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Nice props from the Toronto Star

File under kind of nice — my first book gets props in the Star for illuminating a little-known turning point in Cold War history. Check out the piece by Brett Popplewell, How Glasnost Grew In Ontario. (Photo credit: The family of Eugene Whelan.)

Miracles of Life by JG Ballard

(#10 of 2010) The other day I was at D.E. Lake and Company and I got into a conversation with the guy who owns the place, the eponymous D.E. Lake, whose actual name, in case you're wondering, is Don. The store he runs is a weird amalgamation of art gallery and book store, down on King Street East near Sherbourne, with Don peering out at you through  these haphazard stacks of books and ephemera, such as, the last time I was in there, just sitting out in the open, a framed cheque signed by Stephen Leacock. I was there to pick up a map I'd bought from Don, a Charles E. Goad fire insurance map (pics below), one of a series dating from 1890 that features highly detailed renderings of every building in downtown Toronto. During my previous visit I'd been delighted to find the one of my neighbourhood, which featured my actual house. Don and I got to talking about Goad, and the maps, and how it kills him to sell the collection because each one is one of a kind—once he's sold one of a certain area, it's gone. Interestingly he said, Goad's ancestors still live in Toronto.

Then the conversation turned to books because I noticed on top of another of the book stacks the memoir by JG Ballard, Miracles of Life. Which, hey, I didn't know Ballard wrote a memoir. Don said it was great, a page turner, and then he asked me whether I would recommend any page turners and I suggested he read Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone, and Don kind of painstakingly wrote down the title and author. An awkward pause followed and I realized I should buy the Ballard book. Out of obligation. Because, you know, he'd just written down my recommendation. So I did. Then, as I was walking back to my car with my book and my enormous framed map, a red Audi passed going the opposite direction. The window rolled down and a guy stuck his head out the window. "Is that a Goad?" he called out. A bit bowled over by the recognition, I said it was. "Hey," he said, pointing to himself. "I'm a Goad!" He was still repeating himself as the light changed and off he drove: "I'm a Goad!" 

OK, now about the Ballard book. I liked it. Before this I'd only read two books by Ballard: Crash and High-Rise. I really liked both of them. There's a conceptual brilliance to Ballard's fiction that gives his writing a zip I've never found anywhere else. His writing feels dangerous -- the characters are dangerous, but even more so, the ideas Ballard's books contain are dangerous. High-Rise in particular I love—It's the story of the breakdown in civil society that occurs in a completely self-contained skyscraper apartment complex, one I identify with after spending five years separated from the outside by two elevator rides in the Merchandise Lofts. 

The problem with Ballard's writing in all of the three books I've now read by him is his trouble suggesting a subject's inner life. Reading Crash or High-Rise, one never has the sense of access to the individual's emotional complexity. There's a clinical, almost academic separation between Ballard and his characters. They may as well be wax figures or chess pieces. His memoir suggests a reason why that may be. Speaking of his parents' generation, he says, "I often wonder why many of them bothered to have children at all, and assume that it must have been for social reasons, some ancient need to enlarge the tribe and defend the homestead, just as some people keep a dog without ever showing it affection..." Ballard speaks in general of the kids of his generation, who "never saw their parents dressing or undressing, never saw them brush their teeth or even take off a watch... I rarely saw my father without a jacket and tie well into the 1950s... The vistas of polished furniture turned a family home into a deserted museum, with a few partly colonised rooms where people slept alone, read and bathed alone, and hung their clothes in private wardrobes, along with their emotions, hopes and dreams." Is Ballard unable to access his characters' inner lives because he didn't ever emotionally connect to his parents?

