Polanski etc

Geraldine Ferraro was the Democrat Party's vice-presidential candidate in 1984. Recently, she wrote:

Polanski was convicted of a serious crime in the 70’s. He chose to abscond to France and because he had money and connections, has lived a charmed life, unhindered by his obligations to society. The message is, rich guys can get away with anything … or wait — is it only rich guys with friends in Hollywood? The statute of limitations for rape does not toll simply because 31 years has passed. And victims cannot “forgive” the rapist. The criminal justice system is meant to protect all of us.

Ferraro led off her comment piece this way:

“A male is guilty of rape in the second degree when, being eighteen years old or more, he engages in sexual intercourse with a female less than fifteen years old. Rape in the second degree is a class D felony.”

That is the current law in New York. When I was prosecuting these cases in Queens in the 70’s the law required that the child be less than 14. The legislature tightened it. But there is no doubt that California had the same protections for children when Polanski was prosecuted in California for having intercourse with a 13-year-old girl. It still does.

This isn't the usual type of topic for this blog, but two weeks ago I went to work. It was a normal day. I took a bit of a different route, got on a streetcar, and picked up one of those free newspapers.

There was a story on the first page about a 10-year-old who had been sexually assaulted. Someone had been arrested. There was a photograph.

"Merde," I thought. I know that guy.

His case is now before the courts. One can presume innocence, but it's hard. It messes one up.

Quick on the heels of this, Polanski was re-arrested. His case is international.

I hadn't realized that once upon a time, he'd pled guilty. And I'm uncertain what to make of most of the commentary. The New York Times blog debate, for example, that the Ferraro quotation is lifted from, began by posing this:

While it’s clear that the film industry forgave Mr. Polanski long ago, should society separate the work of artists from the artists themselves, despite evidence of reprehensible or even criminal behavior?

This strikes me as the wrong question at the wrong time. His re-arrest isn't about his art; it's about criminal acts he pled guilty to three decades ago.

At the same time, Polanski has unanswered legal questions that he'd like to see answered by the California courts.

Thirty-one years after his confessed criminal acts, due process has not unfolded.

If he had Michael Bryant's PR firm (and is it a stretch to say the ex-AG's integrity?), he would return to California voluntarily and let the process complete itself, fighting vigorously for his freedom, as he has every right to do.

Should we separate the work of artists from the artists themselves? Yes, of course.

But you don't get a pass on criminal action because you're an artist on the scale of Roman Polanski, or on the scale of the other dude.

The work can be assessed and reassessed over decades or centuries. But as individuals, we live in real time, and are accountable for our actions.

For the past three years, I've been tinkering away on a novel, and the justice system is a key element. The protagonist is a judge. He's old, weathered, tired, but he still retains his ideals. He believes in justice, but also that justice is flawed.

When I think about the justice system these days, I often find myself looking at it through the eyes of my protagonist. Or at least asking, "What would the judge think?"

About Polanski and the other newly accused he would think, let's test the evidence. Bring it forward and test it against the rules of the law. Do not try to win freedom through evasion. Be honest, steady and true.

Likewise, he would say that art based on lies is not good art. But art that tests the boundaries of truth may well be excellent.

He would say, "At the end of the day, a decision must be rendered."

Justice can be mean, cruel, and over-simplified. Or even just plain wrong (setting free O.J., for example). But within its boundaries, its systems of signs and laws, it imposes meaning. Art is a constantly shifting conflict of floating, destabilizing signifiers.

Art is about complicating meaning; the law is about clarifying it.

Do I have a point here? I wish I did.

Maybe it's: If you did the crime, you must do the time.

When in doubt, resort to cliche.

I keep seeing that headline about the 10-year-old girl. It makes me retch.

A police source said the victim was alone in the laundry room of a building shortly after the dinner hour Monday when she was allegedly taken into a stairwell.

"She fought tooth and nail as he tried to cover her mouth," a source said. "She put up quite the struggle."

I confess to wondering if it isn't all a misunderstanding. But the reporting so far points to other conclusions. I have met him and enjoyed talking to him, but I fear I don't know him.

The judge would say, that is what the justice system is there for. To sort shit like this out.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com

Alden Nowlan

In 2003, I interviewed Alden Nowlan's biographer, Gregory M. Cook. It remains one of my favorite interviews, and for some reason I thought of it today, so I've dug it up and here it is.

Greg was writer-in-residence at the University of Waterloo when I was there in the early 1990s. I like his answer to the final question, about what Nowlan would have to say about the 21st century.

I had forgotten this quotation, supplied in that final answer, but it's a good answer to why Nowlan is still bouncing around my brain:

Oh, admit this, man, there is no point in poetry
if you withhold the truth
once you’ve come by it.

*

Your new biography of Alden Nowlan (Pottersfield, 2003) has been a labour of love (as well as a challenge and a frustration). Perhaps the best place to begin is a summary of your relationship with Nowlan and how this book came to be.

Alden’s first letter to me on New Year’s Day 1963 carried a postscript: "Hope you’re raising literary hell at Acadia [University]. It needs it." Five years earlier, the editor of the student newspaper and a writer had been given – by the university vice-president, dean of arts, head of the history department and Mayor of Wolfville – twenty-four hours to get out of town. The charge was "blasphemy."

Alden agreed to an interview for the student literary quarterly Amethyst, which I had helped found a couple of years after that fiasco. So we met at the offices of the weekly Hartland (New Brunswick) Observer where he was in his eleventh and last year as a reporter and editor. It was his first magazine interview to be published in Canada. At this point his first four books had been published, including the pivotal The Things Which Are (Contact Press, 1962). We became fast friends for the next twenty years, corresponding and visiting each other.

Not long after my two-year residency at the University of Waterloo, I decided to write a biography of Alden. I was pleased when Lesley Choyce (Pottersfield Press) asked me for the manuscript this spring. Lesley published in Pottersfield Portfolio the last interview with Alden before he died in 1983.

Several people in One Heart, One Way express in their own words the magnetisms of Alden’s presence – his intellectual breadth and depth, his sense of real time (the continuity in which all the dead are his ancestors and the unborn his children), and, most of all, the generosity of his empathy. For me, he becomes an ideal older brother who knew I would write his biography. Yes, in that sense, the book is "a labour of love." After all, "objectivity" is a myth of science. So, I adopted a genre proposed in a letter Alden wrote to the author of a history: "affectionate scholarship."

