Ray Robertson on Dire Straits, Literature & Literalness

When I was in Grade Five, my first errant rock & roll epiphany came while listening to Billy Joel's It's Still Rock & Roll To Me, from Glass Houses. I remember the AHA!!! moment: so that's what I'd been doing wrong! That and my egg salad and dill pickle sandwiches.

It was a good lesson in not taking music (or literature) too literally.

In today's Globe & Mail, Ray Robertson (Moody Food and this Fall's Why Not?) weighs in on the current Dire Straits/ Money For Nothing censorship stupidity. In Grade Seven, every single one of would have given anything to be that little faggot in the earring and the mink coat. Some of us still would. Sadly, my mink-wearing days are long behind me.

Robertson writes:

Every writer with a new book to peddle knows the drill: put together 10 to 15 minutes of what will work best as spoken-word material in preparation for the readings one will be expected to give while out on the publicity circuit. What works most effectively live, I’ve found, is plenty of dialogue combined with a few choice passages illustrating one’s hopefully unique way with the shaping and saying of the English language. Conversely, what rarely works in front of an audience is irony. Better your chances of charming a skeptical crowd of would-be book buyers with potentially alienating scenes of sex and violence and the repeated use of profane language than to ask one’s listeners to understand that the narrative voice to which they’re listening is not to be taken at all times 100-per-cent literally. And double the prospective trouble if your narrator is even slightly less than wholly reliable.

What most of the recent to-censor or not-to-censor brouhaha surrounding Mark Knopfler’s song Money for Nothing fails to uncover is that humour and its prized offspring, irony, are literature’s primary instruments of genuine exploration. Blunt literalness is fine for schoolchildren, who need to be clearly instructed that race and sexual orientation aren’t how we should identify individuals, but the twin scalpel blades of humour and irony are needed to dissect, for instance, the more adult concern of why this is unfortunately so often not the case.

For the rest of Ray's piece, which ranges through Welty, Twain and Kundera, and pinpoints all of the standard stupidities this mess brings to the surface, please go here.

The Carnival Barker Speaks... ( A Canada Reads Post)

[cue Tom Waits' Black Rider]

Ladies & Gentlemen.... Canada Reads 2011 Brings to the Big Top tonight, not only human oddities (& what better description can there be for most authors and publishers?) but the 40 essential Canadian novels to be voted on by YOU, to be whittled down to the 10 essential Canadian novels to be voted on by YOU, to be further whittled down to the 5 essential Canadian novels to be selected and defended by... someone else. Or, at least, so we assume. No one knows for sure what the Canada Reads folk have in mind for this. If you want predictions, you're in the wrong tent. Go see the woman with the feather in her cap and the mirrors under her table.

There's been a lot of discussion about this new approach to Canada Reads, both for & against (mainly against). It's left me a bit ambivalent. I agree with much of the criticisms Beattie & co. have made of the process, and though those who have countered by saying it's just marketing or a populist response to a populist program make valid points, it doesn't mean that there isn't something at least slightly distasteful about it. It's led to a bit of a sense of inertia here: though I have posted a Canada Reads memo here late last week (Canada Reads Needs More Rock & Roll [which it most certainly does]), and done the FaceBook thing, and *Tweeted*, and arranged a few newspaper stories and a radio interview regionally to get the word out, I haven't been able to beg my mailing lists on our behalf. I will, selectively, likely later today, but felt I needed to make a case for this book, here, first.

But how to do so? Readers of Thirsty have other commitments, even public ones. There's no reason they shouldn't vote for Sean Dixon, a very worthy candidate. To ask them to vote for a book that they haven't read, or read and did not love, merely because we published it, seems ... unreasonable. Erin Balser tweeted that more than 6000 people have voted for the final 10 books: if any of the handful of small press books make the cut, it's likely that they have been carried by people who haven't even read them, who are voting for it out of some sense of team spirit or for other reasons entirely their own. And there's nothing wrong with that either. But there is something queasy-making about it. Getting repeated Facebook messages to vote for one book or the other when, as a publisher, I have a book on the list, seems callous, and makes me feel as if the writers and publishers sending these messages either don't know who their audiences are, or don't care. It is, in the end, all about them. I can't ask Kerry Clare to vote for Moody Food because she's already made it clear she's voting for The Girl Who Saw Everything. Or Bronwyn Keinapple, as she's already said she didn't like it. Or others, who represent other presses, or may have books of their own in contention. Or who have friends with books of their own in contention. Or ...

There is a difference between marketing and popularity contests: mainly one of knowing your audience. Whatever else I might say about all of this, I have no doubt that Canada Reads knows theirs, and whatever they do to reach out to it can't be an entirely bad thing. We may wish the audience was different, but that is not the same thing at all.

