That Shakespeherian Rag

What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been

2007-06-01T12:27:00.001-04:00

Well, okay, not really. But, it is with some regret that I must pull the plug on the current version of That Shakespeherian Rag. Thanks sincerely to all who have taken the time to visit and comment over the last eight months; I really appreciate the feedback and support.

So, that's the bad news. The good news (if you choose to see it that way) is that TSR is not disappearing, but merely moving to new digs (to a dee-luxe apartment in the sky, if you will). Please come visit me at my new home: stevenwbeattie.com. This will be the new headquarters for an expanded version of TSR, for which I have grand ambitions in the coming months.

There's a mission statement of sorts posted at the new site, and regular posts will begin in the coming days. Hope to see you all there.

Looking for a Ghostwriter?

2007-05-31T10:27:00.000-04:00

You might want to give this woman a shot:

~With seven years’ experience as a full-time freelance writer and editor, I can offer you a wealth of expertise in informative, conversational and concise writing. I deliver high quality work on time and on budget, ensuring that your projects remain on schedule. I am always open to editorial criticism and a revision, if needed. I am highly motivated and work well independently. I will work with you to provide you with the work you are looking for. You can be as involved as much or as little as you wish throughout the project. If you are tight on time, you can trust my experience, and that I deliver projects on time, 100% of the time. I will work with you to get the results you need.~ (My emphasis.)

And if you're looking for work, she's in the market for someone to do twenty-nine article rewrites of 500 words apiece by June 1, for which she's willing to pay the princely sum of $72.50. Wait ... June 1 ... isn't that ... TOMORROW?

I Need a Cigarette

2007-05-25T16:16:00.000-04:00

~I am convinced that the smoking bond is actually the reason many people smoke. Life is lonely and making connections with other people is a hard thing to do. The smoking bond is definitely the reason I forced myself through those awful first cigarettes for long enough to get properly addicted. For some reason, having a paper tube filled with dried leaves and chemicals between my fingers means that I drop a layer of falseness. I become more willing to let go of all the things that make me different and level out a bit. We both smoke. That seems to be a solid starting point, intensified in an age of banning. There is no scientific explanation for this phenomenon, but it is arguably more addictive than the nicotine itself.~

-- Claire Cameron, The Line Painter

Big Changes Coming

2007-05-24T14:14:00.001-04:00

Watch this space.

Apples and Oranges

2007-05-18T15:23:00.000-04:00

Darby Dixon points out what should be patently obvious about literary reviews and literary criticism: they're two different beasts.

~It's felt like far too often during this whole "save the book reviews" campaign (and really all the time before this campaign as well) that I've seen book reviews and book criticism discussed as if they are the same thing. They are not. Or, they should not be. I really would love to see both forms flourish, and I don't care whether it's done via newspapers or periodicals or blogs or online news sites or whatever. ... But it certainly doesn't help the case when people look at the one and accuse it of not doing what the other does. Let's get our terms and tools straight: I would not use a tow truck to take a photograph; I would not use a 500 word review to provide 5000 words of critical analysis.~

This seems to me to be absolutely basic, but it's fabulously rare to hear people make this distinction. It's impossible to do serious literary criticism -- thoughtful, carefully analyzed, close-reading criticism -- in 500 words or less. Which is not to say that book reviews can't be thoughtful -- indeed, they should be -- but their aim and purpose is essentially different.

Literary criticism takes the long view, placing works in their contexts on a literary spectrum, carefully comparing an author's achievement to that of her contemporaries and her forbears to clarify where a body of work fits in the literary pantheon. A reviewer's job -- and the space she has to carry it out -- is much more confined. People who read reviews aren't likely looking for a carefully teased out analysis of image patterns or intertextual comparisons, and a reviewer doesn't have the elbow room required to include this kind of thing anyway.

The problem, as Richard Powers suggests in his blog post for the National Book Critics Circle's "Campaign to Save Book Reviewing," is that too often reviews are reduced to a simple matter of giving a book "thumbs up" or "thumbs down," and neglect the more nuanced elements of a reader's engagement with a given text:

~I honestly don’t think our crisis is print reviews versus blogs, specialization versus populism, or even the exclusivity of the elite versus the tyranny of the majority. I think our crisis is instant evaluation versus expansive engagement, real time versus reflective time, commodity versus community, product versus process. Substituting a user’s rating for a reader’s rearrangement threatens to turn literature into a lawn ornament. What we need from reviewers in any medium are guides to how to live actively inside a story.~

Powers suggests that one should emerge from a good review changed, the same way one emerges from a good book changed. This is certainly a lofty ideal; the trick is figuring out how to pull it off in 500 words or less.

Good Lord!

2007-05-17T10:03:00.000-04:00

Quillblog reports that James Patterson, writer of "dopey thrillers" (Stephen King's words, not mine -- I'd have used more profanity) and international bestselling author, will close the inaugural BOOKED! literary festival in June.

I'm of two minds about this. Sure, it's a coup to score Patterson, who is sure to be a huge draw. But his appearance sort of puts lie to the "literary" part of the festival. I read Along Came a Spider and thought that it was turgid, semi-literate, and pallidly imitative of better books (The Silence of the Lambs being one of the more obvious examples). I thoroughly detested it, and thought at the time that I'd never read a book that was as bad. Then I read Kiss the Girls. (Don't ask -- a buddy raved about it.)

So I admit to being biased (and am clearly in the minority, if Patterson's sales record is anything to go by). But, honestly, couldn't they set the bar just a bit higher?

I'm a Huge Fan of Zach Wells

2007-05-17T09:46:00.001-04:00

Here's why.

[UPDATE: Nathan Whitlock has an important addendum to the Wells piece:

~That's all to say that it would be going too far to say that a work's Canadianness it totally irrelevant to how it gets received. Mediocrity should not be cheered on, wherever it's from, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't hope a little harder for success for the home team, or feel particularly despondent when it goes into a slump, for this very reason (from Zach): "a country's poetry should be one of the things that shapes it."~]

Missing the Brass Ring

2007-05-16T10:08:00.000-04:00

New York Sun columnist David Blum examines the case of Joshua Ferris's first novel, Then We Came to the End, which garnered ecstatic reviews, has sold 50,000 copies in hardcover, scored a movie deal with HBO, yet still failed to crack the bestseller lists.

The problem? If you believe Blum, at least part of it has to do with the book's title:

~It's easy to blame the bookstores, or the heinous overlords of newsprint, for the problem. But publishers, and even authors, deserve a little of the blame — especially when they pretend that marketing doesn't matter. In the case of Little Brown and Mr. Ferris, some attention to the novel's cumbersome title might have helped. Was "Then We Came to the End" really the best title for this wonderful novel? I doubt it. By allowing his impossible-to-remember title to remain on the book, everyone involved willfully ignored the pragmatic truths of the 2007 literary marketplace: Sometimes the catchier title wins. It's no coincidence that the cleverly-titled "Heyday" sold better, even though it's hard to believe any readers preferred Mr. Andersen's self-conscious artifice over Mr. Ferris's heartfelt tour de force.~

Personally, I don't find Ferris's title all that difficult to remember; it's certainly more manageable than some unweildy monstrosities I can think of.* But we do live in an era where shorter, faster, and catchier are unequivocally better, where novels have their titles chopped or changed by the Hollywood mill, so perhaps Blum has a point. Ferris's novel is set in an office, so why not just call it The Office? Simple.

What? ... Oh, it is? You don't say.

*The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, perhaps?

On Getting Along

2007-05-15T09:47:00.000-04:00

A good article in the Los Angeles Times suggests that it's time to call a truce in the war between the books pages in traditional media outlets and litbloggers:

~Many believe there's a healthy synergy between the two. Maud Newton, who runs one of the more respected literary blogs (maudnewton.com), was puzzled by the idea that the two are somehow competing. "When bloggers disagree with or agree with an article about books in the mainstream press, it drives traffic to the newspaper," she said. The cutbacks at newspaper book reviews are unfortunate, but hardly the fault of bloggers.~

This seems only logical. In an era when newspapers are cutting back on their book coverage with a kind of slash-and-burn mentality, people who crave book discussion are forced to look elsewhere. True, a lot of what is found online is on the order of gossip and recycled news, but there is also a lot of thoughtful, cutting-edge, and critically solid material on offer.

Publishers have figured this out. The blurbs in the paperback edition of Marisha Pessl's novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics feature the usual suspects -- Janet Maslin of the New York Times, USA Today, Harper's -- but also include comments from Bookslut.com and Gothamist.com.

The house of literature contains many mansions, and it's high time the traditional book reviewers and critics, many of whom are, I suspect, reacting out of a legitimate fear for their continued employment and relevance, realized that and started working in tandem with the litbloggers, instead of creating an unnecessarily adversarial environment. We are, after all, in this thing together.

But Christ do I hate the word "synergy."

First Lines

2007-05-11T11:00:00.000-04:00

Guy Dammann at Guardian wants to know what your favourite first line is. Not pick-up lines, although those can be interesting too, but first lines of novels.

Openings are tricky. You've got to hook a reader with something essential, intriguing, or amusing, while not giving the whole game away. Great opening lines stick with a reader even after the rest of the novel has faded to a burnished sepia tone.

Dammann's article trots out some of the old warhorses -- "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."; "Last night I dreamed I went to Manderlay again."; "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

My own favourites (some of which are included in the responses to Dammann's piece) are a bit more idiosyncratic (what a surprise!). A few examples:

"Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea." -- Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

"Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up." -- Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

"I entered the strange world of Justine Shade via a message on the bulletin board in a laundromat filled with bitterness and the hot breath of dryers." -- Mary Gaitskill, Two Girls, Fat and Thin

"Call me Smitty." -- Philip Roth, The Great American Novel

"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo ..." -- James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

"--Money ...? in a voice that rustled. -- William Gaddis, JR

"Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant
to murder him." -- Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

Those are some of my faves. Yours?

I'm All A-Twitter

2007-05-11T10:18:00.000-04:00

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that, after being sealed from public scrutiny for twenty years, the complete correspondence between Flannery O'Connor and Betty Hester, the elusive figure known only as "A" in the previously published letters of O'Connor, collected in the volume The Habit of Being, will be unsealed this weekend.

Hester, a file clerk in Atlanta, had an extensive and wide-ranging correspondence with the legendary American author, and the letters that have already been published provide a wealth of information on O'Connor's feelings about her Catholicism, her writing process, and the state of American literature at the time. According to the article in the Journal-Constitution, the new letters should cover a similarly broad range of subjects: "The archive is expected to reveal much about the nature of their relationship, as well as O'Connor's attitudes about subjects from civil rights to homosexuality."

From The Habit of Being:

~[I]t is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.~

~I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man Is Hard to Find brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. I believe that there are many rough beasts now slouching toward Bethlehem to be born and that I have reported the progress of a few of them, and when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.~

(Via Bookninja.)

Can Creative Writing Be Taught?

2007-05-10T13:19:00.000-04:00

No, if by writing one means "talent" or "creativity"; as Francine Prose points out at the beginning of her book, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them:

~[I]f what people mean is: Can the love of language be taught? Can a gift for storytelling be taught? then the answer is no. Which may be why the question is so often asked in a skeptical tone implying that, unlike the multiplication tables or the principles of auto mechanics, creativity can't be transmitted from teacher to student. Imagine Milton enrolling in a graduate program for help with Paradise Lost, or Kafka enduring the seminar in which his classmates inform him that, frankly, they just don't believe the part about the guy waking up one morning to find he's a giant bug.~

But what if one were to remove talent from the equation? Writing in the Women's Post, author and creative writing instructor Marianne Apostolides asserts that talent is not the key factor in any creative writing workshop: "I cannot teach you talent, because I don't believe in talent; I believe, instead, in dedication, humility, passion, attention. I believe in this – the slavish, seductive work of writing."

Dedication, humility, passion, and attention are all admirable traits in a writer, and should be carefully attended to, but I think Apostolides is too quick to give in to the (perhaps understandable) democratizing impulse that suggests that talent is not required of a writer, and can therefore be dispensed with by stating simply, "I don't believe in talent," the way one might say, "I don't believe in Santa Claus" or, "I don't believe in Bigfoot."

Talent is ineffable, but, for a writer, I'm afraid it's absolutely vital. Close to a decade of editing and reviewing professionally, not to mention a lifetime spent reading, has convinced me that removing talent from the equation, desirable though it might seem from a populist perspective, is a recipe for disaster.

Unfortunately, this implies a hierarchy of ability; if talent is essential, then there are some people who simply won't be up to snuff, and this is not befitting of our egalitarian society, not to mention all the money that creative writing schools will lose out on should they start rejecting all the starry-eyed professionals who long to see their names in print or the retirees who have always wanted to try their hands at writing fiction and now have an oasis of time to devote to this aspiration. (One of my favourite stories, perhaps apocryphal, involves Margaret Lawrence being cornered by a brain surgeon at a party. The brain surgeon confessed to the novelist that he'd always wanted to try his hand at writing a novel. Lawrence is supposed to have replied, "Really? I've always wanted to try my hand at brain surgery.")

This is, needless to say, an unfashionable position to take, but it seems to me to be the true one. In the introduction to his book of collected criticism, The War Against Cliché, Martin Amis railed against the "forces of democratization" that would excise talent from the list of requirements for virtually any endeavour:

~Those forces -- incomparably the most potent in our culture -- have gone on pushing. And they are now running up against a natural barrier. Some citadels, true, have proved stormable. You can become rich without having any talent (via the scratchcard and the rollover jackpot). You can become famous without having any talent (by abasing yourself on some TV nerdathon: a clear improvement on the older method of simply killing a celebrity and inheriting the aura). But you cannot become talented without having any talent. Therefore, talent must go.~

But, pace Marianne Apostolides, talent is essential. When anyone who can write a grocery list thinks that he can therefore write a novel, and can find dozens of substandard examples of published writers clogging the shelves at Indigo to encourage him, talent must be guarded ferociously.

Craft is another matter. The five elements of a story that Apostolides points out (plot, setting, character, conflict, and theme) and how various writers emphasize or de-emphasize each to suit his or her individual needs; the rules of grammar and when it is okay (not to say advisable) to break them; the function of dialogue (to deepen character or advance the story), etc. -- all these things can be taught, provided a student is willing to learn.

But talent, that raw and ineffable commodity, is probably beyond the realm of even the greatest creative writing instructor.

It's About Time

2007-05-10T09:09:00.000-04:00

Don't you just hate that feature on Amazon.ca that provides you with "personalized" suggestions for future reading based on your book-buying choices? I bought a book on Canadian demographics for work -- something I would otherwise never read -- and now all my suggestions have to do with statistics and population trends.

As an antidote to this nonsense, Library Thing presents The UnSuggester.

The UnSuggester gives you suggestions of books to avoid depending upon your particular taste in reading material. For example, if you liked Infinite Jest, the UnSuggester recommends avoiding Red Lily by Nora Roberts and Honeymoon: A Novel by James Patterson.

Some other suggestions: People who liked A Critique of Pure Reason should avoid Confessions of a Shopaholic; fans of Confessions of St. Augustine probably won't like Night Pleasures by Sherrilyn Kenyon; Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants aficionados should (definitely) avoid Michel Houellebec's Atomised; people who dug Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel should steer clear of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information; and, my favourite, people who admire Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus probably won't like A Million Little Pieces by James Frey.

(Via Bookninja.)

One of the Benefits of Book Reviewing

2007-05-09T15:41:00.000-04:00

I probably wouldn't have picked up Daniel Mason's novel A Far Country had I not been assigned to review it by the Edmonton Journal, which would have been a shame, since it's a pretty good book.

My Journal review is online, here, for anyone who might be interested.

In Defence of Fearless Criticism, or, Why Don't People Seem to Like My New Novel?

2007-05-09T09:40:00.000-04:00

Is it just me, or does this Telegraph article by Lionel Shriver not seem completely self-serving and whiny?

Writing about the perils of being both a working author and a practising book reviewer, Shriver wonders what would prompt a writer to put herself in the position of giving her colleagues bad notices when they will presumably be in the position to return the favour in the future, not to mention may one day sit in judgement over her own book on an award jury.

Taking up the mantle of the fearlessly honest critic, one who is not afraid to call Norman Mailer's new novel "one of the worst books [she has] ever read," Shriver positions herself as a fighter in the cause of literature, someone unafraid to pillory other authors with "lacerating one-liner[s]" and "slash ... novels to ribbons" if she feels they deserve it.

All of which I'd be much more disposed to accept were it not couched in the broader context of what seems to be a preemptive strike against negative reviews of her own new book, The Post-Birthday World. The book, which has been getting mixed reviews in North America*, was recently released in the U.K. -- to mixed reviews.

Well, of course they had problems with it: it's revenge, you see? Ill feeling caused by egos bruised by the strokes of Shriver's "lacerating" critical pen.

At least that's how it feels to me. I was put off by the very first sentence of Shriver's Telegraph piece, in which she cracks wise about "[t]ossing off reviews of other people's novels." Speaking as someone who has writerly aspirations, and who nevertheless has written his own fair share of negative reviews for publication, the notion that a review should simply be "tossed off" with little or no consideration, regard, or sober second thought, strikes me as odd at best. Perhaps Shriver was simply striving to sound casual, or to indicate that this whole matter of being simultaneously a working novelist and a reviewer was no biggie, but that's pretty much where she lost me.

The irony is that the off-putting tone of her Telegraph article has made me less inclined to pick up her new novel. Of course, she'd argue that I'm making the same mistake that Jonathan Yardley, a critic she disagreed with so strongly about his assesment of one of her books that she engaged him in an e-mail correspondence that eventually "went off the rails," apparently made: "he dispensed with the artificial distinction between author and book and now unabashedly despises me." I don't despise Shriver: I don't know her. But I find the tone of her article unfortunate.

[UPDATE: Hmm ... maybe it's not just me after all.]

*Julia Scheeres wrote in the New York Times that "Shriver stumbles across provocative themes — the private erotic fantasies of long-time lovers, unplanned pregnancy in middle age, the sexuality of anger — but doesn’t dwell on them long enough to enliven her characters or her story ... she seems to have rushed out this new book, churning through tired themes of infidelity and regret without offering fresh insight or even an entertaining story."

This Is Cool

2007-05-08T09:51:00.000-04:00

If you're like me (and I know that you are ...), the first thing you do when visiting somebody's living space is check out the books on their shelves. Now, thanks to Flickr, you can do this virtually. I wonder how many people have done what I'd do if I had access to a digital camera, and picked a bunch of books that make them look smart (or edgy or funky) to photograph and upload.

