I’m coming to GUELPH, ONTARIO TODAY (May 8) to deliver the Musagetes Lecture.
Lee Lai's Cannon is an extraordinary graphic novel that turns out a beautifully told, subtle and ambiguous tale about Lucy (Lucy -> "Loose" -> "Loose Cannon" -> "Cannon"), a queer Chinese-Canadian chef at a Montreal restaurant whose messy family, work, personal and sex life are all falling apart in ways that are powerfully engrossing:
https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/cannon/
This is the second outing from Lee Lai, whose debut, Stone Fruit, swept many of the field's awards and won major critical acclaim. When a debut comes out that strong, it's sometimes followed with the dread "second book syndrome" in which a creator who has poured everything they ever thought about putting in a book now has to write another book, from scratch. But Cannon avoids any hint of that second book malaise; rather, it is jammed with dense and densely connected ideas, character beats and graphic signifiers that are brilliant in so many ways:
Cannon is a thirtysomething chef in a Montreal restaurant run by Guy, an instantly recognizable hustler who praises Cannon for her culinary abilities and her pliability, talks over her, demands the impossible from her kitchen colleagues and periodically breaks out into soliloquies about his own martyrdom to the hardships of entrepreneurship.
Cannon cares for her grandfather, who has been abandoned by her mother, who has been traumatized by the abuse he meted out to her during her upbringing. Now in decline and unable to care for himself, Cannon's grandfather continues his abusive ways, scaring off all of his home help, which means Cannon must devote even more time to him (she can't bring herself to put him in a care facility that will inevitably be full of white people who don't speak Chinese).
These familial duties leave Cannon isolated, with only one important friendship: Trish, an up-and-coming novelist whom Cannon has known since their school days in Montreal's suburban Eastern Townships, where they were the only queer Chinese girls either of them knew. Trish owes her professional acclaim to her own neurotic social instincts, which she polishes on the page with the help of an old writing teacher who serves as her mentor. Trish may be Cannon's oldest and best friend, but she's not actually a very good friend, and now that they're both in their 30s, neither Cannon nor Trish is entirely sure where they'd make new friends.
This is where Cannon starts, as Cannon tries to resolve all these bad situations, each of which is only worsening. Trish disapproves of Cannon's sexual affair with the new front-of-house woman at the restaurant – even as Trish begins a friends-with-benefits arrangement with a guy from her fitness club who clearly wants more than the odd tumble. Guy the restaurateur positions Cannon as his hatchet-woman and confidante, driving conflict in the kitchen that she is meant to hold the bag for. Her grandfather enters a terminal decline, and still her mother won't answer her calls and texts about it. And then, Cannon discovers that Trish has violated her in a way that is intimate and appalling.
These may sound like the beats that you'd find in a melodramatic soap opera, but Cannon's affect is so stoic, and her interiority is so beautifully and inventively depicted – Lai deploying the unique strengths of the graphic novel form here with total virtuosity – that the vibe is more David Lynch than Dallas.
The result is something that's beautiful, sharp, critical and lingering. Long after I closed the cover, I found myself mulling over the delicate ways that Lai raised the contradictions, sorrows and beauty of queer love, racial identity, camaraderie, self-control, and self-indulgence. Lai's characters have no answers, only questions that can never be fully resolved. Instead, these questions are the defining puzzles, defeats and triumphs of their lives.
It's a magnificent, sensitive and innovative work of storytelling.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
2026 Book Review #2 – Why Fish Piss Matters: On The Last Authentic Bohemia by Andy Brown
The independent, alternative, vaguely punk-aligned artistic and music scenes of the late 20th century have been mythologized while everyone involved is basically still around like nothing else I have ever encountered. This book is a proud addition to that effort, a hagiography of the zine Fish Piss and the scene in the downtown Montreal of the ‘90s and 2000s that it rose out of, written by someone who was intimately involved on the ground as it happened. It was a Christmas gift, and not something I’d have picked up otherwise, but an interesting enough little read. Though I’m not sure whether it’s better to describe it as a fascinating emic account of a specific cultural moment undercut by pretensions to profound social import, or as a slim book of pop-sociological theory drowning in a 40-something guy with the three kids and a house in the country reminiscing about how cool and punk rock he used to be.
