• It’s official! This summer I’ll be interning with the publications department of the Adventure Cycling Association in Missoula, Montana. It looks like I’ll primarily be helping the magazine develop its online presence, but will likely have my fingers in plenty of other projects too. As everyone in my program knows how into bikes I am, I don’t think this came as a surprise to anybody.
• Over the next week, I’ll be writing a long paper about the publication history of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. During spring break, I biked up to UBC Special Collections and viewed some early editions of the book (from 1897 and 1900), which were polar opposites in terms of treatment of the text. While excited about the topic, I’m a little overwhelmed, and working on my blog is arguably my method of procrastination du jour.
• Armed with fearlessness, I’ve been doing a bit of customization with Bookish. This is directly linked to my MPub technology project—over the next several weeks, my group will be doing some testing on a web-based system for doing magazine submissions, which was completely built in WordPress.
CanCon is the idea in Canada that a certain percentage of television/radio content needs to be Canadian in nature: either created by Canadian artists or about Canadian topics. Providing a few CanCon posts while I’m here seems only natural.
One message has been pounded into my head, daily, in my MPub classes: Canadians produce a lot of great artistic and cultural work. The irony is, now that I’m here and the deadlines are flying, I don’t get much of a chance to take it in.
An exception was last semester when we had a children’s book editor visit our editing class. She brought a bag full of children’s books to use on an exercise, and I was introduced to The Red Tree by Shaun Tan.
As soon as I laid eyes on the cover, I was sucked in and spent the next several minutes absorbing the book cover to cover. It’s surprisingly marketed as a children’s book, but it seemed to me to cut across boundaries of age. Both the art and typography are used in complex ways to tell the inner story of a little girl struggling with depression. She finds herself navigating a world that doesn’t make sense to her, feeling like she can’t communicate. (Fret not though, there is hope at the end!)
Over the past few weeks I’ve been doing some writing.
Recently I finished a piece for Taking the Lane, a zine put together by my friend Elly Blue. It’ll appear in the third issue, which should be released later this spring. The piece shares the story of some pretty amazing women cyclists in the 1800s. Elly seems pretty excited about it, and that makes me pretty excited too. After all—bikes, history, and feminism are three of my favorite subjects. On a related note, it’s looking like I might be interning at a bike magazine this summer, fingers crossed.
Also, one of my classes this semester requires us to post all our presentations and papers online. Last night, after a week of scrambling and fretting, I posted a paper about what Google’s “information monopoly” could mean for ebooks and publishers. It’s not a very good paper, but it does have a LOLcats if you make it to the end, and it can help cure insomnia.
We’ll get back to our regularly scheduled format one of these days…
This past year (2010) was terrific, horrific, and just plain heart-wrenching. While I’d like to be able to encapsulate all the complication in one brief-yet-pithy blog post, the fact is that this is a blog about life as it relates to books, not all the crap that happened while I wasn’t reading much this year.
Instead, I’ll split the difference and talk about one of the best things to come out of 2010: Rain!
Rain is a seven-month-old Australian shepherd puppy. The photo at left was taken when she was eight weeks old, while the one on the right, taken a few weeks ago, is about the best I’ll be able to capture with a camera for some time.
Rain is bursting with wiggly puppy energy, easily leaping straight up from the ground to lick my nose and land squarely again before I know what hit me. She is a bit of a thief, stealing whatever is in reach on the kitchen counter and will fit in her mouth. She sounds a lot like her mom Skye, but also makes noises that are uniquely her own. Her face has funny freckles like her dad, and as she doesn’t yet have full muscle control over her big ears, she often looks goofy when at full attention.
Of course I’m a sucker for puppies, but I’ve really been enjoying getting to know Rain while I’ve been home from school over break. She has calmed considerably having extra attention and playmates the past few weeks, and my mom has had her hands a lot more free from the puppy tornado now that both my dad and I have come home from several months spent far away.
One of my favorite things about Rain: I delivered her! After staying up all night with Skye in labor, we had to go to the emergency vet. They gave her a shot of oxytocin to stimulate her uterine contractions, as they worked to remove an enormous stuck puppy. (Unfortunately, he had died from being in transit too long.) After that the puppies shot out in quick succession, and we were soon on our way home. As Skye seemed to be having milk problems, my mother left me with the litter to go get some bottles and formula at PetSmart. About three minutes after she left, Rain was born: a complete surprise!
