apparently the art of losing sight is hard to master

The irreverent and funny Jason Anderson considers sightlessness and its various artistic implications in an essay on the Canadian film Blindness in the most recent issue of Ontario's cinema scope magazine.

Quote:

Blindness may also belong to a category of literary adaptations—including Gus Van Sant’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993), Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), and Alan Rudolph’s Breakfast of Champions (1999)—whose dogged faithfulness to their sources inadvertently prove just how unfilmable the books were in the first place. Being a capital-a Allegory that is intentionally free of cultural markers that would situate the story in any specific time or place, Blindness presents a daunting challenge.

well done, sir

Joseph Boyden wins the Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel Through Black Spruce.

Here's a quote about the win, from today's Globe and Mail:

In an interview after his win, Mr. Boyden said, "What I'm most excited by is being allowed to give voice to a segment of the first nations population that I'm so impassioned by and so in love with and so a part of."

He indicated some of the prize money might be put toward "a fellowship for young students in Moose Factory and the Georgian Bay area, native students, to help them get into university."

Mr. Boyden divides his time between New Orleans and Northern Ontario. Through Black Spruce splits its narrative between two settings — the rugged wilderness of Northern Ontario, near James Bay, and the ecstasy-fuelled modelling world of contemporary Manhattan. The book has two alternating narrators — Will Bird, a Cree bush pilot (and the grandson of Xavier Bird, introduced in Three Day Road) who's in a coma in a hospital in Moose Factory after being pummelled by drug dealers, and Bird's niece, Annie, who until recently has been searching for her missing sister, Suzanne, a model in New York.


(image courtesy Penguin Books)

linking to Ontario's literature

The last section in the right-hand menu of this blog is now an alphabetical list of links to the many and various magazines, book publishers, art service organizations and literary festivals supported by the Ontario Arts Council Literature Office in 2008. I will add more as they arrive within the granting system, and will also include links to groups operating without OAC support. As we know, the OAC cannot possibly fund all of the worthwhile requests it receives in a given year.

Have a look through the list and marvel, as I do, at the size and breadth of literary culture in the province of Ontario.

where I've been

One of the things I will be doing with this blog as I take on my new role at the Ontario Arts Council, is to track my own movements around the province. I plan to be working hard at expanding the already extensive network of contacts for the Literature Office, making sure everyone working to make excellent writing and publishing in Ontario is aware of the OAC and the potential for public support.

I had a real taste of that work this weekend, as I traveled with Lorraine Filyer (the retiring Literature Officer) to Ottawa to meet with a number of OAC clients and potential clients. This was a valuable and enjoyable trip for me. It gave me the chance to observe Lorraine in action, and to meet with the organizers of some of Ottawa's outstanding reading series. I spent two student winters in Ottawa back in the 80s, and struggled through my time there, trying to build a literary community for myself. ink magazine, the national quarterly I edited and published in the early nineties was conceived and planned in the student pubs of Ottawa, and our first issue was launched on Rideau Street. So it was very gratifying indeed to see how far bookish Ottawa has come from those days.

What I would have given as a student to have The Ottawa International Writers Festival to attend early in each school year. Or local series like the Tree and Dusty Owl readings. And it seems I left Ottawa just a few short years too soon to see the birth of the Ottawa Storytellers Festival -- but I made up for it on Saturday evening when I attended the festival's closing concert. I'm not old enough to have been a student before the establishment of Ottawa's venerable ARC magazine, but it's satisfying to see it still around, and with such a vibrant web presence as well.

Thanks for a great visit, Ottawa... and sorry to all those friends I didn't see on this trip. There was a whole lot on my schedule. Next time.

Thanks to local Ottawa writer and blogger Pearl Pirie for this photo from the weekend. Andrée Laurier of the Canada Council for the Arts, Lorraine and I presented a workshop to a group of writers gathered by the good folks at Dusty Owl readings:

why we read what we read

“At thirty-three, and newly married, I spent four months in the infectious ward of a hospital — no visitors,” he said. “People could send you books, and my friends did send me books, but because it was an infectious ward the books were non-returnable. The literary works my friends were able to part with without breaking their hearts were old detective novels.” He took to them, not surprising given the alternatives: “True, the hospital had a library, but it was full of Lenin and awful socialist-realist fiction.”

Toronto writer Josef Škvorecký's discovery of the detective genre, as described in The Walrus.

the next day

'round about midnight, Wednesday morning:



... and about 6(ish), the same morning, downtown Buffalo, the subtle celebration: