firmly ambivalent

2009-01-24T16:40:00.006-05:00

Please proceed to approaching the subject.

2008-11-15T20:27:00.004-05:00

Sacrificial blog

This blog has obviously run its course: it's something I've known for quite some time. All that it's good for anymore is that set of links over there to the right. I'm ostensibly the sole user of said links, and that is a weak weak reason to keep a blog alive. Hence, there will be no further posts. Archived posts will be all that remain.

I remain yours, as always, firmly ambivalent.

2007-07-10T14:02:00.000-04:00

We cater to all your needs

Fluorescent lighting. Air conditioning. Super high-definition plasma television screens. Household cleaners and potato chips and shaving cream and greeting cards. Blood glucose monitors and nicotine patches and erectile dysfunction aids and long-acting narcotics. White polyester jackets with permanent stains atop white shirts with permanent stains; black pants with unravelling hems; comfortable albeit ugly shoes. Compromised intellect all around. Cynicism and disdain and irritation and indifference, but mostly indifference. Worry and stress; pressure and judgement. There must be a drug for what ails me.

2007-05-04T22:31:00.000-04:00

Three whole months, well, nearly...

An embarrassment to be absent for so long, though no one is keeping track. I happened upon an installation in a local gallery this past weekend, the crux of which is an old fashioned typewriter that is to be used by gallery goers to provide accounts of 'stories of invisibility'. Too timid to start typing then and there, and too hard pressed to come up with anything at all momentous, I refrained. But here is an example if not quite a story of invisibility: the web journal that nobody ever reads except for known unknowns, if that. There are, however, daily stories of invisibility, though none are of much interest. I am invisible at this very moment, though this information in and of itself is of very little consequence. Stories of invisibility seem to balance themselves with stories of visibility. Sometimes when I am unwillingly visible I long to be invisible, so we cannot always denote invisibility as a negative circumstance. For example, when I am working and come upon the realization that I alone am responsible for things no one else wants to be or can be responsible for, I feel more uncomfortably visible. Even if I try to be invisible, it is all for nought: I am sought out and pulled back into the realm of visibility. I often feel that my countenance is at complete odds with the environment. I do not belong there, can nobody see that? Or can they see it and are just too polite not to mention my overt physical displacement? This is, alas, all in my mind. I do not appear out of place. My visibility is expected, and the longer I stay, the more visible I become, almost like an image being burned into a pixelated screen. Even as I type this, I'm burning pixels into the screen. I leave a trail of pixels behind no matter what I do. I'm ensuring that my visibility is duly noted, though no one in particular is taking note.

2007-02-14T10:35:00.000-05:00

Snow day!

I almost feel like a little kid again. Today was going to be a day of white-knuckle driving, but it has miraculously turned into a cozy indoor day during which I find myself with time to write a blog post while I sip on a gigantic cup of coffee and nibble on a peanut butter brownie.

The logical activity for me to embark upon today is preparation for the imminent move, but packing boxes may have to be postponed, as the boxes in question are to be found in the trunk of my car, which would require actually going outside and subjecting myself to the blowing snow and howling wind. Alright, I'm exaggerating...it's not that bad here, but over Hamilton way, my ultimate destination most days of the week, is a different story: they have been absolutely pounded with snow, hence my current state of inertia.

I look at this move as a great opportunity to reduce personal inventory, or as Ian Brown so unmercilessly called it in last weekend's Globe & Mail manifesto, culling. A harsh harsh word for an activity already fraught with anxiety and misgivings, especially for a person that can attach sentimental value to almost anything (that old concert ticket stub conjures up such fond memories!). I will make something clear at the outset, however: no books shall be harmed in the process. Culling of books is strictly forbidden. Every volume that resides with me in this humble abode shall travel with me to the next space. What gets culled is the stuff that causes the clutter, like all the amassed papers and magazines and otherwise useless nothings that serve no real purpose other than to occupy space and collect dust. That is what I aim to eliminate today.

Admittedly, it is a strange approach to take in that I am moving from a smaller space to a larger space. I could approach it in a different way, such that all my worldly possessions and then some could come along with me, but why carry so many useless tchotchkes along when all they will do is sit idly until it is time for them to be moved again further down the line. Cull them then, cull them all!

Not so easily done. I am reminded often of the woman I chatted with over breakfast in an oceanside inn in Newport, Oregon a few years back. She was a self-professed ruthless lawyer until she went on a pilgrimage to Macchu Picchu, and it subsequently changed her life. She quit her job and dropped most of her possessions and adopted the credo 'reduce and simplify'. I listened to her story and was mostly amused by her new-agey flakiness, but I still think about the reducing and simplifying idea all the time. Not to the monastic extent of eliminating most everything I own, but to an extent whereby I transcend my tendency toward materialism and become satisfied with the select few possessions that I consider essential to my small world life: books and bookmarks, pens and notebooks, computer and two or three accessories thereof, blankets and sheets and pillowcases, some clothing and some shoes, plus the most basic of worldly implements. That's all.

