Entries by Philip Turner

European Union & Privacy Matters

I don’t know how many readers I have that live in the EU, or are EU subjects, but I know that the international body is installing new requirements about safeguarding web users’ information, so whether you EU readers are one or many, this statement is for you, and really for anyone concerned about their privacy and personal information.

I

I don’t have any data harvesting software that picks up people’s info, even when they don’t leave it deliberately.

II

If you choose to subscribe to my blog—which you can do by clicking through to “Sign up to get New Posts By Email” on the right-hand rail adjacent to this post—that just means you get an email announcing each new post I publish, but my referral system doesn’t do—and will never do anything—with your email address, other than to automatically send you the new posts.

III

If I ever were to email you directly and personally it might be to announce something major, like the creation of a wholly new blog, but not randomly or incessantly.

IV

If you happen to subscribe to this blog, or to my other site, The Great Gray Bridge, thanks for doing that. But whether you do,or not, I promise to keep your data away from any commercial users. Thanks most of all for reading The Great Gray Bridge and Honourary Canadian.

For more information, please visit this web page.

 

SCTV Documentary Coming Soon

If I had time, I could write a post about how it is that Canadian comedy has been leading the comic parade since the 1980s. Until then, here’s a video of one of my favorite sketches by SCTV, when he played Babe Ruth. Candy plays the skit in a Yankees uniform, visiting the hospital room of a supposedly mortally ill kid. Babe’s been told he’s supposed to try to make the kid feel better, even if only for an hour. So he promises the kid he’ll hit a home run for him. But the kid, played by a good kid actor, acts all entitled and selfish—”Gee, Babe will you hit two home runs for me?” Gee, Babe will you dance around on one foot with your hand on your cap and singing a song for me, Babe?” It’s a subversive little playlet.

Remembering a Favorite Canadian Novelist—Robertson Davies Visits a NY Hotel Room

Canadian novelist Robertson Davies (1913-95) in the Dorset Hotel, NY, 1988. From a NY Times story yesterday about the Ryerson Image Center in Toronto. Davies has since the 1980s been a favorite novelist of mine, when I sold hundreds of copies of his books at Undercover Books in Cleveland.

At the Great Gray Bridge I wrote about Davies in 2013 on the 100th anniversary of his birth, when CanadaPost made a stamp in his honor. With my web designer Harry Candelario, I later adapted the stamp into a motif for this blog.

Elsewhere, on Honourary Canadian, I shared several letters I received from Davies when I was selling his books, and marketing executives at his publisher, Viking Press, asked me to encourage other publishers to read and recommend his books. One of Davies’ letters was a response to my question for him after a visit I had made to London, which included a pilgrimage to a statue honoring the great thespian Henry Irving. Davies wrote to me on May 30, 1980:

“You will not find any magicians or jugglers under Henry Irving’s statue in London now because they have put flower beds around it, but at the time that Magnus Eisengrim [of The Deptford Trilogy] performed there it was flat pavement and street performers of all kinds gave their exhibitions there and on the outskirts there were always a number of pavement artists, who are also a vanishing breed. Unfortunately, life is becoming so heavily policed in our Welfare State that all these picturesque people are vanishing, but, when I saw them there when I was a young man, I always thought how pleased Irving would be that these humblest members of his profession were gathering, so to speak, under his cloak for protection.”  

I love Davies’ phrase “pavement artist” and the twinkle in his eye that appears in all these renderings of his audaciously bearded countenance!  #CANLit

