A summer of reading

I started the summer of 2012 by reading Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

These were the first two books I read following my wife's death from breast cancer in May.

I wrote an essay about "returning to reading," and it was published by the literary blog Numero Cinq in July.

Other books I read over the summer:
- Off Book by Mark Sampson
- Hamlet by Shakespeare
- Fathers and Sons by Turgenev
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- Flaubert in Egypt by Gustave Flaubert
- The Victim by Saul Bellow
- Widower's House: A Study in Bereavement (or how Margot and Mella forced me to flee my home) by John Bayley

I'm also poking my way through:
- A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain
- Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhaur
- Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
- This Side Jordan by Margaret Laurence
- Saints of Big Harbour by Lynn Coady
- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Long, Last, Happy by Barry Hannah

Do you see a pattern? I don't see a pattern.

Some of these books are works I've "meant to get to" and now find myself seeking out. Some I've picked up in used book shops. Others have been on a shelf in my house, ignored.

There's a lot of ribald reveling in the oddity of humanity in the above, but there's also some earthy earnestness.

I found in Turgenev cynicism that was starkly contemporary, and in Huck Finn's Mississippi adventure a freakishness consistent with the current U.S. election cycle.

I felt Hamlet's pain as my own, and, like Sampson's protagonist, remembered how wild and liberating the internet seemed in the 1990s.

Bellow's early novel contains both his trademark singing souls and bureaucratic absurdity of a Beckettean order.

But Flaubert in Egypt? Twain in Germany? Alien and eccentric. The diversity of human weirdness is duly noted.

Schopenhaur? I read the first paragraph and laughed. Likely not what he intended, but there is a dark humour there that I've seen before and like. I went to Schopenhaur after reading The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones. Schopenhaur is referenced throughout that book, and I was curious for more. The introduction compares Schopenhaur to "our own great pessimist" (Shakespeare), and I hadn't thought of the Bard that way before. I'd thought of him as a poet of chaos (like Bob Dylan). But pessimist? Hmm.

A Sentimental Education I'm drawn to, I think, because it's other worldly. Most of my life I've felt more akin with 20th century literature and not much desire about the 19th century so-called masters. But this summer that has changed. The contemporary has become fraught and I want to read the back catalog.

Early Margaret Laurence, set in Africa. Curious. Barry Hannah, the selected. Wild and wonderful. Lynn Coady just because I haven't got around to that one yet.

I started my essay on Woolf and Beckett without a voice, or with the most meager of voices, and with the faintest of ears. I was only getting one frequency, and I couldn't make out the full signal.

I can hear more now. I can speak more now. But the world is different. There has been a break from the past that will never heal.  Beauty, however, remains, and much else. A deeper recognition of the mixed-up-ness of everything. A recognition that there is no resolution, no end to the storytelling.

The mighty river of literature just rolls on and on.

I Heart Short Stories - Part 2

Inspecting the Vaults by Eric McCormack (Penguin 1987, 1993).

The 1993 edition includes the novella The Paradise Motel. It also includes a cover blurb from a Montreal Gazette review: "odd and unsettling ... murder, deformity and cruelty are treated as everyday occurrences."

McCormack taught contemporary literature at the University of Waterloo while I attended that institution in the late-1980s, early-1990s. I didn't take his course, but I sat in on a couple. He taught Raymond Carver, Borges, Donald Bartheme. None of whom I'd heard of before.

He was also known as the author of a freaky collection of short fiction, Inspecting the Vaults.

I read it after I left Waterloo, during a period when I trembled with desire to write decent short fiction. What was that even? What was a short story?

I remember one McCormack class when he described meeting a woman whose grandmother had sat on the knee of Thomas Hardy (if I remember correctly). "There's a direct line from this classroom to Thomas Hardy," he said. Then he went on to describe a Hardy novel as one that turned on a plot point: "she drank a cup of tea."

No such subtlety to the degree of manners in the curriculum of McCormack's class. Later, after I'd asked McCormack to read some of my budding short fiction, I mentioned the blurb on his book to him.

"But murder, deformity and cruelty are everyday occurrences," I said.

He nodded knowingly and made a clever comment.

Cleverness is what shines out of his stories. Pessimism, too, likely. More than a flirtation with the gothic. A deep knowledge of world literature and movements away from realism. A fantastical imagination.

An un-Canadian disinterest in earnestness.

Reading this book helped me to define for myself what was the essential "storyness" in a short story. It wasn't the movement of action within a plot. It wasn't a twist or surprise ending. It was a manipulation of language and an attempt at a new kind of see-ing.

A digging deeper past surfaces and a stark honesty to reveal what one felt.

Eric, thank you. I haven't forgotten.

I Heart Short Stories - Part 1

It all stared with Hemingway, with the self-conscious literariness of the short stories, with the iceberg comment, with show-don't-tell and A Clean, Well-Lighted Place and Hills Like White Elephants.

I was taken with the idea that the author could provide, say, 10 per cent of the story (the iceberg above water) and leave it up to the reader to fill in the rest. The story would be like a painting, requiring engaged interpretation, not simply an exposition stuffed with all possible details, which is what Dickens seemed to me, over-written nonsense.

Later, I would read in A Moveable Feast how Hemingway's style evolved from viewing the suggestive brush strokes of the Impressionists, and the circle of influence grew tighter. Impressionism is what I thought art should be. But then I was a teenager and listened to The Doors.

Break on through. Capture the small, essential granules of life.

Portray grace under pressure.

Over the years, I've tried to unwind Hemingway's influence on my reading habits. I've broadened and complicated my views of what a short story can be. I've noted the limits of the Hemingway style, how minimalism can be a trap, how the heroic, the depressive and the male ego mix in Hemingway in sometimes destructive ways.

But even after all of that, it's where I've chosen to start what I hope will be a series of reflections on different short story authors and books, a random flowering of opinion and fact.

