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The Olympic Committee is proud of its ecological consciousness and has boasted that the summer games in Paris this year will be the greenest ever. And now, thanks to the activism of numerous high-profile groups of national and international citizenry, the Games will be greener still, with the green bookseller stalls of the storied bouquinistes allowed to remain. There are numerous articles about it out there, but here are two that I think sum up the situation quite nicely:

​​​​​https://www.rawstory.com/paris-bouquinistes-resist-plans-to-remove-riverside-book-kiosks-for-2024-olympics/

https://ilab.org/article/positive-outcome-of-a-large-international-campaign-the-paris-bouquinistes-will-not-be-removed-during-the-2024-summer-olympic-games-in-paris

It seems not all sports-minded people are made in the mold of Big Bobby Clobber. Mind you, my imagination was going wild envisioning the various ways bouquiniste culture could be incorporated into a whole raft (pun definitely intended) of new Olympic sports! For example:

1) The stall disassemble/reassemble challenge: How quickly can the competing bouquinistes dismantle and reassemble their stalls without damaging the merchandise, destroying the heritage value of their structures or breaking any of the rules regarding dimensions of boxes and shelving units (any of which would result in automatic disqualification)?

2) The sniffer dog challenge: How quickly can the dogs and their handlers sniff out all the packages of explosives and illicit drugs concealed within or around the stall on the bookseller's property? To add to the fun, if the bomb goes off before it's discovered, the bookseller will be banned from Olympic competition for the next 400 years.

3) The security detail book-theft challenge: Security guards compete to foil would-be thieves from stealing books. Points awarded based on number of books and their estimated value.

I'm also mulling over a possible connection between "Share the Flame"/Olympic torch and book-burning.

Maybe you can think of a few more?

So on Wednesday, I went to Toronto for a few literary activities. I had signed up for a lunch and tour on the Thursday with some of my Ex Libris Association colleagues, centred around the Yorkville area.

My train actually arrived ahead of schedule to a beautiful sunny, warm day and as it was still too early to check into the hotel, I took the subway all the way up to Davisville and went for a walk along Mount Pleasant Road to the recently-opened Inhabit Books. It's quite small but very inviting, with an excellent selection of both adults' and children's books in both English and Inuktitut. But conscious as I was that I would have to lug any books I bought back to Ottawa, I tried very hard to limit my choices!

I ended up buying: an Inuktitut-English dictionary; a beautifully illustrated children's book called The Other Ones, by Jamesie Fournier, illustrated by TomaFeizo Gas; Elements, a bilingual book of poetry (Inuktitut on one side of the page spread, English on the other), also by Jamesie Fournier; and a memoir by Larry Audlaluk, What I Remember, What I Know: The Life of a High Arctic Exile.

Did I mention that Inhabit is not just a bookstore but also a publisher? For more information, see www.Inhabitmedia.com

By then it was late enough to check into the hotel, so off I went back to the subway. It was also getting into rush hour and as I got into the train, one leg gave way beneath me and momentarily got wedged between train and platform before somebody helped me to un-jam my foot, thereby averting what could have been a major disaster! I assured the nice young man that I didn't need any first aid or other medical attention and after a couple of minutes' delay, we were all on our way.

I checked into my hotel without further mishap and spent the evening unpacking, relaxing and watching TV.

The Ex Libris activities on Thursday involved lunch at The Pilot, followed by visits to the Metro Toronto Reference Library and the Yorkville Public Library in the afternoon. But before meeting the others for lunch, I had time to stop into Glad Day Books on Church Street, grab a coffee and browse their collection.

I really love that area of Toronto, although unfortunately the weather wasn't as great as the day before. Still, I saw some people I hadn't seen in years. We had our own separate room at the restaurant too, which facilitated conversation.

Late afternoon saw me heading back to my temporary home base, where I had a light snack and changed into some warmer clothes before heading out yet again into a rainy evening.

It was purely by chance that my visit to Toronto coincided with a double book launch by BookHug press at Type Books on Queen Street West. But I decided it was an opportunity not to be missed.

