LitBlog Spotlight: The Literary Type
It’s become ever so important for magazines to increase their online presence. Literary journal The New Quarterly has been hard at work to that end, offering up online exclusive content, an easy to use website, and, best of all, a book blog! Candid, fresh, and funny, The Literary Type offers up guest posts by favourite authors, a look inside the TNQ offices, highlights of other small magazines worth a look, and much more.
Books@Torontoist chatted with TNQ‘s managing editor, Rosalynn Tyo, about the what it’s like to run a book blog from inside a lit journal.
Torontoist: How did The Literary Type come to be and how has it evolved?
Rosalynn Tyo: Hm. Well, a few years ago, the consultant we hired to write our business plan recommended that we start one [a blog], as a way of maintaining our connection to our readers in the longish period of silence between issues—The New Quarterly comes out only four times a year (natch!)—and as a way of reaching out to a new audience. Back then, I felt I didn’t have the time. In my view, a professional (versus purely personal) blog that is not updated frequently, at least a few times a week, is not worth doing if its intention is to build a relationship with your readers and/or with like-minded people who may become your readers.
However, as time went on and I found myself reading more and more lit blogs, I felt that TNQ was excluding itself from this amazing conversation and that we really should be there. When Melissa (our Circulation Manager) joined the team, I found I had not just the time to blog, as she relieved me of several responsibilities, but also more energy to do so: she’s a fellow blogger, and highly literate in all things online, and has been a huge boost for me. I was pretty nervous about this whole process at the outset, as most of my experience until then was on the print side of things, as is the case for most of us (editors, board, volunteers) at TNQ.
The Summer of Oprah: Kings of the Earth
This summer, Erin Balser is reading all 20 titles on Oprah’s Summer Reading List. The Summer of Oprah will be chronicled on Books@Torontoist every Monday and Thursday throughout July and August.
Reading Jon Clinch’s Kings of the Earth is like eating in a busy restaurant. The many voices ring together as a single chaotic noise, but if you’re patient and listen carefully you can break down the voices, listen to the individual stories, and understand how they weave together, turning that noise into a narrative.
Inspired by true events, Kings of the Earth tells the story of three brothers living a Grey Gardens-type life on a farm in upstate New York, working on their family dairy farm by day and sharing a bed by night. When one of them passes away in their sleep, a murder investigation ensues, upsetting the brothers’ filthy subsistence existence. The men are really, really disgusting (and the most poetic parts of the book come when Clinch describes their repulsiveness): their clothes caked in manure, their linens soaked in urine, the house never cleaned, the farm equipment rusty and ancient. On the rare occasions they head into town, atop their broken-down tractor, they repel people and evoke stares.
Yesterday, when I was headed to work, I ended up riding the streetcar with my new neighbour, Frank. He lives one house down, the house between us a decrepit unoccupied mess.
“So, you know about #10?” he asked.
“Not too much. Looks pretty run down to me.”
“You don’t know that half of it! Tree roots have invaded the basement, much of the frame is rotted and cracked, no running water….” He shuddered. “When we moved in, the man living there was quite a character. Mice and raccoons everywhere. Don’t think he ever went outside. Don’t know how he showered or ate. Disgusting. When it was for sale, the realtor placed a ‘Enter At Your Own Risk’ sign on the door.”
Clinch easily slips between people and decades to piece together the story of the brothers and the surrounding cast of characters—their lone sister, who escaped the squalour early, their compassionate neighbour who has watched out for the men their entire lives, the detective who feels guilty about pursuing a murder charge, and their nephew, who uses their ancient farm as a front for his grow-op—create a rich tapestry through which to better understand these men and their lifestyle.
That eccentric neighbour is gone now, selling his house in a bidding war early last year, and the poor souls who ended up with the place didn’t realize what they were getting into. The house looks untouched, rotting away. Who was this neighbour? Why did he choose to live this way? Why did the brothers of Kings of the Earth choose to live this way? Is it really a choice, or does something deeper alienate them from contemporary society and propel them to reject convention, charity, and cleanliness?
