paved :: marc weisblott

BookExpo Canada took over the Metro Toronto Convention Centre for a few days, and most of the coverage surrounded the potential obsolescence of those very volumes being promoted to sellers, librarians and critics. Yet, the celebrities pushing lowbrow wares for fall don’t provide much of an argument for the preservation of the printing press either – Tommy Chong was there to stir up interest in his jailhouse memoir, Dr. Ruth Westheimer appeared to plug the third edition of Sex For Dummies, and coffee table book U2 by U2 merited a sidewalk chalk mural. BookExpo kicked off with a conference dubbed “Writers to Readers: Linking the Content Creators to the End Users”, the sort of terminology meant to make the publishing industry feel like they’re part of something loftier than words on a page. Famous technophobe Margaret Atwood’s surreal response to digitization, an automated autograph device called the LongPen, also made its local debut – publishers will be charged $3,750 for five virtual signings that would have all the visceral excitement of an encounter with Blinky the Talking Police Car. A party in the Distillery District for the 100th anniversary of publishers McClelland & Stewart earned a recap at Bookninja, as blogging poet George Murray was taken aback by the popularity of his own site, although it’s fairly obvious that online conversations can be more conducive to making a new book seem vital than the stodgy confines of a newspaper review. What’s required are the personalities assertive enough to exploit the potential for a real literary feud – otherwise, internet discussion of the industry will consist of pronouncements of doom, e.g. Books will disappear. Print is where words go to die. But the enthusiasm felt by a first-time author is also capable of being transmitted over the internets – blog vivant James Bow attended BookExpo to shill for his young adult novel The Unwritten Girl, and trudging through the PATH on the way to his Convention Centre duties found him inhaling toner from a location of The Printing House, which made him particularly nostalgic about his own 20-year progress from sci-fi zine publisher to author pressing the flesh at a trade show: “The slightly sulphury smell of the copy machines was the smell of creativity.” Bow will be dropping into Nicholas Hoare Books (45 Front St. E.) on Sunday (June 1 to sign his name in a non-robotic manner while he still can.

The current issue of Harper’s isn’t available at the World’s Biggest Bookstore – or any of the 260 outlets run by Heather Reisman – which prompted Toronto Star columnist Joe Fiorito to look elsewhere for a copy of Art Spiegelman’s critique of the Danish cartoons, only to draw the unnamed newsstand owner’s attention to something he scrambled to take off the racks, too. “If he were to screen his shelves, he would find no end of books and magazines offensive to women, harmful to children, and insulting to any race, creed, religion or political belief you can name,” writes Fiorito. “And if you can’t take the heat, or the heated words, then get the hell out of the bookstore. And if you can’t live with the freedoms guaranteed in a democracy, then you might want to consider living somewhere else.” The form letter drafted by Reisman in response to inquiries about her decision to lump this contextual reprint of the cartoons together with the Western Standard’s gratuitous gesture earlier this year has been reposted on a few sites: “We did not want to take what we felt was a serious risk on a company-wide basis,” wrote Reisman. “During working hours we are responsible for the safety of 7,500 people who work with us.” And while admitting “a great deal of the fervour has died down” the intent was to avoid further “incendiary incidents”. From the blog Covenant Zone: “If the Islamic imperialists demanded, for example, that we shut down the hog industry, or the academic study and criticism of Islam, do we do so to protect all the employees in those industries?” Boswarlos Daily blogger Barry Stagg remarks, “Offending the purveyors of scented candles and Britney Spears albums is apparently bad business for Harper’s” – then digs up something they published back in 1920, the apocalyptic poem “Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost. And while the stateside Borders chain is carrying the issue of Harper’s, after keeping secular humanist mag Free Inquiry off their racks back in March for running an illustrated piece called Mutt, Jeff and Muhammad, yet another round of protest was fomenting around the debut issue of dude-skewed tabloid Shock, whose cover features an American soldier carrying a wounded Iraqi child – much to the chagrin of pro-military photographer Michael Yon, who claimed it was stolen from his website. That specific dispute has been settled, but at least Shock publishers Hachette Filipacchi know the quickest path to attention in the Canadian market is to publish something the CEO of Indigo thinks might cause her employees physical harm. Besides, the terrorists don’t stand a chance of winning when a bookstore chain is working overtime to pander to illiterates.

