End-of-the-Week Jottings

Posted 16 November, 2007 in Jottings | 2 comments

• A thoughtful piece by Daniel Green on the disparity between early Ian McEwan and recent Ian McEwan. Green prefers the stylized Gothicism of The Cement Garden and First Loves, Last Rites to the realism of Amsterdam, Atonement, or On Chesil Beach. I’m not sure whether this marks a conscious “selling out” on McEwan’s part, or is simply the mark of a writer’s maturation (in the sense of his developing style), but I’d have to agree with Green that there is something more arresting in the earlier works than in anything McEwan has published recently.
• Panic on the hazards of having one of your guilty pleasures picked for Oprah’s Book Club. As a bit of a book snob myself, I freely admit to retroactively disliking books that Oprah has chosen for her club: We Were the Mulvaneys, The Poisonwood Bible, Love in the Time of Cholera. Then she goes and chooses something like Light in August or Anna Karenina (which I’ve heard rumours she hadn’t read when she picked it for her club), and I find myself helplessly waving a white flag and muttering in a despairing voice: “You win, Oprah. You win.”
• The best explanation of the current Hollywood writers’ strike I’ve yet seen. (via Bookninja)
• Tom Brevoort, Executive Editor for Marvel Comics, takes a surprisingly contrarian stand on the utility of collecting omnibuses (omnibi?) of “classic” comics: “The people creating those stories were just trying to sell that month’s issue and put food on the table. They had no idea there’d be book collections of this stuff decades later. It was designed to be read, enjoyed and thrown away, disposable entertainment.”
• As a writer, what writerly strengths do you see in others that you wish you possessed? (via Moonlight Ambulette)

Post-Giller Hangover Jottings

Posted 9 November, 2007 in Jottings | 2 comments

• My recent encounter with the Scotiabank Giller shortlist has left me exhausted and slightly depressed, and not really in the mood to talk about literature. Call it the “anti-Giller effect.” While I work to drag myself out of my self-induced funk, here are a few items that caught my eye over the last couple of days.
• Librarians in Hillsborough County, Tampa, scramble to track down copies of the children’s Magic Attic Club series, after a local parent discovered that an 800 number printed in the books connects readers to a phone-sex line.
• Parents in Charleston, West Virginia are upset over the “graphic depictions of violence, suicide and sexual abuse” in two novels by Pat Conroy — Beach Music and The Prince of Tides — that were provided to their children as high school reading material. I’m with the parents on this one: heaven forfend their adolescent offspring should read anything dealing with issues such as violence, suicide, and sexual assault. That might give the young whippersnappers the idea that these things actually exist in the world and that they might be relevant to their own lived experience. Obviously, we can’t have that.
• In an instance of literary piling-on, Robert Fulford and — will wonders never cease? — Conrad Black have joined Knopf Canada publisher Louise Dennys in decrying Peter C. Newman’s negative Globe and Mail review of former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s new volume of memoirs. Both Fulford and Black make a couple of valid points, not the least of them being that Newman’s characterization of Chrétien’s years in power as a “baleful interregnum — an extended, listless March break between the reigns of Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper” seems inaccurate: ten years is not exactly an “interregnum,” and if one were to take the long view of Canadian history, it could be argued that the Mulroney years constitute the “interregnum” between long periods of Liberal governments. Having said that, it doesn’t take long for Black to devolve into ad hominem attacks on Newman, whom he describes as “shambling about in his ridiculous sailor’s cap, bilious and at least verbally incontinent … pitiful but not at all sympathetic.” The irony inherent in Black calling someone else verbally incontinent appears to escape him.
• Kerry Clare on reading in the bath.
• The Battle of the Post-Its: Claire Cameron vs. Will Self.

