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Tag: mark medley

Published January 25, 2016

Where Pilgrims Arrive in Bewilderment

let us compare

In a long profile for the Globe and Mail, book review editor Mark Medley visits Nicky Drumbolis owner of the singular Letters Bookshop in Thunder Bay:

Walking through the store is an overwhelming experience. Everywhere I look I spot something I’ve never seen before and will probably never see again. I could have picked a single shelf of a single bookcase and spent my entire visit studying its contents. Not that Mr. Drumbolis would have let me do that. As we amble up and down the aisles, he is constantly narrating, constantly picking out items at random and telling their story – how he acquired it, or who published it, or whatever happened to its author – which often leads into another, entirely different story, and another book, and so on, until I can’t remember which book started the conversation in the first place.

He throws around words like “shit kicker” or “heavyweight” to describe books he particularly loves, his voice growing progressively louder and more animated, the longer he talks. He pulls out a first edition of Leonard Cohen’s 1956 debut Let Us Compare Mythologies, part of what is probably the most extensive sampling in existence of Montreal’s legendary Contact Press, which helped to launch Margaret Atwood, Irving Layton, Raymond Souster and others. Now here’s his Franz Kafka collection, and over here Ezra Pound, and Charles Bukowski, and a few remaining titles from his collection of William S. Burroughs, most of which he sold years ago to David Cronenberg around the time the director was adapting the Burroughs novel, Naked Lunch.

“Henry James,” he says, tapping a shelf filled with first editions of the American master. “The guy I wanted to read cover to cover before I died. I don’t think I’ll get to it now.”

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Published January 26, 2013

Something for the Weekend

The Many Lives of Donald Westlake — Michael Weinrab on the work of Donald Westlake, for Grantland:

The Outfit is 213 pages, which is actually somewhat long by the standards of the early Parker novels. There are 24 Parker titles in all, and most of the early ones are tight little symphonies of spare and rigid prose, split into four distinct movements; they somehow manage to adhere to a rough formula and still blow your hair back every time. Their tone is brutal and unsentimental, and their themes are Nietzschean to the extreme: People act, without adverbial accompaniment, and the whys and wherefores are utterly beside the point. The protagonist is a career criminal, a sociopathic utilitarian who despises small talk. When someone asks him if he had a good flight to his destination, he thinks, This wasn’t a sensible question. He is concerned entirely with the successful execution of crimes and with his own self-preservation amid this process. One memorable chapter ends with the line, “He buried him in the cellar in the hole the kid had dug himself.”

The Parker novels, written by Westlake under pseudonym Richard Stark, have been republished by the University of Chicago Press, with covers designed by David Drummond.

Simulations  — Tim Maughan on Extreme Metaphors, a new collection of interviews with J.G. Ballard, at Tor.com:

You can perhaps argue that Ballard missed the big change that was to come just years after his death—the apparent crisis of global capitalism, the shift of industrial and financial production towards the east, and the tightening pressure on the suburban middle classes that this would result in. But the kicking back against these pressures, in the form of the online rebellion and well mannered protest of Anonymous and the Occupy movement, seem to fit perfectly into this description. Both are, in many ways, more of a simulation of a protest than an actual protest themselves—one involves doing little more than clicking a mouse, the other seemingly owing more to music festivals and camping than to hard-fought political resistance.

Let It Bleed — An interview with cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi at Hazlitt:

The parents were really up in arms about these bad books. Manga at that time was different than it is now. It was friendly manga, so little kids could read it too… On the page you have the same number of panels, the people move from left to right and they’re all the same size and it all looks the same on the page… There was no movement or anything like that. We took inspiration from movies, doing zoom shots or close-ups. Using the camera. We wanted to use these techniques in manga, really violent movement. We were trying to move the panels in a realistic kind of way, to make work without lies, true work.

Tatsumi, Eric Khoo’s 2011 film based on Tatsumi’s memoir A Drifting Life, is currently showing at the Lightbox in Toronto.

And finally…

The Names Change But… The conclusion to Mark Medley’s fascinating series on House of Anansi, ‘A Publisher’s Year’, at the National Post:

“The truth about publishing is that publishing houses change their names and identities all the time. It’s the nature of this perilous trade. When I started in the business there was a Collins, and there was a Harper & Row. I can’t even remember when it became HarperCollins. There was Doubleday Canada, and all of its imprints, and there was a Random House, and all of its imprints…”

Publishers fail and new publishers emerge to take their place.