What a remarkable invention the internet has turned out to be – after seven months of postings at this site, the most Googled item to date is one discussing What’s For Dinner? sidekick Mary Jo Eustace getting dumped by actor spouse Dean McDermott. Those searches re-ignited after a lead item in the New York Post’s Page Six which discussed Eustace’s book proposal, currently being eyeballed by publishers, called My Husband Dumped Me For Tori Spelling. Yet, if there’s really enough to the story to merit a bound volume – not to mention her screaming for vengeance – rather than expecting to win the book advance lottery, why wouldn’t Mary Jo just publish the thing herself? Teri Hatcher may have a best-seller with Burnt Toast and Other Philosophies on Life, but she had to get a starring role on Desperate Housewives, tell sordid tales of sexual abuse while posing in underpants on the cover of Vanity Fair, and discuss with Oprah Winfrey what it’s like to be dumped by Ryan Seacrest. Back in November, giants of journalism at CTV issued a press release headlined Sources tell eTalk Daily That Tori Spelling is Pregnant!, perfectly timed for selling commercial spots on the late December airing of Mind Over Murder, a triumph of prime-time CanCon quota-filling where McDermott had his initial legover with the television heiress. Given how this eTalk scoop didn’t travel elsewhere, presumably she wasn’t knocked up, after all – yet the more permanent penetration involved a tattoo needle on Dean’s wrist, which now reads “Truly, Madly, Deeply Tori”, along with her headshot embedded on his arm. The sordid tale from Mary Jo Eustace promises to tell of how the electric bills for herself and their two kids – including a baby adopted just a few months prior – were being ignored in favour of financing this body art. And while Tori has recently suggested she’s on the verge of being disinherited by her 83-year-old father Aaron Spelling, all in the name of promoting her self-parody show So NoTORIous, one must figure that Dean McDermott is counting on never having to pay his ACTRA dues again. Plus, they will share a home on the dial when both Due South and Beverly Hills, 90210 are fixtures of CanWest Global’s rebranded channel TVtropolis, which promises to be “the only national network built on back-to-back, iconic hits from the last 10 to 15 years”. With such tepid teevee marketing schemes out there, no wonder a woman no longer needs to have been married to David Bowie, Stephen Hawking or Pierre Trudeau to write an ex-wife memoir anymore.

Never has an allegedly famous author blended so well into her homecoming cocktail party as Bonnie Fuller. The bewildering amount of Canadian media attention granted the publication of The Joys of Much Too Much was reflected in the turnout on the back patio of the Amber nightclub in Yorkville, packed with the definitive guest list of professional celebrity observers, interviewers and photographers – a few might’ve even qualified as local celebrities, but who needs ‘em when there are so many sycophants to go around? The idea that any girl can achieve pseudo-stardom just by acquiring a corporate media internship owes considerable debt to Bonnie, who’s written 214 pages detailing how she doesn’t think she’s all that special, yet has succeeded by becoming the manifestation of her own fantasy life. Too bad the women most likely drawn to Fuller’s tale of raising four kids between a succession of jobs as the helm of glossies dedicated to hausfraus craving checkout counter escapism are more likely to be experiencing their daily nervous breakdown at dinnertime than slurping back salmon tartare and flutes of Moët to celebrate the publication of a book advising younger gals torn between pursing their own career path, or hunting down a husband who’ll buy everything for you, to reap the benefits of trying both. Well, those recent grads must be too preoccupied with chipping away at their student loans than getting free advice directly from Fuller. And based on the 30 apparent fans who turned out for her post-cocktail book signing around the corner at Indigo, most of them were either older or more masculine than the demographic the book is addressed to – evidently, Fuller’s self-proclaimed ordinariness excludes her from fag hag status, or that of somebody flamboyant middle-aged females are yearning to meet. The bookstore gathering began with Bonnie reciting a prepared summary of her platitudes. However, when some old chap asked about her current job, it was instantly clear that Fuller’s natural rapport is the stuff of media industry boardrooms – like how moving Star from a tabloid format to one with staples allowed for the insertion of cards, resulting in 600,000 new subscribers. Bonnie is clearly better off sticking to media shop talk than imparting elliptical epiphanies like, “I think there’s a difference between geeky and goofball … they’re sort of related … but …” But won’t Mrs. Fuller’s unbridled confidence that magazines fixated on celebrity flaws are here to stay diminish after she gets bored with the effort to be mass marketed as a star herself?

PREVIOUSLY: Bonnie Fuller’s point of view is tipping over

The prefab banality built around Mel Lastman Square once felt a world apart from the perversions illustrated by Chester Brown in his 1980s comic Yummy Fur – followed by his more autobiographical stories about growing up as an introverted outsider. But after the publication of Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography in 2003, his position this spring as writer-in-residence at the North York Central Library either reflects the validation of Brown’s endeavors, or the idea that the shoulder pad landscape north of Yonge and Sheppard can finally facilitate traces of a downtown aesthetic, or maybe it’s a little bit of both. The artist’s primary task is reviewing graphic novel manuscripts from anyone over age 16, followed by a personal consultation, with submissions accepted until April 30 – and for those who miss the deadline or don’t know where to begin, a hands-on workshop on “The Art of the Graphic Novel” takes place on Saturday, June 3. Hopefully there’s a few young cartoonists whose first-person tales of 21st century local suburbia will be encouraged by the interaction; besides, everything that could be drawn about GenX nostalgia, followed by the neurotic 1990s experience of being overeducated and underemployed, seems to have been preserved in comic book form. Brown’s fellow travelers in this medium followed divergent paths – Palookaville creator Gregory “Seth” Gallant settling into a pastoral pursuit of his pre-rock ‘n’ roll aesthetic, recently reflected in the book Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World, in addition to designing the archives of Peanuts; Joe Matt, the creator of Peepshow, took off for Hollywood to adapt his first-person tales of poor, broke and lonely Toronto life, The Poor Bastard. Did the sensibilities that fueled the earlier work of this trio grow up and grow out of this city, though? (Comments welcome below.) Nowadays, the flamboyant whimsy of Toronto Islands resident Maurice Vellekoop is positioned to make him the illustrator of the so-called cultural renaissance – his latest book, A Nut at the Opera, gets launched at The Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen St. W.) with the taping of a CBC Radio quiz show on Tuesday (April 25). But the greatest progenitor of illustrated self-loathing, retired hospital file clerk Harvey Pekar, spreads the love at Innis Town Hall (2 Sussex Ave.) on Wednesday (April 26), promoting Ego & Hubris: The Michael Malice Story, in which Pekar scripts the life of someone more abrasive than himself.

BookCrossing originally sounded like one of those wacky dot-com social networking ideas destined to make a novelty media splash, then fade away, but a Toronto convention this weekend (April 21-23), attended by about 50 people who ritualistically release books into the wild frontier, comes a full five years after the concept was hatched by Ron Hornbaker, a software developer in Kansas City, Missouri. So, that’s what happens when a website is entirely predicated on people finding free books with a message inside, then going online to confirm their discovery, and perhaps getting hooked into the cycle themselves. The agenda for the BX gathering includes a Reverse Scavenger Hunt, where armies of book liberators will be divided into teams and dispersed to various neighbourhoods where they will have the opportunity to cast adrift even more paperbacks by John Grisham – whose name graces the cover of 11 of the top 25 all-time most registered BookCrossing titles, just because Dan Brown has been slow to publish a follow-up to The Da Vinci Code. But even if the consensus catch-and-release list resembles an unappealing pile of discards from an apartment building’s laundry room, individual tastes of the most devoted members are bound to be more eclectic. Local convention organizer Stephanie Spencer admits to harnessing much spiritual energy through this hobby, as explained in a feature story in the Toronto Star – her most traveled title so far was a garage sale-purchased copy of Not Many People Know That! Michael Caine’s Almanac of Amazing Information, which went from a bench in Nathan Phillips Square to Nanjing, China, along with the vow that Michael Caine trivia would eventually bewilder somebody in Beijing and beyond. Those looking to play the BookCrossing game appear to have the best luck focusing their efforts on specific zones – the Starbucks at 765 Yonge St., converted in 1999 from the Albert Britnell Bookshop situated there since 1928, has found its remaining shelves transformed into a favourite spot for stealth exchanges. While that’s sweet revenge on the gargantuan Chapters that trampled other wordy retailers in the Yonge and Bloor neighbourhood before being unceremoniously closed itself, it also reflects how the benevolence of BookCrossing will endure, even if bookstores offering plush chairs for cheapskates to read cover-to-cover was a premise that couldn’t last.

