Grave, grave Anne Michaels

Anne Michaels has an essay in The Atlantic on... reading, or... culture, maybe... books?

Tense up your buttocks, Gentle Reader, we’re going in:

It is the most obvious of observations, that as humans we are entangled—by intimate experiences such as parenthood, death, love, and by commerce, culture, politics. And today we are entangled as never before—by the global consequences of our actions, small and large.

She’s right: that is the most obvious of observations. No worries, though, she can easily save this opening from banality with a novel metaphor.

A dolphin in captivity is taught tricks to please a human audience and then, once released, teaches these skills to wild dolphins an ocean away.

Amazingly, this has been documented. (Though, if you think about it, humans have been doing this for a while. We’re Number One! We’re Number One! Suck on that, dolphins!) Fucking with nature almost always has hidden repercussions, but in this case, the idea of trained dolphins teaching tricks to wild ones is fairly cool. Though it’ll be a real pisser when they realize that beach balls and “Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins do not exist in nature.

Moving on….

And now, of course, another entanglement: in the local high street of the Western world, in the length of two blocks, about a minute’s walk from home, the shopkeepers come from everywhere—Italy, Estonia, Mexico, Thailand, Britain, India, Germany, China, France, Sri Lanka, Trinidad, Spain, Poland, Jamaica, the Czech Republic, Japan, Greece.

That’s a minimum of 17 shopkeepers of different backgrounds in a single two-block stretch. Imagine what that “local high street” looks like during World Cup.

At the local milk-mart, the man behind the counter reads Goethe’s Faust in Korean.

Yes, and the butcher reads Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy in Farsi, the cobbler reads Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in Swahili, and the haberdasher reads the complete works of Virginia Woolf in Cree….

Somehow, I think they’re all reading the Toronto Sun. Or The Da Vinci Code.

Though this kind of multiculturalism through labor migration or political exile has become commonplace, one question never loses its poignancy, no matter how often it is asked: Do we belong to the place where we are born, or to the place where we are buried?

Some would put that as “Do we belong to the place where we grew up, or to the place where we live now?”, but Anne is an award-winning novelist – it’s her job to soak this stuff in literary sauce.

When one is dispossessed of everything—home, country, landscape—what is left?

Faust?

Language, memory, one’s own body.

Oh. Well, if ye ain’t got nothing, says Anne, ye can always have a talk, have a think, or have a wank.

Not too long ago—an instant ago, in terms of evolutionary history—we knew one thing with a fair amount of certainty: the place where we were born would likely be the place where we would die.

I’m not feeling so good, myself.

We are marinated in our childhoods, in the places of our earliest memories.

Ew.

Even when a writer decides never to write overtly about his childhood—perhaps the food of that childhood is too hot and burns the tongue, or is too cold to be eaten with pleasure—nevertheless, for a writer, it is a metaphorical meal that must be eaten, even if only in private.

Thus are the meals of our childhood preserved in the Tupperware of memory, burped by emigration and displacement, left at the back of the fridge by time and loss, until served up, with most of the moldy parts cut out, by internationally celebrated literary novelists.

In Canada, we have been politically stable enough to be able to define a national literature by way of geographical region: Arctic, prairie, east and west coasts, the looming wilderness. In some sense, this definition has not changed. Two great themes weave through our literature—our relationship with the wilderness, and the immigrant experience. These themes were combined even in the beginnings of published writing in this country, and this continues.

Wilderness and the immigrant experience. Wilderness and the immigrant experience. Wilderness and the immigrant experience.

Who said Canadian literature was predictable?

I heard a comedian once say that all British humour can be reduced to “Toilet” and “Royalty.” Which sounds like an infinitely more interesting basis for a culture.

On the other hand, I plan to start a band called “Wilderness and the Immigrant Experience.” We’ll never play a single show – okay, maybe a Writers’ Union general meeting or two – but we’ll all buy ourselves houses with the proceeds from our many Canada Council grants.

The changes now, in global influence and global consequence, in a global witnessing, will of course change what there is to say, and how we say it.

We’ll have to say “global” a lot more, for one thing.

But will it change how we read? What will a national literature mean to a society that reads globally with ease, absorbing novels online and downloading instant translations of books?

Kids today, with their online absorptions and instant translations…

Despite the new ease with which we cross borders and enter the experiences of others, some truths will not change: love finds us wherever we are, a child is born in only one place, the ground where we bury our dead becomes sacred to us; these places do not belong to us, we belong to them.

And that which is thrust heavenward, must soonafter return to the rocky ground from whence it came. What goest around, does surely comest in that same direction, with time.

And where does a writer metaphorically wish to be laid to rest? In a book, in a reader.

Were these Frank McCourt’s last wishes? Because I’m not sure that’s even hygienic.

Not laid to rest in terms of immortality, but in terms of common experience; laid to rest in this common ground. A writer may be born in one place and write in another—but who claims him? The reader—who may live in a very different place and in a different time. In this sense alone, perhaps, globalization cannot be considered a new idea.

Actually, Anne, none of what you’ve written here can be considered a new idea. Except the for the dolphin bit – again, that’s pretty cool.

A national literature is made not only by writers, but by readers. Recently, a project was launched in Toronto to “bookmark” the country; passages of Canadian literature, set meaningfully in real locations, will be commemorated in those actual locations. We can cross an ordinary bridge or an intersection and read a passage describing a fictional event that takes place where we stand. Where we stand, there is a story. And perhaps that is the simplest, and most privileged, definition of what a national literature is.

You remember that one, don’t you? Methinks Anne is looking for some plaque action of her own.

When people are dispossessed, a national literature can reside in a single voice. What makes a home for words is a reader; and what makes a home for a reader is words.

And what makes a reader for words is a home; and what reads words for a home is a make; and home readers make what a is.

When the dead cannot be laid to rest in ground that remembers them, sometimes literature is the only grave we have. And that grave is one way a migrant claims a place in his adopted country—a place, ironically, for the living.

“Sometimes literature is the only grave we have” – and people say I hate books…

The one where I interview Chandler

The new issue of Fashion magazine has an interview I did with Chandler Burr, the New York Times' perfume critic and the author of a brand-spankin' new novel about Hollywood and book clubs and Jewishness and acceptance.

(It's not online, but you can see the table of contents here.)

Happy Bastille Day!

Hip hop hegemony

The Jay-Z/Game beef from a foreign policy perspective. Seriously.

It's a bit like reading an analysis of what a given pro wrestler "needs to do" to get back on top (when the answer is always "follow the script, tight pants"), but it's fascinating nonetheless and an efficient time-waster.

Fuck book magazines, too

My deskmate Steven "Dubya" Beattie (who often plays the Felix Ungar to my Oscar Madison, or the Frank Burns to my "Hawkeye" Pierce, or the Chip to my Dale - anyway, he's clean and I'm messy, he's careful and I'm sloppy, he takes his job seriously and does it well while I spend most of my time thinking up dirty puns for headlines) has an essay in the new issue of Canadian Notes & Queries about the fiction of Anne Michaels Ondaatje that mines a bit of potty-mouthed anti-literariness from my novel for it's title, and quotes the source to boot.

Give it a read here.

(By the way: the Patrick in my book is not named after the Patrick in Ondaatje's. I didn't even notice that until the book (mine, that is) was already written.)