Oh, and furniture of course. A couple of new pieces would be lovely for the new place. Perhaps a teak wall unit and a Barcelona chair. But I swear that will be all.

2007-02-04T14:19:00.000-05:00

The dervish, she whirls

She turns and she turns and she turns. She stays mostly in one spot but at the same time goes oh so far away. Where she goes is known only to her and perhaps the others that turn next to her or not next to her. I suspect I will never know the place where she goes. It is not mine to know. A lot of faith and meditation and singlemindedness may allow for such a journey but it would only be the beginning. I am not sure that I even want to go there: I am only sure that I know she is happier no place else. That is the draw.

I am speaking of Mira Burke, a modern day dervish that some have called avant garde in her approach to the ancient practice. Her turning evokes all that she feels as she cyclically prays, because not only does she turn and turn and turn: her body wrenches with perpetual moments of true feeling as she does so, thereby changing an onlooker's response from the expected hypnotic transcendence to one of shared knowledge, shared understanding, shared feeling, albeit fleeting. So so fleeting.

The transcendence is only intensified by the accompaniment of Sufi-inspired electronic sampling provided by the Turkish-Canadian composer Mercan Dede. He and his Secret Tribe lull both the dervish and the onlookers into an altered state of consciousness by pairing electronic beats with the more traditional sounds of the drum, the clarinet, the kanun, and the ney. Dede rivals the dervish in his ability to captivate the audience [whether he is clanging his tiny cymbals or manipulating his mixing board or simply just moving to the music], but he is also in complete harmony with her. He has also been called a modern day dervish, so perhaps he goes to the same place as she does when he turns the music on his table. Perhaps they go together, leaving only their bodies behind. The closing of one's eyes renders their physicality inconsequential, leaving only the music, the haunting, beating, infiltrating music. But then the whirling would go unseen. The visual and the aural must go hand in hand.

All of this begins to fade as soon as one ventures from the dimly lit warmth of Trinity St. Paul's Church, into the biting cold of the unforgiving midwinter night. It fades a little further as you run to catch the streetcar to avoid waiting untold lengths of time for the next one to come screeching through the night. There are no dervishes on board, and if there were, they would be regarded with much disdain, because any overt sign of spiritual devotion is generally frowned upon in the public transit system. Of course, it is possible to go to a different place, that is to say, it is possible to transcend the here and the now by simply staring straight ahead into oblivion, or better yet, at a wall. No whirling necessary.

2007-01-31T09:42:00.000-05:00

Wait, so it's Dion who has difficulty setting priorities?

The latest smear campaign from the Conservative Party of Canada targets Stephane Dion and his perceived inability to be an effective leader, using fellow Liberal Michael Ignatieff to drive the point home. I suppose Stephen Harper and his surly gang figure that the attack will be more effective if a colleague of Mr. Dion's does all the dirty work. But their hands still have stains on them. It would not be so despicable were we in the midst of an election campaign. But we're not. If they feel that it is necessary to air attack ads even before officially calling an election, it must mean that they know that the imminent budget will displease Canadians. They know, and we know too. It will undoubtedly suck. Yay military!

2007-01-24T21:08:00.000-05:00

Lobotomy not required

Lately I have felt as though I have been living in cloud cuckoo land. I am unsure how this state of mind has come into existence. A new sense of optimism is the ostensible cause of this mindset. The cause of the new sense of optimism, however, remains unknown, having obliquely arisen from a previous state of mind that I am only able to identify as 'not optimistic'. Despite the occasional unpleasant circumstance that may arise in the course of a life, I am always able to shift my headspace back into a place where things are good and tolerable and not hopeless. Small small things are able to instill in me an enormous sense of wellbeing. Has this anything to do with getting older, wiser, etc.? Or has it more to do with casting a blind eye on all the worldly matters that normally make one cynical and pessimistic? Perhaps it is just a realization that cynicism and pessimism are mostly pointless activities. This is not to say that my outlook is devoid of either of these things, just that I happen to be carrying around a little less of each for a change.

2006-12-31T00:17:00.000-05:00

Nowhere girl*

How negligent I would be if I didn't add one more post to this mostly defunct blog before the year ended. Of course, my mind turns to the new year, and all of the potential that it holds in store. All fresh, all shiny, no mistakes.

My new year's resolution is to move to Park Slope, Brooklyn and accidentally bump into Paul Auster on Seventh Avenue, and then proceed to ask him if he knows of any local shops that sell blank notebooks of a decent quality, as I am new to the neighbourhood, and would like to avoid commuting to Manhattan to procure said item (akin to the manner in which Nathan asks the Beautiful Perfect Mother if she knows of any art supply stores in the neighbourhood in The Brooklyn Follies). Of course, Paul would venture to inquire about my inclination to write, and the conversation would build upon that, necessitating a move to a local coffee shop where the two of us could properly discuss matters pertaining to the topic of interest. I don't think I need to mention that Paul and I would become fast friends.

