Underground Book Club

Anita Lahey

2015-02-13T16:50:00.001-05:00

The Mystery Shopping Cart
by Anita Lahey
Palimpest Press, 2013

This book is subtitled "Essays on Poetry and Culture," which is sort of true, but there is enough variety in this collection of literary non-fiction to also make it untrue.

The middle section includes a number of interviews, for example, one with Alice Munro about on one particular short story.

The title also comes from a remembrance piece, a eulogy, which is touching and poignant.

Then at the end of the book is an extended - and excellent - essay on eulogies.

Which is to say, there is much more than poetry addressed here, and to sum up the rest as "culture" is misleading.

But what a quibble!

Instead let me sum up this book by praising Anita Lahey for her calm, cool erudition and for sharing her evident passion for Canadian letters, both recent and in the deeper past. We get considerations of P.K. Page and Gwendolyn MacEwan. We get an interview with John Barton and Stephanie Bolster. We get Alice Munro. And much more.

Poets who kickbox, box and weight lift!

Lahey avoids the poetry wars, only saying at one point she like reviewers to take a stand. Don't be boring! Lahey is not boring, but her tone is often detached, ruminative. Her deep dive into the eulogy as a form is no accident. She has a reflective mind and a curious one. The mystery of the shopping cart is, therefore, an appropriate title image.

There is an oddness in the every day and Lahey is determined to contemplate it.

Mark Sampson

2015-02-01T12:36:00.001-05:00

I participated in a literary reading series in 2010, and Mark read from his manuscript in progress, which later became Sad Peninsula (Dundurn, 2014).

It was impressive in progress, and it remains impressive in final form.

The sad peninsula is Korea, and the story cleverly riffs on John Donne's famous line, "No man is an island," noting on a peninsula you are always connected to something larger.

Connection and its challenges is a theme deeply engrained in the two main stories that alternate chapters in the novel. In one, the first-person narrator, Michael, tells of his two plus years in Korea as an English teacher. He eschews the dance clubs and fast sex chased by many of his North American colleagues and instead recounts his slow moving romance with a young professional Korean woman, Jin. They bond initially over a common admiration for the work of Milan Kundera.

The second story reaches back in history to tell the story of a teenaged girl taken from Korea by the Japanese military during the Second World War. She becomes one of many "comfort women," who exist in stalls in compounds to be raped by Japanese soldiers upwards of 35 times a day, day after day. According to Wikipedia, "Estimates vary as to how many women were involved, with numbers ranging from as low as 20,000 to as high as 360,000 to 410,000."

Spoiler alert. Ultimately, the two stories converge. It is Jin's great aunt who was forced into sex slavery.

But there's more than this neat narrative hookup that connects the parallel stories. For one thing, the entire novel is saturated with sex, from the extreme torture of multiple rape, to the casual pickup culture of the dance clubs, to the slow burn sexuality of Jin and Michael as they date for months and months before consumating their forbidden love.

Forbidden? Not really, but the tension between the modern and the traditional is never far away. And here, of course, is where Korea is struggling with its soul. What to be? Which is the second thing that connects the two narratives. Before WWII, Korea was a colony of Imperial Japan, and its identity was weak. Following WWII, Korea was divided between the West and the Communists. After the Korean War, the South is strongly aligned with the USA and implements a ferocious capitalism. The modern and the traditional, at the macro and micro levels, struggle to co-exist, caught in an endless feedback loop.

As narrator, how much of this does Michael understand? He is smart, sensitive, caring, alert, but also sometimes in over his head. Jin brings him into her life, into her family, tells him things she has told no other, but - spoiler alert - ultimately decides she cannot stay with him: "I need to be Korean."

The reader can only wonder what she means by this. She is approaching thirty, and she tells Michael she will never marry because she has had relations with too many men. She is laden with shame. This is the third thing that connects the two stories, because shame is what burden's Jin's great aunt, though - it must be noted - she does find a husband following the war, and she has a complicated marriage that fails. Eun-young's experience is extreme, yet Jin says she is caught in the same tide of cultural expectation and control ... a control she chooses to remain tied to (she decides not to go to Canada with Michael when he returns home).

Sad? For Michael, yes. For the reader, sure. For Jin, who knows. One wonders what will become of her. Will her retrenchment into a cultural nationalism make her life happier, more meaningful? Or is she just repeating the errors of her family, her mother in particular?

Interestingly, it is Eun-young, the one who is most broken, most alienated, who moves farthest to reconciliation at the end of the novel. She visits, finally, the institution set up in Seoul to house aging comfort women, a place that includes a museum and the thing that Eun-young had been lacking all of her adult life, community. On a peninsula, you are always connected to something larger than yourself.

Leanne Simpson

2015-01-31T12:25:00.003-05:00

Fragmentary in structure and written without the standard capital letter at the start of sentences, Islands of Decolonial Love (ARP, 2013) is what it proclaims to be in its title. Some of the pieces present as short stories, some present as poems. There is an audio component, which can be found at the publisher's website.

The pieces frequently make use of Indigenous words, which are translated in footnotes. The overall experience is one of entering the colonial space that is being deconstructed by storytelling, or maybe just call it the reality of Indigenous Canada.

"right off the bat," begins the story *buffalo on*, "let's just admit we're both from places that have been fucked up through no fault of our own in a thousand different ways for seven different generations and that takes a toll on how we treat each other. it just does."

Many of the pieces are as short as a couple of pages, some a bit longer, but not much. Love and the search of intimacy between people is a frequent concern. Though (obviously) written, many of the pieces are examples of oral storytelling, and include a diversity of voices presented on the page.

There is much complication here, much intensity, even in the relative simplicity of the pieces themselves. The focus is not just interpersonal, it is, as the quotation above suggests, the legacy of the past on the present and pressures on people to live well, thrive, and sustain communities and places.

Hooray, Leanne Simpson. Check out her other work!

*

Gender Failure

2015-01-31T11:56:00.001-05:00

I'm giving this five out of five stars because I can't imagine how it could be different. It is pretty perfect in what it is and does.

Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon alternate short chapters through the book, telling a range of stories about how they were born assigned female and then left that identity behind, or tried to.

The tried to part is, of course, dealing with other people, dealing with social expectations, getting caught in the gender binary, where you only have two options, M or F.

Both Coyote and Spoon tell about how they moved through many different options. They each call themselves gender failures. Spoon writes powerfully about how they (meaning Spoon, who has adopted this pronoun) has retired from gender. Each repeatedly tells stories about how they were misidentified, misrepresented, left to explain themselves over and over, often giving up and going with the socially expected flow, simply to board an airplane, or complete any number of ordinary activities. Make a living.

For the reader, this constant misrepresentation is exhausting and deeply saddening. One can hardly imagine having to perpetually live it.

This book began as a multimedia show that Coyote and Spoon toured. It includes song lyrics and photographs from that show. As a book it works fine. The stories of the two run parallel and sometimes cross. Their voices are distinct, and they also amplify each other. Coyote tells the story of having breast removal surgery, after two decades of binding them. Spoon writes of the evolution of her musical career.

Evolutions, shifts and changes is the key here. How each captures the unfolding of their lives underscores the unknowingness of selves. We are never one thing, singular, locked down forever. The book is the stories of two trans, but it also reveals universals, if we care to listen. How to be a self, how to connect that self to others, how to overcome and protect oneself from other people's bullshit. The building blocks of life. Great book.

*

Shawn Syms

2014-10-23T20:01:00.002-04:00

Nothing Looks Familiar
by Shawn Syms
Arsenal, 2014

Eleven strong, tender short stories that follow the contours of the every day, including sending out shockwaves of the unexpected, which, after all, is part of every day.

Put another way, there is much in Nothing Looks Familiar that is familiar. These are not stories that strain towards oddness. If anything, they are comfortable in their normalcy, until suddenly they're not.

Syms has a plainspoken style and a painterly eye for detail. The reader is easily placed in each scene and is connected well to every character. Motivation is never a mystery.

These are stories warm of heart that eschew cynicism, but neither are they shy or "safe." Portraits of our contemporary world, these stories help us face ourselves and feel alive. Here and now.

Did I have a favorite? Maybe "Family Circus" - a mother of young children is scheming how to escape her drug den / ID stealing household ... Okay, not so "normal", but the narrative voice is calm, cool, collected. All goes to hell, but the kids end up alright, which was all the mother wanted. A happy ending, but an unfamiliar one. It's really quite brilliant. Bravo.

Sheila Heti

2014-10-10T20:50:00.001-04:00

How Should a Person Be?
by Sheila Heti
Anansi, 2012

So I liked this book, quite a lot, but as I've thought about what I would write about it, I've become muddled about why.

What should a review be?

Clear? Concise? Searching? Uncertain? Open to interrogation? Defiant?

Enough with the question marks.

First off, the fact that the protagonist is named Sheila and the author is named Sheila is a fact that I am not going to consider from this point forward, but readers beware. Something is afoot.

What? Don't ask me.

Sheila (protagonist) is pretty fucked up. She's graduated high school, plus quite a bit more, and she doesn't know how to "be." Poor her, except not really.

Sheila's pretty stuck up, she's pretty self-involved, she's narcissistic as all get out. At least she is at the beginning, where she tells us she entered a three-year marriage for not the best of reasons. Ended it without really explaining why, either to the readers or her husband. And this is where we find her, divorced, twenty-something, lost, seeking an ideal state of "being," discovering a female best friend, something she's never had before, Margot.

Margot is a painter, brilliant by all accounts, and she enters an "ugly painting" competition with another young painter. This competition frames the book. The painters seek beauty in their work, and they challenge themselves to make the most ugly painting they can. Margot's competitor (male) doesn't think she can. She delays doing so for nearly the entire length of the book. He yanks it off quickly.

