If you lived here you'd be home by now

I am on the move, and giving up a great apartment on the third floor of an nice, old building overlooking High Park.

The rent's not cheap*, but it's all inclusive (with free laundry), the neighbours/landlords are very friendly, and you can literally roll a tennis ball into the park from in front of my place, if that's what you're into.

Anyone interested? (It's available April 1, but can probably had for May 1.)



* for one person, that is. Shared between two people, it is very affordable.

Pictures of lily(-white authors)

The Andrew Kaufman launch I onstageinterviewed at the other night had some photos taken thereof.

Pleased to meta me

Tonight I'll be interviewing Andrew Kaufman onstage at the Gladstone Hotel for the launch of his second novel, The Waterproof Bible.

To mark the occasion, Torontoist has seen fit to interview me about interviewing (and about second novels).

Down on the Valley

The Globe and Mail, in giving some background on Colonel Russell Williams, the former commander of CFB Trenton who has been charged with the murder of two young women, takes a moment to disparage the area in which I was born and raised:

Born on March 7, 1963, in the Midlands region of England, young Russell was quickly uprooted for a new life in Chalk River, Ont.

The 800-person village, which is home to Canada's premier nuclear research laboratory, was hiring experts - including Russell's father David Williams, a metallurgist.

David and his wife, Nonie, had another son, Harvey.

The marriage soured and they divorced. But in the remote and frigid Upper Ottawa Valley, Ms. Williams found love again, and married Mr. Sovka, in 1970.

Okay, so we aren't the most open-hearted and lively people, but come o-

Oh, they mean the place....

Yeah, it gets pretty cold up there. But hey, my dad worked in Chalk River, too (as did my brother), and I ain't never killed nobody. Yet.

(Coincidentally, I've been reading a lot of Ottawa Valley-set Alice Munro stories lately, and it's not like the place comes off much better there, either.)

Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith

My review of Zadie Smith's new collection of essays in the Toronto Star.

A capful:

Early fame can set very young actors on the road to notoriety and a mug shot-accompanied crack-up. The effect it has on youngish authors is much less dramatic, though similarly destructive. Sudden literary fame turns the essentially internal, intuitive and private act of writing inside out, exposing it to dangerous new strains of self-awareness.

For Zadie Smith, this fame has made for a full decade of second-guessing herself. When critic James Wood used a review of Smith's first, 2000 novel, White Teeth, to rail against what he called "hysterical realism," Smith, who was only 25 when that book was published, replied that the term was "painfully accurate ... for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own." Even with two more novels under her belt, she still seems to be finding her way back either to the certainty of intent that made White Teeth such an anomaly, or, more likely, to some completely other authorial state of mind in which uncertainty and second-guessing are strengths, not weaknesses...

Read the whole thing here.

J.D. Salinger RIP

I hear he was shot by an obsessed former fan who had a copy of Imagine in his pocket...

(Too soon!)

"Cum" is always house style

Not long ago, while earning a portion of the money I hand over to my landlord each month in rent by proofreading a work of fiction not written by me, I had to double-check the name KITT, the issue being, if I remember correctly, that of proper capitalization.

Also:



"Imagine if Janice wasn't being licked out" is a handy mnemonic device for that rule, actually.

Why music videos don't need to exist

Maybe this is somehow intended as ironic bad, but in the end it's just bad.

I think I came off as less self-conscious and awkward at my first Grade 7 dance than Ezra Koenig does here. (Though I'm pretty sure I wore my shirt just like that....)

Still, great song. Next time, go with claymation or something.

Joe Fiorito says: "No snitchin'!"

Having occasionally come dangerously close to nodding off at my own desk, I am a little sympathetic to the plight of the TTC ticket booth operator who got snapped in full snooze. Not much, but a little.

Even if I were more sympathetic than I am, however, it would still seem odd that the Star's Joe Fiorito seems to have forgotten he works for a newspaper:

Suppose the kid with the camera had given the picture of the sleeping token taker to the brass at the TTC. The correct response, in that scenario, would have been for the brass to make sure the token taker hadn't had a stroke or a seizure or a bad reaction to his meds.

And then the brass should have thanked the kid with the camera for the picture, told him the matter would be dealt with, and given him a month-long pass, with an apology and the promise that they'd let him know the outcome.

If the picture was offered to the brass and ignored, then that's the story. But maybe it's not the story.

We all know it's not good to sleep on the job, especially if you work in public service.

I'm not defending the guy.

But if there was a crime, we should let the punishment fit it. What's the point of posting a picture where it can, as the kids say, "go viral?"

Have we made the world a better place? Or have we merely indulged in a drive-by shooting?

Yes, what's the point of publicizing a very accurate symbol of the TTC's approach to customer service shortly after a wildly unpopular rate hike? Why reprint a photo that a million people are already talking about online? What's the point of reporting things?

