Woo-hoo! Malarky nominated for Amazon.ca First Novel Award

Hot off boiling the kettle here …Malarky has been nominated for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. This just in from the Toronto Star report

“Amazon.ca announced the finalists for the 37th Annual First Novel Award Wednesday. This Canadian literary award recognizes the outstanding talent of Canadian novelists who have published their first novel in 2012.”

Click here to learn about all 5 titles nominated including the intriguing People Park by Pasha Malla.

Click here to read the offical news release put out by Amazon at the rising of the sun.

From a Malarky reader yesterday

I have been meaning to share some of the messages i receive from readers: the image of people discussing anything for hours is always boldly up lifting. This was most cheering to read. Thank you dear reader(s)

“My book club finally got around to reading Malarky and I must say we all loved it – what a wild ride! We talked about it for hours which doesn’t often happen when we get together – we forwent our usual gossip session to talk about your wonderful book. Our Woman was a delightful character and we all loved your dialogue and gift with language. Rarely has a book made me laugh so hard and feel so heartsick at the same time. Two of the group read it twice and recommended we all do the same. We can’t wait for the next one.”

First weather news: a Pineapple Express is on the way passing through Thurs & Friday — it is rumoured to be a light one, so may prove more pineapple crush than express. Do not go out in your bedroom slippers unless you are after soggy toes.

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Second: Tim Parks prostate memoir. Jeepers Mr Parks this memoir is the Lincoln Tunnel of urology! Fascinating ! It has pushed Mrs Dalloway aside so I returned to her and I am not sure if that is simply a talent of Mrs Dalloway but that book seems to constantly speak at or back to whatever is being read beside it.

Today Mrs Dalloway in reply to Mr Parks memoir:

“and all the time let rumour accumulate in their veins and thrill the nerves in their thighs…”

Perhaps it would need to be remixed to “and shrill are the nerves in the thighs”

There is a moment of deciphering happening in Mrs Dalloway where the women are looking at the sky trying to figure out the letters the planes are making. It could be said that Mr Parks memoir is entirely laden with deciphering and uncovering.

Mr Parks and his wife Rita have just undertaken a walk that’s not going very well on account of his prostate. For thirty years they’ve been together they’ve walked — isn’t that a mighty thing to have done for thirty years? I think so. But I am a walker. My current pain dilemma is making walking both a challenge and an enticement in equal measure. Dickens. I recall, was also an obsessive walker who suffered with terrible physical pain.

Mr Parks Prostate

I am grateful to my fellow Little Star writer Tim Parks’ banjaxed prostate and his recording of such in his memoir Teach Us to Sit Still, which I have today added to the I Love Dick (Chris Kraus), Mrs Dalloway reading mix. The third party being Mr P’s prostate. What’s curious about his memoir is its, thus far, whole focus on urology! This a rare focus! Thus far it’s mainly him dithering over urology and living with astonishing discomfort. What possessed you Mr P to piss about for so long in such misery? It’s remarkable. Has the reader hopping leg to leg in some kind of Pavlovian retort. Anyhow he has finally gone to the clinic for tests at the chapter I have reached.

The first time I met a urologist I shudder to recall remarking to him that basically he’d pulled the short straw having to sit about puzzling out peoples piddle problems and wouldn’t he have been more excited by performing open heart surgery? He, a calm older dude, who reminded me of something out of The Godfather laughed warmly and explained how he gets to do kidney transplants and poking about with piddlers was only one part of urology. Now of course I hail him and all who work in urology, especially those who label test tubes and do the scans and the grunt work that delivers up the verdicts that urologists set about analyzing and fixing. But yes pain, it does rather do the head in, force one to stay still, drugged up while embracing three books and remembering all the many more days of flittering about, drinking too much tea in pain-free abandon.

This is curious: how to conflate someone who wrote a urology textbook with someone who wrote 10 mysteries who shares the same name. Or are the 10 mysteries full of urology? 

Withering weather

There are up to 20 weather warnings today in our province. For our city, it is rain and for the Island wind warnings. It occurred to me that we haven’t had so many rainfall warnings this season, yet it never seems to cease raining.

Friday was a particularly abysmal day. Yesterday a beautiful blast of blue light, which now has given way to worse than Friday.

I think along with weather warnings forecasters could begin melancholy measuring alongside the warnings. This weather is likely to induce the following in people: then the challenge to find appropriate adjectives to match the weather. Writers could be hired. I find the language of weather forecasting has such potential.

