Why I don't read Yann Martel

Yes, I know I would be a better person if I read Yann Martel: Life of Pi, What is Stephen Harper Reading? and now Beatrice & Virgil.

And I'm not exactly sure why I don't.

Something about the topics, maybe? Animals on a raft ... sarcasm about a surly leader ... a writer trying to publish his latest book.

Nothing wrong with a little postmodernism. (Can you be a little postmodern? Or is it like being a little pregnant?) Anyway, what could be more fascinating for an author than writing about his writing?

I wish you all the success in the world, Yann. May you increase in wealth and fame. Not that you're doing badly in the fame department already.

It's just that I often go for stuff over which the news media fawn a little less. Stuff I can decide on for myself.

In the last couple of weeks, for example, I have read and enjoyed Kaspoit!, a crazed piece of fiction that consists almost entirely of dialogue, with few descriptions and almost no verbs. Oh yeah, it's about a serial killer on the Lower Mainland of British Columbia.

Want postmodern? Look closely at the signs in the cover picture.

Then there was Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training by Tom Jokinen, a hilarious tale of a few months the author spent working at a Winnipeg funeral home -- incidentally, the place that arranged my parents' funerals.

And A Quiet Flame by Philip Kerr, who has received his share of adulation, and rightly so. This is Kerr's fifth novel featuring Bernie Gunther, an anti-Nazi German policeman and member of the SS who somehow survives the Second World War and flees to Argentina.

Gorgeous description and dialogue in all five. I expect to revel in more of the same when I read the sixth, If the Dead Rise Not.

I also zipped through 88 Men and 2 Women, an anti-capital-punishment memoir by a former warden of San Quentin prison.

Then, for a break from crime and death, I read a couple of Dashiell Hammett stories.

So Yann, as the human resources departments say when you don't get the job, it's not personal.

I'm just going in a different direction.

P.S. Not all reviewers worship Beatrice and Virgil. Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times of April 13, 2010, for example, scorns it as "misconceived and offensive" and as "this disappointing and often perverse novel."

Maintiens le droit

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have apologized to the mother of Robert Dziekanski, who died after Mounties attacked him with a Taser at Vancouver airport in 2007.

It's about time. Dziekanski's unjustified death has damaged the reputation of the RCMP and our country.

Let's applaud Paul Pritchard, whose video of Dziekanski's death kept the issue in the public eye and prevented a coverup.

It's funny to recall the debate over the video two years ago. CBC invited me on air to discuss the burning question: Should broadcasters air the video? It wasn't shot by a journalist!

The answer then and now is: Of course they should. It's news.

Get used to it, journalists.

Upholding the law.

You have arrived at your destination

The Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski's not-so-love letter to America, contains a couple of creaky plot devices and extended product placement.

But look past those, and the usual goofs, to the movie's use of the GPS system in the Luxury European Automobile driven by Our Hero, the ghost. The GPS, apparently living in the past, re-creates a recent trip.

The ghost tries to make his own way but eventually submits to the route advocated by the nagging, unflagging monotone. And discovers ... OK, no spoilers.

How long before the talkative GPS becomes a movie cliche?

Perhaps it will outlast the technology. After all, some movies still feature pre-digital, pre-call-display telephone answering machines that play messages while they are being recorded.

Come to think of it, that device is too handy to abandon just because it's obsolete.

Cameras in inquests: Eventually, or maybe never

No cameras in Manitoba inquests, the judge says.

Manitoba Provincial Court Judge Tim Preston announced on March 19, 2010 that he will not allow broadcast or online streaming of the inquest into the death of Brian Sinclair.

Why not? Because he doesn't have to, for one thing. "The broadcast of an inquest is not something that is reasonably necessary to accomplish my mandate as a judge sitting at an inquest" (paragraph 61).

And besides, judges from the three levels of Manitoba courts will "eventually make decisions in this regard" (paragraph 33).

