Wednesday, September 09, 2009

If a Chapters outlet closes they have a sale. When Pages bookstore closed they held a wake. The Gladstone was filled to the rafters with Toronto's literati, hipsters, bon vivants, sexy librarians and curious onlookers (did I mention the sexy librarians?) One after another, friends of Pages past and present (though I guess they're all "past" now) stood in front of the gathering recounting books found and friends made.

 As the stories grew darker and tears started to appear in the eyes of many I thought I'd step out of the crowded bar just to feel some air. Sitting on a concrete step was a well-dressed artist having a smoke break. Unfortunately I don't smoke otherwise I would've gladly joined him. I went for fries instead. Have you ever wanted a coffee and run into a coffee shop and immediately known this cup was going to cost approximately twice what a normal cup would cost? That's what this French-fry shop was like. Still, it satisfied. On my way back to the Gladstone for another drink I met a colleague and we decided to have that drink together. We wound up sitting next to a group made up of those who earlier in the evening were eulogizing Pages Bookstore and praising it's owner and life force, Marc Glassman.

 It occurred to me that without Pages Bookstore, this table of like- minded folks may not ever convene again. Rep theatres, record stores and book shops - dying breeds all, done in by digital media or the economic scale of big box stores. For all the talk of "community" on the Internet, it cannot create a place like Pages Books or The Revue Theatre or SoundScapes. Because I still value those places I don't see why they can't stay open and serve a certain market - me. I guess a market of one is really a market of none.

For more on the Pages sendoff see The Torontoist.

Posted via email from peterrogers's posterous

Labels: ,

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Urban Spiritual



Image via Flickr

It's difficult to describe my experience tonight other than "near spiritual".

Some context. On a whim I decided to go to an ersatz book launch as part of Pages Books' TINAR event (This Is Not A Reading Series) to hear designer/author Reif Larsen talk about his book "The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet". I was a little more mobile because I'd ridden my bike to work so I wasn't too worried about getting to the event, which was at the Steam Whistle Brewery. The brewery is housed in the old rail yard round house South of, what we all know as, the Skydome, as such it offers some remarkable views of Toronto's skyline. While I was enjoying the event, I decided to leave early as it was getting dark and I thought it was best to hit the road. Stepping out into the twilight, I was struck by Toronto's illuminated high rises standing before a big purple blue sky. All the clichés were there. Ribbons of clouds, shredding through a darkening sky. Pin lights from buildings punctuated shadowy buildings that defined the city. Garish neon seemed luxuriant and the asphalt streets seemed more like murky still rivers. They don't call it the magic hour for nothing. Maybe they should call it the "insipid romanticism hour".

I shook off the awe and started my ride home. The first portion of the route is beneath the Gardiner and West bound on Queens Quay. This would be treacherous in full daylight but is even more terrifying in the fading light of early evening. Despite several lane changes and many (MANY) cars stopped or parked in the bike lane, I eventually made my way to the safer ground of the bike path. The idea being it would be so much safer to ride on a bike path without any car traffic to contend with. Of course, I didn't realize there wasn't any light at all on the path and my tiny LED wasn't really helping much. Then something special happened. My eyes adjusted and I turned a corner where for the next five kilometers I was riding only meters away from Lake Ontario on my left and Toronto's tremulous city scape on my right. One of my favourite pieces of music came through my ear buds and for the next eleven minutes I floated over black tarmac and swooped through the trees while the lake's shoreline sparkled beside me, the city lights lay out before me and the night sky's giant inky-dark sheet billowed above me.

I was probably only going 40KM/hr at the fastest downhill section but it felt like flying at 30,000 ft and for those few moments I was falling through Toronto's pavement-black night and slicing the atmosphere. By the time the song ended I had been delivered to Roncesvalles and was only a few moments from home.

That music I was listening to is from Animal Collective called Pride & Fight. Here's that song:

You can buy the song in iTunes.

Labels: , ,

Monday, May 04, 2009

At a Pages TINAR Event


Wetting my whistle at a literary event. You'd think by now I'd know not to attend these things alone. You'd think I might recognize a single soul but nope. Not a one. Which explains why I'm bothering to post this at all. Thank God it's finally starting.

Posted via email from peterrogers's posterous

Labels:

Friday, April 03, 2009

Infinite Jester



David Foster Wallace - via Consumat
Slate.com's Audio Book Club take an hour to discuss David Foster Wallace's influential door stopper, "Infinite Jest".

Hear it here (runs 59 mins): Click Here to Listen

Labels: , ,

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

The Illustrated Man



via This Magazine

A friend just sent me this brilliant book, The Shatner Show which documents 76 images/illustrations/portraits by various artists inspired by the man hisself. This is exactly why "we stand on guard for thee".