Back-to-School, Desperately-Trying-to-Stay-Hip-with-the-Kids-Well-into-My-Thirties Jottings

Posted 30 August, 2007 in Jottings | 7 comments

• It’s Frosh Week at Ryerson University, and the campus environs have been descended upon by marauding bands of freshly scrubbed, rosy cheeked young men and women who not only don’t look old enough to drink (or, in the men’s case, to shave), but look as though they’ve only recently graduated from high chairs and sippy cups, which makes me feel the encroaching tendrils of old age and decrepitude profoundly, if somewhat unnecessarily. So, in an attempt to stave off incipient feelings of irrelevance and obsolescence, I give you TSR’s first — and likely only — MTV-oriented roundup.
• The New York Times is reporting that MtvU, an MTV affiliate broadcast exclusively into college campuses, has chosen a poet laureate, and it’s not Justin Timberlake or Avril Lavigne. Instead, the poet who will be bringing iambic pentameter sexyback is eighty-year-old John Ashbery, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. I wonder if this means Lauren and Heidi will start carting around volumes of modernist poetry on The Hills, or is that just too much to ask?
• Writing in something called The Daily Toreador, Britney Drumm suggests that Miss South Carolina’s recent botched attempt to answer a question at the Miss Teen U.S.A. beauty pageant is emblematic of the ills of such competitions. If you haven’t seen the clip (which I won’t link to: it’s easily found, if you’re so inclined), Miss South Carolina is asked why she thinks that one fifth of American teenagers are unable to locate the United States on a map, which precipitates a rambling and incoherent response about “U.S. Americans,” “the Iraq,” and South Africa. According to MSNBC, Miss South Carolina, whose real name is Caitlin Upton, later claimed that “she was so overwhelmed by the moment she barely heard any of the question.” I have a certain amount of sympathy for this, and for the unfortunate fact that, thanks to the Internet, her embarrassing moment is being kept alive for mockery online. Obviously one would have wished for a more coherent response to what seems like a fairly straightforward question, but the continued delight over her evident discomfort has a vicious and mean-spirited aspect to it that is upsetting, to say the least.
• Talib Kweli, one of the most articulate, politically aware, and intelligent hip-hop artists currently working, has been denied the brass ring once again. His new, career-best release, Eardrum, which (among other things) quotes Langston Hughes in its opening track, has been kept out of Billboard’s number-one chart position — by the soundtrack to High School Musical 2. And the world slouches one step closer to the Apocalypse.
• R.I.P. Hilly Kristal, founder of legendary New York punk rock club CBGB’s, dead of complications from lung cancer. He was seventy-five years old.
• The Killer’s frontman Brandon Flowers made one of the most arrogant and hubristic comments by a rock star since John Lennon claimed that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus when he said that Sam’s Town is “one of the best albums of the past 20 years” (for the record: it’s not). But that hasn’t seemed to hurt the band any. According to bassist Mark Stoermer, they’ve managed to land some heavy help on at least one of their new tracks. One of the songs the band is currently working on is a duet — with Lou Reed. What was I saying about the Apocalypse?

