Buzzcock block

I hate it when good bands do this. (The performing part, not the reissuing part, which can be great, if it isn't treated as a mere cash-grab.) Beyond the fact that you are supposed to be musicians, not self-revivalists, it just feeds into the Classic Album mentality that freezes art into place and panders to middle-aged boys with static tastes and cash to burn.

Subcontract it all to a cover band, if you just need the cash.

Pleased to meet me [UPDATED]

Whoa:


"I’ve told them a hundred times: put 'Spinal Tap' first and 'Puppet Show' last."


[Spelling fixed. That's right: I misspelled "whoa." I really did.]


UPDATE: one of my older brothers has sent me the correct version of the sign...




That's more like it.

From the archives

Here's something I found buried deep in my computer. I don't remember the context – I'm not even 100% sure I wrote it. I think I was trying to imitate some of the things Ken Sparling wrote for Gordon Lish's The Quarterly from way back. (Or maybe this is something by Sparling I wrote out, who knows?)

The only thing I can say is that I must have written it when my own first kid was about a year-and-a-half old, maybe two. That puts this at about eight years old. I can also say that I didn't follow my own advice.

"Good Advice"

Don’t write about kids. Don’t do it. Don’t write about parents, either. Don’t write about people wanting kids. Don’t write about people having kids and not wanting them. Don’t write about people getting kids. Don’t write about people losing kids. Don’t write about kids losing their parents. Don’t write about kids. Don’t write about groups of kids. Don’t write about kid-groups. Don’t write about families. Don’t write about parents doing stupid things. Don’t write about the stupid things done by people who never became parents. Don’t write about grown up kids. Don’t be stupid.

Don’t write about other people’s kids. Don’t, do not, write about your kid. Don’t write about how much you adore him. Don’t write about the stupid, cruel things you think and do despite your adoring him. Don’t dedicate the book to him. Don’t think that makes it any better. Don’t think you can get away with any of this.

I think it at least proves that I've always been a bit of a prick, only now I have a blog to demonstrate this publicly.

Fire's burning, fire's burning...

And so, with depressing predictability, some nutjobs, egged on by a few radical/cynical clerics, have firebombed the home office of the U.K. publisher who plans to put out The Jewel of Medina. This is the novel that was dropped by its U.S. publisher for fear that some nutjobs might do something crazy – like firebomb their offices.

Just as depressing is the thought that, yet again, a book that is, in all likelihood, a middlebrow snorer, has become a symbol of free expression.

To be glibly philosophical about it, it's some small consolation to know there are people out there who think books are still important enough and dangerous enough to be worth throwing Molotov cocktails at.

AWOT @ WOTS

This coming Sunday, I'll be doing a thing at the Toronto edition of Word On The Street in Queen's Park. Not entirely sure what I'll be doing yet – some combination of reading and genial blah blah blah, I'm guessing. I'll try to keep it lively, whatever it is.

What I do know – and what I'm more excited about, frankly – is that Alex Lukashevsky will be reforming The Weeklongs (one time only!) to perform the odd little piece of music he composed specifically for the launch of my novel, lo those many months ago. He has also arranged a version of one of his own songs to perform.

This is all happening at 4:30 on the EYE Weekly stage at the east side of the park. Come one, come all. There'll be books for sale, as well as (I think) copies of Alex's most recent CD.

Speaking of Alex, Owen Pallet (a.k.a. Final Fantasy, a.k.a. the guy who done did the strings for Arcade Fire, etc.) just released an EP of six of Alex's songs, all performed by a full-on orchestra. The results are a little surreal, though I haven't yet heard the whole thing. I think it's great for Alex, and I hope it leads more people to his stuff, but I worry that the orchestral versions remove some of the tight corners and pointy elbows that are integral to the songs. Alex's music can be a hard sell because it revels in its musicness to an occasionally uncomfortable degree. Even having listened to his stuff for years (including a brief period finding myself musically way over my head playing drums in his band, Deep Dark United), there's still a few a few floors on his particular tower of song that I tend to bypass. But that's the point: it doesn't all have to taste like chicken. Alex doesn't present fully formed musical vignettes (however great that can be when done right) or multiple variations on a single theme (ditto), but rather turns the whole process – songwriting, performance, recording – into a kind of continuous workshop, with all the attendant hazards. (I am furiously resisting words like "journey" and "search" and "exploration" due to the anal-clenching that occurs just typing them, but there it is.) Too much Cassavetes can leave you yearning for something a little more composed, idiomatic, and singular in intent, but there has to be room for the kinds of raw power and engagement that only occurs when you take off the leash, or the apron strings, or whatever metaphor of restraint you prefer. And some of Alex's shows – solo and otherwise – are among the most wig-flipping musical performances I've ever seen.

Which is all to say that you should come out Sunday afternoon. There'll be balloons for the kids.

ADDED: Alex and I both pick a favourite in this week's EYE Weekly.

A modest proposal

From Think Progress:

The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that state Rep. John LaBruzzo (R) said yesterday that “he is studying a plan to pay poor women $1,000 to have their Fallopian tubes tied.” LaBruzzo worries that people receiving food and housing assistance “are reproducing at a faster rate than more affluent, better-educated residents.”

I actually love it when this kind of thing is said publicly. It's like when they dredge a river: you get to see the noxious shit that is usually covered over.

Three reviewers in search of a point

1. Geoff Pevere reviewing David Bergen's The Retreat in The Toronto Star:

No, fictional people absolutely must possess at least a spark of hope and possibility, even if it's ultimately extinguished. Novelists must provide characters with this trait not out of any sense of contrived or sentimental optimism, but out of respect for drama.

To live with any chance of sparking interest from others, even in a fictional sense, folks must believe they've got a chance to make their own future.

