Happy New Year, 2008

Posted 1 January, 2008 in Uncategorized | No comments

Woke up this morning to a gentle fall of snow, which continues unabated. The city is resting under a canopy of pristine white, its streets are quiet, presumably because the urban denizens are sleeping off whatever bacchanalian revelries transpired last night. (Sadly, your humble correspondent was unforgivably well behaved and is therefore unable to regale you with stories of streaking through the high school football field, funnelling beer through a vacuum hose, or waking up in a hotel room in Prague with absolutely no idea how he got there. Hmm … Perhaps I’ve just hit on a resolution for the coming year …) By tomorrow things should get back to a normal routine, the new-fallen snow will have turned to a brownish slush, and the hangover will kick in for real. In the meantime, please accept my heartfelt wishes for a happy, safe, prosperous, and literary new year.

Downtime at TSR

Posted 21 December, 2007 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

A combination of my frenzied capitulation to the consumerist impulses of the season and my own talent for procrastination has left me with a ton of shopping to get done before I skip town tomorrow for a few days, so posts may be a bit light until after the 25th. I’ll try to get something up here later today, but if I fail in this vain endeavour, please forgive me. It’s only because I’m involved in the Hurculean task of overcoming my misanthropic inner Sartre while battling hordes of frothing, snarling Visigoths in Christmas store lineups. You really wouldn’t want to read me when I’m in such a mood, anyway.

Return of the Reluctant Calls It a Day

Posted 18 December, 2007 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

Ed Champion, the prodigious litblogger who is the driving force behind Return of the Reluctant, has decided to pull the plug on the blog after four years.

The blog, whose name and inaugural post on December 2, 2003 (along with an accompanying quote from The Godfather, Part III) always did suggest a kind of love/hate relationship with the form, was a mainstay for those of us who troll the literary byways of Web 2.0. Along with his podcast series, The Bat Segundo Show (which Ed assures us will continue), Return of the Reluctant provided a sometimes overwhelming daily dose of literary news, links, and gossip. It was written in an arch, sarcastic style, and was unafraid to criticize mainstream news organs such as the New York Times Book Review (a favourite whipping boy of Champion’s) and Time’s Lev Grossman, who wrote a piece for the magazine entitled “My Mortal Enemy” about Champion.

I was frequently astounded by the sheer amount of material on the site — at times I half believed that Champion employed a platoon of researchers and typists to create and collate the mountains of content that he posted daily — and enjoyed the author’s contrarian (and often ironic and hyperbolic, something his critics were seemingly unable to understand) take on the literary matters of the day.

Ed is leaving the blogosphere (for the moment: he’s done this before, but insists that this time, he’s serious) to devote more time to his journalism and to a novel in progress. TSR thanks him for the enjoyment he’s provided over the last four years, and wishes him all the best in his future endeavours.

The Hands-Down Dumbest Comment I’ve Read in Ages

Posted 14 December, 2007 in Uncategorized | No comments

From a BBC news article about a virtual world built around the plays of William Shakespeare:

If you have a theory about human society and it does not survive the transition across the membrane to a virtual world then it’s not a very interesting theory.

Jesus wept. Somebody invent a time machine to take me back to the 1800s. I think I’d be much happier there.

Get Ready to Lose Your Shit

Posted 10 December, 2007 in Uncategorized | No comments

Stephen Fry has a blog.

How difficult, how exquisitely difficult it is to know where to begin. Anyone who has had the time or disposition to read the comments that readers have submitted to these pages over the last three weeks or so will be aware of a number of issues that need addressing.

Firstly and most crucially: how do Terry Pratchett readers eat soup?

Go there. Now. That’s all.

I Wish I’d Said That

Posted 5 December, 2007 in Uncategorized | 3 comments

“Nearly all the discussions of criticism that I am acquainted with start off with a false assumption, to wit, that the primary motive of the critic, the impulse which makes a critic of him instead of, say, a politician or a stockbroker, is pedagogical — that he writes because he is possessed by a passion to advance the enlightenment, to put down error and wrong, to disseminate some specific doctrine: psychological, epistemological, historical, or esthetic. But this is true, it seems to me, only of bad critics, and its degree of truth increases in direct ratio to their badness. The motive of the critic who is really worth reading — the only critic of whom, indeed, it may be said truthfully that it is at all possible to read him, save as an act of mental penitence — is something quite different. That motive is not the motive of the pedagogue, but the motive of the artist. It is no more and no less than the simple desire to function freely and beautifully, to give outward and objective form to ideas that bubble inwardly and have a fascinating lure in them, to get rid of them dramatically and make an articulate noise in the world.”

