Canadian literary event round-up: Nov. 4-10

Here are just a few of the literary events happening across the country in the next week:

• BookFest Windsor holds readings, discussions, and workshops, Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario (Nov. 4–5, tickets at bookfestwindsor.com)
• Toronto Public Library hosts Human Library, various branches (Nov. 5, 12 p.m. to 5 p.m., free)
• Anne Emery launches Death at Christy Burke’s, Durty Nelly’s, Halifax (Nov. 5, 3 p.m., free)
• Andrew Nikiforuk signs Empire of the Beetle as part of the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival, Willock & Sax Gallery, Banff (Nov. 5, 6 p.m., free)
• David Sedaris reads from his collected works, The Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts (Nov. 5, 8 p.m., from $45)
• Don Ferguson, Georges Laraque, Will Ferguson, and David Berlin discuss their writing at Books and Breakfast, Paragraphe Bookstore, Montreal (Nov. 6, 10 a.m., $32)
• Wade Davis discusses Into the Silence, Metro Toronto Reference Library (Nov. 7, 7 p.m., free)
• Scotiabank Giller Light Bash, various locations across Canada (Nov. 8, tickets at gillerlightbash.ca)
• Allan Levine launches King, Laurier House, Ottawa (Nov. 9, 6 p.m., free)
• Barbara DeLory launches Three Centuries of Public Art, Nova Scotia Archives, Halifax (Nov. 9, 7 p.m., free)

Davidar tells his side of the story

Former Penguin Canada president David Davidar has hit back at claims by ex-employee Lisa Rundle that he had sexually harassed her over a three-year period. Via his lawyer, Peter Downard, Davidar released a lengthy statement recounting the nature of his relationship with Rundle, insisting that it was a consensual one:

David Davidar has not sexually harassed anyone. He has not assaulted anyone. David Davidar had a consensual, flirtatious relationship that grew out of a close friendship with a colleague. He deeply regrets the hurt this has caused his wife.

Commencing in late 2005, Mr. Davidar and Ms. Rundle had offices next to each other at Penguin. They became friends.  At work, Mr. Davidar and Ms. Rundle spent significant time in each other’s offices. At Ms. Rundle’s invitation, Mr. Davidar played tennis with her at her tennis club. They went to a tennis tournament together. They attended the theatre together. They had lunches in restaurants together.

[...]

Ms. Rundle and Mr. Davidar kissed on two occasions. The first was in Ms. Rundle’s room at the October 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair referred to in Ms. Rundle’s claim. However, contrary to Ms. Rundle’s claim, Mr. Davidar did not bully his way into her room, nor did he force himself upon her. Ms. Rundle did not object when they kissed. After the kiss, Ms. Rundle said she wanted to take a nap, as she was feeling jet-lagged. She asked Mr. Davidar to wake her up in an hour.

Two days later, Mr. Davidar and Ms. Rundle went to dinner at a restaurant. After dinner, Mr. Davidar kissed Ms. Rundle again, this time in his hotel room. Ms. Rundle then left to spend the evening with a friend. The next morning, Mr. Davidar and Ms. Rundle returned to Toronto. Upon arriving, Ms. Rundle asked Mr. Davidar for a ride to her home, which he provided.

Ms. Rundle subsequently told Mr. Davidar that she had enjoyed their kisses in Frankfurt, whether or not they were ever repeated. She did nothing to convey to Mr. Davidar that his attention was unwanted.

The statement goes on to claim that Samantha Francis, another employee who filed an earlier complaint of sexual harassment against Davidar, told him that the human resources department had simply misunderstood an enquiry she had made about one of his comments, and that she wished to withdraw the enquiry against him.

The charms of David Sedaris

David Sedaris has just swung through Canada to promote his latest book of essays, reminiscences, and exaggerations, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, and there’s been lots of coverage. Like this Q&A with Hannah Sung on the CBC Arts site, which includes the following baffling excerpt:

Q: Do any recent encounters with fans stand out?

A: There was a guy last night at the reading whose parents are from India. I saw him standing there, and I said, “Do you work at Canadian Tire?” And he didn’t, he had some grown-up job, but he said, “It’s funny, everywhere I go, people ask me to get them another size or just ask me questions as if I work there.” I’d never in my life talked to anybody with that problem! It was fascinating to me. I absolutely love it when I learn about something like that.

We here at the Quillblog labs may just be missing something, or perhaps some detail has been lost in the telling, but we’ve been scratching our heads trying to figure out how that reply makes any kind of sense. Sedaris looks at a fan “whose parents are from India” and asks if he works at Canadian Tire? (And to those who do work at Canadian Tire: don’t worry, you may work your way up to a “grown-up job” yet.)

If anyone can clear things up for us, hey, that’s what the comments section is for.