My Back Pages

Pages Books and Magazines, R.I.P.

Full disclosure:

Dinosaur Sr.

I'm amazed these guys are still at it – and in exactly the same way they were twenty years ago:



They've mostly dropped the Sonic Youthesque atonalities for guitars that roar clean a la Neil Young, but that's what getting older will do to you. (Even if it doesn't seem to be doing it to, well, Sonic Youth.)

This sound hasn't really been my thing for a while now (as far as "comebacks" go, I was more excited/intrigued by the new DOOM and the new Mos Def), but I've been listening to Farm a lot lately, almost without meaning to. There's not a single moment on the record that will come as a surprise, but for some reason, they pull it off. It's the post-rock equivalent of AC/DC, if the AC/DC were still able to do what they do with some dignity, which they mostly don't. (Except for live, or so I've been told.)

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton

My review of de Botton's new book in the Toronto Star.

Fallen down

A hilarious, counter-intuitive take on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (which I will end up seeing, eventually, for free, if I can, because my son will insist, though even he admits that the first one was pretty awful):

Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that's because people don't understand that this isn't a movie, in the conventional sense. It's an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.

And the true genius of Transformers: ROTF is that Bay has put all of this excess of imagery and random ideas at the service of the most pandering movie genre there is: the summer movie. ROTF is like twenty summer movies, with unrelated storylines, smushed together into one crazy whole. You try in vain to understand how the pieces fit, you stare into the cracks between the narrative strands, until the cracks become chasms and the chasms become an abyss into which you stare until it looks deep into your own soul, and then you go insane. You. Do. Not. Leave. The Cabinet.

Got 99 problems but the beach ain't one

Suck macaque

This week in monkey sex, from Time magazine:

According to the paper, "Payment for Sex in a Macaque Mating Market," published in the December issue of Animal Behavior, males in a group of about 50 long-tailed macaques in Kalimantan Tengah, Indonesia, traded grooming services for sex with females; researchers, who studied the monkeys for some 20 months, found that males offered their payment up-front, as a kind of pre-sex ritual. It worked. After the females were groomed by male partners, female sexual activity more than doubled, from an average of 1.5 times an hour to 3.5 times. The study also showed that the number of minutes that males spent grooming hinged on the number of females available at the time: The better a male's odds of getting lucky, the less nit-picking time the females received.

The article pushes the "monkey whore" angle, but this just sounds like a case of the nicer males getting laid more often. All the same, let's hope Hitchens doesn't see this one.

Chatting with Rosalind Porter

Here's the interview I did for Open Book Toronto with Rosalind Porter, senior editor of Granta magazine.

Note how I edited out all my actual questions, most of which were pretty pedestrian. It was done out of necessity in this case, but in general, I hate reading interviews in which the interviewer can't seem to stay out of the way. Case in point: the Jhumpa Lahiri interview with Mavis Gallant in the very issue of Granta Porter talks about. More on that interview later...

Dan the man

Here's a profile of beyond-notorious Toronto booker Dan Burke that ran in Sunday's Star. I encountered Burke a few times back in my band days, and especially during the period when I pretended to play trombone for The Deadly Snakes. (Photo at right.) I was always a little half-assed about playing music and rarely did any organizing and such, so I never had many direct dealings with the guy.

However: anecdote time – gather 'round kids! Years ago, a friend roped me into playing drums as part of a made-up opening act for André Williams at the El Mo. He and I and a guy named Chris Isom, who played amazing blues guitar and whose father, I think, was Larry King and David Letterman's heart surgeon – not sure how that's relevant, but there it is – worked out a set list in the cab on the way over. Burke was not impressed by the fact that we needed to borrow equipment (especially, um, drums), and went on and on about "fucking amateurs" and the like. For whatever reason, we were actually pretty good – sort of a knock-off Flat Duo Jets, or proto-White Stripes, if you will – and Dan loved us, going so far as to come and sit on the front of the stage to watch. He tried to book us in for more shows, but Isom was moving back to New York, and I thought we would never pull it off so well again, so why bother?

End of story. My life is a series of near-misses and shrugged-0ff chances. (Hence the kind of fiction I write.) Now scoot – grampa needs a nap.

Shit sandwich

Not sure this guy would like the idea of his own tragic death being the occasion for a Spinal Tap reference:


But then, I don't really think that the end can be assessed as of itself as being the end, because what does the end feel like? It's like saying when you try to extrapolate the end of the universe: you say, if the universe is indeed infinite, then how – what does that mean? How far is all the way, and then if it stops, what's stopping it, and what's behind what's stopping it? So, what's the end, you know, is my question to you.

Ah Um, ahem

I have nothing to say, and no time to say it in, so let me just point out that this album is still in that small group of albums I would want with me on desert island equipped with a stereo system and a power source.

Writing about jazz is the worst kind of literary abuse (unless your name is Philip Larkin), so I won't try to lay out why the record is so great. Just know that it is, k?

I don't know about everybody, but I'm working for the weekend, at least

Welcome, welcome – have some whine:

In addition to my day job, which is unusually hectic right now, I have a review of the new Alain de Botton book due, I just finished a short books article for Fashion magazine yesterday, I am in the middle of editing a wrestling memoir (!), I am interviewing a lit-magazine editor this afternoon, and my lowly second novel picked this moment to demand daily, break-of-dawn labour (and I am abiding, mostly happily).

Plus: my son's baseball team seems to play every other night, and my daughter is continuing her descent into full-on hellion status.

This would all be just fine, were I not, at heart, a lazy goodfornothing who would rather lie around and re-read Kingsley Amis novels all day.

Was it not Huey Lewis (and his News) who once sang, "all I need is a couple days off"?

Wise words, Mr Lewis, wise words.

Toronto is a pot o' gold

Pretty stunning rainbow arcing over the city last night. From where I was seeing it – nine floors up, way out yonder in the Distillery District – it appeared to be touching down right next to a docked tanker ship:



The city itself looked fairly otherwordly after the storm, too:

Kill us now, let Zordog sort us out...

When inquisitive aliens, visiting our scorched, lifeless planet many millions of years from now – after the total economic collapse, after the brutal automotive duels in the wastelands over gasoline, after the nuclear holocaust, after the rise of the flesh-eating zombies, after the ascendancy of intelligent (damn dirty) apes over humans, after the division of humankind into Morlocks and Eloi, after the ecological cataclysm that eliminates all life on Earth – this will be the kind of cultural artifact they will study to ascertain why we failed as a species (and why we deserved to):

Show no mercy

B.R. Myers reviews Toni Morrison's A Mercy in The Atlantic:

Some people complain that 19th-century fiction takes too long to get going. But does it really? Once the hero’s pedigree is out of the way, the Victorian novel moves resolutely forward. The contemporary narrative, on the other hand, offers a quick thrill up front that readers must pay off, in a kind of installment plan, by enduring one flashback after another.

[...]

A short novel at only 167 pages (the title is apt), A Mercy might still have held the reader’s attention had it ignored the contemporary taboo against straightforward, sequential storytelling. But this is in effect a series of back­stories, some told in the narrator’s affected voice, some in the characters’ scatty idiom, but all moving at the same uninvolving expository trot.

