Underground Book Club

Toni Morrison

2012-02-02T20:05:00.005-05:00

Of course, later she would win the Nobel and top the NY Times list of "most prominent" novelists, 1980-2005.

I saw her read at Trinity St. Paul's United Church in (I think) 1997 (what fantastic hair!) and walking out afterwards overheard two women:

"You know from a feminist point of view she's interesting."

"Why's that?"

"She doesn't just present women as victims."

*

[This review first appeared in Imprint, University of Waterloo, June 26, 1992]

Jazz
by Toni Morrison
Knopf, 1992

Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Aveune. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going.

There is a school of literary criticism that holds to the belief that black women writers are doubly discriminated against in their quest for intellectual recognition. They are, it is said, excluded from the discussions that determine academic excellence first because women's experiences are generally devalued in our culture, and second because white people simply don't try hard enough to understand black people.

Toni Morrison is one of the few writers, along with Alice Walker, to have broken through this cultural barrier. She won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for her novel Beloved and has just released Jazz to somewhat confused critical acclaim. Affirming the notion that institutions of power are unable to understand marginal voices, Time magazine's review of Jazz praised Morrison's literary ability while confessing not to understand her purpose.

The novel's plot is contained in its first sentences, quoted above. Simply put, the novel is about a couple who grow apart as they grow old. He takes a young lover, who leaves him. He kills his lover. Life goes on, somewhat like before. But also radically different. The novel concentrates on its characters, not its plot. It tells us in deeply drawn strokes each individual's quirks and fantasies, and after a while it is difficult to discern the victims from the offenders. Everyone is hurting, everyone is looking for redemption.

Likely this is not what you'd expect from a novel about a love triangle and a murder. But Morrison's point is that there are not easy answers, the roots of the problem run deep. The symptoms may be obvious, but the causes are certainly not. Jazz explores (as a Charlie Parker solo explores; it wanders, but always to the right place) the depth of this theme, celebrating human connections at the same time as it points out the consequences of their failings.

Love's connections may be frail, Morrison is saying, and they are often the cause of much pain and anguish, but they are also life's strongest bonds. Jazz plays with this paradox. The purpose of the novel, then, is simple. Jazz is jazz. That is all. Nothing more, nothing less. And as Louis Armstrong once said, "If you have to ask what's jazz, you'll never know."

As a cultural phenomena, the novel deserves to be discussed within the context of contemporary race and gender relations. A novel about black people in Harlem in the 1920s, Jazz speaks the voices of the marginalized people who feel they've moved up in the world. The readers, however, who know how hollow these dreams of 70 years ago are, can see the tragedy in the characters' ambitions. Just as they can see how little has changed with regards to violence against women.

But Jazz is not an overtly political novel, though in a completely subversive way the novel points out the commonalities that bind all people. These are the connections of emotion, the need to be loved, understood and wanted. And though these connections function on the level of individuals, they are also symptomatic of our culture as a whole.

Says one character: "All kinds of white people are there. Two kinds. The ones that feel sorry for you and the ones that don't. And both amount to the same thing. Nowhere in between is respect."

Elizabeth Smart

2012-01-29T17:35:00.000-05:00

Google Elizabeth Smart today and you get the teenage kidnap victim. But there was another Elizabeth Smart whose story is at least as interesting and quite divergently different.

*

By Heart: Elizabeth Smart, A Life
by Rosemary Sullivan
Penguin, 1992

[This review first appeared in Imprint, University of Waterloo, May 29, 1992]

Once upon a time there was a woman who was just like all women. And she married a man who was just like all men. And they had some children who were just like all children. And it rained all day. ... In the end the died. Do you insist on vulgar details? Mere gossip? Loathsome gluttony? Chapter one: they were born. Chapter two: they were bewildered. Chapter three: they loved. Chapter four: they suffered. Chapter five: they were pacified. Chapter six: they died. -- Elizabeth Smart

Elizabeth Smart wrote the poetic-prose masterpiece, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, and may just be Canada's greatest and most misunderstood writer. I mean, The Globe's Jay Scott somehow found it fit to describe her in last March's Chatelaine magazine as "the bisexual bohemian product of a wealthy Ottawa family against whom she rebelled."

Smart, says Scott, "carried on a passionately masochistic relationship with married poet George Barker for 19 years; she even bore him four children." Even, says Scott. It makes you wonder if he even bothered to read By Heart, "the awkwardly written but superbly researched biography" he was supposedly reviewing. What an idiot. What a country.

Elizabeth Smart once described Canada as a majestic country without any people in it, by which she meant there weren't any decent Canadian poets. For Smart, there weren't any people but poets, which was why she had four kids by T.S. Eliot's protoge, George Barker, though they hardly ever lived together and her four children were only four of his fifteen.

Smart wrote By Grand Central Station about the initial stages of her relationship with Barker, when he was drifting between Smart and his wife, manipulating them both and putting down his carelessness to the cause of Art. First published during World War II, the book was well received but quickly vanished. Its powerful poetry only resurfaced to prominence later with the rise of interest in women writers and a democratic reshuffling of the literary canon. Smart's work now stands as one of the pinnacles of poetic-prose of the 20th century.

In her own way, Smart, then, is a transitional figure. Hugely passionate and yet fiercely independent, she embodies both the traditional female mother-archetype and the contemporary feminist-ideal. She had four children because she wanted children. She was obsessed with them all her life. When she read George Barker's poetry in a book store one day, she decided he would be the father of her children -- damn the powers that be -- and he was. In that way, she was what her generation of told her a woman should be.

But she was also a New Woman, a female writer, a romantic, who wanted to live a life like Byron's. She wanted to live her life with kinetic energy, fight against the forces that would try to hold her back, struggle against the suffering, and win. Of James Bond she once wrote that he could have his mistresses as long as she could have her lovers. Society was hypocritical: it praised adventurous men but damned adventurous women.

...

Reading at Seagram's Museum on May 6, Sullivan expounded on her thesis that Smart had two primary themes in her writing, love and silence. Smart first pursued George Barker with an obsessiveness that was total and blinding, believing as she did that heroic love would save her from her bland, bourgeois, Canadian up-bringing.

But finding her vision far less than realistic, Smart then turned later in life, like many creative women of her generation (Sylivia Plath comes easily to mind), to trying to find a voice for all the women who are silenced by a culture that dominates and subjugates them.

Smart came from a wealthy family, but she spent the prime of her life as a single mother struggling to make ends meet, dying all the time only to write. She knew only too well what she came to call "woman's lot." Smart's second book, The Assumptions of Rogues and Rascals, illuminates her second theme. She "rebelled" (said Scott)? Good God, I hope so.

At one point in By Heart, Sullivan poses the rhetorical question, How then do you survive life's script? "By a rage of will," she says and quotes Smart:

Like this: pray; bang your head; be beautiful; wait; love; rage; rail; look, and possibly, if lucky, see; love again; try to stop loving; go on loving; bustle about; rush to and fro. Whatever you say will be far less than the truth.

"Refuse dismay and battle on regardless," says Sullivan, "which is what Elizabeth did. Indeed, Elizabeth believed the only response to life was 'ecstatic surrender' since life has a will stronger than yours. 'It is not for you to know.' She would always ask herself, 'Can't I possibly be a little braver?'"

Elizabeth Smart, says Sullivan, "lived on a vertical plane, where ecstasy or pain could deliver themselves like shafts shattering the moment." And -- oh! -- she is so sad! Her language has such strength and yet she was so subsumed by her need to love and be loved. She couldn't believe she was a good writer until a man told her she was. But not just any man, a poet. Barker, thankfully, gave her that praise, and Smart gave us her prose.

So full of contradictions, it is difficult to know what to make of Smart's life in our contemporary context. Her absolute devotion to her children might be seen as an attack on women's progress in the workplace, and yet Smart broke through many -- if not all -- of the social taboos of her day (and these days, too). That she is a great writer is gospel. Her life will only grow in significance. Rosemary Sullivan has done her well.

Milan Kundera

2012-01-28T18:39:00.002-05:00

This is the first book review I ever published, over 20 years ago, and its conclusion still rings true today.

Interesting to read this so much later. I can't remember much about the book now. Forgot all about Imagology. But I did remember the 60-year-old waving to the swimming instructor.

The point being, WC Williams and the imagists were right. The concrete wins out over the abstract every time.

On the same page, above the fold, was Derek Weiler's review of Atwood's Wilderness Tips.

*

[Review first published in Imprint, University of Waterloo, Sept 27, 1991]

Immortality
by Milan Kundera
Grove Weidenfeld

Back after a seven year hiatus, Milan Kundera has published a new novel. Probably best known in North America for the film version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera has returned with a delicate and delightful novel, a novel very much of its time.

Not that its time, the present, is delicate and delightful. Quite the opposite. The present is paradoxical, as is this beautifully heavy novel with a light touch, Immortality.

Translated from the native Czech, Immortality is Kundera's first novel since the end of the Cold War and the restructuring of Eastern Europe. For an expatriate living in France whose last novel studied the intricacies of modern life on both sides of the Iron Curtain before, after, and during 1968's Prague Spring, these must be significant events. And they are. But Immortality sets them in a broader context.

This is not a novel about the end of communism, though the effects of the recent changes are in evidence. This is a novel about Europe(ans), past and present, a contient too told and too much ravaged by supposedly Great Leaders this century to trust too quickly in another promise of renewal.

The novel explores the relationship between personalities and environments in intricate detail. This is a novel about a continent and its people stuck in time, not Movements or destiny or the Great Future. The characters, including one named Milan Kundera, are metaphors, imaging life in our uncertain age. Each character represents a personality-type whose almost every action the novel explains in continually evolving essays: the novel begins by interpreting the connection between the wave of a 60-ish woman to her young male swimming instructor with her adolescent self. Some people, the novel explains, are better suited to their environments than others, are luckier.

Though most of the "action" (very little happens in any real sense) takes place in Paris, late 1980s, the landscape of the novel includes a couple-three scenes in Heaven, where Hemingway, Goethe, the 19th century German poet, converse about their respective losses of power over their images on Earth now that they are dead. Being dead for Kundera is apparently as unbearably light as being alive.

"Nobody reads me any more," Hemingway complains. "Instead, they read about me."

Goethe, on the other hand, decides that immortality is as much a joke as his first life and zaps himself from eternity.

The relationship between words and reality, a theme explored in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is picked up again in Immortality. Where the first novel included "A Short Dictionary of Words Misunderstood," Kundera now expounds his theory of Imagology, the theory that the illusion is more powerful than reality because the illusion is what people believe.

Bernard Bertrand's father, Bertrand Bertrand, is a big-time journalist. Bernard chooses his occupation, breaking away from the partri-lineal tradition of politicians of his family because he realizes those who choose the images make the politicians. The power base has shifted.

And power, after all, is what life is all about. Think globally, act locally, the personal is political, and we're all responsible. Deluded perhaps, and more than a little confused about how to act in unity with the rest of the world's population, the environment, History, Time and Space (read, Immortality), but still responsible.

Life is a series of power relations, or at least that's the "image" to believe in these days (Kundera says Imagology has replaced Ideology, as both communism and capitalism have proven themselves morally backrupt).

The Gulf War was still Saddam Hussein's fantasy when Immortality was written, but the century's most destructive one-sided massacre appears only to have provided evidence for Kundera's thesis. Iraq's millions fought the "Great Satan" and the coalition forces fought "Another Hitler." Meanwhile, reality lost once again, along with civilians in both Iraq and Kuwait. The images of hate prevailed.

Immortality is President Bush's New World Order on a literary level. It draws allusions of hope out of destruction. However, like the President's vision of a new and lasting international peace, Kundera's vision of immortality is based on his own politics, not universal truth (the situation of very real death and destruction in Yugoslavia is proof enough that peace and renewal will take more than American rhetoric, or another novelist's sweet despair). His exclusive use of male pronouns reveals the walls of only one of his illusions.

The novel is a fine work of art and great reading, but any attempt to pull definitive truths from its pages will only meet frustration. We have no way of knowing how events are going to turn out, and nothing is new about that!

Sam Roberts

2012-01-21T19:53:00.002-05:00

"There's no road
that ain't a hard road
to travel on."
-- Sam Roberts, "Hard Road"

Don Freed

2012-01-20T22:18:00.001-05:00

Apropos of nothing, I thought I'd look up "Talkin' Louis Riel Day Blues" by Don Freed on the internet. Isn't that the home of everything these days?

My my, I couldn't find it.

And yet, there I was in 1992 in Saskatoon (what was the name of that place?) in a little club watching Don Freed record a live album. Colin James guested.

I think "Talkin' Louis Riel Day Blues" is a song every Canadian should know.

I'd first seen Freed when he opened for Jane Siberry at the Ontario Place Forum in 1988-ish. Is none of this on YouTube?

From Wikipedia, I learned that the live album was only ever available on cassette. I have a copy. Upstairs. Somewhere.

But I didn't know this - Freed with Johnny Cash - and more.

Here he is from 2007:

Also on MySpace.

Here he is again.

Rock on, Don!

No Regrets, Coyote

2011-12-28T16:50:00.002-05:00

Reading and Unread 2011

2011-12-27T14:08:00.000-05:00

What follows is a list of books that are scattered about the house in various piles. They are the books I'm currently reading or had hoped to have started by now.

The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories by Don DeLillo
Autobiography of Childhood by Sina Queyras
Jew by D.O. Dodd
The Granta Book of the African Short Story, edited by Helon Habila
The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
Lament for a First Nation: The Williams Treaties of Southern Ontario by Peggy J. Blair
We Others: New & Selected Stories by Steven Millhauser
Fine Incisions by Eric Ormsby
Dead Babies by Martin Amis
The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard
Idaho Winter by Tony Burgess
Choosing His Coffin: The Best Stories of Austin Clarke
Algoma by Dani Couture
Shag Carpet Action by Matthew Firth
Super Flat Times by Matthew Derby
Drown by Junat Diaz
The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God by Etgar Keret
Emporium by Adam Johnson
The Return by Dany Laferriere
Venus Drive by Sam Lipsyte
Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod
The Big Dream by Rebecca Rosenblum
This Cake is for the Party by Sarah Selecky
Reliving Charley by Dean Serevalle
Girl Crazy by Russell Smith

Part of closing out 2011. See ya'all on the other side.

Coetzee, Vonnegut, Hitchens

2011-11-27T15:16:00.007-05:00

Three dudes with last name monikers.

Diary of a Bad Year
by J.M. Coetzee
Viking, 2007

A Man Without a Country
by Kurt Vonnegut
Random House, 2005

Arguably: Essays
by Christopher Hitchens
Signal/M&S, 2011

"Declinism is making headway," Thomas J. Courchene writes in his revealing 2011 essay, Rekindling the American Dream: A Northern Perspective. In decline, of course, is the United States of America ("America's status as the sole global superpower seems contestable"), and the momentum of the concept is footnoted thus:

Among the many studies and articles that raise concern about the future of America are Friedman (2008), Zakaria (2008), Steingart (2008), Bremmer (2010), Fry (2010), Stiglitz (2010) and Rachman (2011). For a more sanguine view, see Fallows (2010).

W.H. Auden famously termed the 1930s "a low dishonest decade." What are we to call the aughts?

The three books under review here could easily be added to Courchene's bibliography, though Hitchens is "arguably" both sides of that question. (Incidentally, the opening sentence of Courchene's essay is, "American exceptionalism seemed unassailable as the world welcomed the third millennium." Courchene's "northern perspective," i.e., Canadian point of view, is that keeping America at the top of the heap is in our best interest. So this isn't an anti-American crowd we're talking about here; it's a group of essayists trying to figure out WTF has gone down.)

9/11, of course. Globalism, of course. The rise of the Chinese, of course.

And a bunch of decisions to deregulate the banking sector and go to war, and war, and war ... and now what?

Deciphering Vonnegut's title is simple enough: America has disappeared itself. One might suggest that this is the natural conclusion of Vonnegut's oeuvre. But let's not oversimplify.

One notable piece in Vonnegut's book is titled, "Here is a lesson in creative writing":

I want to share with you something I’ve learned. I’ll draw it on the blackboard behind me so you can follow more easily [draws a vertical line on the blackboard]. This is the G-I axis: good fortune-ill fortune. Death and terrible poverty, sickness down here—great prosperity, wonderful health up there. Your average state of affairs here in the middle [points to bottom, top, and middle of line respectively].

This is the B-E axis. B for beginning, E for entropy. Okay. Not every story has that very simple, very pretty shape that even a computer can understand [draws horizontal line extending from middle of G-I axis].

Now let me give you a marketing tip. The people who can afford to buy books and magazines and go to the movies don’t like to hear about people who are poor or sick, so start your story up here [indicates top of the G-I axis].

You will see this story over and over again. People love it, and it is not copyrighted.

Vonnegut presents a number of prospective storylines and graphs (Courchene take note), and, yes, people do love some more than others. The American Dream is one people like: hard work and solid individualism leads to material success. Cue the strings!

Somehow, however, the 21st century has turned out to more of a downward curve. The Kafka storyline: We woke up and discovered we'd all been turned into bugs. I mean, we were broke.

Or we woke up to discover that America practiced torture. Wither the shining city upon a hill?

Coetzee's novel takes the form of essays on contemporary global topics (torture among them), supplemented with two parallel narratives about the narrator of the essays, his pretty typist and her boyfriend.

Thus there are fictional levels of "deniability" that the opinions expressed belong to the author himself, but I'm not going to discuss the mirrors within mirrors implications. In the space I plan to devote to these three books, I merely want to point out a common element. Struggle against absolutism; the conundrum of America in the 21st century; torture; the meaning of life.

Hitchens actually quotes from the Vonnegut book: "Commenting on Socrates' famous dictum about the worthlessness of the unexamined life, the late Kurt Vonnegut once inquired: 'What if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?'"

This question sums up the queries raised by Coetzee's novel as well. But it must be said that it is the contemporary context of all three of these titles that inflates the currency of the question. When the day-to-day vernacular includes "declinism" perhaps it is better to leave the stone of life's complexity unturned? All the better to amuse ourselves to death with our digital toys and swelling string orchestrated stories.

N'est pas?

No. Of course, not. Let's take a look at that torture question. Actually, let's take a look at Hitchens being tortured.

Hitchens can be both earnest and funny, and though the shock of seeing Hitchens waterboarded may strike some as humourous, it is not. (One is not boarded, he writes; one is watered. Also, he defies anyone to call this "simulated drowning;" one is, he writes, being drowned.)

Ever the dialectician, Hitchens provides both pro- and anti-waterboarding advocates their say, which returns me to Coetzee. The pro-side, Hitchens outlines, base their support of waterboarding on practical concerns. America is at risk, and we need to know information to defend ourselves. Coetzee, ever cautious of the manner governments claim the right and need for new abuses of power, includes in Diary of a Bad Year a note on Machiavelli:

Necessity ... is Machiavelli's guiding principle. The old, pre-Machiavellian position was that the moral law was supreme. If it so happened that the moral law was sometimes broken, that was unfortunate, but rulers were merely human, after all. The new, Machiavellian position is that infringing the moral law is justified when it is necessary.

And so here we find ourselves in the 21st century with low prospects of a way out.

Vonnegut is dead, and Hitchens is dying. I have not always enjoyed reading them. I have at times quarreled with them (with the them that is in my reader's head). I could not understand, for example, how Hitchens could be such an advocate of war in Iraq when the rhetoric (to say nothing of the decisions and actions) of the Bush administration was so inflated as to be fantastical. (Hitchens' essay on the journalism of Karl Marx in Arguably responded to my confusion in part. Marx (!) wrote vociferously in support of the Union during the American Civil War; he supported British Imperial intervention in India; he supported, in short, the modernization of the world, taking long-terms views over short-term consequences.)

Hitchens has been widely praised for his prose, and all I want to add here is that his essays can make me laugh out loud, and I wish more writers would sharpen their pens (or their iPads) and do the same.

I love Vonnegut's story schemes and graphs. I love this, too: "I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex."

Coetzee should only be taken in small doses. I believe he has a sense of humour, but it is dry as toast (actually, Diary of a Bad Year, at times, is hilariously self-deprecating) and only revealed on close reading.

To America, I say, good luck. We need you to bounce back. Send us your wearied, your wanderers, your writers. Harness your brilliant idealism ...

And calm the fuck down.

Wandering the Earth: A Selected Stories Sampler

2011-11-20T23:14:00.000-05:00

Wandering the Earth: A Selected Stories Sampler (e-book), published today at Smashwords. ISBN 978-0-9866206-3-8

And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.

Table of contents:

Boys and Girls, Girls and Boys
Beginnings and Endings
Running with that Indian
Border Guard
Watching the Lions
Book of Job
Six Million, Million Miles
Yes, I Wanted to Say
Niagara
My Life In Television
Bonus Track: Hercules

Read these stories and more in:

Thirteen Shades of Black & White (Turnstone Press, 1999)
Only A Lower Paradise & Other Stories (Boheme, 2000; e-book, 2011)
The Lizard & Other Stories (Chaudiere, 2009)
How Many Girlfriends (Blurb, self-published, 2010)

Richard Outram

2011-11-13T15:10:00.000-05:00

It's never too late to make a discovery.

2011 is the year of the short story, but it's also the year to discover Richard Outram.

Porcupine's Quill has published The Esssential Richard Outram, edited by Amanda Jernigan.

Guernica has published Richard Outram: Essays on His Works, edited by Ingrid Ruthig.

Steven Heighton

2011-11-12T22:09:00.000-05:00

Workbook: Memos and Dispatches on Writing
by Steven Heighton
ECW, 2011

Stealing from William Blake, W.H. Auden wrote (and abandoned) a slim book in 1939 that was eventually published and titled (after Blake's line) The Prolific and the Devourer.

I first came upon it in the late-1990s, shortly after a new paperback edition came out, and it dazzled me. One of my subterranean interests is learning about the moments of transition of individual artists. Think, for example, about Picasso and his different periods. Bob Dylan and the great variety of his career. Ditto: Shakespeare. Neil Young. Joni Mitchell. Margaret Atwood. Susan Sontag. Joan Didion. The Beatles (who did it all in seven years!).

The Prolific and the Devourer captures Auden on the cusp, or in the middle of, a great transition. WWII was imminent. Socialism was fading. Auden commitment to Christ beginning (renewing?). Full of aphorisms and deeply personal (internal) conflicts, The Prolific and the Devourer is a tremendous portrait of a deep soul undergoing change and grappling with what it means.

(According to Blake, the prolific are the creative, and the devourers the bureaucratic. Or as the back cover says: "In Auden's interpretation, the Prolific are those who produce: the farmer, the skilled worker, the scientist, the cook, the innkeeper, the doctor, the teacher, the athlete, the artist. The Devourers are the politicians who depend on what is already produced for their well being. The strongest and most bitter energies of the book are directed against the idea that art should serve a political cause.")

Thus, shortly later (or contemporaneously), Auden wrote September 1, 1939.

Oh, it's alright ma (I'm only bleeding).

Anyway, Steven Heighton's new book, Workbook: Memos and Dispatches on Writing, isn't like Auden's book. It doesn't capture an artist in transition. But it is also like Auden's book. It is a portrait of an artist. It synthesizes the energies of an engaged and deep-thinking writer into a slim volume that is highly readable, though dense, and well worth reading and contemplating.

At 74 pages (dedicated to John Lavery), the book had better be intense (I know you know what I mean); and it is.

Here's a direct quote from an interview with SH about the book:

OB: You also tackle the waning culture of professional literary criticism and the rising trend of writers reviewing one another in Workbook. Do you think it is possible for writers to review one another in an unbiased manner?

SH: Yes, so long as the writers in question aren’t friends or antagonists. If they are, an unbiased review is pretty much out of the question. That’s just human nature.

Of course, all reviews are biased on some level, but your question seems to be referring to personal, collegial, competitive biases, which are different from, say, intellectual or ideological ones.

OB: Workbook is refreshing in its focus on the writing process, rather than career-centric advice. How do you avoid getting too wrapped up in the business side of things?

SH: I’m not above that stuff, it’s just that the business side of things dismays me, so avoiding it is a breeze, like avoiding creamed corn, Coors Lite or reality TV shows. As for dispensing “career-centric” advice on the use of social networking to promote one’s work, avoiding that, too, comes easily, since my knowledge of the subject is nil: I don’t use Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. In fact, they all sound really useful, but — as I argue in "Given to Inspiration,” one of the essays in Workbook — a writer needs to be cautious about overextending his or her already stretched attention span and “expending [more time] as a compliant, efficient functionary — earnest secretary to [one’s] own little career.”

OB: How different would Workbook have been if you wrote it ten years ago? Has your view on any of these subjects changed over the years?

SH: I doubt it would have been very different if I’d written it ten years ago. But fifteen or twenty? Here are a few lines (from “Memos to a Younger Self”) that would not have been in that earlier version — and their conjectural absence will give you an idea of the kind of material an earlier Workbook might have contained: “Squash the temptation to accentuate, poeticize, or wallow in the difficulties of the writing life, which are probably not much worse than the particular difficulties of other professions and trades. Take a tradesman’s practical approach to your development: quietly apprentice yourself to language and the craft, then start filling up your toolbox, item by item, year by year.”

I quote this at length because I want to accentuate the notion of transition. Heighton, note, says that he doubts that what he has written would have been different 10 years ago. But 15 or 20? This is both encouraging and discouraging to me. I like artists that change a lot (Dylan) over artists who remain clustered around a stable identity (most others). (Though, let's argue; is this true? Is this fair?)

Part of me would would prefer him to say, My thoughts are always a-changing; I'm always alert to alternative interpretations and perspectives. But where is the grounding in that? Where is the argument? If literature is a lover's quarrel, what's the point? One must take a stand. All the world's a stage. Perform.

And Heighton, in this book, takes stands.

He is in favour, as the interview above indicates, of judicious (non-ideological) reviews (and I hope this counts as one).

"Complaint," he writes, "is not criticism."

He instructs us as follows:

Good reviews appreciate books on the level of execution, aesthetic integrity, and achievement. Mediocre reviewers judge books by the degree to which they "identify with" or like the main characters. Bad reviewers like only what they can imagine writing themselves and lash out at anything they can't understand or which threatens their vision.

This is commonsenseical, but it begs for rebuttal. What is "aesthetic integrity"? What is "achievement"? What, even, is "level of excecution"? The brevity of the book, on these questions, leaves a hungry wake.

Also, a literary polemic that takes a point of view and takes a shot at defining and defending a (type of) "literature" is not necessarily a "bad review" or unwelcome. The spectrum of literary critical achievement, I would argue, is broad and accommodating of multiple approaches. To be blunt, I have heard people disparage Carmine Starnino's criticism because it is "negative" without allowing any acknowledgement that he goes to pains to promote a particular critical framework. One can admire the sophistication of the framework (and the insights derived from the framework) without also buying into the framework hook, line and sinker.

I would argue (and I think Starnino would, too) that it is the clash of frameworks that is the point of critical dialogue. It is the point of criticism. The sophisticated reader acknowledges multiple frameworks. As in politics, the point ought to be the continuation of the dialogue; not the dominance or absolute commitment to any one point of view.

George W. Bush's "You're with us or you're against us" has no place in literature, or criticism. Or politics, for that matter.

But, now, where am I going with this? Is Heighton some kind of neo-critic? Is he exclusionary? Absolutist?

No, I don't think Heighton is a neo-critic or an absolutionist. He a believer in dreamscapes and roads less traveled. He believes in aiming high and warns of the danger of careerism.

He knows how to wear Al Purdy's shirt.

Let me say clearly, I enjoyed this book. I recommend it. I'm trying to define my argument with it, which is mild.

I started this review by mentioning my interest in artists in transition. I don't know if Heighton is in transition. I hope so. I wish he had told us more about his changes.

Change came, and is a-coming.

People are crazy and times are strange

2011-11-08T20:52:00.000-05:00

Greg Kearney, Matthew J. Trafford, Tim Conley, Brian Joseph Davis

2011-10-29T22:10:00.000-04:00

Short story madness.

Pretty
by Greg Kearney
Exile, 2011

The Divinity Gene
by Matthew J. Trafford
Douglas & McIntyre, 2011

Nothing Could be Further
by Tim Conley
Emmerson Street Press, 2011

Ronald Reagan, My Father
by Brian Joseph Davis
ECW, 2010

It used to be said (I mean, like, 10 or 15 years ago) that the Canadian short story was stuck in the lyrical pastoral mode. Barbara Gowdy may have been our Aimee Bender, and Lee Henderson and Zsuzsi Gartner pushed the envelope, but real innovation in the genre was elsewhere.

In 2003, Christian Bök edited an anthology of avante-garde Canlit, arguing that the experimenters have been here all along. And, of course, he was right, but the anthologies often excluded them, and the cultural arguments all but ignore them. (Though Margaret Atwood, always our guide, apparently, is a radical exception.)

In any case, rushing ahead, my point here is simple. In the dying days of print (and the YOSS) we are blessed with abundant richness of weirdness. Jeet Heer, in a perceptive comment, has called Gartner the "anti-Munro":

Pure nature does not exist in Gartner’s fiction. Her characters are immersed in a completely technological environment. Surrounded all their lives by a digital sensorium, when Gartner’s people encounter nature, they see it through the prism of the man-made world.

Each of the authors under review here could compete for the title of "anti-Munro," but the point here isn't to degrade one form of fiction making or to promote another; it is to celebrate some nifty risk taking and encourage more.

