How to boil a perfect egg: wait for the egg to tell you it’s ready. This reminds me of the time I found Kraft Cheese (food product) slices in a New York grocery store that had “Open here” printed on the clear plastic flap of every slice. Seriously. People had obviously complained that they couldn’t open a cheese slice, so a table-full of marketing execs was sicced on the problem. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before “open here” gets replaced with a bent arrow icon because the consumers complain that they can’t read “open here”. What an age we live in.

Another fraud makes it to the screen. A woman pretends to have an AIDS-stricken son and cons a bunch of famous people into talking to her on the phone. How different is this, really, from any other story of how movies get made? Okay, very different, but you get my snide point.

The bizarre story of Vicki’s masquerade, in all of its incarnations, haunts most who hear it. It’s hard to believe so many could be deceived by a recluse with a passable talent for voices. Yet it speaks to the nature of human compassion that even skeptics fleetingly entertain the idea that poor Anthony might, in fact, be real.

Through his literary alter ego, Gabriel Noone (played in the film by Williams), Maupin detailed the intense bond he formed with the boy (played by Culkin) on the other end of the phone line – despite the fact that, for the majority of those years, he nursed an inner debate about whether Tony really existed.

Meanwhile, the boy’s strength in the face of extraordinary medical complications – an amputated leg and testicle, a stroke, shingles, constant pneumonia – inspired many celebrity supporters. They were all happy just to chat with the sick boy over the phone or by e-mail, respecting Vicki’s edict about how her son was too sick to see anyone at all – ever.

Fascinating. So many real stories of suffering out there, but none of them so neatly put together by a mind that knows how to tell a story, so they get no attention…

“British Oprah” (no jokes about it taking two people to equal one Oprah, please) Richard and Judy profiled in the NYT.

The “Richard & Judy” approach differs significantly from Oprah’s. While Ms. Winfrey invites a selected author into the studio for a discussion that is part interview, part cheerleading, the “Richard & Judy’’ authors never meet their hosts. For the summer reads, minor celebrities like soap opera stars, socialites and comedians describe the books while filmed on vacation posing (and occasionally reading) in a variety of spots: on the beach, by the pool, in the Jacuzzi.

Then the segment cuts to the studio, where Richard and Judy are joined by a panel of celebrities who discuss the book as if they were regulars in a monthly book club. “They are never experts and never book critics,” Ms. Ross said. “I want people to feel like it’s a group of friends chatting.”

Hmmm.

An interesting piece on the pros and cons of the life of backlist titles. The market is moving toward niche, and other retailers are learning to appreciate the sales-over-a-lifetime of backlist items through online retailers, but booksellers have other concerns that may not make hanging around such an appealling strategy.

Each house has at least one title that seems to buoy the rest of the list. Warner Books’ edition of “To Kill a Mockingbird” sells in the “robust six figures” annually, said Beth de Guzman, the company’s paperback editor in chief. “The Catcher in the Rye,” a major title in Little, Brown’s backlist, sold more than 200,000 last year, according to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks sales in 70 to 80 percent of the domestic market, but doesn’t include books assigned for college courses — a major source of sales for some books. Penguin Classics — an almost all-backlist imprint that has 4,000 titles, some from the public domain and most with a newly commissioned scholarly introduction — sells “hundreds of thousands” of copies of its most popular titles, including “The Grapes of Wrath,” “The Crucible” and “The Odyssey,” said Elda Rotor, the imprint’s executive editor. Some frequently taught newer titles also have steady sales. Tim O’Brien’s 1990 Vietnam War novel, “The Things They Carried,” routinely sells more than 100,000 copies a year, as does Howard Zinn’s left-leaning “People’s History of the United States,” originally published in 1980.

