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About us | Quill and Quire
 
111 Queen Street East
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Toronto, ON
M5C 1S2
T: 416.364.3333
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ABOUT US

Quill & Quire is the magazine of the Canadian book trade. The print edition, published 10 times per year (monthly except for joint January/February and July/August issues), includes author profiles, news about upcoming books and developments in the Canadian industry, and reviews of new adult and children's titles. The magazine reviews around 400 new titles each year, offering the most comprehensive look at Canadian-authored books in the country.
Q&Q also posts regular online updates, featuring up-to-the-minute industry news, regular listings of new book deals, award nominations and wins, personnel changes, and more. Our daily blog, Quillblog, spotlights book-related news in other media with our own context and commentary, as well as added features such as regular event photos.



Link:  http://www.quillandquire.com/

Seth Godin & Tom Peters on blogging. - YouTube

Seth Godin & Tom Peters on blogging. - YouTube

Hilary Mantel wins 2012 Man Booker Prize | The Man Booker Prizes

Hilary Mantel wins 2012 Man Booker Prize | The Man Booker Prizes

Bring Up the Bodies Wins the Booker Prize: Hilary Mantel’s second novel reviewed. - Slate Magazine

 
Illustration by Nick Pitarra

Springtime 1536, and in taverns and alehouses up and down England they are singing about Henry VIII’s sexual prowess: “the ballad of King Littleprick and his wife the witch.” That’s the national result of the rollicking affair that was at the center of Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s Booker prize-winning historical novel. In that work, Mantel dusted off Thomas Cromwell’s 500-year reputation as Henry’s sinister henchman, to bring a fresh character onto the world stage—a renaissance man who, as Wolf Hall informed us, is “at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury." Only now he has 10 years of power behind him.

Mantel knows how to plunge the reader into the thick of things. At the end of Wolf Hall Henry VIII and his entourage were descending upon his latest romantic intrigue, Jane Seymour. Behind them were the machinations wrought by his chief minister Cromwell, ousting all who opposed the King’s separation from the Catholic Church. There was the sense of a great author at the height of her powers taking a breath and beaming; on the page, a palpable atmosphere of relief and future glory.

That atmosphere dissipates in the first few pages of Bring Up the Bodies, which picks up just two months later, as the court packs from a summer of hunts. Though this second book in a planned trilogy stands alone as a meticulously crafted novel, the first chapter is a seamless continuation of the final page of Wolf Hall; last seen galloping across summer fields, Cromwell returns watching hawks swoop in early autumn.

For the reader, there is a happy familiarity to a sequel. Even the two deaths that dominated Wolf Hall—beloved mentor Cardinal Wolsey, and sadistic fanatic Thomas More—hover ghostlike over Cromwell. He calls upon Wolsey for advice, and when he thinks of More, “He doesn’t exactly miss the man. It’s just that sometimes, he forgets he’s dead.” Death is everywhere in the book—Cromwell’s wife and daughters are ever remembered; the discarded Queen Catherine coughs her way to oblivion, forgotten in a country house; the jolly crew of sycophants around the king have no idea their demise is weeks away. Cromwell himself has less than five years before his own beheading.

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Until then there is the magic of Cromwell’s mind. Cromwell: the blacksmith’s son from Putney, the soldier from Italian campaigns, risen to be the King’s right hand. Having more than ably established his humanity in Wolf Hall, here Mantel gives him free rein. You want to say that he is Machiavellian, but he’s already read The Prince and deemed it “almost trite ... nothing in it but abstractions.”

One fool he suffers gladly is the king, who calls him “Crumb.” There are shades of Jeeves and Wooster, as the buffoon Henry, romantically hopeless, rages and whines and boasts, and the dark cloaked minister looks on gravely. Henry is made decent only by the reverence with which Cromwell treats him. But there is a limit. At one point, he screams at his chief minister: “I really believe, Cromwell, that you think you are king, and I am a blacksmith's boy.” Cromwell reflects, “You could never be the blacksmith's boy.” Mantel sets the stage through the autumn and winter before that deadly spring. The king grumbles frustrations, as the once-bewitching Anne turns shrewish, her womb not as promising as hoped. Anne is as haughty as ever, but after three years of marriage, she has gone from being so alluring as to inspire a new religion to annoying enough to provoke a beheading, all without changing her affect. Henry alights on wife No. 3, the plain Jane Seymour of Wolf Hall. It is up to Cromwell, once again, to intuit the king’s wishes and realize them. Only this time he doesn’t have eight years, just nine months. A procession of events: We’re at Christmas within 100 pages, then St. George’s Day and on into the breathtaking final third, the grinding death march.