As fiction editor of The Danforth Review, there's a little thing I look for. Call it originality or whatever. I've never been able to define it, except all these writers have it in abundant richness. Kearney has appeared in TDR twice ("Bad Readings", "The Man Who Ate Babies") as has Conley ("The Watch", "Propositions Concerning Animal Magnetism").

Onward. Book by book.

Pretty is Kearney's second collection, following Mommy Daddy Baby (McGilligan, 2004). I don't know how to say this, except to say it directly: Kearney must be the most family values alternative writer on the planet. There is tremendous tenderness, compassion, dependency and the related dysfunction between his characters, and also at times the starkest honesty and revelation of notorious truths. If we were to begin to define the "Kearneyesque," this is where I would begin. Kearney's stories combine an acknowledgement of other people as flawed, yet loveable, while at the same time harbouring an awareness of the alienation of individuals and the horrible burdens individuals bear that cannot be, ultimately, shared.

If Hemingway was all about grace under pressure, then Kearney does Papa one better.

An awesome achievement. (I'm not describing any details, because they're better left for readers to discover on their own.)

"The Divinity Gene" is the title story of the collection by the same name. It's a story about Jesus being cloned. It's a challenging read, but a brilliant concept, brilliantly executed. The collection overall, however, is more diverse than this summary of a speculative fiction might seem. While there is also a story about a mermaid, overall the collection is grounded in a contemporary reality that is refreshingly transparent. One story, for example, is about a gay young man who goes on a canoeing trip with straight buddies who shrug off his "otherness." Of course, also along on the trip is a dead man whom one of the friends has brought along because they needed an extra paddler. But stretching the reality boundary is very 21st century, n'est pas?

Tim Conley, a professor of modernist literature, might possibly remind us that boundary challenging fiction has been as basic as language formation since, well, forever. Conley's latest, Nothing Could be Further, is at times Kafkaesque, forcing the reader to consider the competency of the narrator's reality receptors. At the same time, language itself is scrutinized, as Conley's often complex phrasing challenges the meaning, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, "of what is is."Conley also challenges what a short story is, as some of these pieces are as short as a paragraph and many are as short as a page. Others are longer, however, and it isn't the length that determines their consistency. The Conleyesque is as specific as the Kearneyesque, but (at least to me) it defies more precise definition.

BJD is an icon and an acronym. Ronald Reagan, My Father is out there on the edge of viable comprehension. Some of it, frankly, was too much for me, and I struggle (when writing this) to remember a single concrete image. The cover (front, Ron; back, Nancy) dominates. There was a story about a self-publishing maven that was clever and astonishing. There was much wild cynicism, but also not enough tender consideration of otherness. Not enough of the Kearneyesque. At least, for my tastes (at this moment in time). But I still recommend the book. It is not, most certainly, not in the least, stuck in the lyrical mode.

Total Self-Promotion: Banner Ads

2011-10-29T17:42:00.000-04:00

Brian Fawcett, Shane Neilson

2011-10-10T16:42:00.001-04:00

Gunmetal Blue: A Memoir
by Shane Neilson
Palimpest Press, 2011

Human Happiness
by Brian Fawcett
Thomas Allen, 2011

"I can't go on; I'll go on." - Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable

Derek Weiler (1968-2009) had the above quotation tattooed on his forearm. As he explained on his blog, now only available on the Wayback archive:

I don’t really know why most people get tattoos – novelty? lark? body as canvas? message to the world? But anyway I know I got mine mainly as an act of defiance. I wanted to engage this treacherous renegade in some way, to remind it that it has to deal with me. And also to remind myself that this flawed, frayed skin I wear is mine for good. That this is what I have to work with, for better or for worse.

Weiler passed away in 2009 at age 40. He'd lived bravely for many years with a heart condition.

I was thinking about Weiler today, partly in relation to these two books, and partly in relation to my own life. This past week my wife heard medical news that affects us all. Last year, she had breast cancer and the associated treatments. Six months ago, we were told it was effectively gone, but now it has returned, this time in her liver. Doctors are hopeful, but we've entered an arena we don't want to be in.

We can't go on, but we must go on.

Gunmetal Blue and Human Happiness are both memoirs, both essay collections, both written by reflective, analytical, skeptical and humanistic literary men. In many ways, these are books written to address the stark conundrums of existence, the Beckettean quandaries.

Brian Fawcett's book is, at base, a memoir of his parents, Hartley Fawcett and Rita Surrey, who were, he maintains, "happier than most of their generation" (240). Shane Neilson's book is structured as a collection of non-fiction pieces, some of which are memoirs of his life as a general practitioner, some are essays on poetry, and some reflect on his time in a hospital psychiatric ward, where he was a patient for many months following a suicide attempt.

By way of critical summary, let me say that both books are incomplete and flawed, but they both also contain lovely moments, deep feeling and thought. They have bitten off massive subjects, and they are worthy of the authors' efforts.

There are a couple of images from Gunmetal Blue that keep returning to me. One is of a middle-aged man on a stationary bicycle, continuously peddling. He has prostate cancer. He's going to die, but he can't stop cycling. The other image is of the author attempting to throw himself out of the window of the psyche ward and being blocked by an orderly. Later, the author realized that the window is a metaphor. Does he want to continue his life or not? Only he can ultimately decide. (He is, in this respect, very different from the peddling man.)

The main images from Human Happiness concern the author's parents, whom he portrays in significant psychological and sociological detail. Each lived nine decades or more. They lived primarily in Northern British Columbia. His father was a self-made business man, his mother a home-maker who had breast cancer in her late-40s.

On the opening page of the book, Fawcett notes what happened the last time he spoke to his mother: "She announced that she hated my father." At this point, they'd been married 64 years. Within weeks, she'd be dead. Hartley, then in his 90s, would go on to remarry, starting his flirting at his late-wife's wake: "I have to arrange a housekeeper. I don't suppose any of you are going to look after me."

I was compelled by the portrait of Hartley and Rita. I liked them. I thought they were interesting. In full confession mode, however, there were portions about inter-generational conflict that left me baffled. Too simple. Brian's self-portrait comes across as a cliched baby-boomer. Too general. Uncompelling.

Shane Neilson, on the other hand, may well provide too much information for some readers. And too much variety for others. This is a book about overcoming a mental illness crisis, but it's also a book about the trials and tribulations of a young doctor, and also a book about the author's love of language and the potentially healing powers of poetry.

It's all interesting, but it doesn't always hold together.

The portraits of Neilson's patient congregants are classic character studies. Life is what happens, John Lennon sang, when you're busy making other plans.

I would like to write more about these two books; there is much within them to reflect upon; however, my life, these days, is elsewhere.

Onward we go.

Paul Quarrington, David Gilmour, André Alexis

2011-09-26T22:04:00.002-04:00

Cigar Box Banjo: Notes on Music and Life
by Paul Quarrington
Greystone, 2010

The Perfect Order of Things
by David Gilmour
Thomas Allen, 2011

Beauty & Sadness
by André Alexis
Anansi, 2010

Three gentlemen of Canadian literature. Three memoirs. One of them framed as a novel. One of them a celebration of life and critique of music. One of them a hybrid short story /essay collection.

One of them published posthumously.

Paul Quarrington wrote Cigar Box Banjo in the 12 months his doctors gave him after his lung cancer diagnosis. He'd already started it, but what had started as a reflection of his life-long interest (and career in) music became a reflection on the significant moments of his life and the strange space of his final year.

If you knew you had a year to live, what would you do? Quarrington makes it clear that he took his diagnosis as a gift. Of course he would have liked to live longer. Of course he was angry. But it could have been worse. He could have left with no chance to say goodbye, with no chance to do some of the things on his bucket list (such as record a song in Nashville with his childhood friend, Dan Hill).

And without that final year, we wouldn't have this book, which is imperfect but also more than charming. It resonates with life-force, and it serves as a reminder that the well-lived life is possible even in the most trying of circumstances.

This blog began in 2008 with a report of The Writers' Union of Canada's AGM. Specifically, it recounted a session on the writing life led by Quarrington, Nino Ricci and Wayston Choy. Quarrington repeated some learned wisdom: "Bitterness is the writer's black lung disease." Quarrington said: At the end of the day, there's the body of work. Be proud of it. Avoid careerism.

It was the only time I "met" Quarrington, and it was enough to understand that he is widely missed by friends, family and colleagues.

Reviewing his memoir in the context of other memoirs of the Canadian writing life, it is easy to conclude that Quarrington's is the cheeriest. Matt Cohen's Typing: A Life in 26 Keys, also written as its author was dying of lung cancer, for example, is rife with bitterness, though also interesting reportage from the publishing front lines.

David Gilmour's The Perfect Order of Things (Thomas Allen, 2011) trawls a series of traumatic events in its (unnamed, first-person) narrator's life. The reader is informed early that the book's 10 chapters will return the 60-ish-year-old narrator to the geography of a significant (usually suffering) event in his life.

The events include his father's suicide, his mother's death, lovers' quarrels, drug trips, multiple marriages and divorces, a murder, interviewing George Harrison, punching a book critic, and meeting Robert DeNiro outside the bathroom door at a Toronto International Film Festival after party.

The Perfect Order of Things also recounts a life well-lived through trying circumstances, but its narrator is (a) masked by the armor of fiction, and (b) not dying. Trauma is portrayed in relief; it is distant and manageable. But let's not be glib. This is a narrator who knows what it means to endure. And he is also enthralled by life.

By which I mean, love. Both romantic and filial. Love makes all things endurable, and his enduring good relations with his ex-wives is commendable. The wound of the suicide and the parental abandonment masks all. There is no bosom to return to and the narrator grasps at alternatives.

Again, let's not be glib. The theme of this novel is suffering, and its resolution is the ordering of chaos. That is, its aesthetic ambition is true. And, I submit, its ambition is achieved. Though there are some truths I wished the narrator had come cleaner on, such as his relationship with mood altering chemicals.

Why the drugs? It's unexplained. They're just there, a comfort where comfort is needed. At one point, a new wife gives him two conditions: no women, no pills. Later he remembers there was one pill bottle he didn't dispose of. Not sure why. Not sure why he's remembering it now. But, boy, how handy.

I don't mean I wanted a more fulsome confession. That is delivered and unambiguous. What I wonder about is a different word: addiction. An acknowledgement of a deeper mystery. I didn't want a presentation of a 12-step cure, and I wasn't looking for a Naked Lunch tangent from reality, nor any Oprah-like restoration to the greater good.

I guess what I'm saying is that the drugs were not revisited as a geography of their own. They are simply there, and they seemed a topic (an activity) that needed a little more explanation.

But explanation isn't what this book is about. There is only, This is what happened and I'm still trying to make sense of it all. This reader was engaged and sympathetic. Others may be less inclined.

The controversy surrounding André Alexis's Beauty & Sadness began prior to its publication with the appearance of an excerpt in The Walrus in July 2010 called "The Long Decline" and subtitled: Canada used to have a vibrant critical culture. What happened?

The sharpest point of the controversy regarded Alexis's claim that John Metcalf was the source of all that was wrong with Canadian literature.

Okay, let's not exaggerate. Here's a direct quotation: "If I had to blame any one Canadian writer for this state of affairs, I'd blame John Metcalf" (209).

To this notation, the blogosphere erupted. And, frankly, I don't blame them (it?). Laying the fault of a culture at the feet of one individual is a silly claim. Though let's also reference the footnote attaches to this sentence: "It is, of course, rhetorical to blame any one person for attitudes that spread through a population. Metcalf is the purveyor of ideas that, at a certain time in our literary history, met with certain approval…"

An odd, uneven collection, Beauty & Sadness contains short stories, essays and first-person memoir. The disparate pieces are held together by the author's claim that this is the best way to present his aesthetic growing up; that is, coming of age; that is, progressing from the age of innocence to the age of disappointment.

And it is disappointment and anger that dominate this book, not beauty and sadness (though, fair play, those concepts get a lot of time on the field also).

David Gilmour's narrator is buoyed by love and infuriated by bureaucracy and meanness. André Alexis is buoyed by beauty and saddened (and infuriated) by ugliness and nastiness, a darkness that he identifies in others, but also within himself:

Worse, literary society -- the world of grudges, launches, and festivals -- is anti-literary in a surprising way. First, there is the petty gossip and the secret enmities. Here, it would be easy to point out the pettiness of others, but I'd like to admit to my own enmities. There are a number of my fellow writers whom I loathe. And, just to we understand each other, I'm not proud of my feelings. In fact, I'm dismayed to confront my dislikes, dismayed that I can still feel loathing at all, now I'm in my fifties, a time by which, unless I was misinformed, I should have acquired at least some wisdom. What is anti-literary about the loathing I feel is that it keeps me, in one instance, at least, from reading work that is demonstrably good. Demonstrable by me, I mean, despite my dislike for the writer (184-5).

The reader does have the feeling of being hectored at. (The Globe and Mail review calls this section of the book "stark.")

Yet, the short stories are good. The essays on Beckett and Ivan Illych are engaging, well-argued, cogent, and worthy of recommendation. There are also tantalizing moments of criticism that beg for expansion. Alexis's close readings of Russell Smith and Christian Bök, for example, are interesting, but they also beg for more.

As a memoir, this book frustrates. There is much brilliance here, but ultimately, it left me sunk with a feeling of disappointed incompleteness.

Quarrington's book, on the other hand, is less brilliant, but more satisfying, despite the fact that the author died before being able to complete it.

Gilmour's book, like Alexis's, is unconventional in structure, but it delivers more robustly on what it promises.

Some of the reviews of Beauty & Sadness have suggested that Alexis blames Toronto and the city's literary/media culture for his own experience of disappointment with the literary life. But I disagree. I don't think he blames Toronto; I think he is engaged in an honest attempt to capture the source of his feeling of disappointment, of his hope (dashed) that Toronto would be a better, more welcoming place to be a contemporary man of letters. And that analysis, in part, turns (bravely) in on himself.

However, as others have pointed out, the publishing world has transformed in the past quarter century. Alexis complains about the shrinking book review coverage in Toronto newspapers without providing the context that this is a global phenomena. But, yes, it's happening here, too. Or, more specifically, Alexis's disappointment is specific. His experience of loss happened here.

But the lack of global awareness is a weakness. It's as if Alexis's attempt to chart the local specifics of his experience has blocked avenues of analysis that would have added richness and relevance to the narrative.

It's a cliché, but still true; we live in an increasingly global world. Alexis's short stories and literary essays are alert to that fact. However, his memoir is too local and is over-burdened with personal grievance.

The current global mentor of the fiction-memoir is arguably Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee. Trying to think about these three books in international terms leaves me wondering what foreign audiences would make of these titles.

Quarrington's memoir is warm hearted and deeply felt, but it's not genre bending. Despite it's introduction from Roddy Doyle, it's appeal is limited. Gilmour's novel is episodic and insightful, but muted. Alexis's mixed genre approach is interesting and often compelling, but the long whine about literary culture in Toronto is degrading and, at times, disturbing.

Coetzee cuts to the bone examining self and others, personal and social history, linguistic assumptions and traps. He shies away from nothing and can leave readers frightened and exposed. A memoir is not just an opportunity to learn about its author, it's also an opportunity to be challenged to look at oneself, one's world, one's narrative-making.

Gilmour's narrator mines a deep emotional vein, though the path he follows is quirky. The Perfect Order of Things is a novel, but it has the feeling of a life lived. It is a life well examined, but it also contains many loose ends. Of these three books, it is closest to Coetzee in spirit.

Which brings us to Beauty & Sadness. Yes, Alexis lays himself bare. But, to meet his starkness with directness, his complaints about the anti-literary struck me as anti-literary, and I'm left, ultimately, with the simple subjective. While there is much (brilliance) in this book I admired, in the end, however, I was left frustrated.

This isn't a life presented as well-lived; it's a life presented as having gone off of the tracks. "[N]ow I'm in my fifties, a time by which, unless I was misinformed, I should have acquired at least some wisdom," he writes.

Misinformed by whom?

If the word addiction is missing from Gilmour's book, the word depression is missing from Alexis's. The last sentence in the book, however, is "Drowned but still living is exactly how I feel."

The Globe and Mail review concludes that Alexis's subject is himself. "It is a vast, fertile terrain, its landscapes varied and surprising, and well worth exploring alongside him."

This is a conclusion I would like to agree with. However, Alexis doesn't strike me as one who welcomes fellow travelers. Or, any more, expect them.

David Gilmour

2011-09-25T18:48:00.002-04:00

How Boys See Girls
by David Gilmour
Random House, 1991

[Review originally published in Imprint, University of Waterloo, January 10, 1992. This is only the second book review I ever published. It's a document of its time. Lightly edited below.]

Mordecai Richler, to his credit, knows a good line when he sees one. In two of his essays, written 20 years apart, he recounts Hemingway's opinion of Henry Miller. Miller had once got laid in the afternoon and thought he'd invented it, said Hem. And, depending on which of Richler's essays you read, so have certain other fools who spout off about the originality of their sexuality.

David Gilmour, the CBC's film critic and second-time author, to his credit or not, has reinvented Henry Miller with his novel, How Boys See Girls. While there is nothing terribly original in love, sex, suffering, and ecstasy, the novel is a reminder of the chaos of trying to put together an eventful love life. The accompanying joy when it succeeds. The horror when it fails. And the need simply to get on with life when it's all over.

Bix, the novel's protagonist, is a 40-year-old professional speech writer with an erotic obsession for a 19-year-old street vendor. He courts her, wins her, loses her, suffers for her, gets back, leaves her, and, we suppose, lives happily ever after: "'I love you,' I whispered in her ear. 'Promise me you'll remember that. No matter what.'"

How Boys See Girls is a charming, self-defacing and honest book, surprising in these earnest if at times paranoid days of political correctness. Henry Miller, the king of phallic obsession, has been taken to task by feminists far and wide for his brutal portrayal of women as objects of desire. One wonders these days where to draw the line between erotic fantasy and the selfish abuse of power.

Gilmour dodges the question deftly, and the book sparkles because he does it so well. Holly, the love interest, is portrayed with sympathy and understanding. A high school dropout, she wants to go back to school. "'Do you know how attractive you are?' 'I'd trade it for a good job,' she said." She is a long way from one of Miller's "cunts."

The tension in the novel is generated not out of Bix's need to dominate his partner, as will Miller, but out of that genuine need for fulfillment through copulation. Bix is head over heels in lust, and the novel, as tenderly and sweetly as is probably possible, turns his graphic desire into art:

I stopped at the cluster of street vendor tables ... when a couple of tables away, a girl in a red sleeveless shirt lifted a bare arm and unconsciously, almost sleepily, scratched the damp hair underneath while she talked absently to a male customer. I stood transfixed, in a kind of nauseated trace. I wanted to put my tongue there; I wanted to hold her wrist over her head and lick the sweat from under her arm; taste the salt on my tongue. I wanted to lead her to the restaurant ... bathroom across the street and do the most extraordinary things to her.

And he eventually does. But could Miller have written this?

I put my tongue on her again. Don't think about making her come, I reminded myself. Just taste her, smell her, think about nothing else. A Zen blow job, as it were. When her breathing came faster and faster I ignored her. I maintained the same pace, like a robot tennis player. Indefatigable. Don't aim for the finish line. In a Zen blow job, there is no finish line.

No, Miller was too obsessed with his own transcendence. And there the difference lies (no pun intended).

I pushed it (the thought) in a bit further. While I was thrashing around in my sheets with the window open, in case she should come by, with the phone beside my face, in case she should call, she was on her back with her legs wrapped around him.

It was simply nightmare mindboggling, the enormity of it, a kind of wrecking ball right in the nuts.

It is entirely possible that Gilmour may find himself the centre of a discussion on gender power politics with the publication of this novel. How boys see girls, after all, is said to be at the root of many of our social ills. Gore Vidal, for example, has said, "Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Charles Manson ... a logical progression." Well, you know.

(Bix on his ex-wife): "Margaret believed, sometimes it was her undoing, that if you ignored unpleasant traits in people you liked, they got better."

Clark Blaise

2011-09-07T21:42:00.000-04:00

The Meagre Tarmac
by Clark Blaise
Biblioasis, 2011

Masterpiece. That's a big word. In 20 years of writing book reviews I don't think I've ever used it, but I'm throwing the dart at Clark Blaise's new short story collection, The Meagre Tarmac (Biblioasis, 2011).

Born in the USA in 1940 to a French-speaking Canadian father and an English-speaking Canadian mother, Blaise lived part of his childhood in French in Quebec and other parts in English in the USA. His entry in the Canadian Encyclopedia says he lived in "at least" 25 cities before he finished high school in Pittsburgh.

Determined to be a writer, in the 1960s he attended the famous writer's workshop at the University of Iowa, where he met his life-partner, novelist Bharati Mukherjee, and also Philip Roth, among other literary notables.

Primarily a short story writer, Blaise has often explored the period of this upbringing and his multiple identities and senses of self. He has also been an administrator of writing programs and a notable essayist and non-fiction author. He is currently the President of the Society for the Study of the Short Story.

The eleven short stories in The Meagre Tarmac continue Blaise's interest in the social construction of identity. This time, however, his characters are not exploring the two solitudes of North America's English/French divide. The characters in this book are nearly all Indo-American. The two solitudes on display here are the East and West. Also, cultural tradition versus liberal capitalism.

Post-Obama, are we post-racial? Blaise's book argues emphatically, no. But it's a no that is dense with complication.

In an earlier age, this book would be a lightening rod for an "appropriation of voice" debate. How can this white dude write from within the perspective of the Indo-American population? And he does it over and over, in precise detail, and so well!

Clearly, the author has experience of Indo-American culture through his in-laws, but (more importantly) he has brought to it a lifetime of experience, a lifetime of thinking through precise cultural differences, a lifetime of mastering the short story.

And it is a mastery, here, that ought to be celebrated. And read. And studied.

The table of contents includes a note: "These stories are meant to be read in order." The back cover includes a blurb from Joyce Carol Oates calling it "a novel in short story form." The reader can choose how she would prefer to proceed. The stories link and inter-relate, but you could probably skip about and still make sense of the whole.

Many of the narrators are older men, nearing the end of their prosperous careers in America, yearning to return to India (and complete a plan begun earlier in life), their minds seeking a simpler time, one when the supremacy of the elder male wasn't in question.

The collapse of patriarchy is a significant subtext. Over and over male narrators talk about loss of prestige. American is partly to blame. Western liberalism with the stress on the individual. Marriage is the metaphor that rises to prominence next. Marriage is how the family perpetuates itself. On the subcontinent marriages are arranged. How or whether marriages will continue to be arranged is a question that repeats through many of these stories.

Money is often discussed, but it is the challenges of the rich, not the challenges of the poor, that consume (no pun intended) these characters. America has held up its end of the bargain. The families moved from the East to the West to seek economic opportunity and were amply rewarded. In the process, to oversimplify, they lost their souls.

But then, there is no opportunity to return to the land of their youth, because the New India (Mumbai, not Bombay) is rife with corruption (see recent new stories) and booming with its own out-of-control capitalism. Where East meets West, West tends to win, and the ensuing complications (loss of identity, collapse of family, cultural fragmentation) follow.

Canadian geography features in the book. That is, some of the action takes place in Toronto and Montreal. But the Canada here is indistinguishable from America. The West is the West, though one Indo-Canadian family settles in Montreal and one of its sons becomes a high-ranking official in the Parti Quebecois! (Another son, a gay man and actor, makes his fortune in Hollywood.)

The women in this book are brilliant. Not just sharply drawn, exquisitely portrayed and smart (one thirteen-year-old girl is on her way to Stanford, if her father doesn't first take her back to India so he can marry her off), they are also emote sensitively and diversely. That is, there are traditional mothers, untraditional mothers, dutiful daughters, undutiful daughters, Western beauties seeking Eastern wisdom, Eastern women corrupted by … what? the West? No, greed. Corrupted by corruption. By human nature.

For "an exploration of the human condition" is ultimately where analysis of this book leads. The superficial (yet strict and real) boundaries of culture and tradition colour every page, but the underlying architecture of every story (in the book and always?) is built on questions about what it means to be human. La condition humaine.

What an old formulation! What risk of cliché! Yet, so it goes. It is what it is. Or as my seven-year-old says, you get what you get and you don't get upset.

Sadness pervades this book. As does beauty.

The conclusion is simple: read it.

Cheever: A Life

2011-09-05T14:26:00.002-04:00

Cheever: A Life
by Blake Bailey
Knopf, 2009

A late bloomer in nearly every respect, I have learned to over-compensate in the present for time lost in the past.

I married, for example, at the age of thirty-eight, picking up two children (then aged three and seven) in the process.

This enabled me to skip the early child rearing stages of sleep deprivation and diapers, while providing a strong masculine presence during later pivotal evolutionary moments of bed-wetting and night terrors, not to forget story time.

Similarly, I was well past the age of thirteen when I first slipped someone the noodle, but married life (when one isn't changing sheets or the dishwasher or napping) provides multiple opportunities for … um … yawn … what were we talking abou -- ?

Oh, yes. Hanky panky.

Which brings me to John Cheever. Short story writer. Novelist. Punch line for an episode of Seinfeld. And subject of Cheever: A Life (2009).

Hanky panky? Oh, me, oh, my.

First, though, the short stories. The reason Cheever is the subject of such an expansive (770 pages) and invasive (wait for it) biography, is because he is one of the best short story writers on the past century. Nach, ever.

The Stories of John Cheever (1978) is essential reading. To the extent to which Cheever: A Life brings us into better relationship with the stories, it is interesting. To the extent that it alienates us from the stories (and novels), it risks being anti-literature.

Put another way, I intend to review the biography here, not Cheever's life. The biography is a shaped, created, curated thing; the life is the wild process of lived experience. I have no intention of judging or interpreting Cheever's life.

In 1995-96, I was a graduate student of English at the University of Toronto and for half-a-semester I was part of a seminar studying literary biography. We read Boswell on Johnson, the whole thing, unabridged (1,492 pages with index). We read Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians and The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell. I read two biography's of W.H. Auden for my term paper, Elspeth Cameron's take on Irving Layton, Rosemary Sullivan on Gwendolyn MacEwen, and Julian Barne's Flaubert's Parrot. We also read some of Freud's dream analyses (patient biographies) and speculated on whether biography itself could be an act of literature.

Writing the life of a writer is more complicated than it seems, we concluded. It is rife with temptation. Can you separate your response to the work from your response to the life, and vice versa? What connection is there, really, between the life and the work? Does your interpretation of the work colour your interpretation of the life? Does the life story have meaning apart from the work? Does our engagement with the work require any understanding of the life? If something is seen as negative in the life does that contradict things pleasurable in the work? Are we obliged to take new (possibly disturbing) information from the life into account in our analysis of the work?

And so on.

Ultimately, Cheever would become known as the bard of suburbia, a chronicler of the social mores of the post-WWII new American bourgeoisie. Stories such as "The Swimmer," "Goodbye, My Brother" and "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill" are classics secure among the deep roots of the American canon, ensuring Cheever an eternal reputation as a Great Writer.

That is, until he was reduced on an episode of Seinfeld to "a writer who was gay."

Gay? Cheever's biographer is clear that the writer never would have used the term. Yes, he had sexual (and romantic) relationships with men throughout his adult life. He also married young (and for life), raised a family, had sexual and romantic affairs with women. He made out, according to this biography, with his son's teenage girlfriend. He also had sex with a young man in his hospital bed as he lay dying (not the only male sexual relationship he was involved with at the time).

This hanky panky, the biography strongly suggests, began when Cheever and his brother shared a bed as teenagers. The suggestion is that the two boys mutually masturbated each other, and that Cheever's brother was the great love of his life, a man-bond that Cheever repeatedly tried to re-create.

The Seinfeld episode was called "The Cheever Letters," and it revolved around a box of love letters supposedly written by Cheever to his male lover. (Read the script for the episode).

ELAINE: (Turns to George, he is now reading a book) Hey, what are you reading

GEORGE: Oh, uh, "The Falconer" by John Cheever. It's really excellent.

ELAINE: (To Jerry) John Cheever, you ever read any of his stuff?

JERRY: Uh, yeah, I'm familiar with some of his writing. (George shoots Jerry a smirk, then returns to his book) Alright, (Hand the check to Elaine) look, we gotta get back to work. We just had a big breakthrough here.

ELAINE: (Folding up the check) Ok, I'll leave you two alone.

Interviewed for the biography, Seinfeld co-creator Larry David said the show used Cheever as the letter writer because "he was a well-known writer who was gay" (672).

Which brings us back to the question of the life versus the work. And the question of the biography itself is a work of literature.

No, I would argue. This one is not. Though it is a remarkable work of research. (For the record, I believe the graduate class would have concluded that most biographies of writers are not literature either; many are not even decently written and contain bad criticism. Bailey's book is free of those latter two complaints.)

Boswell is read over and over because (a) through him we have a Johnson we would never have had otherwise (true of all biographies that are more than derivative), but also because (b) it is a Johnson worth knowing, an expansive, rollicking, self-contradicting, complicated mass of a human life. In other words, Johnson becomes a literary character within a literary narrative created by an author. It is not merely reporting or interpreting; it is creating. Sophisticated creating.