When I first read Raymond Carver, Short Cuts, I saw how he had taken Hemingway, added some Kafka, and revealed new textures of storytelling. Story making. So Much Water So Close To Home, for example, has a title that sounds like Hemingway. The minimalist style forces the reader to interpret "what's missing" in order to make sense of the action, the story also critiques the male ego and introduces a female voice in a way Hemingway could never quite provide.

So Hemingway is still part of the foundation of my reading experience, but also I look for writers who can breakout of the perspective of the Hemingway experience and put their own stamp on "reality."

Which is something I'll get to later, the whole question of whether language can refer to anything other than itself and the struggle between the realists and fabulists. Which may not be a struggle at all, just different points on a storytelling spectrum with no contradiction inferred between them.

For now, though, I salute Hemingway and his declarative sentences. They are built to last.

Ralph Ellison and Fussing about the Novel

Hospital waiting rooms aren't good for much, but they are places to pick up miscellaneous magazines.

And so it happened that this week past I acquired a copy of the January 12, 2012 New York Times Magazine, which includes an article by Garth Risk Hallberg titled "Why Write Novels at All?"

The past few weeks I've also been reading Ralph Ellison's essay collection, Going to the Territory, and the recent issue (#84) of Canadian Notes & Queries, which contains much of interest, but the essay I'm going to reference here is by Patricia Robertson and called "Against Domesticated Fiction, or The Need for Re-enchantment."

I also see the Douglas Glover has added an online summary of DG sources on how to write a novel.

Personally, I have no idea how to write a novel, and I don't have a locked-in view that novels should be any one way or another. Except that they should not be simple; they should not be cliched; they should challenge the reader and provide evidence of an originality of style, voice, technique and/or point of view. We don't need novels that sound like other novels or stories that replicate other stories.

In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera argues that novels should do what only novels should do. That is, now that we have TV, movies, radio and a host of other media, what is special to the novel?

Ellison's view (from "The Novel as a Function of American Democracy") is that "the novel has always been tied up with the idea of nationhood. What are we? Who are we? What has the experience of the particular group been? How did it become this way? What is it that stopped us from attaining the ideal?"

On Henry James, Stephen Crane and Mark Twain, Ellison says, "In the works of these men ... the novel was never used merely as a medium of entertainment. These writers suggested possibilities, courses of action, stances against chaos." "The novel functioned beyond entertainment in helping create the American conception of America."

To Canadian readers, this mission might sound familiar; it might remind us of the nationalist mission of the 1970s, that the primary job of Canadian writers was to define Canada. That is, it might seem a corporate mission rather than an individual mandate.

However, Ellison is at pains to repeatedly stress that writers ought to position themselves within the tradition of great writing first and foremost, and they need to avoid the swamp of the sociological "we." Ellison tells us he took his inspiration from Joyce, Eliot and Pound (as well as Twain, Hemingway, and Emerson) and claimed the pluralistic culture of America as his own well spring.

Repeatedly, he says that Americans are both black and white, European and African, in their cultural influences and it is not race or blood that defines an individual's culture or talent. It is individual force of will and self-education of all of the best and broadest of all of the world's cultures. But, for him, there is also a signature document: The American Constitution. Ellison's narrative of the evolution of the novel is bound up with the 18th-century celebration of the individual and the break from the British Crown. It is also bound up in the failure of that promise in the form of ongoing slavery, leading to the Civil War, and then the failure of the Reconstruction.

Ellison's claim is that it is the novel's job to help America complete its promise, and assist the creation of a new consciousness of the individual beyond the boundaries of race, social class, or other cliches. His essays make for stirring reading, and they remain surprisingly contemporary. One might say that they even foreshadow Obama, and also the failure post-2008 of a post-racial cultural revolution to take hold.

In the NYT Magazine, Risk Hallberg writes about what he called the Franzen Generation and a literary conference in Italy in 2006 called Le Conservazioni, rich with YouTube links.

The Franzen Generation consists of Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace, and their common element, says Risk Hallberg, is that these writers have made making us feel less alone the primary purpose of their fiction.

The focus, in other words, has become hyper-individual as the post-modern experiments have taken away our ability to agree on a common, stabilizing reality.

Risk Hallberg concludes that this approach "won't quite be enough" to ensure that "art is to endure."

Patricia Robertson's excellent essay also plays for high stakes, and she also identifies what she calls a "downward and inward trend of contemporary fiction."She quotes Janet Burroway:

The history of Western literature shows a movement downward through society from royalty to gentry to the middle classes to the lower classes to the dropouts; inward from heroic action to social drama to individual consciousness to the subconscious to the unconscious.

And the problem, says Robertson, is that "we have nowhere further to go."

At this point, I hear Ellison harking back to 1776 and the documents of the Founding Fathers. There were promises stated there that remain unfulfilled. There is an unfinished revolution that is still ripe with narrative. The financial collapse of 2008, for example, writ large the failure of American capitalism to deliver on the promise of a perpetually renewing middle-class dream. The poor got poorer and some of the rich went bankrupt, but very quickly the political and economic elites rushed not to fix the system, but return it to the status quo as much as possible.

Going forward, the crash of 2008 may affect more lives and be a more defining early-21st century moment than even 9/11. And we need our writers to grasp that.

Patterson echoes some of Ellison's moral vision. She calls on writers to "revivify old forms by using our imaginations in the service of new stories. In doing so," she says, "we will reclaim the essential role of the storyteller, the one who reminds us who we are and where we came from, and who restores the world through authentic story."

Actually, that sounds a lot like Ellison, doesn't it?

I look forward to reading the novel about Fort McMurray, Alberta. That's an epic awaiting its Balzac.

On Reading & Reviewing

Literary fiction consists of story and manner. That is, the same story (plot) can be told any number of ways. As Wallace Stevens reminded us, there are 13 ways of looking at a black bird, and many more multiple ways of writing fiction.

This is, of course, an over-simplification, but sharing any interpretation requires it.

Are some manners of fiction better than others? I can't say that this is so, except that surely some manners are worse than others.

Some are more niave and some are more complex, and as literary readers, it's the complexity we crave. Yes?

Not always. In fact, in my experience, rarely.

