As Quillblog recently reported, Nicole Rycroft, the executive director of Markets Initiative, took part in a pro-Tibetan demonstration late last week wherein she and four others spread a banner that read “Free Tibet” over an Olympic billboard in Beijing.

Rycroft was arrested and immediately sent home to Vancouver. She recounted her experience for Quillblog today.

We unfurled a banner at about six o’clock in the morning, Beijing time, on Friday to bring attention to the continuing grave human rights situation in Tibet…. We needed to remain flexible [regarding the location] because security is very tight in Beijing at the moment…. The billboard [we chose] was outside the China Central Television building. That building is very striking architecturally and is part of the modern face of China. You see it a lot in new promotional material about Beijing, and also its being the CCTV building is symbolic from a freedom of speech perspective because it’s the [centre for] state-controlled media, or propaganda mouthpiece, of the Chinese regime.

I rappelled down the front of the billboard alongside the banner and another climber, Phil from the U.K., rappelled down the other side of the banner. We were down stabilizing the banner because it was very gusty, probably for 25 minutes to half an hour. The CCTV building is on a fairly major thoroughfare in downtown Beijing. There were probably 20 or 30 police in front of the billboard, and most of those had cameras or video cameras. There were a couple of international film crews. On the back side of the billboard where the scaffolding was there were another 15 to 20 police and then an equal number of paramilitary personnel that arrived on the scene. We had two people on the ground on the back side and a support person on the top to make sure our ropes stayed safe.

[We decided to come down] when the plainclothed police reached the top. Our support person at the top gave us a very clear signal that it was time to come up. At that point, we weren’t in danger, but it was clear that we needed to move.

We were treated well. Obviously, the Chinese authorities are handling this quite smartly. There’s obviously a lot of international attention on … the Chinese government and how they will be treating dissenting voices.

I was held for six or seven hours and then I was put on a plane that I had already booked for that afternoon…. The support I’ve received on returning home has been very heartwarming. I’ve been really appreciative – from small notes to phone calls… But really, […] as an individual, as a person of conscience, as a former athlete, I was willing to put my personal safety on the line to bring world attention to the situation in Tibet. It’s terrible – people are being tortured, Tibetans are literally dying for the most basic human rights. More than six million have been engaged in a non-violent struggle for their independence and their homeland for more than 60 years. Largely, the rest of the world has watched the Chinese military machine roll over the Tibetan people…. I’m under no illusion that things are going to change overnight in Tibet, but if we look back on history, change does happen.

Another interview with Rycroft can be found on The Tyee’s website.

The winner of the 26th annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for the worst opening line of an imaginary novel was announced last week (the winner wrote something about passion in a New York City taxi).

However, in a letter to the editor in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, Chris O’Connor, mayor of Lytton, B.C. (Bulwer-Lytton’s namesake), announced the town will host a debate on the merits of Bulwer-Lytton’s prose.

For years, Professor Scott Rice has been making sport of Lord Edward George Bulwer Lytton, with his Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

Lord Lytton was both a statesman and an author. As colonial secretary, he helped create the Crown Colony of British Columbia in 1858.

Prof. Rice has accepted our challenge to debate Lord Lytton’s writing prowess in our village this Labour Day weekend, with the Hon. Henry Cobbald-Lytton, his great-great-great-grandson.

The Guardian covered this story as well, publishing the entire ridiculed first sentence of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, Paul Clifford, showing there’s more to “It was a dark and stormy night” than Rice suggests.

The debate will take place on Aug 30 and, as O’Connor says, “It won’t be a ‘dark and stormy night’; the debate is at 3:00 p.m.”

Well, the barricades have not exactly been stormed, but there have been a couple polite protests to recent cuts at the Toronto Star (which has halved its weekly books section, from four pages to two) and The Globe and Mail (which has put its own books section on a two-week hiatus). A letter to the editor appeared in the Star and two appeared in the Globe (the latter one from gardening author Liz Primeau).

Oh, and there’s a Facebook group called “Save the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star Weekend Books Sections,” though we’re not sure where they’re getting this info: “After [the Globe’s August hiatus], it’s undecided whether or not the Saturday Books section will even continue.”

• Allegra Goodman offers advice on how to be a writer (and begins by tweaking Margaret Atwood’s classic joke about a novelist and a brain surgeon at a cocktail party)
• So you want to live greenly but you’re feeling guilty about buying books? Here are some things you can do. (Strangely, no mention at all of the publishing trend toward printing on recycled paper)
• Maclean’s looks at Tish Cohen and Andrew Davidson
• Next Harry Potter movie postponed to next year … just after Entertainment Weekly put it on the cover of its Fall Movie Preview issue

Slate columnist Timothy Noah takes on a new book by right-wing journalist Jerome R. Corsi, calling it an unambiguous smear-job against presidential hopeful Barack Obama. The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, which will top The New York Times bestsellers list this weekend, is marred by “multiple errors,” Noah claims – for instance, Corsi’s suggestion that the Illinois senator may have continued to experiment with drugs past college. The book is no doubt a fitting companion to Corsi’s previous work of, er, political reporting, titled Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry.

Why did Corsi write The Obama Nation? Was it in disinterested pursuit of scholarly truth? Er, not exactly. “The goal is to defeat Obama,” he told the Times. “I don’t want Obama to be in office.”

Of course, overheated polemics are nothing new to U.S. readers, especially during election season. Noah’s real scorn is reserved for Corsi’s publisher, Republican strategist Mary Matalin, whose eponymous imprint is backed by Simon & Schuster.