No, they just have to be interesting to read about, period. Who – aside from maybe Oprah – gives two shits whether a character is full of hope? I don't remember reading The Metamorphosis and thinking, "well, as long as Gregor believes he can make it as a bug..."

2. J.C. Sutcliffe on Joseph Boyden's Through Black Spruce in The Globe and Mail:

Through Black Spruce feels rushed, more sketchy and less careful, sentence by sentence, than Three Day Road. Although it is not the best novel that Boyden could have produced, its shortcomings are forgivable. Both novels demonstrate that there is much more to modern Anishnabe life than the clichés of alcoholism and the unsporting use of technology to make the most of traditional hunting rights. Even if the people who most need to hear this message are too busy riding their own ATVs to their high-tech deer hides to actually read Boyden's books, their children will no doubt come across them at school as this author becomes part of the canon.

To recap: the book's not all that well written, but that's okay, because, unlike this review, it doesn't propagate certain cultural clichés. And therefore kids should have to read it.

3. My personal favourite – Rob Salem on Ghost Town in the Star:

Téa Leoni's misguided widow is something else entirely, in her case unintentionally unlikeable – the victim of poor writing and a needlessly needy, poorly conceived and inconsistent character.

It is only Leoni's irresistable charm that makes the girl even remotely sympathetic – just as, conversely, her mere proximity as Adam Sandler's neurotic wife made Spanglish somehow bearable.

I swear, she just gets better and more interesting and more luminously beautiful with the passing years.

You are moved to ask the same question you ask in real life – what on earth was her husband (David Duchovny, he of the sex-addiction rehab) thinking?

Never mind that, what on earth was Rob Salem thinking? Uh, never mind – I think we can guess.

Unconvertible assets

From Anthony Powell's The Valley of the Bones, here's the narrator Jenkins on literature's limited reach:

I was impressed to the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.

This is the kind of thing that can sound like smug elitism, sombre resignation, or merely a sober view of the facts, depending on your mood.

It's actually all three.

Harry Squatter

Handmade sign being held by a young panhandler near the (former?) CityTV building:

"Voldemort turned me into a hobo. Need money for wizarding school."

Street kids say the darndest things.

Election fever

I saw Jack Layton’s bus on my way to work today…

Thus endeth my likely engagement with this beyond-depressing election until the day I dutifully drag my ass to some local gym to once again mark my ballot for whatever no-profile no-hoper the NDP has decided to drop into my riding this time.

Let cynicism and apathy reign!

(Actually, the local candidate is not quite so no-profile this time. Still...)

Literary tourism, AWOT-style

This is odd and unexpected, but very flattering: someone actually sought out the exact intersection on the cover of my book and sent me the photographic evidence.

The intersection is in Dorchester Sackville, New Brunswick. (And, as some of you may know, has a "Stop/Arrêt" sign that had to be unilingualized for the cover.)

(And there never was a pink house there. Magic!)

Here's the photo (click to enlarge):



(Many, many thanks to Yvonne D. for this.)

(Town corrected - thanks, Macx)

Cockroach by Rawi Hage

My review of Rawi Hage's Cockroach is in this week's Ottawa Xpress.

You can take my domestic cultural industry from my cold, dead hands!!

I am both pleased and puzzled that it is cuts to arts and cultural funding, of all things, that finally seems to be riling people against the cynical consortium of dim-bulb yokels and privilege-fattened weasels that is the Harper government.

Pleased because, putting aside my deep loathing for the amateur pose-striking, laughably corrupt cliquishness, promotion of friendly no-talents, and desperate clinging to trivial privilege that constitutes our "culture," I happen to think that the arts are genuinely important – no, make that Important – and that funding their creation is a perfectly good and virtuous use of public dollars. Whatever quibbles I have about the way those dollars are spent are beside the point. Governments spend enormous amounts of money on a dizzying variety of crap. It is perfectly legitimate to demand they spend some money on things that are potentially not crap, like the arts. (Oh, and a stable cultural industry is a crucial element in a mature civilization, etc., etc....)

Puzzled because this government has done things much more heinous than this, with only minor grumbling as a result.

You never know what will send people to the barricades. (And yes, I realize that much of that barricades-manning is likely being done by those same clingers, but Premier Danny Williams, in promising to make up for lost cultural dollars in his province, must believe this one has traction even outside the Writers Union of Canada.)

Noir News

This is my second post in a row making fun of the CityNews site, but look at this, from a story about a man shot down on his front lawn:

It's difficult to ascertain exactly why so many residents on Bon Echo Ct., in the Markham and McLevin area ignored the sound of gunshots in the early morning hours of Tuesday. Many likely didn't want to get involved, while others simply mistook the sound for fireworks, or some other equally innocuous neighbourhood ruckus.

But as the sun rose and the blindfold of night was lifted, their collective folly was revealed.

I think whoever wrote this imagined it being read aloud by Sam Elliot.

I also like this line, which just seems too good to be true:

"The body has been removed, on its way to the morgue," noted a grim Det. Sgt. Chris Buck.

Later, Det. Sgt. Buck – who was one day from retirement, and, furthermore, too old for this shit – sat alone in his basement trophy room, drinking straight bourbon and contemplating the black mystery that is the human soul as hard rain assaulted the windows and his family dreamed innocent dreams in their beds above him.

Knowing when to stop

"China's Olympics Conclude With Closing Ceremony" says the headline on the CityNews site.

Closing ceremonies usually do signal the conclusion of something, yes. It would have been rude, even by Beijing standards, to have shut the thing down in the middle of an event.

Bikin', drivin', messin' around

What I did on my summer vacation:

• lost my wedding ring after flipping a paddle boat (it can be done, apparently).
• read Jane Mayer's horrifying (because true) The Dark Side. (Inappropriately glib capsule review: "It's like Hostel meets Noam Chomsky!")
  
