BCAMP seeks new executive director, new project coordinator

BCAMP, the B.C. Association of Magazine Publishers, is looking for a new Executive Director and a new Project Coordinator. Word on the sidewalk is that candidates with some experience of lobbying government and arts councils (eg. the B.C. Government and the B.C. Arts Council) will be looked on kindly.

For many years BCAMP has avoided paying the fare from Vancouver to Victoria where a strong Executive Director might press for tax credits, government advertising in B.C. magazines, proper cultural funding, and generally chat up government functionaries and politicos who know nearly nothing about the huge magazine industry in B.C. (as described by Rowly Lorimer in 2005 in a study available in a pdf).

Prospective candidates should send a note to exec@bcamp.bc.ca forthwith.

[UPDATE: According to an item in mastheadonline, Anna Torres resigned from BCAMP as executive director to take a position with Vancouver private company that manages health and science associations.]

Gillers under fire at CNQ

The summer issue of CNQ (Canadian Notes and Queries) carries a withering attack on the Giller Prize by Alex Good, who may be the only person in Canada to have read (and to admit having read) or slogged his way through the entire Giller shortlist of 2007. In a thoughtful and amusing polemic, he concludes that the Gillers, as an institution administered by a “poisoned pool of peers,” have grown “sclerotic and incestuous.” The effects of the Giller process of culture-making-by-coterie, he suggests, are insidious and widespread, and tend to reinforce the making of a dull semi-official literature consisting of “historical” novels and soft romance stories set in exotic locales. After fourteen years, the Gillers, he writes, have “led to the creation of our own home and native genre: the ‘Giller bait’ novel”:

Giller bait novels are very serious books emphasizing history and geography, generally without any sense of humour, and written in a vague, pseudo-poetically lush and highbrow style. And it’s not only the authors who are being corrupted. Getting the Giller Prize winner has become a ritual for many occasional readers. Indeed the “bounce” in sales provided by being selected for the shortlist is often publicized. But what kind of introduction to the world of Canadian literature does the shortlist provide? How will books like Divisadero or The Assassin’s Song turn anyone on to Canadian writing? As Russell Smith put it in the Globe and Mail, the Giller Prize shortlist is typified by “ecstatically lauded, good-for-you Canadian books . . . that you can’t bear to even begin.”

Stephen Henighan is another critic who writes on the Giller Effect; his column in Geist two years ago provoked cries of foul-play from offended Giller supporters.

CNQ is the venerable literary review published three times a year by Biblioasis.

Citizen Blogger (workshop plug)

On the March 15 cover of the New Scientist, at least seven men and two women in a crowd of onlookers aim their cellphones toward the scene of an event off-camera, a tragedy, accident or disaster, and by so doing they become news themselves, in “How 'citizen journalists' are transforming the news,” a useful introduction to blogs, podcasts mashing (up) and other mysteries by Dan Gillmor.

On July 12, 2008, the Geist Foundation and the SFU Writing and Publishing Program will host Taking It To the Net, a day of workshops for bloggers, YouTubers, podcasters and would-be pundits in the electronic world. This should be a great help to me, a print person who has failed so far to grasp the genre, to wield it for useful ends, even to provide the weekly, daily, hourly postings promised by the existence of a blog such as this one, an apparently benign repository of observation and comment passively waiting for the blogger to post and then post again, at any time of the day or night, and then again, etc. The most daunting aspect of blogging, for print people who are still trying to make the transition, is the disappearance of the fearless, graceful, intervening, life-saving editors who in the non-virtual world stand ready to throw themselves between the writer and the dreadful turnings in the underbrush, where dense thickets lie. Bloggers, then, have no one to blame but themselves: they go naked and alone into the dim flickering light.

More Tackiness at the WMA

At least one tacky joke delivered by a major recipient at the 25th Western Magazine Awards last Friday resulted in boos and catcalls rarely heard at these sedate events, where bad and even tacky jokes are heard every year, and even welcomed, given the legendary tedium of these celebrations.

The tackiness may have been enhanced by the setting of this year’s Gala, which convened outside Vancouver in a so-called Casino Resort on the fringe of the suburban desert. The event was boycotted by several editors, sales people and at least one publisher, none of whom possessed the visas necessary for crossing the Oak Street Bridge. (Hence the lateness of this report.)

For those desperate for recreation after the strain of the ceremony, gambling vouchers (50% off, according to a reliable informant) distributed with dinner enticed the gullible into the casino, where the proprietors were able to recover the rental of the banquet hall that had been waived in order to entice the hapless magazineers into their clutches in the first place.

Those who chose not to gamble were free to plunge into the existential void just outside the front door.