The biography of Cheever is arguably a sophisticated creation also, and the Cheever presented is a self-contradicting complicated mass of a human life, but in years (i.e., centuries) ahead readers will not return to the biography to encounter the literary Cheever (as they do with Boswell and Johnson); they will go to Cheever's short stories.

Because it is in the stories (and novels) where the self-mythologizing Cheever emerges, or rather disappears into the deepest mysteries. There is no doubt that the biography illuminates certain aspects of the fiction. The hints of homosexuality, for example, can no longer be read as ambiguous.

The details of Cheever's sexual adventurism, however, is altogether too much. For one, it encourages the reduction of Cheever's oeuvre to a Seinfeldian conclusion: he was a writer who was gay. Yes, gay. Let's use that word. And then? Does it matter? Do we care? We are not literary if we do not take our analysis or aesthetic discussion beyond that point.

Cheever was a man who cloaked his sexual identiti(es); yes, this is relevant. However, he was also a man of New England with a mythic sense of self and formal, proto Edwardian ideals about proper behaviour. He was, in other words, a man of many personal contradictions, and his self-analysis of his contractions is on display in the stories and novels. And, again, the stories and novels soar to the level of creation above mere reporting. They are infused with imagination and conveyed through a unique rich use of language.

A John Cheever story is a John Cheever story.

In art, he achieved a singularity of voice and purpose (a distinction) and, for this, he will be remembered. Forever.

In the quest for penile stimulation, he started early, and he finished strong. So what.

Jessica Westhead

2011-09-03T13:43:00.001-04:00

And Also Sharks
by Jessica Westhead
Cormorant, 2011

The narrators and characters of Jessica Westhead's And Also Sharks are an irritating bunch.

They are narcissistic, alienated, unhappy, and searching in all the wrong places for solutions to what ails them.

In short, they're just like many people you know.

But these folks are characters in a book and you can laugh at them without worrying that they will call you up in the middle of the night or corner you in the elevator lobby at work next week and ask you WTF were you thinking.

WTF are they thinking, is the binding theme of this short story collection. The lost puppies presented here (who are often naïve,helpless, innocent, and drifting wildly) include

a couple of women with trouble in the "O" department
an office worker whose dog died, whose colleague has cancer, and whose co-workers live vicariously though the suffering of others
a young man who wants to believe that he had healing powers in his hands whose best friend takes him to a photography show, then mugs a photographer and his assistant in the parking lot
an office worker who lusts after a colleague's wife

The stories, in other words, are Carvereque in their minimalist approach. It's not what happens in the stories that's significant so much as what doesn't happen. The significant event that the characters are anticipating that never arrives. The withholding of expectation rather than its delivery. Which isn't saying there's no payoff.

The stories are well-written, clever, wry, funny, and disturbing. Like the Raymond Carver story, "Neighbors," where one couple house sits the others' apartment and bit by bit moves in, assuming their neighbours' lives, Westhead's stories have a complexity that belies their seemingly simple presentation.

The stories challenge the reader to delve beneath the surface of things. Where there be sharks. The stories are like anthropological studies of contemporary madness. Are these individuals making poor choices or are the pressure points of social expectations too strong to break free of?

Here's one narrator and a particularly funny/odd passage:

But then Elba had a stillborn baby, your former best friend tells you, and instead of, say, making the experience into something meaningful by making it into art, such as the woman could have bought a baby doll, one of those very lifelike ones, and spun a cocoon-like structure around the doll with her loom, as if to represent the baby being in a pupa, something far-out but ultimately meaningful like that, she just stopped going to art openings and stayed home all the time. And eventually when she started coming around again, all she wanted to talk about was her dead baby. And come on, if you're not going to translate that event into a narrative that people can understand, or even that people have trouble understanding but then they can at least refer to as an artist's statement, then where is the value in life's sad times?

(from "Brave Things That Kids Do," p69-70)

Westhead's talent for understatement is, ahem, an understatement. The stories commit to a larger weird-world vision (Tim Burton-like) and their significant success stems from their ability to see the weirdness through to meaningful, if not always logical, conclusions. As a result, reading Westhead is like reading with electrodes attached to the sides of your head.

And I mean that in a good way. Her world is our world, and it's shocking.

Dimitri Nasrallah

2011-09-02T22:18:00.000-04:00

Niko
by Dimitri Nasrallah
Esplanade, 2011

A novel of immigration. A narrative that transacts with Canada, but it is not about Canada. A novel that explores multiculturalism, but it is not bound by Trudeau- or even Mulroney-era pieties. A novel about the New Quebec that doesn't mention nationalism (or at least Quebecois nationalism). A novel of immigration that speaks to the world.

Niko is a boy born in Lebanon during that country's civil war in the 1980s. His father owns a camera shop. It's bombed. His mother writes scripts. She's killed. The boy is six, and what is the father to do? They scramble to find a way out. They make it first to Cypress, then a small Greek Island. Nobody wants them, and their money is running out.

Taking advantage of the best offer available, Niko's father ships him to Montreal to live with his late-wife's sister. He promised to come for him as soon as possible, then he takes a job on a cargo boat. The job provides money, but it doesn't get him any closer to Montreal. His passport has long since expired. He seems permanently cut off from his son, so he signs up for the first boat heading for the Americas. If he can only get across the Atlantic, he will walk the rest of the way. The boat, heading for the southern hemisphere, sinks and Niko's father drifts in the ocean until he is rescued.

There are other major plot points that I won't give away. As you can see, however, while the book may be titled after the boy, a great part of the story is about the father. Once the father is lost in South America, though, the reader's focus returns to Niko, now a teenager and shoplifting food in Montreal. His aunt and uncle are anxious to secure their citizenship, so that they can finally begin anew in their new country. Eventually, they all conclude that Niko's father is dead, but an unlikely reunion is on the horizon.

Written in swift, clear prose, this book clips along nicely, covering vast personal, political and geographic territory. It is also a tremendously tender book. Love pulses from cover to cover. The pain caused by the separation of individuals, both physical and ideological, is the subject and cause of the book. Niko and his father are separated by geography. The warring factions in Lebanon (and elsewhere) are separated by the failure to recognize each other's humanity. In the various diaspora's around the world, these differences do not disappear, but they are more easily contextualized, minimized, and set aside in favour of more essential human bonds.

Niko is a lovely novel and a significant achievement by a young writer with much to say.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

2011-08-07T17:51:00.001-04:00

I'm digging this playlist thing. Did two new ones:

Playlist: James Brown

2011-08-05T22:42:00.001-04:00

I had some fun the other day on Dani Couture's blog, creating a short story playlist.

Long story short, I can't believe I didn't include any James Brown. So to make up for that error, I've created a special James Brown playlist, 12 videos.

I saw JB twice, once at the Ontario Place Forum in 1992 and once at Casino Rama in 2005. At Rama, they kicked him off the stage. Clearly, they wanted the audience back in the casino, spending money, but JB wanted to keep playing, so his final song ("Sex Machine") went on for 15 minutes. Then he complained that he had to leave; they wouldn't let him play any more. The dude was 72 years old.

The videos I've picked are from all over his career. They include videos from The Blues Brothers and a movie everyone should see, When We Were Kings.

Ali and JB. Giants. Super bad.

Criticism is demolition

2011-08-03T21:31:00.002-04:00

Discuss.

ReLit 2011 - Short Story Long List

2011-08-02T20:46:00.000-04:00

The ReLit Awards: Ideas, Not Money.

Ravenna Gets, Tony Burgess (Anvil)

Ronald Reagan, My Father, Brian Joseph Davis (ECW)

This Ramshackle Tabernacle, Samuel Thomas Martin (Breakwater)

All Those Drawn to Me, Christian Peterson (Caitlin)

World News Story, Michael Woods (Book Thug)

Three Deaths, Josip Novakovich (Snare)

I Still Don’t Even Know You, Michelle Berry (Turnstone)

Recipes From the Red Planet, Meredith Quartermain (Book Thug)

Punishing Ugly Children, Darryl Joel Berger (Killick)

Mystery Stories, David Helwig (Porcupine’s Quill)

The Mountie at Niagara Falls, Salvatore Difalco (Anvil)

I’m a Registered Nurse Not a Whore, Anne Perdue (Insomniac)

The Devil You Know, Jenn Farrell (Anvil)

Mennonites Don’t Dance, Darcie Friesen Hossack (Thistledown)

Sex in Russia, Kenneth Radu (DC Books)

The Young in their Country, Richard Cumyn (Enfield & Wizenty)

High Speed Crow, Sheila McClarty (Oberon)

Bird Eat Bird, Katrina Best (Insomniac)

The Doctrine of Affections, Paul Headrick (Freehand)

The Meaning of Children, Beverly Akerman (Exile)

Faded Love, Robert N. Friedland (Libros Libertad)

Bats or Swallows, Teri Vlassopoulas (Invisible)

There is No Other, Jonathan Papernick (Exile)

Missed Her, Ivan E. Coyote (Arsenal Pulp)

Light Lifting, Alexander MacLeod (Biblioasis)

Icebreaker/ Auricle, Alisha Piercy (Conundrum)

Zsuzsi Gartner

2011-07-24T12:06:00.002-04:00

I have been asked by Canadian Notes and Queries to review Zsuzsi Gartner's Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (Penguin, 2011).

So ... collecting some online research here.

Interviews with ZG

Audio/video/online fiction

ZW on Channel 4
Audio version of "Summer of the Flesh Eater"
Story: "We Come in Peace" (The Walrus)

Reviews of Better Living Through Plastic Explosives:

Based on a quick survey of the reviews, it would seem fair to say that the book has so far provoked mixed opinion.

I thought it was very funny and very clever.

But more on that later in CNQ.

(See also my review of the Gartner-edited anthology, Darwin's Bastards.)

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

So You Want To Write Short Stories

2011-07-14T21:48:00.003-04:00

This is a brilliant synopsis of the current "short story universe."

Everyone* says this is a bad idea
*publishers, booksellers, Steven Galloway, critics, David Mount, magazine editors

Step 1 - Try writing something else
Step 2 - Decide ‘new media’ are the short story’s new best friend
Step 3 - Find the Curators
Step 4 - Collaborate
Step 5 - Bypass the gatekeepers?

Year of the Short Story

2011-07-12T21:36:00.000-04:00

2011 may be half over, but it's not too late to get in on the Year of the Short Story action.

Complete with logo!

Susanna Moodie

2011-07-10T16:18:00.000-04:00

This essay first appeared in Paragraph (Summer 1997).

Defying the black flies: The Romanticism of Susanna Moodie

In (1995-96) I attended a graduate course at the University of Toronto called "Romantic Constructions." The purpose of the course, according to the course catalogue, was to "address Romanticism as a cultural phenomenon, as reflected both in late eighteenth/early nineteenth century writing, and in the writing and cultural expressions of our own moment."

Midway through the first term, an event occurred which influenced my choice of topic for my term paper: the federalists narrowly defeated the nationalists in the second Quebec referendum. I became interested in exploring a part of the Canadian psyche that I had previously all but ignored: the 19th century. Susanna Moodie easily came to mind.

I had never read Roughing It in the Bush, but I was aware of Margaret Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie. More importantly, I knew that in Survival, her thematic guide to Canadian literature, Atwood had linked Moodie's sense of imprisonment in the Canadian wilderness with a sentimental Romanticism incompatible with black flies and mosquitos. A study of Moodie's "Romantic constructions" seemed like an excellent choice for my term paper.

Moodie came to Canada with visions of Woodsworth's daffodils floating in her head, I saw myself saying. "But the Canadian wilderness breeds only survival instinct," I would quote Atwood. Amongst the bears and the bugs there is no room for sentimentality, I would say. The Canadian wilderness stopped Romanticism dead in its tracks.

The reality, of course, was somewhat different, as I soon discovered. I had to alter my thinking, sometimes drastically, and when I was done I could only say that Atwood was mistaken. Here's why.

*

On July 1, 1832 a twenty-eight-year-old Susanna Moodie, her husband, J.W. Dunbar Moodie -- whom she had married the year before -- and their infant daughter, set sail from Edinburgh for what was then the British colony of Upper Canada (Moodie, 1991, viii). Over a century-and-a-half later, Moodie is firmly fixed among the early members of the Canadian canon. But who was she? Critics have constituted Moodie in a variety of guises, as Carol Shields has noted:

Moodie is often reduced to the role of microcosmic, schizophrenic citizen. To others Mrs. Moodie is a spoiler, an educated woman, snobbish and dour, who carried to the land of opportunity a baggage of already corrupt literary mannerisms (1).

Of one fact, however, the critics are generally agreed. Moodie was temperamentally unfit for pioneer life in Canada. In Survival, Atwood generalizes this conclusion to Canadian literature as a whole. Atwood writes: "Canadian writers as a whole do not trust Nature, they are always suspecting some dirty trick. An often-encountered sentiment is that Nature has betrayed expectation" (49). Atwood argues that the emotion "may be traced in part to expectations which were literary in origin." Atwood says of Roughing It in the Bush (and other nineteenth century Canadian texts) "the tension between what you were officially supposed to feel and who you actually encountered when you got here -- and the resultant feeling of being gypped -- is much in evidence" (50-1).

My research indicates, however, that Atwood overstates and oversimplifies the case when she claims that Roughing It in the Bush is a catalogue of "Mrs. Moodie's determination to preserve her Wordsworthian faith" despite "the difficulty she has in doing so when Nature fails time and time again to come through for her" (51). Atwood is here perpetuating the myth of Canada's hostile wilderness. "If Wordsworth was right," Atwood proclaims, implying that Wordsworth was wrong, "Canada ought to have been the Great Good Place. At first, complaining about the bogs and mosquitoes must have been like criticizing the authority of the Bible" (50).

It is true that Moodie's descriptions of the landscape of Grosse Isle and that surrounding Quebec City provide examples of the conventional Burkean response to nature popular in the Romantic period (25-38). Moodie informs the reader how she was "blinded by the [landscape's] excess of beauty" (26) and inspired by the scene's "melancholy awe, which becomes painful in its intensity" (27). Moodie responds to the natural world here in the terms laid out for her by her culture: nature is beautiful and sublime, nurturing and terror-filled.

Yet to attribute to Moodie a simplified Burkean (or Wordsworthian) approach to nature, as Atwood does, is clearly inadequate. Moodie's autobiographical novel of her life in the Canadian backwoods includes some of the stock responses to the natural world conventional of her period; however, Roughing It in the Bush is also stocked with the complications presented to those conventions by the Moodies' New World habitat.

Many of Moodie's complaints, for example, have nothing to do with a hostile natural world. Instead, she often complains about the indecorum of someone of her class and sensibilities living in the backwoods (14, 526) and of the greed of unscrupulous land speculators, whom she continues as late as her introduction to the 1871 edition of Roughing It in the Bush to blame for cheating her and her husband out of the money they brought with them from England (527).

The myth that a hostile wilderness is predominant in early-nineteenth century Canadian literature, however, lives on. Les McLeod, for example, is following Atwood when he argues that Romanticism implies the importance of nature and the individual,

. . . [which] posits a beneficent, harmonious and ideal interaction between man and nature. In Canada, when a persona attempts to experience nature in this way, when, so to speak, he or she attempts the pathetic fallacy, the overture is rebuffed, and the persona becomes self-aware in nature (1).

Other critics, like Alec Lucas, find it sufficient to simply restate Moodie's "preconceived view of nature, a Wordsworthian view" (150), as if it were a banality. Atwood, however, is easily the chief propogandist for this view of Moodie. In Survival, Atwood depicts Moodie as a disciple of Wordsworth with "a markedly double-minded attitude towards Canada" (51). Atwood quotes the following passage from Roughing It in the Bush to support her claim:

... The aspect of Nature ever did, and I hope ever will, continue: "To shoot marvellous strength into my heart." As long as we remain true to the Divine Mother, so long will she remain faithful to her suffering children.

At that period my love for Canada was a feeling very nearly allied to that which the condemned criminal entertains for his cell -- his only hope of escape being through the portals of the grave (Moodie, 135).

Atwood says of this passage: "Those two emotions -- faith in the Divine Mother and a feeling of hopeless imprisonment -- follow each other on the page without break or explanation. If the Divine Mother is all that faithful, we may ask, why are her children suffering?" (51). The answer, of course, goes back to the roots of Judeo-Christian mythology, back to the earthly paradise -- Eden before the Fall -- that Raymond Williams argues in The Country and the City the western literary tradition has been attempting to recreate for hundreds of years (12).

Atwood's question, therefore, is too broad to say anything meaningful about Moodie's response to her wilderness homestead. The question distorts the relationship between humanity and nature in Wordsworth's poetry, since it implies that in Wordsworth's "Great Good Place" nature protects humanity from suffering, a position that an examination of Wordsworth's poetry does not sustain. Wordsworth's poetry contains the same "double vision" towards nature that Atwood identifies in Moodie.

In "Michael," the shepherd loses his son; in "The Ruined Cottage" the cottager loses her husband, her children and eventually her life; in the first book of "The Prelude" Wordsworth says he "grew up/ Fostered alike by beauty and by fear" (ll. 301-2) before telling us how he was chased by a mountain after stealing a boat. Suffering exists within Wordsworth's natural world as it does in Moodie's. Moodie's representation of the natural world, therefore, does not contain the break from her Romantic precursors that Atwood would have us believe. Instead, Moodie fits into a tradition Atwood -- with her obsession for defining a Canadian literature -- was unable to see. Atwood oversimplifies Wordsworth's response to nature in order to construct a foil for her vision of the dominant theme of Canadian literature: survival.

As Mary Lu MacDonald points out, the myth of a hostile Canadian wilderness has no basis in the Canadian literature of the early-nineteenth century:

The question of why negative myth-making appeals so strongly to the modern Canadian psyche must be left for others to resolve. It is a present-day problem, the answer to which must come from present-day Canadians. As far as the literature written and read by our ancestors is concerned, the fact is that before 1850, with few exceptions, all the evidence points to an essentially positive literary view of the Canadian landscape (48).

Roughing It in the Bush does not catalogue Moodie's disillusionment with her Wordsworthian inheritance; it records her deepening understanding of the natural world and her place within it. Far from complaining about mosquitoes as if she were "criticizing the authority of the Bible," as Atwood claims (50), Moodie inscribes herself as one who learned to "defy" the mosquitoes -- along with the "black flies . . . snakes, and even bears" (329) -- and milk a cow despite her fear of the beast: "Yes! I felt prouder of that milk than many an author of the best thing he ever wrote. . . . I had learned a useful lesson of independence, to which in after-years I had often again to refer" (183).

We must admit, however, that the myth of a hostile Canadian wilderness remains a complication to any reading of Roughing It in the Bush. While Moodie's feelings about the backwoods may not be entirely negative, they are far from entirely positive. To be honest, we must say that Moodie responds to the backwoods with ambivalence. Her feelings about the Canadian wilderness echo her feelings about emigration. They also plug her into a Romantic environmental tradition that Karl Kroeber and Jonathan Bate have begun to articulate.

Kroeber argues, for example: "An ecologically oriented criticism directs itself to understanding persistent Romantic struggles to articulate meaningful human relations within the conditions of a natural world in which transcendence is not at issue" (38).

Kroeber claims that "too many intellectuals still work from an assumption that nature and culture are essentially antagonistic" (139). Kroeber argues for the suspension of "current presuppositions about humankind's inescapable discomfort within its natural habitat and the inevitability of mankind's self-defining antagonism to nature" (6). Kroeber argues that the Romantics would not have understood the nature/culture opposition as it is presented by critics like Atwood:

people of the Romantic era felt profound respect for and awe of the natural world. Because of that awe and respect their perception of possibilities for channelling, harnessing, directing parts of nature for the benefits of humankind was bewilderingly exciting (42).

We need to consider that when Moodie writes "the Upper Province was reclaimed from the wilderness" (534) she does not imply that the province was built in opposition to the wilderness, but that the wilderness was a partner in the evolution of the developing society. As Kroeber says of Wordsworth:

Wordsworth's profoundest discovery-creation was that we dehumanize ourselves most perniciously when we use our consciousness to separate ourselves from nature. The separation is disastrous because the natural environment is both the source and the primary sustainer of our singularly human power of consciousness, supremely manifested in our imagination (138).

Culture -- or human society -- cannot exist apart from the natural world. As Kroeber says: "Natural history and human history, however different, are inextricably intertwined" (119).

In Natural Supernaturalism, M.H. Abrams argued twenty years before Kroeber that the Romantics made use of the natural world to express age-old religious ideas within a secular frame (13). Abrams sees a "procreative marriage between mind and nature" in Wordsworth's poetry, a union which is "able to beget a new world," a new Eden (27). Abrams construction of Wordsworth's view of the relationship between humanity and the natural world resembles the Romanticism that Atwood says ill prepared Moodie for the settler's life.

An examination of Moodie's inscription of herself in Roughing It in the Bush, however, makes clear that Moodie's relationship with the natural world is not constructed on an assumption that the self is capable of uniting with the nature to create a new paradise. Moodie's view of the natural world is more complex -- and more practical -- than Atwood's projection of Abrams-like views on her suggests. As Kroeber argues: "the Romantic proto-ecological vision is no simple substitute for traditional religion" (119).

The relationship between the natural world and the human world in Roughing It in the Bush is neither idealized, as if humanity and nature were capable of being united in a perfect transcendent union, nor is it presented as a competition of opposites. For Moodie, the two worlds -- nature and culture -- are interdependent, and Moodie inscribes herself as one composed of an integrated nature-self and a culture-self. She is a lover of nature and one who finds meaning in the sensibilities of middle-class urban living. Roughing It in the Bush demonstrates that the latter has a stronger pull on her personality than the former, but Moodie's narrative does not destroy one at the expense of the other. Even after five years in the Canadian wilderness, living in an area she calls in one of her "jaundiced" moments a "cheerless wasteland" (274), Moodie is still able to write of her "dear forest home which I loved in spite of all the hardships which we had endured since we pitched our tent in the backwoods" (480).

According to Kroeber's Romantic proto-ecology, Moodie's ambivalence demonstrates that she understands the complexities of her situation; she is aware that the family's move took her away from her intensive, everyday contact with the natural world. Moodie knows that the move, which provided her with the means to recreate in Belleville a likeness of her English middle-class urban lifestyle, also cost her something; her period of new learning in the backwoods came to an end. Kroeber argues: "for the Romantics, the highest human attainment is to achieve and sustain intensely contradictory feelings" (5).

The paradox of Moodie's nationality becomes relevant here. Moodie's British audience is warned to stay home, yet Moodie proclaims "few people who have lived many years in Canada, and return to England to spend the remainder of their days, accomplish the fact. They almost invariably come back, and why? They feel more independent and happier here" (531). Moodie warns the English class "not only accustomed to command, but to receive implicit obedience from the people under them" (526) to remain in England, yet she celebrates Canada as the best chance for the "sons of honest poverty" (527) and predicts that "before the close of the [nineteenth] century, [Canadians will] become a great and prosperous people, bearing their own flag, and enjoying their own nationality" (534). In the above quotations, we see the primary complications of Moodie's character -- she identifies with both her British audience and her New World neighbours.

Moodie (as narrator) is dependent on the social and cultural traditions of the Old World, which provide her with coherent rules of behaviour and roles for persons of different social standing. The Old World provides her with her social and cultural norms, yet the Canadian wilderness -- both as itself and as a symbol of the resources available to build Canada's prosperous future -- feeds her hope.

Recounting a canoe trip by moon light, she writes: "In moments like these, I ceased to regret my separation from my native land; and filled with the love of Nature, my heart forgot for the time the love of home. . . . Amid these lonely wilds, the soul draws nearer to God" (340). Moodie (as narrator) is neither alienated from the natural world, as Atwood suggests, nor does she seek to unite herself with it, as Atwood implies is Moodie's aesthetic goal. Instead, she demonstrates proto-ecological values by inscribing herself as ambivalent to the natural world; she celebrates it -- and her life in the backwoods -- at the same time as she acknowledges how her circumstances have limited her ability to reconstruct in the New World a life that resembles her upbringing.

Kroeber notes a similar spectrum of emotion in Wordsworth: "Wordsworth's faith in life's intrinsic pleasurableness was held in conjunction with his antithetical awareness of nature as a dauntingly vast, ever-ongoing system implacably indifferent to the fate of particular parts of it" (47).

Susanna Moodie left Edinburgh for the New World thirty-four years to the day before Canada become a country. She remains, twenty-nine years after the country's centennial, a significant member of Canada's cultural legacy. Moodie's Romanticism -- and the proto-ecology embedded within it -- however, is too little understood.

*

Works cited

Abrams, M.H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1971.

Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi, 1972.

Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Kroeber, Karl. Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

Lucas, Alec. "The Function of the Sketches in Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush." Re(Dis)covering Our Foremothers: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Writers. Ed. Lorraine McMullen. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1990: 146-154.

McLeod, Les. "Canadian Post-Romanticism: the Context of Late-Nineteenth-Century Canadian Poetry." Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews. 1984 (Spring-Summer): 14, 1-37.

MacDonald, Mary Lu. "The Natural World in Early Nineteenth-Century Canadian Literature." Canadian Literature. 1986 (Winter): 111, 48-65.

Moodie, Susanna. Roughing It in the Bush. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989.

---. Voyages: Short Narratives of Susanna Moodie. Ed. John Thurston. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1991.

Shields, Carol. Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision. Ottawa: Borealis Press, 1977.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Hogarth Press, 1985.

Punk Rock Girl

2011-07-05T20:51:00.002-04:00

Sing after me!

Saul Bellow and David Foster Wallace

2011-07-02T18:08:00.003-04:00

Are there two writers with less in common?

Oh, probably. But these two, a quick census would surely agree, aren’t obvious soul-mates.

I group them here because The New York Review of Books recently ran reviews of Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (Little, Brown) and Bellow’s Letters (Viking).

Which got me to thinking.

Did you know, for example, that Foster Wallace had attended a Mennonite church? Or that Bellow had an obsessive interest in Rudolf Steiner?

Reviewing The Pale King, Jonathan Raban concludes that Foster Wallace had “a deep fundamentalist streak in his makeup, a disconcertingly innocent thirst for ‘capital-T Truth’” (12, NYRB, May 12, 2011).

Reviewing Saul Bellow: Letters, Edward Mendelson writes of Bellow: “Public and private chaos had erupted because, he thought, no one was guiding the course of history. …[H]e was grateful when he found in Steiner … a future in which the spirit would take charge of the world and shape it through inner vision and imagination” (19, NYRB, April 28, 2011).

I have a quotation from Bellow that I once liked enough to clip out of a newspaper where it appeared. I don’t remember the source. I just clipped it and stashed it with other such clippings of indeterminate origin.

Here’s the quotation:

Our society, like decadent Rome, has turned into an amusement society, with writers chief among the court jesters – not so much above the clatter as part of it.

In response, I would say to Bellow, there is no difference to being in the world and of the world. We are all post-modernists now, living in perpetual uncertainty. Aren’t we?

Well, no. Apparently not. Even Pynchon’s heir, Foster Wallace, stands accused of harbouring “a disconcertingly innocent thirst” for certainty. Raban reads The Pale King as a failed text book in how to “break on through.”

Both Bellow and Foster Wallace, these reviewers argue, housed capital-R Romantic souls.

Raban says of Wallace:

Wallace was both a satirist and preacher in the same breath, and the idea that the IRS, imagined as a quasi-religious foundation in which the burdensome and egotistic self might find redemption in the service of a greater good, could be both a comic conceit and a heartfelt belief seems to have been central to his conception of The Pale King.

Mendelson says of Bellow:

Bellow’s vestigial plots exist mostly to give his narrators something more to talk about then cultural complaints and philosophical musings. … Bellow had the characteristically American ambition to master European culture while also seeking beyond culture and beyond ambition for some transcendental spiritual truth.

Word drunk they both were, too. Outside of the mainstream, yet also saturated with it, singular voices singing towards a future that would break all boundaries.

Isn’t it pretty to think so, Hemingway wrote.

I turn to Wallace and Bellow when I’m seeking feats of literary derring-do. In this way for me they are linked as exemplars of a sort for the scribbler set.

Though, of course, much else could be said about each of them.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

The Longest War

2011-06-29T20:55:00.000-04:00

If you read one book about the last ten years:

The Longest War by Peter Bergen.

The paperback edition, just released, includes the death of bin Laden.

Robert Kroetsch

2011-06-26T15:37:00.000-04:00

Robert Kroetsch was tragically killed on June 21, 2011 in a car accident. He was 83 and an icon on Canadian literature. I don't include with that statement any regional qualifier, but he was particularly well regarded in Western Canada, specifically in Alberta.

Here's his Wikipedia entry, which calls him "the single most influential figure in Canada in introducing ideas about postmodernism." (See also my review of Re: Reading the Postmodern.)

My short story "Beginning and Endings" (from Thirteen Shades of Black and White (Turnstone, 1999) includes a reference to Kroetsch and his novel Words of My Roaring (1966), which I withdrew from the Saskatoon Public Library circa 1993.

Beginnings and endings is an idea that repeats in that novel, and it's an idea I've often repeated in my fiction, along with the question: What is a story?

Here's the passage from my story:

She was wearing the same clothes, the same stupid baseball cap on backwards. She saw me first. I was glad to see her.

I was sitting in one of the cafes, sipping a beer, reading that Kroetsch novel. Beginnings and endings. I had them on my mind.

I waved at her to come join me.

"You want something to eat?" I asked.

