Fall publishing season is well under way, and it’s also award season!

Congratulations to Will Ferguson for winning the Giller Prize for 419, and congratulations are also in order for the winners of the 2012 ReLit Awards: Suzette Mayr for best novel (Monoceros), Greg Kearney for short fiction (Pretty) and Patrick Friesen for poetry (Jumping the Asylum).

I read Monoceros in October, though the others I haven’t acquired yet. I can never make it through the shortlists before the winners are announced. I’m always amazed the judges for these competitions, who have to read through hundreds of books to arrive at and argue for their final selections. What remarkable fortitude.

• Book Riot’s rounded up ten kick-ass secret passage bookshelves. My grandfather has a secret storage room hidden behind a floor-to-ceiling bookcase in his study. I’m jealous.
• “The novelist Ian Rankin’s wife,” who doesn’t seem to have a name of her own, isn’t thrilled with her husband’s writing habits. Blanket statements about ruthless authors follow. Sigh.
• Things are going to be ok though, Russell Smith says the sky isn’t falling. It may not be falling, but it still looks shifty to me.
• The Canadian Conference of the Arts, Canada’s largest arts nonprofit, is disbanding after government cut to its funding.
• A great conversation with Tamara Faith Berger and Kate Zambreno on teen sex and sexuality,  porn, and writing.
• Margaret Atwood writes zombie fic.
• I love cemeteries, and this dead poet’s society is something I can get into. When I was in Paris a few years ago the cemeteries were among my favourite haunts.
• While we’re on the subject, this handy bookshelf becomes a coffin.

I think I saw my first snowflake of the season today.

Most of my time is spent reading, writing and waiting for the mail man. He arrives most days between 9 and 3 pm. I try to work in the time I’m waiting, but seconds after he leaves I’m up and at the door, checking to see what’s come in.

Today I received a rejection which invited me to send in more stuff. That was kind of nice. Nicer would be a publication I’m published in, an acceptance letter, or, let’s get really optimistic, a cheque. For poetry. Yeah, stop laughing, it happens. Rarely, sure, but it does, in fact, happen.

John Degen has a piece in the Globe about how writing isn’t free. It deals mostly with the Access Copyright case, but it could be extended to the price people want to pay for culture. Everyone wants it: music, films, books, art – but no one wants to actually, you know, pay to support the people who create it. Even to the extent of bemoaning tax dollars (various grants) going to sustain the very things that help cement our identity, fixing who we are as a people in mediums that can be experienced and shared, and…

Ok, forget it, here’s your free linkage:

• A six-year old guesses what literary classics are about based on their covers. Hilarity ensues.
• More funny: Ewan Morrison says there will be no more professional writers in the future. Oh wait, that’s not funny, that’s horrifying. See above.
• Jess Davidson reports on the Torontoist blog that a number of mini-libraries are popping up around the Beaches. I love this kind of stuff. I wish there was more of a market for it in my neighbourhood.
• Someone’s put together Rory Gilmore’s reading list from Gilmore Girls, a show that was smart and funny up until its final season. Check out the rather extensive list here, along with the comments section for corrections and additions. I heart you, Internet.
• If that’s not enough, Flavorwire has a “The Reading Lists of Your Favourite Fictional Characters,” compiled by Emily Temple. Top of the list is, of course, Ms Gilmore.
• Margaret Atwood has lent her name to an online poetry prize.
• I don’t give a fig about the Olympics, but even so, I do think it’s kind of cool that Canada has a poet-in-residence, Priscila Uppal.
• FirstShowing.net shares the first trailer for the new Life of Pi film. Though it confuses me a little. Friendship? What about, you know, the cannibalism…?
• Speaking of eats, Temple has another great list on Flavorwire where she’s rounded up a recipes from well known authors. Want to try Eggs à la Nabocoque? How about Elizabeth Bishop’s Brownies, or Emily Dickinson’s Coconut Cake? Vegetarian or no, I don’t recommend you try any of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s turkey recipes. Yikes.
• Blastr has shared four spoof labels for the popular soup company in honour of our favourite chin’s birthday. My favourite: Bruce Campbell’s Cream of Darkness.
• The Damson Dene Hotel in England’s Lake District has replaced the Gideon Bible with Twilight fan-fic. Ick.
• Speaking of bad books, Jacob Silverman blames Twitter for the decline of publishing negative reviews. Um, what?
• Lemon Hound interviewed Natalie Zina Walschots on reviewing. Good stuff.
• In turn Natalie Zina Walschots has interviewed the awesome Beth Winegarner about her interest heavy metal for Canada Arts Connect.
• Unsure how to mosh? There’s a (presumably unintentionally) hilarious eHow article to teach you “How to Mosh Different Styles.” You know, for when you’re in the “mosh zone.”
• You may need an outlet for aggression after reading Amanda Craig’s vapid piece in The Telegraph, “If Maeve Binchy had been a mother …” Rage.

No “mosh zone” nearby?⁽¹⁾ Diffuse with a picture of my cat being adorable.

There, all better now.

Footnotes:

1. Seriously, who calls it that? [↩]

A varied month.

50. Twenty-Seventh City, by Jonathan Franzen
(Picador , 1988, 2001)

To backtrack, I really liked The Corrections, and thought The Discomfort Zone was pretty good, but I felt like I kept waiting for Twenty-Seventh City to make sense.

At its most bare, it’s the story of a conspiracy by a group of people to destroy a family in order to take financial and political control of a city, ranked twenty-seventh in America. But while individual threads sometimes work, as a whole it fails to come together.

Through the entire novel I kept waiting for Franzen to bring it all around, but to skirt actually resolving plot points, he just kills off characters and then the book stops. Not ends, stops.

Kinda disappointing.

51. Kiki de Montparnasse, by José-Louis Bocquet and Catel Muller
(SelfMadeHero, 2007, 2012)

Kim kindly invited me to TCAF, the Toronto Comics Art Festival, and it was my first time attending. I’ll definitely be attending next year. It’s a free festival held at the Toronto Reference Library with an overwhelming number of small and indie comic presses from around the world, as well as artists, writers – with comics, art and other merchandise available for purchase.

It was there that I can across this gorgeous book. Catel Muller and José-Louis Bocquet were there, illustrating and signing copies purchased. It’s beautifully made, and captures a fascinating woman I’d not heard about previously, Kiki de Montparnasse, nee Alice Prin. It captures the rich life of Paris in the twenties among artists. Continue reading »