Category: Books

Satirist Jon Stewart’s Book Named Year’s Best
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Political satirist Jon Stewart’s mock look at a political science college textbook “America (the Book), a Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction,” was named on Sunday the book of the year by Publishers Weekly, the trade publication of the book industry.
The magazine said, in its issue to be published on Monday, that, “in a year defined by political polemics, it seems fitting that PW’s Book of the Year be one in which the authors survey the entire political system and laugh.”
The book is written by Stewart, the host of the “The Daily Show” on comedy Central with colleagues Ben Karlin and David Javerbaum. It is currently number one on the New York Times best-seller list.
Publishers Weekly said, “‘America (The Book)’ offers more than just humor, however. Beneath the eye-catching and at times goofy graphics, the dirty jokes and the playful ingenuousness shines a serious critique of the two-party system, the corporations that finance it and the ‘spineless cowards in the press’ who ‘aggressively print allegation and rumor independent of accuracy or fairness.”‘
The book is filled with satirical jabs, including tips for TV news reporters including mastering the “reporter reaction shot cutaway. You’ve got half a second tops to overshadow your subject. Make it count.
In its annual review of the year, Publishers Weekly listed notable books in other categories ranging from sex to politics to religion but did not give them in order of preference.

New book is about blunt realities of dating: He’s Just Not That Into You
NEW YORK (AP) – So you’ve been dating this guy, and it seemed to be going so well. Long dinners. Cuddly walks in the park. Flirty text messages. And then, suddenly, he just stopped calling.
Your mind races for an explanation. Is he lying in a hospital bed? With amnesia? Did his house burn down with his address book inside it? Or maybe he’s wounded from a previous relationship and just needs a little time?
Oh, for heaven’s sake, say the authors of a hugely popular new book. Enough with the excuses! Face the truth, girlfriend, and the truth will set you free:
HE’S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU.
With that simple message, emblazoned on the cover of a slim, pink volume, Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo have shot up bestseller lists. Launched in September with a printing of 30,000, He’s Just Not That Into You is now in its 14th printing, at 1.2 million copies and counting. It’s been featured (twice) on The Oprah Winfrey Show, with Winfrey shouting over and over to dating-challenged women in the audience: “He’s Just Not That Into You!!”
So what, you might ask, is so revolutionary about advice that’s so common sense it could be coming from your mother?
“It’s just a wake-up call,” says Tuccillo, a former writer for Sex and the City who also happens to be single and dating in New York. “It’s just a clear-as-a-bell, funny, simple wake-up call.”
It all began with a story meeting at Sex and the City. Behrendt, a standup comic and writer, had been serving as consultant to the show. A woman on the staff started talking about a guy she liked who’d been running hot and cold. The other women launched into thoughtful analyses of the man’s every action, and Behrendt just blurted out – you guessed it! – “He’s just not that into you.”
“We all started shrieking!” Tuccillo says. “Because women never talk to their friends like that. We started playing ‘Stump Greg’ … like what about the guy who’s caring for his sick mother? And he answered, ‘If that was me, you’d be the bright spot in my day, and I’d make sure you knew it.”‘
As die-hard Sex and the City fans know, the incident became a much-discussed episode, with Cynthia Nixon’s character, Miranda, on the receiving end of the blunt verdict delivered by Berger, a boyfriend of Carrie’s (Sarah Jessica Parker).
But even more important, Tuccillo says, it became obvious that this should be a book. Behrendt recalls that he went home and told his wife, “You know that crazy Liz? She wants me to write a book with her on this. And my wife said: ‘She’s right. You should.”‘
It is not like most self-help books you’ve seen. Only 165 pages, it is funny and blunt. Its cover delivers the message succinctly: an answering machine, set to a big fat zero. There are pithy chapters on all the ways a man can show you that he’s just not … well, you know.
-He’s Just Not That Into You if … He’s Not Calling You. (“With the advent of cellphones and speed dials it is almost impossible NOT to call you. Sometimes I call people from my pants pocket when I don’t even mean to.”)