Ballard had a fascinating life. He was born in 1930 in Shanghai to a British businessman and his wife. His internment with other expatriates during the WWII Japanese invasion of China formed the basis for his novel, Empire of the Sun. Back in England after the war, he married, his wife bore a boy and two girls and then died while the children were still young. And Ballard raised the children himself in an era when single fathers were rare. It's as a father that Ballard appears finally to have connected with other human beings. "Some fathers make good mothers, and I hope I was one of them," he says. As a parent he formed close relationships with each of his three children, and what I found most inspiring about the book is the extent he could birth from such a domestic milieu such deeply subversive novels. The dude who wrote Crash was a mild-mannered father of three from the suburbs of London? That is awesome. And Ballard says the domesticity powered the subversion. "A short story, or a chapter of a novel, would be written in the time between ironing a school tie, serving up the sausage and mash, and watching Blue Peter. I am certain my fiction is all the better for that," he writes. "My greatest ally was the pram in the hall."

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Finally, a few close-ups from my Goad map. Sorry about the image quality. The last image is what the intersection of Bathurst and Dundas looked like, 120 years ago -- Dundas was called Arthur Street, back then.

 

My Booky Wook by Russell Brand

(#9 of 2010) I didn't know much about Russell Brand before beginning My Booky Wook. I mean, I knew about a few controversies, particularly that kerfuffle about him dressing up as Osama bin Laden the day after 9/11, and really that was enough to make me want to read a book about him. It's nuts and gutsy and really kind of impressively off; what's he on about, then? Also he was great in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Also I'm kind of half-assedly reading books that deal with people quitting things because I'm paranoid about my book saying things other already have said. I just want to avoid being a cliché. And I did find something in Brand's book similar to what I'd said in mine—on page 221, he has a sentence talking about how he was a tourist in the land of drugs. So now I have to go into my book to tweak the sentence about being a tourist in the land of drugs. Damn it.

Other than that I was pleasantly surprised. If I was to draw a graph that mapped my enjoyment of the book it would look a bit like a bell curve pushed slightly to the right. The beginning's a drag. Brand seems slightly bored recounting his youth in the English city of Essex. He's chubby, his parents are divorced, his mom has cancer, things suck. Then, blam, on page 89 he has a minor role in a school play. It's his first performance, and the experience electrifies him as well as the book's writing. From then on it's Brand getting famous plus lots of drugs and sex, and who doesn't love a good Horatio Alger story with lots of drugs and sex?

It's better than that. While there aren't a lot of scenes, Brand's voice is great. Reading this is a bit like reading Money written not by Martin Amis but by John Self him, er, self. Brand's life before he quit the heroin and crack is something out of an early Amis novel. And Brand is a gifted storyteller. When I read I scrawl notes in the front cover. Usually the notes are good lines the author's written, or good stories. But for whatever reason, for much of this book I didn't have a pen with me, and so I folded the pages over. At one point I folded down four pages in a row. Other times I did have a pen, and my quick notes may give you some flavour of the book: "p. 213: Gay night pantsless. p. 215. great heroin description. p. 217: gravity: 'Newton's implacable adversary.' p. 230: kicked off airplane, anus full of heroin, security gives him a hug."

Brand sounds like he's more fun to read about than be around. In one story, an ambulance arrives while he's in the midst of some self-destruction and he whips off a line about "usually by the time the ambulance arrives... I'm generally feeling pretty upbeat." Spoken like someone whose had many ambulances called on him. And then, once Brand quits the heroin and the crack, he once again grows bored with his story. But that doesn't happen until the very end. While Brand is on the drugs, the book's more entertaining than most celebrity autobiographies. I have no idea how much of this Brand wrote himself. There are many middling famous self-obsessed entertainers, but few of them are willing to write about themselves with any semblance of honesty. Brand seems to, and his story's worth reading not just for its accounts of debauchery. It also contains its share of insights into fame, ambition and the nature of performance. There's also a fair bit on his creative process.

One last thing... You know how at the beginning of the year I said I would concentrate on reading books? I'm realizing that reading well is a habit. Reading books is getting easier. The more I'm reading, the more I want to read. It's kind of fun.