It's a particularly skillful reviewer who can let you know exactly what you'd be in for were you unfortunate enough to encounter a given book.

Gimme the old guys with the cigars...

It's not as though it's a well thought out or deeply researched position – mostly it's a sweeping, cranky generalization of the sort I am prone to – but I've often thought that one problem with publishing is that the money-mindedness gets mixed up with the concern for art, muddying both and weakening both. Some people complain that publishing has become all about money – ahem – but really, it's the mixing of aesthetic concerns with economic ones that ruins it for everyone. It's one reason why contemporary Canadian fiction hews so closely to a middlebrow sensibility that is sellable while smelling just enough like literature to make everyone involved believe they are doing well by the art form. Rather than make clear distinctions between literary fiction and outright commercial fiction, we produce awkward hybrids that aren't literary enough to last, and aren't commercial enough to entertain. I believe that excellent literary/commercial hybrids can exist, and do, but they have to be considered happy accidents.

Thus, the problem isn't that publishers abandon notions of literary value in the pursuit of profit, it's that they cling to them. Art should never be asked to make a profit. If it does, great, but you can't put prior expectations on it, because that leads to a kind of funneling effect wherein the definition of art gets narrower and narrower. Companies need to pay their employees, so they should feel free to put out the slickest commercial crap they can, while leaving a little room for the arty stuff that makes them look good but rarely makes a dime.

There's more to this argument, but really, all I wanted to do was set up this short interview clip with Frank Zappa below, wherein he makes a similar argument. ("The young guys are more conservative and more dangerous to the art form than the old guys with cigars ever were.")



(I'm hoping it's intentional that later in the clip, when he talks about censorship, words such as "masturbation" and, um, "the white stuff" get bleeped.)

Another Story, a second wind...

Shaun Smith spotted this on Roncesvalles last week and sent it my way:

Very odd, given that it's been over a year since that sad little book limped out into the world, but I'll take all the reminders that I was once a published author I can get...

(Another Story Bookshop deserves your patronage, by the way.)

There is always more rhetoric to say and do

Since I don't have one of them fancy blogs that scroll all the fresh comments on the left-hand side, you may not be aware that people occasionally leave pithy little rejoinders on old posts, especially when those posts involved Mark Steyn.

Here's one I got this morning on this post:

Oh, my, what a typical bunch of intellectually bankrupt lefty moral equivocalism. But nothing really new about that, right? Same old, same old. Orwell bemoaned it 70 years ago. When all the rhetoric is said and done, you lefties always love your fascists. Only makes sense, you both have a lot in common: the cleansing of the "corrupt" in a "regrettable" but necessary siege of terror. But you keep telling yourself you're the clever good guys, if that's what it takes to get yourself up in the morning.

Sadly, despite the show of intellectual bravery in the name of right thinking and Xtian hegemony, the commenter has chosen to remain anonymous. Oh well. Seen any good fascists lately?

A "sable sapphist?"

Yowch:

Writing is really hard work--mostly because thinking is really hard work. When you don't want to do that work, but you want the meager payment it offers, the fleeting fame it brings, than you resort to thinking on the cheap. You go for shock. And you do it that way because you have nothing to offer except your rep as contrarian, and a provocateur. You do it because you are lazy.

To call his statements racist, or homophobic, demeans racist and homophobes. Indeed Hitchens displays something more than that--weakness. Weakness is the root of these sorts of slurs--an unwillingness to do the hard work of taking your opponents at their merits. So you name call and strawman. You mock what you don't understand, what you fear.

I guess this sort of fits with Hitchens' contention that wimminfolk just ain't funny. But that idea always had a fatal flaw: the fact that Hitchens himself is pretty much humourless these days. Since about 9/11, he's only ever gotten the shits, not the giggles.

Talking to the hand

Over at the Pages site, I get interviewed by a penguin puppet. Oh lord, it's hard to stay humble...

Here's a taste:

W: Over the years, you have conducted interviews with writers of all stripes. Can you share your strangest exchange (no names)?

N: The strangest was probably conducting the entire interview on a stage-sized board game while my son rolled an oversized die. The most awkward was interviewing a minor celebrity who had written an entire memoir but hadn’t seemed to have given the events related therein much thought prior to my asking about them. She projected vulnerability, I think, while I tried not to project panic.

Is it much too much to ask, not to hide behind the mask?

Apparently not:

It's not exactly one in a million - more like one in 500,000. But it's still a pretty rare sight. A Toronto wildlife company responding to a request for help has found a rare white albino raccoon at a construction site at Yonge and Eglinton.

I'm not David Attenborough or anything, but I'm pretty sure the unusual colouring is an indication of pure evil. Or good. Whichever.

And yes: I am wildlife blogging.

The princess and the pirate

I can't remember if I've linked to this already, and I am too lazy to check right now, but either way, here's the article I wrote for Canadian Family about navigating kids' gender roles.

Quirk it

Quirkity quirk quirky quirk quirk quirkity Toronto Star quirky quirk quirky Leanne Shapton:

Leanne Shapton is strolling through Greenwich Village wearing Truman Capote's raincoat.

Quirkola Capote quirk?

An art/publishing phenomenon, she bought three of his coats for $120 at an auction that she viewed as a strange and sad narrative of his life, but that led her to think about fresh ways to tell a story.

Quirk! Quirkish quirk quirk quirk It-girl quirkity quirkola...

Shapton, who was raised in Mississauga and now lives in New York, believes objects can be haunted by their previous owners – and found one of the Capote coats unwearable.

"It had kind of a bad vibe," she says. She took it to Goodwill with a note on its provenance.

The coat she is wearing as she walks along Bleecker St. with Bunny, a compact wheaten terrier, is tan-coloured and shapeless; one button is sewn with mismatched red thread. Yet despite the shabby coat and messy tumble of black hair, she's stylish.

Quiiiiirrkk... quirk? Quirkimmy quirk adorably neurotic quirk quirko quirka quirké.

Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry has been optioned by Plan B, Brad Pitt's production company. Pitt and Natalie Portman have expressed interest in playing the roles of Harold and Lenore.

Quirk quirk film deal quirk!

The illustrated novel has been praised by Dave Eggers, founder of the publishing house McSweeney's, and writer Amy Sedaris, who is quoted on the back cover saying that she's "jealous."

Quirkapalooza! Quirkumma quirk famous friends quirk, quirk-o-quirk – quirk.

It's an understandable emotion; Shapton is the girl who seems to have everything. "My friends and I were having brunch the other day, sitting under some Elvis posters," says Shapton collaborator and writer Sheila Heti, who "portrays" Lenore Doolan in the photographs in Important Artifacts. "We played a game: Who was the most charismatic person we knew? The verdict was: Leanne."

Quirkiddily quirk, quirk inevitable Sheila Heti reference quirkalicious quirkagoo.

Shapton's illustrations have been on the cover of Time, in The New Yorker and on book covers for leading publishing houses. Until last year, when she joined The Times, she had a page in Elle magazine called "Jet Setter" in which she used her own paintings and snapshots to document what she ate and where she shopped in places such as Ireland and Morocco – " ...had a perfect cashmere-tweed suit tailored by Michael Frazer..." (The gig was not a completely jealousy-inducing – Shapton had to pay her own travel expenses.)