The backlist can also drive business acquisitions. Simon & Schuster bought Macmillan in 1994 partly for its backlist, which included “The Joy of Cooking.” The cookbook’s heavily updated 1997 edition has sold 1.7 million copies. (Several earlier editions also remain in print.) In 1984, Penguin bought a small English publisher, Frederick Warne, largely for one author on its backlist: Beatrix Potter, whose children’s books sell millions of copies a year. “We bought the company and isolated the key treasure in there,” said Peter Mayer, who was Penguin’s chief executive at the time and is now the president and publisher of Overlook Press.

You know, some times you read an article on publishing that’s supposed to be about thinking outside the box and hope, and you still come away depressed and feeling like you need a shower.

A new bio-pic helmed by a Canajun will shed light on the “gritty reality” of the Bronte sisters.

From the suppressed emotion between Jane and Mr Rochester to the wild passion of Heathcliff and Cathy, many readers have speculated on the Victorian writers’ sexual lives. Workman, a Canadian of British descent who spent four months researching at Haworth, said: ‘Everyone talks about how passionate the books are. I think writing became an outlet for them. That will be in the film: a sexuality that emerges out of them in the way it does for people who can’t express it, who are physical and temperamental. It comes out in their fantasies as they’re playing, in the dirt, wind, rain, cold.’

God, just the thought of dirt, wind, rain, and cold get me so hot I could just Morris dance myself into deep sin.

The government wants to fine a Hemingway museum in southern Florida for letting 46 six-toed cats descended from Papa’s original six-toed sneeze-machine, Snow White, roam the grounds.

The US department of agriculture wants to fine the museum’s owners up to $200 (£107) a day for “exhibiting” the animals without a licence, according to a lawsuit filed in Miami, but the trustees insist that tourists pay to see the house, of which the cats are merely residents.

“They’re comparing the Hemingway house to a circus or a zoo because there are cats on the premises,” said Cara Higgins, the museum’s lawyer. “This is not a travelling circus. These cats have been here for ever.”

Ah, the Hemingway legacy, both descendants and pets: a pack of freaks around whom nothing but squabbling ever seems to happen.

It’s not just for house-bound ladies any more, people. *Cough*Bullshit*Cough-Cough*

Though romance writing remains an almost exclusively female vocation, some men have ventured into the field. Former Green Beret Bob Mayer, who has written many non-romance books under his own name and under the pen name Robert Doherty, teamed up with veteran comedic romance writer Jenny Crusie for a military romance called “Don’t Look Down,” released this year.

Mayer and Crusie met at the Maui Writers Conference three years ago. Both were looking to do something different, and they decided to collaborate. Crusie writes the parts that come from a woman’s point of view, while Mayer weighs in with the male perspective.

Wow. I bet that’s gonna be electr… um… exhiler… um… incomprehens… um… profitable.

“Drunken Scot” Mowat gets public school named after him. Whiskey will be served in the cafeteria.

Salman Rushdie has reignited his longstanding feud with Germain Greer, with a letter denouncing Greer’s apparent support for protesting Brick Lane residents.

In a letter published in the Guardian today, which is expected to reignite a row which has simmered since the early 1990s, Rushdie denounces Greer’s support for the Brick Lane activists who are attempting to block the film as: “philistine, sanctimonious, and disgraceful, but it is not unexpected”.

“As I well remember, she has done this before,” he continues. “At the height of the assault against my novel The Satanic Verses, Germaine Greer stated ‘I refuse to sign petitions for that book of his, which was about his own troubles’. She went on to describe me as ‘a megalomaniac, an Englishman with dark skin’. Now it’s Monica Ali’s turn to be deracinated by Germaine.”

Finalists announced. Go Coach House!

Montreal, after years of letting people walk all over its streets, is now going to let writers gouge their names in hearts and skulls on its public benches. Or have I misread this?

It was just resting. Or something. It’s like a Terminator. You squish one in an industrial press and they send another with ice picks for hands. You can’t kill it. And it won’t stop until you’re DEAD! Oh, sorry… a little transferrance there.

This has something to do with copyright, but there are big numbers in it and my head gets all swimmy and kooky, so I’ll let you figure it out.