Yet, had Canada Reads not opened it up to the public in the way that they have, a Biblioasis book wouldn't even be a contender. The token small press inclusion would be a Coach House or Cormorant, which isn't meant to disparage either press, because they are both exceptional: it's merely to acknowledge that we do not often look beyond our own noses, and one can see it time and time again when Toronto tastemakers decide to get charitable. So, despite the discomfort I feel about all of this, I owe a debt of gratitude to the Canada Reads crew in this instance: without this, we wouldn't even be on the list. We've been able to generate considerable regional media for it, and sold at least a handful of copies we would not, likely have otherwise done. By opening things up, there's at least a slight chance that Moody Food, a book we believed in enough to bring back in print last year, might find a real audience for the first time in its history. And, for me, that is the most exciting thing about Canada Reads, when it works well. And who can complain, really, about that?

We published Moody Food last year as part of our Renditions reprint series. When we started this series 5 years ago, we dreamt of doing two, then four, then six or more titles a year. It was part of our commitment to bring back books that we believed deserved to find their audience. In that sense, the Renditions series and Canada Reads, at their best, share a common goal. Moody Food was the sixth title in the series. It is also the last. We've been forced, by necessity, to shelve the series for a while, simply because we couldn't sustain the losses. It's no less costly to produce a reprint, and in several instances we have done so without even the benefit of funding. To publish a great book and see it sell 20, 40, 100 copies, is heartbreaking. No one will review a reprint. And in our focus on the new, new, new, no one cares about what was published a decade ago, or four decades ago. The only chance a book like this has, or a series like our Biblioasis Renditions has, is if we see course adoptions, the writer in question wins a major prize, refocusing interest on backlist, or we get lucky and get the book on CanadaReads. So, for now, Moody Food needs to represent the series, the idea of the series, from Ray Smith's Century -- a book we need to get on Canada Reads some day -- to Terry Griggs's Quickening. And all of the others we would like to do, a list of books and authors longer than my arm.

So why vote for Ray Robertson's Moody Food? First, hopefully, because it's an excellent book by an excellent writer, voted among the Top 10 Rock & Roll novels of all time. It's fun and sexy and witty and moving and thoughtful and -- in the best of all possible ways -- moral. But it also isn't for everyone, which is fine too. You need to know your audience. But it's a book, like others on the list of forty, which deserves a chance at a wider readership, a readership which, at this moment and time, for this particular book, only CanadaReads can provide.

But if this isn't enough for you, perhaps you might also vote for it because it does represent something, as part of the Renditions series, larger than itself. The idea that we need to keep these key books around so that eventually they will find their audience, so that they won't get lost in the weight of what is new, new, new. Every author and aspiring author and perhaps even every reader knows something about that, or at least the fear of getting lost in the mass and mist. A vote for Moody Food, frankly, will help us keep the series going, which will ensure that other Moody Foods and Centurys and Quickenings have their chance to find their audience as well. And that, my dear Thirsty Readers, is no small thing.

Carnival Barkers, of course, know their audience very well. They are the impresarios of the boardwalk. They know both what their customers want, and what they can provide, and do their best, even if only with occasional smoke and mirrors, to find the spot where the two meet. And, I suppose, in the end, there's no shame at all in that.

So: if you can do so, please vote for Ray Robertson's Moody Food. You have until Sunday.

http://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/2010/10/the-verdict-is-in-the-top-40-revealed-and-your-chance-to-choose-the-canada-reads-top-10.html

Thank you.

Canada Reads Needs More Rock and Roll

Ray Robertson's Moody Food (Biblioasis Renditions), his great novel of sex, drugs and rock & roll, has made the Canada Reads list of 40 essential Canadian novels of the last decade. We all know Canada Reads could use more rock & roll. But Moody Food won't get any further without your help. Please consider voting for Ray's Moody Food over at CBC's Canada Reads site, to help us ensure it makes the Canada Reads Top 10. You can vote for it -- or (sigh) another of your favourite non-Biblioasis books -- by following the link: http://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/

But, really: Moody Food, people.

CBC's Top 10 Music Books ...

includes our own Moody Food, by Ray Robertson, coming in at number 7 (& number 4 in terms of fiction).

For the entire list please go here.

Canada Reads Independently

Over at Pickle Me This, Kerry Clare has decided to run a separate book club of sorts, due to her disappointment with the official CBC Canada Reads shortlist. She asked me in December if I'd care to select a title to defend. I asked her, at least in part with my tongue in my cheek, if I might choose one of my own. Kerry said that the fact that I had endorsed a book by publishing it was good enough for her.