Dampness at WOTS, BCAMP, Walrus

Word On the Street in Vancouver was heavily rained on for the first time in its history yesterday, and it was cold and windy and you had to keep jumping up and down to stay warm. The crowd was thin and hardy; indeed, heartiness was evident everywhere. CUPE picketers sang and led revolutionary chants. It was impossible to stand still long enough to grill members of BCAMP in a search for answers to the Nine Questions posted here last week, although I did learn that another BCAMP director has resigned from the board.

And the rumour making its way into through the moisture-laden venue next to the Vancouver Public Library was that The Walrus is having big trouble flogging seats, at $125 per, for “Go North Young Man,” an event described as a reception with post-reception, in Vancouver, on 9 October. There were no troubling rumours concerning a Walrus Calgary event labelled “Guess Who’s In Charge Now?” set for 22 October at the same price, or an Ottawa event, “Globalization or Bust,”scheduled for 3 October at a mere $110 a ticket.

BCAMP demurs

Silence continues to emanate from the tiny headquarters of the British Columbia Association of Magazine Publishers in the tower of the historic Sun Building in Vancouver, where as reported in an earlier post, the air has been rank with unpleasantness. Nine months or more have passed since the eruption of a “labour dispute” that has yet to be named or discussed before the membership, or even settled by the directors of BCAMP, including those elected in June of 2007.

The labour dispute, also referred to as a “staffing dispute,” appears to be embedded in larger problems of insiderism, coterie-building, and conflict of interest.

On September 2, two ex-directors of BCAMP (I am one of them) outlined the following complaints in an email sent to each of the current BCAMP directors, none of whom has responded:

1. Unresolved staffing dispute not disclosed to board or to the membership at the AGM.
2. President’s refusal to deal with member concerns.
3. Improper denial of member participation on committees.
4. Failure to schedule an external investigation as advised by the Mediator engaged to resolve the “staffing dispute.”
5. Conflicts of interest: research contracts.
6. Questionable documents: A policy and procedures manual never adopted by the membership.
7. Improper procedures: minutes improperly kept; job and salary reviews not made.
8. Inexperienced board of directors kept in the dark.
9. A climate of secrecy and bad faith.

One of the new directors of BCAMP resigned from the board in the summer of 2007, although his name remains on the BCAMP web page.

BCAMP lists 63 member publishers on its web page.

MediaScout & Maisonneuve: a mystery

Today in the email, another edition of MediaScout, the news digest prepared daily by Maisonneuve magazine in Montreal, containing another brilliant precis (by Daniel Casey) of the so-called news of the day. The topic is the Montebello Summit as covered (or not covered, or covered up) in what MediaScout calls the Big Seven (Globe & Mail, National Post, La Presse, Ottawa Citizen, Toronto Star, CBC TV News and CTV News). As is often the case, the report today in MediaScout is much better written and more to the point than any of the accounts that it summarizes. The question is: how does Maisonneuve, a literary quarterly with the limited resources of a “cultural” magazine, continue to produce such a high quality news publication? And who are these people, the writers of MediaScout: Daniel Casey, Daniel Tencer, Jordan Himelfarb, Valeries Howes, Claire Ward? We imagine them locked in an attic somewhere in Montreal, speed-reading the news and then writing about it in well-formed sentences, all before dawn—how much black coffee does it take? Since signing on for MediaScout a couple of years ago, I haven’t paid for a single newspaper. (Out west of course we supplement MediaScout with the excellent online coverage at The Tyee.)

BCAMP up in the air

For the last six months, the BC Association of Magazine Publishers has been stumbling along under veils of secrecy thrown over a putative “labour dispute” that has been boiling away since February, an odd state of affairs for a staff consisting of two people working in one room. No mention of the dispute was made at the BCAMP Annual General Meeting in June, and the only committee that made no report to the AGM was the so-called Human Resources Committee, whose members were not identified.

In the aftermath of the AGM, a few rank-and-filers learned to their dismay that at least some of the Directors on the board knew nothing about the “dispute,” which had become so inflamed that the two employees engaged or embroiled in it were permitted to work in the same room only in the presence of a third party. This policy (unreported to the membership and at least some of the Board) must have posed no difficulty as the BCAMP office is (in my memory) a tiny room in the spire of the historic Sun Tower on Pender Street, where third parties have merely to open the door to separate first and second parties in the act of lunging for each other’s throats.