*

My "challenge" was to recognize that omniscience is the privilege of fiction. My book is a document and, in part, a memoir. But only in part, because I adopt Alden’s understanding of "living memory." The oral history of our elders becomes so vivid in our consciousness that it is as though we experienced time and events before we were born. The concept is close to that of duree – or real time – in Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, which Alden felt was the most under-rated book he had ever read. (I hope the day is not far around the corner when a graduate student of literature will examine Alden’s works in light of the 1927 Nobel Laureate and ancestor of post-modernism.)

*

The only "frustration" I faced was the result of the rather pathetic realities perpetuated in the cultural politics of Canadian publishing and education. Perhaps we still live in a young country, because there seems to be an adolescent phenomena of hanging out with an "icon" in the group until he graduates (or dies) – in a kind of self-aggrandizing way – and then the magazine or anthology editors (often a contemporary poet or writer) and publishers – begin looking over their shoulders for a new pony to ride.

A senior editor in Toronto explained to me that her publishing house was populated with young people who don’t know who Alden Nowlan is a decade after his death. I find that a self-condemning admission on the part of an industry charged with the responsibility to mirror who we are.

Of course, it plays itself out closer to home. I recently visited a high school in Fredericton (the day before I had participated in the kick-off reading for the third Alden Nowlan Festival in the newly renovated quarters of the University of New Brunswick Graduate Student Association – called "The Alden Nowlan House," where he spent the last fifteen years of his life). I asked the assembled sixty students if any of them knew who Alden Nowlan is. Not one student did.

The Toronto editor’s recommendation was that I look to a Fredericton-based publisher, which had "staked a claim" on Alden Nowlan. And that raises the ugly head of another beast in the cultural politics of Canada – and one that threatened to drive Alden to distraction – the balkanization of the country. It’s the same creature by another name that acts itself out in Parliament in the Reform/Alliance (or whatever is this week’s brand name for disaffection) and the Bloc Quebecois.

The poetry: American poet Robert Bly states in his foreword to the biography that Nowlan is the greatest Canadian poet of the 20th century. For those unfamiliar with Nowlan's work, could you briefly state the case in favour of Bly's proposition?

Yes, Robert Bly, provides a sensitive preface, "The Nourishing Voice of Alden Nowlan," for my book. As a poet, psychologist, political activist and translator, Bly is well positioned to make his claim. I suppose the only person in Canada to imply the same is novelist David Adams Richards. Perhaps most Canadian contemporary Canadian poets and critics are still defending their own turf, although in my book I name several Canadians who are Alden’s senior and who said – or predicted – almost as much.

Bly’s search for truth knows no borders. In his five decades of publishing, he has introduced Scandinavian, South American, European, Indian and Middle Eastern poets to readers in the United States. Among them is Pablo Neruda, whose lines from the poem "Don’t tell me" in Epic Song -- "I soothe their wounds and close them. / This is the work of the poet" – I intend to borrow as an epigraph to my Songs of the wounded: selected and new poems (Black Moss 2004). My brother, poet Harry Thurston, said to me one day, "Bly looked south and saw Pablo Neruda. He looked north and saw Alden Nowlan."

I make the case for this claim quite simply. 1) The classic simplicity of Alden’s poetry is the secret of his accessibility. Perhaps no other poet in Canada is as versatile by genre (poetry, fiction, journalism, history, drama for stage, radio, film and television and political speech writing) and as prolific as Alden. There are 12,000 leaves in his correspondence, for example, in his papers at the University of Calgary. 2) His eclectic devouring of available libraries (private and public) since he was a child allowed him to avoid the pitfalls of formal education – the most critical pitfall being the standardization of our thinking (brainwashing). 3) He had an immense capacity to identify with the "other." In fact, it is so powerful that the poet himself becomes the third person, the "other," as he says in his notebook pages, in his work and in his life. This last feat is his most complex feat, but he achieves it with a magical simplicity that nearly defies analysis. Of course, empathy (entering) is the antithesis of analysis (circling around).

The life: Nowlan is remembered not just for his work but also for being a man of near mythological proportions. Nowlan's life, his story, if it's possible to separate the biological being from his literary production, resonates as a metaphor of his time, place, and gender. What sort of a man was he? And why is he often remembered, revered and feared so fiercely?

Alden’s life is a manifestation of mythological proportions – his omnivorous reading, his connectedness to all that is, his insatiable curiosity, and his absolute faith in his craft. Add his humility before his art and you have the ingredients of prophecy. He is remembered because he fulfilled the prediction he made for himself. Early (before he has turned thirty years of age) in his correspondence with novelist Raymond Fraser, he wrote:

I am fairly confident that [if] I keep living and growing and developing I will be considered Canada’s greatest living poet by the time I’m 40. But it won’t mean anything really....
All we can do is write the best we can. Saroyan says it is a fatal mistake to strive for greatness: he says a writer should concentrate on making whatever he is writing here and now the best of which he is capable....

In my realistic moments I think that the best I can hope for is to be a footnote in a history of Canadian Literature published 2062 A.D....

I’ve found by experience that it is a mistake for one to study his own motives too closely....

The aspiration is the joy, the striving, the dreaming just as love is the desire rather than the fulfillment.

Alden wrote to me that most literary criticism seems to be based on the fallacy that the writer writes his life, yet he also wrote to me that when people ask him what he writes about, he replies: "What it’s like to be Alden Nowlan. The poor bastard is all I’ve got to work with." He is revered for the courage to write – and live, as few can – with such honesty.

Feared? Fear is so often a manifestation of self (a projection), involving hypocrisy or envy – at the very least a lack of humility, which any artist must learn. Alden’s definition of a hypocrite was clear and probably the key to why people feared him. A hypocrite is: "one who is too kind to be wholly honest and too honest to be wholly kind." Such a person can get close enough to another human being to be wounded. In fact, I don’t know of any relationships where the parties don’t get wounded.

Alden’s publisher, Bill Clarke, speaks it well when he explains that if you are truly yourself with Alden you had nothing to fear. Many of us understood this and weathered his wrath when we let him down. Our education – both formal and social – conspired to encourage us to be what others expect us to be, rather than who we are. It’s a disastrous recipe for a poet, or any human being.

