I have nothing but praise for Clive Thompson.
But!
The man is simply not human. Read this brand new profile of him and try not to curse your useless, non-overclocked brain.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Monday, April 17, 2006
Some C.R.A.Z.Y. Class Analysis
My favourite part of C.R.A.Z.Y. (which I watched Saturday evening) was the fact that a family with five children could own a house, a car, and various other amenities all on a working class salary. There was even a reference to the husband and wife having a savings account.
Now that’s crazy. Perhaps the 70s weren’t so horrible after all. To the barricades, comrade!
(Link).
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Dead (On) Stick Target
This from Dead Things on Sticks, a blog I’ve been enjoying lately:
Anyway, amidst the not-thinking-about- writing, there's the oh- God-you-haven't- started-your-taxes (April 30 is the magic day in Canada.) Then there's little other things like the paper. I had a funny thought reading the Arts Section in the Globe & Mail today. It was very unsatisfying -- it has been the last three weeks running... and it occurred to me why.
Flipping through, every article in the Globe Review is about the Establishment. The Canadian Establishment. There's Atom Egoyan. There's Don McKellar. Another profile on Bonnie Fuller -- Jesus. (Nice language for Easter, I know, but c'mon.) When I read the NY Times Arts & Leisure section on Sunday, there's always a profile of someone interesting who's unknown to me. An up-and-comer. I read The Playlist and learn about musicians I haven't heard. I read a profile of a writer I don't know. I don't know why the Times can do it, but Canada's National Newspaper can't. Maybe because they're too busy taking articles from the New York Times. Sigh..
(Link).
What I enjoy the most about this blog is that although Denis is a television writer, he often offers nuggets of insight that apply equally well to fiction or non-fiction. In the above post, he talks about churn (read it for yourself), and recently he wrote about the power of finishing a project, regardless of its final outcome. That really resonated with me.
Denis also had some brilliant thoughts on the recent spate of useless CBC comedies. In summary, a well written blog, relevant to non-script writers, and finally, very nice to know that I’m not alone in my frustrations regarding the Saturday Globe. The Toronto section is usually decent (and not because I occasionally write for it), and there are sporadic bright patches elsewhere, but he really nailed the Globe, especially the part about stealing from the NYT. We get the Internet in Canada, you know. The Sunday Styles section is not a hazy mystery to us Toronto types. Reading a well-written faux-trend piece in the NYT is one thing. Reading a mangled photocopy of said trend piece two weeks later in the Globe is not the best way to start the weekend.
Anyway, amidst the not-thinking-about- writing, there's the oh- God-you-haven't- started-your-taxes (April 30 is the magic day in Canada.) Then there's little other things like the paper. I had a funny thought reading the Arts Section in the Globe & Mail today. It was very unsatisfying -- it has been the last three weeks running... and it occurred to me why.
Flipping through, every article in the Globe Review is about the Establishment. The Canadian Establishment. There's Atom Egoyan. There's Don McKellar. Another profile on Bonnie Fuller -- Jesus. (Nice language for Easter, I know, but c'mon.) When I read the NY Times Arts & Leisure section on Sunday, there's always a profile of someone interesting who's unknown to me. An up-and-comer. I read The Playlist and learn about musicians I haven't heard. I read a profile of a writer I don't know. I don't know why the Times can do it, but Canada's National Newspaper can't. Maybe because they're too busy taking articles from the New York Times. Sigh..
(Link).
What I enjoy the most about this blog is that although Denis is a television writer, he often offers nuggets of insight that apply equally well to fiction or non-fiction. In the above post, he talks about churn (read it for yourself), and recently he wrote about the power of finishing a project, regardless of its final outcome. That really resonated with me.
Denis also had some brilliant thoughts on the recent spate of useless CBC comedies. In summary, a well written blog, relevant to non-script writers, and finally, very nice to know that I’m not alone in my frustrations regarding the Saturday Globe. The Toronto section is usually decent (and not because I occasionally write for it), and there are sporadic bright patches elsewhere, but he really nailed the Globe, especially the part about stealing from the NYT. We get the Internet in Canada, you know. The Sunday Styles section is not a hazy mystery to us Toronto types. Reading a well-written faux-trend piece in the NYT is one thing. Reading a mangled photocopy of said trend piece two weeks later in the Globe is not the best way to start the weekend.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Reader's Dickgest
So I'm standing in line at Dominion, and the line never moves quickly at Dominion, so I'm looking at the cover of the new Reader's Digest. And it's the humour issue. And every single person mentioned on the cover is a man.
Which is not that surprising. What is surprising is that the very top cutline of the magazine says:
Why punchlines split the sexes.
Which means issues involving humour and gender were on the magazine's radar, and yet they still managed to create a cocktail wienie cover. That's truly sad.