The stack in the photo belongs to Sarah Williams of Something Slant (who is smart and edgy and funky), on whose site I discovered the Flickr link. I hope that Sarah doesn't sue me for appropriating her photo, but as I mentioned, I don't own a digital camera (though I do have a birthday coming up in a few weeks ... hint, hint).

A Note to Genre Writers

2007-05-05T08:58:00.000-04:00

From Anthony Lane's New Yorker review of Spider-man 3:

~The fact is that if the fantastical is to flourish it must lay down the conditions of its magic and abide by them; otherwise, we feel cheated.~

That's all.

BOOKED! Lineup Released

2007-05-04T08:03:00.000-04:00

The lineup for BOOKED!, the new readers' festival programmed to coincide with this year's iteration of Book Expo Canada, the annual booksellers' trade show, has been made public, and includes the first Canadian appearance ever by Stephen King. Apart from being agog that King has never before made it north of the 49th parallel, I hope that the hype around his appearance at the festival won't needlessly obscure the other, equally worthy but perhaps less-well-known authors who are slated to appear, including Barry Callaghan, David Gilmour (the Canadian writer, not the Pink Floyd guitarist), Linda McQuaig, Sherman Alexie, and Ray Robertson.

There has already been some cynicism expressed about King's appearance at the festival, but I was chatting with a buddy last night who is of the opinion that anything that draws attention to books is inherently a good thing. I agree up to a point, but I suspect that the marketing and media surrounding the event are going to focus on King, and perhaps Christopher Hitchens, hopefully not to the exclusion of the other authors in attendance. BEC is a Canadian book fair, after all, so one would expect that the opportunity would be used to aggressively promote some homegrown talent.

This being the first year for BOOKED!, I'll hang fire for now and see how things go in early June.

Mother's Milk

2007-05-03T09:55:00.001-04:00

Darcey Steinke has always trafficked in what Henry James, in the Preface to The American, called "a rich passion ... for extremes." The lyricism of her first novel, Up through the Water, gave way to a kind of frenzied, Gothic sensibility in her second, the hallucinatory Suicide Blonde, which tracks the psychosexual odyssey of Jesse, its troubled protagonist. The Gothicism that emerged in Suicide Blonde found its apogee in Jesus Saves, arguably Steinke's strongest novel, which tells the twin stories of Ginger, a sexually adventurous minister's daughter in an unnamed suburb of the American South, and Sandy, a girl who has been abducted from her summer camp and repeatedly sexually abused.

Sex and religion are the twin shibboleths in Steinke's work, and these two themes are inextricably fused in her short novel, Milk, which follows three main characters: Mary, a recent mother trying to negotiate the perilous terrain of her feminine sexuality as it collides with her maternal nurturing instincts; Walter, a homosexual Episcopalian priest; and John, an ex-monk who craves human intimacy.

Throughout Steinke's brief, but not slight, book, sexuality and the body's physical needs are shone through the prism of spirituality, and our dual natures -- simultaneously sacred and profane -- become the linchpins for the trio at the novel's centre. Mary, who has been neglected by her husband since she gave birth, feels her child's presence in a palpably physical way: "to a baby love was not abstract but visceral: warm skin, milk, her voice." It's the same tactile relationship she has always had with her own body, which responds to her shifting moods and yearnings, making manifest her inner turmoil: "She felt the various parts of her skull, temples, sinus and her cheekbones ache. Mary stood up; her neck was sore, as if strains of metal wire were embedded in the musculature."

Mary's body is highly responsive; her lactating breasts serve as barometers of her emotional engagement with the world around her: "Usually her milk was exclusively for the baby, but occasionally the sweet liquid came for flood victims on television and when the homeless man asked her for a quarter." This physicality is a counterpoint to Mary's spiritual impulses, and Steinke insists on the connection between the two: "There was so much vulgarness inside her; it was beautiful really." This insistence is not abstract; Mary conceives of her sexuality as a creation of her god, and the act of masturbation is explicitly connected to a spiritual force: "Only God could infuse something so rudimentary with life. She was made out of cosmic refuse -- stardust, smoky vapor -- and so occasionally if she concentrated, she would tease down the life force for her own selfish use."

This spiritual connection is something that Walter once felt for Carlos, a boy on whom he was fixated and who has died, but is now unable to recapture. Sex for Walter has become a series of anonymous assignations with men he meets online or in cruise bars, "The thing against the other thing; that was the most human of all, the most embodied, not flesh infused with spirit." When Walter has sex, he feels "many things, including degradation and peace."

The contradiction is intentional, and signals the key precept by which Walter lives: the notion that religion is a mechanism for humanity to embrace conflicting impulses in their lives.

~[R]eligion insists on paradox. Everything is wonderful. Everything is terrible. Both at the same time. That's how it is with everything, degradation and divinity, the material and the corporeal, all unified so on one level a blade of grass is an everyday object, but in another way it's a supernatural thing.~

This notion of duality at the heart of religion, not some dogmatic edict or fundamentalist proscription, is the driving force behind Steinke's narrative. Milk deliberately eschews a Manichean view of humanity, and instead offers a vision of unity, in which the sacred and the profane are equally worthy of spiritual congress. As Mary tells the priest, "I understand my soul is like a piece of God implanted in me, and while it's the same substance as God, it's much more cloudy because it's so hard to be human."

The Case of the Disappearing Book Pages

2007-05-02T12:10:00.000-04:00

Newspapers across North America are cutting back on the number of pages they devote to book news and reviews. This is axiomatic. Last month, the Los Angeles Times folded its previously discrete books section into the Sunday paper, and according to this article from the New York Times, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently eliminated the position of book editor from its masthead. Here in Canada, the book coverage in the major urban dailies has been curtailed over the last five years or more, and of the national papers, only the Globe and Mail still has a stand-alone books section. This obviously means fewer reviews in general, fewer reviews of specialized or non-mainstream titles, and less overall attention paid to the world of books by traditional organs of print journalism. All of which is a bad sign.

Or is it?

While it's true that the books coverage in traditional print newspapers is declining, there is plenty of online coverage that is at least equal, if not far better, in quality and analysis. The Guardian's site is required reading for any book lover, and while it did merge its books section with the rest of the paper, the Los Angeles Times simultaneously beefed up its online coverage of books, which currently features reviews, author interviews (including a recent interview with Jim Crace), and book news.

In addition, as the Times piece points out, the field of litblogs (of which TSR might be considered the redheaded stepchild) is blossoming. Although Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford expresses skepticism about the lack of oversight that bloggers have as against writers for traditional media outlets, my experience has been that there are any number of bloggers writing about books who can provide coverage that is at least as careful and comprehensive as that of the major dailies.

I've already pointed to the author interview series over at Identity Theory as one example. Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant regularly provides well-informed, acerbic commentary and thorough roundups of literary news, as well as a podcast series featuring interviews with writers as varied as Martin Amis, Octavia Butler, Nora Ephron, Sheila Heti, and Nina Hartley. Here in Canada, Bookninja is essential daily reading.

In terms of numbers, Champion points out that on May 1, 2007, his site logged 43,865 unique requests, which "easily matches the circulation of a midsize newspaper." TSR has far fewer daily hits, but the number is steadily increasing, which is encouraging to its author, both from a narcissistic perspective, and because it signals a willingness on the part of book lovers to search out information and reviews that are (one hopes) informative, well-researched, and entertaining.

Champion asserts on his site that the Times article, in which he is quoted, missed out on his hope for convergence between the book coverage in traditional and new media, a hope that I'd heartily second, as do Dan Wickett and Maud Newton, who says that she "find[s] it kind of naïve and misguided to be a triumphalist blogger." What is devoutly to be wished for is an environment in which print and online coverage can find a way to comfortably coexist, such that both can continue to nurture and tend the garden of literature.

In the meantime, those of us who, to paraphrase Champion, give about 10,000 good goddamns about literature, can take solace in the fact that while book coverage may be in a period of transition, it's not vanishing off the face of the earth, at least not yet.

What Do the Books on Our Shelves Tell Us about Our Personalities?

2007-05-01T10:57:00.000-04:00

According to Tania Kindersley, not nearly as much as we might think.

I've had my say on this matter, and have pointed to Steph D.'s response, so I figured I'd just give you George Murray's take from Bookninja, since it made me howl with laughter:

~What’s the first thing you do when you get into someone’s house? Assuming it’s not pee in the corner and/or that you didn’t come in through the basement window with a dollar sign-decaled sack, I suspect it’s check out the bookshelves. But what happens when you don’t like what you find there? How much can we judge people by what’s on their shelves? Personally, I’ve condemned people to the scrap heap of friendship for even the slightest transgression. Danielle Steel? See ya! Anne Coulter? Sayonara, suckah! Dean Koontz? May your armpits rebel and cover you in a carpet of sweaty hair. Dan Brown? Look out in the field there, Old Yeller. (Okay, you get a hype pass if you have the Da Vinci Code, but if you bought Angels and Demons after, you deserve whatever karmic train accident you get smushed in.)~

Adverbs

2007-05-01T10:07:00.000-04:00

I'm suspicious of adverbs. And I'm suspicious of writers who (over)use them. Adverbs are often needless words and, as pointed out in yesterday's post, I'm of the opinion that needless words should be eliminated. I'm a big fan of streamlined writing: regardless of whether a piece is 1,000 words long or 1,000 pages long, every word should be put to work; if a single word isn't pulling its weight, it should come out. I tend to be fairly ruthless about this, and the first words I target are adverbs.

I once heard Mavis Gallant interviewed, and when she was asked what constitutes good writing, she said it begins with getting rid of the adverbs. One of my favourite moments in the movie Outbreak occurs when Dustin Hoffman chastises Kevin Spacey for excising a word from Hoffman's report, to which Spacey replies, "It's an adverb ... It's the weak tool of a lazy mind."

Stephen King explains the dangers of overusing adverbs in his nonfiction book On Writing:

~I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they're like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day ... fifty the day after that ... and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it's -- GASP!! -- too late.~

King goes on to admit that the sparing use of adverbs is acceptable, and even a profligate use can be overlooked in certain cases except for one: dialogue attribution. In this I would unreservedly agree. The adverb used to modify the verb "said" is unnecessary at best, since a well written line of dialogue should indicate how it is being uttered, thus rendering the adverb unnecessary. In the worst case, the adverb can actively undermine the meaning of a sentence:

~"Where's the money?" Tom demanded menacingly.

"I don't have it," Edgar asseverated in a shaky voice.~

In the first case, the adverb is a mere redundancy. In the second sentence, the adverbial phrase "in a shaky voice" actually contradicts the verb "asseverated," which means "to declare solemnly." This is Elmore Leonard's fourth rule of good writing:

~Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" ...

... he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs."~

Having said all that, there are writers who are extremely adept at using adverbs and should be free to disregard the above blandishments with impunity. Marisha Pessl is one such writer. In her début novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, she describes one character as "brutally blond," which tells a reader more about that character in two words than many writers could pack into 200.

Like any rule of writing, the rule regarding adverbs is made to be broken. But a writer must know what she is doing, and why she is doing it. Sprinkling adverbs around indiscriminately (... ! ...) is inadvisable.

Exactly

2007-04-30T07:51:00.000-04:00

Chelsea Cain's review of Barbara Gowdy's new novel, Helpless, in yesterday's New York Times Book Review, nails precisely what makes Gowdy's writing so potent, in words that should be tattooed across the heads of creative writing MFA students:

~Gowdy writes as if she's on a sinking boat and needs to throw out all the dead weight. The only words that survive are the ones that matter: no extraneous evidence of her research, no long-winded descriptions, no self-indulgent frills of characterization.~

If more working writers adhered to that precept, I wouldn't be so cranky all the time.

I'm Back

2007-04-30T07:30:00.000-04:00

Well, we've moved. Thanks for all your well-wishes and commiserations. (Patricia: Oy is exactly right. Kerry: We got movers, but my back is sore nevertheless.) The apartment will be great once we get everything unpacked; right now it resembles that warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the one stacked floor to ceiling with crates of useless junk. I tried to do a purge of my library before we moved, but it's hard to part with books. I managed to get it down to just the bare essentials, which still counted for forty-plus boxes.

Speaking of which, I was thinking about this article (featuring commentary from one of Canada's most astute literary critics) as I was setting up my office over the weekend. Steph D. writes about using books as decoration, or as a means of showing off how intelligent you are. I was (semi-)consciously aware of this impulse as I lovingly arrayed the volumes on my office shelves, rough sorted by category (fiction in translation, international relations, classics, etc.). Now whenever I'm feeling a bit unsure of myself, I can simply cast my gaze over the company that surrounds me to reassure myself that I'm well read and deep: Hemingway, Roth, Dostoyevsky, Jenna Jameson. Okay, so maybe not all that deep. Broad, perhaps?

An Apology to My Peeps

2007-04-24T09:15:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the extended blog silence: we're moving at the end of the week, so things have been a bit chaotic here at the home office. I'll try to post something in the next couple of days, and promise that regular posts will return once the dust settles.

Do Writers Matter?

2007-04-19T11:33:00.000-04:00

According to Nathan Whitlock, not half as much as they themselves think they do. Responding to Yann Martel's idea to send Prime Minister Stephen Harper a book every two weeks for the duration of Harper's incumbency -- an idea prompted in part by Martel's dissatisfaction with the reception he and forty-nine other Canada Council grant recipients received in the House of Commons -- Whitlock, who is quickly becoming the enfant terrible of Canadian letters, writes:

~I hate to be the one to break it to you, Yann, but no, in the grand scheme of things, you don't count for anything. You write literary fiction. In Canada. I'm sorry if you were expecting the elected representatives of this country to go down on one knee in your regal presence, but even the most junior cabinet minister has a lot more on his or her plate than what you face every morning when you sit down in front of the computer. That's the reality of it.~

Now, I have a good deal of sympathy for this position. Writers are not equivalent to surgeons or firefighters or police officers, all of whom face life-and-death situations every day of their lives. And Canada's parliamentarians, debating legislation that will keep our soldiers on the front lines in Afghanistan or enacting laws to combat homelessness or protect the environment (oops, sorry: the Conservatives are in power, aren't they? Well, bear with me anyway, I'm trying to make a point ...) daily face more pressing issues that affect more people than does a writer toiling away in his garret.

In the short term.

Writers, however, have been known to make tremendous differences in the real, practical lives of individuals and groups. Émile Zola's intercession in the Dreyfus prosecution is an obvious example, but he also stirred the hearts and souls of France's populace to protest the dreadful conditions faced by French miners in the 1860s, and he did this not by making a speech in front of France's parliament or by taking to the streets in protest. He did it by writing a novel. Zola's Germinal had such a profound effect on the French psyche that when the author died, writes Robert Lethbridge in the introduction to the Oxford Classics edition of the book, "[f]ifty thousand people followed behind Émile Zola's funeral procession on 5 October 1902, and among them a delegation of miners from the Denain coalfield rhythmically chanted, 'Germinal! Germinal!' through the streets of Paris." All this for a writer of literary fiction.

So I have to believe that writing -- and writers -- matter. That they -- we -- count for something. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre:

~To write is thus both to disclose the world and to offer it as a task to the generosity of the reader. It is to have recourse to the consciousness of others in order to make one's self be recognized as essential to the totality of being; it is to wish to live this essentiality by means of interposed persons; but, on the other hand, as the real world is revealed only by action, as one can feel himself in it only by exceeding it in order to change it, the novelist's universe would lack thickness if it were not discovered in a movement to transcend it.~

Harold Bloom picks up on Sartre's notion of transcendence in the prologue to his book, How to Read and Why:

~We read Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Dickens, Proust, and all their peers because they more than enlarge life. Pragmatically, they have become the Blessing, in its true Yahwistic sense of "more life into a time without boundaries." We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading of the now much-abused traditional canon is the search for a difficult pleasure. I am not exactly an erotics-of-reading purveyor, and a pleasurable difficulty seems to me a plausible definition of the Sublime, but a higher pleasure remains the reader's quest. There is a reader's Sublime, and it seems the only secular transcendence we can ever attain, except for the even more precarious transcendence we call "falling in love."~

To provide a reader with that kind of secular transcendence, to help her know herself and others better, to create "more life into a time without boundaries": all of these writerly duties seem significant, they matter. To believe that the act of writing, even writing something as apparently useless and self-serving as literary fiction, has the power to change even one person's life, even for a moment: that has to count for something.

So It Was the Victims' Fault

2007-04-18T10:12:00.000-04:00

Two separate reactions to Monday's shooting at Virginia Tech caught my eye. The first is from John Derbyshire, who suggests that the students who were being shot at should have used their superior numbers to tackle and disarm their assailant, rather than cravenly ducking for cover:

~At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him. Handguns aren't very accurate, even at close range. I shoot mine all the time at the range, and I still can't hit squat. I doubt this guy was any better than I am. And even if hit, a .22 needs to find something important to do real damage—your chances aren't bad.~

The second comes from a letter to the editor, written by M.J. Ackermann, the secretary of the St. Mary's Shooters Association of Sherbrooke, Nova Scotia, and published in today's Globe and Mail:

~Any rational person should be able to see it was the victims' lack of defensive capability that allowed yet another madman to kill so many. ... Disarming lawful citizens only provides a state-guaranteed killing field of helpless victims. There are no mass killings at shooting ranges, only schools and other so-called "gun-free zones."~

So, if I'm understanding this right, had the students been more heavily armed themselves, or had they chosen to react in the manner of Bruce Willis in Die Hard, Monday's massacre could have been avoided, or at least mitigated.

The mentality that blames the victims of wanton and indiscriminate violence for the atrocities perpetrated on them -- a mentality fostered and encouraged by a culture that fetishizes guns, overdoses on violent movies and video games, and promotes militarism as the quintessential solution to any and all geopolitical conflict -- boggles my mind and turns my stomach. Surely the vitims of Monday's tragedy deserve better than this.

RIP June Callwood

2007-04-15T09:53:00.000-04:00

Dead at 82.

Pop Quiz

2007-04-14T12:09:00.000-04:00

What do all these people have in common?

Madonna
Katie Couric
Jamie Lee Curtis
Ed Koch
Julie Andrews
John Lithgow
Jerry Seinfeld
Tiki and Ronde Barber
James Carville
Jay Leno
Maria Shriver
Sarah Ferguson
Spike Lee
Jane Seymour
John Travolta
Billy Crystal
Whoopie Goldberg
Jimmy Carter

and

Margaret Atwood and Geri Halliwell

Go here for the answer, and try not to be too appalled.

No Site Belongs Here More than This

2007-04-12T16:37:00.000-04:00

I first came across this promotional Web site for Miranda July's new book of short stories on Moonlight Ambulette's blog. Then Quillblog linked to it. And now my girlfriend has sent me the link.