Regionalism: Northrop Frye once said that Canada had no east coast. Immigrants rode up the St. Lawrence, docked at Montreal and headed for Toronto. The silliness of this statement is evident to anyone on the Atlantic seaboard, but the statement is also profound because it clearly illustrates (among other things) the distortions that the cultural centre in this country inflicts on the margins. Nowlan lived and wrote outside the centre of cultural power. I imagine this was both a blessing and an irritation to him. Perhaps you could say about the friction between "down home" and "away" in Nowlan's life and work.

Frye was speaking the accepted norm – the status quo – of neo-Canadian cultural politics and commerce, all of which he found appealing because he is attracted to myth. I use the term "neo" because any of us who are seen to live on the so-called "margins" of those myths may understand Derek Walcott perfectly when he reminds us that civilizations don’t crumble – or, I suppose, we could say therefore are not born – at the centre, but from the margins. I believe this is central in Alden’s consciousness. In "The Migrant Hand," one of the Romanian poems he translates, it is clear that the Pharaohs of any society don’t build its centre or centerpieces – the "marginalized" do:

For how many thousands of years, for how many millions
of baskets and wagon loads and truckloads of onions,
or cotton, or turnips has this old man knelt
in the dirt of sun-crazy fields? If you ask him,
he’ll put you off: he’s suspicious of questions.
The truth is that Adam, a day out of Eden,
started him gathering grapes: old Pharaoh
sold him to Greece; he picked leeks for the Seljuks,
garlic for Tuscans, Goths and Normans,
pumpkins and maize for the Pilgrim Fathers,
has forgotten them all, forgotten all of the past, except
the last ten hours of blackflies and heat,
the last two hundred barrels of potatoes.

These are Alden’s people, to whom he was faithful without idealizing them. Perhaps poet Thomas R. Smith, Alden’s U.S. editor, best understands this quintessential Nowlan view of class – a view most North American poets, Smith argues, shrug off or flinch from. It takes too much courage to write what conventional myth denies.

In Canada we all know that Ottawa, like Fredericton, for example, has a "marginal" existence. After all both capital cites were established as "retreats" or "havens" – removed from the military avenues/borders and the centers of commerce. Alden was born in a margin of such a retreat thirty-two kilometres from Windsor, Nova Scotia – that location of the first agricultural fair in North America. How so? Because Windsor was an imperial Block House (secondary fortress) on a sailing escape route, should Halifax (the garrison city) be overrun by the enemy. In other (domestic) words, Windsor was the idyllic setting at the eastern end of the Annapolis Valley, where the gentry could raise their horses and their daughters at a safe distance from all the kings horses and all the king’s men.

As you say, it appears Nowlan lived and wrote outside the centre of cultural power. But the problem, Alden would say, is in the eye of the beholder. He knew the assumptions of the centrists are false. He never had any doubt that the centre of the universe is where one lives. You see, he would understand completely the success of what will be the 5th Annual Northrop Frye Festival (which honoured Alden and Antonine Maillet two years ago) is where a good number of people in the "margins" of Moncton are correcting the myth that Frye is more honoured in Italy than in Canada. You see, Frye was of a generation that needed to be accepted by the so-called "centre" of power. The organizers of the festival, however, are not in Toronto. They know Frye is one of the 20th century's leading intellectuals, literary critics and educators. They know Northrop spent his formative years in Moncton and the festival celebrates his legacy to the Atlantic region. People like Alden Nowlan don’t hold it against Frye that he lived in Toronto.

Alden reminds us of what is too easily forgotten. As my biography points out, he lived in two / both worlds, as he said, "working for a weekly newspaper in Hartland, N.B., and publishing verses in New York, San Francisco, Mexico City, and Lamoni, Iowa, or was it Lamoni, Idaho?" He becomes representative of what he will call a type of person, like his friend Richard Hatfield, who becomes Premier of the province. Such a person, he wrote for MacLean’s magazine, is

found more often in the Atlantic Provinces that anywhere else in Canada: one who combines what William James called "cultural immersion" in a particular region with full membership in the global village. In his own very different way the novelist Ernest Buckler is another such man, writing articles for Esquire in the parlour of the Nova Scotia farmhouse where he was born [where he lived most of his life]…. So is the painter Tom Forrestall, riding his bicycle along the elm-shaded streets of Fredericton one day and arranging an exhibition in New York the next.

A question about your own poetry. How your work been influenced by Nowlan's and by your relationship with Nowlan?

My own poetry, like that of a number of writers who were influenced – or encouraged – by Alden speaks of what I know. And I try to be faithful to the lines of his poetry I quoted to introduce my 1963 interview with him:

Oh, admit this, man, there is no point in poetry
if you withhold the truth
once you’ve come by it.

In other words, he has encouraged me to trust my ear and remain faithful to the oracular wisdom of my people.

The state of the nation: What does Nowlan have to say to us in the 21st century? I hate to ask you to distill Nowlan's legacy into a sound bite but I'm going to anyway. I imagine Nowlan would find much to rage about and much to be pleased about in today's world. Yes?

In the 21st Century Alden says, a preoccupation with form over (or without) content in poetry is the same as running the world on ideological principles enunciated by political "spin doctors."

He says that the international sport of torture yields no truth – only what the torturer wants to hear.

What might please him about today is the technological ability to communicate (by e-mail, for example) and "travel" (on the net), although he would probably agree with Appollonia Steele’s e-signature – Steele is the head archivist at the University of Calgary, the major repository of Alden’s papers – Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? – T.S. Eliot.

As a communicator extraordinaire, Alden boasts that his best line in a magazine piece on Hartland, New Brunswick, reveals that the collective consciousness has prophetic powers: "The power of collective conviction in small towns is so powerful that sometimes by a process of constant, almost telepathic pressure it brings about events it seems merely to anticipate." In a global village with today’s means to communicate, one would think such "telepathic pressure" might have avoided the invasion of Iraqi. He would be disappointed that it didn’t.

Of the radical fanaticism of so-called "terrorists," Alden would probably remind us that there may be nothing more terrifying than unfettered capitalism/consumerism. Or, if that sounds too much like Greg Cook speaking, then let Alden speak for himself about the dangers "of what can be achieved by absolute self-assurance and absolute self-righteousness when it turns from theology to commerce."