Quirkadoodledoo!

[NB: full disclosure.]

"I think I'll have the hand that feeds me, with a side order of OH SNAP!"

Alex Good, reviewing Emily Schultz's Heaven is Small in the Toronto Star:

With apologies to Wallace Stevens, romance is our supreme fiction – its formulaic fantasies accounting for roughly a third of all mass market paperback sales. In other words, Harlequin (whose profits presumably help keep the lights on at the Toronto Star) and its ilk do not service a cultural niche; they are the mainstream.

(Emphasis added.)

Over before it began

Anyone notice a problem here?



"Omigod, they're all gone ... oh wait, nevermind – I see them."

I, me, mine

Having just plowed through a pile of surprisingly well-paying freelance work (and thus making room for the waiting pile to come), I decided to treat myself by wandering over to She Said Boom! on Roncesvalles to exchange cash for cultural product: Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy (my old copy of The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories is in worse shape than Ilyich himself), Buster Keaton's The General on DVD (replacing a beloved VHS copy lost ages ago), and, on a whim, and because it was cheap and looked great (and, as it turns out, sounds even better), Good God! A Gospel Funk Hymnal.

Who's a happy boy? Who's a happy boy?

Ondaatje, abridged

Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion got the ribbon-cutting treatment last week, getting enshrined next to the Bloor Viaduct, the book's central symbol:

No Toronto author has done a better job of breathing life into our landmarks than Michael Ondaatje. His iconic 1987 novel, In the Skin of a Lion, tells of the lust and muscle that built Toronto in the 1920s and 1930s. An immigrant himself, Mr. Ondaatje worked up his own sweat weaving fiction and truth as he imagined the back story of such landmarks as the Bloor Street Viaduct and the R.C. Harris Water Filtration Plant.

Yesterday Mr. Ondaatje returned to the scene of his masterpiece, in a little parkette on the east end of the bridge, to unveil the first plaque by Project Bookmark Canada. The brainchild of Toronto-area writer Miranda Hill, this project aims to post pieces of prose next to geographic features all over Canada, thus inspiring us to read our stories about our landscape.

I'll just pass over "no Toronto author has done a better job of breathing life into our landmarks than Michael Ondaatje" for now, but the bit about being an immigrant writer "who worked up his own sweat weaving fiction and truth" is just plain offensive. Does Kuitenbrouwer think Ondaatje showed up with nothing but a dream, a pen, and a steamer trunk full of memories? I must have skipped the chapter in Running in the Family where Ondaatje describes the years he spent living with twelve other guys in a dirty squat near Queen and Lansdowne, eating nothing but hamburger buns and Cheese Whiz, showering at the Y, and working for a shady contractor.

Yes, he toiled in fiction's sweatshop, stitching together the prose-garments that would clothe this city in myth. He drove our storytelling taxicab, politely ignoring our drunkenness or horniness and chatting the passing streets into the stuff of legend before dropping us off curbside at the doors of literature. He washed our fictional dishes, scraping off the symbolically rich leftovers and rinsing each plate until it gleamed with new literary light.

I also have to take some exception to this:

Mr. Ondaatje, now 66, looked great in a suit jacket and red wool scarf. He posed as Mayor David Miller snapped the inevitable Twitter photograph and bantered easily with the hundreds of fans who flocked to hear him speak and thrust tattered copies of novels for him to autograph. And he embraced the project, noting that we too seldom blow our own horn.

“I remember being told when I began to write that it was commercial suicide to set a thriller in Toronto or any Canadian city, as opposed to New York or Miami or Kiev. Even Delhi, they said, was better than ­Toronto!”

"A thriller." Hmm....*








* those of you who have read my novel can probably suss out my own feelings about ITSOAL.

Mordecai Richler by M.G. Vassanji

My review of the M.G. Vassanji's pocket bio of Mordecai Richler in the Toronto Star.

Read 'em all, let time sort 'em out

Roy on forcing high school kids to read books they don't have a chance of understanding, much less enjoying:

If this sounds harsh -- if you think students should be inculcated with the joy of reading, rather than frog-marched through big books -- please take a moment to gather your memories of high school, and not just your own experience but also those of your classmates, as you perceived them. Then, consider: at which are schools better -- at instruction, or at enlightenment? If your mind was awakened in high school, congratulations, but chances are it would have awakened in any case, whether you had school or not. But you were less likely to have learned on your own polynomial equations, how to write a paper, historical analysis, or other such building blocks of intellectual life. I didn't want to learn these things, but I was taught them nonetheless, and I'm grateful for the experience.

As someone who barely made it through high school alive, having nearly been eaten from the inside-out by the seething hatred for the place that sat in me like a tape-worm and gnawed at me every single day I spent within its walls (forcing me, once drinking in the afternoon was a feasible alternative, to spend as little time there as possible), I have a knee-jerk reaction to the idea of being forced to read anything. (A reaction, by the way, that has only been sharpened by many long nights yawning and grumbling through yet another book under review.)

However, Roy's point – that finding something teens want is a fool's errand, so you might as well give them something they need – is a good one. There are books that went right by me during those days that never quite left me. And happy accidents happen: some people who know me are rightly sick of me relating how, in Grade 9 English, I laughed at all the dirty jokes in Shakespeare, but there it is. I still read the stuff. (And still laugh.)

Part of the reason I forced my son to watch Kurosawa movies and Grand Illusion with me back when he was barely four years old: I hoped the experience would linger. (That and the fact that I'm a selfish bastard...)

Jughead's eyes are closed, but mine are wiiiide open

Macleans has a piece on economic anxiety making it's way into otherwise ageless (and humourless) comic strips.

Hey man, I was on this one two years ago.

And I did it for free.

(Oh wait, that's not a point in my favour.)

Uh rilly güd po'm

Here.

I knew English cooking was terrible, but...

So, after a week of respectful (nay, stunned) silence in honour of a much-missed colleague and friend, I figured it was time to get back to the usual juvenile offerings. The kind of thing Derek, to his eternal credit, would never have let me post over at Quillblog.

Found this at Sadly, No!:

PLAYBOY: In Fight Club Durden pees into the soup he’s serving and farts on the food. Do you know people who have done that?

PALAHNIUK: I know people who worked at the big hotels in downtown Portland, and yeah, they would tell stories like that. There was a kid in England — and very handsome, well-presented kid — who told me, “I work in an upscale restaurant in London, and we do things to celebrities’ food all the time.” I said, “Tell me one person.” He said, “I can’t because there are only two of these restaurants, and it’d be too easy to find me.” I wasn’t going to sign his book until he told me one person. So he sheepishly goes, “Margaret Thatcher has eaten my sperm.” I started laughing. As soon as I did, he got bold. He said, “At least five times.”

Derek Weiler, 1968-2009

I only heard the news a few hours ago after having been away all weekend, so I am still processing this.

For now, please go to Quillblog for more about Derek.

Here's an interview with Derek from last year.

Deep Throat(ed)

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

All hail

I was ready for rain.

I was ready for snow.

I was ready for wind.

What I was not ready for, was millions of jagged pebbles of ice being flung into my face the entire ride to work.

I mean, I am used to wincing the entire bike ride to work, but that's usually out of guilt and shame...

