Archive for June, 2012

July Update with our monthly Newsletter

Hey everyone! Hope your summers are going well.

Click this link for our Argo Bookshop July 2012 Newsletter!

June was good to us (save for the heat waves), and we can’t wait for all of the great stuff coming up in July. The store’s got a new New Arrivals section and we gave the ol’ girl a new paint job, so things are looking up and feeling great.

Again, just so you all know, the sun is up later, so we’re open a bit later: We’re now open from Thursdays to Saturdays until 8PM. We hope you’ll find the time to come by the shop this month to check out our sales and some of the planned performances, all of which are listed in the link. If you don’t receive our newsletter, but would like to, send us an email: argobookshop [at] gmail [dot] com

Section Sale of the Month Continues! All Biographies from 20-50% off

Consider the life and times of a favourite author, politician, wiseman, musician(s), civilized ruffian, violent libertine or upstanding humanitarian for your summer reading: Faulkner, Nabokov, Robertson Davies, Solzhenitsyn, Leonard Cohen, Walt Whitman, John Glassco, John Fante, Primo Levi, Martin Luther, Outkast, D.H. Lawrence, de Sade, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Norman Bethune, Modest Mouse, Rilke, George Thackaray, Thoreau, Stephen Leacock, Confucius…the whole section is marked, from 20 to 50% off original price.

Book of the Month: Lars Iyer’s Spurious – 20% off

In a raucous debut that summons up Britain’s fabled Goon Show comedies, writer and philosopher Lars Iyer tells the story of someone very like himself with a “slightly more successful” friend and their journeys in search of more palatable literary conferences where they serve better gin.

Another reason for their journeys: the narrator’s home is slowly being taken over by a fungus that no on seems to know what to do about. Before it completely swallows his house, the narrator feels compelled to solve some major philosophical questions (such as “Why?”) and the meaning of his urge to write, as well as the source of the fungus…before it’s too late. Or, he has to move.

LARS IYER is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He is the author of two books on Blanchot (Blanchot’s Communism: Art, Philosophy, Politics and Blanchot’s Vigilance: Phenomenology, Literature, Ethics) and his blog Spurious.

Here’s the title poem from one of our new arrvials, Alien VS. Predator by Michael Robbins:

POETRY

ALIEN VS. PREDATOR

by Michael Robbins

Praise this world, Rilke says, the jerk.

We’d stay up all night. Every angel’s

berserk. Hell, if you slit monkeys

for a living, you’d pray to me, too.

I’m not so forgiving. I’m rubber, you’re glue.

That elk is such a dick. He’s a space tree

making a ski and a little foam chiropractor.

I set the controls, I pioneer

the seeding of the ionosphere.

I translate the Bible into velociraptor.

In front of Best Buy, the Tibetans are released,

but where’s the whale on stilts that we were promised?

I fight the comets, lick the moon,

pave its lonely streets.

The sandhill cranes make brains look easy.

I go by many names: Buju Banton,

Camel Light, the New York Times.

Point being, rickshaws in Scranton.

I have few legs. I sleep on meat.

I’d eat your bra—point being—in a heartbeat.

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Published June 30th, 2012 in Announcements, Events

New Arrivals – 30/06/2012

Here are the latest arrivals in the shop.

Get ‘em while they’re here!

Reservations are welcome, just send us an email at argobookshop@gmail.com

Click on a photo to get a closer look!

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Published June 30th, 2012 in Announcements, Uncategorized

New Arrivals – 23/06/2012

Here are the latest arrivals in the shop.

Reservations are welcome, just send us an email at argobookshop@gmail.com

Click on a photo to get a closer look!

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Published June 23rd, 2012 in Announcements

Robert Walser’s The Walk

The Walk by Robert Walser. Trans. Christopher Middleton & Susan Bernofsky. New Directions, 2012. pp 90. $10.99

Despite his boasting one of the most distinguished cast of supporters in all 20th Century literature (Kafka, Benjamin, Bernhard, Hesse and Sontag to name just a few) the great, mad tragi-comic Swiss writer Robert Walser has remained something of a well kept secret. A cultish figure whose work anticipated Kafka as well as the surrealists, Walser’s work is spun out of a bizzare hybrid of pastoral and modernist qualities, alternately realistic and whimsically imaginative, his approbation of all things small and unintentionally beautiful giving way to wild confrontations and social misunderstanding. As translator Susan Bernofsky writes, his voice comprises a “mix of solemnity and whimsy, impertinence and veneration.” Sontag compared him to a good natured Beckett.