"Sure," she said.

I gestured to the waitress to bring a menu. The waitress was from Ireland. She was in Toronto for the summer on an employment exchange program.

"How have you been?" I asked.

"Good," she said.

She picked up the Kroetsch novel, flipped it over. On the back cover was a photograph of Kroetsch from the 1960s. He looked awful, like a real suit. Some kind of McCarthesque dinosaur. He wasn't like that at all, I knew. But that's what he looked like. Like a university lecturer. A real drag.

There are many moving tributes on him this past week. A drag he wasn't. An important figure, he was.

Wayde Compton

2011-06-19T15:07:00.000-04:00

Wayde Compton's After Canaan (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010) is subtitled "Essays on Race, Writing and Region."

And it is so.

It is, furthermore, rich with intelligence and timely analysis.

Following Barack Obama's remarkable electoral victory in 2008, the commentariat were insistent that we had entered a "post-racial" world. Within this unique historical moment, Compton's essays ring with caution. They also, and I don't know how else to say it, sing with sanity.

What I mean is, Compton addresses many topics that are often swamped with anxiety. His voice is clear, unwavering, and dedicated to a depth quest for meaning. It should also be said he is a critic of both the left and the right of the political spectrum. He is a poet and historical researcher, free from any party line.

I devoured this book eagerly. Here's some places others have commented:

Here's an interview with Compton from Geist.

I'm going to provide a simple response to this complicated book.

The NY Times link above (and the author's response) jumps off from the first essay in the collection, "Pheneticizing Versus Passing," a remarkable and creative piece of analysis about racial identity and how people often project racial conclusions on others. The author's distinction between passing and pheneticizing is who has the power of agency, the subject or the audience.

"Seven Routes to Hogan's Alley and Vancouver's Black Community" provides a fascinating historical recreation of a key moment in the past century when the West Coast's miniscule black population came up against the forces of urban modernization with predictable results.

"The Repossession of Fred Booker" made me sad.

"Obama and Language" -- simply a must-read. And interesting to read alongside Zadie Smith.

Finally, a word about "region." As you might guess, the region is Canada's Pacific south-west. Compton repeatedly make the point that the region's black population has historically been so small as to be nearly invisible. Asians and First Nations folks are the more noticeable minorities. Compton make the point that this fact gives West Coast blacks a unique perspective and narrative history. While this is no doubt true, it is Compton's searing intelligence that makes this book singularly valuable.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Random Recommendations

2011-06-18T12:44:00.000-04:00

Over the years people have recommended books to me, and I've collected a small pile of torn bits of paper with authors and titles scribbled in corners.

I've been recently cleaning up my crap and was going to throw out these random recommendations, but I decided to post this odd little list here instead.

(I haven't read any of them. I'm a bad receiver of recommendations.)

Robert Lecker, Making It Real: The Canonization of English-Canadian Literature (Anansi, 1995)
John Glassco, Memoirs of Montparnasse
Celine, Journey to the End of the Night
Anthony de Mello, Awareness
Marjorie Howes, Yeats' Nations
Donald T. Phillips, Martin Luther King on Leadership
Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Homage to Robert Frost
William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow
Robert Schneider, Brother of Sleep
P Fitzgerald The Blue Flower

Shane Jones

2011-06-13T23:03:00.000-04:00

Last week I picked up Craig Segilman's Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me at a charity used book sale. Based on the first 20 pages, I recommend it.

Among other things, I learned Sontag began her career aggressively against those things she disagreed with, and then later focused her energies praising those things she liked.

This post is of the latter variety. It's not criticism; it's merely praise.

I first became aware of Shane Jones when I published a short story of his in The Danforth Review. It did it twice: Celebrity Furniture (2006) and Figure Four Leg Lock (2004).

Now the dude has a Wikipedia page and a film deal.

More significantly, though, he's produced a good novel: Light Boxes (Penguin, 2010). I was in my neighbourhood bookstore and saw it on the shelf. A very pleasant discovery.

I'm not going to say much about it, just point to an excellent review here. Or here.

Congratulations, Shane!

TISH Happened

2011-06-12T17:12:00.000-04:00

Brian Fawcett on Frank Davey's WHEN TISH HAPPENS (ECW Press, 2011) over at Dooney's Cafe.

A bit more of the conversation about Canlit's Pomo moment.

Daniel Jones

2011-06-05T22:33:00.001-04:00

Toronto Stories: The People One Knows
by Daniel Jones
Mercury, 1994

The Brave Never Write Poetry
by Daniel Jones
Coach House Press, 1985 (reissued 2011)

1978
by Daniel Jones
Three O’Clock Press, 2011 (Rush Hour Revisions, 1998)

I missed Daniel Jones and I miss him. I feel self-conscious saying that, knowing that he killed himself and, thus, there are those who miss him in a more-real way than I do.

What I mean is, I never met him. Never saw him read. Never heard of him until I reviewed his short story collection, The People One Knows for ID Magazine in February 1995. By then he was already gone, and I discovered he’d been the editor of Paragraph, a magazine I read (though, apparently, inattentively).

My review is posted below. I remember approaching it as if Jones were still alive. I didn’t mention his death in the review. I wanted the review to be about the book, not him. I liked the book, though how much I liked it doesn’t come across in the review, it seems to me now. I continue to recommend it highly (though it’s difficult to find).

At the time, I thought, “This is the type of book that people should be writing.” But I didn’t realize how extraordinary it was. Lo, all these years later, I am much more aware of how rarely Canadian writers attempt to articulate the sharp moment of the evolving present.

And how hard it is to do so.

The People One Knows articulates a world that I felt very much a part of (call it post-punk ennui, or whatever), which is why I miss Jones. He was able to write things that resonated with me. Wrote things that I wished I had written. Wrote in a way that I was trying to write, before I was able to realize it. So I am, of course, curious what else he would have done, but, sadly, there is no more.

What we have now, instead, lucky for us, is two reissued Jones titles: The Brave Never Write Poetry and 1978. One poetry collection, one novel.

The poetry collection is legendary. I have heard about it repeatedly, seen poems from it spray painted on walls and sidewalks around Toronto, but never actually viewed a copy of the bloody thing. So, hooray to Coach House (and Kevin Connolly), for bringing it back. The poems are as sharp and controversial as ever. They are also strangely reassuring. Yes, life was like that. Someone else saw it, too.

Jones was a powerful figure for his generation. This year, he’d be 52. He was never a “major” writer in his lifetime, but his ambition and his connections and contributions are major enough to have remained of interest. I have used the term “post-punk ennui” above, but a more reflective examination of Jones’ era (and his role in it) is long over-due.

Any curious PhD candidates out there might want to start with the National Library and Archives Canada collection on the author.

From “The Brave Never Write Poetry”:

The brave ride streetcars to jobs
early in the morning, have traffic accidents,
rob banks. The brave have children, relationships,
mortgages. The brave never write these things
down in notebooks. The brave die & they are
dead.

etc.

*

[Review first published in ID Magazine, Feb 2-15, 1995 issue]

Toronto Stories: The People One Knows
by Daniel Jones
Mercury, 1994

Drug addicts. Alcoholics. Freaks. Failed artists. Aging punks. This book presents an evocative vision of the underside of Toronto in the 1990s.

Nine of the 10 linked stories that make up this collection, which is titled after a line from one of Hemingway’s poems, are told in the first person. In these nine stories, the narrator, a thirtysomething writer, poet and writing instructor (much like the author) introduces the people who surround him.

We meet Lee, a teenage junky, who house-sits the narrator’s cats when he goes to Montreal for New Year’s with his girlfriend. We meet Richard, who dropped out of the army to be a sculptor. Richard points a rifle at the CN Tower and asks the narrator to dare him to pull the trigger. We meet Assa, an ex-girlfriend with a deformity.

The characters are unflinchingly real in their weaknesses. They want to do the right thing, but often don’t know what that is, or find that they haven’t the strength to follow through. For example, after one of his writing classes the narrator finds himself on the subway with one of his students. She tells him that she’s not getting along with the instructor of one of her classes. She posits that this is because he doesn’t like the way she looks. The narrator wants to reassure the student that she’s attractive, but he doesn’t. Instead, he resents having to decide whether his student is attractive. He would rather stay uninvolved.

Still, these characters are not whiners. The overriding emotion in this book is regret, not a shallow sense of injustice. The narrator often looks back on the by-gone days when he was “cruel” or “an alcoholic, though I didn’t know it at the time” and wishes that he had done better. You get the feeling one or two bouts of rage at the world might have done him good.

The narrator’s lack of self-esteem is one of the book’s weaknesses. One episode of naval gazing could have been overlooked, but the scene is repeated in at least three stories.

A second criticism stems from the best story in the collection, “The Poet’s Wife.” Strangely enough, it belongs in a different collection. The author’s ironic awareness shines brighter and digs deeper her than in the other stories, but the shift to the third-person voice creates an awkward dissonance.

It’s a good read, though. In a very funny twist, the story features Jones, once the editor of Paragraph: The Canadian Fiction Review, in a cameo as himself, alongside two of Canada’s other literary lights, Barbara Gowdy and Brian Fawcett.

The book is written with an eye for realism often missed from the contemporary literary scene. Jones provides facts and images, but little interpretation and zero political claims. His sparse writing style suggests Hemingway’s influence extends beyond the title. Like Papa, Jones doesn’t tell us more than we need to know.

Toronto Stories provides a look at a side of Generation X that Douglas Coupland could never capture. The people Jones knew aren’t struggling to put back together their suburban dreams. They are struggling for something more universal. Call it purpose, relief, or redemption, Jones’ characters are looking for ways to integrate the pain of their pasts with the hope they hold out for the future. This theme has long been grist for the literary mill. Jones works with it well.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Short Stories - Spring 2011

2011-06-02T19:30:00.001-04:00

Six years ago I wrote a "state of the nation" piece about the short story in Canada. Re-reading it recently, I thought it remained an interesting snap shot in time.

In 2005, buzz was the short story collection was in decline. Publishers didn't want them. Readers weren't interested in them. Only workshop organizers and creative writing programs were making any money off of them.

In Best American Short Stories of the Century (Mariner Books, 2000), John Updike (editor) intoned:

The health of the short story? Its champions claim that as many short stories are published as ever. Whatever statistics show, my firm impression is that in my lifetime the importance of short fiction as a news-bearing medium -- bringing Americans news of how they live, and why -- has diminished.

Humpf. Maybe so, maybe not.

Opportunities for short story writers have certainly diminished. Yet the genre keeps attracting attention and talent. See, for example, Nathaniel G. Moore's recent series on the short story in Open Book Toronto.

Here's some recent and newish short story titles that caught my attention (haven't read them all yet; just sayin'):

Greg Kearney - Pretty (Exile Editions, 2011)

Jessica Westhead - And Also Sharks (Cormorant, 2011)

Julie Booker - Up Up Up (Anansi, 2011)

Matthew J. Trafford - The Divinity Gene (D&M, 2011)

Zsuzsi Gartner - Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (Penguin, 2011)

Hal Niedzvecki - Look Down, This is Where It Must Have Happened (City Lights, 2011)

Dennis E Bolen - Anticipated Results (Arsenal, 2011)

Review in Q&Q

Clark Blaise - The Meagre Tarmac (Biblioasis, 2011)

You might also want to check out the new Douglas Glover story "A Flame, A Burst of Light" in The New Quarterly (#118, spring 2011).

The short story. Alive and kickin'

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

John Lavery

2011-05-09T22:59:00.000-04:00

John Lavery passed away yesterday (Sunday, May 8, 2011). See also rob mclennan's tribute.

Sandra Beck
by John Lavery
Anansi, 2010

You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off
by John Lavery
ECW Press, 2004

Very Good Butter
by John Lavery
ECW, 2000

And an interview with John Lavery, first published in The Danforth Review.

*

I have been contemplating writing about Sandra Beck for a couple of weeks. I had imagined that I would begin with a line like, "John Lavery is Canada's Nabokov." The Quill & Quire obituary quotes Lavery's Anansi editor, Melanie Little, saying the writer "had this almost maniacal base of fans." Well, count me among them. Ever since I read his first book, a decade ago, I've been wanting to elevate him to the head of the pantheon.

The interview I did with him for The Danforth Review in 2005 was among my favourites. Reading that interview again tonight I am reminded anew of a brilliant man:

I, however, only started to gain an inkling into human nature, and therefore to say things worth saying, after I had children. With people of our own age, give or take, we are always giving and taking, always on the make and trying to mask it. It's vital, yes, but it's a distraction, an entertainment, however human. To observe, as a parent, how the self-interest of children operates in the open has been a revelation to me. There is really very little difference between children and adults. Children are childlike. Adults are childish.

And it is his children whom I am thinking of tonight.

So there is no hope here of this being an objective review. I tried to read this book skeptically, but John populated the novel with astonishing events, language, and characters. I'll say it again: He was our Nabokov.

Which doesn't mean that this isn't a tres unusual novel; one that demands a lot of the reader. Little told Q&Q: "It was really refreshing to work with someone with the level of confidence in his voice that John had." Yes! John pushed fiction into new shapes. And he dared his readers to keep up.

Sandra Beck is a novel about a woman named Sandra Beck. The back cover blurb says Sandra is "present and absent on every page." Sure, okay. But she is present more on some and less so on others.

The novel is also broken into three sections. Roughly the first third is narrated by Sandra's daughter, and roughly two-thirds is narrated by Sandra's policeman husband, P.F.; the remainder of the book is a 5-page episode that is like an out-take from the main movie, like a DVD extra. A cute and funny moment between P.F. and Sandra.

The plot? There isn't much of one. I'd like to write more about Sandra Beck, but I'm not going to be able to do it, here, now. So instead, I'm going paste in a bit of the 2005 interview I did with John. It sums up better than I ever could the essence of his work:

I'm not sure if that's the right way of saying it. We're all in a state of becoming, never arriving, might be a more optimistic phrasing. I want to ask you about that idea generally: Do you agree?

Well now that’s a good question. Doesn’t Lydia have a line, “Every step we leave to arrive again to leave again to arrive. Every step.”? My mother used to accuse me, in a friendly way, of never knowing whether I was coming or going. She was right of course. She could have saved a little breath by simply accusing me, in a friendly way, of becoming.

Ambiguity. I had an architecture professor once who liked to ask whether architecture was the creation of solid forms, or the creation of the space they encompass. And we could answer Heidegger’s famous question about why is it ‘something’ that exists, rather than ‘nothing,’ by simply saying that it is ‘nothing’ that exists, the ‘something’ being so staggeringly infinitesimal by comparison as to be negligible. I mean by this that ambiguity is everything and everywhere. Human relationships are wiltingly, joyously, ambiguous. Always. Find me a writer who doesn't get a lot of mileage out of ambiguity. Especially George Orwell who, I believe, got it wrong: doublethink not only does not entail a restriction of individual freedom, it is absolutely necessary for the individual to flourish, to doubt itself, to allow itself to be convinced.

Conversation. I don’t know if there’s that much conversation per se in my stuff. On the other hand, it is aural, vocal, from first word to last, it has all been read out loud. Many times. In his fabulosisimo story “The Bear,” Faulkner has the principal character say that story-telling is “the best of all possible talking.” Yes, yes, a hundred times, yes. Writing, while always literary, is, for me, a kind of talking.

*

[Review first published in The Danforth Review]

John Lavery is the author of a previous short story collection, Very Good Butter (ECW, 2000). Now he's back with You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off. Put frankly, this is one of the best books of 2004, IMHO. It also has one of the strangest titles. A collection of linked short stories (eight in 209 pages), You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off integrates traditionalist excellence with inspired innovation and creates something unique in the process.

In TDR's review of Very Good Butter, I noted that "the instability of meaning ... [is] one of Lavery's strongest themes." That theme continues in this new collection, whose protagonist may be the Kwaznievski of the title, or it may be the one who speaks the title phase, a police officer in Montreal, Detective Inspector PF. Late in the book, PF says: "People fuck up, they always will, and I take my cut." As an officer of the law, PF is charged with helping to maintain order, but order doesn't want to be maintained -- as Thomas Pynchon reminded us decades ago, entropy rules (see the story "Entropy" in Slow Learner). Life is crumbling towards heat-death, but there are forces pushing against it: fear, paranoia, the law, the media, your Aunt Matilda. Detective Inspector PF pushes against death, too; at least on his good days, of which there seem to be fewer and fewer.

("People fuck up, they always will, and I take my cut" could be the mantra of fiction writers, too, who would have nothing to say were it not for the slings and arrows of outrageous human drama.

This is a book with many italicized passages. They add to the narrative's polyphonic presentation.)

What makes You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off so remarkable, to me, are the layers of story Lavery integrates into an operatic whole. Some stories move the reader along by following a single protagonist through a series of changes, or crises, or along a thought-process. .... You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off does all of those things and more; it is literature that it is truly symphonic.

(I keep reaching for music metaphors -- "operatic," "symphonic" -- because I'm not sure how else to describe this book. Like a Van Gogh painting filtered through Jackson Pollack? Like Eminem jamming with Pink Floyd?

What's the plot, you say? Detective Inspector PF is a Montreal cop. He is 20-odd years into his career. His wife has died. He is something of a celebrity because he appears on a local television show. He is obsessed with a woman -- Kwaznievski -- who appears to be homeless and who claims to have found a large bundle of cash by the side of the road. The different stories take numerous detours along with way, showing similar characters from dis-similar angles.

Any weaknesses in this book? Some readers will find an emphasis on the thought-processes of characters detracts from the forward thumping motion of the plot. Some readers might say: "Too much philosophizing." For those readers, there are many other books out there to please them. Personally, I wouldn't ask Lavery to change a word.)

On the back cover, Lee Henderson says: "Lavery's stories are today's great laughless comedies." And Mark Anthony Jarman calls Lavery "a dolphin of a writer, jumping through the waves with glee." What I want to add is that Lavery's stories are serious and ambitious in a way that most books in Canada are not. Publishers complain that short story collections don't sell -- as if sales were the sole criterion for publishing decisions. You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off will not be the next Da Vinci Code, but no matter -- it is the kind of book that ought to be winning all of the high-falutin literary prizes -- both in Canada, and abroad.

*

[Review first published in The Danforth Review.]

Very Good Butter is a great name for a book (it is metaphoric, suggestive, tasty), and Very Good Butter is worthy of its moniker. This collection of short stories is the first book by John Lavery, a Quebecer with an international and varied education. He puts both qualities to good use.

Butter - which by itself is little more than fat - is what we add to food to give it extra flavour, even to make it palatable. The image on the cover of someone chomping on toast is a perfect example. Just looking at that photograph is enough to make one salivate. Is Lavery suggesting his stories add a little extra to life? Are his tales about the spices that make existence palatable? Such speculation is interesting, but not rewarding. Which is a little like butter, too - it tastes good, but offers little nutritional value.

The ten stories that make up Lavery's strong first collection contain many first-book joys and concerns. Lavery's voice is fresh. His stories are sprightly and provocative. They do not settle for the easy conventions of lost love, small town isolation, or urban alienation. For example, one of the strongest stories - "The Premier's New Pajamas" - follows the ordeal of one provincial premier's speech writer, who assists his boss escape from student protesters by driving the premier out of town to his mother's. Once there, the premier lays on some heavy homoerotic innuendo and then disappears. The strongest element of the story is its narrative voice, which moves quickly and refuses to allow the reader to settle on any singular narrative track for long - the instability of meaning being one of Lavery's strongest themes.

The strength of this theme, on the other hand, contributes to one of the concerns about the book. Namely, it falls into a common first-book trap - the one-note syndrome - as the stories strike a similar tone again and again. But this failure is more than forgivable, as Lavery has demonstrated an original calling and vision, which if it borrows from anywhere, it borrows from fabulists like Terry Southern or Italo Calvino - who are part of a constellation in the literary universe Canadian writers, and readers, could do worse than visit more often.

*

INTERVIEW WITH JOHN LAVERY (2005)

http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/202/300/danforth/2009/no27/features/interviews/john_lavery.htm

Could you provide a brief background of who you are -- and your journey as a writer, up to and including the most recent book.

I grew up in Montreal.

A grade 5 friend of mine, Dudley Smith his name was, had the ability to sit at his desk and read, without so much as dipping his head, books hidden inside bigger books. Dudley got very high marks, teachers left him alone, and he could go through the better part of a Hardy Boys book in a single morning. He read at least twenty of them in Grade 5. I had a young boy’s admiration for Dudley, who was left-handed and exceptionally good in sports, and I was utterly captivated by his ability to read so quickly and still keep track of what was going on in class.

Because I, for my part, read with laborious slowness, listening to every word as I pronounced it silently to myself, going back over any passages that I missed because my attention wandered, looking up every word I didn’t know in the dictionary. It took me ten days to get through The Sign of the Crooked Arrow, which, despite my admiration for Dudley, I could not convince myself that I really liked. I never read another Hardy Boys book.

I didn’t read quickly, but I read all the time. Brits mostly: A A Milne, Enid Blyton, Hugh Lofting (Doctor Dolittle), G A Henty. A forgotten Canadian, John F Hayes, Rebels Ride at Night, Treason at York. I read Sports Illustrated from cover to cover. Sports journalism remains the most engagingly written form of journalism.

In High School it was Dickens, Austen and Shakespeare, every year, and I never bitched, although you were supposed to. And, thanks to my friend Walter Gordon, I was getting into Hesse, Sartre, Camus, Anouilh, Kant, Kerouac, Steinbeck, the Dylans, Thomas and Bob, Ezra Eliot and T S Pound. You have to read a gazillion books. But the ones you read when you're young are the ones that matter most.

I waited a long time before writing. It’ s a tough job, you have to know a lot of stuff, and I was terrified, the word is not too strong, of not being good at it. In 1989 or ’ 90, when I was living in Fredericton, I entered a little fiction contest organized by the New Brunswick Writers’ Association. Douglas Glover was the judge that year. I said to myself that there were barely half a million anglophones in New Brunswick, that if I couldn’t win a such a dinky little contest, there would be no point in ever trying to write another story.

To this day I love to watch people who read fluently. I am still a poor reader, slow, sleepy, I have to understand everything, I have to hear it all. I’m really better off writing. And I still write for the fluent readers, like Dudley. To keep them reading. When they should be doing something else.

What was the story that won the contest?

Actually, I submitted two stories. And although I appreciated Mr. Glover's writing 'first' in big letters over the title of one of them, I was even more winged off at him for not giving the other story, which was ten times better, a second place at the very least. Neither story was worthy of publication. I never tried, and never will.

To me, your writing -- at least the two short story collections I've read -- seems quite unlike what else is going on in Canadian letters. I wonder if you could say a bit about your literary influences and maybe how you think what your doing relates to what others are doing.

Influences. Wow. Everybody. Everything.

The summer after Grade 10, much to the horror of my mother, I read Crime and Punishment. A big, red hardcover edition with gruesome, line-drawn illustrations. I mortgaged the book over the entire summer and probably read it more than twice by the time I got it finished.

A little later on I read William Faulkner’s A Fable. I thought it was a little forced, a little artificial, but I was taken by the majestic sentences, so I decided to go for The Sound and the Fury. After that, I read a big part of the entire Faulkner canon. 13 straight novels. It took me a long time to recover, of course, but the idea had definitely germinated in my brain that I would like to trade places with Bill, let him do the listening, and me do the composing.

I also had the immense privilege of a second linguistic childhood, in my thirties. In French this time. And this time, instead of Faulkner, it was Colette. A marvelous portraitist and a pure writer, difficult to appreciate in English translations which often make her sound distortedly patrician. It is certainly not without significance, as far as my development is concerned, that Colette is so rich where Faulkner is, at times, so embarrassingly inadequate. In the areas, that is, of sensuality and the feminine personality.

I don't have the slightest impression of being technically innovative, or of doing things that many other writers aren't doing or haven't done. I do try to engage the reader, to get him or her surrounded. I wish books came in earphones. I'm a playful little fucker, speaking seriously.

Let's turn to your new story collection, _You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off_. In my review of it, I mentioned that one of the main characters (a police officer) says at one point, "People fuck up, they always will, and I take my cut." I thought that writers are sort of the same way. Without drama, we're got nothing to say. I thought that line nailed something central about the book. Maybe it's not fair to ask you about one line, so how about I step back and ask about the genesis of the book. What's the book about for you?

Actually, the seed for You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off was the title itself, although I did not immediately find a name with the right rhythm. Kwaznievski is a Polish name, not particularly common, but not rare either. The current President of Poland is Aleksander Kwasniewski, in fact. I altered the spelling of the name to avoid the last part being pronounced "ooski," and discovered recently, much to my delight, that it means "sour-faced."

Out of the name grew, gradually, the talkative character of Lydia and her alter ego, Jane Bing. Or is it Lydia who is the altered ego?

The immense popularity of crime fiction is based on two rather comforting premises: one, that crimes are clearly defined acts, and two, that those who commit them yield, ultimately, to the ratiocination, to use Poe's term, the ability to analyse and think clearly, of the non-criminal. Both premises are perfectly false. A great many criminal acts can never be adequately reconstructed, nor can the motives for committing them, or their degree of criminality, be convincingly assessed. And the truth is, that the vast majority of crimes are never solved.

So I set out deliberately to find a context for Lydia by writing stories in which the crimes committed would be elusive. Some would be inconsequential, some would even work out well, some would be purely imaginary, some would be committed by mere happenstance. And few, if any, would be solved. Along the way, I discovered the character of Inspector PF, the "chocolate dick," who seems to be developing into my own alter ego.

It is true that PF's line "people fuck up, they always will, and I take my cut," might be taken to fairly well sum up the book. It would help, though, if we had a clear idea of what fucking-up means.

Drama, on the other hand, results when human beings come in contact, whether they fuck up or not, although fucking up can speed the process and simplify things for the story-maker. Writing, however, is above all the art of language, of verbal expression. I've been through page after marvellous page of Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust (in French! he comes across as a verbose prig in English), Lewis Carroll certainly, Beckett even (sticking to stars of yesteryear), and not a fuck up in sight.

That's an excellent answer. It makes me think the next question should be: There's a lot of conversation in _You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off_, and as you noted above, also a quite a bit of doubt about identity. Characters aren't quite sure who they are, who they were, or who they're becoming. Your stories get a lot of mileage out of ambiguities. I'm not sure if that's the right way of saying it. We're all in a state of becoming, never arriving, might be a more optimistic phrasing. I want to ask you about that idea generally: Do you agree?

Well now that’s a good question. Doesn’t Lydia have a line, “Every step we leave to arrive again to leave again to arrive. Every step.”? My mother used to accuse me, in a friendly way, of never knowing whether I was coming or going. She was right of course. She could have saved a little breath by simply accusing me, in a friendly way, of becoming.

Ambiguity. I had an architecture professor once who liked to ask whether architecture was the creation of solid forms, or the creation of the space they encompass. And we could answer Heidegger’s famous question about why is it ‘something’ that exists, rather than ‘nothing,’ by simply saying that it is ‘nothing’ that exists, the ‘something’ being so staggeringly infinitesimal by comparison as to be negligible. I mean by this that ambiguity is everything and everywhere. Human relationships are wiltingly, joyously, ambiguous. Always. Find me a writer who doesn't get a lot of mileage out of ambiguity. Especially George Orwell who, I believe, got it wrong: doublethink not only does not entail a restriction of individual freedom, it is absolutely necessary for the individual to flourish, to doubt itself, to allow itself to be convinced.

Conversation. I don’t know if there’s that much conversation per se in my stuff. On the other hand, it is aural, vocal, from first word to last, it has all been read out loud. Many times. In his fabulosisimo story “The Bear,” Faulkner has the principal character say that story-telling is “the best of all possible talking.” Yes, yes, a hundred times, yes. Writing, while always literary, is, for me, a kind of talking.

How does being a Quebec-based writer affect your work?

As a writer, I am Quebec-based, but as a person I am simply a Quebecer. It is true that the Saint Lawrence is treacherous between Montreal and Quebec City. I've been at the helm going down it, actually, so I know. But below Quebec, it's a strong, majestic river. Montmagny, La Pocatière, Charlevoix. Lovely names. My Quebec is as much outside as inside the big cities.

Socially, it's a bit tricky, and the social aspect of writing is important. When Very Good Butter came out, I knew exactly nobody in the English-speaking writing world. Nobody. Now, though, I have some really good friends, in Ottawa and in Toronto. Without them, I might very well have let Kwaznievski choke in my PC's memory.

Linguistically, the importance of being in Quebec is immeasurable. I'm not really bilingual. I speak a single bi-systemic language. More than once, I've found myself blabbing away to someone and wondering why they look as though they don't understand what I'm saying, until it has dawned on me that I haven't been speaking the language I thought I was. The influence of French, and not only French, on my English is, of course, very strong, but you are likely a better judge of that than I am.

I might add that I read almost exclusively in French. Even Auster and JC Oates. Weird, uh? A habit. That insulates me from a natural tendency towards mimicry. And protects me from being constantly reminded of how many people are writing so fabulously well in English.

What's the question you thought I'd ask you, but haven't yet? (How would you answer it?)

I might have expected a question about style, mine being distinctive apparently. I don't think I'll answer it though, except to say that I have, at my work station, I just counted them, sixteen dictionaries in four languages. There are others kicking around the house. I do think of myself as a sort of publicity agent for English. I want to use all the English I can, but I'm always nervous about going over the top. Michael Holmes, my editor, wisely made me replace "cervine" with "deer-like," but he kept all the other uncommon and nonce words. All the fucks and shits too, obviously. You can hardly paint the sky without blue in your palette.

