FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 2000. All Rights Reserved

Bookends by Harry Vandervlist Face it, summer time's over. The evenings are shorter, the nights are colder and at last the hay bales in the fields outside of town outnumber those in the downtown bank branches. The only consolation available is that fall, perennial winner of Calgary's "best season" award, is coming. And with it all kinds of literary events. In France they call it la rentrée culturelle. Here we just call it September. The Annual Stroll of Poets will take place on September 10, starting at Annie's Book Co. It's a day-long stroll, it's a free stroll and it winds its way through Kensington. More details to come the week before the event. The usual full slate of book events will be on offer this fall at Pages on Kensington. Watch this space for details on readings by Bruce Allen Powe and Dave Margoshes, along with a celebration of Alberta magazines, all in September. Also, on September 24, Word on the Street will be celebrated at Eau Claire Market in Calgary, as well as in five other Canadian cities. The event is a celebration of all forms of print media, and features displays, readings, etc. Announcing upcoming announcements is so much fun, but this really has to be the last one for this week: WordFest. Watch for it. In October. Promising. Meanwhile, in the ingenious bootstrap publicity via self-created counter-event department.... There's this magazine called Good Magazine. It comes from Montreal. It wants to be known as smart, critical, international – all that. Yet Armani-wearing Canadian writer, philosophy prof and commentator Mark Kingwell has never appeared in print on the publication's site at www.goodmagazine.com. "How can this be?" ask editors John MacFarlane and Jonathan Leitch. Dr. Mark Kingwell, the man whose appearances on CBC far outnumber even those of Stephen Reid in the Globe and Mail’s book section? The man who reflected, for more than a full page of the Globe's Focus section, on the curse of being someone who is way too much with us, media-wise, but who just keeps on getting these invitations from editors, producers and publishers? And this guy's never even been in Good Magazine? No Kingwell, no Canadian media presence – that seems to be how Leitch and MacFarlane feel. So every single day since August 14 they've been running something on the topic of Kingwell. Their dream: to attract official Kingwell notice and get their own Kingwell clipping, to prove they have a place in the Canmedia firmament. They could always just call and offer payment, like regular editors. But where's the edge in that?

| Back To This Issue Table of Contents | Back To Main Index |