Signed copies of Gloria Steinem's Life on the Road, Overrated Writers, Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken, The Tribe in LARB, Hammershøi Exhibition in NYC,

• Gloria Steinem's event  at Rialto with Drawn & Quarterly was a lot of fun. Such a fascinating life that woman has had so far and her big lesson is simple: listen to others. Think of all the problems we might solve if we merely listened, really listened. If you missed it and want to get a signed copy of her book, you can order one on their website.
• A really interesting discussion on one of France's best-known writers, Delphine de Vigan. Does Delphine de Vigan deserve her success? (The discussion is in French and it's all in good fun in one way though the French rather take these things rather seriously.) One critic argues she's brilliant and fascinating. The other critic argues that she's overrated. Both men, of course, but still, part of a new trend where writers and critics are starting to push back again: really taking certain writers to task and exploring the idea of the overrated writer. Personally, I love de Vigan's work but I definitely do agree with Partisan's analysis of some their writers.
• A really interesting piece on Matthew Orr's book The Road Not Taken and his analysis of Robert Frost's widely anthologized poem, "The Road Not Taken." Orr's argument is that the poem has long been misunderstood as an anthem of individuality when, upon closer analysis, it really does not contain that kind of message at all.
• If you're in New York next week, there's an exhibition at Scandinavia House on the work of painter Vilhelm Hammershøi which ends on the 16th. His paintings are so moving and lonely and I am reminded of Edward Hopper though from a totally different era. This writer looks at the exhibition and at Hammershoi's work in context with his time and age. 
• Great long analysis in LARB of the Ukrainian film, The Tribe, that swept Cannes in 2014. I saw it at Cinema du Parc a while back and thought it was pretty revolutionary, not only in terms of the lack of spoken dialogue (the film is set in a deaf school and everyone communicates in sign language, none of which is translated, yet it's easy enough to follow the broad plot arcs), but also in terms of its squalor and portrayal of the downtrodden (death, murder, rape, accidents, it's a bleak and depressing film but one is still left with hope), things shown on screen that I have to say, I've never seen before. I walked out of that theatre in a daze...

Vilhelm Hammershøi: in New York until next week

Michael Cunningham's new one, Muji Flagship story in NYC, German photographs from 1900, Image+Nation starts this weekend: Links of Note

Germany in 1900

• LARB Interview with Michael Cunningham about his much-anticipated new book about fairy tales. He's also the one performing it in the audible.com version. I generally find his work engaging and accessible so will definitely have this on my list.
• OK I don't write about stores or shopping really at all but I have to admit that I am a huge fan of the Japanese retail outlet, Muji, and their shop in New York is one of my favorite places to go. They've opened a new flagship store near Times Square and the next time I'm there, it'll be high on my list. I have so much Muji stuff around my house, it'd be like a monastery in here without it (clothes, kitchen stuff, bedroom stuff, bathroom containers, etc.).
• Here are some really beautiful early 20th century color photographs of Germany.  These come from a new Taschen book, Germany Around 1900, which contains 800 color photos of the country from that  year. Stunning. Speaking of New York City (see above), the Taschen NYC store is also amazing and I could spend days there.
• Some very interesting films from Image+Nation starting this weekend and going until the end of next weekend, including this German film, Where are you going, Habibi; Welcome to this house about the life, loves and work of poet Elizabeth Bishop (plays this afternoon); and a series of gay shorts from around the world which is on Sunday, plus many others (not very flexible schedule this year with films almost only at night: why not more afternoon screenings?).

Elizabeth Bishop biographical documentary at Image+Nation

New York in the 1970s, Daniel Allen Cox's new novel, Artist Idris Khan, Denzel Washington + August Wilson = HBO series, Gentrification: Cultural Digest September 20

New York City in the 1970s: not so great

• American writer Edmund White (Blue Met 2014) asks us to stop romanticizing New York in the 1970s ("the city was edgy and dangerous," women carried mace and that people craved a city, largely believed to be at its worst and one of the most dangerous cities in the US, that was more democratic).
• Speaking of the 1970s, Montreal writer Daniel Allen Cox has a new book out, Mouthquake, set in Montreal in 1979. I wasn't able to attend the launch last week at Drawn & Quarterly, nor have I read the book yet, but it's getting some good buzz (more here and here) and if it's anything like his last two books, it'll be a really unusual and fascinating read. Plus the afterword is by Sarah Schulman one of my favourite contemporary writers (and woefully underappreciated, I think).
• Interview Magazine talks to amazing artist Idris Khan. I am so in love with his haunting, black & white work that I want to follow his exhibits around the world like a superfan, just in case I can ever afford to buy a piece.
• Denzel Washington will adapt August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle into a mini-series for HBO. Not a lot is known about the project yet, but Wilson was one of contemporary theatre's most original voices until he died suddenly in 2005 at age 60.
• Very relevant to Montrealers: PBS Newshour looks at how gentrification changes a neighborhood.

