November New Orleans

Only hours after I moved into this apartment on the edge of Tremé, a 'Second Line' marching band went past my door, taking flowers to the cemetery for All Saints' Day.

I feel a bit like Colette in her Palais Royal apartment--she called the place "the tunnel" because of its shotgun layout. I spread books and various cooking ingredients around the kitchen & work there, because the kitchen door gives onto a sunny courtyard.

The tattoo parlor down the street has its air conditioner running. Four entirely black feral kittens peer out from under the fence, tropical flowers are blooming, and the palm trees rattle in the wind.

I woke up to the roving fruit vendor who drives past every morning around 9am. Her megaphone makes her sound like a muezzin, except her call to prayer is "I have pine-apples, I have cante-lope, I have sat-sumas..."

Last week, the mayor finally reopened Louis Armstrong Park, with the Tremé Brass Band playing, Congo drumming, dancing, sacred smudging and Mardi Gras Indians in blindingly-bright embroidery & feathers.

Now, to cycle across town, avoiding the worst of the earthquake-fissures that linger six years after Katrina. Collecting details, trying to understand a little bit about this city so thoroughly inhabited and worn by its past but also determined to be present. I'm more awake here than in so many other cities where life is definitely easier (what a misnomer, 'the Big Easy') but less alive.

LAS VEGAS PATKANYAI

RATS OF LAS VEGAS now exists in Hungarian, in real & virtual/e-book form. i wish i could read Hungarian, but maybe that's the mysterious beauty of the translator's art...the author will never know exactly what the book means in the new language. honestly, sometimes i think the author is the last person to understand what the book means, even in the original language.

so the Hungarian edition is now out in the world, with a cover that makes me feel like a Raymond Chandler-era pulp fiction writer...a great honour, as Chandler is one of my literary heroes.

at first, the Hungarian publishers considered a cover that seems closer to the Canadian concept for the book. the back image on this proposal delights me--the car, the flamingo neck--

but in the end, the Hungarian editors went with a more visceral look. and i admit, if i ever get a tattoo, it will probably be the upside-down Ace of Spades at the bottom of the current cover.

dare your next mistake

i saw this at Mark Folse's blog Toulouse Street. some days, it's nice to know Ira's on your side... i also think this 'phase' happens every time I start a new project & i always need to fight my way through it.

a moment in Calgary

drove into Calgary for an excellent meeting with my editor extraordinaire, Rose Scollard, at Frontenac House, and wrapped up the day over BBQ, discussing the new Poet Laureate position that the City of Calgary has created.

how interesting: while Toronto's mayor is attacking libraries & literary culture, good ole' redneck Cowtown is funding a new literary position with pride.

The Mayor of Calgary, Naheed Nenshi, says "I think that these things actually really do matter...It helps us think of better ways to tell our story. And telling our story has value in and of itself." A very articulate retort to the Fords' recent blathering.

am looking forward to hearing who becomes Calgary's official poet--the city has a surfeit of excellent contenders.

"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.

the medium, the message, the McLuhan

100th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan's birth. the man who essentially invented the field of Communications grew up in Winnipeg. today i went by & photographed his very nice childhood home with my cellphone--seems a most appropriate anniversary nod to the man who said:

"When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body." - Marshall McLuhan

Which makes us all the more disembodied today.

To tell you the truth... (the writer's equivalent of stage fright)

"To tell you the truth, though, I still haven't made up my mind whether I shall publish [Utopia] at all. Tastes differ so widely, and some people are so humourless, so uncharitable, and so absurdly wrong-headed, that one would probably do far better to relax and enjoy life than worry oneself to death trying to instruct or entertain a public which will only despise one's efforts, or at least feel no gratitude for them."

wrote Sir Thomas More in 1515 (translated by Paul Turner & quoted by Fay Weldon in her novel, Letters to Alice.)

Richler gazebo

SO impressed with Florence Richler's comments about the gazebo in Parc Mont Royal which is to be spruced up & dedicated to her late husband, Montreal's best-beloved literary curmudgeon, Mordecai Richler.

"Were the graffiti to be left, I think somehow that would have delighted Mordecai because...it would be critical and that was his nature." - Florence Richler

true, his critical nature didn't make this founder of the "Impure Wool Society" particularly popular with Quebec's powers-that-be. and some other powers-that-be feel the gazebo is simply too small a gesture for such an important writer. but i like the idea.

as soon as i'm back in Montreal, i'm taking myself over there with a small appropriate bottle & a copy of Solomon Gursky Was Here (my fave of his novels). the gazebo makes such a toast feasible...if they named a street after Richler, one would get run over.