Archive for July, 2007

Even famous writers need appreciative readers. Joseph Conrad, author of Heart of Darkness, once said to his wife after she made what she believed were helpful comments on one of his drafts: “I don’t want your criticism, I want your praise.”

Of all the people who’ve so far read Fantasy in Florence, the highest praise has come from a friend who enjoyed the last chapter best. “It’s a love story,” she said. “I cried at the end.”

What author could hope for anything more!

As a writer, I also work hard to get things right, so it has been a pleasure to hear from many of the Florentines I interviewed for the book. This comment from jewelry designer Angela Caputi was typical. “I’m sure that this book will have a lot of success because you wrote it with a lot of humor and sympathy,” she said. “I recognize myself very much.”

Reviewers have been kind, too. “Rod diarised their stay in a highly readable account, recording their impressions and personal growth as the months passed,” wrote Harriet Zaidman in the Winnipeg Free Press. “Unlike Peter Mayle, whose wry wit created caricatures in A Year in Provence, McQueen tries to understand his new friends and lets them explain how their surroundings shaped them.”

I’d be happy to hear more. Ciao.

Michael Moore’s new movie “Sicko” favorably compares the Canadian health care system with the U.S. He reduces wait-times in our emergency rooms to mere moments, a nosestretcher equal to his claim in “Bowling for Columbine” that in crime-free Toronto everyone leaves their front door unlocked.

Despite Moore’s ridiculous comparisons, we Canadians are nothing if not morally righteous about how much better off we are compared to Americans. Behind our phony facade, however, lurks a day-to-day dilemma that should have us up in arms: how much more expensive it is to live here than in the U.S.

There’s been a lot of foofarah about keeping corporate taxes competitive with U.S. rates, but what about personal taxes? When I returned to Canada after working in Washington D.C. where I paid U.S. income taxes, my annual taxes in Canada doubled even though my income dropped.

Moreover, the stronger Canadian dollar - now at a thirty-year high - has done nothing to ease the cost of imports. Book publishers and retailers have been laughingly slow about reducing prices here. Tom Bower’s book about Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel is US$17.79 on amazon.com, C$22.02 on amazon.ca (or US$23.56), fully one-third more in Canada. Bought a birthday card lately? The printed pricing is even more tilted against us.

Or how about a new car? The manufacturer’s suggested retail price for a 2007 BMW 328i in the U.S. is US$32,400 (or C$34,668) versus C$41,000 in Canada - 18 per cent higher here. That’s a lot to pay for daytime running lights. Gas to put in the car also costs more. In British Columbia gas is C$1.05 a liter (equal to US$4 for a gallon taking currency and different volumes into account). In Seattle, gas costs US$2.75 a gallon, 30 per cent less.

Among the worst institutional offenders is the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. I’m a beer drinker; Sandy prefers Beringer Chardonnay. The $20 price for a 750 ml. bottle of that California wine has not changed in the four years during which the C$ has strengthened by 40 per cent. Neither the importer nor the LCBO could possibly be paying the same price now to put this wine on the shelves as they were four years ago. Why am I?

Because Canadians are gray mice, that’s why. We spend half the year with our shoulders hunched, grumbling about the cold, the other half whining about a short summer and waiting on tenterhooks for the brief bit of warmth to wane. In such a place, there’s no gumption for consumer boycotts, let alone outright revolutions.

It was only a matter of time before Edgar Bronfman Jr. sold his magnificent Upper East Side townhouse. Nothing in his life lasts for long. After Edgar Jr. married his second wife, Clarissa, in 1994, the next year he paid $4.375 million for what had been a five-storey nine-unit apartment building on 64th Street in the same block as Donatella Versace and Ivana Trump.

Edgar Jr. and Clarissa spent two years on the design, two years on construction, finally moving in 1999 to the thirty-one foot wide home with its two-and-a-half story atrium containing a life-size Nigerian fertility statue. Three years later, he put the place on the market, asking $40 million. It’s taken another five years, but the house has finally sold for something in excess of $50 million.

This now-I-care-now-I-don’t attitude toward so much in life is a character flaw I explored in The Icarus Factor, my book about Edgar Jr. When he bought Universal Studios in 1995, Edgar Jr. hired not one, but two, consulting firms to re-engineer the studios. Re-engineering was in vogue in those days, but few executives paid as much for the pleasure of being told how to save money as Edgar Jr. He shelled out $100 million in fees to Boston Consulting and Booz Allen but lost interest part way through the process so the savings were slim.

When he took Sumner Redstone to court in order to acquire Viacom’s half of USA Network and Sci-Fi Channel, Edgar Jr. did what no one thought he could, and won the case. He immediately turned around and offered to sell the spoils to Barry Diller.

People were little different. He fought to hire Frank Biondi Jr. to run Universal then took a scunner to him after a few months and finally fired him. Edgar Jr. is a butterfly collector. Once he’s pinned his latest trophy to the board, he’s on to the next species.

It’s not that Edgar Jr. is careless about relationships, he empathizes with people, worries about their private lives, and has an unerring capacity to remember names of individuals he’s met only once. But his path through life is like a skipping stone across a pond, never touching down for long enough to make a difference.

