McGill-Queen's University Press Blog

This week in publishing...

What you may have missed this week at the MQUP… 

John Glassco on social media and James Frey

Seven timeless lessons from Peter Cundill’s biography

Have you visited MQUP's new Tumblr?

Anthony J. Hall pays tribute to Marshall McLuhan

 

What else?

Margaret Atwood fights for Toronto libraries

Which author would you most like to have a drink with?

Why there’s still a place in the world for literary readings

Annoying things people say in bookstores

Hack, hacker, hackney, hackneyed and hackergate 

"Who knew that words not only could be read but smelt." 

NY library pardons 140,000 kids' late fines

Anatomical profiling: touchscreen keyboard morphs to fit your typing style

 

Upcoming

September 18 - Book launch: Maria Meindl's Outside the Box part of Toronto's Draft Reading Series

September 22-25 - Merrily Weisbord at the Kingston WritersFest

October 12-23 - Merrily Weisbord at Edmonton Litfest 2011

November 4, 6 and 10 - The McGee Band, featuring David A. Wilson, will be touring Ontario East to celebrate the publication of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Volume 2.

• November 4 - Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario
• November 6 - The Town Hall, Almonte, Ontario
• November 10 - Hugh's Room, Toronto, Ontario

November 18 - Book launch: The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas at the Glicrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma

November 20 - Book launch: Rebecca Margolis' Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil at the Montreal Jewish Public Library

November 22 - Book launch: Jack Lipinsky's Imposing Their Will at Beth Tzedec Congregation, Toronto

John Glassco on Social Media and James Frey

Canadian Bookshelf recently sat down with Brian Busby, author of A Gentlemen of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Memoirist, Translator, and Pornographer. John Glassco (1909-1981) is best known for his Memoirs of Montparnasse, the controversial chronicle of his youthful adventures and encounters with celebrities in the Paris of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. Less known are his poetry, his instrumental role in the foundation of modern translation, and his numerous - and widely popular - works of pornography.

 

JW: What do you think Glassco would make of the James Frey controversy and the rise in popularity of creative non-fiction? Did Glassco consider himself a made-up self? I'm also trying to imagine what Glassco would do with social media, if he would subvert or embrace it.

BB: It's interesting to consider what relationship, if any, Glassco might have had with social media. He was, at heart, very much an Edwardian—though he was just four months old when that era ended. His own tastes were to a large extent rooted in the years enjoyed by Edward VII. We see this in his final fantasy, Guilt and Mourning, an unpublished novel set in a Montreal that has somehow avoided the technological advances of the 20th century. Had Glassco lived to be a centenarian—or even a mere nonagenarian—I very much doubt that he would have taken to social media except in one key area: his sex life. Here, the world would have become a less lonely place. I dare say it would be much easier to meet people who shared his interests over the Web than through personal ads.

As to Frey, I wonder how much attention Glassco would have paid the controversy; he had so very little interest in the prose of his own time. That said, he did enjoy a good hoax—and perpetrated some of the very best. We might get a sense of his reaction to the Frey controversy through his own memoirs. In a letter to Kay Boyle, he writes, "I look on the real value of 'memoirs' as being not so much a record of 'what happened' as a re-creation of the spirit of a period in time." So he telescopes and rearranges time, invents dialogue and encounters, dresses "naked facts" and in the end produces a work that Malcolm Cowley considered "the most accurate picture of Montparnasse".

Read the full article

 

To learn more about A Gentleman of Pleasure, or to order online, click here.

To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

Seven Timeless Lessons from Peter Cundill’s Biography

Peter Cundill, a philanthropist and investor whose work has been praised by the likes of Warren Buffett, found his life changed forever when he discovered the value investment principles of Benjamin Graham and began to put them into action. There's Always Something to Do by Christopher Risso-Gill tells the story of Cundill's voyage of discovery, with all its ups and downs, as he developed his immensely successful investment strategies.

Columnist Greg Speicher lists his top seven lessons from the Cundill biography:

1. Follow your passion with conviction and success will follow. Cundill discovered Ben Graham after knocking around in the dark for several years and that was it. He followed the path laid out by Graham with unwavering gusto and built one of the great long-term track records in the process – a compound annual rate of return of 15%+ for over thirty years.

2. Operate from a value-oriented framework and you will make money. This is a time-tested approach that has proven to make big money slowly but surely. The track records of many great investors attest to this fact.

3. Search widely for value. The more rocks you turnover, the greater your chances of finding something worthwhile. Cundill became a global investor and scoured the globe looking for deep value.

Read the full article on Gurufocus.com

To learn more about There's Always Something to Do, or to order online, click here.

Anthony J. Hall's pays tribute to Marshall McLuhan

Author Anothony J. Hall, author of The Bowl With One Spoon series and a former Marshall McLuhan student offers tribute to McLuhan on CBC's Ideas.

 

Click here to listen

This week in publishing...

What you may have missed this week at the MQUP… 

E-waste not, want not

Vintage computing

The MQUP Tumblr is born

Marshall McLuhan's would-be 100th birthday

 

What else?

E-Book revolution upends a publishing course

Ten unconventional bookstores for your browsing pleasure

Have you heard about the secret bookstore?

How to build an invisible bookshelf

The art of great writing

The price of typos

Stories told by book dedications

Famous for the wrong book

 

Upcoming

September 18 - Book launch: Maria Meindl's Outside the Box part of Toronto's Draft Reading Series

September 22-25 - Merrily Weisbord at the Kingston WritersFest

October 12-23 - Merrily Weisbord at Edmonton Litfest 2011

November 4, 6 and 10 - The McGee Band, featuring David A. Wilson, will be touring Ontario East to celebrate the publication of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Volume 2.

