Actor (and now author) David Thewlis came to this year’s International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront in Toronto to chat about his first novel, The Late Hector Kipling (Viking Canada).

Thewlis can make ‘em laugh merely by pointing at his own chin. Only Penguin publicity manager Debbie Gaudet, lurking in the background, seems unamused. (From left: Titus McNally, Rupert McNally, singer/songwriter Tom Phillips, Gaudet, Thewlis, Ben McNally.) Photo courtesy of the IFOA.

The final three YouTube video trailers for Douglas Coupland’s new novel, The Gum Thief, were released last week. The series has been attracting steady traffic since the campaign started a month ago.

CBC.ca reports:

[Coupland’s publisher] Random House worked with marketer Crush Toronto to produce the nine viral shorts, which they hope will attract people to Coupland who don’t usually read fiction.

The most popular videos, which have collectively logged over 3,000 views, are the ones based on Glove Pond, the novel-within-the-novel at the heart of The Gum Thief; they feature Coupland deadpanning over an animated collage of late 1970s-style advertisements for cigarettes and scotch (excerpts from the novel are cleverly worked in as ad copy). The result is surprisingly stylish, casual, and hip, and oh so Couplandian.

The irony, of course, is that Coupland’s viral campaign is itself embedded with ads – whether intentionally or not – for Staples, the office supply superstore in which the novel is set. Three of the videos are filmed in the aisles of an anonymous Staples outlet, while two others feature stop-motion animation using thousands of small “s” staples – what a marketer might call subliminal metonymy.

Whether the real-life Staples is privy to – or paying for – any of this is yet unclear, but Coupland could take a cue from author Jim Munroe, who in 2002 invoiced real-life brands lampooned in his novel Everyone in Silico for (admittedly unwanted) product placements.

Weighing in on the controversy over whether or not you-know-who is you-know-what, The New York Times cultural critic Edward Rothstein makes the reasonable assertion that “it is possible Ms. Rowling may be mistaken about her own character.” He goes on to say that “Ms. Rowling may think of Dumbledore as gay, but there is no reason why anyone else should.”

While this seems to be consistent with Rowling’s own views on the matter – all she said in the first place was that she “always thought of Dumbledore as gay” – Rothstein’s clear-eyed insight is nevertheless buried amidst an elaborate exegesis of the Potter oeuvre – at the end of which he rules that Dumbledore is decidedly not gay:

There is something alien about the idea of a mature Dumbledore being called gay or, for that matter, being in love at all. He may have his earthly difficulties and desires, but in most ways he remains the genre wizard, superior to the world around him.

Elsewhere, Rothstein places Dumbledore in the canon of other a-sexual wizards.

The master wizard is not a sexual being; he has shelved personal cares and embraced a higher mission. And if he indulges in sex, it marks his downfall, as it did, so legend tells us, with Merlin, the tradition’s first wizard, who is seduced by one of the Lady of the Lake’s minions. Tolkien’s wizards — both good and evil — are so focused on their cosmic tasks that sexuality seems a petty matter. Gandalf eventually transcends the physical realm altogether.

Well, excuse me, but “blahbitty blah blah” to you, too. While Rothstein takes obvious delight in his pseudo-intellectual take on Harry Potter, it leaves this Quillblogger cold. Jeez, grown-ups can be such bores.