Jean Clotte’s Cave Art, out this month from the inimitable Phaidon Press, is the sort of book that convinces you to care about something you never have before. In this case it’s the titular cave art, which, despite the best efforts of a documentary on the Discovery Channel years ago, I was pretty sure was just scribbling. But no! It’s called art for a reason, and, as Clotte’s book meticulously explains, it’s essential to an understanding of both artistic and human history.

Chronicling the evolution of cave art over time, Clottes structures his book around three central periods, each explored by a detailed account of a representative cave: the Chauvet Cave begins a discussion of the period of 35,000 to 22,000 years ago, the Lascaux cave for 22,000 to 17,000 years ago, and the Niaux Cave for 17,000 to 11,000 years ago. It’s a clever approach, and as a result the book’s structure is one of its real strengths. By associating these eras with strong examples that are considered in tremendous detail, Cave Art gives one a sense not only of the broad strokes of a period’s development, but the finer details that make each unique. (more…)

Last Saturday, Toronto was enveloped in muggy greyness. I was riding my bicycle along Bloor Street West, after being doused in unspectacular rain in High Park, and the street was less appealing than usual. Two women were yelling at each other outside a store with sad appliances in the window, the kind of appliances that break when you get them home; the police were cordoning some building off; and the whole street—which occasionally vibrates with a kind of transglobal charm—was entirely charmless.

“Amazing knowledge!” a man called from the sidewalk as I rode past. I laughed, and kept on down the block to the Salvation Army, where all the summer dresses were polyester testaments to humanity’s ability to create dreadful fashion; the kind of fashion that evokes a physical response, a shiver or a cringe. Stepping back out into the humidity, I followed my curiosity, and walked my bike up the block.

“What kind of amazing knowledge?” I asked the man.

“No, a maze of knowledge. Entry five cents.” There was a table on the sidewalk with a smiling woman and a yellow piggy bank. They were positioned in front of a door with black curtains. I rummaged through my pocket for a nickel and the man waived me along. “It’s free for people with purple shoes today.” (more…)

Featuring: Glenn Gould, Robert Downey Jr., Christopher Shulgan, Arthur Conan Doyle (again), Barack Obama, Katie Hafner.

1. Taking the Cure I’ve been meaning to write about Christopher Shulgan’s new book, The Soviet Ambassador, but unfortunately other work has gotten in the way of me reading it first. But since we published a feature by Chris in June about his book’s subject, Aleksandr Yakovlev, and Yakovlev’s visit to British Columbia’s Doukhobors, I feel very confident in recommending the new volume to any and all. Chris’s piece one of my favourites of the year, and it shows off his charming prose and extensive research in such a manner that you’ll probably proceed directly to your local bookstore and collect a copy of his book. For actual evaluation, you could see Amy Knight’s review in the Globe. Watch that section this weekend for further discussion of the The Soviet Ambassador, and, if you’re in Toronto, tune into CBC Radio One at 9am on Sunday to hear Chris on The House.

2. Iron Man in a Tweed Jacket I’m really trying to stop talking about the upcoming Sherlock Holmes movies, which have been frequent topics of discussion here. But news continue to arrive, most lately this week’s revelation that Robert Downey Jr. is in talks to star as Holmes in Guy Ritchie’s ill-conceived action version. Now obviously the inclusion of Robert Downey Jr. makes anything better, but I don’t think even he can save this movie. It’ll still be terrible, but at least the lead will be charming.

3. Literary Biography I’m a big believer in the school of thought that says you can learn a lot about a person by what he or she reads. Al Purdy, for instance, read a lot of campy genre novels, some of which you can see pictured on this very blog, and I believe that type of reading was important to the sort of man he was. (I should say, though, that Purdy also read broadly and deeply across literary history; I would imagine he read more great books most of us could ever dream of finishing.) So I liked Laura Miller’s piece in Salon this week wherein she performs a bit of literary criticism on the idea of Barack Obama’s reading history, exploring his predilection for, among others, Melville, Roth, Nieburh, and, of course, Lincoln. (On a semi-related note, I’ll also recommend Gary Wills’s piece on Lincoln and Obama’s speeches on race from the NYRB a few months back.) And while it isn’t as nuanced as Miller’s argument, this now semi-famous photograph doubtless inspires the same sort of heart fluttering among those of us unaccustomed to seeing our leaders even holding a book.

