WOTS this then?

I've always considered Word on the Street an event for the bookish, so I felt clammy dismay creeping up on me trawling through Eye Weekly's guide to this Sunday's festival. Surely there are other venues for a "Money Matters" tent and a "Cooks 'n' Books" stage pushing tomes about French recipes and cooking with beer. And of course, much of WOTS will be accompanied by tuneless and wholly unnecessary amplified dirges passed off as music.

I can only hope those of us who take the "word" seriously - like, y'know, fiction and lengthy, serious stuff in serious magazines - that Austin Clarke, Ray Robertson, Camilla Gibb and others will come to our rescue. We'll see.