The Walk is the most recent of the half a dozen or so of his titles that have made their way into English in the past couple of years, and it is one of the best yet. Quite simply, it is a novella length fictionalization of a day’s journey on foot, a loose chronicle of an unnamed narrator’s (presumably Walser) informal stroll with attending sights, sounds, encounters and appointments both stilted and successful described, our perambulatory hero extolling the virtues of walkers and the malice of engines all the way through.

The subject fits Walser’s rambling, intuitive and discursive style perfectly, as the pace of the mind settles into that of the foot (or vice versa?), so that more typically edifying reflections upon writing and the mind are peppered with speculations upon the miserliness of tailors; “youthful presumed budding cantatrices” and “alleged retired actresses” roam the countryside among stray dogs and distasteful giants; and luxuriant pensiones bear placards with several hundred word essays advising potential “candidates” as to the ridiculous litany of virtues necessary to make the cut.

One of Walser’s greatest qualities as a writer is that he is effortlessly, perhaps unintentionally humourous, as if he can’t help himself, and this hilarity doesn’t preclude a genuine emotional engagement, a vague understated sadness. He doesn’t seem to have a bad bone in his body, and indeed his criticisms are always immediately followed by long fawning apologies to the reader who cannot help but fall pray to his charm. Hermann Hesse infamously said that if Walser had a hundred thousand readers the world would be a better place, and I believe he is right. With that many readers experiencing such unadulterated delight, who couldn’t help but crack a smile?

- Jesse

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Published June 21st, 2012 in Book Reviews

June 28th: Matthew Gavin Frank reads from ‘Pot Farm’ + A Review

On Thursday, June 28th @ 7PM:

Chicago-born Matthew Gavin Frank will be stopping at the Argo Bookshop on his North American tour to present his latest book Pot Farm (University of Nebraska Press, 2012), a text full of firsthand observations, experiences, interviews, and research detailing the strange, sublime, and sometimes dangerous goings-on at the North Californian Weckman Farm. It’s a place with hidden politics and social hierarchies, populated by recovering drug addicts, alternative healers, pseudo-hippie kids, and medical marijuana users. From pickers to drivers, cooks to yoga instructors, snipers to illegal immigrants, Frank explores the various roles that allow this industry to work, and the blurry legislation and logistics that regulate and rectify the “mostly” medical marijuana industry, a thriving but unsung faction of contemporary American culture.

Matthew Gavin Frank is an assistant professor of creative writing at Northern Michigan University. He is the author of Barolo (Univeristy of Nebraska Press, 2010) and five collections poetry: Sagittarius Agitprop, Warranty in Zulu, Four Hours To Mpumalanga, Aardvark, 6×6 and The Morrow Plots.

So, Thursday @ 7PM. Here’s a review I (JP) have done for the book:

“Having to live with a mother who is dying is… I want to say ‘difficult’, but that hardly encapsulates the experience. The doubt, preliminary grief, and frustrations (among a myriad of other emotions… break out your thesauri, kids) are understandably too much to handle for some.

Matthew Gavin Frank faced living with his mother’s battle with cancer, and it seemed to me that it wasn’t just the steady decline of the body of the woman bore him unto this earth that chipped away at his emotional endurance. It’s also the routines involved with living in that situation that “drove (him and his wife) to do something deliberately foreign and ‘off the grid,’ the way people do when they realize, but are fleeing from, the awareness that they may have just shed their youth, or whatever it was that allowed them carefreedom.” Weekly ‘chemo breakfasts’, walking the dogs, trying to have sex as quietly as possible in your teenage bedroom while your parents are sleeping a few paper-thin walls away… all this, while the reality of the cancer hangs above.

This is how Frank’s book opens, calling upon his reasoning for coming to a northern Californian pot farm, Weckman Farm, as he clips and prunes and picks buds from their sticky stalks. It shows how he mixes the past and present into one lucid movement, memory and immediate reality moving as one into a precarious future. It’s this quality that functions as a central device for the book, feeding into the descriptions, with Frank immediately synchronizing the unreliability of memory with unreliability of his narrative.

Unreliable because, ahem, he was almost as stoned as Marc Emery will be when his expedition comes to an end.

But don’t get me wrong! Sure, Frank begins by discrediting his own words by evoking the great spirit of marijuana, but as the story moves forward, you slowly realize that he’s a great voice of balance between the highly opinionated supporters and those who would deplore the industry. He doesn’t shout “legalize it!” from the farm’s hillsides, and is humble enough not to look down upon anyone who treats weed as a panacea.