(Oh, and stroke victims and people having bad reactions to medication don't usually push their chairs to the back of their booths, lean back, and clasp their hands comfortably on their belly. Perhaps Fiorito is in the habit of running up and performing CPR on people he sees dozing in hammocks.)

Paul Quarrington

Sad news.

I only met Paul a few times, though I did do an onstage thing with him as part of the IFOA in 2008. He seemed like a guy supremely uninterested in maintaining any aura of writerliness about him, which I liked a lot. (The disinterest, not the aura.)

The next time I met him was last fall. We were in an elevator together, on our way up to a self-consciously swanky party being thrown by a publisher (his, to be precise). I introduced myself; he remembered me and asked how I was doing. I said something like, "Fine," and was about to do the obvious thing of asking him the same question, when suddenly, for some stupid reason, I decided this was the exact question I could not ask him. I knew how he was doing, after all: he was dying!

I think I ended up making some comment about how slow the elevator was going...

I feel less bad about being so stupid than about not seeking the guy out later and confessing the whole thing. My guess is he would have got a good laugh out of it.

catl call

I went to see these folks on New Year's Eve at the Dakota, and while there's definitely a bit of a schtick to what they do, it's a pretty good schtick and they don't go overboard with it, and they are a bucket of fun to see live. (Plus, I'm not exactly anti-schtick, by any stretch.)

(One of the better parts of the evening - for my ego, anyway - was being approached before the show by the drummer, Johnny LaRue, who told me he really liked my book - which just shows that blues musicians are, by definition, a little more sympathetic to works that are monotonous and depressing.)

They're doing a CD launch at the Silver Dollar tonight, and play an all-ages show at Sonic Boom on Bloor that I am going to try to drag the kids to. (I may try to get LaRue to repeat his compliment in front of my son, who didn't believe me when I told him...)

My new motto

"Writing may not be enjoyable, its discontinuance may be worse..." - Temporary Kings, Anthony Powell

This is also partly to explain why there has been so little activity hereabouts.

In the meantime, have some Marianne Faithfull, from the album I am subjecting everyone to who is unfortunate enough to ride in my car:

Great twitterature

It's funny cuz I read books but don't have a twitter account.

So, har har.*

Speaking of books, that Alice Munro can really write those stories, can't she?**







* ... he laughed, haughtily.

** This is to be understood as a joke on me, for having nothing much to add at the moment, rather than a shot at Munro, who really can write those stories. Am in the middle of Friend of My Youth (the collection, not the story itself - I'm not that bad) and feeling suitably humbled/inspired/mostly humbled

Dutch = Butch

Given that Mark Steyn has called Canadian men a bunch of health-cared, gun-controlled pansies ("Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone") because nobody shouted "Bring it on!" and wrestled that violently unhinged Muslim Marc Lépine to the ground, you might wonder what he thought about the fact that the passenger who subdued the violently unhinged Muslim Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was Dutch.

Wonder no more:

The last time a Dutch filmmaker encountered a jihadist face to face he said "Can't we talk?" and was rewarded with eight bullets, near decapitation, and a crowing note from his murderer skewered by knife through his chest. By contrast, Mijnheer Schuringa jumped on the guy, got him in a choke hold, and dragged him away.

Something tells me Mark has been privately recreating this scene in his basement, with him as Schuringa and an upstanding local lad who is working his way through college (and who greeted Mark at a nearby park with the offer of some company) playing Abdulmutallab.

In my mind, both of them are in Speedos. ("Let's see who's the first to detonate their concealed incendiary device...")

Schureeeeeenga!

Welcome to our world

Try and guess what country Jeffrey Simpson is writing about in his Globe column:

Bubbling beneath the surface, therefore, are significant elements of [...] society fed up with their government, embarrassed by its foreign policy, and angry at its authoritarian ways. The dissident citizens are mostly young, urban and educated; the regime's supporters are mostly old, rural, poor and badly educated. Exceptions, of course, would include the business people who get rich on government contracts, and those employed in the various security services and the pro-government press or ministries.

(See here if you were right.)

We have the makings of a Christmas soccer truce here.

"Your country's political culture is ruled by authoritarian assholes supported by ignorant rednecks and greedy oligarchs? So's mine! Shirts versus skins!"

The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov

My review of the Nabokov's unfinished novel in the Toronto Star.

A taste:

If there is one word, one theme, that runs through all of Vladimir Nabokov's work, it isn't "beauty" or "sublimity" or "bliss" or any of the other possible candidates that might be offered up by his most ardent admirers (and almost all of his admirers are ardent).

Rather, the one word is "control." His fiction was supremely, proudly inorganic, every inch of it hostile to the idea of the happy accident or the free-willed character.