4. The Steinway Variations McClelland & Stewart just published Katie Hafner’s excellent new book, A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano. It’s the first major work of Gould scholarship since Kevin Bazzana’s fine biography, Wondrous Strange, and one of the loveliest books yet written about the pianist. Hafner, who writes for Wired and the New York Times, delivers an impeccably researched take on Gould’s decades-long relationship with CD 318, a junky old Steinway piano with which he had a serious infatuation. The book also features Verne Edquist, Gould’s piano tuner, whose story hadn’t been explored in full until this volume. Alternating between the two men, Hafner explores the complexities of Gould’s relationship with his instrument.

Because Gould’s a difficult figure to wrestle with intellectually, we’ve developed a cultural fixation on his bizarreness that’s reduced his particularities as a performer and man to a set of clichés: sandwiches at Fran’s diner, summer-time top coats, his audible humming while playing. What Hafner finds, though, goes deeper, to a level that we can all understand. In his obsession with CD 318 Gould wasn’t demonstrating some strange personal tic that puts him at a remove from most people. Instead, it was among the more normal enterprises in which he engaged. More than anything, he was in love with the beauty of the instrument as it sounded to him, and it’s a lot easier for the average person to identify with finding something captivating than, say, an overwhelming need to phone people long distance in the middle of the night. In focusing on the piano, Hafner elevates the pianist to a place where I, at least, understand him in a way I never have.

Last weekend, as I was shuffling around BookExpo Canada, searching for catalogs and in need of fresh air, I came across the booth of Ten Speed Press, who really are a top-notch operation. I was drawn by what appeared to be a finished copy of Grant Achatz’s new Alinea cookbook. It turned out to be a dummy copy, though one that in its size and beautiful dust jacketry gave an idea of how impressive this book will be. The Ten Speed rep had a black and white galley of the book, though, and I can report that the recipes are aesthetically stunning and practically impossible for the average home chef. (Apparently by buying the book you’ll have access to a website that will let you learn from Grant & Co., which sounds to me like another way to feel inadequate. To learn more about Achatz, you should read D.T. Max’s very good New Yorker profile from a few weeks ago.) (more…)

Lincoln Hall’s new book, Dead Lucky: Life After Death on Mount Everest, is pretty much what it sounds like: an account of how Hall, who had nearly reached the summit of Everest in 1984, suffered a cerebral edema and was left high on the mountain during his second attempt in May 2006. Presumed dead after hours of immobility and non-responsiveness, he was found alive the next morning having miraculously survived the night with no shelter, oxygen, water, or warmth. As far as things to have done go, that’s pretty impressive.

Almost as impressive is the book itself. Hall, an Australian magazine editor by trade who has been climbing for decades, recounts his story in elegant prose and with a generosity of spirit that comes not only from his very nature, but also his dedication to Tibetan Buddhism, a spiritual orientation that infuses the narrative with calmness, kindness, and a thoughtful precision. The end result is a sort of existential account of a near tragedy, vastly more meditative than the typical climbing yarn, and ultimately more rewarding.

I met with Lincoln Hall earlier this week.

Jared Bland: Toward the end of the book, you ask yourself how it is that you could still be alive, but realize that you don’t think you’ll know until you’ve recovered properly and had time to explore it. It’s been just over two years since these events. Do you have a better idea of what happened? (more…)

I’ve been meaning for some time to write some posts about short stories. Not so much the idea of the short story, but reviews of individual stories themselves, considered as stand-alone works of art instead of as a part of a collection or larger body of work. With tomorrow’s tonight’s launch of Pasha Malla’s first collection, The Withdrawal Method, now seemed like the right time to start. I didn’t know which story to choose, so I emailed Malla, and he suggested “Big City Girls,” which is the piece that he says has been most on his mind since completing the book.