When I was at the University of Toronto for a Master's Degree in English, I took a seminar on teaching at the university level. It was really for the PhD students, but I was interested. One of the senior academics, a world-renowned critic, told a story about how she had put a book on her syllabus that she hadn't read. On the first day of class she asked the students: "What can we learn from the first page?"

For some reason, this story came back to me as I was reading Heti's book. You can tell a lot about this book from the first page. It's a fantastic first page. But on page three, there's a phrase that rivals the "prostitute" quote at the beginning of Catcher in the Rye: "We live in an age of some really great blow-job artists." Except the use of prostitute is explicitly metaphorical, and the use of blow-job artist is not quite. But should be read that way. But not quite.

Read the first page, and BAM! You're on your way. And what the fuck is up with Sheila? I mean, really. Is it all in her head?

Dickensian this novel is not. The sensory details are all but absent. You want description, sights, smells, taste, touch, any sensory details at all ... this novel is not for you. Existential dread is what this novel is all about. And THANK GOD someone else in Canadian literature has done THIS. Heti is not alone, but THANK GOD ALMIGHTY AND THE SEVEN DWARFS that she undertook this project. Break free of memory, loss, and historical realism, please, please, please the rest of you.

Okay, I've gotten another glass of wine, and I've calmed down.

Yes, there is sexual frankness in this book. Heti told the Guardian she loves "reading people who write well about sex. I love dirty books! I think there's a way of talking about the human that can be quite profound. I tried Fifty Shades of Grey but three pages in I realised I just couldn't read it. It was like every sentence was written by a different writer."

That quotation begins with the four words: "I love Henry Miller." The Guardian apparently loves Sheila Heti, because what a trove of links! Here's a complete summary of the book under review. And a quotation from that summary:

Email from Israel to Sheila. 1) I want you to gag on my cock again. 2) I want you to show off your pussy to a tramp.
Email from Sheila to Israel. 1) OK, but on one condition. 2) You let me put my head up your arse.

Oh, Israel. What are we to make of this? Metaphor? Hot guy?

He's hot. He's misogynistic. Sheila repeatedly complains about "another man who wanted to teach me something." She also compares herself to Moses, who is her leader, not Jesus, who is the leader of the Christians. In case you were confused about that.

WTF?

Ah, there's something going on here that is above me. I've decided to just flounder. Floudering is a strategy often deployed by Sheila. I can't say it often works for her. She leaves her husband without much explanation, then she leaves Margot without explanation either. Sheila takes herself to New York (from Toronto, yay), deciding it's best for her and everyone else that she leave. Not that she discussed this with another else.

Did the burning bush tell her? Are we expected to think so? Briefly, I think. Then Sheila realizes not. Margot is really fucking pissed off at her. Sheila begins to realize that her identity is not cast in some idealized sphere, but it is dependent on her closest, most loving relationships.

But I may be projecting my own crap on that.

Judaism. Let's not lose sight of that. This is a diaspora novel, which I didn't expect. It's not a "late-capitalist" novel, as one back cover quotation claims. Well, maybe it is, sort of. But while Sheila has some money anxiety (she works for a while in a hair salon), she frames even that experience as an opportunity to "be" in the best possible way, and the best possible way is to be Jewish. Like Moses. Lost in the desert. Called to greatness but ill-suited for it. Driven to exhalation and struggle.

Wow. This book goes from the lowest of lows to the highest of highs. Henry Miller? Whatever.

Heti has pulled something off here that is unique and remarkable. What? Fucked if I know.

*** Bonus track: Jeanette Winterson on Henry Miller. What?!

Oh, I read the "new and expanded paperback edition." Thought I should note that.

Also, my buddy who teaches Cegep in Montreal assigned this book to his students without reading it. I told him my UofT story. His students were only 16-17. I said, Oh, boy. Look out.

Funny story, I noted on Goodreads that I'd started to read this book and a couple of days later I got notice asking if I wanted to take part in a forum or something about Heti's new book, women's clothes or something. No, thanks. Freaky.

What should I wear? I dunno. We live in an age of some really great dressers.

Michelle Berry

2014-09-19T19:42:00.000-04:00

So Rob Ford, mayor of Toronto in name only for another five weeks (until the election), has cancer. His cancer may or may not be lethal. He started chemotherapy this week, and from what his doctors have told the media, I gather no one knows what is going to happen. I wish him well.

Ford's doctors have told the media that his cancer is aggressive (which is bad), but it generally responds well to treatment (which is good). Three years ago I sat in small clinic room at Princess Margaret Hospital and heard a doctor describe the exact same scenario to my wife, who had breast cancer.

"What would you rather have," he asked, "a non-aggressive cancer, or one that doesn't respond to treatment?" (We agreed that having a cancer that responds to treatment sounded better. Not having cancer, wasn't on the menu.)

The best article I've read that describes this impossible-to-be-in dilemma is a piece called "Living with Cancer: Truthiness" by Susan Gubar (NY Times, April 4, 2013).

The disjunction between feeling all right and not knowing what verdict will come down causes all sorts of disruptions in the lives of the women in my support group. Judy finds herself fragmented by anxiety: whether she is watching a movie or dining out, part of her mind wanders off, worrying about a recurrence. Diane engages in “serious culling”: she keeps on going through her closets, bagging the stuff she hasn’t worn, and hauling it to Good Will so “the kids won’t find a mess afterwards.” Alison, no longer trusting her body, finds her world narrowing as the house becomes “her nest.” Like Sarah, I fear the interminable lining up for security surveillance and the coughing crowds at airports. But now at take-off, when (as always) I picture the plane crashing in flames, I joke to myself, “Not a bad way to go!”

Not knowing, sometimes called denial, sometimes called normal.

My wife died in May 2012. The aggressive cancer responded well to treatment, but it also never went away. Cancer is ingenious. It evolves to evade the poison. As my brother-in-law said after his sister died, "I take some satisfaction from the fact that the cancer died, too." There wasn't anything else that could kill it. Not for nothing, is cancer The Emperor of All Maladies.

Among other things, as Mr. Ford is now experiencing, cancer is an interference of the best made plans, and it is only one of the interferences that play like flies to wanton gods with a collection of neighbours in Michelle Berry's powerfully quiet new novel, Interference (ECW, 2014), set in a town very much like Peterborough, Ontario, where the author lives.

Truthiness is a common element among the cast of characters Berry introduces us to in this ensemble novel. There is no single protagonist, and no straight through line. As a novel, it resembles another newly released creative work, Richard Linklater's movie Boyhood, which is framed around the life of one character (boy, ages, from 6 to 18), but is really a portrait of a collective, the family. Interference takes place over a winter, and it is rife with anxiety, often related to the safety of children. Violence often appears to lurk around every corner, but the slasher (figuratively speaking) never appears.

Any parent will recognize these feelings as par for the course. Berry's brilliance here is to make us care about so many people all at the same time. She speaks truth about the prevalence of fear, and also battens down the anxiety with a flavour of hope that doesn't resort to sentimentality or naivete.

I could give more plot summary, but why give anything away. Here's how the publisher frames it:

From fall to spring, the inhabitants of Edgewood Drive in the small town of Parkville prove that the simplest lives can be intricate and complicated. The interwoven, layered narrative of Michelle Berry’s Interference moves between Senior Ladies Leisure League hockey, the unsure and awkward life of pre-teens and teens, suspected pedophilia, disfigurement, and cancer. In Interference, there is always someone watching, biding their time — and as this suspense builds the vivaciousness of a congenial neighbourhood, full of life and happiness as well as fear and sorrow, becomes at once more humorous, frightening, and real.

Does the empty swing and the splash of red on the cover make your stomach churn? Good. Berry explores that churning with a sensibility fine tuned with calm reality (which is different from truth). She displays a sensitivity that is as large as it is remarkable.

Each of the chapters begins with a "found text." An email. A note home from school. A message to the team of female hockey players who stumble to a winning season over the course of the book, no matter how few pucks they put in the net. The tone of these notes is frequently jovial, and contrapuntal to the gist of much of the other action. The humour enlivens the book, and serves as a reminder, too, that even in the midst of catastrophe (or the fear of catastrophe) the beat of the absurd stampedes on.

xo

Lisa Moore

2014-06-22T22:50:00.000-04:00

I wrote at the end of last summer, and it was just published in #90 of Canadian Notes and Queries.

Please check out the magazine, and send them funds to cover an annual subscription - from now until the end of time.

I reviewed Moore's novel February in 2009 on this blog.

Caught

By Lisa Moore

Anansi, 2013

Fifteen months ago I was sitting outside Sunnybrook General Hospital in Toronto with my wife. She was in a wheelchair. She had just had a chemotherapy treatment, her last. She was in a wheelchair because her breast cancer had spread to her liver and then her bones. Her T1 vertebrae fractured. She took a series of high powered pain killers and that day was streaming hydromorphine (seven times more powerful than morphine) into her abdomen through a catheter. She could stand, but barely walk. The chemotherapy was for a resurgence of cancer in her liver. It was a last ditch effort to extend, not save, her life, however briefly. Before the chemotherapy, Kate had pulled up her blood results from that morning on her ipad (yay, e-health). They were not good. The one number we’d been told to watch, that we were hoping was at least stable from a week earlier, that we were hoping most of all would go down, had doubled.

“I guess this is it,” she said.

“Do you want to go through with the chemo?” I asked.

“Might as well,” she said. “We’re here.”

She had the treatment, then I wheeled her out into the sunshine and called the private ambulance company I’d hired to transport her that day. I have 24 steps from the sidewalk to my front door. Kate couldn’t do it anymore. I needed someone to carry her up the stairs.

The ambulance didn’t come until three hours later.

