Maisonneuve has interviewed me about The Warhol Gang. An excerpt:

AV: Was The Warhol Gang modelled after a city?

PD: It’s not modelled after a city because, other than the stuff that comes with your basic geography (like Vancouver’s got a different setup than Toronto) I don’t see any difference between them. When I step into a mall, it doesn’t matter, it’s got the same Banana Republics, it’s got the same Starbucks. Your social experiences are fundamentally unchanged, no matter what city you’re in. I could drive across the border and be in a completely different country in Seattle and my experience is going be largely the same. So I deliberately didn’t set it in a city because I wasn’t talking about Canada, I wasn’t talking about Vancouver or Toronto, I was talking about a particular type of lifestyle that has come to dominate us, no matter where we are.

The other day I did a two-hour interview in a bar with Sean Cranbury of Books on the Radio. We talked about The Warhol Gang, DRM, iPhones, Stephen Harper and Canadian politics, why I hate American Idol, and a whole bunch of other stuff. The podcast is now up, along with this quick and dirty video. Check it out!

He’s designing toys for newborns:

A little while ago I did a Q&A with HarperCollins’ Savvy Reader to promote my new book, The Warhol Gang. It’s up now, and the book will be following next month.

1. Give it up –what’s the most embarrassing song on your iTunes? Why did you download it in the first place?

“Champagne Supernova” by Oasis. I don’t know how it got there. It just showed up in my library after a night hanging out in Russian chat rooms while drinking scotch. What the hell do those lyrics mean?

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Anxieties are fantasies.

(I ride across this bridge most days. It’s actually collapsed before.)

Just a reminder I’m reading tonight at the Real Vancouver Writers’ and Culture Series at the W2 Culture and Media House. My first reading in five years! I’ll be doing a little bit from my new book, The Warhol Gang. The location is 112 West Hastings Street — just look for the burning building:

A mashup of Billboard’s top 25 hits of the year.

The Ansel Adams of Flickr?

The Peep Diaries is a very interesting read — and project. The basic lesson: We’re all following you online. And we don’t care about you.

(I wish I’d read this before writing The Warhol Gang. The real world is always stranger than anything I can imagine.)

I just finished Kevin Brockmeier’s story collection The View from the Seventh Layer. This is a book for writers, with language so careful and beautiful it’s as if the book was transcribed by monks — fitting given Brockmeier has an angel’s powers of observation. As for the subject matter of the stories, well, think Chris Adrian having coffee with Kelly Link in Italo Calvino‘s cafe, and you’ll have an idea. Just a few examples:

• A man finds God’s overcoat and discovers people’s prayers written on notes in the pockets.
• Strange silences descend upon a city, and the inhabitants realize the city itself is trying to talk to them in morse code
• A philosophy student learns why other philosophers stopped writing

I had to think about reading itself in a different way when I encountered “The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device: A Choose Your Own Adventure Story,” and the story about the city’s morse code actually had me learning about morse code to figure out the city’s message. A book that makes you think? Imagine that.

See also Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead, about a city populated by the souls of the dead, who exist only so long as the living remember them — but now there’s only one person left alive on Earth.