Showing the literary world that the
smack-in-the-face everyone wanted to themselves deliver would
likely have only revealed them to be foaming-at-the-mouth,
homophobic bastards like you
goes to Stanley Crouch
*
Doing Papa Proud
goes to the fucked-up descendents
of Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck
*
"Fiction"
goes to Saddam Hussein
*
Destroying
American literature by selfishly nominating five
women from New York for an award that by rights should have
gone to a man from a manlier state, thereby crippling the American
book community's attempt to lick the scrotal sacs of George Wubblewoo
Bush, the pack of Marlboro man wannabes he keeps rolled up in
his scrawny-armed sleeve, and his base: the witless, all-consuming
public of America
goes to The National Book
Award jury for fiction, starring Rick Moody
*
Necrophilia
goes to the community of academics,
writers
and filmmakers
who make up the Sylvia Plath/Ted Hughes cottage
industry
*
Transparency within the field of reviewing
goes to the high class author/"users"
of Amazon who were revealed to be engaged in massively
unethical cronyism and blatant self-promotion by writing
glowing reader reviews of books written by their friends
and themselves
*
Opening up and saying "Ah"
for the spin-spunk of Bush and his political porn stars, then
shitting said ejaculate out as a fecal stew of misinformation,
hearsay and "news"
goes to the American Media
(special commendations to CNN,
The New York Times,
and Fox News)
*
Finding a literary common denominator
lower than Dean Koontz
goes to Penguin Books,
creator of the Good
Booking campaign designed to appeal directly
to a man's penis
*
Smack-in-the-forehead laziness and
stupidity that leads to excitement and indignity among a caste
that otherwise thinks the quarterly arrival of a dry-as-dust journal
that only they and eight others in the world read is cause for
a foot shuffle and a nip of sherry
goes to the plagiarizing
academics of North America
*
Special Effects Make-Up
goes to JK Rowling
Trying to make yourself look like a
needy pauper in order to justify selling a vital library that
ethically belongs to a non-profit organization that could really
use the money anyway
goes to Greg Gatenby
*
Attempting to limit the freedom of
the artistic community by linking risk-taking with pedophelia
and thereby branding artists who push sexual boundaries as perverts
goes to the Canadian Government,
Bill
C12
*
Screwing-up royally by recycling
a press release that uses judges' citations from 2003 for
an award in 2004, then proceeding to deny any wrong doing first
by pointing an accusatory finger at the people who made said fuck-up
public and second by pretending
nothing happened and going on with business-as-usual as though
the award winners, jurors, union members, and Canadian public
didn't all deserve written apologies
goes
to The Writers' Union of Canada
*
Pruning from the top of the tree by
forcing out an editor who screwed up everything he touched anyway
and who risked a ridiculously unearned subscription base by pumping
out issue after disappointing issue of poorly-designed boring
stories, and then covering said coup up with a story about "health
concerns" that is about as opaque as the vodka in the desk
drawers
goes
to The Walrus
*
Alienating the best folks at your magazine
by sticking your publisher nose in where it doesn't belong, thereby
undermining the editorial process and ensuring the slow demise
of what was endowed to be the best hope Canada ever had of having
a big-money, big-ideas magazine
goes to Ken Alexander at
The Walrus
*
Laying the
verbal smackdown on a long time opponent by disguising it
in the rhetoric of your recent half-sociology, half-poetry book
goes to Michael Holmes,
poet
*
Cancelling
and swiftly un-cancelling the National Magazine Award for Poetry
in a fashion that would look heartless, and subsequently cowardly,
to some, but looks brave and noble and wholly reasonable to us
goes
to The National Magazine Award Foundation Board
*
Buying out a smaller brewery that not
only brewed better beer, but sponsored one of the only national
awards for short fiction, then cancelling
said award and not telling anyone about it (indeed, keeping
the award information and links to "arts" and "culture"
on the website as though nothing had changed) for fear of looking
bad, yet looking like complete fools by blaming the writing community's
lack of interest for the award's demise
goes
to Sleeman's Brewery
*
Bringing us what we didn't know we
wanted from a bookstore: 40% fewer books
goes to Heather Reisman,
Indigo Books
*
Turning poets into foppish street mimes
for the amusement and annoyance (and possible
beating pleasure) of the general public
goes to Wendy Morton,
WestJet's "Poet" of the Skies and chief "cultural"
farce behind Random
Acts of Poetry Week
In
2004 we reported on a bunch of absolutely ridiculous stories about
people and organizations involved with or affecting the literary
world. Many of these stories disappeared far too quickly for our
liking and didn't involve the stocks and public floggings we would
have liked to have seen. So we're trying to recapture our initial
outrage and bile with a list of memories from the past year in literary
news. Think of it not so much as bile but "bile in review".