Richard Harris's Blog, page 45
October 10, 2016
World Mental Health Day
In support of #WorldMentalHealthDay, which falls today, October 10, I’d like to point out a few things.
1) It’s encouraging to see countries finally starting to realize that mental health is not a stigma, but a bona fide disease. In Canada, for example, 20% of us Canucks will experience some form of mental illness in our lifetime.
2) Kudos to Bell Canada through its Let’s Talk campaign, and its spokesperson, Olympic champion Clara Hughes, for making this a subject of national conversation here North of 49. Since its launch in 2010, the initiative has raised more than $50 million, and plans to raise at least $100 million for mental health-related projects by 2020
3) Here in Toronto, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) is playing a hugely positive role in addressing this issue and subsequently treating the disease to the best of its ability. Of course, places such as CAMH could always use more funding – especially private donations – but despite allegations from someone south of the border whose skin tone matches his man rug, Canada’s healthcare system (and by extension its mental healthcare system) is not “catastrophic,” nor do we head en masse to the U.S. for medical treatment annually. (In a comprehensive study of 18,000 men and women that was published in the journal Health Affairs, 0.005% of Canadians received medical care in the U.S. based on a recommendation from their doctor, while a mere 0.001% did so of their own volition.)
4) There are a million and one scholarly books on the subject of mental health, yet there are also a number of down-to-earth fiction/non-fiction works on the subject, too. Goodreads.com has a pretty long list of books shelved as mental-health, with some of the top-rated ones (in alphabetical order by title) being the following: All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness by Elyn R. Saks, Impulse (Impulse #1) by Ellen Hopkins, Equating the Equations of Insanity: A Journey from Grief to Victory by Durgesh Satpathy, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, and Still Alice by Lisa Genova.
(P.S. Many of these same writers are what are known as “Goodreads Authors,” meaning they often hold chat sessions with readers in real-time through goodreads.com, and sometimes even take personal emails to talk about their work(s).)
Quote of the Day
Milan Kundera is one of the more interesting characters in the world of literature. A political maverick in his birth land of the Czech Republic, he’s part rock star for many reasons. On top of being a highly lauded author, he’s one of a handful of respected writers who actually uses his second language (French) to tell his stories. He’s also constantly in the mix for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Perhaps his most alluring/enticing (strange/frightening?) trait is that he’s got a bit of the J.D. Salinger going on, rarely offering press interviews and going incognito much of the time.
Whatever the case, he’s so much more than his most famous work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. While that’s a great book (and film!), all four of the books I’ve read by him have had something to offer that another one didn’t.
In the wake of pus**gate and the U.S. political arena’s equivalent to Chernobyl, I think Mr. Kundera would offer these sage words from the last novel he wrote in Czech, Immortality:
“Woman is the future of man. That means that the world that was once formed in man’s image will now be transformed into the image of woman. The more technical and mechanical, cold and metallic it becomes, the more it will need the kind of warmth that only the woman can give it. If we want to save the world, we must adapt to the woman, let ourselves be led by the woman, let ourselves be penetrated by the…eternally feminine.”
October 9, 2016
Quote of the Day
I know what you’re thinking: Cats, they ain’t read so good. That’s a fair and reasonable assumption. But try proving it scientifically! Anyway, the real point here is that cats are cute and books are cool. Except when your cat pees on a book. Then said cat is naughty and your book smells.
On a quiet Sunday morning before homes across Canada turn into madhouses for Thanksgiving, a lighter set of quotes about reading and books.
Incidentally, for the hard-core bibliophiles out there, I strongly recommend Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading and The Library at Night.
October 8, 2016
Six Degrees of Maria Semple
Kevin Bacon, pack up your grits. You ain’t got nuttin’ on Maria Semple. Per an article on slate.com, Dan Kois and Andrew Khan were struck with an idea upon publication of Semple’s latest book: Why not ask the Seattle-based writer what she thinks is the funniest book by a living writer.
The “daisy chain of hilarity” led them to ask those authors named by Semple what their list of funniest books by living authors was – and the results are very cool, including renowned writers like David Sedaris and Junot Díaz.
Personally, the two books which have actually made me cry out loud I laughed so hard were Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (though Thompson is no longer alive) and Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel (and I have no idea how Sabbath’s Theater made the slate.com list!).
As a side note, click here to see some of the funniest book titles known to humankind. Just make sure you’re wearing diapers or reading this in a bathtub, as you may unwittingly urinate on yourself.
If you have a suggestion for funniest book by a living/dead writer, feel free to drop me a note in the Leave a Reply box.
Quote of the Day
Unless they’re out of a novel by writers like Leo Tolstoy or Norman Mailer, or from the herculean efforts of scholars like Barbara Tuchman or Margaret MacMillan, military commanders aren’t often known for their mellifluous oratory skills. Nor, for the most part, are they known for their prose.
That made Dwight D. Eisenhower all the more unique. He remains one of only a handful of five-star American generals and was supreme commander of Allied Forces on D-Day for the largest seaborne invasion in history.
In freaking history!
As if that weren’t enough, he went la de dah into the White House and served two terms as president.
No bigs. Just a walk in the park.
Ike was so much more than just the sum total of his accolades and battlefield victories, though. He was a gifted speaker, respected as much by his servicemen as he was by statesmen around the world.
