Will Canadian Literature Finally Be Featured at the Frankfurt Book Fair?

Until this March 4 article by Globe & Mail Books Editor Mark Medley, I’m sure it wasn’t widely known outside of Canadian publishing that two years ago organizers of the Frankfurt Book Fair had invited Canada to be the fair’s featured country for 2017, a plum opportunity for any country’s book sector; nor that the Harper government, in typical fashion, stupidly declined the invitation (it would have required some investment).

Harper was horrible, and the government he created did too little to put cultural industries forward as economic generators. Glad to see that with PM Justin Trudeau leading Canada since last November the Book Fair has renewed the invitation. The Ministry of Heritage is considering it, with a decision possibly due this month on whether the funds required (around 4 million dollars CAN) will be provided. It would be for 2020. As an American editor who loves Canadian books, has published many Canadian authors in the US, and worked with many Canadian publishers, I’m very excited about this. It would be great to see Canadian literature recognized globally, even more than it is already. I’m hopeful this initiative will move forward.

George Elliott Clarke, a Stellar Ambassador for Canadian Poetry

Very pleased to learn via CBC News that George Elliott Clarke—”a seventh-generation Canadian of African-American and Mi’kmaq heritage, whose work has explored the African experience in Canada”—has been named the new Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada. In 2006, I published the US edition of his amazing novel George & Rue. He is an immensely likable person with an ebullient, inclusive personality, and a hugely talented writer.
 
 
Video of Professor Clarke:

Happy to See “All the Broken Things” Up for the Toronto Book Award

As readers of my blogs may recall, I enjoy circus novels and fiction about the carney world, with books by Robertson Davies, Angela Carter and Ellen Hunnicutt among my longtime favorites. Here’s a post on that world called “Life is a Carnival.” One literary highlight I discovered last year is Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s All the Broken Things, a resonant and beautifully written novel about a teenage immigrant to Canada from Vietnam who befriends an animal trainer and becomes a carnival’s star attraction wrestling the troupe’s bear. I wrote about the book here on my other site, The Great Gray Bridge. Earlier this week, I was pleased to read that the book is now officially available in the US.

A day later, I was delighted to see the book is a finalist for the Toronto Book Award, along with another novel I enjoyed very much, the apocalypse-tinged, yet gentle, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. Here’s a screenshot from Shelf Awareness showing all the finalists. The winner will be named at a public event hosted by CBC Radio’s Gill Deacon at the Toronto Reference Library’s Bram and Bluma Appel Salon on Oct. 15.

NXNE Day IV—Celebrating Community at the CBC Radio3 Picnic

During this year’s NXNE, Toronto’s great music festival, Honourary Canadian is publishing guest posts by Regina Sienra, aka Reginula, a music journalist who hails from Mexico City. She’s a stalwart fan of Canadian indie music, and has been recognized by the CBC Radio 3 community as our Fan of the Year. You can follow Regina on Twitter and Instagram where her handle is @Reginula. From one honourary Canadian to another, I’m delighted to be publishing her work here—Philip Turner.

Every June for the past five years, the CBC Radio 3 community has gathered in Toronto’s Trinity-Bellwoods Park for a fan picnic on the Saturday of NXNE to celebrate an extraordinary community that always supports and watches the back of the Canadian indie music scene.

Attendees from all over Canada, the US, Mexico, Puerto Rico, the UK, and other countries, savor the opportunity to spend quality time with a handful of indie musicians who offer to play acoustic tunes at the picnic, gratis I should add. The performers this year were Kathryn Calder, David Vertesi, Rolfe Klausener from The Acorn and Murder Murder, a band that recently participated in CBC’s Searchlight contest, winning the Northern Ontario region. Among the hosts for the picnic is erstwhile Radio 3 host Grant Lawrence, who emcees the proceedings. The photo above shows all the picnickers and musicians in a group shot taken by Vancouver photographer Christine Macavoy.

Kathryn Calder performed a couple sons from her new, self-titled album, as well as her classic “Turn a Light On,” accompanied only by herself on acoustic guitar, which is pretty special considering Calder is more often seen playing keys with the The New Pornographers, who were slated to play Yonge-Dundas Square later that night.

David Vertesi, longtime member of the Vancouver band, Hey Ocean!, performed songs from his recent album “Cardiography,” and although he only had a few hours of sleep after finishing a NXNE set at 3am that morning, Vertesi delivered a mesmerizing performance under the trees. David Vertesi

Rolf Klausener, introduced by CBC Radio 3’s Lana Gay, performed “Dominion,” from his Polaris long-listed album, as well as songs from her earlier work, sharing some stories about his family and how his 2008 Polaris-Prize nominated album Glory Hope Mountain was inspired by his mom’s journey as an immigrant from Nicaragua to Canada.