• bought groceries and gas in towns where every second business was named Karla's Krafts 'n' Things or suchlike.
• ate a whole lot of crap.
• watched a whole lot of sunsets.

For your amusement, here are twin articles from The Globe and Mail – an open letter from a cyclist to a driver, and one from a driver to a cyclist. The gag is... I wrote them both myself. (Get it?... Hey?... Hello?)

NB: both the online and print versions of the article(s) are accompanied by photos of me looking completely relaxed and natural on a bike and behind the wheel.

(ADDED: I took the photo above – while driving, no less – somewhere between Bancroft and Barry's Bay.)

Talking with Mr Pyper

If any of you are looking for something to do next Tuesday night:


This Is Not A Reading Series presents Andrew Pyper in conversation With Nathan Whitlock

Is death an appropriate punishment for the crime of stealing another writer's story and calling it your own? To celebrate the launch of his highly anticipated literary mystery, The Killing Circle, Andrew Pyper will discuss such perennial conundrums for Canada's literati with fellow novelist and Quill & Quire review editor Nathan Whitlock. — A This Is Not A Reading Series event presented by Pages Books & Magazines, Random House Canada and EYE WEEKLY.

Gladstone Hotel Ballroom, 1214 Queen St W, Toronto
Tues Aug 19; 8:30pm (doors 8pm) free

THE KILLING CIRCLE reaffirms Andrew Pyper's reputation as a novelist whose work is as psychologically complex as it is compulsively readable. After his wife's death and a demotion from star journalist to reality TV critic, Patrick Rush joins a writers group in Toronto. His goal is to write the novel that he has long believed lived within him. Unfortunately, it turns out that Patrick has no story to tell. The only person in the group with any literary promise is a woman named Angela, whose unsettling readings allude to a murky childhood tragedy and Sandman, "a terrible man who does terrible things". Could "Sandman" be anything more than a figment of a troubled imagination? Patrick begins to suspect that a string of unsolved murders may be connected. And then the circle's members start to go missing, one by one. Still haunted by loss–and by a crime only those in the circle could know of–Patrick finds himself in a fictional world made horrifically real. The Killing Circle explores the side effects of an increasingly fame-mad culture, where even the staid realm of Canadian letters can fall prey to ravenous ambition and competition.

ANDREW PYPER is the author of three bestselling novels, Lost Girls (a New York Times Notable Book), The Trade Mission, and The Wildfire Season, as well as Kiss Me, a collection of short stories. Lost Girls and The Killing Circle are currently in development for feature films. Andrew Pyper lives in Toronto.

NATHAN WHITLOCK is the author of the acclaimed debut novel, A Week of This. He is the review editor of Quill & Quire magazine. His writing and reviews have appeared in The Toronto Star, Saturday Night, The Globe & Mail, Maisonneuve, Toro, Geist, and elsewhere. Whitlock lives in Toronto with his wife and two children.

Searching high and low

O where be the "definitive" 9/11 novel?

What is the "definitive" WWII novel? What's the "definitive" novel of the Holocaust? What's the "definitive" [insert large cultural and/or political event/era] novel?

The whole idea of "definitive" novels is stupid and anti-literary. The reason most of the 9/11 novels have thusfar been underwhelming is precisely because their authors are caught up in this game, too. Too often they read like knowing prequels, winking at the reader with casually dropped details designed to provide a frisson of foreboding.

I picked up Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children this summer – at random, knowing nothing about it – and enjoyed reading it in a kind of low-yield, grasp-well-within-reach kind of way... right up until the moment when I realized that 9/11 would be its narrative money shot. "Oh, those self-absorbed upper middle-class New York intellectuals and their self-absorbed, upper middle-class intellectual ways... will they pursue them forever, or will some CATACLYSMIC EVENT bring the triviality of their lives into sharp focus and inject into their existences a needed sense of gravitas and mortality? Why look: it's a beautiful morning in September 2001!"

Revenge of the Sith felt less nakedly manipulative...

Who's the cat that won't cop out?

"Theme from Shaft" wasn't the first Hayes tune I ever heard – it was the monster, much-sampled version of "Walk on By," on a record I borrowed from the library when I was about 15 or 16.

It's still one bad mother-*, all 10+ minutes of the thing:



* Shut your mouth!, etc.

Louv 'em alone

Anyone who has had to spend an extended time in a car with me - i.e., my family - knows that my love for the brothers Louvin goes deep and wide and far and high and well beyond the call of duty.

Covers of their stuff are not exactly rare – though I do think Emmylou Harris has a lock on the practice, with or without Gram Parsons on the other mic.

But two hipster goofballs* doing a whole album of Louvinalia?

Ew, I say. Ew.



* Putting aside for the moment the fact that, in his own charming way, Gram Parsons was something of a hipster goofball, too.

If you go into the woods today you're in for a big surprise...

Last week I went camping at a site located on CFB Petawawa. You may ask yourself, "Why would anyone want to camp on a military base?"

Well, because you come across things like this while walking the beach:

Banal conquers all

August over at Vestige.org has posted a long and very complimentary review/essay about my novel that morphs into a defense of the boring old realistic novel, a category that includes my own boring novel.

In other boring news, I am in the middle of writing reviews of Haruki Murakami's wee little memoir about running and James Wood's How Fiction Works, and just recently wrote a review of Rawi Hage's Cockroach that should appear near the end of the month. I'm also writing a thing about city biking for the Globe and Mail and a short piece about a graphic novel for the next issue of Driven magazine, which has just been taken over by fellow dad-bander Gary B.

A busy little bee, me.

Couple more

Recoil magazine (Grand Rapids, Michigan):

In A Week of This, Whitlock has done an outstanding job illustrating contemporary life in its nude figure.

