Just a heads-up to all literature fans in the area that the fall edition of this year's Writers Festival is being held from October 20-26, in various locations around the city. The full schedule can be found at the Festival website, here. Just a few of the many highlights include: novelists Michael Cunningham (October 20) and Sandra Birdsell (October 24); sociopolitical commentators Tariq Ramadan and Ezra Levant (October 23); historian Charlotte Gray (October 24 and 25), and a closing session featuring local writers such as Elizabeth Hay and Brian Doyle (October 26).

That's not all, though! There are also several pre- and post-Festival events. The first, already held on September 17th, featured Canadian non-fiction writer John Vaillant, whose latest work, The Tiger, was described by Simon Winchester in The Globe and Mail as "a tale of astonishing power and vigour," featuring poachers, conservationists, and a dwindling population of stealthy, immensely powerful, hyper-intelligent, but nonetheless vulnerable, Siberian tigers.

Fortuitous coincidence alert: the New Yorker's books blog, The Book Bench, posted an interview last week with Peter Richmond, the author of Badasses: The Legend of Snake, Foo, Dr. Death and John Madden's Oakland Raiders. The book is Richmond's take on "the last great football team that played the sport for love and camaraderie, not money or fame."

The Raiders of the 1970s (they won the Super Bowl XI, in 1976) gained a reputation for their ferocious, hard-hitting intensity on the field, and their shaggy-haired, hard-partying habits off it. The team's veterans, Richmond notes, would actually show up for training camp early, to spend time socializing with each other, something that is inconceivable today.

When asked to explain how this rebelliousness and strength of character was able to arise (and has since died out), Richmond points to the administration of owner Al Davis and head coach John Madden, who both believed in a light disciplinary hand - so long as the players gave their all for the team on the weekend, they were free to do as they pleased during the week. But Richmond also points to the 1970s as being a particularly rebellious era in all of sports:

Michel-Luc Bellemare's showing at the Snapdragon Gallery is a vibrant display of bright, deep colours and thickly textured oil paint, from the palm-sized, circular, orangey-pink "Cupcake" to the large, tri-coloured triptych "Do-Re-Mi." Bellemare's technique can indeed sometimes look like icing applied a pastry, particularly when he works in those pale, pinkish hues, but darker works such as "Burnt Autumn" also show an earthier sensibility.

A visit to the gallery, on the corner of Bank Street and Third Avenue in the Glebe, will be time well spent, even if you are not in the market for art. The space is clean and bright and open, showing the works to good advantage, and the welcome, from gallery owner Richard, is congenial. It will be an oasis of calm and relaxed contemplation of art on a hot, buzzing summer day.

Today, in various places around the world, men are dressing in bowler hats and suspenders, and women are wearing Edwardian-era dresses. The more sedate of them will drink tea at public readings; the more boisterous will eat kidneys and go on pub crawls, drinking Bass Ale. Why? Because today is Bloomsday!

Held to commemorate June 16th, 1904, the day on which the fictional events of James Joyce's novel Ulysses take place, Bloomsday is a celebration of Leopold Bloom and his wanderings and musings through Dublin. He eats breakfast, has a bath, goes to a funeral, eats a sandwich for lunch, meets up with some people drinking in a pub, and after some further digressions, ends up having a drunken conversation in the early hours of the morning with his surrogate son, Stephen Dedalus. In the meantime, his wife Molly is fooling around with Blazes Boylan, a local boxing manager and ladies' man.

A recent book, Ulysses and Us, by Declan Kiberd, is an attempt to wrest control of the novel's legacy from the esoteric, ivory-tower discussions of academics, and assert its relevance to the everyday life of ordinary men and women - the very sort of people whose existence the novel celebrates.

As mentioned before, Ayaan Hirsi Ali will be in Ottawa on June 10, as part of the Ottawa International Writers Festival. The event coincides with the publication of her third book, "Nomad," which is primarily a charting of her alienation from the Muslim faith she grew up in. The Globe and Mail's reviewer, Theodore Dalrymple, is, on the whole, very positive and notes that she states her case "with both modesty and great eloquence." His sole caveat is that "the Enlightenment ideal that she espouses is rather too simple as an answer to the problems of human existence."

The latest issue of Brick magazine contains a series of three essays on the passing of Allan King, the versatile Canadian filmmaker most known for his powerful documentaries on social issues such as race, poverty, domestic abuse, and death. (Here is an insightful youtube clip incorporating an interview with King and footage from some of his films. It also has Orson Welles, smoking a cigar and saying that movie directing is "the only profession in the world where you can be incompetent and go on being successful for thirty years with nobody ever discovering.")

