Wednesday’s Literary Events
It’s a potentially busy day in the city for books fans. The Toronto Public Library’s Northern District Branch (40 Orchard View Blvd.) presents a metro-themed reading with Sarah Elton and Kevin Robbins. The authors will read selections from City of Words: Toronto Through Her Writers’ Eyes, an anthology of writings about Hogtown. The event is free and begins at 12:30 p.m. Authors Margaret Atwood, Graeme Gibson, and Wayne Grady host an event at the Park Hyatt hotel (4 Avenue Road) in support of World Literacy of Canada. Admission is $60 and includes hors d’oeuvres, readings, and book signings (doors open 6:30 p.m.). Now Hear This, a local arts-based literacy organization, launches its second anthology of writings by participants in the S.W.A.T. (Students, Writers and Teachers) Creative Residencies Program. The launch happens at The Gardiner Museum, Terrace Room (111 Queen’s Park) at 7:00 p.m. and is free. And over at the Authors at Harbourfront Centre series (235 Queens Quay West), Poetry Month, which begins tomorrow, will be kicked off in style with the Now Magazine Open Poetry night. Twenty published poets will read from their works, with a jury choosing the best poet of the night. The winner will be invited to participate in the International Festival of Authors in October. Last year’s winner, Torontoist poetry columnist Jacob McArthur Mooney, hosts the event (7:30 p.m., $8 or free for members and students with ID).
An Interview with Comics Artist Marc Bell
Cover of Hot Potatoe, a collection of Marc Bell's art and comics from 2001 to 2008. Published by D&Q Sept 2009
The first time I met Marc Bell was at one of the first Canzines in the mid 1990s. He and Gavin McInnes (who went on to found the infamous Vice Magazine) had come down from Montreal, sharing one of the many jammed tables set up for zinesters to sell their wares. Throughout the day, Marc and Gavin’s mischievous antics, animated conversation, and general disdain for just about anything that stood still charged the atmosphere in the hall. They were creating a scene. And Marc’s charming comic zines–which positioned him as a kind of young Canadian Robert Crumb–flew off the table.
It is some 15 years later and Marc has never abandoned his totally original vision. Today he is represented exclusively by the Adam Baumbold Gallery in New York, and his work sells for far more than his much-collected early zines. If that weren’t enough, Drawn & Quarterly recently published a massive volume of his collected comics work entitled Hot Potatoe.
Last week I had an opportunity to interview Marc over the phone, just after his recent move back to his hometown of London, Ontario, with his partner Amy Lockhart.
Dave Howard: You’ve broken in and started doing the “art thing” more as your source of income, rather than your comics. Can you talk a little bit about your transition from one to the other? And what is it you feel you might be giving up and gaining by moving from comics to fine art?
Marc Bell: Well, I think the art thing came along at the right time. I was doing this weekly comic, and it was good because I was getting paid–steady income, though it was very small. And when the art thing came along, it was stuff I was interested in doing at the time, and someone was interested in showing it. In my weekly I was doing a story and it was driving me crazy. I felt I had started all this stuff in the narrative and I couldn’t deal with it. So, whenever I didn’t feel like continuing the story, I would do a thing called “International Doodle Week,” where it would just be a drawing. And then it became more and more frequent. Maybe about the same time–I’m not sure which happened first–there was a little interest in showing the art work in a gallery, at a level I hadn’t been able to do before. And there was interest in this stuff that I found interesting to make, and so it was just an obvious choice to move my attention a over bit. But you know, making the art, it’s still very cartoony, it’s the same thing I have always done, it’s just not about the stories as much. I don’t have to draw the same character over and over.
Howard: |You say it’s the same thing as your comics but without the narrative–what is that same thing?
Bell: Filling up space. (laughs)
Events for a Tuesday
Poets John Toone, Sandy Pool and Dave Morris read tonight at the Artbar Poetry Series at Clinton’s (693 Bloor Street West). The readings begin at 8 p.m. and are free, though a hat will be passed. Over at Tinto cafe (89 Roncesvalles Avenue, 7:30 p.m.) Joe Fiorito, Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, and Andrea Thompson all read from recent work. The PWYC event also features music by Elizabeth Shepherd.