Attempts by BCAMP members to find out what’s going on with either the “dispute,” which is still unresolved, or with the anonymous Human Resources Committee, have been spurned in emails from the president who, having consulted a “solicitor” and a “litigator,” has concluded that no discussion of the putative dispute can include rank-and-file members, who unlike board members are unprotected against “potential liability” and therefore would be putting themselves at risk. (The same rank-and-filers observe however unfairly that BCAMP has operated for years as a coterie of board members determined to protect the membership from damaging itself with too much information.)

Publishing spectacles are not unknown to the historic Sun Tower, originally the World Tower, when it was the tallest building in the British Empire (103 metres), and owned by the World newspaper. In 1918 Harry Gardiner, aka the Human Fly, scaled its heights equipped only with bare fingers and sneakers, while thousands watched from the street. Five years later, after the Vancouver Sun moved into the tower, another huge crowd gathered in the street to watch Harry Houdini escape from a straitjacket while dangling from a rope above the sidewalk. They just don’t make publishing spectacles like they used to anymore.

What we forget when we forget about magazine awards

As the recent leaf storm of magazine awards fades completely but not quite from memory, I can still (barely) recall observing aloud the day before the so-called gala evening of the National Magazine Awards that cultural magazines can barely afford to participate in these events in a meaningful way—a meaningful way being to enter as many contenders in as many categories as possible—as Maclean’s and The Walrus have demonstrated (once again): if you spend a lot of money you can make the awards “meaningful.”

For the cultural magazines, which can be defined as small-circ magazines whose subsidy derives largely from non-advertising sources, nominations and instances of meaningfulness are few and far between. Every year at Geist we ponder again this question of the money and the enormous amount of time required to complete the application process, and in the end someone (often an idealistic intern who feels that we owe it to our contributors) bites the bullet and arbitrary choices are made and hefty, expensive packages go out to Toronto and Vancouver. And every year we regret having bitten the same cliche yet again. The person to whom I made this observation (at the Mags Canada lunch), I also recall, was a director of the National Magazine Awards and I did not wish to be entirely unfriendly to her cause. “What we need is a separate set of Awards for the cultural mags,” I said to her, in a tone that suggested that I had been pondering this idea for some time. “Call it the Arts and Letters Awards, or something like that. Lower the fees, cut back on the glitz and that ghastly dinner, and move it around from city to city. Let the cultural mags celebrate themselves and award themselves plenty of nominations.” (I quote from memory.)

Plenty of nominations would inject meaning into the event for the small mags, and perhaps even make news. The cultural publishers I know would be happy to participate, especially if they can remember how dreary and expensive and meaningless the last rounds of awards were—not easy to do as we see, because it is in the nature of awards to fade rapidly from memory, leaving behind only a faint trace of regret, to be rekindled once again, and always too late, in the weeks following next year’s awards.

The Summer Fiction Question

When the summer fiction issue of the New Yorker hit the newsstand a short time ago did you feel a familiar twinge when again you did not buy a copy precisely because it was the summer fiction issue, and then did you fail to suppress the querulous flood, the peevish trickle of nagging familiar questions that one never speaks aloud in bookstores or libraries, or in the halls of the CBC?

What is it with fiction and summer, anyway? Why is fiction supposed to be good for you and why do we have to read it in the summer? What's wrong with me that I don't want to read a bunch of fiction all at once in the New Yorker—is this a neurosis or a psychosis, is it a phobia? Is fiction supposed to have some kind of being-in-itself, is fiction some kind of Higher Art? Or is it because fiction isn't about anything? Isn't it perfectly all right to print fiction alongside other narrative forms every now and then, making no big deal and finding an illustration to go along without illustrating so much as accompanying--or is this mere fetishism, frippery, more bagatelles? Didn't the Puritans circa 1620 censure frivolous reading, thereby forcing readers to define fiction as High Art and therefore good for you and that's why it's good for you, because its good to be good? Is that why things seem to be different in Latin America, in Europe, in Japan or anywhere in the world where people tend to read books helter skelter like people rather than citizens engaging in civic behaviour? Why does the CBC want everyone in Canada to read the same novel? Is the CBC connected to the mind police? What do "five celebrity panelists" yawning on about novels they flipped through the night before know that I don't know about novels I ought read along with everyone else in the country? What exactly is a celebrity panelist on AM radio in the morning? What do celebrity panelists do to relax, off-panel? How many weeks have already passed since the new summer lists came out again, long lists of more novels to read on the beach, in the heat, as we slumber through the days slathered in ointments rated SPF15, improving ourselves with literature? Do we look forward eagerly to those long windy passages in door stopper novels inserted by considerate authors precisely to allow readers the luxury of paging on and on, heedlessly skipping over this bit and that bit, heading out into the sea of fiction in the summer?

—from the summer letter to subscribers of Geist