Number 543 Never Looked Quite So Good.

Hey folks! A couple new publicity hits for Mark Kingwell, one from UWO's Gazette, and another from our dear friends at the National Post (who seem to have at long last gone completely round the bend). From their new compilation of Top 2,012 things for 2012, we're proud to announce that our very own Mr. Kingwell is number 543. Anyone else on there we should know about? We'd read the whole thing ourselves ... but that's 2012 seconds / 33 minutes / 0.543 hours we just don't have.

The Agenda with Steve Paiken: Mark Kingwell on Coarse Discourse and the Politics of Luck

Unruly Voices author Mark Kingwell has been chatting with TVO's Steve Paiken on The Agenda. The first segment aired Nov. 5th and is called "Coarse Discourse"; the second aired yesterday and is called "The Politics of Luck." They go handsomely together. Enjoy!

Nov. 5th: Mark Kingwell on TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paiken ("Coarse Discourse")
Nov. 27th: Mark Kingwell on TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paiken ("The Politics of Luck")

The Ups and Downs of the Uncanny Valley: An Interview with Mark Kingwell

For those of you who would like a preview of what you might get at our "All Saints and Fast Zombies" night with Mark Kingwell at Type Books this evening, I'm posting a little interview. On the title of Unruly Voices, the importance of the humanities, urban architecture, and more. See you tonight on Queen! For more information, visit our page on landoflastnight'szombieinstagrams.com. 

U of T Prof and Harper's Contributing Editor
Mark Kingwell.

“The Ups and Downs of the Uncanny Valley”: An Interview with Mark Kingwell.

1.      Tell us about the title of your book. To what does Unruly Voices refer?

The phrase has a layered meaning for me. One of the core essays is about the erosion of civility as a feature of public discourse, and as a virtue of political life. This goes back to my earliest interests in political theory, especially the virtues (or otherwise) of citizens. So that’s one kind of unruly voice, the one that disrupts politics for self-serving ends. But there is another, positive sense of the phrase that alludes to the mix of voices and tones that make up a single human consciousness—the unruly voices of personhood. The modern idea is that we gather these together, smooth them out, and call the result an ‘inner voice’ or some such. But the insights that dominate the later essays are about the impossibility of doing this, the enduring unruliness of the voices that are the texture of consciousness. So, finally, there is the sense that the collection itself is a matter of unruly voices, the different tones and pitches of the various essays, which range from popular to fairly scholarly, even as they all revolve around the basic question: Is democracy possible?

2.      You mention the range of tone in these essays, which deserves a question in itself. Not many writers can shift from strict philosophy to dramatic monologues in the voice of President Obama! What else did you hope to achieve by bringing these different modes of writing together?

Well, I wanted to highlight a range of approaches and styles of writing, all of them linked by themes—and by the fact of their authorship by this allegedly singular consciousness I am, or ‘have’, or ‘experience’. It happens that I routinely contribute to a variety of publications that expect different styles, so that is directly reflected here. All of the essays date from the period between 2008 and 2012, so obviously the dominant politics facts they are preoccupied with include Obama’s first term, the 2008 economic collapse, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy Wall Street movement. I don’t see them adding up to a single political theory so much as illustrating various facets of what it means to dwell critically on the world of democratic politics.

3.      Throughout Unruly Voices you emphasize the value of literature and the humanities to North American democracy, and you often will teach works of literature in philosophy classes. In your opinion what does literature bring to philosophy that straight-up philosophical writing doesn’t? And do you think literature is more relevant to democratic theory than to other lines of philosophical inquiry?

The emphasis on human imagination, once central to democratic theory, has been lost in recent years, and part of my purpose here is to try and bring it back. The cultivation of consciousness that is unique to the experience of literature is a necessary part of the ‘sympathy’ (as Adam Smith called it) that alone makes society possible. We have to see the other as an entity with the same mysterious qualities of desire and reason as we sense in ourselves. Literature is not the only way to accomplish this, but it remains the best—not least because, as Northrop Frye said, argument actually convinces few people, while narrative and imagination often do. And further, without imagination and vision, argument has no point or direction. To use the title of one of my previous books, we have to engage with the very idea of a world we want.