So until "eventually," people who cannot afford to take time off work or school to travel to downtown Winnipeg and compete for the limited number of seats in the courtroom will have to wait for the coverage in the traditional news media -- TV with no pictures from the courtroom, radio, newspapers.

Maybe they still will, even after "eventually."

Cameras in inquests: A no-brainer

A judge in the Western Canadian province of Manitoba will announce on March 19, 2010 whether he will allow televised coverage of an important inquest.

This should be a no-brainer. Cameras belong in inquests and courts, just as Canada allows them in public inquiries.

Local media outlets are seeking permission to broadcast and live stream coverage of the inquest in the case of Brian Sinclair, whose death after 34 hours in the emergency ward of a large hospital has raised all sorts of issues.

Cameras aren't allowed in inquests and other court proceedings basically because the rules were created before television was invented. But hey, TVs have been in almost everyone's home for more than half a century, long enough to be made almost obsolete by online live streaming and recorded coverage.

Journalists are already covering judicial proceedings on Twitter.

The nurses' union says it fears that disclosing identifying information would endanger some nurses.

Simple solution: if the union can persuade a judge that this is true in any case, the judge can simply ban the disclosure of that information -- just as the courts routinely protect the identities of undercover police and victims of sexual assault.

Judges should leap at this chance to get on camera, and not only because it would allow wide public access to judicial proceedings.

Televising judges at work would shatter myths, perpetuated by tabloid columnists, open-mouth radio hosts and their yappy acolytes, that judges are arrogant high-paid fatcats isolated from reality.

Canadian judges are serious to the point of being boring in court. They are very concerned about fairness and proper procedure.

Oh, and they really don't like people wearing hats in court.

Television coverage of this inquest and trials in general would demolish a couple of other misconceptions created by television dramas, many of them American:

Canadian judges never bang their gavels. They don't have gavels.

And perhaps more important, many Canadian judges are women.

Sit in a a Canadian trial court and you will witness the increasingly female face of justice. Not just the judge, but many of the lawyers and the court clerks and other officials are women.

We have lots to learn and nothing to fear from allowing cameras into this inquest, and into courts in general.

We can even wear hats while watching.

Also sprach Xerox Workcentre 5655

They may not have the "rattle and moan" of "Hank Williams talking to Nina Simone," in the words of Tom Russell, but the messages of the copying machine in my office have a crude poetry of their own.

Please wait, exiting sleep mode.

The screen will reset shortly.

Please wait, machine self-test in progress.

Accounting/ Authentication logout.

Xerographic Module Cleaning.

Ready to scan your job.

Select the Active Messages button.

Print system configuration report.

Faults/ All faults

Display usage counters.

Clear all Confirmation.

Reset user programming in all pathways.

Touch a button if you require more time.

Selections are about to be reset.

You have been logged out of your session.

Who am I to doubt these mysteries?

Flash! People read newspapers!

Sometimes complaints are good. They assure you that you are still alive.

Example: On Feb. 25, 2010 the Winnipeg Free Press annoyed a host of readers by printing a large front-page picture of the Canadian men's Olympic hockey team winning a quarter-final victory over the Russians.

What about the Canuck women who won four medals the same day, including local fave Clara Hughes?

Small pictures on the front. Turn inside the paper to see and read more.

"Readers were furious, and rightly so," Margo Goodhand, the paper's editor, acknowledged in a column the next morning.

"I am not a male chauvinist, and neither is the rest of the Free Press news team."

The paper's editors assumed that readers would be more interested in men's hockey than in actual medals. Wrong, Goodhand admits.

(Even more wrong now that our hockey women have kicked Yankee butt and won the gold medal.)

Bottom line for newspapers: the dead-trees edition may be losing audience, but big stories still attract readers. The Free Press needs to keep killing trees even as some of its reporters make forays into news coverage on social media such as Twitter.

As Melanie Lee Lockhart, my instructor colleague at Red River College, has commented, mainstream media ain't dead yet.

Take that, Twitter.