Filed under: Imagination, Interview | Tags: Advent Book Blog, Back + Forth, George Walker, Great Lake Swimmers, Kara Walker, Mart Chudolinska, Porcupine's Quill, Shary Boyle, St. Augustine's Pub
So, a weird edit of the Marta Chudolinska interview is up at the podcast place and you can listen to it by clicking this link right here.
Have some patience with the sound file.
You just gotta get thru the weird extended ending from the previous radio show on CJSF.
(The beginning of this file – which is the end of the previous radio show – is actually quite interesting to me. David K Levine talking about patents, innovation and copyright. And steam engines. Perhaps there’s a BOTR interview there.)
Also, there’s a classic hard cut edit at the end where I snap off the interview at the point where Marta glows about her parents.
I cut it there because it was such a positive comment, said with such obvious love that I decided that the best thing to do would be to drop a Great Lake Swimmers song at the end and call it a day.
Great interview! Marta is awesome.
There was a cool book launch party at Lucky’s Comics on Main Street which is always a great place to be on a Friday night.
You can check the action on her sweet Back + Forth website which includes some snaps of the Vancouver Launch.
During the interview Marta touches on the influences of a few different artists like George Walker, Shary Boyle and Kara Walker.
If you’re looking for a great gift for visual artists or young women or older women or a favorite linocutist in your troupe, I highly recommend Marta’s book.
In fact, if you’re interested in suggestions for the best books to purchase during this holiday season check out the Advent Book Blog – fully endorsed by Books on the Radio.
Filed under: Enthusiasms | Tags: Advent Book Blog, Book Madam, Books, Digital Handsell, Holiday Shopping, Ideas, Julie Wilson
On December 1st, Julie ‘Book Madam‘ Wilson and myself, will unveil our new collaborative project, The Advent Book Blog: Great Books Recommended by Great People.
The idea behind it is simple: authors, publishing professionals, bloggers, and booksellers will write short enthusiastic recommendations of their favorite books that have been published in the last year. We’ll publish a few of these every day, including pics and links for the books. We’ll also publish short bios and photos of everyone who contributes.
It’s what we’re calling the Digital Handsell 3.0. Just in time for the Holiday Season.
Here’s how it works:
We’ve asked our participants to respond to the following imaginary scenario: You’re working in your favorite bookstore and a customer walks into the store and tells you that he/she needs a good book. A gift for a curious, open-minded and adventurous reader. The customer is someone that you’ve helped many times before and they trust your taste implicitly, but they’re in a hurry.
In 25 words or less (or more, depending on your sense of restraint) what book do you recommend? What book, regardless of genre, format, relative bestsellerness, colour or shape, gets your unequivocal stamp of awesomeness?
Tune in on December 1st to find out!
Filed under: Events, Interview | Tags: Graphic Novel, Linocuts, Lucky's Comics, Marta Chudolinska, Porcupine's Quill
Ok. This is how it’s going down.
Friday, November 27th at Lucky’s Comics on Main Street is the date and time for your chance to meet the charming and talented artist/writer/linocutist Marta Chudolinska (that’s pronounced Hoo-doh-linska as in the Guess Who).
She’s in Vancouver from balmy Toronto to launch her new wordless graphic novel Back + Forth (A Novel in 90 Linocuts). It’s gorgeous, check the poster below to confirm.
It’s a story of emotional and physical journeys. Vancouver and Toronto landmarks are beautifully rendered in 90 blocks of sublime evocation. Her publisher, Porcupine’s Quill, have done an amazing job with the book. The paper and print quality are their usual high standard.
Marta has brought some of the blocks with her and will be doing something with them at Lucky’s that night. I’m not sure what she’s going to do but it’s probably gonna be magical.
So come check it out. This Friday @ 7. Also: Gabe will be sad if you don’t come.
Filed under: Imagination | Tags: Bryan Slusarchuk, Cris Derksen, District 9, Electronic Arts, Guy Dauncey, Kevin Caroll, Marc Stoiber, Monica Hamburg, Neill Blomkamp, Nicholas Molnar, Shamik, TED, TED Lectures, TEDx Vancouver, Terry McBride
Photo by Kris Krug.
The best conferences are like legal drugs. They change you on a molecular level, you see and feel things that you’ve never experienced before and your body is charged by mysterious energies.
The first TEDxVancouver Conference, held at the sprawling Electronic Arts campus in Burnaby, was one of those experiences.
Cyrus Irani. Photo by Kris Krug.