From his experience of a small town, he would say of the so-called "clash of civilizations" being discussed in the "power centres" of today’s global village, as the United Church clergyman of Alden’s Hartland years tells me Alden explained to him: "If you talked about religion you had nothing but problems. If you just talked about other things in the community – that’s where Alden said – ‘the natural goodness of the people overcame their religion and we got along as good friends.’"

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

[This interview first appeared in The Danforth Review]

Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen turns 75 on Monday, and I see from today's Globe and Mail that his two novels are being republished in a new, single-volume issue.

Below is a report from 2006, when he sang on Bay Street in Toronto with Anjani Thomas.

*

He came, he spoke, he sang, he joked, he smiled, he laughed, he recited poetry.

It began with Heather Reisman, Founder and CEO of Indigo Books & Music Inc., saying she was known around her corporation as "Chief Book Lover . . . but on this occasion, I'm just 'Chief Lover.'"

Reisman spoke shortly after 3:45 p.m. from a 20'-wide stage set up outside the Bay Street entrance of Indigo's Toronto flagship store. At 3:00 p.m., the police had blocked off the road at either end of the block and the crowd, which had been slow to gather, soon filled the street well over 1,000 strong.

Reisman introduced Ron Sexsmith and the Bare Naked Ladies. Sexsmith sang "Heart With No Companion," noting it was "one of my favorite Leonard Cohen songs." Sexsmith gave the song a strong and heartfelt rendition, a twinge of sadness in his voice, a seeming requirement of every Cohen composition.

Sadness was replaced with a complicated mix of camp and nostalgia when BNL's Steven Page followed Sexsmith with lead vocals on "Sister's Of Mercy." The Bare Naked Ladies and Leonard Cohen? Only in Canada, eh? Somehow it all worked fine. There was a keen "in-joke" quality to the performance, but a deep reverence also.

Reisman then returned to exhort the audience with the news that for the first time ever in Canada: "a poetry book is the number one best-seller!!!" The crowd cheered. The title was, of course, Cohen's Book of Longing (M&S, 2006), his first new title in over a decade.

Then there he was!

The crowd responded with sustained applause. Cohen: "I want to apologize to the pedestrians and the drivers for the inconvenience." He looked relaxed, pleased, slightly hunched. He recited a poem, then introduced Anjani Thomas and her band -- keyboard, bass, guitar -- and left the stage. Thomas, under the name "Anjani," has just released "Blue Alert," a CD of new songs, lyrics by Cohen with whom she has worked off and on since 1984 when she sang backing vocals on the Cohen classic "Hallelujah."

Thomas sang five songs from "Blue Alert." Her vocal styling was Cohenesque, if two voices remarkably different can be said to be remarkably similar. Thomas is heavily jazz-influenced, and she sang at times breathless like Billie Holiday, or Joni Mitchell. Chorus lyrics included: "thanks for the dance" and "saying goodbye at the innermost door." It seemed almost as if Thomas was Cohen's 21st century voice, delivering his goodbye as the poet/songwriter himself knelt at the back of the stage, hands clasped in front of him as if in prayer.

For the fifth and final song of her set, Thomas called Cohen to the microphone, but not before thanking the crowd for its "Canadian aloha." The Hawaiian native said, "In Hawaii, we take off our shoes, so I hope you don't mind."

Lyrics from the final song included:

You're my first loveand my last

there's no love after you

and

I had so much to tell you

but now it's closing time
the heart is always right

and

I never got to tell you

how beautiful you are

and

I don't know how it happened

but I missed the exit sign

it's dark out in Los Angeles

it's dark out along the line

and

I never got to love you

like I heard it can be done
the heart is always right

Is the heart always right? In Cohen's universe, the song and poem is a vehicle of purity in emotion. Back at McGill in the 1950s, Cohen had a country & western band. He must have learned something from Hank Williams early on and stuck with it. Ambiguity of expression is not a Cohen trademark. Recovering lost perfection is. Speaking with gratitude for what's lost is, too.

And so, Ron Sexsmith and the Bare Naked Ladies returned to share the stage with Cohen and deliver spirited versions of two of Cohen's better known "goodbye songs." ("Blue Alert" -- we were reminded sharply -- is only the latest in a long line of song/poetry cycles from Cohen that obsess about endings.)

Sexsmith and Page shared the microphone with Cohen. "I'll follow you guys," Cohen said, but soon the other two had maneuvered their elder into taking over lead vocals. And he smiled like he'd been reunited with "Suzanne." His voice raised on the lines: "you held on to me/ like a crucifix" ("So Long Marianne"). Should we let him go? No, the next -- and final -- song was "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye."

[First published in The Danforth Review]

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Zoe Whittall

I know that Zoe Whittall has a new novel out, but I've just gotten around to finishing her 2007 title, Bottle Rocket Hearts (Comorant).

How about we start with the trailer?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMXCxJ8YCBM

So what's this book about? This summary from the Feminist Review sums it up nicely:

If I were to describe Bottle Rocket Hearts as a sort of creative autobiography replete with journal excerpts and a first person narrator, which also reads like a queer coming of age novel, you probably wouldn’t want to read it. But for anyone who has ever tried to align their politics with their personal life and discovered a plethora of limits and contradictions, this book will be a fun, fast-paced read. And it has punk rock bulging from the seams and postmodern emotional conundrums that will resonate with those who have tried to live in uncharted territory. Having read Zoe Whittal’s tightly crafted tale, I’ve had to reassess my position on the idea that diaries are cheesy and coming of age novels are boring. Bottle Rocket Hearts suggests otherwise.

The best review I found was by Sandra Alland in Xtra:

There are no simple solutions in the world of this book, instead [it becomes] a dedicated personal investigation by Eve. For this reason, Bottle Rocket Hearts never becomes preachy despite being chock-full of righteous politics. Whittall lets her characters breathe and fail like real humans, rather than forcing them to be cardboard cutouts for ideas.

Then there is this intriging comment from Vancouver's Straight.com: "a novel this is not."

Not a novel? Why not?

The review in Matrix hints at an answer:

An entire chapter is dedicated to the long description of a play staged by Seven in reaction to the incident, telling rather than allowing the characters’ feelings to manifest organically through their actions.

