"Toward the end of the book, Otto and Sophie, the central couple, go to stay in their holiday home. Sophie opens the door to the house, and is immediately reminded of a friend, an artist who used to visit them there; she thinks about him for a page or so. The reason she's thinking about him is that she's staring at something he loved, a vinegar bottle shaped like a bunch of grapes. The reason she's staring a the bottle is because it's in pieces. And the reason it's in pieces is because someone has broken in and trashed the place, a fact we only discover when Sophie has snapped out of her reverie. At this point, I realized with some regret that not only could I never write a literary novel, but I couldn't even be a character in a literary novel. I can only imagine myself, or any character I created, saying"Shit! Some bastard has trashed the house!" No rumination about artist friends--just a lot of cursing..." -Nick Hornby, in his collection of reviews & essays, THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE.

Initially, I'm distracted less by the house-break-in & more by the idea that any artist would love a bottle shaped like bunch of grapes. But probably I'm a snob about grape-shaped bottles.

I'm reading this book in my friend Mari-Lou's fantastic garden, over various meals while I'm in Saskatoon. I'm going back to doing book reviews, and Nick Horby's musings about books are just right--cool and slightly fizzy, like really nice not-too-strong ginger beer on a summer afternoon. So I'm hoping he gets me into the right headspace to write intelligent book reviews.

Strangers in Paris

am so pleased to be part of a new Paris anthology, edited by Megan Fernandes & the illustrious, frequently top-hatted David Barnes.

Strangers in Paris is a museum of experience and objects that is anything but iconic; the collection establishes a new hunt for language worthy of a changing city. It is possible to find Paris in these pages, but it is just as possible to find everything else.

Launches have been happening in Canada & Paris & New York, and i've somehow managed to be in the wrong city at the wrong time to miss each & every one of them so far...but hey, it's amazing technology, this book thing, possible to experience even if one misses the launch.

in the official blurb about the anthology, Tightrope says: The stunning variety of writing in this volume addresses the city of Paris in all its complexity, while challenging the mythology of expatriate Parisian literature. The anthology contains entries as diverse and disparate as an excerpt from John Berger’s novel, Here is Where We Meet; Suzanne Allen’s ekphrastic poetry, a tongue-in-cheek take on the nineteenth-century novel by Helen Cusack O’Keeffe; Canadian writer Lisa Pasold’s story of a forced extended stay in Paris; and an interview with the celebrated American poet Alice Notley.

i'm so pleased to be part of the book...and i'm particularly sorry i missed the KGB event, as it was one of my favourite literary booze locations when i lived in New York back in the dark ages (ie. the Giuliani years). i wonder if KGB (above) still has the series of Stalin's official photographs--where Stalin's colleagues were mysteriously air-brushed out over the years, very creepily.

order info for the book here...or find it at Shakespeare & Co in Paris.

if i ever get an iPad or kindle, i’m making it a cover that says DON’T PANIC. there's even a site with instructions for various designs.

“...he also had a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million ‘pages’ could be summoned at a moment’s notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words DON’T PANIC printed on it in large friendly letters.
[…]
Arthur turned it over nervously in his hands. ‘I like the cover,’ he said. ‘Don’t Panic. It’s the first helpful or intelligible thing anybody’s said to me all day.’”

– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)