Most visibly now, the agency is helping to shape the landscape of literature and journalism through its cultural fund.

With digital copying gradually being corralled along with photocopying, the agency’s revenues have grown from $72 million in 2003-04 to $86 million in 2004-05 and more than $100 million in the past financial year. This will be distributed in roughly 5000 payments to its members, minus running costs of 14 per cent.

Wha?

Gets solved by putting on the cherries and beating the snot out of each other. Craig Davidson has challenged all comers as part of his publicity for The Fighter. (Thanks, Stephen!)

Question: When did artists first start thinking of themselves as “other”? Answer: When they first realized the chicks dig the bad boys, yo.

Then came the Romantic movement, and with it, artists turned from pleasing the world to indulging themselves: they rebelled against conventions, proclaimed their uniqueness, disdained the bourgeoisie as philistine, savored their own melancholy and formed cliques. Many also chose a bohemian lifestyle to exhibit their otherness.

Oh, the pain! The pain of it all!

The Kerouac scroll is about to see the light of day, as opposed to a bare bulb dangling from a chain in a drug den.

And speaking of writers caught between a blockheads and a hard place…

The episode has echoes of earlier collisions between art and passionate belief, including the Christian pickets at each touring venue of Jerry Springer: the Opera, the cancellation by Birmingham Rep of Gurpreet Bhatti’s play Behzti after pickets by local Sikhs and the most notorious episode of all, the threat to the life of Salman Rushdie over his novel The Satanic Verses.

The film company and Ali’s publishers say she is aware of the developments, but has chosen not to comment.

However, the link with earlier controversies was explicitly made in a letter to this paper signed by Rushdie, as well as Gillian Slovo, the South African-born novelist, writers Hari Kunzru and Hanif Kureishi – both London-born with mixed English and Asian families like Ali – and Lisa Appignanesi, deputy president of the English branch of the writers’ association PEN.

I’m sure that if anyone can broker peace here, it’s Salman Rushdie. He’s like the Condi Rice of the literary world.

Turkey lets one of 60 something writers charged with defaming the nation off the hook. See, just let them into the EU. They’ll be good, they promise. Aw, look at that hang dog expression. They’ve learned their lesson. Let’s buy them a present.

Sony has pushed the release of its e-reader back another season. Those six nerds camped out at FutureShop better get some more blankets and supplies.

There’s a small part of me that wants to point at this with a look of horror and scream: “Wiiiiitch! Wiiiitch! Burn it! Buuuurrrrnnnnn it!”

Imagine if there were a magic machine that could print entire books in mere minutes. You could go to a bookstore or coffee shop, choose a book online from millions of digital titles and then—poof!—out would come a fully bound book. You could get rare and out-of-print titles, in any language, and for less because the inventory isn’t stored on site.

That machine exists—it’s called the Espresso Book Machine—and it’s currently being tested at the World Bank bookstore in Washington, D.C. (The New York Public Library and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, in Egypt, are each getting one in the fall.) Former Random House editorial director Jason Epstein, a legend in the industry, and former Dean & DeLuca CEO Dane Neller are backing the venture. “We’re on the verge of something really powerful here,” says Epstein.

How long do you think this would need be installed before the makers were forced to capitulate to the average user and change the name to the “Expresso” Book Machine? (From the Saloon)

Magazine sales are down, but Canadian percentages are up… Um?

True, as a recent study by PricewaterhouseCoopers shows, Canadian periodicals continue to occupy only about 15 per cent of the rack space in any decent Canadian newsstand, with U.S. titles taking up most of the remaining 85 per cent.

But in the past quarter-century, the total number of these titles purchased by Canadians has dropped by 30 per cent, while the average circulation per American title has been slashed in half, to 13,243 in 2005 from 26,303 in 1983.

It’s a decline that has become especially noticeable in the past five or six years. And it has resulted in higher percentages of sales for domestic publications. Indeed, in a presentation last December to the Ontario government’s budget secretariat, Magazines Canada, the association representing more than 300 commercial titles, proclaimed that “roughly 50 per cent of all magazine sales in Canada” can now be attributed to Canadian periodicals.

