Book News: 419 wins the Giller

via glooce

 

 

 

 

 

Will Ferguson has won the 2012 Giller Prize, the $50,000 award considered one of Canada's most prestigious literary honours.

Though best known for his humour and travel writing, the Calgary writer won for his dark novel 419 on Tuesday night, accepting the prize at a star-studded gala in Toronto.

"I want to thank the jury for putting together such a fresh list of books," Ferguson, who was dressed in a traditional kilt, said after taking the stage to accept the prize.

"I commend them for taking the books on their own merit, without preconceptions — which is how a jury should act."

Then, reaching into his sporran for a flask, the author concluded his speech by leading the audience in a toast.

"Ladies and gentlemen: To the written word," Ferguson said before taking a sip from the flask he procured from the pouch.

"And finally, to answer the question you're all wondering — yes I have something on underneath!"

 

 

 

A departure and a continuation

419 is a provocative tale of an email scam and a woman who sets out on a wide-ranging search for those she believes responsible for her father's death. It's different sort of writing for many fans of Ferguson, a three-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal.

"Everyone's saying it's a departure, which is understandable, but I think it's a continuum from Spanish Fly," he told reporters after the ceremony, referencing his earlier book.

"Spanish Fly was about con artists in the 1930s. It was a historical novel. So I didn't think of [419] as out of the blue, but I think of it as a continuation."

Ferguson didn't worry as much about writing in a genre for which he isn't as known.

"I think my publisher really took more of a risk than I did, to be honest, when I switched to literary fiction," he said.

Despite the kudos he's received for 419, he not ready to limit himself to one type of writing either.

"If a funny story grabs you, it grabs you. If travel grabs you, it grabs you," he said, noting that his next book will be a travel narrative about Rwanda, Burundi and potentially eastern Congo.

"I try to switch between fiction and travel. It uses different parts of your brain. No, I'm not giving up on travel writing, but I'm certainly enjoying fiction."

Along with the $50,000 cash prize, Ferguson will likely see a healthy sales boost for 419 — a post-prize bump dubbed "the Giller effect."

Audience of notable Canadians

Satirist Rick Mercer, Olympian Rosie MacLennan, actress Kim Cattrall, soprano Measha Brueggergosman and actor Allan Hawco each introduced one of the evening's finalists.

Ferguson's fellow shortlisted authors included St. John's writer Russell Wangersky (Whirl Away) and Montreal authors Nancy Richler (The Imposter Bride), Alix Ohlin (Inside) and Kim Thuy (Ru) — each of whom will receive $5,000.

Tuesday night's ceremony opened with a dance piece by two members of the National Ballet of Canada, performing to an acoustic version of I Won’t Let You Go (Darling) sung by rocker Jacob Hoggard.

CBC personality Jian Ghomeshi hosted the gala, which he described as a celebration of authors, at Toronto's Ritz-Carleton Hotel.

Actor Gordon Pinsent, interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae and Conrad Black were among the notable figures who attended the posh awards gala. Past Giller-winners Margaret Atwood, Vincent Lam and Linden Macintyre were also in the audience.

This year's jury — Irish author Roddy Doyle, Canadian publisher and writer Anna Porter and American satirist Gary Shteyngart — read more than 140 books in approximately 4½ months, according to businessman and prize founder Jack Rabinovitch.

Awarded annually since 1994, the prize was established by Rabinovitch in memory of his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller.

Honouring the best book of English-language fiction written in the past year, the Giller has previously gone to writers such as Mordecai Richler, Rohinton Mistry, Alice Munro and Esi Edugyan.

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15 Strange Claims Naomi Wolf Makes About Vaginas

Via Glooce

In her new book, gender-politics author Naomi Wolf says vaginas can control our minds, make us more creative, and feel “vaginal grief.”

1.A vagina is not happy without a penis.
"A happy heterosexual vagina requires, to state the obvious, a virile man."