Owen Sound Sun Times:

I love novels that are both sarcastic and darkly comic like Nathan Whitlock’s A Week of This [...] Danielle Steel it isn’t. Instead what you get is a book that is sweet with humour and sad with the everyday living of life. Intelligently written, it captures the readers’ attention from the first page not letting them go until this train wreck of a novel comes to its unsentimental end.

(Uh, "nude figure"? "Train wreck"?)

By the way, I will be reading this coming Monday night as part of the "Strong Words" series at the Gladstone Art Bar in Toronto.

The end is nigh

From Waiting for the End by Leslie A. Fiedler (1964):

Perhaps narrative will not continue much longer to be entrusted to print and bound between hard covers. But this does not especially dismay me, since I have no special affection for the novel as such: this fat, solid commodity invented by the bourgeoisie for the ends of commerce and culture-climbing. There is always the screen, if the page proves no longer viable: the neighbourhood movie, the drive-in, or the parlour television set. And I presume that if cinema eventually becomes a lost art, too, there will always be some of us scratching pictographs on the walls of caves, or telling each other stories over bonfies made of the last historical romance hailed as the novel of the year in the last book review section of the last New York Times.

Uptight (Paglia's not alright)

Your mom's iPod + an undergraduate course on postmodernism = Camille Paglia's music playlist for the NY Times.

Some lowlights:

2) Ballad of a Thin Man, Bob Dylan (1965). Sinister atmospherics of the garish sexual underground in the repressive pre-Stonewall world. A naive voyeur reporter steps through the looking-glass and may or may not escape.

3) Season of the Witch, Donovan (1966). Nature and society in turmoil, as identity dissolves in the psychedelic ’60s. The witch marks the return of the occult, a pagan subversion of organized religion.

8) Bitch, The Rolling Stones (1971). Powerful, jagged, stabbing chords that seize the mind. Is the Stones’ bitch goddess a capricious woman or enslaving heroin?

I don't know!

She also calls Heart's "Straight On for You" "a throbbing, sonorous tour of erotic neurology" and claims that Pink Floyd's post-relevance single "On the Turning Away" is not by-the-numbers classic rock stadium-lighter-whoring schmaltz after all, but rather "Celtic mysticism rising to a grand, Wagnerian finale." Who knew? Does that mean that it's worth buying the new Eagles album, after all?

Best is when she wonders whether James Brown's "Lickin' Stick" refers to "an antebellum whip or melting phallic candy."

It's a cock, Camille, a cock.

Here are some of Paglia's picks that didn't make the cut:

Dancing in the Street, Jagger/Bowie duet (1985). Two Dionysian demi-gods (one in animal print - very telling!) call out the blue-balled Gordon Gecko wannabe's of the mid-eighties, only one year after Orwell's prophecy was revealed to be both true and false, truth having become as slippery a commodity as the old Glimmer Twin and the Thin Caucasian Duke themselves.

Happy Birthday, (1913). Proof, if proof were needed, of our clinging paganism in its chanted celebration of one solar year. An aggressive, almost sexual offering of joy, with implicit demand that "you" accept it willingly. The thrusting repetition puts the emphasis on the day – but who are "you?" Are you a cypher, a song-and-dance convention, or a very personal pronoun?

Axel F, Crazy Frog (2005). The ultimate rockstar - mentally unstable, non-existent, amphibious. Perfect for our unhinged, virtual, rising-oceans times. Fully digital and downloadable, the next stage of evolution, perhaps, for us just-add-protein-and-water beings. A star from the world of cellphones, a triumph of communication as entertainment, and a final death knell for the pedophilic priests of classicism. This medium is a message, and the message is "we are insane."

Heat

The summer's been shit so far – either raining or way too hot – and next week doesn't look much better (Sunday, in particular, looks like a scorcher):


(They'll probably fix it by the time you check.)

AWOT on Popmatters.com

A Week of This got reviewed in–

(Yeah look – I know you're sick of me linking to these things, but as long as they keep popping up, I'm going to keep passing them on, if only to keep this ego balloon afloat for just a little longer....)

As I was saying, A Week of This got reviewed on Popmatters.com:

Weirdly enjoyable ... Whitlock has such a fine knack for observational details that one can’t help but become engrossed. A Week of This is filled with engaging prose about the mundane.

AWOT in Ottawa Xpress

Ottawa Xpress:

Whitlock takes four simple lives and puts a brilliant, page turning twist on each of them ... The novel ends on Wednesday just as it had begun and it continues in the reader's mind forever. A Week Of This is the life of each of us.

(Review/interview hybrids are awkward beasts, aren't they?)

Fanboy Chabon

I'm juggling a few things at once at the moment – and not in a cool Rahsaan Roland Kirk way, either – so go here to read Jimmy G's assessment of the new Chabon book of essays. (Mr G turns 105 today, by the way. Hurry up and die you fossilized old gatekeeper!)

The review's great, but I have one point of contention:

...Chabon's argument goes off the rails when he equates the value of strictly genre fiction (and other pop art forms) with such literary classics as Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby – seminal works that have undoubtedly "entertained" generations of readers but have endured and inspired precisely because they provide something far richer than amusement, and do so primarily through harnessing the unique powers of the written word. Moby Dick may indeed have a similar plot and larger-than-life characters as many genre novels, but its prose contains a few things those novels lack – raw genius, richness of character and a seemingly exhaustless depth of expression and allusion.

I don't disagree with this, but I would say the real problem with Chabon's argument is that, except for the last 50 or so pages, Moby Dick isn't even very exciting. Melville was a popular novelist in his day, but Dick was seen as a giant, flabby, boring flop, too full of theology and cetology to work as an adventure story. The bare story makes for a great comic book, but it could have been told in about 75 pages. Melville took around 800. It's a brilliant book, but it's a work of endurance. You have to sweat your way through it, and the rewards, though enormous, are rarely immediate.


But like I said. I'm kind of busy.