Not Every Gesture Is a Manifesto: An Interview with Michael Lista
He takes Auschwitz in one hand
And Japan in the other––
The flash that gnarls out proposes to marry him.
–from “Louis Slotin Improvises”
(scroll down for full text and a link to the source poem)
Michael Lista is a twenty-something Toronto poet who, with his first collection, has managed an incredible thing. He has written a book that, without straying far into the political, the religious, or any of the more traditional means of rendering an insult, has an opportunity to make a lot of people very angry. His book, Bloom (Anansi 2010) has the power to piss people off on purely aesthetic grounds. Written as a series of poems that each take their structure, form, and often content or voice from a previously written piece (ranging back to 14th-century Pearl Poet and as close-at-hand as Karen Solie), Bloom tells the story of Louis Slotin. Slotin was a Canadian physicist who worked on The Manhattan Project and, amidst personal problems, died mysteriously during a routine procedure at his laboratory. Bloom is both dizzingly complex and completely readable. I loved it to bits.
Quite graciously, Michael Lista agreed to sit down (electronically, anyways) and talk about his new book. The result is a little long, but worth your time, I believe. The guy has a lot of good stuff to say.
Jacob McArthur Mooney: Thanks for doing this, Michael. The element of the book I want to talk the most about is your respect for art’s multiversal capabilities. We never really see Louis Slotin directly, as he’s either filtered through these surrogate fictions (Odysseus, Leopold Bloom) or his experiences are being reflected through your own decision to fill the book with re-writes and adaptations of other works. This creates a number of complementary worlds: the visible, invisible, unchronological, fictional, interpersonal, and they’re all sort of piled on each other in a really interesting way. Most of your alluded-to sources are poems but, as an example, you pull away from the narrative’s big climax to take your readers to a scene from the premiere of a Hollywood movie about the Manhattan Project, in which a character is loosely based on Louis Slotin. What inspired this reliance on the allusive and intertextual?
Michael Lista: In a good heist movie, in the scene where the master thief is busting into a safe—he’s got an ear to the safe door, listening—there’s a shot of the three lock rings revolving into place, the little “U”s of the combination lining up for the tongue to slide through. That’s what it was like the first time I read about the Slotin accident. There was this sort of triple occlusion happening in the lab that day; Slotin in front of the atomic bloom, shielding his colleagues from the radiation; the actual experimental apparatus, with the two half-spheres of Beryllium closed down around the core; and even at the atomic level, the neutrons coming loose and sliding through neighbouring nuclei, coming between the protons and neutrons, going critical. In that moment of alignment, which cast its harmonizing, mutative rays out across the decades, I saw where we were: in Polyphemus’s cave, the Cyclops blinded by “Nobody.”
At first, the English-to-English translation technique worked because it was a pretty faithful simulacrum of Slotin’s experimental technique that day; dangerous, reckless, taboo. It also had the happy coincidence of updating “the man of many ways.” And as I continued to write the book, and focus more on what was happening between the people in it, I realized that the key figures in Slotin’s life that led to his behaviour in the lab that day were Harry Daghlian, his predecessor who died after performing the exact same experiment on the exact same nuclear core nine months to the day earlier, and his replacement, Alvin Graves, who was having an affair with Slotin’s wife (weird: I had incorrectly written “life”). And what was happening between them all—ontogeny mirroring phylogony—looked just like what was happening at the atomic level, later in the lab. Therefore Slotin was in an exciting musical moment for me, where the present is ripe for improvisation, though it’s set in the key of the past. And that’s the poet’s position before the canon, the dragon.
But most of all—and this is something I hope my readers see—it was also the way I figure the world looks. Something that has bothered me enormously as a reader of poetry is the failure of poets—especially the so-called avant-garde—to pick up on the formal complexity of the world as revealed by the various scientific disciplines. Biologists have shown us the double-helix, the root not only of physiology but also of behaviour, cognition; chemistry gives us Bach and personality; and physicists are proving we’re more math than matter. And yet so many poets give us a world that looks profoundly out-dated; disordered, solipsistic, self-made, random, positively 20th century. I think a more honest book is one in which the spontaneity of personality is set within the strict—and ancient— clockwork of the world.