2.Your vagina makes you a goddess. Or rather, "The Goddess."
"Throughout this book, I will be referring to a state of mind or a condition of female consciousness I will call, for ease of reference, but also for the sake of the echo, 'the Goddess.' [...] I am carving out rhetorical space that does not yet exist when we talk about the vagina, but which refers to something very real."

3.Foreplay is called "the Goddess Array."
"The autonomic nervous system prepares the way for the neural impulses that will travel from vagina, clitoris, and labia to the brain, and this fascinating system regulates a woman's responses to the relaxation and stimulation provided by 'the Goddess Array,' the set of behaviors a lover uses to arouse his or her partner."

4.The vagina can control the mind.
"Once one understands what scientists at the most advanced laboratories and clinics around the world are confirming — that the vagina and the brain are essentially one network, or 'one whole system,' as they tend to put it, and that the vagina mediates female confidence, creativity, and sense of transcendence — the answers to many of these seeming mysteries fall into place."

5.The vagina evolved to help women reach nirvana.
"The mystical or transcendental potential of female sexuality [...] allows women to connect often, and in a unique way, even if just for brief moments, with experiences of a shining, 'divine,' or greater self (or nonself, as Buddhists would say) or with a sense of the connection among all things. Producing the stimulation necessary for these mind-states is part of the evolutionary task of the vagina."

6.Uteruses can think.
"I experienced some of the 'thoughts' of the uterus myself."

7.The vagina is the meaning of life.
"It is not so surprising that when the neural pathways from brain to vagina are damaged, one feels that life has less meaning; truly, the well-treated vagina is a medium that releases, in the female brain, what can be called without exaggeration the chemical components of the meaning of life itself."

8.Women need love more than men, because of vaginas.
"To respect the central paradox of the female condition — the sexual/emotional need of the vagina and cervix — might mean that we need to face the fact that women are, in a sense, more easily addicted to love and good sex with the person who triggers that heady chemical bath, than men are."

9.Vaginas get depressed.
"[...] between one woman in five and one woman in three seems to be suffering from something very like sexual, or even like vaginal, depression."

10.They feel grief.
"[...] I wanted to be sure I was isolating 'vaginal grief' from general physical grief."

11.Sex for women (but not for men) is all about the "mind-heart-body connection."
"The most destructive thing that men are being taught about women is that the vagina is just a sexual organ, and that sex for women is a sexual act in the same way it is for men. But neither gender is being taught about the delicate mind-heart-body connection that, it turns out, is female sexual response."

12.Men told women not to touch their vaginas because they were too powerful.
"Given the dopamine-vagina-brain nexus, it is not unreasonable in retrospect to understand that an ideology would arise — however subconsciously — that would increasingly rigorously keep these same newly educated, middle-class Western women, who were seeking and gaining so many new rights, from understanding how their own vaginas even worked, and that would indeed punish them in many ways for even considering touching their vaginas and clitorises in ways that would activate more unruly dopamine."

13.The vagina has an imagination.
"In the 1940s, Anais Nin, Henry Miller's lover and contemporary, worked in the sexual-transcendentalist tradition of the female modernists, who revered the imaginative potential of the vagina."

14.Porn will ruin your vagina.
"Female masturbation to porn can desensitize women themselves to their own vaginas."

15.And your man, whom you need for your vagina.
"[...] we are discovering that porn diminishes rather than heightens libido over time; that its effect on the phallus is ultimately unmanning and depressive; and that its effect on the vagina is a short-circuiting of the intense erotic potential — which means, also, the intense creative potential — inherent in every woman."

Many of Wolf's chapter and section titles are also a bit bizarre. A sampling:
"Porn and Vaginal Illiteracy"
"Help Her Go Into An Orgasmic Trance State"
"Modernism: The 'Liberated' Vagina"
"Is The Vagina An Addict?"
"The Self-Defining Vagina Of The Second Wave"
"The Blues Vagina"

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