This lends a sense of immediacy, as if after spending years honing Wolf Hall (and decades waiting for the opportunity) Mantel has to get the tale of Anne Boleyn’s downfall out of the way before the next volume. Bring Up the Bodies is still superb, but it is that much more breakneck, the intrigues hurtling forward.

This most shopworn of historical tales has been told in many ways, from the ponderously reverent (A Man for All Seasons) to the salaciously silly (The Tudors) and everywhere in between (see Philippa Gregory and Antonia Frasier). The most successful recent telling is C.J. Sansum’s terrific Matthew Shardlake series, the first two books of which feature Cromwell as the hero’s terrifying boss.

And of course there’s the Holbein portrait, a running gag in Wolf Hall, continued here as Cromwell mutters about being made to look like a murderer (Page 6). The portrait he refers to, now hanging at the Frick, makes him look like Tony Soprano: a fattened, middle-aged tough guy who can meekly bow and scrape to a lord a few months before having him executed.

 

The Booker Prize-winning follow-up to Wolf Hall from an author whose anger “would rip a roof off.”

By William Georgiades|Posted Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2012, at 5:55 PM ET

(Continued from Page 1)

 

Cromwell hasn’t just risen in the king’s court, he has been elevated in Mantel’s handling, so that the lowborn son whose coarseness so irked the lords is this novel’s guiding presence. This time around it is Cromwell’s humor, sensitivity, and reason set against the vulgarity of the dignitaries. It is a tidy sleight of hand.

Hilary Mantel
Photograph by Jane Bown.

The level of detail in both books is so excessive that with a charmless narrator a reader would feel lectured. But Cromwell is exceptionally entertaining. Along with his grief, professionalism, and toughness is his sense of humor, Mantel’s sense of humor. Everything in the book is very funny, never more so than when Cromwell’s mind is turning a polite formal meeting into something so much darker.

Gruesomeness is blinked at with macabre glee. At a polite formal interview Cromwell notes of Anne’s doomed brother George: “Today he wears white velvet over red silk, scarlet rippling from each gash. He is reminded of a picture he saw once in the Low Countries, of a saint being flayed alive.” Mantel isn’t done yet: “The skin of the man’s calves was folded neatly over his ankles, like soft boots.”

As the noose tightens, and Cromwell focuses on the Queen, so does Mantel's verve and wit, the courtliness giving way to ribald vulgarity, the queen's womb a point of conjecture. Cromwell holds interviews with Anne’s ladies in waiting. “Who would not pass time with a man who has cakes?” he asks innocently of one pregnant lady. “You think I will confess just for cakes?” she asks. A few lines later: “That white one, is that almond cream?” Just as she spills the beans on her queen’s behavior. Cromwell is impassive, deadpan.

This is the greatest trick in the series and in this book, conveying the deep nonsense at the heart of courtly life, the upheaval of a nation over one man’s inability to produce a surviving male heir, or, for that matter, to deal with females like a man. Cromwell himself, less histrionic, has a one-night stand with an innkeeper’s wife.

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Cromwell is still startled by his own survival. “He once thought it himself, that he might die of grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But the pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm.” That pulse is the careful, patient rage of the consummate professional in a world of highborn twits who never see him coming. At an interview with one of his victims, it dawns on the man that he is paying for his humiliation of Cromwell’s mentor. “Not one year’s grudge or two, but a fat extract from the book of grief, kept since the cardinal came down.”

You get the sense that he is grimly laughing at everyone, all the time, even as events become increasingly serious. His greatness is as inimitable as it is unfathomable to his contemporaries. Part of the story’s glory is surely its autobiographical nature, the notion that Mantel has here sublimated herself to Cromwell—the lowborn genius awash in grief rising above his contemporaries, astonished at the hypocrisy in society. One of the great satisfactions in watching Mantel win the Booker for Wolf Hall was her reaction to all the “oozing” of her contemporaries, who once reviled her, now congratulating her, much as Henry’s couriers compliment Cromwell.

This is a woman who said she “accumulated an anger that would rip a roof off.” Who endured decades of professional misogyny and medical misdiagnoses that altered her, body and mind. The clarity with which she finds Cromwell’s voice—halting in Wolf Hall—is here ragingly steady, a volcanic presage of what is to come. It is vindicating to see Mantel come into her own after 27 years and 10 novels, just as it is to see Cromwell in his element, still quiet and dark in the shadows, moving his betters around like pawns on a chessboard. The convincing revisionist history on display, that Cromwell executed four men on trumped-up charges for mocking Cardinal Wolsey after his death, is both tidy and chilling, making fierce sense of his resolute nature in the face of grief: “God takes out your heart of flesh,” he thinks, “and gives you a heart of stone.”