So, not one to be left out, but always sort of pulling up the rear, like the one lame horse in the Kentucky Derby, here you go.

[UPDATE: Okay, I'm going to say this once, because the comments I've been getting seem to indicate that there's some confusion on this score. The Web site featured above is not mine. I did not write the book(s) pictured. I am not Miranda July (although I play her on television). You have to read the text at the side of the image to get in the game.]

[UPDATE 2: I assume that the comment from "anonymous" was meant ironically, since the commenter would have to scroll through July's entire site to get to the oatmeal picture, by which point it should be fairly clear that she and I are two separate entities, but still ...]

The Battle of the Sexes: A Literary Cage Match

2007-04-12T10:03:00.000-04:00

I was chatting with blogger Steph D. the other day, and she asked me about writers I admire. Never comfortable being put on the spot, I spluttered and stammered and eventually managed to name Philip Roth, Martin Amis, and Bret Easton Ellis. Steph's response was, "No women?"

Well, of course, women: Mary Gaitskill, Flannery O'Connor, Jeanette Winterson, Darcey Steinke, Virginia Woolf. (See, it's easy with the benefit of reflection and a chance to scan the bookshelves in my office.) But her point was well taken: these days, for whatever reason, my tastes in literature run to the distinctly masculine. (To the list I gave her I could easily have added Haruki Murakami, Cormac McCarthy, and Hubert Selby, Jr.)

In my younger and more naïve days, I used to assume that there was no such thing as a masculine book or a feminine book. I no longer believe this. Philip Roth is a distinctly masculine writer, as are Amis and Ellis. It could be argued that Gaitskill, O'Connor, and Steinke have distinctly masculine elements in their writing, as does Joyce Carol Oates, another female author whose books I devour (almost as quickly as she can churn them out). By contrast, Michael Ondaatje's writing could be described as having certain feminine elements to it.

So what is the distinction? Steph suggested that women are more concerned about relationships among characters in novels while men are more concerned with plot. This would seem to hold with the various studies that have concluded that women privilege emotion over reason, while men are more prone to reason and logic than emotion.

Lucy Mangan feels the same way. In her Guardian commentary about British Conservative MP Boris Johnson's attempt to read Middlemarch as a way "to understand the female mind more," Mangan argues that it is precisely the subtlety and nuance that Johnson finds off-putting that women readers most prize:

~So why do we girls (or, as we might prefer to style ourselves if we are in fact old enough to read Middlemarch, women) love these big, epically long, boring books? Perhaps because where men like Boris see vast acres of impedimenta to plot and purpose, we see nuanced description, the subtle and elegant construction of character, the careful dissection of social niceties and moral ambiguities, all of which seems at least as satisfying and as worthwhile a reward for reading as does simply jumping from plot point to plot point like Wodehouse's chamois with his crags.~

I see Mangan's point, but I would nevertheless respectfully demur. While I am glad that she qualified her assessment as applying to "men like Boris," I can't help but feel that she is tarring all men with the same brush. There are male readers -- I count myself among them -- who absolutely prize subtlety and nuance in character development as much as, if not much more than, the intricacies of a cracking good plot. And male writers from Roth to Henry James to Richard Ford have been more than willing to accommodate this thirst for character development and psychological depth.

Moreover, I would argue that male writers and readers are absolutely interested in relationships: Roth's My Life as a Man is the best literary portrait of a relationship, from the man's point of view, that I've read. It's blistering and angry and nasty, but it's also brutally honest and searing. Love it or hate it, that entire book is about relationships.

But the male writers enumerated above, and the female writers who resemble them, share certain traits in common. The writing tends to be more visceral than lyrical, which is something that I find males gravitate toward in larger numbers than females. Violence, both psychological and physical, is more prevalent in the work of these writers than in that of, say, Carol Shields. The writing tends to be more aggressive, more intense, angrier. These all seem like qualities that male readers find more acceptable, if not more appealing, than their female counterparts.

The male writers above also deal almost exclusively with masculine protagonists and masculine psyches. Roth has never created a fully realized or completely believable female character. Neither, for that matter, did O'Connor, who, despite the presence of the double X chromosomes, always did better by her male characters than her women. Gaitskill and Steinke both employ female protagonists, but they view them coldly, without the kind of empathy or compassion that would perhaps be expected of the stereotypical female consciousness.

I realize that this all amounts to nothing more than a catalogue of sweeping generalizations, and that for every assertion made above a critical reader could likely find at least a dozen examples to refute it. This is a testament to the prickliness of this subject, and I welcome alternate perspectives or ideas about it.

RIP Kurt Vonnegut

2007-04-12T09:44:00.000-04:00

Dead at 84.

The world seems a little sadder and meaner today.

The Case of the Phantom Author

2007-04-10T11:25:00.000-04:00

A buddy of mine was once approached by a mutual friend to ghostwrite an author's first novel. Once I got over my offence at not being asked to do this myself, I couldn't help but wonder what kind of novelist would want his or her novel ghostwritten? I can understand a sports star who thinks that a comma is what you slip into after one too many blows to the skull wanting a ghostwriter, but a novelist?

Apparently, this happens more often than I realized.

Again, I understand the impulse for Robert Ludlum to employ a ghostwriter (or a team of them), what with him being dead and all, but James Patterson? What's his excuse? And, more to the point, if he's got a team of writers working for him, why are his books so bad?

(Via Bookninja.)

A Trifle

2007-04-09T11:35:00.000-04:00

Some clever parodist with too much time on his/her hands has done a video of Alanis Morisette singing "My Humps."

(Via Quillblog, of all places.)

The Critics Weigh In

2007-04-09T10:56:00.000-04:00

Actual readers' responses to The Road, from the Oprah's Book Club message board:

~This book really affected me. It actually made me cry in yoga class even 2 days after reading it.~

~During post nuclear, from all the movies we have seen, all the millions who were destroyed Japan ... we can pretty much realize that if any of us ever live through such a thing, that we all are going to take on the attitude of protecting what is ours.~

~These fiction books are simply to entertain the mind. [...] I think the book "The Road" will take us absolutely no where in life.~

~McCormac is pure genius.~

~All these aspects make for a memorable book, but it is the parenting that stays with you.~

~I just began reading the excerpt from "The Road." In transferring this material to your site, did someone drop all the punctuation? No commas in the first paragraph? In the second paragraph, the word hadnt (sic), a contraction for had not, should read hadn't, etc.~

~Traveling cross-country after the apocalypse. Rip-off of Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny.~

~My initial thought was, I love how the book is blocked into short paragraphs. This makes it easy to read in the bathroom, during commercials, between innings in baseball games ...~

~I kept thinking while I was reading ... this would suck, but God would be with you and whatever the outcome, it would be God's.~

~I used to hate McCarthy; now I love him. [...] On the Road is a brilliant tour de force, a must-read, an unforgettable, haunting and provocative book.~

Get a Job?

2007-04-09T09:49:00.000-04:00

Jonathan Morrison at the Guardian asks the age-old question: How does a writer balance writing and a full-time job?

~The days of starving in freezing bohemian garrets whilst putting the finishing touches to the masterpiece seem to have passed. Everyone has a day job. Many writers teach, but not always creative writing. There's a little bit of Arts Council money floating around, and it's helped Graham Swift amongst others in the past. But most aspiring writers seem to hang around the edges of the profession, using their skills indirectly, honing them a little more every day. They work in advertising, journalism, even public relations. They're like actors waiting tables, only without the tips and human contact.~

Writing fiction or poetry tends to be an obsessive, all-consuming endeavour, but it doesn't always drum up enough scratch to put food on the table. Through the ages writers have solved this problem in any number of ways. Chekhov was a doctor. Anthony Trollope worked for the British Post Office. Wallace Stevens was an accountant.

However, for my money, John Gardner's solution to this dilemma in On Becoming a Novelist is the best:

~The best way a writer can find to keep himself going is to live off his (or her) spouse. The trouble is that, psychologically at least, it's hard. Even if one's spouse is rich, it's hard. Our culture teaches none of its false lessons more carefully than it teaches that one should never be dependent. Hence the novice or still unsuccessful writer, who has enough trouble believing in himself, has the added burden of shame. That's one reason writers, like other artists, have so often chosen to live off people that, at some conscious or unconscious level, they need not respect -- generous prostitutes, say. It's hard to be a good writer and a guilty person; a lack of self-respect creeps into one's prose. Yet for all that may be said against it, living off a spouse or lover is an excellent survival tactic.~

Excellent, that is, until said spouse or lover attacks you with a frying pan while shouting about how you're a sponge who doesn't contribute to the cable or phone bills. And Gardner neglects to mention what you should do if your spouse is also a struggling writer. Arm wrestle to see who gets to pay the bills for a particular month? Or just keep on searching for that generous prostitute to support you both?

As If the Oprah Endorsement Wasn't Enough

2007-04-04T20:37:00.000-04:00

I'm a few days late with this one, but the winner of The Morning News Tournament of Books, 2007, beating out Absurdistan in the final round, is:

Although I haven't yet read either book, Jessa Crispin's comment sounds about right, given what I do know about both authors and books: "Sending Absurdistan up against The Road for a duel just seems unfair. Shteyngart is armed with a pillow and McCarthy a gun."

You May Need a Stiff Drink for This One

2007-04-04T11:14:00.000-04:00

Rebecca Eckler's thoughts on getting bad reviews:

~Getting a book review is kind of, well, it's like life.

You could have abosolutely [sic] everything going for you - a roof over your head, a job, even a beautiful, healthy child - and you end up fixating on the things you think suck in your life - like you weren't invited to a party, you think your thighs are too fat, that that [sic] guy didn't call you when he said he would.~

You know: the important things in life.

Seems like Ms. Eckler's Aristotelian ruminations were provoked by a negative review for her new book, Wiped! Life with a Pint-Size Dictator:

~I called The Fiance [sic: It took me five or six kicks at the can to realize that "Fiance" = "Fiancé."] at work. "Well, I probably got one of the worst reviews EVER," I told him, as I changed into my gym clothes. The Fiance asked what magazine the review was in. I told him. His response?

"Um, what magazine? Is it Canadian?" he asked. The Fiance, a very smart and well read man, had never even heard of the magazine. Which I thought was super cute.~

And what was the obscure, low-circulation, underground organ this "very smart and well read man" had never heard of? Quill & Quire! The trade journal of the Canadian publishing industry. I. Shit. You. Not.

The Quill review is deliriously nasty, but Eckler proves extraordinarily sanguine in the face of this barrage, perhaps because she knows in her heart where all the negativity comes from: she's just misunderstood.

~I think to find a reviewer who would "get" and be open to someone like me would be very hard indeed.~

Although I threw up in my mouth a little when I read that, she may be right. I'd be hard pressed to think of anyone who could really "get" that level of unbridled, solipsistic self-absorption.

~~

And speaking of negative reviews, it appears that the publicity and marketing departments at Key Porter Books, which publishes Wiped!, are not being entirely above board in their promotional material for the book. That obscure non-entity, Quill & Quire, has discovered certain discrepancies between the "positive" review blurbs for Eckler's earlier book, Knocked Up: Confessions of a Modern Mother-to-Be*, in the Wiped! press release and the reviews as they appeared in their original contexts:

~From the Key Porter press release:

“This mommy memoir feels like a humorous crash course in maturity.” – PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

The full sentence in the original review (you can see the complete review here, under “Editorial Reviews”):

Sometimes this mommy memoir feels like a humorous crash course in maturity, though at other points the author’s attitude comes dangerously close to that of one who has a baby as a chic accessory.~

And the infelicities continue with an apparently "positive" three-sentence blurb from the Toronto Star, which was actually cobbled together -- sans ellipses marks -- from sentences scattered throughout the article (including the headline).

While I understand the impetus behind this strategy, given the paucity of positive reviews for Knocked Up, this kind of manipulation has always struck me as dirty pool. Kudos to the Quill for pointing it out.

*I notice that the title on the American edition has been changed to Knocked Up: Confessions of a Hip Mother-to-Be. Is it more desirable in America to be hip than modern? Or should we Canadians just reconcile ourselves to the fact that we'll never, ever be "hip"? Curious.

The Darkness at the End of The Road

2007-04-02T11:08:00.000-04:00

The Boston Globe has more on Oprah's idiosyncratic book club choice:

~Still, her recent decision to gold-star McCarthy -- a legendarily reclusive author known for his exquisite, idiosyncratic language and Gothic violence -- may signal a new level of dark realism, particularly coming as it does on the heels of Elie Wiesel's "Night, " showcased in 2006. Wiesel's autobiographical account of surviving Auschwitz, first published in English in 1960, is unrelentingly bleak, its only redemption the narrator's having lived to tell the tale. And fictional though it may be, "The Road" may trump "Night" for sheer dead ends. No possibility of Allied forces on this colorless landscape, where even the struggle for good and evil has become a question of semantics. With its Old Testament outrage and its Beckettian notion of grace and longing, "The Road" is a heartsore, riveting account of how we go on, we must go on, when the world itself may have given up.~

McCarthy is notoriously media-shy, but he's apparently agreed to appear on Oprah's show to talk about the book, which might actually get me to watch. Which means I'll have to get to reading The Road sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, in an act of blatant self-promotion, here's my review of No Country for Old Men, which first appeared in the December 2005 issue of Books in Canada. For those who may be interested.

~~

It has been seven years since Cormac McCarthy published Cities of the Plain, the final volume of his so-called Border Trilogy, and 20 years since he unleashed on the world his ferocious masterpiece, Blood Meridian. The intervening years have found McCarthy in a more contemplative mood, and his newest offering, No Country for Old Men, while by no means devoid of the fire-and-brimstone violence that characterizes his earlier work, seems nonetheless more muted, at once more personal and less expansive than the sweeping, apocalyptic epics of the past.

On its surface, No Country for Old Men tells a simple genre story. While hunting antelope near the Texas-Mexico border, Llewellyn Moss happens across a group of vehicles containing several dead men, a stash of drugs, and a document case full of money. Moss takes off with the money, and is soon pursued by a killer-for-hire, and a kindhearted sheriff who wants to find Moss before the bad guys do. This is fairly familiar terrain for a noir-type thriller, but -- McCarthy being McCarthy -- the author is not quite content to let things rest there.

The first indication that McCarthy is not simply any old hack recycling tired thriller clichés comes fewer than ten pages into the book, when we are introduced to Chigurh, the freelance killer who chases Moss and the satchel of money. When we first encounter Chigurh he is in manacles, having been arrested for some unspecified crime. The lone deputy in the tiny outpost police station bends to retrieve the keys to the cell and without warning or build-up, Chigurh has the chain of the handcuffs around the deputy's neck: "The nickleplated cuffs bit to the bone. The deputy's right carotid artery burst and a jet of blood shot across the room and hit the wall and ran down it. The deputy's legs slowed and then stopped. He lay jerking. Then he stopped moving altogether."

In a few deft strokes, McCarthy sketches the landscape of his story: a dangerous place where random violence can befall innocents in the blink of an eye, and where the traditional notion that virtue is rewarded and vice punished doesn't apply. Here we glimpse the McCarthy of old: the McCarthy of Blood Meridian, who saw the opening of the American West as an operatic saga drenched in blood. Chigurh is a force of nature, "a true and living prophet of destruction", who tears through the book with the power and effect of a whirlwind.

The counterpoint to Chigurh in the novel is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who could perhaps be considered the story's moral centre, to the extent that it has one. Here, again, McCarthy subverts the conventions of a traditional thriller by pulling something of a bait-and-switch on his reader. For the first two thirds of the novel, it is Moss, not Bell, who garners most of our sympathy; it is Moss we are pulling for, in the vain hope that this poor, deluded soul will find some redemption, some way out of the seemingly impossible situation he has created for himself.

But Moss's ultimate fate -- and particularly the way that McCarthy handles it -- should put the reader on notice: "See?" the author seems to be chiding, "All this time you've been paying attention to the wrong thing." Sheriff Bell eventually emerges as the central figure in the narrative, and as the character who cleaves closest to traditional notions of morality and justice. A decorated war hero, Sheriff Bell is the repository of old-fashioned values that might seem reactionary if they weren't so difficult to dispute:

~I read in the papers here a while back some teachers come across a survey that was sent out back in the thirties to a number of schools around the country. Had this questionnaire about what was the problems with teachin in the schools . . . And the biggest problems they could name was things like talkin in class and runnin in the hallways. Chewin gum. Copyin homework . . . So they got one of them forms that was blank and printed up a bunch of em and sent em back out to the same schools. Forty years later. Well, here come the answers back. Rape, arson, murder. Drugs. Suicide. So I think about that. Because a lot of the time ever when I say anything about how the world is goin to hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I'm gettin old. That it's one of the symptoms. But my feelin about that is that anybody that cant tell the difference between rapin and murderin people and chewin gum has got a whole lot bigger of a problem than what I've got.~

Sheriff Bell's ruminations throughout the novel are tinged with a kind of melancholic nostalgia for a vanished world, one in which notions of morality were more clearly defined and more fervently defended. But McCarthy does not portray Bell as some unthinking arch-conservative; even his nostalgia is tinged with remorse and the possibility that the world he longs to recover never really existed in the first place: "I was supposed to be a war hero and I lost a whole squad of men . . . They died and I got a medal."

The world of the novel is an unforgiving one: fallen and barren. It is this fallen, barren world that enables Chigurh to appear, like some demonic avenger, and cut a swath of violence and murder. Sheriff Bell, who decided in middle age that Satan didn't exist, finds that he must now accept such thinking: Satan, he reasons, "explains a lot of things that otherwise don't have no explanation."

These are the kinds of issues that McCarthy has previously grappled with: the big questions of life and death, and mankind's place in a universe that often seems antithetical to human survival. Like his hero Dostoevsky, McCarthy is an existential writer in the best and truest sense of the word: he insists that a person's character is defined by an act of will and that it is impossible to outrun the consequences of one's actions. Moss tries to escape the consequences of his actions, only to discover the futility of this endeavour: "You think when you wake up in the mornin that yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count."

What is missing in No Country for Old Men is the sense that this existential battle is played out on a vast canvas; there is little of the grandeur that elevated Blood Meridian to the status of myth. That earlier book owes a huge debt to Melville -- one of the writers whom, along with Faulkner, McCarthy most closely resembles. It is messy, elegiac, and infused with a language that is almost Biblical in its ferocity. By contrast, the new novel is quieter, more constrained. The Texas landscapes seem somehow less expansive, and by comparison with the apocalyptic fury of the earlier work, the language is tamed and subdued. Instead of an elegy, it is a lament; instead of a sprawling, Hieronymus Bosch-like epic, we are presented with the sepia tones of an old photograph.

