Black Ink

This week the Montreal Mirror has published a couple of interesting interviews with Canadian authors.  Recently, I have been diving into the history of Canada--particularly Montreal--as part of the research for the book I am writing.  Canadian History for Dummies was first published in 2000, but its author Will Ferguson has returned with a second edition, this time adding some of the country's latest developments such as retarded politicians, SARS, same-sex marriage...:

Here are some facts from Canadian history you may or may not know already. In 1642, Montreal began as a would-be spiritual utopia, founded by a group of religious visionaries in Paris who wanted to build a New Jerusalem in the wilderness. In 1962, Canada was the third nation in space, after the Soviet Union (1957) and the U.S. (1958). And in 2000, enough Canadians bought Canadian History for Dummies to make it the first For Dummies title to ever become a national best seller.

We wouldn't have survived three centuries of Montreal winters, or made it into space without a certain level of competence, so it's safe to say that we're not a nation of notably stupid people. According to www.dummies.com, anyway, the intention behind these guidebooks has never been to insult people's intelligence. The title is meant merely to reassure people that no subject is too intimidating, complex or dull to prevent basic understanding. No, not even Canadian history.

(read more here)

Recently a very good friend of mine became the owner of a pitt bull and I'm anxious, yet at the same time apprehensive, about meeting this animal.  Of course the apprehension is do to my own miseducation.  A new book--with a slight hip-hop vibe--about this controversial breed is being published and it aims to dispel the myths surrounding a dog the Montreal author claims to be an "ideal family companion":

"BSL is doggie genocide. Basically, it says that this breed of dog is no good and should be destroyed, and instead of promoting owner responsibility, there are some politicians that would rather wipe out a breed. This is ridiculous to me."

"... There is a story about my friend Turf back when he lived in France. He went out one day when his pit bull was still a puppy, and it decided to chew stuff up, the way a puppy does. It got hold of one of his tapes and went crazy. Later that day, his mom went to walk the dog and ended up having to pull 90 minutes of tape out of the dog's ass."

Ewww!
(read interview here)

I was first introduced to American author Edwidge Danticat back in 1997 during my postcolonial literature class at university.  Moorish Girl has posted a link to a timely article by the Haitian-born writer who tells us how America's occupation of Iraq is remniscent of a nearly 20-year occupation of Haiti:

Those who resisted the occupation -- among them a militant peasant-run group called Cacos -- were crushed. In 1919, U.S. Marines in blackface ambushed and killed the Cacos' fearless leader, Charlemagne Peralte, mutilated his corpse and displayed it in a public square for days.

By the end of the occupation, more than 15,000 Haitians had lost their lives. A Haitian gendarmerie was trained to replace the U.S. Marines, then proceeded to form juntas, organize coups and terrorize Haitians for decades. Although U.S. troops were officially withdrawn from Haiti in 1934, the U.S. government maintained economic control of the country until 1947.

Ninety years later, there are many, including some current foreign policy experts, who maintain that Haiti, like recently occupied Iraq, should be declared a failed state. This could make way for another lengthy takeover. After all, some of the conditions that existed in Haiti in 1915 are still present today: rampant insecurity, political uncertainty, proximity to U.S. shores and concern for American interests, no small part of which is the fear of an exodus of boat people headed for Miami.

(via TimesUnion.com)

Uk fantasy author Orson Scott Card has a book out called Magic Street in which his  characters are African-American.  In an interview on SF Crowsnest.com he explains how as a white author he avoided stereotypes about the black community and the type of research he conducted for this book:

OSC: The original idea was from my friend, Roland Bernard Brown, who wrote to me (from LA, where he lives), asking me to write a black male hero who would be as strong a figure as the white male and female heroes I had already written. I told him then that while I was confident of my ability to write a hero of either sex or of any age, the decision to set a story within an existing community was a guarantee of failure – unless I had help. He agreed to help, so I began a long process of coming up with an effective story.

Since the premise was to create a contemporary black male hero, I could hardly tell the same story with white characters.

The more Roland talked to me about upper-middle-class life as a black living in both black and integrated society in LA, the more determined I became that this story was not going to be about race – that is, about relations between whites and blacks in LA. Too many ugly things happened in the intervening years – like the Rodney King incident, and the riots after the trial, and the O.J. thing, all of which made me less and less interested in writing a fiction about black-and-white.