Alland found the novel "never" preachy, but some of it is, which undermines its other novelistic qualities: clear protagonist, moving through time to reach an objective, facing obstacles, battling an antagonist, overcoming complications, reaching new insight, resolution, promised land.

The story structure is conservative and effective. The book provides a good read, and a satisfying, thumping ending, which I won't give away, though I will come back to it at the bottom of this review.

What is the story? Here's Eye Weekly's summary:

Eve is a few days shy of her 19th birthday when we meet her, infatuated with an older woman but still living at home with parents who don’t know she’s gay. As she leaves their home in Dorval for an apartment in downtown Montreal, she enters a world of feminist activism, open relationships and drugs poached from dead people’s medicine cabinets, soundtracked by Team Dresch and Le Tigre.

Set around the time of the 1995 referendum, the book sizzles with heightened political awareness and urgency. Walls are tagged with “oui” and “non,” biker bombs explode in the night and the riot grrrl movement has jumped the shark. The political becomes personal as Eve is torn between her separatist girlfriend and Anglo friends and a hate crime hits close to home.

As Alland noted, there's a high degree of risk that this plotline will become "preachy" ... or as the Feminist Review reviewer suggested, "boring."

On the whole, however, Whittall avoids the pitfalls.

Eve is a fantastic character. Sensitive, charming, lovely, tough and tender, honest and self-confident, loyal and curious. Slightly mysterious, too. She doesn't reveal, for example, how she voted in the referendum.

One might call her oui-curious.

Eve carries this novel, and one can't help but root for her.

So, of course this novel is a novel. But what kind of novel is it?

The book it reminded me most of was George Fetherling's Travels by Night: A Memoir of the Sixties (1994). Because, while Whittall's novel is the story of Eve, it's also the story of Montreal in the mid-1990s ... and specifically the story of gay Montreal in that period.

It's a social novel with documentary power.

For example, on referendum night, Eve sits in a francophone gay bar surrounded by oui supporters who are becoming despondant as the results go against them. Someone eventually says, "We'll still be gay tomorrow."

A unique perspective about what happened that night.

The Globe and Mail's review is worth quoting:

Zoe Whittall might just possibly be the cockiest, brashest, funniest, toughest, most life-affirming, elegant, scruffy, no-holds-barred writer to emerge from Montreal since Mordecai Richler ... Bottle Rocket Hearts is a major statement about lessening unhappiness by overcoming the small dishonesties that creep into everyday life.

*

Now, about the ending (and be warned, I'm going to give it away)...

The last sentence is, "I feel soft and furious."

Eve is furious because she's just discovered that her girlfriend, Della, isn't who she said she was. Della had been keeping some major secrets from her (I'm not going to give those away), but these are revealled to Eve when Della lands in the psyche ward of the hospital. Eve's response is to turn away, leave the hospital, feeling "soft and furious."

Boom, bang. The end.

A few sentences earlier, Eve says: "Della is a story I will tell to reference my last stretch of adolescence. Those years I dated a fiction. She's locked up and I am anywhere I choose to be."

Well, whatever. I felt let down by this, and I puzzled over why.

I think Eve made the right choice by walking away from Della, but I think it's false to call Della "a fiction." It's a too-neat summation, and I think it's a false sentiment. Eve is highly ambiguous about her feelings about one of the most dramatic events in Canadian history, and yet she reduces the complexity of her former lover to a quick dismissal.

That bugged me, and it made me dislike Eve.

When Eve's mother says she's "tolerant," Eve rightly remarks that she doesn't want to be tolerated because she's gay; she wants to be "accepted."

But Della is offered no retrospective tolerance or acceptance.

In the end, Eve fails to offer a reflective response; she leaves behind a harsh, conservative judgement. Della is not a "mystery"; she is a "fiction." And the love that Eve talks about so much, isn't a path into the unknown, it's more of a social contract.

If we ever hear more from Eve, I suspect we'll learn that her adolescence didn't end with the dismissal of Della; it ended when she realized that she still had much left to learn.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

John Goldbach

I guess you'd call the reviews mixed for John Goldbach's Selected Blackouts (Insomniac Press, 2009).

Quill and Quire

The narrative doesn’t so much progress as extend through matter-of-fact statements about what is happening, which is rarely anything special. The language does not employ any rhetorical flourishes, and the dialogue in particular tends to repeat simple, common words like “good” and “nice” with distressing frequency.

Eye Weekly (Toronto)

'How Much Do They Know?' is just so first draft and ranty. Even the title gives the story away as an exercise. As every waitress knows, a table of drunk people in their twenties are obnoxious and narcissistic but when a narrator is as well, then what’s the point?

Montreal Mirror

There are no secrets between friends and this is nothing new. When he gets it right, though, Goldbach nails it.

Vue Weekly (Edmonton)

On a first reading, so much is too familiar to really be provoking and it's only on a second reading that the reader can remove themselves from the situations described to read the subtext. Goldbach has a gift of insight and tremendous writing talent that makes this book a must for anyone in their twenties wondering, "What's this life thing about anyway?"

*

Still, the word "masterpieces" is used by both the Mirror and Eye Weekly reviewers.

Mirror: "Conversation at 4 a.m." and "Wedding" are stunning little masterpieces.

Eye Weekly: “Wedding” and “Conversation at 4AM” are little masterpieces.

Alex Good's Quill and Quire review agrees with the praise for "Wedding," but also praises the story Eye Weekly dissed:

In the final story, a single-paragraph account of a woman watching a wedding show on television, there is a subtle feeling of inner drift, and in the paranoid interior monologue “How Much Do They Know?” the narrative voice has a manic energy that is absent in the rest of the collection.

*

My impressions?

This book owes more to Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero than it does to Hemingway, but Papa does hover in the background. These are undergraduate stories, stuffed with undergraduate obsessions, undergraduate humour, undergraduate ennui and an undergraduate sense of doom.

Yes, sometimes you want to smack these characters and say, Grow the fuck up.

And yet. One must look at the book for what it is. And I confess I enjoyed reading it. The book is plain, direct and, gasp, perhaps even attempts to grasp the "real" without playing at arsty fartsy games.