Frantic, Scattered, Edge-of-Panic Jottings

Posted 28 August, 2007 in Jottings | No comments

• It’s the last week of August, and I’m staring down the first week of September with the kind of foreboding that T.S. Eliot reserved for “the cruellest month,” which he for some reason located at the beginning of spring. See, every year I attend the Toronto International Film Festival, where I engage in the relatively preposterous endeavour of attempting to view twenty-five (or more) films over the course of ten days. This is a peculiar strain of insanity that only dedicated cinephiles could possibly comprehend, but it also means that there’s always a frantic rush in the lead-up to TIFF to clear off my desk all the accumulated detritus of the summer. Which frantic rush begins … now.
• David Halberstam, author and journalist, is unable to tour in support of his new book, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, because he’s, ahem, dead. So, a group of authors, including Joan Didion, Bob Woodward, and Seymour Hersh, are doing his tour for him. I can’t decide whether this is a touching tribute to a departed and much-loved writer, or the apogee of cynical marketing (according to the New York Times article the idea originated with Hyperion, the book’s publisher). In any event, it may symbolize the Boomers’ ultimate conquest: in their quest to remain vital and young, now apparently even death doesn’t stand in their way. I can’t wait for Margaret Atwood to get wind of this. Coming soon: The Really LongPen, which allows authors to sign books from the great beyond. George A. Romero is said to have already optioned the film rights.
• How do you organize your books? Alphabetically? By subject? By height? If all else fails, you could try organizing them the way Callie Miller has: by colour. I’ve been meaning to link to this brilliantly eccentric (read: slightly mad, but nonetheless hilariously attractive) idea for a while now, but it’s somehow slipped through the cracks. Check out the photos on her site: they’re spectacular, in a kind of how-did-she-manage-to-pull-that-off? way. Apparently she received some antagonistic e-mails in response to this project, and she herself admits that it might not have been the most functional way of arranging her library, but man does it look cool!*
• Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, already the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and an Oprah endorsement, has won Britain’s James Tait Black memorial prize.
• The Big Bad Book Blog offers writers six tips on how to conduct a good interview. It’s sad that authors these days are judged more on the cut of their suit than the quality of their writing; it’s even sadder that this observation has been made so frequently that it’s taken on the mantle of a cliché and yet nobody seems to care, presumably because they’re too busy watching E! True Hollywood Story.
• I’m going to go now. I appear to be cranky and stressed.

*[UPDATE: It has just come to my attention that the second linked photo of rainbow books, although appearing on Callie Miller’s site, does not picture Callie Miller’s library. It’s a shot from a Flickr user named chotda. TSR regrets any confusion caused by this error. Appropriate wrists have been slapped.]

Friday, Deadline-driven Jottings

Posted 27 July, 2007 in Jottings | No comments

• A peculiarly literary podcast from the CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi. Ghomeshi interviews Don McKellar, who is currently shooting an adaptation of José Saramago’s novel Blindness; McKellar’s script is being directed by Fernando Meirelles, with Julianne Moore, McKellar, and Gael Garcia Bernal among the cast members. I haven’t been this excited about a single film in years. (My favourite Ghomeshi quote from the McKellar interview: “The end of civilization should include me.” If we cast our minds back to his days with Moxy Fruvous, it could be argued that it already has.) The podcast also features interviews with Veronica Tennant, currently serving as something called a “movement director” for the stage adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad in London, and “cuddly” ninja blogger George Murray, talking about one of TSR’s favourite sites, Bookninja.
• Speaking of Bookninja, the site currently features a new story called “Impossible to Die in Your Dreams” by Journey Prize winner Heather Birrell.
• Nerd alert: Zach Snyder (300) is directing an adaptation of Alan Moore’s groundbreaking comic book graphic novel Watchmen, which will star Matthew Goode, Billy Crudup, and Jackie Earl Haley.
• Tim O’Brien, interviewed at Artful Dodge: “The purpose of writing is to enhance mystery, not solve it.”
• Anthony Lane, reviewing Danny Boyle’s Sunshine in The New Yorker: “Their task is to explode a stellar bomb, ‘with a mass equivalent to Manhattan island,’ on the surface of the sun. The effect will be, we are told, ‘to create a star within a star,’ a plan that has not succeeded since the union of Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland.”

Jottings

Posted 26 July, 2007 in Jottings | 2 comments

• Russell Smith’s column in today’s Globe and Mail is about “the commodification of the erotic,” and the idea that Western society has become saturated in sexual imagery and language (which Smith sees as preferable to the kind of repression that prevailed in the ’50s). What I find most amusing about this is that the column is located directly beneath an article about Martin Gero’s debut feature, which will open the Canada First! series at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. The title of the film? Young People Fucking.
• “I don’t think bloggers read”: Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, profiled at the Guardian.
• They paved paradise, and put up a coffee shop.
• “Just kick the fucking thing.” (via Ed.)
• James Wolcott tears Mark Steyn a new one. (via Whitlock.)
• Craig Davidson’s record as an amateur boxer is now 0-2. He deconstructs his bout with rival novelist Jonathan Ames (who is forty-three years old, by the way), here.
• Moonlight Ambulette on libraries.

