This past spring, Pasha Malla released his first book, The Withdrawal Method , a collection of stories that is high on my list of 2008 favourites. In addition to his short fiction (and, as you’ll read below, his upcoming long-form fiction), Malla’s also a humour writer, and as his piece in our September issue shows, a particularly good one. Recently, I asked Pasha about his book, his ha-has, and his upcoming projects.

A lot of the work you’ve done—like your Imaginings in our September issue and your pieces for McSweeney’s —is humour writing. How did you start writing humour, and why do you continue?

Well, I think whether or not my Imaginings piece or the McSweeney’s things are "humour" is totally subjective. I wrote them, obviously, trying to be funny, but other people finding my stuff funny—or not—is up to them. That’s the thing about humour: it’s completely individual and subjective, maybe more so than any other form. I can read a poem in a style or about something I don’t care for, but if it’s well-crafted (and I’m in a good mood) I can objectively say, "OK, I don’t like this, but it’s well done." With humour you can only succeed (making people laugh) or fail (not making people laugh). I’m sure some people will read my whisky tasting thing and think it’s just dumb, or boring, or pointless, or whatever—which is OK, because it comes with the territory. But hopefully some people will laugh—and then hopefully they’ll toilet paper the houses of the people who don’t. (more…)

Advance copies of our September issue arrived the other day, which means it’s probably about time that I say something about July/August, soon to disappear from shelves. The 2008 edition of our annual Summer Reading Issue is centred around the idea of escape. We have, among many others, Don Gillmor on his brother’s final, tragic escape; Wendy Dennis on fleeing Toronto for Austin, Texas; and Stephen Henighan giving Mozambique its best treatment since Bob Dylan’s Desire. (more…)

Jean Clotte’s Cave Art, out this month from the inimitable Phaidon Press, is the sort of book that convinces you to care about something you never have before. In this case it’s the titular cave art, which, despite the best efforts of a documentary on the Discovery Channel years ago, I was pretty sure was just scribbling. But no! It’s called art for a reason, and, as Clotte’s book meticulously explains, it’s essential to an understanding of both artistic and human history.

Chronicling the evolution of cave art over time, Clottes structures his book around three central periods, each explored by a detailed account of a representative cave: the Chauvet Cave begins a discussion of the period of 35,000 to 22,000 years ago, the Lascaux cave for 22,000 to 17,000 years ago, and the Niaux Cave for 17,000 to 11,000 years ago. It’s a clever approach, and as a result the book’s structure is one of its real strengths. By associating these eras with strong examples that are considered in tremendous detail, Cave Art gives one a sense not only of the broad strokes of a period’s development, but the finer details that make each unique. (more…)

Featuring: Glenn Gould, Robert Downey Jr., Christopher Shulgan, Arthur Conan Doyle (again), Barack Obama, Katie Hafner.

1. Taking the Cure I’ve been meaning to write about Christopher Shulgan’s new book, The Soviet Ambassador, but unfortunately other work has gotten in the way of me reading it first. But since we published a feature by Chris in June about his book’s subject, Aleksandr Yakovlev, and Yakovlev’s visit to British Columbia’s Doukhobors, I feel very confident in recommending the new volume to any and all. Chris’s piece one of my favourites of the year, and it shows off his charming prose and extensive research in such a manner that you’ll probably proceed directly to your local bookstore and collect a copy of his book. For actual evaluation, you could see Amy Knight’s review in the Globe. Watch that section this weekend for further discussion of the The Soviet Ambassador, and, if you’re in Toronto, tune into CBC Radio One at 9am on Sunday to hear Chris on The House.

2. Iron Man in a Tweed Jacket I’m really trying to stop talking about the upcoming Sherlock Holmes movies, which have been frequent topics of discussion here. But news continue to arrive, most lately this week’s revelation that Robert Downey Jr. is in talks to star as Holmes in Guy Ritchie’s ill-conceived action version. Now obviously the inclusion of Robert Downey Jr. makes anything better, but I don’t think even he can save this movie. It’ll still be terrible, but at least the lead will be charming.