Be careful before you cheer. It said, “per cent”. (Also, note the top five Canuck mags include Reader’s Digest (number 1) and TV Guide (number 5)… Sweeeet.)

An art programme helps develop literacy skills? But how will that be useful to our children in their future careers as button pushers and lever pullers?

The study found that students in the program performed better in six categories of literacy and critical thinking skills — including thorough description, hypothesizing and reasoning — than did students who were not in the program. The children were assessed as they discussed a passage in a children’s book, Cynthia Kadohata’s “Kira-Kira,” and a painting by Arshile Gorky, “The Artist and His Mother.”

The results of the study, which are to be presented today and tomorrow at a conference at the Guggenheim, are likely to stimulate debate at a time when the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind has led schools to increase class time spent on math and reading significantly, often at the expense of other subjects, including art.

I says, we’re fayling our children if we teech them to reed! And further, we’re fayling our presidett if’n we kweshun his god delivered plan for our kids and the terrorismists will have alreddy one!

Maud points to questions about why we haven’t seen the newly rediscovered Shelley anti-war poem that is said to be critical of western (nee British) imperialism…

Protestors have forced the company adapting Monica Ali’s Brick Lane for film to move out of the neighbourhood.

But the lead convener of the Campaign Against Monica Ali’s Film Brick Lane, officially launched yesterday, vowed to continue with the protest irrespective of where the movie is filmed. Abdus Salique threatened to burn Ali’s book at a rally on Sunday which is expected to be attended by hundreds of protesters.

He said the rally would be peaceful, adding that he was trying to deter fringe elements – “who could become violent” – from attending. But he added: “[If] she has the right to freedom of speech, we have the right to burn books. We will do it to show our anger. We don’t like Monica Ali. We are protecting our community’s dignity and respect.”

Um, no, moron, you’ve actually forfeited your dignity and respect with your threats and crybaby antics. Bravo. The world thinks you’re a bunch of uneducated philistines. There are better ways to handle these things than yelling into a camera, dingbat.

Dan Brown: Banned in Iran! “Throw it on the stack,” says Brown, while using a Faberge egg to crack the bone of an endangered white tiger so he might suck out the marrow.

The NYT’s daily tv listings are small pieces of art.

The capsules spend 20 words—and usually fewer—to pass informed judgment on movies. Even if you never intend to watch any of the films, the capsules make for good morning reading. Consider this taut kiss-off of The Matrix Revolutions: “Ferocious machine assault on a battered Zion. Stop frowning, Neo; it’s finally over.” Appreciate, if you will, the efficient setup and slam of the 2 Fast 2 Furious capsule: “Ex-cop and ex-con help sexy customs agent indict money launderer. Two fine performances, both by cars.” And for compression, it’s hard to better the clip for the Julie Davis feature Amy’s Orgasm. It warns potential viewers away with just four syllables: “Change the station.”

When I lived in Toronto and watched tv, I was always partial to Mark Dailey’s acerbic judgements of late night movies on CityTV.

Tel Aviv author Yoram Kaniuk is writing about the new war in the Middle East for Nextbook. Rivetting stuff.

Or, if you’re already dead, it just frustrates.

Nothing like a good jab and the wiki to brighten up a day.

“It would have been a major oversight to ignore this portentous anniversary,” said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose site now boasts over 4,300,000 articles in multiple languages, over one-quarter of which are in English, including 11,000 concerning popular toys of the 1980s alone. “At 750 years, the U.S. is by far the world’s oldest surviving democracy, and is certainly deserving of our recognition,” Wales said. “According to our database, that’s 212 years older than the Eiffel Tower, 347 years older than the earliest-known woolly-mammoth fossil, and a full 493 years older than the microwave oven.”