Doing right by Joshua Key

From CBC.ca:

An American war deserter could have a valid claim for refugee status in Canada, the Federal Court ruled on Friday.

In a decision that may have an impact on dozens of refugee claimants in Canada, Federal Court Justice Robert Barnes said Canada's refugee board erred by rejecting the asylum bid of Joshua Key. He ordered that a new panel reconsider the application.

Key was sent to Iraq in 2003 as a combat engineer for eight months where he said he was responsible for nighttime raids on private Iraqi homes, which included searching for weapons.

He alleged that during his time in Iraq he witnessed several cases of abuse, humiliation, and looting by the U.S. army.

If you've read Key's memoir of his time in Iraq, The Deserter's Tale, you'll know there's no way he should be sent back.

FYI: my review of Key's book here.

Exactly [UPDATED]

Dennis Perrin:

If Hitchens is truly serious about experiencing life on the business end of empire, we should arrange to break into his home in the middle of the night, force his family on the floor at gunpoint, yell at him in a language he does not speak, kick him a few times in the balls, hood him, and drag him off to a black site where the waterboarding isn't choreographed ahead of time (and no safety words -- he can save that for his dominatrix), with plenty of beatings, sleep deprivation, and sensory derangement mixed in (a long Waco-style audio tape would be a nice touch, complete with the screams of slaughtered rabbits). I'd say a good two to three weeks of this should suffice, and who knows, Hitchens might enjoy it. The DVD special edition box set of his ordeal (yours free with a year's subscription to Vanity Fair) would give his career added freakshow boost. And really, isn't that what it's all about?

(Context here, in case you missed it.)

Just a tad ironic, isn't it, that the self-proclaimed keeper of Orwell's intellectual/ethical flame has to go through his own Room 101 experience to admit that – just maybe – the powers that be are not being entirely honest, and in fact may be employing euphemisms ("extreme interrogation") to conceal sordid realities ("torture")?


[Responding to Zach in the comments]:

And if the issue were rape, not torture? Would I still owe Hitch credit for denying reality until the prevailing political winds compelled him to cede that, yes, maybe it's a nasty thing, after all? Do you really have to be raped (under highly controlled and artificial circumstances) to admit that it's rape? Part of being an intelligent person is being able to understand certain truths without being (literally, in this case) beaten over the head with them.

There was never any ambiguity on torture. It's not a partisan issue and never was. The only people who asserted there were some grey areas were either naive, stupid, or corrupt. Which was Hitch?

And if you read Hitchens article, his "concession" is so filled out with pokes at straw-men lefties and assertions that both his torturers (and the people who support them) are noble, serious gents as to undermine the whole exercise. Really, what is the point of saying his interrogators are part of a "highly honourable group" and are "heroes"? Hitchens is at least smart enough to know that, where such crimes are concerned, the honour of the men perpetuating them is irrelevant.

So it's a stunt, and nothing more.

And if someone is wrong nine times in a row, he doesn't get double credit for being sort-of right the tenth time. In an ideal world, that person would lose all credibility, and would have to cede his place to someone who'd been right all along. (Doesn't work out that way, I know.)

Having said all this, I sincerely hope this is the start of a trend, and that more of Hitchens' empire-cheering gasbag friends sign up for Brubaker-esque stints in Gitmo, Saudi prisons, and CIA interrogation rooms at undisclosed locations around the world.

Teach them well

This afternoon, I was a guest speaker at a Jr. Authors camp run by the Harbourfront Centre and held at Fort York.

It was a messy business, with keeners and eye-rollers/yawners alike among the two dozen or so kids I talked to. At one extreme was the kid who said she'd just finished To Kill a Mockingbird and wanted to be a journalist covering international affairs, at the other was the kid who couldn't think of a single book he'd been able to finish.

I think it went okay in the end. If I didn't exactly have them standing on their chairs and singing the praises of the Chekhovian approach to storytelling – the question "what genre do you write in?" sparked an awkward attempt on my part to define literary fiction, that imaginative realm where, in kids' minds at least, there's nothin' doin' – I at least had them engaged more often than I had originally feared walking in there. As if to prove my meanie reviewer opinion that people should hate books as hard as they love them, the most vocal and passionate exchanges occurred when I asked what books they found totally boring.

(They were too young yet to shout out, "Yours!")

The highlight of the visit, for some of the kids, was my admission that I couldn't read much from A Week of This due to all the swears, and the impromptu search through my copy of the book by some of the boys for the forbidden words.

It was like a very modest and slightly surreal tribute to the late George Carlin.

(Thanks to Jen T. and Hbfront for the invite.)

Parking and flying

I'm a little phuct for time at the moment, so here's some elsewhere things.

My Toronto Star review of Jonathan Miles's Dear American Airlines.

A short first-person piece in the Globe & Mail about parking in Toronto. (Spoiler: I find it difficult.)

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.)

Meet the CFACers

Trying to work out the logic in this letter to the editor in the Toronto Star:

Your statement, "Right wingers like Charles McVety, president of Canada Christian College and the Canada Family Action Coalition, are all for C-10 because it's a way of keeping sex and violence off the screen," is either wilfully ignorant or wilfully false.

Had you even attempted to be fair and accurate you would know that CFAC has not called for banning, censorship or any curtailment of making any films. We have supported Bill C-10 on the sole basis that taxpayers should not be required to pay the salaries of wannabe film producers, etc., for films that are likely losers at the box office.

Brian Rushfeldt, Canada Family Action Coalition, Calgary

That would be this Canada Family Action Coalition, whose site poses such chin-scratchers as "Childcare - nationalized or socialism?" and "Will England develop 'camps' for 'homophobes'?"

(Magic 8 Ball says: "I don't know karate, but I know ke-razee.")

