The scents of CanLit

Following up on our earlier post about the new Danielle Steel perfume, we thought we’d offer some fragrance suggestions for our own literary stars:

Wayne Johnston’s Terre Neuve – Cod oil, salt water, and seal blubber combined in one haunting, historically epic fragrance.

Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero – A puzzling perfume that begins one way and ends another. You’ll never be sure what you are smelling.

Souvenirs of Douglas Coupland – The smell of today and tomorrow and the day after! Contains essences of bubble tea, Red Bull, and bad office coffee.

Alice Munro’s The Scent of a Good Woman – A fragrance that is dependable, trustworthy, and utterly devoid of flash. It’s not your mother’s perfume – though it may be her mother’s.

What is Stephen Harper Smelling? by Yann Martel – The patron scent of lost causes! Equal parts piquant and pedantic, this relentless fragrance reminds you, over and over and over again, of its own importance.

Old is gold

Popmatters.com, that marvellous repository of all things culture-vulture-esque, plays to our nerdy bookishness this month with a series of essays examining the wonderful world of secondhand books. With two new essays posted each Wednesday, the series takes a look at everything from contributors’ favourite used-book shops to the economics of selling secondhand books. Perhaps the most charming of the lot is Erika Nanes’ “The Dust Test,” in which she judges potential dates based on the way they approach secondhand books:

Some women evaluate men by their taste in books; I do it by their taste in bookstores. The secondhand bookstore is, after all, an entirely different animal from its shiny new book-selling kin. Crowded, badly ventilated (I’m talking to you, Strand), with floor plans that often seem deliberately designed to confuse the hapless readers wandering inside, the used bookstore does not appeal to those who prefer their pleasures easily won.

[...]

The bookstore test can also answer the question of how well a potential boyfriend deals with order, or with its absence. Let’s face it, secondhand bookstores are not for everyone. In some bookstores of my acquaintance—Acres of Books, near Los Angeles, comes to mind—the books have spilled from the shelves and now take up residence in piles stacked on the floor, usually right in the turning ratio between one side of an aisle and the other. These encampments are not part of any section and demonstrate absolutely no observable order. Men who like their world neatly organized, who get flustered when their CDs are out of alphabetical order, won’t last long in such a place. Which is useful information, right? After all, sex—good sex—is nothing if not disorganized.

Ian McEwan’s libretto

The Telegraph has an interview with Ian McEwan on the subject of his collaboration with composer Michael Berkeley on an opera that will be debuting in the U.K. next week. Asked why opera, McEwan admits it’s not because of an enduring love (sorry) for the stuff:

“Well, there are certain pieces I do rather like,” he says reluctantly, “but I think operas rather suffer from uninteresting plots.

It’s precisely the lack of real interest in what’s said or what happens that’s often the major problem.”

All of them? “Well, I suppose some contemporary pieces like Wozzeck and Lulu are interesting, much more than The Magic Flute or Così.”

McEwan set out to emulate their combination of intensity and truthfulness. “I wanted something in a basically realist mode,” he says, “but heightened musically.”

McEwan and Berkeley had already written one piece – the oratorio, Or Shall We Die?, premiered as far back as 1982. Why such a long wait for their next collaboration?

“It’s my fault, really. Fifteen years ago Michael was saying, ‘We should do an opera,’ and I would say, ‘Yes’ but do nothing about it and just drift into another book.

We looked at a story by Melville, and a Swedish novel, but the theme we kept coming back to was sexual obsession, we thought this made a good plot.”

So for McEwan, it’s opera: meh, sexual obsession: hello.

Now there’s a shocker.

Talk books, knock boots

Over at The Tyee, Shannon Rupp has posted a lengthy response to a recent New York Times piece about bibliophiles judging potential mates by their reading material.

Using a booklist to divine a man’s character seems no worse than rating his shoes – which many women swear is infallible – and it may be better. A meeting of minds as a prelude to a meeting of . . . well, it just seems more authentic. Or so I thought, until I saw male reaction to the Times piece and discussed it with a few of my well-read men friends who began reminiscing about how knowing what was between the covers got them between the covers.

From there, Rupp shares a number of her men friends’ cheesy book-related pick up lines, and also exposes the all-too-common practice of “bookwinking” – pretending to have read and/or liked a book in order to get laid.

In perusing online comments it became clear that bookwinking is common. For every woman who dismisses a man for not knowing Pushkin, there are 10 men who have been literary poseurs. While it’s generally agreed by those of all sexes that a fondness for The Da Vinci Code, Ayn Rand, Dianetics, The Secret, and anything by Ann Coulter or Eckhart Tolle will get you booted out of bed by most thinking singletons, women note that there are a few books that serve as a kind of code-speak that a man’s taste in fiction is just that.

For example, beware any guy who claims Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being on his reading list. He’s trawling for casual sex.

Another warning sign is an alleged fondness for Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Apparently, it’s the title-of-choice among men posing as sensitive guys.

More wardrobe problems for Rowling

Ian McEwan, Khaled Hosseini, and J.K. Rowling were all honoured at the Galaxy British Book Awards last night, but much of the subsequent media coverage has focused on a brief moment after the awards, when Rowling came perilously close to a boob reveal.

From The Daily Mirror‘s pun-tastic take on events:

She may be a wizard with words – but Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling keeps getting herself in a right old muggle with her frocks.

At the Galaxy British Book Awards on Wednesday night she almost revealed everything in her Chamber of Secrets as her figure-hugging purple satin gown suddenly started Slytherin down.

Luckily her press aide Mark Hutchinson gave new meaning to the phrase PR handout – by quickly grabbing the top of the dress to spare her blushes.

J.K., who picked up the Outstanding Achievement Award at London’s Grosvenor House, suffered more overexposure on a U.S. tour last year when her dress slipped to reveal her white bra.

Not to dedicate too much more time to this, but be sure to scroll down in the Mirror piece for the three-picture slide-show of the dramatic rescue as it unfolded.

The First Annual Hooker Prize

Who says booksellers are the last guardians of good taste in an ever-more tawdry world?

From AbeBooks:

Welcome to the Hooker Prize – in honor of Elliot Spitzer and his fall from grace in a New York minute, AbeBooks.com has compiled a list of 10 recommended non-fiction reads about hookers, madams, high-class callgirls and prostitutes. Prostitution, of course, is the oldest profession in the world and has fascinated readers for centuries. Since the 1970s, there has been a wealth of memoirs from ‘ladies of the night’ so here’s the literary lowdown on the callgirl culture.

Yes, The Happy Hooker by Xavier Hollander is #1.

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.]

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.

Battle of the Bonds

From MI6.com (which, we assume, is your one-stop shop for all things James Bond):

James Bond legends Sean Connery and Roger Moore will go head to head with rival books this autumn, after Weidenfeld cajoled Connery into telling his story, and Michael O’Mara won the battle for Moore’s memoirs.

Our question is, where’s the book from George Lazenby?

U.S. publisher relents on eensy-weensy penis in German kids book

From EarthTimes.org:

A German children’s book can be published in the United States after a publisher there dropped its demand for the genitals on a picture of a statue in it be air-brushed out, it was revealed Thursday. The German illustrator of the book had angrily complained of censorship and withdrew it from the US market last summer after being told that shoppers might object to the nudity.

[...]

The offending male organ is a tiny squiggle in the picture: the male statue itself is only 7.5 millimetres high on the page.

[Emphasis added]

All we can say is, whoever got upset about this in the first place is a bit of a tool.