LitBlog Spotlight: vestige.org
vestige.org, the online space that was originally conceived as a “huge, rambling mess of a thing,” now offers some of the most thoughtful commentary on the Canadian book scene around. Creator August C. Bourré may spend his days scanning books for the Internet Archive, but at night he’s either crafting stories of his own or commenting on the stories of others, with a critical honesty that’s not often seen in the world of book blogs. With vestige.org alive and kicking since the year 2000 (and reimagined as a book blog in 2002), Bourré is both an old-timer and one to watch in the book blogging world.
August chatted with Books@Torontoist via email about vestige.org.
Torontoist: Vestige.org has undergone a lot of change since you launched it in 2000. Can you tell me about this evolution. Why did you decide to focus on the literary?
August C. Bourré: Vestige.org started out as a kind of catch-all. Blogs weren’t really an established thing when I bought the domain, though I was doing extensive, daily, and extremely personal online journaling on other sites. I wanted vestige.org to be more about what I was working on and the things online that fascinated me, and less about my personal life. I hadn’t really come into myself as a Book Person yet. The site had photography, bad poetry, bad fiction, a Rebecca-Blood-style blog, another blog where I incorporated links to interesting things into a piece of short fiction, and then a handful of mini-sites that were about experimenting with CSS-only layouts and typography and things like that (much harder to work with then than now).
It was a mess, really. It was just this side of impossible to update because I coded everything by hand and it had a very convoluted structure, and aside from the notorious Jakob Neilsen thing, I had a hard time connecting with an audience because I was all over the place. I killed the site for a revamp, and in the meantime I put up a basic news/politics blog, because there was an election on and it felt like something I could talk about consistently. Once the election was over I realized I didn’t much care about politics anymore, at least not enough to write about it on a semi-daily basis, and anyway I was reading 2,000+ pages a week for my English Lit degree and just didn’t have the time. I did keep a short list of the books I was reading in a sub-directory. I knew that the site needed something to focus it to keep me interested, and since I was devoting so much energy to books and literature (I wanted to be a professor) that it seemed like an obvious choice.
TO: For the past few years, you’ve been running a project you call Reading 2007 (2008, 2009, 2010). Tell me about this and why you decided to start this.
AB: It was a discipline thing, really. 2005 was an absolutely catastrophic year for me, personally, financially, career-wise, basically in every way that mattered. For a while I became the kind of person who ate, slept, went to work, and watched some television once in a while, I otherwise did nothing else. I felt lucky to be that functional.
I found a really amazing relationship that brought me out of that for a time, but when it ended abruptly I realized that I needed to make changes or I just wasn’t going to survive as a person. I needed a structure, a project, some way to impose a level of discipline on how I spent my spare time that would be a stepping stone to renewing that discipline in the rest of my life. I still had the list of books I was reading (which was literally just a list of titles), and I decided to expand that into full-on “reviews” of everything I read. One book at a time, in order, period.
It turned out to be fun, and just what I needed. I’ve had another couple rounds of really hard times since then, but having a project like Reading 20XX around means there’s always some kind of structured “work” I can turn my mind to. On top of that, knowing that my original career goals weren’t really possible anymore, it was a way to still feel involved in a world, in a conversation, that I really care about.
Teresa Toten Talks Growing Up and Fitting In, Piece by Piece
Teresa Toten is a YA author best known for her Blonde books—Better than Blonde, Me and the Blondes, and the upcoming Beyond Blonde. Her books may be about those who win the inclusion jackpot—ah, to be young, blonde, and beautiful—but she was surprised to discover that it wasn’t those girls coming to her book launches, reading her books, and being touched by her stories. It was girls who felt like outsiders, who felt like they never belonged. Girls, like Teresa, who weren’t born in Canada. (Teresa was born in Zagreb, Croatia.) This experience inspired her latest project, an anthology about growing up and fitting in, Piece by Piece: Stories About Fitting into Canada. Books about growing up and fitting in are published every day. But this book, like the contributors in it, is different.
Small Print will launch Piece by Piece on Sunday afternoon with a performance mash-up, bringing together contributors from the book and kids with their own stories to tell for what should be some unforgettable performance pieces.
Teresa spoke with Books@Torontoist over the phone about the book and Sunday’s launch.
Torontoist: Tell us about your book, Piece by Piece.