Daniel Allen Cox's new novel

Gloria Steinem wins peace prize, NYT posts thousands of recipes, in stock at D&Q, New York City Reading List: Cultural Digest August 22

• New book alert: Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh is now in stock at Drawn & Quarterly (consistently impressed at the quality of their curation: every time I step into that shop, I want to buy 20 books). Get in on the ground before this writer is a household name.
• Hungry? The New York Times just put up 17,000 recipes online. Get feasty!
• Headed to New York? The Millions has an entire reading list to get to. Get cracking!
• Gloria Steinem wins Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
• James Baldwin and Malcolm X spar.

Gloria Steinem: longtime peacenik, now official

US Publishing and East Coast stories

I've been thinking about the baggage we bring to books we read and how that baggage affects the way we react to them. I'm about halfway through Claire Messud's novel The Woman Upstairs and I had this odd reaction when I first started the book: a sense that I am sick to death of novels set on the East Coast about rich white people. For a couple of days, I forced myself to read it, despite the fact that it was the third or fourth book I'd read in a row about rich white people from the East Coast (including Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch which I liked and wrote about, despite what I'm about to say below).

Not every American story is a Manhattan story

It turns out that my feelings (my baggage) were not fair: the book really isn't about rich white people from the East Coast. East Coast, yes, but these are run-of-the-mill people. I have other issues with the book though my initial reaction has really made me think about the way I encounter things I'm reading, particularly since I almost gave up reading it due to my reaction at first.

Since our Festival is an international festival, I read a good deal of international writers from all over the world. True, I read a good deal from Canadian writers, too, but when I delve into an American novel it's somewhat of a rare treat and I approach American novels as both an insider (I was born and raised in the USA and all my family still lives there) but also as a  foreigner (I live in Canada and haven't lived in the US since I was in my early 20s).

Why are Americans so fascinated with stories about rich upper-class east-coasters? I suppose a big part of it is the fact that the US publishing industry is so based in the east (read: New York City) and editors are culled from the upper classes and Ivy League schools. To me, growing up in the west, the east was always far away, hard to imagine, exotic, dangerous, crowded, full of overdone ladies in fur coats and hard-edged men in $5000 suits.

Perhaps even all these years later, despite having lived outside the west since around 1995, I still hold certain prejudices and assumptions about easterners. And it's not like there aren't plenty of writers who write about Western lives (Sam Shepard, who I've written about recently, Jim Harrison, many others).

All of this leads me back to Claire Messud's book. Again, it's set in the east but it's not at all conforming to my preconceived ideas about books from the East Coast. Still, I find it a puzzling work. I'll write about it another day since that's a slightly different topic and I should finish the book before passing judgement.

Henry James feels too heavy for summer

So we're off to NYC for several days next weekend and, as I am often wont to do before I travel to New York (or just about anywhere, in fact), I want to read fiction set there. I picked up this excellent edition (with an introduction by 2013 Blue Met Grand Prize winner, Colm Tóibín, no less!) of The New York Stories of Henry James. It's been slow-going.

I'm a fan of Henry James but, first, it's hard to read such dense and heavy text on a hot summer day when people are riding by my balcony on bicycles and dogs are barking in the sunshine. It feels too weighty, requires too much concentration. I read the first three stories with some effort but after finishing the third one, I just couldn't bring myself to continue. At least not for now.

Why does Henry James feel like a cold autumn afternoon writer? Or a stay-in-bed-and-drink-hot-chocolate-while-it-snows writer?

The other reason I couldn't make it work this week is that though the stories are all connected to (not all set there) New York, Henry James is not the kind of writer that revels in space. No long passages about taking the train or sitting in a park people-watching (or at least not in the three stories I read). You get no sense of life in New York (not "common life" at any rate) from reading the stories. Henry James' interests lie inside: in the psychology of human interactions, motivations, fears, secrets. That's fine but because of that fact, I think, the "New York" side of this collection feel rather arbitrary and Tóibín's contextualizing James within the New York of his day is about the only time in the collection where New York really features as part of the stories.

I should dig out my old copy of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, a real New York kind of novel...

Lorca in New York

I discovered this amazing website where one can read all about Frederico Garcia Lorca's brief life in New York City in 1929 and 1930 (as a student at Columbia).

Yay! New York City!!

