Up in Ontario

Author's Forbidden Love

Authors have a fascination with creation. You might call it a love affair. This love enables them to doggedly carry on writing their books, with little financial reward, or with a speculative financial reward a far-off mirage, while no one cares and no one reads them. But it has recently come to light that Australian author Norma Khouri may have taken creativity too liberally, and created not just her text but herself as well, as alledged by the Sydney Morning Herald.

In case you have not been paying rapt attention to the publishing press, let me fill you in on the case. Ms. Khouri wrote a book entitled Forbidden Love, a memoir of her experiences as a Jordanian woman, in particular focused on the "honour" killing of her best friend. Large publishers bought up the rights to the book all over the English-speaking world and Ms. Khouri toured and presented herself to book clubs and audiences to tell her story. Unfortunately, it seems her personal story was an fabricated as her memoir. Now publishers are pulling the book off of shelves, led by the originating publisher, Random House Australia, and Ms. Khouri has gone into hiding, saying only, "I completely and utterly deny these allegations and can prove they are false beyond any doubt."

The Guardian newspaper has a good summary of the Khouri case.

What interests me about the incident though is not the circumstances or the details Ms. Khouri identity. I'm interested in the shrill pitch of the reaction of her publishers (Shock! Outrage!) and the implicit agreement that readers are buying an image of the author and not the book, its content and its story. If Forbidden Love had been published as a novel, and the same course of events had followed, what would have been the reaction?

Some outlets have even gone so far as to call the issue plagiarism. But last time I checked, plagiarism was copying someone else's work and calling it your own, not making up an alternate identity and calling it your own. If Ms. Khouri ends up being a student from Chicago, who has spent some time studying at an American school in Jordan, as the Sydney Morning Herald alledges, the book remains the exact same. If Ms. Khouri ends up being an extreme marathon runner with a penchant for limericks and woolly socks, the book remains the same. If Ms. Khouri doesn't even exist and an actor has been hired to play her role, the book remains the same.

Or does it? It seems to me that in our touchy feely world, books are marketed to exist as product spin offs from the celebrity of the author, a way for average Janes to get in touch with the person they see on the TV and hear on the radio, a way for any of us to read about and feel the pain and horror of what it must have been like to live in one of those shadowy parts of the world. Then we can go back to worrying about finding parking at CostCo.

If Paris Hilton Wrote Poetry

From the good lads at Bookninja, a pointer to If Paris Hilton Wrote Poetry.

Enjoy the weekend. The Duck and I are off the Flores Island, on the north end of Clayaquot Sound, a forty-minute water taxi ride from Tofino. Perhaps some photos may come of this for you good loyal blog readers.

Google's Error

Yesterday Google was attacked by MyDoom and laid an egg when folks tried a search. This may be interesting to you or it may be like telling you moss only grows on the north side of trees.

Book Burning in Iowa

Everything old is new again. CNN reports that in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the Rev. Scott Breedlove wants to git hisself an old-fashioned book burnin'. Along with the books, offending CDs, videos and clothing were slated to be burned. But before you could say Hitler Youth, the good people of the fire department stepped in with their fire codes to block the purge.

Luckily, CNN points out that, "Preachers and congregations throughout American history have built bonfires and tossed in books and other materials they believed offended God." So it's okay to burn books, which is part of a long American tradition of squelching dissent, as long as you comply with fire codes.

No word in the CNN report on whether Breedlove is a real or assumed name, or whether The Jesus Church accepts members to their congregation without a thorough search of their homes. Filth cold be anywhere. But seriously, this truly is the new, new puritanism that scares the rest of the world (and many Americans, I'm told) about the USA. Fundamentalist, scared-of-the-world, repressive, organized religiousity is just that, if it wears a cloak of christianity or islam. Look deep into thine enemy's eyes and you will see your own.

Le Weekend

It's hot as H-E-double hockey sticks here in Vancouver, so take the weekend off and get yourself into the water. When the Duck and I travel anywhere we have a deal: 20 percent swimming. (This means that whatever we do and wherever we go we'll try to be swimming 20 percent of the time). It works well for us. We're still travelling and we're still planning future trips.

And if you're looking for something to amuse yourself for 5 minutes, check out GeorgeBush.ca. From the site:

Q: What business do Canadians have interfering in another countries democratic election?

A: The foreign policy of any United States government directly impacts the rest of the world. US voters have the right to know how their northern neighbour, and ally, feels about the current administration's policies.

