phoenicia publishing

this is a test post

some test copy

Salon du Livre 2007, Montreal

Last night was my first visit to Montréal's annual French-language book fair, the Salon du Livre. It was quite an experience. Not only was the exposition far larger than I expected, filling the huge convention hall at Place Bonaventure, but I was both inspired and impressed by the breadth of the titles offered, and by the energy, vitality, and warm spirit that radiated from both the exhibitors and the attendees. It was the first night, so the crowds were smaller than they will be on the weekend, but the whole ambiance was one of excitement about reading and books, full of color and joie de vivre.

This is the thirtieth year for the Salon, and in their welcome to the media, the organizers celebrated that fact:

Thirty years, it's wild, no? 30 years of promoting reading, 30 years of presentations organized with care, 30 years of authors in intelligent interviews, 30 years of book signings, 30 years of passion about books!

For a book lover and writer, it was a wonderful evening of wandering and browsing, even for someone like me who reads French but with a certain amount of labor. There were plenty of beautiful books to touch and covet : gorgeous guidebooks to the birds, forests, and far reaches of Quebec; art books; bandes désinées (graphic novels); cookbooks; travel books; and a huge selection for young readers, alongside all the latest offerings of cultural or intellectual significance from both European and domestic French-language publishers.

In the province of Quebec, the population is approximately 7.5 million. Of those people, 3.6 million live in Montreal, and 715,000 in Quebec City. There are 4,000 books published annually. I've been told that selling 3,000 copies of a title qualifies a book as a "best seller" in the province, so the numbers are much smaller than in the U.S. However, a greater proportion of the population are readers and book enthusiasts, willing to support less commercial titles. In its first year, 1978, when francophone sentiment was very high, the Salon du Livre attracted 40,000 visitors. Last year, in a calmer and more cosmopolitan Montreal, 124,000 people attended. The vitality and enthusiasm surrounding books and reading here cannot be in doubt, as the immense and continued popularity of the new Bibliothéque Nationale also attests.

What's the significance, then, for a recently emigrated American with an interest in English-language books of limited mass-market appeal? First of all, how good it is to be living and working in a culture where books and reading are widely appreciated! If a larger market exists to the south, that's all to the better, but here one is in less danger of feeling totally lost, and media attention is possible even for smaller-scale endeavors, especially those that appeal to the strong desire to appreciate and understand world cultures that exists in Montreal. The atmosphere of French intellectualism that supports the publication of so many books of essays, poetry, politics and philosophy has a palpable effect on the wider population of English speakers and immigrants from other countries, as well as on the educational system. I was amazed by the number of poetry books presented last night: small editions, produced with care and beauty. Inside those books, one often sees marks of support by government and non-profit institutions - another indication that literature is valued for what it contributes to the culture even if the books sell in small numbers. The book advertised on the bookmark in the photo above is a post-modern litany by one of the most celebrated Canadian poets, Herménégilde Chiasson, born in 1946. I was astonished to read today that he is now serving as Lieutenant-Governor of the province of New Brunswick. Poets running governments? The mind boggles!

It's far too early for me to judge the future of any books we may offer here, but how good it was to see a grand-scale affirmation last night of what one witnesses in buses and metros and cafés all over the city: readers pulling books out of their backpacks and quickly becoming absorbed in the worlds they create. Thirty years of passion for books can only be a good thing.

Roaring Headlong into History

It's been two days, and it's still difficult to get my head around the news that Norman Mailer has died. I hadn't realized he was faltering as much as he apparently was, but it's not the fact that he died that seems so astounding - he was, after all, 84 and in failing health - it's the fact that his voice will no longer be a part of American arts and letters, as it has been for longer than I have been a reader. That voice, encountered in his books and in his essays, not only influenced how I write but the very decision to try to write. Of course there were, and are, plenty of other writers I admire greatly. What Mailer did was to get out of the ivory tower, and bring his intelligence and awareness of the political and social world into his writing: he tried, or so it seemed to me in the best of his work, to bring all of life as he was experiencing it into his work, never afraid to take risks and sometimes fail quite spectacularly. He had a most personal voice, and a very wide range, and he wrote beautifully: wonderful sentences that could be descriptive, biting, self-deprecating, brilliant, and often very funny. It's no wonder he tangled with his contemporary Gore Vidal, another very fine writer and stylist who has surveyed the American scene and not been afraid to bring all his talents together in his commentaries on it.