• November 4 - Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario
• November 6 - The Town Hall, Almonte, Ontario
• November 10 - Hugh's Room, Toronto, Ontario

November 18 - Book launch: The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas at the Glicrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma

November 20 - Book launch: Rebecca Margolis' Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil at the Montreal Jewish Public Library

November 22 - Book launch: Jack Lipinsky's Imposing Their Will at Beth Tzedec Congregation, Toronto

Happy Birthday Marshall McLuhan!

Today would have been Marhsall McLuhan's 100th birthday.

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian scholar, philosopher and one of the world's most famous media theorist. Pre-internet, he predicted in 1962, "a computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind."

In The Virtual Marshall McLuhan by Donald F.Theall, the author explores and explains the significance of the emergence of McLuhan as an key figure in North America in the development of an understanding of culture, communication and technology. He reveals important information about McLuhan and his relationships with his earliest collaborator and life-long friend, anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, as well as with Theall himself, McLuhan's first doctoral student. McLuhan emerges as a complex human being, at once attractive, witty, egotistic, and exasperating. Theall examines McLuhan's many roles - proponent of a poetic method; pop guru adopted by Tom Wolfe, Woody Allen and others; North American precursor of French theory (Baudrillard, Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze); artist; and shaman.

 

To learn more about The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, or to order online, click here.

 

The MQUP Tumblr is born

 

Visit the new MQUP Tumblr where we'll be unearthing McGill-Queen's literary odds and ends for your enjoyment.

Vintage Computing

The MQUP recently sat down with Zbigniew Stachniak author of Inventing the PC, an insider's view of events on the front lines of pioneering work on personal computers.

Click below to discover how the personal computer came to be, the author's favourite vintage PC along with the story of the first seafaring personal computer.

 

 

Click to listen to the author interview

 

 

MCM/70	Dynalogic Hyperion	PDP-8

E-waste not, want not

Excerpted from The Whig-Standard article "E-waste not, want not" by Paul Schliesmann.

 

Scott Environmental is the largest e-waste collector in Kingston with a massive facility on Fortune Crescent. It is filled with discarded electronics that will make their way to one of a dozen processors around the province, including Sims in Mississauga.

Scott picks up the TVs, monitors and computer stacks from Kingston-area retailers, or accepts them directly at the plant, in a dumpster at the back of the building.

The components are sorted, stacked and plastic-wrapped in boxes that must be less than six feet in height. Batteries are removed and stored separately.

The products then sit at Scott Environmental until [Ontario Electronic Stewardship] calls to say which processing plant is ready to take the goods.

Under this tightly regulated system, no processing plant has to contend with material shortages.

Processors are also allowed to find their own private customers, and those transactions are also subject to OES regulations.

Ontario Electronic Stewardship is guided by a board of directors comprised of industry representatives from some of the biggest electronics makers and retailers in Canada.

The chairman is from Sony of Canada Ltd. He is joined by members from Home Hardware Stores, Best Buy Canada, Dell Canada, Hudson's Bay Company, Sears Canada and Hewlett Packard.

OES maintains a fee schedule based on the types of items sold in Ontario. The stewards pay, for instance, $26.25 on a television larger than 29 inches, $12.25 for a computer monitor, all the way down to 40 cents for a computer keyboard.

While the $71 million in stewardship fees was paid upfront by the retailers and importers, many pass these costs on to consumers.

As of August 1, the fees will be reduced on some products because there is still $20 million remaining from the $71 million collected in 2010.

Hochu says the directors, despite their direct connections to electronics, have no conflict of interest when it comes to making decisions on behalf of OES.

"These programs are all set up as industry-led organizations so the manufacturers and im-porters and retailers are helping to lead and drive the programs," she said.

"This is an industry stepping up to assume responsibility for managing end-of-life electronics."

McGill University professor Thomas Naylor doesn't agree.

"It's a classic corporate green-wash system," said Naylor, who teaches an ecological economics course and is the author of a new book, Crass Struggle: Greed, Glitz and Gluttony in a Wanna-Have World.

Greenwash is the term used to describe corporations that claim to be acting in environmentally sensitive ways but really aren't.

Like many academics in urban planning and environmental economics schools across the country, Naylor believes the North American consumer-oriented lifestyle, fuelled by cheap and disposable goods from developing nations, is driving us to the brink of environmental destruction.

"Recycling is a fraud. It was set up to dissolve bad consciences," he said. "We have to recycle ourselves in terms of our ideologies of consumption."

Read the full article

 

To learn more about Crass Struggle, or to order online, click here.

To arrange an interview with the authors, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

 

This week in publishing...

What you may have missed this week at the MQUP… 

Creditors pull plug on Inuit film company behind Fast Runner

Phoenix: The Life of Norman Bethune reviewed

North American society, the "Have's and the Want-More's" ? 

 

What else?

Authors and their inspiration

Weird writing habits of famous authors

Contractions are a-changin'

The birth of a bookstore in high speed

The history of English in 10 minutes

 

Upcoming

July 14 - Book launch: Christopher Powell's Barbaric Civilization at McNally Robinson

September 22-25 - Merrily Weisbord at the Kingston WritersFest

October 12-23 - Merrily Weisbord at Edmonton Litfest 2011

November 4, 6 and 10 - The McGee Band, featuring David A. Wilson, will be touring Ontario East to celebrate the publication of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Volume 2.

• November 4 - Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario
• November 6 - The Town Hall, Almonte, Ontario
• Novermber 10 - Hugh's Room, Toronto, Ontario

November 20th - Book launch: Rebecca Margolis' Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil at the Montreal Jewish Public Library