Bookmarks: Shakespeare, Waugh, Sedaris, Seinfeld, Bush

Some book-related links:

• Stolen Shakespeare folio recovered in U.S. (Dallas Morning News)
• The battle over Brideshead Revisited (Times Online)
• David Sedaris in Ottawa (The Ottawa Citizen)
• Latest round in the Seinfeld cookbook fight (The New York Times)
• Corruption alleged over donations to Bush presidential library (Think Progress)
• Baghdad bookseller holds out hope for Iraq (Financial Times)
• Who needs bookstores when you’ve got libraries? (Scrimisms)

Bookmarks: David Sedaris, Gotti’s daughter, and Baghdad’s National Library

Some book-related links:

• Rick Mercer interviews David Sedaris (The Globe and Mail)
• HarperCollins to sue Victoria Gotti over unwritten memoir (NY Daily News)
• Meet the director of Baghdad’s National Library (The Guardian)
• Antique book hunt can get vicious (Calgary Herald)
• Real estate crisis reflected in shift in real estate books (The New York Times)
• Who wants a “worthy” book? (The Guardian)

David Sedaris: survivor

A new collection of David Sedaris essays – entitled When You Are Engulfed in Flames – comes out next week, and Entertainment Weekly has used the opportunity to check in with the humorist and to find out how he survived all those accusations of “reportorial inaccuracy” that dogged James Frey and Augusten Burroughs, et al.

If you ask Sedaris, the Frey backlash, culminating in a public shaming by Oprah Winfrey, was overblown. ”His punishment outweighed his crime,” says Sedaris. ”I don’t recall Oprah Winfrey calling George Bush a liar when he was on her show. And those lies cost thousands of people their lives.”

So to get back to that question he always gets from the crowd: As he’s strip-mined his own North Carolina upbringing and subsequent adulthood, how much has Sedaris himself made up? Plenty, he has frequently and cheerfully confessed. But it doesn’t matter because he’s a humorist, right? The New Republic begged to differ last spring. In an article titled ”This American Lie” by Alex Heard, TNR accused Sedaris of doing more than just stretching the truth. ”With some of his stories, especially the early ones, like in Naked,” says Heard, ”he’s taken every liberty a fiction writer [does]. It makes the story very funny, but also makes it something you shouldn’t call nonfiction.” Responds Sedaris: ”I’ve said a thousand times I exaggerate. Why is it news when somebody else says it?”

Some of the sleuthing Heard did seems solid, including, for example, getting Sedaris to confirm that he invented details of encounters with mental patients in 1970. But many a bizarre situation checked out true, and Heard’s contention that Sedaris’ work amounts to a mean-spirited exploitation of his family and others seems, well, grossly exaggerated. Sedaris’ Little, Brown publisher, Michael Pietsch, shrugs off Heard’s piece as ”a ludicrous exercise” that ”ignores a great American literary vein of essays in which great writers take liberties with their personal experiences.”

But the more pressing question is: how much longer will Sedaris be able to mine his personal life for stories? As the EW article points out:

[...] fame and scrutiny change things, including audience perceptions, and Sedaris worries that success may be dulling his outsider-loser edge. Maybe nibbling at his credibility, too. The withering assessments of his own lunacies haven’t diminished, but the events are tamer and backdrops fancier: swanky hotels, the first-class section of an airplane. ”I don’t know if I’ll get away with it,” says Sedaris. ”I’m trying to write about what’s happening to me now. So there I am sitting in first class, right? I don’t know if people will say, ‘F— you, I never get to sit in first class!”’

A few thousand paint chips never hurt anyone

The often entertaining and frequently bizarre David Sedaris has a reflective piece in the latest New Yorker. He writes about the phase in his life when he was obsessed with quasi-antiques and lived in a house in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, run by a woman who shared his passion.

I hadn’t even crossed the threshold when I agreed to take the room. What sold me was the look of the place. Some might have found it shabby – “a dump,” my father would eventually call it – but, unless you ate them, a few thousand paint chips never hurt anyone. The same could be said for the groaning front porch and the occasional missing shingle. It was easy to imagine that the house, set as it was, on the lip of a student parking lot, had dropped from the sky, like Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz, but with a second story. Then there was the inside, which was even better. The front door opened into a living room, or, as Rosemary called it, “the parlor.” The word was old-fashioned, but fitting. Velvet curtains framed the windows. The walls were papered in a faint, floral pattern, and doilies were everywhere, laid flat on tabletops and sagging like cobwebs from the backs of overstuffed chairs. My eyes moved from one thing to another, and, like my mother with her dining-room set, Rosemary took note of where they landed. “I see you like my davenport,” she said, and, “You don’t find lamps like that anymore. It’s a genuine Stephanie.”

This Quillblogger doesn’t even know what a Stephanie is.

The issue also features an essay by Nobelist Orhan Pamuk, who meditates on the advent of hot dogs in Turkey. (For hot-dog lovers out there, street meat is a popular topic in Toronto right now, too.)

The art of the selective blurb, or, “The most … important … Quillblog post … [in] history!”

