Categories
In The Newspapers

Dave Bidini – Interview with Writer/Musician

bidini

Photo (from First Chapter ) of Dave Bidini, with Bobby Orr button, Hockey Canada tuque and short lived mustache.

The Toronto Star has a great profile on writer/musician Dave Bidini, check it out here.

Categories
Festival Reading

Pacific Festival of the Book

Due to travel/work I missed the 3rd annual Pacific Festival of the Book that ran May 4-15. Well, I did manage to run  in to (for maybe 10 minutes) one panel discussion and here, finally, are a couple of photos from the event. I didn’t want the Festival to pass  without a mention even if it’s late because every festival/event is important.

pacific-festival-1

Banner for festival along Quadra Street

pacific-festival-2

A panel discussion on the writer and responsibility, moderated by Trevor Carolan (centre, in vest) and with (L-R) Walter Hildebrandt, Rhona McAdam, Janet Marie Rogers, Stephen Henighan and Gary Geddes

pacific-festival-3

Stephen Henighan and Gary Geddes

pacific-festival-4

Audience listens to Gary Geddes (L)

Categories
In The Newspapers

Beat poet Harold Norse, dead at 92

Obituaries from the New York Times and the LA Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Categories
In The Newspapers

Poets And Authors Write The News

Israeli newspaper assigns 31 poets and authors to cover the news for one day.

Categories
In The Newspapers

If You’re Happy And Don’t Want To Be………

The Independent has a quirky feature by David Nicholls, a list of  The Top Ten Literary Tear Jerkers. This is actually quite amusing, not quite what you’d expect from a list of this sort.

Here’s a sample:

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST BY KEN KESEY
I’ve not read this for twenty-five years now, so am quite prepared to be told that it’s nothing special. As a seventeen year-old, however, I thought this was a masterpiece of world literature. I was working in a coffee percolator factory at the time, reading this in my lunch breaks, and returning to the assembly line red-eyed and shaken after the death of McMurphy. You can imagine how complex and interesting my workmates thought I was after that.

Categories
Blogs In The Newspapers

Other People Are Busy With Ugly Big Toes

I may have been inactive but other sites are busy.

Zach Well’s latest entry at Career Limiting Moves is titled The Ugly Big Toe of Essentialism and frankly it’s worth reading for that headline alone.

While I was slacking off,  John MacDonald was very busy documenting the Ottawa literary scene (and family, and news etc).

Richard at Book Addiction updates about the Eighth Biennial Conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE).

By the time you read this you can check out Patrick Rawley on Desk Space.

Need to get out of town, check out the lineup for the upcoming (Aug 15-31, 2009) Edinburgh Book Festival courtesy of the Guardian. Canada’s own Margaret Atwood will be in attendance.

Coming up from Lumiere Press, publishers of very fine art books on photography, a new volume, this one on Paul Caponigro.

Biblioasis promotes Terry Griggs with a National Post link.

Categories
Photography

Back And Annoyed But With A Reminder of Robert Service

My apologies for the lack of updates, interviews etc.

I have been busy, away etc. and the downside of one person operation is that it’s one person.

I had hoped to get the site rolling again tonight with photos from the David Sedaris reading at Bolen Books but that won’t be happening as I was told that photos were not allowed, not before, during or after. I’m not sure if this rule comes from Sedaris himself, his management or publisher (please be clear it was not from Bolen).

One reason I really like to photograph writers is because they don’t usually act like stars.

Anyhow…………..

The closest I’ve been to anything (besides an actual book, anybody read A.A. Gill’s journalism, he’s cranky but fun) connected to writing were these reminders of the poet Robert Service in Whitehorse. Service, before he went to the Yukon worked at a bank in Victoria, the bank is now a very nice pub, The Bard and Banker.

Robert Service

A bust of poet Robert Service in downtown Whitehorse, Yukon territory

Whitehorse Yukon 47

Sam McGee’s cabin in the McBride Museum, McGee the inspiration for Service’s classic ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ actually lived a full life and moved back to his American home before dying of old age.