Piracy, Copyright & Censorship: A Call for Clarity

I occasionally provide blog posts for the Centre for Free Expression at Ryerson University in Toronto. Here is the first such posting:

Piracy, Copyright & Censorship: A Call for Clarity

When I lived in London as a young man, I spent a great deal of time at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, listening to all of the many and varied voices with their many and varied opinions. I agreed with little of what I heard, but I was awfully glad for the public space to go and hear all that disagreeable, often hilarious stuff. I also thought it quite amusing that so many of the speakers brought their own little ladders, stepstools or podiums on which to stand – an extra bit of height lending their opinions a bit more authority, or so they thought.

... click through to the CFE site for the rest of this article.

Book Room #21: David Sax

Today's guest is journalist and author David Sax. We talk about his new book The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter.

There is no denying we live in a world dominated by digital, but that matrix of digital process and product did not actually destroy the analog things it replaced. Those things are still there, behind the glowing green flow of ones and zeros. Pen and paper, photographic film, vinyl records, dice and playing cards... not only are these things not lost in our past, they are storming the future in surprising ways.

David Sax would describe The Revenge of Analog as a business book - and it does indeed track the surprising resurgence of analog products, work flows and consumer preferences, showing how even in the age of tech dominance there is a solid business incentive for going real. All good stuff, but I read the Revenge of Analog almost as a self-help book - as a reminder that there are board games on the high shelf in my closet, that there are vinyl records in my parents garage, just waiting to bring me the same pleasure they did when I first bought them forty years ago, and that, like my previous guest Michelle Berry, real folks are laying down real money to open real old-school businesses like bookstores, still.

Book Room #20 - Michelle Berry, Hunter Street Books

Michelle Berry is the author of nine books, including a new novel entitled The Prisoner and the Chaplain, coming next year from Buckrider Books - the fiction imprint of Hamilton, Ontario's Wolsak and Wynn publishers. Michelle is a dedicated servant to literature, having taught creative writing in various post-secondary programs around the country, having served on the boards of some of Canada's oldest and most prestigious literary organizations including The Writers Union of Canada, and having reviewed many of her fellow Canadian writers for The Globe & Mail newspaper.

All of that has not been enough for Michelle. Now she wants to grab you by the wrist, drag you over to a bookshelf and show you all the wonderful books you can buy in her brand new books store, Hunter Street Books, in beautiful Peterborough, a city ripe with literary history and excellent places to read while sipping wine.

Michelle joins us in the Book Room to freak out a little bit about opening a book store.

Sandy Crawley provides all the music to the podcast, for which we thank him again and again.

Book Room #19 - Nicole Dixon

Today's guest is a woman of many talents. Nicole Dixon is a writer, of course - an award-winning author of short fiction and essays. She is a former teacher and librarian, and a current permaculture home-farmer on her company-town plot of land in New Waterford, Cape Breton, on Canada's Atlantic coast. As you will hear, she has also taken to raising chickens.

Nicole spent the winter of 2015 at the Berton House Writers Retreat in Dawson City, Yukon - a very cold and dark place. While in Dawson, Nicole's fascination with permaculture led her to a unique view of the local lifestyle, and she wrote out her thoughts on all that in a wonderful essay called Permaculture on the Permafrost in Canadian Notes & Queries magazine.

Nicole joined me over skype from her lovely home on Cape Breton, to talk about chickens and writing and everything in between.