-He’s Just Not That Into You if … He’s Not Asking You Out. (“Sadly, not wanting to see you in person is massive as far as dating obstacles go.”)
-He’s Just Not That Into You if … He’s Not Having Sex With You. (“Get a big red crayon. Colour in this flag. You’ve just made a big red flag. Good, because that’s what a man not wanting to have sex with you is.”)
The book also lays waste to some tried-and-true excuses women often let men get away with. Like, he’s just too busy. (“The word ‘busy’ is the relationship Weapon of Mass Destruction. It seems like a good excuse. …”) Or, he doesn’t want to ruin the friendship. (“Unfortunately, in the entire history of mankind that excuse has never ever been used by someone who actually means it.”)
And, not to focus solely on male behaviour, it leaves women with some key advice on how to act when feeling hurt and angry. “One simple rule, ladies, always be classy. Never be crazy. It will ensure that you never have that awful memory of cutting his clothes in half or leaving his dog by the side of the road.”
Although Behrendt and Tuccillo say they’ve received mostly excellent feedback, inevitably some people don’t like the book. They don’t get the humour, they don’t like the title, they don’t like the tone. “But hey,” Behrendt says, “it’s just advice, it’s not a mandate. I’m not a doctor or a therapist.” Though, he adds, some therapists have praised the book, too.
And asked why the book is directed only at women – hey Greg, aren’t there guys out there who need to hear “SHE’S Just Not That Into You?” – Behrendt has a simple reply.
“Sure, we could have written that book,” he says. “And about eight guys would have bought it.”

Saga of 1951 Stanley Cup hero Bill Barilko retold in new Kevin Shea book
After all these years, the saga of Bill Barilko is as compelling as ever.
Barilko scored the overtime goal to earn the Toronto Maple Leafs the Stanley Cup in 1951 and died in a plane crash that summer at the age of 24. The Leafs did not win the NHL title again until 1962, the year Barilko’s remains were discovered in the Northern Ontario bush outside his home town of Timmins, Ont.
The tale has been previously told in print, put to music in The Tragically Hip’s 1992 recording, Fifty-Mission Cap about the club’s failure to win the NHL title during the 11 years after Barilko’s disappearance and the current Leafs had BB 16 embroidered on caps during their playoff run last spring.
Now, Kevin Shea has written Barilko: Without a Trace, which is the most complete presentation of the hockey icon’s brief life. Film rights were recently purchased.
Shea’s project came about after a conversation around a coffee machine at the Hockey Hall of Fame, where Shea works as manager of special projects and publishing.
“Somebody said that he couldn’t believe that Bill Barilko was still a topic of conversation, and a third request had come in that day for the photo of the Barilko goal,” Shea explains. “I’d long been fascinated with the Barilko story, and Bill’s sister is a volunteer with us here at the Hall so . . . ”
Anne Klisanich’s extensive scrap book collections of practically every newspaper and magazine article ever written about her brother proved invaluable to Shea’s research. Her insights into the Barilko family also were prime assets with which to work.
“The story has been told so many times that I wanted to put a new face on it,” says Shea. “I wanted to find out more about the person than the guy who scored that one goal.
“Talking to neighbours and minor-hockey teammates in Timmins and his pro teammates was fascinating. It was intriguing to find out about the guy behind the goal.”
Shea, Klisanich and Mayor Victor Power will participate in Bill Barilko Day in Timmins on Nov. 19. Then it’s off to Alfie’s Cigar Store for book signings.
Shea’s previous hockey books include one on the Smythe Family and one on former Leaf Ron Ellis.
“I enjoyed this one so much,” says Shea. “But it also was the hardest one, not necessarily to write, but just that there were so many Barilko stories out there and I was getting people calling up right till my deadline.
“It was just wonderful to have that happen, to try and fit it all in was a wonderful task.”