The book is in equal parts an exploration of the idea of ‘Bohemia’ (in the Rent sense, not the medieval Prague sense), an examination of why Montreal (and specifically the Mile End neighbourhood thereof) was such a productive example of one in the ‘90s and 2000s, and a history and recounting of the ‘zine Fish Piss and its particular influence. It does, I think, decent-to-good job at the first two and a curiously terrible one at the last. (Curious because the book is written by a man who was intimately involved in the thing’s production and has made a career out of preserving artifacts of the scene it emerged out of).
‘Bohemian’ is one of those terms that gets used a lot as a vague, vibes-based description, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it considered or defined with any sort of rigour before. The book’s effort is a bit drawn out (especially given how short a volume it’s taking up space in), but is both interesting and (it seems to me) useful. After exploring a few different agreed-upon historical examples and delving into the etymology of the term, Brown defines it with something like sociological rigour. A Bohemia, to him, is a neighbourhood or locality in a larger city, defined by a constellation of cultural and artistic venues and populated by an artistically productive but economically marginal subculture of (predominantly) the downwardly mobile scions of the middle and upper classes. Such circumstances never last for long, but the density of connections between people genuinely dedicating the majority of their waking hours towards the production of art for its own sake and for the appreciation of their peers is often explosively productive.
I appreciate this definition a great deal, in large part because (despite Brown’s clear sympathies and inclinations) it resists the urge to make Bohemia a purely ‘good’ thing. A Bohemia is necessarily not any sort of real mass movement, nor something of real political power or relevance (except in mythologized retrospect). It’s to some degree necessarily elitist, a subculture centred around the over-educated and under-employed (even if they are often dying from drinking bad water in their 30s with the best of them) and only peripherally involving those without access to some sort of cultural capital. The book never really explicitly reckons with this, but insofar as ‘gentrification’ is a specific coherent and bad thing (which the book clearly agrees that it is), it’s also impossible to read it without coming away understanding that somewhere becoming Bohemia is a guaranteed way to start the process. It is always – for me, anyway – much easier to take the analysis of something by an author who clearly loves it seriously when they do reckon with the negatives.
More controversially – and I’m undecided how much of this is just an old man yelling at clouds – Brown argues that no true Bohemia will ever appear again. The internet ruined it – social media and cultural globalization make the development of the kind of close-knit and isolated scene where artists grow together in tightly-nested and overlapping petri dishes impossible to sustain for long enough for anything interesting to happen. Bohemias are necessarily physical locations. Venues where the same people trade off being performers, audience and critiques and come into organic contact with wholly different projects which end up influencing each other. Which I can see if I squint, but I really can’t help but wonder if Brown’s problem is just that he’s incapable of finding the scenes online where similar processes occur – if he could find them, that would just be proof positive that they’re not hidden enough to avoid the social media flattening he complains about).
All that said, the most interesting part of the book to read for me (and not by any close margin) was the series of chapters exploring the Mile End scene, its history, and why it developed. This may be because I personally find Québécois language politics (that the scene was largely anglophone in a city and province consciously dedicated to promoting the French language was not incidental), late 20th century urban decay and redevelopment, and cute little cultural anecdotes all fascinating reading, but still. I don’t really have anything to say about it but part is just straightforwardly good.
It’s when the book shifts from talking about the scene at large to talking about Fish Piss in particular that it runs into really major problems. The author was, as mentioned, personally involved with the ‘zine’s production and the people behind it – even if it weren’t stated, this would be painfully obvious. The book is a hagiography in the worst possible way, refusing to even obliquely discuss flaws of or arguments between figures the author clearly thinks highly of, and not having much of interest to replace them with. The result is the dullest recitation of names, dates and titles I can imagine. No amount of generously heaped superlatives used to describe the art included in the ‘zine can really stop the book’s descriptions of it sounding like particularly bad plaques at a mediocre art gallery (though the reprinted cover art in the middle of the book is appreciated). The major changes and events across the ‘zine’s run (the shift in who was printed, the deemphasis of prose and fiction for more music coverage, the distribution deal at Tower Records, the end of the ‘zine) are relayed exclusively in passive voice, with no interest in mining them for drama or explaining the decisions behind them. The chapter titled ‘The Death of Bohemia’ has all the vigour and passion of a Wikipedia article.