It was the last time we were alone together. It was a Friday. She died the following Wednesday.

It was the time to say those things. I can tell you there isn’t much to say at that point, except reiterating love. I said, “I wish this moment would last forever. Just you and me, right here, right now. It’s not the disease that’s the enemy. It’s time.”

We can’t stop tomorrow from coming.

We said some other things. It was a lovely moment. A grain of sand in the ocean of time.

Lisa Moore’s fiction, all of it, is full of such moments. She is an expert at stopping the clock and forcing the reader to focus on the intense swirl of details locked into an instant.

In a review of Moore’s Giller-nominated short story collection, Open (Anansi, 2002), I wrote: “Moore's stories are fragmented like memories. They have a coherence from beginning to end, but in the middle the reader is often jarred by the sudden, apparently random, thoughts of the characters.”

In a review of Moore’s novel, February (Anansi, 2009), I wrote of what I called “Moore’s genius”: “The structure of time, the implications of time, is perhaps Lisa Moore's primary narrative obsession. ... Moore's style and attention to the details of her character's specifics, focus the reader's attention on the here and now, while also allowing the past and future to resonate.”

Which is to say that I disagree with the pull quote on the cover of Moore’s new novel, Caught (Anansi, 2013). The quote, by Patrick deWitt, calls the new novel, “A propulsive and harrowing read.” Harrowing is okay. Propulsive, however, the novel is surely not.

Nor should it be.

Though let’s first judge a book by its cover. The girl in the red bikini, standing in the big-waved surf, sailboat on the horizon, large red italicized CAUGHT weighing down on the ocean like a primeval sun. Yum. Propulsive. But that’s not what this book is about.

This book is about David Slaney, a 24-year-old convicted drug smuggler, who breaks out of prison after four years on the inside and is on the run on page one. Where is he running? To find his old mate, Brian Hearn, who skipped bail on the original charges and is now living under a false identity and, get this, studying to become an English professor.

The largest part of the book focuses on Slaney’s trek, east to west, as he seeks to meet up with Hearn, who has a new smuggling operation planned, one that doesn’t include getting caught. Slaney’s job will be to lead the operation on the sailboat (see cover), meet up with a militia in South America, trade cash for a whack of marijuana, and slip back up the (west) coast (this time). Millionaires, they will be. Set for life on the lam.

The frame of the plot is high adventure, but for all of the revving of engines, it never picks up speed. Slaney’s journey west is episodic, as Moore deep dives into scene after scene. The writing in these scenes is sharp and intense. As discussed above, Moore is able to stop the clock through an expert use of repetition and a journalistic eye for detail. Like Jeff Wall, she takes miniature moments and blows them up to enormous scale. The scenes are also often highly cinematic.

For example, Slaney stops at a hotel where he trades labour for room and board. On the eve before he’s scheduled to leave, he catches wind that there are police in the building. He doubles back and seeks escape. He travels along a floor that houses guests from a wedding. A door opens and the bride, inside alone, asks him to enter and help zip up her dress. They hear the police pounding on doors along the hallway. Slaney hides and the bride assures the officers that all is well within. Slaney wishes the bride well on her journey, and she wishes him well on his.

“It’s only pot,” is repeated more than once.

To which the refrain is, boys, you knew the risk.

But as the bride story illustrates, Slaney is no gangster. In fact, the arc of the story is more folk tale than novel. Slaney doesn’t go through a transformative learning curve, reaching a climax of confidence that leads to crisis and resolution. He gets batted around like one of Lear’s flies to wanton gods. He’s just a good old boy, never meaning no harm. He’s not even a red neck.

Women, it must be said, love him. He gets laid with rapid frequency.

Is he a kind of idealized boy-man?

Slaney is the one the title refers to. He is the caught one. But he is also the one who is most free. He makes no compromises. He never negotiates his integrity.

He is like Pretty Boy Floyd, except he lives.

Hearn, on the other hand, skips bail, bankrupts his father, lives a notoriously open life for a “most wanted” man. He grew up with Slaney, and they were best buds, but the connection between them is never proven; it is only asserted. Readers will have no trouble understanding the attractiveness of Slaney. Hearn, however, reeks of a slime ball, however well read. Why does Slaney risk it all for this man? Why is it Slaney who is always the one putting himself at the forefront of harm’s way? The questions are never answered satisfactorily.

The girl on the cover, for example, is a passenger in the sailboat. There wasn’t supposed to be a passenger. There wasn’t supposed to be a girl. Hearn isn’t as in control of the details as he should be as a hands on project manager. Slaney is the muscle; Hearn, logistics. Slaney trusts Hearn implicitly, but his trust isn’t earned.

So let’s get to the end. Spoiler alert. Stop here if you would prefer not to know.

The rendezvous in South America succeeds. Along the Mexican coast, they hit a hurricane, which they are lucky to survive, but the sails are torn to shreds. They need to go into port. They are held by the authorities. The gig is up, surely, except, no, it isn’t, because Hearn’s operation has been infiltrated by the police, and the police want Slaney back in Canada, so they can complete their arrest. Deals are made, and the Mexican’s release the crew and their cargo, and out to sea they go, but they know something is up because a cop talks to the girl and tells her she can get off if she cooperates.

Slaney decides on a bold move. They will reverse course, go through the Panama Canal, and head home, to Newfoundland. This is a brilliant plot twist and it had me riveted, but by this part of the novel Moore had dropped the time pause techniques and only a few pages later Slaney was in handcuffs in the back of a squad car. Hearn got off on a technicality. Slaney did 20 years and in 1998 he gets out and heads back to the Rock to whittle away his days.

He visits the local university and the English Department, which is the new home of Dr. Brian Hearn.

I didn’t like this ending. It came too swiftly. It came because of betrayal, the girl’s. Slaney, as a character, I felt, deserved better. He deserved to at least reach Newfoundland and have a taste of success. One roaring party on the beach, say. I would have held in there for another 100 pages for that, even if he got caught in the morning, hung over and stoned. Instead, he and his mates are swiftly rounded up upon arrival and the prospect of a Grand Finale fizzles, and I closed the book feeling sour and disappointed, despite enjoying most of it and admiring same.

To add insult to injury, Hearn, the bastard, gets to teach iambs to undergraduates.

Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye.

Ice Storm Ontario 2013

2014-05-05T21:35:00.001-04:00

Photo credits: (top) Colin McConnell, (middle) Lucas Oleniuk, (bottom) Keith Beaty.

Three days before Christmas, 2013, the power went out as an ice storm hit southern Ontario. The story of the month that followed is captured in Ice Storm Ontario 2013 (ECW, 2014).

Subtitled The Beauty, the Devastation, the Aftermath, this book of Toronto Star photographs tells the city's tale of woe.

There's even a pic of Mayor Rob Ford getting chewed out by residents. Why won't you declare an emergency?!

There's a photograph of a wet fox scampering between towers of ice.

There's a photograph of a dude in Mississauga chopping wood and a notation that he may be the last person in Ontario to have his power reconnected. He was chopping wood a month after the ice storm hit, still waiting for hydro to reconnect juice to his house.

There is no photograph of my in-laws making tea on my front porch using my camping equipment. Tea! First! Okay, tea made, now ... what's your plan about what we do next? Ah, the English!

A portion of the sale proceeds of this book will be donated to The Toronto Star Fresh Air Fund.

What can one say about this book? Nice pictures. Um, no narrative. Just what's on the cover flap and in the cut lines.

The most compelling news I read accompanied piles of iced branches. Toronto's tree canopy will take decades to recover. Perhaps that is the take away. The trees. Even five months later, there are still piles of branches about, torn limbs visible, concern for our city forest still top of mind. When had we ever spared so many collective thoughts for our trees?

Another take away should be noted, because this week is Emergency Management Preparedness Week in Ontario.

Ice Storm 2013 is the only time I used my pre-packed candles and emergency water supply. And I was extra glad to have a supply of propane for my camping stove. And tea!

Three days supply of stuff is what is recommended. It wouldn't have been enough for the dude in Mississauga ... or many others ... but better than nothing.

I'm sure many folks have photographs as stunning as many of those included in this book, but the book shows the context across the city and across the weeks of the aftermath.

Not exactly a stocking stuffer, this book will none-the-less remind you that disaster is one freezing rain storm away. Thank God it's almost summer!

Zachariah Wells

2014-04-13T16:15:00.000-04:00

I first heard from Zach Wells before I'd heard of him. I suppose that's now an unlikely sequence. His reputation precedes him.

It was 2002 and I was plugging away at The Danforth Review, the online magazine I started in 1999 and continue to tinker with. I published something that Wells took issue with and he let me know where he stood.

Subsequently he wrote book reviews for the magazine and I asked him to write a review essay on Carmine Starnino's A Lover's Quarrel. That review is included in a revised ("New and Improved!"?) form in Career Limiting Moves (Biblioasis, 2013), which Google for some reason categorizes as "humor" (see link on title).

Funnily enough, I saw Wells recently and I said humor was one of the reasons I was enjoying his book. "It's not what you're known for, though," I said. "Some people seem not to get it."

"I know some people don't get it," he replied.

Which brings us back to the reputation that now precedes him.

I have heard him called an asshole. I've heard him called right wing. I've heard him called a misogynist. In the book he notes he's been claimed and rejected by both the populists and the elites. In truth, he has always been what his letter to TDR in 2002 perhaps should have made clear: a jury of one. An iconoclast. One who rejects systems. One who seeks a genuine, unpredictable deep connection with the wildness that is existence and also, therefore, literature.

Which doesn't mean he isn't sometimes a literary bad boy. The conversation about Canadian poetry in the past decade has had multiple moments of overheated debate. Wells has often been in the middle of it or nearby. (Sometimes of his choosing; sometimes dragged in by others.) I'm not going to sift through any of that, except to say little of it made it in between the covers of this book. Readers expecting score-settling won't find it here.