Time for a bright Wednesday morning wake up call. Ninja reader Lynn Coady writes in with this juicy link and says:

This link is a big downer but probably a good post. The title “Authors: Don’t Give Up Your Day Job” makes it sound like ‘duh’ material, but actually it details how things are getting —heavy sigh— a lot worse for writers what with the big box stores and the unfettered corporate bloat and whathaveyou.

A key quote: ‘In what other business would you find yourself facing a pay cut from £20,000 to £10,000 in a year?’

Thanks, Lynn. Thanks. And thank your agent for us. Send her a big bouquet of flowers that she can turn into wreaths for our funerals.

“By totally banning the Cuba books and the rest of the series, the school board is in fact prohibiting even the voluntary consideration of the themes contained in the books by students at their leisure,” he said. “This goes to the heart of the First Amendment issue.”

Our youth have lined up in orderly rows to consume the Harry output of Rowling, which is a damn sight better than the hairy output of television.

More than half of kids ages 5-17 say they did not read books for fun before the Harry Potter series came along, according to the report, which surveyed 500 children and 500 parents nationwide. Among parents, 76 percent say reading the series has helped their child perform better in school, while 65 percent of children agree.

I love it when conformity and blind loyalty swing even the slightest bit closer to my end of the intellect spectrum. (Intellectrum?)

Who needs romance when there’s webcams, the glory hole through which even your bits don’t need to look appealing.

Writers are indeed inspired not by love’s satisfaction but by its passion, and passion is all about suffering. Certainly, writing about passion and love is not quite what it used to be. Many serious writers seem embarrassed by love. But our culture doesn’t help a bit. De Rougemont must be turning in his grave at the proliferation of dating websites, chatrooms and TV dating programmes such as Would Like to Meet.

The internet has transformed the way we choose partners and perform the rites of love. If the modern world was already heading for a supermarket ethos of choice-choice-choice in relationships, the net has accelerated it to broadband speed.

What a time we live in. Imagine the stories we’ll be able to tell our grandchildren as they copulate with each other in virtual reality suits.

How come novelists aren’t very good at writing for the stage? Is it because what they really want to do is direct?

It’s a curious fact that very few writers have ever been able to write both good novels and good plays. Almost invariably, even the most acclaimed and technically skilled novelist turns into a rank amateur when writing for the theatre. The most famous case is that of Henry James, who decided in the 1890s to embrace the stage. He published four dramas in book form, with prefaces complaining that nobody would put them on…

They’ve dug up an old book in the bog in Ireland. Even as I write, a contingent of poets is being choppered in to the scene to write emergency ballads.

Nicholas Blincoe is hopping in the Telegraph over a pseudonym that seems designed to confuse the public.

My inner Victor exploded when I saw a poster for a thriller, promising: “This Summer A New Conspiracy Is Bourne.”

What seemed to herald a new instalment in Robert Ludlum’s Bourne series was revealed to be a book by a writer named Sam Bourne: not a super-assassin with amnesia – in fact, not anyone. This Bourne is the pseudonym of Jonathan Freedland, a Guardian and Evening Standard columnist.

That’s so funny, because I’ve been going apeshit lately too, but mostly about unjust war, poverty and the underhanded suppression of civil liberties and human rights by the US government. We’re so, like, on the same vibe, eh?

Apple is looking into eBooks. But can hipster silhouettes dance to them? I think not. Unless of course they exclusively produced books written by Gloria Estefan! In which case, all the world’s shadows couldn’t help themselves! Come on shake your body baby!

SFSignal points to another sf literary debate — whether categorizing books into subsections like “literary” and “genre” is helpful or destructive.

But for me, talking about “literary and genre” is like talking about poodles and dogs; I keep thinking the initial assumption is wrong. Perhaps I simply miss an implied “other,” as in “literary and other genre,” but if it’s there, I keep missing it. I hear an implication that “literary” is fundamentally different from other genres, but I only see a difference of degree.

Thoughts?

