Memories of World’s Biggest Bookstore

Eye Weekly has a brief history of the World’s Biggest Bookstore in downtown Toronto. Apparently, it used to be a bowling alley. (Bring your own tenpins and a bowling ball and it still could be.)

The writer, Marc Weisblott, traces the evolution of the WBB from its awe-inspiring early days when it dwarfed all the other book stores (which were all 5’x11’ or smaller and sold flour and sugar too) to its Indigo-owned present day, when barnlike stores are the norm and one of the WBB’s biggest-selling titles is Mood Your Change – How to Mind Your Think by Feeling Your Toes (or something like that), which Weisblott takes as a marker of the store’s current identity.

Weisblott lumps the WBB in with such much-loved icons as Sam the Record Man and Honest Ed’s, but its history, while varied and quirky, has brought it to its present state of fluorescent lighting, grubby lino flooring, and Conrad Black via LongPen. Meanwhile, as Weisblott points out, the Yonge and Dundas intersection on which it squats is rapidly cleaning itself up. How long before the condo developers come calling?

So do you want to save the WBB? Do you want to save things just because they’re old and rich with history, or do you have to actually like them too?

Kevin Patterson under investigation for Afghanistan story

According to a story in The Globe and Mail, author Kevin Patterson (who is also a doctor) is under investigation by the Canadian military for an article he wrote for the July/August issue of Mother Jones magazine that includes, in part, a graphic description of Patterson’s attempts to save the life of a young Canadian soldier. Patterson served for six weeks as a doctor in Kandahar. At issue is the fact that, in the article, Patterson names the soldier, who died of his wounds. For his part, Patterson says that the soldier’s death was covered at the time in the Canadian media, and thus his identity would have been easily discovered.

Patterson’s account of his time in Afghanistan will be included in Outside the Wire, an anthology of essays and interviews on Canada’s involvement in that country, to be published this coming December by Random House Canada. Patterson co-edited the book with former McDermid Agency agent Jane Warren. (Random House publisher Anne Collins wrote a letter to The Globe in support of Patterson.)

Elsewhere, Toronto political blogger Jack Cunningham defends Patterson’s actions on his blog Whig, even going so far as to suggest that the military’s actions may be politically motivated. Commenters on Cunningham’s blog, however, say the issue is clearly patient-doctor confidentiality.

Laura Miller, Granta, and immigrant lit (and James Wood)

Granta‘s new “Best of Young American Novelists 2” issue is now out (the followup to a 1996 issue), and The Los Angeles Times looks at the under-35 authors who made the cut this time, noting that “many of the list’s 21 writers were raised abroad or are nonwhite. Are stories of transnational identity where the literary action is these days?” Taking the counterpoint is Salon critic Laura Miller, who tells the Times, “Writing about immigrants saves you from having to write about mass culture.”

“American novels have an extremely ambivalent relationship to mass culture and have a very difficult time coming to terms with it,” she said. “Because it’s supposed to be the opposite of all the things that people want from literature. People would just rather avoid it,” and writing about ethnicity or migration allows them to.

Those comments have already drawn some fire from Bookslut, and while Quillblog has never understood the obsessive antipathy some litbloggers seem to bear for Miller, she is guilty of a pretty big generalization here. Undoubtedly, many “transnational” writers come by their subjects honestly, should write about what they want to write about, etc.

On the other hand, Miller probably isn’t talking total nonsense either. Didn’t another much more celebrated critic, James Wood, sort of say the same thing in a review of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane a while back?

[Literature with immigration themes has a] momentous service to perform, which is to return fiction to its nineteenth-century gravity. This it does by re-importing into the Western novel traditional societies, with their ties of marriage, burdens of religion, obligations of civic duty, and pressures of propriety — and thereby restoring to the novel form some of the old oppressions that it was created to comprehend and to resist and in some measure to escape.

Wood’s position is admiring rather than fretful – he loved Brick Lane – but to Quillblog it sure sounds like a wish to retreat to the good old days when fiction was both simpler and more substantial.

Ghost stories

The Guardian site has a survey of the long tradition of ghostwriting, pegged to a recent book deal for footballer Wayne Rooney, who has signed a five-book deal (!) with HarperCollins in the U.K. Hunter Davies, the author of a William Wordsworth biography, will ghostwrite the first three of those books. Writes The Guardian‘s Tim Adams: “It seems to me that such books are rather a last resort of wish fulfilment. We invest so much of our culture in sport and celebrity that it feels necessary that the principal players have something to say for themselves. The soundbites you hear on Sky Sports News, or the quotes that are reheated in Heat will never be enough. The frustration of celebrities is they are in a world we desire but are unable to articulate how we imagine it feels. That’s why the ghost – who exists in a hinterland between reality and surreality – is so engaging. He or she provides a voice that is halfway between his or her mundane life – and therefore ours – and that of the subject.”

