24 posts tagged “books”
- David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
- Will Self's How the Dead Live
- Chuck Palahniuk's Pygmy
- Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day
- "Beautiful, sunny day here in Toronto! Martin (the drummer) and I went to the arts centre and ate oysters. I hope this does not hurt my metal cred."
- "I once saw the stock photo from that album on a TV ad for PMS. True story."
- "I think I should cut my hair like Geddy Lee's."
- "Tomorrow we're playing a church in Pittsburgh. Right on the fuckin' altar. I am slightly uncomfortable with this."
Thursday was another one of those ridiculous brush-with-fame mayhem days at the bookstore. This one was interesting, if only because our celebrity guest was notable less for his fame than for his staggering influence. I'd only heard of him in passing prior to his arrival, but Canada's own David Foster is apparently a forty-year going concern in the music business, and has been the producer for a ridiculous amount of ginormous pop acts. The guy discovered Céline Dion and Michael Bublé, for crap's sakes (treason, really, but I digress). Funny thing is, despite all the wealth and the glory, he's definitely in the top five for the most down-to-earth A-listers I've met. I find it hard to judge the celebrities' moods on tour; if I had to keep their schedules, I'd probably be surly too. Mr. Foster, though, is my nominee for writing How To Flog Your Products Without Being a Dick. He even brought some random budding songwriter from the signing line over to our piano and gave him a few tips. Hats off, sir.
As an aside, I also got to have a brief chat with Ben Mulroney, who is apparently an old friend of Foster's and was brought in as an interviewer. The man is orange, bright Star Trek orange, but also a really nice guy.
I also finally finished reading the Illuminatus! trilogy today. It's interesting stuff: a solid introduction to the hilarity of Discordianism, a ridiculously far-reaching and entertaining conspiracy satire, but also a weird product of its time. It's amazing how even a late-70s novel feels really dated and odd, though this one in particular was so rooted in the drug culture and wonky politics of its era that it's hard to imagine it any other way. At least now I more fully understand references to Erisian nerddom fnord.
Four days left before my ballyhooed return to the ivory tower. I've martyred my bank account, dialled back my availability at the bookstore, gotten a feel for campus, and laughed off one quasi-threatening email from a professor asking if I was sure I wanted to take her "very difficult" class. Despite all that, I approach the coming year with zanshin and sharpened pencils. I'm excited to be moving forward again. It's going to be a good year.
Highlights of the past few weeks:
- I've been getting a lot of shifts in the music section lately. This is more fun than I can comprehend. Picking the store's music is a blast, as is talking music with the customers, and pretty much everyone seems to be happy to have me there. Here's hoping I can continue this trend.
- I had a pretty awesome visit to Guelph. What was going to be a standard paperwork run led to busking, surprise hangouts with all kinds of characters, and crashing on the last couch I ever thought I'd crash on. My spiritual hometown gets weirder and better every time I come back.
- On that note, I am now completely in love with hollowbody electric guitars. Sustain and heavy-gauge strings are my friends.
- Does anybody else remember Moist? I swear, I hadn't thought about that band for at least a decade, but "Breathe" came up on somebody's iTunes at a party, and I still remembered every word. Frickin' awesome song.
- One of my coworkers called me "quite good-looking" after a shift this week. Uh-oh?
- God help me, I've gotten hooked on jazz music now. After having heard some of John McLaughlin's Indian jazz-fusion work when I did a project on Carnatic music back at Guelph, I decided to look up the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and from there, wound up lost in Miles Davis and John Coltrane. How the hell did I miss this stuff? I knew they were brilliant, but it's about time I experienced it.
- Rebecca came up to visit me this week! Hooray! We mostly just walked around a lot, cooked delicious quiche, watched some movies, and played Soul Calibur in my basement, but hey. It was glorious to see her again, especially since the next time will probably be the Three/Alpha Galates concert at the end of the month.
- Speaking of ridiculously complicated academic twists on lowbrow media, I've started reading Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Eco is quite the interesting character. He's a semiotician by trade, so even though the plot (so far, anyway) is pretty standard thriller fare, the text and dialogue are so full of obscure references (particularly Italian historical footnotes and the occult), I find myself turning to Wikipedia once every few pages to get the full gist of a joke. That said, some of the banter between his main characters (a trio of occult-book publishers) is downright hilarious, and this is a much more interesting look at all the Grail/Templar/Rosicrucian stuff than anything Dan Brown has ever done.