The book’s other main stumbling block – not a small one – is politics. Which is to say – the Mile End scene and Fish Piss in particularly clearly had about the kind of not-especially-coherent, deeply felt anti-globalization, anti-consumerism anarcho-socialist punk politics you’d expect of the place Godspeed You! Black Emperor emerged from. For all his enthusiastic singing of their praises, Andy Brown does not seem to share these convictions (or, at least, finds them embarrassing). The book seems to view any sort of mass movement or organized politics with distaste, instead defaulting to a sort of ‘Keep Montreal Weird!’ commonsense where the most pressing civic issue is setting aside zones of urban blight for starving artists to settle in. The dissonance is sharpest in how Brown keeps insistently referring to the (protests against the) 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec City as a disillusioning moment for much of the scene and frames it as almost a beginning of the end – but basically every direct quote included about the event is an impassioned account of radicalization. It’s a bit odd for the book to conclude that Fish Piss’smain political message was the DIY ethos embodied in its very production so soon after the reprinted anti-Iraq War cover art of an American Flag made of missiles and erect penises.
Brown is very passionate and effusive about that DIY ethos and the importance of outsider art, but also painfully insecure about it. The title of the book invites you to ask why you should care about any of this. The resounding answer it, somewhat accidentally, gives is that you should care about this sort of Bohemia because they eventually produce art that gets mainstream acclaim and recognition. Mile End was important because it gave you Godspeed and (later) Arcade Fire. Fish Piss Matters because a half-dozen different award winning authors practiced and tried things out in it before making it big. The alternative scene deserves support because it’s the disgusting compost that the occasional actually good artist will grow out of. Now to be clear I’m certain this isn’t what Brown is actually trying to say, but it is still what comes across.
All told, this was an afternoon’s read that I got as a Christmas gift. So certainly worth the price of admission. An interesting read, provided you have a high tolerance for rolling your eyes.
hi videogame fans. don't worry this tumblr isn't changing to monetise or advertise, but i wrote a novel with a kickstarter coming in august and think that you might be interested. inspired by apogee and id software releases i'm using the '90s shareware distribution method, aka first 'episode' free
most things haven't worked out, a science fiction novel
industrial gothic scifi about you and me and everyone else, with networked brain implants
wondering what's gone wrong with the economy and our society ? most things haven't worked out is a gothic science fiction novel about brain implants romance and our breaking world
read the first chapter (100 pages) now for free (PDF, no account necessary just click 'download'): https://tinyurl.com/y6ke36fw
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So I've stumbled across Cat Sebastian and let me tell you this is exactly the sort of cotton candy read that I love in June. Normally I'm not that into an uncut romance but god if there isn't something compelling about how she creates her characters and arranges her settings.
Absolute Pleasure: Queer Perspectives On Rocky Horror
A neat collection of essays all about the queer experience and interpretations of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Like any sort of essay anthology this did have some wildly varied levels of quality but I by and large quite enjoyed it. My favourites were the ones that dealt more with “historical” perspectives or actual film analysis. The ones that were more personal narratives with minimal ties to the movie itself inspired me less (at least one was so wildly unhinged that I had to gleefully read it outloud to multiple people so they could also experience it with me). There was some about this whole book that made me feel very seen… it’s obvious that there’s a real sense of community built around Rocky Horror and it spills out warmly into this. Makes me want to rewatch the movie again.
Boom Times in Chilliwack: Memories from the Post-War Years
A nonfiction book looking at how a Canadian farming community has gradually changed over time, from the baby boom in the 1950s to modern day. It was quite indepth, covering different larger categories (residential, businesses, sports, recreation, etc) and describing general attitudes and influences that played out in the community. It did a decent job of providing a broad overview while also looking at minutiae as small as how individual buildings changed over the decades.
