At (Cult)ure we're in the business of producing written words, but that doesn't mean that we don't enjoy things like spoken words or words set to music or things that don't have words at all. So each week we'll bring you a small collection of non-written things that we enjoyed.

Best Podcast: On Being, "Roseanne Cash"

Maybe I was always predisposed to enjoy a podcast with Roseanne Cash. Hearing her talk about music and the particular angle of her father's back that she knew best were perhaps to be expected, but "mystery" and playing with an interactive table of elements? Now that's good stuff. 

Suze Rotolo passed away last week after a battle with lung cancer.  She was 67.

Rotolo was an activist, artist, writer and teacher. 

She was also, for a time, muse to the 20th century's greatest song writer, Bob Dylan. 

The Nicholas Hoare bookshop on Sussex Drive here in Ottawa was tonight the setting for yet another elitist literary snob-fest. From 6 to 8 p.m., five of the winners of the recent Governor General's Literary Awards managed to take time from their gruelling day-jobs of sitting at desks and thinking really hard to meet some members of the public and sign a few books with their lily-white, manicured and moisturized hands. (What sort of "public" can afford to take two hours off between work and returning home to care for their families? Head-in-the-clouds intellectuals, maybe, and a few lazy literature students, but certainly not the common masses.)

Dianne Warren, whose novel Cool Water was selected as the best English-language fiction book of the year, languidly toyed with the string of pearls around her neck as she spoke to a watery-eyed university student about her "devotion" to her "craft." Unsurprisingly, Warren did not admit to having hired minimum-wage research assistants - as has been reported by reliable sources - to dig up the small-town Saskatchewan gossip she then weaved into a tawdry, contrived mess of a book while ensconced in the well-padded nest of her Toronto penthouse.

Allan Casey, the non-fiction award winner for Lakeland: Journeys into the Soul of Canada mumbled something about "beauty," "nature," and "national character" in between stuffing great handfuls of the seafood buffet into his mouth. It is no doubt pleasurable to contemplate those things from the floor-to-ceiling windows of his three-storey "cottage," or the deck of his 48-foot sailboat.

Book time to meet Canada's top writers!
Don't miss this opportunity to meet the winners of the 2010 Governor General's Literary Awards. These 14 acclaimed writers include novelists, non-fiction writers, poets, playwrights, illustrators and translators from across Canada. They will gather in Ottawa for one night to sign books and meet the public.

Wednesday, November 24 from 6-8 pm
Nicholas Hoare Books, 419 Sussex Drive (English-language winners)
Librairie du Soleil, 33 George Street (French-language winners)
Free admission. Hors d'œuvres will be served.

Information

Two fun Mad Men-related things:

1. A mash-up of "Mad Men" and "Mr. Men", from the British humour website The Poke.

2. "Sterling's Gold: Wit and Wisdom of an Ad Man," the much-anticipated memoirs of advertising guru Roger Sterling will be published in time for the Christmas shopping season.

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:

What makes a badass badass? Is it a motorcycle and leather jacket, à Marlon Brando in The Wild One? Is it sensitive Holden Caulfield's escape from all the phonies in The Catcher in the Rye? Is it the complete opposite of selling J.D. Salinger's toilet on eBay? (We're gonna go with yes on that last one).

Badass is a lot of different things to a lot of different people, so definitions naturally vary. Mostly, badassery isn't just action, it's an attitude. It's a confidence that permeates every action combined with intolerance for bullshit and a certain level of apathy toward things that don't concern the badass. It's Maslow's self actualization by way of The Most Interesting Man in the World.

There is no badass uniform, no secret handshake or easy identifier. Badasses simply are. They're trail blazers without calling too much attention to themselves, so we're here to do it for them. For this, the third anniversary issue of (Cult)ure, we've gathered together badasses from politics and pop culture, so you don't have to. Welcome to the Badass issue.

Predators is coming out! Predators is coming out! Wait, you're not as excited about that as I am, are you? Okay, go read this interview and then dare tell me that you are not excited to see Predators. Adrien Brody is Danny Trejo's hog, man. Also, Topher Grace is still making movies (yay!).