But: which title should I choose? I immediately gravitated to our Renditions list of reprints. I love this series, and consider it in some ways the heart and soul of the Biblioasis enterprise: to ensure that important and unjustly overlooked works of Canadian literature are brought back into print, that they are given a chance to find the audience they deserve. If Canada Reads worked as it should, it would be books like these -- overlooked classics, in my opinion -- and not recent bestsellers and more common fare -- that would be given a shot at the spotlight. If I could afford it, I'd do 3-4 of these titles a year, and you would see books by Clark Blaise, Bharati Mukherjee, Susan Kerslake, Norman Levine, Leon Rooke, Mavis Gallant, Douglas Glover, Mark Anthony Jarman, Linda Svendson and many others alongside the already existent titles by Terry Griggs, John Metcalf, Ray Robertson and Ray Smith (3 of them). I've viewed the series as a form of service, of giving back, and it is something I hope we can eventually grow as a bit of an aesthetic counterpoint to the New Canadian Library. As it is, unfortunately, I may have to take a break from the series for a year or two until my finances make it once again possible to take the hit these titles inevitably are.

Of the current Renditions titles, my favorite at the moment may just be Ray Smith's Century. I worried about selecting this title for Kerry's program: it's elicited wildly different responses from its readers. There are those who think it perhaps the most important work of Canadian fiction published: Charles Foran said as much in his introduction to the book, and a few others since the title's re-release this past Spring have concurred. Others have read it and hated it, and have not seen what the big deal is about. It is certainly an uncomfortable book: dark, troubling, sad, moral, while remaining blackly humorous, as is the case with so much of Smith's work. Steven Beattie, reviewing the book on That Shakespherian Rag this past summer, said, in part: "... the experience of reading Century is bracing, even 23 years after it was first published. Its pervasive sense of melancholy in the face of a fallen world may even carry greater impact in our post-9/11 society. In any event, it remains sui generis: a strange, searing work by one of our finest literary practitioners." It is one of the books I most hope readers of this blog -- all six of you -- will pick up. And i'm thankful for Kerry for agreeing to read it, and giving it a shot at finding at least a few more readers.

I was surprised to learn later that the same Steven Beattie chose another Renditions title, Ray Robertson's Moody Food, as the title he'll be defending. Beattie writes: "Rock and roll novels are difficult to pull off. It’s hard to capture on the page the unkempt spirit of the music – its energy, its anarchy, its ethereal, emotional immediacy. Which makes Moody Food, an extended booze- and drug-fuelled odyssey into Toronto’s Yorkville (and beyond) in the 1960s, a fairly stunning achievement ... the novel is many things: a modern retelling of The Great Gatsby; a vividly realized portrait of Yorkville in the 1960s; and a metaphor for the disillusionment of the generation that came of age pursuing a heady mix of peace, love, and marijuana smoke. Robertson has said, "I believe that no matter what artistic pursuits you have, you want to be regarded like a rock star." Ambitious and ultimately highly moving, Moody Food is that rarest of all beasts: a great rock and roll novel."

The other contestants are:

Katrina Onstad: How Happy to Be.
Martha Ostenso: Wild Geese
Carrie Snyder: Hair Hat.

To read the write ups about each book and its defener, please go here.

Parsons Legacy Inspires Words, Music

by Ted Shaw: Windsor Star

The truckers and the kickers and the cowboy angels will gather tonight at Phog Lounge.

There's a unique event planned linking popular music to the literary arts, celebrating the music of Gram Parsons in song and the spoken word.

Novelist Ray Robertson, who is in town promoting his latest book, David, at Bookfest Windsor at the Art Gallery of Windsor, will slide over to Phog, 157 University Ave. W., at about 10 p.m. to join a Parsons tribute staged by local musicians, Kelly Hoppe and Greg Cox.

The event was put together by Bookfest, Phog's Tom Lucier, and Robertson's local publisher, Biblioasis Press.

Robertson, originally from Chatham, wrote a 2002 novel, Moody Food, which was based on the life of country-rocker Parsons.

The first line of this column was taken from Parsons' 1974 song, Return of the Grievous Angel, one of the tunes Hoppe and Cox will perform during tonight's set.

"I was a big fan of Gram Parsons all through the wilderness years of the 1970s and '80s," said Robertson, 43, who now lives in Toronto.

During that time, Parsons was often mistaken for the British pomp-rockers, Alan Parsons Project.

But Robertson was a purist who was drawn to Parsons' unique talent for blending many styles of American 20th- century music.

"I was drawn to it because, for me, (Parsons' music) consisted of all the stuff that makes up popular music. It had rock, it had country, it had R&B, it had gospel.

"It also had a quirky, psychedelic vibe to it."

Parsons is credited with being one of the originators of the country-rock sound. Born in Florida in 1946, he formed the Boston group, The International Submarine Band, in 1967, then got hired to join The Byrds the following year.

His time in The Byrds resulted in the seminal album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which pop musicologists regard as one of the first country-rock records.