The book that really intrigued me was Blue Notes, a thriller by Anne Cathrine Bomann, a Danish psychologist and novelist who was in Toronto for the launch of the English translation of her book. It centres around the idea of prolonged grief as a form of mental illness. And what if a pill could be developed to "cure" people of that grief? In the book, a fictional pharmaceutical company claims to have done just that, trials are conducted and analyzed at a university and one of the researchers looking at the statistics notices what look like some disturbing side effects in those who have benefited most from the drug. The basic question it raises: in overcoming their grief, have these patients lost their capacity for empathy and even veered into psychopath territory?

I mostly read the book on the train trip back to Ottawa on Friday, finished it yesterday, and found it absolutely gripping!

The other book being launched (or actually re-launched in an expanded version) was a book of short stories called How You Were Born. That too sounded interesting and I may try to get hold of it at the library.

Overall, it was a fascinating two-day getaway.

I definitely would not be qualified to teach a course on personhood. But if such a course were offered to me, I'd sign up in a heartbeat!

What got me aboard this train of thought was a recent article about the Supreme Court of Alabama, which recently decreed that human embryos are children:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/20/us/alabama-embryo-law-ruling-supreme-court/index.html

"Preposterous!" was my immediate reaction. And I remain firmly pro-choice on the abortion question. But what exactly characterizes a child? Or an adult? Or a person?

Most Canadian adults are probably aware that Canadian women were not legally considered persons until 1929. Even then, we had to appeal to our colonial masters to earn that status, as the Supreme Court of Canada was not yet the highest court of the land.

Humans and prospective humans aside, there are other entities out there that have been granted the rights of personhood. Rivers, for instance:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/25/rivers-around-the-world-rivers-are-gaining-the-same-legal-rights-as-people

Or parks:

https://commons.allard.ubc.ca/fac_pubs/715/

I'll mention here that I see many advantages to prioritizing natural features like rivers, forests and wetlands over... I don't know, other things that seem less natural and desirable. But to deem them persons? That feels like a bit of a stretch. Do we need a category other than personhood like, for example, spirithood? But how would we ever come to some sort of consensus in defining a concept that nebulous?

I think we need to work on our terminology here. I'm just not quite sure how to go about it.

Welcome to Freedom to Read Week, February 18-24. If you live anywhere in Canada, you may be able to find an event you'd enjoy here:

https://www.freedomtoread.ca/events/?syclid=cn9rscj7v77s739m300g&utm_campaign=emailmarketing_129722318918&utm_medium=email&utm_source=shopify_email

If you're in Ontario, it's Family Day and all public libraries and schools are closed. If you're in the Ottawa area, it's the final day of Winterlude and the Rideau Canal is actually open, as is the community rink around the corner from us.

Over the past year, I've been reasonably content with the (lack of) decisions to ban books. The Ottawa Public Library received 7 "requests for reconsideration" of books on their shelves and acceded to none of them:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-public-library-book-challenges-tintin-stegosaure-1.7109676?cmp=rss

In Alberta, some public library materials relating to LGBTQ+ issues were returned damaged or vandalized, but I guess the good news is that the libraries did have those items available for loan in the first place, and police were called in.

The policies in school libraries (at least the ones I've heard about) are a little less progressive. But I was cheered by this article in a Brandon, Manitoba paper in which candidates in the fall 2023 provincial election were asked about their position on censorship:

https://www.brandonsun.com/local/2023/10/19/candidates-speak-against-book-bans-at-bsd-forum

The election resulted in a change of government, a shift to the left.

I'll conclude this entry with a link to an article on recently challenged books in Canadian libraries:

https://www.freedomtoread.ca/articles/rising-tide-of-censorship-recent-challenges-in-canadian-libraries/

Today after attending a café discussion at the Alliance française and before going to lunch with friends, I stopped in at Perfect Books on Elgin Street, just to browse. Except that if you know anything about me with bookshops, there's really no such thing as "just browsing". So here's what I bought:

Novels:

Not Your Child, by Lis Angus (signed by author)
A Pen Dipped in Poison, by J.M. Hall
Bookworm, by Robin Yeatman


Books I've always meant to read (but never have):

Berlin Alexanderplatz, by Alfred Döblin, translated by Michael Hofmann
Journey into the Past, by Stefan Zweig, translated & with Afterword by Anthea Bell; intro by André Aciman


Front-of-Store stuff with cool bindings (though all with content of interest!)