This is perhaps appropriate for a book that deals so insistently with the themes of aging and nostalgia, and it would be foolish to fault McCarthy for changing modes to suit his story. No Country for Old Men is arguably McCarthy's most accessible book, but it is difficult to entirely dismiss the idea that its accessibility comes at a cost. In tightening his focus, in reducing and narrowing his scope, McCarthy has created a work of great immediacy, but one lacking in the transcendent qualities of his earlier book. No Country for Old Men is a meditation about the aged; Blood Meridian is a story for the ages.

Plain Jane, Revisited

2007-04-02T10:24:00.000-04:00

Seems I'm not the only one to notice the Jane Austen makeover that Wordsworth Editions has perpetrated. Yesterday's New York Times contains not one but two articles about the newly retouched portrait.

Charles McGrath refers to "the BBC-ification of Austen," and suggests that the appearance of the author might not matter so much if we had access to more primary biographical material about her:

~But as long as we have her books, does it matter, really, what Austen looked like? It might matter less if we understood more about her in general; yet in many ways we know less about Austen than we do about Shakespeare, of whom we have many more likenesses, or purported likenesses, as well.~

It has always struck me as odd that readers require biographical detail of a particular author to supplement their readings. Perhaps because of my university grounding in New Criticism, I've always supposed that the work should stand on its own, and that the biography of the writer is more or less incidental, however interesting it may otherwise be (and the truth is that most writers lead unbearably boring lives; how scintillating can it be to read about someone who spends the better part of her days alone in a room with only a typewriter or paper and pen for company?). As T.S. Eliot puts it in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," "It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting."

Verlyn Klinkenborg gets this right elsewhere in yesterday's Times, writing:

~But the work always stands apart from the life, no matter how much we know. No amount of biography -- no grasp of the details of the life as it was lived -- ever accounts for the transfiguration that takes place in the work itself. You can search all you want in the life, but you will never find the ghostly separateness, the act of imagination, in which the work emerges.~

Klinkenborg concludes:

~It is a failing to read Shakespeare and feel impoverished by the lack of biographical detail. It is no less a failing to read Austen and wonder what the mirror said when she looked into it. I cannot think of anything that would make "Emma" richer than it is.~

Q.E.D., I think.

A Quandary

2007-03-29T13:55:00.000-04:00

I was a populist in university, but I hung around with a lot of hipsters. One guy in particular vested all of his credibility in being an iconoclast. When I first met him, he was totally enamoured of the band REM, which seemed to represent everything he admired about avant-garde rock 'n' roll: their lyrics were intelligent, often to the point of obscurity, they played fuzzy, guitar-driven rock that seemed like a slap in the face of the safe, synth-heavy pseudo-rock that dominated the airwaves in the mid-80s. To him, they were the shit.

Until, that is, they released Out of Time in 1991, and the single "Losing My Religion" became a huge mainstream hit. All of a sudden, REM was dead to him. Clearly a band that was so popular with so many people couldn't have any real integrity. They had sold out for mainstream success, and he wanted nothing more to do with them.

This attitude struck me as peculiar, because he was always going on about how the general public just didn't get it, how the mass populace was unable to recognize true musical genius, preferring instead to retreat to the comfortable pablum offered by commercial radio. But then one of his favourite bands achieves the kind of success he'd always advocated for them, and instead of rejoicing, he abandons them. (An argument could be made that Out of Time was a crass capitulation to mainstream tastes, but this falls apart once you recognize the similarities between that album and Reckoning, the band's second album, which was recorded and released in 1984, when REM was still genuinely "alternative." Indeed, with sombre, distortion-laden tracks like "Belong" and "Country Feedback," Out of Time is arguably less accessible than its folksy predecessor.)

At the time, I vowed never to capitulate to this kind of elitist attitude, but instead to throw my support behind any artist I felt deserving, regardless of their mainstream appeal, or lack thereof.

Fast forward sixteen years, to the era of Oprah's Book Club. I've tried to remain true to my vow not to dismiss cultural works out of hand simply because too many people approve of them, despite the mountain of evidence that suggests that mass appeal equates to a lamentable flattening of artistic edges (Exhibit A: The Da Vinci Code). But I will admit to an involuntary reaction against any book that Oprah chooses for her club, regardless of the esteem in which I hold the authors, or indeed the specific titles themselves.

There are exceptions, of course, but by and large the books Oprah chooses are of a type: stories (or memoirs) about plucky spirits who face adversity and prevail, about individuals who fearlessly stare down the demons that plague them (be they drugs, or intolerance, or some kind of physical ailment) and ultimately find redemption. I have nothing against this kind of book per se, but Oprah's seeming ignorance of any other kind of tale strikes me as narrow-minded and overly safe. Moreover, you'll never see an author like David Foster Wallace or Haruki Murakami make an appearance on Oprah's couch: she resolutely eschews any kind of stylistic adventurousness or philosophical heft, preferring instead the more recognizable environs of literary naturalism.

I'll admit to liking books that Oprah has chosen -- The Poisonwood Bible, We Were the Mulvaneys, Song of Solomon -- when I first read them, only to feel a slight aversion toward them creeping in after they found themselves blessed with the Oprah imprimatur. And I was firmly on the side of the author in l'affaire Franzen.

It gives me no pride to admit this, but somewhere along the line, I have become what I beheld. I am a literary snob.

Which presents a problem when it comes to Oprah's latest book club selection: Cormac McCarthy's The Road. McCarthy has always been one of my favourite authors (or, at least, Blood Meridian has always been one of my favourite books), and The Road has been on my "to read" pile since it was published last fall. I have avoided reading it, in part, because I'm not a huge fan of postapocalyptic literature. But I had every intention of getting to it, never considering for a second that it might find itself in Oprah's sights. I mean, really, this is a guy who, in Blood Meridian, included a scene that featured a group of travellers in the American west coming across a tree festooned with the corpses of babies: what could such an author possibly have that would appeal to the world's most influential advocate of The Secret?

Now I am faced with a quandary: do I preemptively reject The Road in the manner of my university buddy who dropped REM once they discovered mainstream success? Do I read it knowing that I'm predisposed to dislike anything Ms. Winfrey recommends, and therefore not give it a fair shot? And what should happen if, God forbid, I read it and actually like it? Will I have to eschew my hard-won literary elitism, climb off my gilded pedestal, and admit that occasionally the unwashed masses actually get it right? Or perhaps The Road won't take with Oprah's denizens; perhaps McCarthy's violent, scorched-earth storytelling and Old Testament wrathfulness will prove too off-putting, the way Faulkner did when Oprah assigned three of his novels as summer reading*.

Or perhaps, when all is said and done, I should just get over myself.

*I have otherwise chosen to ignore Faulkner's presence in the Oprah pantheon, since it pretty much flies in the face of all my criticisms of her. Hey, it's my blog, leave me alone.

Finding a Way Out

2007-03-28T10:43:00.000-04:00

It's tempting to view the work of Jorge Luis Borges as artificially proscribed, both generically (he wrote exclusively short stories, never attempting a novel or novella) and thematically, but this would, I think, be an enormous mistake. True, his fiction is confined to the short form (and, due to his blindness later in his life, to the short short form), and he repeatedly returns to the same set of images, metaphors, and tropes (the labyrinth, the mirror, the universe as a sphere with the centre everywhere and the circumference nowhere). But, like the American short story writer (and occasional novelist) Flannery O'Connor, what Borges lacks in range he makes up for in depth. Taken together, Borges's stories -- of which Labyrinths forms a representative selection, a kind of "greatest hits" collection -- comprise one of the most completely realized and cohesive fictional worlds in all of literature.

Certainly Borges's influences were not narrow: he read widely, taking inspiration from sources as diverse as Plato, the Cabalists, Cervantes, Valéry, Schopenhauer, Kafka, and popular detective fiction. Poe is an obvious influence: the story "Death and the Compass" is formally a detective story, and the protagonist, Lönnrot, "believed himself a pure reasoner, an Auguste Dupin." In their brevity and their focus, Borges's stories could be seen as a working out in practice of Poe's theory of singular effect in short fiction.

But to restrict Borges's writing to an agglomeration of influences seems reductivist, and in any case would have had the author in conniptions, since he felt that each writer creates his influences through his work:

~In the critics' vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.~ (From the essay "Kafka and His Precursors.")

The themes that Borges explored -- Zeno's second paradox, the ephemeral nature of time, the universe as a circle that is all centre and no circumference -- were not new to him; indeed, they had puzzled and fascinated philosophers and thinkers for millennia. But Borges internalized them and reinvented them in a manner that was, at the time he wrote, groundbreaking.

The reader in 2007 may be in danger of becoming impatient with Borges's more explicit postmodern games -- inserting himself into his stories, employing the form of an essay to comment upon the creation of stories, including the one that the reader is reading, the prevalent use of footnotes and ironic distance as metafictional devices to question or problematize the fictional world the author has created -- but it is important to bear in mind that these stories were first published in the 1930s through the 1950s, before the world had ever heard of David Foster Wallace or Jonathan Safran Foer, let alone John Barth. (Barth's first novel, The Floating Opera, was published in 1956, perhaps not incidentally a scant three years after Borges's failing vision caused him to cease writing short stories.) True, writers prior to Borges had employed these and other postmodern tactics -- Cervantes in Don Quixote, Sterne in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Joyce in Ulysses -- but none had made this the bedrock of their entire fictional approach in the manner that Borges did.

This is, of course, a benefit of hindsight. Surely Borges would not have expounded any such grand schema for his fiction, particularly given his assertion, in "The Argentine Writer and Tradition," that the true nature of a writer's work must perforce remain obscure to him:

~I believe, in addition, that all these a priori discussions concerning the intent of literary execution are based on the error of supposing that intentions and plans matter a great deal. Let us take the case of Kipling: Kipling dedicated his life to writing in terms of certain political ideals, he tried to make his work an instrument of propaganda and yet, at the end of his life, he was obliged to confess that the true essence of a writer's work is usually unknown to him. He recalled the case of Swift, who, when he wrote Gulliver's Travels, tried to bring an indictment against all humanity but actually left a book for children. Plato said that poets are the scribes of a god who moves them against their will, against their intentions, just as a magnet moves a series of iron rings.~

Borges did not concern himself with traditional notions of plot or dramatic movement, although he did frequently borrow elements of popular detective stories or supernatural fiction and interpose them into his own work. The danger is that readers view his stories as simple exercises in style devoid of any emotional engagement. In an essay comparing Borge's work with that of the Italian postmodernist Italo Calvino, John Barth refutes this notion:

~Both Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino managed marvelously to combine in their fiction the values that I call Algebra and Fire (I'm borrowing those terms here, as I have done elsewhere, from Borges's First Encyclopedia of Tlon, a realm complete, he reports, "with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire.") Let "algebra" stand for formal ingenuity and "fire" for what touches our emotions (it's tempting to borrow instead Calvino's alternative values of "crystal" and "flame," from his lecture on exactitude, but he happens not to mean by those terms what I'm referring to here). Formal virtuosity itself can of course be breathtaking, but much algebra and little or no fire makes for mere gee-whizzery, like Queneau's Exercises in Style and A Hundred Thousand Billion Sonnets. Much fire and little or no algebra, on the other hand, makes for heartfelt muddles -- no examples needed. What most of us want from literature most of the time is what has been called passionate virtuosity, and both Borges and Calvino deliver it.~

My own reading of Borges yielded plenty of algebra, but only intermittent fire. There is erudition galore in these stories, but they are so dense, so laden with allusion and intertextual references, that the modern reader practically needs a concordance by her side while she's progressing through these stories. This is cerebral fiction that requires -- arguably demands -- a second reading.

The editors of Labyrinths have been helpful in the arrangement of the stories: the opening selection, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," conflates most of the elements of Borges's writing -- the doubling motif, mirrors, labyrinths -- that will crop up in the rest of the book; it could be considered a kind of prolegomenon or instruction manual on how to read the stories that follow. "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," which posits a twentieth-century author who rewrites Don Quixote word for word after undergoing a recapitulation of the events of Cervantes's life ("The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer."), is told as an academic treatise manquè, and is an hilarious send-up of the pomposity and flagrant wrongheadedness of much academic discourse. And stories such as "The Lottery in Babylon," "The Library of Babel," and "Death and the Compass" appear at first blush to be more accessible than some of the others in this collection.

These are stories that cannot be read fleetingly, on a bus to work or at the beach. They require deep reserves of patience and complete concentration and a willingness to grapple with highly abstruse philosophical and theoretical arguments. It is a book that in all likelihood does not give up its riches willingly, but insists on frequent revisits and careful parsing of its densely packed contents. It will be an interesting experiment to return to it at some point in the future, and to gauge my reaction then against my reaction now. Of course, if time is merely a theoretical human construct, then this endeavour, in itself, would be academic.

Plain Jane

2007-03-27T10:31:00.000-04:00

This is depressing:

~After being made over as a pin-up for the big screen, Jane Austen is has [sic, in the Guardian, for fuck's sake!] now being dolled up by a publisher.

Becoming Jane, the recent quasi-biopic, saw her portrayed by the very glamorous Anne Hathaway. Now Wordsworth editions has decided the only fully authenticated image of Austen is "off-putting" and have Photoshopped her into something more appealing.

Helen Trayler, the publisher's managing director, said: "She was not much of a looker. Very, very plain. Jane Austen wasn't very good looking. She's the most inspiring, readable author, but to put her on the cover wouldn't be very inspiring at all. It's just a bit off-putting."~ (From the Guardian.)

I guess Ian Brown wasn't as far off-base as I thought he was.

What the hell does it matter that Jane Austen "wasn't much of a looker"? Does that change the content of the books one whit? And would a publisher ever do this to a male author? (Charles Bukowski wasn't a feast for the eyes either, but he isn't Photoshopped to look like Jude Law.) This is the worst kind of pandering to our celebrity obsessed culture.

It shouldn't matter what authors look like, just as it shouldn't matter whether they are inherently nice people or reprehensible misanthropes. What's important is the quality of their writing. Nothing more, and nothing less.

A Lone (?) Voice in the Wilderness

2007-03-26T11:21:00.000-04:00

Neil Smith's debut collection of stories, Bang Crunch, has been getting an extraordinary amount of hype, and was the subject of a bidding war when the manuscript was first shopped around. The reviews have been glowing, and at the Indigo store in Toronto's ManuLife Centre, it's been recommended by no fewer than five employees.

All of which leaves me wondering whether I read a different book from everyone else. The stories I read were contrived and overly precious and too clever by half. (It amuses me that all the things people seem to love about the book are exactly those things that drove me crazy.) This is not to say that Smith is without talent, but he desperately needs to find a way to rein in his more flamboyant and self-conscious instincts and simply tell his stories.

For anyone who's interested, my review of Bang Crunch is online, here.

Comma Sutra

2007-03-23T09:27:00.000-04:00

It's also a T-shirt. And a short film.

(I shamelessly cribbed this from Patricia over at BookLust. Sorry.)

So That's What Oprah Was On About

2007-03-22T22:26:00.000-04:00

~The Secret is sacred but is always somewhat ridiculous; its performance is furtive and even clandestine and the adept do not speak of it. There are no decent words to name it, but it is understood that all words name it or, rather, inevitably allude to it, and thus, in a conversation I say something or other and the adept smile or become uncomfortable, for they realize I have touched upon the Secret.~

-- "The Sect of the Phoenix," by Jorge Luis Borges

The Unfinished, or An Uncomfortable Admission from a Book Lover

2007-03-20T10:01:00.000-04:00

The first "grown-up" book I ever read was Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith. My family used to rent a cottage near Perry Sound for two weeks every summer and my father would always stock up for the trip with half a dozen or so mass market paperbacks. These were always gaudy affairs with raised lettering and brightly coloured covers, which I coveted shamelessly. I remember a particular edition of Peter Straub's Floating Dragon with a blue cover and an image of a diaphanous dragon outlined in white (and in retrospect obviously foisted on the book by an overly literal graphic designer). It was enticing and mysterious and I could only imagine what treasures awaited inside that book.

In fact, I could only imagine what was inside the book, since my father strictly forbade me to read it, or any of the others he brought with him on those summer excursions. Other authors included Robert Ludlum, Sidney Sheldon, and Jeffery Archer; I hope that my father was interested in preserving my literary sensibilities, but I don't think that was his primary motive in forbidding me to read these books. Rather, he was convinced that the books contained "adult" material, which was inappropriate for my young, unformed mind.

He was probably right. But I was not to be daunted, and one year I sneaked a look at his summer selection and found what I considered to be literary nirvana: a thriller set in Moscow with a cover that was entirely black, except for raised red lettering with the title and the name of the author, and a shining silver star, also embossed. It was brilliant. I had to know what such a package contained between its stunning, alluring covers. So I trundled over to the Sleuth of Baker Street bookstore and bought myself a copy with my allowance.

My father was angry at first, but I think he admired my industry, or my literary ambition (such as it was at the time). For whatever reason, he made me a deal. He would allow me to read Gorky Park so long as I promised him that I would read every single word, a promise I was more than delighted to make. I read every last word of that book, and by the end I was frankly bored to tears. But I persevered, because I promised that I would.

In the years that followed I felt a kind of compulsion to finish every book that I took up, regardless of how little I was enjoying it, how bored or irritated I became with it, how poorly written or sloppily researched it was. I wasted untold hours in the company of books that I found to be excruciatingly dull, mind-numbingly vapid, abysmally crafted. I was willfully blind to the truth that books don't suddenly get good on page 300 (although many books that start out well have long since worn out their welcome by that point).

These days I'm much more ruthless. If I'm reading for pleasure*, I'm likely to give a book a dozen pages to hook me; otherwise, it's time to move on. It's a simple question of physics: life is too short, and there are too many books out there to spend an inordinate amount of time with one that is displeasing.

There's a copy of Lydia Millet's Oh Pure and Radiant Heart on my desk as I write this. It's been there since I purchased it last summer, the bookmark still holding the same place it has for lo these many months: page 65. I gave it my best shot, but it just didn't do it for me. I had much the same reaction to it that Samuel Johnson admitted having to Paradise Lost: "... one of those books which the reader admires and puts down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is." There are 532 pages in Millet's book, and I may still give it another try, but there's so much else to get to: David Mitchell's Black Swan Green and Sarah Waters's Night Watch and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, to name just a few that are in the on-deck circle of my office bookshelves right now.