Davidson himself turned out to be a lot of fun: charming, articulate, funny, and movie-star handsome. Funny, though, that all the papers describe him as "tall;" he's less than my 5'11, and a fair bit lighter. He still has that new-author love for meeting people, though, and he chatted with everyone as he signed their complimentary copies of The Gargoyle.
As for the book, though? I'm torn. The dude has a gift for lively, clever prose, and for combining conversational tone with some truly lush descriptions, but there are far too many places where his prose gets purple enough to make the Disney-cartoon gargoyles (remember that show?) in today's picture jealous. Likewise, his impeccable research into bookbinding, Middle High German, Japanese, Dante Alighieri, schizophrenia, and the physiology of burns rivals the kind of erudition you'd see from a Palahniuk or an Eco novel, but then he goes and makes garish historical errors like having a crossbow that fires arrows instead of quarrels or bolts (this isn't just my D&D-fuelled medieval-weapons snobbery talking; it's actually a fairly important plot point). Davidson's got potential, but he's also got a lot of room to grow.
On a happy academic note, I finally managed to get a Toronto student ID and pick my damn courses. It took a two-hour squat in the admissions building, but I'm finally officially one of them, and I have some damn fine classes to look forward to this semester. Phonetics! Syntactics! Writing systems! Historical Linguistics! Latin! I win.
Things:
- Yet another aging legend left us on the weekend: Mr. Conductor and Cardinal Glick himself, George Carlin.
Free-speech warrior, keen social commentator, and general scatological
goofball, his legacy should be so much more than the "Milwaukee Seven"
skit that gave him such infamy. Still, I hope that, as his soul was flung to the roof, never to return, he managed to growl out one last "cocksuckers!"
- Speaking of cocks, culinary tragedy struck the Bradlands today. I dropped my vaunted bottle of Cock Sauce, coating my floor in a fine layer of fermented fish. Despite all efforts to clean up, I have a feeling that that curious is-that-South-Asian-cuisine-or-an-oversexed-dorm-room smell is going to be here for a while.
- Oh Lord. I, Lucifer was awful. The plotting wasn't bad, but the prose was hideous; Duncan's Satan was pretentious without the wit to back it up. On the bright side, with Daniel Craig and Ewan MacGregor starring in the film adaptation, the film stands to greatly improve on the source material.
- On Sunday, Indigo had a big charity softball tournament. That was actually loads of fun, even if we got knocked out well before the semifinals. Our team had some ridiculously good players holding down the defensive side of things, and even I got my moment in the sun with a dramatic base slide. Never slide without pads, folks. I can't move my knee more than 90 degrees right now, lest I tear open the paperback-sized scab. It's pretty badass.
- Speaking of moments in the sun, what the hell was with that hailstorm on Sunday? Hail? In Toronto? Geez.
First off! Holy crap, it's a lion webcam. A LION WEBCAM. I don't even want to admit the amount of time I wasted watching the cute little cubs feeding and the lioness expressing her disdain for everything and everyone. I love animals.
So. Graduation. That was a night to remember, to be sure. I got to see a strange medley of old friends, and the alphabetical seating arrangement miraculously put me right beside my old sociology soulmate Cait. President Summerlee's speech was suitably funny and inspiring (but he was wearing shoes! What the hell?), and Chancellor Wallin is far more stately and matronly than you'd expect. I take back every "is that your final Chancellor?" joke I ever made.
Speaking of jokes in need of abrogation, I was originally a little irked by the choice of honoris causa speaker for my ceremony; while the folks in the afternoon session got to hear Roméo Dallaire, we got somebody who was only listed as "the former finance minister of Afghanistan." That seemed like the perfect storm of boredom and small potatoes compared to the good General, until I looked at the rest of Dr. Ghani's résumé. He probably still wasn't the most relevant choice for a crowd of nutrition and sociology students, but that was a pretty cool speech.