3. Literary Biography I’m a big believer in the school of thought that says you can learn a lot about a person by what he or she reads. Al Purdy, for instance, read a lot of campy genre novels, some of which you can see pictured on this very blog, and I believe that type of reading was important to the sort of man he was. (I should say, though, that Purdy also read broadly and deeply across literary history; I would imagine he read more great books most of us could ever dream of finishing.) So I liked Laura Miller’s piece in Salon this week wherein she performs a bit of literary criticism on the idea of Barack Obama’s reading history, exploring his predilection for, among others, Melville, Roth, Nieburh, and, of course, Lincoln. (On a semi-related note, I’ll also recommend Gary Wills’s piece on Lincoln and Obama’s speeches on race from the NYRB a few months back.) And while it isn’t as nuanced as Miller’s argument, this now semi-famous photograph doubtless inspires the same sort of heart fluttering among those of us unaccustomed to seeing our leaders even holding a book.

4. The Steinway Variations McClelland & Stewart just published Katie Hafner’s excellent new book, A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano. It’s the first major work of Gould scholarship since Kevin Bazzana’s fine biography, Wondrous Strange, and one of the loveliest books yet written about the pianist. Hafner, who writes for Wired and the New York Times, delivers an impeccably researched take on Gould’s decades-long relationship with CD 318, a junky old Steinway piano with which he had a serious infatuation. The book also features Verne Edquist, Gould’s piano tuner, whose story hadn’t been explored in full until this volume. Alternating between the two men, Hafner explores the complexities of Gould’s relationship with his instrument.

Because Gould’s a difficult figure to wrestle with intellectually, we’ve developed a cultural fixation on his bizarreness that’s reduced his particularities as a performer and man to a set of clichés: sandwiches at Fran’s diner, summer-time top coats, his audible humming while playing. What Hafner finds, though, goes deeper, to a level that we can all understand. In his obsession with CD 318 Gould wasn’t demonstrating some strange personal tic that puts him at a remove from most people. Instead, it was among the more normal enterprises in which he engaged. More than anything, he was in love with the beauty of the instrument as it sounded to him, and it’s a lot easier for the average person to identify with finding something captivating than, say, an overwhelming need to phone people long distance in the middle of the night. In focusing on the piano, Hafner elevates the pianist to a place where I, at least, understand him in a way I never have.

Featuring: Haruki Murakami, Arthur Conan Doyle, Junot Diaz, Stephen King, and John Reibetanz.

1. Running Man In their summer fiction issue a few weeks ago, the New Yorker published an essay by Haruki Murakami about his simultaneous birth as a novelist and long-distance runner. Like most Murakami, it was really good, but sort of hard to say why. It’s actually an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which Bond Street will publish at the end of this month. What to say that doesn’t break the review embargo? I’ll note that if you enjoyed the essay, you’ll enjoy the book, and you’ll finish it with the same sense of perplexed pleasure with which you ended the excerpt. Murakami’s work is, stylistically at least, deceptively simple, and I always leave his novels a little uncertain of what’s transpired, but very sure that I’ve enjoyed its transpiring. Since the book is non-fiction, what happens within it is a bit clearer than in, say, South of the Border, West of the Sun (seriously—was she like a ghost or something?), but the prose still has its mysteries. For instance, how did it manage to entrance me enough to finish a book about long-distance running, a subject in which I have no interest? The title, of course, is borrowed from Raymond Carver, and Tess Gallagher is thanked within for permission. Not thanked, however, is Horace Silver, though he should be—Murakami’s cover borrows and adapts the running man from Silver’s semi-excellent 1972 Blue Note LP In Pursuit of the 27th Man (part of which is pictured above). (more…)