I like these kinds of books and wish more writers would attempt to strip back the pasteboard masks of the world, as I remember my American lit prof telling us all, referring to a passage in Moby Dick.

I didn't like the book's beginning. The opening story struck me as weakly funny, superficial, and not worthy of inclusion. The stories improved towards the middle, showing more complexity, depth of character and thoughtfulness. A greater variety of tone, however, would have made the collection more interesting.

To disturb the consensus about the closing story, "Wedding," I didn't think it was particularly special.

Little masterpieces included? I'm unconvinced.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Reading and Ranking

[First published in August 2006 in The Danforth Review]

In May 2006, The New York Times published a feature that attempted to answer the question: "What is the best work of American fiction of the last 25 years?" The Times had asked 125 prominent literary figures to pick a single novel published between 1980 and 2005 that they held in the highest regard. The novel with the most votes was Toni Morrison's Beloved. Others short-listed were Underworld by Don DeLillo, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, the four novels of the "Rabbit" series, Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike, and American Pastoral by Philip Roth.

Most interesting to me was the moderated on-line conversation the newspaper hosted from May 22-26 between two novelists and two critics. The moderator was Gregory Cowles, an editor with the NYT Book Review. The novelists were Michael Cunningham and Jane Smiley. The critics were Stephen Metcalf and Morris Dickstein.

What was interesting about it?

Well, let's begin with the notion of that every list includes not just what's on it, but what's left off. In an essay that introduced the list, A.O. Scott called the results of survey "a rich, if partial and unscientific, picture of the state of American literature, a kind of self-portrait as interesting for its blind spots and distortions as for its details."

Looking at the list, however, one is not aware of the blind spots and distortions unless one is aware of the blind spots and distortions (i.e., to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you don't know what you don't know). Which is the first reason why the moderated conversation is invaluable; it illuminates the blind spots and interrogates the idea and process of list-making in the first place.
For example, of the 22 titles on the long-list, only two were written by women. One of those titles was the "winner." The other was Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1980), which the newspaper wryly notes "was not reviewed" upon publication.

Now no one is suggesting that a "Best of..." list has an obligation to be sociologically representative; however, two out of 22 is without a doubt a "distortion." Can anyone imagine a similar list reviewing Canadian fiction of the past 25 years yielding a similar result? A CanLit list is more likely to be tilted in the opposite direction, featuring Atwood and Munro dominating the field. So what's going on in the USA? The moderated conversation teased out some interesting possible answers.

I found Jane Smiley's contribution particularly instructive (insofar as she said things outside the boundaries of what I would have expected), even as I found her irritating (perhaps because she took me beyond where I felt comfortable venturing). In the end, I felt as one with Stephen Metcalf, who said: "Jane, we disagree so thoroughly, we're practically soul mates." Though I would have added: "Jane, without you, this trip wouldn't have been worth taking."

*

Smiley is the author of many, many books, including 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), an examination of the evolution of the novel through history. Having completed her own survey of the form over a broader period of time and wider context, Smiley was well prepared to discuss the ins-and-outs of the Times' narrower review. First, she asked about the gender composition of the judges (50/50). Then she asked about the gender composition of those who bothered to send in a response (69% male, 31% female). Then she said:

I had thought of not responding, not playing the game, as it were, so that statistic intrigued me. It does seem to me to be a male game. Here we have the final four, and here we have the champion. Maybe the women novelists who didn't respond did[n't] feel that one novel could be chosen as "best."

Later, she bemoaned the fact that so many female jurors took themselves out of the competition. She also noted a study that reported men read mostly male authors, while women report reading male and female authors about equally. She cited this study as another reason why male authors were more likely to get more votes; because the women authors aren't being read by men. Male readers have their a subjective definition of "best writing," and it doesn't include the work by the authors Smiley considers her peers: female novelists.

This is the question the group returned to again and again: is it possible to define and defend "best writing" or is the question merely about competing subjectivities? No one was suggesting that sociological reading patterns ought to determine definitions of literary quality; however, the clear distinction between male and female authors on this list, and in apparent studies of reading habits, provided the primary background for the discussion that took place. How to define "best writing"? Is it even possible?

No, is the short answer. At least, there was no answer that garnered consensus. A.O. Scott, in his introductory essay, came up with the most plausible definition of enduring literary greatness:
The best works of fiction, according to our tally, appear to be those that successfully assume a burden of cultural importance. They attempt not just the exploration of particular imaginary people and places, but also the illumination of epochs, communities, of the nation itself. America is not only their setting, but also their subject.

Interestingly, both Metcalf and Dickstein said they were certain that Beloved would win -- and they voted strategically with hopes of dethroning it. Metcalf even wrote a stinging essay in Slate outlining his objections to the book: "No other American novel of the past 25 years has so elegantly mapped the psychobiography of its ideal reader." However, Metcalf's salvo seemed only to confirm Scott's argument about what makes a great book great. Beloved is the ideal book for the readers of its period. Metcalf can't critique the book without also critiquing the period (quite legitimately, one might add).

In other words, while both Metcalf and Dickstein didn't want Beloved to win, they also assumed it would. Why? Because it has, as Smiley noted, "the historical scope that a 'best' or 'most important' novel would have." And this fact is so broadly recognized that jurors opposed to it surmised it would win even before the list was drawn up. As Scott noted:

Any other outcome would have been startling, since Morrison's novel has inserted itself into the American canon more completely than any of its potential rivals. With remarkable speed, Beloved has, less than 20 years after its publication, become a staple of the college literary curriculum, which is to say a classic.

Smiley was Beloved's defender in the conversation, and as its advocate she was articulate and forceful. The list, however, had another subtext, one that required her to make a confession and do some homework.

While Beloved was the survey's clear winner, Philip Roth placed many more books on the long list than any one else. Seven of the 22 were by Roth; DeLillo was second with four titles on the list. Roth may not have written the "best novel" of the period, but as Scott noted, he was clearly the "best writer" as judged by his peers. Smiley, however, confessed she hadn't read a Roth novel since 1969; so she quickly picked up American Pastoral and offered her on-the-go comments (not complimentary).

*

Which brings us back to this perplexing relationship between book and reader. Why do some readers admire certain creations and not others? Metcalf said it clearly, but all involved in the conversation appeared to agree: "The selections say as much about the selectors as they do about the winners and losers."