Look, coming from Canada, I am completely desensitized to the concerns that surround pot. Legalization is a no-brainer in the end, if not just for the sake of the hemp industry. Its legality in my country is a joke, existing in a limbo where so many have done it/currently do it, yet it simply won’t be legal any time soon (likely due to our proximity to the States in the first place). The only time I really realized the Canadian-American discrepancies surrounding pot was when I met my first American outsider as a teenager. She couldn’t frankly discuss how much she wanted from the dealer over the phone. “The cops don’t really care” I said, trying to reassure her, but that fear was only dissuaded with a lot of time and blatant deals out of car windows on populated streets.
In a way, I found myself relating to how little Frank knew about the situation with pot in the States. The Compassion Act of 1996, the organizations that fight for its distribution, the outdated laws constructed from a defunct Reagan administration… who knew that pot farm struggled to exist south of our border so much? Thieves, renegade anti-pot militias that violently attack the farms, military-style visits from divisions including the California National Guard, the California Department of Fish and Game, the federal DEA, the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service, the Marijuana Eradication Team, police departments…

But this book is no grand elucidation on the pot industry. It’s one guy working in it and taking in what he can from first-hand accounts. For those of you who crave a bit of blood in your books, sadly there is no attack on Weckman Farm during his stay. And if political manifestos are not your thing, no worries! As aforementioned, Frank is not giving a sermon from the weed field, only first-hand accounts that accurately paint the reality behind farms like Weckman. Choose your own adventure in ideals.

Consider this book as the following:
1 part emotionally-wrenching family fiction
1 part conversation borne from a joint being passed around
1 part recent history of the pot trade in California
Simple syrup, ie. Frank’s skill as a poet feeding into the descriptions
& seasoned to taste with colorful character vignettes and pondering impressions.

The people Frank meets are worth the book alone. We’re not talking about a sea of deadhead hemp-promoting granola-crunchers, but a far-reaching palette composed of ex-cops, ex-Vietnam soliders, people trying to KICK hard drugs like cocaine or heroin, yoga instructors, father/mother figures, blue-collared workers, a Hurricane Katrina survivor, AIDS patients… some of which can play a mean guitar or trumpet. Yes, there are some people you could certainly deem to be hippies, but wouldn’t it take a liberally-minded individual to work in a quasi-legal industry that supplies medicine to chronic pain sufferers at the risk of imprisonment? And yes, some pot does go out to people for recreational enjoyment. The horror, the horror!

Some of you may not enjoy Frank’s tendency towards the somewhat tangential and/or surreal in his descriptions, but if that’s the case, I believe this to simply be a kind of voice you haven’t given a chance. Frank isn’t necessarily going for the overbearingly literary with this text, but he has done something that is socially conscious, both politically and empathically engaging. Its passages are fun, breezy and at times very beautiful and enlightening:

“Driving at dusk, the satellites come out over the desert. The sky through the windshield is a painful blue, the moon like some lewd headlamp parting the knots of creosote. Some, so many tired people are harvesting mairjuana. (My wife) Johanna has had her hand on my leg for over an hour, the sweat cooling between our skins. We are driving toward.” ”

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Published June 20th, 2012 in Announcements, Book Reviews, Events

Argo Featured Reading #7: Cory Lavender, Darryl Whetter and John Wall Barger

Greetings, Montreal!

Firstly, we’d like to thank everyone who came out to Mark Lavorato’s debut poetry collection launch, a lovely book entitled Wayworn Wooden Floors put out through the illustrious Porcupine’s Quill this year. We still have copies in the shop for anyone who is interested; he’s certainly a writer to pay attention to as his work forges on.

On to business.

Speaking of authors and poets worth paying attention to: Tomorrow, June 16th @ 7PM, we have three fantastic east-coast-bred poets coming into the shop: Cory Lavender, Darryl Whetter and John Wall Barger.

To begin the night, Nova Scotia-bred poet Cory Lavender will be reading some of his work. He was a long-standing host of an infamous spoken word performance series in Halifax for years, known as Tensity, and his poems and essays have appeared in many prominent Canadian journals including The Antigonish Review, The Queen’s Quarterly, The Dalhousie Review and The New Quarterly. His first and eagerly anticipated manuscript, tentatively-titled Smear, will contain all of the rich lyrics you can expect to hear if you come out tomorrow night, encompassing material that ranges from the familial, to scathing political critiques and even the scatological:

“At the corner of profound and profane, where we watch

the time of our lives get poured down the drain.

Where pillow-talk meets potty-talk and we patty-cake in protest.

Where internal meets extrinsic then splits.

Where diurnal meets diuretic and we wake in soaked beds.

Where shat meets shyte and scat meets shit.”

Lavender’s poetry holds a delicate dichotomy, balancing the grit and honesty of his native dialectic tongue with an immersive emotional rapport.