Hooray for Matt Mays Who’s Coming to Play Live in NYC, Sept 13

I’m thrilled that Matt Mays, one of my favorite Canadian rockers, will be playing a live show Sept 13 in NYC at the excellent local venue, Rockwood Music Hall, Stage 2. It will be the first time I know of that Matt’s played Gotham since I began following Canadian rock n’ roll avidly almost 10 years ago.  I love all of Mays’s records, especially his exceptional concept album, “When the Angels Make Contact,” released in 2006. (It was written as a soundtrack for a movie that hasn’t been filmed.) Though it’ll be the first time I’ve heard him close to home, I have heard him live twice before. The first was at a big show in Toronto with his whole band at Lee’s Palace in 2012 (l.), and then in the wee hours at The Cameron House in 2014. Below is a picture from that sweet night. On June 22, 2014, I wrote at my other blog The Great Gray Bridge:
“Late last night I lucked in to an impromptu show at the great venue the Cameron House w/one of my musical heroes, Matt Mays. He had been invited by frontman Sam Cash to sit in with his band the Romantic Dogs. Matt began by leading the band, and the audience, in Neil Young’s “Helpless.” Matt and I spoke afterward, exchanging heartfelt appreciations. I conveyed my condolences for the sudden loss last year of his bandmate Jay Smith. He thanked me for remembering his old friend. I told him about Honourary Canadian and he told me he was already a reader of the blog. Thrilled to hear that, I gave him my card for which he thanked me and said it would be going in “a special place.” Here’s a shot of Sam and Matt from that night:

Click here for tickets to the Sept 13 show at Rockwood Music Hall. That’s a venue friendly to acoustic or unplugged acts. I wonder if Matt, who can rock with the best of them (I like think of him as Canada’s Springsteen, or a bit like Tom Petty), will be playing with a band or on his own. I’ll found out a month from today!

“Dirty Windshields,” Grant Lawrence’s New Book on Touring with The Smugglers

Readers of this blog may recall how much I enjoyed Grant Lawrence’s first two books,  Adventures in Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and other Stories from Desolation Sound, a memoir of his many summers spent in the environs of a family cabin on Desolation Sound in the wilds of British Columbia, and The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie, which chronicles his uneasy relationship with hockey. That’s why I’m delighted that yesterday I received a copy of Grant’s new book, Dirty Windshields: The Best and Worst of The Smugglers’ Tour Diaries, which chronicles the life of the band he was lead singer and frontman for in the 1990s, before he became a CBC broadcaster and music journalist. I began reading it right away, and was fascinated with the Prologue, which provides the origin story of The Smugglers. What I love about Grant’s books is how he blends hilarious laugh-out-loud tales you instantly want to share with your seat-mate, along with tug-on-the heart stories that leave you touched and a bit teary-eyed. Rock writer Ira Robbins, publisher of the Trouser Press Record Guide enjoyed Dirty Windshields: “Told with equal measures pride and shame, this uproarious chronicle of vans, violence, alcohol, cops, fires, floods, blizzards, wrong turns, crooked club owners, actual snakes, robbery, bodily fluids and calamities of all sorts is the perfect companion to the band’s mega-fun music.”

 

Always Something New to Learn about Canada, like the Acadian Dialect Chiac, Vernacular for Author Antonine Maillet

I recently heard a fascinating radio episode on the public radio program The World about a dialect of French heard nowadays exclusively in the regions of Canada where people of Acadian descent live today, Nova Scotia (NS) and New Brunswick (NB). It’s called Chiac, a name derived from a nearby town, Shediac, NB, that calls itself “Lobster Capitol of the World.” The program had run a shorter version of this half-hour podcast on WNYC, and I’m listening to the full version while writing this post. I was particularly excited when at the end of the radio bit they played a song by the incomparable Lisa Leblanc, who I heard live and loved at the CMJ festival in 2014, shown here. As readers of this blog may recall, I’ve traveled a lot in Atlantic Canada, including through Acadian locales, including the scenic island of Cape Breton, NS, where I learned about the mass expulsion of 1755-1764 which the British Navy forced on French-speaking people who’d settled in the region. I’d never known the local dialect had a name.

Relatedly, as editor at Walker & Co in 1987, I published the US edition of a novel by one of New Brunswick’s most honored writers, Antonine Maillet (b. 1929) of Bouctouche, NB, a town just north of Shediac facing the Gulf of St Lawrence across from the southern shores of Prince Edward Island. The book had come out in Canada a few years earlier, and I acquired US rights from a doyenne of Canadian publishing, Louise Dennys, for many years with Random House and Knopf Canada who was then part of her own company, Lester & Orpen Dennys. Maillet’s book was a fantastical historical novel, featuring a female pirate named Crache à Pic (translates as ‘spit-in-your-eye), skipper of a ship called Sea-Cow. who while Prohibition prevails in the States is running whiskey to American smugglers’ boats in the north Atlantic. My flap copy read, “Immediately reminiscent of Compton Mackenzie’s Whisky Galore and Howard Frank Mosher’s Disappearances, the Walker Adventure Series is pleased to publish The Devil is Loose! and Antonine Maillet, a storyteller of international reputation.”