However the reading process works, it is subjective above all. You look at the black bird one way, and I see it another. Do we have any chance of understanding each other? Can we ever read the same book?

What can the book reviewer hope to accomplish?

In the past, I have answered this question (for myself) by trying to convey in my reviews a clear articulation of my response to the book ... to back up that response with quotations from the text. If someone has a difference response to the book, then they can at least see the "evidence" behind my conclusion.

Lately, I haven't written any reviews. Not even on this blog. I'm feeling an existential drift. In writing these blog posts, am I speaking only to myself? (If so, that hasn't been a problem in the past. Often, just the process of writing the review enabled me to understand more deeply my response to the book.)

Also, I've realized that my response(s) to book(s) are multiple. Not only do I not evalulate books by a thumbs-up, thumbs-down principle, but I also recognized that I have contradictory conclusions about many books. In fact, these are the complex books that I (say I) crave.

Andre Alexis's Beauty & Sadness was one such book. There are many others.

In writing reviews, how do I capture this multiplicity of thoughts? This rainbow of responses? We are taught to write an essay with a strong central thesis and back it up, bang, pow, smash, with confidence.

Is multiplicity not just wishy-washy-ness?

A recent post on Lemon Hound also addresses this conundrum.

First linking to Constant Critic, Sina Queryas then comments on why she likes that website:

...there is such a diversity of vision and style here and you know, I don't want to know what a reviewer is going to think about a book before I start reading a review....though I do want to know that there will be a consistent kind of looking, or an integrity of vision even if I don't agree with the reviewer, and that, she said, was her objective: consistent reviews.

Diversity and unity, engaged perpetually in the act of criticism, a revolution (spinning) of thought, never settled, yet always seeking coherence.

This blog attempts a spinning of opinions by providing links to other Canlit blogs, reinforcing that there is no single point of contact for any reader (or ought not to be).

And I attempt to write spinny reviews, that offer argument, and also, hopefully, open multiple avenues for (re)interpretation.

Interpretation as breath, as act of living, as unending.

A thought that intrigues me.

Robert Kroetsch

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.

Richard Ford & Men

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.

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[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/

"Teaching" Canadian Literature

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

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.

Carol Shields

The new issue of Canadian Notes & Queries (CNQ #80) includes my essay “Thinking about gender and narrative: The short stories of Carol Shields.”

Click here for PDF copy.

Check out the magazine, if only for the other contributors. It’s a lovely, newly redesigned mag – frequently stuffed with lively and necessary (and ocassionally ridiculous) content.

*

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The below is the bibliography for the essay, at least the bibliography for an earlier draft of the essay, which rambled hither and yon.

Blake Baily, Cheever: A Life, Knopf, 2009.

Paul Bailey, “Wise funny tales of love stripped bare,” The Independent, August 6, 2004.

Stephen Henighan, “Reshaping of the Canadian Novel,” When Words Deny The World, Porcupine’s Quill, 2002.

Anne Hulbert, “’Collected Stories’: Woman on the Edge,” New York Times, February 6, 2005.

Barbara Kay, “Unreadably Canadian,” National Post, July 15, 2009.

David Willis McCullough, “Itemize This,” New York Times, June 11, 2000.

Carol Shields, “A View from the Edge of the Edge,” Carol Shields and the extra-ordinary, Marta Dvořák and Manina Jones, eds., McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007.

Carol Shields and Blanche Howard, A memoir of friendship: the letters between Carol Shields and Blanche Howard, Viking Canada, 2007.

Carol Shields, Collected Stories, Harper, 2004.

Carol Shields, “Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard,” Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction, Edward Eden and Dee Goertz, eds., University of Toronto Press, 2003.

Carol Shields, interview with READ Magazine (Vol. 1, No. 1), May 2000. http://www.randomhouse.ca/readmag/previous_issues/carol_shields.htm

David Thoreen, “Elegance and excess,” Boston Globe, February 20, 2005.

Adriana Trozzi, Carol Shields’ Magic Wand: Turning the Ordinary into the Extraordinary, Bulzoni, 2001.

“What is the best work of American fiction in the last 25 years?” New York Times, May 21, 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/books/fiction-25-years.html and online discussion http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/books/fiction-discussion.html?_r=1&ex=1156651200&en=d6ed6813166bea8f&ei=5070

Jim Smith, Patrick Lane

Earlier this week, I was thinking about writing a blog post called "Literature WTF."

I was despairing for a new book to read, disappointed by the gossipy coverage of the latest "Giller Scandal," and turning over again in my muddled brain for the upteenth time questions about what is literature, what isn't, and who cares.

I care, clearly, though I don't understand why I can still get so enraged by the idiocy of "book news." The Giller Prize every year seems to spark much stupidity.

Hooray, books are being given front page news.

Hooray, a book award show is on TV.

Boo, every year there seems to be more commentary about the selection process, the jurors, the conflict between large and small publishers, etc., than there is about ... what?

What is it that I'd prefer to be given prominence in the major media?

This is my muddle.

Oprah's Book Club has generated ongoing controversy for seeming to promote books as a form on therapy, the major theme of Oprah's media empire being personal redemption. And my spine stiffens when I hear people speak about liking a book because they:

• identified with the protagnonist
• found the characters likeable
• related to the problem the protagonist had to covercome

Or equally if they disliked a book because of the opposite reasons: found the characters unlikeable, etc.

The shortfall here, of course, is that there is no analysis (perhaps no comprehension) of literature as language-made. That is, no arguments are often put forth about the author's use of language (complex, simple, good, poor).

Difficult language is sometimes described as "poetic" (Ondattje gets this label frequently), an oversimplication. Poetry is obscure and prose that is difficult must be good and, therefore, like poetry, is the false argument often put forward.

John Metcalf has made a career of reinforcing the need for more vigorous criticism of the language used by our writers. But there is more. There is also genre analysis. How does one book related to others similar to it. There is also ... well, all sorts of different kinds of analysis.

Depth, however, isn't what the major media are good at. They are known for the opposite.

Superficiality.