Now, on the eve of the second presidential debate, I feel that General Eisenhower not only had his finger on the pulse of society at the time, but was far more prescient than perhaps we give him credit for today.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
October 7, 2016
Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined
Congratulations to my friend Danielle Younge-Ullman on the upcoming release of her third novel, Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined (great title, eh?), which is expected to be out from the juggernaut of the publishing world on February 21, 2017 and can be pre-ordered through the previous link.
EBINR is already garnering advance praise and I couldn’t be happier for someone who knows on an intimate level how hard it is to make a living in this industry and actually thrive.
Danielle’s previous novels include Falling Under and Lola Carlyle’s 12-Step Romance.
Good on ya, Danielle. You might be receiving another invite to Curling Was Full in the near future…
Keys to an Effective Marketing Mix
While reading an article about creating an effective marketing mix on boundless.com, I had to laugh to myself. Not because I’m the funniest person I know (obviously), or because of my extensive training in the field (through my MBA at Harvard and Ph.D. in economics at Oxford), but because of something I noticed while carrying out a little experiment over the past 12 months.
In my never-ending quest to market my first novel, A Father’s Son, I have tried everything under the sun these last three years. Most recently, I wanted to do something productive with the extra copies of my book rather than simply giving them away to random people (which I’ve done) in random parts of the city (been there, done that).
Thus, therefore, consequently and as a result, I came up with a BRILLIANT! scheme. I asked the owners of a popular convenience store in my ‘hood to sell my book for about 50% off the retail price on Amazon in return for a small profit to be given to them after the sale of each copy. The store had lots of traffic day and night, and the husband-wife team genuinely liked me (who can blame them, right?). To my chagrin, they put my books way off to the side of the cash register, above the samosas and deli meats. Which makes sense. Clearly. Furthermore, they didn’t ask me a single question about the story and simply placed it atop a fridge display case.
Over the course of the following three months, I sold exactly one book. Discouraged, I took the remaining copies of my novel home, a long, cat-like tail lodged firmly between my legs. Then, in the coming weeks, I had a different thought, the four P’s of an effective marketing mix, usually seen as product, placement, promotion, and price.
I knew I had price down ($10 a copy) and felt that the final product itself met the threshold for a potentially successful commodity. That left placement and promotion. I’d been a one-man wrecking crew for promotion since 2013, doing as much as I could with my enviable marketing budget of approximately $9.74. And the placement? Well, it was being sold on amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com, and talked about on goodreads.com by people from around the world, especially in the book-buying meccas of Lichtenstein, . Laos, and Liberia. ‘Nough said, right?
In a moment of ethereal sales bliss, however, I was struck with an idea, so I marched across the street and talked with my friend Andrew, an ethnically Korean man who was born and raised in Ecuador and had been raising his family in Canada since the birth of his first child 14 years ago. Global citizen, anyone?
Anyway, he was a big supporter of mine, and although he didn’t run a convenience store with nearly as much foot traffic as the previous place I’d displayed my book, he agreed to put A Father’s Son front and center and vigorously promote it.
The result? Thirty books sold in its first three weeks.
Despite my impressive marketing background and unparalleled credentials in the field of marketing, I’m now convinced that of the four P’s to an effective marketing campaign, placement is king.
As a sidebar, I tend to watch YouTube for roughly 27-32 hours a day. Like many of us, I usually hit SKIP AD while waiting for a clip to stream. Not long ago, though, I watched a video on The Tube for an insurance company that was actually very, very well done. I guess effective marketing really does transcend preconceived biases. Click here to check it out.
Quote of the Day
I’m not a religious man. I don’t secure the buoy of my spiritual beliefs to any monotheistic faith, though I do believe in faith. And hope. And, of course, love.
While not a Christian, I value strong writing/storytelling as much as anyone (bonus points for great translations from obscure languages), no matter what banner it falls under or what stigmatism might be attached to it, and the Bible certainly has its fair share of inspiring, meaningful and beautifully crafted passages.
Among the most famous and well-known of these would certainly have to be 1 Corinthians 13, the chapter focused on what is most commonly translated today as “love,” and authored by Paul the Apostle and Sosthenes. Parts of the thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Coronthians in the New Testament have been quoted innumerable times by politicians, artists, activists, religious leaders, parents, teachers and Christians the world over, but one of my favourite recitals of the tremendously moving words came from Robert De Nero in Roland Jofee’s masterpiece, The Mission.
I’m cheating today by (1) cutting part of the original text and (2) including quotes (plural), but this one certainly warrants it in my opinion.
4 Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; 5 does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; 6 does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
11 When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
13 And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
October 6, 2016
National Poetry Day (Canada Edition)
Considering that it’s National Poetry Day, I figured I should include one of my favourite Canadian poems. For those who know me, it will come as no surprise that my choice is a selection from Michael Ondaatje’s beautifully crafted lyric poem, The Cinnamon Peeler.
If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
And leave the yellow bark dust
On your pillow.
Your breasts and shoulders would reek
You could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you.
The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.
Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to you hair
or the crease
that cuts your back.
This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler’s wife.
I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
–your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers.
.
When we swam once
I touched you in the water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
you climbed the bank and said
this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter’s wife, the lime burner’s daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume
and knew
what good is it
to be the lime burner’s daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.
You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
Peeler’s wife.
Smell me.