And yet for all the dazzle and momentum—the last hundred pages sail by—its sharply drawn vignettes, moments of beauty and hilarious vulgarities, there is the faintest comparative lack in Bring Up the Bodies. Set against Mantel’s singular achievement in Wolf Hall, this book feels not so much slight as a bridge to her next, a necessary and highly entertaining throat-clearing. Only a writer of Mantel’s abilities could be criticized for writing a merely brilliant novel, rather than another outright masterpiece. It is the scope that feels limited, the weeks in the novel as opposed to the years in the first. And perhaps that gnawing sense of consumerist pique that comes from knowing that even now, Mantel is writing about Cromwell’s fall from grace in the third part of this trilogy, The Mirror and the Light. That is the worst that can be said about Mantel—her latest book makes you angry, because you want more.

See all the pieces in the new Slate Book Review.

 Read More:

 Source:
 http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2012/05/wolf_hall_sequel_hilary_mantel_s_bring_up_the_bodies_reviewed_.html

Bring Up the Bodies Wins the Booker Prize: Hilary Mantel’s second novel reviewed. - Slate Magazine

Man Booker Prize won by Hilary Mantel's "Bring up the Bodies"

Hilary Mantel wins 2012 Man Booker Prize

16 October 2012

The whittling has finished. The judges of this year's Man Booker Prize started with a daunting 145 novels and have winnowed, sifted, culled, and in some cases hurled, until there was only one left: Hilary Mantel's Bring up the Bodies.

Hers is a story unique in Man Booker history. She becomes only the third author, after Peter Carey and J.M. Coetzee, to win the prize twice, which puts her in the empyrean. But she is also the first to win with a sequel (Wolf Hall won in 2009) and the first to win with such a brief interlude between books. Her resuscitation of Thomas Crowell – and with him the historical novel – is one of the great achievements of modern literature. There is the last volume of her trilogy still to come so her Man Booker tale may yet have a further chapter.

The writing will have to wait a bit though. She may have won before but the torrent of media interest will still knock her back as if she's been hit by a wave. In 2009 she confessed to feeling as though she were “flying through the air”, well, she's soaring again. When she lands she won't have time to think and she will talk into microphones until her throat is sore. It comes with the territory: everyone wants a bit of the Man Booker winner.

It has been a long and uniquely intense journey not just for her but for everyone associated with the prize. For the judges it has meant nine months of work, worry and pleasure. Their choices have been scrutinised and criticised and their thoughts and penchants imagined. They will have read the shortlisted books at least three times. They will await the public's verdict on their choice with sang froid mixed with curiosity. They needn't be worried, Bring Up the Bodies has had near universal praise from critics and reading public alike.

The shortlisted authors meanwhile have felt the hot brightness of the media spotlight on them since July when the long-list was first announced. They can breathe out now. For Hilary Mantel all those middle-of-the-night moments when she had to tell herself not to think of what it would be like to win again, not to jinx herself, can stop.

Indeed, spare a thought for the shortlisted authors; they will have had a day unlike any other they have known. How do you take your mind off the fact that in a matter of hours you might be the winner of arguably the world's most high-profile literary prize? Of course it is an honour and validation to be shortlisted but they will have known that at 11.30 this morning the judges closed the door of a room somewhere in London – possibly near to where they themselves were standing/shopping/chomping their nails – and settled down to decide their future. They will have wondered what that group literary holy men and women, like the conclave of cardinals in the Sistine Chapel choosing a new Pope, were talking about and wondered whether the puff of white smoke that finally emerged was for them. They may be writers but they're only human.

The nerves will have continued all through the prize dinner, even a phalanx of loved ones, publisher and agent can't keep them away. They chatted amicably, a drink – but perhaps just the one – to steady the beating heart. I doubt they tasted their food. Who would have wanted to be them as Sir Peter Stothard took to the rostrum and opened his mouth to enunciate the first syllable of the winner's name? She may qualify as an old hand but Hilary Mantel confessed that her nerves this time round were infinitely worse than in 2009.

This is not the end of the process, however. For Hilary Mantel it is the moment of coronation before she confronts the wider horizons that have suddenly opened up before her. For the other shortlisted authors who came so agonisingly close they have the knowledge that every publisher in the land will bite their hand off for the chance to publish their next book and that, whatever they write, they will have a wide and eager audience. Their names are now known to readers who may have had no idea of them only a few months ago.