Teresa Toten: It’s beautiful and Penguin did a gorgeous job. They let me do what I wanted and the result is an amazing mix of stories. But it’s not just essays. The very first story is a comic by Svetlana Chmakova. She examines the heartache of coming to Canada from Russia, when all the leaves here are the wrong colours. There’s also a spoken-word piece from Boonaa Mohammed, a slam poet whose parents are from Ethiopia, about being emotionally destroyed and resorting to violence to get his point across. Each story really brings to the table a different perspective. It’s not a bunch of stories about hard luck, they’re not “Oh woe is me, it’s so hard to be an immigrant” stories. They’re passionate, thoughtful examinations of the immigrant experience.
TO: Where did the inspiration for this project come from?
TT: I was touring for my Blonde trilogy. The books are set in the 1970s and the protagonist is a Bulgarian girl, Sophie. I was completely caught off guard when kids were in burkas telling me how much this book meant to them. Frankly, I was stunned. It’s about blondes, but I started to ask what touched them about the book, why they loved it so much. Everyone looked at me and said, “I am Sophie.” It was strange at first, because these girls were nothing like Sophie. But it dawned on me that other is other. It’s formless and defined by what it is not. As I started to go across the country, I realized that this was a national issue. The audiences didn’t look like me. How did all these people who didn’t look like me and didn’t look like Sophie relate to this book? Who are they? What matters to them? What are their stories? I started asking all those politically incorrect questions: where are you from, where did your parents come from? I wanted to know their stories, how they connect with literature and what they wanted to see represented in the books they read. I connected with that. Growing up, it would have meant a lot of me as a Croatian to have someone on television or in the books I read reflect my culture and heritage. I realized how powerful and universal it would be to bring together personal stories to reflect on a moment, to reflect on a point of change, acceptance or change of trying to become Canadian.
TO: How did you solicit and select the pieces for the book?
TT: There was so much research! I wanted balance. I wanted young people, but I also wanted people of a certain generation. There’s powerful stories in the European immigrant experience too. I wanted some masculinity. And, wow. The men wrote such powerful pieces. Richard Poplak wrote about coming from South Africa in Grade 8. He came from apartheid to Canada, and wrote from the perspective of a white man and his struggle to overcome the shock and dismay of seeing white people touching brown people. It’s a powerful piece that gets into the complex political and identity politics of that situation in a way that’s rarely written about. Linda Granfield wrote about coming to Canada as an American and facing vicious anti-Americanism. She feared for the safety of her family, and that’s something we never see or think about. For us, anti-Americanism is abstract. We never see or think about how it affects the day to day of families who live here and who support and believe in Canada.
TO: Why did you feel an anthology would be represent your vision for this project?
TT: I felt this was the best way to give everyone a little tidbit of experience. I don’t mean this in the geographical sense, but also in the breadth of experience. Everyone who is from someone else will be touched by the array of experiences that are touched upon in this book. Some of them came here at the point of a gun, or they were dragged here by a sense of an adventure. Others came out of economic necessity, others just wanted calm. One wanted to be an actor and make a living, so he came here for that. There’s geographical dispersion, age dispersion, but what I’m really proud of is the variety of stories. Mahtad Narsimhan wrote about becoming a Matty when he moved to Canada. How does one undergo that process? Changing your name turns your entire identity upside down. These essays touch on the different emotions you feel when coming to a new country: fear, hope, confusion, anger, relief, freedom. Marina Nemat, who wrote the essay “Crossing Yonge Street,” was raped and tortured before she came to Canada. She wrote about being so moved by standing in a convenience store with her three year old, completely bewildered by the array of chocolate chip cookies. Here are more cookies than could would imagine, you can have any kind you want, and you can choose them in peace.
TO: The book looks gorgeous. Can you tell me about the concept for the cover?
TT: There’s always been this idea of suitcases and how it represents travel and change, which I love. Penguin and I talked about that from the very beginning. An immigrant can be moving from Scarborough to downtown Toronto which, in many ways, can be as big as a move across the ocean. You still need to pack up your belongings and move them with you. What do you take? What do you leave behind? Are you bringing pieces to help you adjust to a new life or remind you of the old? Are they practical or sentimental? The best way to represent these transitions, both geographical and philosophical, is with a suitcase. On the back of the cover, there’s a line from the various essays, such as “How do you pack a life?” “If I gave up my name, what would I be left with?” and “No one ever tells you that fitting in never ends.” It’s beautifully done and it conveys exactly what the book is about.