My book-buying habits are promiscuous and impulsive (a dangerous combination in any area of endeavour). I purchase at least two or three books a week, on top of all the books that already sit unread on my shelves. My shelves are bloated with books I've bought and never read (although I fully intend to get to all of them at some point, lack of time and inclination notwithstanding), as well as books I've started and abandoned at various stages: Gaddis's JR, Kierkegaard's Either/Or, Cowley's Exile's Return, Boswell's unabridged Life of Johnson (well, come on ...), and -- yes, I'm sorry -- Ondaatje's The English Patient. I still feel pangs of guilt about not finishing these, and perhaps I'll return to them at some later point. In the meantime, I'm holding out for the next great read that grabs me by the throat and pins me to the chair and insists that I finish it.

[UPDATE: Hey, look what Patricia over at BookLust is blogging about today. Must be something in the air.]

*The caveat here is that I always finish books that I'm reviewing, no matter how painful the experience may be. Professionalism dictates that the author under review deserves a complete reading; doing otherwise is an unforgivable abdication of responsibility.

Imagining Toronto

2007-03-19T13:59:00.000-04:00

I'm enormously grateful to Amy Lavender Harris for her comment about the pros and cons of reviewing, in part because I'm a comment whore, but mostly because it led me to her own blog, Imagining Toronto, which is a fascinating collection of thoughts devoted to the literature of Toronto. I could cheerfully follow Lavender Harris's links all day; she's read deeply and widely, and offers commentary on everything from neglected out-of-print titles to popular literary fiction to modern-day vampire stories, all with a Toronto setting. Very, very cool stuff. Also, be sure to check out the main site for the Imagining Toronto project, which examines the confluence of geography and literature of the city.

And Speaking of Women ...

2007-03-19T11:18:00.000-04:00

... Kerry Clare over at Pickle Me This has a good post about the conundrum of pigeonholing female authors within the artificially proscribed category of "chick lit":

~My crux/thesis statement? That chick lit is "no longer just a genre of popular fiction, but instead has become the touchstone by which almost all contemporary fiction written by women is gauged". And I don't think that this is good for anyone.~

She's right, of course. Of late we've seen the broader generic category of chick lit broken down into various subgenres such as "mommy lit," "baby lit," and "chick lit noir" (this last has been applied to the work of Bella Bathurst and Helen Walsh, among others). What's problematic about this is the misguided attempt to take a large number of disparate writers with divergent styles, approaches, and points of view, and yoke them by violence together under one catchall categorization.

This is the same mistake that Marxist critics or feminist critics make in putting the literary cart before the horse. If you have a prescribed ideology and then try to force disparate texts to fit that ideology, rather than moulding your ideology to adapt to the differences between and among texts, you're going to end up with some pretty strange readings and some wacky bedfellows. (Who'd've thunk that Lionel Shriver could ever be considered a chick-lit author? Eden Robinson writes about families raising children: I guess she qualifies as chick lit, too?)

[UPDATE: Steph D. has a good take on the whole "chick lit" issue, here.]

Cracking the Glass Ceiling

2007-03-19T09:36:00.000-04:00

Ian Brown, in Chicago to cover the Conrad Black trial for the Globe and Mail, has a problem. It seems that the intricacies of jury selection last week were a tad, well, boring. Fortunately, according to his article in Saturday's Globe (pages A1 & A21), the intrepid Mr. Brown has found a way to occupy his time during the trial's many "dull moments": "checking out the babes of the Black courtroom."

~There are many contenders. The defence table alone boasts three lookers: Julianna Greenspan, [defence counsel] Mr. [Edward] Greenspan's tall, dark-haired daughter, who is in turn set off at the other end of the Shakespearian spectrum by the table's two blondes, Greenspan partner Jane Kelly and Carolyn Gurland, who works for Edward Genson, Lord Black's Chicago attorney and the man who will deliver the defence's opening statement on Monday. To their right, at the prosecution table, is Julie Ruder, a tall, dark Chicagoan antelope.~

"... [A] tall, dark Chicagoan antelope"? Jesus wept. I guess we can be thankful for the adjective "Shakespearian," which is at least a touch more complimentary than "babes" or "lookers." (I wonder if Brown is aware that these highly qualified, professional women have been given the vote?) Reading this slavering, sexist drivel I felt an honest pang of sympathy for Belinda Stronach. Hopefully the interest level of the trial will pick up with today's opening arguments so that Brown can find somewhere else to focus his puerile attention.

20 Worst Cover Songs in History

2007-03-14T11:05:00.000-04:00

Back in the early days of iTunes (aka the late Stone Ages), my buddy Dustin England decided to amuse himself one afternoon by plugging "covers" into the iTunes search engine. Naturally, it spit back hundreds of songs, one of which was -- I shit you not -- Celine Dion singing "You Shook Me All Night Long." I didn't listen to the song at the time, but now, thanks to the miracle of You Tube and the good folks at Cracked, it's available online, along with nineteen other cringe-worthy covers, including Britney Spears singing "Satisfaction," and Limp Bizkit doing "Behind Blue Eyes." Some of these have to be seen to be believed.

If you're having a bad day, watch the Celine clip and take solace in the fact that things could always be worse. You'll never listen to AC/DC the same way again.

(Via Edrants.)

A Pig of a Job

2007-03-14T10:12:00.000-04:00

From the Guardian, Meg Rosoff on the plight of reviewers:

~I've heard about writers reviewing to return a favour, reviews written in revenge, authors so devastated by a bad review that they never wrote again. When you think about it, reviewing's a pig of a job. Someone else's years of hard work given over to an amateur, a fellow novelist with an (always strong) opinion in a very small town where everyone knows everyone else and there are thousands of overlapping agendas. Think about that next time you volunteer.~

This is a subject I've touched upon before in these pages, but it's something I've been thinking a lot about recently. As I'm writing this, I'm avoiding writing a review that will probably tilt toward the negative; I'm less and less enthusiastic about penning negative reviews with every passing day. Part of this is cowardice: CanLit is such a small pond that there's a better than average chance I'll run into an author whose book I've panned at a party or an industry function, and I really don't know what I'd say in that situation. Andy Lamey, a former book editor at the National Post, pointed out this quandary in The Walrus:

~The real reason these writers didn't want to review their peers was that it's a small community. The most honest ones would come out and admit as much: writing a negative review could hurt them in the future, either at grant time (many grant juries are composed of writers) or when one of their own books was sent out for review. The least honest would turn down opportunities to review -- and then publish articles or give interviews in which they called for higher standards in book reviewing.~

There is an obvious, albeit understandable, hypocrisy at work here, and I do believe that a vibrant culture of reviewing, in which writers honestly critique the work of other writers, is essential to the development of a strong national literature. (And here I make a distinction between the narrow field of reviewing and the larger enterprise of literary criticism.) But it's also virtually impossible to remove the writer's ego from the equation.

Much of this has to do with the unique nature of literary reviewing, which is something else Lamey points out in his Walrus piece. Book reviewers, unlike music reviewers or film reviewers or dance reviewers, work in the medium they are assessing. The review is, at least in part, an attempt to outperform the person under review. To paraphrase Clive James, when a reviewer pans a book, (s)he wants to hurt the writer under review. If (s)he pans the book in prose that is stronger than that of the book's author, (s)he has succeeded. And that is perhaps the unkindest cut of all.

[UPDATE: The Literary Saloon has a contrary, and well-taken, point of view, here.]

[UPDATE: More here. I agree with Nathan that the discovery that an author one has reviewed is a nice guy/horrible prig/raging alcoholic should have nothing to do with what's on the page. Some of the best authors in history have been reprehensible human beings, and I'm sure some very nice people whose feelings are easily hurt have written some unmitigated crap. The personality of the author doesn't change the merits or flaws of the work.

Similarly, Rosoff's decision to review only those books that she likes is an abdication of responsibility. Taking the pose that all is well and there's no such thing as a bad sentence degrades the cause of literature. Better not to review anything at all.]

A Surfeit of Ambition

2007-03-13T14:16:00.000-04:00

Eden Robinson's novel Blood Sports is a sequel to the novella "Contact Sports," one of four stories in her 1996 collection Traplines. The earlier story focuses on Tom, a teenager in east Vancouver, and Jeremy, Tom's ne'er-do-well cousin, who has been discharged from the army for an unspecified incident involving a gun. Jeremy takes up residence with Tom and his mother, Christa, and begins throwing gobs of money around. He outfits Christa's apartment with a new entertainment system and buys Tom a brand new wardrobe. Tom is suspicious of the money's provenance; Jeremy insists it's from an inheritance, but Tom thinks that it was acquired by more sinister means. Wary of being dragged ever further into his cousin's debt and angry at Jeremy taking up with Paulina Mazenkowski, with whom he is infatuated, Tom arranges for a local thug to steal Jeremy's prized Jaguar; Jeremy responds by torturing Tom remorselessly.

"Contact Sports" is a sleek, nasty piece of work. It is streamlined and spare, stripped of all ornament and filigree. It has a kind of dreadful inevitability and Robinson gives no quarter in her relentless pursuit of her narrative's horrible, inescapable conclusion. That the reader follows her is a testament to her skill at creating a believable milieu and investing it with characters who live and breathe and take up residence in our psyches for the duration of the story, and for a good long while afterwards.

Unfortunately, the brutal efficiency that propelled her earlier novella is absent from its novel-length sequel, which is too diffuse, too scattered to sustain the same pitch or intensity its predecessor achieved.

The main action of Blood Sports takes place between June 22 and July 9, 1998, five years after the events of the earlier story. In the interim, Tom and Paulina have married and had a daughter, Mel. As the novel proper opens, after a brief prologue, Jeremy is (unsurprisingly) finishing a stint in jail. Tom and Paulina are struggling to raise their daughter; these early scenes have a kind of baldly mimetic quality to them, but this proves to be the calm before the storm. Before long Tom is kidnapped by burglars in his home who spirit his wife and daughter away and proceed to torture him.

Formally, what follows is a mystery story, the mystery being why Tom has been snatched and what his tormentors want from him. Throughout, Robinson fractures the chronology of her narrative, shuffling her readers back and forth in time as she weaves the internecine web of relationships connecting her characters. There are references to the earlier story, and scenes from the novella reappear in a different context. Much of this may be obscure for a reader who is unfamiliar with the earlier work. I read them in reverse order, and found the novel to be easier to follow with the background of the novella in mind.

Robinson also employs a clutch of different narrative techniques in the course of telling her story: there are transcripts of videotapes that Jeremy has been secretly recording since his return in 1993, a section told in the second person, and a section of letters between Tom, Paulina, and Jazz, Paulina's AA sponsor. All of this betrays a great deal of ambition on Robinson's part, but it tends to detract from the immediacy of her narrative. The long middle section (coincidentally or not, the section that features the greatest amount of narrative pyrotechnics) bogs down in places and feels too contrived, too written to be completely effective. (It should perhaps come as no surprise to learn that Robinson holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia's creative writing program.) When, in the final third of the novel, the narrative trickery gives way to the kind of streamlined storytelling that was the hallmark of "Contact Sports," the story takes off and hurtles its reader forcefully to its devastating conclusion.

There is violence aplenty on offer in Blood Sports. Robinson has cited Stephen King as one of her primary influences, and her novel is consistent with King's marriage of a Gothic sensibility and a kitchen-sink realistic approach. However, Robinson's choice to open the book with a letter, which Tom writes to Mel after the events of the novel have transpired, bleeds the subsequent book of a good measure of its suspense, since we know from the get-go that everything will turn out (more or less) alright. Although I have read one critic who thought that Tom's letter was a helpful leavening device for the dark material that follows, I felt that it diluted some of the impact of the rest of the book.

It's hard to fault a writer for having a surfeit of ambition, and given the number of risks Robinson takes in Blood Sports, it is perhaps inevitable that not all of them will pay off. Robinson is at her best when she eschews the narrative ornamentation and postmodern contortions that are somewhat in vogue these days and simply tells her story. She is a potently visceral writer, who provides her readers with an unflinching glimpse into a violent, tumultuous world that is nonetheless tinged with hope and even, in places, dark humour. Her ambition in Blood Sports is commendable, but it is when she plays to her strengths that her writing really comes alive.

Books as Decoration

2007-03-12T10:00:00.000-04:00

An article in the Guardian suggests that many people buy books without ever intending to read them. They purchase books to decorate their homes, or to make themselves appear erudite:

~Fifty-five per cent of those polled for the survey, commissioned by Teletext, said they buy books for decoration, and have no intention of actually reading them. Rachel Cugnoni, from the publisher Vintage, said the apparent unpopularity of tough literary texts like Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment - all voted in the top 10 - suggests readers are purchasing "intellectual credibility for the bookshelf" rather than books they actually want to read.~

I confess I've done this. The house we're renting is currently being sold (anyone know of any nice two-bedroom rentals in Toronto?), so there have been people trooping through to view the property for the last week or so. I semi-consciously rearranged the piles of books on and around my desk so that literary titles like Borges's Labyrinths and Jonathan Culler's book of criticism, The Literary in Theory, were prominently displayed. Of course, I plan on reading both of these. (I actually started the Culler a couple of months ago, and am still on page 24.)

I don't have hard evidence for North American titles that are frequently bought but rarely read, although anecdotal evidence would indicate that The English Patient and Guns, Germs and Steel both fall into this category. I've talked to dozens of people who never finished the latter, and as for the former, maybe three people have told me they finished it, one of whom I believe.

I finished Vernon God Little, which topped the British list, but it wasn't worth it.

(Via Bookninja.)

In Praise of D.H. Lawrence

2007-03-10T10:37:00.000-05:00

Also from the Guardian, James Wood defends D.H. Lawrence:

~It is Lawrence's misfortune that this highly doctrinal and metaphysical writer is more often discussed doctrinally and metaphysically than aesthetically. The Rainbow is indeed full of "lovely things", yet it's rare to find detailed advocacy on behalf of its many verbal beauties. Lawrence is famous for his desire to capture the ineffable, to put into words the shifting ecstasies, both negative and positive, of the human soul in flux. His reputation for "obscurity" is founded on such efforts. But at bottom he is an extraordinarily acute noticer of the world, human and natural.~

I read Sons and Lovers in university and adored it. It might have been an age-and-stage thing: Paul's relationships with his parents -- and particularly his mother -- struck a chord with me at the time. I wonder if I would have the same reaction to the book today? I venture to guess no.

Bloggers, v. 1.0

2007-03-10T10:20:00.000-05:00

Over at the Guardian, Alex Clark writes about the Co-operative Correspondence Club, a virtual community that existed for fifty years, beginning in 1935:

~The "magazine" that came out of the venture endured for over 50 years. The club operated on a membership that, although its personnel changed from time to time, stood at around 24. The only qualification was that you had to be a mother: class, religion, location, interests and temperament were immaterial though, as with any self-selecting group, patterns emerged. The members of the CCC, one finds from reading them, were intelligent, inquisitive, articulate, keen to learn about one another's worlds, occasionally argumentative, always generous. Over the years, friendships flourished and there were face-to-face meetings - but the vast majority of their interaction was through the articles that they wrote and passed around once a fortnight.~

Hmm, sounds a lot like the virtual community of Web readers in general, and bloggers specifically. Clark goes on:

~So the CCC magazine was a thing far flimsier, in certain senses, than today's virtual communities, which will probably endure somewhere in cyberspace long beyond their members' lifetimes. Yet what it afforded to its members was exceptionally strong: emotional support, connection with others, an open exchange of views on a range of subjects that appeared to know no bounds.~

Perhaps the idea of a virtual community is not quite as revolutionary as people often make it sound. Writing -- of any sort -- is a solitary and obsessive endeavour; it's nice to know that there's a community of like-minded folk out there willing to share in the process.

To all the people who have taken the time to read and comment on this site: Thanks!

Invisible Bookshelves

2007-03-09T11:25:00.000-05:00

Are you a book lover who also harbours an insatiable desire to freak the shit out of your friends and family? Do you have a knack for home improvements, are handy with a hammer, nails, and other rudimentary carpentry tools? If so, then click on over to this site and learn how to create your own invisible bookshelves.

(Via A Cup of Tea and a Wheat Penny.)

Sniff, Sniff

2007-03-08T15:25:00.000-05:00

From MSNBC.com, a list of seven movies that make guys cry. I've seen all of these except for The Notebook, and the only one that made me cry was Titanic, not because of the story, but because of the horribly wooden dialogue, Billy Zane's unforgivable overacting, and Celine Dion's banshee wail. God, I hated that movie.

(Via Edrants.)

Rate Your Novel's Title

2007-03-06T15:32:00.000-05:00

This is too much fun. Novelist (and, according to the Titlescorer, future bestselling author) Corey Redekop points to this generator that will rate a given title's probability of becoming a bestseller.

According to the Titlescorer, The Da Vinci Code and The Five People You Meet in Heaven both have a 10.2% chance of becoming bestsellers; Can You Keep a Secret? and Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures have a 20.1% chance; and Finnegans Wake has a 51.4% chance of becoming a bestseller. So, no points for accuracy, but I'd almost prefer to live in the Titlescorer's world than our own.

Freezing My Ass Off

2007-03-06T09:50:00.000-05:00

Here in Toronto it's minus 35 degrees Celsius with the wind chill, blocks of ice have been falling from the CN Tower onto the Gardiner Expressway, we've had whiteout conditions in all the outlying areas of the GTA, and there's another winter storm on the way. So it was with no small measure of incredulity that I read Sam Jordison on the Guardian's blog:

"Here in North Carolina, the sap is rising. The sun is shining, the wind is blowing soft and fragrant. I'm wakened in the morning by a chorus of songbirds and go to sleep at night safe in the knowledge that tomorrow is going to be still warmer and finer than today. Meanwhile, reports from back home tell me that the daffodils are out there too, that the snowdrops have come and gone and that even if the rain might still be falling, it has at least lost its sting. In short - as I'm sure you don't need me to tell you - it's spring."

Fucking Catullus. I'd figure out some kind of appropriate retribution, but I'm too damn cold.

(Via Bookninja.)

Under Eastern Eyes

2007-03-01T17:37:00.000-05:00

Martin Amis has always been a vicious writer, and House of Meetings, his latest novel, is indisputably a vicious book. It could hardly have been otherwise. The setting is postwar Russia, where the unnamed narrator, formerly a devoted soldier in the Russian army, is forced to endure the horrors of Norlag, one of Stalin's brutal slave labour camps. "There will be war in these pages," the narrator warns, but he goes on to insist that at its core his story is a love story, "triangular in shape, and the triangle is not equilateral."