All this raises the question of whether the world of “conservative” publishing, which includes not only Matalin’s imprint at Simon & Schuster but also Random House’s Crown Forum and Penguin Group USA’s Sentinel, aspires even to the standards of the nonideological (or what conservatives call the “liberal”) publishing establishment, which are nothing to write home about. What I’ve learned about The Obama Nation suggests it does not. What the hell is Mary Matalin doing running a publishing imprint in the first place?

The answer is depressingly obvious – runaway sales, regardless of the cost to truth (or American political culture, for that matter). Noah ends his piece with another rhetorical question:

The conservative movement has won the publishing houses’ attention but not their respect. Does it even care?

Nicole Rycroft, the executive director of Markets Initiative, has been arrested in Beijing for her part in a pro-Tibet demonstration. According to her spokesperson, Bruce Walsh, Rycroft scaled a wall near the China Central Television building in downtown Beijing and unfurled a banner, which read “Free Tibet” in English and Chinese. Swaddled in a Tibetan flag, she then rapelled back down again.

Along with four other activists, Rycroft was picked up by the Beijing police shortly after the stunt took place in the early morning hours. Students for a Free Tibet, the group that organized the demonstration, has been closely monitoring the situation since then. According to the official release, the activists’ whereabouts are “currently unknown,” though Walsh says he expects that Rycroft has been released and put on a plane home. “They want the protesters to go away as quickly and quietly as possible,” he says.

In her native Australia, Rycroft was an elite track athlete who competed on a national level. She was on track to join the Olympic team before a back injury scuttled those plans.

Since then, “she’s put all her drive as an athlete into being an individual activist and humanitarian,” says Walsh. “It was really important for her to [go to Beijing] because she has strong feelings about the ideals behind the games, which she feels have been totally corrupted by what China represents.”

This isn’t the first time Rycroft has put her own safety on the line in pursuit of humanitarian goals. Before joining Markets Initiative, Rycroft worked to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in western Burma, which she blamed in part on China’s support of the Rangoon regime. “She smuggled refugees through the Burmese-Thai border jungles under mortar attack,” says Walsh. “China has been in her sights for some time.”

Walsh stresses that Rycroft took part in the demonstration as an individual, and not in her capacity at Markets Initiative.

(Below is a picture of the event, courtesy of SFA.)

Our brand-new September issue features a cover profile of Miriam Toews, whose new novel, The Flying Troutmans, is set for release next month (and is also reviewed in the issue). Also in September, we look at the succession strategies of four B.C. publishers; offer a close-up on author Rukhsana Khan; look at the issue of booksellers ordering from Ingram in the U.S.; and ask whether Canadian novels are just a little too long. Plus the Fall Announcements, and reviews of new books by Ronald Wright, Helen Humphreys, Joan Barfoot, Joseph Boyden, Rawi Hage, Tish Cohen, Cary Fagan, Polly Horvath, and many more. The full contents can be seen after the jump.

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You may think, looking at the photo below, that this is a shot of two unsuspecting tourists about to be fleeced by a suspicious-looking con man. But in fact it is authors Lynn Coady, Ray Robertson, and Ken Babstock in Prague. All three authors were in the Czech Republic to participate in the Month of Authors Reading Festival, which took place in the town of Brno in late July. The focus this year was on Canadian writers. Joining the three below were such authors as Michael Crummey, Madeleine Thien, Thomas Wharton, Eden Robinson, Louise Desjardins, and Sheila Heti. (Photo courtesy of Ray Robertson)

Canadian publishers are continuing to experiment with direct sales online – and at least one is offering Amazon.ca- or Indigo.ca-style incentives. The Random House of Canada website is currently highlighting (see upper right corner of the home page) a “Summer Reading” promotion that offers 30% off and free shipping on all books. The same deal can be found on the McClelland & Stewart site.

Random has been edging in this direction for a while, doing similar deals in the past on selected titles. They’ve also denied that it’s an attempt to compete with booksellers, though undoubtedly not all booksellers will agree.

Random isn’t the only publisher courting the consumer with incentives: Anansi is currently running a buy-three-get-one-free deal on its site. Other publishers, like Penguin Canada, sell online sans deals, while others, like Key Porter and Douglas & McIntyre, direct readers to booksellers. Same goes for HarperCollins Canada, though their proper site is in the shop at the moment.

The next time someone tries to tell you that movies are a more visceral, exciting medium than literature, you can counter their arguments by pointing to a new scientific study that has just been released in the Netherlands.

According to Science Daily, three scientists at the University of Groningen decided to compare what happens in our brains when we view the facial expressions of other people with what happens in our brains when we read about emotional experiences. The scientist they quote, Christian Keysers, sounds like a very intense fellow, and we like to imagine that he looks and sounds something like the German filmmaker Werner Herzog:

“We placed our participants in an fMRI scanner to measure their brain activity while we first showed our subject short […] movie clips of an actor sipping from a cup and then looking disgusted,” said Christian Keysers. “Later on, we asked them to read and imagine short emotional scenarios; for instance, walking along a street, bumping into a reeking, drunken man, who then starts to retch, and realizing that some of his vomit had ended up in your own mouth. Finally, we measured their brain activity while the participants tasted unpleasant solutions in the scanner.”

“Our striking result,” said Keysers, “is that in all three cases, the same location of the anterior insula lit up. The anterior insula is the part of the brain that is the heart of our feeling of disgust. Patients who have damage to the insula, because of a brain infection for instance, lose this capacity to feel disgusted. If you give them sour milk, they would drink it happily and say it tastes like soda.”

Prof. Keysers continued, “What this means is that whether we see a movie or read a story, the same thing happens: we activate our bodily representations of what it feels like to be disgusted – and that is why reading a book and viewing a movie can both make us feel as if we literally feel what the protagonist is going through.”