The questions surrounding these lifestyles are as fascinating as the murder investigation that unfolds in the book. The brothers are semi-literate and, let’s face it, not that smart, but there is so much more to their story than simply not knowing any better. There is family and their relationship to the farm, the land, and each other. It doesn’t really add up, but by the end, I developed a begrudging respect for their lifestyle and choices, even if thinking about the smell was enough to make me run to the bathroom.
Poverty and justice are two unbelievably complex concepts, and Clinch artfully tackles them, offering no answers but passing no judgment. He, unlike HBO’s Grey Gardens movie, doesn’t glorify their existence, but he doesn’t dismiss it either. He simply lets it sit on the pages, where it will sock you in unexpected ways and in unexpected places.
Like a streetcar ride with a new neighbour.
Illustration by Brian McLachlan/Torontoist
Join the Club: Jeffrey Moore on Cruelty and the Narrator
Nile Nightingale is a man on the run, but when he tries to seek sanctuary in an abandoned church in rural Quebecall chance of a low-key existence is scuppered by his discovery of 15-year-old wildlife protection activist Céleste Jonquères, who’s been dumped, barely alive, in the church’s graveyard. The dramatic meeting opens The Extinction Club, the third novel by Jeffrey Moore, an exploration of humanity’s pillaging of natural resources and the exploitation of animals.
Moore, who grew up in Toronto and attended U of T, is now based in Quebec, where the novel is set and where the events occurred that triggered his fictional investigation of human brutality towards animals. What was that event? “Huxley’s death,” Moore says. “Not the British author’s, but my cat’s. I have no proof, but I suspect it was a hunter’s steel trap that killed him. I’ve found several of these leg traps in the Laurentians—all of them illegal and all of which I’ve dismantled or otherwise sabotaged.” Moore also cites the case documented in Zev Asher’s notorious 2004 film Casuistry: the Art of Killing a Cat, in which a group of Toronto students tortured and ultimately killed a cat in the name of art, as a “dubious—make that despicable—’artistic’ experiment” that inspired him to explore the theme of human cruelty toward animals.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the novel is the sheer ubiquity of the inhumane treatment meted out. Moore recounts another story from his personal experience. “[T]he mistreatment of the golden retriever in The Extinction Club…may be related to something I observed nearby,” he says. “A local resident used to keep a dog chained up in a small dog house all year round, never letting it out and never walking it. It was the saddest thing. So I left a threatening note, of the thuggish variety, in the owner’s mailbox. The next day, and the days thereafter, I noticed that the dog was free to roam, off his chain and out of his jail.”
The violence against animals in the novel is graphic and deeply shocking, but Moore argues that it is not gratuitous. “I should point out that the violence is a small part of the novel, usually recounted with a certain distance, outside the main action,” he says, and notes that many hunting shows and “kill” videos depict—and, indeed, celebrate—extremely gruesome levels of real-life violence. “I once saw two women hunters [in a ‘kill video’] holding up a lynx they shot, laughing their heads off, explaining that they wanted to make a rug out of it. And two male hunters in the States, while indiscriminately slaughtering flocks of birds, screaming, ‘Not a good day to be a dove!’ A dove.” But Moore maintains that he has taken care to depict the level of human viciousness realistically. “The challenge, I suppose, was not to invent anything simply for shock value. I was careful to base everything on actual practices in the wild, which we tend to ignore for some reason.”
The Summer of Oprah: Words That Matter
This summer, Erin Balser is reading all 20 titles on Oprah’s Summer Reading List. The Summer of Oprah will be chronicled on Books@Torontoist every Monday and Thursday throughout July and August.
My life is complete chaos. As I write this, I sit on the floor of my near-empty apartment, surrounded by fast food packaging while stealing internet from our neighbor. The past week has been exhausting, both emotionally and physically, as dealing with multiple family members, painting a house top-to-bottom, and the death of a grandparent takes its toll.
Which is why this felt like an appropriate time during the Summer of Oprah to check out Oprah’s own Words That Matter, a self-declared “little book of life lessons.” Words That Matter is a compilation of quotes, ideas, and passages from some of the world’s best and brightest people, all which appeared in the pages of O magazine sometime during its 10-year history. This is the stuff you find cross-stitched on a pillow or hanging over the stove at your grandmother’s house. The book is meant to inspire, provoke, and celebrate O, Oprah, and life itself.