I'm not going to attempt a Social History of Canadian Poetry in the Aughts and Beyond, because what I'd like to attempt here is a book review. I have read this tome, and I'd like to record a few thoughts about it. Is any of that extra-curricular stuff relevant? I have decided to mention it in passing because, let's be honest, the book exists in a context and the context is relevant, if sometimes wanton. Willfully spiteful, is what I'm saying, not promiscuous. And, yes, I know Wells has been accused of the same. (So have I, and sometimes I have even deserved it.)

But see how quickly we move away from the book? I will try to stay focused.

The book is subtitled "Interviews. Rejoinders. Essays. Reviews." It begins with "Rejoinders." which is the category most responsible for ZW's reputation. It's the category where the TDR letter would fit. It's not the category that, ahem, contains his best writing. While the writing here is playful, snarky, sharp-witted, intelligent, and polemical, his debate skills (formidable) leave his opponents flattened. The later essays, some of which are also put-downs, are more finely tuned; complex; subtle; and therefore interesting. Wells can be an excellent close reader. His intricacy of thought is not on best display when he's demolishing Dr. Zwicky, for example. (However entertaining the piece is. Too entertaining? No. We must save some room in our life of letters for some fun; at the same time, we must save our praise for that which is truly great. This ripost is fun, and needed, but not great.)

ZW's rhetorical approach is part of the package, however, so ...

"I'm with Angela Carter," Wells writes in his introduction, "a day without an argument is like an egg without salt."

Being Wells, he then adds: "(I prefer pepper myself.)" (So he's with Angela Carter ... but only up to a point.)

This is a small thing, but let's notice that the movement here is towards the specific and subjective. The general point is all he needs. He likes to argue. Okay, we get that. But he also likes things to be grounded in the concrete, the real, the authentic, which is also, therefore, personal and subjective. Is Wells the only poetry critic to include his Myers-Briggs score? Likely. This subjectivity contradicts his reputation. The imperialist doesn't tell you where she is coming from; she simply states what is.

But here's what I really want to say about this book. I acquired some learning that I hadn't expected. I encountered arguments from Wells that I hadn't expected.

Wells is a brilliant polemicist, but his reputation obscures and over-simplifies a more interesting (to me) critic, poet and thinker.

I'm going to focus on one element that emerged from multiple pieces within the book, a pattern that I wouldn't have grasped if I hadn't read each of these essays, reviews and interviews in sequence.

And that is the connection between language, wild nature, and the impenetrable unknown.

I'm not a close reader of Wells's poetry. I have dipped into it, but I claim no insight about what he's "up to." What's at the core of Career Limiting Moves, however, it seems to me, is a collection of interests that might even move toward claiming the label of mandate. (And it's a mandate far beyond the limited conversation about positioning for privilege of place within Canada's hyper-competitive hierarchy of career minded, um, how is this even possible?, poets.)

"If we persist in being so insecure and isolationist, we are doomed to remain infantile," Wells ended his TDR letter. And since 2002 he has been mapping out his vision of a poetry of maturity. What should be starkly obvious is that it is an individual's vision, not part of a collectivist campaign.

He slams poetry that tells us what we already know. He slams poetry that uses worn out language. He turns to the natural world for examples of "the real," and also for example of spontaneous creation. Not his words, but I sense he sees humanity as an animal within nature. We are not apart from it; we are part of it. And what is this thing that we are a part of? What can we know of it? How can what we can know of it tell us about ourselves? What is the limit of our knowledge? How can we break the barriers so that we can know more? He praises poems that press against the outer boundaries. He praises poems that pressure language until it reveals its limit. Then he asks it to go further.

He is claimed by People's Poetry because he writes of work. He is projected to be a member of the elite because he eschews informality and values received forms. Yet every collective who claims him (or he is pressed into), he rejects ... one must say, Dylan-like ("Don't follow leaders, watch pawkin meters"). At one point in my reading I made a note: "straddling the authentic." And here's where that "pepper" comment comes in again. Wells grounds his line, his polemics, his mandate, as it were, in the every day, but it is a deeply mysterious (subjective) kind of quotidian. He is highly alert that day follows night, and night follows day, and life is full of pattern and routine, as poetry has form, as nature has seasons, but also that none of this is simple or self-evident. Whatever intimacy the day-to-day holds is best revealed through interrogation. Not simply conversation, argument.

The wildness of language and the wildness of nature is where he finds value. (I might have anticipated the first, but the second caught me off guard.) Each is perpetually in motion and impossible to set down except in instants. And here I recollect that ZW's debut collection was called Unsettled. The void looms large over his work. An anxiety to sweep away the superficial and dedicate the best resources to the biggest reward. While time lasts. His patience is weak for those who contemplate lesser obstacles. I knew that about Wells over a decade ago when I received from him from that first email, which set me back a couple of steps. (Most don't bother to engage; those who do, often have nothing to say. Those who have something to say, one never forgets.)

In 2002 I wouldn't have called Canadian literature infantile, but today I'm happy to claim that ZW is helping it grow up.

*

As a laying of cards on the table seems appropriate, yes, I count Wells as a friend, though I have only met him a handful of times, and I have not met his family, and he has not met mine. About that latter I am sad. He and my late-wife would have got on like a house on fire, if you will pardon the cliche. She liked to argue, too, and she didn't like to lose. It is strange to me to be writing this review and referring to events that happened before I met Kate in 2006 and including events that happened after she died, but that is what we do. We knit our lives together out of what we have, and this is constructive grieving. Just telling the stories and expressing the emotions. I wish Zach and Kate had met. I'm sure that I would have enjoyed that, a lot.

The M Word

2014-04-01T21:53:00.001-04:00

The M Word: Conversations about Motherhood
Edited by Kerry Clare
Goose Lane Editions, 2014

My step-daughter (10) saw me reading this.

"The M Word," she said. "Michael."

Last May, she gave me a Mother's Day gift. I can't be the only man who's ever received one, but none of the essays written in these "conversations" is written by a male.

A year before I got a Mother's Day gift, my wife mother died, following 21 months with breast cancer.

The temptation to write "following a 21 month battle ..." is immense, as you might understand.

The real battle, however, was in the final three or four months. The disease had gone to her liver and her bones, her T1 vertebrae specifically.

Breast cancer can put you in a wheelchair. I didn't know that until it happened. It also typically progresses, as it did for Kate: breast, liver, bone, brain. Once it leaves the breast, cure is impossible, and you get the special benefit of learning to live with the fact that your days are numbered.

But then they are for all of us, right? We just typically forget that part. We let other anxieties grip and define us.

Goose Lane sent me this book in the mail, a review copy for this site, even though I haven't reviewed anything here in six months. Turns out there's something worse than living with someone who's dying of cancer. It's living without the person who was dying of cancer.

Reviewing books used to give me pleasure; now I have a hard time thinking three sentences in a row.

Ah, but I exaggerate. Some of my Tigger bounce is returning.

I don't like "Conversations about Motherhood," the sub-title. What's wrong with calling essays essays?

A quibble.

Confession: I'm only halfway through this book, but I've been itching to capture my thoughts, so here goes.

Persistently these essays (the one's I've read) reinforce the idea that motherhood is a choice (even if the conception is accidental, because abortion an option and a second level of choice). Alternately, not becoming a mother is also a choice, except for those times when it isn't because conception (and carrying to term) is biologically impossible.

That is, there is anxiety about control. Control to make the choice, one way or the other, and the strong assertion that the choice is valid, whatever the choice is.

Now I support choice, and I accept the validity of any choice anyone makes. It's your body, it's your choice, this is all fine.

What I find oddly missing is, um, well ... awe. Mystery. The miraculous. What also might be called, fate. What will be will be. The revelation that comes with the encounter with the void, the other, the greater power that drives away all expectations and replaces it with that indescribable whatever that shakes you to the core and makes you realize that you've never been so alive. And so lost.

So changed.

I mean ...

In 2007, I became an instant part-time parent of a three-year-old and a seven-year-old. I chose to tie myself to this ship. I love being a parent almost more than I loved being married. I will be eternally grateful that Kate allowed me this experience. It caused rapid growth in my psyche and emotions that could not have happened any other way.

The best days of my life were spent talking to Kate about how we were going to grow these munchkins. The most important thing I've ever done is clean up puke at three o'clock in the morning, while Kate slept, undisturbed. (I know!) She didn't believe that it had happened, until I showed her the sheets in the washing machine. (But there were other times I let her do it. Fair is fair.)

Then in May 2012 I sat with Kate as she told the children that she was going to die, which she did eight days later, in the back room of our house, in front of them.

I wonder how the lost mother becomes part of this conversation.

Anyhoo ...

I'm enjoying reading this book. I enjoy the diversity of the stories, the variations of circumstance.

I wonder why, though, in 2014 we can't have a book about parenting. The P Word. How many generations until these marketing categories get broken down?

But it's not just that, I know. The entire parent council of the school across the street from my house is made up of women. Women are the do-ers, overwhelmingly. They make the household spending decisions, overwhelmingly. They organize the birthday parties, overwhelmingly. They care for the boo-boos and late night puking, overwhelmingly. They are the caregivers, emotionally and otherwise, overwhelmingly. And each new generation of young women is raised to be independent and self-actualized. Crash, boom, bang. The center cannot hold. Conflict is inevitable, and also interesting. The source of narrative.

I'm starting to get the "conversations" bit now. It's sort of like Sarah Polley's "Stories We Tell," each story strand is okay. It gives us a different angle on an impossibly angled object.