I would, though, like to say something about fitting writing into the one life you've been given to live. Frankly, I admire the ability to finance a writing life more than I admire the ability to write itself. Having children is generally not even a consideration for most writers, and understandably so. I, however, only started to gain an inkling into human nature, and therefore to say things worth saying, after I had children. With people of our own age, give or take, we are always giving and taking, always on the make and trying to mask it. It's vital, yes, but it's a distraction, an entertainment, however human. To observe, as a parent, how the self-interest of children operates in the open has been a revelation to me. There is really very little difference between children and adults. Children are childlike. Adults are childish.

I'd like to add that I've enjoyed doing this interview, which, being written, has allowed me the time to give some thought to the answers. A useful exercise. I've learned something. Thanks.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Canlit Pomo

2011-05-05T00:07:00.001-04:00

Re: Reading the Postmodern: Canadian Literature and Criticism After Modernism
Edited by Robert David Stacey
University of Ottawa Press, 2010

On page 188 of this disparate collection of essays, is a footnote:

Ami McKay, for instance, describes how her agent picked up her highly popular debut novel The Birth House, about a midwife in rural Nova Scotia in the early twentieth century, on the condition that McKay excise a contemporary, parallel story.

The essayist, Herb Wyile, cites the source of the anecdote: McKay’s 2006 Quill & Quire profile, which also includes this:

Today, with the help of her husband, who now works as a freelance web designer, McKay maintains two extensive websites, a blog, and an online forum with more than 600 registered users. Her site for The Birth House includes an interactive virtual scrapbook, a reading guide, downloadable bookplates, and The Hysteria Quiz, which gives a mock diagnosis of the user’s need for “vibratory treatment.” She has created an online community for her readers, and in return, they shower her with letters praising her work and sharing their own stories.

Yes, Anne Shirley, we’re a long way from Green Gables – and a long way from 1988.

That was the year U of T professor Linda Hutcheon published The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (Oxford UP), a work that is a touch stone for many of the essayists in this volume, which documents (some of) the Canadian Literature Symposium held at the University of Ottawa in May 2008.

Here’s a quote from Hutcheon’s website:

In the postmodern novel, we find … self-reflexivity, … parody, but always combined with an awareness of the particularities of the place and time in which the work is both written and read. The move from modernism to postmodernism came with the paradoxical use of that art-as-art focus to engage directly with the social, the political, and the historical—to comment critically on the worlds of both art and experience.

Which brings us back to the point Wyile made with his footnote, which he places following these three sentences:

The last couple of decades have witnessed increasing concentration in the [publishing] industry and an increasingly corporate, profit-oriented sensibility. With publishing houses increasingly contained within larger, diversified corporate structures, the emphasis is less on supporting innovation and fostering cultural diversity and more on moving product. One consequence is a reduced volume of literary titles and a greater emphasis on accessibility to a wider audience.

Arguably, the book McKay was writing before her agent intervened would have aligned with Hutcheon’s definition of the postmodern, extending a Canadian tradition: to engage directly with the social, the political, and the historical—to comment critically on the worlds of both art and experience. Equally, by losing the contemporary storyline, and shifting point of view, McKay’s book became a more accessible “product.” It became less a work of art and more a tool of “late-capitalism.” However, let’s also note that it is a product readers now interact with even after the reading experience, through McKay’s “extensive websites.” The work is, therefore, a post(post)modern experience, surely, that couldn’t have been imagined in 1988.

As usual, when contemplating the post(crazy)modern, my head is spinning.

And so I “begin” here by highly recommending Stacey’s editorial introduction, titled “Introduction: Post-, Marked Canada.” It is as clearheaded and ideologically neutral an overview of the (Canlit, post-1967) field as I’ve read anywhere. He outlines the positions of the Canlit granddaddies (Robert Kroetsch and Frank Davey), contextualizes Hutcheon’s canonical work, explains the contemporary counter-attack, arguably led by Christian Bök (who suggests Hutcheon was more defender of the status quo than radical), and generally squares the circle regarding the never-ending (?) interplay between modernism and its post/past/aftermath.

That is, Stacey explicates far better than I am going to do here the contentious nature of (capital ‘T’) Time. Is postmodernism a reference to a period after modernism? Or it is a condition within modernism, which hasn’t ended? The telling (and creating) of history is a recurring theme in these essays, and a topic of particular interest to Hutcheon, who summarized it as a notably Canadian concern. Thus, arguably, she helped to shut out other connotations of postmodernism within the critical discourse of contemporary “English-Canadian” fiction – and created distortions of “reality,” what people were really writing and publishing, if not reading.

Not long after 1988 (if not before), of course, any consensus about the “postmodern” collapsed. As Stacey explains it:

In part because of the immense popularity of Hutcheon’s work, an academic interest in the postmodern in Canada and the Canadian postmodern (which, though related, are far from synonymous) was by the mid-1990s already nearing its high-water mark. It was not long before the concept, having been so suddenly and thoroughly incorporated into academic discourse, lost much of its value as a contestatory term. In addition, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, postmodernism increasingly became the target of a number of identity-based critical schools, such as feminism and postcolonial studies, for whom the “reign of the signifier,” as Carolyn Bayard characterizes the linguistic and textual emphasis of postmodernism, posed a double threat: first, by seeming to devalue the experimental basis of their various critiques, and second, by putting in doubt the very language of reference on which those critiques relied.

And if you can get through that quotation without reaching for a cigarette, congratulations.

Another way of saying it is, the historical uncertainties released by postmodernism provided opportunities for new emphasis on previously “marginal” narratives (women, minorities), and these new narratives then created their own centres of power or new/renewed certainty that disabled the very notion of historical uncertainty itself.

Again, another way of saying it is, readers wanted a different kind of realism. One that focused on stories like McKay’s The Birth House. Readers didn’t want historical uncertainties; no parallel narrative that links the present to the past and offers a chance to compare/contrast. Readers simply wanted a different kind of reassurance.

Whatever post(post)modernism is in Canadian literature, it doesn’t look like it emerged from 1988. In fact, the dominant impression left by this collection of essays is that Canlit has an awful lot it hasn’t digested. The perspective of the baby boom generation hasn’t been significantly displaced (though it needs to be), and there are some devastating critiques included here that deserve wider notice.

One is Alexander MacLeod’s “Reconciling Regionalism: Spatial Epistemology, Robert Kroetsch, and the Roots of Canadian Postmodern Fiction.” Essentially, MacLeod suggests that Kroetsch’s postmodernism is really a regional (Albertan) critique of the Canadian consensus. Kroetsch’s uncertainty, he suggests, isn’t an uncertainty at all:

In the end, Kroetsch’s trickster blend of regionalism and postmodernism seems to venture out into the abstractions of theory only to double back again and sneak home through the side door. Though his regional loyalties and his pure affection for nature may ultimately undermine the elevated postmodern pedigree so many scholars have tried to graft onto his work, Kroetsch, perhaps more than any other figure in Canadian literature, is experienced enough to know that it is never the writer’s fault when critics do what they do, and that in the end “a local pride,” misplaced or not, can always promise more comfort than the postmodern condition could ever provide (146).

Ouch.

On the other hand, I think it would surprise John “Metcalfe” to be described as a “rabid anti-American writer-critic” and included in a list along with Robin Mathews and Keith Richardson (320). It wouldn’t surprise him, though, to find his name spelled incorrectly with the extra ‘e’.

One of the “corrections” offered in the essays collected here is a special focus on poetry. From the 1970s expanding outwards, the TRG and others have been pressing forward a Canadian engagement with experimental poetry. As the title of Hutcheon’s book makes clear, she didn’t address this genre in 1988 and the editors of the new essay collection have made sure that gap was filled here.

It is, therefore, surprising that there isn’t a single essay on the short story in Canada, which has had as lively a past quarter century as its versifying cousin.

In sum, this is an essential work. And more essential work remains.

Final comment: I confess that it surprised me to find not a single reference to George W. Bush and the eight years of his Presidency, which featured a renewed emphasis on ideological certainty not seen since the 1950s, which was the kind of certainty against which the Big Wave of American Postmodernists initially defined itself. Perhaps Canadian literature has always tended to define itself as skeptical of American exceptionalism and American certainty, so this silence about the post 9/11 era is unremarkable, but it did seem notable to me. Odd, even.

C’est la vie.

*

POSTSCRIPT

A couple of other items of note:

Frank Davey notes the lack of interest in the rest of the world regarding "Canadian Postmodernism." As he writes: "I can only find one book on Canadian postmodernist writing edited and published outside of Canada" (9).
If Canada is the world's most postmodern country, it is strange that literary scholars have ignored this nations writers who have been most engaged in this arena.
The 2011 federal election, however, shows that the Canadian electorate remains full of surprises; and is ready, willing and able to re-align centres and margins in directions our media and political elite were previously unable to anticipate or articulate. Canada has a majority government, but a polarized electorate, and the party of the centre has been sent to the woodshed. Hmm. Interesting times.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Maggie Helwig

2011-04-13T21:47:00.003-04:00

Girls Fall Down
by Maggie Helwig
Coach House, 2008

It's the beginning years of the new millennium as the book opens:

The city is a winter city, at its heart. Though the ozone layer is thinning above it, and the summers grow long and fierce, still the city always anticipates winter. Anticipates hardship. In the winter, when it is raw and grey and dim, it is itself most truly.

People come here from summer countries and learn to be winter people. But there are worse fates. That is exactly why many of them come here, because there are far worse fates than winter.

...

It is hard to imagine this city being damaged by something from the sky. The dangers to this city enter the bloodstream, move through interior channels.

Girls fall down on subways, remembering the smell of roses before they collapse. Was it poison? They don't die, but they are the seeds of a growing fear. The War on Terror isn't named, and historical context is generally ignored. The Toronto of this book is a Toronto with ravines, subways, and streets like the "real" Toronto, but the geopolitical details of the early-21st century are ignored. There is no Bush, for example. No 9/11. Still, the atmosphere and mood undergirding all of the events of the novel is one of ever-expanding fear.

The atmosphere of the novel is a major feature, and a major accomplishment. The plot is simple. It features a triangle between a young man, a young woman, and her brother. All are thirty-ish.

The man, Alex, is a photographer with a degenerative eye disease. He's slowing going blind. The woman is Susie-Paul, who knew Alex when they were undergraduates, but then she "disappeared" for a decade, and they are reunited just as the girls start mysteriously falling.

Susie-Paul's brother is Derek, who is schizophrenic, and missing. Susie-Paul is desperate to find him. Alex assists. Along the way, they hook up and rekindle the complexities of their connection a decade earlier.

Helwig's prose is confident, direct, searing, and multi-voiced. It's excellent, in other words.

As the opening paragraphs quoted above show, parts of the novel are written by a narrator with a broad view and deep insight. These sections offset the third-person narration of the plot-driving portions; the sections about Alex, Susie-Paul, and Derek. Then there are sections that point the camera in random locations around the city, often focused on the behaviours of teenage girls. These bits are simply hilarious:

The first girl who fell, on the day it began.

She had come out of school with her friends, in her kilt and tie and red wool jacket, her thigh still feeling intangibly damp where the geography teacher had put his hand on it after class.

'Sid the Squid,' snorted Lauren as they walked down the steps. 'God, he's so gross. He's just made of gross. And his wife is a hog and a half, seriously, I mean, she weighs like a thousand pounds.'

'She totally could sink the Titanic with her ass. I'm not kidding,' said Tasha.

The strangeness of adults, their clenched little needs.

'Yeah, can you imagine them in bed?' said Lauren. 'Oh, oh, darling, argh, I can't breathe!'

...

'I just feel so cheated,' Tasha was saying. 'Because every year after sports day they have pizza, like every year, and then our year we just have chips and Coke. Literally like a single chip each. And you expect you're going to have pizza, you know?'

'I know, it's so cheap,' said the girl. 'It's like, hey, we're saving five cents, we're so awesome.'

'To me it's like a betrayal,' said Lauren.

In 2008, NOW named Helwig TO's best author. As perhaps you can infer from the maladies of the characters (degenerative eye disease, schizophrenia) and the image of the title, falling girls, this is a novel about social and personal disintegration. There are passages that question the solidity of identity. Isn't who we think we are just chemicals sloshing around in our brains? How can we say we "know" something when everything is always falling apart? Yes, the book has touches of DeLillo, but it's a tres contemporary Toronto book (not a US-lit knock-off), and it invites and deserves engaged Canlit contemplation.

Not all Canlit is focused decades backwards.This is a book concerned with what it means to live right here right now.

Alex has a project to take photographs of the city before he loses his sight, a kind of catalogue and capturing of reality. But it's a reality turned into images, a removed reality that their creator won't be able to access (see) once he's blind.

What of the rest of us? Are we watching? Paying attention? More than a little lost?

The city, says the God-like narrator (to be trusted? or feared?), "is a winter city, at its heart." Cold. Lifeless. Waiting, one hopes, for an eventual spring.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Stacey May Fowles

2011-04-10T23:25:00.000-04:00

Be Good
by Stacey May Fowles
Tightrope Books, 2007

Stephen Cain and Gregory Betts outline conclusions in Re: Reading the Postmodern: Canadian Literature and Criticism After Modernism (University of Ottawa Press, 2010) that overwhelm me as overdue.

The volume of essays within which their work appears began as the annual Canadian Literature Symposium at the University of Ottawa in May 2008. Cain's essay is "Feeling Ugly: Daniel Jones, Lynn Crosbie, and Canadian Postmodernism's Second Wave." The Betts essay is "Postmodern Decadence in Canadian Sound Poetry and Visual Art."

Here's a quote from Cain:

The postmodern literature that emerged in this country post-1986 is what I call "pessimistic pomo," a type of postmodern that, despite using many of the same textual techniques, resulted in texts whose primary ideological manifestation was nihilism, and that rather than rejoicing in the lack of epistemological centre and seeing this absence as a site for liberation and reconstruction, despaired at the futility of existence and lack of agency toward social and cultural change (105).

Here's a quote from Betts:

While early Canadian visual and sound poetry retained an avant-garde sense of history, a turn away from inherited traditions led rather quickly to a disillusioned sense of history and progress. This transition could be characterized as a shift from revolutionary decadence to postmodern decadence (169).

What is this? and what's overdue about it?

I must begin with the personal. Betts and Cain are speaking my language. They have articulated my experience; my perspective; my opinion. They have given words to a "reality" I absorbed without being able to define; or see; or step outside.

Post-1986, to use Cain's timeframe, is my entire, post-17-year-old adult life.

To be more specific, the short stories I was writing in the 1990s were rooted in the "despair" Cain gives voice to, and they were also motivated by a force Betts calls "a disillusioned sense of history and progress."

That's what "this" is; an acknowledgement of a cultural moment.

What's overdue about it? Maybe I'm over-emphasizing the significance of these essays.

One could argue, for example, that Mordecai Richler was always the existentialist, never the nationalist. So perhaps I'm only glad to find others promoting a tune I recognize. One that isn't new, only too often faint.

It's not that "urban fiction" hasn't had its supporters. Or its anthologies. Some of which I've been in.

It's just that the Canlit ethos is still struggling towards a sophistication that can accommodate internationalist influences without the anxiety of a self-loathing colonialism. A-hem. Apologies. (Did I say something? Can I keep my passport?)

A fair chunck of Re: Reading the Postmodern concerns reactions and responses to Linda Hutcheon's 1988 title, The Canadian Postmodern, which concentrated on the uncertainties innovatively (?) embedded within Canadian historical fictions. The past is not, you know, what it seems. Brilliant; or not so much.

Okay, so, like, eh (my internal hoser provokes me), as Betts points out, what Hutcheon found notable in 1988 was fading fast even as it was being published. A new, darker complexity was imminent, if not already encompassing.

And I include myself among the crowd of writers Cain lists as captured by this influence: Tony Burgess, Matthew Remski, R.M. Vaughan, Derek McCormack, Patricia Seaman, Andre Alexis, Michael Turner, Natalee Caple, Nancy Dembowski, and the two authors of focus in his essay: Lynn Crosbie and Daniel Jones (105-6). For good measure, I have to include also Matthew Firth, Sal DiFalco, Alexandra Leggat, Peter Darbyshire, Hal Niezviecki, Ken Sparling, and Kenneth J. Harvey.

There are others, of course, quite a field, actually, but I need to move on to what's supposed to be my subject here: Stacey May Fowles' Be Good, a terrific companion to Zoe Whittall's Bottle Rocket Hearts. Both are stories about being young and restless in Montreal at the turn of the century, or thereabouts.

Both represent a turn beyond "nihilism," though both muck around on the dark side. Whittal's protagonist is way too damn bouyant to be nihilistic; Fowles' characters never give up believing (or searching for) the authentic experience. Call it love, if you like. Or call it something other than endless drunken hell, mind-fucks, and so-called friends.

These novels by Fowles and Whittall wouldn't find a home in Hutcheon's 1988 postmodernism, but neither are they aligned with the 1980s/90s Jones/Crosbie. But they are part of a continuity, one that interests me, makes my synapses ping, ping, ping.

Fowles' characters are early-twenties, either in or just out of university in Montreal. Many are would-be bohemians floating on their parents' dime. As a generation, they were playing at being beatniks, because what else was there to do? Betts quotes Steve McCaffery about the 1960s' "utopian potential of decadence" (173), and McCaffery says: "Well, that utopian belief in a language revolution is long gone but at the time it was instrumental." My point is, Fowles' characters never had any belief in revolution. They just move into the future dreading that worst of all outcomes: becoming a suburbanite.

A plot summary: Hannah finishes university. She is in love with her roommate, Morgan, but can't tell her. Instead, she follows "boyfriend" Finn to Vancouver, where he won't let him move in with her and their intimacy ends. Meanwhile, we find out that Morgan isn't her real name and that "Morgan" has a profound gift for self-mythologizing. She also seeks out sex with men who hit her and hooks up with a man twenty years her senior, who knows what everyone seems to know about Morgan. One day she will leave.

The story does ultimately lead to a moment of heightened authenticity, but I won't give it away here.

All I wanted to say was, this is a groovy little book that fits snugly into a non-tradition tradition. "Isn't it pretty to think so," Hemingway had his protagonist say in The Sun Also Rises. The year was 1926, and not much has changed. Except that it has.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Zadie Smith

2011-03-10T20:53:00.004-05:00

If it had been published a few years earlier (that is, if it had been published during the Presidency of George W. Bush), there would have been a stronger political context for unpacking the title: Changing My Mind (Occasional Essays).

As it was, Zadie Smith's brilliant and diverse essay collection was published in 2009, and so can be read politically as an affirmation of the dude who followed dubya, the cosmopolitan Mr. Obama, who is sometimes derided as a waffler.

Smith doesn't celebrate waffling, but she does celebrate deep and attentive thinking. "For reasons that are obscure to me," she writes, "those qualities we cherish in our artists we condemn in our politicians" (142).

Quote: "Shakespeare's art, the very medium of it, allowed him to do what civic officers and politicians can't seem to: speak simultaneous truths" (143).

Quote: "From our politicians, though, we still look for ideological heroism, despite everything. We consider pragmatists to be weak. We call men of balance naive fools" (144).

Well, not all of us do, and not always, but point taken. Life, reality is mutable. The bards are more honest than the politicians. It is hypocritical, nay, dangerous, to seek purity in our politics or truth through ideology.

Smith quotes John Keats' famous definition of negative capability, then notes: "Through the glass of 2008, 'negative capability' looks like the perfect antidote to 'ideological heroism'" (144).

So, she takes us into the G.W. Bush era, after all. (Which for many, ahem, hasn't ended, and didn't begin with dubya, anyway.)

The book's seventeen essays are classified by five verbs: reading, being, seeing, feeling, and remembering. They are not, despite what might be suggested above, overtly political. The title, however, is well chosen.

Covering topics are diverse as film (seeing), David Foster Wallace (remembering), her father's D-Day involvement (feeling), her early engagement with Zora Neale Hurston (reading), and Mr. Obama and Shakespeare (being), Smith champions life as an engaged process. One with ebbs, flows, regressions, and, above all, change.

Lord, bless her. Early on, I discovered I needed to read this book pen in hand; all the better to put check marks in the columns where I wanted to shout out, "Right on!"

Smith is dedicated to the delicate, sophisticated, and precise. She is a detractor of the, well, fanatic. Here's a couple sentences from her essay on E.M. Forster:

To his detractors, the small, mild oeuvre of E.M. Forster is proof that when it comes to aesthetics, one really better be fagged: the zeal of the fanatic is what's required. "E.M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot," thought Katherine Mansfield, a fanatic if ever there was one (15).

In a terrific compare and contrast essay ("Two Directions for the Novel"), Smith shows what literary criticism can be and so often isn't, an opportunity to be open to different perspectives and not build up an argument on one side with the goal of eliminating any opposition.

The two novels contrasted in this essay are Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Tom McCarthy's Remainder. Do these novels represent the two directions for the novel? The two directions or just two directions? They are two very different novels. They may even be, as Smith suggests, "antipodal." "One," she writes, "is the strong refusal of the other." But are they the only two paths novels can go by? Unlikely.

Smith writes:

All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us down this road the true future of the Novel lies. In healthy times, we cut multiple roads, allowing for the possibility of a Jean Genet as surely as a Graham Greene. These aren't particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked. For Netherland, our receptive pathways are so solidly established that to read this novel is to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition. It is perfectly done -- in a sense, that's the problem. It's so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait (73).

"A breed of lyrical realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked." Yummy. This sentence describes the state of the Canadian novel, and the above paragraph is stunning criticism calling out for mimics within the Canlit cosmos. Not a criticism of nationalism, but a criticism of form, style and content. One rooted in deep history and respectful of diversity of approach.

Meanwhile, anyway, and in any case (apologies for the diversion), it's a great essay.

Also recommended (worth the price of admission all on its own) is the elegy (strangely available on YouTube) to David Foster Wallace, who could not have asked (or dreamed or prayed) for a more sensitive reading of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which (unknown to me until this latest google search) is now a movie ("comedy, drama").

"Elegy" is my word. Within the essay Smith notes that she began writing it while DFW was alive, but the tone overall is elegiac. The tone avoids hagiography, but the sensitivity of the reading Smith presents makes clear her respect for her late-colleague.

Smith quotes the following from DFW (from a 2005 commencement speech (Smith, 264)):

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

...

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: "This is water. This is water." It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.

DFW did, and Smith does. The evidence is on every page of Changing My Mind. I liked the essays about books and literature best. The rest were okay.

Smith writes about Nabokov and Kafka and much else. Here's one of the lighter moments: "It's a cliche to think liking Keats makes you cultured (Larkin and Amis defaced their college copy of The Eve of St. Agnes) ... " [and here she puts in a footnote: "Next to the phrase 'into her dream he melted' was written 'You mean he fucked her, do you?'" (24).]

I looked for a decent video of Smith to end with here, but didn't find one. So here instead is DFW.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Amy Lavender Harris

2011-03-06T15:47:00.004-05:00

Amy Lavender Harris’s Imagining Toronto (Mansfield Press, 2010) is both easy and difficult to describe.

The book contains an analysis of Toronto literature, from the earliest of times to the present.

But what is “Toronto literature”? And what is the critical approach taken in the analysis?

First, Toronto literature is books that set (most of their) action in Toronto.

Second, Lavender Harris teaches at the Geography Department at York University and focuses on “urban identity and the cultural significance of place.” See also the Imagining Toronto website. Her book, she writes:

… is predicated on a belief that rather than comparing Toronto to the world’s other great literary cities and finding it wanting, we should instead realize that Toronto’s literature reflects an entirely new kind of city, a city where identity emerges not from shared tradition or a long history but rather is forged out of a commitment to the virtues of diversity, tolerance and cultural understanding (14).

That is, she presents an urban planner’s view of Toronto as reflected in books written about Toronto. What she compares and contrasts are books about Toronto to other books about Toronto and all of those books to the city itself. The book emphasizes, therefore, the integration of the “real” and the “imagined.” The first sentence quotes Michael Ondaatje from In the Skin of a Lion: “Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting” (13).

One caution here. The Ondaatje quotation contains the suggestion that the real can be seen, defined and stabilized. Once it has been routed through the filter of the imagination. But the imagination is nothing if not mutable, and so the real is constantly shifting also. Lavender Harris presents an image of Toronto as filtered through dozens of books published between the recent past and stretching back through the decades to pre-Confederation. She has distilled patterns and provides a remarkably wide-ranging reading list, but I’m uncertain how much this has to do with “the real.”

The greater value in Imagining Toronto is the “kind of charting” the book provides of the imagined Toronto presented across genres in the dozens of books Lavender Harris analyses. This is perhaps the place to say that “literary value” isn’t at the top of the author’s mind, though this doesn’t stop her from calling Gwendolyn MacEwen “undeservedly neglected” (21) or Hugh Garner “internationally regarded” (15), claims George Fetherling challenged in his otherwise praising Quill & Quire review. Lavender Harris, however, does outline a sort of Toronto Canon, but it is a canon shaped around the cultural significance of space rather than a holding to account against a particular school of literary criticism.

The best Toronto books, in other words, are those that assist in defining Imagining Toronto’s thesis and thus they are books that include an exploration of the specific history, geography, and sociology of Toronto. Such books include: Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For, Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, Maggie Helwig’s Girls Fall Down, Claudia Dey’s Stunt, Hugh Garner’s Cabbagetown and Death in Don Mills, Gwendolyn MacEwen’s Noman’s Land, Michael Redhill’s Consolation, Phyllis Brett Young’s The Torontonians, Sarah Dearing’s Courage My Love, Austin Clarke’s short stories and Hugh Hood’s The Swing in the Garden. To name but a handful.

I kept a pen handy as I read this book, jotting down titles and authors I’d never heard of or had previously passed over. Lavender Harris provides more than ample proof to contradict the skeptics who think that Toronto hasn’t been deeply engaged as a subject in literature. Here is Lavender Harris outlining that school of thought:

In a 2005 essay called “Making a Toronto of the Imagination,” journalist Bert Archer asserted that Toronto is “a city in no one’s imagination, neither in Toronto, nor in the rest of the world,” adding, “Toronto is a place where people live, not a place where things happen, or, at least, not where the sorts of things happen that forge a place for the city in the imagination.” Similarly, author Andrew Pyper has claimed that “there’s a reluctance in our fiction to engage Toronto directly as a place,” a sentiment echoed by literary critic Philip Marchand, who wrote flatly of the “bland and featureless reputation” of Toronto’s literary landscape and insisted that “our city awaits its great novelist” (15-16).

Of great interest to me was Lavender Harris’s inclusion of many titles published pre-1967. Just as Carmine Starnino did in his expansive introductory essay to Lover’s Quarrel, where he argued that the pre-dominant view that the nation’s literature had failed to mature prior to the Centennial Generation was false, Lavender Harris re-introduces the sophistication of previous eras to help renew and reframe discussions about Toronto’s literary history.

Lavender Harris, in fact, goes back to the beginnings of geological time, discussing the impact of the Ice Age on the topography of what would become Toronto (i.e., it left the city dragged with ravines, a feature that repeats with unsurprising frequency in many Toronto novels. Paul Quarrington’s The Ravine, Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and Maggie Helwig’s Girls Fall Down, for example).

Lavender Harris also explores other common features of Toronto: its famous neighbourhoods, its multiculturalism, its suburbs. She also provides a class analysis and surveys the city’s topography of desire. She does all this while also suggesting there is much more that could be said.

Imagining Toronto provides an outline and an overview. It is perhaps overburdened by having to begin by addressing such severe skepticism. It is an introduction to Toronto literature, and it suggests many opportunities where deeper analysis may be richly rewarding. The section called “The Myth of the Multicultural City,” for example, is a mere 25 pages. It deserves a volume unto itself.

Here’s some other online responses:

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Another Tricky Day

2011-03-05T22:46:00.002-05:00

Dany Laferrière

2011-02-07T22:29:00.000-05:00

I am a Japanese Writer
by Dany Laferrière
Douglas & MacIntyre, 2010
Translated by David Homel

Not my first post about Laferrière, but this is the first book I've read by this Haitian-born Montrealler in probably a decade.

On the one hand, the conceit is apparent from the cover. The writer is not Japanese; we are going to encounter in these pages play with or about identity.

Imagine for a moment the title: I am a Canadian Writer. Would it carry the same disquiet? Laferrière is, after all, a Canadian writer.

How about, I am a Quebecois Writer?

From the second to last page:

I certainly don't believe in the peasant, who is often racist, nor in popular culture, which is always reactionary (Mishima is the perfect example of the writer falling into the trap of "pure" identity). But Basho -- Basho amuses me.

An exchange from earlier in the book:

"There is no book -- that's what I've been explaining to everyone."

"That doesn't matter. They're completely obsessed with identity, I'm telling you."

"I don't give a shit about identity."

"So you say, but then you write a book with a title like that. What does it mean?"

"It means I did it to get away from the whole business, to show that borders have disappeared. I was tired of cultural nationalism. Who says I can't be a Japanese writer? No one."

