JWhiting.com

The Gazette is Montreal’s only English-language daily newspaper. It’s an adequate paper with adequate local coverage that sources just about everything of substance from its parent and other newswire services. (It also runs Christopher Hitchens articles several days after they’ve appeared in Salon. Maureen Dowd’s NYT piece often receives the same treatment.)

When I first moved to Montreal as a not-so-mature student about ten years ago, I subscribed to The Gazette because the student rate was so low. Since then I re-subscribe whenever I get a call from the Gazette’s deep-discount promo people. (Right now I’m paying about $5/month for my Gazette subscription; reg. rate is, I believe, $22/month. The Gazette is worth $5/month. It’s not worth $22.)

Anyhow, even though I’m on a super-low subscription rate (that’s set to expire tomorrow actually), I still maintain a bitchy atitude when it comes to the paper’s content. Yes this is petty and small, but that is sometimes my way. We know this. We sigh, shake our heads and move on.

Even though I hate that the Gazette is only now rushing to catch up to the climate crisis problem (without touching its daily “Driving” section cash-cow, of course) and even though I find their columnists to be, for the most part, old and out-of-touch, the section that usually causes me the most grief is the Books section.

I think it’s because I like books so much. The Books section should be a source of joy and wonder. A chance to discover a new treasure. I love to tuck into the New York Times’ book review. The Gazette’s effort, however, always leaves me cold. I find that there’s rarely anything of interest in there to anyone who was born between the 1950s and the 1990s.

So, on Monday, in the spirit of one activist action a day, I decided to do what any fine subscriber should do: Even though I’m only paying pennies a day, I demanded a better books section. Here’s my back and forth with the Gazette’s Books editor:

Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2008 09:55:10 -0800 (PST)
From: “Jason Whiting”
Subject: Books for 20-40s.
To: MShenker@thegazette.canwest.com, ESadler@thegazette.canwest.com

Hi Gazette Editors,

When you’re assembling and assigning the Gazette’s books section can you please remember that there is a big section of readers between the ages of 20 and 40? These days it seems like it’s all kids books and historical/World War II fare. I didn’t feel compelled to read a single review this past week.

Thanks.

Jason

I received a reply (formatting untouched):

Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 11:27:53 -0500
Subject: Book section
From: “Austin, Edie (Montreal Gazette)”
To: jasonrwhiting@yahoo.ca

Dear Mr. Whiting,

Many thanks for having taken the time to write.

Am sorry you did not find anything interesting in last week’s Books
section.
I do try to vary the content to cover a variety of tastes and
interests.

In your opinion, what type of books is the 20-40 age group interested
in?

Granted, the section you refer to had a cover review on retirement
planning
(never too soon to start, by the way…), and there were several
historical
novels and memoirs. However, not being so far past 40 myself, I do
think
that there were a lot of things in the section that would have been of
interest to many people in the 20 to 40 age group (including at least
some
of the historical material), even if they did not happen to be of any
interest to you. For example, The Painter of Battles, by Arturo
Pérez-Reverte (reviewed on page 4) is a novel about a war photographer
that
raises some important, perennial human issues (and the war in question
is
not even WW2, but the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s). (As for the
children’s
book coverage, it is targeted at parents more than children, and a lot
of
people in the 20 to 40 age group are parents.)

In any case, I hope you will find this coming Saturday’s section more
interesting. In it, we will be featuring some graphic novels/memoirs.

Please let me know what you would like to see more of in the section. I
would appreciate your viewpoint on this.

Sincerely,
Edie Austin
Books editor

I replied:

Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 10:09:09 -0800 (PST)
From: “Jason Whiting” View Contact Details View Contact Details
Subject: Re: Book section
To: “Austin, Edie (Montreal Gazette)”
Hello Edie,

Thanks for getting back to me.

The biggest blind spots in the Gazette’s Books section are, as I see it, books about scifi, horror, and graphic novels (memoirs not so much). I’m also missing books about technology, including the technology of books. (I haven’t, for example, seen any discussion on Amazon’s Kindle. Why is that? Why so silent about Google’s putting the full-text of books like Fast Food Nation online?)

Why no review of Man Gone Down, or The Savage Detectives?