BookCrossing.com [+ convention site here]

The professional pickup artist known as “Mystery”, a local magician whose talent for coaching the lovelorn via the internet provided the foundation for a recent bestseller, returns home for a Learning Annex seminar on Saturday (April 8), described as a three-hour crash course in the art and science of social dynamics. But that hundred dollar session must barely scratch the surface of the following weekend’s Comprehensive Bootcamp, where it costs a couple grand to learn all the ropes: “Just like the martial arts – you need to learn the theory and practice somewhere safe, and then go into the arena and see how you measure up.” The students for such an intensive program “tend to be cool guys who generally have their lives together, who are looking to either improve in this one area, get more options, or work towards mastery. Previous students have included minor celebrities and multimillionaires. You don’t have to be a celebrity to fit in, but you should have a career, solid goals, friends you enjoy, hobbies, and some interests in the world beyond the venusian arts”. That’s not the impression left by the cast of desperate characters between the covers of The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists by Neil Strauss, which doesn’t provide the most flattering portrayal of Mystery’s own mental health – along with the plot twist that finds Courtney Love taking up residence in a seduction lair when she lost her marbles. While the book leaves the impression that most of these fellas would rather hang with each other instead of incorporating women into their lives, none of this has stopped the reverse psychology tactics preached by Mystery and his acolytes from gaining mass appeal, to the point where the Village Voice ran a cover story a few weeks ago about how NYC ladies won’t be fooled again by the patter lifted from The Game. (But, in the effort to prove his thesis, writer Nick Sylvester took a few liberties with the truth, which led to an embarrassing round of retractions, along with the unemployment of the Voice’s editor-in-chief.) Meanwhile, the entertainingly truthful book is being adapted for the big screen by the Weitz brothers – for a potentially perfect hybrid of American Pie and About a Boy – which should only increase the demand for flirting coaches. The weekend-long US$2150 bootcamp provides an opportunity for students to spend time in GTA nightclubs under the watchful eye of Mystery protege “Maximus”, in order to apply lessons like “How to use Body Rocking and False Disqualifiers to make the target chase you” and “Solving Incongruence: How to make other people’s proven material sound like your own”. That is, assuming the women haven’t heard it all.

PREVIOUSLY: Building a Mystery

The wisdom of Bonnie Fuller moves into the spotlight this week with the publication of The Joys of Much Too Much – a book geared to young women seeking elder approval to pursue an overindulgent existence – as the tables are turned on the formerly local rag mag editrix with a double shot of coverage in The New York Times. A magazine Q&A challenged her philosophy in the face of postfeminist Realpolitik: “Your house doesn’t have to be clean,” she responds. “You don’t have to have clean floors. Your drawers don’t have to perfect, and dishes can pile up in the sink.” Also, she’s decided that periodicals like her old workplace, Glamour, are “too much work” and ultimately make women feel inadequate – as opposed to her current primary gig, Star, which is dedicated to detailing celebrity faults. The NYT Business section peeks between the covers of Bonnie’s book, including her unabashed boast that she was reading proofs of the issues she was editing in the midst of giving birth. More about her upbringing is provided in a New York Sun profile – while admitting that she developed a “bossy” persona at an early age, Fuller also mentions that her lawyer dad would take her to civic hearings on the revitalization of downtown Toronto. Today, in her role as extravagantly compensated editorial director of American Media, she has the luxury of playing one tabloid against the other, lest the editorial integrity of Star be compromised. A tawdry photo of the 19-year-old who accused basketballer Kobe Bryant of sexual assault was handed off to the lower-grade Globe. And when Demi Moore pregnancy rumours turned out false, The National Enquirer came to the rescue with a miscarriage scoop. (Word of Demi’s latest spermination is the big headline of the latest Enquirer, whose sales have been foundering after a recent redesign.) But those tactics couldn’t keep Star from histrionically reporting “Brad & Jen Back On! IT’S BABY TIME” days after their split was confirmed – the “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN” of our gilded age. So, when does it all end? Maybe it already has, calculates snark pioneer Kurt Andersen in the pages of New York, figuring the twilight of Paris Hilton’s career means celeb obsession is ready to fall apart along with the rest of mass culture. Bonnie Fuller may well get a two-decade head start on her aspirations to take up competitive gardening before she turns 70.