Dinosaur Sanctuary v1-7
A fun, quirky manga series I’ve been wanting to try for a while! I busted up my tailbone so I was stuck lying around not doing much and read through this in a few days. It’s a fun story about a newly employed “dinokeeper” who works at a Dinosaur Park, something like a zoo for dinosaurs which were rediscovered and cloned in the 40s. It’s at a point in time where artificially bred dinosaurs are a norm, and if anything are rather out of fad — it’s like Jurassic Park except a mundane slice of life with a dash of animal conservation on the side! One of its strongest points is that it’s very well-researched and illustrated, a lot of academic thought was put into how these dinosaurs should look, move, and act.
Hockey Super Six v1-8
A children’s series about a group of hockey-loving kids who all acquire hockey-related super powers and use them to save hockey and/or Canada and/or the world (priorities vary xD) from all sorts of mad scientists, monsters, and schemes. It should be ridiculous, and it is, but I found it shockingly charming — I meant to read one book to see what it was all about and ended up reading and enjoying the entire series. It knows exactly what it is, decided to jump the shark in book one, and is so unapologetically over the top that it ends up creating a very fun romp. Also the author plays hockey himself and you can tell in how he writes the hockey matches. Some of them are seriously high octane, I couldn’t look away from them! (Heated Rivalry take some fucking notes, please add better written hockey to your hockey story!)
A Long and Speaking Silence
The latest novella in The Singing Hills cycle, which I always look forward to. This book acts as a prequel and shows one of Cleric Chih’s earlier adventures with Almost Brilliant. It’s very neat to see them as a younger, less experienced, and less confident cleric, and the book itself had some very timely things to say about refugees and immigration. It wasn’t my favourite in the series, but it was a very solid entry that I enjoyed reading.
Mistakenly Saving the Villain v1
This one disappointed me a bit — I heard so much hype around it and got strongly recommended it as my next danmei read but honestly it kinda fell flat for me. Part of it might be that it leans heavily into a “yandere” sort of character, which is not a trope I’m very fond of, but mostly it just felt… tropey and not very deep. There was stuff that I found very compelling, but the story often felt like it was skating along the top of what I was really interested in without getting as deep into the emotions and natural repercussions or broader healing journey that I would have really liked to have seen. I don’t think I’ll continue it, especially knowing that it’s been stretched out into four short books rather than three normal sized ones.
Night Watch
I’m not sure I could ever tell you which is my absolute favourite Discworld novel is, but I do think that Night Watch is hands down the best written of them all. It’s also, sadly, one of the only Discworld books I don’t recommend people start with just because it is such an emotionally impactful novel and you don’t really get it unless you’re already familiar with the characters. This book follows Sam Vimes tracking a deranged serial killer up the wizards’ tower and ultimately being blown straight into his own past by the magical storm that was building up. It is fascinating to watch Vimes need to readapt to how things were done in “the bad old days”, before he turned his life around and started turning the Watch into something that mattered. There’s a reason why the tumblr Discworld fandom all but has a holiday built around this book.
Star Shipped
I happened across this in a local bookstore, was mildly intrigued by what looked like a queer Star Wars rpf parody, and decided to listen to the audiobook to see if it was any good. Given how many more Cat Sebastian books I then followed this up with, it can be safely concluded that I liked it way more than I expected! I can’t say this is anything approaching high brow literature, but the author does a very compelling job of creating characters and relationships that you really want to follow. Her stories from what I’ve read so far tend to be somewhat meandering, more slice of life than pursuing any serious plot, but it gives breathing room for the relationships to develop very naturally.
They’re like a warm hug and I’m a little addicted to them. This book is about two actors who had been working together in a trashy scifi serial for years and had an off-screen rivalry. Just as one of them decides to leave the show and set out for greener pastures, a chain of events end up forcing them into closer proximity and make them reevaluate their feelings about one another. It’s part work-place drama, part-road trip, and just so very, very affectionate. I then went back to the bookstore to buy myself a physical copy.
Thud!
More Discworld, more Sam Vimes. I love the Koom Valley storyline, and who doesn’t love everything that happens with the Summoning Dark? I have a keychain that has both the Summoning Dark and the Guarding Dark on it!