A good go-to book about Australian shepherds is All About Aussies (here’s the blog). It was written by Jeanne Hartnagle-Taylor, whose family has been instrumental in development and history of the breed. All About Aussies is the book my family references for information about breed history (hint: Australian shepherds are not from Australia!), famous Aussies and their handlers, proper gait, breed-specific grooming standards, and more.
At school when I was presenting my redesign of Aussie Times, the official “magazine” of the Australian Shepherd Club of America, a classmate asked why Aussies have docked tails, and I was able to answer based on having read much of this important Aussie reference.
If you’re at all Aussie-inclined, never you mind any book selections you find in a pet store. (That holds true for pretty much any breed or animal: the most authoritative books aren’t going to be the ones that are most readily available.) Pick this book up and your Aussie will soon be Best in Show!
It’s Veteran’s Day! Or as they like to say in Canada, Remembrance Day! In fact, people observe Remembrance Day in Canada by wearing symbolic poppy pins. Coming from a country where people mostly consider Veteran’s Day a day to sleep in and catch up on your DVRed episodes of American Idol, the ubiquitousness of the poppy pins is rather touching. (And tasteful in comparison to the jingoistic overtones when the US honors people in the military.)
In honor of these international observations of our friends in the armed services, I’ve decided to showcase a book I recently read: Her Last Line of Defense by Marie Donovan. This Harlequin novel, part of the “Uniformly HOT!” series, stars SFC Luc Boudreaux, a Green Beret from cajun Louisiana, and Claire Cook, a congressman’s daughter and real southern debutante. Claire wants to do humanitarian work in a South American banana republic, and SFC Boudreaux is assigned to train her in jungle survival. But of course, he also ends up training her in LOVE…
Now before you barf, I’m right there with you.
Never in a million years did I think I’d be reading a romance novel. A series of events led me down this insidious path. First, Harlequin is the largest Canadian-owned publishing company, so the company is often the subject of discussion at school. Similarly, we have been encouraged in our editing class to read and pay attention to anything and everything that uses words, in order to be a better editor (and, I would say, a better writer): Russian novels, style guides, graphic novels, cereal boxes, tax forms, romance novels. Finally, a friend passed this book on to me in jest. In a serious commitment to irony I’ve now also decided to write my big paper this term on Harlequin, so I guess you could consider this book research.
Romance novels seem to function as porn for women. While the scenarios may be different from book to book, and while the official party line of the romance community seems to be that the story comes first, consumers expect sex sequences. Given the relatively thin character and plot development, the sex sequences are extremely descriptive and in the context of the story, feel rather shoehorned in. The scenarios seem to play on what are seen as common female fantasies (in this case, a man in uniform, subversion of traditional power structure when they go “into the wild,” winning over the rugged bachelor for marriage, etc.), just like porn movies showcase male fantasies of women in uniform (say, nurses), lesbians, etc.
The cookie-cutter fantasies even extend to the cover. Boudreaux (whose name is spelled “Boudreau” on the back), appears as a nondescript oiled-up muscleman. Many covers of this genre don’t even show faces, just chests or body parts. Doesn’t that sound like objectification? Kinda like porn? Since Harlequin pumps so many of these things out, nobody seemed to notice that the guy on this cover seems to have light brown hair, whereas the character in the book has black hair.
Well, instead of writing my 20 page (gulp) paper about Harlequin here, I’ll close with a few quotes that made me chuckle.
• He stood next to her and stared across the parking lot, shoving his hands into the back pocket of his jeans, tightning the thin fabric across his zipper. Not that she noticed things like that.
• He was as hungry as if he’d come out of a six-week training exercise and she was a lavish buffet.
• “I specifically warned you she was too pretty and you were too horny to take her out in the woods alone, but do you listen to me? No, you don’t.” “It wasn’t like that,” he growled. “It wasn’t? Olie drummed his fingers. “I get it now—it was her idea, right? maybe she’s one of those party girls who wanted to get laid by a real American fighting man before leaving the country. I can understand that—you were horny, she was slutty—” Luc was on his feet grabbing Olie by the lapels and giving him a good shake. “Don’t you ever talk about Claire like that!” Olie stared cooly at him. “So that’s how it is.”
If you’ve never read a romance novel, I recommend giving it a try. It will give you plenty of food for thought, and we’ll have something fun to discuss next time I see you!