The three points on the triangle are the narrator, his brother, Lev, who is incarcerated alongside the narrator in 1948, and Zoya, the only woman the narrator has ever loved. When Lev arrives in the camp, the narrator learns to his horror that his brother has married Zoya. Despite his seething jealousy of Lev, the narrator takes it upon himself to shelter and protect his brother in the camp: "I said, as I'd planned, You have arrived in hell. I don't have to tell you that. Here, man is wolf to man. But the funny thing is it's just like anywhere else."

This kind of scabrous existentialism bordering on nihilism would have been right at home in the works of Dostoevsky, and this is surely one of Amis's intentions. His narrator, a killer during the war who, after the war ends, "raped [his] way across what would soon be East Germany," is incarcerated in Norlag and released upon Stalin's death, whereupon he finds wealth in the field of robotics, building weapons for the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. House of Meetings is his end-of-life confession, written to his American stepdaughter, Venus, toward whom he displays no small amount of tenderness.

Amis's narrator is a tortured, conflicted soul who arrives at the ultimate realization that "nobody ever gets over anything," and that "[w]hatever doesn't kill you doesn't make you stronger. It makes you weaker, and kills you later on." It is impossible to read Amis's novel without conjuring an image of another unnamed narrator, that of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground: "I did not know how to become anything: neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything."

As he did with John Self in Money, Amis here confronts his readers with a thoroughly reprehensible first-person narrator and forces us to make an effort at understanding him. In this, we are aided by the narrator's own advice to Venus: he alludes to Conrad's protagonist in Under Western Eyes, who admits early on in that novel, "I have no comprehension of the Russian character. The illogicality of their attitude, the arbitrariness of their conclusions, the frequency of the exceptional."

Amis's narrator asserts that his "eyes, in the Conradian sense, have stopped being Western and started being Eastern," and he implores his American stepdaughter to jettison her Western preconceptions and try to view him, and his country, through Eastern eyes, to "keep a lookout, hereafter, for other national traits: the freedom from all responsibility and scruple, the energetic championship of views and beliefs that are not only irreconcilable but also mutually exclusive, the weakness for a humor of squalor and cynicism, the tendency to speak most passionately when being most insincere, and the thirst for abstract argument (abstract to the point of pretension) at unlikely moments."

All of this is on display in House of Meetings, which is short but not slight, brisk but not abrupt, tough but not heartless. It showcases all of what is best in Amis's writing: the crystalline prose, the detached irony, the cold, hard vision of the world in all its muddiness and confusion. In an interview with Simon Houpt, published in last Wednesday's Globe and Mail, Amis describes the process of writing House of Meetings, saying that it was the most difficult book he's ever written: "Almost every scene, I had to start from scratch, gouge it out of myself. It was as if the book was begging me to abandon it." I'm happy to report that, at least to these Western eyes, it was well worth the effort.

Manson 1, O'Reilly 0

2007-03-01T10:50:00.000-05:00

Bill O'Reilly inteviews Marilyn Manson. Not as ridiculous as it sounds, once you get past the fact that it's part of a segment called "Children at Risk." Between his appearances here and in Bowling for Columbine, Manson is emerging as one of the most sensible men in America. If for no other reason, this clip is worth viewing for the look on O'Reilly's face when he contemplates the possibility of Marilyn Manson as a homosexual icon.

(Via MeFi.)

Custom Made Drivel

2007-03-01T10:35:00.000-05:00

Ever wanted to star in your own romance novel? Well, now you can.

I created a custom-made excerpt from one of the titles on offer. Just try to read the following without laughing, I dare you:

"The drive back to their hotel in Cannes was interrupted by a romantic walk along a deserted beach. There wasn’t much sand left as the tide was high but they walked along the dunes. Despite being late, the air was still warm and soothing. Meringue lay back against Adonis and looked into the clear night sky; a million tiny stars twinkled from across light years of space. Back in Venice there were so few visible stars, but there on the beach, without clouds and light pollution, they could see forever. She stroked the sand and passed the grains between her fingers. The sand glistened under the moonlight and for a moment the beach became a reflection of the sky, with the sand and the stars. She felt her lover’s breath on the back of her neck as he gently kissed it; his arms wrapped tightly around her waist. Soon they were peeling each other’s clothes off and flinging them to the wind. Time became meaningless and irrelevant as they made passionate love on the beach. She longed for it to go on forever. It was different; gentler, yet more intense at the same time, she felt more fulfilled than ever. The sand clung to her back and bum as she rolled him over and mounted him; riding him like she had never before."

That's perfect. £26.95 to have your life rendered in cliché-ridden, stilted prose that reads as though it was written by someone who has never actually been in a romantic relationship. What's not to love?

(Via Bookshelves of Doom.)

Dylan Hears a Who

2007-03-01T09:08:00.000-05:00

Via Edrants, Bob Dylan singing Dr. Seuss. Freakin' awesome.

P.S. I can't find independent verification of this site's authenticity. It may be a hoax/parody, but it's freakin' awesome either way.

P.P.S. Okay, so it is a parody. But, in some small corner of my heart, I still want to believe that it's real. Please don't anyone harsh my buzz.

Responding to Reviews

2007-02-27T10:44:00.000-05:00

There's an interesting discussion going on over at Bookninja about whether writers should respond to negative reviews of their books.

The short answer would seem to be no, even if the review in question is stunningly misguided. In the best case, a response simply pours more fuel on the fire, whereas in the worst case the aggrieved author comes off sounding petulant and childish. Better just to suck it up and move on, secure in the knowledge that the review, like one's individual university course marks, will (in most cases) be quickly forgotten.

There are negative reviews that do have a certain amount of staying power, such as Dale Peck's review of The Black Veil, which began with the now-infamous assertion that "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation," or Tibor Fischer's assessment of Martin Amis's Yellow Dog, which compared the experience of reading the novel to discovering your favourite uncle naked in a schoolyard, masturbating. But in these extreme cases the weight of negative response has fallen not on the writer under review, but on the reviewer: it is Peck and Fischer who are most frequently held up for ridicule, not their subjects.

As someone who has written his share of negative reviews, I am very conscious of the effect such criticism can have on a writer who has spent years teasing out a story and painstakingly crafting it through successive drafts. The process of writing a novel is so lengthy, so taxing, so obsessive and passionate, that it can surely be devastating to witness some upstart come along and tear down the result in 300 words written of an afternoon.

I take no pleasure in writing a negative review, particularly if the book in question is a Canadian small-press novel. Canadian authors have a difficult enough time making a go of it without having someone like me come along and chastise them for not being sufficiently original or technically proficient. As Martin Amis says in the introduction to his collected reviews, The War Against Cliché, "Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose your taste for it when you realize how hard people try, how much they mind, and how long they remember."

Having said that, honesty is an important attribute in a reviewer, as is fairness: the Pollyanna reviewer who praises everything to the skies is as undesirable as the reviewer whose consistent response is a knee-jerk retreat into snark and ad hominem attacks. But behind and beneath all of this subjective opinion, one hopes, should reside a sense of context and history, and a demonstrated knowledge of where individual works exist on the literary spectrum. This knowledge cannot develop overnight, and it is one reason why Philip Marchand insists that literary criticism is "basically a middle-aged profession. You have to know your mind, you have to have read widely, you have to have discarded or modified early enthusiasms for certain writers or modes of writing -- it takes decades."

The sensibility required of such a reviewer transcends surface considerations of whether the reviewer "liked" or "disliked" a particular work; it implies a set of literary standards by which individual texts are (or should be) judged. In the words of Harold Bloom: "Contemporary writers do not like to be told that they must compete with Shakespeare and Dante, and yet that struggle was Joyce's provocation to greatness, to an eminence shared only by Beckett, Proust and Kafka among modern western authors." Given such a literary sensibility, it is inevitable that certain works will fall short. One is reminded of Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dorothy Parker in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, when she says that she does not believe the term "art" is elastic: "If I did, I'd be better company."

This is the Platonic ideal of the reviewer: the person who patiently sifts through the literary record, diligently comparing individual works with those that have gone before, noting influences and instances in which the works under consideration boldly strike new ground in their perspective, use of language, narrative strategy, etc. This kind of reviewer hardly exists in the real world, nor could she. (It's difficult, after all, to get all of that into a 300-word review.) So writers are inevitably left with a pale shadow of that Platonic ideal.

I'm paraphrasing something I read long ago here: What a writer wants most is an intelligent positive review. Failing that, an unintelligent positive review will suffice. The next most desirable outcome is an intelligent negative review. What a writer doesn't want is an unintelligent negative review. Unfortunately, there are plenty of those to go around.

Still, to return in a circuitous way to the original point of this post, it is probably not in a writer's best interest to point out where a reviewer has been unintelligent in his assessment of a particular book. Even the greatest works of literature are going to have their detractors. Better to chalk it up to one person's opinion and move on. In any event, the only thing worse than negative attention is no attention at all. Better for an author to be criticized vocally than ignored. Exposure is the name of the game here, as my publicist friends have always said. Don't get caught up in whether a review is positive or negative. Just count the column inches.

This'd Suck

2007-02-25T11:08:00.000-05:00

Waking up in the morning to the smell of freshly brewed coffee ... and 100 dead sheep rotting in a neighbour's backyard.

Gawker Pulls Back the Curtain on the NYTBR

2007-02-25T10:16:00.000-05:00

Here's a Gawker piece about a talk that Barry Gewen, one of the editors at the New York Times Book Review, gave last week at Harvard University. Gewen provided his audience with a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the review. Among his revelations is that the review's offices exist in a kind of journalistic gulag, separated from the rest of the paper: "In his eighteen years as an editor, [Gewen] has never met Michiko Kakutani, the infamous Pulitzer-winning book critic for the daily paper."

Elsewhere, Gewen proffers his assessment that there "is no bitchier industry than publishing." He quotes former review editor Rebecca Sinclair as saying, "I took this job because of my love of books, but all I'm doing everyday [sic] is dealing with crap," and says of current editor Sam Tanenhaus, "He has a pretty thick skin, but I would anticipate that after five or six years, he too will have been worn down by it all."

But arguably Gewen's most startling admission is the last one quoted in the Gawker piece: "We really don't know who our audience is." Which actually explains quite a lot.

(Via Maud.)

Let the Literary Bloodletting Begin

2007-02-23T11:43:00.000-05:00

The Morning News has announced the contenders for the 2007 Tournament of Books, a round-robin-type tournament that pits books against each other two-by-two (something known in the shadowy netherworld of sports as "brackets") until only one remains standing.

If you check the site before Sunday the 25th, you can vote for your favourite. The two books with the most votes will be entered in something called the "Zombie Round" of the tournament. I voted for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Half of a Yellow Sun, which I haven't read yet (but isn't that part of the point, as I understand it?).

(Via Quillblog.)

Who's the Greatest?

2007-02-23T11:20:00.000-05:00

Remember that link about Martin Amis teaching at Manchester University in yesterday's post? Seems the Guardian's blithe characterization of Amis as "Britain's greatest living author" has ruffled a few feathers.

Guardian reader Kathy Love wrote in to say that "[i]f the media refer to Martin Amis as 'Britain's greatest living author' once more, I shall kill myself." Failing that, Love threatens to emigrate to Uruguay.

This passionate response to what seemed to me like a throwaway line prompted the Guardian to muse on who Britain's greatest living writer might in fact be, in the process recalling the survey that The Book Magazine conducted last year:

"[Ian] McEwan, Salman Rusdie, Harold Pinter, AS Byatt, Doris Lessing, Alan Bennett, Iain Banks, David Mitchell, Ian Rankin, Pat Barker, Alasdair Gray, Philip Pullman, Nick Hornby and, yes, Martin Amis all scored well. Muriel Spark also made the top 20, even though she had died two months previously. But the winner by a landslide was JK Rowling, with almost three times as many votes as her closest challenger, Terry Pratchett. The wisdom of crowds."

So, who is it to be, Amis or Rowling? Or neither? Or is this whole exercise just a pointless waste of time?

(Thanks, Ashley.)

Grinderman at MySpace

2007-02-22T15:50:00.000-05:00

MySpace currently features a new band called Grinderman, which in itself wouldn't be noteworthy, except check out who's second from the left in the photo. Oh, yeah! First two singles are available here, and they RAWK!

The video for "No Pussy Blues" is here.

(I'm detecting a pattern of sorts in the last few posts. There must be something in the air. I'll try to find a new subject for the next one, promise.)

A Writing Tip, from a Master

2007-02-22T12:14:00.000-05:00

I'm currently reading Martin Amis's new novel, House of Meetings. There's a review coming (be patient!), but in the meantime, I'll just whet your appetites with this little tidbit, which should be forcibly branded on all creative writing MFA aspirants:

"I transcribe Lev's speech in the normal way, but in fact he spoke with a stutter. And a stutter is something that prose cannot duplicate. To write 'd-d-d-dog' is perfunctory to the point of insult."

I understand that Amis will be teaching a creative writing course at Manchester University. Please be aware that I'm not suggesting that he should literally brand his students with the above advice. Although ...

Defining Porn

2007-02-22T10:49:00.000-05:00

Russell Smith has a cogently argued column in today's Globe and Mail on the subject of Telus's recent decision not to offer their customers pornographic images and movies on their network's cell phones.

Smith rightly points out the hypocrisy involved in a telecommunications company suddenly taking the moral high ground regarding the dissemination of pornographic material, since it was the phone companies that were in the vanguard of both the phone sex industry and the Internet. For Telus to turn around now and say that they are standing up for the moral integrity of their customers, when in fact phone companies have been profiting off of the porn industry for years, is disingenuous at best.

But Smith also points out that one of the essential difficulties with regulating pornographic material, on cell phones or elsewhere, is first defining what exactly it is. Smith writes: "Since no one has ever been able to give me a convincing definition of pornography, particularly in regards to how it differs, philosophically, categorically, from any other form of art or representation, I have a hard time getting worried about the harmful effects it's going to have on us. If no one can explain what pornography is, how do we know it's bad?"

Clearly images and representations of sexuality exist along a spectrum: there is a difference between the glossy, air-brushed, soft-focus nudes in Playboy, for example, and the raunchier content offered by hardcore magazines such as Hustler or what's available online. If representatives at Telus are to be believed, the content they would have offered would have run to softcore images and film clips; hardly the downfall of civilization as we know it, particularly when compared to what's available elsewhere. (You can see the same kind of thing on CITY-TV after midnight on Fridays. Or so I've heard.)

However, the lack of an empirical definition of terms bothers me, as it does Smith. Vancouver Archbishop Raymond Roussin, one of the most vocal critics of Telus's plan, is quoted in the Globe as saying that he is "pleased and grateful that Telus has decided to remove itself from the business of profiting from pornography." Leaving aside for a moment the utter falsity of this claim, since any cell phone with a Web browser is still capable of accessing pornographic images, the archbishop does not indicate what he understands "pornography" to entail. Does it run to nude portraits of women and men, or does it necessarily have to represent people engaged in sexual congress? In the broader scope, what separates a sexually explicit mainstream movie such as Michael Winterbottom's Nine Songs or John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus from, say, Jenna Jameson's opus Cover to Cover (which I haven't seen, but which, according to her book, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, involves a series of vignettes "strung together by the not-too-original motif of a librarian who fantasizes about being a character in the books she reads" and includes "three boy-girl scenes, three girl-girl scenes, and one solo masturbation")?

In her reactionary screed, Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families, Pamela Paul writes, "As porn creeps into the mainstream press and into popular culture, it crowds out other, more positive forms of sexual expression. It also keeps raising the bar higher for 'real' pornography, which stretches to surpass every imaginable ethical, humanistic, and societal limit." But notice how she neglects to define what separates "real" pornography from "more positive forms of sexual expression." Into which category does Lolita fall? Or Tamara Faith Berger's novel Lie with Me? What about Last Tango in Paris? Or Catherine Breillat's controversial film Fat Girl?

In her book, Paul repeatedly refers to a survey she conducted, which she claims to be "the first nationally representative poll of Americans to deal primarily with pornography." Among the questions she asked her respondents were: "Does pornography improve the sex lives of those who look at it? Is using pornography cheating? Do you believe all men look at pornography? How does pornography affect the children who view it?" But note that the questions that undergird all of these remain unasked: What exactly is pornography? How do you define it? What do you mean when you say that such-and-such is pornographic? Without asking these basic questions, how could Paul know that she and her respondents were even talking about the same thing?

In fact, over the course of her entire book, Paul refuses to provide a definition of exactly what she thinks pornography is. She simply assumes consensus on this most essential question. This is the issue that Smith raises in his Globe column. He is so sure that pornography is impossible to define that he challenges his readers to send in their own definitions, which he promises to refute.

Never one to shrink from a challenge, I'd offer this: pornography is the visual, aural, or written representation of sex which is primarily intended to produce sexual arousal or satisfaction on the part of the consumer. Note that the key word here is "primarily": other representations of sexuality may be arousing, but that is not their primary intention, their raison d'être. In other words, Jane Smiley's new novel, Ten Days in the Hills, doesn't count, since Smiley claims to have done her best "to have the sex grow out of the idiosyncratic lives and sensibilities of [her] characters ... and then to result in some furthering of the plot or the fate of the characters." In pornography, considerations of character and plot are moot: the sex is an end in itself, and its purpose is the arousal of the person consuming it.

How does this work in practice? It's the same with pornography as it is with art: I know it when I see it.

Jane Sexes It Up

2007-02-21T09:57:00.000-05:00

From the Los Angeles Times, Jane Smiley talks about writing the sex scenes in her new novel:

"I would like to say, of course, that it was one long, terrifying, exhausting, self-sacrificing slog that I subjected myself to for you, the reader. Alas, no. I enjoyed it. But it wasn't easy because, in fact, the mechanics of sex are rather repetitive in literature as in life. Boredom is the danger. So my only recourse was the conventional recourse of a modern literary novel -- I did my best to have the sex grow out of the idiosyncratic lives and sensibilities of my characters (10 men and women of varying ages, a loosely-knit family taking refuge in a house in the hills around L.A.), and then to result in some furthering of the plot or of the fate of the characters."

That was better than a cold shower. Never has sex sounded so ... I don't know ... unsexy.

(Via Bookninja.)

Too Clever By Half

2007-02-21T09:41:00.000-05:00

Headline in today's Globe and Mail, page A1:

Woman, 76, attacked with a cane -- but she was able

I need much more coffee than I've consumed so far this morning before I can accept something like that in my morning paper. Moreover, the article, about a seventy-six-year-old woman who got into a confrontation with a fifty-two-year-old man about who would cede space on the sidewalk, is accompanied by a photo of the woman bearing this cutline: "Torontonian Walburga Schaller, 76, wasn't afraid to back out of a fight." Is it just me (remember, I haven't had much coffee yet today) or does that cutline not say precisely the opposite of what it means?

