Listen to this week’s show on the crfu site.

*****

Dan’s reading list:

- Pamela Druckerman: Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting >  On the topic of raising kids (and how we’re doing it wrong).

- Jonathan Goldstein – I’ll Seize the Day Tomorrow > A new book to tell people about when they say “Give me something to make me laugh!”

- Joan Didon: Blue Nights > On the topic of aging, grieving and surviving loss.

Peter’s reading list: 

- George Orwell: 1984. > Peter makes an analogy to the band Nirvana.

-Mark Binelli: Detroit City is the Place to Be > Peter loves Detroit. You can too.

- Greg Rucka: No Man’s Land > Batman! But… well, Peter was confused but also delighted.

- Don Delillo: Mao II > Paranoid socio-political semi-thriller by Peter’s #1 guy.

Are comic books actually books? Are they? Aren’t they? Depends who you listen to. Junot Díaz has an opinion on this.

 *****

Dan and Peter interviewed Jane Burpee from the University of Guelph’s McLauglin Library. In a couple of weeks, she’ll be back to talk about the Campus Author Recognition Program, in which 89 authors associated with the Guelph campus are celebrated this year alone! But today she is with us to talk about  Open Access Week, October 22-26. 

 The library has collaborated with other organizations to bring in speakers all week, on the topic of access to academic writing and research. Their idea is that peer-reviewed scholarly work (publicly funded) should be (but isn’t) available online for free, immediately on publication. As things stand, taxpayers contribute to the production of scholarly journals, which in turn make their output available to post-secondary institutions for a fee; students and faculty have access to these journals online, but lose that access if they stop being enrolled or employed at the university, and anyone without such an affiliation has to pay (sometimes quite a steep price) to view more than an abstract of most scholarly articles. This means, among other things, that professional discourse and development is cut off from discussions and innovations in scholarly research, and this contributes to the “ivory tower” aspect of the academy and research.

What do you think? Come out this week and take part in the discussion.

 *****

And we hereby rename our town Bonkersfestville USA (Ontario), in honour of the apparently endless stream of events happening here.

Aside from Fru-Fest (October 19-25), there’s the Festival of Moving Media, Guelph’s international documentary film fest: provocative, affordable, at various locations in Guelph Nov 1-4. Check it out.

And not a festival but: Friday Oct 26, you have a chance to see the popular and critically-acclaimed one-man-show Bookworm, by Corin Raymond, with musical guest David Ross Macdonald, downtown at Magnolia. (Emily recommends this to all book nerds (and book nerd lovers) everywhere.)

*****

Next week’s show will be Live From The Bookshelf! Come on in and be part of the show.  

-Jeff Rubin

The End of Growth

This week’s show features an interview by Jan Andrea Hall (of Royal City Rag) with Jeff Rubin, former chief economist of CIBC, “regarded as one of the world’s most sought-after energy experts.” Rubin will be appearing in Guelph in The End of Growth tour, head-to-head with ecologist David Suzuki, next Tuesday (October 16th), 7pm at the Lakeside Hope House (formerly Norfolk United Church).

Books!
Dan read some special ones. Check ‘em out:

Rae Spoon: First Spring Grass Fire (Arsenal Pulp Press). Rae is a musician and is branching out to master new art forms with their first book: linked stories about growing up queer, searching for acceptance, discovering music. Peter and Dan spoke with Rae recently; look out for the interview in upcoming weeks. Here’s the book trailer.

Steven Marche: Love and the Mess We’re In (Gaspereau Press, Nova Scotia).

Chris Ware: Building Stories (Pantheon): A box of documents, drawings, illustrations, exploration about books, buildings and tangibility in the world.

Events!

These are all going to be awesome:

October 16th, 7pm: Jeff Rubin and David Suzuki will go head to head in The End of Growth tour at the Lakeside Hope House (formerly Norfolk United Church).

October 17th, 11:30 am: Christopher Dewdney, the U of G’s current writer-in-residence, will read at the The Trans-Canada Institute.

