Plenty of Nothing

Turning Toward Snow

First snow here today. Roofs are whitening. Pavements are damp and dark. A moment’s sunlight will return us to autumn dryness.

The snow has put me in mind of one of my favorite blogs: Antarctic Conservation. Recently they’ve been working on paper restoration and have confessed to being somewhat distracted by the interior of objects like this well-used copy of the Illustrated London News

I’ve always been curious about what the Edwardian explorers read. Expedition accounts frequently mention the reading habits and materials in passing. Lawrence Oates’ reading, for example, of Napier's multi-volume history of the Napoleonic War was a matter of comment on the expedition and is often noted in historical accounts,  sometimes with a note of surprise.

In Ponting photographs, books of one sort or another often peek out of the background.

I've often wanted to know is whether there’s a list of all the printed material taken along on the Edwardian expeditions. Oh wait. Conservators. Of course there’s a list. I wonder if there’s a publicly accessible list.

Heather

Ottawa Small Press Book Fair, Nov. 28, 2009

I rented a half table at the Jack Purcell Centre yesterday. The Ottawa Small Press Book Fair is a pretty modest semi-annual event, but it's the sort of thing you need to hunt out if you want to discover Ottawa's homegrown culture. There's a mix of small presses, self-published authors and comics people, mostly from Ottawa and just about entirely in English. How much do you want to bet there's a parallel event in Gatineau in French? And that they haven't heard of each other? It usually works like that around here. Sold three copies of Shaolin Cricket, one Wonderful Hell, one Evangeline Brandt, and was asked by two people if Evangeline Brandt Mobilisée is a colouring book. Saw Dwight Williams from the Comix Jam. Bought some drawings from Colin White. Sat beside the entertaining Workhorsery booth, with its diorama and stop-action animation in aid of Jocelyne Allen's novel You and the Pirates. Jocelyne was Yoshihiro Tatsumi's interpreter at TCAF in May. Cool!

Douglas

Pages to Close

In case you hadn't noticed the continuing going-to-hell of the Canadian book business, here's your final proof. Sequential is reporting the imminent closure of Pages on Queen Street in Toronto.  Pages seemed to achieve effortlessly what no bookstore in Ottawa has ever managed to do -- be cool.  A large part of its appeal came from the decision to hire illustrator Michael Cho to do all the in-store signage.  I hope some Toronto blogger has the foresight to go through there with a camera and post the section signs.  Douglas

Overqualified, by Joey Comeau

All Maritime literature is about, at some level, alcohol.  When you read Joseph Howe, you have to bear in mind the punch bowl on the sideboard, or David Adams Richards, the stack of empties in the mud porch. Even Anne of Green Gables gets drunk on raspberry cordial. In Christy Ann Conlin's Heave, Serrie the recovering protagonist wonders exactly what it is Maritimers are supposed to do when they stop drinking.

Joey Comeau's Overqualified fits right in there.  The epistolary novel takes the form of a series of job applications, the applicant Joey Comeau's strategy being to lie in the resumé and tell the truth in the cover letters.  Though for "tell the truth" read "unveil manic fantasies of revenge".  Many of these letters have the belligerence you might meet in a tavern parking lot.  Biographical details sift out about a dead grandfather, a broken relationship, and a brother killed by a drunk driver.  By the end the narrator is no closer to a job, but you are closer to understanding why.

But aggressive truths are still truths.  Here he is applying to Absolut Vodka:

You don't know what I mean, do you, Absolut?  Your commercials are all pretty pictures and clever design. They're very attractive.  I'm applying for a job, because I don't think you understand what it means to be cool or strong or invincible.  You of all people should know.  That is what alcohol does.  It makes you strong.  You can fight anyone.  You can seduce any woman.  You can drive faster than death.

Cross Promotion

Nice piece of cross-promotion here.  The LCBO has loaded up on gift boxes for the holiday season, and one of them is this all-Edinburgh tandem of Deuchars IPA and Rankin's detective John Rebus.  The beer's all right, though more oaty than I'd expect from an India pale ale.  The novel is ... meh.  Maybe Rebus gets sharper in the sequels, but God he's a shitty detective in this one.  His only advantage as a cop is that he's sleeping with a coworker who knows what's going on.  The rest of the time he's drinking.    Here's the crucial moment for me, on page 194, just as Rebus has figured out the identity of the psychopath who is about to murder his daughter: "Rebus, shivering, entered a pub for the hell of it and ordered a triple whiskey."  Dude!  Catch the guy!  Douglas

Obama and Walcott

Bookninja is in a faint because President-elect Obama has been spotted with a copy of Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott's collected poems.  The last president to show any grounding in poetry was Kennedy who had Robert Frost over for his inauguration and who, like Obama, knew how to speak.  To be fair, though, the copy Obama is holding in this Reuter's photo looks fairly pristine, as if it has just been handed to him by some staffer who'd learned via the intertubes that Walcott has written this poem.

Jet Fuel

I finished two books yesterday: Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero and Spent by Joe Matt.  Divisadero is unlikely to unseat The English Patient as Ondaatje's best-known novel, but it might be his most Ondaatje-esque work.  There are reminders of his earlier books throughout, and he satisfies the scar/river/dog requirement by page 17.  At one point I seriously expected Caravaggio to step into the action.  The structure feels especially diffuse, but there's a lot of doubling going on, and one character's dilemma will get picked up by another character in another time or place (or book).  Spent also sits in the middle of a group of other books, in this case graphic novels in which Matt, Seth and Chester Brown draw themselves hanging around together in Toronto.  Some day there will be a show about it at the AGO.  Matt is an R. Crumb devotee in style and content.  By coincidence both Matt and Ondaatje mention a Toronto coffee house, Jet Fuel.  Douglas

Making Libraries Safe For Books

 
A couple of comics have made it onto the shelf here at our digital journal Plenty of Nothing that presage nothing short of the survival of the book and that temple of literacy the public library. Rex Libris: I, Librarian, by James Turner, features the titular Rex Libris, a Eugene Levy lookalike who crosses time and space to collect overdue books and return them to the Middleton Public Library.  His methods are both crude and high tech -- he thinks nothing of leaping from low orbit to trade knuckle sandwiches with delinquent borrowers -- but his motivation comes from personal knowledge of the burning of the Library at Alexandria, where he used to work.  The comic, paradoxically, is totally computer generated.  Simultaneously comes Read or Die by Hideyuki Kurata and Shutaro Yamada, a manga starring Yomiko Readman, a paper master who similarly kicks ass in the name of recovering rare and collectible seventeenth-century editions.  The faith these stories place in calfskin and ragpaper is quaint, but it points out an interesting oxymoron: increasingly as readers move to the internet for their reading, it's the comics that keep them coming back to the bookstore or the library.  Maybe literary publishers ought to consider returning to including half a dozen illustrations in each novel, as they did a hundred years ago.  The comic book collector is not so far from the rare book afficionado.   Douglas

Trifecta of Sorts

When I bought Whiteout I knew that it would fit into two sets of (book and mental) collections--Antarctica and comics--but the whole DTOWF connection was a hoot out loud surprise.

(Apparently Kate Beckinsale plays Carrie in the upcoming movie version. Strikes me as odd casting.)

There's a nice MA thesis waiting for someone out there who looks at the tendency of fictions set in Antarctica to focus on murder. (Preliminary bibliography here.)

Heather

Other People's Reading

I sometimes save the bits of paper I find in library books.

This I found in Cheri.

Heather