The list that gets made depends on who's making the list, though the participants also seemed to agree that if there was no way to objectively rank titles, there was at least still room for reasoned judgment. Cunningham, for example, told the story of how eight professors at Brooklyn College made a list of their ten favourite books, and "five of the eight of us selected Alice Munro's Open Secrets and four Denis Johnston's Jesus' Son."

Much more interesting was Smiley's argument about why certain readers respond to certain books:

My first premise about what we like or don't like (or respond to or don't respond to) is that our affinities aren't necessarily reasonable or based in any sort of objective standard of aesthetic quality. They are more on the order of crushes or friendships -- there is something about a novel that is perceived emotionally and that draws us into willingly suspending disbelief or not. Arguing about which novel is best, or even about the virtues and faults of a particular novel is like arguing whether your sister should be dating that guy -- basically, the arguments don't matter while the sister still feels drawn to him.

When I first read this, I thought -- yes, but sometimes (objectively speaking) the sister shouldn't be dating that guy (abuser, molester, all around prick). The second time I read it, I thought, Okay. Add some qualifications and this is a reasonable working premise, though Smiley moves on from it to explain why she "just can't enjoy" The Great Gatsby:

None of the characters or themes or incidents seem to me to be developed -- rather, Fitzgerald seems to me to be talking about them at length, but more as a way of exercising his eloquence than as a way of exploring or revealing the situation -- but really, my reason is a made-up justification of an already formed lack of affinity [emphasis added].

And this was what irritated me about Smiley. She provided a reasonable, objective argument to explain her reaction to Gatsby, and then she undermined her own argument and insisted that her rationality was just covering up the subjectivity of her gut reaction, which must obviously dominate, just as she assumed every other reader must primarily be guided by their gut, no matter what other reason-based explanation they might provide.

The critics of this crew, of course, were having none of this. Metcalf:

I'm fascinated by how a discussion featuring two prominent novelists hasn't yet talked about aesthetics!! Isn't this what makes our concerns so parochial in time?? In fifty or a hundred years, who will believe we talked race, class, gender, geography, and even autism, before mentioning good writing?

I shared Metcalf's frustration, though was pleasantly surprised at how well these four outlined the issues that abound in contemporary literary culture -- and how respectfully they discussed them.

What I couldn't wrap my head around was Smiley's privileging of subjectivity when she was so clearly more than capable of close reading. Yes, she had a negative gut reaction to reading Roth, for example, but she also provided an in-depth analysis of the weaknesses of American Pastoral. So cogent was her analysis, that Dickstein, who'd voted for Roth's Sabbath's Theatre as the best book of the past quarter-century, was quick to affirm her argument against the Roth novel that landed on the short list. It turned out, he didn't like it much either. (A matter of the gut? Not for him.)

Dickstein, in fact, provided the deepest (best?) analysis of the group. For example:

The most striking feature of the five books on the short list is what they are not: first, as we've already said, they are not small, perfect books like Marilynn Robinson's two novels. But, except for the Updike tetralogy, they're also not large, circumstantial works in the tradition of Balzac, Trollope, Tolstoy, or Dreiser, books that build up a world, brick by brick, and allow us to inhabit it as we're reading. Instead, they're highly metaphorical works, historical parables that are sharply focused and almost meditations drenched in violence and written in white-hot anger.

They read more like essences, distillations, than like life itself.

This might be the place to mention that Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man topped a similar list in 1965, and the group seemed to agree that no one in the past forty years had written anything that could top it. Race may be a sociological category, in general, but it is also the dominant subject of America, and Invisible Man is its dominant statement.

Comments about Marilynn Robinson also repeated through the dialogue. Her novel Housekeeping made the long list, but I also got the sense from the group that they thought this novel was gaining in gravity as time went along. For example, Cunningham asserted that "if history is any indication, we can assume that every generation is wrong about its enduring works of art. ... I suspect we're seeing a shift away from the monolithic ur-book toward a more motley assortment of books that bite of smaller bits of the world but chew them more exquisitely."
On the other hand, Smiley said "the form of the novel has always seemed to alternate (or fail to decide) between 'perfect' and 'abundant.'" She cited Austen and Henry James as examples of the former and Dickens and Zola as examples of the latter.

It was also pointed out that the writers celebrated on this list -- well, only two of them were born after World War II. They're old! Has the "younger generation" (now into their 50s; and so also old!) not written any "great novels"? In response to this question, Cunningham provided a list of books written since the mid-1970s "that strike me as potentially enduring." And Smiley said the whole exercise had missed the point, or at least had missed what had really going on in recently in American letters:

I do not think that the last twenty-five years in the American novel was the era of Roth, Updike, McCarthy, and DeLillo. In my world, the last twenty-five years is the era Virginnia Woolf predicted in "A Room of One's Own" -- the period when women routinely gained a place to be and an education, and put both of these to use and wrote books. In my world, the last twenty-five years is the era of, in no particular order, Valerie Martin, Gish Jen, Susan Cheever, Anne Tyler, E. Annie Proulx, Francine Prose, Alison Lurie, Diane Johnston, Alice McDermott, Geraldine Brooks, Marilynne Robinson, Sue Miller, Linda Hogan, Joyce Carol Oates, Barbara Kingsolver, Susan Sontag, Andrea Barrett, Marianne Wiggins, Joy Williams, Urusla K. LeGuin, Alice Hoffman, Alice Walker, Carol Shields, Louise Erdrich, Amy Tan, Anita Shreve, Joan Didion, Octavia Butler, Ann Beattie, Sandra Cisneros, Jamaica Kincaid, Lee Smith, Gail Godwin, Ellen Gilchrist, Cynthia Ozick, Mary Gaitskill, myself, and plenty of others I didn't think of in the first five minutes. To me, it's the women, young and old, who have been doing new and interesting things, both large and small, and that's who I've been reading. And when I suggested this to David Lodge at lunch, he agreed.

Well, then. I guess that settles it. (What, no Atwood?)

*

Stephen Metcalf:

Time purges the past of its irrelevance; so said a wise professor of mine once. In the end, no demographic category matters, on the part of the author or the reader; power relations melt away; what is left is good writing. Nothing rots faster and more conclusively than bad writing. Even a hint of the meretricious will kill it off. If it so happens that a series of bulletins from the over-inflated male ego turn out to best capture the soul of a demented culture, so be it; then Roth will triumph. Or maybe not. Some very smart money is on a book called Housekeeping. Or maybe the heart and patience of posterity will have room for both.