I should likely highlight some examples to give you some idea of the content of the book, and not just my own muddling meanderings. (I warned you, though; my mind is griefstriken.)

My heart went out to Heather Birrell. Her piece was super lovely.

Julie Booker's late-arriving twins sound like a handful, yet their arrival gave me sweet joy.

Diana Fitzgerald Bryden's story about her nephews and their dog was fantastic. Rich complex layers of super goodness.

Kerry Clare's tale of her abortion and subsequent pregnancy was well argued and poignant.

Myrl Coulter's reflections on giving up a baby for adoption show well-earned wisdom. Very effective integration of her own story with researched facts.

Christa Couture lost two small children. Separately. One after the other. Her essay is heartbreaking and, frankly, it contradicts my earlier claim above about the lack of fatalism in the collection. This is a brave and remarkable piece, one of the best here.

Nancy Jo Cullen sounds like a nifty drinking companion. She has two teenagers she will be happy to see out the door. She is a true den mother and zen mistress with a zingy comedic touch.

Marita Dachsel captures the anxiety of parenthood with gut stabbing precision.

Nicole Dixon doesn't have a kid and doesn't want one.

Ariel Gordon is a mother and a poet and she seems pretty good at balancing both roles.

Amy Lavender Harris reminds us that conception, even in modern advanced societies, is not a given. Her essay is another excellent example how effective it can be to mix the personal with well chosen researched facts. This is a very compelling piece that addresses how to become a mother in a lab. It looks at the personal pressures and costs, the social narratives that define and deny "naturalness", and the scientific details about how it all works, when it does.

Fiona Tinwei Lam is a third-generation single mother, and it seems to be working out well for her. As I step-parent, I appreciated her analysis of the changing social ideals of "attachment." Once unwed mothers were thought to be too unstable to care for their children (best for the children to go elsewhere); now the biological connection is privileged above nearly all else.

Deanna McFadden tells the ugly truth. Your children will make you angrier than you ever thought possible, and you will wonder why they aren't like other kids, specifically the quiet one that you saw on the way home on the subway.

And that's as far as I've gotten so far. I'm hoping that there's more craziness to come. Starker confrontations with the abyss. I want to hear from a mother who would be at home in a book like this. Or maybe from Jennifer Lawrence's character in "American Hustle." Or from an incarcerated mother. Or a drunk one. Or by a mother who spends her time looking after other people's kids so she can support her family in another country, typically the Philippines.

The narrative tension between the expectation and the real is okay, you know. It is what it is. It's motherhood in our current moment, though perhaps most prominently in an educated, middle-class type mode.

Motherhood is a role like every other role, in that it is complicated by a variety of pressures: race, class, family background, mental and physical health, level of education, geography, and pure random luck or lack thereof. (Wealth and power might be more common recent additions to this list. I imagine Allison Redford has an interesting tale to tell now. Kathleen Wynne, too.)

The truth is, that life is wild and unpredictable and out along the high wire we go. There is no net. No amount of desiring control and demanding validity is going to change that, though you may get strapped into a safety harness or two.

Yesterday I saw Michèle Taïna Audette speak. She is the president of the Canadian Native Women's Association, and she is currently leading the call for a national public inquiry into missing and murdered Aboriginal women.

She started her talk saying she is a mother of five. And single.

One of the stories she told went like this. She was giving a talk in Sault Ste. Marie to about 300 people. There were about 30 Aboriginal people. She asked them to stand up and raise their hand if one of their direct relatives (grandmother, mother, sister, daughter, granddaughter) was counted among the missing and murdered. Twenty-nine raised their hand. Then she asked the 270 non-Aboriginal people to stand and answer the same question. One person put up their hand.

Someone asked her about the sex slave trade on the Great Lakes. Did she know about that?

Oh, yes.

Life is really a great disaster and the ability to bare and look after children a great gift. Unless you don't want to, then that's okay, too.

It would be a shame if conversations about motherhood skirted that chaos too tightly.

Melia McClure

2013-10-15T20:02:00.000-04:00

My review of Melia McClure's The Delphi Room (CZP, 2013), from Quill & Quire. (See also me reading this thing on YouTube.)

*

When Bob Dylan told us, “It’s doom alone that counts,” he might have been anticipating Melia McClure’s tragicomic debut novel. In the first sentence, the narrator, Velvet, hangs herself; all subsequent action is post-mortem. Like Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which opens with the narrator waking up as a bug, the plot’s trajectory goes straight down. McClure’s protagonist has more self-determination than poor Gregor, but not much.
After hanging herself, Velvet wakes up naked in a room that is decorated like her childhood bedroom and resembles a jail cell. The closet contains a single set of clothes. Besides a bed, there is a mirror, a desk, and a pad of paper and a pen. Is this heaven, hell, or somewhere in between?
Soon she discovers she’s not alone. A neighbour, named Brinkley, is in the next cell, and they pass notes back and forth under the door. The mirrors in their rooms show scenes from each other’s lives. Velvet and Brinkley start off as strangers, but move toward something resembling intimacy.
Despite this growing relationship, Velvet is often alone with her thoughts, and we learn much about her sad, tragic life. She is an engaging narrator: cultured, self-aware, and often funny despite the disturbing circumstances. Existential and philosophical questions are inevitable in this context; McClure addresses them directly and wisely avoids simple solutions.
A clever novel with a unique approach, The Dephi Room both challenges and entertains. Though the story takes place after Velvet’s death, the characters are full of life, painted with emotional depth and affirming the wild complexity that is the human condition.
- See more at: http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=8143#sthash.FJoDdt6p.dpuf

When Bob Dylan told us, “It’s doom alone that counts,” he might have been anticipating Melia McClure’s tragicomic debut novel. In the first sentence, the narrator, Velvet, hangs herself; all subsequent action is post-mortem. Like Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which opens with the narrator waking up as a bug, the plot’s trajectory goes straight down. McClure’s protagonist has more self-determination than poor Gregor, but not much.

After hanging herself, Velvet wakes up naked in a room that is decorated like her childhood bedroom and resembles a jail cell. The closet contains a single set of clothes. Besides a bed, there is a mirror, a desk, and a pad of paper and a pen. Is this heaven, hell, or somewhere in between?

Soon she discovers she’s not alone. A neighbour, named Brinkley, is in the next cell, and they pass notes back and forth under the door. The mirrors in their rooms show scenes from each other’s lives. Velvet and Brinkley start off as strangers, but move toward something resembling intimacy.

Despite this growing relationship, Velvet is often alone with her thoughts, and we learn much about her sad, tragic life. She is an engaging narrator: cultured, self-aware, and often funny despite the disturbing circumstances. Existential and philosophical questions are inevitable in this context; McClure addresses them directly and wisely avoids simple solutions.

A clever novel with a unique approach, The Dephi Room both challenges and entertains. Though the story takes place after Velvet’s death, the characters are full of life, painted with emotional depth and affirming the wild complexity that is the human condition.

Maitland & da Costa

2013-08-17T22:24:00.000-04:00

My review recently posted on The Winnipeg Review.

*

Being assigned two books to review at once, one cannot help but return to grade eleven English. The command echoes loud and clear: compare and contrast.

Paulo da Costa’s The Green and Purple Skin of the World (Freehand Books, 2013) and Collette Maitland’s Keeping the Peace (Biblioasis, 2013) are both short story collections. Even a cursory contemplation of their titles, however, would lead one to suspect that while they share a form, they are divergent in other significant aspects.

In his 1998 book Ripostes (Porcupine’s Quill), essayist Philip Marchand compares and contrasts the work of Terry Griggs with that of Barbara Gowdy and illuminates insights that are assistive to our consideration of the works under review here.

Griggs, says Marchand, is Catholic; Gowdy, Protestant. He considers their treatment of angels. In Griggs, they foretell miracles; in Gowdy, death. Marchand writes of Gowdy’s characters: “It is as if they have a genetic memory of salvation anxiety – an anxiety in striking contrast to the relatively relaxed approach to salvation characteristic of many Catholics, who know that if Jesus hasn’t entered their hearts, at least they can make a novena on nine first Fridays and feel fairly safe.”

Based on the titles, do you want to guess which of these writers I am about to suggest is the Catholic and which the Protestant: da Costa or Maitland?

Let’s get it over with. Maitland, Protestant; da Costa, Catholic.

Keeping the Peace contains nineteen stories in 238 pages. The stories are short, sharp, intense. They are often shocking. They contain domestic violence, mental illness, teenage sex. The stories often turn on moral failure. More specifically, they turn on the failure of an individual to live up to the standards of “the code,” which is often the unspoken social expectations of contemporary rural Orangetown — I mean, Ontario. You know what I mean. There is no salvation for those who don’t follow “the code,” and for those in danger of straying away from the code there is much anxiety, an emotion that swells to bursting in every story in this collection.

Compare and contrast this with the stories in The Green and Purple Skin of the World. The stories in this collection rollick in the foibles of their characters. Aren’t people strange and wonderful? Wow. Did you hear the one about the old widow with the gun who scared the crap out of her live-in caregiver? Did you hear the one about the kid with that disease and he went to the doctor, and he had an operation, and he was freaking cured? Can you believe that? A miracle!

The Green and Purple Skin of the World contains sixteen stories in 206 pages. Many of the stories are intimate family portraits. It would be a stretch to call them dramas. Some haven’t much drama at all, really, or to approach it another way, they haven’t much anxiety. Some of the stories are full of intimate moments, portrayed lovingly, lightly and suffused with fun. To use the word Marchand highlights, salvation is not at risk in these stories. The fate of the family, the fate of an individual is not at risk. These stories don’t sharpen a narrative edge; they expand with love of life and risk being boring.