The plot, such as it is, is of a writer (first person) who is writing a book called I am a Japanese Writer. He is a Haitan-born Montrealer. He is living in rented digs in the same district where Laferrière set his first book How to Make Love to a Negro (Without Getting Tired), over two decades ago. There is no book, as the narrator explains above, but there is a book. You are reading it. You have it in your hands.

But let's get back inside its pages. There is no book. There is the narrator trying to explain to everyone that there is no book. The publisher has paid an advance, but there is no book. The Japanese consulate has helped to manufacture a cultural sensation in Tokyo about a black man from Montreal writing a book called I am a Japanese Writer. The narrator likes to read Basho. The only subject he writes about, he says, is himself. But there is no book. Only a writer playing complicated, deceptive games.

Ah, Laferrière. It's nice to be back inside your pages. You are sly and always welcome.

Various reviews of the book on the D&M website.

I like this summation best, from the Telegraph Journal (October 16, 2010):

“[I am a Japanese Writer] is all about place and identity, names and nationality and the paradoxical relationship between rigid lines of nationalism and the fluidity of the individual. Episodic and picaresque, it is a humorous look at identity and nationality, writing and the mind of a writer...This is a deceptively painless read, when really it's a complex, multi-faceted look at race, identity, art and culture.”

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Scott Pilgrim

2011-02-05T23:49:00.000-05:00

Not the usual fare around here, but I just saw this movie on Rogers on Demand and it expresses so much I never thought I'd see expressed. Especially on film.

So well done. So fantastic.

Inshallah, dudes. Rock on.

W.P. Kinsella, Salvatore Difalco, Journey Prize #22

2011-02-02T21:49:00.000-05:00

Short stories!

Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa
by W.P. Kinsella
Oberon, 1980

The Mountie at Niagara Falls
by Salvatore Difalco
Anvil, 2010

The Journey Prize Anthology #22
Various authors
M&S, 2010

I picked up the Kinsella book at a used book store on Bloor Street late in 2010. (Yes, there's at least one left.) This book is now 31 years old. Holy, Jesus. What blasphemy and all that.

I read Kinsella's "The Thrill of the Grass" in an Oxford anthology edited by Robert Weaver in, eeks, grade 13 in 1987. It was about Shoeless Joe, too, I thought, until I dug up that old anthology and realized it wasn't. But Shoeless Joe, and "if you build it, he will come," was the name of Kinsella's novel (1982) that became "Field of Dreams" (1989), starring Kevin Kostner.

I read Shoeless Joe, too, years ago and enjoyed it. I liked that Kinsella wrote Salinger into it, and I was interested to read Kinsella's recent comments about that online in Macleans: the movie producers' feeling was that "only 15 per cent of the movie-goers would have any idea who Salinger was anyway."

Eeps.

But back to the stories. There wasn't much risk in picking up this early Kinsella for $2.95, but there was a lot of reward. Yes, it was effen good. The title story is canonical, and at least half the collection is simply excellent. The rest is merely effen good.

Just a high-level analysis here. Stories that display sensitivity. Stories that display humour. Stories that integrate the power of the imagination with the gritty hum-drum of reality. The full range of rhetorical skills is on display here. It doesn't get much better than this.

Salvatore Difalco's The Mountie at Niagara Falls (Anvil, 2010) has more stories in it than I can count. More than 100 in 142 pages. They are intense narrative chunks, full of incident, frequently spliced with zingers and twists, emboldended with absurdity, on occasion sad. It's the full-meal deal, rapid fire. I don't know what to compare it to, except John Lennon and Spike Milligan.

The story "Peameal Bacon" killed me. The narrator meets a woman at a party. She's a "colonic hydrotherapist." She explains what this means. Quote: "She explained that over twenty gallons of fluid would be flushed through my system. I thought about that at some length. Nice to know that there are cures for being full of shit."

In 2010, the Journey Prize was at it again, promoting "the best of Canada's new writers." This year's selection is edited by Pasha Malla, Joan Thomas and Alissa York, and I have no dispute with their picks, chosen from short stories initially published in small, literary magazines. The Journey Prize, of course, includes a $10,000 cheque to the best of the best.

Money aside, congratulations to the Vancouver Review. Two of the most remarkable stories here (in my opinion) were initially published there: Danielle Egan's "Publicity" and Andrew Boden's "Confluence of Spoors." Krista Foss's "The Longitude of Okay" was excellent, as was Lynn Kutsukake's "Mating," Mike Spry's "Five Pounds Short and Apologies to Nelson Algren," and Andrew MacDonald's "Eat Fist."

I've just listed exactly half of the anthology, which shows how I'm struggling to limit the good good from the merely good. The best work, to my taste, pushes beyond the boundaries of the "real" into the wild, unknown and unmappable beyond. "Publicity" blew me away. It nearly defies summary. Told from the point of view of an author on a book tour in 2020 (or thereabouts), the story focuses on his visit to Vancouver, his relationship with his publicity assistant, and his desire to swim in the (now fatally toxic?) ocean. What isn't going on in this story? I was humbled. Wow. Fantastic.

There is much else to praise in the collection, and I could be snippy about a few things, too, but I won't. Congratulations to everyone included.

Short stories. Lots of life left in the old form yet.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Bruce Serafin

2011-01-29T22:28:00.004-05:00

Bruce Serafin (1950-2007) was born in St. Boniface, Manitoba, and raised in Hinton, Alberta, before moving to Vancouver in his late teens. He was a founding editor of the original Vancouver Review in the 1990s. His first book, Colin's Big Thing, was published in 2004.

So reads the biographical blurb on the back of his second book, Stardust (New Star, 2007), a collection of literary and personal essays, winner of the 2008 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction.

Stardust was recommended to me by T.F. Rigelhof as part of the intereview I did with him, following the publication of Hooked on Canadian Books (Cormorant, 2010). I asked him about the paucity of general, non-academic responses to Canadian literature, and he pointed to Stardust as an exception worth seeking out.

So I did, and I agree.

Stardust includes 20 essays, many of which were previous published in Books in Canada, the Vancouver Review, the Tyee website and the Dooney's Cafe website.

Serafin spent most of his working life employed by Canada Post, but it is clear from the memoirish pieces here that he was engaged with books from his earliest days and long nursed an aspiration to write. It is also clear, however, that the post office did more than help pay the bills; with his colleagues, he found a community that fostered, shaped, and encouraged a critical response to the world. The post office kept life "real," and it is against this reality that many of Serafin's judgements are tested.

One curious essay about William Henry Drummond's "Habitant Poems," for example, begins: "One afternoon about ten years ago I was talking to the five-ton driver at Postal Station D in Vancouver. We started talking about writing."

From there, Serafin conducts an analysis of a now obscure 19th century Canadian poet. Obscure? Talking to colleagues around the postal depot, Serafin finds a half-dozen people who remembered the poet and in general his questions "received enthusiastic responses."

This is not how literary essays usually begin (grounded in working class labour), but Serafin uses his working life to enhance the credibility of his criticism -- and to contextualize his critical approach. Drummond wrote about working people, and Serafin engages this faded poetry with lively analysis. More lively than I think the poetry deserves, frankly. It was racist and wooden when it was written, and it remains so now.

Serafin argues, however:

A true national literature isn't just a sequence of masterpieces. It is a spectrum of things ... The truth of our past is the most exciting thing about it. And like other exciting things it will sometimes embarrass and even shame us. Drummond is part of that truth.

Other essays I'd recommend:

"A Chest of Drawers." About Michel Tremblay.
"Wearing a Mask." About Roland Barthes.
"Stardust." About the Sixties and Marcel Proust.
"Stan Persky's Enormous Reasonableness." About, well, Stan Persky's enormous reasonableness.
"The Crosses." About West Coast Native masks.
"Dead on the Shelf." About literary magazines.
"Avant-Garde Mentalities." About Steve McCaffery.
"Long Tall Sally." About Don DeLillo.
"Vermeer's Patch." About Northrop Frye.

Serafin's thought is brightly unsystematic. He delights in Roland Barthes, defends Northrop Frye, explains how reflections on First Nations masks helped ground his throughts about the importance of the local, links Prousts memories about the girls during World War I to late-1960s fashion, outlines his awe of DeLillo's Underworld, engages Steve McCaffery in detailed analysis, revels in memories about the vulgar in Michel Tremblay's work, and provides a portrait of a man he clearly admired, Stan Persky.

Other essays in the book were autobiographical in nature and didn't interest me as much.

What did interest me were thoughts like the following:

"Vulgar" comes from a Latin word meaning "of the people." But English Canadian writing is almost never "of the people," even linguistically. (Think of the difference between most Canadian novels and Trailer Park Boys.)
And it was the same with Barthes. Because his "I," so completely turned outward, never marked the inner anxiety of an individual, it didn't awaken my own anxiety. Instead I turned to Barthes for the same reason I turned to Scientific American and The New Yorker ... for a powerful feeling of order, a domestication of the world.
Vanity was Cohen's element, just as a black leather sportscoat was his favoured dress, and the consequent staging of this personality that I now sense everywhere in his work meant that an infatuated intelligence instead of an alert one was the order of the day so far as his readers were concerned.
I know that the comforting presence at our sides isn't Marchand; it is Frye. He understands our need for wonder, for the excessive, unprecedented image in which the true surrealistic face of existence breaks through. He knows what literature is for.

The Marchand in that last quotation is, of course, Philip Marchand, whom Serafin calls a "disciple of John Metcalf." Yes, another reverberation of these battle lines.

Serafin's intelligence shines through in these essays. He is a presence too late encountered, though his influence remains pulsing, important, and keen.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Sina Queyras

2011-01-23T22:29:00.007-05:00

Unleashed
by Sina Queyras
Book Thug, 2009

Unleashed is an edited record of the Lemon Hound blog between 2004 and 2008. Sina Queyras, says The Canadian Encyclopedia, is a:

poet, editor, teacher, web blogger (b at Thompson, Man 1963). Sina Queyras is the award-winning author of 4 books of poetry and one book of nonfiction, and is the editor of an anthology of contemporary Canadian experimental writing. Her writing explores the limits of individual expression and sensual experience in a landscape that is densely marked by politics and ideology. Through her critical writing, reviews and web commentary Queyras has worked diligently to create an encouraging and challenging environment for writers, especially Canadian women writers.

The anthology is Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets (Persea Books, 2005).

See also her Wikipedia entry, an interview with her about Unleashed, an interview with her in The National Post, her Desk Space interview, a questionless interview with her at OpenBook Toronto, and a Q&A with her from UCalgary.

Reviews of Unleashed have appeared online at:

Harriet, a blog from the poetry foundation
Rover Arts
johnathanbull.com
Lambda Literary
robmclennan.blogspot.com
Mansfield Press (open letter to the author) (the letter writer also mentions Unleashed here)

(Apologies if I've missed any other helpful links.)

What do I think of Unleashed?

First, I like it. I like it a lot. Among other things, it got me thinking about the paucity of critical, non-academic responses to contemporary Canadian literature. The top reason I like this book is its illustration of a mind engaged with literature (and other aesthetic questions, e.g., visual art) in a plain-spoken yet complex way. There is also a self-consciousness about the critical aparatus being applied and a persistent questioning of perspective (i.e., there is no naive "objectivity" here). I wish, wish, wish there were more books like this.

More critically, let's examine what we have here. As noted above, Unleashed is a book made up of blog posts. Like most blogs, the entries tell the story of their author. Events happen in linear time (2004-2008). The book, however, is static. So we are confronted immediately by questions of form.

Reading a book based on a blog, one asks, what difference does form make? Is there a difference? Following McLuhan (the medium is the message), yes, there is a difference. Form determines content. The book and the blog are not equivalent, and yet they are related.

I'm not reviewing the blog. I'm reviewing the book. The blog is a subject within the book. To be or not to be, is the blog's question. The central question of the narrative of the book (Camus-like in its insistence) is whether or not to murder the blog. "To blog or not to blog" is the subject of the post dated September 3, 2005. "Winding down" is the subject on November 22, 2006: "After much consideration, I've finally chosen a date to pull the plug on ths adventure." And yet the blog survived, and continues still.

Can a blog answer questions about its own survival? Does the book enable a necessary distance about which questions of persistence of meaning and nuance can be more critically considered?

The book closes open-endedly. Its final entry dissolves into a run of "comments." The conversation continues, the form of this open-ended book says. (Though the book really closes with an essay on the art of the open-ended blog.) The book does have a hard ending (it runs out of pages), but the author's emphasis on and prioritizing of open-ended process is unambiguous.

Some, of course, may find in this approach a weakness. The book's arguments are fragmented, episodic, non-linear, and yet clear themes can be discerned.

The Canadian Encyclopedia notes Queyras has worked diligently to create an encouraging and challenging environment for writers, especially Canadian women writers. In her September 3, 2005 post ("To blog or not to blog"), Queyras credits a friend with suggesting her blog is "a place to praise and inform." She then says this is "a combination of things I can get behind."

And get behind them she does. So committed is she to this mission, the blog survives multiple attempts to murder it. Like a contemporary Gertrude Stein, Queyras becomes the patron of a lively salon (one that at times puts so much pressure on her to maintain it that she contemplates killing it; one that also clearly sustains her as she shares the lively fortunes of her mind).

The reference to Stein is intentional. Stein and Virginnia Woolf appear to be Queyras's patron saints, and continuing their female-determined deep engagement with Modernism and art seems one of her prime motivations. "Female-determined" is an awkward phrase I just made up. What does it mean? In part, it connotes that Queyras distances herself from "feminism." Her post on October 17, 2006, is titled "Why I'm not discussing feminism," and it starts like this:

Wondering what happens when men speak is a lifetime occupation. All over the globe women with their heads in between their knees, wondering. This is an occupation. This is wondering. How do men weep? Is it like thinking? When men think is there a little pause before speaking? Why have they not changed the world, men? How many years of thinking and still there are so many problems. Maybe it's time to give up on them? After all, men are only half of the population. Troublesome as they may be. This is why I'm not discussing feminism. This is what it leads to.

Then she continues:

There sill be no discussing feminism here. Anyone who wants to discuss feminism should go and read about feminism. Reading about feminism is a way into feminism. Imagining being a woman is another way into feminism. Imagining then, is feminism. Thinking is also feminism. So, there will be no arguing about feminism. After all, what is feminism? Feminism is doing. Feminism is being and doing. Talking about being and doing is a way to keep women from doing. Really, women need to be doing and not thinking of ways to explain to men what it is to be a woman. ...

Who is invested in having women not doing? Suddenly everywhere people are thinking. Wow, that is what doing is. And now there is a lot of doing. ...

Still, if everyone is doing then men therefore are women if they are thinking and women are men if they are doing and everyone is feminist if they are seeing. So if looking then feminist. If looking is seeing. If you look and what you look at looks back, not you looking back, then feminist. Naturally things are more complicated than they seem, and naturally, quite naturally, it is time for tea.

Got it?

I would paraphrase the above as follows. Women shouldn't be so concerned with what is "holding them back" that they remove themselves from the role of producer of art, producer of criticism, producer of literature, etc. Also, one should look at art/literature/reality with self-awareness, so that the Self and Other are not confused. Especially in criticism, one should avoid the risk of colonializing the art object and projecting onto it meaning and connotations that it doesn't itself intend or hold. Such an approach, is feminism, but because feminism has become loaded with so much ideological baggage (and is subject to enormous waves of public and critical discourse), let's leave that term aside and focus on something simple. Doing. Making and discussing art. But let's discuss and do this in complicated ways that acknowlege the influence of gender (where appropriate).

In her mission, Queyras's pole stars are Stein and Woolf for their "female-determined deep engagement with Modernism and art." (I hope I've now explained myself.) Readers will not be surprised, therefore, that the entries in Unleashed engage the work of writers and visual artists. Most of the writers/artists are women, but not all. On April 23, 2007, for example, she blogged about a Jeff Wall show at the MoMA.

I'm going to become more specific now, because there's a point I want to make clear. There are hints of it in the above, but it's been nuanced in a way that could easily be missed. The point is about ordering, the making of hierarchies. Queyras is not interested in canon-making. Her blog is "a place to praise and inform." But that doesn't mean she is uncritical and without judgement. She is, however, not an "evaluative critic."

I don't want to re-hash recent debates about the role of literary critics here, but let's summarize. On one hand, some critics (mostly men) believe critics should sift and order literary works and sit in judgement over writers who need smacking down for their errors. One example is a quotation by Frederick Philip Grove (from 1929) that Nigel Beale repeated favourably in a recent issue of Canadian Notes of Queries (#79):

Literary criticism - or the body of critics - should be to the writer what the Roman senate was to the Roman general in the field: an unseen presence sitting sternly in judgment over his blunders; but also voting him a triumph if he did his duty well.

Other Canadian critics who fit this school include Carmine Starnino, David Solway, Philip Marchand, John Metcalf, and, um, Elvis Stojko.

In short, Queyras disagrees with Grove's suggested approach. At one point, she suggests that lover's quarrels are better left in the bedroom. This is a not-so-subtle reference to Starnino's sometimes incendiary and controversial book of essays and reviews (2004). This reference disappointed me. It was a rare moment of turning away, a shutting down of dialogue, and a missed opportunity. Queyras, to her credit, however, later engaged the question (not in the book, on the blog) about how the Self ought to approach the Other; I mean, how the critic ought to approach the work, in a series of interviews on her blog with literary reviewers (yours truly among them).

Is this ordering and canon-making really a male/female thing?

Gosh. All I'm gonna say is Queyras wonders repeatedly where are the other female critics. On August 9, 2008, for example, in an entry called "Make the world your salon," she writes:

This goes out to the women who read Lemon Hound and other blogs. Those who don't comment, don't enter into public discourse. What would it take to make the world your salon? To be as comfortable with one's opinion at a conference table, or weblog, or site otherwise filled with experts (all men, of course, with endless commentary designed to undermine your place at said table) as one is sitting across from friends in one's living room, a cup of tea and endless streams of commentary about everything from the design of the cup in hand to the possibilities of poetry as political tools? ...

What if Susan Sontag had blogged? What if Gertrude Stein or Mina Loy had blogged?

Make the world your salon.

There's that metaphor again: blog as salon.

[Incidentally, Jane Smiley said similar comments about "playing the game" in the New York Times (2006), quoted here by me.]

From Lemon Hound, June 4, 2007:

Further, I hazard say that there are few women who have the power of chronicaling literature, ordering it, as the Bersteins, Sillimans, Wahs, Olsons, Duncans, Creeleys, Lehmans, Geddes, Patersons, etc., of the world do. To be fair, many women I've spoken to have said that such ordering, such canonizing, is not something they are interested in doing... so why whine? Still, it's the world we live in and so at least acknowledge the terms and conditions.

These terms and conditions, Queyras, points out include such statistics as:

7%, the percentage of art produced by women in the Tate Modern (March 27, 2007)
25%, the percentage of women writers interviewed by The Paris Review (June 4, 2007)
women in publishing table, via The Poetry Foundation (November 5, 2007)

[I found that last link by going to the Lemon Hound blog; i.e., it wasn't in the book.]

So, feminism, as a term, may be spurned, but feminism as a corrector is in full force. I also find feminism in a cute story (November 26, 2007) that Queyras tells about "one of the most inspiring people I've ever heard of," a man with a head injury who could no longer work who started taking daily walks in Toronto's Don Valley. He noticed garbage. He picked it up. He started recording what he was doing. He talked to others. They got organized. And the Don Valley revitalization program began.

So ... don't talk about it. Do it. That's feminism.

(On November 27, 2005, writing about why she hasn't killed the blog, she says the "most important" reason she hasn't pulled the plug is the "question of gender," i.e., "there are not enough women engaged in the discussion of poetry and poetics. Over and over again the voices seem to be male, shouting about this or that school or lineage .... Where, one might ask, are the women?")

So ... we've covered off how Queyras approaches her subject (what: visual art and literature), and we've covered off some of why. I want to end with who. If Lemon Hound is about praise, who is she singing about? In no particular order:

Lisa Robertson (July 12, 2006)
Margaret Christakos (October 26, 2008)
Anne Carson (the book says November 1, 2005, but the blog appears silent on this one (hmm))
Vanessa Place (July 10, 2008)
Stacey Szymazek (April 8, 2008)
Alice Notley (May 31, 2007, June 2, 2007) (the May 31st doesn't appear on the blog)
Rae Armantrout (May 21, 2007; this is the date in the book, but there is nothing matching it on the blog)
Elizabeth Willis (August 29, 2006)
Zoe Strauss (June 20, 2007)
Stephanie Fysh (July 10, 2007)
etc.

I've put links (where available) on the names above to (one of) the relevant posts (Queyras writes about many of these women more than once). My final summation follows. Random comments first.

Queyras called Christakos "the most inventive 'domestic' poet I've ever encountered." I've written about Christakos here. I liked her. Queyras likes her, too. It's not the domesticity that she likes; it's the innovative word combinations.
Domesticity, however, also comes up in Queyras's interview with Stephanie Fysh, a photographer. They speak about a series of photos Fysh took, using herself as subject. The photos were misinterpreted as commentary on domesticity. Fysh: "I don't want to have to photograph men in order to say something that isn't gender-specific."
Queyras is very, very pleased with Lisa Robertson.
Queyras's interest in photography often returns to questions about portraiture. Susan Sontag's On Photography is invoked. "But what Sontag didn't anticipate was the extent to which these technological advances in photography would turn our gaze upon ourselves."
The entry that includes the quotation about Sontag is a rumination on narcissism. Interestingly, blogs are often little more than centres of narcissism. Web logs about ... trivialities. Lemon Hound is anything but.
"Are you kidding me?" That's Zoe Strauss's reply when told about the 7% figure at the Tate Modern. "We're post-post-feminist, post, oh, we've made it. Like we're a Virginia Slims ad. Fuck you. (Just for the record, I'm a radical feminist, and I believe that we're still in the process of creating a feminist movement. I believe the idea that social movments are fixed or static is false, and we're as connected to Seneca Falls as much as we are to Tribe 8...)"
A Hemingway quote I hadn't heard before (on Stein): "She used to talk to me about homosexuality and how it was fine in and for women and no good in men and I used to listen and learn and I always wanted to fuck her and she knew it."
There is a hilarious and insightful entry about marginalia in Sharon Thesen's A Pair of Scissors. Queyras bought the book used in New York City and the margins were marked up by someone who had serious problems with the poems. The interplay between the poems, the riled critic, and Queyras is quite lovely, IMHO. Best to read in full, except it appears to have been removed from the blog (August 1, 2008).
Then there's this quotation from Alice Notley: "You can fuck/ a visiting poet: you can be paraded before/ a visiting poet as fuckable but not fuck...." About which Queyras says: "Refreshingly honest in a poetic economy that is as much about 'fame' and 'fuckability' as anything else, though of course the poem itself is making fun of 'the poem' itself."
April 24, 2008. Queyras comments on Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm (Yale U Press, 2007), also reviewed by Michael Kimmelman in the New York Review of Books (October 25, 2007).

Kimmelman's review begins with three framing paragraphs:

Janet Malcolm begins her remarkable work on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas by recalling how, half a century or so ago, like many other pretentious young Americans feeling hemmed in by Eisenhower-era conformity, she gravitated to Toklas’s cookbook. Its carefree, worldly snobbishness “fit right in with our program of callow preciousness,” she writes. “We loved its waspishly magisterial tone, its hauteur and malice.”

Years later, coming again upon her old food-stained copy, she reads the chapter about life under the Nazis, which she hadn’t read before. Toklas recalls how she and Stein hid in an area of provincial eastern France called Bugey, where they kept a house in the town of Bilignin, discovered one summer day in 1924 on the way to visit Picasso. When the war broke out, they wheedled a military pass and drove to Paris, fetched winter clothes, then settled back in the countryside for the duration. Toklas’s tone is cheerful. Malcolm, who has made a career of not taking writers at their word, asks herself what Toklas must be hiding. Two Jewish Americans in occupied France, and she is reminiscing about “Restricted Veal Loaf”? Why no mention of their Jewishness, “never mind [their] lesbianism,” she asks.

And so begins a rich meditation, born from articles in The New Yorker, on a storied relationship in modern letters, which, not coincidentally, also leads Malcolm to contemplate the slippery and shifting nature of language. As much as any experimental twentieth-century writer in English, Stein made a point about getting to the deep truth of language, its fundamental nature, but she also manipulated words to mean things very different than they usually do. In life, it turns out, as in art.

Queyras, on the other hand, isn't convinced that Stein has a Nazi problem:

Not surprisingly, Janet Malcolm's project rests on the question of how Stein and Toklas managed to survive the Second World War in Nazi-occupied France. Compelling, yes. And one wonders, one does want more information. And we are given some information in the form of Bernard Faÿ a man with a complicated relationship to Stein, homosexual/Catholic and a collaborator under Vichy. Is this altogether surprising? Stein was conflicted politically, did not seem to want to bother with politics in a direct way, and there is more than one slant reference to unseemly connections in her own writing: one assumes that there were forces at work.

The facts are glaring, and one must wrestle with them, but Malcolm offers little insight into the episode because, quite frankly, there isn't much to illustrate. What is curious to me is the narrative of obliviousness that she crafts for Stein, a strand rooted in the by-now cliched crtique of Stein's ego (we know all that...), her status as last born child, a person with a sense of things "always working out for herself," and them doing so. (In a way, Stein is a perfectly modern American subject isn't she? Just imagine help and abundance and it will arrive...). It would be interesting to imagine the making of that ego and the implications of it, the uses of it in terms of the risk of her multiple and complex identities.

Unfortunately, I don't see much "wrestling" with complicity with fascism here. The topic is too lightly passed over for my comfort. It's strange, too, to me that Queyras, politically engaged with percentages and the ecology of the Don River, can say simply (naively?) that Stein did not seem to want to bother with politics in a direct way. Living in Nazi-occupied Europe, was that possible? The review, however, does provide evidence (for those disbelieving that Queyras can be not-an-evaluative critic and also critical). She links to a number of other reviews of Malcolm's book to illustrate her points, then ends with:

But really, if one is going to take up the trope of the scathing and insouciant biographer, one might want to have something to say not only about one's subject, but about one's relationship to it, something to back up the penchant for the whip of a good quip (Malcom recently here on Gossip Girls), for the flaying of the unfortunate object who has managed to catch her eye. It isn't that I was looking for a love affair with Stein, it's that I was looking for some genuine insight.

Zing!

So ... in closing ... the blog and the book are two different things. The blog has many, many more entries than are collected in the book, and the book (apparently) has entries that have since disappeared from the blog.

Re: the book, Unleashed. Once again, I liked it. I liked it a lot. In 165 pages, it introduced me to a range of people, places and things, often returning to common themes: poetry, aesthetics, visual art, photography, female-directed criticism, ecological concerns, and, yes, feminism.

To blog or not to blog. No question. Do, don't talk about it. Blog.

Queyras has a lot of interest to say. A more linearly organized collection of essays would enable her readers to understand her thoughts in greater depth and detail and allow her space to expand on her positions. The blog form, on the other hand, provides her opportunities to explore topics and ideas in a hit-and-miss manner, interacting with readers, and participating in an ever evolving, often highly charged community.

The blog and book are not opposites, not in competition; they merely have different strengths and weaknesses. As e-readers become more prominent, it will be interesting to see how literary bloggers like Queyras take advantage of this form.

There is also a sizeable dollop of good natured subtle humour in this book. (Overheard dialogue of the week [November 9, 2005: A says:] "I mean I know this class isn't high on her list of priorities, but I have things to do too, and I have to give them up, so you know, she should at least be prepared .... [B replies:] Yah, or at least dress properly.") Since I haven't mentioned this before, it seems a good place to end.

p.s. - An index please.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Richard Ford & Men

2011-01-18T21:07:00.002-05:00

I wrote a blog post about Richard Ford in 2008. I linked to it last week from my John Gould post. Before I linked, I re-read the post, and I was reminded of one of the reasons I'm writing on this blog. Because if I don't write it down, I forget what my reaction to books are. I was quite hard on Ford's Rock Springs in my previous post. Whereas now I remember that book rather fondly. Hmm.

In the 2008 post, I linked to something else I'd written on Ford, a short review of The Lay of the Land. I've now posted that review below.

But there's more.

I have a half-started essay on "Men" that I began in the early part of the last decade that was in part inspired by Ford's The Sportswriter. I happened to be reading Unless by Carol Shields at the same time and noticed two quotations that called out to be placed side-by-side.

All my men were too serious, too brooding and humorless, characters at loggerheads with imponderable dilemmas, and much less interesting than my female characters, who were always of secondary importance but free-spirited and sharp-witted. – Richard Ford, The Sports Writer

I need to speak further about this problem of women, how they’re dismissed and excluded from the most primary of entitlements. But we’ve come so far; that’s the thinking. So far compared to fifty or a hundred years ago. Well, no, we’ve arrived at the new millennium and we haven’t “arrived” at all. We’ve been sent over to the side pocket of the snooker table and made to disappear. – Carol Shields, Unless

It got me to thinking about writing an essay on the different types of male characters. If women are stereotyped into madonna/whores, men are stereotyped into bruts/wimps. Which isn't to say I wanted to write about spreading misandry. No, I was hoping for something more nuanced. What I wanted to write about was the diversity of "males," to develop a catalogue of literary male types. To celebrate complexity.