“Big City Girls” is the story of Alex, age seven, who stays home from school on a snow day with his fifth-grader sister and a few of her friends. They’re bored kids, and without much to do after building a snow fort, they retire to the living room to play Clue and have a conversation that eventually turns to sex. Or at least sex in the unknowing way that kids of that age talk about it—“Maybe Miss Scarlet and Professor Plum were having fun with the candlestick, said Shayna…In the Secret Passageway! screamed Heather”—which is to say with imprecision and anxiety. (more…)

CBC Radio Ideas producer Richard Handler summarizes Dr. Leonard Sax’s book, Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men:

But then he bucks up and gives us five reasons for this epidemic. Many are familiar but Sax puts them all together like a brick thrown through your window:

• Video games. These addictive activities disengage boys from the world. Some young men even seem to prefer online porno to the prospect of sex with another human being.
• Teaching methods. Girls develop intellectually up to two years ahead of boys. Boys in grade school are naturally rambunctious. They need ways to express their native energy. They are being taught to read and write too early. Their mostly female teachers prefer compliant, dutiful girls.
• Prescription drugs. Hyperactive, frustrated boys are increasingly being medicated. This we all know. What Sax claims is that these drugs shrink the motivational centres of the brain and that the effect of this lasts years, well after these kids stop taking their meds. I hadn’t heard this before but if it’s true, it is truly frightening.
• Endocrine disruptors. Chemicals from plastic bottles, canned food linings and some shampoos mimic natural estrogen, the female hormone. Boys’ testosterone levels are half of what they were in their grandfathers’ day. Also, their bones are significantly more brittle.
• The devaluation of masculinity. Boys don’t know how to become men. They no longer have appropriate rights of passage. Once Father Knows Best was the paternalistic model but now he has been replaced (and mocked) by a dopey Homer Simpson. Sax likes the old virtues of courage and temperance, with a good measure of intelligence.

Sounds familiar. Not sure whether I agree with all the elements of his diagnosis. Another book to add to the pile.

Much like Damien Hirst, Bigfoot considers his work “No dark, just misunderstood and ahead of time”

(Much like Damien Hirst, Bigfoot considers his work “No dark, just misunderstood and ahead of time.”)

This month marks the release of the third book in a series of collaborative memoirs by Bigfoot and Walrus contributing illustrator Graham Roumieu. Bigfoot: I Not Dead is a tender yet violent addition to Bigfoot’s ongoing self-exploration project, sure to please both fans of his previous work and those who aren’t yet familiar with him but enjoy furry creatures, mutilation, poetry, existential anxiety, and/or hard-learned life lessons.

Readers in Toronto should be sure to attend the book’s launch, which takes place Thursday night at the Gladstone Hotel as part of Pages Books’ “This Is Not a Reading Series.” Michael Winter, Nathan Whitlock, Douglas Bell, The Walrus’s own Jeremy Keehn, and others will speak about what Bigfoot means to them. Second floor, 7.30pm, free.

I reached Bigfoot last week at his home in the woods.

How has your life changed since your first book came out?

Bigfoot hang dirty laundry on line for all to see. Some things just needed be aired out on wind of disclosure. Others so heavy shit-encrusted that they fall off of line into mud and now scrutiny birds pick bits of corn out of it and neighbor steal and put on Ebay. Not totally regret writing books but wish sometime to go back to old technique of whisper secrets into hollow stump. (more…)

“To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.”
–Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”

It is somewhat of a consensus around the Walrus office, or at least whichever part of that office Paul Isaacs and I happen to be in at a given time, that Sherlock Holmes is tops. This is one of those hyperbolic statements that sounds playful and ridiculous, but which is not. I believe some call this Birony.