And Prairie Fire magazine contains an interview with Austin Clarke, the author of the Giller Prize-winning The Polished Hoe, in which he discusses race, immigration, and the concept of "home."

The New Quarterly's latest issue -- No. 114, "To List is Human" -- is guest edited by Diane Schoemperlen, and contains, among other things, a charming story by Julie Paul, "The Black Forest."

The esteemed New Brunswick journal The Fiddlehead celebrates its 65th anniversary with stories by Deborah-Anne Tunney and Julie Curwin, and poems by Emily Carr and charles c. smith.

And finally, a note on Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil, which, while it was lauded in the Globe and Mail as "ingenious," the New Yorker has, in a mini-review, derided Martel for making "a series of baffling choices" in his attempt to create thoughtful art out of the Holocaust. Sounds like the only way to decide which one is more accurate is to read it yourself.

1. Go to the Louvre. Skip the most famous pieces, the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo - or, if you must, run past them just so you can say you were in the same room as them. (Watch this video to see how it should be done in maximum, floor-sliding style.) Instead, go to the Dutch and Flemish paintings to see works of Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Ruysdael, and others. Particularly impressive is the Medici room, a series of 21 paintings by Rubens depicting the life of Marie de Medici, the wife of the French king Henri IV, and mother of Louis XIII. Spend as much time there as you can stand, and then go out into the Tuileries and sit down for an ice cream cone, and then a glass of wine and a sandwich at one of the outdoor cafes.

2. Go to the Shakespeare  & Company bookstore, just over the bridge from Notre Dame Cathedral, on the left bank. Go up to the second floor, grab a book from the shelves, and find a chair or couch in a quiet corner to read it. (This is not only tolerated, but encouraged - in fact, most of the books on the second floor are not even for sale.)

3. Go to a cemetery. Pere Lachaise is the famous one, with Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison, Piaf, Proust and Chopin; but the Montmartre and Montparnasse ones also have loads of famous dead people (including Hector Berlioz, Francois Truffaut, and Louise Weber, aka the can-can dancer "La Goulue" in Montmartre; Sartre, de Beauvoir, de Maupassant and Susan Sontag in Montparnasse). Just make sure you have a good map of the cemetery and the notable graves in it before you go. They are not neatly, geometrically arranged places; there are acres and acres of tombs and gravestones, many of them old, faded and mossy, often hidden behind large sepulchres of long-forgotten aristocratic French families, and few pathways through them.

E.O. Wilson, an 80-year-old Harvard biologist, has just published his first novel, called "Anthill." One section of the work tells, in great detail, of the triumphs, the conflicts, and the downfalls of four separate ant colonies in Alabama. The other parts of the book are more autobiographical, and tell the story of a man who gives up a successful career in law to protect the particular plot of land where he learned, as a boy, to love nature -- the plot of land on which the four ant colonies are based.

Here's an excerpt from "Anthill," recently published in The New Yorker.

And here's the Globe and Mail review.

Ben Saunders, the Arctic adventurer who was interviewed for (Cult)ure a couple of weeks ago, has had to abandon his attempt to reach the North Pole only a few days into his expedition, due to a broken fuel container that contaminated most of the food he was carrying. He has decided to try again next year, rather than having more fuel and food flown up to him for a renewed attempt on the receding ice this spring. (You can read the full story at the expedition's website, here.)

If you haven't yet, we highly encourage you to go this week to see the play "Where the Blood Mixes," at the National Arts Centre (on until April 3rd). Focusing on the lives of two natives from BC, Floyd and Mooch (played by veteran actors Billy Merasty and Ben Cardinal) as they drink, fish and bicker, and gradually come to terms with their residential school experience and the impact its had on their friendships and family lives. With a live musical score performed by guitarist Jason Burnstick, the play is 90 minutes of humour, pathos and understated morality; a portrayal of good people who have been victimized and are struggling heroically not to be defined by that victimization. It is everything a night at the theatre should be: funny, moving and inspiring.

Yasmina Reza's play "Art" is now running at the Bluma Appel Theatre in Toronto, until April 10th. Here's the Globe and Mail review. And here's an interview with one of the leads, Colin Mochrie.

We discussed Reza in this blog last year.

In honour of the great Japanese director's 100th birthday, here's a clip from one of his best, "Yojimbo," starring Toshiro Mifune.