PREVIOUSLY: Tabloid queen fixes your lousy life

What was dubbed the most boring feud ever – by a fellow fluff reporter if not both of the apathetic participants – the reaction to Ryan Bigge’s scalding review of Leah McLaren’s debut novel The Continuity Girl, which generated at least a dozen other blog posts that ended up contributing little to the discussion beyond links to other blog posts on the subject, culminated in a mea culpa from Toronto Star books editor Dan Smith: “What we didn’t tell readers last week, and we should have, is that Star reviewer Bigge had previously, in 2001, been on the receiving end of a decidedly nasty putdown of not just his own debut book, the semi-memoir A Very Lonely Planet, but also his person – at the hands of one Leah McLaren, in the Globe.” And nearly five years too late for McLaren to be joined in the best-seller list by Bigge’s self-help book for perpetually single guys, a premise that was slightly ahead of its time – or an idea that might’ve flown off the shelves more briskly had it been packaged as a field guide for females instead. Due to the fact that Bigge’s one book to date, published by the smallish Arsenal Pulp Press, dealt with his own quest for companionship, his newfound demi-celebrity finds him cast as the male version of whatever exactly Leah became famous enough to get a Harper Collins contract for. A glance at the Bigge World website verifies that Ryan cultivated this career in the field of zines and other independent media, in addition to many heartbreaking years in the brutal domain of mainstream freelancing. Leah McLaren? Not so much, given the frequently evoked web of connections that led to her securing regular pontification space in The Globe before age 25. But while antipathy toward Leah rivals water-cooler contempt otherwise reserved for tabloid celebrities, none of the journalism student types sniping about her have posed a challenge to the fearless wit that she’s credited with having. How can it be an issue of access when anyone can freely publish online, and seduce an unsuspecting world of readers? And if it’s not possible for anyone to secure and surpass Next Leah status on their own, how can anyone argue that she isn’t deserving of that $18.95 plus tax for each copy that’s sold of The Continuity Girl?

PREVIOUSLY: Local lurper lacerates Leah lexicon [*pic above by Bigge]

A five-year feud between local writers Leah McLaren and Ryan Bigge had its long overdue denouement in the Book pages of the Sunday Star, which published Bigge’s review of McLaren’s novel: “The Continuity Girl illuminates the limitations of my thesaurus. Uber-lousy? Fifth-rate? Super-bad? None of above. There exists no English word that adequately describes the residuum, offal and drek that slosh through the pages of this novel. Even the German word SaumassigeSchreibmaschiene, which roughly translates into ‘putrid garbage typewriter prose,’ fails to convey the stench of this slushpile.” (An unedited version of the review appears on The Bigge Idea blog.) Leah’s problem with Ryan dates back to her 2001 Globe and Mail column that labeled him a “lurper”, a class of fellas whose craving for attention was fulfilled by complaining about their lack of it. The term didn’t stick – although it was really just a trial run for McLaren going to the U.K. in order to publicly condemn all the men over there for being repressed homosexuals, resulting in the very negative attention she derided lurpers for. “Her fishwrap is ostensibly harmless, but this brand extension disguised as a novel is where it ends: the joke isn’t funny anymore, especially at $18.95 plus tax,” writes Bigge. “McLaren is a provocative pool toy that is kept inflated only by the warm air of the chattering classes.” Concurrently, the review in the Globe by a fellow practitioner of chicklit lavished the book with blandishments like “clever, poignant and insightful”. Leah McLaren can be leered at next Thursday (Feb. 23) at 12:30 p.m. at the Metro Reference Library (789 Yonge St.).

PREVIOUSLY: Fatigue in the first person