The New Pornographers are true headliners, which earned them the prime time slot Saturday night at Yonge-Dundas Square. Performing after California sensation Best Coast and Canadian act Mise en Scene, the Pornos hit the stage without longtime members Destroyer and Neko Case (she was in the NYC area for the Clearwater Festival).

To make up for the absence of the auburn-haired crooner, the band crammed some other hits in to the setlist and, as in the past years, Kathryn Calder took charge of Neko’s songs.

Rather than focusing on 2014’s “Brill Bruisers,” the band went through their entire history and played songs like “Slow Descent into Alcoholism,” “Sing me Spanish Techno” and “All the Old Showstoppers,” closing the evening at a packed YDS with fan favorite “The Bleeding Heart Show.”

NXNE 2015 Day III, Enjoying Born Ruffians & Hollerado at Yonge-Dundas Square

Because I couldn’t be in Toronto for this year’s NXNE, the city’s great music festival, Honourary Canadian is publishing guest posts by Regina Sienra, aka Reginula, a music journalist who hails from Mexico City. She’s a stalwart fan of Canadian indie music, recognized by the CBC Radio 3 community as our Fan of the Year. You can follow Regina on Twitter and Instagram where her handle is @Reginula. From one honourary Canadian to another, I’m delighted to be publishing her work here! Philip Turner, Publisher, The Great Gray Bridge and Honourary Canadian.

Screen Shot 2015-06-22 at 6.00.33 PMOne of the best opportunities NXNE offers live music fans is close proximity to both new and classic acts from the local Toronto and Ontario scene, as well as acts from the rest of Canada and internationally. On Friday, the ones in charge of that approach were the guys from MusicOntario, who threw an afternoon party at The Garrison.

KASHKA, latest project from Kat Burns, leader of the seminal band founded in 2006, Forest City Lovers, performed at this party around 5 in the afternoon, an unusual set time for her. “I feel a vampire,” and it’s understandable, her electronic sound—rather than the indie, almost folk sound from her earlier projects—would fit better at a nighttime party. Still, Kat and her bandmates delivered a relaxing set that included tracks from her 2014 release “Bound.”

One of the biggest shows of the festival had just been announced only four days earlier: Hollerado and Born Ruffians would play a free show at Yonge and Dundas Square on Friday night. YDSQ is like the Times Square of Toronto, and crowds are big at these NXNE shows, especially with two big Ontario acts, definitely what NXNE must’ve been hoping for when they booked the show.

Always stylish and rhythmic Born Ruffians hit the stage around 8:30, opening with their latest single “Oh Cecilia.” The setlist included songs from all of their albums, pleasing both long time fans and newcomers. Singer Luke Lalonde is a charming man on stage indeed, but bassist (Name)’s energy on stage and virtuosity is the soul of the band. Luke Lalonde announced they will be releasing a new album later this year.

Up next came Hollerado, with a brand new female member to help the quartet on keys, guitar, and backing vocals. First song of the set was “Pick Me Up,” the upbeat track from their 2013 release, “White Paint.” Stage props were brought in to play as that first tune that included lots of strewn confetti. Also, when the band played “Firefly,” a song from their recent effort, “111 Songs,” several personalities came on stage to throw white illuminated balls onto the crowd.

The set also included some new songs that will be on Hollerado’s next album. From those samples, it’s somewhat noticeable the band has moved on from their striking sound to a calmer, a là “Pinkerton” sound.

Down west on Dundas Street, CBC Music also held a showcase featuring Jane’s Party, Iceage (a Danish band), CATL and Ben Caplan, the latter being joined by a band called The Casual Smokers, a group of musicians Caplan himself discovered on Queen St in Toronto. The sheer number of musicians on stage enhanced the intense presentation of Caplan, the bearded singer whose voice often resembles an articulate growl.

Leonard Cohen Singing His 1970 Ode “Joan of Arc,” in 2015

Quite a gorgeous Leonard Cohen song here, a recent recording of his longtime standby, “Joan of Arc,” from a forthcoming album, “Can’t Forget.” His voice has gotten so much deeper over the years, which makes the gorgeous voices of the female singers he chooses to sing with sound all the more gorgeous. Listen to it at CBC Music.   