(And while we’re on the subject, what is the rambly, predictable mainstream-defender Dr. Schwartz column doing in the Books section? )

To me, the entire books section seems to be pitched to the baby-boomer crowd. I’m glad to hear that its not meant to be, and look forward to the time when I can dig into more reviews that are of interest to me.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond to my first letter and for soliciting my opinions.

Best,

Jason Whiting

Soon after sending the above, I received this reply:

Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 14:00:59 -0500
Subject: Re: Book section
From: “Austin, Edie (Montreal Gazette)”
To: “Jason Whiting”
Thanks for your reply, will reply to your new email when I have a chance, but in the meantime, have to update something I wrote in my previous emai. My package on graphic novels/memoirs has just been bumped temporarily by something else that has just had its pub date changed, however I expect to get the graphic stuff in the following week.
Am now scrambling to deal with this development…
Edie

Since my subscription runs out tomorrow, I guess I’ll have to head over to MultiMags on Saturday to if there’s anything interesting hits the Gazette’s Books section this week… And thanks to you for listening to my crazy ramblings.

Online just got a little smarter. (”George loves online.” <— who said it?)

Yesterday while blogging about meat-eating, I stumbled upon the full-text of Fast Food Nation over at Google. Wow. Those two rich multi-coloured geniuses are raising the bar again.

And then this morning I wake up to discover that The Atlantic Monthly is tearing down the wall that separates its content from the world. All of a sudden everyone has access to articles that date back to 1857. Like this excerpt from a November 1857 travel piece by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

One would think from the talk of men, that riches and poverty were a great matter; and our civilization mainly respects it. But the Indians say, that they do not think the white man with his brow of care, always toiling, afraid of heat and cold, and keeping within doors, has any advantage of them. The permanent interest of every man is, never to be in a false position, but to have the weight of Nature to back him in all that he does. Riches and poverty are a thick or thin costume; and our life—the life of all of us—identical.

Who knew the Internets could feel so old and wise?

As quoted over at Boing Boing:

Beginning today, TheAtlantic.com is dropping its subscriber registration requirement and making the site free to all visitors.

Now, in addition to such offerings as blogs, author dispatches, slideshows, interviews, and videos, readers can also browse issues going back to 1995, along with hundreds of articles dating as far back as 1857, the year The Atlantic was founded.

We’re pleased to bring The Atlantic before a broader online audience. We hope that the quality of its writing, the trenchancy of its insights, and the depth and thoughtfulness of its reporting will inspire many of our online readers to join the Atlantic family by becoming print subscribers.

See the Atlantic Monthly editor’s note here.

I don’t eat mammals for the following three reasons: 1) Cruelty to the Earth, 2) Cruelty to humans (read Fast Food Nation to find out what that’s about), and 3) Cruelty to intelligent, emotional animals.

There’s an article in the Globe and Mail today that says that Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the United Nation’s Nobel Prize-winning scientific panel on climate change, has asked the world to “please eat less meat.”

Like the article says, this is unlikely to receive much traction in the media at-large as the commercial meat-packing industry is big-business, mainstream Western society has a lot of built-in meat-eating tradition and politicians hate to tell people that they have to make lifestyle changes if they actually want to stop the world from turning into an oven that drowns and starves all the polar bears.

Speaking at a press conference in Paris [Pachauri] said meat was a very carbon-intensive commodity, a fact established by UN research showing that livestock production creates more greenhouse gases than all forms of transport combined.

globeandmail.com: Care about the environment? Eat less meat

Boing Boing has a post up about James Randi who for 10 years now has been offering $1 million to “anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event.”

Guess what? The prize remains unclaimed.

James is giving people 2 more years to try and claim the prize and then he’s pulling the plug. From the Boinge:

Now, we’re sure that there will be those who will offer all kinds of objections to this decision – though they could have simply applied and won the prize. There will be accusations that the JREF is concerned about the safety of the prize money – which was never any sort of concern, I can assure you – and there will be more claims that the money was never there in the first place. I can see the professionals out there sighing in relief that they no longer have to answer questions about why they won’t take the prize, and they’ll just wait out the remaining period that the prize is available. All that’s to be expected.

Ten years is long enough to wait. The hundreds of poorly-constructed applications, and the endless hours of phone, e-mail, and in-person discussions we’ve had to suffer through, will be things of the past, for us at the JREF.

Those who believe they have mystic powers now have two full years to apply… Let’s see what happens.

Link here.