resist the urge to rescue all those bargain books and freshly-printed magazines from the elements. My haul this year was relatively modest: the Fall issue (#66) of Geist magazine, fresh off the presses; and another of those wonderful Poetry in Transit bus “cards” to decorate my office.