Sometimes I wish it was fashionable to wear a robe out in the street, just so I could imitate Mifune in this scene.

Following on a previous post mentioning David Grann's "The Lost City of Z," here is some (very old) footage of Theodore Roosevelt, a few years after his presidency, looking for thrills by joining an expedition to map the source of the River of Doubt, in the Amazon rain forest.
Roosevelt went in 1913-14, but much of the footage of the actual river was taken in 1927, by George Dyott, another American explorer who followed the same route.

At the National Arts Centre tonight, the Mariinsky Orchestra, under the baton of Valery Gergiev, performed works by Berlioz, Rachmaninov and Shostakovich. The Rachmaninov was the 3rd Piano Concerto, with the dazzling Denis Matsuev as soloist. Here's a clip of Matsuev playing another piece of Rachmaninov's, "Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini."

And here's the Mariinsky playing Dmitri Shostakovich's 13th Symphony. (They played the 15th tonight.)

The whole thing was spectacular. All I can say is that, if these Russians take over the world with as much elegance, sophistication and verve as their musicians display, then I, for one, will welcome our new imperialist rulers.

Russell Smith of the Globe on why we should lament the decline of the book:  "[W]e lose forever the pleasure known to humanity for 500 years of taking a stroll up and down the aisles of someone else’s brain by perusing their bookshelves."

Also: some recommendations for books to read: De Niro's Game, by Rawi Hage;  Evelyn Waugh's satire of Fleet Street journalism, Scoop (featuring the nature columnist William Boot's immortal line, "Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole"); and, in the non-fiction aisle, The Lost City of Z, the journalist David Grann's story of following in the footsteps of the British explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in the Amazon rainforest in 1925 while searching for a mysterious lost civilization.

If you watched the closing ceremonies of the Olympics, you may have come away with the impression that Russia's culture is a little more...mmm...high-brow than Canada's. (Please don't think I'm necessarily complaining about this, though.) They have the Bolshoi Ballet, we have giant floating beavers; they have Valeri Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra (who, incidentally, will be at the National Arts Centre on March 15), we have William Shatner and a sadly under-used Catherine O'Hara telling very poor jokes. (We do, on the other hand, have Neil Young, who is probably worth a couple of those wordy 19th-century Russian novelists all on his own.)

The Russians have always taken their culture seriously - sometimes too much so. The poet Osip Mandelstam famously said, "Only in Russia is poetry respected - it gets people killed." (He himself would eventually become one of the victimes.) Joseph Stalin had been a well-known, even admired, romantic poet in his youth in Georgia, and showed a lively (and deadly) interest in Soviet writers and composers after he became dictator.

But still - they were also able to produce something like this:

The Guardian has asked 29 well-known writers - including Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Neil Gaiman, and Jonathan Franzen - to submit ten rules for writing fiction:

Macy Halford at The New Yorker's book blog The Book Bench, has written a thoughtful response.

We are sitting here listening to Darren Dreger ask if Canadians should be worried that both Martin Brodeur and Roberto Luongo were both pulled in their most recent NHL games. Meanwhile, professional misanthrope Christopher Hitchens has an interesting take on this whole Olympics thing. Initial reaction: get a grip, Hitch! Sure, sports are not a cure-all for the ills of the world, and athletes can be unpleasant jerks, if not downright slimy (including, sometimes, Canadians). But you could make similar claims about, say, free speech: it often leads to conflict and suffering, and  people who exercise their right of free speech to the fullest often reveal themselves to be cruel, ignorant or both. (There are lots of people we'd like to see contract lockjaw.) But that's a poor argument for scorning the practice as a whole.

I can understand part of Hitchens's point, though. All the headlines about skiing, skating and sledding obscure other important stories. There is, for example, a new development in the war in Afghanistan -- involving Canadians, of course.

And finally, something totally unrelated: this, friends, is what an imaginative, top-notch piece of short fiction looks like.

Losing Hope for the Future of Humankind Dept.:

http://www.slate.com/id/2244062/

http://www.slate.com/id/2243797/

St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Orchestra (formerly known as the Kirov) will be performing at the National Arts Centre on March 15, with superstar conductor Valery Gergiev. Gergiev is a fascinating personality, as this article attests: maestro, businessman, jet-setter, Russian nationalist and friend of Vladimir Putin; and, according to a review of a documentary about him, the possessor of "an elemental ferocity just barely held in check."