ARE THESE WRITERS ON THE JOB TRAINING. NO S/L

A Good year-in-review

Like last year, Alex Good has organized an excellent year-in-review panel discussion for GoodReports. This year's allstar cast includes Maud Newton, Jessa Crispin (Bookslut), Micheal Orthofer (The Complete Review), and Robert Birnbaum (Identity Theory).



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The year in culture

Must hate everything Crouch likes... Damn. Can't. Blogs get a mention here too. We done come up.

The movie that most blew me away this year was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and the book, probably Stephen Elliott's Happy Baby. But if I really think about the precise wording of Slate's request, which asked about the "one cultural happening" that most affected my year, I'd say that the single biggest change in the way I experience culture can be summed up in one word, which is by now such an oversaturated media buzzword I can barely bring myself to type it: blogs.



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Ha. They're good that way, aren't they?

Yes, these are really obscure books that got no airplay at all this year. Wow, it's amazing that a publication like Macleans even found them. Thanks so much for this. I never would have heard of these books otherwise. I'm heading to a bookstore as soon as the light comes up.

Forgotten books

Are usually best left forgotten, but not if they just came out this year. Macleans rounds em up with its usual unintentional lightness and iron-fisted brevity.



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Canadian poet Lisa Robertson is on that list too.

OCCASIONAL WORK AND SEVEN WALKS FROM THE OFFICE FOR SOFT ARCHITECTURE
By Lisa Robertson
Clear Cut Press, 288 pp., $12.95

A pocket-size extravagance, a decoder ring, a gorgeous megadose of genius prose and apposite quotation: This book will make you smarter and more beautiful. Robertson's essays are at once elegantly succinct and impossibly, even hilariously dense. We say, on almost every page and with utmost reverence, Holy shit. You will never think of scaffolding the same way; chances are you have never thought, as Robertson has, "If architecture is writing, the shack is a speech." We picked this up in March, carried it around the city for a day, stopping by the meat market where our counter number came out the same pink as the dust jacket. We reeled and still reel. Ever since, we have wanted to think like Robertson, write like her, maybe even be her. Occasional Work is the exact color of our preposterous desire, and the Baedeker of our vertigo.

You know you heard it here first, right?

I know I said we wouldn't bring you book of the year lists, but this is the Voice and two of our favourite Canajuns are on it. - Michael Redhill and Derek McCormack. Here's the blurb for shizzy D:

Gay vampires. Lonely highways. Country songs. No, it's not a Stephin Merritt musical (not yet, anyway). It's the double debut of Derek McCormack, who conjures creepy worlds using little more than elliptical triads. Weird, inventive, magical, the omnibus Grab Bag features a lonely closeted teenager named Derek McCormack and a grotesque fascination with carnivals, drifters, and disease. The Haunted Hillbilly reimagines Nudie the Rodeo Tailor, who in real life dressed Elvis in gold lam?, as a bloodthirsty undead Svengali with a crush on his doomed client, c&w legend Hank Williams?perverse, mesmerizing, heartfelt. With a morbid comic vision and a delightfully twisted imagination, McCormack delivers a one-two knockout punch that establishes him as one of the best new voices of the year.

Yahuh.



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The year-end book list

This time of year they come out like mice in Washington Square at night. Book lists. But what all goes into them? Mostly the shoulder chucks of friends, it seems.



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