Let me be clear, not all stories in The Green and Purple Skin of the World meet this description. One story about a combat pilot who watches his buddies blow up, for example, has plenty of anxiety and narrative edge. We might conclude, therefore, that da Costa’s stories showcase greater range that Maitland’s, but that would be a superficial conclusion. Maitland’s stories push harder against the edges of reality, focusing on the fraying edges of relationships. The title may be Keeping the Peace, but these stories more often articulate the point at which relationships fragment. There is much anxiety that the peace be kept, that the code be followed, but damnation is inevitable within this mythology. The centre cannot hold.

In the final story, for example, the wife of an elderly man with Alzheimer’s takes him for a walk in the park. It seems a nice day until the man pulls a kitchen knife from his pocket and attacks a concrete lion statue, scraping newly applied paint off the creature’s eyeballs. A mother with a young child passes by and then turns away. The old man’s wife watches the woman pull a cell phone from her pocket. She can only imagine that the woman is calling 911, and she notes as the story ends “she would have done the same.”

Oi vey. Really? The wife identifies with Nurse Ratched? Surely this is the point where Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters enter the picture, but, no, the book ends. It’s severe, man. Yikes.
The Green and Purple Skin of the World, on the other hand, offers frequent reconciliation. One story collects a family at Christmas for the traditional torture. The mother is desperate for a granddaughter. Is the daughter going to fulfil her mother’s wish? Why should she, since her parents kicked her out of the home many years earlier when she was a teenager and caught in bed with her boyfriend? The daughter went on to live years on the street. The boyfriend was sent off to posh schools. Years later, they married and now all is supposed to be forgiven and forgotten. The daughter swears, however, she will never have a child. Never inflict on another being the damage that was inflicted upon her. But the story doesn’t end on a note of negation; it ends with the mother sharing the daughter’s childhood bathing suit with her. Wouldn’t it look nice on a girl? Yes, the daughter agrees. It sure would.

Cue the strings. Full orchestra. Bleeding heart and tears. Oh, lovely. Yes. It is, though.

As we reach our own conclusion, let us settle on relativity. Different strokes for different folks. An engaged reading, however, demands what Leonard Cohen asked of us in 1956: Let us compare mythologies. Off you go, now. Get reading.

Peter Roman

2013-07-17T17:12:00.000-04:00

Peter Roman's The Mona Lisa Sacrifice (CZP, 2013) is the first novel I've read that made me feel like I was playing a video game.

Maybe it was the protagonist, who kept dying and coming back to life, fighting assorted demons (and angels) and progressing to higher levels of complex game play.

But the protagonist isn't Super Mario; he's Jesus Christ. Or at least the soul who inherited Christ's body. Confused? So is he. His name is Cross, as in the Cross, but also angry.

Cross has the biggest case of amnesia in history and a unique problem. He can't die. He wakes up in a cave, rolls away enough of the rock to squeeze out. He has vague memories of being crucified. He remembers his enemy, Judas. No Prince of Peace, he's pissed off.

Over the next two thousand years, he drifts around the world indulging the body's cravings (often simply described as wine and women), fighting in the Roman Coliseum, with King Arthur's Knights, against assorted knaves, rogues and rascals. He has a burning hatred for Judas and a permanent existential crisis. He cannot erase himself (he dies repeatedly, only to dig himself out of various graves). He is propelled forward for a desire to know himself (though he's not much for philosophy) and a desire for revenge (he's convinced Judas is the cause of his fate). Judas, it must be explained, is a lot like Lucifer; he is no mortal; he morphs throughout history, often placing himself at the site of catastrophe and chaos (e.g., Hiroshima et al).

The background of the story is Christ withdrew to Heaven and God withdrew from the world. Judas, essentially, inherits the earth, except he hasn't achieved the complete Doom's Day he expected either. Angels remain, abandoned by God, awaiting his return. A host of other magical creatures also exist, each with different agendas.

Cross is like Moses in the desert, cast out, wandering. How can one not quote Bob Dylan? "Like a complete unknown/ Like a rolling stone." He hunts angels for grace. He kills them and sucks out their power, which restores him. If he died low on grace, he would still be restored, but it would take longer. Being stocked up on grace also allows him to perform magic of various sorts.

While the context-setting is complicated, the plot isn't. The story opens with an angel offering Cross a bargain: find the Mona Lisa (the real Mona Lisa, not the painting) and he will be given Judas. And since his search for Judas is one of the few things that have kept him going for the past two thousand years, of course he says yes. He would do anything for that. And what follows is a series of the odd and improbable. It's also a love story. And everything wraps up tightly, while also setting us up for the sequel.

Part hard-boiled detective novel, part magical realism, part mystic fantasy, part picaresque adventure, this genre bending novel may leave you seeking grace yourself. Though as Cross makes clear, eternal life has its down sides.

Leon Rooke

2013-07-08T21:06:00.003-04:00

There's a video on YouTube about manuscript records of Barry Hannah's at the University of Mississippi, and they interview a professor who recounts first reading Hannah, oh so many years ago, and the prof talks about how he had to learn to read Hannah the way Hannah wanted to be read.

He summarizes this as: learning to read for "language," not just for "story."

Rooke is the same way.

Read for the stories, the "acts of kamikaze fiction" in Wide World in Celebration and Sorrow (Exile, 2012) are going to confound.

Read as wild arrays of language, these stories will amaze.

Rooke's fans already know this. Eager readers everywhere, all aboard!

*

Here's my other post about the marvelous Mr. Rooke (from May 2010, written earlier), plus bonus interview!

*

Here's the Barry Hannah video:

*

Here's Leon reading poetry:

Donald Barthelme

2013-07-07T21:24:00.000-04:00

We're due for a Donald Barthelme revival. Or at least I was, because of passages like this (from an interview with Charles Ruas and Judith Serman, 1975):

BARTHELME: [On teaching creative writing] About the only thing I give them [the students] in the way of general pronouncements is that I forbid them absolutely to use weather in any form. ... Weather, weather. Thunderstorms, rain.

I say, "This is an entirely artificial prohibition and as soon as you leave my class you can use all of the weather you want. But for this space of time, weather is verboten."

That immediately gets rid of a lot of really bad writing.

RUAS: Why, because --

BARTHELME: -- Because it's so easy to use weather as the equivalent of an emotion, and you know --

RUAS: -- And Shakespeare's already done it better than anyone else can.

BARTHELME: Yes, and one very good student, at the start of this semester, said, "What, no weather? What would Lear be without weather?"

And I said, "The exception to this rule is if you write Lear."

*

My favorite quotations from Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews:

“There’s nothing more rewarding than than a fresh set of problems.”
“There’s nothing so beautiful as having a very difficult problem.”
“Beckett’s work is an embarrassment to the Void.”
“To quote Karl Kraus, ‘A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.’”
“Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.”

*

Most people probably encounter Barthelme in a classroom, which is unfortunate, especially if he is taught as part of the post-modern crowd, which of course he is (part of it, and taught that way). His fiction may be of the 1960s & 1970s, but his influence (and potential influences) span backwards and forwards in time.

Not-Knowing begins with two substantial essays, "After Joyce" and "Not-Knowing," which establish Bartheleme's bona fides as a Modernist and a Texan. His father was an architect and high on the intellectual curve for his time. Barthelme's interviews and essays show his deep immersion in aesthetic debates from visual art, to buildings, to books. While he may have picked up some avant garde tendencies from his father, his pater didn't appreciate Donald's sense of humour, or the advent of the "post-" prefix.

What one senses in all of this is the primal conflict, perhaps best illustrated by noting the title of what of Barthelme's novels, The Dead Father.

"Not enough emotion" and "too many jokes" were what Barthelme considered the weaknesses of his fiction. We might identify here instead an anxiety to simply be himself. But what was that?

Barthelme situates his work, like Joyce (and his other oft cited influence, Gertrude Stein) in the perpetual state of becoming. Or as he calls it, Not-Knowing: "The not-knowing is not simple, because it's hedged with prohibitions, roads that may not be taken. The more serious the artist, the more problems he takes into account and the more considerations limit his possible initiatives."

There is also the ongoing argument with those who don't "get it," those content to be hip to be square.

Barthelme quotes Kenneth Burke (from "The Calling of the Tune"):

For the greater the dissociation and discontinuity developed by the artist in an otherworldly art that leaves the things to Ceaser to take care of themselves, the greater becomes the artist's dependence upon some ruler who will accept the responsibility for doing the world's "dirty work."

Puzzle that one out for a moment, before reading Barthelme's response:

This description of the artist turning his back on the community to pursue his "otherworldly" projects (whereupon the community promptly falls apart) is a familiar one, accepted even by some artists. Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and the other writers of the transition school (Burke mentions them specifically) are seen as deserters, creating their own worlds, which are thought to have nothing to do with the larger world. The picture is, I think, entirely incorrect. ...

Burke's strictures raise the sticky question of what art is "about" and the mysterious shift that takes place as son as one says that art is not about something but is something. In saying that the writer creates "dissociation and discontinuity" rather than merely describing a previously existing dissociation and discontinuity (the key word is "developed"), Burke notices that with Joyce and Stein the literary work becomes an object in the world rather than a text or a commentary upon the world -- a crucial change in status which was also taking place in painting. With Joyce, and to a lesser degree with Gertrude Stein, fiction altered its placement in the world in a movement so radical that its consequences have yet to be assimilated.

*

Barthelme wrote that in 1964, just when the Sixties were becoming the Sixties. He then went on to become one of the leading literary innovators of his generation. His short stories and novels kept up the beat. The times were a-changing. At least, so it seemed for a while. They don't really change. They just modulate within a frequency. (What frequency, Kenneth?)

Check on the podcast by The New Yorker: Chris Adrian reads “The Indian Uprising,” by Donald Barthelme, and discusses it with fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.