It wasn’t a perfect day. There were some flaws in the program but overall the successes of TEDxVancouver vastly outshone any of the problems that occurred during the day.
Cyrus Irani, the rest of the TEDxVan organizing team, the army of volunteers, camera men, technical wizards and whoever it was that made the call on the freshly bagged popcorn all deserve highest praise for putting on the show.
The theatre looked great. The videos and the personal presentations were all of a very high quality, and a few technical issues aside, came across with a high degree of professionalism.
The location itself possessed a certain fluid feng shui as well as a pool table and lots of arcade style video games.
The crowd of conference-goers was a good mix of people. On a few occasions I heard people happily comment that ‘it wasn’t another conference populated by the usual suspects’. I met a bunch of new friends. I also got to hang out with Monica Hamburg for the better part of the day. This was great because we’d recently met and hadn’t yet had time to get to know one another.
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Cris Derksen. Photo by Kris Krug.
The day was broken up into 3 separate but thematically linked sessions containing 3 or 4 speakers each.
The sessions were organized like this: Session 1: Playfully Young – creativity, imagination and expression. Session 2: Globally Young – environment, ecology, natural world. Session 3: Emotionally Young – passion, emotion, transformation.
Each speaker was given roughly 20 minutes for their presentations and there were a couple of lengthy breaks that allowed people to meet, mingle and share ideas.
The second and third sessions were accentuated by live musical performances.
Before the second session began the attendees experienced the beautiful and sublime Cris Derksen accompany herself on cello with a digital tape loop and drum machine. It was pretty amazing and I really hope that I can get an audio file for that.
Human beatboxing machine, Shamik kicked off the third session with an epic organic throwdown that dabbled in aspects of jazz, hip hop, techno and trance. It was also excellent.
Cris and Shamik performed an impromptu duet at the end of the day that was capped by a standing ovation. Kris Krug caught the last bit of it with his camera but you’ll want to watch their whole performance for the maximum effect.
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Terry McBride. Photo by Kris Krug.
Terry McBride was an excellent choice to speak first and set the conceptual framework for the whole day.
Terry introduced context as a theme that would come to permeate the day. Context impacted almost every talk and several of the speakers actively spoke to it in their presentations.
One of the things that Terry does better than anyone else – and the reason why it was a good idea to give him the floor at the beginning of the day – is that he speaks clearly to the fundamental concepts and ideas behind the commercial aspects of art and music that are often butchered for public consumption by the language of accountants and corporate executives.
Context has deposed content in the kingdom of commodified creativity, according to Terry. If you’re selling music or movies or books in the digital age you would be wise to step away from the illusion of control, the false promise of DRM and from any plans to litigate the fans of your artist or product.
You need great artists to create compelling content that will provide the unique context that you can capitalize upon. In this case the context is the enthusiasm and the relationship that the fan has with the artist or work.
Every fan will experience the content in their own way and generate a relationship with the artist and the work that is unpredictable. The publisher or studio will be in the business of facilitating that relationship and providing high quality opportunities for the fan to embrace that relationship and build upon it.
You cannot prevent behaviors that younger generations have developed by using the technologies that the older generations helped to create any more than puritanical lawmakers could prevent the birth of rock n roll in the 50’s.
And when the technologies of production are easily accessible to any creative person the map for traditional creative content publishers to remain relevant going forward runs right through the land of remaining completely transparent and adaptable to the artist/fan relationship.
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The best TEDxVancouver talk of the day came via video from Neill Blomkamp, famed graduate of the Vancouver Film School and director of the movie District 9.
Neill’s presentation was brilliant in many ways.
Two things set it apart from the other TEDx talks that day: 1) Truly visionary subject matter. 2) Next level imaginative story telling technique.
The presentation was essentially a long answer to a short question and was framed like this: a journalist in Chicago had once asked Neill whether the aliens as depicted in his film District 9 were an accurate representation of what he truly believed aliens to look like.
Thus begins a long and fascinating trip through space and time that touches on distant planets that might potentially support life. These potential alien life forms face a struggle against almost impossible odds to develop their cultures and technologies to the point where they can leave their home environments and seek to explore or conquer other worlds.
Kind of like humans.
I won’t even try to approximate the whole story here. It’s just too mind blowing. It leaves you with a harrowing picture of our current place in that cosmic evolution. It touches directly on our current environmental problems and the deepening dangers of our geopolitical nightmare situations all over the world.
It is not a message of hope.
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Tech dudes. Photo by Kris Krug.