The truth is that Sherlock Holmes is just about the best company a person could have. (He’s also a great instructor in the art of reasoning; were we all to study at his feet, the world would be a better, and slightly cooler, place.) But Holmes has had the misfortune of what we might call the public domain treatment. This phenomenon happens when a book is no one’s property and thus anyone can release it in basically any form at any time. This leads to two things: 1) a wider, often less-expensive dissemination of the texts, which in the case of Holmes is excellent, for people tend to enjoy the stories, but which in the case of Hard Times is certainly pernicious and potentially disastrous to the book’s public conception (average twenty-first century reader: not so much with the activist Dickens); and 2) a proliferation of ugly design (see: everything by Dover Thrift Editions) which is often so prevalent as to render the book forever hideous in the reading public’s mind. (I should note that it’s great that Dover makes very affordable books, and I don’t criticize their enterprise there. I’m not even asking them to make the books beautiful. Just less ugly.) (more…)

Last Friday, just as I became preoccupied with planning and hosting a two-year-old’s birthday party and then launching into a nightmarish hell of day-job research, The Shelf cried out to me for my opinion about Tree of Smoke and its particular appeal to male-type people and further, the relationship of men to literary fiction that plays with genre conventions.

To which I say, um, well gee, it would appear you have a point, since, um — ahem — well, it’s a spy novel with, um hey, look over there at that shiny object!

Still there? Oh, alright. The thing is I haven’t read Tree of Smoke. But I’ve now added it to the pile — and I’ve now read Jared’s post and the NY Times review, which makes me an expert on the subject by Internet standards. So as for Jared’s core question to me (why would this kind of great book appeal more to dudes, and why is that the case for genre-exploring lit fiction in general?), I feel qualified to put forward a fairly straightforward theory (more…)

This past November, when he won the National Book Award for his novel Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson couldn’t make it to the ceremony because he was in Iraq reporting a piece for Portfolio. At the time it seemed like strange news. But one can only imagine that, after spending years chained to a monstrous novel, the man felt like a vacation.

As Gregory Cowles recounted the other day on Paper Cuts, the New York Times books blog, Johnson made his absence up to New York with a recent reading and Q&A at the New School. I have to assume that anyone who’s ever read an interview with Johnson would show up mostly for the reading, as he’s notoriously taciturn during question periods. (A favourite of mine from the a National Book Award-sponsored interview last fall: Bret Anthony Johnston: Were there moments in your writing process where you worried the book wouldn’t work? If so, how did you press on? Denis Johnson: Well, I’ve never thought about this before, but now that you ask, it occurs to me I don’t have much interest whether any of my books work or not.) (more…)

Exclusive Edward Burtynsky photos

(Backstage at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, photograph by Edward Burtynsky.)

In the sixth grade, I played Lysander in the Iles Elementary School’s presentation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was as professional a production as you’d imagine it to be. The fairies danced to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”; Hermia, Helena, Demetrius, and I wore pyjamas (it was nighttime, you see, and we were very sleepy); and Christie Walden’s memorable Titania looked like a twelve-year-old cross between the Bride of Frankenstein and Diana Ross on the cover of Why Do Fools Fall in Love?

I wasn’t cut out to be an actor, and it was my second and final appearance on stage. (The year before, I’d played a senile mountie in a show about an old folks’ home. My job was to intermittently wander across the stage singing, “I love the North.” Video survives.) In fact, I’ve grown to vaguely dislike the theatre. I prefer my artifice in the form of anapests and enjambments, and I do not like being seated in a crowded room. In high school, I tried to avoid the theatre kids, and was largely successful. I went to one play in university, and only because a friend was playing Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, a role that I knew (from reading, not seeing) that I liked. While she was good, I enjoyed the version in my head better. (more…)

It’s sort of a shame that Torsten Krol is best known for the question of whether or not he’s real. He lives in Australia, and, as the first page of Callisto reminds you, nothing else is known about him. This, of course, has led to speculation about his identity, with rumours swirling that he may actually be some other, more famous writer using a pseudonym. All of which is pretty un-germane, actually, and distracts from the reception of his new book, which is worth reading for reasons entirely unrelated to the identity of its author. So good thing we got that mystery out of the way, no?

Callisto is the story of Odell Deefus, a lumbering hunk of corn-fed Wyoming, a man with limited mental capacities and who is so convinced Condoleezza Rice’s merits as the woman of his dreams that he carries a picture of her in his pocket. It’s also the story of US paranoia, a cartoonish, kitchen-sink satire that embroils its hero in unending manifestations of an American anxiety about terrorism in particular and Islamic fundamentalism in general. Since one of the book’s pleasures is in discovering its curveball plot points and increasingly preposterous developments, I don’t want to ruin it by getting into a detailed plot summary here. (I’d avoid reading reviews, which will doubtless be forthcoming in Canada, for this reason; more than most books, their summaries will ruin this one.)