It's not you, it's capitali$m: Why it's time to break up and move on by Malaika Jabari; illustration & design by Kayla E.
An Elderly Lady Must Not be Crossed, by Hélene Tursten translated by Marlaine Delargy (this is a novel too; I've read & enjoyed other books by her)
Beauty and the Beat: 33 1/3, by Lisa Whittington-Hill


Freebie:

Room to Dream: A zine about the Ontario Basic Income Pilot, by Kendal David and Chloe Halpenny

This morning I've been reading a feature article in The Nation, "What does it mean to be Palestinian now?"

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/what-does-it-mean-to-be-palestinian-now/

Powerful stuff. Heartwrenching too. The writers are all living more or less safely in the U.S. but all have close or extended family caught up in all the destruction in Gaza. What's particularly depressing is that while these writers are mostly relatively young, this is a situation that has persisted for many decades now.

I remember seeing the Vanessa Redgrave documentary The Palestinian at the National Film Theatre, soon after the film's release in 1977. At the time, NFT screenings were held in the National Library building at 395 Wellington Street and since I worked for the National Film Archives library, side-by-side with Canadian Film Institute staff, I had a pass to get into any of their film presentations free of charge. Anyway, the place was packed. But the people introducing the film were, shall we say, not exactly opening the door to a free exchange of views on what the situation in the Middle East might be. It was more like a subtext of "Well, of course this film is pure propaganda and you're too smart to be taken in by it, but here it is for what it's worth." Well, that's how I read between the lines anyway, or in this case heard between the spoken words. There were, as I recall, a few brief murmurs of protest in the crowd but not a lot. It was as if "Palestinian" was being conflated with the PLO (and probably their more extreme factions at that), much as many people today equate Palestine and Hamas.

Then maybe 30 years later, working in a completely different federal government office, I attended a lunchtime presentation by a young man working on our floor who had taken an unpaid leave of absence to work with Stop the Wall (www.stopthewall.org) That was fascinating too. While still floored by what Palestinians had endured over the intervening years, I was impressed by this guy's combination of passion for the cause and lack of bitterness towards the Israelis for a range of acts, from wanton destruction of olive groves to far more grisly occurrences. I suppose maybe it was his ability to see both the forests and the individual trees, so to speak:

https://imgur.com/gallery/mMujATf

I've watched the terminology of these things evolve (and sometimes deteriorate) over time. Settlers? Settlements? Colonizers and colonialists? Well, aren't we ALL settlers really, whether we're indigenous or immigrant or second- or third- or tenth-generation somethingorother?

As I once wrote in another context, set out to establish a land of milk and honey and sooner or later you'll be trampled by the sacred cows and stung by the bees!

In 2023, I read 96 books, an average of 8 per month. That's more than I read in 2020, 2021 or 2022, although I'd have to say the reading I did during the early COVID lockdowns was rather more challenging and ambitious. The books are coded as follows:

A Anthology (a bunch of short pieces, whether stories, essays, poetry or whatever)
D Drama
F Fiction
M/B Memoir, Biography (including autobiography), Diaries etc.
NF Non-fiction, if it doesn't fit into one of the other categories above

The numbers break down as follows: 3A, 1D, 64F, 11M/B, 17NF

So here's my list (books listed in the order I read them)