Barilko and his chums frolicked on outdoor rinks in the Porcupine gold mining region in the 1930s. Those were hard times and he quit school at age 15. He’d listen to Foster Hewitt’s play-by-play of Leafs games on radio and always dreamed of making it to the NHL.
But he was no teen star. When he turned pro at 18, the Leafs sent him to a fourth-tier affiliate in Los Angeles, where he played for the Hollywood Wolves. From the wilds of Canada to Tinseltown – that was a trip.
A tough defenceman who could rock opponents with hip checks, he picked up nicknames such as Bashin’ Bill and The Basher.
He got a huge career break when Toronto boss Conn Smythe, looking to rebuild with young players, promoted him ahead of more experienced players at the team’s top affiliates. Barilko was playing for the Wolves in February 1947, and sipping champagne from the Stanley Cup that spring.
“It’s that great Canadian story – from rags to riches,” says Shea.
Barilko’s 1951 Cup-winning goal, scored while he was in the air horizontal to the ice, was captured by the late Nat Turofsky’s photo that is the most requested from the HHOF archives. The goal gave the Leafs a fourth title in the five springs Barilko was with the team.
Dr. Henry Hudson, a dentist friend, piloted a light aircraft that he and Barilko rode in towards James Bay for a last fishing trip before the start of a new NHL season. His mother pleaded with him not to go. They were leaving on a Friday, and Barilko’s father had died on a Friday five years earlier. She didn’t want her son flying into the bush on a Friday.
Barilko and Hudson weren’t heard from again. A massive search turned up nothing.
“The family never gave up hope,” says Shea. “They washed his shirts and would put them on the clothesline.”
The wreckage was spotted May 31, 1962, just north of Cochrane by a pilot inspecting timber. The remains were removed on June 6 and interred in Timmins Memorial Cemetery on June 15. A gravestone is decorated with twin maple leaves, hockey sticks and pucks. Under the surname is a head-and-shoulders photo of Barilko wearing a Leafs sweater.
“He was becoming an outstanding player,” Shea says of what might have been. “He was getting better and better and probably would have eventually been in the Hall of Fame. But that’s all conjecture.”
Barilko memorabilia in the possession of the HHOF includes the sweater he was wearing when he scored the unforgettable goal, the puck that went in the Montreal Canadiens net, a stick he used during that season, a pair of his skates, a fishing rod he once used and a small bench with a wolf’s head carved on each end that he made when he was a boy.

New Hannibal Lecter Book Due Late 2005
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Ever wondered what made Hannibal a cannibal?
The answer will come when Thomas Harris’ new novel about serial killer Hannibal Lecter, “Behind the Mask,” is published next year.
“Millions of readers in 25 languages have wondered how Dr. Lecter developed his particular appetite for evil. This novel will satisfy their curiosity,” publisher Bantam Dell said in a statement announcing the book would be ready late in 2005.
Chillingly brought to the screen by Anthony Hopkins in the 1991 film “The Silence of the Lambs,” Hannibal Lecter is due to be back on movie screens for another outing based on the new novel. Film rights for the book have been acquired by The Dino De Laurentiis Company, producer of “Red Dragon” and “Hannibal.”
“Behind the Mask” will be the fourth book about Hannibal, who first appeared in “Red Dragon.”
“Hannibal,” the third book in the series, was a number one New York Times hardcover and paperback bestseller, with sales of nearly 1.5 million hardcovers in 1999 and more than 3 million paperbacks.
Irwyn Applebaum, president of Bantam Dell Publishing Group, part of Random House, called Harris, “the premier novelist of psychological suspense of our time” and said Lecter was “the literary figure to whom all other villains are compared.”
Random House is a division of Bertelsmann .

Porn Star Hits It Big as Best-Selling Writer
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – She has two bodyguards, four dogs, a surgically enhanced double D-cup bust and an almost 600-page book on the best-seller list.
And the fact she spends a lot of her time naked has nothing to do with living in the sunny climes of Scottsdale, Arizona.