I will leave it for others to discuss at length the session entitled Globally Young since the accurate language needed for those conversations is beyond me. It’s a highly specific dialogue that is too emotionally charged and contentious for me to want to wade into here.
However, I was most impressed by Bryan Slusarchuk’s presentation on new green ideas in the venture capital space. I think that he should be applauded for bringing new ideas to the discussion and for showcasing practical ways that people can be involved in investing in innovative environmental projects.
The other three presentations during the Globally Young session – by Guy Dauncey, Patrick Moore and Marc Stoiber – were each very well done in their way. None of them struck me as particularly visionary or progressive, though.
Two of those presentations were crafted to promote/showcase polar (pun intended) ends of the environmentalism debate, book sales or both.
The other presentation, by Marc Stoiber, while entertaining, was a wickedly honed experiment in viral advertising. It will be very interesting to see what happens with this particular piece – who responds to it and how – when it is posted on the site.
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Kevin 'Katalyst' Caroll. Photo by Kris Krug.
The final session, Emotionally Young, was an excellent and fun finale for an energizing day.
All of the presenters were very good and clearly Kevin ‘Katalyst’ Caroll is about as engaging and professional a speaker as is possible for the human race to produce. His performance skills and message are exceptional.
He brought Terry McBride’s theme of context full circle for the day. He challenged everyone in attendance to find the thing that they’re most passionate about – no matter what it is – and to find a way to carry the message of that passion into the world.
To share it with others and to inspire them by your example. It is essentially an echo of Mahatma Ghandi’s famous quote, “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
Having said that, though, I am clearly missing some crucial part of the equation that connects a Philly born, Nike-endorsed globe trotter to the emotional spirit of Vancouver.
Don’t get me wrong, Kevin was very funny, very cool and has an incredible sense of timing and rhythm but I don’t really understand why he was there.
Put another way, one has the impression that the organizing committee didn’t spend a whole lot of time selecting young voices native to the Vancouver area. That could seem to run contrary to what’s implied by the name TEDx Vancouver and the conference’s official theme of Forever Young.
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Which brings me to the one tragic flaw of TEDxVancouver.
Not tragic in a Shakespearean everyone dies at the end kind of way but tragic in a Stan Smyl missing an open net with a chance to score the goal that wins the game kind of way.
Ideas Worth Spreading. Photo by Shaun Scholtz.
Nicholas Molnar, one of the presenters that I was most looking forward to seeing, was bumped from the first session to the last session of the day. He was then scratched right off the roster all together due to time restrictions and content guidelines specific to the TEDx license.
It was really unfortunate because I thought that Nicolas represented an original, local voice speaking on things – “using the tools of economics, statistics, and game design to make websites and online games more addictive” – that originate or at least resonate with the technology culture of Vancouver.
News of Molnar’s session had been making the rounds on the twitter for a few days prior to TEDx Vancouver. His friends who had seen his early preparations and auditions of the piece were clearly stoked and spreading the word in anticipation of his presentation.
I think that it’s tragic that a home town voice that may have spoken to new ideas in video gaming, alternate reality game design, digital morality missed the opportunity to participate in the first ever TEDxVancouver.
It represents a significant blemish on an otherwise excellent day and I would suggest that the organizers seek to include more young, original, local presenters in their future programs.
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In the final analysis, TEDxVancouver was a huge success. The organizing team must have worked long hours and overcome ridiculous challenges to put the day together and they deserve a lot of respect for doing just that.
They provided a vital and engaging day built around sharing ideas worth spreading and I was lucky to be a part of it.
I can’t wait for the videos to be made available online so that we can continue this conversation and share TEDxVancouver with the rest of the city and the world.
Cris Derksen & Shamik: Impromtu Duet Finale. Photo by Shaun Scholtz.
Filed under: Enthusiasms, Imagination | Tags: Burnaby, Cyrus Irani, EA, Electronic Arts, Forever Young, Open Mind, Stephanie Vacher, TED Lectures, TEDx, TEDxVancouver, Terry McBride, Vancouver
An Open Letter to Cyrus Irani, the TEDx Vancouver organizing team and everyone who has raised concerns about the event,
Welcome to a crash course in the difficulties of shaping and guiding something that belongs to the Public Trust!
That people feel passionately about the TED Lectures is beyond question. The organizing team are passionate enough about it that they’ve dedicated their time and energy to making it happen. The people who have made their thoughts known since the event was announced many months ago – who put their ideas forward to speak at the event, who applied to attend and, perhaps especially, those who have turned up the volume across the social media channels over the past day – are just as passionate about what TED means to them.