Ha! Well, we'll see....

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com

Short Story Theory

[This essay first appeared in lichen 7.2, Fall/Winter 2005]
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the short story is a genre in want of an audience.

Publishers are wary of short story collections because they "don’t sell." Book sellers interweave story collections into banks of novels under the general category of "fiction." There is no National Short Story Month. There is no Griffin Short Story Prize. No one has ever claimed short story writers are the "unacknowledged legislators" of the world.

Perhaps that’s because it is a truth universally acknowledged that the short story is difficult to define. The short story is commonly defined with a tautology: a short story is a story that is short. But how short is short?

Hal Niedzviecki’s collection Smell It (Coach House, 1997) includes a one sentence story. Joseph Conrad’s "Heart of Darkness" is significantly longer. If the adjective is difficult to pin down, consider the noun. What is a story? It is a prose tale, yes. But is an anecdote enough?

What’s more, it is a truth universally acknowledged that short stories are novels in embryo. Short stories are widely seen as a kind of training ground by aspiring writers, creative writing programs, publishers, agents, journalists, and readers with, and without, literary aspirations.

A training ground for what?

A training ground for the "real" genre, the genre of substance, the genre that sells (and thus employs), the genre against which history judges: a training ground for the novel.

Truths universally acknowledged, however, are often balderdash. Short stories are no more miniature novels than photographs are miniature movies. Nor are sales figures a relevant category when classifying or evaluating literature.

What, then, of this problem of definition? How long can a story be and still remain "short?" And what counts as a story?

Attempts to answer these questions have been made repeatedly over the past 200 years.

Short story theorists point to Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) as the one who first claimed the short story was an independent genre – and a genre superior to the long prose tale, or novel, at that. In her introduction to The Tales We Tell – Perspectives On The Short Story (Greenwood Press, 1998), Susan Lohafer says of Poe:

He gave us our primary emphases in discussions of the form: style; brevity; status. He identified what he called the short prose tale, and told us it could be read in one sitting. He placed it once and for all between the lyric poem, with its power to concentrate effort, and prose forms like the novel and the sketch, with their power to represent the world.
If Poe set the original terms of the discussion, he also started a dialogue without end. Problems of definition are intrinsic to the short story form.

In The New Short Story Theories (Ohio University Press, 1994), editor Charles E. May begins by noting that "the first issue about which we need to come to some understanding – if for no other reason than to call a truce on it – is the issue of definition."

May goes on to outline some of the areas under dispute. Such as "length."

Some theories argue, he said, "that length alone is not a sufficient determiner [of the short story] if all characteristics besides length that may be posited for the short story may also be posited for the novel."

On the other hand, May notes others argue the short story is dependent on the longer form because the shorter form "cannot be defined except by comparison."

Length, however, has not be a problem of definition for the novel, May notes: "for some reason, the ‘longness’ of the novel has been seen as an intrinsic characteristic."

What we can see here is the problem of definition spinning in its endless cycle of infinite regress. More substantial categories are needed.

Consider, for example, two possible definitions of the short story by Douglas Glover (The New Quarterly, #87, Summer 2003):

A short story is a narrative involving a conflict between two poles (A vs. B). This conflict needs to develop through a series of actions in which A and B get together again and again and again (three is a good number to start with, but there can be more). Or, another definition I use: By a story I mean a narrative that extends through a set of articulations, events or event sequences, in which the central conflict is embodied once, and again, and again (three is the critical number here – looking back at the structure of folk tales) such that in these successive revisitings we are drawn deeper into the soul or moral structure of the story.
If you are inclined to theorems, Glover provides this mathematical-type paraphrase of his primary definition of a short story:

((GOAL=DESIRE)+CONFLICT+(SERIES OF INSTANCES OF CONFLICT=BACKBONE=PLOT))=(STRUCTURE=FORM).
Glover defines narrative as "the movement of characters through time," which excludes Niedzviecki’s single sentence story from contention. (The story is titled "Between Two Old Ladies," and goes like this: "There is a sudden smell here").

Or does it?

The title provides the characters, the story the plot. The word "sudden" suggests a "before" and an "after." What’s missing is any information about these characters. What are their motivations (desires)? What are the obstacles to attaining their desires?

There is no series of instances, no central conflict, no look back at an archetypal folk tale.

So, what makes a short story?

One must begin with the admission that no single definition will suffice – and no ultimate definition ever found. Writers will continue to expand the boundaries of the possible, in many directions. Niedzviecki’s story is obviously an extreme example of the form.

Equally limiting, if applied severely, is Glover’s emphasis on "structural" elements; if story is more than length, it is also more than plot.

In A Moveable Feast, for example, Hemingway famously noted how visits to the Louvre influenced his prose style. Similarly, Joseph Brodsky has said that "a writer’s biography is in his twists of language."

Literature rests, in part, on making unique marks.

Technique was central to the definition of the short story 100 years ago. As Lohafer notes, writers emphasized "subjective points of view, pervasive imagery, controlled voice, ellipsis."

Today, however, "we have waded free of explications de texte" (i.e., limiting our interpretations based solely on articulating the interrelationships of the words on the page).

For example, Lohafer notes one influential theorist sees in the short story links "to the angst and rebellion of excluded peoples." Others (including Lohafer herself) see in "story . . . the origins of culture, the morphology of folktales, the oral tradition, the circuits of the brain."

In his introduction to The Best American Short Stories of the Century (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), John Updike claimed that the importance of short stories as a "news-bearing medium" had diminished in recent decades.

When pressed to explain himself in an interview on Amazon.com, Updike said, "I do think short stories used to tell people how other people lived, and in a surprising and edifying way. Now many readers turn toward celebrity anecdotes for narrative."

Yes, the days of mass audiences for short stories may be long gone. It’s unlikely, however, that readers of John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor ever had much in common with the readers of The National Enquirer.

In conclusion, if short stories are in our brain circuits, they will remain with us as long as the synapses are firing. They will continue to surprise and awe us.

They will always be at least a little bit mysterious.