Shits 'n' Giggles Inc.

Oh yeah, uh... Something That Is Blatantly Untrue!

April Fo–





Shit, too late.

So, why are we in Afghanistan again?

From The Independent:

Afghanistan's President, Hamid Karzai, has signed a law which "legalises" rape, women's groups and the United Nations warn. Critics claim the president helped rush the bill through parliament in a bid to appease Islamic fundamentalists ahead of elections in August.

In a massive blow for women's rights, the new Shia Family Law negates the need for sexual consent between married couples, tacitly approves child marriage and restricts a woman's right to leave the home, according to UN papers seen by The Independent.

Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme by Tracy Daugherty

My review of the new biography of Donald Barthelme in the Toronto Star.

Why didn't they use The Troggs?

The trailer for Where the Wild Things Are just got hoisted onto the hinternet:



Movies based on picture books are a dubious proposition, as plotting them out to a full hour and a half inevitably leaves lots of room for the insertion of lessons that weren't there, and that even contradict the spirit of the original. The big one for me will always be Shrek, which took a great little story about an unashamedly nasty and obnoxious troll who stays nasty right to the end, and added in a whole bit about friendship and loneliness and being misunderstood and blah blah blah. The movie wasn't a complete horrorshow, but it was a pretty distant cousin to the book.

Already from the trailer above, it looks like Max is set up as a Lonely, Imaginative Boy With Problems. Which is fine, I guess, and it's not like some fine filmic hay hasn't been made from that premise, but in the book he's something of a little shit. That's the point. He acts up, gets punished, finds a way to turn his punishment to his advantage, has his fun, then gets homesick and hungry. Here, he looks like he's just looking for a big, furry friend.

Other than that, though, it looks great – I'm a sucker for the Henson-style man-in-puppet-suit method – and if they have avoided using Robin Williams or Seth Rogen or someone to voice said big, furry friend, it may end up being a good one. Either way, I'll be seeing it with half-pints in tow.

(And the fact that Dave Eggers co-wrote the screenplay doesn't worry me at all – he's already a schmaltz-meister, so this is probably a better fit for him than fiction.)

Hither and yawn

Just an update on some places where I've been paid to string sentences together lately:

• the new issue of Canadian Notes & Queries is their "future" issue. I contributed an essay on the "Future of Canadian Fiction." (Spoiler: it ain't pretty.)
• the current issue of Canadian Family is their "gender" issue. I've got a thing in there called "The Princess and the Pirate," about having both a son and a daughter, and how the two of them simultaneously conform to and warp gender stereotypes.
• the upcoming issue of Maisonneuve includes a brand new short story by me. It's about unhappy people (obviously), but also features a reclusive fantasy writer and a monkey that shits too much.
• this coming Sunday's edition of the Toronto Star will include my review of Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme. I will link to that when (and if) it gets put online.
  

I've also recently joined on as the fiction editor for Driven magazine. Since Gary B. (the pun-happy editor I referred to a few posts back) took over last year, the magazine has featured original fiction from Andrew Pyper, Kenneth J. Harvey, and Joseph Boyden. So kudos to Gary. The upcoming issue, out shortly, features a nasty little nugget from Pontypool author Tony Burgess.

(Very soon, too, Driven's web site will begin featuring original micro-fiction from authors both known and not.)

Ikhyd Edgar Arular Bronfman

That's the name of M.I.A.'s kid.

It's like something out of a "satirical" novel by a Canadian "humour" columnist.

Why are newspapers in trouble again?

The most prominent story on the front page of today's Star:



"Maybe Fido should have worn a Speedo," for a picture of a dog losing his pants.

Classic.

Vernal affairs

Happy first day of A) spring, B) the rest of your life.

Why didn't he just get out of a limo while wearing no panties?

Spotted this ad over at The Huffington Post:

Times are tough when the President of the United States has to schlep up to Ottawa in February just to get noticed.

Mystery and manners on the Dundas streetcar

I swear to god I watched Flannery O'Connor step off the streetcar in front of me on my bike ride to work today.

Same stern yet slightly ironic look through semi-translucent horn rims, same distressed bank of cumulus cloud hair, wearing a dress that could conceivably been made out of gingham, and carrying a library copy of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, which seemed to fit.

The only difference was that she seemed downright sprightly, compared to the double-caned lupus sufferer you see in photographs. Maybe death is agreeing with her.

The warrior and the photographer

From the Star:

MONTREAL – In one of his most iconic photos, Canadian Press photojournalist Tom Hanson captured a defiant Mohawk warrior – arm raised, rifle in hand, standing atop an overturned police van – during a tense standoff with police in Oka, Que., in 1990.

Remarkably, the lives of Hanson and his masked Mohawk subject, Richard Livingston Nicholas, converged again this week when they both died suddenly, in separate incidents, on the same day.

They were both 41 years old.

Straight from my lips to Mark's beard

I seem have made a frenemy. (Check the "reader of the day" box on the right-hand side.)

If it's not there anymore, here it is:

The man with a movie camera

My friend Ian Daffern has started a company, Vepo Studios, "that develops and produces short films, videos and promotional solutions for the arts, culture, and publishing industries."

That's all code for "we make porn," by the way.

(Bonus: a Daffern co-production from early last year.)

Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, witless?

Mark Steyn is a dangerous idiot with a suspiciously homophobic streak for a bearded, show tunes-loving man who is drawn to big, strong, authoritarian types.

I'm pretty sure I've made that point here before, and I know that others have made it, too, but it bears repeating.

Especially when Beardo is denouncing the month-and-a-half old Obama administration as "incompetent." And slipping in a not-very-subtle racist crack ("Barack ain't run nuthin' but his mouth") while doing so.

It's nice to see him take a shot at fellow expat-Canadian David Frum, though, which raises hopes there may be some retaliatory man-boob nurpling coming soon.

Mawk on

Commenting on war widow Mishelle Brown, Christie Blatchford has some stern words for those who would use the deaths of Canadian soldiers as an occasion for purple prose:

There wasn't a mawkish note to any of it, and in our world that is saying something, well accustomed as we are to those who believe that a feeling un-emoted, preferably in the most public imaginable way [sic], is not a feeling actually felt.

Yes, one should show restraint and dignity in times of war, and not let one's words go all sloppy in the most public imaginable way.

Here's Blatch demonstrating her un-mawkish restraint last August:

In this beautiful place perched atop the green Arghandab River plain, before the sun was even up Sunday over ochre-coloured stony hills, the young men of Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, the Royal 22nd Regiment, gathered in anguished knots, clamping one another in brief, fierce embraces, consoling the most stricken with a clap on the back or a tender rub of a bent head.

Blatchford calling for greater restraint and dignity in the face of human tragedy is like a pedophile urging children not to talk to strangers. Both know full well that, were this advice heeded across the board, they'd have nothing to do.

Rabbit is twitching

The still-warm corpse of John Updike contributes a thoughtful review of a new Cheever bio to the latest New Yorker.

By sheer coincidence, I am the midst of working on a review (for the Toronto Star) of a new doorstop-bio of an author who, like Cheever, was best-known for his short fiction, was closely associated with The New Yorker, and who directly and indirectly influenced thousands of other writers, often for the worse – Donald Barthelme.