It’s been a fascinating conversation to watch, a very public conversation and I’ve tried to bite my tongue on it but I just can’t do it. There’s a few things that I am feeling compelled to say.
But first an admission: I will be attending TEDxVancouver. I will be listening and speaking to people at the event that day with an open mind. It’s about respect. Make no mistake, I am honoured to be a part of the first TED event in Vancouver.
My expectation is that the presenters at TEDxVancouver will deliver an amazing, inspirational and life-affirming day and that optimism and a renewed commitment to action will reign.
But that doesn’t mean that I am exactly enthralled by how the organizers have handled things or that I’m 100% in agreement with what the dissenting voices are saying.
For those of you coming a late to the party, a little background.
TEDx Vancouver was announced some time during the early summer, I believe, and during those early months people could apply to present a lecture. I applied to present but was not chosen.
Then the organizing team opened the registration for attendees. I applied to attend (I know how ridiculous that sounds and I will leave it to others to pick this aspect of the whole thing apart and offer creative solutions) and was accepted.
I printed my evite when it arrived and happily waited for the event.
Then yesterday the TEDx Vancouver organizers announced the line-up of speakers and the shit hit the proverbial fan.
Twitter and Facebook lit up with links, opinions and commentary like your drunk uncle had just found a secret stash of roman candles in the attic.
People were outraged that only 1 of the 11 speakers chosen to present that day is a woman. There were questions about the racial mix of the speakers’ panel and the intellectual pedigree of some of the speakers.
People wanted to know: is Vancouver really best represented by video game designers, television personalities, film makers, web strategists, environmental entrepreneurs and Terry McBride? (Does any Vancouverite really want an honest answer to that question?)
Was the agenda of the organizing team too narrow in its scope? Did the organizing team bother to look any further than the corporate rolodex at the EA headquarters where the event is being held?
Some people weren’t ‘feeling’ the vision. They weren’t sure that venture capitalism, advertising and cinematic special effects were the stuff of ‘inspirational genius.’
The voices that were speaking out wanted something. And they were passionate about it, but what did they want?
They wanted to be heard. They wanted to feel like they were a part of TEDxVancouver even if they weren’t going to attend the actual day.
I’m not sure that their outrage really had too much to do with the speakers on the panel. I think that it’s actually more about how the organizing committee communicated their vision for TEDxVancouver to the public over time, and how they handled the backlash when it happened.
The best expression of how people felt was written by Stephanie Vacher in this post that appeared shortly after the news broke.
A very eloquent and thoughtful letter.
Those are not the terms that I would use to characterize TEDxVancouver’s response posted on their site the next day.
Their letter, in my opinion, sucks. It’s appallingly generic and does little more than gloss over the concerns expressed by Stephanie and others. It reads like a form letter from Telus and I think it exposes the true root of the problem.
The Root of the Problem: a perceived lack of accountability/communication on the part of the organizing committee for 2 things that people feel very strongly about: a very personal vision of what the City of Vancouver represents to them and the founding ideals of the TED brand. Then mix in a sensitivity to how the rest of the world perceives Vancouver and its relationship to the TED brand.
Especially in this city of boundless interconnection and frenetic, highly-caffeinated intellectual and artistic energy you’ve got to meet people on their turf and share the info.
It is better to have transparent processes and more open public communication when handling things that are so connected to people’s aspirations and sense of place.
To me, that is what we have learned over the past 36 hours.
I think that Raul Pacheco-Vega, PhD said it best in his response to the letter posted online:
There is one point that I think is far from obvious and that I want to address in print. TED’s success in promoting “ideas worth spreading” hinges on successfully exploiting the scalability properties of information flow in a networked society. In other words, for TED to succeed, the videos and talks need to go viral and have the broadest reach in the shortest amount of time. Best medium to accomplish that? The online world.
And the online world favors transparency and accountability.
Filed under: Copyright, Creative Commons, DRM, Enthusiasms, Industry Change, Interview | Tags: Bakka Phoenix Books, Books, CBC, cjsf, CopyFight, Copyright, Cory Doctorow, DRM, George Stroumboulopoulos, Globe and Mail, Google Book Search, Interview, John Barber, Makers, Merrill Collection, National Reading Summit, Publisher's Weekly, Radio interview, The Hour, Tor Books, Toronto, TV Ontario, TVOntario, With a Little Help
Cory Doctorow Photo by Jonathan Worth.
This interview has it all. Well, some of it. In pieces. Kinda glued together.