But no, they are not about censoring dirty movies – what a suggestion! – all they want is for our precious key grip and best boy dollars be taken away from immoral unprofitable films and put toward potential blockbusters like: Without the Family, There Is No Freedom, or Sex Crazed Government Adults, or Another Case of Intolerant Homosexuals (and its sequel, It is A Queer Thing!), or The Enemy is Not Done With Canada, or my personal favourite, Virgin is Not a Dirty Word. (All titles from the CFAC site - go look.)

This in THIS

One more quick one: AWOT reviewed in THIS magazine.

"Whitlock has an excellent grasp of metaphor and simile, and A Week of This is a highly polished novel."


And a quick reminder: I'm a guest eulogist at the launch for Bigfoot: I Not Dead tomorrow night at the Gladstone. It's free, so come one, come all.

More of this

I'm back from reading and talking here and there, and am a little tired of self-promotion at the moment...




...but all the same, one must soldier on, so here's some places where AWOT has popped up over the past couple of days:

Review in The Ottawa Citizen.

Review in the Guelph Mercury.*

Review in The Danforth Review.

(Thanks to everyone who came out to the various events over the past week or so.)


ADDED: AWOT was also reviewed in the May 8 issue of Scene magazine (London, ON), which said the book is "filled with vibrant, gritty imagery and wondrously colourful turns of phrase" and "an ideal springtime read."

* this one also ran in The Waterloo Region Record.

Some Montreal numbers

Six hours of driving, three minutes reading, one mid-reading Bob Newhart reference, a dozen or so drinks, a couple of old friends, two separate conversations about No Country for Old Men (the movie), one lost room reservation, one basement bed in a student hostel, three hours sleep, one big hangover, a $40 parking ticket, two cans of Red Bull and a stale croissant, six more hours of driving, listening to Hank Williams, Richard Pryor, Lindsey Buckingham, Bill Hicks, Nigeria Special, and a lecture on Kierkegaard, of all cheerful things – I feel like I need the mental equivalent of a tub of Rolaids, along with the actual kind.

Thanks to everyone who came out, and thanks to the LPG for hosting/organizing.

One day back and then it's on to the Ottawa Valley. Onward and northward.

Montreal reading

A reminder: I'm reading in Montreal tomorrow night (Monday, May 5) at the Casa del Popolo as part of the LPG's "Fiery First Fiction" campaign.

Come have your brain melted by the scorching words of some incendiary–

Never mind – just come out if you're in the 514.

Furthermore: May 8 - Pembroke Library, ON; May 10 - Bean House Cafe, Deep River, ON; May 11 - Collected Works, Ottawa, ON; May 12 - Supermarket, Toronto (another "FFF" event).

It's the "AWOT Across Montreal and Parts of Eastern Ontario" tour.

Not that you need me to tell you...

Iron Man: lots of fun.

Choke me

From the Toronto Star:

Chasing cheap highs, tens of thousands of Ontario adolescents are strangling themselves or each other in what's known as the choking game, a report out of Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health says.

The report says as many as 7 per cent of Ontario students – some 79,000 – between grades 7 and 12 will have played the game, which is often prolonged to the point of fainting and is blamed for at least 82 deaths in the United States since the mid-1990s.

Even when I was a dumb teenager – and choking highs were a six-month fad – I thought the whole thing was stupid. Hilarious, but stupid. I remember being at a house party and watching two drunken 15-year-olds earnestly trying to make each other pass out. I couldn't breathe either – from laughing so hard. One of the most ludicrous sights I've ever seen. I said then, and I saw now: what happened to good, old-fashioned glue huffing?

AWOT: the trailer

Below is the web trailer for A Week of This. All of the footage is taken from the film loop Ian Daffern made for the Toronto launch – chopped up, re-ordered, and played out over a plinky little tune I whipped up on a laptop. (Macs are wonderful things.)




Watch it, share it, pan it, forget it.

ADDED: Ian gives a little background here.

Too much of a good thing

Based on this review of his new one, it would appear James Kelman has not yet lost the habit of writing novels you really want to like and that are intermittently brilliant but that are just too frigging long and loose to really work. (I'm still curious to read it, though.)

Here's my review of Kelman's previous novel, You Have To Be Careful In The Land Of The Free, from way back in 2004.

Confucious say: what were they thinking?

A rather unfortunate juxtaposition of story and image on the front page of the Toronto Star this morning:



You can juuuuust see that "Sinophobia" story on the right, which is what the image actually refers to.

Beer League Band Man

I have a thing in the Globe T.O. section today about a recent night out at The Rehearsal Factory.

Getting fried with Mr Frye

It's been a long while since I've had Northrop Frye over to guest blog (see here and here), so we're long overdue.

What's he on about this time? Why, gettin' loaded, of course:

For the relaxations of the spirit which is wisdom some kind of narcotic is essential, I think. It disturbs routine existence enough to suggest the infinite. Teetotallers are often cultural go-getters & over-rationalized. Their rhythm is all wrong. In the Middle Ages everybody was stewed in beer all day long.

(From here, as always)

Rhetorical question

Who the fuck steals a ten-year-old's new bike?

There is indeed evil in the world.

Mordecai Richler: Leaving St Urbain

My review of Reinhold Kramer's Mordecai Richler biography here.

Last night

The launch for AWOT went smoothly, I think – the room was crowded, the books sold out, and people seemed to enjoy it.

The piece Alex composed (and performed) was odd, spiky, hypnotizing, and way beyond what I would have settled for. I would have been happy with entertainment, and the fucking guy brought music – which is why I love his stuff.

Ian Daffern’s film loop was even more hypnotizing – we may be doing something more with it.

I was glad to be able to thank certain people who helped out, and I’m glad the books sold – not only for my own egotistic purposes, but because Chris Reed and Pages put so much into this event, I didn’t want to lay an egg. I was especially glad that I could publicly thank Phil Rudz for the fantastic cover he made for the book. I’ve heard that people were getting him to sign the cover, which is at it should be.