After Cory Lavender, Darryl Whetter will be reading from his latest collection of poems Origins (Palimpsest Press, 2012). He’s the author of two books before Origins, both from Goose Lane Editions: The story collection A Sharp Tooth in the Fur (2003) named by The Globe and Mail as one of the Top 100 Books of its year, and the novel The Push & the Pull (2008). He has published poems and stories over 40 times in some of Canada’s best journals—including Descant, The Fiddlehead, Arc, The New Quarterly and Prairie Fire.

Darryl holds a PhD in English and has published or presented papers on contemporary literature in France, Sweden, Canada, Germany, the United States, India and Iceland. Nearly 100 of his commissioned book reviews have appeared in venues such as The Toronto Star, The National Post, The Vancouver Sun, The Montreal Gazette, The Globe and Mail, Detroit’s Metro Times and the national CBC Radio program Talking Books. While Whetter has been a professor of English and creative writing at various universities, he currently teaches at Université Sainte-Anne.

Here’s the write-up from Palimpsest Press: “Entombed within a thirty-kilometre-deep seam of rock, the fossils of Joggins, Nova Scotia are pried from a cliff-face by a version of the ocean out of which their creatures evolved—for the first time on Earth—more than three-hundred-million years ago. With probing metaphors and a keen eye on science, the poems in Origins create a multi-faceted portrait of evolution, extinction and climate change. Centered on the powerful Bay of Fundy, Origins compares the displaced, prehistoric marks of fossils with cultural marks like art and books. These varied poems observe eternal traces and lingering residues, from fossilized footprints to landscape sculpture to pollution and industrialization. With only one bone in a billion fossilized and a perpetually changing planetary surface, these celebratory yet cautionary poems also investigate chance, loss and ruin. The intersection of forces, which both create and destroy, are echoed by poems devoted to transitory art, the human addiction to energy, and an evolving media history (from nineteenth-century field drawings to twenty-first-century digital libraries). Origins is a nuanced ledger for a troubled world.”

Lastly, John Wall Barger will be finishing off the night as he reads from his latest collection Hummingbird. Coming all the way from China to present this collection in Halifax, Toronto and Montreal. A good friend of Lavender’s, Barger has received shining praise from The Malahat Review (“Barger has an ear, so all pieces have that musical buzz, the rig-a-jig of craft”) and Prairie Fire(“poems sing through a maze of faceted opalescence that tends toward brilliancy”). Whoa.

Barger’s poems have appeared in many literary journals, including CV2, The Antigonish Review, The Malahat Review, Grain and Descant. His work has also appeared in anthologies including The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 (Tightrope Books) and The Montreal Prize Global Poetry Anthology (Véhicule Press, 2012). His first book, Pain-proof Men, was published in 2009 by Palimpsest Press.

Here’s a write-up for Barger’s latest, also from Palimpsest Press: ” The Portuguese word for “hummingbird” is beija-flor—flower-kisser. In Aztec mythology, Huitzilopochtli is the hummingbird god, the bloodthirsty god of war, requiring nourishment in the form of constant human sacrifices to ensure that the sun will rise again. In this book, Barger documents his recent itinerant years in closely observed, honest, and sometimes surreal episodes: on a filthy street in Delhi, inside a statue of Buddha in Taiwan, and on the back of a Vespa in Rome. The hummingbird is a territorial, aggressive creature whose life depends upon its quest for fuel, compelling it to taste up to one thousand flowers per day. Its pulse, as it flies eight hundred kilometers across the Gulf of Mexico, can rise up to twenty-one beats per second. In these gritty poems, the furor of the hummingbird’s desire to survive and the roving spirit of the poet merge to compel a reading of life in flux that is at once breathtaking, agitated and fragile.”

So! That’s tomorrow evening, June 16th, with the doors opening to attendees at 7PM. The reading will begin around 7:30/45PM.

Refreshments will be served!

Hope to see you there!

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Published June 15th, 2012 in Announcements, Events

June 2012 Update with Newsletter

Greetings,

You’ll find a copy of our latest newsletter here.

We’re looking forward to June. Seeing as the sun is up longer, we’re up a bit later: We’re now open from Thursdays to Saturdays until 8PM. We’ve also got plenty of great books and great authors to go ’round. We hope you’ll find the time to come by the shop this month to check out our sales and some of the planned performances, all of which are listed in the link. If you don’t receive our newsletter, but would like to, send us an email: argobookshop [at] gmail [dot] com

Our Featured Publisher: Gaspereau Press

For a limited time, we’ll be carrying selected titles from the prestigious Gaspereau Press, an award- winning Canadian literary publisher which employs an unusual mix of traditional and contemporary technologies to produce beautiful trade books. From editing, typesetting and production to sales and promotion, their hands-on approach carries through every aspect of a book’s creation, resulting in a process which is as culturally enriching as the books it fosters. All this, and it’s 100% Canadian!