Jottings

Posted 24 July, 2007 in Jottings | No comments

• Yeah, what Daniel Green said. My favourite bit in this piece comes when Green quotes Charles Taylor castigating Harold Bloom for thinking that a book that has sold 35 million copies could possibly be bad. To hear Taylor explain it, if 35 million people have laid down their hard earned cash, that number is sufficient in itself to induce a bad book to spontaneously morph into a good one.
• As part of their ongoing campaign to save the book reviews, the National Book Critics Circle blog has posted an essay by Lindsay Waters, and editor at the Harvard University Press, on the importance of criticism to literature.
• Alison Bechdel on e-mail: “E-mailing has become almost an autonomic bodily function for me - it’s just going on all the time in the background. Yes, it’s all very distracting. But from what, really? What else would I be doing?” Oh, for the love of …
• Harry Potter 7, the Digested Read. Warning: spoilers inside. Spoilers, I said, SPOILERS … Don’t look … Don’t … Augh, my eyes!
• Remember last fall’s launch for Craig Davidson’s novel The Fighter? You know, the one where Davidson got in the ring with poet Michael Knox and had his ass handed to him? Well, apparently unbroken, Davidson is doing it again for the U.S. launch, this time battling Jonathan Ames. The fight goes tonight in Brooklyn, for anyone who happens to be in town and wants to see two novelists beating the snot out of each other.

Jottings

Posted 17 July, 2007 in Jottings | No comments

• Jeff Gomez, director of Internet marketing for Holtzbrink Publishers, and the author of the forthcoming book Print Is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age, argues that if publishers want to escape the fate of record companies — steadily declining sales, mass industry layoffs, the decline of the album format in favour of downloaded singles — they should not repeat the mistakes of the record industry, but rather should embrace the Internet, free up digital copyrights, and become more flexible about the formats in which they offer their products. While I am an avowed advocate of books as physical objects, I do think that publishers have so far largely failed to exploit the potential of the Internet and related technologies. This is starting to change: HarperCollins, Anansi, and Cormorant all have presences on the social networking site Facebook, and the very fact that Holtzbrink Publishers employs a director of Internet marketing indicates that there is an industry willingness to adapt. Having said that, it’s important to bear in mind that books and music are not the same things: computers are a more obvious delivery system for multimedia content than they are for novel-length works, which are still easier to consume and manipulate when printed on paper and bound down one edge.
• One author who’s not afraid to embrace new technology wholeheartedly is Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek, who is serializing her new novel online, for free. Entitled Neid (Envy), it’s available at elfriedejelinek.com to any and all — provided you can read German. Quoted in the Chicago Tribune, Jelinek says that she “find[s] the Internet to be the most wonderful thing there is,” and that publishing online is “a wonderfully democratic method.” Democratic, yes, in the sense that everyone with a modem can access it, but I remain unconvinced that because pretty much anyone can publish a novel online, that means that pretty much anyone should publish a novel online. Talent, after all, is not democratic. Moreover, it’s easier for the recipient of the Nobel, worth 10 million Swedish kronors ($1.5 million Canadian) to be magnanimous in giving work away for free than it is for, say, a first-time novelist who might have been paid a $2,000 CDN advance against royalties.
• Pre-orders for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows are breaking records in the U.K. and zzzzzzzzzzz … Huh? Oh, sorry, I nodded off there for a second.
• Italian novelist Robert Bernocco has Elfriede Jelinek beat. The Internet is cool and all, but Bernocco has completed work on Compagni di Viaggo (Fellow Travellers, although my interest was initially peaked because I mistook the word “viaggo” as referring to an erectile dysfunction drug), a 384-page science-fiction novel, written entirely using the T9 function on his cell phone. The book is available at Lulu.com, but please don’t buy it.
• You can tell a lot about a book, and its author, by what kind of wine is served at the book launch. (via Maud.)
• Daniel Green deconstructs John Freeman’s recent Guardian essay claiming that The Sopranos is partly responsible for the decline in novel-reading: “If the novel is being marginalized, it is not because too many people are watching HBO; it’s because too many novelists are writing novels that are clearly meant to be made into movies.”
• Tom Stoppard is seventy this year? Say it isn’t so.
• Nooooooooooo … ! (via Ed.)