Anyone who has come within smelling distance of my own misery-soaked fiction could easily guess I am more of a Cheeverite, but I do think there is a strain of domestic melancholy in Barthelme's work that often gets overlooked amid all the funny names and narrative jiggery-pokery, and that the two writers are not quite the polar opposites they are assumed to be.

Not to mention that Cheever was more of a fantabulist than his reputation as "Chekhov with a high ball in his hand" would suggest. With some adjustments, both tonal and typographical (and maybe cosmological), "The Swimmer" could have fit into Barthelme's oeuvre.

There's no life like it

A.L. Kennedy on the writing life:

But I do try to tell other people what it will come to – hence my occasional visits to Warwick University and its creative writing students. They want to write, they have application and vigour, they've all come on since I read them last and yet ... it would be unfair not to remind them of how horrible their futures may become. If they're unsuccessful, they'll be clattering through a global Depression with a skill no one requires, a writing demon gnawing at their spine to be expressed and a delicately-nurtured sensitivity that will only make their predicaments seem worse – and yet somehow of no interest to anyone else. If they're successful, they still may not make a living, will travel more than a drug mule, may be so emotionally preoccupied that they fail to notice entire relationships, will have to deal with media demands no sane person would want to understand and may well wear far too much black.

Writers always overdo the self-pity bit – I try to keep in mind Mordecai Richler's frequent admonition that we volunteered, and weren't drafted. But given that I am currently re-immersing myself in a novel-in-progress (which is a little like lowering yourself into a pond full of stagnant water in March at six in the morning while wearing clothes made entirely out of wool), I'm in a particularly "I can't go on, I'll go on" kind of mood.

"Wish I had me some money, I'd buy me some better luck"

Sign o' the times: the front shelves of a big grocery store near me, which usually feature seasonal candy and the like, are right now loaded up with no-name macaroni and cheese, canned meat, cheap condiments, and budget tuna.

Thank god publishing's still in good shape...

Musick to read by

There hasn't been much about my novel 'round these parts, and that's because, well, what's to say? In about two months, it will have been a year since the poor thing was let loose on the world. Work continues, in fits and starts, on novel #2, which will have very little in common with the first – except that it will also be about boring, unlikeable people who go through small, unremarkable routines against a drab background. With any luck, it will at least be funnier.

That's all by way of a preface to my telling you that Alex Lukashevsky, who composed and performed music both at my launch and at my appearance at Word on the Street (and who was recently given the tribute treatment by Final Fantasy – see below), has posted the piece he performed on his myspace page. Click on "Dumbdowneden Suite" – then listen to the other songs.

In particular, listen to "Horsetail Feathers," which, in addition to being a great song and one of my favourites of his (my kids love it, too, and do the "ah hoo's" when it comes on in the car), is one of the songs Final Fantasy did the full-orchestra number on. Not only that, he made a video. And it's... well... have a look – eye of the beholder and all that:

The end of history (or maybe just historical novels) - UPDATED

I don't agree with everything Walter Benn Michaels writes* in this Bookforum essay about the effect of the economic crash on literature, but I'm definitely with him on this:

In 1987, the year Beloved appeared, the top tenth of the American population made about 38 percent of the nation’s income. (The bottom fifth made about 3.8 percent.) That top figure was substantially up from the relatively egalitarian numbers that prevailed from the end of World War II until the late 1970s, but that rise was nothing compared with the jump that has taken place since: In 2006, according to the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, the top tenth earned about half of all the money made in America, more even than in 1928, till then the highest figure of the century. The bottom quintile got 3.4 percent.

For a great many Americans, in other words, the boom has been the problem, not the crash. But the more unjust and unequal American society has become, the more we have heard about how bad, say, the Holocaust was. And in the past few years, as the actual Holocaust has begun to show the first signs of brand fatigue, enterprising writers like Roth (in The Plot Against America) and Chabon (in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union) have boldly moved beyond bad things that happened in the past to bad things that didn’t happen in the past: a Nazi takeover of the United States and the exile of a whole society of Eastern European Jews to Alaska.

You can hear the creak of the hobbyhorse and the sharpening of the axe throughout the essay, and linking literature so directly to the economic realities can easily lead to a stiff-backed form of literary marxism, one that makes its point by cherry-picking this or that award winner or bestseller and letting it stand in for the entire realm of contemporary literature.

But all the same, those links do exist – not that you'd know it from the way fiction gets written about in most book sections, where a breezily post-historical drawing room tone of pure aesthetic appreciation (something that has never existed) tends to reign.

Later, he dubs the memoir a "Thatcherite genre," which is a little sweeping, but hard to dispute.

Not that you can't dispute it, and that's the point. There is nothing to dispute in bland appreciation of books, because there is nothing there in the first place.


* for example, this:

You get a better sense of the actual structure of American society from any of Ellis’s famous descriptions of what people are wearing ('a suit by Lubiam, a great-looking striped spread-collar cotton shirt from Burberry, a silk tie by Resikeio and a belt from Ralph Lauren') than you do from all the accounts of people reclaiming, refusing, or repurposing their cultural identities.

No you don't, and to say you do is just lazy Russell Smithism. Brand names can reinforce a point about character or setting, but to say they alone nail down both is the equivalent of those high school English tables of symbols where the colour blue always means "God" or something. In the not-very-distant future – indeed, if not already – people will read those descriptions and wonder whether the character is supposed to be seen as haute or gauche.



UPDATE: Thought I'd pull out this earlier rant about historical fiction from way, way back in 2006, when we were younger, more alive, more open to possibilities, more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, with bellies more full of piss and vinegar, etc.

"Before I forget, Mr President, did you know our Governor General is black?"

Ensuring we continue to be seen as the dorky, approval-seeking irrelevancies we are, Peter Mansbridge wrapped up his exclusive interview with Barack Obama thus:

Q: I'm down to my last minute. A couple of quickies on Canada -- your sense of the country. I mean, I think -- as you may know, you carry Canada on your belt. (Laughter.) That Blackberry is a Canadian invention.

THE PRESIDENT: Absolutely.

Q: You've been to Canada once. What's your sense of the country?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, yes, I've been to Canada a couple of times. Most recently it was to visit my brother-in-law's family who was from Burlington right outside of Toronto. Look, I think that Canada is one of the most impressive countries in the world, the way it has managed a diverse population, a migrant economy. You know, the natural beauty of Canada is extraordinary. Obviously there is enormous kinship between the United States and Canada, and the ties that bind our two countries together are things that are very important to us.

And, you know, one of the things that I think has been striking about Canada is that in the midst of this enormous economic crisis, I think Canada has shown itself to be a pretty good manager of the financial system in the economy in ways that we haven't always been here in the United States. And I think that's important for us to take note of, that it's possible for us to have a vibrant banking sector, for example, without taking some of the wild risks that have resulted in so much trouble on Wall Street.

Q: Appreciate this very much. You still haven't seen your first hockey game.

THE PRESIDENT: I'm looking forward to making it happen at some point.

Q: Mr. President, thank you very much.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

What? No mention of Feist? Seth Rogen? The Canadarm?

I like to think that, at the end of this interview, Mansbridge leaned in for a dap, and was denied.