Why the hell is this book on the summer reading list?
There’s no escapist element, no beach-read ready attitude about Words That Matter. It’s schmaltzy, over-the-top, and is best read in one’s bathroom. It’s the kind of read that tells me to take my move in stride, that purchasing that ill-fated Ikea wardrobe was an important life lesson, that the scuff marks on the walls from fitting furniture down stairwells it was never meant to fit around is the stuff memories are made from, that I should eat less fast food, laugh more, and every so often stop to realize how precious life is.
Ugh.
I’m not against magazine compilations. It can be a great way to anthologize popular articles, celebrate a magazine’s anniversary, and create a memento for long-time fans. This book is true to Oprah and will be a keepsake for her many fans and magazine subscribers. It’s beautiful and well done. But blatant self-promotion on a reading list is problematic. Would Stephen King ever include his own book when he compiles his summer reading list for Entertainment Weekly? I hope not. Oprah needs to sell her book, but reading lists like this lose their authenticity when tinged with self-promotion. Reading lists are inherently self-promotion (valuable content can convert readers in brand converts), but I prefer it when it’s masked by pseudo-intellectual choices, breezy beach reads, and, god forbid, heavy historical fiction. I’m not ready for my reading lists to be infiltrated by inspirational garbage. I’m too young and too jaded.
This is the type of book you leave in bathrooms for guests to flip through while on the can. My new house has two bathrooms, but that kind of lifestyle can wait until I reach Oprah’s target demographic.
Guess what my mom is getting for her birthday.
Illustration by Brian McLachlan/Torontoist
The Poem Then Becomes the Correspondence: An Interview with Antony Di Nardo
“I run into on a Sunday night an oratorio
performed by the brass blare of taxicabs
herding fares along the listless streets
of Beirut. Shout ye triumphant, they blast…”
from “Correspondent (Notes for a Mideast Solstice)”
Scroll down for the rest of the poem
Antony Di Nardo is the author of two new collections, Soul on Standby (Exile Editions) and Alien, Correspondent (Brick Books). The latter is a collection of outsider pieces taken from the poet’s years spent living in Beirut, Lebanon. It’s a surprising book; as successful an act of reportage as a collection of personal lyrics. Di Nardo’s tone is mature, concerned, and almost radically apolitical at times, a thorough and meticulous attempt at documenting and translating an experience too massive for simple accounting, but too specific for the blunt force of the proclamation. It’s also a surprisingly beautiful work, filled with a sneaky craftsmanship that belies its formal casualness and twists the rhythmic presentation of the lyrics in unexpected ways.
Di Nardo exchanged emails with Torontoist’s poetry columnist, Jacob McArthur Mooney, while journeying home from Beirut, through Paris, and finally back to Ontario soil. Their correspondence follows, edited somewhat for space.
Jacob McArthur Mooney: Thanks for doing this, Tony. We are writing to each other from opposite sides of the planet (the geography website Geobytes.com lists Toronto to Beirut as a rather whopping 5,701 miles, or 9,174 km.) so I appreciate you fitting me in. I feel like I want to get the obvious (but superficial, or maybe superficially obvious) question out of the way first. That would be the matter of your somewhat atypical publishing history. Alien, Correspondent is your first published collection, but you’re publishing it in your sixties and at the exact same time as a, let’s call it, co-debut collection from another press called Soul on Standby. I hate to dwell on matters of publishing, but perhaps you could map out for me your relationship with poetry. Is this a newer pursuit? An old one with a long, quiet prehistory? Or something in between these two?
Antony Di Nardo: First of all, I’d like to comment on your numbers. Somehow, and perhaps as a result of the conjunction of globalization and cyber-driven communications, I look at distance in terms of hours. We’re only seven hours away from each other; fourteen if we intend to meet for coffee. The other number is that sixties thing you bring up. I’ve just turned the corner on that decade, so according to the ticking of my internal clock I still consider myself a pup at fifty-something. And I think we all agree that one is never too old for poetry. Was it not Thomas Hardy who turned to poetry in his fifties, after a successful career as a novelist, never to write another novel again? And his career as a poet went on for decades. (When you’re sixty, you like to think of time in terms of decades—it adds volume and longevity to one’s future.)