October 23rd, 7 pm: William Whitehead (Timothy Findley’s long-time partner) will present his memoir, Words to Live By, on, 7pm at The Bookshelf.

October 19-25: Fru-Fest 2012! Celebrate our amazing community/campus radio station with lots of live music.

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b4b s2 e19: Clare Hitchens & Mariko Tamaki

Clare Hitchens
Working as the publicist for Wilfrid Laurier University Press has honed her media talents; years of churning through thoughtful reviews and summaries for Goodreads has sharpened her critical eye, and added to her reputation as an A-Class book-ingester; parenting a voracious reader has kept her in tune with young book worms; all this to say, Clare Hitchens, Super-Reader, is perfect in the role of programming coordinator for the Young Adult stuff on Sun Sept 16th.

Mariko Tamaki
Scooter Activist. Stand-up Comedienne. Living Gallery for Cool Tattoos. Smart, appropriately sarcastic and really nice person. (No, Really Nice.) Author and performance artist. Comics creator. Mariko for Class Prez, please. Please tell me you have looked at Skim, the book she co-created with her cousin, Jillian Tamaki? (Puh-lease tell me that, or please go look). Have you buried yourself in the shy, suburban coming-of-art story Emiko Superstar (co-created with Steve Ralston for DC’s fantastic imprint for female readers, MINX books)?

Proof, both, of her sense of humour and sense of fun, and all of that she has now stuffed into the character of Allison Lee, college-ingenue, budding lesbian, accident-prone and fire-cursed person who is pulled into the vortex of a dangerous friendship/loveship in the wonderful new YA novel, (You) Set Me on Fire. A novel about “school, about fire, and about love…” and about, oh, a tonne more. This book is about one week old and it is already garnering great reviews. Shannon Ozirny, a reviewer at Quill & Quire, says “…this book could easily spawn its own Tumblr quote site.” A total pleasure to talk with Mariko today.

Music We Played
(band-song)
Mary Margaret O’Hara-My Friends Have
Pere Ubu-Books on the Table
Ben Grossman-Untitled 6(squared)
Dirty Projectors-See What Shes Seeing

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Eden Mills Soft Launch (b4b – s2.e18)

Summer’s Summaries
A Monday night book launch for The Western Light (with accompanying a capella) steered expertly by Susan Swan’s Sexual Gothic troupe; and a Wednesday night premiere screening of Northwords (with live appearances by Director Geoff Morrison and authors Noah Richler and Alissa York)… I catch a whiff of the Eden Mills Writers Festival, and the waning of sweet summer, do you smell it?

We read from Lorna Crozier’s new collection of prose poems, The Book of Marvels: a compendium of everyday things (Dan: “Shakers”; Peter: “Vacuum”); we frolicked through the idea of Paul Auster’s new family memoir, “Winter Journal”; and holy guacamole is it ever a rich season of releases in Your Local Independent Bookstore: Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton, Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth, Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, for example. (!)

Music We Played
(band-album-song)
Dirty Projectors – Swing Lo Magellan – About To Die
Matthew E White – Big Inner – Big Love
Liminanas – Crystal Anis – Longanisse
Staff Benda Bilili – Bouger Le Monde! – Bilang

“[Torngat Mountains National Park is] very hard to get to, and the park isn’t designed for visitor experience. If we could go there with these artists and create a kind of response to the place, and film them doing it, and film beautiful footage of the park, then that would be a tremendous document.”
–Geoff Morrison

“…uh,… it’s MORRISON…?”
–Geoff Nicholson

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Susan Swan & Geoff Morrison (b4b s2 e17)

The Setting
The Eden Mills Writers’ Festvial is on, softly. Next week two events mark the beginning of this year’s season: Susan Swan is touring her new novel, The Western Light, and bringing along girl-noir band The Billie Hollies to perform her theatrical revue piece, “The Heroines of the Sexual Gothic”; and Geoff Morrison is bringing his newest film, the documentary Northwords, to the Bookshelf Cinema for an advance screening. We talked with both of them today.