The novel succeeds on the basis of Odell’s narration, which is charmingly simple and entirely engrossing. It only fails, in fact, when it tries to be too simple by introducing malapropisms that are jarring given the subtlety with which his mental limitations are explored elsewhere. Imagine the Forrest Gump of Winston Groom’s novel wandering not through a greatest historical hits of the second half of the twentieth century but a small Kansas town where he mows lawns, drinks a lot of Captain Morgan, and notes to everyone who will listen that he has read The Yearling sixteen times. (As someone who is interested in both alcohol and the assigning of definite articles to nouns that don’t require them, Odell’s predilection for “the Captain� really resonated with me.)

By offering Odell as a sort of conduit between us and society’s reactions to the idea of terrorism, Krol succeeds in making us think not only about that society, but about how we think about it. And since Odell intends to enlist in the Army and remains a relatively unquestioning believer in his country’s trajectory, we end up thinking not just about how we think about that society, but about how we think about those who support that society’s more militaristic endeavors. In other words, Odell’s mental limitations mean that we can’t automatically rely on the narrator’s understanding of his world as we might in another novel, and what results is a sort of meta contemplation of the paranoid state and those who support it. It would be too simplistic to say that Krol indicts this mindset by aligning it with a narrator who is borderline retarded. Lots of the smarter people in this book believe in the ultimate benevolence of the police state Callisto’s America has become, too. But in giving us Odell Deefus, Krol complicates things with simplicity, and in an age where black and white can easily become too sharpened, a little complexity is not a bad thing.

This week finds me in the middle of both a production cycle and a terrible cold, so I do not have the time or capacity to write the essay I’d intended to write about Samantha Power’s excellent new book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World. I had planned, you see, to point out how it’s a very good guide to understanding some of the thought behind Barack Obama’s remarkable foreign-policy philosophy, of which Power was an influential architect, and I was going to discuss Spencer Ackerman’s fine piece on that philosophy. I was going to note how unfortunate it is that the book’s release has been overshadowed by the fallout from Power calling Hillary Clinton a monster, which isn’t to say that it’s okay to call people monsters, but that one should at least wait until one’s book tour is over before doing it. If, that is, you want to talk about your book on that tour rather than your public political statements. (more…)

Michael Pollan’s new book, In Defense of Food, has an air of summation about it, drawing on years of research to make an argument that is both profoundly radical and embarrassingly simple. In Pollan’s estimation, many of the epidemics facing our corner of Western society have little to do with, say, the ratio of saturated to unsaturated fat in our diet. Instead, the problem is the nature of our diet as a whole, and the fact that we eat way too much of it: too much red meat, too many refined carbohydrates and sugars (usually including an array of chemical enhancements) and too little of everything else.

Partly to blame for this is the rise of nutritionism, a particular branch of food science that has spent decades casting about in an attempt to blame some evil or other for the reality that many of us are overweight. Pollan’s book is as much a defense of food as it is an indictment of the mindset that has seen us reduce food from being nutritious to being comprised of particular nutrients. This tendency, Pollan argues, lies behind our societal fetishization of the latest black-balled ingredient, a focus that allows us to ignore actual nutrition, which would just tell us to eat more vegetables and fruit, and less food overall.

In Defense of Food is a small book in size, but its scope is massive: a comprehensive study of the ways in which, over the last fifty years or so, scientists and journalists have manipulated what and how we eat. Pollan also looks forward in its call to common sense. “Eat food,� Pollan advises. “Not too much. Mostly plants.� Simple advice, and geared less to a diet fad than a new lifestyle. The book’s overwhelming success indicates its message is being well received. And let’s hope so, for as Pollan suggested in our interview, as more and more of us “vote with our forks,� casting the ballot will become easier, and more delicious.

I spoke with Michael Pollan last week, by phone from his office in Berkeley, California. (more…)