High Tech Meets Low Tech, Part II

2007-02-20T14:37:00.000-05:00

I've always loved books. Not literature, per se (although I indisputably love that, too), but books, the physical objects, sheaves of paper printed on two sides and bound along one edge. I love the tactility of books, the sound the pages make when riffled, the compactness and portability of smaller books and the satisfying weight of larger ones. I love the look of sentences on a page. I love the subtle differences between fonts, the aesthetics of leading and kerning. I love the pristine smell of new books and the well-worn, well-loved smell of old ones. (Before any of you start calling the guys in the white coats on me, consider this.)

And, perhaps best of all, I love the way books look on a bookshelf. Forget gilded mirrors or Italian furniture or million-dollar works of art: for me the most aesthetically pleasing room is one that is adorned with shelf upon shelf of books. The first thing that I do when I enter somebody's living space is look at the books that person has on her shelves. It's more telling than any Rorschach test. (If there are no books in evidence at all, chances are we aren't ever going to be really close friends.)

I've always bought books for myself, even when I used to work in a public library. For me, the relationship between book and reader is almost sacred; it's certainly mysterious, and I'd go so far as to say it's spiritual, in the non-religious sense of being concerned with the soul as opposed to the material. To the extent that we are all products of our environment and our experiences, the person I am today owes as much to the books I've read -- to Philip Roth and Flannery O'Connor and Mary Gaitskill -- as it does to the fact that I'm from Toronto and went to a Catholic boys' high school.

This is why I'm so reluctant to lend books out, even if I'm reasonably sure of getting them back. I have formed a relationship with every single book I own: the ones I love and keep coming back to, the ones I hate but can't seem to get shut of, even the ones I never quite bring myself to finish. They are my close friends, my bitter enemies (I'm looking at you, Ayn Rand!), my boon companions, my teachers, priests, and fellow pilgrims.

And this is why I never, ever want books to disappear in favour of electronic reading devices like the Sony Reader. Several electronics companies have been trying for some time now to develop workable e-book readers and they have so far failed, largely, I suspect, because they are trying to fill a non-existent need. Look at the selling points of the Sony Reader:

"It boasts an impressive display, utilizing breakthrough technology that's almost paper-like." Why not just go all the way and read off of paper? With more and more publishers switching to ancient forest-friendly, post-consumer recycled fibre as opposed to virgin fibre, even the environmental impact of printing books is being mitigated.

"[I]t's light enough to travel with you wherever you go." So are most books.

"Its rechargeable battery powers you through up to 7,500 page turns." Books don't require any batteries, and will withstand as many page turns as you like.

"A very compact and light design you can take almost anywhere." Ditto books.

"The Sony Reader will allow you to search, browse and discover thousands of popular electronic book titles." So does Amazon.ca or any number of bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Books also don't have compatibility issues and are cheaper than any e-reader ever offered for sale.

So, in sum, there is no value added to the Sony Reader whatsoever, and plenty of value lost. I have never talked to a single reader who has expressed a desire for this kind of device. Admittedly, this is anecdotal, but it indicates to me (since it is, assumedly, readers who will be the putative consumers of this technology) that Sony's new product is not something that the market needs, or even wants. I hope in my heart that I'm proven right.

(Thanks to Steph D. for the link.)

High Tech Meets Low Tech

2007-02-20T08:57:00.000-05:00

In the latest installment of Useless Gadgets You Never Knew You Were Missing, I give you ... the combined tape dispenser/USB hub:

The pencil sharpener with Blu-tooth compatibility is still in the production stage.

(via Boing Boing.)

Revenge of the Book Nerds

2007-02-19T11:36:00.000-05:00

Before we get started, a disclaimer. I got my hands on a copy of Corey Redekop's first novel, Shelf Monkey, from an employee at his publisher. Said employee also happens to be my girlfriend. Knowing that, you are free to take what follows with as much or as little salt as you see fit. Here goes:

Timothy Findley once burned one of his own manuscripts, which Stanley Colbert, who was his agent at the time, told him was "not creative -- not a legitimate exploration of style -- not a declaration of purpose -- and not the transcription of any true voice." In fact, Colbert charged, Findley's pages were "a crime." And so Findley burned the book. This story, which Findley recounts in his memoir, Inside Memory, has always stuck with me, not so much because it is potent and heart wrenching, although it is both of those things. Rather it has stuck with me for the coda that Findley provides to this anecdote:

"Margaret Laurence burned a manuscript once, in her backyard incinerator.

No one else should burn a writer's book.

The only books you can burn are your own. And you have to know why. It is really not so that no one else can read them. It is so they will be gone from who you are. I mean, who you are as a writer."

I was reminded of this story while reading Corey Redekop's novel Shelf Monkey. Redekop's protagonist, Thomas Friesen, is an ex-lawyer who now works in a Winnipeg megabookstore called READ. (Pronounced variously REED or RED, depending upon who's speaking. One of the book's running jokes involves an uncertainty as to the correct pronunciation of the store's name, even among the employees.) READ is "a massive expanse of novels, textbooks, music, DVDs, and book-related paraphernalia" that people flock to "by the thousands," despite the fact that it "has all the architectural charisma of a wedge of rancid feta."

At first, the furloughs of printed material seem like the perfect environment for Friesen, a self-confessed "pack rat of literature," who has constantly endured the taunts and jeers of those who don't share his innate love of reading. "Of course," he says, "these are the same people who come in their pants when heavily armoured figure skaters manage to flick a lump of rubber into a goal with a piece of wood." Friesen quickly makes friends with a trio of co-workers -- Aubrey, Warren, and Danae -- who share his abiding interest in all things literary.

But it's not long before the cracks begin to show. Friesen is assaulted daily on several fronts. First, there is the musical drivel that serves as the store's aural wallpaper: Gino Vanelli, Bette Midler, and that "Hakuna Matata-singing motherfucker," Elton John. Second, there are the questions from the store's patrons, who are, to be polite, not aficionados of great literature. One person asks for a science-fiction novel to give as a present, then becomes utterly befuddled by Friesen's thoughtful recommendations of writers like Theodore Sturgeon and Roger Zelazny, preferring the more lowbrow havens of books based on video games and Star Trek. Another patron can't understand why the legal thrillers aren't separated from the rest of the fiction. Another wants "the newest book" that was featured on the radio that morning: "It's about this guy who's afraid? Of something? I think it was in Africa, or Italy. No, Kansas. It sounded really good, it just came out, I'm sure you must have it." When Friesen says that he'll need more information, the incensed patron asks rhetorically, "Why don't they ever hire people who understand books?"

All of this is amusing, if a tad obvious, but the book really comes into its own when it "goes a touch Palahniuk" and introduces the Shelf Monkeys, a cabal of disgruntled bookstore employees, teachers, librarians, and the like, who despair at literature's debasement in our modern, media-saturated world and hold regular meetings to redress this situation, during which they ritualistically burn books by authors they feel are responsible for lowering society's collective IQ.

Many of these authors are published by Munroe Purvis, a television talk-show host whose book club reaches millions of viewers and who has his own literary imprint, but who has never advocated a challenging, stylistically adventurous, or intellectually stimulating title, preferring instead to shill bottom-of-the-barrel, sentimental drivel about children struggling with crippling diseases, and their mothers, who find renewed faith in God through their encounters with adversity. When they discover that Munroe Purvis will be making a personal, in-store appearance at READ in Winnipeg, the Shelf Monkeys begin to hatch a plot designed to stop him from poisoning the collective literary well any further.

It's not giving anything away to let you know that things don't go well. From the beginning of Shelf Monkey, Friesen is on the run from the law because of his part in an unspecified incident involving the famous talk-show host. Most of the novel is presented as e-mails sent from Friesen to Canadian author Eric McCormack, who Friesen saw at a reading once and with whom he feels a bond. Interspersed among these e-mails are newspaper clippings, transcripts of FBI tape recordings and telephone calls, and excerpts from the Munroe Purvis show. This is a stylistically playful way of telling the story, and is reminiscent of Stephen King's approach in Carrie. That it feels neither redundant nor artificial is a testament to Redekop's control over his material and his ability to push his story effortlessly forward.

What is most praiseworthy about Shelf Monkey is its tone, which is blackly comic, and not afraid to get its hands dirty. There is an hysterical scene involving the humiliation of one of Purvis's authors, a vapid dilettante named Agnes Coleman, which is bracing and edgy and skirts the line of cruelty without ever quite tripping over it. (The front-page headline in the next day's paper reads "TASTELESS PUNKS MAKE AUTHOR CRY.")

There is a dramatic tension at the heart of Shelf Monkey between the literary ideals that Friesen and his clan hold dear and the kind of intellectual snobbery that they engage in, looking down upon anyone they deem to be less sophisticated, less serious, or less weighty than themselves. Redekop plays with this tension nicely throughout the novel, providing a critique of a literary culture that prizes shallowness and false sentiment over an authentic engagement with difficult texts, while at the same time assuring all of us who love books that, whatever our literary tastes or predilictions, and for better or for worse, we're all in this together.

(Shelf Monkey is due for release in April.)

This Is So Much Better than the Original

2007-02-19T09:24:00.000-05:00

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King ... in five seconds.

Cover Me

2007-02-19T09:05:00.000-05:00

James Bernard Frost, the author of the novel World Leader Pretend, hated the cover that his publishers created for the book. He hated it so much that he commissioned a San Fransisco artist to create a new cover, which he turned into stickers that can be pasted over the publisher's jacket.

This reminds me of those stickers that went over the surgeon general's warnings on cigarette packages. The ones that said things like, "What's a beer without a smoke?" or "Smoking goes great with coffee." I don't smoke anymore, but when I did, those things were da bomb. (Except they weren't big enough to cover the image of the rotting teeth, which was the only one I really couldn't stand.)

(via Bookninja.)

Who's a Smarty-pants?

2007-02-15T17:08:00.000-05:00

Here's a link to a table of IQ scores ranked by field of study. I'm ranked fifteenth out of twenty-eight categories, behind economics, philosophy, and civil engineering, but ahead of business, psychology, and (surprisingly) medicine.

Ha! Take that, Vincent Lam. Oh, but wait, he's a writer, too, so if you add those two scores together that puts him into some bizarro genius category that hasn't even been invented yet. If that's the way it works. No? I was never any good at this kind of thing.

One interesting note is the disclaimer: "[T]hese cold numbers expressing typical IQ for different occupations must be interpreted very carefully. They don't necessarily imply anything. The outcome depends on the character of the question, discrimination, etc. Despite different numbers, all of us are equal." Doesn't that render the results, kind of, um ... what's the word I'm looking for? Meaningless? Or is it just me?

(Thanks, Giffer.)

P.S. I just noticed the Google ad in the sidebar of the above site that reads "Higher Your IQ: Higher Your iQ over 125 and Become a Better Earner." No word of a lie.

Books in Bed

2007-02-14T13:42:00.000-05:00

For Valentine's Day, Patricia over at BookLust points to a survey of 2,000 people, the majority of whom rank reading a book higher than making love to their partners as a bedtime activity. This supports her own informal survey suggesting that women prefer books to men. (And, really, who can blame them?)

Me, I can't read in bed. I haven't yet found a suitable way of positioning myself so that my arms don't get tired and my neck doesn't develop a crink. Also, I'm worried about falling asleep, especially if I'm reading a heavy tome like Infinite Jest or Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell; I'm afraid that if I let the book fall over my face I'll accidentally asphyxiate myself.

The other thing that interested me about the Sky News article was the most popular titles for bedtime reading these days, which include The Da Vinci Code, Lord of the Rings, and Treasure Island. I think that if my girlfriend ever chose The Da Vinci Code over me, it would be her way of telling me that we were done.

Sinking Like a Stone

2007-02-14T12:17:00.000-05:00

Apparently emulating Scott Baio, actress and perpetual gossip-column mainstay Sharon Stone is shopping around a manuscript of her own. This one isn't a memoir, but a self-help book.

Really? A self-help book? Has the woman not seen Basic Instinct 2? How are we to trust self-help advice from someone who quite clearly can't even help herself? And let's not even talk about the ridiculous, scenery chewing bit at the end of Alpha Dog. (The scene she did in the fat suit? She gives Fiona Shaw in The Black Dahlia tough competition for the single most laughably over-the-top sequence ever committed to film.)

My favourite comment from the Gawker piece is the one about how editors are being led "to a Stony inner sanctum" to view the manuscript. Insert tasteless Basic Instinct crack ... er, joke ... here. (Sorry! No, really, I'm sorry; it was just too easy.)

(Thanks, Sarah.)

How's the Fishing?

2007-02-13T10:20:00.000-05:00

Bookninja points to an article about a Slate writer who was disgraced when it was discovered that a piece he'd written about fishing for monkeys in the Florida Keys was fabricated.

That's right: fishing for monkeys. It's easy to see how that could slip by an editor. It ranks right up there on the plausibility scale. I'm currently working on an article about how I wrestled three polar bears in my backyard the other day to save a baby seal. Any takers?

All the Names

2007-02-12T22:14:00.000-05:00

Satire is a difficult literary form to execute effectively. Done wrong, it comes off feeling heavy handed and glib. (For example, see: Coupland, Douglas.) Doing it right takes a deft hand, a light touch, and no small measure of subtlety. It also requires a complete lack of sentimentality.

The protagonist of Colson Whitehead's third novel, Apex Hides the Hurt, is a "nomenclature consultant," someone who is paid to "think up good names for things." He creates catchy names for toothbrushes, insurance policies, and breath fresheners, always in search of nomenclature's holy grail: the name that becomes representative of, and indistinguishable from, the product or class of products to which it is applied. Band-aids, Kleenex, Windex. The name of the product is inseparable from the product itself.

The closest the novel's unnamed protagonist has come to that holy grail is in naming Apex, a brand of adhesive bandage distinguished by the fact that it is available in various different skintones: "Most adhesive bandages are flesh-colored. Are advertised as such. And it did not occur to anyone to ask, whose flesh is this?" Accordingly, Apex is sold in different shades (white skin is "Shade #A 12"; black skin is "Shade #A 25"; and so on) and marketed with the catchphrase, "Apex hides the hurt."

On the basis of his success with branding Apex, the consultant is recruited by the leaders of the town of Winthrop to come up with a new name for their home. He soon finds himself ensconced in the Winthrop Hotel, "a good place to make a bad decision, and in particular, a bad decision that would affect a great many people," and embroiled in the lives of the town's residents.

The consultant's interaction with the denizens of Winthrop, including an effusive librarian, a muttonchop-clad bartender, and a rather too-insistent housekeeper, are fodder for some good comedy, but Whitehead really shines in his canny and incisive commentary on our marketing-obsessed society and the way in which we use, and abuse, language to achieve ends that are not always particularly noble.

On one level, the entire novel could be read as a critique of language, particularly the kind of politically correct vocabulary that too often serves as a dodge for avoiding any kind of meaningful examination of racial politics. The key symbol in this regard is Apex in all its many-hued guises. The consultant describes a television commercial for the product, which features a white mother and child, a black mother and child, and an Asian mother and child, all of whom apply different shades of Apex bandages to wounds that magically appear to vanish. This is the great promise of Apex: "The deep psychic wounds of history and the more recent gashes ripped by the present, all of these could be covered by this wonderful, unnamed multicultural adhesive bandage. It erased. Huzzah."

But the promise is, of course, illusory. Apex hides the hurt, sure enough, but it doesn't cure the hurt, it doesn't make the hurt go away. It is prophylactic. So too, Whitehead seems to be saying, is our language often prophylactic, hiding our deepest wounds under a sheen of politeness and empty verbiage. In case there was any doubt about this, the narrator stubs his toe, which he blithely refers to as his "misfortune"; although he applies successive Apex bandages to the wound, the toe festers and must eventually be amputated.

So, too, does the name of the town mask the racial tensions that are an inextricable part of its history. Founded by freed slaves, the original name of the town -- Freedom, which the consultant openly disdains -- was changed to commemorate the white family that came to dominate it. Lucky Aberdeen, the local software maven, advocates changing the name to New Prospera, which elides history and meaning altogether in favour of the kind of bland marketing tag that has universal appeal precisely because of its universal lack of relevance:

"Want to import the coast to the prairie? You have to learn how to be just as dull, name by name. Whereas the black settlers had different marketing priorities. Hope crossed Liberty, past the intersection of Salvation. Better than naming the streets after what they knew before they came here. Take Kidnap to the end, make a left on Torture, and keep on 'til you get to Lynch. Follow the lights 'til Genocide and stop at the dead end. Not exactly the kind of stuff that inspired positive word of mouth among prospective neighbors, unless he was so out of the loop that the phrase 'We saw the prettiest little bungalow on Rape Street' was now much more upbeat than it used to be."

What ultimately makes Whitehead's satire so potent is the way in which he uses language to lampoon its very debasement in our modern, media-saturated, ahistorical culture. His prose is ridiculously nuanced: this is a book that practically demands a second reading. A novel of ideas that never for a moment seems remotely academic, Apex Hides the Hurt is funny, poignant, and provocative: it's the kind of novel we need in today's linguistically compromised world.

Writers' Rooms

2007-02-12T16:25:00.000-05:00

From the Guardian, pictures of writers' rooms (click on the links) with accompanying musings.

My favourite is Hilary Mantel's room (pictured), in part because I love that desk. I also like all the books in Beryl Bainbridge's room, and the poster above Sarah Waters's desk (terribly British, that).

Some of the best advice that I've encountered about fitting out a writer's room comes from Stephen King's book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft: "[P]ut your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind youself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around."

(via Pickle Me This.)

Are You Fucking Kidding Me?

2007-02-12T11:13:00.000-05:00

Damien Leith, an Australian Idol winner (who knew?), has sold the rights to his début novel to HarperCollins. Linda Funnel, fiction publisher at HarperCollins, first read Leith's "inspiring story of courage and hope" way back in 2005, before he became Australian Idol champ. At the time, she "thought it had terrific potential" and "gave him some feedback for rewrites." Now, in the wake of Leith's Idol victory, she thinks that "it's wonderful to have the chance to publish it."

I'm sure it is. No word as to whether those suggestions for rewrites will be incorporated into the finished book, and I'm absolutely, positively, one hundred percent certain that Leith's Idol win had nothing to do with HarperCollins's decision to sign it. Nothing whatsoever. Those aren't dollar signs in Funnel's eyes, it's just a trick of the light.

I realize that I'm being completely unfair here, not having read Leith's book. He may be the reincarnation of Marcel Proust. But I doubt it.

(via Edrants.)