Everything from now on is gravy, as far as I'm concerned.


Some photos therefrom (courtesy of Chris Reed) -

The Weeklongs - a.k.a. Ryan Driver, Brodie West, Alex Lukashevsky, and Colin Fisher:



Some dork and his Powerpoint presentation:




Thanks to all who came out.



ADDED: More photos here.

Where I'll be

If you're looking for me tonight, I'll be the one puking at The Gladstone – in panic, before the event, recreationally afterwards.

Come on out. Listen, laugh, buy a book. Be a good sport.

AWOT gets Pickled

Pickle Me This goes firm but fair on the book.

I especially appreciate this:

Manda is a great character, altogether realized. She's mean, which I appreciate – I don't find nearly enough mean and sarcastic heroines in books who we're still meant to like.

AWOT in the Winnipeg Free Press

A Week of This just got reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press.

Here's the money quote:

A good novel can take you some place you've never been. But it takes a great one to take you some place you've been a thousand times and show it to you anew.

Holy mac.

Please read the whole thing here.

And don't forget: the big launch is this Wednesday, 7 pm, at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto.

I've also got events coming up in Montreal, Ottawa, and beyond. (Plus more Toronto readings.) See here (under "News") for more events.


ADDED: if you haven't seen the window display at Pages Books, see below (courtesy of Chris Reed, who took the photos).





And closer up:

There are limits

Overheard in the Eaton Centre, yesterday:

Older man, talking on a cell phone: "I try to respect all points of view and people's opinions, but not when it's coming from those bastards."

It was like my conscience was talking.

More me

Interview in The Danforth Review.

Plus a short piece about waiting to run the review gauntlet on the Pages site.


(Thanks to Shawn and Shaun for these.)

Damn dirty japes

You'd have a hard time finding sang that is froider than this letter to the editor in today's Globe and Mail:

Now that Charlton Heston is dead, perhaps it's time to pry the gun from his cold, dead hands. - Peter Dawson, Halifax

(Context.)

AWOT arrives at last

Look what the cat dragged in:



Want one?

Bookstores should start getting copies in stock around April 12th. Pages at Queen & John will have copies earlier than that, I believe. (And they will soon have a window display for the book – go see it if you can.)

Also, for the next two months, the Revue Cinema will be running an ad for the book before every movie.

A million thanks to everyone who helped to make this book happen, most especially Michael Holmes and everyone at ECW Press, Ciabh (my goodwyfe), Phil, who did the cover, posters, ad, and much more, and everyone else who helped, offered advice and support, or just generally helped me on my way, most of whom I remembered to thank in the book itself.


ADDED: The Library Journal review is now online. (Scroll down.)

DeNiro's (big league) Game

Congratulations to Rawi Hage on the IMPAC shortlisting.

In the Toronto Star, the headline for Hage's IMPAC nod is:

Canadian up for $160K Prize

There's a whole lotta national and cultural anxiety packed into that little five-word hed.

Me talk pretty one day

A brief Q&A for the "Fiery First Fiction" promotion, which is based on the notion that first works of fiction can induce either aneurysms or explosive diarrhea, I forget which.

(I tried not to let the thing devolve into a series of one-liners, but only partly succeeded.)

Gott in himmel!

Things have been getting awfully high-minded and literary around here, so we are overdue for some good, clean smut.

Unfortunately, this is neither good nor clean:

Max Mosley, one of the most powerful men in world sport, was under pressure to resign as boss of Formula One’s governing body last night after he was exposed enjoying a Nazi-style orgy with five prostitutes.

Jewish groups condemned the behaviour of Mosley, 67, whose father, Sir Oswald, was the leader of the British Union of Fascists and a friend of Adolf Hitler.

Mr Mosley was caught on video by the News of the World with five women in an underground “torture chamber” in Chelsea, where he spent several hours allegedly indulging in sado-masochistic sex.

The Oxford-educated former barrister, who is president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), reenacted a concentration camp scene in which he played the role of both guard and inmate.

Speaking in German and brandishing a leather whip, he beat the women after allowing himself to be subjected to a humiliating inspection for lice and an interrogation in chains. [Emphasis added, maybe unnecessarily]

Really? The Nazi angle wasn't creepy enough so he had to add a lice check? This is the point where most people would look at their genitals and say, "you know, I'm starting to think I shouldn't listen to you so much."

Price is right

James Wood on the new Richard Price.

Recommended not just because it's Wood on Price, and because it's really an essay on the use of dialogue in fiction, but because it refers to Henry Green's Loving (not that surprising, given that it's Wood, but always a welcome sight), and because it quotes one of the characters in Price's novel on how he knew the event he was at was a poetry reading: “I guess it was poetry because it had that pronouncement thing, you know, where you say each word like you’re angry at it?”

Exactly.

Writing lessons

From The Finishing School by Muriel Spark:

“You begin,” he said, “by setting your scene. You have to see your scene, either in reality or in imagination. For instance, from here you can see across the lake. But on a day like this you can’t see across the lake, it’s too misty. You can’t see the other side.” Rowland took off his reading glasses to stare at his creative writing class whose parents’ money was being thus spent: two boys and three girls around sixteen to seventeen years of age, some more, some a little less. “So,” he said, “you must write, when you set your scene, ‘the other side of the lake was hidden in mist.’ Or if you want to exercise imagination, on a day like today, you can write, ‘The other side of the lake was just visible.’ But as you are setting the scene, don’t make any emphasis as yet. It’s too soon, for instance, for you to write, ‘The other side of the like was hidden in the fucking mist.’ That will come later. You are setting your scene. You don’t want to make a point as yet.”