Aside from resolutions that involve stalking great writers and obtaining citizenship in a foreign country, I have to make an effort at other more tangible things. These things include, in no particular order:

reading more
writing more
learning more, perhaps through the auspices of reading (see above), or by simply taking a course or two
finding a new apartment
making a decision about work, as in whether to stay or leave
writing more
writing more

I don't feel that these are unattainable goals. With that said, I will not let complacency damper my enthusiasm on the cusp of a fresh and shiny new year.

* The song of the same name was playing on the radio when I started writing this post, and at that very moment I felt completely like a nowhere girl. As time has a way of flip-flopping our emotions, I am confident that I will no longer feel like a nowhere girl in a very short time.

2006-11-26T11:46:00.000-05:00

The truth about solitude

A strikingly personal description of a day in the life:

No day was uniformly terrible. Even the worst days had moments of relative happiness. And if there were not these moments of happiness there was always something to look forward to in the coming day. There may not be anything to get up for but there was always this urge to wake up. Like this, life went on, tolerable and intolerable, bearable and unbearable, slipping between these extremes. It was not a question of hope, it was part of the rhythm of the day, of the body. And it was part of this rhythm that tomorrow he would wake up with desolation lying over him like a thin blanket, would try to remain asleep a little longer, wanting to put off the claims of the day, to prolong the comforting sense of not yet being quite alive. But there might be a letter in the mailbox and that would be enough to get him out of bed...

-Geoff Dyer, Paris Trance

I am heartened by the optimism in this passage, despite its ostensible gloominess. It is only the possibility of a letter in the mailbox that Dyer dwells upon, not the likelihood that there will, indeed, be so much empty space and dust to greet his hopeful glance therein. Never mind the fallout of the certain disappointment that follows, there will always be something else to look forward to, something that is at once small and important, whether that be the anticipation of a hot cup of coffee or the happenstance of viewing a brilliant sunset: these co-incide with moments of happiness and corresponding albeit infinitesimal moments of clarity.

2006-11-02T15:01:00.000-05:00

Much much later

Negligent blogger exhibits glaring omission of posts. No excuses save sloth come to mind. The consolation is that consequences do not ensue.

Inspiration waxes and wanes, co-existing with baseline levels of original thought. Creative destitution ensues.

And persists. Real life ensues.

2006-09-10T01:03:00.000-04:00

A bad week for young Stephen

...losing the Toronto Book Award and getting remaindered at the biggest local chain. Poor Stephen Marche. The prestige of such a nomination is as good as nullified by the 'reduced to clear' phenomenon. It helps if a published writer is able to separate the idea of the book as a product of intellectual rigour from the idea of the book as a stylized marketable good. The biggest local chain better have enough courtesy not to sell the Toronto Book Award finalist's work at a reduced price at Word on the Street, which will have a reading stage set up at the event, presumably with a table selling all the finalists' offerings. Somehow, I have a feeling that the biggest local chain would not have any hesitation about selling Marche's book for just $4.99, a little way down the street, with only a hot dog cart and a lemonade stand to keep young Stephen from seeing the big red sticker on the cover of a pile of his books. Alas, I am sure he already knows.

Music: past/present/future

Blast from the past: Collapsing New People by Fad Gadget (most recently heard on David Marsden's show on Pulver Radio)

Best current feel-good indie pop song: Publish My Love by Rogue Wave

Best current ode to urbanism: City I Love You by Bravo Silva

Best contemporary classical offering: Affairs of the Heart by Marjan Mozetich

Most anticipated albums of the fall: The Information (hmmm...that sounds familiar...) by Beck & I Am Not Afraid of You And I Will Beat Your Ass (also qualifies for best album title) by Yo La Tengo

Danielewski redux

Having now seen Only Revolutions in the flesh, I am certain that this is either the most experimental work of fiction ever, or the most gimmicky. I didn't really get it. Perhaps my sense of the literary avant garde is somewhat compromised, but it's just comes off as so much shiny, pretty nonsense. But then again, I am just a common philistine.

2006-09-08T23:41:00.000-04:00

Festival of Authors

With autumn comes vibrant foliage and author readings. I am still not certain whether I find author readings enjoyable or merely something I think I should enjoy, but the fact remains that each year's announcement of IFOA participants makes my heart leap a little with anticipation. In my mind, the most notable of this year's participants is Cynthia Ozick, having recently published a collection of essays, the most excellently titled The Din in the Head. However, my guess is that there will be a bigger buzz around the likes of Man Booker longlister Claire Messud, and cult writer Mark Z. Danielewski. Everything I read about Messud's The Emperor's Children makes me think of Jay McInerney's Bright Lights/Brightness Falls/Good Life triumvirate. My, but I do love New York, but the writing that revolves around life there can sure be cliché. As for media whore Danielewski, his imminent release has been subject to a bloated marketing frenzy, and is sure to excite and confuse those who have been MZD worshippers ever since House of Leaves made its postmodern presence felt virtually and otherwise. Despite all of my negatively bent speculations, I am sure that they are two very fine books.