What I wanted was for my hero to be a black man who nevertheless was saving the world (in the generic sense). I wanted to focus on him within the neighborhood he grew up in, the people that he knew well, and not his prickly and dangerous relations with "the man." Besides, Walter Mosley was already writing his Easy Rawlins books, which did everything I could possibly have hoped to do with racial interaction in LA – and far better than I could have done it. (Being members of the minority, blacks are, by experience, experts on black and white culture; few whites have enough opportunities to interact with large numbers of blacks to be able to know black society half so well as blacks in America have to know white society in order to survive!)

Driving around Baldwin Hills; meeting with Queen Latifah about another project; conversations with African-American friends here in Greensboro and elsewhere; reading books by black writers about black culture – all these things contributed to the growing story. Ultimately, though, it was a story that came out of my own imagination and experience of human life; what else do I have to rely on?

Q: Wait, so there really is a Baldwin Hills, California?

OSC: Take the La Cienega exit from the 10 and drive south.

Q: And wait again: you're working on a project with Queen Latifah?

OSC: I can't say any more about that right now. Sorry.

(via SF Crowsnest.com)

This afternoon I took a break from procrastinating so I could fill up on my daily dose of Bookninja and there I find an interesting link to damali ayo, the conceptualist artist that is shaking up the debate on race relations in North America with her satirical Rent-a-Negro guide:

She uses the Michael Jackson case as an example. When the verdict came down, Ayo believes people wanted to know what she thought because of the color of her skin.
"People expect me to have an opinion that's race based, rather than justice based, or my opinion of pedophilia or any of those things," says Ayo.
So from now on, Damili wants to get paid, and she says, so should you if you're African-American: $75 for a 'black' opinion; $150 if you want to call her 'sista'.

I can't tell you how much it irks me to see the North American media overwhelmingly flooded with images of black people during the month of February or when there's a shooting in the black community, as if these are the only safe moments to discuss race, and all other issues pertaining to multiculturalism and tolerance.  I abhor the word "tolerance."  I don't want anyone "tolerating" me.  Everyone should be talking about race.  I was just saying to co-workers the other day how strange it is that we are so adamant about teaching mathematics, English and French in Canada, yet there is no emphasis on high school curriculum regarding race and prejudice.
Another thing that irks me is the fact that damali ayo's author tour includes dates for Ottawa and Toronto, but none for Montreal.

I'm shaking my head at these fools.  The Source magazine would prefer to hire immature and incompetent people rather than treat their former female employees with the respect they deserve:

Two employees of The Source magazine were charged with attempted murder on Saturday [July 23] after a shootout erupted outside a New York bar.

Source general manager Leroy Peeples and salesman Alvin Childs were arrested outside the Limerick House pub on W. 23rd Street, across from the magazine's offices, according to The New York Post.

 

One investigator told the Daily News that after argument erupted between the two suspects, an aspiring rapper, his cousin and a busboy, over whether they were going to play a particular hip hop album, the altercation moved outside the bar where witnesses heard four shots fired.

So much for reviving your publication.
(via VIBE)

Meanwhile, this article below is certainly not news to the rest of us:

When executives at Sony BMG needed to drum up support in 2002 for Jennifer Lopez's album "This Is Me … Then," they called the program director of a San Diego radio station and offered her a 32-inch plasma TV in exchange for adding the artist's songs to her play list.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment knew such payola, or "pay-for-play," was improper. Nonetheless, the company asked the programmer to provide a fictitious contest winner's name and Social Security number to cover up her involvement...

According to Spitzer's office, Sony BMG also expended "significant resources" to manipulate call-in request lines, paying interns and others to repeatedly phone stations posing as listeners. To make sure the callers sounded authentic, Sony BMG employees issued specific guidelines.

"You need to rotate your people," an Epic promotion employee wrote last year in an e-mail to a call-in campaign leader. "My guys on the inside say that it's the same couple of girls calling in every week and that they are not inspired enough to be put on the air. They've got to be excited. They need to be going out, or getting drunk, or going in the hot [tub], or going clubbing…. You get the idea."

And this is why commercial radio sucks donkey.
(via LA Times)

While posting on Black Ink has become a little more regular than usual this past week, my motivation to work on my articles for American Hunger and my book has diminished.  I am one of the greatest procrastinators in the world.  This happens to be one of my best talents, not writing.  I've managed to sign out several books from the library and gather my file with a plethora of photocopied material, but once again, they all look prettier on the floor than they do on my desk.  In theory starting this work today seems like a good idea, but I probably won't be able to do anything until this weekend.   More on that later.

For now, Jane Pratt has announced that she will be stepping down from her magazine Jane:

The magazine has become “sort of like a soap opera, where you get to know the people on staff, and you follow them through their relationship adventures,” Pratt said, adding that the magazine’s voice is engineered to allow “the readers to get very close to the staff.”
Pratt said that her decision to depart now came because the magazine is on “solid footing.”