– H.L. Mencken, reprinted in A Mencken Chrestomathy, p. 429

I’ll Have a Half-Double-Decaf-Half-Caf

Posted 5 December, 2007 in Uncategorized | 9 comments

A friend of mine pointed me in the direction of this amusing Dave Barry article on coffee:

Specialty coffees are very popular these days, attracting millions of consumers, every single one of whom is standing in line ahead of me whenever I go to the coffee place at the airport to grab a quick cup on my way to catch a plane. These consumers are always ordering mutant beverages with names like “mocha-almond-honey-vinaigrette lattespressacino,” beverages that must be made one at a time via a lengthy and complex process involving approximately one coffee bean, three quarts of dairy products and what appears to be a small nuclear reactor.

This is something that has annoyed me for some time, especially before early-morning screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival, when I’m stuck in line behind a phalanx of artificially tanned ponces from LA, all wanting their decaf mochaccino with soy milk heated to precisely 180 degrees, if you please, while all I want is a cup of industrial-strength, high-octane black coffee to wake me up sufficiently to sit through the latest tearjerker from Uzbekistan.

Barry’s article is good, but this is my favourite take on the whole “specialty coffee” industry.

Bragging rights to anyone who knows where the title of this post is lifted from.

Fighting Outside My Weight Class

Posted 19 November, 2007 in Uncategorized | 8 comments

According to this site, which rates the reading levels of blogs, you need a postgraduate education (which, ironically, your humble correspondent does not possess) to understand my blog.

Apparently Whitlock’s blog is written at a genius level. I figure the Giller coverage bumped me out of the “genius” category. Or maybe it’s my repeated use of the word “assmonkeys.”

[UPDATE: It would indeed appear that, as of December 3, 2007, my site has been downgraded to a high school reading level from a postgrad college reading level. This is distressing news. I’m clearly going to have to resort to more subordinate clauses and latinate phraseology in the future to get my old rating back. (I’d love to know what kind of algorithm they use to determine a site’s reading level. Is it something like v / a x ge = r, where v = latinate words like “vicissitudes,” a = juvenile vocab like “assmonkeys,” ge = spelling and grammar errors, and r = reading level? Or is it, as I suspect, entirely arbitrary?)]

Ten Short Stories

Posted 1 November, 2007 in Uncategorized | 9 comments

We interrupt our marathon of Giller goodness to point to Kerry Clare’s list of ten favourite short stories, which was prompted by a similar list in the Guardian. This got me thinking about the versatility and rich heritage of the short story, and how different literary sensibilities will lead people down different paths. For example, I’d heartily endorse Kerry’s choice of Flannery O’Connor (though I’d choose a different story), but “Moral Disorders”? Really?

Kerry got me thinking about my own favourite short stories, which are legion. While it’s difficult to limit the choice to a mere ten, my version of Kerry’s list appears below. These are not necessarily what I consider to be formally the best short stories ever written, mind you, but each one offers the kind of richness — the fullness of character, the depth of emotion, the aesthetic wallop — that many novelists strive for yet never achieve. These ten stories can’t help but make your life better.

1. “The Lottery Ticket”, Anton Chekhov

2. “The Middle Years”, Henry James

3. “The Dead”, James Joyce

4. “Barn Burning”, William Faulkner

5. “Hills Like White Elephants”, Ernest Hemingway

6. “In the Penal Colony”, Franz Kafka

7. “Pierre Menand, Author of the Quixote“, Jorge Luis Borges

8. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, Flannery O’Connor

9. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, Joyce Carol Oates

10. “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”, Haruki Murakami

Now That’s a Surprise

Posted 17 October, 2007 in Uncategorized | 2 comments

Anne Enright has won the 2007 Man-Booker Prize for her novel The Gathering. Enright beat out the establishment favourite, Ian McEwan, and the odds-on bet, Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip.

Before presenting the award, Sir Howard Davies, director of the London School of Economics, said, “I think a little more distance, and critical scepticism, is required by our reviewers, together with greater readiness to notice new names.” I couldn’t agree more.