And here's an innovative idea for a festival feature: an interview with Margaret Atwood. Very original. Never before done, I think. I am quite sure that CanLit cannot continue to revolve around the inventor of the Unotchit. Very soon, she will invent a device to sell side by side with the remote autograph signer, that being the remote author reading device. Harbourfront is sooo far away from the Annex! Despite all of my snarky musings, I am sure that she is a very lovely woman.

To sum up: two very fine books, a very lovely woman, and listening to successful writers read from their published works...what could be more fucking enjoyable than that?

2006-09-03T23:10:00.000-04:00

My guess is t-shirts

How is this for absurdity?

The $3,000 was intended to fund a pamphlet on the avant-garde, which the editors hope to publish in the fall. It was also meant to offset the cost of producing the tote bags, which was much more expensive than expected.

It is a relief that the tote bags are more expensive to produce than the avant garde pamphlets.

All of this begs the question, what is n+1 magazine doing to finance to their twice yearly publication?

2006-08-31T22:13:00.000-04:00

In case of rapture, this blog may not be updated

But I can't be sure. There is a chance I may get left behind. If I hurry up and change my inherently sinful ways, by which I mean become superficially pious and throw all my ideological and political allegiances from the left to the right like the good Christian conservative that I know I could and should be, I suspect that there, too, may be hope for someone as morally bankrupt as moi.

Thank heavens for proselytizers like Tim LaHaye, whose Left Behind series of so-called futuristic fiction is designed to save those of us that can't save ourselves from eternal damnation. What a thoughtful and selfless, albeit filthy rich fellow. He's even making sure the children find their way to the right hand fork in the road by publishing a juvenile Left Behind series, wherein children get left behind, presumably by their parents and Jesus both at the same time! What a fair and just God, to leave children alone and defenseless in a world of evildoers and naysayers.

Despite my overt disdain, I am more than mildly curious about these books. I know that the writing contained within is certainly of poorer calibre than that found in the worst kind of mass market paperback. It is no kind of literature, and it most assuredly has an underhanded agenda, but I am nevertheless tempted to read one of the fifteen, just as I am tempted to visit the local Christian megabookstore to stare with morbid fascination at the clientele and staff and crazyass inventory alike. Alas, I do not think that I could muster the wherewithal to drop money on such tripe, and I cannot by any means allow such a worthless title to sully an otherwise respectable library lending record. At the risk of getting left behind, I will opt to maintain my readerly integrity. And if my professed literary sensibilities seem to come across as snobbery, then I have accomplished my mission here.

2006-08-24T15:32:00.000-04:00

The answer is (d).

Günter Grass is a bad man because:

a) He was a member of the Waffen SS.

b) He kept his membership in the Waffen SS hidden.

c) The revelation of his membership in the Waffen SS
is intended to bolster sales of his recent memoir.

d) None of the above, hence he is not a bad man.

Critics of Grass are all atwitter over one or more of these three skewed versions of the story.

To begin with, Grass was a mere seventeen upon entering the Waffen SS. A boy of seventeen should possess all of the exuberance and zeal required to play the sort of role that Grass might have played in the Waffen SS, except that he didn't play the role. He was finished with them rather quickly, ostensibly without killing a single person. At the time, were these facts kept hidden? No, they would have been known to acquaintances and family members of Grass. The public at large would not have cared, because Grass would have been a younger, unknown version of his current famous self. At what point did the fact of his uncommitted involvement in the Waffen SS become "hidden"? It did not turn into a secret, it turned into a memory. The memory, in turn, became a means to an end, which, of course, has turned out to be the epic canon of Günter Grass. He is a man who has attempted to come to terms with his own personal memory in addition to the collective memory of an entire nation, and has, in fact, succeeded. So why, as the moral compass for his country's post-war Kampf, should he be reduced to what has lately been deemed as hypocritical and false? He has been very forthright about his position from the very beginning of his career proper, and his opinions certainly must stem from that what was witnessed in those earlier wartorn years. So there is no secret. Nothing is hidden. Everything we need to know has been written on a page, and is indeed, written on his face. Should we not laud him for his efforts and his courage and his commitment? Or should we just call him a monster without examining the travails of a man's life within an uneasy and overly scrutinized country a little more closely?

2006-07-27T20:05:00.000-04:00

Jamais vu

The opposite of déjà vu is jamais vu, literally 'never seen'. It's the phenomenon whereby things are at once familiar and unfamiliar. The former morphs into the latter as exposure to a known stimulus is repeated again and again. Type out the word 'again' one hundred times, and you will have experienced jamais vu first hand.

This phenomenon has been studied extensively by Chris Moulin at the University of Leeds, in the hope that it will help to understand certain psychiatric disorders that relate to schizophrenia and Capgras delusion.

