ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

Several of us sat in on a web conference call this week to learn more about how the Google Book Settlement affects Canadian authors. The call included a review of the powerpoint presentation found here in pdf, on the Access Copyright site.

There is more information available on Google, including a way to check whether your (in-print) books have been digitized by Google up to January 5, 2009, and are therefore covered by the settlement.

Be warned, you must create a Registry account in order to search for your books, and this registry asks for a lot of personal information; you can’t proceed to the search screen until you provide it. Surely this is some kind of violation of privacy? I have written to Rust Consulting (a Minneapolis-based “trusted leader for complex data management…claims processing and award distribution”), who appears to be the owner of the registry, with the following questions; I’ll let you know if I get an answer:

• Why is this amount of information required for a search to see if I’m included? Why not ask for it only if/when the search has produced results for a claim?
• If I’m not included, what do you intend to do with my personal information?
• Why does your form not explain which fields are required fields? You obviously know which ones are required.

But back to your created works. If your books are covered, you have until January 5, 2010 to claim for payment; or until May 5, 2009 to opt out (if, for example, you want to pursue your own claim through the courts with Google). The money set aside for compensating authors for the violation of copyright entailed by the digitization project amounts to a stonking great payment of around $60 per book for single-authored books. Hurrah! Enough for a bottle of champagne (or slightly more cava or prosecco).

The reason authors are pursuing this is that Google, whose stated mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (while reaping huge corporate profits themselves), has in this ambition conveniently side-stepped any responsibility to allow authors to earn a living from their writings. Which is the whole point of copyright.

During the web conference, one author wondered why libraries thought they had the right to offer their collections for free digitization, when they do not own the copyright. Nobody had a good answer on this call; it would be interesting to hear a library’s reasoning.

The whole process is skewed towards the interests of everybody except the people who created the work being passed around for free. The libraries who donate their collections to the project get a digitized copy back; the authors of those works do not.

Elizabeth sent me this review of a food poetry collection by Deanna Fong, which sounds fantastic.
We watched The Real Dirt on Farmer John last night; it was a terrific documentary, though for a while we were weeping into our popcorn and hoping against hope for a happy ending. Glad to say they gave us one. And lots of information about CSA programs; I was shocked to realise the one at Angelic Organics was over ten years old!

I was sad to have missed the Bigleaf Maple Syrup Festival in Duncan last weekend. There’s a small but active group of local syrup makers called the Sapsuckers, who tap the western maple – lower in sugar than its more famous eastern counterpart, but still doable (as is birch) – and offer workshops and advice on making syrup.

We’re into the end of the middle of the first week of the writers’ and artists’ colony at St Peter’s and time is flexing its mean muscle as we brace ourselves for the first of two change-over weekends where some of us leave and some more of us arrive and we roll along together a while longer.

The birds have welcomed us back, the nuthatches being bolder now than the chickadees, and demonstrating an irksome singlemindedness where the menu is concerned. After one round of feeding I had run out of peanut pieces and had only a few sunflower seeds to offer; when nuthatch saw these it picked them up and threw them off my hand onto the ground and gave me a few gentle pecks on the fingers to record displeasure before flying off to have a public hissy fit in the trees. I don’t know what names I was called but they were certainly not nuthatch endearments.

Other wildlife encountered included a pair of poets and a nature writer, in the library, with a reading. Three books were launched before our eyes: Mari-Lou Rowley‘s Suicide Psalms;

Allan Safarik‘s Yellowgrass;

and Candace Savage‘s Bees: Nature’s Little Wonders.

It was an excellent reading all round, with offerings of intensity, hilarity and curiosity. The Bee book in particular was a treasure: absolutely gorgeous design and offering a fascinating trail of poetry, myth and research about honeybees.

GE Free BC reports that our biggest sugar processing company, Rogers/Lantic, the last GM-Free sugar beet processing company in North America, is about to decide if they will accept GM sugar beet this growing season. This sugar beet has been genetically modified to resist Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup. Because sugar beets are wind-pollinated, there is a huge risk of cross-pollination between GM and conventional varieties, as well as related crops such as organic chard and table beets.

And as always, of course, there’s the overriding safety concern about genetically-modified plants intended for human consumption, which is that we simply don’t know enough about the long-term health risks of eating such foods. To paraphrase what I heard one seed grower say about it, do we really have the right to perform this kind of science experiment on our grandchildren?

It is suggested, therefore, that you send a special valentine to Rogers/Lantic’s CEO, Edward Makin, asking that he keep our sugar GE free.

Another sweet thought this week might include sending a submission to a new publication, Food & Sex (a new independent quarterly that explores the history, nature and culture of food and sex) from The Bouwerie, “a collective of visual linguists, wayfaring wordsmiths, agricultural artists, and culinary arbiters” who also bring you the very useful Eat Well Guide, a fun search tool to keep you sustainably nourished in Canada and the U.S.