Elif Shafak, whom I have shallowly fallen in love with just from her author photo, is one of 60 something writers waiting to hear whether or not Turkey has hauled itself out of the middle ages and is prepared to join the civilised world.

Shafak joins a roster of more than 60 writers and journalists to be charged under Article 301 of the Turkish criminal code since its introduction last year. University professors, journalists and novelists such as Perihan Magden, Orhan Pamuk and now Shafak have been charged under legislation drawn so broadly as to criminalise a wide range of critical opinions. Writers not only face the prospect of a three-year jail term, but the prosecutions also lay them open to a campaign of intimidation and harassment waged by rightwing agitators.
…
This is something that nationalists fail to understand, she says. “It is always us versus them, this or that. Nationalists cannot understand that one can be multilingual, multicultural, cosmopolitan … without feeling obliged to make a choice between them once and for all.”

So says Bookslut Jessa Crispin.

A while back, I was sitting at one of Chicago’s many reading series, listening to an Irish poet perform a symphony she had written using only bird and animal noises. She squawked and twittered and bellowed her way through it, and I sat hunched over, trying to tell if I should be laughing or not. I hoped my posture suggested rapt attention and not suppressed hysteria. Later that week I went to hear a bestselling author read from his book at the largest Borders in the city. He was funny, charming, and an excellent performer. The thing is, the audience for the strange Irish poet was much larger than the crowd at Borders.

And when Jessa speaks, people listen. Or they do if they knows whats goods for thems.

In the growing world of comic book academia, the fans have the last laugh.

The irony of a fan telling the panelists to get a life — in the middle of the world’s largest comics convention, of all places — wasn’t lost on some members of the audience. But skepticism from fans is an occupational hazard in the growing world of comic-book academia.
…
Conference co-founder Coogan acknowledged that academia can be a fun- buster. “You have this dog and you love it, and you want to find out why you love it. You dissect it, and you’re left with this dead bloody dog on the table,” he said. “That’s one of the things that academics do.”

I’m just now paying off the last $5G of the $40G I spent on my dead dog. How about you?

Does book talk on TV have to be boring? No! Just do it like the Canajuns do it!

By now, some readers have been patiently holding up their hands to ask, “What about Charlie Rose? Or C-SPAN’s Book TV?”

Here’s my beef about both: They rarely get out of the dusty library. As admirable as its refusal to appeal to a mass audience is, Book TV confines itself to books as social issues. This is pipe-smoking, leather-chair book talk – all very fine, all very serious, but hardly compelling. The same for Mr. Rose, who adds his own windy, suck-up questions to this, the only media universe where government economists are TV stars.

Is it truly impossible for a TV show to be as rich and wild as all of the books that are out there? Not really. The Canadian Broadcasting’s Open Book is hosted by comic Mary Walsh. It has an eclectic mix of authors, academics and entertainers (members of the Kids in the Hall comedy troupe) free-for-alling about a title they’ve read. It’s the book club as quip session (although it’s often thoughtful, too).

Mary Walsh is dreamy. Please, US cable, don’t pick this idea up and turn it into a mud-wrestling match for bikini-clad authors. Please?

Amazon is now offering groceries. I’d hate to see what a granola bar looks like after it arrives in the mail. Probably… like… granola. Sans bar.

You might remember posts I did last year on Bruce Holland Rogers, the sci-fi author who sells subscriptions to his short short stories. You pay 8 bucks and get three stories a month for a year. I’ve been more than pleased with the transaction, and Bruce has delivered three a month, just like he said he would. Well, some kid in Malta has done an animation of one of Bruce’s stories, The Dead Boy at Your Window, for a class project. I think he got his little brother or sister to read. It’s a bang up creepy piece that’s just a wonderful adaptation. Someone get this kid a job in animation.

Canuck sf god Robert Sawyer has gotten himself into a bit of a dustup with some author types over an assertion that self-publishing is a waste of time for authors. SFSignal, the best SciFi blog I’ve read, has the call and the links.