Indeed if, as some have suggested, porn stars are the new socialites, Jenna Jameson, whose raunchy memoir has been on the New York Times best seller list for months, is more at home in a G-string than an evening gown.
“How To Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale,” written with Neil Strauss, is more self-absorbed than Bill Clinton’s autobiography although Jameson says :”Clinton had more sex.”
That depends, of course, on what ones mean by sex, undeniably the thrust of Jameson’s oeuvre. The book teems with pictures of bare-breasts, comic book panels, handwritten diary entries and graphic detail.
“I’ve had … women tell me I’m their idol,” 30-year-old Jameson said in an interview. “They want to be like me. They’re seeing the glamour icon but don’t realize … there are more facets to me besides spreading my legs.”
Born in Las Vegas to a cop turned criminal father and showgirl mother who died when she was two, Jameson entered the X-rated world at age 17.
Wanting to be a stripper at Las Vegas’s Crazy Horse Too, the voluptuous blonde was told to come back after getting rid of her braces. That night, Jameson says, she yanked them from her teeth with pliers and wire-cutters and never looked back.
Changing her name to Jameson (after the Irish whiskey), she made her way from stripper to X-rated photo model, eventually becoming a porn performer. The book chronicles a litany of sordid escapades, including a gang rape and Jameson’s eating disorders, drug addictions and numerous lesbian and three-way affairs, both on and off camera.
As a cinematic porn goddess, Jameson says she worked only five times a year, usually with the same partner. “I was lucky to not have caught any sexual diseases, even though I worked without condoms for two years.”
Today Jameson says she is monogamous and happily married and only has sex — both on-screen and off- — with her husband, Jay Grdina, an adult-film studio owner and business entrepreneur. The couple started a film production, marketing and web hosting company. So with Jameson a millionaire who no longer needs to bare her body for bucks, one wonders why she persists.
LOVES WORK
“I love what I do for a living,” said Jameson, dragging on a cigarette, the only vice she claims to still have.
“I’m also trying to change the way the industry is run, which is mostly headed by men who don’t take women seriously as business people. To change things for girls going into the industry, I have to continue. I want to continue.”
Like many actresses, Jameson worries about losing her beauty. “Our looks pay our bills. I get Botox and love it. I’m very expressive and I’m trying to keep lines from appearing. I did have a chin implant and I’m having breast-reduction surgery,” she said.
Downsizing her implants to a C cup seems right, Jameson says, because to remove them completely “would leave too much extra skin.”
“I’ll get a full reduction after I have children,” she said.
In the interim, the couple continue to produce hard-core films, with a Hollywood deal in the works for her autobiography.
“I initially wanted Kate Hudson to play me,” said Jameson, “but she’s not as endowed as I am. My fans have mentioned Pamela Anderson, Jaime Pressly and even Meryl Streep.”
Absurd as that sounds, it’s no more farcical than living in a world where a porn star achieves the American dream.
“I don’t know if I can spit out another book. Maybe it’ll be a coffee table book of photos or maybe I’ll focus on something more family-oriented.
“If I do have a daughter,” she said with resolve. “There’s no way in hell I would allow her to be a porn star and go through the things I went through.”

Paris Hilton to Publish 198-Page Memoir
NEW YORK – Paris Hilton is trying on a new outfit: a hard cover. The model-reality TV star is publishing a 198-page memoir, “Confessions of an Heiress: A Tongue-in-Chic Peek Behind the Pose,” (Fireside).
Though the missing Chihuahua saga was too recent to make the book, Hilton writes about her youth as an heiress in a “really close” family. Excerpts of the book (to hit shelves Sept. 7) are printed in the Sept. 6 issue of People magazine.
“It’s traditional for an heiress to be raised in a sheltered way,” she writes. “No one thinks that’s true of me, but it actually was.”
Still, Hilton insists that she was not coddled: “The rumor is that I got a credit card at age 9, which is ridiculous. It was more like 19, and I had to get one myself without my parents.”