Click here to hear the podcast of my interview with Cory.
I called Cory on Thursday November 12th, 2009 from Control Booth B at CJSF. He was in his hotel room getting started on a day of media publicity for the launch of his new book, Makers, published by Tor Books.
I have no idea whether I was his first interview of the day but I am certain that I wasn’t his last.
He did TVOntario, CBC’s The Hour with George Strombo and countless other interviews throughout the day.
He eventually finished with a talk at the Toronto SF reference library, the Merril Collection, where his old friends at Bakka Phoenix Books (where Cory once worked as a bookseller) sold out of books for him to sign.
His talk the next day at the National Reading Summit was a huge success according to all of my sources in Toronto.
Well, all of my sources except the Globe and Mail’s John Barber, who apparently couldn’t be bothered to actually show up. Not that a little detail like being physically present prevented him from writing about it.
But back to the interview that you may or may not have already started listening to.
It’s a bit of a reanimated corpse brought together by magic and electricity. The sound quality is off and my recording software kinda crashed about half way through then came back to life again and then died for good.
So I apologize for the quality and I promise that I’m going to get this whole ’sound’ thing figured out. I finish the show off with a recording of Cory’s reading from the Makers that night at the the Merril Collection Science Fiction Reference Library in front of his home town audience. It’s a great piece about Suzanne Church’s first encounter with a few of the Makers. A scene that I allude to earlier in our talk.
I still like the interview, though. I’m sorry that an infernal machine ate chunks of our conversation about DRM and most of the talk on Google Books and everything about his With a Little Help Project that he’s cataloging for Publisher’s Weekly.
Here’s the video from his excellent talk on TVOntario:
Filed under: Imagination, Industry Change | Tags: Advent Books, Advent Books Calendar, Advent Calendar, Book Madam, Books, Books on the Radio, Canadian Publishing, Gifts, Holiday, Julie Wilson, Publishing calendar, Seen Reading
Some of my most dedicated readers know that I’m good in the kitchen. I’m always workin’ with the heat and mixin’ the ingredients and layin’ surprise concoctions of extreme tantalization upon your tongues!
Well… this Holiday Season I’m stepping away from the charcoal broiler, the freshly oiled cedar planks and the dwarf-sized oak peppermill and I’m stepping back into the ring of Bookseller.
A kind of Bookselling 3.0 Digital Handsell / Best Books of the Holiday Season by the People Who Should Know – the Writers, Booksellers, Editors, Designers, Publicists and other Creators who help bring great books into the world.
The irrepressible Julie Wilson aka the Book Madam (and the artist formerly known as the Seen Reading lady, who may or may not be making a surprise reappearance of her own in a certain iconic American digital periodical) is joining me in largest non alcohol related herding of book publishing professionals in Canadian History.
The 2009 Advent Books Calendar
Julie and I are working to gather some of the best people that we know in books – from the booksellers to the writers to all points on the publishing compass – to bring you their selections for the best books for gift giving this holiday season.
We’ll be publishing 3+ book reviews a day on out TBA Blog. Each review will be written in 25 words or less!
That’s right. Maximum enthusiasm, minimum space.
Micro-reviews of the best books available to make your shopping easier.
If you’re in publishing and we haven’t contacted you yet and you’re sure that we would because, seriously, what are we, crazy? Then drop me a line sean[at]booksontheradio[dot]ca.
It all starts on December 1.
Filed under: Art, Industry Change, Interview, Support Independents | Tags: Bank Vault, Book Publishing, Brussel Sprouts, Brussel Sprouts and Unicorns, Codex, DIY Publishing, Do it yourself Publishing, Hand made books, Independent Publishing, Library Editions, RBC Vault, Robert Chaplin, Royal Bank of Canada, Ten Counting Cat, Unicorns, Vancouver, Vancouver Artist
In the vault with Rob Chaplin: to listen to our conversation click this link.
I’ve known Rob Chaplin for a few years. Ever since he walked into Sophia Books – back when I was buyer there for art books & graphic weirdness – and asked me to take a few copies of Ten Counting Cat into stock for general sale.
No problem. After all, the writing was funny, the drawings were great and the design was bang-on.
It had everything that I wanted from a book: independent spirit, unique and well realized vision and a sense of humor.
So we took the books, put them in the shelves and displayed them in the window. It didn’t take long for them to sell.