On Pat Endings

2007-02-08T20:19:00.000-05:00

Maud has a link to a post by writer Randa Jarrar, in which the author defends the use of "pat" endings in stories -- endings that tie everything together in a neat, tidy, and satisfying way. Jarrar offers as examples stories by Oscar Wilde, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O'Connor.

Um ... Nabokov and O'Connor as examples of authors who employ pat endings? I'm not sure I see that. One of the stories Jarrar cites as an exemplar of a pat ending is O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Now, the ending to that story may be legitimately called many things -- surprising, scary, upsetting, even blackly comic -- but one thing it is categorically not is pat.

According to my Canadian Oxford Dictionary pat means "known thoroughly and ready for any occasion" or "apposite or opportune, esp. unconvincingly so (gave a pat answer)." Perhaps it is in this latter sense that Jarrar is using the word, assuming "well chosen" as the connotation of "apposite or opportune." However, for me, the condition of being "unconvincingly" apposite or opportune is as significant, and the end of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," when the Grandmother reaches out to touch the Misfit and he reacts by shooting her three times in the chest, could not reasonably be called unconvincing. To the contrary, it goes to the heart of what, in talking about the story herself, O'Connor said makes a story work:

"I often ask myself what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as a story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity. ... It would be a gesture that transcended any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make." (My emphasis.)

The final scene in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," which has provided fodder for dozens of competing critical assessments and interpretations, seems to me to exemplify the kind of action that is "both totally right and totally unexpected ... both in character and beyond character." In this sense, it is anything but pat, and it is clear from the quotation above that O'Connor would have given no quarter in this regard.

The problem with pat endings, in addition to their being unconvincing much of the time, is the concomitant quality of being "known thoroughly," that is, being familiar, clichéd, old hat. Jarrar tips her hand to this when she writes, "That's what good stories do, I think: they give you something familiar, something shiny, something satisfying." Satisfying, perhaps, but familiar? I'm not sure that, were I to enumerate the qualities I look for in a good story, familiarity would be high on the list. Hell, I doubt it would be on the list at all.

Art should not be comfortable. When it's at its best, art should make us profoundly uncomfortable. It should be confrontational, it should rattle our complacency, it should cause us to scrutinize and question our deepest preconceptions about the world. It should, in Kafka's phrase, act as the axe for the frozen sea inside us. Art that coddles us and comforts us and shows us things that are "familiar" (and therefore safe) is not doing its job. And readers who eschew anything challenging or unsettling or ambiguous, who run from art that requires them to think or to make an imaginatve leap into a psyche or a milieu that may be alien to their experience, but instead settle for what's cozily familiar or comfortable -- or pat -- are doing a disservice to themselves as well as to the cause of literature.

In the words of Jeanette Winterson, who has never written a pat sentence in her life, "Readers who don't like books that are not printed television, fast on thrills and feeling, soft on the brain, are not criticizing literature, they are missing it altogether."

My Hangover

2007-02-08T10:24:00.000-05:00

It's not a sharp pain, like needles pricking flesh, but rather a kind of dull, insistent, throbbing ache at the front of my skull, beating a steady tattoo in time with the pumping of my heart. It's not the worst I've ever experienced; certainly not one of those wracking, heaving, all-consuming fugues that has its sufferer making bargains with a deity he hasn't really consulted much of late, promising to turn his life around, to start going to church again, to be kind to children and small animals in return for just a momentary respite from the pain. It's not of the order that prompts the pious and patently insincere assertion that "I'll never drink again." It's not like that. It's not like that at all.

Posh Advised to Keep Becks on a Short Leash

2007-02-07T09:22:00.000-05:00

It seems that Victoria Beckham is the recipient of some unsolicited relationship advice ... from Jackie Collins. The novelist says that the erstwhile Spice Girl should be wary of L.A.'s female "predators," who are sure to come sniffing around her football star hubby, especially if he decides to pursue an acting career.

I'm not sure, but it strikes me that getting marital advice from the author of Stud and Hollywood Wives is kind of like getting anger management counselling from Russell Crowe.

(via Edrants.)

Which Book Are You?

2007-02-06T17:29:00.000-05:00

Here's a personality test that tells you which book you are.

My result?

Not sure how I feel about this. The test also said that I was "54% Great Book." Don't know what that means, but at least it's better than average.

Breeding Intolerance

2007-02-06T11:48:00.000-05:00

Two disturbing articles from either side of the Atlantic caught my attention today. The first, from Bloomberg.com, is a review of Chris Hedges's new book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. The reviewer cites Hedges's claims that Christian evangelicals in the States are taught to recruit by targeting vulnerable members of society: "people dealing with divorce, death or other crises are more susceptible." (This, of course, is precisely the way cults operate.)

But what really caught me up short was the reviewer's claim that "according to the schoolbooks of one major Christian publisher, African religious beliefs are 'false' and Hinduism is 'pagan' and 'evil.' Those of another define 'liberal' as 'referring to philosophy not supported by scripture' and 'conservative' as 'dedicated to the preserving of scriptural princpals' [sic]."

Meanwhile, in Britain, the Guardian reports on a former schoolteacher at a Saudi-run London school who claims that the school used racist textbooks in its classrooms: "Teaching materials used at the King Fahd school in Acton, west London, translated from Arabic for an unfair dismissal claim against the school, say Jews 'engage in witchcraft and sorcery and obey Satan', and invite pupils to 'name some repugnant characteristics of Jews' and to give examples of worthless religions, such as Judaism and Christianity."

Am I the only one, in 2007, who is scared shitless by this kind of blind hatred? Forget for a moment the odious connection between conservatism and Christian values in a country where church and state are putatively separate. What is most troubling is the fact that these racist, xenophobic ideas are being foisted on children in a classroom environment. Schoolrooms that should be fostering tolerance and acceptance of diversity are instead being used as breeding grounds for hatred and the promulgation of an us-versus-them mentality. In our tenuous post-9/11 climate, this kind of racist indoctrination is not just a hideous and retrograde betrayal of the liberal democratic notion of multiculturalism, it is actively dangerous to the safety and security of our societies.

At least Sam Harris agrees with me. In his book The End of Faith, which should be required reading for all theologians and politicians of any party, stripe, or ideology, Harris points out that "[t]he contest between our religions is zero-sum. Religious violence is still with us because our religions are intrinsically hostile to one another." (Author's emphasis.)

Harris's book, which appeals for a return to reason and an abandonment of blind faith in religious institutions and leaders, should be a clarion call for all of us who value tolerance, diversity, and the notion that peaceful coexistence is possible or achievable. The final paragraph of this frightening, stirring, and provocative polemic should become dogma for liberal democracies around the globe:

"A kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion, because spiritual experience, ethical behaviour, and strong communities are essential for human happiness. And yet our religious traditions are intellectually defunct and politically ruinous. While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it. Clearly, it must be possible to bring reason, spirituality, and ethics together in our thinking about the world. This would be the beginning of a rational approach to our deepest personal concerns. It would also be the end of faith."

Why can we not teach Sam Harris's book in schools, rather than allowing young minds on all sides to be poisoned by the rhetoric of hatred and division?

The Right Way to Abridge a Book

2007-02-05T19:46:00.000-05:00

Steph D. turned me on to Jim Crace's Guardian column, "The Digested Read," in which he distills current novels down to 400 words, thus saving severely time-pressured readers the time it would take to actually read the books in their entirety. Novelist Corey Redekop links to Crace's précis of Hannibal Rising, for which I must thank him, since I no longer feel any need to read the book.

Bookends

2007-02-04T13:39:00.000-05:00

Because you didn't know you were missing it, here's a link to every book Art Garfunkle has read in the last thirty years.

(via Pickle Me This.)

Too Much Information

2007-02-04T11:23:00.000-05:00

The inside front cover and flyleaf of JPod, Douglas Coupland's eleventh novel, are plastered from top to bottom, and left to right, in random, decontextualized phrases that create a veritable wall of print. About two thirds of the way down the flyleaf page appears the phrase, "Generate a shitstorm." These three words constitute a mission statement of sorts for the 500-plus pages that follow.

Coupland has been routinely praised for his ability to stay one step ahead of the cultural curve: his early novels Generation X and Microserfs satirized the foibles of a generation that seemed adrift in a spiritual wasteland of cultural ephemera and instant gratification. More recently, he has appeared to back off from his relentless examination of our technology-obsessed, spiritually bereft culture in favour of the more personal narratives in Hey, Nostradamus! and Eleanor Rigby. His latest novel, a kind of sequel to 1995's Microserfs, can therefore be seen as a return to form for the author. The burning question is whether the form warrants returning to in the first place.

JPod's story -- such as it is -- revolves around six listless figures who work as drones for a Vancouver-based software design company. These six have been arbitrarily thrown together by the company's faceless human resources department because either their first or last names all begin with the letter J. Early on in the proceedings, Coupland, who has never been a dab hand at character development, helpfully provides us with "Living Cartoon Profiles" of the six JPod denizens. The profiles offer character information such as "Preferred room temperature" and "Preferred Simpsons character," which highlight the vacuousness and absence of anything really meaningful in their lives. In case we missed this point the first time around, the novel repeatedly hits us over the head with it by including exchanges such as this one:

"Cowboy said, 'I miss the greed of the 1990s bubble.'

John Doe said, 'I miss the possibility of unearned wealth.'

Bree said, 'I miss the possibility of doing something Apple, something one-point-oh.'

Evil Mark said, 'I miss people having Hot Wheels tracks set up in their cubicles.'"

Coupland's characters talk incessantly -- about Melrose Place and the origin of Zima and what Ronald McDonald does in his spare time -- without really saying anything. Much of their time is spent devising various schemes for wasting time, which they delight in sharing with one another. So, readers are treated to the first 100,000 digits of pi, with a single erroneous digit (this takes twenty-four pages); a list of 58,894 random numbers with a single capital O substituted for a zero (another twenty-four pages); a list of 8,363 prime numbers with a single non-prime number (eighteen pages); and a list of all 972 three-letter words allowable in Scrabble, with one non-allowable word (five pages).

When they are not busy wasting time, the JPod workers are trying "to retroactively insert a charismatic cuddly turtle" into a skateboard game they have developed. The turtle is a sop to Steve, the company's recently hired head of marketing, who "took Toblerone chocolate and turned it around inside of two years." The JPoders' various attempts to work a sympathetic turtle character into a skateboarding game are fodder for some effective comedy, but this storyline is frequently derailed or deferred by successive ludicrous subplots including a homicidal mother with a grow-op; a would-be actor father who is having an affair with a woman two years his son's junior; a Chinese gangster and professional-level ballroom dancer spearheading a human smuggling operation; and a mysterious project being developed by a character named ... wait for it ... Douglas Coupland.

Coupland's insertion into the novel of a character named after himself -- a character who is a writer and a colossal prick (his word, not mine) -- is one of the book's more ham-handed postmodern conceits. JPod's first lines -- "Oh God. I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel." -- don't bode well, but things really go off the rails when Ethan, the novel's protagonist, runs into the novelist "Douglas Coupland" on a plane to China. Coupland's portrait of "himself" as a smug, pompous egomaniac is difficult to navigate, because a reader feels constantly ill at ease with the author's apparent self-loathing. But the larger problem with the "Coupland" character involves his ultimate purpose, which is to serve as a deus ex machina for Ethan. This is out of character for "Coupland" in the context of the novel, and is highly suspect as dramaturgy. Perhaps the presence of "Douglas Coupland" as a character would feel more fresh and invigorating if countless other authors -- including Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Paul Auster, Norman Mailer, and Bret Easton Ellis -- had not done the same thing before, and better.

This sense of déjà vu permeates JPod, which essentially reads like Microserfs Version 2.0. As with the earlier book, Coupland inserts into his narrative random pages of Chinese characters, lists of countries, advertising slogans, and computer code, but these don't add up to anything or serve any larger narrative purpose, except to indicate that in the wired world of the early twenty-first century we are inundated by useless data and random factoids coming at us constantly from all directions. This is hardly a groundbreaking revelation.

It has become almost trite to observe that the consumers of western culture, with its increasingly broad range of diversions and technological innovations, suffer from an attenuated attention span, the seeming inability to concentrate on anything for any length of time. Perhaps it is appropriate, then, that JPod should stand as a novel for the ADD generation, since it suffers itself from a kind of narrative ADD. Its surface is unremittingly chaotic but, unlike the great works of modernism, there's no underlying structural order, just an agglomeration of narrative strands, character tics, and textual elements that don't add up to anything. The book's idiosyncratic text design (also by Coupland) could be said to transform the book on some level from a conventional novel into something resembling a Pop Art object, but this is small comfort to a reader who is searching for meaning and cohesion within the narrative.

The novel's broader structural disorder bleeds over into the micro level, where the writing is often careless and clunky. There are misplaced modifiers, as when we are told that "[o]ne of JPod's quirks is an air intake duct in front of which you can puff away on anything. Hell, you could let off an Exocet missile, and it'd suck everything up and away in a jiffy." (i.e. It's the air duct, not the Exocet missile, that would "suck everything up and away in a jiffy," n'est-ce pas?) And the author often seems to be stretching to find appropriately descriptive language: "Dad phoned a minute later, his voice kind of distant and calling-from-a-tin-can-y."

Late in the novel, when Ethan's realtor brother tells him about a property he's selling -- Lot 49 -- the far too obvious reference to Pynchon only reminds us of what more a more careful, deliberate writer might have done with this material.

In Memoriam

2007-02-02T18:07:00.000-05:00

John Nichols of The Nation perfectly delineates what was so galvanizing about Molly Ivins, who succumbed to cancer last Wednesday at the young age of sixty-two:

"The warmest-hearted populist ever to pick up a pen with the purpose of calling the rabble to the battlements, Ivins understood that change came only when some citizen in some off-the-map town passed a petition, called a Congressman or cast an angry vote to throw the bums out."

We can all learn from Ivins's example. Long may her voice resound.

Sorry, Honey

2007-02-02T17:49:00.000-05:00

Here's another one for the men folk. In case yesterday's poetry generator didn't work, or in case you're in dutch for presenting your significant other with a lame-ass, computer generated poem in lieu of an actual Valentine's gift, Esquire magazine's Web site presents: The Apology Generator.

No need to thank me.

(Thanks for the link, B.)

Almost Forgot

2007-02-02T11:25:00.000-05:00

It's Groundhog Day!

Do People Really Spend Time Thinking About Things Like This?

2007-02-02T11:19:00.000-05:00

Robert J. Sawyer, on whether to separate sci-fi and fantasy on bookstore shelves. Okay, all together now, on three: One ... two ... three. WHO CARES? (All the good sf is shelved with the general fiction anyway.)

Random Love Poetry

2007-02-01T15:47:00.000-05:00

Because it's the first of February, and just two weeks before Valentine's Day (guys, take note), here's a fun little time waster: a random love poetry generator. There are only a limited number of combinations and permutations it will spit out, but plugging random information into the requested fields is fun and addictive.

Here's a poem I wrote (okay, generated) for that magnificent flower, Britney Spears:

Britney Spears, I never told you how I truly feel
Being with you feels surreal
You are my eternal sunshine
I hope you'll forever be mine

Britney Spears, you mean so much to me
When I am near you my heart goes like a raging bull
The moment I saw you my heart was sold
I feel energized as if struck by 1,000 volts

Britney Spears, you mean so much to me
Being with you, one plus one equals three
I anxiously await our time ahead
With impatience, I am fed

I hope you can put this underwear to use
It is a symbol of more good news
I look forward to our next moment together
I hope you enjoyed this letter

(via Neatorama.)

A Million Penguins

2007-02-01T09:29:00.000-05:00

My first experience writing fiction involved a collaborative "novel" written in elementary school. In grade seven, my best friend and I recruited some buddies, and even a couple of teachers (yes, I was a geek), to write a continuing story, a page at a time on a rotating basis. I've long since lost the scribbler that contained our literary masterpiece, but I remember this as my first experience with the subtleties of voice and perspective in a narrative. I realized with some surprise the tectonic shift that occurs when one writer decides to shift the story's perspective from third person to first person midway. (Well, honestly: I was in grade seven.)

Years later, I participated in the one and only creative writing workshop I've ever been involved in, and we did the same thing, admittedly at a more sophisticated level. (Some of the participants were more sophisticated than my buddies and I were in grade seven, others ...)

Now, the folks at Penguin, in collaboration with De Montfort University, Leicester, are taking the idea of a collaborative novel to a new level. A Million Penguins is an experiment with what is being dubbed a "wiki novel." The project, which is scheduled to run for five weeks, is open to anyone who wishes to participate. You sign up at the Web site, and then you are free to contribute passages of up to 250 words to the novel-in-progress. Participants can also edit segments that have already been posted.

This is an intriguing experiment, and I'll be interested to see what the final product reads like. The opening passage is less than inspiring, being replete with clichéd turns of phrase (Carlo, the apparent protagonist, "only meant to read the riot act to Liz and Dean"; a dog's tongue "lolled" from its mouth; "[n]ormality snapped back") and odd, strangely contradictory descriptors (Carlo is described as having "arms hanging like string, fingers vibrating"). At the beginning of the excerpt, the narrator describes the "gritty slush" and "sharp crystals of snow" on the ground, then at the end notes that "[t]he ground was mushy." (Is it really necessary to point out that the ground can't be gritty, sharp, and mushy?)

But perhaps this is where the collaborative nature of the process will yield results. Since anyone is free to go in and edit any part of the work-in-progress, it's not inconceivable that stylistic issues such as the ones above might be worked out by the time the novel is complete.

What is less likely is that the finished narrative will find a consistency of vision or of voice. On its "About" page, the creators of A Million Penguins point out that many television programs and movies are written by teams of writers, and that consultation with focus groups and preview audiences often results in filmmakers changing their work before its official release. What is left unsaid is that this consultation with the general public rarely results in better work, and the scripts that are produced by committee are often bottom-of-the-barrel dreadful. (Remember the live-action remake of The Flintstones? I rest my case.)

The Penguin team also quotes James Joyce from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. At the end of that novel, Stephen Deadalus says that "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." The insistence on the solitary nature of this endeavour is not accidental, and it is perhaps the biggest obstacle to the success of A Million Penguins. Artists, and especially writers, tend to be very proprietary over their work, either out of an inflated ego or, more often, out of a genuine belief in their own individual vision and the means by which they express that vision. When asked about his relationship with his editor, Nabokov famously replied, "By 'editor' I assume you mean proofreader." This is a wholly appropriate response from an artist who knew better than anyone else why he chose his words and what he intended to convey with them. The Penguin project makes no allowances for individual artistic vision, but posits that a coherent vision will emerge as if by osmosis.

And perhaps it will. I have my doubts, but am more than willing to be proven wrong. Check back here in about five weeks for the verdict.