Our selected titles include (click the title to view):
~ Robert Bringhurst’s Selected Poems
~ Christopher Patton’s Curious Masonry
~ Susan Gillis’ Twenty Views of the Lachine Rapids
~ Bruce Johnson’s Firmament
~ Tim Bowling’s The Annotated Bee and Me
~ Monica Kidd’s Handfuls of Bone
~ Peter Sanger’s John Stokes’ Horse
~ Jan Zwicky’s Forge
~ Sean Howard’s Incitements
~ Don McKay’s The Shell of the Tortoise
~ Thomas Wharton’s The Logogryph
~ Basma Kavanagh’s Distillo

Book of the Month: George Orwell’s 1984 – 20% off

What better summer read than a chilling prophecy about the future? While 1984 may be one of those come-and-gone books for some, none can really doubt the timeliness of Orwell’s narrative. 1984 presents a startling and haunting vision of the world, one that we can picture all too clearly from the 21st century with our own Electronic Police States, the collection of personal information online or our growing obsessions with one another’s personal lives. It’s a powerful novel in how it holds onto the imaginations of multiple generations of readers with its admonitions —a legacy that only seems to grow with the passage of time.

So kick back, drink a mojito, and enjoy some dystopian fiction.

Book of the Month Sale: Biographies, from 20-50% off

…And if dystopian literature is not something you’d consider for summer reading, consider the life and times of a favourite author, politician, wiseman, musician(s), civilized ruffian, violent libertine or upstanding humanitarian: Faulkner, Nabokov, Robertson Davies, Solzhenitsyn, Leonard Cohen, Walt Whitman, John Glassco, John Fante, Primo Levi, Martin Luther, Outkast, D.H. Lawrence, de Sade, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Norman Bethune, Modest Mouse, Rilke, George Thackaray, Thoreau, Stephen Leacock, Confucius…the whole section is marked, from 20 to 50% off original price.

So, hope you’re enjoying the summer. Here’s Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, #21:

III, 21
I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate
into new tongue.

I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.

I chant the chant of dilation or pride,
We have had ducking and deprecating about enough,
I show that size is only development.

Have you outstript the rest? are you the President?
It is a trifle, they will more than arrive there every one, and
still pass on.

I am he that walks with the tender and growing night,
I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night.

Press close bare-bosom’d night—press close magnetic nourishing night!
Night of south winds—night of the large few stars!
Still nodding night—mad naked summer night.

Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset—earth of the mountains misty-topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!
Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!
Far-swooping elbow’d earth—rich apple-blossom’d earth!
Smile, for your lover comes.

Prodigal, you have given me love—therefore I to you give love!
O unspeakable passionate love.

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Published June 6th, 2012 in Announcements

June 7th: Tess Fragoulis reads from and discusses her latest novel, ‘The Goodtime Girl’

On June 7th, Crete-born writer Tess Fragoulis will be reading from and discussing her latest novel, The Goodtime Girl at the Argo.

It’s the story of a young girl named Kivelli Fotiathi who finds herself stranded in Piraeus after the Great Fire of 1922 destroys her home in Smyrna. Having lost everything, Kivelli lives in a brothel’s broom closet until her singing talent leads her out of abject poverty and into the precarious realm of fame in Piraeus.

Tess Fragoulis is the author of two works of fiction, the short story collection Stories to Hide From Your Mother (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1997, QWF First Book Prize finalist in 1998) and Ariadne’s Dream (Thistledown Press, 2001). Fragoulis also co-edited the anthology Musings: An Anthology of Greek-Canadian Literature (Vehicule Press, 2004). She now lives in Montreal, where she teaches part-time at Concordia University.

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Published June 5th, 2012 in Events

Argo Bookshop -

Where Montreal's Readers and Writers Gather

Archive for June, 2012

July Update with our monthly Newsletter

POETRY

ALIEN VS. PREDATOR

by Michael Robbins

New Arrivals – 30/06/2012

New Arrivals – 23/06/2012

Robert Walser’s The Walk

June 28th: Matthew Gavin Frank reads from ‘Pot Farm’ + A Review

Argo Featured Reading #7: Cory Lavender, Darryl Whetter and John Wall Barger

June 2012 Update with Newsletter

June 7th: Tess Fragoulis reads from and discusses her latest novel, ‘The Goodtime Girl’

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