"Even the dream I describe to my wife across the breakfast table is only a first draft," he wrote in the foreword to Strong Opinions, a 1973 collection of his letters, occasional prose and interviews.

With an artist who is so defined by his own sense of control, there is a strong postmodern urge to get a look behind it, to catch the master in his underwear and find the vulnerable, beating heart beneath the aesthetic arrogance. The Original of Laura seems the perfect opportunity to sample that most improbable item: raw Nabokov. The novel – more a series of scenes, sketches and notes toward a possible novel or novella – was a work in progress at the time of the author's death in 1977.

Read the whole thing here, if'n you like.

Contrarian-sounding (but sincere) thoughts about films that have been out for a while: war movie edition

Inglourious Basterds is a an unhinged and unholy mess, but an astonishingly entertaining and gripping unholy mess. It just about makes up for Kill Bill.

The Hurt Locker, meanwhile, has its moments, but is ultimately brought down by a terrible pacing, a go-nowhere and implausible story, and deeply clichéd dialogue and themes.

"The Not-Quite Novel"

I have an opinion piece about the attempts to create literary-commercial hybrids in this country in the new issue of Maisonneuve.

A taste:

Here's what a literary hullabaloo looks like these days: In its July/August issue, Quill & Quire magazine (full disclosure: I work there) ran a feature review of Lori Lansen’s The Wife’s Tale by author and Q&Q contributing editor James Grainger (full disclosure: he’s a friend). The review was mostly positive, praising Lansen’s “knack for satisfactorily ending one scene while creating anticipation for the next” as well as the novel’s “irresistible narrative thrust and character arc.” Grainger did find fault with the characterization, but concluded that, given the kind of book it is—i.e., mainstream and commercial—and given the intended audience, it wasn’t a big deal, and maybe beside the point.

In short, it was a review most authors would kill for.

However, Grainger made two errors. The first was getting some incidental facts wrong about the film rights to Lansen’s previous novel, a mistake duly noted and corrected when the review went online. The other blunder was a little trickier: by grouping the novel with the “big-hearted and story-driven” tales that tend to be favourites of book clubs, Grainger committed the Sin of Distinction, one that cannot be washed away by subsequent praise.

Read the whole thing.

In the print issue, the piece is accompanied by a caricature of me that looks like a 14-yr-old Caillou. Such are the wages of critical sin.

Let them eat false equivalencies

Marcus Gee, on the Toronto doctor who has allegedly been helping welfare recipients top up their meager cheques by approving their dietary allowance forms:

It's a modern version of sticking it to “the man.” Your employer isn't paying you enough so you raid the supplies cabinet or take a sick day when you are perfectly well. The store is charging too much for jeans so you slip a pair in your backpack without paying. The store is rich, after all, and you are poor. You are entitled.

Quite right, Gee. Poor people using a loophole to get almost enough money to survive is exactly like someone shoplifting jeans.

Here's Gee doing a little concern-trolling:

In other words, the ends justify the means. If people are suffering and claiming a diabetic condition can get them more welfare money, why not help them claim it? The trouble is that dodges like that undermine the whole welfare system, reinforcing a public suspicion that people on welfare are out to fleece the system.

Oh no - people in this province might start thinking badly of welfare recipients! In other words, it's all about not incurring the wrath of the fat assholes who think all poor people are lazy schemers. Not to be too class war-ish about it, but why is it that corporate execs never worry about all this "public suspicion" when it comes time to offer themselves bonuses or write off every expensive little perk at the taxpayer's expense?

Keep in mind, too, that Gee, in his past few Globe columns, has defended the sneaky and possibly illegal billing practices of the owners of the 407 and railed against the proposed new billboard tax (billboard putter-uppers being some of the more flagrant and visible bylaw-breakers in our fair city). He has also, as far as I know, had nothing to say about the notion of Toronto police hiring themselves out as human traffic cones.

Gee's Law: It's only cheating when it's done by someone less powerful than you.

(Oh, and you forgot to capitalize "the Man", daddy-o.)

Raw Powell

It's not online, but my interview with Julie Powell (Julie & Julia) is in the current issue of Fashion. (In the "Culture" section, where else?)

Most of the interview concerns her new memoir, Cleaving, which recounts the huge pit her life fell into a couple of years after her year of cooking according to Julia Child. There's infidelity, sex with strangers, unhealthy obsession, and a whole lot of butchery. It's a long way from the tone of the first book and, especially, the movie, which I had to actually pay to see after arriving at the press screening five minutes late. About 20 minutes in, I decided they ought to be paying me to sit there. (Though Streep is fun to watch, etc etc.) She's mostly careful about it, but from her comments to me (many of which are in the article), I get the feeling Powell's not a huge fan of the movie, either.