Back in the day

Re. the link: While it persists my colonial outrage is not so acute these days.

1989

And not too long after I was giving the forgiving David Milligan grief The Great Eastern went to air on CBC Radio – for five years. I did another radio pilot, “24 Hour Duplication” featuring Andy Jones and Barry Newhook that went swimmingly and similarly disappeared into the bureaucracy. I’m going to see if I can’t find that one and post it, though it might be gone forever. Grateful for Mr. Milligan’s kind words here,

Link

Coincidentally my next book (working title, “Young Germans”) is set in 1989, and partially in St. John’s.

A letter from Robert Haas

Received a lovely note (with a correction) from Robert Haas of Tablas Creek Vineyards.  Mr. Haas was a gracious, learned and generous host one afternoon when I was in California doing research for Easy to Like. The photograph below is of the Tablas Creek Vineyards … yeah, it is that beautiful.

 Hello Edward,
I loved “Easy to Like”.  I appreciated  the satire.  I do not think that we are quite so idealistically pure and demanding as Elliot: even as we become convinced that biodynamic and dry farming and native yeasts are more than just hype.  Nor, thankfully, has the wine press been unaware of what we are doing. The consumers and key gatekeepers in the trade, are becoming more diverse in their wine appreciation so that we can comfortably coexist with the runway wines, “factories” and the critter labels that do not share our ideology.
There is a mistake in your research that could be easily corrected in future versions, if any should be forthcoming.  Tablas Creek did, indeed, import “rootstocks,” but the important imports were the vinifera vine material to be grafted onto the phylloxera resistant rootstocks.  Mourvèdre, Grenache, Roussanne, etc. are vinifera material, or simply vines.  Rootstocks are 110R, 140R 1103, 3309, etc.  We imported them and started our own nursery because we were afraid that that we would have wasted three years of USDA importation procedures to get clean vines by having them infected by sending them for multiplication and grafting to U.S. nurseries with the then prevalent vine viruses here.

Best, Bob

 

Close readers

I said to a colleague in the film racket this weekend that 99% of the audience for most art and entertainment regard it as a forgettable diversion.  And there is nothing wrong with that.  I have the start-of-the-school-year cold right now and would kill for some great diversion.  Occasionally you have a reader or a viewer or a listener that pays extra attention and finds things in your work that gave them meaning when you made them.  I don’t know this Angela Hickman but readers like her make it worth it.

Link

It was more than 25 years ago but I studied that Restoration satire too.

I Zebra

Yes, yes, yes there are feral zebras in California.  Yes, they really are a vestige of the bestiary William Randolph Hearst kept at San Simeon.  Introduced non-natives, definitely not “authentic” they seemed the perfect enemy of the non-native grapes Elliot was cultivating.  And there was the Orson Welles connection, Citizen Kane, the Paul Masson ads, Mike Vargas, yes, all connected, yes. black and white in motion, yes. Whether one of the critters has ever made the short passage over the Santa Lucias to munch on grapes I cannot say.

Central Coast California

Macleans Review

REVIEW: Easy to like

Canadian-born Elliot Jonson is a Hollywood screenwriter and vintner before events conspire to send him home. His penance? To become the vice-president of the CBC’s English-television programming. “It’s like PBS, but with commercials,” he explains to an American movie executive. That’s the kindest thing Elliot says about the CBC, but not the funniest, by far. The title of Riche’s hilarious new novel is a backhanded compliment to TV and wine, topics that find a surprising kinship in a story about a guy trying to simultaneously save his failing vineyard and a public broadcaster.

The book opens with Elliot schooling a couple of California trophy wives on wine appreciation. Elliot plays the straight man to their airhead banter, reassuring readers they’re in for a treat. The rest of the story races along, from FBI investigations to trouble with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. We learn that Elliot was served the ultimate, ironic punishment for moving to Tinseltown after film school: his son, once a child star, is currently in prison for drug possession and robbery. But Elliot isn’t jaded about Hollywood so much as he’s tired of rejection. He calls method actors dissociative psychopaths, more like “method humans.” When Elliot lands in Toronto, his powers of observation are lethal.

The best stuff is the author’s parody of the CBC bureaucracy and its adherence to regional balance and bland programming. Elliot’s job interview is laugh-out-loud funny, as are his speeches to the staff. In the book’s acknowledgements, Riche thanks the CBC employees who “sang”—boy, did they. While “the Corpse,” as some call it, admittedly is an easy target, Riche skewers the policy wonks with glee, just as he pilloried private school administration in The Nine Planets. That book’s protagonist, Marty Devereaux, is a classic antihero, but there’s something sweeter about Elliot, who strives simply to make a great bottle of wine. Elliot’s a dreamer: “You can chase taste all you want,” he says, “you’ll never catch it.”

- Joanne Latimer  www.sinussister.com

Dis Like

These past few years I have found it ever harder to suffer heaped similes in descriptive prose, feeling the device should be used more sparingly.  I don’t think it’s a widely held view.

I’m considering writing, for a lark, something filled with failed similes, “the mountains jagged like melting butter”.

The protagonist in my new novel bemoans the lazy (and unavoidable) identification of facile taste equivalencies in wines, usually in the finding of various fruit and berries notes.  I thought it would be a little too cute to spell it out but I hope readers gather he feels it’s too easy to “like” (verb) the fermented juice of grenache grapes to cherries.

Launching in a Hurricane

Book launch is tomorrow, all are invited.  Hurricane Maria is forecast to be arriving the same day.  Perhaps we’ll be doing it in the dark.

Conversation

Interview with Weekend Arts Magazine host Mack Furlong was more a conversation than a regular Q and A.   Mack brought interesting ideas with him into the studio ( as well as a second book other than mine). It was an entirely pleasurable and stimulating experience.  Helped that Mack “got” and enjoyed the novel.

Link

Our chat was considerably longer than this so Mack did a terrific job editing it and, I believe, making me seem more lucid than was the case.

9/11 and TIFF

Here’s a re-post of the first thing I put on this site.  The “Rare Birds” film has a sort of cameo in “Easy to Like” as “Silly Goose”.  The fact that 9/11 is referenced in a line that begins on line eleven of page nine of the new book is just a coincidence, as is the fact that the official publication date is 10/9/11.

Rare Birds played the Toronto Film Festival on September 11, 2001.  The above is a ticket for a screening cancelled after that day’s news.  It was given to me by its holder, my good friend Jim Vivian. Roger Ebert saw the film the night before and was partial to it. I did not attend the festival.

wine in food

Mentioned in an interview over at my publisher’s website that my favourite wines are from Burgundy but that they have become expensive.  Most that are fit to drink are much too dear to put in the pot (when cooking small game, hare or birds, nothing else will do). When I’m preparing something au vin or bourguignon  I sometimes use a Canadian wine made from pinot noir grapes.  Canadian pinots have improved  tremendously over the past few years.  Jeremy Bonia, the wine director at Raymond’s Restaurant  http://raymondsrestaurant.com/ here in St. John’s, put me on to a particularly good value, the Pelle Island Reserve.  The wine reminds me of village wines from around Gevrey.  It’s not as fine, not as complex  as those wines (it has cherry and choke cherry but nothing like mushrooms or,  in the best examples from Gevrey, something like the meat juices of the small game), though it is a near equal in having a very silky mouth feel and it comes at a price that I can pour it in with the braise and it’s good enough to drink alongside.

grapes from Gevrey Villages courtesy Bill Nanson