How We May Grow Even After Losing a Part of Ourselves

Naked Imperfection was my #FridayReads last weekend, and it gripped me straight through until early this week. Gill Deacon is the host of CBC Radio’s daily afternoon show from Toronto, Here and Now, with a voice that’s good company on the air, and which translates well in print. Prior to her broadcasting career, she was an environmental journalist and consumer health advocate. She lived consciously and consumed carefully, avoiding products that could harm her, her family, and her fellow denizens of the earth. She wrote an earlier book called There’s Lead in Your Lipstick. This made her all the more ill-prepared when she received a chilling diagnosis of breast cancer. She propels her narrative forward rapidly, in modified stream-of-consciousness style, with many of her paragraphs built of staccato sentences, like this one, after she’s had a mastectomy: “Tonight, as Grant and I move between the sheets in the blue-grey, pixelated, late-night bedroom light, I look down at my chest. A single orb of flesh presses up against my husband’s chest, its twin felled—an abandoned goddess, carrying on alone. Beside it, the graveyard of ribs. I am snatched by the escapist pleasure of my husband’s touch by the reminder of what had happened. Mourning the imperfect body I once had. I wish I still had two breasts. Sometimes the sadness surfaces like a beluga gasping for air. How can I be grateful for being misshapen.” The closing chapters were so well-crafted, I slowed my reading, lest I finish the book too quickly. I kept paging back to re-read passages I’d just read, so apt were they about living a full life, even if an imperfect one. After writing candidly about the prosthetic breast she got after her surgery, Deacon ends her book, some years in to the slow-motion crisis, with good news from her doctor, who “used the words cancer and gone in the same sentence. ‘Go out and live your life,’ she said with a smile. ‘You’re always going to have more doctor’s appointments than most of your friends, and technically it takes more than five years before the odds of you getting cancer drop down to match the general population, but for all intents and purposes your cancer is gone. Get back to whatever you were doing before this disease rang your bell.'”

Much of my recent reading and other cultural consumption has featured people who through accident or illness have endured the loss of parts of themselves, like Miles O’Brien, whom I tweeted about above. To his credit, he not only wrote in New York magazine about the frightening accident—when on a reporting trip to the Philippines last February he suffered an accident that led to the amputation of his left arm—he also reports on the neurological sources of phantom pain, and the design and engineering of high-tech prosthetics, a field that’s burgeoning due in part due to the return home of many wounded veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the growth of miniature electronics.(Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine)

Relatedly, I later listened to a gripping episode of a new CBC radio series called Live Through This. It featured an account of Paul Templer, a wilderness guide in Zimbabwe who survived an attack by an aggressive hippo that nearly killed him, though he lost an arm in the melee, during which he was for some time in the gaping mouth of the animal. Templer healed and was fitted with a prosthetic arm. He later guided another trip down the Zambezi River, to raise money that will help victims of land mine explosions receive prosthetic devices of their own.

These incidents reminded me of what my longtime author Lt General Roméo Dallaire told me in 2006, when he was in New York City, promoting Carroll & Graf’s edition of his Canadian bestseller, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Reflecting on the PTSD he’s been afflicted with ever since, as commander of the under-manned UN Peacekeeping Force in Rwanda in 1993 he endured the searing experience of trying to prevent the genocide, he told me: “When I slip into depression, the medicines and therapy act like a prosthetic and keep me from falling.”

It occurs to me that in some ways human evolution is a long-running narrative of the development of various kinds of prostheses, from the first crutch to aid a hobbled walker, to the development of finely ground lenses for eyeglasses, the fitting of dental plates (the latter two are prostheses that I use every day), limbs, and other miscellaneous body parts. Even the wheel can be seen in this light as an aid to our daily work, and the club or hammer. Whether affixed and integral to our body; an extension of our hand or arm; or wholly apart from our person, it it fair to say that tools = prosthetics, and vice versa.

These were among the reflections stirred up in me while reading Gill Deacon’s astonishingly fine memoir, a superb first person narrative. I recommend it if you want to read a candid memoir, and if you, or a friend or relative, has been ill. There’s lots of hope and bright humor in this honest book.

 

N.B. Gill Deacon’s book is the second terrific memoir I’ve read by a female Canadian writer in the past few months, the earlier one having been Jan Wong’s Out of the Blue, which I made a #FridayReads last March 14 and wrote about again on March 21, after I’d finished it.