1. The Story Species - Joseph Gold (NF)
2. Dreadfulwater - Thomas King (F)
3. People change - Vivek Shraya (NF)
4. I'm afraid of men - Vivek Shraya (NF)
5. Ottawa Rising - Ottawa Independent Writers (A)
6. Son of Elsewhere - Elamin Abdelmahmoud (M/B)
7. Chokepoint Capitalism - Rebecca Giblin & Cory Doctorow (NF)
8. The Persuaders: At the front lines of the fight for hearts, minds & democracy - Anand Giridharedas (NF)
9. Devil's Delight - M.C. Beaton with R.W. Green (F)
10. The Book Eaters - Sunyi Dean (F)
11. My Darling Detective - Howard Norman (F)
12. Death takes a perfect trip - Mary Jane Maffini (F)
13. Open and Closed - Mat Coward (F)
14. Petit Pays - Gael Faye (F)
15. All the Queen's Men - S.J. Bennett (F)
16. You light up my death - Mary Jane Maffini (F)
17. The Swedish art of aging exuberantly - Margareta Magnusson (NF)
18. Gobsmacked! Peter Cleveland (F)
19. Stealing Jenny - Ellen Gable (F)
20. The Library Suicides - Fflur Dafydd (F)
21. Hobgoblins of Little Minds - Andrew J. Simpson (A)
22. The future is now - Bob McDonald (NF)
23. The Bookseller's Notebooks - Jalel Barjas (F)
24. The White Hare - Jane Johnson (F)
25. The Black Dove - Colin McAdam (F)
26.Bill Bergson Lives Dangerously - Astrid Lindgren (F)
27. Behind the scenes at the museum - Kate Atkinson (F)
28. Once upon a prime - Sarah Hart (NF)
29. L'évangile du nouveau monde -Maryse Condé (F)
30. A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon (F)
31. Book collecting now: The value of print in a digital age - Matthew Budman (NF)
32. The Little Wartime Library - Kate Thompson (F)
33. When last seen - Brenda Chapman (F)
34. A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf (NF)
35. Open Heart, Open Mind - Clara Hughes (M/B)
36. Git Sync Murder - Michael Warren Lucas (F)
37. The Brothers Lionheart - Astrid Lindgren (F)
38. War Diaries 1939-1945 - Astrid Lindgren (M/B)
39. End of Story -Louise Swanson (F)
40. Astrid Lindgren: The woman behind Pippi Longstocking - Jens Andersen (M/B)
41. Vinyl Resting Place - Olivia Blacke (F)
42. The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan - Stuart Palmer (F)
43. A Natural History of Transition - Callum Angus, ed. (A)
44. Avenue of Champions - Conor Kerr (F)
45. Crow Winter - Karen McBride (F)
46. Sun Storm - Äsa Larsson (F)
47. Queen High - C.J. Carey (F)
48. Librarian Tales: Funny, strange & inspiring tales from the stacks - William Ottens (NF)
49. Maudites Rumeurs - Chantal Beauregard (F)
50. Sweden: The essential guide to customs & culture - Neil Shipley (NF)
51. The Forgotten Home Child - Genevieve Graham (F)
52. We know you remember - Tove Alsterdal (F)
53. L'Avare - Moliere (D)
54. A Nearly Normal Family - M.T. Edvardsson (F)
55. Red Wolf - Liza Marklund (F)
56. Mio, My Son - Astrid Lindgren (F)
57. The Girl with the Sturgeon Tattoo - Lars Arfssen (Lawrence Douglas) (F)
58. Faceless Killers - Henning Mankell (F)
59. The Murder of Halland - Pia Juul (F)
60. Sweet Revenge: 2 novellas (Women Without Mercy; Truth or Dare) - Camilla Lackberg (F)
61. The Survivors - Alex Schulman (F)
62. Master Detective - Astrid Lindgren (F)
63. Sweden for Beginners - Gunnar Jägberg (NF)
64. Meet me in Malmö - Torquil MacLeod (F)
65. Once upon a time in Uppsala - Shirin Amani Azari (M/B)
66. An extra pair of hands: a story of caring & everyday acts of love - Kate Mosse (M/B)
67. Crisis - Karin Boye (F)
68. The Autists: Women on the spectrum - Clara Törnvall (NF)
69. Karlsson on the Roof - Astrid Lindgren (F)
70. The Foulest Thing: A Dominion Archives mystery - Amy Tector (F)
71. Memories look at me: A memoir - Tomas Tranströmer (M/B)
72. Anywhere out of the world - Karin Tidbeck (F)
73. Speak for the dead - Amy Tector (F)
74. Red X - David Demchuk (F)
75 The Pale Horse - Agatha Christie (F)
76. Shadow Play - Peggy Blair (F)
77. Sleet - Stig Dagerman (F)
78. Loving the Difficult -Jane Rule (NF)
79. Pageboy - Elliot Page (M/B)
80. Losing the signal: The spectacular rise and fall of Blackberry - Jacquie McNish & Sean Silcoff (NF)
81. Encore- Alexis Koetting (F)
82. The Dogs of Winter - Ann Lambert (F)
83. An English Murder - Cyril Hare (F)
84. Reykjavik - Ragnar Jonasson & Karin Jakobsdottir (F)
85. The Power of Language: The codes we use to speak, think & live - Viorica Marian (NF)
86. Wishin' & Hopin' - Wally Lamb (F)
87. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop - Satoshi Yagisawa (F)
88. The Instant - Amy Liptrot (M/B)
89. Woman in the Shadows - Jane Thynne (F)
90. The Librarianist - Patrick DeWitt (F)
91. The Go-between: A portrait of growing up between different worlds - Osman Yousefzada (M/B)
92. Death of a Bookseller - Alice Slater (F)
93. Yule Island - Johana Gustawsson (F)
94. Tom's Story: My 16-year friendship with a homeless man - Jo-Ann C. Oosterman (M/B)
95. Blood and Circuses - Kerry Greenwood (F)
96. What you are looking for is in the library - Michiko Aaoyama (F)