So I don't feel betrayed (pace Andre Alexis) when the major media can't produce decent literary analysis. They never have, and they never will.

Yet it irks me.

Here are some recent links on the recent "Giller Scandal":

• Toronto Star: Good luck trying to buy a copy of the Giller Winner
• Nigel Beale: Susan Swan accuses Giller judge of conflict of interest
• NOW: Giller Gossip Grates
• National Post: Great art can't be rushed
• Globe and Mail: I want my Skidsrud and I want it now
• rob mclennan: MINE MINE MINE NOW NOW NOW

Sigh.

Stray related thoughts. A couple of weeks ago, my six-year-old step-daughter avidly explained to me the difference between fiction and non-fiction (a concept she had learned that day in school). "Non-fiction is real," she said, "and fiction is made up."

Later she asked me if Shrek was fiction or non-fiction.

"Fiction," I said. She pondered this.

"Right," she finally agreed. "Because there's no such thing as a talking donkey."

After 9/11, it was common to hear that sales of fiction were down. Sales of non-fiction were up. People wanted to make sense of the "new normal." I challenge the underlying assumption that non-fiction better explains the world (pre- or post-calamity).

For one, the other thing that people were doing post-9/11 was returning to poetry. Interest in Auden's September 1, 1939 surged (click on link to hear that poem read by Dylan Thomas).

But more generally we interpret the world through language, frame it with stories, turn sequences of events into narratives. Facts are meaningless outside of context. Context is meaningless without the movement and ordering of time.

Cause/effect, in other words, is fiction.

It is what we make it up to be.

A reader of George W. Bush's memoirs, for example, could come to no other conclusion.

Shrek is to non-fiction what the Bush White House was to the events in Kafka's TRIAL. That is, a manufactured reality that locked in its own pre-determined conclusions. It could have been different, given a different set of imaginative gifts.

Or as Bob Dylan said, "If I can think it, it can happen."

Which brings me to Jim Smith's Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems (Mansfield Press, 2009) and Patrick Lane's Witness: Selected Poems 1962-2010 (Harbour, 2010).

These two "selected" collections round up the careers of two significantly different poets. Smith's book is edited by the evil genius Stuart Ross, whom I have previous described as "Canada's leading literary surrealist." Smith shares Ross's attraction for the well chosen odd juxtaposition. Another feature of the book is an attraction to radical political positions (i.e., Sandanistas good, Ronald Reagan bad), a quality I found endearing and which ignited within me waves of nostalgia. (Where did I put that Clash CD?)

Smith and Ross have mixed old and new poems non-linearly. That is, having not read Smith before (he's been publishing since 1979) I had no idea which were "selected" poems and which ones were "new," except to infer from clues in the content (like references to the Nicaraguan class struggle). The approach means the naive reader (me) can approach all of the content fresh, and I did, and I enjoyed it. It left me, frequently, befuddled, but no more so than when I make my daily scan of CNN.

Perhaps you can see where I'm going with this.

Reality is absurd, so the absurdists are the true realists.

Patrick Lane's Witness disappointed me. Many of the poems are about animals. They seemed like Ted Hughes lite. There were poems of youth, work, hardship, violence - earnestly told, yes, but shimmering like non-fiction. They were too real; they didn't spark with imaginative weirdness.

At least, not to me.

Without imaginative weirdness, how can I trust that they are true?

Donkeys do talk, you know.



http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

On Reviewing - Elvis Stojko

Elvis Stojko is arguably Canada's best figure skater ever. He is also evidently of the school of evaluative reviewers (as opposed to descriptive reviewers).

Exhibit A: Stojko's post about men's figure skating at the Vancouver Olympics.

The title is, "The night they killed figure skating."

Stokjo concludes with:

Figure skating gets no respect because of outcomes like this. More feathers, head-flinging and so-called step sequences done at walking speed – that’s what the system wants.

I am going to watch hockey, where athletes are allowed to push the envelope. A real sport.

He seems to be channelling his inner David Solway.

As I noted earlier:

Professional athletes face a phalanx of television cameras and newspaper reporters mere seconds after every single devastating loss (or celebratory victory). Politicians face the scrutiny of policy wonks, the media, and the heat of their colleagues in Question Period. Medical research progresses due to the rigour of peer review. Research and development in all fields depends on transparent, accountable, honest scrutiny of tentative conclusions. The world is a marketplace of ideas, John Milton said four centuries ago. The clash, conflict, and negotiation of ideas is the essence and root strength of democracy, which was exactly Ms. Roosevelt’s point. If we are to be afraid of anything, we must be afraid of silence. Silence is death. Silence does more than stagnate dialogue, it is the end of dialogue. Monologue (“everyone thinking alike”) is not just everyone thinking poorly; it is not thinking at all, as Orwell reminded us: 2+2=5 and WAR IS PEACE.

And yet silence is exactly the quality championed by many book reviewers.

Here's more of Stojko:

How can you be Olympic champion when you don’t even try the quad? If you’re going to take the quad out, why not take out another triple axel and just have more of the other stuff so the International Skating Union can make it more into an “art” recital.

Plushenko had a great performance. His footwork was great and maybe his spins weren’t quite as good as Lysacek’s, but it wasn’t that big of a difference. He also had a quad toe triple toe that wasn’t even attempted by anyone else. He did both triple axels, so all the jumps were there.

But the judges’ scoring was ridiculous.

Here's a quote from Solway's Director's Cut:

Our poets dress themselves up as renovators of the language without whom, presumably, people would be reduced to carrying out their ordinary discourse in grunts and pantomimes, like the speculators of Lagado. The contradiction here is that many of these same poets have already valorized common speech as the register in which they blithely continue to work.

A page later, he is blasting both the "simplifiers" and "complicators" (i.e., those poets who celebrate common speech and the academics who champion theory and obscurity). Neither group, says Solway, produce real poetry, as Stojko says these Winter Olympics are producing real figure skating competition.