Surely Biblioasis, the small independent press run out of Emeryville, Ontario, is among the bravest entities in Canadian literature. This spring, after all, their list contained not one but two books of critical essays. One would be risk enough. Two is sort of admirably crazy. Fortunately for them, though, both books are very good, and I say that not just because both authors are contributors to The Walrus. Charles Foran’s Join the Revolution, Comrade and Stephen Henighan’s A Report on the Afterlife of Culture are excellent in part because their publisher has encouraged their scope to extend beyond the traditional confines of Canadian essay collections. Foran and Henighan are decidedly internationalist in their orientation, and what results are wide-ranging surveys of everything from, in Henighan’s book, Roberto Bolano to Haruki Murakami to Wole Soyinka, and, in Foran’s, from finding memories of Vietnam movies in Hue to searching for quality in Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons. (I’ll put a preemptive plug here for Biblioasis’s new edition of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s collected poems, which I’ve not yet bought, but sort of has to be good, no?) (more…)

Last weekend, as I was shuffling around BookExpo Canada, searching for catalogs and in need of fresh air, I came across the booth of Ten Speed Press, who really are a top-notch operation. I was drawn by what appeared to be a finished copy of Grant Achatz’s new Alinea cookbook. It turned out to be a dummy copy, though one that in its size and beautiful dust jacketry gave an idea of how impressive this book will be. The Ten Speed rep had a black and white galley of the book, though, and I can report that the recipes are aesthetically stunning and practically impossible for the average home chef. (Apparently by buying the book you’ll have access to a website that will let you learn from Grant & Co., which sounds to me like another way to feel inadequate. To learn more about Achatz, you should read D.T. Max’s very good New Yorker profile from a few weeks ago.) (more…)

In what is surely one of the worst ideas in recent cinematic history, Warner Brothers has asked Guy Ritchie to direct a new Sherlock Holmes movie. Making it even worse? The script is to be based on a comic book, and both of these iterations are to focus, Variety tells us, on our hero’s physical side in an attempt “reinvent Holmes and sidekick Dr. John H. Watson.” According to information shared by Lionel Wigram, the film’s producer, the new Holmes will “be more adventuresome and take advantage of his skills as a boxer and swordsman.” The Guardian headline really says it all: “Guy Ritchie takes on ‘all-action’ Sherlock Holmes.” I like to think that those scare quotes are some British copy editor’s way of saying, “Hey, listen everybody: how dumb is this?!”

In effect, greenlighting this project is like saying that it would be really cool to make a movie about Hulk Hogan’s recent dalliance with modal logic. It’s not inconceivable that the Hulkamaniac is into the whole possible worlds thing, but it certainly isn’t his day job. The fact that Holmes is physically agile and has a history of boxing makes him a rounder character, but it doesn’t define that roundness; while I would find Hogan more interesting if he had some serious thoughts about David Lewis, I would never expect—nor would I want—it to be more essential to his character than, say, the time he body-slammed Andre the Giant while defending the world title at Wrestlemania III.

The last time I wrote about Holmes, my focus was on the brilliant new Penguin series of paperbacks. While thinking about the man in preparation for writing that, it occurred to me that the notion of order is central to the Holmes world. I didn’t mention it in the post, because it seemed sort of self-evident; the books and stories are based on the possibilities of reasoning, which is an inherently structural act. While Holmes may have distracting tendencies—his occasionally debilitating drug addiction, say—the idea of order is at the centre of his capabilities.

Which is why this news is particularly terrible. Setting aside the fact that the direction of the film stands in distinct opposition to any reasonable interpretation of what is essential to the character (and ignoring the fact that it’s a crass attempt to make a biceps-and-zingers superhero out of a character who is already a superhero, though of a different kind), the idea of Guy Ritchie helming this picture is ridiculous. Ritchie’s style—frantic, frenetic, jittery, annoying—is the antithesis of the masterly calm that defines Holmes’s personal world, and the precision with which Conan Doyle relates the events that happen within it.

But I suppose it’s all tied up in that word ‘reinvention’ To truly reinvent the character, it seems, they’ll need to change not only his fundamental nature, but the way he relates to what is fundamental to his world. So perhaps Guy Ritchie and his MTV editing team are exactly the right choice. Because if you’re going to kill an idol, you might as well make doubly sure he’s dead.