Pride comes before the fall; the ensuing afterparty was nothing short of epic. Cait and her crew invited me downtown to Doogie's for one last disaster, and it was a perfect night: tons of my friends in one place, great music from the one-man bar band, and the let's-make-this-one-count vibe that defines a good goodbye party. I have the feeling I'll never live down making out with that random pierced girl during "Tonight, Tonight," but I blame the celebratory mood.
As if I didn't have enough nifty stuff to write about in this entry, today was Book Expo. The mighty swag festival, like the industry it represents, is having a bit of a lean year, which meant the lightest haul I've ever left the Convention Centre with, but I still had a great time and got some very nifty loot. Meeting Jay Ingram was a treat (turns out I know his daughter), I scored a copy of the new David Sedaris to get signed when he's at my store in July, and those crazy Scottish condo-flipping guys from television were fun to meet, too.
Currently on my nightstand: Glen Duncan's I, Lucifer. I refuse to judge it before I've read a bit more of it, but it's got a cult following over at the office, so I remain optimistic.
So I went on a date. There was a park and an extravagant milkshake and a lovely hug and an insinuation that we should definitely get together and laugh like that again sometime. I'm pretty thrilled.
That was just one part of a half-week of fun and interesting things, though. I had to duck down to Guelph today to pick up a German award from the University, and that humble bus odyssey turned into a long chain of nostalgic run-ins (Jon! Meg! Half of my old German class! Two of my old Ontarion editors!) around campus. There was also a ceremony with superb cheesecake and a whole bunch of folks I'd never seen in my life. As a proud CSAHS kid, I have no idea what I was doing at the College of Arts ceremony, but award committees will be award committees. Props to the Dean of Arts, anyway, for only choking on two sticky surnames: mine, and a consonant-lite Hungarian one (he even got mine right on the first try). The material portion of my prize? A handsome hardcover edition of Martina Hefter's Junge Hunde. I hope I can understand postmodern literary German.
The actual hats-and-speeches convocation ceremony is tomorrow, and then I have about 24 hours to gorge on Guelph nostalgia before I get dragged back to the Big Smoke to sell books. Reports to follow.
On the book side of things, I just finished reading Corey Redekop's Shelf Monkey. I could have done without some of the let's-make-fun-of-manic-depression scenes, and the Golding-meets-Palahniuk breakdown seems a bit far-fetched, but the guy is an amazingly tight writer for a first-time novelist, and he's made a pitch-perfect satire of life in a big-box bookstore. I've served those customers. I've worked with those employees. I've hated those talk-show hosts.
Signs of spring: there was a spider crawling down my wall as I woke up this morning. It was a nice bit of poetic justice (maybe even irony?) that the only object handy for arachnicide was my beat-up copy of Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory.
After the student union meeting tonight (free pizza! Moreso if their usual trend continues and they don't make quorum), I have to meet with my English group and put the finishing touches on our paper on the evolution of the double negative. When was the last time you had a paper that quoted Chaucer, Mencken, Fowler's usage guide, Fabio, Pink Floyd, and Homer Simpson?
Also: I'm never buying Martin guitar strings again. Harumph.
Ah, Easter, that holiest of days, when the Easter Bunny and his Peep minions bring Jesus back from the dead so they can both hop around the world, giving delicious chocolate and gummy candies to the saved and curse the damned with those awful creme eggs. Or something.
As seems to be the trend with family occasions lately, it was a low-key one this time. My ailing grandparents didn't show up, so it was just my parents, aunt, step-uncle, and I devouring the Easter feast. After that came a very silly game of Scattergories (things that jump, starting with M: "Mid-1920s Stockbrokers").
I'm reading one crazy-ass book right now: Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital. It's a (surprise, surprise) end-of-the-world story about a second Great Flood, with the Ark replaced by a somehow-floating pediatric hospital. The mixture makes more sense when you consider that Mr. Adrian's degrees are in children's medicine and divinity, but it's still quite the trippy read. Lock Salman Rushdie in his fatwa-proof bunker with only the first two seasons of House, M.D. and he might write something like this, except it wouldn't be quite this morbid and magical (though the angel in the elevator is starting to get on my nerves). His prose is gorgeous, too.
I'm just worried, on page 150 of 600 or so, as to how he's going to pull it all together. Don't fail me now.
