Russell Smith, the not-so-reluctant pornographer

Just in time for Valentine’s Day comes a new book from author, Globe and Mail columnist, and self-appointed fashion pundit Russell Smith. Diana, published by Biblioasis Press, is an erotic novella in diary form.

Actually, this new book is an old one – it was originally published by the now-defunct Gutter Press five years ago. In an interview with Eye Weekly, Smith lays out the twin urges – sex and money – that lay behind his initial interest in writing porn.

“I started it as an exercise,” Smith recalls. “I found that in all my fiction I was not writing the sex scenes. I was doing the stereotypical pan to a window when a couple fell onto a bed. Why was I avoiding it? Part of it was that sex is difficult to write. There’s such a lack of a vocabulary and in the vocabulary that exists, you have a choice between the clinical and the euphemistic. So I felt I had to practice to get better.” With a full manuscript (made wholly from solicited scenarios contributed by his female friends) Smith also became enamoured of pulling off a literary hoax by hiding behind a distaff pseudonym — a time-honoured tradition in the world of blue books.

Beyond the fun of a hoax, Smith also points out that the pseudonym, Diana Savage, was to be his way of skirting the realities of demographics. “Women are the market you want for any work of fiction. They are pretty much the only readers of fiction left, and particularly of erotic fiction, of which they, statistically, are the only readers.” Diana was initially accepted by Black Lace, the UK publisher of erotica quickies, but Black Lace confronted Smith’s agent at the last minute and demanded proof that Diana Savage was a woman. Not wanting to turn his hoax hobby into professional fraud, Smith put aside his dreams of a second, lucrative career as Diana Savage, chronicler of infernal passions.

The article also mentions the critical pasting that the original edition of the book – and its author – got from Noah Richler, who was then the book columnist for the National Post. Smith lays this all out in detail in the book’s introduction:

I remember seeing Noah Richler … [at the 2003 launch party], and warmly shaking his hand and asking him if he would like a beer. He seemed friendly enough. I left him to go and chat up a tall and very pretty woman who turned out to have a Polish accent. She later said that I seemed obnoxious and full of myself. I must have been in a good mood.

Fast-forward to the next day, when the book receives its drubbing in the Post.

Richler was disgusted by this book. I think he was disgusted by pornography generally, by the idea of pornography. Basically, he was embarrassed.

I was, let’s say, surprised. Had I not seen Noah at the launch party? Had he not enjoyed the free beer and the attendant tall Polish girls? I seemed to recall him listening to the reading at least. And, wait a minute – when did he have time to write the article?

None of which is particularly erotic – unless the petty politics of Toronto launch parties are your thing.

Lest he kill the mood entirely, Smith does end the intro on a note more befitting the overall aim of the book:

It’s that simple, dear reader: this book is pornography. Its purpose is to titillate. It exists solely to arouse you. It is telling you to position yourself at a window where you can be seen, unbutton your jeans and slip a hand inside the waistband. Now await further instructions.

Unless you happen to be reading the book on the subway or on a plane, of course.

Lest anyone think Smith has given himself completely over to the realm of stroke-lit, we should point out that the book’s full title is Diana: A Diary in the Second Person.

Everyone knows that narrative POV is just so hot.

(But really: jeans? How déclassé.)

[Russell Smith launches Diana tonight at Toronto's Gladstone Hotel as part of This Is Not A Reading Series.]

Author is turned into beautiful Swan for Gillers

The National Post had a full-page spread on Saturday entitled “The Great Canadian Literary Makeover,” in which novelist Susan Swan is shown being put through the wringer of makeup, hair treatments, and even Botox. The article itself is not online, but Swan’s diary of the experience is, and it shows that Swan did not exactly throw herself into the whole thing with enormous enthusiasm.

Oct. 23. I didn’t think about Giller preparations today. I marched with Community Air on Queen’s Quay protesting the opening of Porter Airlines at the Toronto Island Airport. [...] I protested instead of going to International Festival of Authors’ opening cocktail party — everything social seems frivolous and distracting, including the Giller make-over.

Oct. 24. I don’t want to write anything in my journal about make-over preparations for the Giller. My rebelliousness is tiresome but if I know anything about myself at the age of 61, it’s that I will ultimately oppose any enforced regime. Work on my new book is going well and I haven’t lost weight, although I am exercising a lot. I suppose I am getting ready in my own way.

For those Giller- or Giller Light-bound authors without a major daily newspaper willing to underwrite their preparations, Quillblog recommends the services of novelist Russell Smith, who offers “Image Consulting” on his website for the nominal fee of $500 (CDN) per day, plus expenses — the equivalent of dinner for two, with tip, as Giller founder Jack Rabinovitch might say.