MIA now officially a MILF

From The Guardian:

MIA gave birth to a baby boy this week, having gone into labour just hours after appearing at the Grammy awards.

"SUNDAY NITE I CAME HOME FROM THE GRAMMYS STILL IN THE MOOD TO PARTY," she explained on her MySpace blog this weekend. "I coulda easily gone out but I went home instead. Lucky I did! Coz my early stage labour kicked in around 2am."

(That's right: MILF jokes.)

If it pees, it ledes

John Barber opens his Globe column about the controversial new Canada Prize for the Arts and Creativity thus:

David Pecaut stuck in his thumb, pulled out a plum, and said sorry so profusely you'd think he had peed in the pudding instead.

If only he had followed that up with "What was intended as a golden shower for Canada's arts sector has turned into a pissing match."



(That's right: pee pee jokes.)

[Insert pun here]

I have an editor friend (hello, Gary) who has a troubling propensity for inserting puns everywhere they can be inserted – and a few places they really shouldn't. Everything he touches editorially becomes lousy with kneeslappers.

But not even he, at his worst, would give a review of a new translation of Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov's 19th-century comic novel of sloth and torpitude, a title like "Sofa, So Good."

Belated thanks

"If I say that Henry Green taught me how to write it implies that I learned, and it is not a business one learns – unlearns, rather, the premature certainties and used ecstasies unravelling as one goes, with each day new blank paper to confront." – John Updike

Ingrate that I am, I had forgotten, until I read the obituary in The Economist, that it was Updike's writing about Henry Green that led me to that writer – who remains a favourite, as well as that other tricky thing, an "influence."

Don't laugh at this blog, for your own sake

Reality, not content with constantly outstripping satire, has begun actually stripping it. And beating it.

From the Daily Mail:

A British ‘resident’ held at Guantanamo Bay was identified as a terrorist after confessing he had visited a ‘joke’ website on how to build a nuclear weapon, it was revealed last night.

Binyam Mohamed, a former UK asylum seeker, admitted to having read the ‘instructions’ after allegedly being beaten, hung up by his wrists for a week and having a gun held to his head in a Pakistani jail.

It was this confession that apparently convinced the CIA that they were holding a top Al Qaeda terrorist.

But The Mail on Sunday can reveal that the offending article – called How To Build An H-Bomb – was first published in a US satirical magazine and later placed on a series of websites.

Written by Barbara Ehrenreich, the publication’s food editor, Rolling Stone journalist Peter Biskind and scientist Michio Kaku, it claims that a nuclear weapon can be made ‘using a bicycle pump’ and with liquid uranium ‘poured into a bucket and swung round’.

Despite its clear satirical bent, the story led the CIA to accuse 30-year-old Mohamed, a caretaker, of plotting a dirty bomb attack, before subjecting him to its ‘extraordinary rendition programme’.

During his eight-year imprisonment, Mohamed has allegedly been flown to secret torture centres in Pakistan, Morocco, an American-run jail known as the Dark Prison near Kabul in Afghanistan and, finally, to Guantanamo Bay.

I suspect that we'll be digging up this kind of awful shit – and worse – for decades to come.

Stepping Razor, Honest Ed

I didn't notice until just the other day that, among the hundreds of framed, signed headshots of old skool actors and such on the walls of Honest Ed's, is a framed, signed headshot of Peter Tosh.

It's down near the toy section, if you're looking.

The Spare Room by Helen Garner

My review of Australian Helen Garner's memoir-like new novel in the Toronto Star.

Fat man denounces fatwa

In the new issue of Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens writes about the "cultural fatwa" that the West has been put under – has put itself under, through self-censorship and preemptive fear – in its dealings with Islamic fundamentalism.

So there is now a hidden partner in our cultural and academic and publishing and broadcasting world: a shadowy figure that has, uninvited, drawn up a chair to the table. He never speaks. He doesn’t have to. But he is very well understood. The late playwright Simon Gray was alluding to him when he said that Nicholas Hytner, the head of London’s National Theatre, might put on a play mocking Christianity but never one that questioned Islam. I brushed up against the unacknowledged censor myself when I went on CNN to defend the Danish cartoons and found that, though the network would show the relevant page of the newspaper, it had pixelated the cartoons themselves. And this in an age when the image is everything. The lady anchor did not blush to tell me that the network was obliterating its very stock-in-trade (newsworthy pictures) out of sheer fear.

There's nothing particularly wrong here, and it's hard to go wrong kicking back against the forces of tyranny and the suppression of ideas and art through means both violent and non-. The only real problem is that these expressions of despair of our unwillingness to confront Islamic radicalism head-on must necessarily float on a kind of ahistorical plane where the only thing the West has ever offered the world is the olive branch of free expression, only to have it repeatedly slapped out of our hands and stamped into the dirt by crazed religionists.

Must we always turn the other cheek so? Hitchens asks. The end of his essay is pretty revealing, actually:

But the culture that sustains [Rushdie], and that he helps sustain, has twisted itself into a posture of prior restraint and self-censorship in which the grim, mad edict of a dead theocrat still exerts its chilling force. And, by the way, the next time that Khomeini’s lovely children want to make themselves felt, they will be armed not just with fatwas but with nuclear weapons.

Ah, see? All our timidity and Christ-like notions of cheek-turning and such will only leave us vulnerable to nuclear annihilation at the hands of the ayatollahs!

So what is the answer? Buy war bonds and Rushdie novels? Hitchens makes an implicit connection – pretty explicit, actually – between a war of competing ideologies and a larger geopoltical one. And this is where that complete lack of context gets tricky. After all, all our mushy, relativist ideas of tolerance and accomodation has led to the simultaneous occupation two Muslim countries and the propping up of a dozen utterly corrupt, tyrranical, and not-at-all nice regimes around the Islamic world, some of which will eventually fall, leading to even more tyrranical and not-nice Islamic fundamentalist regimes. I'm not sure the Islamic world can handle any more niceness from us.

Art and ideas is always getting enlisted in this or that ideological or political struggle, sometimes for the better, sometimes worse. The point that Hitchens is intentionally eliding is that those who feel the Iranian nuclear threat is an existential one do so for reasons other than a desire for greater literary freedom. In fact, for many of them, shutting writers up and blocking ideas is part of their plan, too.

But then, this isn't the first time Hitchens has gotten in bed with people who represent the very forces he claims to deplore. And once again, just like a fundamentalist, he will justify this in the face of objective reality, and will do so based on the fatal misreading of a book – in his case, George Orwell's Collected Essays.

One in 112,000...

Just found this in my Inbox:

Dear Mr. Whitlock,
An entry has been prepared about you for inclusion in a forthcoming edition of Contemporary Authors (CA), a reference series that provides information on approximately 112,000 writers in a wide range of media, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, journalism, drama, and screenwriting.

I wonder if I can get someone to buy me a drink for this...

Updike at Rest

From The Guardian:

The American author John Updike has died of lung cancer aged 76, his publisher said today.

A novelist, short-story writer, poet and critic, Updike was considered one of the most important figures in postwar American literature.

Who's going to break the news to Nicholson Baker?