In rejecting an impatient author who had sent a ms for his consideration, Sawyer wrote:

So, best of luck elsewhere. All that said, though, one writer to another, I think going the route of online serialization and POD are mistakes you will regret in the years to come. Online publishing and POD are a waste of time; you’ll have fewer than a hundred readers, I’m willing to wager, in either format. But it’s up to you.

It’s at the end of this short piece, but it brings up a neat point I’m hoping someone will flesh out with some discussion.

There is a wider point to these musings: novelists seem particularly bad at giving and receiving praise. I wonder if we think the spoken word is intrinsically facetious – speaking is where we play around, before starting the serious work of writing everything down.

This part, though, hits home with me:

There is no art to reading the mind’s construction in the face. But what about reading its construction in a tone of voice? My problem, as a friend once told me, is that I cannot say anything without sounding insincere. Or ironic, facetious, even piss-taking. I am incapable of transmitting earnestness, even if I raise my voice an octave and wave my arms around.

I too am a misunderstood sourpuss. I didn’t realize until just recently that my face naturally settles into a scowl when it’s relaxed. At best it’s an expression of impassive disdain. I have to keep smiling constantly to be sure people don’t think I hate them. For years I thought no one would sit next to me on the streetcar because I have broad shoulders. Turns out they were frightened of my gob.

A new James Bond novel “will be written to celebrate the centenary of writer Ian Fleming’s birth.” Oh, sorry, there’s been a copy edit for accuracy. A new James Bond novel “will be written to celebrate the upcoming advertising tie-in campaign for the Casino Royale remake.”

Antics ensue.

Instead of, you know, printing it. Three of my favourite authors, Sheila Heti, Andrew Pyper and Shyam Selvaduri, discuss Toronto as a place and a setting for fiction.

Quote Andrew Pyper: “If anything, I think there’s a reluctance in our fiction to engage Toronto directly as a place. There are plenty of exceptions to this, so I have to footnote this generalization. But there’s almost an apologetic reflex to set stories elsewhere so as to not upset fellow Canadians—“Oh, here we go, not Toronto again.” I’m writing a novel right now that’s set in Toronto—and no one’s going to stop me, damn it—but I’m aware of that being a factor. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone said, with an eye roll, “Oh, a Toronto novel,” whereas I don’t think someone would have that same cynicism with regard to a Vancouver novel.”

Well, Mr. Pyper (if that is your real name), I refuse to accept your footnote so I can say with mock indignation that Michael Redhill’s upcoming novel Consolation directly addresses Toronto as a place of being and becoming in the most eloquent and graceful of ways. I read the galleys on the boat over to Newfoundland and have to say that this book should be a shoo-in for about 10 major awards. That said, if anything holds it back, it will be exactly what Andrew is talking about, a sense that nothing authentic or elegant can come from Toronto. [A bias this book proves wrong.]

Question: Why do we keep books in the bathroom? Answer? Because all flat surfaces in the rest of the house are full. (Okay, real answer? Who wants to be reminded they are evacuating their bowels…?)

Today, many of us still read and keep books in the necessary house, even if our reading material is sometimes less Ovid and more Gary Larsen. When I redecorated my guest bathroom recently, I put 42 books on top of the toilet tank, arranging them so as to highlight the more brightly colored ones. Decoration was my motive — I had just painted the ceiling with gold leaf, aiming to create a destination bathroom. But what prompts others to place books in the loo? Are the books we keep there a reflection of our deepest selves? Many people read in the bathroom to escape family life; Freudians say we read there to distract ourselves from shame (the shame that arises from wanting to spite our parents by playing with our ordure). But what other motives are out there, and what do these motives say about us?

Um, excuse me, but Gary Larsen IS today’s Ovid. (My favourite moment of bathroom humour ever was in The Fisher King when the nutbar played by Robin Williams describes the moment he went insane. He describes taking a dump that was borderline “mystical” and then, POOF!, there were little fairies floating around him.)