As Smith’s website promises:

He will travel to wherever you are, evaluate your current wardrobe and help you find and shop for any items of clothing or personal style, whether formal, business-related or casual. He will see purchases of tailored items through to their final fitting.

He specializes in occasions: the wedding suit, the visit with royalty, the awards ceremony. Or he can suggest simple changes to subtly update your everyday look.

He also offers help with etiquette and protocol, particularly in formal situations.

That last bit would certainly come in handy for Tuesday night’s non-winning authors and editors.

Related links:
Read Susan Swan’s makeover diary
Read about Russell Smith image consulting

May the coverage begin

It’s only two days after the Governor General’s Awards shortlists were announced, and media coverage has already been plentiful. The Toronto Star‘s Philip Marchand weighs in on the lack of overlap between this year’s GG and Scotiabank Giller shortlists, noting the frequency of the phenomenon — it also happened in 1997 and 1994 — and citing the release of a large number of books that were great but not too great as the cause of it this year, while shining a spotlight on only one of them — A Perfect Night to Go to China by David Gilmour, chosen ostensibly for its author’s status as the only veteran novelist on the list who was born and raised in Canada.

Over at The Globe and Mail, Michael Posner approaches the shortlists’ lack of intersecting books in a more realistic way, citing the subjectivity (but not the politics) involved in selecting a nation’s greatest books for any given year. Posner devotes web space to all English fiction finalists but Golda Fried and reports on lessons learned by novelist, GG English fiction juror, and Globe columnist Russell Smith. “You know what a grump I am about Canadian literature,” said Smith on Monday. “I thought this would be my opportunity to find out what was wrong with it.” Instead, Posner reports Smith saying that the problem was “how good so many of the books were.”

The CBC Arts website also has what reads like a puffed-up list of all books nominated. So far, no one has really owned up to the politics of shortlists. Will the realist in the audience please stand up?

Related links:
Click here for Marchand’s piece in The Toronto Star
Click here for Posner’s piece in The Globe and Mail
Click here for the piece on CBC.ca

A second look at spoken word

Russell Smith’s screed against author readings in last week’s Globe and Mail apparently generated a number of intelligent responses. Smith had complained in his weekly column that author readings are not only generally dull, they undermine one of reading’s greatest joys: the intimacy created between author and reader through the solitary (and silent) act of reading a book. Though Smith does not back down from his main point that books are best enjoyed in silence, he concedes, as some of his readers argued, that “on the rare occasions that authors are dramatic and entertaining, they can bring new levels of understanding and appreciation to their work.”

Related links:
Read Russell Smith’s Globe and Mail column

The importance of being Richard

Russell Smith looks at the male version of chick lit in his weekly Globe and Mail column. Dubbed “dick lit,” these chronicles of male relationship angst are touted as the antidote to treacly but hip chick-lit novels. But as Smith points out, the two sub-genres have a lot in common: “[The dick-lit book] takes the form of first-person memoir or first-person fiction, is set among striving young people in a large city (usually New York) and tells the story of a youngish man — a man who is starting to feel not so young — who works in the world of media, just like Bridget Jones.” Smith also notes that not only are the plotlines and characters in dick lit books similar to their feminine counterparts, they espouse the same conservative, family-values ideology: “They all begin and end with the same premise: that sex on its own is unsatisfying, that monogamous true-love relationships are the goal of every sensitive man, and that a man who is unmarried by the age of 30 should be embarrassed.”

Related links:
Read Russell Smith’s Globe column

Is that a forsythia in your pocket….

Globe and Mail columnist Russell Smith is at his bilious best with a scathing look at the abundance of horticultural name dropping in Canadian fiction these days. It seems Smith can’t open a Canadian novel without being reminded of his own dearth of botanical expertise: “You have a character who is a sea captain or a railway engineer or a prostitute … and this person’s gaze casually registers milkweed, burdock and something-wort (dusty, in poignant decline, this ragged, humble, valiant greenery). Or he/she notes the receding vistas of spruce and cedar, occasionally punctuated by elm and beech…. If everybody in Canada, even plucky runaways and uxorious mathematics teachers and everybody who could conceivably appear as a character in fiction in any setting, urban, rural or suburban, can casually register these things not as dusty green things but as discrete species with names, then why was I not taught?” Smith brings up some interesting points about narrative point of view, arguing that too many Canadian authors seem to be lacing their work with bits of horticultural arcana simply as a way of showing off.

Related links:
Read Russell Smith’s Globe column