More Detroit Pics

More photos I took while in Detroit. The final round of images are detail shots from the Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of the Arts.

  

  

 

 

 

 

Housing in Detroit

Now that my memoir is in the editing stage I've returned to a project that's been coalescing for awhile, a crime novel about Detroit that on one level just tells a good story and on another chronicles the spirit of the city's residents. This feels like a return. Nothing inspires me like Detroit. Back in the mid-'90s I began my writing career here, working as an intern at the alternative news-weekly, the Metro Times, when it was edited by Desiree Cooper. Over the years I've been itching to do something about the place and now, with this idea for a novel, I think I've figured out the way to do it.

I took these pictures as I drove around downtown. Some are from east Detroit, some from the west side. The city feels unlike any place I've been. "Ghost town" doesn't quite fit. In fitting with the latest scheme to turn the city centre into one grand urban farm, Detroit's downtown feels more rural than urban. Many intersections feature traffic lights gone dark, presumably to save on their operating costs, and because the decreased traffic means a traffic light is unnecessary. Other times, the traffic lights just flash yellow or red. And as I was driving around, the radio stations were discussing a statistic--the school board here has closed 100 schools since 2000, and just released plans to close another 45 in the next few years.

By posting these pictures, I'm not beating up on Detroit. We get it, the city's got problems. I'm not saying, look at all these empty houses, isn't that messed up? My intent is a little more complex. I think these homes have a beauty to them. They are empty, perhaps, but they are still standing. They have an energy, and a pride. They are defiant in spite of their failed occupancy, just like the city where they stand.

 















 



 



 

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

(#8 of 2010) The first time I read The Road, it absolutely wrecked me. The second time I read The Road, it absolutely wrecked me. The first time I finished it with my son sleeping snuggled into my side, the only sound his breathing. The second time I read it, my son was there, yep, snuggled into my side, and on the other side was his sister, and this time I could hear both of them breathing. The first time I was struggling with the responsibilities of fatherhood. The second time, I was just about done a memoir about my struggles with the responsibilities of fatherhood (Superdad: A Memoir of Rebellion, Drugs and Parenting, due out with Key Porter in October). I read the book the second time to ensure McCarthy's work was fresh in my mind as I conduct the  final round of edits on my own book. Because The Road forms a turning point in my memoir, I'm not going to say much else about it. For now, I'll just provide a link to this Cormac McCarthy interview conducted by Oprah, in which the author and father provides a half-dozen pearls in the space of five minutes.

The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis

(#7 of 2010) I was really looking forward to reading this novel. Rather than waiting for the North American release, in May, I went and ordered the book from the British Amazon site. And despite the mountain range of spines and bindings next to my bed, I shoved all those hardcovers aside to read this hardcover.

The set-up of The Pregnant Widow is not unlike that of Amis's 1975 novel, Dead Babies. Young people gather in a remote, self-contained setting. In Dead Babies, craziness ensued. The problem with The Pregnant Widow is not much at all ensues. There's the 20-year-old narrator, Keith Nearing, who has lots of sex with his girlfriend, and lots of imagined sex with his girlfriend's best friend, Scheherazade. Aside from that, Keith reads the canon of English literature. You get some funny-ish takes on Austen and the Brontes, but besides that, for long stretches, the writing reads like a parody of an Amis novel. It feels a bit like Amis is too imprisoned by his own style to really say anything interesting. And so far as storytelling goes, this one feels clumsy. It's the worst thing possible for an Amis novel: It's boring.

There is a great book in here somewhere, something about the aborted revolutions of sex and feminism brought on by the Baby Boomers, and a look back at these revolutions through the prism of age. Is there such a thing as an aging revolutionary? To paraphrase, what happens when the Sixties crowd becomes the sixties crowd? And yet, the result is a bit of a mess. Is Amis too old? Too nice? Too sympathetic to these characters to manage the cruelty that created the excitement of Money and The Information? Naw, my theory is that the problem here relates to ambition. Dude is too ambitious. He's so busy trying to give us a grand statement on the zeitgeist that he's forgotten the novel's most base purpose, which is, to recount a story to the reader.

