For you see, Stephen Harper failed to learn a critical lesson of statecraft: never tick off an artist. The problem with annoying an artist, especially someone as influential as Yann Martel, is that artists are, by definition, creative people. And they find very creative, sometimes unexpected ways to get back at those who slight them.
Of course, since the purpose of an artist is to create, and not destroy, Yann Martel came up with a form of ingenious constructive revenge against Mr. Harper. I won’t go into all the details, for they are explained on the site. Suffice it to say that the Canadian government did not pay enough attention to the Canada Council of the Arts’ 50th anniversary, and that made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
So now Yann Martel has pledged to send Harper a book every two weeks, along with a letter. The books he chooses, he hopes, will offer Harper in his moments of “stillness” suggestions, opportunities, if you will.
I for one think that this is an interesting idea. Certainly superior to publishing a roasting rant about Harper’s policies on someone’s blog. So it’ll be interesting to see what sort of response (if any) we get from Mr. Harper.
Leave your opinion
The Website field is optional, but you must enter your name, email address, and of course, a comment. In order to make it harder for bots to spam my blog, you need to answer a simple addition question. But if you select Remember me, then your details will be saved, and you won’t have to answer the question again.
Formatting
- Bold
**Bold text**- Italics
//Italic text//- Underline
__Underlined text__- Monospace
''Monospaced text''- Link
-
[[http://google.com/|Google search engine]]Bare URLs will automatically become links.
- Images
{{http://imageurl.com/image.png|Alternate text if the image does not load}}- Quotation
-
> This is a quotation.
> It can span multiple lines.
>
> Or even paragraphs, as long as each line has a > before it. - Unordered list
-
* List item (note two spaces preceding the asterisk)
* Second list item - Ordered list
-
- List item (note two spaces preceding the dash)
- Second list item - Definition list
-
t: Term (note two spaces preceding the t)
d: Definition (note two spaces preceding the d)