Solway refers to sociologist Erving Goffman's study of "'selective disattention' to facts which would otherwise challenge the frame of discourse and perception we take for granted." Unfortunately, the example he provides to illustrate this point is infected with an error. He mentions "Bobby Hull" scoring a goal which won the Stanley Cup, even though his foot was in the crease, a violation of what was then an NHL rule. Of course, it was Bobby's son, Brett, who scored that goal. The point being, however, that mass delusion decends to allow us to forget the rule and accept the "reality."

Challenging the frame of discourse would be a good description of what Stojko is up to in his article. The reality he sees is different from the reality of the judges. Solway is equally attempting to articulate a classification system across a broad field of poets, a system meant to alert poetry readers to their slumbering predicament.

My point here isn't to suggest that I agree with these critics -- only to draw a parallel between them. This is criticism that is interesting to read and challenging to think about it.

I'll have more to say about Solway later, after I finish his book.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Oh Canada - 2010 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony

I thought - I wonder what the rest of the world thinks.

Not because Canada needs "validation," but the opening ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver last Friday was awash in local iconography. Most of it quite lovely. The risk of descent in to kitsch, of course, was high -- and it wasn't completely avoided. But there were a number of moments that reached for the profound.

I'd link to some of them here, but the International Olympic Committee -- that model of fair play and equal competition (ha, ha) -- has sent an army of monkeys to strip all content from YouTube and other sources (though the death of a Georgian luger can be seen over and over again on the official CTV site). Shame refuses to bow before profit. "Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch!" as Allen Ginsberg wrote in "Howl." (Notice I was able to link to that....)

Anyway, the rest of the world (results taken from a very small sample) seemed to enjoy the ceremony, but they were a bit perplexed by it.

In the U.K., the Indepenent's correspondent complained of getting the assignment to stay up all night:

The Winter Olympics? Me neither. It's hard enough getting worked up about a summer Olympics in this day and age.

An Olympic games opening ceremony? Me neither. But someone has to do it. So there we were at 2.0 yesterday morning, sitting up and tuned into the BBC, the bottle of Blue Nun in the fridge in case desperate measures were needed to make it through the night.

Still, s/he found the ceremony "was suitably classy. Or at least it managed to keep the ludicrousness to a minimum." Pretty good for someone from a nation that struggles to see beyond the seal hunt when it thinks of Canada.

While there is no indication that the correpondent understood or was at all engaged by the metaphoric apparatus of the diverse range of the ceremony's segments, the event's emphasis on geography wasn't lost on the correspondent, who wrote:

Canada is a country teeming with writers and musicians and some of their greatest were represented during what was at times a beautiful spectacle. Opening ceremonies are essentially tourist pageants for the host nation and Canada told its story through its fabulous landscape, from the Northern Lights of the Arctic Circle through to its vast golden prairies. A tableau featuring CGI images of the latter was particularly stunning: just a boy on the vast stage, the stadium bathed in yellow light and a lone voice singing Joni Mitchell's gorgeous ballad Both Sides Now.

[The "boy" was a girl.]

Australia's athletes reportedly enjoyed the experience. One Aussie website quoted athlete Bree Munro:

I thought it was actually quite spectacular. It was a great mix of all the different cultures from around Canada and it was just amazing the light show and technology that they’ve used. It’s moved opening ceremonies up to the next level. It’s a three dimensional show that offers everything, spectacular light to dancing, action and it was such a colourful collection of all Canadian culture. I was feeling proud to be part of such a spectacular event, and with every Canadian sitting there I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house.

The New York Times provided a typically wry report, which concluded with a comment about how tidy and civic minded Canadians are: "In Vancouver on Friday, young people thronged the streets for a couple of hours after the ceremony, singing, dancing, banging on drums. Then, almost at midnight on the dot, most of them went home."

Two evaluative paragraphs from the Times' report follow:

This ceremony was not without its marvels: there was a giant bear, whales spouting their way across the stadium floor, the now obligatory fliers and levitators. But a bigger part of the appeal was that the proceedings actually had some content.

The ceremony was long, a little dull at times, but it was also thoughtful and stirring. It was authentically and unabashedly Canadian. The poet Shane Koyczan pointed out that his was a country not afraid to use the words “please and thank you.” You could add that it’s a country unafraid to put a poet up there on the stage.

"Authentically and unabashedly Canadian" is an interesting phrase. It could mean that the ceremony had the emotional tenor of a Tim Horton's commercial. Or it could mean -- what?

This is what I'm interested in exploring, this thing the Times calls "content."

Personally, I didn't find the "poem" moving, but I did find it interesting. More on that below. In the meantime, The Toronto Quaterly has posted video and a copy of the complete poem, for those who haven't seen/heard/read it.

Ian Brown also provided an analysis of the ceremony's "content" in today's Globe and Mail:

The thing is this: it's a complicated country.

A lot of people noticed that Friday night, watching the opening ceremonies of the Games in Vancouver. They saw an abstract Canada, a place that has more collective interests than it does people to explain and reinforce them. It's a country that is an idea as much as it is a country, a strange and surreal and often lonely and sometimes surprisingly serious idea. And that, impressively, was what the ceremony was about.

Here's two of Brown's evaluative paragraphs:

The Canada the opening ceremonies showed to the world displayed a country that isn't afraid to use symbolism at an elevated level, despite an audience of millions. They could have pandered, but they didn't. The opening night of the Vancouver Olympics displayed a country that wasn't afraid to perform a spoken poem or recite passages from books - books! - in the middle of a stadium filled with about 50,000 people wearing white condom-like capes; that mixed in a minute's silence and a flag at half mast and a small funeral oration, thereby confronting the looming spectre of the death of an athlete that morning. All this happened in the middle of a breathtakingly beautiful and wet city on the edge of the sea. The sea was part of the show too, the importance of that sea and what is in it.

