Happy go lucky

Mike Leigh has a new one, and it looks like it's as close to an opposite of Vera Drake as you could get – thank god*:



(Note the name of the unborn baby late in the trailer – I'm taking that as a good omen.)


* VD being the one Leigh film I'm not all that crazy about, mostly because it was too earnest and stiff-backed, a strange thing for a director responsible for some of the most painfully funny (and funnily painful) moments ever put on film.

Pricks and profanity

Glenn Beck's boy book problem and some thoughts on cussing over here.

AWOT in the Toronto Star and the Edmonton Journal

Two new reviews of the book over the weekend.

In the Toronto Star, Beverley Stone wrote:

Nathan Whitlock's snapshot of semi-suburban/rural Canada is not your parents' classic Canadian novel [...] It's not Whitlock's storytelling that makes me queasy, or the fact that he has a new take on what it means to be a small-town Canadian, but the feeling that maybe he's got it right. A Week of This might be the truth.

Mathew Halliday, in the Edmonton Journal, wrote that:

The novel is full of intimately suggestive details [...] A nod as well has to be given to the dialogue, especially the inventive and rhythmic way the characters swear. Some of the exchanges are laugh-out-loud funny.

Pyper envy

Some thoughts on literary envy from Andrew Pyper over here.

Down to the dirt nap

The good news is: the podcast of the episode of CBC Radio's Talking Books I was on is now available for download. (The one called "Down to the Dirt.")

The bad news is: I appear to have killed the show.

IFOA, Okay

Just heard that I've been invited to the International Festival of Authors, aka the "CanLit Kahuna," aka the "Big Readsy," aka "IMFOA!"

Over there

I did mention I was over here these days, didn't I?

Okay, good.

AWOT in the Montreal Mirror and The Globe and Mail

A Week of This got a mention in the Montreal Mirror's "Hot Summer Guide," alongside new books by David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs, Pasha Malla, and the like.

(The article also mentioned Toby Barlow's "werewolves in LA" novel Sharp Teeth, which I reviewed for the Toronto Star, and which I happily recommend. It's a fun read.)

AWOT was also reviewed in The Globe and Mail this weekend, and while the review was mixed (can't win 'em all), it did call the central character of Manda "an impressive and unsparingly true-to-life creation."

Number two with a bullet

Look, I know it doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things, and I know it's just one store, and I know it probably won't last much longer than it takes to read this post, but all the same, I'm taking some pleasure in the current (as of date above) bestseller list over at Collected Works in Ottawa.

Look see:



So, if you live in the Ottawa area, and you haven't yet picked up a copy of the book, and you wish to ensure my continued dominance over the powerful Cheapeats monopoly, you know what to do and where to go to do it.

The waiting is the hardest part

Some thoughts on the unnecessarily masochistic – even for writing – process of getting a story published in a lit magazine over here.

Open for business

If you are looking for me, I'm over here.

Bo

... is no mo.



"Quit mumblin', and talk out loud" is still the best advice, and the toughest to heed.

(But then, there are just as many great songs that counsel "silence, exile, and cunning." What's a boy to do?)

Open Book

Just started my Writer in Residence tenure at Open Book: Toronto, where I'll appear all through June.

My first post here.

AWOT in the The Vancouver Sun

AWOT reviewed by MAC Farrant:

It's as if he's transplanted a group of rough-edged, foul-mouthed "folk" from reality TV to the printed page and completely blown off the shallowness and the stereotypes attached to them. His characters are individuals with beating hearts and wounded histories and sentimental hopes for the future. Before long, we sink unresistingly into their stories.

Who stole the soul?

Here's something you don't see every day: a soul record getting criticized, not for any musical lack, but for a spiritual one. And on Pitchfork, no less...

From the review (of the new Al Green):

The hole in the middle of the album is, in fact, Jesus-shaped. Green's Christianity was always an enormous presence in his music, even before he gave up secular singing for a while; his constant awareness of mortality and divinity is what raised the stakes on his love songs. His best album, Call Me, followed "You Ought to Be With Me" with "Jesus Is Waiting", and the ever-present tension between the sacred and the secular on his records came to a head on 1977's "Belle": "It's you that I want, but it's Him that I need".

There's none of that here-- the closest Green comes is singing about "a love divine" on "Too Much", and he doesn't really mean "divine." Instead, we get flabby romantic couplets ("You're the best thing I ever had/ Losing you, that would make me feel so bad"; "Your love is more than true, oh baby/ It's just, it's just for me and you"). There's no desire here for a person (or a God) that Green wants to bring closer to himself, just an appreciation of someone he's already got. Yes, it's a pleasure to hear Green articulate romantic satisfaction, and good for him if he's satisfied. But the grain and pull of his voice is all about longing for both flesh and spirit, and it doesn't quite fit here. Green's classic records were never just baby-making music, and without a context greater than a shared bedroom, this precise reconstruction of their sound is a ritual that's lost a lot of its meaning.

The Devil may have the best music, but the stuff God cranks out is a close second. (And either are preferable to whatever the hell someone like Richard Dawkins puts on his iPod....)