Amongst my Ex Libris Association colleagues, there's been a fair amount of buzz around the fact that Icelanders traditionally give each other books on Christmas Eve. But I want to point out that Icelanders don't have all the fun! In my childhood, I could usually count on getting a few books under the tree. Trips to the library on Saturdays were also a regular occurrence and as I grew older and more independent, a library branch opened at our local shopping centre, within walking distance of where I lived. Then I grew up and went to university, first Carleton for my undergraduate work and then Western for my Masters degree in Library Science. Then I embarked on a few-decades career as librarian, then I retired. And all that is now history. Fast forward to today.

This year I got book-gifts from number of significant people in my life: my daughter, my partner and one of my sisters. Plus l'Alliance française, which held a book giveaway December 13 and 14, of items that its library was discarding. I'll start by enumerating the four books I picked out there:

1. Lorsque j'étais une oeuvre d'art - Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
2. 13 å table [short stories, various authors]
3. Des cornichons au chocolat - Stéphanie [YA?]
4. Voyages en absurdie - Stéphane de Groodt [essays]

From my daughter I got Blood and Circuses by Kerry Greenwood (a Phryne Fisher mystery) and also a Petit Robert French-English dictionary, an excellent replacement for my ancient Harraps which was literally falling apart.

My sister gave me 4 books:

A Haunting in the Arctic - C.J. Cooke
I Only Read Murder - Ian & Will Ferguson
Charlotte Illes is not a detective - Katie Siegel
The Cat's Meow - Jonathan B. Losos

My partner gave me a $100 gift card for The Spaniel's Tale, an independent bookshop that opened recently in the Hintonburg area of Ottawa. We went there today, and I used it to buy the following:

The Circle - Katherena Vermette
Letter to my Transgender Daughter - Carolyn Hays
Meeting my Treaty Kin - Heather Menzies
What you are looking for is at the library - Michiko Aayoana

While on Wellington West, we also dropped into an offshoot of The Record Centre, where I bought 8 el-cheapo records for a grand total of $27. But I'll get into those in a future post!

I don't usually pay much attention to these manufactured occasions like Black Friday or Cyber Monday or Giving Tuesday. And incidentally, I haven't heard a word this year about Buy Nothing Day.

Anyway, today, Giving Tuesday, with my e-mail box overflowing with beg-messages from organizations I've donated to in the past - and several more that I don't recall EVER donating to - I File-13'd the lot of them and made a donation elsewhere: the Schulich School of Music at McGill University:

https://giving.mcgill.ca/make-impact/faculties-schools-and-units/schulich-school-music

Quebec's decision to double tuition fees for out-of-province students is one that's deeply personal for me. While I've never actually lived in the province of Quebec, I did work in Gatineau for about 12 years out of my 33+ year career in the federal public service. My daughter, now in her early 40s, has been a Quebec resident since she was 18 and got all of her postsecondary education in Montreal.

Montreal used to be a wonderfully vibrant, international city. When it hosted Expo '67, it managed to construct a subway system and underground city in record time (Is there a lesson there for our beleaguered LRT?) In my late teens and early twenties, I took numerous day trips to Montreal, both to shop at their quirky boutiques and soak up the language and culture. Voyageur offered buses every hour on the hour, from 6AM to midnight, at an economical same-day-return rate. Mind you, I recall one occasion where I had to forgo the cheaper rate after spending an uncomfortable night in the Montreal bus station, the result of attending a Joni Mitchell concert that both started and finished late.