If you don't want to see aliens kill a bunch of apparently dangerous humans (plus Topher Grace), I'm sure you could do worse than Despicable Me, a cartoon about a villain (v. Steve Carrell) who plans to steal the moon until three little orphan girls decide to adopt him as their dad instead.

At Coliseum Ottawa, which apparently is where all the Bollywood movies go, you can check out I Hate Luv Storys, starring Sonam Kapoor and Imran Khan.

Friday

Dale Smith Gallery is pleased to present "The Return of the Beothuk," an exhibition of recent paintings by Nova Scotia artist Jonathan Howse (pictured, First Europeans). In "The Return of the Beothuk," Jonathan combines stories and images of the Beothuk, his own family history, and issues faced by Newfoundlanders today to explore how the lessons of the past may provide solutions for the future. Please contact the gallery for more information or images of exhibition work.
July 9 - August 1 |  Vernissage: Friday, July 9, 7- 10 PM | 137 Beechwood Ave.

One Night Only Exhibit
Lyle Richardson
New Pastel & Watercolour on Paper
Friday July 9, 2010 / 7-10 pm
La Petite Mort Gallery | 306 Cumberland Street

Galerie McKenzie Marcotte at 26 Sully Rd. in Wakefield Quebec is pleased to present “Attitudes and Expressions,” an exhibition of wood fired sculpture by Raymond Warren. The vernissage will take place on Friday July 9 at 7 pm. The exhibition continues until August 3, 2010.

In what sounds like yet another made-up-by-the-media trend, all of one teen is claiming to be involved in biting and blood exchanges to demonstrate romantic passion and intimate friendship. While the doc quoted has legit concerns about infections, let me tell you why this is preposterous:

• This is the exact kind of shit that freaks teens out, which is why vampires work so well as a metaphor for sex.
• Vamps and their human lovers don't bite each other in Twilight. Humans aren't physically able to break through vampire skin. Vamp bites mean death or vampirism. Which brings us back to human-on-human action, and that is strictly prohibited in Twilight.
• The Vampire Diaries and True Blood do feature blood exchanges, but it's really only kinky sex stuff in True Blood. And while teens no doubt watch True Blood, they, too, would be freaked out by the INSANE sex scenes. Which means that they wouldn't want to do that kind of stuff because it is too freaky.

Ergo, the entire thing is too freaky, even for freaky teens. One high school does not a trend make.

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."

In yet more not-coming-t0-Ottawa news, add TwiCon to the list. In fact, TwiCon has ceased operations and did so in March (where was I? Oh, how your ace vampire reporter has let you down). Quelle disappointment, you guys. I was really planning to rock that thing, press-style. In the meantime, read Bite Me: A Love Story, celebrate the fact that Kellan Lutz and Ashley Greene have finally signed for Breaking Dawn, and check out this vamp army shot from Eclipse:

Just showing the vamp army puts the movie head and shoulders above the book, right?

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.

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.

 

Now that Gossip Girl is finally, finally back (unlike, say, Glee), we can hopefully staunch our rivers of tears and let the show get back to the things it does best: scheming, complicated sexual dynamics, and dire stupidity. Though "The Hurt Locket" wasn't GG at its best, it was a nice warm up for the full tilt run toward the season finale (don't leave me again, show! I mean . . . ).

Scheming

Chuck's running around all over town (even missing out on Anna Karenina-role play with Blair) in search of mystery lady from his father's grave (the last ep was about two weeks ago for the UES). Or, as Chuck puts it, "I think that whore might be my mother." In an episode that was actually kind of boring, you know Ed Westwick's exquisitely expressive face* made me choke up a little over that one. We finally meet her, and Elizabeth's got the right weird face (sadly lacking in expression), a weird accent, and half a locket containing a picture of her holding baby Chuck. Or maybe some other Bart baby. I am going to be très disappointed in this show if she turns out to be Chuck's mom after all. I will be happy if this means Chuck gets more to do, though. When was the last time we saw him menace anyone?

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.

American author/actress/socialite/designer Gloria Vanderbilt is establishing a literary prize for Canadian short-story authors. The prize is dedicated in the memory of her son Carter V. Cooper, who committed suicide in 1988. So, she's responsible for real life hottie Anderson Cooper, fictionally related to hottie Nate Archibald, and giving to the literary community in Canada? Gloria Vanderbilt is some kind of magic.