Jacob McArthur Mooney on the demise of Pages

Poet Jacob McArthur Mooney is the latest writer-in-residence to pepper Open Book: Toronto’s pages with witty first-person anecdotes about the writing life. His first topic is not the Munro-Giller debate, thankfully, but another much-twittered topic: the demise of Toronto’s Pages Books and Magazines.What starts as a nostalgic entry about his first visit to the Queen Street West store develops into an interesting rumination on west-end gentrification:

As of this morning, the city has lost a thriving, Canadian-focused business, thrown out of its location not because sales are down but because members of the neighbourhood it helped create have made an executive decision to be a different kind of neighbourhood. This isn’t the grassroots evolution of taste it’s been made out to be. Sure, there’s a Club Monaco and a Starbucks on the block, but Pages’ two closest neighbours are still a basement-bred used clothing store and a mid-level sushi place. Rumours of the death of Queen West have been somewhat exaggerated for commercial effect.

Somewhere along this error chain, there simply must be a handful of people who went out of their way, or who inconvenienced themselves, to see to it that there was no longer room on Queen West for Pages Bookstore, and it wouldn’t be at all childish to call these people “enemies.” Enemies to literature, to art, even enemies to the city. It’s possible that one of those enemies is Pinedale Properties, Pages’s landlord, though as of this January CBC.ca article, the store’s owner, Marc Glassman, seemed to think they were trying their best to keep the store in its home. Maybe one of the enemies is around the corner, at the Chapters location south of Queen and John, though whereas sales volume was not among the key reasons listed for the store’s demise (given only as “skyrocketing rents”), possibly not. I’m just a new arrival who liked the bookstore. I can’t know these things for certain.

The gospel according to Dan Brown

New York Times columnist Ross Douhat (who does not look at all like David Brent … well, maybe just a little) believes that Dan Brown’s novels are successful not just because the books are cheesy page-turners, or because the notion that the Vatican conceals nasty little secrets is inherently interesting (especially to many Catholics), or even because, well, corny thrillers often sell huge, but because The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons (the film of which just opened to big numbers) present an alternative vision of faith, one more attuned to modern life:

Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He’s writing thrillers, but he’s selling a theology.

[...]

For millions of readers, Brown’s novels have helped smooth over the tension between ancient Christianity and modern American faith. But the tension endures. You can have Jesus or Dan Brown. But you can’t have both.

Jesus and Dan Brown, then, are kind of like cake and cookies – you can only pick one.

Anosh Irani in the NYT

An op-ed piece by Canadian novelist and playwright Anosh Irani appears online in The New York Times today. Irani, who was born in Mumbai, writes about the seige of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel during the Mumbai attacks last week.

As I watched the Taj Mahal hotel breathe fire, I remembered my grandfather, Burjor. For more than 30 years, he was the florist at the hotel, ordering roses flown in daily from New Delhi.

I essentially grew up in the hotel. And I would have been there on Wednesday night, browsing in its bookshop, and at the Leopold Café nearby, if it were not for the last-minute distraction of a soccer match in my neighborhood.

It is one of the quietest and most picturesque locations in Mumbai. It can feel like it’s a world away from the city. Except when it’s not, like when the attacks started.

Irani was named as one of Q&Q‘s “writers to watch” in 2002. In 2007, he was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Drama for The Bombay Plays, and his second novel, The Song of Kahunsha, was a Canada Reads selection.

L.M. Montgomery’s sad end

For the second week in a row, the weekend brings news about the suicide of a well-known writer. Arguably as startling as the news last week that David Foster Wallace hanged himself at the young age of 46 is the revelation, in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, that Lucy Maud Montgomery, one of Canada’s most beloved authors, also killed herself, with a drug overdose at the age of 67.

The revelation was made in an essay by Montgomery’s granddaughter, Kate Macdonald Butler, who writes that she wants to bring Montgomery’s long battle with depression and its sad conclusion to light in the hopes that it will encourage more people suffering from mental illness to seek help:

I have great admiration for my grandmother, for her contribution to Canadian literature and culture, her strength of character, and the love, pride and sense of responsibility she gave to my family.