The Landscape of a Dream, the extended, multi-chaptered dance that formed the core of the show, was daring all on its own. It's always a risk to be sincere; the trick is not to be earnest. It wasn't. Up in the dignitaries' box, even Stephen Harper, a man who has the physical charm of a bathtub plug - even Hairhat looked like he was getting carried away. The whales and their blowholes spouting from the floor alone, to say nothing of the astonishing effects produced by the magic Kleenex box that hung from the centre of the ceiling - clouds, storms, water, blizzards cracking and melting ice - were funny and beautiful too. It was a show that took the elemental events of Canadian life, things that are often clichés, and dropped deeper into every one of them. The aerialist show over a patchwork of prairies could easily have appeared on any stage in any large sophisticated city in the world, and brought the house down.

I agree with Brown's sense that (parts of) the ceremony "dropped deeper" into Canada's clichés. And yet -- what was it saying? Perhaps it was only saying Canada is dominated by its geography, something uninteresting, something we've long known.

“If some countries have too much history, we have too much geography,” said former Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King in a speech to the House of Commons in 1936. This quotation comes from the Statistics Canada website, though David Solway attributes the same quote to John A. Macdonald in Director's Cut. It's also attributed to John A. here. (Quel fuck, man. Who knows?)

But there were those other elements, too. The "poem," k.d. lang singing Leonard Cohen, the First Nations dancers, the quotation from Who Has Seen the Wind?, the Martime fiddlers, including Ashley MacIsaac. Plus that segment about modern, urbanized Canada .... wait, um, I must have slept through that part. Did anyone else see a segment that represented Ontario? Is that what Wayne Gretzky and Bobby Orr were doing there?

Ah, but there's what Brown was talking about when he said Canada was "a place that has more collective interests that it does people to explain and reinforce them." I see, for example, that the federal Heritage Minister has joined the post-game commentary, asking why the ceremony didn't feature more French. (Celine Dion was too busy trying to have a baby, apparently. No joke.)

After the CGI-enhanced profundity, Canada returns to its absurdities.

Which brings us back to that "poem." If I wasn't moved by it, what did I find interesting?

First, I was intrigued that the ceremony would include such a direct statement that Canada is a nation that struggles to define itself, that it may well be a nation beyond definition, that perhaps the nation's central idea is we don't know who we are, but we are a work-in-progress. How different we are from our friends to the south, who speak of "American exceptionalism" and speak of "moving towards a perfect union." Canada, the Olympic ceremony said, is unfinished; it is a collection of parts that don't cohere.

Still, Shane Koyczan looked like a parody of Ginsberg, with his scraggly beard, glasses and black hat (not a beret, but very nearly). I enjoyed watching him, sure. He was entertaining, but his "poem," as a poem, wasn't good. It was full of what Solway calls "undistinguished diction and trivial infatuations." As a civic statement, however, Koyczan's performance played much better. His future in Canadian literature is clearly bright.

On the other hand, as Brown noted, "The trick is not to be earnest." Koyczan was, cloyingly so. Yes, we say please and thank you. We also invented the Blackberry; built up, then collapsed Nortel; have adulterous politicians and serial sex murderers (both archetypal degenerates have been making news here in Upper Canada of late).

The outlines of a conflict are emerging. It is the conflict for the nation's artistic soul. For while the Olympic opening ceremony was more than a typical "tourist pageant," and as a portrait of the nation's "collective interests" the CGI prairie, whales, northern lights, etc., "dropped deeper" into our clichés than we might have expected from such a public spectacle, in the end it was a "Song of Ourselves." A statement of powerful narcissism. A trip to a nuclear enhanced gift shop.

As popular entertainment, that is likely as good as it gets. What the ceremony also showed, however, is the end of the track of the narrative line Canada has been following post-Meech Lake. We can all be Canadians, this line says, as long as we all are different and allowed to follow our own ways. Our fractured minority federal parliament is another example. We are a country of powerful regional identities, bound by the practices of common courtesy. Down this road live increasing neuroses, which may be our fate. The Australian athlete was wrong, for example, too see in the ceremony "all Canadian culture." What was on display was simply most of our common tropes.

As noted earlier, I've been reading some of the crotchety critics published in the past decade by Porcupine's Quill. Three specific titles:

• A Lover's Quarrel by Carmine Starnino
• Director's Cut by David Solway
• Ripostes by Philip Marchand

Each of these books, in its own way, reads against the "Canadian consensus." As the blurb on the back of Marchand's title says: "The tone is considered, and critical rather than celebratory, although the essays are respectful of the genuine achievements of Canadian literature in the past few decades. They try to clear the air, as it were, of boosterism, political correctness, and other attitudes which hinder the appreciation and reception of good writing."

Critical rather than celebratory. That's what I've been attempting here. Some folks, I know, think that these three critics are writing out of mean spirits. Others celebrate them because they have a keen ability to crush high flying reputations. Starnino takes down Susan Musgrave; Solway stab Al Purdy; Marchand argues that Margaret Laurence had an "uninteresting mind."

We will never be free of the narrative risks of our vast geography and our nation's regional nature. However, the war against cliché demands more than that we "drop deeper" into them. The opening ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics had numerous lovely and moving moments. As Brown said, it "used symbolism at an elevated level." It illuminated much of our present and our past. It demands a criticism equal to it, one that can open up the future.

Postscript:

Zach Wells revised take on the "poem" -- from his blog.

On Reviewing II

Following up on "On Reviewing," I've posted below an essay I wrote a while back, reflecting on the act of reviewing books.

[This essay first appeared in The Danforth Review, 2003]

*

"If you are a book reviewer, you have a duty to have an opinion, and you have a duty to present that opinion as honestly, as completely, and backed up with as much evidence and argument as you can muster." What's so hard about that?

It is reported that Eleanor Roosevelt said whenever everyone is thinking alike, no one is thinking very well. This simple but profound truth is applicable in every field except book reviewing. Book reviewers are encouraged to think well, but must limit themselves so as to “never write a review in such a way that you’d be afraid to face the author at a party the next day.” This is the appalling conclusion, in any event, reached by Annabel Lyon in a recent issue of The Malahat Review dedicated entirely to the subject of reviewing. The decorum of book reviewing, according to Lyon, demands the reviewer become the guardian of the author’s feelings; book reviewing is somewhere between flirting and nursing. On the other hand, perhaps it isn’t the author’s feelings that need protection. Lyon says reviews must be written so that THE REVIEWER is not “afraid to face the author.” Book reviews should be written to ensure literary parties maintain their joie de vivre.