There are only three Mailer books on my shelf: The Naked and the Dead, Armies of the Night, and Ancient Evenings. I like them all, though I should re-read The Naked and the Dead, which I don't remember very well. I've been sorry that the obituaries and tributes I've read so far have concentrated on Mailer's larger-than-life personality, his anti-feminism, and the most outrageous incidents in his life rather than his writing. I suppose that's inevitable. What will last most over time will be, I think, his non-fiction, which forms a unique chronicle of a particular period in American life, and helped give rise to an ambitious and literary form of creative non-fiction journalism. What we are doing here would be less possible without giants like Mailer, who blew open the doors of literary social and political commentary, wresting the genre away from academia, and blurring the divisions between journalism and literature.

I will miss him.

from The Cassandra Pages

Icebergs, Inuit hymns, and a Patriarch

The image above was taken near Greenland, during the Arctic Symposium 2007, the seventh voyage organized by the Orthodox Patriarch, His All Holiness, Bartholomew, as part of Religion, Science and the Environment, a symposium conceived in 1988 to study the fate of the world's largest bodies of water. Prior symposiums have focussed on the Aegean, the Black Sea, the Danube, the Adriatic, the Baltic, and the Amazon. Like many of us, I'm often too weary and depressed about climate change to read new articles about it. This piece by Neal Ascherson, in the London Review of Books, is a notable exception: fine writing, and an unusual setting featuring an Orthodox patriarch and Greenland villagers.

Before us, on a motionless turquoise sea, the icebergs towered in the evening light, each vast as a city. I looked at the spectators and saw that every one of us, the Greenlanders as well as the patriarch’s retinue of scientists and theologians, stood like a row of Caspar David Friedrich solitaries, facing the ice as if facing their judge.

Climate change is already changing nearly everything about Greenland and its inhabitants, most of whom are descended from the Inuit with some Danish and Norse genes. Some changes are welcomed: the improving economy -- due to greater opportunity because of less cold and ice, and better fishing -- will mean independence from Denmark. Other changes, like not being able to trust that the ice sheet will hold a dog sled, will alter Greenland's culture forever.

Some of us climbed the hill until the group around Tjodhilde’s chapel was a dab of colour on the grey-green shore. Up here, a flock of redpolls swooped about drying cod nailed to posts, and a raven croaked. Inuits have another belief, not quite translatable, in what they call ‘Sila’: the force that brings alarming, unexpected things. Sudden storms are part of it, and disastrous changes in the ice, and caribou migrations shifting out of reach. Sila is also a spirit, and occasionally warns shamanic children that it is coming.

The Cassandra Pages, October 11, 2007

Change in India

The Market is a Donkey is an article by former BBC journalist Mark Tully in OutlookIndia.com. The author discusses India's economic growth and asks whether India, which has always has been characterized by comfort with duality, must inevitable conform to dogmatic emulation of the West in its effort to become a world economic power.

India traditionally does not write full stops because it understands the uncertainty of certainty, it prefers the middle road, and believes in the perpetual search for balance. So, the answer to any question can never be final, no theory should be closed to questioning, and no policy should be taken so far that it creates imbalance. The West, on the other hand, tends to see things in black and white, to look for certainties, and so to lurch from one extreme to another.

The most obvious evidence for this contrast lies in the different attitudes to religion. R.C. Zaehner, who held the chair at Oxford India's philosopher-president S. Radhakrishnan once held, wrote, "Hindus do not think of religious truth in dogmatic terms.... For the passion for dogmatic certainty that has wracked the religions of Semitic origin they feel nothing but shocked incomprehension."

The article goes on to examine what has happened to Indian socialism, and to compare this change with what has happened to British socialism: a fascinating and brief foray into the topics discussed in the author's new book, India's Unending Journey: Finding Balance in a Time of Change.

A Rwandan Looks at Canada

Eugène Kwibuka is a 22-year-old journalism student from Butare, Rwanda, who has been staying in Montréal for six weeks covering the war crimes trial of Désiré Munyaneza. He's been chronicling his experiences in  a blog.He says he loves the idea of Canada's changing seasons and finds the country beautiful, and he's amazed by being able to drink tap water, use wireless internet, ride on excellent roads, and have electricity that works all the time. But he notes that people aren't necessarily happy, even though they have big houses and lots of possessions: the stress and loneliness in western society were immediately apparent to him. He's surprised that even well-off people don't have live-in maids - something that's common and affordable in Rwanda - and that parents have to worry about babysitters for their children.

Can you imagine a person living alone in a huge house in which you find more than two television sets, more than two cars, more than two sitting rooms, and many other things?

And I was interested that he picked up on some colloquial expressions in English that say quite a lot about our society:

Sayings like "there is no free lunch in North America" and "feed the goat" show how capitalist a society is. the first means that people here work hard to eat and buy things... By the term "feed the goat," I learned that people here work for big companies that keep demanding big work and they are considered as goats to be fed anytime...I always wonder what would happen if companies stop employing people who are living in a house they haven't paid for yet? Doesn't it stop them from paying the mortgage? Would they be sent from the house?