Her “Confessions” reveal a girl not as confident as the runway model frequently seen in the tabloids. “It was so embarrassing being flat-chested that I wore padded bras til I was 17. Now, I’m happy to be small. It looks better in clothes. But back then I was really insecure.”
The notorious party-girl also feels a change coming: “I don’t always want the glamorous, jet-set life. Let’s face it, I’ve done it. Someday soon, I want to have children and a big house with a lot of animals ó like my parents had.”
Hilton’s memoirs are not without fashion tips, either. “Trust me, people act differently to you when you’ve got jewelry on your head.”

Book details lives of the 1986 Mets; great team, not-so-nice guys
(AP) – The 1986 New York Mets were larger than life. Literally.
At one point on the West Side of the city, a 25-foot-high mural of pitcher Dwight Gooden stared down from a building, a stunning symbol of the shadow the brash and talented team cast over New York during that dominant season which ended with a World Series win.
To capture the hearts and minds of a city the way the Mets did in 1986, it is necessary for a team to be not just successful, but colourful. There have been countless teams that have won championships, even more that have featured young stars on the rise.
But the Mets – who did win and had more than their share of future Hall of Fame-calibre talent – were not just any other team. They had personality (many would say unabashed arrogance) to spare. And in 1986, with the New York Yankees still years away from their later dominance, the Mets were the best show in town – on and off the field.
This is, after all, a team that had nine players record a rap song inspired by the Super Bowl Shuffle by the Chicago Bears – winners of the 1985 Super Bowl. The only difference was the Mets recorded Get Metsmerized only one game into the 86 season.
It is this irresistible mix of talent, arrogance, personality and general trouble-making that Jeff Pearlman looks back at in his book The Bad Guys Won!
Pearlman, who wrote the Sports Illustrated article in which pitcher John Rocker, then of the Atlanta Braves, disparaged minorities and homosexuals, has crafted an entertaining romp of a book through the successful and turbulent season – albeit one that provides more gossip than insight.
After a brief recounting of how all the principal figures in the Mets organization (general manager Frank Cashen, manager Davey Johnson, the players) came to be with the team in 1986, the focus swings quickly to the championship season.
“The Mets were Satan,” Pearlman writes at one point.
The team wasn’t quite that bad, but they weren’t choirboys either. Still, much of what Pearlman writes is far from a revelation. It has long been known that Gooden and fellow young superstar Darryl Strawberry were out of control, abusing drugs and wasting their talent. It’s no secret that Gary Carter’s rah-rah style of play irritated many opponents and teammates, and that Lenny Dykstra lived his life off the field as hard as he played baseball on it.
The 86 Mets are one of the more charismatic teams of recent times (for better or for worse) and many of their exploits and downfalls have long since been public knowledge. What Pearlman has done is collect them under one umbrella of a book, and provided salacious details for some of the wilder stories.
The Bad Guys Won! is entertaining, but it would be hard for any book about this team not to be. Where Pearlman has failed is in not getting past the outrageousness of the team to look deeper into the effect its rise – and downfall – had on sports and baseball in general, and New York in particular.
Instead, in the pages of this book, the Mets remain caricatures, punch lines to jokes that never seemed possible back when the team was on top of the world.
The Bad Guys Won!: A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo Chasing, and Championship Baseball With Straw, Doc, Mookie, Nails, the Kid, and the Rest of the 1986 Mets, the Rowdiest Team Ever To Put on a New York Uniform – and Maybe the Best was written by Jeff Pearlman and published by HarperCollins.

Thousands of new definitions in latest revision of Canadian Oxford Dictionary
TORONTO (CP) – Canadians have a new word for a selfish hockey player (puck hog), a boy-crazy older woman (cougar) and the colourless rows of cubicles that make up the modern workplace (cube farm).
These entries are among thousands of updated words and meanings in the second edition of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, which hits stores at the end of the month. Although some may seem so common that they barely merit a special mention, editor Katherine Barber said it is precisely those types of words that need to be recorded.