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Good Journalists Borrow Ideas, Great Journalists Steal Them
Jan Wong, please meet Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed. Barbara kinda beat you to the whole maid and minimum wage beat by a few years.
Friday, March 24, 2006
Because You Can’t, You Won’t and You (Do)n’t Gawk
A friend of mine, Jeff MacIntyre, has a sharp story on the CBC Arts, the highlight being quotes from my favourite celebrity chainsaw artist, Cintra Wilson. The CBC Arts site is blessed with strong writing, mediocre design, and a complete dearth of promotional savvy. That said, read Jeff on Gawker’s new Stalk Market .
Sunday, March 19, 2006
New Found Photography Book
I am unable to articulate why this kind of thing is so tremendously fascinating, so I'll just provide a snapshot and a link to a new book from the Found crew that is filled with portrait photography from a small studio in LaPorte, Indiana.
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Culture 1, Hipsters 0
Two recent articles, one exclusive to print, worth checking out. The first is in n + 1, a New York journal and is called
Radiohead, or the Philosophy of Pop and is by Mark Greif.
I think the discussion of Radiohead is sharp, especially when Greif observes that Radiohead found its voice and purpose when it stopped trying to articulate its frustration with modernity through its lyrics (the Fake Plastic Trees of The Bends), and instead found a way to evoke dread and suspicion with the plastic hassle through aural textures. Still, what delights me so much about this article is not the Radiohead analysis (I’m sure a dozen music-crits have already jabbed cigarette burns throughout his musical conjecturing, but that is a game I find both boring and difficult to play) but Greif’s brave and refreshing decision to describe the limitations of pop as it applies to politics. Check this out:
The more I try to categorize why Radiohead’s music works as it does, and by extension how pop works, the more it seems clear that the effect of pop on our beliefs and actions is not really to create either one. Pop does, though, I think, allow you to retain certain things you’ve already thought, without your necessarily having been able to articulate them, and to preserve certain feelings you have only intermittent access to, in a different form, music with lyrics, in which the cognitive and emotional are less divided. I think songs allow you to steel yourself or loosen yourself into certain kinds of actions, though they don’t start anything. And the particular songs and bands you like dictate the beliefs you can preserve and reactivate, and the actions you can prepare – and which songs and careers will shape your inchoate private experience depends on an alchemy of your experience and the art itself. Pop is neither a mirror nor a Rorschach blot, into which you look and see only yourself; nor is it a lecture, an interpretable poem, or an act of simply determinate speech. It teaches something, but only by stimulating and preserving things that you must have had inaugurated elsewhere. Or it prepares the ground for these discoveries elsewhere – often knowledge you might never otherwise have really “known,” except as it could be rehearsed by you, then repeatedly reactivated for you, in this medium.
This was, for me, an incredible blast of oxygen. I don’t care if he is right or wrong, but unlike so many other cultural critics, he actually has the courage to sketch the political boundaries of his object of study. Summarizing Grief’s 17-page article, is tough, so all I can say is find a copy and read it.
The second article can be found in the March edition of Harper’s. Many folks make snoozing sounds when referring to this magazine, and lately I understand why. That said, there is always something good in Harper’s.
Really.
In an attempt to prove my point, I ask you to take a look at the first part of Bill Wasik’s article about flash mobs. Wasik, it turns out, invented the flash mob as an experiment in social psychology. His article mocks the conformity of hipsters, the Strokes, and Wasik hammers away at a number of other worthwhile targets, including the Ford Fusion. His inclusion of Howard Dean didn’t quite work, and I started to sigh when he began to discuss the Milgram experiments, until he did something new with the ol’ shock generator by claiming that:
Stanley Milgram deserves recognition, I believe, as one of the crucial artists of the preceding century.
Here is a good tip for any essayist: if you evoke an overused person or idea from the past, please put a new gloss on it. Otherwise I will stop reading. And so will many others.
Finally, I like Wasik’s attack on McSweeney’s:
Like the Strokes, McSweeney’s promised a cultural watershed for hipsters while making no demands on them. Readers accustomed to a choice between low entertainment and serious literature did not, with this journal, have to make such a choice at all. […] Almost none of the young writers could deploy McSweeney’s style to anywhere near the effect that Eggers, a genuinely affecting writer, could; one suspects that most would have been better (if less well known) writers today if the journal had never existed.
Class dismissed. Be sure to have read both articles for next week.
Radiohead, or the Philosophy of Pop and is by Mark Greif.
