Slow News Day

And if there's anything duller than the annual round of 'Many People Do Christmas Shopping' articles it's 'City That Rarely Gets Snow Confounded By Snow'.

So instead, why not take time to enjoy Virgil on Facebook, courtesy of our New Brunswick Correspondent?

Onwards to Pulau Weh & Nuremberg

The one article I'll keep from this weekend's papers is apparently not available on line: an article in the Globe travel section on the fabulous scuba-diving off the remote Indonesian island of Pulau Weh. Of course, all these fabulous-diving/remote-island pieces are exactly the same, so just take this as an invitation to construct your own tropical reverie instead.... Still, did you know that there's something called the megamouth shark, a prehistoric looking deepwater monster discovered only in 1976 and sighted only 42 times since? Pulau Weh's got 'em. (Now and then.)

While we're on the subject of stuff you and I didn't know, follow the links to the golden hats. (is that cool or what? don't you want one??) This is why it's worth reading even right-wing blogs now and then, if the right-winger is sufficiently idiosyncratic.

All the cool kids are doing it

... so naturally I'm not sure exactly what it is, but I have been been 'tagged with a meme' by Miss Lucy. I'm supposed to take the book nearest to me, and post the 5th sentence on p. 56.

Oh no, I am sitting nearest the retro pulp shelf. And what's that sitting at the near end of the shelf? Oh dear. Ahem:

"If I had had a son I should have liked him to be snub-nosed and bullet-headed, for ugliness in the male is a security for virtue and a passport to popularity."

Heh, you could have done a lot worse. This is an aged clubman reminiscing to our narrator about the evil yet charismatically beautiful Arabin family, who are the mainspring of The Dancing Floor by John Buchan, which is really one of the oddest books I've ever read. It has Buchan's trademark combination of totally ludicrous, coincidence-driven plot with such effective scene-writing as to be at once gripping and unreadable. All aspiring pulp writers should have to read all of Buchan and Daphne du Maurier to learn their trade (and Agatha Christie for the converse virtues and vices). What makes The Dancing Floor specially weird even for Buchan is that there's a lot of very vivid archaic Greek religion mixed in with the adventure story -- it's as if he'd hallucinated the whole plot while stricken with a high fever in the middle of reading The Golden Bough. In other words, it's really rather good....

I believe I'm also supposed to put the fifth sentence of p. 56 from 'the book I'm currently working on'. Unfortunately that description currently picks out a pile of unassembled rubbish with no such page numbers. But I'm sorry to say that several of my current papers-in-progress run to that (if you double space which I therefore usually don't), so here goes from 'Plato on Desire for the Good':

For it is criterial for agency that not everything can count for the agent as success: I must aim at some determinate outcome which my performance may or may not bring about.

This is by way of explaining an argument in Plato, but also in my sly historian's way insinuating that he is right. An insinuation I stand by.

Ah, but is it any truer or better than the Buchan? It certainly isn't any better written.

The book club for men

As for the content of the new Books subsection, there's an interesting piece about an all-male book club: I didn't know there were such things. They read books about wars, Genghis Khan, Conrad Black, and hardly any fiction. (Just a Ken Follett [!] and a hit literary novel about Afghanistan, The Kite Runner.) The group has been around for 30 years, which is pretty impressive, and includes a wide range of vaguely upper-middle class anglo Montrealers. What struck me was this bit:

...the insinuation that the male of the literary-club species will always choose blood-and-guts reality ahead of polished fiction from the pens of great writers. This is, er, correct, as I realized one evening as I left the house happily cradling my copy of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. My wife's book club was reading Proust.

Now I rarely feel in need of gender reassignment, and still hope to get around to Proust one day, but I had a real surge of fellow-feeling here. To see why, just look further down page F9 to the blurb for the new 'Ask the Author' on-line feature, whose first author is Giller-winning Joseph Boyden. Here's the book he's talking about:

The novel follows Suzanne Bird, a native Canadian from Northern Ontario whose sister, a fashion model, goes missing in New York City. Suzanne leaves behind her troubled uncle Will, whose life also unfolds in the book.

The Giller judges said Boyden's novel "takes us on two journeys. Suzanne's sister Annie retraces her sister's steps, from the Native poverty below the Gardiner Expressway to the extravagant fast lanes of New York. Will, their uncle, follows a very different path as he deals with the demons of memory, revenge, and darkest loss."

See, this is the kind of stuff women read. And I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. I can't count the times I've gone into Book City and flipped over the intriguing-looking new novels only to see every single one described as a haunting luminous meditation on family, memory and loss, interweaving multiple resonant narrative journeys in a dazzlingly lyrical deeply personal poetic etc. etc. causing me to flee in horror.

I love fiction. I will read any amount of Evelyn Waugh and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I have some substantial chunks of Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble more or less committed to memory. So why is it so hard now, or socially unacceptable, to write a novel with a simple but compelling story in a style which gets to the fucking point? And why have women been gulled into thinking they like this... other stuff? Maybe they really do like it? But I can't help thinking of contemporary fiction as the literary equivalent of fashion nobody looks good in and microwaveable food that tastes like nothing: something you sell to women because women can be bullied into anything.

J'ai l'oeil Americain et je dirai tout

One of the less-noted benefits of living in Toronto is the whole French TV thing. Due to an obscure regulation from the Trudeau era, cable companies are required to provide French-language channels equal to the number of Francophones currently resident in Toronto. Which means we're now up to four: CBLFT, TFO, TV5, and RDI. (Wait, where did RDI go? Did somebody leave town?) Freed from the unreasonable demands of actual viewers, every one of them offers better programming than the anglo channels; TFO in particular runs great movies, often with surprise value as the TV guide coverage is sketchy. Late Friday night I was hooked by something grainy and enigmatic which eventually resolved itself into a classic of the cinema francais: Le Corbeau, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot and a safe bet for the best French film of 1943. A tense, queasy-making tale of poison pen letters in a country village, Le Corbeau was banned at the Liberation for giving an, erm, unsympathetic portrait of French provincial life, and blacklisted by the Catholic Church to boot (films à proscrire absolument parce qu'ils sont essentiellement pernicieux au point de vue social, moral ou religieux). Apparently it was made by a German company of collaborationist stripe, but the movie itself is misanthropic in a subversive and implicitly lefty way, much like the creeptastic Bunuel Diary of a Chambermaid. So check it out, and don't say bilingualism never did nothin' for ya.

The post title should be a link: for proof that the interwebs can explain anything, see here.