The long strange journey of Carl Wilson’s Journey

It’s been more than a year since Toronto author Carl Wilson released Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, his attention-grabbing meditation on Céline Dion, popular music, and aesthetic taste. And suddenly the book is getting publicity boosts that are unheard of for most Canadian authors (and most authors period).

First, actor James Franco – he played amiable stoners in Pineapple Express and TV’s Freaks and Geeks, but is probably best known for his supporting role in the Spider-Man films – praised Wilson’s book in an on-air red-carpet interview before the Oscars last Sunday.

And now Wilson is apparently scheduled to appear on The Colbert Report next Wednesday, March 4. It’ll be fun to see what Stephen Colbert’s faux right-wing-blowhard persona makes of music writing’s überintellectual.

Literary adaptations score big at this year’s Oscars

The 81st annual Academy Awards ceremony was held last night, and literary adaptations scored very well in high-ranking categories.

The big winner (and, in this Quillblogger’s opinion, the year’s most overrated movie) was Slumdog Millionaire, based on Vikas Swarup’s novel Q&A, which took home statues for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, as well as winning for cinematography, editing, original song, score, and sound mixing.

Kate Winslet finally picked up an Oscar for her portrayal of an illiterate Nazi who has an affair with an underage teen in The Reader, Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s Oprah-approved novel. And The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, won for art direction, make-up, and visual effects.

Revolutionary Road, the corrosive adaptation of Richard Yates’s even more corrosive novel, was shut out, although a case could be made that Winslet’s award was actually a twofer, since she also appeared in it, opposite her Titanic co-star, Leonardo DiCaprio.

Also shut out of yesterday’s ceremony (admittedly due to the fact that they weren’t nominated for anything) were adaptations of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight and Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. Which may not bode well for early literary aspirants for next year’s Oscars, which to date include Confessions of a Shopaholic and He’s Just Not That Into You.

Alice Munro = Oscars gold

Canadian talent fared well in this year’s Oscar nominations, announced this morning. And in case you needed an excuse to catch the February 24 ceremony – if it happens – there’s a publishing tie-in, too.

Besides the best actress nod for Halifax’s Ellen Page for Juno, which is dominating Canadian headlines, Toronto director/actor/activist Sarah Polley is up for best adapted screenplay for her directorial debut Away From Her, based on the Alice Munro story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” Julie Christie also got a best actress nomination for her role in the film.

The news dovetails with a mini-debate on GalleyCat about how Polley’s film has accomplished the seemingly unthinkable by sexing up Alice Munro for a mass audience. Yesterday, a mildly scandalized reader complained about the new Vintage paperback edition for The View From Castle Rock (pictured above), first published in 2004.

“I saw the cover for the paperback of Alice Munro’s latest collection, The View from Castle Rock, in an ad in the NY Times Book Review,” a GalleyCat reader emails, “and Vintage has given the book a Sessalee Hensley makeover.” … [I]t’s not too hard to see what he’s talking about, although my reference point upon first glance wasn’t so much Hensley, the fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble, as it was all those chick lit covers with women’s legs and no faces. (Not to mention the hot pink lettering; nice touch, that!) “While I understand the effort to sell more copies, it seems like a desperate approach for such a great writer,” our source continues, addressing the “chick lit” question directly: “Is that Vintage’s marketing strategy? I guess, if it gets Munro into more people’s hands it’s a good thing, but for me there’s a real disconnect in tone between the cover and the contents.”

Today, another reader rebuts by asking if Munro’s (or Munro’s publisher’s) concession to the marketplace is really such a big deal. After all, in CanLit, as in Canadian film, opportunities to sell out are few and far between.