I think the discussion of Radiohead is sharp, especially when Greif observes that Radiohead found its voice and purpose when it stopped trying to articulate its frustration with modernity through its lyrics (the Fake Plastic Trees of The Bends), and instead found a way to evoke dread and suspicion with the plastic hassle through aural textures. Still, what delights me so much about this article is not the Radiohead analysis (I’m sure a dozen music-crits have already jabbed cigarette burns throughout his musical conjecturing, but that is a game I find both boring and difficult to play) but Greif’s brave and refreshing decision to describe the limitations of pop as it applies to politics. Check this out:
The more I try to categorize why Radiohead’s music works as it does, and by extension how pop works, the more it seems clear that the effect of pop on our beliefs and actions is not really to create either one. Pop does, though, I think, allow you to retain certain things you’ve already thought, without your necessarily having been able to articulate them, and to preserve certain feelings you have only intermittent access to, in a different form, music with lyrics, in which the cognitive and emotional are less divided. I think songs allow you to steel yourself or loosen yourself into certain kinds of actions, though they don’t start anything. And the particular songs and bands you like dictate the beliefs you can preserve and reactivate, and the actions you can prepare – and which songs and careers will shape your inchoate private experience depends on an alchemy of your experience and the art itself. Pop is neither a mirror nor a Rorschach blot, into which you look and see only yourself; nor is it a lecture, an interpretable poem, or an act of simply determinate speech. It teaches something, but only by stimulating and preserving things that you must have had inaugurated elsewhere. Or it prepares the ground for these discoveries elsewhere – often knowledge you might never otherwise have really “known,” except as it could be rehearsed by you, then repeatedly reactivated for you, in this medium.
This was, for me, an incredible blast of oxygen. I don’t care if he is right or wrong, but unlike so many other cultural critics, he actually has the courage to sketch the political boundaries of his object of study. Summarizing Grief’s 17-page article, is tough, so all I can say is find a copy and read it.
The second article can be found in the March edition of Harper’s. Many folks make snoozing sounds when referring to this magazine, and lately I understand why. That said, there is always something good in Harper’s.
Really.
In an attempt to prove my point, I ask you to take a look at the first part of Bill Wasik’s article about flash mobs. Wasik, it turns out, invented the flash mob as an experiment in social psychology. His article mocks the conformity of hipsters, the Strokes, and Wasik hammers away at a number of other worthwhile targets, including the Ford Fusion. His inclusion of Howard Dean didn’t quite work, and I started to sigh when he began to discuss the Milgram experiments, until he did something new with the ol’ shock generator by claiming that:
Stanley Milgram deserves recognition, I believe, as one of the crucial artists of the preceding century.
Here is a good tip for any essayist: if you evoke an overused person or idea from the past, please put a new gloss on it. Otherwise I will stop reading. And so will many others.
Finally, I like Wasik’s attack on McSweeney’s:
Like the Strokes, McSweeney’s promised a cultural watershed for hipsters while making no demands on them. Readers accustomed to a choice between low entertainment and serious literature did not, with this journal, have to make such a choice at all. […] Almost none of the young writers could deploy McSweeney’s style to anywhere near the effect that Eggers, a genuinely affecting writer, could; one suspects that most would have been better (if less well known) writers today if the journal had never existed.
Class dismissed. Be sure to have read both articles for next week.
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Cleverly Obtuse Title Utilizing Pun Goes Here
Nathan Sellyn’s debut fiction collection Indigenous Beasts comes out next month. I was flipping through the Raincoast Spring 2006 catalogue today and his book caught my eye. The cover looks sharp, and my bet is that the fiction inside is none-too-shabby.
However, I cannot help but notice that the bottom left corner of the cover image printed in the catalogue contains the following text:
“This is an amazing quote saying Nate is the Next Big Thing.”
SOME FAMOUS AUTHOR
(Full PDF here.)
I will buy five copies of his book if the final, printed book cover actually says that.
Snakes on a Plane
The amount of debate in the blogoblog about my book review -- in which I suggested what’s-her-name is the worst writer of Generation Why -- took me by surprise.
As someone who doesn’t spend nearly as much time as he should reading local blogs, I have been very impressed by the intelligence and level of debate floating around the internets. I am also very humbled by the dedication many bloggers have, in terms of their publishing schedule.
Habermas would be proud.
What I found most interesting was that by the time a print media response to the book review hit stands on Thursday, February 16 (that would the day I discovered I was Mr. Warren Kinsella's chew toy), the various elements of the issue had already been very thoroughly and thoughtfully debated and digested online. Blogs rule OK!
I did not think for a moment that anyone would waste ink and pulp on the issue. One or two blog postings, maybe. A short paragraph in Frank, perhaps. But not this.
The incident just made its way into Now, in their Upfront section. I feel as though I have been scalded with lukewarm water. This new (and I hope final) wave of commentary appears to be the result of the Star’s clarification on Sunday (February 19), which explained that I was not an unbiased, objective reviewer. This should have been made explicit in the original review, as many people have pointed out. There was a miscommunication between my editor and myself regarding the conflict of interest, which I regret.