Frantic, I’ve-Got-a-Plane-to-Catch Jottings

Posted 28 June, 2007 in Jottings | No comments

• Robert Ludlum may be dead, but Jason Bourne lives on.
• Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, has been nominated for the James Tait Black Memorial prize. One of these days, I’ll get around to reading it, I swear.
• Patricia comments on a blogger who started an online petition to get the CBC to include a regular joe — specifically, him — amongst the celebrities on the 2008 Canada Reads panel. I’m not sure how I feel about this. Regular readers of this site will be aware of my feeling that literary criticism isn’t a dilletante’s game and not every opinion is deserving of equal weight, but Canada Reads isn’t really literary criticism, it’s showbiz. And besides, I’m not sure that Jim Cuddy or Steven Page are any more qualified to discuss the merits or drawbacks of Canadian fiction than is the average Canadian plucked off the street.
• Sheila Parr’s thoughts on creativity.
• A mostly negative review of Tina Brown’s new biography of Princess Diana, which was commissioned by The Spectator, then shitcanned for reasons that remain unclear, has cropped up in the Guardian.
• Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker. (via Whitlock.)
• I’m off to Vancouver for the long weekend — kind of a working mini-vacation — so posts may be sporadic until I return. I’ll try to find an Internet connection when I’m out west, but I make no promises. In the meantime, stay well, and we’ll see ya on the flipside.

Jottings

Posted 25 June, 2007 in Jottings | No comments

• A jury has decided that Laura Albert, who wrote under the name JT Leroy and created a fictional back story for this nonexistent author, is guilty of fraud. Fine, I suppose; she didn’t just write under a nom de plume, she actively promoted “JT Leroy” and his story — teenage runaway street prostitute with AIDS — as authentic, and duped a number of people, including Winona Ryder, Gus Van Sant, and Mary Gaitskill, into believing that Leroy was a real person. What I don’t understand is how Antidote International Films, Inc. can sue to recoup the royalty payments on Leroy’s novel Sarah, which it optioned before the truth about the book’s authorship came to light. True, the novel was promoted as being semi-autobiographical, which is a problem if the autobiography of the author is a complete fabrication. However, Albert is not James Frey: she never tried to pass the book off as anything other than a novel. And the novel still remains. Antidote should not be able to demand royalty payments back simply because the book turned out to be written pseudonymously.
• Penguin is planning to serialize parts of Michael Winter’s new novel, The Architects Are Here, on Facebook. Again, fine, except they’re claiming that it’s the first Facebook serialization of a novel ever, which, love the folks at Penguin though I do, is plain wrong. Brad Kelln, who has published psychological thrillers with Insomniac Press and is now under contract with ECW, has been serializing a new novel on the popular social networking site for the past few months. (If you’re on Facebook, you can find his novel under the group “I am aware Dr. Brad Kelln writes books.”)
• Barbara Gowdy’s Helpless is reviewed in the Guardian. Joanna Briscoe says that the book, about a pedophile, is “more reminiscent of Stephen King than of Nabokov” and that “[t]here’s a strange sense here that Gowdy has both held back and stepped too far.” I still haven’t got around to this one, but I’m glad to see Gowdy getting exposure internationally.
• Edward Gorey was a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Now why doesn’t that come as a surprise? (via Maud.)
• Moonlight Ambulette on pairing art books and music.
• Courtney Solomon sounds like one sick puppy.
• Zachariah Wells on unsolicited submissions to literary journals: “Picked up Books in Canada today. In it, an essay by John Barton called “Where Have All the Poets Gone?”, lamenting the small number of poetry submissions he gets at The Malahat Review. He seems dismayed and a little puzzled by the whole thing. Which makes me think of a farmer who, after years of planting potatoes in the spring and ploughing in the fall, wonders why his once-rich field now yields such a paltry crop.”