Speaking of Al Green, you do know the best-ever Green ripoff/tribute was by Keith Richards, don't you? (See it here.)

Gone into Exile

My story "Mr Harman's Wedding" – which, up until recently, was downloadable from my other site – will be published in the spring 2008 issue of Exile quarterly.

To launch the issue, I'll be reading with Zoe Whittall and others at the Dora Keogh Irish Pub on the Danforth on June 3. Details here.

In AWOT news, Alex Good posted a slightly extended version of his review on GoodReports, and the novel got mentioned in the "Book Hound" column of the Comox Valley Echo.

To get away from books for second, I have to note that this is great stuff. Fela is a near-constant in my musical diet, but all the driving I've been doing over the past month or so has got me back onto side-length grooves that stretch and stretch without snapping.

Sydney Pollock

Sydney Pollock dies at 73.

This is another blow for those of you still waiting for the sequel to Eyes Wide Shut:

Eye Wider Shut – "This time it's impersonal..."


(Why make a lame joke when a man has died? Because laughter starts the healing. And because I thought of it.)

AWOT in Edmonton's Vue Weekly

"From the mundane, Whitlock has pulled something refreshing and beautiful."

Full review here.

Talking Down to the Dirt

On Monday, I taped an episode of CBC Radio's Talking Books with Ian Brown. I was part of panel discussing Joel Hynes’s first book, Down to the Dirt, which, if you haven’t read, I recommend you go do so.

Now. (I can wait.)

The discussion (which should air either this Saturday or the next – I’ll let y’all know when I know) was breezy and entertaining, etc., but I never got around to making the point I wanted to about Hynes’ book, which is that it is about authenticity, and the fervent search therefor, or rather the desperate attempt to maintain a personal, sexual, cultural, and political sense of authenticity when all the world’s forces seem deadset on destroying all such notions.

That’s what gives the book so much of its life, but it’s also the achilles heel. Books with a laser-focus on preserving authenticity tend to burn themselves out before they’re done, and DTTD is no exception. They also tend to reserve the fight for one character, often the authorial stand-in, which means everyone else in the book is forced to play straight men or blocking characters, which reduces complexity and eventually makes the whole thing start to feel inauthentic. It’s not long before you start to wonder why only it’s only this one privileged person who ever figures out the lie that is modern life, society, etc. It starts to feel like a set-up. It often feels as though the book has to work twice as hard to maintain this "one vs. the world" stance. “Never let them see you sweat” is good advice for fiction, too, and there are moments near the end of DTTD where the book’s armpits start to darken from all the effort made to keep the main character fighting the good fight.

And it has to be said: books about one character’s desperate search for authenticity tend to appeal most to a particular kind of male reader/writer; one who, for better and worse, can’t quite let go of that part of their personality that was forged in adolescence. I’m not condemning it, and it’s not like I’m personally any different. On a personal level, it’s very important to keep in close contact with this part of your personality, the one that refuses all compromise, detests hypocrisy, and cannot understand why reality fall so short of ideals. But it can often have a limiting effect on art, precisely because it is such a self-centred perspective.

Women, for various cultural and biological reasons, tend to discover woefully early on that the ideal of “do whatever you want whenever you want” is either impossible, or sustainable only at the risk of enormous unhappiness, even destruction. “But that’s the point!” is the obvious objection. Live hard, die young, etc. It’s not really the ideal itself I’m arguing against here, it’s the reaction that comes when you finally realize it’s pretty much impossible. And even then, only how that reaction manifests itself in fiction.

As I said, women tend to learn this lesson early on, which is why it’s usually male characters who spend so much time throwing petulant fits at the discovery that their world has limits, that society has expectations, and that other people have needs. I often find myself, when reading these kinds of books, trying to look over the shoulder of such main characters to where someone else is standing, some overburdened, thoroughly comprised, even weak-willed character who may be less fun at parties, but is much richer fictional material, precisely because he or she is so burdened. As Mordecai Richler said (though didn’t always follow), novelists should be the “loser’s advocate.” It’s not about picking the most boring person in the room, but it shouldn’t be about simply picking the most exciting, either.

That all sounds harsh, and I don’t want to suggest at all that DTTD is a failure – even if it were, it’d be a hell of a noble one. In fact, one thing I especially liked about the book is that it provides a more dialectical view of its raging main character than is the usual case. In fact, it's made pretty clear that the main character, Keith Kavanagh, is as much simply vain and emotionally childish as he is heroic. (Mike Leigh did a similar trick with Naked.)

Down to the Dirt spills over with verbal energy – it’s great to see a Canadian work of fiction that gets ridden hard and put away wet. So everything I write above should not be taken as being prescriptive – i.e., the book would have been better if only Hynes had made everyone in it a little more boring/sensible. It wouldn’t have. This is just me playing critic/spoiler.


More Hynes matter here and here.

Foto fun

Some photos from last week's event at Supermarket in Kensington Market, courtesy of Open Book Toronto and Lisa Myers.

Note my skateboarding sweatshirt, which I only wear to make my son jealous.

(By the way, I'll be Open Book's Writer in Residence for the month of June, which means there'll be some cross-posting going on. Oh, and a party.)