“Once these words become part of general vocabulary, you can’t remember not having them,” she said.
This update to the tome first released in 1998 adds only words and phrases the editors feel have become firmly entrenched in the language.
“We have a rule of thumb for the new dictionary entries – we have to have 15 examples from 15 different sources before we put it in the dictionary,” Barber said, adding it takes about 10 years of use for a word to make the move from fringe expression to dictionary-worthy.
“We can’t put every ephemeral word in the dictionary. We have to be convinced it’s sticking around in the language,” she said.
Barber pointed out Canadians’ unique use of English continues to provide her and the other lexicographers on the project with new entries.
“Canadians are using Canadian English all the time without realizing it. We have about 2,200 Canadianisms in the dictionary,” she said. “Most people don’t realize ‘butter tart’ is a Canadianism, ‘eavestrough’ is a Canadianism.”
For the past few years, editors have been surveying samples of the printed word across the country – everything from newspapers to grocery store flyers – and coming up with possible new entries for this revision. The mutability of the language means it’s a never-ending job.
Barber’s team encountered several surprises when researching this edition. For example, the everyday word for the orange simulated cheese-flavoured snack, Cheezies, is made-in-Canada. South of the border, they’re called “cheese puffs” or “cheese twists.”
“It’s the ordinariness of (Canadianisms) which tends to surprise us,” she said.
And the challenge goes beyond making sure there’s a u in colour. Barber said Canadian English has a host of alternative word meanings, spellings and even pronunciations to contend with.
The context for Canadians is different as well, said Barber, pointing out that the vast hockey and curling vocabularies her team included isn’t likely to be found in the equivalent American or British reference book.
“Hardly anyone puts curling vocabulary in dictionaries,” she said.
But she rejected the idea that the dictionary, which she has worked on since 1991, is shaping the language.
“We don’t delude ourselves into believing that just because a word is in the dictionary that people will keep on using it,” she said.
In addition to new words and meanings, the latest edition includes a reference list of Canadian prime ministers and new biographical entries for 100 notable Canadians – including one horse. This revised dictionary includes a brief item on Northern Dancer, the first Canadian-bred horse to win the Kentucky Derby.
Since its release six years ago, the Canadian Oxford Dictionary has sold more than 190,000 copies. The new edition includes 300,000 definitions.
Here are some of the new entries in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, second edition:
Canadianisms:
– Alberta clipper
– double-double
– May Two-Four
Sports:
– puck hog
– beer league
– sno-pitch
Sex:
– studmuffin
– sexcapade
– cougar
Technology:
– hacktivist
– netizen
– blog
Health:
– SARS
– West Nile Virus
– erectile dysfunction
Slang:
– geek chic
– jiggy
– SOL
Family:
– co-parent
– commuter marriage
– nanny cam

Connery to write autobiography
After saying he would never pen the story of his life, actor Sean Connery is set to write his memoirs, the BBC.com reports.
Publisher HarperCollins confirmed that Connery will receive a six-figure sum for his autobiography, which will be published in late 2005.
Connery, 73, said: “It’s rather scary, but utterly exhilarating, and I’m looking forward to it.”
The book, said to be “more honest than most celebrity memoirs, will trace the actor’s life from his humble beginnings in Edinburgh to world fame in the James Bond films and his Oscar-winning turn in The Untouchables.

Douglas Coupland solves our image problem
Born on an army base in Germany and raised in Vancouver, Douglas Coupland seemed reluctant for many years to market himself as a Canadian.
In 1991, he set Generation X, his first and most famous novel, in Palm Springs, Calif. His more recent novel, All Families Are Psychotic (2001), is largely set in Florida. But with his latest book Souvenir Of Canada 2, just published by Douglas & McIntyre, and a related art installation titled Canada House that opens tomorrow at the Design Exchange, he comes out of the closet to embrace his Canadian identity.
