Frank is delighted to report that Warren Kinsella, The Artist Formerly Known as The Printh of Darkneth, is typing another tome.
eX-Punk Rock Bore, hailed by industry observers as the most unanticipated book deal of the year, chronicles “the clash between a group of punk rockers and some white supremacists.” These longtime Kinsella obsessions make for ideal fiction, given that Warren has decades of experience as a pretend punk, and what passes for a Canadian white supremacist movement exists mostly in his febrile imagination.
According to the press release, the deal with publishers Dundurn Press was “arranged without an agent,” which would explain rumours that Kinsella scored an advance well into three figures.
His last punk “manifesto,” Fury’s Hour, went much unlauded by critics, particularly Carl Wilson, then with the Globe and Mail:
“Kinsella misunderstands two things. The first is art. Specifically, punk as a late-late modernist art movement. When he responds to the Sex Pistols slogan ‘no future’ by tut-tutting that there really is a future and punks should try to make it brighter (and vote Liberal?), he displays his tin ear for punk’s Dadaist paradoxes.
“I’m not denying punk’s salutary effects on many lives, including my own. But it’s been too loyal an opposition, too close to emerging dominant values, for its own good.
“The DIY model remains useful, but it just restates what countercultures always have done. And today, with far broader information within easier reach, white outsider culture is finally superseding punk. By these fresher standards, Kinsella’s ‘manifesto’ is merely the nostalgia trip of a punk dinosaur and, oh yeah, total sellout.”
Tissue-skinned Kinsellout slipped on his Doc Martens and clomped to the keyboard to bash out a yobbish and homophobic screed on Wilson, a “multi-syllabic Nancy boy,” in his mouth-breathing estimation.
“A buddy of mine who edited this Wilson guy’s stuff at the Globe told me he’s a poseur, that he’s a prissy arsewipe, and that he’ll be insanely jealous of my book –and, ipso facto, that he’d try and figure out some way to rip it. What’s most amusing about this Moron-With-A-Thesaurus is his naked desire to impress someone, anyone, with how very clever he is.”
Typically, only weeks earlier, Kinsella had been sucking up to Wilson via email:
“Just read your bit in today’s Globe. It depressed me because it said so (apparently) effortlessly what the rest of us can’t just pen in a day. Or two or three. For me, this is a problem, ‘cause I’m writing a book about punk for Random House. Would therefore like to take you to lunch to pick yer brain. What say you?”
Did one of Kinsella’s fellow Liberals not refer to him as a “human shrapnel machine”?
“a buddy of mine” is right up there with “I heard it from a couple guys”