Cognitive neuropsychiatry aside, the term seems like it may also be an appropriate designation for those old familiar feelings of fear and uneasiness that creep into one's psyche in the dead of night, loosening their grip ever so slowly as the light of day emerges, and only fully retreating when the day has taken hold of your life, or rather, when your life has taken hold of the day. What I mean is, why do we get so afraid of things that we have faced hundreds and thousands of times before? Most of the time we know what to expect and we can visualize what we are going to imminently experience, but the element of the unknown nevertheless trumps that of the known while in the recumbent position. I would think that insomnia may intensify these angsty late night/early morning sojourns, but even the fleeting consciousness associated with turning over in bed or grabbing a nocturnal drink of water from the glass on the night table has left me grappling with worrisome thoughts that thwart swift return to somnolence. Why should unknown knowns be so frightening?

I venture to posit that the answer may be that we revert to some childlike vulnerability when we go to bed and sleep all those hours in the effort to renew ourselves. We retreat from life and become unencumbered by the restrictions that it imposes while we are conscious. It is a time to be free and a place to be safe. Once the hours start to steal away the night, we have to re-adapt to the idea of how we fit into the outside world, and how do we make the transition from horizontal to vertical without falling down? Man, that is some scary.

2006-07-09T18:35:00.000-04:00

And her epitaph read: "she was fond of words..."

I am trying to understand whether the pairing of words and pictures precludes full appreciation of either medium: does the presence of both at once cloud comprehension? Does one without the other provide enough context? I am leaning toward tentatively answering each question with a no and a yes, respectively, despite the perceived disparity involved in doing that. It might be argued that descriptive prose may be more readily understood if one has to rely solely on imagination and intellect to conceptualize what is being put forth in words and words alone. As soon as a photograph is added, that which was imagined changes, especially when the image is a secondary consideration, as when it appears on a subsequent page. Is the change a good or bad thing? Does it muddle our understanding, or sharpen it? It would seem to largely depend on the perspective of the reader, as well as on the nature of the prose in question. Newspaper article vs. academic paper? Teen novel vs. postmodern tome? Wasn't there once an experiment carried out in which an academic article was presented through the auspices of a broadside format? How would the reader be able to reconcile the presence of an intellectually rigorous article on page two with the presence of a bikini-clad girl on page three, especially when the bikini-clad girl is purported to be the author?

Alas, I have strayed from my original question, which I have so far left largely unanswered. I suppose the answer is that when the picture or photo is well-placed, it can be elucidatory, and hence helpful. But my mind keeps providing itself with the example of a photo accompanying a newspaper article, or a graph accompanying an academic article. Not exactly the sort of thing Kafka had in mind when he refused the inclusion of an illustration in The Metamorphosis, for fear that it may not come across as monstrous as he had in mind (indeed, Peter Kuper's rendering of the giant beetle is decidedly amusing). It would seem, then, that there is some validity in the claim that a picture takes something away from the prose when it does happen to be ill-placed. As Flaubert said, "...a woman drawn in pencil looks like a woman, that is all. The idea is thereafter closed, complete, and all words now become useless, while a written woman conjures up a thousand different women." [taken from Alberto Manguel's Reading Pictures].

So the answer to the first question is a wishy-washy 'it depends'. But what of words and pictures as mutually exclusive forms? I've already established that words work better on their own when the addition of pictures is intrusive, and I believe the same can be said for a picture. Captions are usually extraneous information. Pictures convey words just fine on their own. I accept the convention that dictates a caption to be present, but again, I fall back on the example of the newspaper article (the photo) and the academic article (the graph). As visual art goes, words are mostly absent (unless, of course, the use of words as a medium is inherent to the work itself: elucidation may or may not follow). Works are titled, of course (again, elucidation may or may not follow), but interpretation is left to the observer. Why, then, have I titled and captioned the photos on my new flickr account? Captionless, the photos can be taken at face value, or they can be interpreted according to the frame of reference of the observer. My problem is that I am too fond of words, and alas, it has turned my brain. But I am fond of pictures too.

2006-06-25T16:00:00.000-04:00

Been there, read that...

I am lately always suspicious of a book that I can finish reading very quickly. The suspicion may arise from its perceived simplicity, which I fear may be a misperception. Or perhaps the misperception lies elsewhere, as in presuming that the reputation of the writer's abilities are founded, and that the reputation of his erudition is ill-founded. Admittedly, the main reason for picking up the book in question was because the reputation of the writer preceded him, in addition to the enjoyment of two of his previous efforts, both read at a time when my standards for choosing literature differ from what they are now. I should also mention that a comparison to Martin Amis's The Information played a role in its selection (which I found to be an irksome parallel when first drawn).