“Youth culture is completely globalized; it’s only when you are in your 30s that you are allowed to be Canadian,” he says.
A conceptual artist as well as a writer, he locates this identity mostly in the artifacts of our commercial culture ó objects, places, bilingual packaging, buildings and logos that resonate for Canadians as they do for no other peoples.
Billy Bee honey, the Massey-Ferguson tractor, the Sherwood hockey stick, the Robertson screwdriver, Oka cheese, the Eaton’s catalogue, the purple Crown Royal bag, plastic Canada geese, and the moose-patterned sweater are to Coupland what the wind-twisted pines of Georgian Bay were to the Group of Seven. Soul food.
“When I see something beautiful, I want to eat it,” he says.
Souvenir Of Canada 2, a followup to a similar book he produced two years ago, is filled with photographs of these iconic objects, along with short, quirky texts that deconstruct their meaning and incidentally reveal details about Coupland and his family.
We read about his grandmother, the first woman to drive a car in Sudbury, his taxidermist brother, his doctor father, and are shown a photograph of his mother, wearing the dress she wore to Expo ’67. We also see Mom’s well-organized kitchen cupboards, featuring the usual Janus-faced Canadian brands such as Canada Corn Starch/Fecule de maÔs and Blue Ribbon pure marjoram/marjolaine.
Coupland is 42 now, but he is still close to his family, both emotionally and physically; the Ron Thom-designed house he bought himself in North Vancouver is a short walk from the home of his uncomprehending parents.
“When my father comes over, the only thing he recognizes is the television set,” he says, referring to his high-concept modernist furnishings.
In Toronto last week, Coupland took part in a panel on creativity at the Design Exchange, and explained that his art projects are often sparked by finding some telling or bizarre object on a beach, a back alley or in a dumpster. “You have a nugget or kernel of something strange ó let’s see where it goes, let’s develop it,” he explained. “I refuse to be bored.”
His collections fill his studio at 1000 Parker St. in Vancouver, a sort of art factory where he works with the assistance of a half-dozen friends from his days at Emily Carr College of Art and Design.
In Souvenir Of Canada 2, he devotes 27 pages to Canada House, an installation of Canadian objects he set up in an about-to-be demolished house in Vancouver, having spray painted the interior white.
It displays, too, his unique furniture-with-a-message. “The Treaty Couch,” for example, has two seating portions, a broad one upholstered in tartan (a reference to the United Kingdom), another extremely narrow with upholstery made from a Cowichan Indian sweater.
Only a few people ever saw the original Canada House, which was created for the book.
The public will get a chance to see Canada House at the Design Exchange, where the piece has been recreated (admission is free on Canada Day).
Souvenir Of Canada 2 oscillates between the frivolous and the serious. The pages on Coupland’s visit to the Terry Fox museum in Port Coquitlam, B.C., are serious and moving. His photograph of the dead runner’s shredded sock is presented as though it were the Shroud of Turin.
Coupland has lately been working in the Star library collecting material for a photo book on Terry Fox, to be published next spring by Douglas & McIntyre.
“I can only look at this stuff for about 20 minutes at a time before losing it,” he said, when I found him in the Star’s library last week, after his talk at the Design Exchange. “These images never lose their initial impact.”
He currently has a little essay on Amazon.ca about Canadian stamps and has written a one-man play for the Royal Shakespeare Company in England, which he will perform at Stratford-upon-Avon in October. “It’s called September 10, 2001 and it’s about the day before the world changed,” he says.
In November, his new novel Eleanor Rigby will be out from Random House. “Eleanor Rigby is the loneliest woman in the world ó then she gets a phone call,” he says when asked about the novel’s subject.
Two of his eight novels are in film development and he is preparing to have art exhibitions in New York, London and at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.
When asked about how he maintains his astonishing productivity, he shakes his head: “I’m as lazy as dirt. I like to sleep as much as possible.”
Of course, being self-deprecating is so Canadian.