No.

Professional athletes face a phalanx of television cameras and newspaper reporters mere seconds after every single devastating loss (or celebratory victory). Politicians face the scrutiny of policy wonks, the media, and the heat of their colleagues in Question Period. Medical research progresses due to the rigour of peer review. Research and development in all fields depends on transparent, accountable, honest scrutiny of tentative conclusions. The world is a marketplace of ideas, John Milton said four centuries ago. The clash, conflict, and negotiation of ideas is the essence and root strength of democracy, which was exactly Ms. Roosevelt’s point. If we are to be afraid of anything, we must be afraid of silence. Silence is death. Silence does more than stagnate dialogue, it is the end of dialogue. Monologue (“everyone thinking alike”) is not just everyone thinking poorly; it is not thinking at all, as Orwell reminded us: 2+2=5 and WAR IS PEACE.

And yet silence is exactly the quality championed by many book reviewers. For example, in the same issue of The Malahat Review mentioned above, Zsuzi Gartner wrote: “Often the best response to a lame book is murderous silence.” And Jan Zwicky, an editor of The Fiddlehead, says she’s “made a point of requesting that a review be written only if the reviewer was genuinely enthusiastic about the book.” Zwicky has concluded: “If we have a duty to be negative, we have a duty to be right.”

No.

If you are a book reviewer, you have a duty to have an opinion, and you have a duty to present that opinion as honestly, as completely, and backed up with as much evidence and argument as you can muster. The world is a marketplace of ideas. No book review is ever “right.” It is just one node on a larger wave, one opinion, one more quack into the void of silence. The author presents his or her work to the world. Reviewers and readers respond to it. To treat a work with “murderous silence” is disrespectful; to commission only “enthusiastic” reviews is deceitful; to believe negative reviews “have a duty to be right” assumes one is able to stand in a position of omniscient authority.

No.

On my bookshelf I have a slim volume called Rotten Reviews: A Literary Companion. It contains quotes from negative reviews of works like Ana Karenina: “Sentimental rubbish . . . Show me one page that contains an idea” (Odessa Courier, 1877). Oh, Tolstoy. How much better off we would have been if the world had treated you with “murderous silence,” but then that’s exactly how the Communists treated many authors, taking the adjective literally. (It doesn’t need to be said; let’s cast another glance at Orwell; this model offers nothing but discouragement.) And so, please allow me to build on my earlier point and assert: No one knows if a book is "good" or "bad". In the first place, those categories borrow far too heavily from the field of ethics; assume "errors" that may be nothing such; and carry moralistic overtones that borrow from fields other than literature. (One can turn to Aeropagitica, the essay of Milton's that includes the phrase "marketplace of ideas," to witness even the free speech crusader arguing all books should be allowed to enter the marketplace of ideas -- be printed, basically -- but only if the bad ones can be sorted out and burned; the immoral ones; "Papish" ones . . . Milton was a fervent anti-Catholic.) (For an expanded look on the aesthetics of "error," see TDR's interview with Tim Conley, author of Joyces Mistakes.)

Scott Anderson’s editorial in the December 2003 issue of Quill & Quire (from which I’ve taken the above quotes from The Malahat Review) argues:

The idea that silence is the best response to a bad book ignores the possibility that well-written negative reviews add as much to the public discussion of literature as [positive reviews of] good ones. We’d all tire quickly of a dialogue about literature that stuck continually to the same positive note.

Yes.

Some of us are tired of it already, though I wish Anderson had made his case stronger. Not only do negative reviews have something to add to the discussion of literature; without them, there is no discussion of literature. Without them, dialogue devolves to monologue . . . and (please forgive my hyperbolic tendencies) we are on the road to a fascist state. LITERATURE IS NOT ABOUT CONSENSUS. Maybe I'm too sensitive, but I hear "if you're not with us, you're against us" in "a review [can] be written only if the reviewer [is] genuinely enthusiastic." There is a call there to help create the utopian state, the state that is the root of all despotisms. Despotisms are built on lies re-cast as truths. A world full of only positive book reviews is a false world. Everyone knows this. Authors don't expect to be reviewed positively all of the time. To suggest otherwise is to enter into the fantastical; it is to ask for a world outside of common sense. This is not the world we live in, and it is not a world we should attempt to build. In fact, this is a tendency we should be forcefully discouraging; this is a tendency that is a threat to us all (THE SKY IS FALLING, THE SKY IS FALLING, AHHHHHH).

Now that I've earned the title "Chicken Little," please allow me to complete my revolutionary act. Book reviewers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but invitations to the best book parties. I'm going to overthrow the categories of good book/bad book forever and suggest that books are interesting/dull. And that the burden of proof on whether a book is “interesting” falls on the reviewer. And that the reviewer can only release himself or herself from that burden by SPEAKING.

(An aside: Did you notice how Anderson tucked the modifier "well-written" in from of "negative reviews"? Let me stand up for poorly written negative reviews. Even poorly written reviews -- positive or negative -- can add to the discussion of literature.)

Speaking is not for everyone -- and that's okay. More than one writer has told me casually that s/he does not publish book reviews because the Canadian publishing industry is so small that one cannot afford to piss anyone off. It has even been suggested to me that the recent dramatic rise in the career of David Adams Richards is Exhibit A. As long as he lived in New Brunswick, the publishing industry could ignore him and devalue his work. However, as soon as he moved to Toronto, The Globe and Mail could not review him poorly because the reviewer could count to running into the author at Margaret Atwood’s house, or some such similar place. Hmm.

More distressing to me, however, is when I see a review in The Globe and Mail written by one of those same people who told me he could never write a negative review. Instinctively, I distrust that review. I do not want to engage it. Scott Anderson begins his Quill and Quire editorial by quoting Dale Peck's now infamous review of Rick Moody's The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions: "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation." What is the point of Peck's negativism? Anderson concludes: "It gets people talking about Dale Peck." Ah, reviewing as self-promotion. But doesn't it go both ways? . . . that is, isn't the reviewer who only says nice things equally suspect; perhaps more so, since engendering good feelings is a way of building one's literary capital, whereas negative reviewing is seen by many as career suicide.