Mackenzie’s 1947 novel was set during WWII, when a whisky-laden ship runs aground near the aptly-named Great Todday and Little Todday, Scottish islands whose ration  of spirits has run out, leaving locals high and dry, who must decide what to do with the contraband; it was adapted for the funny movie, Tight Little Island. Mosher’s Disappearances is a multi-generational romp featuring a family who sometimes go by the surname Goodman, and sometimes Bonhomme. They live in the mythical Northeast Kingdom, Vermont’s northernmost region, and run liquor across the very real Lake Memphremagog, a long body of fresh water that straddles the border with Canada. I used to quote the opening paragraph for customers who I thought would enjoy the novel. Mosher has since written many novels set in Kingdom County.

Maillet was by 1987 already the author of more than 25 novels and plays, rich work that draws on a centuries-long store of folklore and local knowledge, about which she’s a scholar. In ’87, she traveled to NYC from Montreal, where she divides time with Bouctouche, and gave a talk at the Americas Society on Park Ave. Her tour in the US was subsidized by the cultural ministry of Quebec. I’ll add, from the year I entered publishing as an editor, in 1986, Canadian authors I published in the US, including Lt Romeo Dallaire and Margaret Atwood, often received significant support from federal and provincial agencies, eager to promote Canadian writers, including authors freshly launched in their careers, like Steven Galloway, whose first adult novel Ascension I brought in 2002. This held true until a few years in to the reign of PM Stephen Harper, whose government shut off the funds for cultural exchange to the US. I’m hopeful the cultural outreach will be restored and reinvigorated under PM Justin Trudeau.

Maillet is a mighty woman of rather short stature, and quite striking in appearance. We found that the lectern reserved for her was too tall, and unaccountably the venue had no stool or riser for her to stand on. Fortunately, I found a big box holding many reams of photocopy paper and at this ultra white-shoe venue she stood atop it to read from her novel, and lecture in a forceful, accented English about the French vernacular in which she wrote the book, and much of her work. Though I don’t think she called it Chiac, she described the local tongue, and its grounding in the French spoken by arrivals in the new world beginning in the 16th century. She likened it to speaking the French of Rabelais, who I note died in 1555! She described the settlers’ remoteness from French in Europe, as France advanced in to the industrial revolution, an isolation that set the local language, as if trapped in amber. Maillet has also created theater characters like La Sagouine, a wise old woman who tells audiences stories and imparts lore, using the local vernacular. I feel like the live theatre piece must form the heart of Chiac. Maillet’s accomplishments are truly a marvel to be celebrated. I first learned of her when as a bookseller with Undercover Books in Cleveland, when in 1979, with an earlier novel—Pélagie-la-Charrette, or Return to the Homeland, an epic account of the Acadian expulsion, a diaspora that scattered them to other parts of North America, including Louisiana, where the Acadiennes, become Cajuns—she became the only North American writer, male or female, to win France’s most prestigious book prize, the Prix Goncourt.

I was aware that people of Acadian descent still maintain a kind of linguistic flavor now rare in the modern world, but was delighted to learn so much more about it in this excellent half-hour of radio. I love language stuff like this, all the better when it’s about one of my favorite countries, and one of my favorite regions in that country! Below is some detail from the podcast’s web page, which you can listen to in full here.

Appreciative for a Shoutout to My Editing of “The Revenant” from Canadian Pal Grant Lawrence

I'm tickled that Canadian music journalist, CBC broadcaster, author, friend—and devoted reader of adventure tales—Grant…

Posted by Philip Turner on Wednesday, 23 March 2016

I was tickled that Canadian music journalist, CBC broadcaster, author, friend—and devoted reader of adventure tales—Grant Lawrence happened to see my name in the Author’s Acknowledgments at the back of The Revenant and deduced that I had been the book’s original editor when Carroll&Graf Publishers brought out Michael Punke’s first novel in 2001-02. Thanks for the shoutout, Grant! Click here for full post.