Lonesome Death of a Teen Actor

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I never watched the Canadian TV show “Degrassi Junior High,” which the CBC broadcast from 1987-91, but I’ve been very touched by two recent articles about the strange, sad death of one of its teenage stars, Neil Hope, who played the character “Wheels.” Hope died alone in a Hamilton, Ontario rooming house in 2007, and was buried in an unmarked grave; surviving family members only recently learned of his lonesome passing at age 35.

In a piece for Newsweek/Daily Beast, Glynnis MacNicol, a Canadian writer living in New York, writes

“It’s painful to imagine anyone’s life ending on such a sad, unobserved note—but doubly so when one considers how deeply Hope’s TV persona resonated with an entire generation of Canadians. . . . Unlike their American counterparts, Degrassi kids were not a pretty or polished group. They looked pretty much like any other group of kids at that age at that time. They looked like the kids you went to school with. And they might have been; for the most part the producers of the show cast regular kids with no acting experience. As one of my Canadian friends put it to me when I broke the news to her, ‘Nobody on Degrassi was perfect. Everyone was ugly, full of embarrassing hair, zits, glasses. The girl in the wheelchair was really in the wheelchair. . . . It was honest.’”

MacNicol explains that the program was a realistic, veritable docudrama, about a group of Toronto adolescents struggling with the rites of passage that young people sometimes experience–substance abuse, pregnancy, and alienation from their families. In a New York Times obituary published this week, five years after the death of its subject, reporter Paul Vitello writes

“‘Wheels’ was a boy who stumbles through misfortunes before drifting into alcoholism, [drawn] broadly on the life of Mr. Hope, who never had formal acting training. . . . After the show’s end in 1991, [he] spoke openly about the wages of alcoholism, revealing that he was the child of alcoholics who had virtually abandoned him and had fed their drinking on his TV earnings. He said he wanted to convey a message to other teenagers whose parents were substance abusers: ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Because it’s not your fault.'”

He was 19 when the program’s run ended.

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#Fridayreads/Feb. 24–“Something Fierce”

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#Fridayreads Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter, Carmen Aguirre’s chronicle of her upbringing in flight from Pinochet’s Chile, winner of the 2012 Canada Reads: True Stories competition. Aguirre’s family first fled to Canada after Allende’s fall, but her firebrand mother moved them to Bolivia, on the doorstep of their homeland, so she could participate in the revolutionary struggle to liberate their country. When Carmen turns 18, she becomes an active member of the struggle. Gripping and good.
Also, finishing John D. MacDonald’s the chiller, The Executioners, the 1957 novel on which the movie “Cape Fear” would be based.

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“Something Fierce” Wins Canada Reads: True Stories

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Congratulations to friends Emiko Morita, Jesse Finkelstein, and Scott McIntyre of Douglas & McIntyre Publishers of Vancouver for their book Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter by Carmen Aguirre being named winner of the “Canada Reads: True Stores” competition on CBC! It was brilliantly championed in this week-long on-air debate by musician Shad. The runner-up was Ken Dryden’s timeless hockey classic The Game. Other finalists during the week were On a Cold Road: Adventures in Canadian Rock by Dave Bidini, longtime member of the great band The Rheostatics; The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Valliant; and Prisoner of Tehran, a memoir by Marina Nemat. Hour-long discussions and debates on the five books have been held each day this week, carried on CBC Radio One, and on the CBC website, with each finalist championed, not by its author, but by an advocate. TV personality Alan Thicke boosted The Game, for instance, and also did a great job.

This was the first year Canada Reads was devoted to nonfiction books. The process began a few months ago with a longlist of fifty books, and through readers and fans voting for their favorite books, the crop was reduced to the shortlist of five. Despite issues I had with the judging at times seeming too much of a reality show, with books being eliminated one by one, and one advocate who I simply came to loathe, I think a months-long national reading fest like this is a great way to raise the awareness of books and reading among the widest possible population. I don’t suggest that the U.S. do this precisely, but initiatives with entire cities reading the same book have been quite successful. As members of the U.S. book community we certainly ought to continue experimenting with ways to heighten the visibility of great books and reading. Winners of Canada Reads invariably become huge national bestsellers. I find time after time that U.S. cultural industries–publishing and music especially–have a lot to learn from the ways that Canada promotes its arts and artists.

Something Fierce will be published in the US in August. I am getting a copy from D&M and will be writing about on this site.

[Feb. 10-This post has been updated with new information from the publisher in Vancouver about the forthcoming edition.]

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Putting Printed Books and Ebooks on Equal Footing

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With indie record labels now routinely making downloads of music available to buyers of vinyl LPs, I’m heartened to see a similar strategy taking hold among indie publishers too, with regard to ebooks and printed books. . . . With the print book and ebook initiative announced today, Coach House has demonstrated their continuing relevance, if it were needed–and that of publishers like them– in the burgeoning digital age that publishing has entered. I wonder how long it will be before big, commercial houses are also routinely making ebooks available, or some digital product, available with purchase of a new book. Meantime, congratulations to Coach House Books for leading the way. // more. . .

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Cheers for Canadian Bands at Year’s End

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“Clearly, this has been years in the making. The Canadian indie scene has been in ascendance ever since Feist’s old band Broken Social Scene put ‘sprawling collective’ into the music-critic lexicon with 2002’s ‘You Forgot It in People’. . . . But Canada’s combined musical might this year is still a revelation.”–Joshua Ostroff in Spinner //more

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Two Great Graphic Novels Coming as Ebooks

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I just got an email from Montreal comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly, a company that produces exceptionally fine graphic novels and comic nonfiction, announcing their first entry into the ebooks space with two books by artist/writer Chester Brown. I think their email is worth quoting at length, because this is a fine print publisher stepping in to ebooks and because of their ebook royalty, which they explain will be an equal share with their authors. This is especially topical, in light of Michael Chabon’s new arrangement with Open Road Media, which I’ve discussed in an earlier post today. Bravo to D&Q and Kobo! This is an exciting publishing collaboration. //more

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All the Romneys’ Horses

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In a weird and offensive article last Sunday that was headlined “Two Mitt Romneys–Wealthy Man, Thrifty Habits,” the New York Times reported on the Republican pol’s supposed ambivalence about his enormous wealth. I barely gave it a look at the time, quickly relegating it to the category of things I didn’t need to know about.

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