Perhaps the real object of envy is not the winner – she thoroughly deserves her triumph – but the readers who have yet to open Bring Up the Bodies. They have just won a prize too.
 



 Source:
BBC News - Man Booker Prize won by Hilary Mantel's Bring up the Bodies
 
 Link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19965004

Seeking Happiness is not a new idea.

 

 Kimiya-yi sa'ādat 

(The Alchemy of Happiness)

 – a text on Islamic philosophy and spiritual alchemy 

by Al-Ghazālī (1058–1111).




 Source:
Alchemy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy

Synthetic Marijuna Fact Sheet

 

1. What is Synthetic Marijuana? Synthetic Marijuana is a man made drug that is not marijuana.

It was invented to act like marijuana; however, it is more powerful and more dangerous than marijuana.

This fake marijuana, often called Spice, K2 or Legal Phunk, is sprayed on real plant products, like leaves, and sold as incense or potpourri. It is usually smoked,but can be eaten too.

When used, it can be very dangerous. Other names for this include Lava Red, Aroma, Dream, Mr. Nice Guy, and many more.

Beware of name changes as they are changed often as is the chemical make‐up.


2. Where is K2/Spice (synthetic marijuana) sold?

K2/Spice can be bought very easily on the internet. They can also be found in head shops, smoke shops,convenience stores and some gas stations.

Government officials are trying to make them illegal, but as of yet, they remain legal.


3. Why is K2/Spice (synthetic marijuana) sold if they are drugs and harmful?

K2/Spice are sold in a way that outsmarts state and local regulations by stating on the package that they are “not for human consumption.” Because of this, it is very difficult to regulate and track. It is cheap, easy to purchase, sold as fake (synthetic) marijuana that doesn’t show up on standard drug tests.



4. How does K2/Spice (synthetic marijuana) affect you?


People who use K2/Spice or any other synthetic marijuana experience:
 
Fast heart rate Convulsions (seizures)
 
Seeing things (hallucinations) Weakness
 
Dry mouth Passing out (coma)
Death has resulted in some cases!


5. What happens to the people who use K2/Spice (synthetic marijuana)?

When people use K2/Spice (synthetic marijuana), they can have heart attacks, brain damage, kidney failure and scary hallucinations (seeing things) that last for many days.


6. Who uses K2/Spice (synthetic marijuana)?

K2/Spice (synthetic marijuana) are used by all people, regardless of age, gender, or status.



Bottom Line:  K2/Spice (synthetic marijuana) 

A. It is very easy to get. 

B. It is very dangerous and can lead to heart attacks, brain damage, kidney failure and scary images/hallucinations.




For More Information
www.upstatepoison.org




synthetic_marijuna_fact_sheet_public.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Link: http://www.upstate.edu/poison/pdf/news_releases/synthetic_marijuna_fact_sheet_public.pdf

....................................................................................

P.S. This information is posted here because medical marijuana is sometimes used to alleviate the symptoms of multiple sclerosis, cancer and 'aids'.  This is a warning to not cut corners and to not use anything but the Real McCoy when it comes to treating your m.s. symptoms.Marijuana has gained the status of alternative medicine... .

You are the master of your fate and you create your own happiness.

If I am not for myself, then who will be for me?  And if I am only for myself, then what am I?  And if not now, when?
- Hillel the Elder, 1st Century B.C.
 

 It's never the events that happen to us that make us disturbed, but our view of them.
Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.


Happiness and misery depend as much on temperament as on fortune.
- Francois de la Rochefoucauld, 17th Century


Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
- Abe Lincoln


Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.
- Leo Tolstoy


 To be in Hell is to drift; to be in Heaven is to steer.
- Geo. B. Shaw


.................

It is not that someone else is preventing you from living happily;
You yourself do not know what you want.  Rather than admit this,    
you pretend that someone is keeping you from excercising your liberty.
Who is this?  It is yourself.
- Thomas Merton, 1961

.................................


I am resposible for the achievement of my desires.
I am responsible for my choices and acktions...
I am responsible for my personal happiness.
- Dr. Nathaniel Branden


 .....................................


"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have."

- Thomas Jefferson

..................................

If you think you're free, there's no escape possible.
- Ram Dass

 ...............................

Happiness is something you can work at.  It's a matter of identifying the things you do that get in the way of happiness,  and figuring out what positive activities you can do everyday to augment it.

- David Lykken, U of Minnesota

 .....................................

Depressed people are caught in a  feedback loop in which distorted thoughts cause negative feelings, which then distort feelings further.

You can break the cycle by changing the thoughts.