TO: The launch, which is a performance piece mash-up, sounds interesting.
TT: It does! I’m so excited. Small Print came up with the concept and I couldn’t be more pleased. It’s such an amazing way to express the sentiment behind the book. Chris Reed’s vision and passion molded it into what you’ll see on Sunday. Joseph Kertes is involved and Andrew Roti is DJing. We have several kids coming in to share their stories. They’ll be working with several of the contributors to create a performance mash-up of their work, and it should be high energy and really creative. Some amazing kids are coming too. There’s one girl, who is of Indian descent, and she recently moved here from the States. But it’s not the colour of her skin that people are harassing her for, it’s the fact she moved from America. I hope she partners with Linda and I think they’ll come up with something fantastic. I’m stunned by the energy of it all and think it’s a fantastic way to celebrate this project.
The Piece By Piece Storytelling Mash-Up will take place on Sunday, March 28 at the Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen St West) from 2-4 p.m. Entry is free.
Author photo copyright Matthew Wiley, courtesy Penguin Canada
Drawing a Winner: An Overview of the Doug Wright Awards Nominees
The much-anticipated Doug Wright Awards will be awarded during a ceremony in Toronto at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival on May 8, 7 p.m., at the Toronto Reference Library’s new Bram & Bluma Appel Salon. The Doug Wright Awards honour one of Canada’s greatest but almost forgotten cartoonists–Doug Wright–by rewarding the country’s most innovative English-language cartooning talent.
This year the juries have selected a truly eclectic shortlist. On one end of the spectrum we have artists from the fine art world, as represented by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas (Red) and Marc Bell (Hot Potatoe), both internationally known for their innovative fusion of storytelling and personal and universal mythology. We also have such vibrant new talent as Marta Chudolinka and Michael Leforge coupled with established comics artists like Seth and the work of Doug Wright himself!
There are three categories in the awards. Here is an overview of the nominees in each category.
FOR BEST BOOK
Back + Forth by Marta Chudolinska (The Porcupine’s Quill)
Back and Forth is a modern homage to traditionally wordless narratives, especially those books of woodcut drawings from the first half of the 20th century. These books tell surprisingly subtle stories in images only and are in many ways the precursor to the graphic novel. Chudolinska’s story is comprised of lino-cut graphics that chronicle the main character’s personal transformation during a transition from Toronto to Vancouver, with the story moving back and forth in time and place as it follows two story lines. There’s a great interview of Marta here, and you can see her work in action here. For the interesting history of the wordless book go here.
George Sprott: (1894-1975) by Seth (Drawn and Quarterly)
This book is my favourite to win, a luxuriously produced volume from a world-respected artist at the height of his powers. The book captures both the sense of death and vibrant life, of angst-ridden longing and the grounding absence of sentimentality, in an innovative portrayal of an imaginary small town celebrity from mid-20th-century Canadiana. Originally serialized in New York Magazine, the book has won much critical acclaim since its publication last year. Go and read this book, you will not be disappointed.
Hot Potatoe by Marc Bell (Drawn and Quarterly)
Marc Bell, underground cartoonist and love child of Robert Crumb and Philippe Gaston, produces labyrinth-like comics of playful dense artwork. Ten years worth of those comics and art are collected in this beautifully crafted, oversized hardcover coffee table book. The work collected here shows how Marc’s work has progressed, pushing at many boundaries and opening up the minds of readers. This is the only book nominated in two categories–for both Best Book and for the Pigskin Peters’ award. I predict Marc’s work may win one category but not the other.
Kaspar by Diane Obomsawin, “Obom” (Drawn and Quarterly)
Quebec cartoonist Obom tells us in a very simple line the naïve story of Caspar Hauser, the 16 year old Nuremberg waif that electrified the imagination of the salons in the early 19th century until his mysterious, untimely death at the age of 21. Using Hauser’s own writing as a source, Obom shows a boy raised in a cellar without contact with other people until his emergence and the subsequent exploitative celebrity in a society waiting to use his story to justify its narrow world views.