The essay didn't get written, but it got started. Here's part of it:

The subject of this essay is men, more specifically, men in literature, more specifically how men make meaning in their lives. Making meaning of life, I think, is literature’s primary obligation. Yes, in part, this essay is a reaction to feminism, because (some) feminists have made it their job to distort the meaning of male lives in order to make meaning in female lives. A couple of weeks ago, I heard Barbara Gowdy on CBC radio discussing her new novel, The Romantic. Gowdy spoke without ambiguity: Women suffer for love, men do not. Yes, she said, after being prompted by the (male) interviewer, some men are sensitive, some men suffer for love. But not the way women suffer. Women suffer collectively, she said. They share their sufferings. Men go to the bar and talk about sports.

This is patronizing claptrap. As is this: “Not one of us was going to get what we wanted. I had suspected this for years, and now I believe that Norah half knows the big female secret of wanting and not getting” (Carol Shields, Unless). The big “female secret”? Feminism can be saluted for its strong, useful critique of so-called “universalism” in literature; but it has locked itself in a dead end by claiming disappointment as a female privilege.

Here's basically all of the rest of it:

In 2000, I took part in a two-week writing workshop led by Bonnie Burnard, author of The Good House, a book as female-friendly as any written by Carol Shields. The workshop included five writers, each of whom had published at least one book. We spent the two weeks talking about the aesthetic problems we were struggling with in our fiction and offered support and encouragement to each other. At one point, Burnard asked us about the patterns we saw in our work. Were there recurring dilemmas, obsessions? Were their questions that drove us to choose certain narratives? What kinds of books did we find ourselves drawn to? Burnard said she found herself returning in her work to existential questions: What is life? Why bother to live it? She also said she liked to read about men, whom she found infinitely interesting.

I remember at that moment feeling a sense of relief. Like Burnard, I also returned again and again to existential questions in my fiction, sensing, like Camus in The Stranger, that the primary question in life was whether or not to commit suicide (Yes, life is absurd, but we must make a conscious choice to live it out fully anyhow). I also wrote a lot about men, which I felt some anxiety about, since I came of age during the feminist revolution and I tended to believe that questions about female emancipation ought to be a priority for everyone, as they were for me during my time on campus (the late-1980s, early-1990s, the period of the Montreal Massacre). I also wrote about women, which was also a source of anxiety, since the “appropriation of voice” debate was at its height during that period, and I felt some sympathy towards those who felt that they alone deserved the right to speak their own stories (I thought: Wouldn’t I want the same?).

But the same was not being offered. Stories about men by men were read as narratives of dominating female; stories about women by men were read as appropriation of voice and narratives which perpetuated male domination of women; stories about women by women were read as female emancipation from men; stories about men by women were … um, were there any? Well, yes. Lorna Crozier wrote her “penis poems” during that period, and feminists took her to task for celebrating the penis as a source of pleasure (and not reducing it to a symbol of oppression). This was the period of “backlash,” when attempts to critique the rigor of feminist claims were categorized as reactionary slights. It was also the period when the term “political correctness” first appeared, used by the first Bush administration and others on the right to lump any progressive critique of their policies into the camp of the leftist loonies. (I wrote a column for the campus newspaper arguing that the term “political correctness” was unnecessary, since language already existed for rebutting empty arguments, if that was your intent. But that wasn’t the intent of those who screamed PC was taking over campuses; their intent was to sweep away all dissent. As Bush II has famously said: You’re with us, or you’re against us.)

But what about those of us who reject the positions at both ends of the polarity? What about those of use who believe reality cannot be reduced to “us/them”? What about those of us who want to see a real discussion of the issues, who believe the freedom we are lucky to have ought to be used to find language that is the most honest, the most direct, the most realistic, and, yes, progressive?

Maybe you can see why I never finished this essay. It hurts my head re-reading it.

And things are so much better now. (Ha, ha.)

For related meanderings, check out CNQ #80. The Gender Issue.

*

[First published in The Danforth Review (2007)]

The Lay of the Land
by Richard Ford
Knopf, 2006

Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land (okay, I haven't actually finished this one yet; it's 485 pages in hard cover, and I've been reading it since the beginning of the year--back in the days when my now wife was my then girlfriend, which is a very Richard Ford-like thought and preoccupation). Here's my favourite passage from this novel so far:

If only Clare would just take the plunge (always the realtor's warmest wish for mankind), banish fear, think that instead of having suffered error and loss, he's survived them (but won't survive them indefinitely), that today could be the first day of his new life, then he'd be fine. In other words, accept the Permanent Period as your personal savior and act not as though you're going to die tomorrow but--much scarier--as though you might live.

The Lay of the Land is the third novel in a trilogy that began with The Sportswriter and also includes Independence Day. The protagonist of all three novels is Frank Bascombe, a one-time short-story writer who also wrote about sports. He is now twice married. His most recent wife has left him to re-unite with her former husband. His two grown children have various minor life crises. His first wife is flirting with him. He has recently survived (for now) a diagnosis of prostate cancer. It's Thanksgiving weekend, and he is living in what he calls "the Permanent Period." What others might call the slow slide to death (Frank is only 52), but Frank sees as the time when no major changes are anticipated or sought and so life can seem like a state of stasis, though clearly not of calm. Oh, yeah. The novel also takes place during the period in 2000 when the Gore/Bush election remained unresolved. Big decisions seem to be on hold. Can this situation remain? Probably not. How does it end? I don't know (haven't finished the book yet!).

So why include it in this review? Because I might not get another chance. Go about your affairs as if you might live!

Those who have read The Sportswriter and Independence Day will likely remember some of the sharp facts of Frank's life. He had a third child, a boy, who died in childhood. This event dunked Frank into a pool of dreaminess and womanizing that ended his first marriage. It also disconnected him from his children, his past ambitions and nearly life in general. In the second book, Frank took a trip to Cooperstown with his other son, in an attempt at father-son bonding, which ended with the son getting a baseball in the head. Accidentally, of course, though also (intentionally) rich in significance. In the new novel, Frank continues his drifting ways, though one should also say that Frank is clearly his life's "decider." He only appears passive because he is so deeply reflective; he is not in denial about what he's done or hasn't.

The narrative of Ford's trilogy is ultimately less the point than the creation of Frank. What I mean is, it's not what happens next that matters. It's how Frank responds to the day-by-day. Who Frank is. How he gets to be that way. What his options are. And the persistence of meaning over time. If it does. The lay of the land, in other words. It's just what's out there and how you deal with it. How we go along for the ride. And Frank provides quite a ride. He's a character as resonant as Updike's Rabbit, as Richler's Kravitz. As Jay Gatz, too.

Pages 326-327, in fact, provide a number of discussion points on the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, The Great Gatsby. Frank's car is in need of repair. At the local auto shop, the attendant is reading Fitzgerald's novel. Frank notes "garage mechanics, of course, played a pivotal role in Fitzgerald's denoument:

I'm tempted to poll his views about Jay Gatz. Victim? Ill-starred innocent? Gray-tinged antihero? Or all three at once, vividly registering Fitzgerald's glum assessment of our century's plight--now blessedly at an end. ... It's possible of course that as a modern student, Chris doesn't subscribe to the concept of author per se. I, however, still do.

When a significant American author (Ford) references a significant American novel (The Great Gatsby), readers are free to rush to all kids of conclusions. Gatsby is famously a novel about the failure of the American Dream, as many high school essayists have insisted. A similar theme could be staked for Ford's trilogy. We might also note that "the end of American exceptionalism" is one of the dominant stories of the presidency of George W. Bush, and Ford knew the outcomes of certain events (Iraq) while he presented the pessimistic Frank in the period that ultimately handed Dubya the keys to the White House. Things often don't work out the way we want them to, but we need to keep trying and live our lives looking forward, not back.

*

POST SCRIPT

So my point is here is that disappointment is not a female priviledge; there are all types of men, and some of us, like Frank B., know the secret of wanting and not getting. Go about your affairs as if you might live!

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

John Gould

2011-01-14T20:33:00.001-05:00

[First published in The Danforth Review]

Kilter: 55 fictions
by John Gould
Turnstone Press, 2003

John Gould's kilter: 55 fictions was nominated for the 2003 Giller Prize. "Fifty-five fictions?" you ask. Yes, there are 55 in this book's 205 pages, an average of less than four pages per story. So, it didn't surprise this reader that many of the stories feel like fragments, aborted beginnings, chunks of middle. Which can be just fine, if the writing is strong. And it is here, as the Giller nomination suggests. Gould's collected fragments add up to a sum that is greater than its parts.

Here is the opening of the first story in the book:

I liked it better back when my son was into stuff I could understand. Sex, drugs, rock'n'roll. Or rap, I guess you'd call it, Yo, mufo, kind of thing, the white boy's black dream. The big challenge in those days was to keep myself upright on the couch late enough at night to catch him creeping in, reeking of rum and Pepsi and Players Light, mauve hair all mussed up, buttons in all the wrong button holes. What would his mother have said? I'd ask myself.

"What would your mother have said?" I'd ask him.

In contrast to Christy's manly men, Gould's men are self-doubters. They are anxious. They are emotionally complicated, in that never-ending contradictory sort of way that cliché says is the singular realm of women (it isn't). If Christy tends towards Bukowski, Gould tends towards the Richard Ford of The Sportswriter.

For example, let's look at the story "Near-Death Experience." A mother is dying in hospital. Her daughter, Boo, and the daughter's partner, Jack, sit by her bed. The dying woman is asleep, semi-comatose, drifting towards death. The story begins with Jack wanting to ask the dying woman about her experience. As he explains to Boo: "How many chances like this does a person get?"

Jack whispers, "She's been where we're all going, Boo. Aren't you the tiniest bit curious about what she's seen?"

"No. And anyway, I know what she's seen. She's seen what she's always seen when she closes her eyes. She sees the inside of her head."

Later, Jack asks Boo what she would tell their child, if they had one, about "this" (death, the afterlife, belief systems).

"I'd tell her . . . I have no idea what I'd tell her," says Boo. "I'd tell her you can't believe anything, you can't count on anything. I'd tell her the only thing you can count on is the absolute, the infinite. Anything less than that is a crock."

Jack says, "The absolute? The infinite?"

"I have no idea. Mom, I miss you, I do." Boo takes her mother's hand, kneads a knobby joint between her fingertips.

"Near-Death Experience" covers barely four pages, and yet its subject matter is as large as can be: death, love, the infinite. It is also representative of Gould's other stories: the asking of big questions, the ambiguous answers, the focus on the domestic. The emphasis on small moments of truth: Boo will miss her mother, she offers the simple solace of touch.

kilter: 55 fictions was a worthy nomination for the 2003 Giller Prize. Some might find its tone of post-modern skepticism relentless. Some might wish the stories pushed outward, included more of the social context of its narrators, instead of keeping its eye inward on relationships. Sure, whatever. Gould's vision is his own, and in this book it is well realized.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Jim Christy

2011-01-11T19:50:00.001-05:00

[Review of Real Gone first appeared in Quill and Quire; review of Tight Like That first appeared in The Danforth Review.]

In addition, I was on the novel jury for the 2006 ReLit Awards and Jim Christy's The Redemption of Anna Depree made the final three short list at my instigation. I see now the book is selling for $48.95 on Amazon, and, gosh, I have no idea where my copy is.
*

Real Gone
by Jim Christy
Quattro Books, 2010

Tight Like That
by Jim Christy
Anvil Press, 2003

Real Gone is a meandering novella about a draft dodger in the 1960s who moves to Canada. Written by one-time American Jim Christy, who relocated to Canada in 1968, the book reads like a memoir.

The narrator, also named Jim Christy, reconstructs a year or so of his life when he was in his early twenties, driving around America with buddies and girlfriends, contemplating the cruelty of bigots and the naïveté of hippies, getting arrested and drafted, deciding to flee north, and taking part in a murder trial.

Written in Christy’s customary plainspoken prose style, Real Gone presents a portrait of an America polarized between revolutionaries and racists. The narrator fashions himself as an anarchist and has no kind words to say about the crazies on either side. If he identifies with any group, it’s the black underclass. He has a deep knowledge of old time rhythm and blues, studies at a black college, and is the only white guy to attend a lecture by Muhammad Ali on the Nation of Islam. (Ali shakes Christy’s hand and hams it up for the cheering crowd while whispering in his ear, “What you doin’ here, boy?”).

Increasingly, Christy has no answer to that question. He attempts to go to Atlanta for the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral, dodging race riots along the way, but ends up in a North Carolina jail for being out on the street after curfew.

America, he concludes, has no place for the likes of him. Before he can leave, though, he’s called as a character witness at a good friend’s trial for murder. The trial goes better than expected, but the accused man is still convicted. Christy heads for Canada, and the book comes to a sudden close.

Ultimately, this slim volume is more first act than complete story. Canada, in this fiction, is the Promised Land, or at least not the Land of Chaos. Canadian readers may find this storyline comforting, but the mythology of the 1960s as the most important decade – and Canada as the Great, Sane, Liberated Place – is more than stale. Entering Canada, Jim Christy (protagonist) leaves behind the outrageous U.S., but this doesn’t offer the reader narrative satisfaction.

*

In Tight Like That, Jim Christy's short story collection, the world is also lovely and freakish. My mother read this book before I had a chance to read it. She liked it. It isn't the sort of book I thought my mother would like. My mother reads Ruth Rendell. Jim Christy is closer to Charles Bukowski than he is to a British mystery writer. I think what my mother liked about these stories was their lack of pretense. Tight Like That presents fourteen stories about characters caught on the rough edges of society, but his characters are not caught in bitterness, nor are they presented as symbols of injustice and oppression. Christy tells worthy stories, honest stories, well-written stories, too.

Well-written in a plain style, it is perhaps necessary to say, since Christy's writing is the type that high-minded literary readers might distrust. The writing may appear naive, it may appear unaware of it connotations, but it is not (in fact, Christy often lulls the reader into expecting one outcome before revealing another). Christy's storytelling is keen-minded, clever, and always one step ahead of cliché. A bit like a British mystery writer, one is tempted to say.

The back cover of Tight Like That says:

The stories in Jim Christy's latest collection span time and space, taking us from the depression-era Deep South to the modern-day commute. Private eyes. Old drunks. Yuppies, hippies, and everyone in between gets the trademark Christy work-over. His characters inhabit a world where one wrong move, no matter how small, can set in motion the direst of consequences. Luckily, they don't let it get in the way of having a fine old time. Compelling, transforming, this collection makes you long for the days when a cup of coffee cost a dime, and dignity wasn't for sale.

I don't normally quote advertising copy in reviews, but here I make an exception because the above paragraph is an excellent summary of the book, though I have a couple of nits to pick.

First, "the trademark Christy work-over." Not having read any other Christy, I'm not sure what this means. No one gets too much of a "work-over" in Tight Like That. Hypocrites are poked and prodded, yes. Radical feminists, the unthinking rich, politicians, narcissists generally. Christy's narrators stand up for common sense, decency, and the protection of real human connection. Christy's characters are often manly men, men who work with their muscles, men more well-connected to their bodies than to their minds, but his men are also in touch with their feelings, though they aren't likely to abstract them; they aren't Momma's boys, or friends of Freud.

Second, yes, dignity, truly, is not for sale in Christy's world. But, overall, the tone is not nostalgic, as the back cover blurb seems to suggest. Christy's stories are locked in the present. They are fine, entertaining tales, written in language direct and rife with integrity. The hint of nostalgia lingers perhaps because Christy's storytelling may strike some as old-fashioned. Those seeking hipster credentials can look elsewhere. Those hip to be square can check out Tight Like That.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Mary Prankster

2011-01-10T23:22:00.001-05:00

So, the kids are in bed.

It was 2002. My girlfriend and I, well, we weren't, anymore, and I was bored of going home alone, and I read something in NOW about this show on College and there wasn't anything to stop me from going and so I went and I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this; this pixie of a what? Punk rock, beatnik, flapper? With a mouth like Lenny Bruce?

It was a great reminder, that, yes, sometimes it's best to just give life the finger.

I understand that the "Mary Prankster character" has retired. But she is carried around in a million hearts.

And out there in little clubs across "America" the next generation of rock and roll hillbillies is givin' it to the man.

Also - video for Mac & Cheese

*

[First published in The Danforth Review]

Lemonade: Live
by Mary Prankster
Palace Coup Records, 2004

It wasn't supposed to be this way. A website devoted to Canadian small press books reviewing a live album by a USAmerican. What gives? Maybe it's the comment a friend said to me: "Tough chicks are cool." Maybe it's that old desire to keep trying something new. For sure it dates to a night back in December 2002 when I saw Ms. Prankster at Rancho Relaxo on College St. in Toronto. Her band had split from her after recording her then latest CD, Tell Your Friends, and she took to the stage solo with acoustic guitar. I knew nothing about her, but soon learned that she was woman of undeniable charisma, wit and intelligence -- and kickass tattoos.

See more of Mary Prankster at her website.

Lemonade: Live showcases 10 songs and some in-between-song-patter: "welcome to my late-twenties." Like many live albums, it's a kind of greatest hits package. Seven of the songs on the album are from Prankster's previous releases, three are previously unrecorded. For my money, Lemonade: Live is not the best place for a Prankster first encounter, but it is a love-in for committed fans of the albums Blue Skies Forever, Roulette Girl and the already mentioned, Tell Your Friends -- the most recent studio album ... and the one interested consumers should check out first, though those wanting a rawer Prankster experience should probably go for Blue Skies Forever, which includes titles such as "Tits and Whisky" and "Mercyfuck," two songs that have zero chance of getting played on mainstream radio.

Mary Prankster is, of course, not her real name. She's a persona rooted in the Merry Pranksters, the band of proto-Hippies ostensibly led by Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cockoo's Nest, and Neal Cassady, the object of Jack Kerouac's eye in On The Road. The Pranksters were the subject of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by the godfather of New Journalism, Tom Wolfe. What Mary Prankster has to do with this group of 1960s swingers ain't exactly clear ... but the Pranksters did drive a multi-coloured bus named "Further" across the country ... and that's where Mary takes us. Into a space where life can be honestly confronted. And a place where goofiness is a key strategy for resolving life's conundrums.

Baby, you're a poseur
Honey, I should know
You ask me where the show's are
But then you never go

Poseur purgatory
Awaits you in the end
But that's not my story
I'll tell you why my friend

Got my Martens on with steely toes
Spike my hair and pierce my nose
I'm going up to Punk Rock Heaven

"Punk Rock Heaven" (from Roulette Girl)

This song is sung as if Prankster were a swinging 1920s flapper. It's an interesting song because it showcases Prankster's propensity to jump genres, but it also shows she's self-conscious of her lineage. Kesey, Johnny Rotten, our Sweet Mary as Ella Fitzgerald. Most recently, Prankster has been experimenting with country music stylings ... and Lemonade: Live includes her in full imitation twang, among other incarnations. Lemonade: Live is Prankster with new bandmates and a variety of cameo musicians. Like I said earlier, it's a bit like a greatest hits collection, but it also seems like a document of Prankster at a transitional moment. "Welcome to my late-twenties," she says right off the top. How much longer can she go on singing, "The world is full of bastards/ I've dated every one" among other such lines?

As I was thinking about what to write in this review, I kept coming back to the question: Why do I think there is value in the songs? It's not the music, which is fine -- but could be from many other people. It's not her charismatic personality, which comes through in performance and in the recordings -- but there are thousands of charismatic people.

Ultimately, I decided the songs have value because they're fundamentally honest. Some are funny, some are quirky, all shine with a bright intelligence. Honesty may not be a rarer commodity than groovy music, great teeth, and cherry cheeks, but there is a difference between confession and art ... honesty and art are mutually reinforcing; they make each other better; transform each other in an act of alchemy ... and Prankster, remember, is a "Prankster." As she sings in one song, "I know who I ain't." She presents herself as a mask, all the better to get at the truth (Bob Dylan, a man of many masks and much truth telling, started life as a Zimmerman).

And what of the songs? The earlier ones are goofier, rawer. The songs on Tell My Friends are more lyrically complicated. All of the songs shudder at pretense ("poseur purgatory/ awaits you in the end"). Finally, Prankster is capable of being both hopeful and hopeless in love.

I fucked a bunch of stupid men
Went back and fucked them all again
Was never much for romance anyhow

"New Tricks" (from Roulette Girl)

*

Wake up every morning
In the breaking heart of town
On the half of couch
I can't be bothered to fold down

Here's the thought that gets me
Out of bed and to the bong
What if I said
I could do better I was wrong?

"None for me" (from Tell Your Friends)

Not that it's all self-pity with Prankster. Actually, I don't think any of this is self-pity, it's just a scrupulous self-examination, a la John Lennon ("I'm a Loser," "Help!", "Mother"), about the challenges of finding a way through. Like Lennon also, Prankster can write lovely love odes:

You're an answer
In the form of a question
You're a riddle
That's just aching to be solved

If I many be so bold as to venture
A suggestion
Hey - I would love to see the way this gets resolved

Because you're hotter
Than an August in El Paso
And you're colder
Than a January 5th

And you tie my silver tongue up
Like a lasso
And your smile shines like
The ribbon on a gift

"Spill" (from Tell Your Friends)

She also does rage outs:

Heard what you said about me
You're better off without me
Heard I was begging you to stay

"Tell Your Friends" (Part One) (from Tell Your Friends)

It's this mixture of gloom and brightness that is at the centre of the title of the live CD: "I've seen the future/ And it looks like lemonade." Lemons may be sour, but they make a sweet drink. Life ain't so different.

Here's my favorite Prankster lyric:

Shoplift ideology
So at a loss for leaders
When the flame-retardant books came out
They had to burn the readers
And the politicians' patriot pride
Seemed more convincing when they lied

Oh my melancholy baby
Is the whole world going crazy?
'Cause it can't be me who's mad
I got it bad, but it sure is hot in here

"Brave New Baby" (from Tell Your Friends)

As Michelle Shocked said, "Keep on rockin', girl. Yeah, keep on a-rockin'."

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Reading TRG

2011-01-08T20:40:00.000-05:00

One of the first reviews I wrote in the early days (1999) of The Danforth Review was the one below. I knew nothing of TRG (the Toronto Research Group), but the book had been sent to be as a review copy and I dutifully read it.

I figured I ought to have known something about them. I had an MA in English Literature from the University of Toronto at that point and had been self-consciously trying to educate myself about the range of writing in Canada.

Interesting reading a decade later. The "eternal debate between the storytellers and the experimenters" (because eternal) remains. The poetry wars, in fact (largely illustrated by the Starnino/Bok polarization), heated up. Mutual mistrust, misunderstanding continues to exemplify the status quo.

*

ABC of Reading TRG
by Peter Jaeger
Talon Books, 1999

That literature is diverse is not news. That some literature (for example, the lyric poem, the 19th century narrative novel) is more accessible than other literature (say, Finnegan's Wake or "Howl") startles no one. Yet, there remains the eternal debate between the storytellers and the experimenters, the conservatives and the radicals, as some would like to politicize it. While the best (i.e., most daring) work does not necessarily come from the margins, it is unavoidable that some work demands explanation where other work is more able to stand on its own. Thus we have Peter Jaeger's book-length essay explicating the work of the Toronto Research Group, namely poets Steve McCaffery and bpNichol.

As Jaeger writes:

[The TRG was formed] in 1973 as a forum to investigate issues pertinent to formally imaginative writing, such as the role of the reader, the material status of the book, and the non-semantic aspects of translation and narrative. The earliest TRG reports built on theories proposed by such writers as Gertrude Stein, Jerome Rothenberg, Ilse and Pierre Garnier, and the Brazilian Noigandres group of concrete poets. After 1974, however, the Group integrated ideas drawn from French poststructuralist theory into their research reports.

In other words, approach at own risk. Like a full appreciation of Abstract Expressionism, the work of the TRG requires submersion in various schools of theory. Theirs is not poetry of the everyday, unless it is the everyday activity of the mind - thought processes deconstructed into increasingly thin layers of ephemera.

Which does not mean the work of McCaffery and Nichol is not interesting. In fact, theirs was a brave and unique project that deserves the attention Jaeger's slim book gives it. As Jaeger notes, the TRG's reports "remain critical because of [their] refusal to organize desire around such typical Canlit tropes as authentic voice, the land or Canadian identity." The popular - and often critical - conception of Canadian literature continues to be dominated by the post-Expo '67 nationalist project and "Canadian Unity" anxiety - despite the increasing international popularity of Canadian fiction - and various attempts by Canadian writers to integrate international literary movements and strategies into their work. (Stan Rogal's obvious affinity for Borgesian fictions in his 1996 short story collection What Passes for Love is only one such example.) The early 1970s was the period of Atwood's Survival and various other attempts to reduce literature in Canada to an over-simplistic thematic structure - thus aligning literature with other socio-political activities to help define "Canada" and "Canadians" and help protect "us" from cultural domination from "them" (mostly, the USA - but also the British - i.e., colonial - structures that form the core of the Canadian political identity).

In this context, it is McCaffery and Nichol - not Atwood et al - who were the true innovators. Jaeger points out that McCaffery was born in the U.S. and was once victimized by the sharp end of Dorothy Livesay's umbrella. Lisesay accused him "as a landed immigrant - of stealing publication space from more deserving (because "Canadian") writers." Jaeger quotes McCaffery: "It was a milieu obsessed with establishing a Canadian identity largely predicated upon nationalist narratives and values." It was a milieu, also, that the TRG reacted against - or at least moved away from in search of answers of a different sort.

In is on this point that this review must begin to break down, as a complete assessment of Jaeger's material depends upon a more thorough understanding of Jaeger's material than this reviewer can bring to it. That said, the book is structured as a series of chapters, each representing a letter of the alphabet and a word critical to the understanding of the TRG's project: "Alphabet," "Book-Machine," "Canadada Concrete," "Derrida." This structure, though obviously arbitrary, provides ready-made categories for the reader to gradually unpackage what the TRG was all about - still not an easy process. Ultimately, this is a book for a specialized audience - though the questions it raises about the role of nationalism in forming the public's understanding of "Canadian" literature deserve both a broader forum and deeper discussion.

Shane Neilson

2011-01-05T21:14:00.000-05:00

Hate is a strong word, is what we say in our house when the kids complain about, well, whatever, as they are wont to do.

“Hate is a strong word. Do you really hate peas?”

I hate journalism. Do I really? No. I am profoundly disappointed in it. I hate the 24-hour news cycle, the promotion of trivialities, the exaggeration of conflicts, the oversimplification of issues, the emphasis on emotional reaction, the denigration of intelligence, the prominence of the image over the word, the implicit assumption that resolution is possible, that problems can actually be solved easily, without creativity and often ground-shaking negotiation.

Oh, my. Is that too much information? More than you needed to know?

I mean, yes, of course, some problems can be solved. And hate is a strong word. I don’t hate the 24-hour news cycle. It just makes my blood boil.

And so, poetry. The antidote?

Shane Neilson’s latest, Complete Physical (Porcupine’s Quill, 2010), spurred my thoughts along this line.

Amongst all of the frantic mass anxiety of the contemporary world, is there a special role for poetry to remind us to stop, shut up, listen and reflect from time to time?

Normally, I hate poetry. Okay, I don’t. It just often leaves me numb, and of all of the different things that poetry ought to do, leaving the reader numb must be near the bottom of the list.

Poetry is a borderless category, I know. That is, there are all kinds of word clusters (sometimes not even words) that people call poetry, and there are all different kinds of readers that “like” all of these different “poems.”

I like all kinds of stuff. I resist being locked into one school or another. That said, I am required here to give a synopsis of what I like best and maybe not so much in Neilson – and to back it up with evidence.

In other words, what I like in these poems isn’t their New Formalism.

Neilson is a doctor, and Complete Physical is a collection of poems about doctoring. It is also a collection that refers a lot to “love,” and the poems collectively form a type of self-portrait of the poet, a man with an aptitude for the well-turned phrase and skepticism about his profession.

The mysteries of language, the mysteries of the body. The poet/doctor narrator often finds that all he has to offer his patients are words. They come to him expecting miracles and all he can offer are “palliatives.” Pain management.

Caught in the constant crisis of the 24-hour news cycle, we might be wise to turn in to this meta-message. No miracles. Only comfort and care.

Here’s one of Neilson’s poems to reflect on.

SONG OF THE MOST RESPONSIBLE PHYSICIAN

At five, I’d play doctor with a toy stethoscope
and only one illness for Mr Bear: You’re sick!
Now I preside over lives that elope,
over illnesses that hide
until they preside and steal.
They call me a healer.
Actually, I’m an actuary,
an on-call oddsmaker,
the farmer that closes the barn door
after the horse-thief made a home visit.

At twenty-five, degree on my wall,
I looked to yellowed yards of textbooks
for wisdom, and found data only.
There is no preparation: people die,
and I solder silver linings to grief.
At five, my belief: that doctors cure,
that patients live. Now I know the furred truth:
palliation, and survival.

On the job I learned to look the part,
to harken back to five years old:
people want a doctor that listens,
that seems to care, that’s sure.
Not a whit in his head,
what they want is faithless understanding
as he massages their fattening chart,
as his ballpoint pen misspells symptoms
and makes a big flatulent blot of diagnosis.

You’re sick, I say, albeit in a different way,
and I may care, I may not.
But I laugh at good jokes
and I reach for tissues at teary times
and the word Expectations
is cursive on my prescription pad.

*

Here’s a fragment from ABSCOND:

I thought on love;
on the medicine you would never take;
on shocks that settle in from crossed wires;
on why.