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Published May 2, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

This Precarious Balancing Act — Maud Newton talks to Alison Bechdel, author of (the astonishingly good) Fun Home, about her new graphic novel Are You My Mother?. Fascinating stuff:

I feel like cartooning for me has been like a way to be a crypto-writer. I couldn’t ever say I wanted to be a writer because my mother was a writer, and even now I’ve had to find this alternative way of expressing myself as a writer. I don’t want to diminish the drawing. I think it’s integral to what I do. But I’m kind of a secret writer… I’m very wordy for a cartoonist. I’m always struggling against that, because the more space your words take up the less room you have for pictures. So it’s always this precarious balancing act.

School Disco — Mark Medley’s latest National Post piece on House of Anansi Press follows the publisher to the London Book Fair:

The London Book Fair, now in its 41st year, is one of the biggest, and most important, in the world — though it is dwarfed by Frankfurt, which takes place in October. This year, the fair hosted more than 1,500 exhibitors from 57 countries and expected more than 25,000 attendees, almost half from overseas. During the festival’s three days, MacLachlan describes it variously as “a meeting of the tribe,” “highly social,” and “like [a] school dance. The cool kids are in one corner, the nerds are somewhere else.”

“Confused By the eBook Lawsuit? So Is Everyone else” — Peter Osnos, founder of Public Affairs Books, writing at The Atlantic.

And finally…

With the Bauhaus: Art as Life exhibition opening at the Barbican tomorrow, author Fiona MacCarthy (William Morris: A Life for Our Time)  looks back at the revolutionary design school at The Guardian:

Gropius’s idea for the Bauhaus emerged from his experience of the first world war in which he served as a cavalry officer on the western front for almost the whole four years. His response to the devastating scenes he lived through was a stark determination to “start again from zero”. Only a new outlook on design and architecture could provide the means for a shattered civilisation literally to rebuild itself… Gropius’s vision was for the “unification of the arts under the wings of great architecture”. It was a democratic concept of art for the people, art for social betterment in which everyone would share. The Bauhaus aesthetic replaced bourgeois furbelows with a geometry of clarity, sharp angles and straight lines.

The Guardian’s art critic Adrian Searle reviews the show here.

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Published April 4, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Comics critic Paul Gravett profiles cartoonist and illustrator Luke Pearson. Coincidently, Pearson has created an amazing cover for a new Penguin edition of Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (pictured above).

Desirable Comparisons — Part three of Mark Medley’s series on House of Anansi for The National Post:

“We want it to appear as a very serious, big, ambitious book,” Bland says. “Which is hard to do in a way that doesn’t look like other big books.”

He shows [Pasha] Malla some text-heavy covers that bring to mind the likes of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Lethem.

“For Pasha, for various reasons that aren’t mine to say, these are not desirable comparisons,” Bland says. “For us, they’re very desirable comparisons.”

Thousands of folk songs and interviews recorded by Alan Lomax are now available for free online.

See also: NPR ‘Alan Lomax’s Massive Archive Goes Online‘

Neue Haas Grotesk — Christian Schwartz has restored the classic Swiss sans serif typeface for the digital era. There’s a history of Neue Haas Grotesk / Helvetica here.

The Books in My Head — The Quill and Quire profile Canadian independent comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly:

Part of what sets D&Q apart is its focus on high-quality design, incorporating elements like glossy embossing on covers. “We want to treat the comic as the nicest object possible,” says [creative director Tom] Devlin.

While Devlin says he collaborates with authors on design, D&Q’s willingness to cede creative control has given the company a reputation as something of an artist’s haven. Seth says he prefers to work independently, providing the publisher with camera-ready artwork for computer production. “They almost never interfere with my design plans,” he says. “I would not be the designer I am today without D&Q allowing me to make the books I see in my head.”

(Full disclosure: As mentioned in the story, D+Q are distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books)

And finally…

With a retrospective at the Oakland Museum of California and the publication of The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist, Carol Kino profiles Daniel Clowes for The New York Times:

“I never thought of myself as a museum artist who’s doing work for the wall,” he said. “For me the book is the final result.” He assumes that most people who see his work at the museum won’t know who he is. “But if they have some connection to something they see,” he added, “and then they read the book, the more I’ll feel like the show was a success.”

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