The Truth
I feel like I never see people talk about The Truth enough, I really adore it. William de Worde delights me, so do Saccarissa, Otto, and the dwarves, it’s just such a lovely dynamic of characters. This is a story that sees moveable type introduced to Anhk-Morpork and the rise of its very first newspaper, brought about mostly by accident and William’s general inclination to be nosy and pedantic.
(also can we acknowledge how absolutely appalling Discworld covers can be? What is this meant to be. Is the hunchbacked villain on the cover meant to be William?? Choices are being made here. Why is it so hard for such an amazing series to get good cover art?)
We Could Be So Good // You Should Be So Lucky
The Cat Sebastian duology that I picked up after enjoying Star Shipped. These two are set in New York City during the 1950s, centred around a newspaper staff (and is in part what spurred me to reread The Truth!). The first book is about the son of the paper’s owner who starts working as a reporter in order to learn the ropes of the business that his father is intent on him inheriting. The second follows a background reporter from the first series who has been struggling with personal grief and finds himself put on a new project somewhat against his will — he is to interview and ghostwrite a “personal diary” of a somewhat notorious new ballplayer that had been recently traded to the new expansion team in New York. Apparently Cat Sebastian is known for her historical fiction and Star Shipped is an anomaly in being a contemporary romance; having read these I understand why she works so well as a historical fiction author! She really makes the settings feel very alive, and the stories and characters feel very grounded in whatever setting she chooses to use.
If I were being perfectly honest most of this would have just been my continuous reread of The Foxhole Court but I'm going to pretend I'm a well-adjusted person who is capable of reading other things...
fuck. i saved this draft to the wrong blog. it is too much work to redo this whole thing so here's an impromptu book update i guess enjoy
Beasts of Burden: Neighborhood Watch // Wise Dogs and Eldritch Men
Wildly varied quality. I quite liked the first volume of this series, as it introduced a world were average, every-day pets acted as the neighbourhood guardians against supernatural horrors. It was a fun twist on the monster-of-the-week genre, and introduced fun characters and laid out a story that seemed to be gradually building on itself. That all feel apart in volume 2 which was a collection of middling episodic nonsense. It felt like any bigger picture had disintegrated, characterization began to flatten, the art fluctuate in quality a lot, and there were suddenly more humans involved in this world that had so tightly revolved around the animals. The sheep story was really he only worthwhile one of the lot — and hey, why was Hellboy there??? Book 3 follows a different group of dogs but was much better than 2. The story felt more put together again, and the art was beautiful the whole way through. Still lost some of the magic that the first book had though.
Boyfriends
Some day I’ll learn to stop trying to read books published by Webtoons
The Convenience Store by the Sea
A nifty little book. It’s doing something similar to The Kamogawa Food Detectives, in that it creates a cosy, low-stakes story that revolves around different people who pass through the Tenderness Convenience Store. It’s not quite as successful as Kamogawa in my opinion — some stories were better than others, and it took a while for me to really figure out what was happening with the pacing but it was interesting enough. I appreciate some of the heavier topics it tackled and how compassionate it was too such a wide range of characters.
Girl Giant and the Monkey King
A middle-grade novel I bought secondhand on impulse — it had Sun Wukong on the cover, I was intrigued! Unfortunately what I had hoped would be a fun romp (Monkey King teaming up with a teenaged girl??? Sign me up, there are gonna be hijinks!) was instead mostly just middle school girl drama. The pacing was slow and repetitive, there was really no adventure, and it circled the same few issues in a heavy-handed way. I ended up not finishing it.
Haikyu!! v7-18
I continue my Haikyu!! Reread and continue to love it. Some books are slower than others, but that’s honestly just the natural flow of a series this long — there needs to be some breathing room so that you’re ready when the narrative kicks back into high gear. I love the summer training arc that you get around book 10, I love the characters that are introduced and I love seeing the growth in those chapters!