I am proud of her courage, given how isolated and lonely she must have felt during certain periods of her life. I wish that her family or community had had some of the tools that are available today. I expect that most families continue to be bewildered about how to help loved ones who suffer from debilitating depression.

I hope that by writing about my grandmother now there might be less secrecy and more awareness that will ease the unnecessary suffering so many people experience as a result of such depressions.

Sadly, Wallace’s recent decision to end his life after a lengthy bout with depression indicates that, while the stigma may be less prevalent in 2008 than during Montgomery’s lifetime, the disease still claims the lives of many people who can see no other way out of their circumstances.

Here’s hoping that next week will provide some literary news that is not suicide-related.

Time to retire Catcher in the Rye?

There’s an internet debate a’brewin’ over the merits of that perennial high school syllabus placeholder The Catcher in the Rye. Over at Good Magazine, Anne Trubek makes an impassioned plea to replace it with something newer and fresher:

J.D. Salinger’s novel was edgy and controversial when teachers first put it on their syllabi. But that was 50 years ago. Today, Salinger’s novel lacks the currency or shock value it once had, and has lost some of its critical cachet. But it is still ubiquitously taught even though many newer novels of adolescence are available.

Meanwhile, the scribes at Gawker have responded with an equally impassioned WTF? directed at Trubek:

My initial reaction to this would be that we read Catcher in The Rye because everyone on some level at some point loves Catcher in The Rye, and we are fast running out of things we can say that about.

Lytton’s had enough!

The winner of the 26th annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for the worst opening line of an imaginary novel was announced last week (the winner wrote something about passion in a New York City taxi).

However, in a letter to the editor in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, Chris O’Connor, mayor of Lytton, B.C. (Bulwer-Lytton’s namesake), announced the town will host a debate on the merits of Bulwer-Lytton’s prose.

For years, Professor Scott Rice has been making sport of Lord Edward George Bulwer Lytton, with his Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

Lord Lytton was both a statesman and an author. As colonial secretary, he helped create the Crown Colony of British Columbia in 1858.

Prof. Rice has accepted our challenge to debate Lord Lytton’s writing prowess in our village this Labour Day weekend, with the Hon. Henry Cobbald-Lytton, his great-great-great-grandson.

The Guardian covered this story as well, publishing the entire ridiculed first sentence of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, Paul Clifford, showing there’s more to “It was a dark and stormy night” than Rice suggests.

The debate will take place on Aug 30 and, as O’Connor says, “It won’t be a ‘dark and stormy night’; the debate is at 3:00 p.m.”

Best book ads ever?

Quillblog recently stumbled across a New York Times slide show of book advertisements from their so-called “Golden Age,” 1962-1973.

Why those dates? The books – and the ads for them – were terrific: fresh, pushy, serious and wry, often all at the same time. There was a new sense of electricity in the culture and in the book world.

Each ad, scanned from a dusty magazine, is accompanied by a paragraph of droll commentary. Highlights include the ad for Cormac McCarthy’s 1968 novel, Outer Dark:

It’s a grinding story about a woman, Rinthy, who bears her brother’s baby, only to have him leave the infant in the woods to die. You don’t get a sense of the novel’s dark subject matter in this perky advertisement, though. It focuses instead on McCarthy’s rugged good looks (he was 35 at the time), and even “pops” his head, giving this ad an ironic, cheerful, proto-Spy magazine feel.

The ad for two Tom Wolfe books, also from 1968, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Pump House Gang, has a couple sitting side by side, asking “Which bestseller should you read first?”

“Honey, my Tom Wolfe book is more zeitgeisty than your Tom Wolfe book.” “Yes, dear, but mine has so many more exclamation points. I counted.” “It’s nice to be both literate *and* happening, isn’t it?” “Do you want to make out?” This advertisement … resembles an ad for coffee, cologne, or condoms as much as it does a typical book ad.

