Top ten titles for upcoming David Adams Richards novels

Read my list at the Atlantic Canada's 100 Greatest Books site.

One Hoarse Open Sleigh: Bob Dylan’s Christmas Tinselectomy

[Cross-posted at Drivenmag.com]

“All I can do is be me, whoever that is.” – Bob Dylan

It’s very, very late in the day to make a fuss about Bob Dylan’s voice, though whole flocks of second-rate comedians and online jokesters are still making damp hay about it. At this point, nearly a half-century into the man’s singing career, pointing at that Dylan’s pipes lack the range of Judy Garland and the sweetness of The Beach Boys is not exactly going to set the collective jaws a’dropping. Notions of “authenticity” in pop music are often only reductive, snobbish constructs, but there is a kind of music lover who, in part thanks to the work of Mr Dylan, both as a singer and as a lifelong proponent of oldey timey music, prefers a throat full of frog than a velvet fog.

But still: even full acceptance of Dylan’s characteristic croak and whine can be strained. Personally, I could never take the sneezy nasality of “Lay Lady Lay.” I’d rather he shouted the thing in my ear in a fake German accent than whistle it, as he did, through one nostril. Thankfully, he rarely went there again.

Lately, he has been settling into a kind of growl/grumble that suits perfectly the jumped-up country blues he’s been sitting on for the past few records. The early reediness had given way to something closer to Joe Cocker or Tom Waits. If you occasionally feel like sucking on a Lozenge a few tunes in, that’s a small price to pay.

And then along comes Christmas in the Heart, Dylan’s new, 100% un-ironic collection of yuletide tunes, and all of a sudden, the man’s voice has become a question again....

Read the rest....

An Open Letter to Yann Martel

My sort-of review of Yann Martel's What is Stephen Harper Reading? in the Toronto Star.

(For the curious, here's my original take on the whole thing.)

Living, Loving, Party Going

Just checking in – life is elsewhere right now.

I have three or four book reviews to write before the end of the month, plus I'm interviewing a Famous American Author! on Friday (whose new novel I need to get read at some point before then), I'm doing a few things at the IFOA next week, I'm helping close a cottage at some point, there's a children's Halloween party to wade delicately through this weekend, I'm still dumping content into the Driven web site pretty much every day, plus day job, plus the usual school lunches and drop-offs/pick-ups/playdates.

And always always always waiting to get kicked around and stuffed with fluff on a near-daily basis is The Novel, which gets longer and more diffuse every time I look at it. (It's much more idiot than savant right now, but further drafts will help correct that, I hope.)

Speaking of the Internet (were we?), here's Henry Green, back in 1958:

People strike sparks off each other; that is what I try to note down. But mark well, they only do this when they are talking together. After all, we don’t write letters now, we telephone. And one of these days we are going to have TV sets which lonely people can talk to and get answers back. Then no one will read anymore.

And, because I've been loving the song:

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

My review of the new Nick Hornby in the Toronto Star.

The last few words of the review got lopped off, by the way – it should read "a criticism he seems to anticipate, interestingly enough, with the novel’s too-cute 'life goes on' epilogue."

(I also originally wrote "assholes" instead of "jerks." What, you can't say "assholes" in a newspaper? What children read the book section?)

Get a room

An adult raccoon has spent the entire day on the roof of the building across from mine, snoozing and licking its crotch.

You notice such things when you spend most of your day in front of the computer, shovelling word-coal into a very slow-moving novel-in-progress.

One other thing I've been doing is putting together a grant application for the Canada Council. (Hey, it's free money.) Given the odds against my seeing dollar one from that institution, and the difficulty I've had in making said novel-in-progress sound like something that more than eight people will want to read, I may as well have spent my day snoozing and licking my own crotch, too.

Emission creep

My favourite class act just gets classier:


Hey, that looks easy – let me try:

"At least all Mama Cass choked on was a ham sandwich..."

Now here are the differences between Steyn's "jokes" and mine:

- I make no effort to tack on some kind of cultural-moral tut-tutting so as to partly disguise the fact that I am making sniggering comments about a situation that's pretty awful all around. (In other words, I just go ahead and eat my cake.)

- My joke actually has the structure of a joke, and is not merely the throwing out of semi-relevant song lyrics and TV show titles in the hopes of maybe landing on "trenchant."

- I have not advocated for an illegal and immoral war, manipulated statistics in order to foment racial paranoia, dismissed human rights abuses, acted as a lapdog to various authoritarian elites, etc, etc, so moral superiority is at least an option for me.

- My joke is kind of funny (or in the neighbourhood thereof).