Saturday, December 20, 2008

Art Imitates Life Imitates Art Im . . .

. . . The National Post's Philip Marchand on Jack MacLeod's J.T. and Me:

. . . If the reader still regards this novel as a pure work of fiction in which any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly the reader's own — lookout — a few pages into the novel should dispel that notion. J.T. invites Zinger to the P.O.E.T.S. corner (Piss On Everything, Tomorrow's Saturday) at a local tavern. "P.O.E.T.S. had been a casual but flourishing lunch group every Friday since 1980, a haven for thirsty journalists, novelists, editors, disillusioned ad men, and dyspeptic academics," MacLeod writes. On the day in question, "Talk around the table turned to Bob Fulford's latest essay and how Canada would be a diminished place without newspaper columns by Rick Salutin and Joey Slinger." . . . None of this is invention. The P.O.E.T.S. corner is indeed a Toronto phenomenon as described in the book, and on any given Friday, members might well be singing the praises of Salutin and Slinger. There's no literary law against this sort of thing, but it gives the reader an odd feeling . . .

(Incidentally [which was McLuhan's favourite word], I think Phil, author of a spectac bio of McLuhan as well as Ripostes, means "readers." Odd.)

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