Red: A Haida Manga by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas (Douglas and McIntyre)
Yahgulanaas’s work, like Marc Bell’s, has crossed the boundaries of fine art and comics, mixing traditional Haida artistic sensibilities with mainstream comics appeal. Yahgulanaas’s ”Haida Manga” has won both international and local attention, growing such a wide and dedicated readership that his current publisher agreed to publish Red sight unseen. Hailing from Vancouver, Michael employs a style reminiscent Haida art, which he blends the visual storytelling tropes of traditional comics, in the process creating a truly original storytelling technique. Red, a full colour work in 108 pages, can also be cut up an rearranged into an actual mural.
FOR BEST EMERGING TALENT
Adam Bourret, I’m Crazy
My first impression of Bourret’s work was that the art was somewhat crude; by implication, I imagined his storytelling would be the same. ButI was quickly drawn in and was very pleasantly surprised by Bourret’s mature, effective storytelling sensibility, especially how it deals with upside down world of living with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I understand this disease much better as a result of reading this work. Frankly, I wish that Bourret would win Best Emerging Talent this year, though my guess is he will not.
Michael DeForge Lose #1 (Koyama Press), Cold Heat Special #7 (Picturebox)
DeForge’s work is technically astute, psychedelic, and psychologically accurate, and surprisingly reminiscent of a young Jim Woodring. His chaotic work will disturb and challenge you, and yet I could not deny the resonate feeling of rightness I experienced when Bullwinkle (of, yes, Rocky and Bullwinkle fame) announces to the protagonist–looking to his left at an extended panel of accurately rendered comic strip characters from the 20th century media–that he is in hell. DeForge’s innovation and technical chops will draw many eyes to his work and may snag him the award.
Pascal Girard Nicolas (Drawn and Quarterly)
Yet another wonderful talent from Quebec, artist Pascal Girard pares down, into little heartbreaking vignettes, the tragedy of losing a younger sibling early in childhood. His simple lines are not unadorned with self-conscious flourishes, and he accomplishes that very difficult but seemingly natural balance of subject matter and art to create a symphonic resonance that builds upon each scene. I challenge you to read through a sample of Nicolas, and see if you are not moved. Girard’s effective wedding of story, art, and pacing place him as my favourite to win this year.
John Martz It’s Snowing Outside. We Should Go For a Walk.
John Martz is the founder of the amazing popular blog Drawn and I admit I was surprised to learn his work was selected for best emerging talent. Martz’s strength here is his wonderful gift for graphic design, creating images you study long after you’ve taken the practical information you need to carry the story forward. Whether it’s his full colour palate, his painterly design, or his use of white space, he uses gorgeous colours and geometric shapes to both engage your attention in a vibrant way while keeping the overall atmosphere soft and quiet. I can’t imagine anyone else on this list holding a candle to Martz’a technical chops.
Sully The Hipless Boy (Conundrum Press)
Sully–the pen name of Sherwin Tjia–is the creator of the very popular dark comedic strip Pedigree Girls. At 250 pages, the art in The Hipless Boy is smooth and accomplished, as crisp spot blacks and fleshy grey tones complement and engage the reader in this twenty-something coming-of-age story. Reflective and poetic, The Hipless Boy effectively evokes its main character’s sophisticated inner world by moving the story from quite introspective panels to plot-advancing action or dialogue. I admit I’m not as interested in coming-of-age stories as I once was, yet Sully’s art and subtle storytelling drew me in.
THE PIGSKIN PETERS AWARD for UNCONVENTIONAL, NOMINALLY-NARRATIVE COMICS:
Bébête by Simon Bossé (L’Oie de Cravan)
Bossé was part of the new wave of underground comics in Canada in the 1990s that included such artists as Julie Doucet and Henriette Valium. Bébête is Bossé’s collection of energetic, complex, and visually stunning wordless comic strips. His style is informed by both Fritz the Cat and Eraserhead–technically astute, absolutely dense, and worth every inch of texture Bossé fills with his pen.