(Write a negative review and you are either guilty of (a) self aggrandizement, or (b) career suicide. Hey, maybe you just didn't like the book. It happens.)

And speaking of career suicide . . . mea culpa: I review books. I have also published two short story collections, and I'd like to think there'll be more in my future. What do you think: Should I give up book reviewing before my reputation as a ship-sinker/self-promoter spreads to the four corners?

No.

The fact is, I've been reviewing books -- positively and negatively -- since I was an undergraduate over a decade ago, and so far no one has punched me in the nose. Some of those negative reviews were in Quill and Quire, some were in The Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Paragraph Magazine, Id Magazine, and Imprint, the University of Waterloo's student newspaper. Many other reviews have appeared on The Danforth Review. For this article, I've tried to make a list of all of the book reviews I've written. Only a rough estimate is possible, because I haven't kept all of them.

What I have at my fingertips is 61 books reviewed on The Danforth Review since 1999 and 35 books reviewed in other publications since 1990. A quick self-assessment reveals: 47 positive reviews, 17 negative reviews, and 32 mixed reviews.

Admittedly, a "mixed" review might be considered negative, especially if one is the author of the book under review. On the other hand, even this brief accounting has forced me to make decisions: How positive does a "mixed" review need to be before it stops being "mixed"? How negative does it need to be before it's truly negative? And who cares anyway? Well, those 17 people whose books I reviewed negatively probably care -- as do some of the 32 who wrote books I didn't exactly praise. On the other hand, I've only ever received two letters in response to negative reviews I've written. One from Michael Twist ("I am somewhat disappointed by your review of my book") and one by the student of Clarence Bolt: "Perhaps it will take another reading for you to understand what Clarence was really getting at." I appreciated these letters and wish I had received more. If book reviewing is about "the public discussion of literature," as Scott Anderson says, then opinions need to go back and forth -- and that happens far too rarely.

Much more often (for me), I find myself going back over the negative reviews I've written and wondering why I was so down on novel A or short story collection B. Sometimes it has to do with expectations; a book is set up to be one thing, then it turns out to be something else. Consistently, I've given low marks to books that struck me as overwhelmed with nihilism. As I said earlier, I believe if you are a book reviewer, you have a duty to have an opinion, and you have a duty to present that opinion as honestly, as completely, and backed up with as much evidence and argument as you can muster. When I write a book review, I try to be clear about my opinion: Did I like the book or not? Also, I try to provide evidence. Recently, I didn't think much of Ray Robertson's Mental Hygiene. I wrote:

Whatever one makes of Robertson's arguments, they cannot be called mentally shiny. The lack of close reading, sustained argument, and engagement with adversaries of substance is astonishing -- particularly given the promise of the title.

The fact is, I agreed with a lot of Robertson's underlying argument, but my disappointment overwhelmed my agreement. Someone said to me once, you dislike in others what you most dislike about yourself. This comment applies to my review of Mental Hygiene because I kept feeling that Robertson was guilty of errors that I'm prone to myself. I kept catching "errors" I wanted to correct. For example:

The first book reviewed is Morley Callaghan's The New Yorker Stories. Consisting of nine paragraphs, this review begins to discuss the book under consideration in paragraph six. The review begins with Robertson reminiscing about seeing Callaghan at the University of Toronto. Robertson was a second-year undergraduate, and Callaghan was an 85-year-old writer who once knew Hemingway. Now about those New Yorker stories -- Are they any good? Robertson tells us: "Anyone acquainted with Callaghan's later work won't be surprised by or disappointed with these early stories." Which is good news -- but a long way from critical commentary.

Critical commentary vs. reminiscing. I accused Robertson of lacking the former and emphasizing the latter, but maybe Robertson and I have a different idea of what "critical commentary" means. Maybe he was aiming for something I never quite grasped. Maybe I started reading with a widely distorted set of expectations. I think about these things because I think the engagement between reviewer and book is different every time. Every reviewer is unique ... and I'm a long way from perfect ... and capable of reminiscing myself ...

(I ran into a friend and he asked, "Was it you who wrote that review of Robertson's book?" Yes, I said. He said he read Mental Hygiene and quite liked it. I said, "I don't know what was wrong. I couldn't make it work for me." He said, "I had different expectations." I said, "I saw Ray Robertson at a party last month -- and spent the evening avoiding him." He said, "Yes, Ray's a threatening character." He was joking about that last part; he winked and made that clear.)

So, don't write a review if you can't meet the author at a party the next day.

No.

Write the review you want, then run like hell. Your readers deserve your honesty -- and so do the authors whether they appreciate it or not. And don't feel you need to be "right"; you can never be. You can only provide an argument that's strong or weak -- and strong arguments can only come from deep honesty, deep empathy, and references to evidence in the texts under review. (Getting a literary education and having a certain aptitude helps, too -- but that's a different essay.)

(A confession: In that Robertson review, I failed at "deep empathy"; I let my disappointment override that check; I made that error; and I regret that.)

You'll never learn anything unless you are open to the other; at the same time, you have a right to stake out your ground and defend it. Some might say it's more than a right; it's duty. Book reviewing confirms the paradox of relationship: How to be open to the other and secure in the self at the same time? It's no contradiction. It's the essence of the job.

Yes, play fighting can be fun ... but it does make one anxious that things will become nasty; that the "play" will be lost. Don't take it to the dressing room; leave it out on the ice.)

Ah, this could go on and on. One final point: Books that go outside the norm are both more likely to be misunderstood (reviewed poorly) and also more likely to be innovative -- and thus interesting. Negative reviews might actually be a barometer of rising talent. (Mary McCarthy was famously one of the few who positively reviewed William S. Borroughs' Naked Lunch.)

So, think for yourself, as the Beatles sang; have a rubber soul.

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