Hockey Rants & Raves
This book was recommended after I finished reading Alan Doyle’s books, and I totally get why, it’s the same sort of exuberant, sincere comedy that you can’t help but get sucked into. I can’t say I honestly know all that much about hockey — beyond being Canadian and absorbing a certain amount through general osmosis — but the author is both a very funny speaker and has a very honest, approachable love for the sport. This man is the opposite of a gatekeeper. He explains what he’s talking about, and is clearly welcoming everyone to come and enjoy this thing he loves so much. It’s just fun, like listening to a friend gush about their favourite thing.
Paddington: Here and Now
I needed something chill to listen to while I was falling asleep so I decided on another Paddington book. It delivered exactly what I wanted. It didn’t stand out in any particular way, but it was charming and cosy in the way of most Paddington stories.
The Role I Played
A second hockey book. After Hockey Rants & Raves I realised I was curious about learning a bit more about the sport beyond the surface level knowledge I’ve scraped up passively over the years. This is a memoir written by Sami Jo Small, an accomplished goalie who played in a number of games and leagues over the years. The most interesting thing about the story is her time participating in the Olympics — specifically the fact that she was generally a third-line goalie, meaning she was almost exclusively a backup and didn’t actually see much if any ice time. It’s such a strange situation that I had never considered before… one of the three women considered good enough out of the entire country to participate on the Canadian Olympic hockey team, but not good enough to win the ice time she so desperately wanted. Unfortunately while the topic is interesting, and I enjoy the stories about her teammates and training camps, the writing itself is pretty tedious. Small is not the most compelling writer out there.
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk
Absolutely bizarre little book. It’s like a modern day Aesop’s Fables for adults… each short story is uniquely strange. It made me feel some sort of emotions. Couldn’t tell you which.
The Smiling Land
The second Alan Doyle book I read after All Together Now from last month. I do think I liked All Together Now more, since it was such a fun collection of vignettes, but The Smiling Land was a charming book in its own right and I definitely enjoyed my time reading it. In this one, Alan Doyle travels around his home province of Newfoundland and Labrador and shares all sorts of descriptions and stories about the places he stops and the people he meets. It’s warm and welcoming and fun; it makes you want to go on a trip there immediately.
The Sunshine Court // The Golden Raven
I am so unwell about this book series 😌 This is the second arc from the All For The Game series. The first trilogy (starting with The Foxhole Court) followed Neil Josten, a boy on the run from his murderous father who is just trying to play exy and figure out how to survive his unhinged teammates. This new series picks at the tail end of book three and follows Jean Moreau, a member of the ruthless Raven exy team who was rescued at the end of the first trilogy. Deeply traumatized and rightful scared for his life, Jean finds himself dumped in California with the USC Trojan exy team, a group of individuals that may as well be the polar opposite to what the Ravens represent. This new trilogy has everything I love from the first trilogy (an oversaturated world of intense mafia drama and sports and whump) but brings a very different energy. Jean’s story is very much one of recovery, and the more we learn about what he experienced with the Ravens and just how broken he is as a person the deeper invested I get. I am going to go insane waiting for the final book.
I finished this audiobook yesterday and I'm listening to it a second time through.
* No spoilers *
It's one of those kinds of books that are a different experience when you have no idea wtf is going on vs you know exactly what is going on.
I liked it. I guess a lot of people didn't like it? Said it was too slow? I didn't find it slow, but I also have a Gen X brain, not a Gen Z brain, so maybe I'm just wired to be slow. Some people said it was predictable, I didn't find it to be so. Predictable in the sense that I figured out what was going on long before the end, but not predictable in how it left me feeling.
Also, maybe listening to the audiobook is a different experience from reading it. A good voice actor can really bring the characters to life and I thought the voice actor (Jacques Roy) was great.
Oh, and I found out after I finished it that the author is Canadian, so yay Canadian authors 🇨🇦
Oh, and ALSO. Maybe the narrative is more relatable to people who have been married and divorced already, or in relationships comparable to marriage/divorce.
Exclu: 'Heated Rivalry' creator Jacob Tierney gets Netflix series order for Alexander The Great drama based on Annabel Lyon book. Jason Bate
Well! This is exciting. A real departure from their usual collabs, but I'm into it.
(Alexander was famously blond, so I imagine folks will put their clown shoes on and assume Connor Storrie is already cast, even though he is not a teenager.)