Reading a book for one of my classes—a book about the Canadian publishing industry, incidentally—I came across this gem:
“The impact of the United States’ imperial bullying in its war in Vietnam must also be taken into account. For a country that claimed the moral upper hand, not only was the claim of protecting the free world from Communism in Vietnam highly tenuous, but the televised carnage and clearly desperate and vicious actions of the US Army also led many Canadians to thank fate or their preferred deity that they were born in or had immigrated to Canada. The determination throughout Canada to carve out a separate national identity was palpable.” (Source intentionally not named!)
These are probably the most scathing words I’ve heard about the US since I’ve been here. Except perhaps when the writer was discussing the US in class…and as the only US citizen in the room, I was a little uncomfortable in my seat.
Despite a love of the Chicago Manual of Style (or as I like to call it, “Midwestern Bible”) I’m not very excited to have just gotten the new 16th edition.
Last month I bought it from Powell’s and had it shipped to my mom, who schlepped it up for me this weekend. Reluctantly, I gave her my 15th edition to take home and sell back to Powell’s when she has time.
To commemorate this historic event, I took a photo of the two compendiums passing in the night.
Ol’ 15 and I had some pretty good times. I bought her slightly used for a mere $25, a significant savings off the hefty list price. We worked on the Muhammad Ali Center together–a pretty major undertaking that intimately familiarized me with Chicago. We continued work on many other projects that I still have pride in having been involved with. Despite not being a fan of orange, I loved the bright color and the stylish look and feel of the cover. I used 15 so much I even uncovered (and of course flagged in case I needed to prove) multiple typos inside!
While I enjoy how 16 changed Chicago’s standard from “Web site” to “website,” our courtesies ended there, and we’ve been on the wrong foot ever since. I didn’t enjoy not knowing until I had moved to BC that I’d need to buy the latest edition (even though our program doesn’t require us to have the just-released Adobe Creative Suite 5). I had already purchased all my books from Powell’s, and buying 16 required more money ($65!), and more patience for it to arrive. The dust jacket design is craptacular, sporting a turquoise background for the front cover and spine, and then an abrupt change to orange on the back. Jarring. Sure, I don’t mind turquoise, but the combination of turquoise and orange screams to me that Chicago is trying to be “hip,” like seeing powder blue put together with chocolate everywhere a few years back. After a few late nights writing my 20-page paper this term, I suspect my retinas will be screaming in agony.
Goodbye, ol’ 15, I’ll miss you and our warm memories. Just another thing I’ve had to involuntarily sacrifice on this ill-conceived journey.
It has been just over a month since I moved to Vancouver BC, and culture shock has been a constant companion.
Experts say that the first stage of culture shock is a honeymoon period, filled with joy and wonder as you explore your new country. Unfortunately I was abruptly catapulted past that stage when my rented UHaul mysteriously disappeared less than 12 hours after I arrived in Vancouver. (It had been towed: it was too close to a fire hydrant which was set back from the curb on an unlit corner, impossible to have seen in the dark when we parked it.)
Combined with the frenetic pace of the program I entered and leftover stuff from home, it has been a rough month. Desperate cries for help on Facebook have resulted in people coming out of the woodwork with supportive messages and open ears, which have all been very helpful. My mom even sent me a T-shirt that is everywhere in Portland, but never meant much to me until I got to BC (left).
A few weeks ago while chatting with my travel-savvy friend Debbie on Skype, I started mentioning some of the strange random cultural issues that had been popping up. Amused, she suggested I keep a list and then write a zine about it.
Turning negatives into a positive seemed like a great idea, so I’m excited to announce my next zine project will be just that! The tentative title is: “I’m a Stupid American: My Adventures in Canada and the Backwardness I Found I Had There.” Right now I’ve got a running list of about 26 items ranging from small differences to humorous anecdotes, but I imagine at some point I’ll want to write a narrative to encapsulate the larger experience. Perhaps I’ll also produce a companion piece about the “reverse culture shock” the experts say I’ll get upon returning home.
Don’t expect to see this project being pulled together until December at the earliest, and possibly not until Summer 2011 or later. The program I’m in is already kicking my butt, and I’m only four weeks in!
After several months of unintentional delay, I am pleased to announce my inaugural zine is available for purchase!
Beyond the Gate: An Ethnic History of Portland’s Nihonmachi and Chinatown offers a walking tour of Portland’s Chinatown neighborhood, guiding readers through major periods in neighborhood and national history.
Visitors and Oregon residents alike will discover why the neighborhood was originally named Nihonmachi, what event forced most residents to move away, and the slow rebirth that followed.
bookish 