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Though no stranger to awards, Roo Borson painlessly nabbed a whole lot of bread at last night’s Griffin Poetry Prize awards ceremony. The fun-furriers couldn’t get into the swank event, even though we could quote some Don Mckay by rote, so we biked over to Coach House Press and cleared broken glass out of bp’s poem.
There once was a paddler named Mason,
who crossed a very shallow basin.
He hit a rock
and split his cock
and now pussy he ain’t chasin’.
Today’s the last day to enter the contest.
Dust off your Robbie Burns collection, it’s good for your grey-matter. I wonder if drivel like the following works too?
There’s a yoga instructor from BC
who sports the name of Shakti Mehi.
With her bladder drained,
she never refrains
from starting her day with a cup of pee.
(On a tip from Place for Writers who don’t necessarily advocate urine therapy.)
Really, it’s my fault. There was that time at Eden Mills, I was browsing the book-table. I didn’t buy anything. $18 seemed like so much for a book and I had a real job then! Then there was the booth at Toronto’s Word on the Street last fall—same thing. I’m sure my bar tab at the end of that night easily topped the cost of a book.
Now Porcupine’s Quill is facing some tough financial troubles. Tim Inkster doesn’t think the publishing house will last past 2007, which makes me cry in my overpriced beer. With John Metcalf at the editorial helm, Porcupine’s Quill has been the veritable antenna of Canadian Lit, publishing Russell Smith and Andrew Pyper before anyone noticed them. The Quill has also kept essential Canuk writers in print such as Clark Blaise, Irving Layton and Leon Rooke. The aforelinked Globe and Mail article has even mentioned that Metcalf, everybody’s favourite literary curmudgeon, may be out of work soon.
Porcupine’s Quill focuses solely on literary fiction. There’s no textbook or cookbook arm to off-set the noble money-losing publications. I’m going to browse their site and then buy something.
The LCBO (yes, that’s pronounced “lĭk-bō” - or at least in my house it is) here in Ontario is the “world’s largest purchaser of beverage alcohol, buying wine, spirits and beer from more than 60 countries for Ontario consumers and licensees.” Of course, they also mark it up at exhorbitant rates and make a tun of loot like some drunken pirates on the high seas.
I’m pleased that there is this push to get Leonard Cohen nominated for a Nobel. As with so many others, Cohen is a poet I can get behind. However, I do think that his poetic father, Irving Layton, was a better poet. Although Layton was nominated in 1981 by South Korea and Italy, he didn’t win the prize. I guess it’s tough when you are up against Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Now, I watch the papers for news of Layton’s death. Currently, he is struggling wth Alzheimer’s disease at Maimonides Hospital in Montreal. Cohen’s renown has long surpassed Layton’s. I wonder if that can translate not only into an Nobel nomination, but a win.
Sarah Boxer plays on my worst fears in her New York Times article. The web, especially the blogosphere, is merely a list of lists, review of reviews and an opportunistic grab for links. I guess I should stop reading the New York Times online.
Leave Emma Richler alone and treat her fiction as fiction, ferchristsakes. While it’s nice to see some traditional style criticism getting dusted off, like Camille Paglia’s turn to New Criticism, biographical analysis belongs in book-clubs for thick CBC listeners. Let it go.
BoingBoing points out a press release from Silver Bullet Comic Books about the English premiere of The Golem, a daily comic strip “featuring Israel’s first nanotechnology-powered superhero” on Ynetnews.
The strip is based on the book, The Golem, a mock history of the character’s path through Israeli comic books. Despite the lengthy volume’s extensive artwork showing The Golem in a series of comics and styles from the 1940s through 1990s, the “history” evoked is fake; none of the comic books in which The Golem is said to have starred actually were published.
The Golem, incidentally, is a MacGuffin used in transporting Joe Kavalier out of pre-WWII Prague in Michael Chabon’s Kavalier & Clay.
I don’t trust an American to write about 9/11. That culture doesn’t know anything about pathos.
In Saturday’s Weekend Post interview, Foer cites the Old Testament as a book that changed his life. What, the whole thing? Including Leviticus? Then he name-checks Bruno Schulz. Hey, back off, dude. Schulz is mine and I will guard him with the same passion that a high-school kid will guard a band that he liked first before anyone else. I found Schulz completely by accident in a Kraków bookstore in 2002 after the book had been out for fourteen years. (My copy of Schulz’s stories has an intro by Updike, who also reviewed Foer’s latest for the New Yorker—spooky.) Where were you then, Foer? Oh, you had probably already visited Schulz’s house in Drohobycz, Ukraine as you researched your first novel. Fine! We’ll share Schulz, but Gombrowicz is mine. Well, mine and Kundera’s and Zagajewski’s…