*

As much as Barthelme was on his period, part of what we mean by literary influence is that the artist was ahead of her time. I think this is true of Barthelme. There is much (too much) "knowingness" in the 21st century, despite all of the quakes, wars, economic and environmental meltdowns. And I don't just mean Dubya's "you're with us or agin us." So-called progressives can be just as closed-minded as the ultra-dumb, I mean, -right.

"Dissociation and discontinuity developed by the artist"? In the interviews Barthelme repeatedly asserts that he's a "realist." Amen to that. He's also a language-magician and an idea-jerking philosopher (joker, midnight toker).

BARTHELME: I say it's realism, bearing in mind Harold Rosenberg's wicked remark that realism is one of the fifty-seven varieties of decoration.

We're talking about art, people.

Repeat after me. Donald Barthelme revival. Donald Barthelme revival.

Sam Lipsyte

2013-07-06T21:59:00.000-04:00

A quick look through the GoodReads reviews of this book suggested many of Lipsyte's fans were disappointed with the new collection, The Fun Parts.

For the life of me, I'm not sure why.

I started Lipsyte's Venus Drive a few years ago and couldn't get into it. The timing wasn't right for me, or something.

After finishing The Fun Parts, however, I'm ready to try again.

The new collection has 13 stories. They are darkly humorous. There is foul language, sexual themes, drug use, gun play and death. Some readers might be tempted to locate cynicism within. I didn't.

This is a completely subjective comment, but Lipsyte is the same age as me, and the collection had a nice "ah" feeling. The stories are uncomfortable, the characters struggling, contemporary reality is presented as a distressed array of random happenings. Yup, I recognize all of that as day-to-day.

So, yes, the stories have a male predisposition, but it's a post-modern, post-feminist predisposition. That is, a la Leonard Cohen, "the war is over/ the good guys lost." The characters are caught in the minor dramas of their lives, disconnected from any saving grace of any mega-narrative.

The disconnected isolation of the individual is a recurring strategy, in fact.

"Nate's Pain Is Now," for example, is narrated by an Augusten Burroughs-type memoirist, whose found himself on the outs. His redemptive self-story is no longer in demand. He just another former drunk/junkie with a father who's disappointed in him.

"Deniers" tells the story of the daughter of a Holocaust survivor who won't talk about his past, or show much emotion about anything. Her friend wants to write a poetry cycle about her, and then she hooks up with a guy with a skinhead past.

As a frame, the story risks cliche, but it avoids that fate and explodes with many small moments that enlighten and entertain, to risk cliche myself.

Here's one passage:

"Anyway," said Tovah, "I've been working on a poem cycle about you."
"A what?"
"A bunch of poems."
"About me?"
"Yeah."
"You don't know anything about me."
"I know a lot, Mandy."
"Not really. Maybe about me and Craig."
"Researching facts isn't the point," said Tovah. "It's about my construction of you. My projection."
"So," said Many, "I don't get it. Are you asking permission?"
"A real artist never asks permission."
"Oh."
"But I don't want any static between us."
"Am I Mandy?" said Mandy.
"Pardon?"
"In your poem, am I Mandy? Do you name me? Do you say Mandy Gottlieb?"
"No. It's addressed to a nameless person."
"Then why should I care?"
Tovah seemed stunned.
"Well...because it's so obviously you."
"But you said it's about your structure of me."
"My construction of...yes, that's right."
"So who cares?"
"I don't really understand your question."
"It's okay, Tovah. Write what your heart tells you to write."

This short passage contains a number of nice reversals, seems to bring these two friends closer together, but ultimately illustrates the gulf between them, while still keeping them connected.

The fun parts?

Lipsyte takes readers to the edge of oblivion. He saves us, however, from going over into the void.

Spencer Gordon

2013-06-22T18:52:00.002-04:00

Winner of the CBC's 2013 Overlookie Bookie Award for Most Underrated Canadian Book, Spencer Gordon's Cosmo (Coach House, 2012) is spritely, clever, funny, thoughtful, and restrained.

That last adjective may seem odd. It seems odd to me, given the wide ranging playfulness of this short story collection, but it's a thought that recurred as I made my way through the book.

Restrained, how? In emotion, surely. In perspective, perhaps. In aesthetic approach, maybe. In interests, not sure I would go that far.

Two of the stories begin with quotations from giants of American post-moderism: David Foster Wallace and Donald Barthelme. And the anxiety of influence is clear throughout. These stories seek to bend form, play games of the mind, articulate multiple layers of surface, foreground the artifice of the story itself, make the reader hyper aware of frames, and celebrate the swirl of language, carefully.

The carefully part is the restrained part. There is much intelligence here and much authorial control. The narratives are strong and assured. The paragraphs, short or long, are well manufactured.

Strangely (?), the book I read immediately before this one was Not Knowing, essays and interviews with Donald Barthelme. In one of the interviews Barthelme is asked to identify the biggest weakness in his writing. Or perhaps his biggest regret. Emotion, he ways. He wished he'd included more emotion. And fewer jokes. He also asserts repeatedly that he is a "realist" because art articulates the tropics of the mind.

Having read these two books so closely back-to-back, it's impossible for me not to draw comparisons. I feel that Cosmo could have used more emotion, though also more jokes, and less restraint. Perhaps an "s" could have been added to the title. Cosmos. I realize these are purely subjective tastes, and suggestions, so I will try now to say something more objective.

As others have noted, "authenticity" is a recurrent concern in this collection. The first sentence of the first story: "This is authentic, Crystle thought." These five words are just lovely. The italics. The concise "thought." The begged question: what is? The inauthentic "Crystle," who turns out to be Miss U.S.A. aboard an American military vessel in South Asia on a medical-humanitarian mission to aid cleft-lipped children.

This is a fantastic set-up. The beauty queen, the U.S. military, the child victims of random cruel circumstance. It is real because it is real; such things happen; but it is also highly "made;" it is an organized event, a deliberate placing of idealized pageant contestants with the randomly displaced. In other words, exactly the kind of "media event" that takes place every day and which can only be called authentic after it's been filtered through tough-fibered layers of skepticism.

Gordon gives us this skepticism, but he also keeps the reader buoyed well above cynicism. There's that restraint again. Crystle is moved by the suffering children, even as she has panic attacks about her biggest fear: falling down on the runway mid-pageant. This is authentic? We should care?

Even as I admired the writing, I wasn't sure.

But it got me to thinking along the lines of what did Andy Warhol have to say about the Holocaust? I popped the two terms in Google and came up with this....: "Sculptor George Segal created this work entitled The Holocaust. The memorial is at the location of the Legion of Honor and overlooking the Bay at Lands End. Segal is considered an important figure in the Pop Art movement which includes Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol."

Barthelme repeatedly insists that he's not ignoring social realities, and that his work references, among other things, the Vietnam War, racial strife, poverty and other social conditions. It just doesn't foreground those things; it foregrounds the activities of the mind (while also acknowledging the place-in-time context).

Here's a couple of the quotations I liked from Barthelme:

“To quote Karl Kraus, ‘A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.’” (1981)
“Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.” (1987)

Cosmo lives up to both of these, and I salute it. It is difficult and a riddle; it is art.

Bravo.

Best Canadian Stories 2012

2013-06-09T15:42:00.001-04:00

I’m not sure if these were the best short stories in Canada from 2012, but some of them are very, very good.

The anthology includes 10 stories, and I would like to celebrate what I consider the best of them.

Caroline Adderson’s “Poppycock” opens the book. Holy cow. This story will have me quivering for the rest of my life. It wouldn’t be out of place alongside the stories of Thom Jones’ The Pugilist at Rest. Paragraph by paragraph, it terrified me. The protagonist is a woman, a divorced mother of two, whose has been alienated from her family (father and sister, mother deceased) for over two decades. Her daughters are young adults and moved out. One day, her father shows up. She hasn’t seen him in 20+ years. He’s extremely unwell. Is this a chance for redemption? A corrective? A chance for explanation?

The whole thing tore my heart out. Unbelievable.

Or as Justin would say, Unbeliebable.

Lynn Coady’s “Dogs in Clothes” is another boot shaker. Ostensibly the story is about a young female publicist who shepherds a famous male (deep thinker) publicist around a metropolitan city (which seems a lot like Toronto during the G20 summit, when there were fences all over downtown and paranoid security apparatus[es] all over). Meanwhile, the publicist is texting a (female) friend and (married-to-someone-else) boyfriend and her brother (who is at the hospital where her father is under the knife for heart surgery). Grace under pressure? Is this Hemingway all over again? Are Coady and Adderson taking the same drugs?

Once again, a story about full catastrophe living. And not a Buddhist in sight.

Shaena Lambert’s “The War Between Men and Women” seems, at first, more straightforward. We’ve all lived through Phase I, II, III, IV, V, VI Feminism(s), so we all get this, right? Well, this is more like Faulkner’s “the human heart in conflict with itself” Nobel Speech (1949). [And isn't that great? Isn't the internet useful for something, once and a while?] “Endure and prevail.” Words post-Boston. Post-catastrophe. Eternal.

Lambert’s story starts: “It was 1968, and there was a war between the men and the women.” Holy crow. The story is told from the point of view of the child of two parents at war. As readers, we are once again in the middle of it all. In the middle of a war of all against all. Is it total destruction? Is there a chance for safety? Is peace an option?

What does all of this have to do with Canada, circa 2012?

“The story is constantly changing,” says the back cover, “and readers have to change as well.”

Well, okay, but why does it all seem so 1918?