A big part of cognitive therapy is training clients to catch the thoughts and  distortions and then find alternative and more accurate ways of thinking.


Over many weeks,the client's thoughts become more realistic.  The feedback loop is broken and the client's anxiety or depression abates.



- Johnathan Haidt, Psychologist and Happiness Researcher


.............................................

Time Out of Mind

This is an incredible way to make the best of things after a lobotomy.

Time Out of Mind

Uploaded by espnmediazone on Mar 17, 2011

SportsCenter (Sunday, March 20, 2011, 10 a.m. ESPN)

Fourteen years ago, Diane Van Deren underwent a right frontal lobotomy that robbed her of some brain function and memory. While she can't remember simple daily details or comprehend physical limitations, Van Deren can run for hours without any sense of how long it's been, or how far she has gone. Tom Rinaldi explores the complex mind of one of the world's greatest endurance runners.

Category:

Sports

Tags:

• Diane Van Deren

Dancer

Dancer: Church dirtier than strip clubs

• 
  
• 
  
• 
  

Dr. Drew|Added on June 28, 2012Exotic dancer Joslyn James makes a controversial analogy between strip clubs and the Catholic Church.

Get a Life, PhD: Six Steps to Writing a Literature Review

Get a Life, PhD: Six Steps to Writing a Literature Review

Friday, October 1, 2010

Six Steps to Writing a Literature Review

In their book, Destination Dissertation: A Traveler's Guide to a Done Dissertation, Sonja Foss and William Walters have a chapter that describes a highly efficient way of writing a literature review. I think it provides an excellent guide for getting through the massive amounts of literature in any field.

Step One: Define the area you will be studying. Before you begin to search for articles or books, decide beforehand what areas you are going to research. Make sure that you only get articles and books in that area, even if you come across fascinating books in other areas.

Step Two: Gather the literature. Conduct a comprehensive bibliographic search of books and articles in your area. Read the abstracts online and download and print those articles that pertain to your area of research. Find books in the library that are relevant and check them out.

Step Three: Find relevant excerpts. Skim the contents of each book and article and look for these five things:
1) Claims, conclusions, and findings about the constructs you are investigating
2) Definitions of terms
3) Calls for follow-up studies relevant to your project
4) Gaps you notice in the literature
5) Disagreement about the constructs you are investigating

When you find any of these five things, type the relevant excerpt directly into a Word document. Don’t summarize, as that takes longer than just typing the excerpt. Make sure to note the name of the author and the page number following the passage. Do this for each article and book that you have in your stack of literature. When you are done, print out the document.

Step Four: Code the literature. Get out a pair of scissors and cut each note apart. Now, sort the pieces of paper into similar topics. Figure out what the main themes are and place the notes each into a pile. Make sure that each note goes into a pile. If there are excerpts that you can’t figure out where they belong, separate those and go over them again at the end to see if you need new categories. When you finish, place each stack of notes into an envelope labeled with the name of the theme.

Step Five: Create your conceptual schema. Go to your computer and type, in large font, the name of each of your coded themes. Print this out, and cut the themes into individual slips of paper. Take the slips of paper to a table or large workspace and figure out the best way to organize them. Are there ideas that go together or that are in dialogue with each other? Are there ideas that contradict each other? Move around the slips of paper until you come up with a way of organizing the codes that makes sense. Write the conceptual schema down before you forget or someone cleans up your slips of paper!

Step Six: Write it up. Choose any section of your conceptual schema to begin with. You can begin anywhere, because you already know the order. Find the envelope with the excerpts in them and lay them on the table in front of you. Figure out a mini-conceptual schema based on that theme by grouping together those excerpts that say the same thing. Use that mini-conceptual schema to write up your literature review based on the excerpts that you have in front of you. Don’t forget to include the citations as you write, so as not to lose track of who said what. Repeat this for each section of your literature review.

Once you complete these six steps, you will have a complete draft of your literature review. The great thing about this process is that it breaks down into manageable steps something that seems enormous: writing a literature review.

I think that Foss and Walter’s system for writing the literature review really can work for a dissertation, because a Ph.D. candidate has already read widely in his or her field through graduate seminars and comprehensive exams.

It may be more challenging for M.A. students, unless you are already familiar with the literature. It is always hard to figure out how much you need to read for deep meaning, and how much you just need to know what others have said. That balance will depend on how much you already know.

For faculty writing literature reviews for articles, this system also could work, especially when you are writing in a field you are already familiar with. The mere fact of having a system can make the literature review seem much less daunting, so I recommend this system for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the prospect of writing a literature review.