The scaaaarrrrryyy Mr Stine

My son's "favourite author" (his words) is profiled in the NY Times.

He gobbles those books up at a rate of about 4 or 5 per week – which may be a conservative estimate. He has a box – a war-surplus crate that used to hold grenades or something – in which he keeps them all. And trips to Value Village are always being requested, because he knows he can pick up half a dozen of the books for about two dollars. He has already started to eye the Stephen King paperbacks on the adult shelves – It being of particular interest. (Killer clowns? Sign him up.)

Some kids go through a kind of "reading puberty" just before the onset of real puberty. Even kids who are book-friendly from the moment they can hold one can go through a spurt that looks almost manic. My own is acting like a little pothead when it comes to reading – there's very little that can get his attention when he's on the stuff. I knew a kid, who is in her mid-teens now, who used to lock herself in a lit, walk-in closet in the basement of her house and spend the entire day reading in her pajamas. The losses in Vitamin D exposure, exercise, and basic socialization are outweighed by the benefits of getting in the habit early. Everyone knows that the fat, pasty-faced weirdos become the cool kids later on. Or sex offenders. But you have roll the dice.

What's Ricky Gervais up to?

The concept of "blogging for the express purpose of promoting cultural product" – which I invented, about a year or so ago – is really catching on, isn't it?

Ricky Gervais, busy putting together his latest movie – Liar Liar II or something like that – has taken the idea and run with it.



(Thanks to Gary C for the link.)

It ain't me

I recently came across a quote I had dog-eared in Typing, Matt Cohen's memoir:

My discovery of my own voice came along with the realization that I was the kind of writer who wrote much better when I was writing about other people. Only when it was about other people did my writing seem to have the freedom, the texture, the conviction, that had been so lacking from my earlier efforts, all of which had centred around various imaginary versions of myself.

Cohen spent a long time trying to write the kind of proudly solipsistic, defiantly avant-garde and non-linear prose that he saw as a kind of challenge to Canada's Scotch-protestant culture and that was big among his literary peers at the fledgling House of Anansi and Coach House presses. Somewhat to his own horror, he found himself – after a couple of failed novels of just that sort – drawn more and more to the idea of writing about the lives of seemingly boring and non-avant garde people in rural Ontario.

Probably not hard to figure out why I marked that particular quote.

Beckett's novel trilogy spun my head around when I first read it. And while I am not nearly as hot for the stuff as I once was, I spent a couple of years gobbling up everything by and about Donald Bartheleme I could get my hands on.

On the other hand, Alice Munro's stories, however brilliant they are individually, still tend to make me a little restless after about three or four in a row.

And yet, in my own writing so far, I see very little Beckett (though there is definitely some, in altered form) and no Barthelme at all. But I do see repeated attempts to achieve the kinds of effects that Munro is a master of, effects that bring with them a certain amount of dryness and distance, along with the itch for lives depicted with a little more raucousness and mess.

Thinking about the first novel about to drop out the chute – which I try not to at this point, focusing instead on the mechanics of publicizing it, and on the second novel currently in the works – I worry that it could have been more raucous and less dry. But I don't regret at all the fact that my own consciousness does not appear as a major character.

This has been a very self-indulgent post about literary self-negation.


ADDED: Before anyone makes the objection, I should say that I'm only talking about myself here, and only about the way I mostly write right now. I am fully aware that some of the greatest works of literature were born out of thinly veiled autobiography.

And I reserve the right to one day write a series of novels about Jason Whitelore, the handsome and unconventional young dreamer from nowhere who is forced to make his way, aided only by his boundless charisma, wit, and libido.

I'm also in the middle of Reinhold Kramer's upcoming bio of Mordecai Richler, a writer who made a lot of sweeping (though mostly dead-on) statements about novelists shamelessly (if backhandedly) congratulating themselves in their fiction, and whose best novels do exactly that.

Voulez vous coucher avec moi? *UPDATED*

Help wanted: I'm doing a reading in Montreal on May 5 as part of the Literary Press Group's "Fiery First Fiction" campaign.

I'm arriving in town the day before, and have a place to stay Sunday night, but does anyone have suggestions as to cheap places to stay downtown Monday night?

Offers of friendly couches or spare rooms will be met with gratitude, the purchase of the drink of your choice, and a free copy of my book. (Which can always be exchanged for one you actually want to read.) I can handle no-star hotels/hostels, though.

E-mail me at nathanwhitlock[@]gmail.com.

Many thanks.

UPDATE: Found a room, right above where I'm doing the reading. And it's cheap. Can't get simpler than that.

(Many, many thanks to Carmine, Chris, Zach, and Gary for the help and the offers.)

First review for AWOT

A Week of This just received its first review – a positive one – in The Library Journal in the US.

This is either a good omen or a last pat on the head before running the gauntlet.

Unexpected pleasures

Who would have thought anything so fun/good/heartening could come out of The Breeders this late in the day?

It's not a clincher, but it's a good sign. Part of me thinks they could/should have stretched that groove out over a few more minutes.

Still, somewhere Frank Black is jumping up and down on his cowboy hat, Warner Brothers cartoon-style. ("Dagnabbit!")

We are somewhat awesome!

They've changed it online, but in the paper the headline for this story was:

Canada's shaking things up a bit.

I dunno – still feels insufficiently qualified. A tad? A tinch? Within proscribed limits?

My Unwritten Books by George Steiner

My review of George Steiner's My Unwritten Books is online here.

Someone – smarter, better read, and with a significantly more puckish literary sensibility – could do a whole study of the peculiarly Borgesian faith in the power of non-existent books.

Maybe someone already has, and I just haven't heard of it. Wouldn't be the first time.

The four-stringed joy machine

You can't be down with one of these around:



And so I bought one. And it looks exactly like the one in the picture.

Life may not be good, ever, but it just became a wee bit more bearable.