So, the simple answer to your question is my relationship with poetry has been an old one with a long, quiet prehistory. I published several poems in my late twenties when I worked as editor of a weekly newspaper in Northwestern Ontario, writing op-ed pieces to illuminate (I thought then), and poetry to satisfy an aesthetic urge. I was reading Purdy and early Atwood, Layton and bp Nichol, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at one of his readings. Some of my poems were published in a long defunct quarterly known as The Squatchberry Journal and several appeared in The Northern Ontario Poetry Anthology published in the mid-70s. Poetry was a path I was ready to pursue for myself when both personal and career circumstances changed. After that, a hiatus of many years ensued before I returned to it again. By then I was already fifty. Numbers again.
That said, this last decade has been most productive for me, both thematically and technically. I’ve taken some important risks with my writing and developed a voice and perspectives giving my body of poetry its muscle and character. Editors have been kind to me and my work has appeared widely in journals across Canada. I published two chapbooks that I gave away like calling cards. I’ve also been reading more poetry than I ever did before. But it’s primarily my experiences in post-war Beirut as an “alien” and self-appointed “correspondent” that gave me the resolve and material to put together a manuscript that I felt had sufficient unity of voice and purpose and adequately represented my ability to craft a poem. That led to Alien, Correspondent and, in what I think is a complete departure from my own traditional conceptualization of the art of the poem, to Soul on Standby. Except for a few pieces, the latter has little to do with Beirut, though it was written in this conflicted, anarchic environment. Alien, Correspondent is a poetry of place; “Soul on Standby,” of the uncommon in the commonplace.
The Summer of Oprah: How Did You Get This Number?
This summer, Erin Balser is reading all 20 titles on Oprah’s Summer Reading List. The Summer of Oprah will be chronicled on Books@Torontoist every Monday and Thursday throughout July and August.
Today’s book is Sloane Crosley’s essay collection How Did You Get This Number?.
I am completely cheating. Crosley’s collection is actually the very last book on Oprah’s Summer Reading List. I already read this book. I interviewed Crosley for this very website. But I recently took possession of my first home and since that fateful Friday—I’m still convinced the bank is going to call and tell me this is all an elaborate prank concocted for some new HGTV reality show—I’ve been painting and spackling and sandpapering and stripping. I would have had time to read and be my lazy, procrastinating four-hour-workday self if my Dad hadn’t come to town to help. He’s putting in 15- and 16-hour work days on my behalf. By the time I walk to the new house, bleary eyed and giant cup of coffee in hand, he’s finished a coat of paint, tuned up my bike, been to the grocery store, and trimmed the bushes in the backyard.
There’s only so far one can left a 60-year-old man show you up, so I’m doing my best to keep up with him. Because of this, I’ve cut both my thumbs, chopped off inches of hair in sporadic locations as a paint removal method, smacked my left wrist, right wrist, and head on the ceiling fan, called Home Depot in near tears because I couldn’t connect the hose on the steam cleaner I rented (I assumed brute strength was needed—it involved pulling a toggle), and got in a fight over who got to use home renovations as an excuse to get out of a funeral (I won).
Sloane Crosley takes events—the ordinary, extraordinary, and the downright bizarre—and turns them into very funny essays exploring universal themes like growing older, falling in love, and finding the meaning of life. How Did You Get This Number? follows Crosley around the world and back home to New York as she encounters road kill, clowns in training, and kleptomaniac roommates. It’s not clear whether she has a knack for meeting strange people or whether she just knows what makes a good story. This doesn’t matter. Crosley could just as easily turn the fact that my downstairs bathroom turned out a little too pink into a delightful romp through the ups and downs of relationships and renovations, arriving at a poignant conclusion about what it takes to rebuild a family.
It makes me hate her. And want to be her.