Olympic Village People

Paul Hochman reports for The Scotsman that "The secret of the modern Olympics is that the athlete village, with its tightly packed collection of firm young bodies, 24-hour sports television and all-you-can eat international cuisine, has become the most exclusive VIP club in the world."

Condom allocations depleted long before the end of the two weeks indicate the real reason the Greeks competed nude. This article provides a behind-the-scenes account of life in the Athletes Village, cobbled together from anecdotes, first-hand accounts, gossip and documented reports. And for nationalistic pride, the Canadian teams seem to account themselves well, particularly in the winter Olympics, where they and their daily deliveries of Molson's products are fingered as "the most boozed up partners in Olympic town," based on an informal poll of athletes.

The latest attraction is free internet service, which Marco Buechel, an alpine ski racer who competes for Liechtenstein, put to good use in Salt Lake City. "You can contact any athlete, even if you don’t know them at all," says Buechel. "They give you a list when you get there. Everybody uses it. I saw this beautiful ski racer, from Greece of all places. She had the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen. I saw her at the village and sent her an e-mail, in English. Her reply was very short: ‘Not good English. Want meet you.’"

According to Buechel, he and the Greek beauty made arrangements to meet soon after. "We tried to talk, which wasn’t very successful," says Buechel, "and then we started to drink, which was much more successful." And? "It was very beautiful," he says. "A beautiful international incident."

Citius, Altius, Fortius indeed.

Braille T-Shirts

Support literacy and the sight impaired with support for braille t-shirts. Just don't ask how people go blind.

Blog Spamming

Yesterday I logged in to post to this blog and found over 295 spam comments. What are spam comments? Well, some people think that they can optimize their websites for search engines by acquiring all sorts of links from any source possible. This includes the comments sections of blogs. The sites that spam blogs are inevitably the same that send bulk, unsolicited emails (spam) and have basically ruined email as a communication channel between businesses and individuals.

If you've spent much time online you know the industries who employ spam: adult/porn, gaming/gambling and pharmaceutical/drugs. Occasionally a stock scam or a nigerian money laundering scheme surfaces. The 250 comments I found in the Up in Ontario blog had subjects and links such as karlsquell edel pils
kirsten pils kilde, martens pils, neptun pils, maes pils, tanning pils, koenig pils, pils spiel, trumer pils. It looks to me like European (German, perhaps Dutch?) pharmaceuticals.

As I started deleting the spam, more links started appearing. The spammer was online right then, spreading the creepy links as fast as I was weeding them out. I kept deleting and the links kept appearing. It looked like a program was adding them, not a person, because they were being added so fast. I thought about the options available to me and made a decision that I didn't want to have to make. From now on, all older posts on the Up in Ontario blog, like this Horseshit post and this post on your Favourite Canadian Novel, will not allow comments. Also, the following IP addresses (203.144.161.230, 80.53.91.35, 68.33.2.161, 66.192.30.22, 205.213.92.64, 195.134.28.3, 209.50.252.95, 213.195.195.6, 209.2.108.2) will be blocked from commenting because they were being used by the blog spammer. If this creates any inconvenience, please contact James Sherrett and let him know.

Annual Trivial Pursuit Showdown

Every year when I return to our family cabin at Kenora, Ontario for the July long weekend, I meet a friend of mine who also has a cabin on the shore of Lake of the Woods and a spirited game of Trivial Pursuit breaks out. Let's call my friend The Smooch, since that is what he was called by some for his ability to curry favour with teachers in high school before he moved away from Winnipeg to the big cities of the south.

The first year that we played Trivial Pursuit we played the Canadian edition and The Smooch's team lost badly. Yes, I mean badly. So badly in fact, that the Duck and I (playing on the same team) won the game, then joined the last place team to overtake The Smooch's team and place second as well. This humiliating loss was not taken well by The Smooch, a friend I had known since we were two years old and swam together in Moms and 2s at the local YMCA, a man able to reconcile any incongruities between the beliefs of John Lennon and a career on wall street in private merchant banking. The Smooch stewed in his loss for a full year.

The next July long weekend, The Smooch came to the cabin armed with a US version of Trivial Pursuit, a version he felt he had an advantage with since for the past 10 years he had lived mostly in the US. On the second night of our trip we laid out the board and played a close game and The Smooch and his wife eventually ended up victorious on the basis of answers to obscure questions based in the minutia of the American pastoral. With The Smooch's dignity restored for another year, this year would prove to be the rubber match.