It's very interactive so you can click on a particular location of the city and find out about a party he attended or a poem he wrote based on that location or someone influential that he met. All of these experiences led Lorca to write Poet in New York which contains some of his best-known works and allows him to present some of this consistent themes in a new light: the oppression of the poor, exploitation, violence, etc.

For any afficionados of Lorca's work or life, the website and map are a gold mine of fascinating anecdotes and direct influences on his poems. For newcomers to Lorca, it's a great introduction to his most accessible series of poems (though one would hardly say that Lorca's work in general is inaccessible).

The map is part of a series of events throughout New York City this spring and summer commemorating the work of Lorca. More information on that here. These events include an exhibition at the New York Public Library which contains his manuscripts, photos and letters.

Man, there's always something cool going on in NYC.

Urban Irony: yech

There is a very interesting piece over the weekend in the NYT blog about contemporary irony as a generational style and it aligns with so much that I've thought about in the past few years. I am struck particularly when I am in Mile End or parts of the Plateau: the girls with oversized 80s eyeglasses, the men with handlebar moustaches, odd posters on the wall (like the one below that I Tweeted about a couple of weekends ago: Lionel Richie on the wall at Flocon Espresso), high-waisted mom jeans on 18 year olds. Francophone young people seem less enamoured with this tendency than Anglophone young people do but the NYT writer captures perfectly an analysis of how it might have come about and why it's potentially damaging or if that's an overstatement, so pointless and banal.

Hello, is it me you're looking for?

What irks me about the whole urban irony thing is the sense that sincerity is almost subversive. Everything is one step removed from intention. Do the people who run Flocon really like 1980s Lionel Richie? Or is this a pose, an affectation? What would a poster of some funky cool new band on the wall communicate? Sincerity, so it's something you'd never see.

I think about when I was in my 20s, the kind of music and style I abhorred was anything that parents would have liked (now, of course, I appreciate Carole King and Neil Young and early 70s film) but now it's like certain allusions to the past allow young people to communicate that they are somehow capable of knowing everything that is cool now (which was how we measured how cool someone older was when I was in my 20s: if he knew Depeche Mode and the Violent Femmes and Erasure, then he was OK; if not, then he was old), not only are they aware of contemporary music and film and style, they know about everything that came prior particularly my generation's icons though it's always people who were terribly "uncool" in the 1980s: Lionel Richie (when I was young, this was middle-aged people's music), Barry Manilow (ditto: my grandmother adored Barry Manilow), etc.

This kind of ironic style isn't that new but the ubiquity of it is: in Montreal, in New York, in Portland, many cities where I have spent time recently, all have young people who look identical. I suppose that's been true for a while but I have to say that going to a new city where there is a unique kind of style is so refreshing. And it happens so infrequently...

It's odd that irony only relates to pop culture or fashion. This demonstrates the shallowness of the tendency: never do you see young people clutching paperback copies of Danielle Steele ironically.  Why aren't hipsters ever ironic about Billie Holliday or Coltrane or Henry James or Thomas Hardy? I guess that's too far away...? It's the contemporary link that contains all the resonance...? And it would require too much thought and analysis? I don't know but the piece linked above is certainly thought-provoking...

10 Thoughts on Woody Allen

1) The opening of the film Manhattan - that horn-blowing chord progression which announces the opening bars of the song "Manhattan" - is iconic. But I never think of Woody Allen when I hear that song. I think of Ella Fitzgerald or Blossom Dearie.

2) I've seen Husbands and Wives so many times there are scenes I can practically recite by heart. Sydney Pollack is such a lovable cad. And Judy Davis' character is so neurotic, really the standard "Woody Allen" character turned around (with added viciousness).

3) I remember being in my early teens when my mom and aunt returned from seeing Hannah and Her Sisters and complaining that it was one of the most boring films they'd ever seen. This prejudiced me for years against that film but when I finally did see it in my late twenties (on a pirated DVD in Shanghai), I thought it was really wonderful. And who can hate anything that has Dianne Wiest in it?

4) Paris at Midnight got great reviews and I have some friends who love it. Me: meh. Definitely one of his weaker films in my view. Hackneyed cliched 'writerly' writers and the girlfriend has absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Plus Owen Wilson pffffft. And the nice little moral which he practically assaults us with at the end. Please. Don't preach, Woody.

5) The Purple Rose of Cairo is about dreaming when you're not a kid anymore.

6) One of his most underrated films is Alice: with Joe Mantegna (the loveable bear who loves Edna St-Vincent-Millay) and William Hurt (a big New York type prick). Plus turning invisible and listening in on an ex's therapy session: cinematic gold.