4.      In “Retouching the Void” you discuss an interview you conducted with Michael Arad, architect of the 9/11 Memorial Plaza. At this time you’d already published one book on consciousness and the city (Concrete Reveries), which focused especially on New York and Shanghai. What was it like to revisit your thoughts on public space with Arad? Did the idea of the memorial shift your thoughts on New York as a transglobal city?

I always love going back to New York since the days I lived there and drafted those parts of Concrete Reveries. And Arad is a passionate New Yorker as well as a talented architect. His task was almost impossible: to memorialize the most significant national, political disaster in recent American history. I don’t think he entirely succeeded, but the attempt is, like all the best architecture, an occasion for thought.

5.      You’ve been writing what we could call moral philosophy for a long time, and you’ve always had an interest in how we as people can create better lives, governments, and societies for ourselves. This is your seventeenth book. How has your approach to writing moral philosophy changed since you published your first book in 1994?

I think I’m less ambitious, in the sense that I no longer retain the full version of what might be called the Philosopher’s Fallacy, namely that argument and theory can save the day when it comes to ethics and politics. I believe more firmly than ever in the centrality of language, however—my version of Heidegger’s claim that “language speaks us”—and these essays from what I guess must be my ‘middle period’ reflect that instability. I’ve been writing more and more in a kaleidoscopic fashion, I think, using both argument and other discursive means to illuminate one facet after another of a basic idea, or problem. Here, of course, that idea is democracy.

6.      Do you feel your interest in popular culture separates your work from that of others working in the field of democratic theory or ethical philosophy? Why or why not?

Well, it does separate it as a matter of fact—most political theorists don’t think about zombies or sports or movies as much as I tend to do. But culture is culture, and the idea that there is ‘official’ culture on one side and ‘popular’ culture on the other is a relic of another historical moment. I follow people like Barthes and Bourdieu, Veblen and Galbraith, in thinking that you can’t understand politics without considering how people actually spend their time, what they consume, and what they care about.

7.      If you had to pick one thing for a reader to take away from Unruly Voices, what would it be?

A sense of possibility, even as the ground seems to be shifting beneath our feet. I finish with an essay that considers the idea of the uncanny, and surely we live in uncanny times, where meanings distort and double, revenants roam, and the repressed always returns. Unruly Voices is my attempt at providing a partial guide to the ups and downs of the uncanny valley that is 21st-century democratic politics.

The Weekend in Review; Sleeps till Zombies, Two!

Afternoon, folks, and happy Tuesday. It was a good if busy weekend here at HQ, what with BookFest Windsor blasting through town and a spate of new reviews to yap about. See them yet on our spiffy new Facebook page? Which you should like, if you haven't already? Yes? Yes. Go. Do it now.* 

So ... here we are. Two more hits (pow pow!) for Anakana Schofield, who was a knockout at IFOA and written up by her panel's moderator (Susan Cole of NOW). Since when does invoking Ulysses get you hopped up and down on? Find out here. And should you be curious as to why AK would claim that "Behind every vice president is a Canadian episodic novel"—which is to say, if you missed that THING in the VP debates—take a look at her IFOA questionnaire. 

It was also a good weekend for short story champ Nadine McInnis, who appeared at the Ottawa Book Festival on Sunday and was interviewed ("Confronting Mortality") in Saturday's Ottawa Citizen. Both the citizen and the Windsor Star also ran syndications of Emily Keeler's piece from the Post last week (hup hup)! Last but not least, Quill & Quire, stalwart as they are, had a few nice nicenesses to say about Craig Boyko's Psychology and Other Stories. 

Last but not least, she says with a tremor and a shiver and a quake, there are only TWO MORE SLEEPS till Mark Kingwell launches Unruly Voices at Type Books. (It's possible that zombies make me a little queasy.) RSVP on the you-know-where today! 