My daughter passed up scholarship opportunities at Carleton and uOttawa to attend McGill, and I think it was a good decision for her. At the time, rents in Montreal were reasonable and tuition expenses affordable. But over the years, housing and tuition expenses have gone up at a much faster rate than overall cost-of-living expenses. That's true in all provinces, of course, but when all Canadians (not to mention people from other countries) are struggling with inflation, it seems particularly egregious for Quebec to be doubling university tuition fees for anyone living outside the province, even if it's just a few metres across a bridge!

Some programmes at English-language universities will be particularly hard-hit, including music programmes at McGill, where nearly half the students come from outside Quebec:

https://epaper.nationalpost.com/article/281736979207644

Legault insists the very survival of the French language is at stake. Like, seriously? French is already one of Canada's official languages. In Ontario and elsewhere in Canada, parents clamour to get their kids into French immersion, to the point that English-only education is rapidly becoming a poor second cousin. And unilinguals who come to Quebec to enrol in an English-language institution are definitely going to want to learn French, just to participation the social life of the city. The strength of one's loins doesn't only apply to "pure laine" Quebecers!

For many of the people enrolling in English-language programmes in Quebec, English is not even their first language. It may merely be, so to speak, a lingua franca. And if they have several languages under their belt already, learning French will likely come easily.

Anyway, I'm somewhat heartened to read that not all Quebecers support Legault:

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/most-quebecers-support-english-universities-alternative-to-doubling-tuition-polls/ar-AA1klvpG

My grandchildren are already citizens of Quebec and will not greatly suffer if this tuition hike goes ahead.
Still, it feels as if, Quiet Revolution notwithstanding, the province is becoming more and more parochial.

I've been pondering this one for quite a while. There are of course many kinds of writing and many different purposes that may be associated with each. Here I'm going to focus on what's probably the most personal one, an individual's diary or journal. What is its purpose? How does the paper-based version relate to its online version in the form of a blog? An article that appeared in Lithub earlier this year got me seriously thinking about this:

https://lithub.com/on-the-sanctity-of-a-journal-on-private-writing-in-the-age-of-public-content/

Like many young people, I started keeping a diary some time in adolescence. I wrote regularly (though not daily) in it throughout my teens and into my early twenties. Sometimes I'd write pages and pages at a time, and not again for weeks on end. Other times I'd write for several days in a row, either briefly or at length.

But then, as the demands of my studies and jobs and youthful shenanigans and adult responsibilities assumed centre stage, the journaling trailed off entirely, except for the occasional special-purpose journaling: travel, pregnancy, dreams, books read, scraps of dreadful poetry...

After retirement, I once again had some spare time. Not as much as I'd envisioned, perhaps, but still...

And that's when I started this blog. I quickly realized that an online blog is not quite like its paper-based cousin.

A central question I grappled with was WHY I was doing it. Was it for myself? For the blogosphere at large? For my own circle of present and future friends, family and acquaintances, geographically near and far?

Then came COVID and lockdowns and more time at home. Although I'm definitely on the introvert side of the personality scale, I still have that need for connection with others. And the need to make a difference, to have some impact, at least in small individual and local ways, when everything seems hopeless and we feel helpless to work towards the changes we wish for.

If you're a "pantser" or a stream-of-consciousnss type of writer, then perhaps blogging is the ideal medium for you. Maybe the so-called social media are even more ideal. But for those of us who prefer to plot and plan and think before we speak, blogging involves some adjustments, perhaps in scrawling notes and organizing them a bit before going online, or perhaps in trying to be a little more spontaneous when writing.

Spontaneity certainly has its risks, however, as we see with some of the vicious backbiting and flame wars that occur on social media. Do we censor ourselves in online blogging? I'm pretty sure I do, and sometimes quite unconsciously. It's one thing to do a thought dump on paper when you can always shred it later or even if you don't, there may be very little chance of it falling into the wrong hands. It's quite another thing if your words are misconstrued and you end up being fired, excommunicated, deported, sued for hate speech, libel or worse! Yes, I know you can adjust your privacy settings and stuff, but ultimately there are still these "forever technologies" threatening to take over the world...

I guess there are uses for both the paper-based and the online versions, depending on what you want to do and what sort of audience you are aiming for, amongst other things. The medium is certainly not independent of the message, but I'm not quite convinced that it IS the message, either!