Part of the magic of Robert’s books is that he does all the work himself. He writes, illustrates and designs each of his books. Then he sends the files to Friesens in Winnipeg and they send him a couple thousand books a few weeks later that he then sells to people, bookstores, libraries, whomever. It’s an act of fine art, true dedication to his vision and more than a little wariness toward the entanglements of the standard book publishing process.
Robert and I have a tendency to bump into each other a couple of times a year at various speakeasy establishments and nocturnal gathering places where we’ll sketch out plans for global conquest on napkins on the bartop.
When I was helping to plan Bookcamp Vancouver I knew that I had to include Robert in the program somehow.
He showed up in his trademark sweater with a backpack full of books.
Every time I turned a corner Robert was singing the rhymes of the Brussel Sprout or leading small groups of confused conference goers in the Oath Regarding the Existence of Unicorns.
It was hilarious.
I really like Rob’s energy, his enthusiasm and his desire to demonstrate his independent approach. He’s out there slinging funny rhymes, perpetrating great design and generating new ideas every day.
I just can’t argue with that kind of dedication.
I’m really happy to be able to share this interview because we really get a chance to hear the fundamental breakdown of how Rob sees the creative/publishing process. It should be like manna from heaven for anyone out there looking for inspiration or help in their own DIY book projects.
For more information on Robert Chaplin, Library Editions and sterling silver brussel sprouts check out his website.
Filed under: Interview, Writers Festivals | Tags: Crime Fiction, Dark Entries, DC Comics, DC Vertigo, Detective Fiction, Detective Rebus, Edinburgh, Graphic Mystery, Ian Rankin, IFOA, Inspector Rebus, International Festival of Authors, Jackie Leven, James Kelman, John Constantine, John Rebus, Malcolm Fox, Margaret Atwood, Mogwai, Orion Books, Scottish Writers, The Complaints, Vertigo Books, Werther Dell'Edera
Listen to the interview now by clicking this link right here!
***
It was a crap morning. Cold rain and fog. The roads and sidewalks were slick with leaves and puddles. Cars haunted side streets at half speed, their drivers wiping at the windows from within, bleary eyes squinting out.
It was unequivocal inclemency of the highest order. The natural world’s embodiment of the emotional turmoil at the core of your average Mogwai tune.
It could have been an autumn morning in any bitter and inhospitable city in the world. Could have been Bogata, Edinburgh, Jakarta or Vladivostok.
As luck would have it the drab and impenetrable city in question was Vancouver and I would have to go out into it if I wanted to get this interview with Ian Rankin.
I’d be lying if I said that the idea didn’t briefly cross my mind.
After the requisite caffeine injections and foggy mutterings I made it to the CJSF station HQ and let myself into the empty confines. Peace and quiet and warmth. And time to gather my energies before making the call to Toronto where Mr Rankin was participating in IFOA XXX and their special showcasing of Scottish writers and Canadian writers of Scottish descent.
No problem. Smooth sailing from here. Should be.
I got the mixing board all warmed, lit up and functional. The digital patch connecting the old touch tone phone to the outside world checked out but the computer with the mixing program was locked by a password that I did not have. It was 730 in the morning and the only numbers that I had were for people who happened to be out of town.
It was grim but eventually I hacked into the machine, made the call to Ian’s hotel room and got the interview up on the rails.
I’d forgotten my notes in the other room during my frenzy to figure out how I was going to crack the password into the computer and now I was improvising wildly to Mr Rankin as we began to talk about the similarities between Scotland and Canada and their shared proximity to proverbial cultural elephants to their geographic south.
From there we talked about James Kelman and boy wizards, Margaret Atwood, the Proclaimers, Mogwai and Jackie Leven, shopping for vinyl records, travelling by train across Canada, return visits to the toy shop on Granville Island, John Rebus, Malcom Fox, reality gameshows broadcast in hell and despairing wives.
An excellent time had by all and topped off by a blistering track from the new Mogwai album, Hawk is Howling.
Many thanks to Ian Rankin and the good people at Orion Books/McArthur Canada and Random House/DC/Vertigo for making it happen.
Evil Book Stack photo by Sean Cranbury.
Evil Book Stack Breakdown (Top to Bottom): Fraktur mon Amour by Judith Salanasky, Daniel O’Thunder by Ian Weir, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ by Friedrich Nietszche, Beast by Various Nefarious Artists, I Shall Destroy all the Civilized Planets by Fletcher Hanks, From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Shake Hands with the Devil by Romeo D’Allaire, Swedish Death Metal by Daniel Ekeroth, A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter Miller, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov, Glamorama by Brett Easton Ellis, and Cities of the Red Night by William S Burroughs.