Elsewhere, Maisonneuve has also recently posted a survey of ghostwriting through history on its site (like the Guardian piece, it spotlights Jennie Erdal’s memoir Ghosting, about her years writing speeches and articles for a prominent British businessman). But Maisonneuve writer Terence Byrnes recaps a Canadian case: that of Nega Mezlekia, who was nominated for a Governor General’s Award in 2000 for his memoir Notes from the Hyena’s Belly, only to become embroiled in a dispute with Anne Stone over her own contribution to the book (she considered herself a co-author, he considered her an editor). Writes Byrnes: “Throughout this tempest, commentators, critics and authors alike put the word ‘author’ in scare quotes, nervously acknowledging their own anxieties about authorship, identity and ownership. Everyone stood to lose: those who believed in the politics of identity, those who claimed the glory of artistic production and those who made money from it.”

Related links:
Click here for the Guardian story on ghostwriting
Click here for the Mainsonneuve story on ghostwriting

On the uncertain future of Canadian publishing

Stephen Henighan’s latest column in Geist magazine, this one on the importance of Canadian-owned publishers, begins with the alarming prediction of a literary agent: that there will be no Canadian-owned publishers in 20 years, only “Canadians who write for American publishers.”

This has Henighan examining the possible causes and effects of such a development. He theorizes that, to compete with Indigo, small chains and independents have had to “reproduce the ‘Wal-Mart level of excellence’” to which Indigo CEO Heather Reisman aspires. Henighan asserts that, in doing this, small chains and independents, once bastions of literary diversity that stocked the entire backlists of writers, will stock only one or two titles from most given authors, leading to the demise of literary presses that depend on sales from independents to exist. Without the challenge of literary presses to contend with, big publishers’ standards will drop.

Henighan adds that the shallow stock of the dominant bookstore chains “train[s] servile intermittent readers rather than self-directed addicts. Their dominance sets in motion a downward spiral in which every year fewer young people are inducted into the reading obsession, leading inexorably to lower and lower sales.”

Just how bigger “Canadian-owned” houses factor into all this isn’t made clear, but given various issues for the “Canadian-owned” industry — such as editorial cutbacks at Raincoast and the partial foreign ownership of M&S, to name a couple — one would surmise that the future is not bright. And what could the agent’s prediction portend for Canadian writers? Henighan looks back and abroad for possible answers: back to the 1940s when “Sinclair Ross suppressed Canadian references from As For Me and My House in order to find a publisher in the United States, and Morley Callaghan’s short stories drained Toronto of its street names and history to satisfy U.S. magazine editors with a faceless Anytown,” and abroad to Angola, whose publishing industry was celebrated throughout Africa, Brazil, and Portugal during years of state sponsorship. A withdrawal of funding in 1990 led to the collapse of the Angolan industry, in which a handful of extremely popular writers continued to be published in Portugal, but young writers stopped emerging. Now that funding has been restored, Angolan writers, young and old, can find audiences.

Ultimately, Henighan revives the old but weighty argument of the effects of indigenous publishing on a country’s artistic life and national identity: “A nation without publishers cannot foster its own literary talent, record its distinctive experience of literary language, host aesthetic debates, thrash out its personal and collective demons, express its regional identities, teach its children their history or project its myths into the global ether. A nation without publishers loses the ability to define itself, and is destined to be defined by strangers and, ultimately, ruled by them. That is the sort of nation Canada may become.”

Related links:
Click here for Stephen Henighan’s essay in Geist

Sexy CanLit?

Sex in Canadian fiction is the angle of Peter Darbyshire’s review of Stephen Marche’s Raymond and Hannah on the CBC Arts website. In CanLit, Darbyshire laments, “sex is rarely a pleasurable event. Instead, it is often used as a metaphor for politics, identity, globalization, consumerism — almost everything but sex itself.” Marche’s book turns out to be no different, though Darbyshire’s review is still an admiring one in the end. “Erotic? No. Sexy? Yes. In a Canadian sort of way.”

In any case, readers may be more titillated by the sidebar Darbyshire’s come up with: “The 10 most memorable sex scenes in Canadian literature,” which include everything from Marian Engel’s notorious ursine love in The Bear to Barbara Gowdy’s tale of necrophilia and its discontents, “We So Seldom Look on Love.”

Related links:
Click here for the CBC Arts story on sex in CanLit