Douglas Glover’s “The Sun King and the Royal Child” offers historical context as respite. In perhaps the “deepest” story in the collection, Glover offers (again, like the others) a narrator under pressure. Here is a young man who has had an long-running affair with another man’s wife. The other man is an archaeologist who has become famous as a researcher of pre-European contact Iroquois history/cosmology in southwestern Ontario. The “Sun King” and “Royal Child” of the title are Iroquois “artifacts,” except maybe they’re not, as the story eventually explains. Like much of the Glover-opus, the “present” of the story is both now and “then.” Or, to quote Faulkner again, “the past is never past.” (Though the quote is often paraphrased, as I have done here, according to Wikipedia: the real quote is from Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”)

Oh, Hemingway. Faulkner. Canada. 2012. What gives?

I don’t know. But it makes for a startling collection of short fiction.

Check, that.

Could use something by Tony Burgess, though. A little zombie ice fishing.

Just sayin.

Julian Barnes

2013-06-03T20:31:00.001-04:00

Levels of Life
by Julian Barnes
Random House, 2013

Early in life, Barnes writes, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven’t. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven’t. Later still — at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) — it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven’t. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross.

He also writes, “There is the question of loneliness.” Then a few sentences later, “Nothing can compare to the loneliness of the soul in adolescence.”

Together, these quotations seem to beg the question, Is loss of a spouse like a return to adolescent confusion?

Yet, he is unambiguous. Adolescent loneliness is the worst.

Before I address this question, I should say something about the book as a whole. It is slim, a mere 118 pages. A quick read, it is divided into three sections. Ostensibly, it is about grief; specifically, it is about Barnes’ grief for his wife of 30 years who died in 2008, after a 37 day illness. Cancer in the brain.

But to say the book is a memoir would be mistaken. It is part memoir, part essay, part fiction. The three sections are titled: The Sin of Height, On the Level, and The Loss of Depth. Levels of life, as the title says.

The balloon on the cover is another hint. There is a survey of 19th century balloonists, and also 19th century photographers. This is all interesting, well told, precise in description, alert in metaphor, and … all preamble to Barnes’ use of the first person to describe his experiences following the death of his life-partner.

There is the question of grief versus mourning. You can try to differentiate them by saying that grief is a state while mourning is a process; yet they inevitably overlap. Is the state diminishing? Is the process progressing? How to tell? Perhaps it’s easier to think of them metaphorically. Grief is vertical — and vertiginous — while mourning is horizontal.

Me, I like this distinction. Grief has nausea; mourning, sadness.

Let’s get back to the question of adolescence, which Barnes doesn’t develop, but which I would like to push deeper. In my own case, as my wife approached death (and I mean her final months, so there was a period of extended awareness of doom many times longer than Barnes had), I had feeling I hadn’t felt in a long time. When you are living with the awareness of doom, yet trying not to be consumed by doom, you focus on the day-by-day. Watch the flowers grow. Take pleasure in the laundry. The future goes blank. You cannot plan. You cannot take for granted that you will be together six months from now. Maybe not even two months from now. “I’ve been here before,” I told Kate. “I know this feeling. I feel twenty-two again.”

History did not record what she said in response. I don't remember. I don't think she said anything. "Do whatever you need to do, honey," or something along those lines.

The future, then, was blank. Full of possibility, yes, but blank. Lonely, too. One quests for love, to relieve the loneliness. Having found love, one can always lose it. It is part of the marriage contract. One must go first. The marriage contract becomes a caregiver’s contract. I will look after you. I will not abandon you.

Barnes writes, “There were 37 days between diagnosis and death.” In my case, there were 21 months. Grief is not competitive, and I don’t mean to be stern; however, the structure of this book is limiting, where it could be broadening. Barnes is careful to say each grief is specific, each experience is unique, yet the book reaches for general conclusions also. Levels of life.

I was not married for three decades, yet I inherited two step-children (and a new partner in her ex-husband), and the future is blank. Full of possibility. It must be. The children demand it so. As they should.

At one point, near the end of Kate’s life, I was speaking to a psychologist. She asked me how I was doing. I said I was listening someone compulsively to the music I used to listen to when I was 15 years old. I told her that for some reason I felt it important to reconnect with that adolescent. He had the whole world in front of him. He had all of his options open. I needed to live like that, I said. I needed to be ready for anything, and I trusted my 15-year-old self to get me through it. She was disagreeable. “We’ll see how that goes,” she said. I would like to report now, in that regard, things went just fine. I have been horribly, horribly sad, but I survived adolescence, and I’ll survive this. (At least, until I don’t. Time comes for all of us.)

I would have liked to have seen Barnes develop this line of thought (find arguments that contradict his absolutes), yet he is fanciful and metaphoric, an auteur, and, let it be said, brilliant. Earnest to a fault. Besotted with love. A true hero. Bravo.

I saw him once, at the Harbourfront Reading Series in Toronto. Late-1980s I would guess. It was the slightest of connections, yet I bleed for him, having read of his heartbreak. I wish him happiness, and healing laughter.

Keep passing the open windows, Julian. You know what I mean.

Primo Levi

2013-06-02T11:46:00.001-04:00

Already a well known classic, this book needs no introduction.

Primo Levi trained as a chemist in Fascist Italy, and managed moments of a career despite his Jewish ethnicity before being removed to a Nazi concentration camp. He has written about his time at Auschwitz elsewhere, but this book includes a couple stories from the camp also.

The main narrative, however, recounts his professional career as a chemist, most of which involves paints and varnishes. As the title hints, Levi provides a tour of different elements: carbon, silver, mercury, lead, etc. "Matter," he reminds us, the building blocks of life, which in the ancient stories the gods breathes with "spirit," giving life.

As so it is with Levi, storyteller. He breathes life into the inanimate, rejoices in the human spirit, even as he reminds readers of the horrors humans can inflict on one another and their world.

Levi writes in an after-the-catastrophe tone. He is writing at the end of his career, and also decades after "the camp," and he presents a narrator both weary and alert with curiosity. The narrator takes a teaching tone, recounting the particulars of each element, but not a pedantic tone. He knows what he knows and he also outlines what is unknown. There is a persistent moderation, recalling that other scientist, Artistotle, and "the mean."

It's a tone our tabloid culture finds hard to replicate or embrace, even. What a pity.

Auster & Coetzee

2013-05-19T16:49:00.002-04:00

When I was reading this, I found it compelling. I wanted to keep going, find out how it "ended," but it (of course) never really ended. It just ended. It had, a la Julian Barnes, the sense of an ending.

As I was reading it, I liked it. Upon reflection, not so much.

My disappointments outnumber my pleasure points. As such, dear book, I think we should break up. It's probably me, not you, but this is a review of you.

Thus, I had admiration for each of these authors before I read their correspondence, yet my admiration for them is diminished, not amplified, by seeing them all up close and personal.

Why so much discussion of sports? Why so clueless about the 2008 economic collapse? Why so little disagreement or pressing of the other into greater unknowns?

I wish now to read a similar correspondence between Carver and Bartheme, or Didion and Sontag. Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney. The genre has possibilities that have been only faintly outlined here.

Coetzee plays the pessimist to Auster's optimist. This gives them a point of conflict but it's also cliche. Auster is the bubbling American, ever hopeful, and Coetzee is old-world rogue, confirmed in his near-cynicism by perpetual disaster.

These tropes play to neither author's advantage. Ultimately I felt that too many opportunities of interest were lost. Coetzee is reflecting on mortality (his own) and "late style". He makes some general observations and Auster offers a series of examples that contradict Coetzee's drift, but the topic is not run to ground.

This book is superficial! That is my conclusion, though it surprises me to say so. Neither of these men is superficial, and their work is full of complexity, but I wanted more from their interaction.

It just is what it is. Play it again, Lenny Bruce.

Pause

2012-10-26T19:29:00.002-04:00

I am going to officially pause this blog for an indefinite period.

I have done a couple of posts since this past May, when my wife died.

I've tried to stay connected to some essential part of me that enables me to read and write, to critique, but I think the writing I need to do right now is not for public consumption.

I don't know how else to say it, because it seems as simple as that.

I'll be back here, I believe. Eventually.

Mo Yan

2012-10-12T22:20:00.000-04:00

Congratulations to Mo Yan for winning the Nobel for literature, 2012.

I saw this writer once at the Toronto Reference Library and mentioned him in a 2009 blog post here about Richard Van Camp, connecting Mo, Richard and William Faulkner.

I saw Richard talk about his writing once, at a First Nations cultural festival at Harbourfront in Toronto, and he spoke about the stress of modernity on Aboriginal communities in the north. His stories attempted to capture that. I told him afterwards that I had seen Mo Yan say something similar about his work. It was about capturing the stress of modernity on rural communities in China. Yan had said he had learned to write about that partly from William Faulkner.

Strange connections? Not at all.

When I saw Yan, he didn't read. He didn't speak English. He was interviewed by translator. He spoke about how the Communist government allowed him to publish his novels while also requiring him to write detective drama for television. His novels sold in the multi-millions, but mostly in pirated copies. He shrugged.

So it goes, as Vonnegut would have said. Did say.

It's a moment I will never forget. Here was a guy writing with a market audience, but without a market payoff. Writing detective dramas for TV, not because his novels didn't sell, but because he was given no alternative. His novels sold, but he didn't reap the profit.

What's to say, except good job Nobel Committee, but don't jinx the guy.

Hemingway kept a couple of novels in draft in a vault in Havana, I once read. Because he didn't want to sell them because they could be sold. He wanted to be sure that they were good. Wanted them to rest and test the tides of time.

Compare and contrast with J.K. Rowling.

I have the above newspaper headline clipped to the wall above my desk.

Every time I read that I shudder.

How much larger could you get?

So, Mo, resist the urge to go for the gold. Resist the urge to be all Nobelesque.

Stay in the groove, man. Just, go.

A summer of reading

2012-09-03T16:56:00.000-04:00

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.