(via Folio)

On another note, fashion editor Nadine Haobsh was fired by her bosses at Ladies Home Journal when they discovered she was blogging undercover as Jolie:

Robach:  What did you write about?  What was so inflammatory to your bosses, to what you thought was going to be your new bosses?    What made them so upset about this?

Haobsh:  Well, to be honest it was about 80 percent celebrity gossip.  Maybe one in every 20 posts were beauty posts but I guess I was unwittingly exposing secrets of the beauty industry even thought they aren't really secrets.  I was just talking about the products we receive, the events we go to and thinks like press trips.  There were one or two posts that I think were a little inflammatory but I wrote on the post that I was just satirizing the industry.

(via MSNBC)

The Quill and Quire website has reported that House of Anansi Press has acquired André Alexis's non-fiction book called Beauty and Sadness: A Look at Canadian Criticism and Fiction.  Alexis also happens to have another novel called Asylum ready for publication in Spring 2006.

A few months ago in my book sidebar on Black Ink I listed Esi Edugyan's The Second Life of Samuel Tyne as one of the books I was reading.  If you haven't read the novel as yet you should.  For non-Canadian Black Ink readers you can get this book too--it was published in the US and the UK.  It was a good debut and you should read it for the eerie identical twins if nothing else.  It seems that the Ghanaian-Canadian author's book has made a lasting impression on African-Americans, as it has been nominated in the "Debut Fiction" section of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.  Nominated in the same category is Nigerian-born Chris Abani's Graceland--another book I've read and listed in my sidebar.  The awards take place in New York this November.

I don't know how I missed this tidbit of information regarding the Montreal bookstore.  A few months back the news of Double Hook bookstore's closure circulated rapidly, but now Babar Books, a kid lit bookstore in Montreal—Pointe-Claire to be more specific—is planning on moving into the premises with a new venture called Babar (En Ville).

(Read more here.)

I'm also very happy to report that Felica Pride has FINALLY given us hungry readers a new edition of The Backlist following a lengthy hiatus:

In the infamous words of Rakim: "It's been a long time, I shouldn't have left you…" For the past few months, life has intruded—I moved, graduated, got a new job, and it's been a bit overwhelming. I had to put BackList on the back burner and even contemplated stopping it all together. But when you have people emailing you "girl, that is complete nonsense" or folks like jessica Care moore telling you, "nope, can't happen," you realize that this is bigger than you.

(Read more here)

Because I have not yet paid for a subscription to the Quill and Quire online I am left with a limited amount of information regarding its article on the increase in book sales in my province (Quebec).  The excerpt reads:

Quebeckers are buying more books, but fewer newspapers and magazines, according to statistics released last week by the Observatoire de la culture et communications du Québec, the provincial government agency that tracks culture…

Now this is good news considering that last year statistics portrayed the population as being a bunch of lazy couch potatoes:

Quebecers sleep more and work fewer hours, according to a new survey. They also spend less time reading and exercising.

A Leger Marketing poll of 1,500 people discovered Quebecers worked 38.3 hours a week on average compared with 42.7 hours for Canadians living in the Atlantic provinces.

Other results are:

• Quebecers slept 7.3 hours a day compared to Ontarians at 6.8 hours.
• Quebecers read an average of 7.3 hours a week compared to people in British Columbia who topped the survey at 11.3 hours a week.
• Quebecers logged 5.6 hours of physical activity weekly compared to eight hours for those in B.C.

(via CBC.ca)

I'm not really trustworthy of any information that comes from Leger Marketing, as they seem to be, in my opinion, an outlet for politicians who want to manipulate the population, but I think here they may be correct.  It is true that some Quebecers watch a lot of television, and as the article points out, it is due in part to the fact that more French-language programming is produced here and caters more to the population, the majority of which is francophone.  I don't think the television viewing statistics applied much to the Anglophone or Allophone population.  As for myself, I do not get much sleep.  My last good night sleep was in mother's womb.

The good folks over at [places for writers] are gathering links to websites of Canadian writers.  If you are a Canuck, a writer, and live north (or south?) of the border, fill out the submission form posted on their website.

In other news, I'm seriously thinking of resurrecting my radio talent  to produce a radio documentary for the CBC.  I have some great ideas floating around, but I'm really unsure how to go about handling the editing and piecing together of the audio segments.  If anyone knows how to do this and can give me a step by step radio editing tutorial, please leave me a comment.