Get on the snake

Don't know what you are doing tonight, but here's what I am doing:

Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Gladstone Hotel Ballroom
1214 Queen St W, Toronto
7pm (doors 6:30 pm)
$5 cover (book rebate) kids get in free

This Is Not A Reading Series presents the launch of Shaun Smith's SNAKES & LADDERS with an evening of games!

This Is Not A Reading Series presents an all-ages evening of fun and games to launch Shaun Smith's YA novel Snakes & Ladders. First, Quill & Quire Books For Young People editor Nathan Whitlock will interview Smith while they play a giant version of Snakes and Ladders.

Then you can grab some chips and dip and settle in to play classics games like Scrabble and Clue, as well as groovy new games (courtesy of Scooter Girl Toys) like Blokus, Qwirkle and Wacky Stacky. Games Masters Shannon Abel and Myrocia Watamaniuk will be calling out Twister moves and settling disputes at the Scrabbleboard. ­ A This Is Not A Reading Series event presented by Pages Books &
Magazines, Dundurn Press, Gladstone Hotel, EYE WEEKLY, Take Five on CIUT,
and Scooter Girl Toys.

Come one, come all. And bring children.

Poppy vs. The Ram

I'm doing a lot of reading/writing for money at the moment (thank god), but one thing I want to do when I'm through some of that is write up something on this humble site (that is, for free) comparing Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky and Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler. Specifically, I want to look at how the two films work as ostensibly realistic character studies that contain much that is highly stylized, sentimental, and clichéd.*

And, having laid that, I want to make clear which movie makes schmaltz work, and which just about gets sunk by it. (Hint: I love just about everything Mike Leigh has ever done except Vera Drake, and just because a film has a scene in which a man gets stapled repeatedly in the chest doesn't mean it isn't schmaltzy.)

Who knows? Maybe I can write this one for money, too. In the meantime, go see both movies (if you haven't already) – they are both more than worth seeing. Not as a double-feature, though.



* "In other words, they're movies," I can hear some of you saying. Yeah, well, shut up.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

[Just because I've got the weight of the world and not a lot say about it at the moment, here's a review I wrote of Haruki Murakami's running memoir that was originally intended for the Toronto Star last fall, before the book section there started shedding pages. Thank you to the Star and Dan Smith for letting me reprint it here.]





What I Talk About When I Talk About Running Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel Bond Street Books/Doubleday Canada $27.95

Despite the plainly informative, Carver-biting title of Haruki Murakami's newest book, the hardest thing for a reader to do is decide what it's actually about. Ostensibly, it’s a kind of memoir of the globally popular Japanese author’s obsessive dedication to long-distance running, a sport he took up in the early eighties after selling his successful jazz bar and starting out as a novelist. (He felt he needed the exercise.) In the introduction, he admits that he has been trying to write this book for ten years without success. “Running is sort of a vague theme to begin with,” he writes, “ and I found it hard to figure out exactly what I should say about it.” On the evidence here, it would appear he never did figure that one out.

The connections between novel-writing and marathon-running are fairly obvious: the loneliness of the act, the single-minded discipline and sheer will power required, the need to best your own previous efforts, and so on. Murakami returns repeatedly to these themes, but never with any central point in mind or with any sense of enlargement. In fact, there seems to be no organizing principle at play here at all, so we are left with accounts of Murakami’s various marathon runs, detailed run-downs of the training he does before each, and only the barest of glances at the one activity we can only assume holds a higher place of importance in his life than running: writing.

The slackness and seemingly off-the-cuff nature of the book would not be such a problem were the writing itself vivid or revelatory or simply interesting enough to draw us along. Instead, we get only the banal ramblings of a writer who is either unwilling to reveal the kind of complexity that could be more usefully channelled into fiction, or – scary thought – who is genuinely this dull.

Consider these nuggets of wisdom:

“Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the world is made up of all kinds of people.”

“Some people can work their butts off and never get what they’re aiming for, while others can get it without any effort at all.”

“You have to wait until tomorrow to find out what tomorrow will bring.”

Etc., etc. Elsewhere, the music of the Lovin’ Spoonful is described as “sort of laid back and never pretentious,” and there is an admission that being old “feels really strange.” If this is how casual his published prose can get, I shudder at the thought of the man’s e-mail style – does he even bother with words, or does he just drag one sleepy arm across the keyboard and hit “Send”? It’s possible that some of this can be laid at the feet of the book’s translator – possible, but not probable, given the abundance of Hallmark-worthy sentiment crowding the book.

Murakami says that he is often asked what he thinks about as he runs. His answer: “I don’t think much of anything worth mentioning.”

As with running, so with writing about running, it would seem.

Goodbye to all that

The verbal gaffes of the outgoing American president are the lowest hanging fruit on the humour tree, and I tend to believe that it's a bad move to make genuinely dangerous people seem merely buffoonish (see: Colbert Show, The), but I have to admit this is pretty funny (and satisfying, in a "about to become one very disappointed mushy default liberal" way):

Listening post

For someone who used to feel all smug and superior about riding my bike through rain, snow, and sleet, I've been doing a stupid amount of driving lately. The only consolation, aside from being warm and dry and superior in a completely different way, is the amount of music I've been listening to without much distraction.

Currently: New Amerykah, Volume One by Erykah Badu, Road Til the Casket Drops by Clipse, American Gangster by Jay-Z, Charlie Louvin Sings Murder Ballads and Disaster Songs by, well, Charlie Louvin, and half-a-dozen episodes of Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour.

ADD TO THAT: Wale's The Mixtape About Nothing, the best Seinfeld-themed hip hop ever. (And I was never even all that crazy about Seinfeld...)

Death if necessary, but not necessarily death

Odd quote in Roy McGregor's column in Saturday's Globe and Mail about the death of young hockey player Don Sanderson:

Team Canada head coach Pat Quinn, no stranger to tough and rough hockey, said it was "a terrible thing to happen" and had no idea "how hockey will look on this sort of thing."

"There's no place for death if it can be avoided," Quinn said. "I don't know what the right answer is."

Not so wild about Harry

My (brief) review of Harry, A History: The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon by Melissa Anelli in the Toronto Star.

Steel yourselves for the holidays

A poorly shot, badly lit, and all-too-brief clip of the best little steel band I am personally acquainted with:



Happy holidays, all.

The one that didn't get away

From MSNBC.com:

MEXICO CITY - A U.S. anti-kidnapping expert was abducted by gunmen in northern Mexico last week, a sign of just how bold this nation's kidnapping gangs have become.

U.S. security consultant Felix Batista was in Saltillo in Coahuila state to offer advice on how to confront abductions for ransom when he himself was seized, local authorities said.

In other cheap irony news, a fitness instructor got fat, a cop got arrested, and a motivational speaker just couldn't get out of bed in the morning.

(This is all assuming that Batista will soon be released unharmed. If anything happens to him, then I am a heartless asshole.)

One drink, just one more, and then another

When I was a kid, this was called "tuning up":

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

December 17, 2008 at 5:00 AM EST

In Britain it's called "pre-loading," in the United States it's "pre-gaming," and here, with typical Canadian candour, it's "pre-drinking."

[...]

"It's certainly something that we see," said Superintendent Hugh Ferguson of 52 Division, who oversees Toronto's nightclub district.

"A lot of the kids are having several drinks before they come down, and they they're going to the clubs and they're one drink away from being at the limit."