I feel the same way about Sloane Crosley as I do about Oprah. Both appear to bring an innate effortlessness to their success. Both are talented, successful women who have a voice people want to listen to. Both take their flaws and use them as a way to connect with their audience and are charmingly approachable, despite the fact that they are unbelievably successful and practically untouchable to the average person.
It’s impossible to become such a person. They just are. When you meet them, they look a little prettier, seem a little smarter, and sound a little funnier than everyone in the room. You gravitate to them, but cannot put your finger on what makes them so captivating.
I’ll never be a multi-platform, all-powerful brand. I’ll never be Dave Eggers’ publicist while writing my own New York Times Best Seller on the side. I’ll never find the right shade of pink. But Crosley and Oprah give us dreams. If Crosley can cheat with directions, if Oprah can cheat on her diet, I can cheat on the Summer of Oprah. And feel good about it.
Illustration by Brian McLachlan/Torontoist
Come on, Pilgrim: The Ultimate Scott Pilgrim Map
Few superheroes have been so intimately tied to their hometown as Toronto’s own Scott Pilgrim, a fictional character who regularly haunts such real-life hangouts as Sneaky Dee’s, Yonge and Dundas Square, and the St Clair Goodwill store. That geographical connection has been tracked by fans before, but now Ben Spigel, a PhD student in the U of T’s geography department and one of the dedicated fanboys behind the manga site Sleep Is for the Weak, has created what may well be the ultimate Scott Pilgrim map. Spigel’s map not only details the multiple characters’ movements across the Toronto cityscape with painstaking thoroughness and accuracy, it provides a scene- and panel-count for each location. Ever wondered how many times Pilgrim goes to the Dufferin Mall? The answer is one. How many panels are dedicated to the visit? Forty-seven. If that weren’t enough, the interactive Google Map allows fans to view street-level photos of all the locations alongside Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley’s corresponding exterior drawings.
Books@Torontoist editor James Grainger spoke about the map with Ben Spigel, who also provided us with a mind-blowing visual that you’ll have to scroll down to view.
Torontoist: How did you come up with the idea of putting together the ultimate Toronto-centric Scott Pilgrim map? How long did it take?
Ben Spigel: I’m actually a geographer by training: I’m a PhD Candidate in the department of geography at U of T and I also did my undergrad here as well. So map-making comes naturally to me. I love Scott Pilgrim for any number of reasons, but what really sets it apart from most other comics is that it takes place *somewhere*. Other comics like Batman and Superman take place in a made-up city. Even comics that supposedly take place in a real place—Spiderman in New York City—just use the urban geography as window dressing. When’s the last time Peter Parker had an argument with Aunt May about where to find the best bagels?
I think I came up with the idea for a map a few years ago, but it was only now, with the excitement of the sixth volume and the movie, that I got around to doing it. My girlfriend Ana helped out immensely, both helping me track down some of the most obscure and hard-to-find places and also with the actual programming of the map. I think all in all, it took around 20-30 hours of going through the books page by page, using the annotated notes that the author Bryan Lee O’Malley wrote a few years ago, and abusing Google Street View to track everything down.
Torontoist: Are you anticipating a number of new Toronto locations with the final book?
Spigel: I’m not expecting too many new locations in the sixth volume. There seem to be fewer and fewer with each volume, since the story is heading toward a climax.
Hundreds Contract Pilgrim Fever at Midnight Launch
(Illustration by Brian McLachlan/Torontoist)
Well, the wait is finally over. It’s hard to believe Scott Pilgrim has been in our lives for eight years now. And it’s impressive to see just how much the popularity of the plucky Torontonian comic book hero has snowballed in that time. Judging by the winding column of tweens, teens, and twenty-oughts lining up outside The Beguiling on Markham Street for last night’s midnight release of Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour, the sixth and final digest-sized comic in the series, Scott Pilgrim is big news. Like, huge news.
Folks started lining up as early as 6 p.m. last night and, as you may imagine, it looked like what it might look like if The Phantom Menace, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and some other Twilight bullshit were all being released on the same night. Plenty of people showed up in costume, which is weird, considering that most of the characters in the Scott Pilgrim books are already archetypes of Toronto youngsters—meaning that people are basically coming in costume as manga-exaggerated caricatures of themselves.
