The conversation we missed

Out here in the boonies, we spend our days sitting around barefoot, playing the banjo and dreaming of overcoming our geographical handicap to write for them big city magazines like Taddle Creek and Joyland. And we have to watch the whole Giller foofaraw on TV.

The following morning, we get up, say howdy to all our cousins, stick a straw between our crooked teeth and then go online to read the Globe & Mail, where we learn what Linden MacIntyre et al ate for dinner.

(I ain’t too familiar with this fancy restaurant food, but I figure it was some kinda tuna salad sandwich.)

The Globe doesn’t tell us what books he’s read recently.

Bob Dylan, commenting on his imitators, said that there was no point in listening to Bob Dylan; if you want to understand Bob Dylan, you have to listen to the music he listened to. You have to go back to his sources. And this is the pleasure of Dylan’s XM radio show: you get to hear all this obscure stuff that happens to interest him, instead of hearing him drone on and on about his fascination with the Bible and his writing methods and the themes he investigates and explores. Or what he had for breakfast.

It sure would be nice to know what the writers on that Giller shortlist have been reading, rather than what they had for dinner, or worse, what they wore to the gala.

Too much to ask? Apparently so.