Bellow’s regrets

Slate’s political columnist Timothy Noah takes umbrage with author and book editor Adam Bellow’s response to a two-year-old column about the Coulter-ization of conservative-leaning books in the U.S. Bellow, who edited two of the books cited in the column, hits back in a piece in the summer issue of World Affairs. But it’s not quite the riposte it might have been – while shrugging off Noah’s criticisms that the current crop of conservative tomes borrow too liberally (pun intended) from right-wing commentator Ann Coulter’s shrill style, Bellow also concedes that the contemporary conservative dialogue ain’t what it used to be.

Granted, Bellow’s piece is about more than just Noah’s column, but regardless, it seems Noah comes out on top in this battle of wits:

Whether Bellow will go to hell for publishing either work is not a question that interests me. I’ve interviewed him by phone a couple of times—we’ve never met face to face—and I found him congenial and intelligent. (Also—full disclosure—when I first started writing this column, he sent a complimentary “if you ever want to write a book” note.) Unlike [...] Bellow, I experience no distress when I contemplate conservatism’s intellectual bankruptcy. Not my religion, and therefore not my problem. But I’m not too fine a person to enjoy Bellow’s torment and vacillation in reaction to something I wrote. Yup, it sucks to be a conservative today. Have a Maalox on me, pal.

In appreciation of Anne

As you may have heard, spunky red-haired heroine Anne of Green Gables is celebrating her centenary this year. Here at home, we’ve always been partial to L.M. Montgomery’s tale of the spirited orphan who grows up on idyllic Prince Edward Island, but it’s amazing to note just how wide an impact our Anne has had on readers around the world.

Slate.com weighs in with some interesting insights into the novel, in light of Random House’s decision to issue and heavily promote a centennial edition of the book on their Modern Library classics imprint. (“Tolstoy and Anna Karenina, meet L.M. Montgomery and Anne Shirley.”)

To some, this canonical promotion of a writer who would probably now be classified as a YA author might seem preposterous. To certain left-leaning cultural theorists who won’t embrace a heroine with a less-than-revolutionary CV—Anne, once the Island’s best young scholar, chooses to become a devoted wife and mother of six—the Modern Library’s decision may appear to be a reactionary cave-in to nostalgic sentimentality. All very plausible arguments. But none of them is capable of accounting for Anne’s still-flourishing appeal and the series’ intellectual hold on the women who read it as young girls. Revisit Anne of Green Gables with an open mind, no matter what your age, and there’s an excellent chance you’ll feel that Anne deserves, however belatedly, to dwell in the company of Huck and Tom.

Apparently the folks at Jezebel.com agree, asking, “Why isn’t Anne Shirley worthy of Huck Finn status?” In a post today, they suggest that Anne should be part of the “kiddie canon” of classic books read in schools:

And yet how many of you (outside of Canada — it might be required reading there) actually read it in school? How did a book — eventually a series of books — beloved by even sometimes-YA author Mark Twain not make it into the canon of Things You Must Read? And how many of the books in that canon are about girls?

A few favourite CanLit covers

Entertainment Weekly recently compiled a list of the 25 most memorable book covers from the past 25 years. Their list is slightly skewed toward ubiquitous mega-designer Chip Kidd, who scores six entries. The lone Canadian reference is Fred Marcellino’s 1986 cover for Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

We thought we’d play along by starting a list of our own favourite CanLit covers.

Below, you’ll find five picks from the bookshelf of Q&Q art director Gary Campbell. These bold, daring, and memorable covers grabbed him straight away, regardless of the title or the author’s name.

	The Bookseller Matt Cohen (Knopf Canada) Designed by Gordon Robertson, 1993
	Miss Wyoming Douglas Coupland (Random House Canada) Designed by John Gall, 1999
	This All Happened Michael Winter (House of Anansi Press) Designed by Bill Douglas, 2001
	Not Wanted On The Voyage Timothy Findley (Penguin Books Canada) Designed by Soapbox Design Communications, 2006
	The Boys In The Trees Mary Swan (Henry Holt) Designed by Lisa Fyfe, 2008