How is your weather, wherever you are?

Mrs Dalloway Loves Dick

Be not alarmed at the title of this post I do not infer smutty tones o’er Mrs D rather I have been on something of a reading adventure during these past 48 hours in tandem with a suspected kidney stone adventure.

I commenced yesterday morning with Mrs Dalloway and paired her with I Love Dick by Chris Kraus and have been fluttering between the two since. On my way back from loving Dick, which is very funny indeed, I began to note some parallels strangely in Mrs Dalloway namely: (This may only make sense if you’ve read I Love Dick if not you can listen to Ira Glass interview Chris & Sylvere here and gather the gist)

“… But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed..” (Mrs Dalloway, Woolf)

And

“She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on.” (Mrs Dalloway, Woolf)

Both of the above I cite relate to the autopsy that Kraus performs on her and Sylvere’s imagination or imaginings in relation to Dick. An autopsy of the possible perhaps? An autopsy of the exhaustible and inexhaustible? And a disciplined deconstruction on the dust passing the pair of them in the air in between. Whatever it is, the point of view in I Love Dick is fascinating, even if the tone of it reminds me occasionally of a BBC Wildlife program on penguin migration. It’s a microscopic interrogation of a moment that could have been fleeting but becomes its own landscape. And remarkably I am beginning to conclude it’s not about Dick at all.

And now a speculative riposte to Dick from Woolf in the form of this line from Mrs Dalloway.

“His letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered…” or to remix it a tad belatedly for Ms Woolf “His letters were non-existant, it was his sofa bed they remembered”

And Dick’s riposte to Chris Kraus and Sylvere Loringer via the words Mrs Dalloway (ok this one will require some Tardis time travel)

“..cared not a straw for either of them.”

Now I interrupt this post and return to Mrs Dalloway.

Iggy on stones

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvRkJzVQBP0&w=420&h=250]

Bridget condos

The other night I walked across the Granville Street bridge and it occurred to me that bridges could soon be locations pounced upon by real estate speculators and that custom slimmed condo towers may soon be plonked in the middle of them and determined to be the ultimate place to live. As I pondered this I could imagine the advertising slogans and what they’d promise. The property would naturally be called “Bridget”

This just caught my eye about the speculated upon BIG tower: “If approved for construction it would rise 52 storeys from a narrow base next to the Granville Bridge and curve up to the top.”

Not much of a hop or a slight misread of the plans (curve around and over onti the top) til my premonition could be realized.

Tripping into collage

At 1:10:00 Jim O’Rourke’s new composition for the Glasgow Improvisors Orchestra can be heard. O’Rourke submitted his score via a double pack of playing cards. Each one containing an instruction to various instruments in the orchestra. I find the compact nature — small rectangles — of the record of his composition fascinating. And how it transforms in the hand/eye of the musicians. The title of the piece: Some I Know, Some I Don’t has a rectangular equality to it: precisely the same number of letters on either side of the comma.

While I listened to the piece I was researching Jeanne Randolph’s ficto-criticism and reading in FUSE her piece Interpreting Water.

This was co-incidental because I tripped over Jim O’Rourke, but went hunting for Jeanne Randolph.

I would love Jim O’Rourke to interpret my novel Malarky through a series of musical instructions to the French horn written on a packet of recipe cards.

LRB piece on the Walkers

Thank you to Rachel Kawapit, Matthew and Chief Stan all of whom helped me with my research to write this piece about the Walkers — the Journey of the Nishiyuu for the London Review of Books blog.This photograph was taken on 16 January by Rachel Kawapit, a member of the Whapmagoostui First Nation, who live in Northern Quebec on the shores of Hudson Bay. It shows David Kawapit, Stanley George Jr, Geordie Rupert, Travis George, Johnny Abraham and Raymond Kawapit, aged between 16 and 19, with their guide Isaac Kawapit (47), setting off to walk 1000 miles from Whapmagoostui-Kuujjuaraapik to Parliament Hill in Ottawa, through temperatures lower than -30ºC, as part of the Idle No More movement, protesting against the violation of Aboriginal Treaty Rights.

To read the entire piece please click here

please share this LRB blog post. The Walkers deserve much more international attention for their extraordinary undertaking. They are walking in temperatures that have been between -30 and -50. They now number 43 young women and men in total, with more youth joining them along the way. I send them my deep respect and admiration.

There is also a Facebook group to follow the Walkers here