Labels: , , , ,

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

It's a Strange World After All




Mark Lombardi image via The Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College

What a strange world it is. Esteemed American author John Updike passed away not long ago and as he was a contributer to the New Yorker magazine for something like 60 years, there were of course, lengthy and one might say, hagiographic tributes to him in a recent issue. By coincidence I'm reading David Foster Wallace's collection of essays, Consider the Lobster. The second essay is actually a critical (hilariously so) review of the Updike novel, Toward the End of Time.

One coincidence is just a curious occurrence. Two coincidences is a little creepy.

At work, I've been struggling to write a concise and informative document and in frustration turned to the Economist's online Style Guide which can politely/diplomatically/favourably be best described as sort of snooty. It's not that they are wrong or right, but just there is an intolerable snobbish way they explain or leave unexplained their reasoning around English language usage.

Every time I find one of these documents I wonder what exactly I was learning in school if it wasn't the mechanics and dynamics of English? I remember exactly one year of grammar - ninth grade, with "Chopper" Dale (I have no idea of his given name, "Dale" maybe?), and really the only thing I recall from that class was "Chopper's" terrible pun-based jokes (something about Mao Tse Tung = Mousey Tongue) and his assertion that pink was not a colour but a shade of red which was a colour1.

Regardless of my own struggles with English or the Economist's arrogant tone, I did wonder where I could find a book on English usage without all the 'tude. Then I started reading the next essay by DFW, which immediately followed his Updike review and oddly it was about the politics of American English usage as embodied by various books on English usage. What follows is not only his admission as a language Nazi but a discussion of the politics of American English.

Third odd coincidence. On a whim, the book I checked out with the David Foster Wallace book was "The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary".

It is a very strange old world.

1. Clearly Dale thought this was some sort of word play or an opportunity to mess with our heads. When I responded with, "The absence of colour is called black, but black is a colour so how does it hold that words like 'pink' or 'rouge' are not colours." the topic was changed. Some time later I came to think he meant, the words used to describe colours are not, themselves "colours" but words we use to describe the effect of light bouncing in our eyes. This was typical of the kind of thing that passed as discourse at Macpherson Junior High in English class. Perhaps I'm overestimating Mr. Dale entirely. I would also like to point out how forced readings of Farley Mowat in Junior High that I never again opened a book by Mr. Mowat.

Labels:

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Little Blue Books 



The story of Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1889-1951) reads like a Coen brothers script.
Photos from a lecture at the Powerplant Gallery in Toronto


A young go-getter Emanuel Julius begins working at the Socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason where he meets and marries a wealthy heiress. Eventually he buys 25% of the paper with the heiress' backing and starts publishing public domain classics in pamphlet format. When EHJ discovers there is a voracious appetite for the pint sized books, he quickly starts churning out pamphlets consisting of re-printed classics and commissioned originals from notable authors such as Upton Sinclair and Clarence Darrow. Not all of Haldeman-Julius contributers were as esteemed and the quality of the Little Blue Books, as they were later called, quickly deteriorated. The following titles attest to the range of work published:

1507. A Rational View of the Sex Issue [by] Harry Elmer Barnes.
1508. What You Should Know about Poisons [by] Heinz Norden.
1509. The Gay Chronicle of the Monks and Nuns [by] Joseph McCabe.
1515. The Love Affair of a Priest and a Nun (Abelard and Heloise) [by] Joseph McCabe.
1516. Facts You Should Know About Gonorrhea [by] Heinz Norden.
1517. Land, and Old Man and His Wife [by] Konrad Bercovici.
1523. How to Avoid Catching Venereal Diseases [by] Heinz Norden.
1524. Famous Eccentric Americans [by] J. V. Nash.
1534. How to Test Your Urine at Home [by] B. C. Meyrowitz.
1535. How to Throw a Party [by] Heinz Norden.
1536. Facing Death Fearlessly [by] Joseph McCabe.
1537. The Essence of Unitarianism [by] L. M. Birkhead.
1538. A Rational Sex Code [by] E. Haldeman-Julius.
1545. Why I Do Not Fear Death [by] E. Haldeman-Julius.
1546. An Encyclopedia of Sex [by] E. Haldeman-Julius.
1553. Beneficial Exercises for Nervousness and Indigestion [by] C. O. Benson and Dr. C. L. Smith.
1560. Why I Quit Being a Prohibitionist [by] Harry Hibschman.
1564. Homosexuality in the Lives of the Great [by] J. V. Nash.
1565. The Danger of Catholicism in the Public Schools [by] E. Haldeman-Julius.
1566. How to Conduct a Love Affair [by] Betty Van Deventer.
1567. Making Men Happy with Jams and Jellies [by] Elizabeth Palmer.

Of course, some of the more popular titles involved titillating topics of sexuality or the conduct of the sexually active (or deviant). Yet these pamphlets, sold mostly through mail-order for 20 for $1, made E. Haldeman-Julius wealthy. He became a man about town, which couldn't be that hard in a town like Girard, Kansas. Eventually though, his wife, Matrice ran off with his alcoholic assistant leaving Emanuel alone to womanize and write many, many, many, many, many, many more Little Blue Books.