At this point, I suppose I should reveal that I am referring to Russell Smith's Muriella Pent. Taken as a whole, I did not enjoy this book, though I will not deny that there were moments of acerbic wit and clever turns of phrase that cannot go unmentioned. I also cannot discount Smith's overt jab at the literary arts community, which I'm sure he has been disillusioned by in his own experience, giving him ample reason to scoff at them so freely in M.P. What I cannot abide by, however, is the romantic angst that runs so heavily throughout the book, a subset of which is the award-worthy bad-sex-writing that intermittently appears. I don't care who you are: describing an act of sex in writing is always going to be cliché, and Smith's efforts are no exception. He tries to make it dirty (both literally and figuratively) and full of ardour, but it just comes off as banal.

I also don't for a minute believe that I'm reading about real writers within a thriving literary community in a large urban centre (i.e. Toronto), but this perception of inauthenticity could have to do with Smith's use of a quasi-suburban uptown manse within a gated community as the hub of all the activity, sexual and otherwise (though I suspect this choice has much to do with Smith's jab at the community being satirized).

As for the comparisons made to Amis's The Information, the only one that can be drawn is intent, which by my estimates, Smith accomplishes as effectively as Amis. The form, too, engages, with Smith's inclusion of letters, journal entries, e-mails, and snippets of writing. Content, I must opine, is lacklustre.

Okay, there. I have effectively panned an otherwise critically acclaimed work of fiction. Why have I done this? I fear it is because I can no longer enjoy a book that does not challenge me in some capacity. To me, quickly getting through hundreds of pages of ostensibly decent prose is no longer an indicator of enjoyment: being a real page-turner does not mean that the book is un-put-downable. All that it means is that the prose is too simple. Of course I realize that this is an over-generalization. There will be exceptions to this viewpoint, and there have been exceptions to this viewpoint. But it only became glaringly apparent to me that this is my viewpoint upon finishing M.P., and this is because it is demonstrably representative of everything that has been pulling me away from the largely unremarkable and unoriginal genre of fiction over the last few years. I have not, however, turned my back on fiction completely. I am rather drawn to the large, difficult tomes that encourage a furrowed brow as well as preclusion of their eventual completion. Self-flagellation aside, I like to be edified, and the implementation of rigorous self-imposed standards where literature is concerned is how I mean to do it: it is, truly, the only thing in the world over which I have complete control.

2006-06-08T16:25:00.001-04:00

The Leaving New York City Blues

A park bench in a city park is as ubiquitous as a downtown skyscraper in the same city. It happens to be the latitude and longitude of the city containing said objects that sets it apart from ostensibly similar physical features elsewhere on the grid.

Today I am sitting on a park bench in the eastern reaches of Toronto, facing Lake Ontario. The CN Tower is not immediately visible, but were I to walk a few southerly steps it would emerge from behind the trees. The day is a stellar one: I have nothing but sunshine, warmth, and a blank page to keep me company. For the moment, I feel content, but there remains a low grade gnawing that keeps taking my mind back to that other park bench in that other city, facing not a lake, but steel and concrete and brick and glass as far as the eye can see.

There is a different sort of beauty at play in Manhattan, one that begins as awe and not-quite-belief. The latter results from an inundation of people (noise and motion), of architecture (girth and intensity), of choice (consumption and sustenance), and of diversity (so abundant as to be almost unnoticeable). Once belief sets in, it is replaced by a desire to be everywhere all at once, and to do everything all at once. To make such an attempt is futile, unless you have nothing but time. When the realization strikes that time is fleeting, there arises a despair that is founded upon having failed the city somehow. There remains no other option but to return, to try and do better the next time.

Sitting on that park bench in Union Square a mere three days ago left me unable to articulate any of this. All that I knew was that I was an outsider, that none of it belonged to me: my brief glimpse of the city was all that I was to be afforded for the moment, everyday life intervening and dictating my swift removal from the streets of somebody else's town. Now I see things more plainly. The city belongs to no one in particular and to everyone in general. It belongs to the out-of-towners just as much as it belongs to the artists and writers, to the financiers and fashionistas, to the street urchins and hipsters.

Returning to Toronto has not left me embittered that I cannot call New York City my home. Rather, I feel newly enamoured with this other great urban centre. The beautiful June day could have something to do with this outlook, but I also suspect that I have adopted a newly found appreciation for this marvel of a city, which is most likely a direct result of having spent time in the most marvellous city of them all. I feel the potential of all that this city has in store for me: I have much yet to learn from it, to learn about it. The low-lying gnaw, however, does not abate. The rattle and hum stays with me too, despite my displacement to another park bench in another city, which is, in fact, not displacement at all: it is replacement, from which I expect to shortly be displaced.

