Your morning aargh

I understand the pressures to fill those column inches, but is it really, really necessary for both my Saturday papers this week to have utterly identical, utterly tedious articles on Robbie Burns Day, Chinese New Year, and the Academy Award nominations? The first two I swear are just recycled from year to year; and there seems to be more and more bilge about the Oscars every year, even as normal people lose interest and the ratings drop. But then journalists are terrified of the responsibility of deciding for themselves what might be an important story. So if they covered Robbie Burns Day last year, and the Tourism Scotland p.r. office sends the same press release this year, they'll happily run the same damn story all over again, probably with a feeling of relief and satisfaction. And if the Oscars become boring, irrelevant, and uninteresting, if the televised show becomes unwatchable and people in fact stop watching, well, they'll just take it as fodder for a further genre of article moaning and whining about the Oscars. Whereas a rational person would respond by, you know, paying less attention to them.

I guess the truth is that at bottom the newspapers and the readers have radically different interests. As a reader, I want to learn important stuff I didn't know and read about things I haven't heard of before. (Pulau Weh, baby!) But new information is costly and time-consuming to acquire, and then there's the dread risk of controversy if you make your own editorial call about what's important. So a huge proportion of newspaper articles now are press release-driven, and/or a statement of the totally fucking obvious: weekend box office figures, stories about the Christmas shopping season, Oscar nominees, Robbie Burns Day blah blah blah. If there's one thing 'the news' should be it's unpredictable, but the papers are digging their own graves.

It's now official

I have directed my computer -- with pangs of regret and in a tone of chagrin that it probably didn't fully register -- to regard everything from the Obama family as spam.

The book club for men

As for the content of the new Books subsection, there's an interesting piece about an all-male book club: I didn't know there were such things. They read books about wars, Genghis Khan, Conrad Black, and hardly any fiction. (Just a Ken Follett [!] and a hit literary novel about Afghanistan, The Kite Runner.) The group has been around for 30 years, which is pretty impressive, and includes a wide range of vaguely upper-middle class anglo Montrealers. What struck me was this bit:

...the insinuation that the male of the literary-club species will always choose blood-and-guts reality ahead of polished fiction from the pens of great writers. This is, er, correct, as I realized one evening as I left the house happily cradling my copy of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. My wife's book club was reading Proust.

Now I rarely feel in need of gender reassignment, and still hope to get around to Proust one day, but I had a real surge of fellow-feeling here. To see why, just look further down page F9 to the blurb for the new 'Ask the Author' on-line feature, whose first author is Giller-winning Joseph Boyden. Here's the book he's talking about:

The novel follows Suzanne Bird, a native Canadian from Northern Ontario whose sister, a fashion model, goes missing in New York City. Suzanne leaves behind her troubled uncle Will, whose life also unfolds in the book.

The Giller judges said Boyden's novel "takes us on two journeys. Suzanne's sister Annie retraces her sister's steps, from the Native poverty below the Gardiner Expressway to the extravagant fast lanes of New York. Will, their uncle, follows a very different path as he deals with the demons of memory, revenge, and darkest loss."

See, this is the kind of stuff women read. And I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. I can't count the times I've gone into Book City and flipped over the intriguing-looking new novels only to see every single one described as a haunting luminous meditation on family, memory and loss, interweaving multiple resonant narrative journeys in a dazzlingly lyrical deeply personal poetic etc. etc. causing me to flee in horror.

I love fiction. I will read any amount of Evelyn Waugh and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I have some substantial chunks of Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble more or less committed to memory. So why is it so hard now, or socially unacceptable, to write a novel with a simple but compelling story in a style which gets to the fucking point? And why have women been gulled into thinking they like this... other stuff? Maybe they really do like it? But I can't help thinking of contemporary fiction as the literary equivalent of fashion nobody looks good in and microwaveable food that tastes like nothing: something you sell to women because women can be bullied into anything.

All we aspired to was 'snarky'

A friend of these pages points out that we have already managed to offend... Facebook?

Look what happened when I tried to switch over... while on Facebook:

The following website has been identified as malicious:
http://globeandmailwatch.blogspot.com/
The link you have clicked has been identified by Facebook as a malicious web site. For the safety and privacy of your Facebook account, we strongly suggest you avoid visiting this address.

As she notes:

Sorry for exercising free speech, Facebook.

And pithily comments:

Holy crap. Where do we even begin?

I have to admit I'm somewhat charmed by the idea of an emergency session of the Facebook Security Council convening for a detailed analysis of all three days of posts here, and after a frenzied discussion caving to unimaginable pressures from the fiendish international Rogers lobby. But frankly it seems to me more likely that a something-bot misfired. Now for a no doubt hilarious Brazil-like exercise in attempting to wrest an admission of error from the implacable Authorities. In the mean time you can join an exciting new Facebook group at http://utoronto.facebook.com/group.php?gid=52246940983&ref=nf. Let the crossfire begin!

It's hard to be sure without knowing what actually happened (thanks for the transparency, Facebook); but if this really is the result of thin human skin I will have to further label this post 'Canadian lameness'. Because frankly the level of snark here is nothing compared to the hijinks American political blogs get up to. There are good (meaning among other things tough) Canadian blogs as well; but not nearly so many and they don't seem to be as big a part of the culture yet, so Mister Delicate-Flower Journalist might not have found out about them. (That would explain a lot, come to think of it... 'You mean they have politics on the intertubes now?' ) Anyway a political blogroll with tons 'o' fun suggestions will be coming soon, so you will be able to see for yourselves just how very constructive, peacable, and dare I say it Canadian we are here.