Parsons was in The Byrds a mere four months before splitting to form The Flying Burrito Brothers with ex-Byrd Chris Hillman and future co-founder of The Eagles, Bernie Leadon.

The wayward Parsons, whose fast life was fuelled and eventually felled by booze and drugs, was also a friend of Keith Richards, and his influence can be heard on The Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street albums.

Parsons died at the age of 26 of a drug overdose in a motel room in Joshua Tree, Calif.

But in his last two years he managed to produce a pair of stunning solo works -- GP and Grievous Angel -- with the help and guidance of Emmylou Harris.

Today, Parsons is a patron saint of alt-country, and his influence is evident in the likes of Old 97's, Drive-By Truckers, Uncle Tupelo, and The Waco Brothers.

In Moody Food, Robertson used Parsons as the inspiration for his fictional character, Thomas Graham. (In a famous Rolling Stone Magazine article at the time of Sweetheart of the Rodeo's release, Parson's first name was misspelled as Graham.)

The novel is set in Toronto's downtown Yorkville neighbourhood in 1966. It was a time of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, and Yorkville was a mecca for aspiring musicians, American draft dodgers, wannabe hippies looking for a score, and college dropouts -- like Bill Hansen, the narrator of Moody Food.

Those who lived through those times have praised Robertson for his accurate portrait of the Yorkville scene in the late-1960s.

But it was all a work of the imagination -- Robertson was born in 1966, so he has no direct knowledge or experience of the period.

The character of Graham, his band The Duckhead Secret Society (Parsons produced the debut album of short-lived New Jersey band, Quacky Duck and His Barnyard Friends, in 1973), and the formative months in Yorkville are purely fictional.

There is no evidence, said Robertson, that Parsons visited Toronto in the late-1960s, although some of his contemporaries, including Jesse Winchester and Bill King, emigrated north to escape the U.S. draft.

Robertson will read passages from Moody Food at The Phog, and sign copies of the book.

Kelly Hoppe, meanwhile, was only too happy to prepare the musical appetizers.

He and Cox will have acoustic versions of, among others, 100 Years From Now and Hickory Wind, from the Sweetheart of the Rodeo album; Hot Burrito #1 and Dark End of the Street, from The Flying Burrito Brothers' The Gilded Palace of Sin album; and Return of the Grievous Angel and In My Hour of Darkness from the last two solo records.

"I like Gram Parsons," said Hoppe. "But I don't think of him as a huge influence on my music."

For his inspiration, Hoppe goes back to the same sources, namely the Bakersfield sound of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.

Hoppe also uncovered a passion for covers in his research of Parsons' discography.

He will include many of those in the set, such as The Louvin Brothers' The Christian Life (covered by The Byrds on Sweetheart), The Bee Gees' To Love Somebody, and Haggard's Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down.

Moody Food

This week we release the sixth title in the Biblioasis Renditions Reprint series: Ray Robertson's critically acclaimed sex, drugs and rock'n'roll-suffused modern tragedy, Moody Food. It takes place in 1960s Yorkville, when Bill Hansen hooks up with Thomas Graham, who draws Bill into an obsessive quest to create what he calls "Interstellar North American Music." As Bill recounts the rise and fall of Thomas Graham and his musical vision, he simultaneously tells the story of frustrated idealism and the passing of an entire generation.

Thomas Graham, as a character, is based on country-rock legend Gram Parsons. This book introduced me to Parsons's work, something I'm deeply grateful for. But the novel is more than a fictionalized biography of a wonderful musician: Moody Food is also, as Books in Canada opined when it was originally published back in 2002, "as good an elegy for the counter-culture as we've seen."

We'll be tagging along for the ride for the Toronto launch of Robertson's David (Thomas Allen) at the Gladstone Hotel next Wednesday, whith Dave Bidini, formerly of the Rheostatics, providing the music. If you happen to be in town, please drop on by. We'll also be doing a Windsor launch as part of Bookfest Windsor on November 6th, celebrating Parsons's birthday, with Kelly Hoppe (formerly of Big Sugar) performing the tunes. Details for this event and others to follow shortly.

Since this is a novel about the power of music -- and no one I can think of writes better about popular music than Robertson -- it only seems right that we launch it with some. Below, courtesy of YouTube, Gram Parsons and The Flying Burrito Brothers singing WHEELS:

Bill Douglas's Cover Love and a first look at our Moody Food

Bill Douglas, designer extraordinaire, has started a new blog, Cover Love Etcetera, which can be found here. He currently has a post on the cover, seen above, for this fall's Biblioasis Renditions reprint of Ray Robertson's great rock and roll novel Moody Food, pictured above. It's the third version of the book he's done, including the early Doubleday and the US edition. Go to his blog to see the others. I must say: I like ours best.

Also learned Bill publishes a mag, Coupe, experimental visual art and culture. Going to have to check it out.