*I had to get that plea out of the way early before I talk about Mark's book, since, um, the third sentence of the jacket copy may or may not suggest that facebook-style 'likes' are eroding complex notions of personhood. Sigh. So 'like' us if you like us, and if not the latter, pretend.

Bookfest Windsor starts tonight ... along with the zombie countdown.

Morning, folks! Today's an exciting day for literature in Windsoria, as it's the kickoff to BookFest, where our very own Ray Robertson (Chathamite and UWindsor Writer-in-Residence candidate for 2013) will be reading with Maxine Gadd, Marty Gervais, Peter Hrastovec, John B. Lee, and Bruce Meyer. Tonight, 7:30, Capitol Theatre. 

Being Thursday October 25th also means we're only one week away from the Zombie Invasion of Toronto. My goodness. Get your shotguns and a copy of the constitution. Mark Kingwell's gonna put Simon Pegg to shame!

All Saints and Fast Zombies,
brought to you live (sort of)
by Biblioasis and Type Books.

New Manse News

"Fans of satirical fiction will love this book," the National Post said of C.P. Boyko's Psychology and Other Stories last weekend: "so will anyone who has reclined on a therapist’s couch, or taken a psychology course from a larger-than-life professor with obvious neuroses, or read a self-help book by an author whose biography reveals them to be a total mess."

Dan Wells and Chris Andrechek
wrestle the Counter of Death 

The BiblioManse Office in its
Final Hours

The New (Blue!) Office

First Books on the Shelves. Does
anyone else smell poetry?

We know something about total messes over here at the new Bibliomanse. Oh yes we do. That's why we've let a WHOLE WEEK go by without talking to you about the VERY EXCITING THINGS that are happening, will happen, HAVE happened, to our VERY EXCITING authors. We've had a spate of reviews and we have people at festivals and gosh darnit we've even had an award nod. And, of course (of course? really? is it real?), we've moved. Last Friday was the Great Migration. We've been phoneless and internetless to varying degrees over the past four days. Which is just my way of saying, er, if you've perhaps been trying to get in touch and found us slightly less responsive than usual, please do just give another poke and we'll get back to you as soon as we're able. It's been, er, zany. (Imagine steel desks with undersides like the death star and an old cash counter from the Bay [and then from the old shop on Ouellette, and most recently from the basement of Dan's house], an old cash counter made entirely of pressboard, glue and maybe some secretly of anvils—imagine all that good stuff being discombobulated and hauled around some staggering corners on steepish stairs, and then imagine something of the 10,000 books in said basement, and you've got an inkling of our week.)
In any event. I apologize for not giving each of these a proper write-up, but here are a few of the wonderful happenings that we've neglected in our boxish and internet-starved state. We'll have pictures of the new office-in-progress up soon. Till then!

Here's the little swooning-on-the-couch for Boyko that ran in the Post on Saturday (what a glower)! 

Here's an interview that David Helwig did with Seth for CBC PEI last week. 

Here are Mark Kingwell's "Seven Pathways to the Stars," which peeped out this Saturday in the Globe, and here is his upcoming IFOA interview with John Ralston Saul.

Here is Alice Petersen's All the Voices Cry reviewed in the Montreal Review of Books. And HERE—ding ding, exciting!—is the press release announcing that Alice Petersen has been shortlisted for the QWF's First Book Prize! Congratulations to Alice from all of us. 

Here are Rebecca Rosenblum's first and second appearances at the Vancouver International Writers Festival, starting today (the Human Carnival with Anne Fleming, AL Kennedy, and Jessica Westhead, then an Afternoon Tea with Steven Heighton, Linda Svendsen, Bill Gaston, Lorna Crozier and J. Jill Robinson);

Here is Anakana Schofield's appearance tonight at said VIWF, in the always-spectacular Literary Caberet (brought to you by Joe Biden—wait, what?—and for which she did an interview on CiTR); 

and here are her appearances at IFOA!

Tonight's an event night here at HQ, with Eugene McNamara reading from Dreaming of Lost America at 7 PM. RSVP on FaceBook today (now, always)—hope to see you soon!