To conclude, I have a few corrections and comments I would like to make, before never mentioning the whole mess ever again. None of my bulleted points are designed to provoke further debate, since one of the main goals of the review was to encourage everyone to stop talking about her. (I failed big time on that front.) These are observations, not provocations.
* Kinsella, in his February 16 column, suggests that SaumassigeSchreibmaschiene is not a real word. Let me be clear: I consulted with a native German speaker, and I can assure you that SaumassigeSchreibmaschiene is a compound word that translates, roughly, into exactly what I said it does.
* Kinsella mentions a photo on my website where I am wearing black nail polish. That photo was taken five years ago. I will endeavor to update my website appropriately.
* Alex Good, over at Good Reports, strikes me as someone that I would enjoy having a coffee with and discussing his frustrations with book reviewing in Canada. I realize he is not my biggest fan, but that’s OK. I agree with some of his complaints, as they appear to echo Henighan’s sentiments in When Words Deny the World, a book that I like far more than I dislike.
* I was very pleased to see someone mention Andy Lamey’s debilitating book review of Crossing the Distance, a review which ran in issue #56 (1999) of Canadian Notes & Queries. Lamey’s review should be taught in university lit-crit classes – it is simply that good. Dale Peck could learn things from Lamey. If my recent review was considered one-third as good as Lamey’s, I would be happy. (A few blogs suggested it was not even close on that score.)
* As I get older, I find that anonymous (or non-anonymous) critiques and even cheap shots bother me far less. In fact, I was heartened to learn that some people don’t care about either me or her -- or, even better, have no inkling of who either of us are. That is healthy. That is good. That puts things in the proper perspective. As another person commented, this is a topic interesting only to a select group of Toronto media folk who live within a 10 or 15 block radius of each other. Here here.
I can only imagine what I am in for if I ever manage to publish another book. In lieu of a written critique, I envision a photograph of the assigned reviewer urinating on my tome.
As someone who doesn’t spend nearly as much time as he should reading local blogs, I have been very impressed by the intelligence and level of debate floating around the internets. I am also very humbled by the dedication many bloggers have, in terms of their publishing schedule.
Habermas would be proud.
What I found most interesting was that by the time a print media response to the book review hit stands on Thursday, February 16 (that would the day I discovered I was Mr. Warren Kinsella's chew toy), the various elements of the issue had already been very thoroughly and thoughtfully debated and digested online. Blogs rule OK!
I did not think for a moment that anyone would waste ink and pulp on the issue. One or two blog postings, maybe. A short paragraph in Frank, perhaps. But not this.
The incident just made its way into Now, in their Upfront section. I feel as though I have been scalded with lukewarm water. This new (and I hope final) wave of commentary appears to be the result of the Star’s clarification on Sunday (February 19), which explained that I was not an unbiased, objective reviewer. This should have been made explicit in the original review, as many people have pointed out. There was a miscommunication between my editor and myself regarding the conflict of interest, which I regret.
To conclude, I have a few corrections and comments I would like to make, before never mentioning the whole mess ever again. None of my bulleted points are designed to provoke further debate, since one of the main goals of the review was to encourage everyone to stop talking about her. (I failed big time on that front.) These are observations, not provocations.
* Kinsella, in his February 16 column, suggests that SaumassigeSchreibmaschiene is not a real word. Let me be clear: I consulted with a native German speaker, and I can assure you that SaumassigeSchreibmaschiene is a compound word that translates, roughly, into exactly what I said it does.
* Kinsella mentions a photo on my website where I am wearing black nail polish. That photo was taken five years ago. I will endeavor to update my website appropriately.
* Alex Good, over at Good Reports, strikes me as someone that I would enjoy having a coffee with and discussing his frustrations with book reviewing in Canada. I realize he is not my biggest fan, but that’s OK. I agree with some of his complaints, as they appear to echo Henighan’s sentiments in When Words Deny the World, a book that I like far more than I dislike.
* I was very pleased to see someone mention Andy Lamey’s debilitating book review of Crossing the Distance, a review which ran in issue #56 (1999) of Canadian Notes & Queries. Lamey’s review should be taught in university lit-crit classes – it is simply that good. Dale Peck could learn things from Lamey. If my recent review was considered one-third as good as Lamey’s, I would be happy. (A few blogs suggested it was not even close on that score.)
* As I get older, I find that anonymous (or non-anonymous) critiques and even cheap shots bother me far less. In fact, I was heartened to learn that some people don’t care about either me or her -- or, even better, have no inkling of who either of us are. That is healthy. That is good. That puts things in the proper perspective. As another person commented, this is a topic interesting only to a select group of Toronto media folk who live within a 10 or 15 block radius of each other. Here here.
I can only imagine what I am in for if I ever manage to publish another book. In lieu of a written critique, I envision a photograph of the assigned reviewer urinating on my tome.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)