Lincoln Hall’s new book, Dead Lucky: Life After Death on Mount Everest, is pretty much what it sounds like: an account of how Hall, who had nearly reached the summit of Everest in 1984, suffered a cerebral edema and was left high on the mountain during his second attempt in May 2006. Presumed dead after hours of immobility and non-responsiveness, he was found alive the next morning having miraculously survived the night with no shelter, oxygen, water, or warmth. As far as things to have done go, that’s pretty impressive.

Almost as impressive is the book itself. Hall, an Australian magazine editor by trade who has been climbing for decades, recounts his story in elegant prose and with a generosity of spirit that comes not only from his very nature, but also his dedication to Tibetan Buddhism, a spiritual orientation that infuses the narrative with calmness, kindness, and a thoughtful precision. The end result is a sort of existential account of a near tragedy, vastly more meditative than the typical climbing yarn, and ultimately more rewarding.

I met with Lincoln Hall earlier this week.

Jared Bland: Toward the end of the book, you ask yourself how it is that you could still be alive, but realize that you don’t think you’ll know until you’ve recovered properly and had time to explore it. It’s been just over two years since these events. Do you have a better idea of what happened? (more…)

I’ve been meaning for some time to write some posts about short stories. Not so much the idea of the short story, but reviews of individual stories themselves, considered as stand-alone works of art instead of as a part of a collection or larger body of work. With tomorrow’s tonight’s launch of Pasha Malla’s first collection, The Withdrawal Method, now seemed like the right time to start. I didn’t know which story to choose, so I emailed Malla, and he suggested “Big City Girls,” which is the piece that he says has been most on his mind since completing the book.

“Big City Girls” is the story of Alex, age seven, who stays home from school on a snow day with his fifth-grader sister and a few of her friends. They’re bored kids, and without much to do after building a snow fort, they retire to the living room to play Clue and have a conversation that eventually turns to sex. Or at least sex in the unknowing way that kids of that age talk about it—“Maybe Miss Scarlet and Professor Plum were having fun with the candlestick, said Shayna…In the Secret Passageway! screamed Heather”—which is to say with imprecision and anxiety. (more…)

Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford’s new book, Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China, is one of the best cookbooks I’ve ever read. Duguid and Alford have compiled twenty-five years of personal history, observation, photographs, travel narratives, and recipes into a collection that illustrates just how rich and varied non-Han Chinese culture is today, and just how endangered. In a year when China is in the news more than ever, the book serves as a reminder that the country is more than its capital city. I spoke with Jeffrey and Naomi a few weeks ago at the Random House Canada offices.

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Your own personal history is woven throughout this book and one gets the sense that these areas have been important to you for a long time. So why this book now? Why wasn’t it, say, your second book? What has changed politically, or in your own experiences, that made you want to write this book now?

Naomi: Well the ones out earlier, we put bits of those things in them—in our first book, Flatbreads and Flavors, we managed to squeeze Tibet in there, there was a lot of Xinjiang in there, and we started the book with flatbreads from Kashgar. But even now on our sixth book, we think this is lucky to be able to write about somewhere that is relatively so far out. So to have a contract even after a track record of six…that’s got to be our answer, partly. This has always been an interest of ours.

Jeffrey: in fact, a long time ago, Naomi wanted to do a book on Tibet. And I kept saying no way in the world…

N:…will anybody ever publish it. Stones and Silk, I thought. That would be a title.

J: Our editor was working on our second book with us, the one on rice, and she said, “you know, I’m okay to have my feet in the mud…”

N: “…in the rice paddies…”

J: “But please not over my knees.” (more…)

Much like Damien Hirst, Bigfoot considers his work “No dark, just misunderstood and ahead of time”

(Much like Damien Hirst, Bigfoot considers his work “No dark, just misunderstood and ahead of time.”)

This month marks the release of the third book in a series of collaborative memoirs by Bigfoot and Walrus contributing illustrator Graham Roumieu. Bigfoot: I Not Dead is a tender yet violent addition to Bigfoot’s ongoing self-exploration project, sure to please both fans of his previous work and those who aren’t yet familiar with him but enjoy furry creatures, mutilation, poetry, existential anxiety, and/or hard-learned life lessons.