2006-05-22T12:03:00.000-04:00

Geometric frustration

More than one month later, I am still chiselling away at Paul Glennon's Oulipean inspired work, The Dodecahedron. As the stories build upon each other, I await some sort of resolution, though Glennon states in his afterword that I will receive no such thing. I get a little thrill each time a new story unveils a semblance of some previous story, but then remember that the inherent disconnect between the anecdotes will preclude any ultimate revelation, despite common threads that run through the book as a whole. It is unclear to me why I crave a resolution so, though the closest I can come to an explanation is that I have been trained as a reader to expect one. Only Glennon is in possession of answers, presumably having deconstructed the dodecahedron from whole in order to display the individual frames. Truly, elucidation lies only in the re-construction of the frames into their original geometrical shape. Even then, nothing more tangible than geometric frustration ensues. All of these considerations render me reluctant to forge ahead to the finish. Perhaps reading the afterword was a mistake. It is curious that Glennon chose to divulge this information at the end of the book. He ostensibly had an inkling that such an admission would deter readers from proceeding: grasping the essence of a work that is a throwback to the French literary movement, Oulipo could be intimidating.

The whole endeavour has allowed me to conceptualize how other frameworks might be utilized in the writing of experimental fiction: idea maps, for one. Post-it notes on a wall could prove invaluable in this regard.

2006-04-18T16:17:00.000-04:00

Words as art

Though I am not yet too far into it, Paul Glennon's geometrically-inspired The Dodecahedron [or A Frame for Frames] is reminding me of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, albeit in only a superficial way. The perceived similarities have to do with the linking of stories with common threads that are sometimes quite detectable, and sometimes not. What sets the two apart, I believe, is Glennon's clever use of geometry as a framework for the novel. I have read reviews that recommend using a physical model to aid the reader in the conceptualization of how the individual vignettes connect, which almost makes me want to seek out my 3-D organic chemistry model set from university [though I suspect that such an act may only result in the lamentation that I have forgotten how to differentiate between two enantiomers of a single molecule, which is in fact the very least of what I've forgotten]. I have not embarked on an endeavour to visualize the involved dodecahedron as of yet, but once I get a better grasp on all the connectors, I may just try. I may appear as a literary ingenue by asking this, but I wonder if anything of this type has been done before? I will naively say this: it would seem as though Glennon is the architect of his very own art movement. More on this later.

2006-04-16T15:34:00.000-04:00

"A made-in-Canada approach to cleaning up the environment"*

I recently learned that environment minister Rona Ambrose put the kibosh on the speaking engagement (i.e. book launch) of Mark Tushingham on the occasion of the release of his futuristic environmental thriller, Hotter than Hell, the premise of which involves Canada and the U.S. at war over water supply shortages in the not-so-distant future. Since Tushingham is an Environment Canada employee, Ambrose seems to have considered his public explication of the controversial subject matter inappropriate for whatever reason [which most likely has something to do with the slashing of environmental spending in the new Harper government], despite the fact that the book is labelled as a work of science fiction. I thought that the resulting fallout from such a revelation would have interested parties crying censorship, but I haven't heard one more peep on the issue since the story emerged on Thursday, which is somewhat unsettling. Perhaps Harper's renowned gag order M.O. is effectively censoring any protestation of censorship? Whatever the case may be, Rona Ambrose is one scary chick, by which I mean, anyone who feels they are justified in cutting environmental programs by 80 per cent frightens me. No wonder Tushingham went into hiding when the decree was issued.

*see rabble.ca

2006-04-13T16:37:00.000-04:00

Aching for Gravitas

Just a fun quote that I came across while perusing my notebook...this one is courtesy of Tibor Fischer:

The drawback to profundity is that it's like being funny, either you are or you aren't, straining doesn't help.

Alas, I think these words arise from Fischer's review of Martin Amis' Yellow Dog a couple of years back [i.e. the book that he deemed the 'not knowing where to look kind of bad'].

However, he also calls Amis the overlord of the OED, so I suspect he must love the Amis on some level. Don't we all?

2006-04-09T12:22:00.000-04:00

Gender Confusion*

So then, women love the work of Jane Austen, while men feel greater affiliation to the work of Albert Camus: passion versus alienation, as the Guardian concludes. Having viewed** the latest film production of Pride & Prejudice just last night, I would say, that yes, certain moments were, indeed, fraught with passion, but a great deal of the other moments were quite irritating and tiresome. Of course I know that a film is not a book, and that I would have to read the Austen classic to offer a more informed opinion, but I do know that the involved story is not one that might change my life. The same goes for the other four titles on the list of books that women have cited as all-time favourites: I have read none of these, nor do I have any desire to do so. If it's all about thwarted romances and overcoming obstacles and love conquering all, I want no part of it. There's a company called Harlequin that caters to the needs of that reading audience.

The list of works cited as the mens' favourites are arguably more promising (if a book that heavily features angst and alienation can be considered promising). Heller, Joyce, Kafka, Kundera, and Vonnegut are some of the names that appear. Now, we are told that the men polled all have some professional connection to literature, yet we are not told of any such connection for the women's group (I suspect that this connection may be absent in the latter). Despite this literary connection, which should presumably carry some weight, literary critic Lisa Jardine, who carried out both polls, calls some of the mens' choices "puberty reading". So feelings of angst and alienation, it would seem, is par for the course for a teenaged boy.