I keep waiting for Martin Amis to return to form. It's funny -- Amis Jr. has observed that his dad went through a bad stretch in the middle of his career. Between Lucky Jim and The Old Devils there was the awfulness that was That Uncertain Feeling. Now, Amis Jr. seems to be going through a similar thing. The Pregnant Widow is not Amis's return to form. But it's closer. He's getting closer. It's coming--soon. But it's not here yet. That said, there are some great bits in here. "There used to be the class system, and the race system, and the sex system... And now we have the age system... everyone between sixty and seventy represents the proletariat..." You have to wait to page 230 to get that. The one that most applies to me happens toward the end of the tale's weird conclusive tail. "My vices got me absolutely nowhere," Keith tells his third wife. "So for years I've been working on my virtues." I feel a bit like that, since I gave up drinking—I've given up on my vices, and now I'm working on my virtues. So thanks for that one, at least, Martin.

Game Change by Two Guys (w/ long names)

(#6 of 2010) I'm always fascinated by double-bylined books. I'm too much a control freak about my writing to ever want to write a book with somebody else. Also, I enjoy the process too much. Maybe I'd allow somebody to work with me if they were willing to plug into the electronic master file all the changes I scrawl on the innumerable hard-copy print-outs I make, each time I swing through a draft. But actually write the thing? With me? No way.

The actual title of this book is: Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. If you follow the link to the book's Amazon page you'll see all sorts of celebrities and politicians getting all hot and heavy about the book. I'd heard the book was super-dishy, that it was the '08 campaign's definitive account, that it navigates the tricky territory between hyperventilating tell-all and serious journalism. And it does. I do wonder, however, whether it really tells anything new to anyone who closely followed the races as it happened. Rather than dishing up new stuff, it instead confirms most of the stuff that you heard. Palin's a whack job? Hillary Clinton's campaign was a mess? Same with McCain's? There was friction, at first, between Obama and Biden? Yep, yep, yep and yep. So think of the book as a useful refresher that chronicles a fascinating campaign. But I'm not going to hyperventilate about this book.

One thing that's interesting is the theme of infidelity throughout. John Edwards, Bill Clinton, both McCains, Sarah Palin—all are suggested to have had affairs. In fact, Bill Clinton's propensity for playing around is what's said (in the book) to have spurred the Democratic Party's bigwigs to search for someone other than Hillary Clinton to run for the '08 ticket. Ouch.

It's serviceably written. Dual bylined books should be consistent in the style throughout. You shouldn't be able to tell it was written by two people. But one of the writers has a strange tic of abbreviating two separate-but-related thoughts into a single sentence bisected in the middle by a comma. Such as this one from p. 167: "Some Edwards aides believed John's denials, thought the story was too far-out to be true." That bugged me. 

Oh, one more thing -- there isn't enough about how the financial crisis changed the campaign. The moment that clinched Obama's victory gets recounted in 16 surface-feeling pages. There were moments that Paulson and co. thought the world was coming apart at the seams, and then Obama stepped in as the political leader with the most credibility. I wanted more details and more drama. The reporting here feels poorly sourced, and much of it is told through McCain's perspective. Sure, it was McCain who suspended the campaign to deal with it, but to me the big drama comes from Obama's side, when they realize what a gaff McCain's tactic was, and then figure out how to use it to their advantage. Hopefully, another '08 campaign book comes out soon that delves more deeply into the events of September '08.

Finally, check this out, from the Canada-U.S. gold medal men's hockey game at Vancouver. Check out the numbers on the top part of the screen. I just missed getting them sequential. How often does that happen? Drat, my camera, and it's unpredictable shutter.