Readers in Toronto should be sure to attend the book’s launch, which takes place Thursday night at the Gladstone Hotel as part of Pages Books’ “This Is Not a Reading Series.” Michael Winter, Nathan Whitlock, Douglas Bell, The Walrus’s own Jeremy Keehn, and others will speak about what Bigfoot means to them. Second floor, 7.30pm, free.

I reached Bigfoot last week at his home in the woods.

How has your life changed since your first book came out?

Bigfoot hang dirty laundry on line for all to see. Some things just needed be aired out on wind of disclosure. Others so heavy shit-encrusted that they fall off of line into mud and now scrutiny birds pick bits of corn out of it and neighbor steal and put on Ebay. Not totally regret writing books but wish sometime to go back to old technique of whisper secrets into hollow stump. (more…)

“To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.”
–Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”

It is somewhat of a consensus around the Walrus office, or at least whichever part of that office Paul Isaacs and I happen to be in at a given time, that Sherlock Holmes is tops. This is one of those hyperbolic statements that sounds playful and ridiculous, but which is not. I believe some call this Birony.

The truth is that Sherlock Holmes is just about the best company a person could have. (He’s also a great instructor in the art of reasoning; were we all to study at his feet, the world would be a better, and slightly cooler, place.) But Holmes has had the misfortune of what we might call the public domain treatment. This phenomenon happens when a book is no one’s property and thus anyone can release it in basically any form at any time. This leads to two things: 1) a wider, often less-expensive dissemination of the texts, which in the case of Holmes is excellent, for people tend to enjoy the stories, but which in the case of Hard Times is certainly pernicious and potentially disastrous to the book’s public conception (average twenty-first century reader: not so much with the activist Dickens); and 2) a proliferation of ugly design (see: everything by Dover Thrift Editions) which is often so prevalent as to render the book forever hideous in the reading public’s mind. (I should note that it’s great that Dover makes very affordable books, and I don’t criticize their enterprise there. I’m not even asking them to make the books beautiful. Just less ugly.) (more…)

This past November, when he won the National Book Award for his novel Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson couldn’t make it to the ceremony because he was in Iraq reporting a piece for Portfolio. At the time it seemed like strange news. But one can only imagine that, after spending years chained to a monstrous novel, the man felt like a vacation.

As Gregory Cowles recounted the other day on Paper Cuts, the New York Times books blog, Johnson made his absence up to New York with a recent reading and Q&A at the New School. I have to assume that anyone who’s ever read an interview with Johnson would show up mostly for the reading, as he’s notoriously taciturn during question periods. (A favourite of mine from the a National Book Award-sponsored interview last fall: Bret Anthony Johnston: Were there moments in your writing process where you worried the book wouldn’t work? If so, how did you press on? Denis Johnson: Well, I’ve never thought about this before, but now that you ask, it occurs to me I don’t have much interest whether any of my books work or not.) (more…)

Exclusive Edward Burtynsky photos

(Backstage at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, photograph by Edward Burtynsky.)

In the sixth grade, I played Lysander in the Iles Elementary School’s presentation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was as professional a production as you’d imagine it to be. The fairies danced to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”; Hermia, Helena, Demetrius, and I wore pyjamas (it was nighttime, you see, and we were very sleepy); and Christie Walden’s memorable Titania looked like a twelve-year-old cross between the Bride of Frankenstein and Diana Ross on the cover of Why Do Fools Fall in Love?

I wasn’t cut out to be an actor, and it was my second and final appearance on stage. (The year before, I’d played a senile mountie in a show about an old folks’ home. My job was to intermittently wander across the stage singing, “I love the North.” Video survives.) In fact, I’ve grown to vaguely dislike the theatre. I prefer my artifice in the form of anapests and enjambments, and I do not like being seated in a crowded room. In high school, I tried to avoid the theatre kids, and was largely successful. I went to one play in university, and only because a friend was playing Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, a role that I knew (from reading, not seeing) that I liked. While she was good, I enjoyed the version in my head better. (more…)