Markham Street was entirely given over to Pilgrim Mania. Bands (including Lynette and Carla Gillis of ’90s Canadian indie pop outfit Plumtree) played to the throngs, while Butler’s Pantry showcased indie video games as well as the sort of classic 8-bit games that infused much of Pilgrim’s nerdier aesthetic flourishes. There was also a costume contest, prize giveaway, underage kids drinking tall cans of Beck’s in line, and a guy walking around holding a cardboard sign with “Say Woo!” scribbled on it in black marker, a directive which many were all too happy to oblige.
Pilgrim-heads pose with their freshly pressed copies of the latest, and last, book in the series
But the guest of the honour last night was Pilgrim creator/author/cartoonist/all-around-good-guy Bryan Lee O’Malley. A former Toronto resident, who was jocking the register at The Beguiling when he conceived the Scott Pilgrim character, O’Malley spent the night signing books, shaking hands, and posing for photos with the gaggle of fans who stood in line for hours to meet him. We had a chance to chat with O’Malley before last night’s launch got into full swing.
Torontoist: It’s kind of an exciting day.
Bryan Lee O’Malley: It’s been a big day.
Torontoist: How do you feel? Are you at all glad that it’s on the cusp of being over?
O’Malley: Yeah. Well, I’m glad that this whole phase is kicking off. It’s been a while. I’ve just been holed up, and doing other stressful shit, like moving. So it’s nice to be on the road and working, which I don’t usually do. And I’ve been doing way more of it than ever before. It’s fun.
The Summer of Oprah: My Name Is Mary Sutter
This summer, Erin Balser is reading all 20 titles on Oprah’s Summer Reading List. The Summer of Oprah will be chronicled on Books@Torontoist every Monday and Thursday throughout July and August.
As I near the middle of Oprah’s Summer Reading List, the Valley of Historical Fiction draws near. The journey started with lighter fare and a few short story collections, but those books were merely a warm up for the many heavy-hitting tales set in 19th-century America and Victorian England. Long multi-generational tales about suffering, perseverance, and death. Lots and lots of death.
I hate historical fiction.
It isn’t really fair to dislike an entire genre. It’s like saying I hate country music or I hate abstract expressionism. All genres are far too varied and diverse, and there’s too much great work happening in their fields to simply dismiss them.
I still hate it.
Book Marks: BakkaPhoenix Books
Twilight. Harry Potter. Lord of the Rings. Lost. Fringe. World of Warcraft. Battlestar Galactica. Over the past decade, the science fiction and fantasy speculative fiction genre has exploded, moving from the fringes of society into mainstream popular culture. It’s not just about geeks and nerds anymore—your daughter reads and watches the stuff, and so does your mom and, heck, your grandfather. BakkaPhoenix Books has been in the middle of this revolution from the beginning, selling readers beloved classics and new surprises, all with a speculative twist.
BakkaPhoenix Books, on Queen Street West just past Bathurst, is Canada’s oldest science fiction and fantasy book store. “We are Toronto’s best resource for all thing speculative,” manager Chris Szego says. Images of dark uncomfortable spaces and awkward nerds gaming seriously in the back room may spring to mind with the term “science fiction and fantasy,” but BakkaPhoenix defies stereotype. The store is bright and inviting, the staff is friendly and eager to help you out, and the books in stock are surprising. The front-of-store features Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil and Hope Larson’s Mercury alongside science fiction staples like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy and Connie Willis’ Blackout.
Chris has been with the store for over ten years and, as a result, is deeply entrenched in the speculative fiction community in Toronto. She knows what’s going to be the next big thing, knows what her clients like and dislike, and isn’t afraid to tell you reading that book in your hands is going to be a mistake. “We’re good at matching people to books. It’s one of our strengths and one of the things we find the most fun,” she says. BakkaPhoenix has their recommendation system down to a (heh) science. “People come in and say ‘Okay, I liked A,B, and C, now what?’ We like to ask for three choices to help us triangulate. We like getting to know people’s reading tastes.”