When it comes to finding something blurb-worthy within a negative review of a book, some publicists are like brilliant surgeons, delicately extracting strings of positive-sounding words from the malignant growth of criticism that surrounds them. As Henry Alford writes in a New York Times article on what he dubs “misblurbing,” sometimes even just one word will do:

It happened to the Time magazine book critic Lev Grossman last October. Grossman says he was “quite taken aback” when he saw a full-page newspaper advertisement for Charles Frazier’s novel Thirteen Moons that included a one-word quotation — “Genius” — attributed to Time. Grossman was confused because his review “certainly didn’t have that word.” Eventually, he found it in a preview item he had written a few months earlier, which included the sentence “Frazier works on an epic scale, but his genius is in the details.” As Grossman put it, “They plucked out the G-word.”

It happened to me about 10 years ago. I had called David Sedaris’s memoir Naked a “tour-de-farce” in a review in Newsday. Shortly thereafter, the publisher ran an ad in which my 600-word review had been boiled down to one phrase: “tour de force.”

But what if there are no positive words in the review? In that case, as the Arts Journal‘s Scott McLemee discovered, the solution is to simply say the whole review was positive. McLemee had reviewed the hardcover edition of Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s Freakonomics – fairly harshly, he thought. So he was surprised to discover his review referred to in the paperback edition as “largely positive.”

Now, it’s true that I seldom reread my work after it is published, and tend to forget what I’ve written pretty quickly once the last revision is done. (Forward ever, backward never.) But this reference to the review as “largely positive” certainly came as a surprise, for I do have some recollection of the book, and it is not a fond one.

McLemee then excerpts large sections of his review, prefacing it with “Good luck to any publicist trying to extract a blurb-able nugget from this.”

But they can, Scott, they can.

David Sedaris and a million little chuckles

There’s a minor scandal brewing for American funnyman David Sedaris. Last month in a New Republic piece, Alex Heard called out Sedaris on embellishments and fabrications in several of his non-fiction humour pieces. Most of these instances were minor, and Sedaris himself admits to them, citing storyteller’s licence. Still, writes Heard, there’s something wrong here: “No, I’m not equating him with Frey or Blair or Glass…. most of his crimes are petty, making him a nonfiction juvenile delinquent rather than a frogwalk-worthy felon. Still, his work is marketed as nonfiction, and there’s a simple rule associated with that: Don’t make things up.”

Heard goes on to add, “I imagine Sedaris’s defenders would argue that, since it’s just humor, none of this is a big deal.” Which, as Jack Shafer shows in an excellent piece on Slate, is pretty much what happened. After surveying the various defences of Sedaris that media commentators have been quick to offer, Shafer efficiently demolishes the leave-him-alone argument:

Sedaris and company want to erect a penumbra that shields humorists from criticism when they blend fiction into their nonfiction but still insist on calling it nonfiction. The logic behind this is difficult to follow. If writing fiction is the license Sedaris and other nonfiction humorists need to get at “larger truths,” why limit this exemption to humorists? Let reporters covering city hall, war, and business to embellish and exaggerate so they can capture “larger truths,” too.

And as Daniel Radosh notes on his blog, big-time famous writers like Sedaris seem to be granted a little more leeway than their more obscure colleagues. Radosh reminds readers of the case of Rodney Rothman, a young writer who was banned from The New Yorker in disgrace for some embellishments and exaggerations that in retrospect don’t sound any different from the ones Sedaris blithely cops to. (But don’t feel too bad for Rothman – he went on to write a book, and to work on the late, great TV show Undeclared.)

Mean people suck

Newsflash: sometimes bloggers say mean things. Seems Canadian author Hal Niedzviecki has been Googling himself and finding some unflattering comments floating around the blogosphere, and he’s worked out how he feels about this in a Globe and Mail essay.

For example, one San Francisco blogger, “Christina,” who apparently went to high school with Niezdviecki, calls him “a self-styled Canadian Chuck Klosterman” and notes that “apparently it’s possible to call oneself a ‘pop culture explorer’ with an entirely straight face and get away with it.” Niedzviecki doesn’t quote that bit in the Globe piece, but he does quote this one:

It’s the Chucks and Hals and David Sedarises that get me, because they give the impression that they just sat down one day and blurted out whatever they happened to be thinking at the time, and next thing you know they’re on book tours and doing interviews for major media outlets.

Happily, this little attack gives rise to some thought-provoking Niedzviecki meditations on the changing shape of discourse in the digital age:

Should I thank her for grouping me with guys like Chuck Klosterman and Sedaris? Should I ask her if she found me at all attractive in high school? Should I debunk her impression that my random ideas automatically end up on the bestseller list?

Well, at least the “attractive in high school” question only leapt to mind second.

Still, Niedzviecki does reach some general conclusions. Mainly that bloggers should, well, be nicer, because unkind words might actually affect someone’s career or even their party invitations. (Yeah, that position should resonate out there in webland.)

And Hal, if you’re reading this, to answer one of your pressing questions: you’re cute and all, but Quillblog just doesn’t think of you that way.

Related links:
Click here for the Globe and Mail story
Click here for Christina on Hal