Advance copies of our September issue arrived the other day, which means it’s probably about time that I say something about July/August, soon to disappear from shelves. The 2008 edition of our annual Summer Reading Issue is centred around the idea of escape. We have, among many others, Don Gillmor on his brother’s final, tragic escape; Wendy Dennis on fleeing Toronto for Austin, Texas; and Stephen Henighan giving Mozambique its best treatment since Bob Dylan’s Desire. (more…)

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…)

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.

Featuring: Haruki Murakami, Arthur Conan Doyle, Junot Diaz, Stephen King, and John Reibetanz.

1. Running Man In their summer fiction issue a few weeks ago, the New Yorker published an essay by Haruki Murakami about his simultaneous birth as a novelist and long-distance runner. Like most Murakami, it was really good, but sort of hard to say why. It’s actually an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which Bond Street will publish at the end of this month. What to say that doesn’t break the review embargo? I’ll note that if you enjoyed the essay, you’ll enjoy the book, and you’ll finish it with the same sense of perplexed pleasure with which you ended the excerpt. Murakami’s work is, stylistically at least, deceptively simple, and I always leave his novels a little uncertain of what’s transpired, but very sure that I’ve enjoyed its transpiring. Since the book is non-fiction, what happens within it is a bit clearer than in, say, South of the Border, West of the Sun (seriously—was she like a ghost or something?), but the prose still has its mysteries. For instance, how did it manage to entrance me enough to finish a book about long-distance running, a subject in which I have no interest? The title, of course, is borrowed from Raymond Carver, and Tess Gallagher is thanked within for permission. Not thanked, however, is Horace Silver, though he should be—Murakami’s cover borrows and adapts the running man from Silver’s semi-excellent 1972 Blue Note LP In Pursuit of the 27th Man (part of which is pictured above). (more…)

Surely Biblioasis, the small independent press run out of Emeryville, Ontario, is among the bravest entities in Canadian literature. This spring, after all, their list contained not one but two books of critical essays. One would be risk enough. Two is sort of admirably crazy. Fortunately for them, though, both books are very good, and I say that not just because both authors are contributors to The Walrus. Charles Foran’s Join the Revolution, Comrade and Stephen Henighan’s A Report on the Afterlife of Culture are excellent in part because their publisher has encouraged their scope to extend beyond the traditional confines of Canadian essay collections. Foran and Henighan are decidedly internationalist in their orientation, and what results are wide-ranging surveys of everything from, in Henighan’s book, Roberto Bolano to Haruki Murakami to Wole Soyinka, and, in Foran’s, from finding memories of Vietnam movies in Hue to searching for quality in Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons. (I’ll put a preemptive plug here for Biblioasis’s new edition of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s collected poems, which I’ve not yet bought, but sort of has to be good, no?) (more…)

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…)

In what is surely one of the worst ideas in recent cinematic history, Warner Brothers has asked Guy Ritchie to direct a new Sherlock Holmes movie. Making it even worse? The script is to be based on a comic book, and both of these iterations are to focus, Variety tells us, on our hero’s physical side in an attempt “reinvent Holmes and sidekick Dr. John H. Watson.” According to information shared by Lionel Wigram, the film’s producer, the new Holmes will “be more adventuresome and take advantage of his skills as a boxer and swordsman.” The Guardian headline really says it all: “Guy Ritchie takes on ‘all-action’ Sherlock Holmes.” I like to think that those scare quotes are some British copy editor’s way of saying, “Hey, listen everybody: how dumb is this?!”

In effect, greenlighting this project is like saying that it would be really cool to make a movie about Hulk Hogan’s recent dalliance with modal logic. It’s not inconceivable that the Hulkamaniac is into the whole possible worlds thing, but it certainly isn’t his day job. The fact that Holmes is physically agile and has a history of boxing makes him a rounder character, but it doesn’t define that roundness; while I would find Hogan more interesting if he had some serious thoughts about David Lewis, I would never expect—nor would I want—it to be more essential to his character than, say, the time he body-slammed Andre the Giant while defending the world title at Wrestlemania III.

The last time I wrote about Holmes, my focus was on the brilliant new Penguin series of paperbacks. While thinking about the man in preparation for writing that, it occurred to me that the notion of order is central to the Holmes world. I didn’t mention it in the post, because it seemed sort of self-evident; the books and stories are based on the possibilities of reasoning, which is an inherently structural act. While Holmes may have distracting tendencies—his occasionally debilitating drug addiction, say—the idea of order is at the centre of his capabilities.

Which is why this news is particularly terrible. Setting aside the fact that the direction of the film stands in distinct opposition to any reasonable interpretation of what is essential to the character (and ignoring the fact that it’s a crass attempt to make a biceps-and-zingers superhero out of a character who is already a superhero, though of a different kind), the idea of Guy Ritchie helming this picture is ridiculous. Ritchie’s style—frantic, frenetic, jittery, annoying—is the antithesis of the masterly calm that defines Holmes’s personal world, and the precision with which Conan Doyle relates the events that happen within it.

But I suppose it’s all tied up in that word ‘reinvention’ To truly reinvent the character, it seems, they’ll need to change not only his fundamental nature, but the way he relates to what is fundamental to his world. So perhaps Guy Ritchie and his MTV editing team are exactly the right choice. Because if you’re going to kill an idol, you might as well make doubly sure he’s dead.

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…)

The late, lamented Canadian men’s mag Toro is back, sort of. As my good friend Marc Weisblott of Eye Weekly’s Scrolling Eye puts it:

[Of the relaunched, internet-only Toro] “It’s an example of how a men’s magazine looks and acts when taking advantage of state-of-the-art 21st century digital technology — as opposed to 18th-century printing press technology,” goes Morassutti’s YouTube-posted pitch. “Carrying forward just enough of the branding, categories and contributors for continuity — but also creating, from scratch, an exciting new men’s lifestyle platform that plays to the strengths of the online medium.”

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“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…)

Consider this the start of a blogroll with benefits — I’ll update it periodically and your own additions, objections and suggestions in the comments section give it a whole Web 2.0 interactivity thing that’s been missing from so many inaccessible blog sidebars. Cause as you can see, this blog ain’t got no sidebar. (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…)

Just to tie up some loose ends after my post about Kay Hymowitz’s “Man Child in the Promised Land.” (Earlier knotting took place here and here.)

Dave M declares his allegiance to the bong and says he hopes I really didn’t mean to give my agreement or approval to Hymowitz’s piece:

it assumes pretty much the worst of men under 30. for a start, Maxim culture — vile as it can be — is in some ways a welcome corrective to the outrageously classist idea that having the time and inclination to pursue Hef’s “jazz, Picasso, Nietzsche and sex” formulation is the best and only way to be a man.

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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.