The Duck and I arrived at The Smooch's family cabin on the second-last night of our visit to Lake of the Woods. Earlier we had been shown the brand new version of Trivial Pursuit that The Smooch had bought just that day at the Canadian Tire store on the Kenora waterfront. The box remained wrapped until we were ready to lay out the board so no one could peek at the cards or replace them with fixed cards from another set. We set up on the table of the screened-in porch as the loons began to call over the lake.

With six of us ready to play, including The Smooch's younger brother and his fiancée, but with no one's enthusiasm too high for a spirited game, we sorted ourselves into two teams and set upon the board. A seesaw battle followed right up until the end when my team (myself, The Smooch's wife, the fiancée) filled our game piece and beat it for the centre of the board. Our die-rolling skills, which had served us so well for the whole game (roll again, roll again, roll again, pie!), suddenly fell apart and we bounced all around the centre hub of the board. Once we landed only one final question would stand between us and a win.

But the hours grew late and the fiancée went to bed. The game ran out of momentum. We're old now, I thought to myself. I may have said it aloud. It proved hard to stay up late after a day in the sun. At one point my partner, The Smooch's wife, posed our opposition their question and in unison they all sat back and began to think/doze. A few minutes later we prompted them for the answer and none of them remembered the question. And just now as I tried to remember the final question, the one we were asked when we finally landed smack dab in the centre of the board and felt the win in our grasp, I needed to consult the Duck to come up with it: Atlanta Braves pitcher Tom Glavine was also drafted by this west coast hockey team.

The Los Angeles Kings.

Frank White, the Literary Years

Stephen Osborne, a favourite here at Up in Ontario central, salutes Frank White, father of Howie White, the founder of Harbour Publishing, a wonder of an enterprise that just keep churning out the books from its offices in Madeira Park, on BC's sunshine coast, north of Gibsons where they filmed The Beachcombers series for so many years and just outside the radius of property-value infection from the lower mainland, where the 1500 square foot condos erected across the street from our apartment are selling starting from $800,000.

Frank White celebrated his ninetieth birthday in May, 2004, at Madeira Park, B.C. Harbour Publishing, which is owned by Howard and Mary White, was founded in 1974 and continues to thrive.

Patrick Brealey Plays Music

Anyone looking for a rock and roll good time tonight should consider dropping in to The Main restaurant (4210 Main St., at 28th Avenue, 604-709-8555, review ) to catch Patrick Brealey playing a few songs. Patrick says:

I believe the Main is on the corner of 26th, although it could be 27th and it's definitely not farther than 28th--it's hard to miss, it has a big sign that says "The Main". It's on the east side of the street. As for when I will be playing, I would say 9:30 or 10pm and that is a guess on my part. Details? Who needs them?

I am opening for Kevin Kane, formerly of the Grapes of Wrath, who is not only an amazing singer, songwriter and guitar player, he is also a great educator, exemplified by the time he told me that there is no maximum daily limit when it comes to consuming Rolaids. A good thing to know.

I hope to see you there and while my set will be short, I will concentrate on making it worth your while, most possibly with some cool dance moves. The Main also has great food and drinks.

When you get there I recommend the calamari and the lamb. Local brews are on tap and patio seating is available.

Google Site-Flavoured Search

This is an experiment. I'm trying out the Site-Flavoured Google Search below. Let me know how it works and if you'd like to see it implemented across upinontario.com.

Status Anxiety Interview

Alain de Botton is interviewed on the Atlantic Monthly website.

...there's a distinction between thinking someone is an idiot and telling them that they are. Still, I do think we tend to have this idea that in order to be a good person, you must like people—that you must have a friendly, open disposition toward everyone in order to be normal and well-balanced. I think it's interesting to contemplate the wisdom of a more misanthropic approach, of which Schopenhauer is a dramatic example. Instead of worrying about what other people think, it might be worth asking, Who is this person? Who am I worried about? Do I actually respect and like this person? Because I think that we're built in a rather odd way: we want people to like us even before we've decided whether we like them or not. And that's a very odd perspective. I think we should try to wean ourselves from that because it's very self-destructive.

Incidentally, I picked up a copy of the Atlantic Monthly for a recent flight and found that the magazine seems to have lost the outsider's perspective I always liked about it. All the articles seemed focused on American foreign policy, American politics and American business. At one point the Duck looked over as I was reading and asked me if I was browsing propaganda.

I haven't seen a great article in the Atlantic, an article like William Langewiesche's The Shipbreakers, for a long time. Sure James Fallows still delivers great articles for them but the perspective of the magazine seems to have shrunk to include the diversity of topics found on the evening news. That is to say, they seem to have succumbed to the lure of the TV news cycle. Hello navel, whatcha knowin'?