In the end, it was E. Haldeman-Julius' writing that may have been his undoing. In a book about the FBI he outed J. Edgar Hover as a homosexual which of course didn't go over too well at the Bureau. The FBI already had a file on Haldeman-Julius due to his role as a publisher of socialist literature and as they dug deeper they discovered EHJ's unpaid taxes. EHJ was charged and found guilty of tax evasion but he died before he served any time. In 1951, he was found dead in his pool, or as many locals believe, the FBI murdered him.

His printing house was left to his son but on July 4th, 1978 errant fire works landed on the roof catching fire and burning the building down.

See what I mean. A Coen brothers' script.

Labels: , ,

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Idle Time 


1st Cover Mock-up of the Idler's Glossary by Seth

Tonight I didn't go out of my way to go to something that isn't part of a book series. Let me explain. On my way home I stopped off at the Gladstone Hotel to take in a book promotion as part of Pages Bookstore "This Is Not A Reading Series". The event was to promote a very small book which took 4 people to create. Mark Kingwell wrote the introduction, Joshua Glenn wrote it, Seth designed and illustrated it and is edited by Daniel Wells.

I'm glad I did. Hailed as the Annual General Meeting of the Royal Society of the Indolent, The Idler's Glossary was showcased as your guide and tool kit for arguing in favour of "idleness". Not just in favour of it, but also to encourage people to be more productive through idling. Who am I to debate that? It's well known that the best ideas come to us in a relaxed state, when the mind is at ease. Which is why we have our best ideas when nodding off or when showering in the morning.

I'm not sure how being idle will affect our GNP, but in this stressful time of economic turmoil we could use all of the rest and good ideas we can get. So go forth and relax. Everything will be alright.

Our regular programming will resume after a brief nap.

Labels:

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Reading, Between the Lines



...it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.
Recently I was catching up on my reading (sitting on a street car allows such habits) when I found this article in the New Yorker called the Twilight of Books. As a Canadian, I'm used to bookworms like those on CBC radio (who seem to fetishize books and authors) complaining about the increase in television and video games and the decline of books. As a person who loves books (with big pictures) and whose brain is mostly interested in visual stimuli, I've always wondered why book nerds get so hopped up on illiteracy and reading. There are hundreds of literacy advocacy groups but I can't think of a single one that promotes "visual literacy" (plenty of Canadians are visual illiterates). I've always wondered what was the case to be made for reading. Why is it important? After all, for most of humanity's existence we've lived in oral societies without any written language. What's the big deal if our dependence on television, film, gaming and the Internet means we revert back to an oral tradition?

Turns out that reading actually changes your brain and that the only way we can have any kind of critical analysis of a topic (be it religion, business, art or science) is through reading. So all you teachers out there, read this article (or download and print it) and arm yourselves with the kind of knowledge you'll need to convince a kid to put down the x-box controller and pick up Halo, Books 1-3.

Labels: ,

Monday, October 22, 2007

comic book confidential




This is as much a reminder to myself as anything, but next Saturday, October 27, 3:00pm in the Studio Theatre at the Harbourfront Centre, Adrian Tomine will be interviewed by Sheila Heti. This is probably my 4th or 5th year attending the IFOA events and each one has been memorable. I've seen such luminaries as Harvey Pekar, Chris Ware, Charles Burns, Seth, Chester Brown, Chip Kidd and Jaime Hernandez and without fail, the conversations have been funny, illuminating and interesting. I'd even go so far as to say, "It's worth the drive to Acton!" (if in fact, it was in Acton). The tickets are still available and at about $17, it might seem expensive but it's worth it to hear a comic book artist have an intelligent conversation outside the circles of comic book shops or the folding tables of the "Fan" convention (that's right, they're treated like real live authors).

Labels: , , ,

Exit and Entry




Last Saturday was a bookish day. I went to the IFOA to see Rutu Modan read and present her work, "Exit Wounds" and James Sturm, founder of the Center of Cartoon Studies talk about his book, James Sturm's America.


It was busy in our 'hood, with all the Toronto FC fans clogging the street cars but somehow I made it to the talks in time. After getting my copies signed (nay, sketched in) I made a feeble attempt at conversation with the artists. Let's just say, that won't happen again. Despite that bit of awkwardness, it was still inspirational hearing authors discuss their work, so I decided to find a place to take a break, read the books and enjoy a pint. With a slight buzz of a too-quickly downed beer in my empty stomach, I again made my annual vow to write and complete a comic. I shouldn't be too disheartened at my inactivity and should know by now, these things take time. Like our friend, Gail Vanstone's recent publication "D is for Daring" which she has been researching and writing for almost as long as we've known her. I said to A. that it's been like a week out of a Woody Allen film for me. I rarely get out but in the span of 3 days I'd been to a gallery opening, an author's reading, and a book launch. That's the funny thing about T.O. - it really is a media centre, with film, TV and publishing companies here. Here here for the cultural index, I say.

Labels: , , , ,