*

Love is the medicine Neilson’s narrator recommends most, the substance he identifies as lacking in the ill. And it is against an essentially tragic background of the ill, dying and dead that this dart is thrown hard into the centre of the board.

There is wisdom in these poems. Let’s not be so post-modernistic as to deny the presence of such a substance. It is tragic wisdom, true. A different doctor/narrator may have found more subjects celebratory in nature. So there is subjectivity here, too. A certain doctor/poet, a certain set of poems.

But even with these caveats, can we not say that the universal is also present? Truths that survive time and context (and also escape cliche)?

If our 24-hour news cycle mainlines us with hyper-anxiety (more so today than even Umberto Eco could have imagined), poetry that reminds us to live at the pace of our heartbeat, not our neurons, contains a shout-out from the deep past.

Complete Physical has been reviewed in The Globe and Mail and elsewhere.

The Globe review is laudatory, if a bit pit-nicky. This is not a book of Major Poems, but it is a book of good poems. It is redundant to say so, but Neilson is a poet to watch and read. I look forward, as always, to his continuing development.

On a personal note, as the husband of someone currently going through chemotherapy for breast cancer, I do hope that doctors can offer more than comfort (and it's not metaphysical miracle that I expect, but the results of diligent science and lots of tests, tests, tests, as one of Neilson's poems sharply points out).

From a poetry angle, I'd like to see Neilson expand the circle of joy he communicates so well and clearly holds close and deep.

Finally, some readers may accuse me of bias. I have a relationship with Neilson that goes back nearly a decade. He was once poetry editor at The Danforth Review, where I was publisher/editor, etc. So be it.

I Love Lucy

2010-12-31T23:51:00.000-05:00

For Christmas, I bought my six-year-old step-daughter Season 2 of "I Love Lucy." She had previously seen the video below on YouTube. She has a terrific belly laugh, and this video brought it out full force. Lucille Ball and her companions from the 1952 season on DVD have provoked similar results.

As 2010 ends, hooray for Lucy. Hooray for laughter. Hooray for strong women.

Watching this 58-year-old sit-com, one cannot help but reflect on what has changed and what hasn't. The social gender roles are significantly out of date and the "situations" for the comedy reflect that, but what a powerhouse Lucy is. She is set-up perpetually to work herself out of problems. She is set-up perpetually to desire more from her husband ("Give her a chance, Ricky," Fred and Ethel say. "Yeah," Lucy says. "Give me a chance").

Within the confines of her environment, she comes out time and again a winner. My six-year-old's eyes light up, her belly shakes, her toes wiggle. This Lucy, she doesn't take no for an answer. She goes for it. She has a hunky husband who adores her (even as he misunderstands and often marginalizes her). My six-year-old sees that ("I don't like Ricky," she said, immediately, after watching a couple of episodes).

But what she sees more, I think, is Lucy fighting back. With laughter. With zaniness. With unbridled determination.

What I see is, wow, what a great comedienne. I see Chaplin's tramp in her physical comedy. Her range - verbal delivery, timing, expressiveness - is astonishing. The writing on the show is sharp, timeless.

The situation below is from an episode called "Job Switching." The men challenge the women to "make the living," as Ricky says. In turn, the men need to look after the house. Both fail in these tasks, and the episode ends with a return to the status quo. It was the 1950s, after all, and that status quo would change.

That status quo isn't anything to be nostalgic about, but the fact that "I Love Lucy" can rock a six-year-old girl's world in 2010 is curious to me. What are the contemporary equivalents? Miley Cyrus? Dora? Marge Simpson?

Ooops, I did it again. I'm trying to end the year on an up note.

Yay, Lucy!

Little Red Rooster

2010-12-30T21:38:00.000-05:00

Apropos of nothing, the link to the Rolling Stones' cover of Willie Dixon's Little Red Rooster on YouTube (the video won't embed).

Earlier tonight, I was listening to a CD of early Stones. Ah, it reminded me of a line in a Mark Anthony Jarman short story (which one?) about how the Stones lost it after 1965. Or something like that.

Even when I was in high school in the 1980s, there were traces (faint, yes!) of discussion about whether the Stones (a) still mattered (b) the point at which they'd lost it. Was it with the death of Brian Jones?

I remember that Jarman line (faintly, yes!) because I remember thinking that Jarman was trying to capture something in his stories that the Stones were trying to capture in their early songs. And it wasn't fame.

What was it? That thing?

(This post goes out to all of those over the holidays who had little ones say to them something along the lines of, "But that happened in the 19th century!" .... And you held back and didn't say, "20th, actually.")

Now an embedded video alleging to be previously unreleased Brian Jones.

Prime Boneheads

2010-12-28T17:11:00.001-05:00

I mean, Prime Ministers. Oh, whatever. Looking ahead to 2011 and a potential federal election, here are four book reviews originally published in Quill & Quire that look backward as we look forward.

*

Prime Ministers: Ranking Canada’s Leaders
by J.L. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer
Bastards & Boneheads: Our Glorious Leaders, Past and Present
by Will Ferguson
(from the November 1999 issue)

Egotists and Autocrats: The Prime Ministers of Canada
by George Bowering
(from the September 1999 issue)

Memos to the Prime Minister: What Canada Could Be in the 21st Century
by Harvey Schachter, ed.
(from the September 2001 issue)

Repeat after me. Canadian history isn’t boring; Canadian historians are boring. Most of them, anyway. As Will Ferguson amply illustrates in his survey of Canada’s glorious leaders past and present, Bastards & Boneheads, the history of the European invasion of the northern half of this continent has just as much drama, conflict, and intrigue as the self-narrative of those deluded followers of manifest destiny to the south of us. Canada has long been a country in need of a storyteller. And Ferguson is an apt one.

First, however, let’s size up the opposition, represented here by J.L. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer’s expanded top 20 list titled Prime Ministers: Ranking Canada’s Leaders. Granatstein has been making the rounds lately decrying how little Canadian high schoolers know about their nation’s history. He does his cause little service here, however, despite using the Chatelaine-like technique of listing the PMs in order of greatness. If only he had called Chatelaine and asked their advice! Surely a survey of the sex lives of our PMs would have done more to focus the minds of teenagers on the significance of leadership in national affairs (no pun intended).

Whereas the nature of Granatstein’s and Hillmer’s exercise limits them to the country’s leaders from Confederation to the present, Ferguson casts a wider net. His narrative begins with the arrival of the first French colonialists (1604) and includes chapters on glorious leaders like Chief Tecumseh, Lord Durham, Louis Riel, and the suffragettes. Ferguson scores here, since his survey of winners and losers includes not only those sanctioned powerful by Parliament, but those who exercised influence in other jurisdictions.

The decision by Granatstein and Hillmer to focus on parliamentary leadership leads them to interpret Canadian history through the challenges faced by our PMs; mainly, how to govern a large, underpopulated country prone to regional conflicts and struggling to wean itself from one empire (British) while avoiding being sucked up into another (American). This is narrative with interesting but familiar features. For example, it raises the eternal spectre of Canada’s collapse, either from inside or from without. On the one hand, we have the War of 1812 and Free Trade. On the other, Canada’s PMs have done battle with openly separatist movements in Quebec and Nova Scotia and sought means to pacify Western idealists from before Riel to the present day.

Ferguson adopts a less conventional view: “If we are good, if we are very, very good, we [Canadians] may one day become Acadians.” The Acadians (remember them?) were French settlers in Nova Scotia for 100-odd years until most of them were forcibly expelled by British military thugs in 1755. A few remained; many were deported to the then-French colony of Louisiana; some managed to return to the Bay of Fundy area and settle in what is now Canada’s only officially bilingual province, New Brunswick. Ferguson presents the Acadians as victims of history who nonetheless overcame the odds and remained big-hearted and prosperous. They are a model for the rest of us. In Ferguson’s view, if Quebec faced facts it would see it has nurtured a victim narrative out of proportion to the details of the past. If English Canada faced facts, it would see the plan to assimilate the First Nations was a disaster; it took too long for women to get the vote; Canada’s failure to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany was one of the nation’s darkest hours. None of these events figure prominently in the book by Granatstein and Hillmer. They were not priorities of Canada’s PMs, and they are not the priorities of Canada’s leading historians. How boring – and unfortunate.

*

Egotists and Autocrats: The Prime Ministers of Canada
by George Bowering
(from the September 1999 issue)

Not so many years ago, when Brian Mulroney led this country into yet another of his misbegotten constitutional adventures, The Globe and Mail ran an editorial reminding readers that Canada was a country-in-progress. We all know that Canada was “born” on July 1, 1867, but was it really? Perhaps it started a few years earlier with the merger of Upper and Lower Canada. Perhaps it began on the Plains of Abraham. Perhaps things didn’t really get started until Trudeau brought home the constitution in 1982.

For over 100 years Canada has been asserting its independence, George Bowering tells us in his thorough and amusing survey of our usually illustrious prime ministers. And similar issues come up again and again. Will Canada send troops to fight Imperial wars? Will Canada get its own navy? What about its own flag? Will Canada embrace Free Trade or a home-grown economic policy? Can Ottawa expropriate provincial land so the Americans can test their latest super-duper torpedoes? The questions never cease.

In Bowering’s view, Canada has never been led so much as watched over. Our prime ministers have suffered the thankless task of overseeing a vast underpopulated land ready to be torn apart by regional lunatics or swallowed up by Imperial so-called friends: mainly, Britain and/or the U.S. You can almost see Bowering’s wry smile as he recounts the struggle of various PMs to balance the country’s competing interests. Mulroney didn’t invent East/West conflict, he only perfected it, and he left the country, as Bowering says, with “Laurier’s nightmare.”

It’s a pity that Mulroney will likely never share Bowering’s view of history, wherein the patterns repeat and those who try to “fix” the intersecting gears are quickly ground to dust. With the country now full of me-firsters and other assorted Mulroney-spawn, it’s left for us to hope that Bowering’s book will prove a useful antidote to the poisonous spores that still drift about the land.

*

Memos to the Prime Minister: What Canada Could Be in the 21st Century
by Harvey Schachter, ed.
(from the September 2001 issue)

Canadians dissatisfied with the lack of discussion of clear public policy alternatives during last fall’s federal election campaign can rejoice at the arrival of this new resource. In Memos to the Prime Minister, Harvey Schachter has compiled over two dozen messages for our leader from some of Canada’s top businesspeople and thinkers.

The writers fire advice at Mr. Chretien from the left, the right, and numerous points in between, leaving readers to wonder what direction the PM will move in. Perhaps he’ll prefer to sit in the middle weighing his options. Bob Rae begins his memo claiming this quiet approach “would be a great mistake. There is much to be done.”

Schachter asked the contributors to be prescriptive, so it is not surprising that the writers follow Rae in urging the Prime Minister to do more, more, more. Cut more taxes. Increase program spending. Innovate health care by providing individuals with their own “health care dollars” accounts. Innovate health care by focusing on quality management systems. Save the environment through tougher regulations. Save the environment by letting the free market rule.

After reading Memos, readers will no longer wonder where the public policy debate has gone in the country. They are more likely to question why the biggest issue the opposition parties can think to raise in Parliament is the PM’s financial relationship to a hotel beside a golf course.

What’s missing from this collection? Artists and church folk. Groups like the Canadian Council of Bishops and the Mennonite Central Committee make policy recommendations to the government all the time. It is strange that their voices are not heard here. Artists also have points to make. It is sad that their ideas to remain unacknowledged.

Cormac McCarthy

2010-12-22T15:00:00.000-05:00

Blood Meridian
or the Evening Redness in the West
(1985)

In the season of joy, peace and consumerism, what can one say about such a book? Hands down, it is the most bloody, most murderous, most haunted with evil book I have ever read.

It is also astonishingly beautiful.

But I don't agree with the cover blurb about "regeneration through violence." I didn't find regeneration in this book. The beauty generally comes from the constrast between the brutality of the actions (constant murder) and the lush descriptions of landscape, which are often harsh, yet they sustain life; they offer alternatives to murder; they offer the argument that meaning can exist outside the context of human discourse. That is, land itself, nature itself, is meaning (though, of course, the book, all books, language is a human medium).

I didn't like the ending, which I'm going to explain next, so last chance to jump out if you don't want to know.

The novel, in quick synopsis, follows a 14-year-old American boy (called "kid") through travails in Mexico in the mid-1800s, where he joins a crew of mercenaries who hunt Indians for their scalps, which they sell. One of the mercenaries is "the judge," who is more than thug; he knows multiple langauges, is deeply read, has many engineering skills, and is generally a Superman (Nietzschean implications intended).

In the book's final pages, the crew has been dispersed. Most all are dead. The kid and the judge alone remain. The kid has opportunities to kill the judge, but he doesn't. They are separated. Years pass. The kid becomes "the man." He meets the judge, who calls to him: "The last of the true. The last of the true. I'd say they're all gone under saving me and thee. Would you not?"

They converse, then the judge says: "I tell you this. As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior's right, and thereby will the dance become a false danse and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there who always is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be?"

"You ain't nothin," is the reply, and we are very nearly at the end. The judge by this point has already accused the kid of withholding part of his heart from the murderous project, one which all recognized he was good at. A natural born killer. Yet he himself won't admit it. "You're crazy," he says to the judge earlier, though he declines the opportunity to eradicate this evil man. Live and let live, might be his motto, if he weren't such a proficient killer himself. He kills, but not with the purity of evil the judge wants to see in him.

Their final encounter is in an outhouse, and it's ambiguous. Except the judge survives to return to the narrative, dancing and saying he will live forever. The kid/man may be dead (it's unclear) or he may just be gone. The resolution is no resolution. Certainly nothing is regenerated here.

Is the judge the devil? That's an easy, oversimplified interpretation, but is he?

I wondered what others had to say, so I set off across the ... western plain, I mean, the internet ... and found that the NYTimes reviewer from 1985 didn't like the ending either:

The kid and the judge are our own dead fathers, whom Mr. McCarthy resurrects for us to witness. He distances us not only from the historical past, not only from our cowboy-and-Indian images of it, but also from revisionist theories that make white men the villains and Indians the victims. All men are unremittingly bloodthirsty here, poised at a peak of violence, the ''meridian'' from which their civilization will quickly fall. War is a civilized ritual beyond morality for the judge, but not for Mr. McCarthy, who positions his readers to evaluate the characters' moral and philosophical stances. The kid frequently responds to the judge's grandiose speeches by saying, ''You're crazy'' - a notion so plausible that it effectively undermines the judge's authority.

Mr. McCarthy carefully builds this dialectic only to let us down with a stylistically dazzling but facile conclusion. Years later, in a saloon where a bear dances on stage, the kid encounters the judge, who calls himself a ''true dancer'' of history, one who recognizes ''the sanctity of blood.'' There is a hint that he kills the kid. Last seen as a towering figure on stage, the judge is ''naked, dancing . . . He says that he will never die.'' H E is denied the last word, though. Mr. McCarthy's half-page epilogue presents a man crossing the plain making holes in the ground, blindly followed by other men who search for meaning in this pattern of holes. The judge's enigmatic dance and the long ordeal of the novel's violence demand more than this easy ambiguity. There are, of course, no answers to the life-and-death issues Mr. McCarthy raises, but there are more rigorous, coherent ways to frame the questions.

The ending also get special mention on the book's Wikipedia page:

... the most common interpretation of the novel is that Holden kills the kid in a Fort Griffin, Texas outhouse. The fact that the kid's death is not depicted might be significant. Blood Meridian is a catalog of brutality, depicting, in sometimes explicit detail, all manner of violence, bloodshed, brutality and cruelty. For the dramatic climax to be left undepicted leaves something of a vacuum for the reader: knowing full well the horrors established in the past hundreds of pages, the kid's unstated fate might still be too awful to describe, and too much for the mind to fathom: the sight of the kid's fate leaves several witnesses stunned almost to silence; never in the book does any other character have this response to violence, again underlining the singularity of the kid's fate.

Some other links:

Interview: Harold Bloom on Blood Meridian (related: Bloom on dumb readers)
Blog: Cindy Minx on the Epilogue of Blood Meridian
A couple critical responses to the novel

Here's some choice Bloom:

AVC: The violence in Blood Meridian is uncharacteristic. It’s not used as a cheap metaphor or a means of catharsis or transformation.

HB: Oh, no, no. The violence is the book. The Judge is the book, and the Judge is, short of Moby Dick, the most monstrous apparition in all of American literature. The Judge is violence incarnate. The Judge stands for incessant warfare for its own sake.

AVC: So you think that, despite your own initial reaction to it, McCarthy is successful in the way he uses violence in the book?

HB: More than successful. It’s not only the ultimate Western, the book is the ultimate dark dramatization of violence. Again, I don’t see anyone surpassing it in that regard.

AVC: You’ve been extremely critical of the politicization of teaching literature…

HB: Critical, young man, is hardly the word. I stand against it like Jeremiah prophesying in Jerusalem. It has destroyed most of university culture. The teaching of high literature now hardly exists in the United States. The academy is in ruins, and they’ve destroyed themselves.

AVC: Do you have a similar resistance to political readings of literature? For example, do you have a problem with those who have read Blood Meridian as a critique of American imperialism?

HB: I don’t think it’s that at all. I think that’s too simplistic an understanding of McCarthy. When he issued that unforgettable vision of the Apaches advancing into battle against the cutthroat desperadoes who are going to cut them down… Who are, after all, these invincible monsters, and in the end all but the Judge will be dead… I don’t think that the aesthetically minded reader is trying to think of that as a sociological commentary on the degradation of the Apache Nation. It’s a grand picaresque in its own right. I don’t think McCarthy was interested, at least at that point in his career, in moral judgments, any more than Melville was involved in moral judgments or Faulkner was involved in moral judgments—at least until he got soft later on and produced a beastly book like A Fable. The kind of apocalyptic moral judgments made in No Country For Old Men represents, I think, a sort of falling away on McCarthy’s part. Blood Meridian is too grand for that.

Can't say that I always agree with Bloom, but I do here.

Blood Meridian is grand.

E-Books of Wonder

2010-12-22T09:43:00.002-05:00

Fast Company has a fascinating slide show on the evolution of the e-book.

I'm e-lusting after an iPad, but willing to wait on edition 2.0. Still, the scroll idea in the slideshow is astonishing.

As ever, I'm curious how the commercially-driven e-innovations can open opportunities for creative communities (aka literature).

Email. Listservs. Online magazines. Blogs. Social media. E-pads.

Been reading Sina Queyras's Unleashed, a book that emerged from a blog. More on that later. I like it. Among other things, it made me wonder about the difference between the e-book and the blog. The book has a couple "broken links." Words that were hyperlinked on the blog, but that sit flat on the page.

Can the e-book be more organized, coherent, focused than a blog - and also enable the sparks of insight from well chosen hyperlinks? (Hyperlinking, to my mind, is just as potentially brilliant today as it was in 1995, nearly the whole point of the interNET, to my mind.)

I've never read an e-book, in actual fact. The Kindle couldn't interest me less. But the iPad, with its rich media and multiple apps ... yummy.

*

RELATED ... I received the following pitch, which I will share here as it is related to the above speculating....

Dear Michael Bryson:

Celebrated novelist Blanche Howard, 87, has released her new novel Dreaming in a Digital World as an original e-book. ....

We hope you will review Blanche Howard’s new novel on your blog and provide a link to it. We can also arrange an interview with the amazing Blanche Howard.

For a free download, click here http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/29176; go to the cart to purchase, then open a free Smashwords account and use the coupon code LZ25D. The e-book is also available for $4.99 at Barnes & Noble, Sony, and Apple e-bookstores. But you can offer the free download to your readers until January 15, 2011.

"Teaching" Canadian Literature

2010-12-18T15:12:00.001-05:00

A recent post by Amy Lavender Harris, "Why We're Teaching The Wrong Kind of Canadian Literature," reminded me of a lively discussion that took place on The Danforth Review in early 2003. That discussion was precipitated by a report prepared by The Writer's Trust that concluded:

fewer than one-third of high schools in Canada offer students a course on Canadian literature;
most students read fewer than six Canadian books during their secondary education;
few students can identify 10 Canadian writers;
the number of Canadian literature courses has declined over the last few years and will continue to decline, in some provinces;
teen literature programs at public libraries receive staggeringly fewer resources than children's programming;
there is an attitude within the high school system that Canadian literature is substandard and doesn't merit being taught in schools; and
community standards and fear of reprisal has a large impact on the materials teachers choose to use in the classroom.

TDR published a summary of the report, which was prepared by Jean Baird.

Harris's piece was prompted by a G&M opinion article by Susan Swan, who also noted the 2002 survey and quoted Baird: “We may be one of the few countries in the developed world that doesn’t teach our own literature.”

Contrary to the Swan/Baird call for a new national literature teaching strategy, Harris recommends a focus on the local:

For one thing, there isn’t a Canadian literature so much as there are many Canadian literatures. By this I mean something other than the old ‘regionalism’ thesis people haul out in efforts to explain why Manitobans and Maritimers drink different kinds of beer. I mean something far more particular. It seems to me that rather than having everyone in the country poring over the plot of Late Nights on Air or Execution Poems (which would themselves be a vast improvement over Roughing It In The Bush), high school students in Sackville would do better to read David Adams Richards (and Clarke) while Vancouver students could focus more particularly on Douglas Coupland and Susan Musgrave.

What I am arguing is that rather than a national or even a regional education strategy, what we need is a far stronger commitment to engaging with local literature, particularly when it reflects the geographical, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds of students learning about it.

This need not lead to simplistic sociological criticism, as Harris's recent Imagining Toronto eloquently proves.

Literature rewards multiple approaches and perspectives. That ongoing fact that students aren't engaging their local or national literature in any significant way ... means whatever rewards are paid them are slim.

A Reading List

2010-12-13T23:43:00.000-05:00

On my bedside table I have a stack of books that I'm "reading." As I type this, the books are piled beside the laptop on the dining table. There are 17 of them. I intend here to preemptively comment on each of them.

I often have a stack of books beside my bed that I jump between. It's not unusual for me to be reading a half-dozen books at once. It is, however, unusual for me to have 17 books within arms length.

Northrop Frye (in The Educated Imagination, I believe; a book I read 20 years ago) wrote about how one's experience of a book is affected by the previous books you've read. Books don't exist independent of each other; they are part of a larger universe of storytelling, literature, myth, language codes, whatever you want to call it.

The reading experience, in other words, is deepened by reading books in the context of other books. The order that you read books in makes a difference in how you experience them. My wife doesn't understand how I can read a handful of books at the same time, but I like the cross-contamination. I severely distrust mono cultures. I distrust arguments that don't recognize their own short-comings. I value ambiguity, even contradiction.

In a recent blog post, I wrote some high-level comments about how I preferred the "weird" over the "real." I don't have a powerful sense of what these categories mean. In any case, I don't mean them to be mutually exclusive or water tight. But I was trying to say something that I sense to be "true" about my reading tastes. I am drawn to books that undermine certainties. I have a notion that literature is ideally suited for this. Literature, I think Frye would say, isn't about reality; it's subject isn't the real. Literature is a system of self-referential patterns, an un/stable house of language cards. (Frye was more structuralist than I would prefer to be.)

Anyway, I don't find much structuralist stability in reality and so prefer the self-consciously unstable world of certain kinds of "fictional" books. ("Reality" being the one word Nabokov insisted ought always to be in quotation marks, a quote Carol Shields was fond of.) My recent essay on Shields' short stories can also be read as a defense of the "weird," and a slap against sociological readings of Shields' influence and impact.

But what about the books? Why are they piling up?

The answer is short and simple. My wife has breast cancer. She is half-way through an 18 week chemotherapy treatment. That's why I have so many books beside my bed. I keep buying them, and I want to read them, but I can't read them. My brain is far too consumed with other storylines, projected fears, mind-over-matter positive thoughts. So I am writing this post to engage these books, which I will read, somehow, eventually.

Blood Meridian by Cormack McCarthy (Vintage, 1985). I'm on page 267 of this one. I bought it maybe five years ago and started it once, then abandoned it after 10 pages. I have returned to it now and will finish it. Yes, the language is haunting. Yes, the violence is catastrophic. Here's a quotation from page 245: "Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (Harper Collins, 2010). I've read 20 pages. They made me smile. I was pleased by the complex ironies Franzen employs with great skills. Now I know that Leah McLaren has warned readers that Franzen's novel isn't anything more than "simply droning on about nothing for 567 pages," so I may be in for a grand disappointment. (My mother-in-law didn't like the book either.) Still, even in the first 20 pages, I would dispute (pace McLaren) that Franzen is "faxing it in." McLaren puts down to "sheer laziness" the "artistic trend" that the "great narrative masters of our time" are "confining the scope of both their storytelling and insights to the suburban kitchen sink." Wow. We're a couple of decades past the K-Mart realists of Carver et al, so McLaren is well late to the party; and I just suspect (apropo of nothing) that the satire is lost on many readers who are otherwise keen on consumerism and such. Moving on.
How to Read Beauvoir by Stella Sandford (WW Norton, 2006). I picked this up on impulse. Existentialism. When your life is shocked by cancer, you tend to be thrown back on first principles. Why are we here? Who are we? Why go on? This is a slim book, and I've read the first two chapters. One called "Anxiety," the other "Ambiguity." I'm digging it.
Sandra Beck by John Lavery (Anansi, 2010). I wish my head was clearer, so I could read this book. I read the first six pages and I remembered why I hold Lavery in such high esteem. I hope to come back and write more about this book later. Needless-to-say, it's not about suburban kitchen sinks.
The Rebel by Albert Camus (Vintage, 1956). More existentialism. I haven't read much Camus. I tend to think about existentialism as a series of cliches. But it appeals to me at the moment. Taking a hard look into the void. I've read the introduction, but none of the book so far.
Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa by W.P. Kinsella (Oberon, 1980). I picked this up used. The title story was in an anthology I read in high school. I still remember it. Kinsella has faded from public view in recent years. His stories aren't celebrated in Metcalf's "Century List" and tend to be more known now for, um, racially complicated issues than their craft. But I'm curious to read this book with fresh eyes. I'm hoping to be pleased.
Flying to America by Donald Bartheme (Counterpoint, 2007). From the master of the absurd, 45 more stories. The uncollected Bartheme. The stories his editors have posthumously gathered. I like what Bartheme stories do to my brain. They send sparks down my spine. Here's a quotation: "Order is not interesting, Perpetua said. Disorder is interesting." Are there insights a post-Vietnam dystopic imagination can teach us in our dystopic 21st century meltdown? Surely to Betsy, yes.
The Mountie at Niagara Falls by Salvatore DiFalco (Anvil, 2010). Three? Four dozen stories? In 141 pages? What's up here? Sharp fragments of narrative. Some work better than others. Okay. But the cumulative effect is a rattling, an unsettling. Isn't that what I said I was looking for earlier on (up there).
Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod (Biblioasis, 2010). Yes, Alistair MacLeod's kid. But he is known to me as the buddy to my buddy, Harold Hoefle. In fact, HH gets special mention in the credits. This is a beautiful book and by all accounts brilliant, but I'm suspecting it may be more lyrical than my reading tastes are desiring at the moment. As per Frye, the right time needs to find the right book ... or the other way around?
Complete Physical by Shane Neilson (Porcupine's Quill, 2010). Poetry by my old Danforth Review colleague, who is also a medical doctor. Neilson has a talent for powerful compression of language. By which I mean, his poetry can be dense and pack a wallop. When writing about poetry, I always feel I lack a proper vocabulary. I don't know what to say about Shane's stuff, except it's uniquely his, and that's the mark of a true craftsman.
Unleashed by Sina Queyras (Book Thug, 2009). A book from a blog. I haven't read any of this yet. Needing to find the right time, place, space.
People Still Live in Cashtown Corners by Tony Burgess (CZP, 2010) and Ravenna Gets by Tony Burgess (Anvil, 2010). An embarrassment of riches. Two new books by Tony Burgess. Bring on the flesh-eating language viruses and zombies. Crush the suburban kitchen sinks.
I Am A Japanese Writer by Dany Laferriere (D&M, 2010). I started reviewing books by DL nearly 20 years ago, then he stopped publishing in English. Now he's back. More, please. More.
Imagining Toronto by Amy Lavender Harris (Mansfield, 2010). I have been anticipating this book for a couple of years now. An offshoot, or culmination, or by-product of, or whatever, of the Imagining Toronto website, this book excites me because I am bored to death with the discourse about my home city and I trust what I've seen of Harris's approach to her project. I admire it, frankly.
Around the Mountain by Hugh Hood (Porcupine's Quill, 1994). First published in 1967, this cycle of short stories was intended to be sold to tourists during Expo '67. The stories cycle geographically around Montreal's "Mountain." It's a book I've been curious about for some time, and I finally ordered it. Another meditation on time/place.
The Complete Novels by Flann O'Brien (Everyman's Library, 2009). Must be what remains of my celtic blood, but I was filled with tickles the first time I dipped into The Third Policeman and At Swim-Two-Birds, and the opportunity to have all of O'Brien in one place was too much to pass up. As should be obvious by now from the list above, I do, too, prefer to the weird to the real, and that's a genuine aesthetic choice, I'll argue any time, however "content based" it may be. A self-conscious use of language as a destablizing force is an acknowledgement of complexity ... anxiety and ambiguity ... and whatever else is in the rest of that book on Beauvoir. I'm guessing. It helps ensure each day is as interesting as the last.