Category Archives: The Shebeen Club

Vancouver’s Monthly Literary Gathering. My baby. No open mic, no hand-holding, no American beer.

The Shebeen Club: The Legend of Gassy Jack August 15th

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www.shebeenclub.com

The Elephant Book
The Shebeen Club Presents:
The True Legend of Gassy Jack

When: 7-9pm, Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Where: upstairs @ The Shebeen, Gaoler’s Mews, Gastown

How: reserve @ lorraine.murphyatgmail.com

How Much: $15 to August 12th, door $20; limited to 25
Dinner and a drink are included in admission

What: A special reading of ‘the true legend of Gassy Jack‘ by Vancouver author and artist Robert Chaplin; he will also discuss his new baby, The Elephant Book

Who: For more info contact: lorraine.murphyatgmail.com
The Shebeen Club is very pleased to present local artist and writer Robert Chaplin. Robert will discuss his newly-launched The Elephant Book, and in keeping with the locale, he will recite his creation “The True Legend of Gassy Jack.” Sean Heather just happens to own the original manuscript, tying things up so neatly an editor would blue pencil “too slick” right alongside!

As usual, we will also feature a fine dinner of bangers & mash or pasta, along with a nice glass of wine, beer or pop. Door prizes, literary community announcements, scuttlebutt, and mingling to rival the Algonquin Round Table to follow.

Meet and Mingle 7-7:30
Reading 7:30-8
Elephantine punning and gassy jacking 8-10 (don’t ask/tell)

100 greatest novels of all time

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Or so they claim. No Euripedes? No Ovid? The Guardian editors have much to answer for. For much the Guardian editors have to answer.

Whatever.

So these Boetians walk into a bar

Here‘s the list, each one with a handy-dandy link to buying it on Amazon, even the ones that have been online at Gutenberg for years.

The case for the defence. Don’t like the list? Post your own suggestions for the 100 best books on the Observer blog.

1. Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes
The story of the gentle knight and his servant Sancho Panza has entranced readers for centuries.

2. Pilgrim’s Progress John Bunyan
The one with the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair. 

3. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe
The first English novel.

4. Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift
A wonderful satire that still works for all ages, despite the savagery of Swift’s vision.

5. Tom Jones Henry Fielding
The adventures of a high-spirited orphan boy: an unbeatable plot and a lot of sex ending in a blissful marriage.

6. Clarissa Samuel Richardson
One of the longest novels in the English language, but unputdownable.

7. Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne
One of the first bestsellers, dismissed by Dr Johnson as too fashionable for its own good.

8. Dangerous Liaisons Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
An epistolary novel and a handbook for seducers: foppish, French, and ferocious.

9. Emma Jane Austen
Near impossible choice between this and Pride and Prejudice. But Emma never fails to fascinate and annoy.

10. Frankenstein Mary Shelley
Inspired by spending too much time with Shelley and Byron.
Buy Frankenstein at Amazon.co.uk

…

Who did we miss?

So, are you congratulating yourself on having read everything on our list or screwing the newspaper up into a ball and aiming it at the nearest bin?

Are you wondering what happened to all those American writers from Bret Easton Ellis to Jeffrey Eugenides, from Jonathan Franzen to Cormac McCarthy?

Have women been short-changed? Should we have included Pat Barker, Elizabeth Bowen, A.S. Byatt, Penelope Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch?

What’s happened to novels in translation such as Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Hesse’s Siddhartha, Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility, Süskind’s Perfume and Zola’s Germinal?

Writers such as J.G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Anthony Burgess, Bruce Chatwin, Robertson Davies, John Fowles, Nick Hornby, Russell Hoban, Somerset Maugham and V.S. Pritchett narrowly missed the final hundred. Were we wrong to lose them?

Let us know what you think. Post your own suggestions for the 100 best books on the Observer blog.

Typepad on Tomlinson

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Tomlinson. Not a happy puppy right now.Got an answer about Richard Tomlinson’s blog, although it’s not much of an answer. No, he didn’t take it down because his conditions had been met; it was taken down by Typepad itself, for TOS violations. Here’s the email:

Hi,Thank you for contacing us. Mr. Tomlinson’s weblog was suspended due to Terms of Service violations. We’re not at liberty to discuss the matter beyond that.Thanks,
Colleen
TypePad Technical Services
Six Apart, Ltd.

and here is a link to their Terms of Service. Looks like he fell afoul of #7. The “not at liberty” seems to indicate there are lawyers involved, don’t it?

For those of you who don’t know, Tomlinson is the former MI6 member and blogger who has been jousting with law-enforcement types for several years now. Probably most notorious for his claim that MI6 assassinated Princess Diana and he can prove it, he’s probably more dangerous for publicly posting a database containing the names of those he claims to know are/were working for Special Services. I blogged about his blog here. It was abruptly shut down on the 4th, as he was negotiating the return of some of this things (including his PDA and the computer of a friend) with the law.

PSA: The Elephant Book launch

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The Elephant Book Launch

Undermining Freedom of Expression in China: the Role of Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google

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As I cross-posted on the Shebeen Club Blog:

Undermining Freedom of Expression in China: the Role of Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google 

By Amnesty International and available as a pdf download here.

‘and of course, the information society’s very life blood is freedom. it is freedom that enables citizens everywhere to benefit from knowledge, journalists to do their essential work, and citizens to hold government accountable. Without openness, without the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers, the information revolution will stall, and the information society we hope to build will be stillborn.’

Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General

Recommendations for Action

Amnesty International calls on Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google and other Internet companies operating in China to:

1. Publicly commit to honouring the freedom of expression provision in the Chinese constitution and lobby for the release of all cyber-dissidents and journalists imprisoned solely for the peaceful and legitimate exercise of their freedom of expression.

2. Be transparent about the filtering process used by the company in China and around the world and make public what words and phrases are filtered and how these words are selected.

3. Make publicly available all agreements between the company and the Chinese government with implications for censorship of information and suppression of dissent.

4. Exhaust all judicial remedies and appeals in China and internationally before complying with state directives where these have human rights implications. Make known to the government the company’s principled opposition to implementing any requests or directives which breach international human rights norms whenever such pressures are applied.

5. Develop an explicit human rights policy that states the company’s support for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and complies with the UN Norms for Business and the UN Global Compact’s principle on avoiding complicity in human rights violations.

6. Clarify to what extent human rights considerations are taken into account in the processes and procedures that the company undertakes in deciding whether and how the company’s values and reputation will be compromised if it assists governments to censor access to the Internet.

7. Exercise leadership in promoting human rights in China through lobbying the government for legislative and social reform in line with international human rights standards, through seeking clarification of the existing legal framework and through adopting business practices that encourage China to comply with its human rights obligations.

8. Participate in and support the outcomes of a multi-stakeholder process to develop a set of guidelines relating to the Internet and human rights issues, as well as mechanisms for their implementation and verification, as part of broader efforts to promote recognition of the body of human rights principles applicable to companies.

Read the whole report online or download it here.