Mr Morrison
Geoff Morrison is a Producer/Director of the new documentary, Northwords, in which Shelagh Rogers accompanies writers Joseph Boyden, Sarah Leavitt, Rabindranath Maharaj, Noah Richler, and Alissa York to Torngat Mountains National Park in Labrador, where the ensemble undertakes a project to tell the stories of the North. In Geoff Morrison’s interview he talks about the ineffability and largeness of that task, but also about the individual stories that do emerge: the landscape’s flora and fauna, the indigenous people, the mission of the newest National park in Canada.

Ms Swan
Susan Swan is a Grande Dame of CanLit. She’s a journalist, feminist, novelist, teacher and mulit-media writer. Her stories have been told on screen, stage and page. Her newest novel, The Western Light revisits Mary Beatrice “Mouse” Bradford, one of Swan’s amazing characters from her previous book, The Wives of Bath. In this story, Mouse is 12 years old, and vying for the attention of her workaholic G.P. father Morely Bradford, MD. Partially in his place comes sanitorium patient John “Hockey Killer” Pilkie, or Gentleman John as he’s known of the ice. He’s a former NHLer charged with the murder of his wife and child, but Mouse is past the point of face value. It’s a wonderful story, and makes for a good chat this episode.

Northwords

NORTHWORDS trailer from filmCAN on Vimeo.

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Sir Hodge Podge (b4b – s2.e16)

Uno
Am I getting old if the first thing I look forward to reading in a dynamic, box-bursting collection like The Best American Comics 2012 is the Introduction? Francoise Mouly is helming here; she edits for the New Yorker, and is a career-spanning comics advocate (including her ongoing marriage to comics-great, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and the influential magazine they created together in the ’80s, called RAW).

For this issue, she brings an expanded definition of comics–one that includes art appearing as a narrative series of images. She has also added a comics for kids section (finally!). And here’s a neat observation: “Back in the RAW days, many cartoonists came to comics through drawing–and learned to write. Now it seems more young writers are learning to draw.”

Duo

“How, for so long, could we know nothing of what was, and yet sit at the table of everything and every person met on the road? Small hearts–we nourish them on grand illusions, and at the end of the process we walk like the disciples in Emmaus, blind, alonside friends and lovers we don’t recognize–trusting in a God who no longer knows about himself”

How about that as a review of Alessandro Baricco’s Emmaus? Peter an I both read this novel, published lovingly by McSweeney’s, and translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein. Baricco’s book poetically explores the first person of a devout young Catholic, navigating the friendhips and loves of his mid-teens, fraught with hubris, hormones, accidental pregnancy and suicide. Four young men, and all the confusion of being alive. It’s up to readers to decide whther or not the narrator escapes the fate of Emmaus… whether or not he can see his beloved as they truly are before they disappear beyond comprehension.

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Alix Ohlin (b4b – s2.e15)

August 2nd: Alix Ohlin
Alix Ohlin (“oh-lean”) is a Montreal-born writer who is four books into a rich writing career that deserves many more readers. June, 2012 saw the simultaneous publication of her new book of stories, Signs and Wonders, and her new novel, Inside. Unheard of, no? But Toronto’s Anansi Press is on to something: Alix Ohlin writes characters you’ll wnat to know better. In her stories, she offers people who are in transition, who alternate between offering help and needing it. “The equation of helping is really very complicated. There are all kinds of reasons why attempts to intervene maynot succeed.”

In the Ohlin-iverse, there is much data for the student of psychology. And lesson after lesson about how easy it is to muddle even a seemingly simple relationship. Or perhaps the lesson is that simple human relationships rare. She says, “unhappiness, as difficult as it is, is usually where the story is found.”

