Toronto Public... Book-Burning-Place

Some years ago I lived in Toronto's High Park neighborhood. Several blocks away from my house stood the High Park Toronto Public Library. One of the best features of this branch was the huge selection of foreign language books they had. I borrowed them, and I purchased many of those which were discarded and offered for sale. I came every day, just to see what books were for sale, and almost each day I purchased some.

Over the years I bought at this and other Toronto libraries over 2,000 foreign language books, majority of which were / are not available in English. The ladies who staffed the counter knew me by name, they let me know when a larger selection of books was scheduled for sale. One day, one of these women pulled me over to a quiet corner of the kids' section, and told me, teary eyed: the Parkdale Library shredded 5 huge boxes of foreign language books!

I wasn't happy. I made it known. The chairman of the library board at the time might still remember my letter, after all it garnered an apology and an explanation: "it was an oversight". 5 huge boxes shredded by accident? Well, whatever, I got over it.

Recently I visited the High Park library again, in hope of scoring some interesting books that would not be available to me otherwise, what with the attitude of North American publishers toward translations. Imagine how I felt when a young woman at the desk explained why the library no longer offers books for sale, foreign or otherwise: space constraints force them to shred all discarded books!

Heinrich Heine once said: "Where they burn books, they will also burn humans in the end".

Paraphrased it reads: "Where they shred books…"

Below is the monument to the 1933 Nazi book burning at the Bebelplatz, Berlin:

Monument to the May 10, 1933 Nazi book burning: Designed by Micha Ullmann,
empty bookshelves, enough to hold all 20,000 burned books,
visible below the pavement of Bebelplatz in Berlin, Germany.

Occupation: pickpocket

“Ongoing SOF [U.S. Special Operations Forces] operations demonstrate the ability to collect significant amounts of pocket litter, hard copy documents, hard drives, cell phones, and other important hard copy and electronic media with significant intelligence value. However, without specialized expeditionary processing, this information becomes inaccessible and of no value to SOF in immediate urgent operational missions, and over the longer term to the war fighter, the intelligence community and others in need of access.”  The Committee recommended additional resources to remedy this deficiency.
READ MORE

Classifieds: Writer seeking Sugar Daddy (or Sugar Mom)

Now, a radical thinning of the ranks of long-haul professional writers looks unavoidable. Even if an upswing comes along, the drop in incomes that digitised reading brings means that, for many, authorship will slip from a semi-rational career option to a passionate hobby. Novelists outside the bestseller lists may have to work as poets long have, stitching together a liveable portfolio from gigs, teaching, grants, and sporadic literary jobs. Many well-known writers of the past 30 years also tended to assume that a comfy university position lay in store when sales fell away. No longer. The creative-writing vogue may well soon pass its peak, and British teaching posts demand hard work. READ MORE

Publishing advances ruin publishers

Finally, an insider sheds light on the reasons behind the troubles publishing houses are dealing with: all those layoffs and cutbacks are not caused by the opportunity presented by the "economic downturn", not by readers who don't spend $$ on books that they cannot believe could be printed in the first instance, but it is the advances paid to authors...

"[...] what I do think – in common with most of publishing – is that the whole system of publishing advances is threadbare. It’s like the Windows operating system: the programme has been stretched and overwritten so much it is cumbersome and worn out. The fact that it just about “does the job” is why it’s still used." Read more.

Five kinds of spies

Knowledge of the enemy's disposition can only be obtained from other men. Hence the use of spies, of whom there are five classes: Local, Inward,  Converted, Doomed, Surviving.

When these five kinds of spy are all at work, none can discover the secret system. This is called "diverse manipulation of the threads." It is the sovereign's most precious faculty.

Local spies means employing the services of the inhabitants of a district.

Inward spies is making use of officials of the enemy.

Converted spies, getting hold of the enemy's spies and using them for our own purposes.

Doomed spies, doing certain things openly for purposes of deception, and allowing our own spies to know of them and report them to the enemy.

Surviving spies, those who bring back the news from the enemy's camp.

Hence it is that with none in the whole army are more intimate relations to be maintained than with spies. None should be more liberally rewarded.

Sun Tzu, in Roots of Strategy, Art of War; 500 B.C.

Harold Pinter's Nobel Acceptance Speech

Found this on FM radio, am posting it cause it ties with the novel I'm writing

Press play button to listen (total 13 minutes).

Part 1:

Part 2:

Books (not) in translation

A French author writes to me to share his frustration at not being able to find a US or a British publisher to release his bestselling novel in the English language. What else could I say but: "You are not being singled out. English speakers are deprived of most of the books that are written in other languages. More books are translated from the English language than into it." Then I forwarded a link to the recently released data (pdf), which shows that of all books available to English speakers only about 2% are translated from other languages; whereas in Germany 13% of books are translations, in France 27%, in Spain 28%, in Turkey 40% and in Slovenia 70%.

The Guardian had an interesting article on the subject. In it we read that

mainstream publishers have a ready excuse for ignoring literature from around the world. "The idiotic notion is that there's enough being written in English, […] so you don't have to bother." English is so generally spoken that it's possible to read very widely and not notice that you're only reading books written in one language.

The Guardian notes that writers are beginning to realize that in order to enter into the English language world of books they must create in the English language:

Creative writing schools in the UK and America are now seeing writers already published in their own languages enrolling for writing courses in English, a solution to the problems of getting translated.

and

there's even a danger that the dominance of English-language publishing is putting other languages and literary cultures at risk.

I don't see it in quite as dark colors.  I recall this quote I read somewhere in my youth: "The boundaries of our language are the boundaries of our world." Books in other languages will continue to be printed, though perhaps not translated. In my view the real losers are / will be all mono-language speaking readers who are / will be deprived of glimpses into other cultures via books written in languages other than their own.