Dirty Dishes by Amy Lockhart (Drawn and Quarterly)
This collection of full colour illustrations presents Amy’s distinct paintings. Both cartoon-ish and painterly, the over-rendered forms are both innocent and disturbing. Also known for her sculpture and animation, Amy Lockhart is one to watch, and will have a lot to bring to the non-verbal comics medium.
Hot Potatoe by Marc Bell (Drawn and Quarterly)
Nominated twice! See the description earlier. It’s a cliché yet unfortunately true, that some very deserving works must lose and others win.
Never Learn Anything From History by Kate Beaton
Beaton is the newest bright star on the Canadian comics scene. Her work is clever, intelligent, informed, unpretentious, kind, wicked, and gut-busting funny. I mean, who has yet been able to render history and English literature utterly ridiculous in six panels? I believe she just may be the Gary Larson of the webcomics world–she mahy be the one who will put strip comics back on your fridge at home, in cubicles at work, and in philosophy and history departments around the world. All my friends are getting copies of her book this year. Get them now, she keeps running out.
The Collected Doug Wright Volume One by Doug Wright (Drawn and Quarterly)
Okay–let’s own up–it was the creative process behind the creation of this book that moved it’s editors so profoundly that they decided to create an award to honour a great cartoonist who was at risk of being forgotten. Perhaps it is fitting–and entirely Canadian–that the judges defer this great book and choose another fitting winner. That would be a mistake, in my opinion. If one is entirely objective, and honest, it is this beautiful tome that is the best book on this list. Brad Mckay and Seth both deserve awards for the work they put into this gorgeous book.
Thursday’s Cavalcade of Book Events
The Toronto Public Library continues “The eh List Reading Series” with free readings at two of its branches on Thursday. Annabel Lyon, whose debut novel, The Golden Mean, was nominated for more awards than you shake an Indigo card at, reads at the Reference Library (789 Yonge Street) at 12:30 this afternoon, while up at the Barbara Frum branch (20 Covington Avenue), novelist Lauren Kirshner reads from Where We Have To Go at 7 p.m. Ben McNally Books (366 Bay Street) hosts the Toronto launch of Joyce Wieland: Writings and Drawings 1952-1971, a collection of the late artist’s visual and verbal explorations of her emerging ideas (5 p.m., FREE). The Dora Keogh Traditional Irish Pub (141 Danforth Avenue) is the site for another non-fiction book launch, Robert Wright’s Our Man In Tehran, an examination of the dramatic rescue of six American hostages during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. The free event features an appearance by the book’s real-life hero, ex-Canadian ambassador to Iran Ken Taylor (6 p.m.). And finally, our friends over at Open Book Toronto are helping out with an event at The Pour House Irish Pub (182 Dupont Avenue) called “The Advent Book Blog and Open Book Toronto Want You to Get Sociable!” Described as an “an event for social media geeks, publishing professionals, and anyone with a passion for books and readers,” the evening will be hosted by Julie Wilson and Sean Cranbury, creators of the wonderful Advent Book Blog (7 p.m., FREE).
Book Marks: A Good Read
(Photos by Elizabeth Mitchell.)
Although A Good Read has been tucked neatly in Roncesvalles Village since 2007, you’d be forgiven if you haven’t noticed the used bookstore over the past year—incessant street construction can have that effect. Despite the continuous onslaught raging just outside his storefront, owner Gary Kirk continues doing what he does best: discovering bookish gems and offering them up to book lovers curious enough to seek them out.
“I carry a limited number of titles that are new, at least in fiction and non-fiction, which I order from publishers,” says Kirk. “But the majority of my slate is used and collectibles.” Like, for example, the Life of Brian script signed by two Monty Python members that Kirk procured after investing many hours lining up at different events over the years. “It was quite funny, actually,” he says, “because Eric Idle signed it first and when Michael Palin saw that he’d signed it he said “I see Eric’s here. Will I go under Eric? Oh, I’ve tried that! I don’t want to do that again, I’ll go over here.’”
Kirk’s conversation—like his store—is intelligent, varied, fun, and completely lacking in pretension. He began his sojourn into the world of used books causally enough, merely dabbling in collecting, but before long his interest, and collection, grew. “I remember someone in a line-up somewhere asked me whether I was a collector or a dealer,” he says. “I said I was a junkie who deals on the side to finance my habit.” Collecting morphed into scouting and soon enough Kirk went viral and began selling through AbeBooks, but even that wasn’t enough to contain his expanding selection. “Once you get up to 20,000 books in your house,” he adds, “it’s either open a store of get a good divorce lawyer.”