The explanation is not just inheriting all that money. There’s nothing wrong with his work ethic. Edgar Jr. has always gone to the office every day, even though he doesn’t need to. The problem is that he doesn’t know why he’s there.

Numerous people have asked for a copy of my speech last month on the occasion of receiving an honorary degree from The University of Western Ontario. Here it is, minus a few minutes of introductory remarks:

Convocation may seem like an ending, but it isn’t. It’s what you learn next that counts, and then what you learn after that. So here’s what you can learn today - here are my top ten secrets of life.

• Secret #1: Choose well. I’m talking about picking your spouse, partner, significant other, whatever description fits best in your case. This is absolutely the most important decision you will make in your young life. I lucked out; may you do the same and may you both enjoy good health and good humour all your days. Laughter really is the best medicine.
• Secret #2: Always take the most difficult road. If someone asks: do you want to do A or do you want to do B, where A is dead solid simple and B looks insurmountable, pick B, because A will almost certainly be boring. You’ll soon find that B wasn’t as difficult as you feared and you’ll fly higher than you ever thought was possible.
• Secret #3: Take risks, which is different from taking the most difficult road. Taking a risk is when you do something off-the-wall that’s combusted in your own brain. When Alison went off to university, Sandy and I had our middle-aged crazies together. Sandy walked away from a lucrative real estate career; we rented our house in Toronto and moved to London, England where we lived for 1987-88. In 2004, we did it again. By then, Sandy had gone back to school at the Ontario College of Art and Design. OCAD has a program where a small number of students take their third year of studies at the school’s studios in Florence. Sandy applied for and won a position. I had some portable writing projects so I was able to tag along for those nine wonderful months in Italy. We looked at this time when we stepped outside our ordinary lives as “the now or never plan.” So unique was that experience that we collaborated on a book called, “Fantasy in Florence: Leaving Home and Loving It,” that’s just been published. I wrote the words, Sandy did the illustrations. We’re back living in Toronto - but during those desperately cold days last winter, we could still feel that Mediterranean sun in our bones.
• Secret #4: Enjoy the moment; you’re a long time dead. Another way of looking at this is to say, revel in the journey, don’t rush to get to some destination. Just remember this: “The past is history, the future is mystery, the present is a gift.”
• Secret #5: Woody Allen once said, “Eighty per cent of success is just showing up.” You’ll be surprised how often that turns out to be true. Even better, if you show up with an idea that solves somebody else’s problem, you’ll be in the top one per cent. If you haven’t got an idea or need help finding your way, ask the most important person you think might know. People love questions for which they know the answers and you might even uncover a mentor to accelerate your career.
• Secret #6: Be an optimist. Nobody wants to work with duds. You don’t just find a happy life, you make one. In the same way, you don’t just stumble upon success, you make it. Nor do you learn from success; you only learn from failure. Looking back at the thousands of interviews I’ve conducted over the years with business leaders, the characteristics of the most successful include a capacity to pick yourself up after a fall and push yourself to get going again, a high energy level, excellent communications skills, and a capacity to analyze information that’s available to everyone and then come up with a new thought. Vision is the ability to see the invisible.
• Secret #7: Trust your instincts. I’m not nearly as good at this as I should be but your first “blink” -?to use Malcolm Gladwell’s term for “gut feel” -?is often all you need. Similarly, in the case of a potential conflict of interest, here’s my definition: If you have to think about it, you’ve probably got a conflict. The same applies to decision-making. There may be occasions when you’ll want to do a careful assessment, by writing down all the pluses and minuses and then weigh both sides, but most times I suggest you follow the method used by the late Peter Gzowski, CBC Radio’s revered morning man. Gzowski would flip a coin. If he looked at the outcome and was filled with disappointment, he took the other course.
• Secret #8: Do what you enjoy and enjoy what you do. Everybody will tell you the same thing and you’ll pay no attention, but it’s true. Without a passion for something - you’ll achieve nothing. I happen to be passionate about writing. If you asked me, ‘If you could do anything you want tomorrow, what would it be?’ I’d reply, ‘I’d like to spend the day writing.’ I try to write 500 words a day; do that for a year and you’ll have more than enough for a book. I wholeheartedly endorse what novelist Graham Greene once said: “I have no talent. It’s just a question of working, being willing to put in the time.”
• Secret #9: Seize the moment. Life’s what happens to you while you’re making plans. Most life-changing events are serendipitous. They come as a surprise, like the first frost of fall. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a goal, you should. Sandy wrote two words on a Post-it a while back. I have kept those words in sight and in mind ever since. The words are: “Limitless possibilities.” If you can dream it, you can do it.
• Secret #10 comes from a lecture delivered in 1922 by J.M. Barrie, the British author best known for Peter Pan. In the lecture, published in a slender volume entitled Courage, Barrie had this to say about what matters in life. “God gave us a memory so that we might have roses in December. The people I have cared for most and who have seemed most worth caring for - my December roses - have been very simple folk.” As for the most important personal characteristic, Barrie said, “Courage is the thing. All goes if courage goes.”