When People Wish They Could Re-chart the Course of History

Tandey paintingKudos to the Toronto Star for running this story on a fascinating historical what-if that is examined in a new nonfiction book, The Man Who Didn’t Shoot Hitler: The Story of Henry Tandey VC and Adolf Hitler, 1918 by David Johnson. In a surprising twist, the mystery, a sort of urban legend about Hitler, is rooted in the painting shown here, depicting the aftermath of a battle in France, in 1914, early in WWI.

Star reporter Stephanie MacLellan writes that the oil painting—featuring the most-decorated British private, Henry Tandey, carrying a comrade on his shoulders—was commissioned in 1923 by Tandey’s regiment, the Green Howards, executed by war artist Fortunino Matania from a drawing made by a company draughtsman during a lull in fighting when a military hospital was being evacuated.

Many historians, including Tandey biographer Johnson, believe that Hitler was prone to embellishing his WWI record. For instance, his work as a runner, shuttling messages, was entirely behind friendly lines, not near hostilities. MacLellan picks up the tale in the 1930s, after Hitler had been elected to the office of German Chancellor:

“One of the German medical officers at First Ypres, [had been] a Dr. Schwend, [who] went on to join Hitler’s staff. According to Tandey biographer Johnson, Schwend stayed in touch with one of the British soldiers he treated, and in December 1936, the soldier sent him a copy of the Matania painting…. Hitler had his staff order a large photograph of the painting from the Green Howards. His aide sent a note thanking them for the artwork that captured a scene from Hitler’s first battle: ‘The Fuehrer is naturally very interested in things connected with his own war experiences. He was obviously moved when I showed him the picture. He has directed me to send you his best thanks for your friendly gift which is so rich in memories.’

“Hitler hung the photo in the study of his Bavarian retreat. It was here in September 1938, the story goes, that it was spotted by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who had come to Germany in his famed attempt to secure ‘peace in our time.’ According to [a] 1940 Canadian Press story, Chamberlain asked his host about this unusual artistic choice. ‘That man came so near to killing me that I thought I should never see Germany again,’ Hitler told him, pointing to Tandey. ‘Providence saved me from such devilish accurate fire as those English boys were aiming at us.’ On his return to England, Chamberlain telephoned Tandey at home to relay the story. To biographer Johnson, this is where the story starts to fall apart—starting with the fact that Tandey didn’t have a home telephone.”

The legend began with that inaccurate article in 1940, which according to MacLellan, left readers with the idea that, as Germans were routed from a battle at Marcoing, “one of them caught Tandey’s attention. He was quoted at the time, ‘I was going to pick him off, but he was wounded, and I didn’t like to shoot a wounded man,’ he said, according to the Canadian Press story that ran on the Toronto Star’s front page. Tandey didn’t know it at the time, he said, but the wounded German he had in his sights was Hitler, then a 29-year-old dispatch runner with the Bavarian army. It’s one of the most tantalizing what-ifs in history: What would have happened if Tandey had killed Hitler in World War I when he had the chance? The only problem, historians say, is that the incident probably never happened.”

“A more likely possibility, according to historian Thomas Weber [author of Hitler’s First War is that Hitler]— ever the embellisher—used the Tandey story to win political points with Chamberlain, who had come looking for assurances of peace. ‘I think it was just a good tool for Hitler to tell Chamberlain the story of an amicable Anglo-German encounter that he had….Hitler had an incredible talent to tell people he met exactly what they wanted to hear.’ And if he was going to have his life spared by a British soldier, who better than a famous war hero who had won a Victoria Cross, Military Medal and Distinguished Conduct Medal in a matter of weeks? In other words, Tandey.”

In addition, MacLellan reports that Hitler’s service records show that he couldn’t have been near Marcoing, where Tandey certainly was, on the dates in question. MacLellan and her sources fall squarely in the skeptical camp. Their reporting makes it seem remarkable that for the past several decades there have been people who believed a British soldier might’ve killed Adolf Hitler long before WWII, but declined to pull the trigger. For his part, in later years, Tandey doubted it happened at all.

Counter-factuals in historical reading are fun to make up and consider, but sometimes a purported counter-factual may just be non-factual. I think this example, probably more urban legend than anything else, points to our human impulse in which we wish we could erase terrible things from our memories and our common history. How much better the world would’ve been better off if Hitler hadn’t even been alive in the 1930s. To the mindset that believes in something like Henry Tandey’s lamentable decency at not finishing off a wounded enemy soldier, there is the accompanying, “But, he might’ve done it,” therefore keeping alive the hope it needn’t have occurred. This incident also reminds that errors and mis-reporting in news stories can have a knock-on effect lasting decades! I recommend you read Stephanie MacLellan’s whole article, one of the best reads in today’s papers.