So, a store it was. As it happens, Pollack’s, the long standing hardware store that occupies a good stretch of Roncesvalles, was amalgamating its design and paint department within the confines of the original store, leaving a storefront vacancy. Kirk knew the Village would be a great area for his version of a community bookstore and he made his move. Another serendipitous event he used to his advantage was the release of the final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which gave him the opportunity to have his store opening at an usual time—midnight. “I figured if there’s such tremendous buzz around a book,” he says, “I should be in on it.”
Such an unorthodox opening befits A Good Read’s spin on the used bookstore and Kirk uses the space he took over to great effect. Upon entering the store, the space’s depth and accessibility are instantly established. Despite the vast visible number of stacks—they run down the centre and both sides of the store’s considerable depth—it’s a sense of adventure that seems prevalent and not the staid atmosphere that so often is associated with such environs. The store boasts many delights, but Kirk’s knack for getting his hands on rarities really shines in the back of the store. “Elmore Leonard’s Touch, a book about a faith healer, has a priest by the name of Vaughan Quinn,” says Kirk, as he takes a book off a shelf in the “Signed and First Editions” section and opens it to the inscription. “One day, a man comes into the store and asks me if I wanted the book he hands me. I open it up and it’s signed ‘to Vaughan Quinn from Elmore Leonard’. I look up and the man says, ‘I’m Vaughan Quinn. Me and Dutch were in AA together and he wrote me into one of his books.’”
And that’s just on the open shelves. The locked glass cases at the back of the store contain a selection hardy enough to satisfy even the most discerning bibliophile. There’s a copy of Koji Suzuki’s Spiral that Kirk—who just happens to speak Japanese, thanks to his Japanese Studies degree from U of T—asked the author to sign in both English and Japanese, which he did; a fabulous first edition of Barbara Gowdy’s Through the Green Valley that looks like a Book of the Month romance selection circa 1964; a curious copy of Booker Prize-winning Irish author Anne Enright’s What Are You Like?; and many, many others
“My job is to get these books to readers who will protect them,” says Kirk, adding matter-of-factly, “I price my collectible books reasonably, but at a price that someone will not read it in the bath tub.” Right now, the task of getting the books into the right hands is challenged by the construction outside. “Business has decreased by 60 to 80 percent,” he says, noting that if it wasn’t for his online sales, his store would not have survived the invasion. The construction is due to end come November, but Kirk won’t hold his breath. Instead, he’ll continue looking for and selling books many collectors would drool over and play host to his loyal regulars and new comers alike.
(A Good Read is at 341 Roncesvalles Avenue and is open Tuesday to Thursday and Sundays, from 11- 7, and Friday and Saturdays 11- 9.)
Tales from the Crypt: An Evening with Tom Jokinen
(Photos by Chris Reed)
Last night the Gladstone Hotel hosted a packed house of book lovers and other ghoulish types who came out to watch Books@Torontoist’s James Grainger interview Tom Jokinen, author of Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker in Training, the story of Jokinen’s eight-month apprenticeship in a Winnipeg funeral home. As Jokinen points out in his book, death is one of the few taboo topics left in our youth-obsessed, full-disclosure culture, but you wouldn’t have known it by the size of the crowd or the enthusiasm displayed for Jokinen’s verbal snapshots of the funeral industry. Who knew that morticians use a type of face paint when preparing bodies for viewing because the adhesiveness of regular cosmetics is generated by body heat, a commodity sorely lacking in corpses? Who knew that savvy companies, to cash in on the consumer shift to cremation, have created a line of urns that include a cuddly teddy bear that discreetly houses the ashes of the departed? Jokinen also spoke eloquently of the challenges facing the funeral industry and the daily regimen of respect, care, and hard work his employers brought to the handling of the dead and the bereaved.
Below are a few photos from the event.
(Author Tom Jokinen, left, fields another cryptic question from host James Grainger.)
(Jokinen settles in for what turned out to be an epic book-signing session.)
(A personalized wreath sets the appropriate tone for the evening.)