For Alix, stories are more of a playground for the writerly mind, whereas novels take commitment to character over time.

b4b s2-e14 – July 26 – Ben Stephenson
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Ben Stephenson (b4b – s2.e14)

b4b s2-e13 – July 19 – andrea bennett
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andrea bennett (b4b – s2.e13)

b4b s2-e12 – July 12 – Matt Soltys
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Matt Soltys (b4b – s2.e12)

b4b s2-e11 – July 5 – Noir Episode with Guy Goldston
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Noir with Guy (b4b – s2.e11)

b4b s2-e10 – June 28 – Eden Mills ED Andrew Simpson
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Andrew Simpson (b4b – s2.e10)

b4b s2-e9 – June 21 – Hodgepodge (intro to Chris Hedges’ work)
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Hedges Hodgepodge(b4b – s2.e9)

b4b s2-e8 – June 14 – Matthew Stadler Lecture
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Matthew Stadler Lecture(b4b – s2.e8)

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Matthew Stadler (b4b – s2.e7)

June 7th:
Peter is bleary because it’s another Cassettestival week (series #2). This is a periodical publication that sees bedroom recordings issued as hand-designed cassettes. A highlight of this event will be the release of a compilation of local female musicians.

Jon B joins us for a game of Stump The Literary Canon. Listen to find out the rules of this wild new party game.

Feature: Matthew Stadler
Boy is this guy inspiring. With poverty and passion as his drivers, and Patricia No as a co-editor/co-publisher, Matthew Stadler found a way to make gorgeous, minimal, handbound, print-on-demand books in a loaned storefront in Portland, Oregon. Publication Studio further expresses Matthew’s ideas about the public that can and will form around the publication of a text. We talk with Matthew about selling books one at a time, selling books at dinner parties, special events planning, writing from the margins, and the speaker’s circuit for a guy who is on the vanguard of print-on-demand production. He also presents us with a recent Publication Studio Bordeaux release, Revolution: A Reader.

Also, for those in need, we coin a term: “Booksick” is when you call in sick to work because you are compelled to finish the book you’re reading.

Next Week:
Books: something you might want to read. Music: Peter Bradley’s personal shortlist of what should make the Polaris Prize shortlist but probably won’t.

Things we talked about:
Cassettestival #2

“Comics are essentially diagrams, if you break it down.”
-Marc Bell

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Mark Bell; Amy Lockhart (b4b – s2.e6)

June 1st:
A live author visit to a bookstore that doesn’t involve a formal reading!? Kristel Thornell came to the Bookshelf for the Fourth Fridays art crawl, just to say hello to potential readers and show off her new novel, Night Street. Browsers had a sniff. And then there’s Matthew Stadler, a prophet of literature who talks about “Publication” as the creation of a public around a work of art. He’s in Ontario next week to deliver the Cafka/Musagetes BIG IDEAS lecture. And the night after, he hosts a literary dinner.

Feature: Marc Bell & Amy Lockhart
Hey, Amy Lockhart, tell us about your iconography: “Ladies in profile, usually their tongues hanging out, big foreheads, big necks and sort of creepy-cute is how it gets described. And ink line drawings (I used to do more corss-hatching) and also acrylic painting that is somewhere between flat and bad-illusionistic rendering. Weird muscle-y men. Lots of ladies.”

Amy is an illustrator and an animator. She can talk about razzle-dazzleless film making, but also film fundamentals. “All you need to make a good film,” she was told at school, “is a good idea.”

Amy’s current animation features a hinged-paper puppet character, Dizzler (based on the character The Dazzler), who is a pop-star returning home to give a ‘thankyou’ concert.

Marc Bell is a veteran cartoonist, but he spends more time these days on his capital”A” Art — busy, formally designed, diagrammatic drawings, inspired as much by micro-biology as by theme park maps. His work changed around 2000 when he shifted away from comic strips with casts of familiar characters, and added more density and finer mark-making to his drawings. “My art wouldn’t exist as it is without comics,” he says. “Comics is traditionally about giving people a bang for their buck.”

We also talk about what it’s like to live as two working artists in one small apartment.

Next Week:
Matthew Stadler and his Portland, Oregon based Print on Demand operation Publication Studio. A promise to inspire…

Things we talked about:
Amy Lockhart’s 2009 Dirty Dishes was edited by and uncredited Marc Bell

Marc Bell’s 2009 Hot Potatoe is a gorgeous monograph & his 2011 Pure Pyjamas is a collection of early work

Horror Vacui

Couples Therapy for partnered artists