7) Manhattan Murder Mystery is about marriage (duh) but the focus is off somewhat so it becomes about murder. It's not really about murder, one has to keep reminding oneself. Even the director seems to forget it at certain points. The imagery of the city always watching, of always having witnesses, of never really being alone is both creepy and comforting. Anjelica Huston is such a smooth operator: as a kid, I wanted her to be my mother (an exotic writer with a facade of never-ending confidence). Now I'd want to be her best friend.

Don't Speak!

8) Dianne Wiest's character in Bullets Over Broadway can make me laugh so hard, tears can well up in my eyes ("Don't speak!") and John Cusack plays that role with the perfect blend of naivete and deception. Plus Jennifer Tilly is spot on.

9) I love Annie Hall  but feel the scenes in Los Angeles are inauthentic and over-reliant on a New Yorker's shallow conception of life out west. Also, though I like the film, I'm not very sure I like the character Annie Hall. How can Diane Keaton play her so ridden with neuroses but then play Carol (so ready for a dangerous adventure) from Manhattan Murder Mystery so convincingly? A good actress...

10) Good Woody Allen films (in addition to the ones noted above): Vicky Christina Barcelona, Broadway Danny Rose, Mighty Aphrodite.

Decent Woody Allen films: Melinda and Melinda, Match Point, To Rome With Love, Interiors, Radio Days.

Awful Woody Allen films: Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Whatever Works, Scoop, Cassandra's Dream, and several others...

Literary Adventures

New York`s one of those places that most of us get to know from books, movies and TV before we ever set foot here. This always causes an odd kind of sensation when I walk around: so many buildings and streets and corners have something associated with them. If and when the city doesn`t conform to our expectations we have to shake it off and remind ourselves that the New York as portrayed in art is not the same as the New York in reality.

Something Hisham Matar said last night stuck in my brain and won`t exit: that for certain cities (like New York, like LA perhaps, like London or anywhere that we encounter extensively in a literary context before visiting), we have to remain longer to really `be` there. Though I have been to New York many times, I have never stayed for more than a few days at a time and this means it is hard to shake off the preconceived ideas I have about the city. It`s hard to really `get at` New York unless one can talk to many people, spend enough time here for the city to develop as a character independent of all that`s written about it.

Hassam`s Washington Square Arch

Another interesting concept discussed was how reading certain books is like visiting a city: the example was Joyce`s Ulysses (which figured widely in last night`s discussion). Just as we don`t visit every neighborhood in a city when we visit, we hit a few spots, meet a few people, sit on a few park benches, eat a few restaurants, we still feel that `know` the city in a certain way. And we can also do this with books: pick it up, read a chapter, put it away and feel confident that we know that book in a certain way without having to read it all.

I think about many writers as I walk around New York: Henry James especially around Washington Square. Theodore Dreiser (I love Sister Carrie). Pete Hamill (who, in his novel Forever, is granted eternal life as long as he never leaves Manhattan.

And, of course, Woody Allen. I probably know far more about New York from watching Woody Allen films than I do from anything I`ve ever seen here with my own eyes.

I keep looking for Diane Keaton

We start our planning...

Yes, it's time to start thinking about 2013 already. Actually, we have four writers confirmed already so that helps.

I am considering novelists, poets, memoirists, essayists and even those who haven't published a book recently (or, in fact, at all). Books are a key part of what we do but they certainly aren't the only reason to bring a guest who has something interesting to say if it fits in line with our programming tracks.

That's all so vague but I have to be careful at this point not to give away too much. We are still very early in the process, naturally, and our planning goes through several revolutions before it starts taking shape in mid to late October.

In the meantime, I am reading and planning a few upcoming trips:

Been reading Taras Grescoe's latest, an excellent book about the damage the automobile has done to cities and our quality of life generally. Also recently read Nelly Arcan's Exit (which was highly readable though I wasn't in love with the narrator's whiny persona), a book about common daily life history called Hoping for the Best, Preparing for the Worst about early life in Canada, Against God by Patrick Senécal, The Sweet Sixteen by Concordia prof Linda Kay (about the founding of the Canadian Women's Press Club - sounds dry but it's actually quite compelling), and of course finding time for reading for fun, naturally. Also was captivated by Gods and Soldiers, an anthology of contemporary African writing, edited by Rob Spillman (of Tin House fame). Read a lot more besides...

And I've got a huge stack of additional books to get through as well in the next several months. Never a shortage of things to read around here!

In terms of traveling, headed to Berlin in a few weeks for The Berlin International Literary Festival, then to NYC for the New Yorker Festival and wrapping it all up in Portland for Wordstock. Busy fall!