Newsflash: feelings of angst and alienation are also par for the course for every other age group, and not just men! Perhaps women are fooling themselves into believing that their existential crises can be quashed by losing themselves in the romantic fluff that Jane Austen and others write (though, to be fair, Mr. Darcy's own existential crisis is brilliantly executed: I have only Colin Firth's and Matthew Macfadyen's performances to go by, however).

I guess it's apparent that I fall into the alienation camp when it comes to literary preference. Just another lone wolf on the steppes. Whether I would call any of these works "life-changing" is questionable, insofar as the realization that angst and alienation are a part of life is made known to me through life itself, and not exclusively through literature. Reality, in other words, is what changes lives. It would follow, then, that works of non-fiction should be considered as potentially life-changing. And indeed, this is the case: of the men polled, a number cited works of non-fiction as the ones with the most impact on their lives. Of course, they also said they "had a slight fixation with the stiff covers of hardback books". And with that, I have no more to say, except for this: I suspect that Kurt Vonnegut may be somewhat pleased to discover that the Guardian reporter has characterized him as a "dead white man" (I'm not sure what Nick Hornby will think).

*By which I mean, judging by the works appearing on each list, I feel greater affiliation to those works in which a certain degree of alienation prevails, that is to say, the works chosen by men. Ergo, I am like a man?

** Here, it should be noted that the copy in question was not rented or purchased, but rather, lent to me by a colleague who I mistakenly told that I wouldn't mind watching said movie when asked, would you like to see this movie?

2006-04-07T00:29:00.000-04:00

Gotham Writer

Was there ever a writer more devoted to his craft than Paul Auster? Having recently finished reading Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure, in which Auster recounts his early years as a struggling writer, it is perfectly clear that there was never a doubt in his mind that writing would be his only occupation. He is unrelentless in this belief, despite an abundance of hard times that befall him. White collar work? Forget it. Blue collar work? Sure, but only for the experience it affords, which may shape itself into a story later on. Translating the work of others? Definitely, because it involves sitting down at a desk with pen and paper and requires a substantial amount of intellectual effort. Plus it pays the bills. Of course, it doesn't hurt that he had both Paris and New York as backdrops to inspire him during the leaner years. How does an artist survive in this day and age when the rising cost of living in such urban centres accompanies a steely and unwavering resolve to remain true to one's calling? A difficult question that shouldn't be but must be asked. As Auster relates in The Art of Hunger [a critical piece revolving around Knut Hamsun's Hunger],

A young man comes to a city. He has no name, no home, no work: he has come to the city to write. He writes. Or more exactly, he does not write. He starves to the point of death... The process is inescapable: he must eat in order to write. But if he does not write, he will not eat. And if he cannot eat, he cannot write. He cannot write.

Auster forged ahead despite an ongoing (but impermanent) relationship with poverty: poetry, non-fiction, criticism, fiction, screenplays, and more. My admiration for this man and his varied body of work is expansive. His work overflows with humanity that is achieved in a most understated and straightforward manner. However, my favourite aspect of Auster's writing has to do with his use of place, which seems like the single most important facet of his oeuvre: he is undeniably the quintessential New York writer. When I think of New York, one of the first things that pops into my mind is Paul Auster. The city belongs to him, and it reflects in his writing. One day, I hope to have such a relationship with my own city. I already feel the ties starting to bind.

2006-03-30T21:14:00.000-05:00

As things stand

There was a time when I lived without art, yet I knew that it existed. I deluded myself into believing that it didn’t play a role in my life, and that I could subsist on a steady diet of everyday life. I could, but it was a mostly hollow existence. The first stirrings of taedium vitae quelled any notion that complacency was an option. I turned to literature for solace. Then I turned to writing. My limited exposure to anything beyond the confines of my small world life precluded quality output. Sadly, I did not know it at the time.

At once happy and ignorant, I pursued the belief that I would go somewhere with my writing. My perseverance resulted in a short stack of pages abundant in mediocrity and resplendent in banality: indeed, it was very bad prose. I think, perhaps, that I did know it at the time, though I pretended to be oblivious to my literary shortcomings. It was because I was too much in love with the idea of being a writer. Of course, there are writers, and there are writers, though this knowledge did not come until much later.

I stopped writing, thus sparing others from the awful fruits of my toil. Yet I thought about writing, and I thought about it often. At the same time, I read fiction of questionable authorship (I will not name names here). It was only a matter of due course that I became a bibliophile. It was not my intention to pursue rare first editions or volumes whose physical beauty outshone their content. I merely bought books, mostly of the fictional sort. Mostly they remained unread. Mostly they collected dust. It was around then that their physicality struck me as being as important as their content. The sight of their horizontal arrangement on my growing number of bookshelves was capable of evoking an enormous sense of wellbeing. Maybe it had to do with their reliable steadfastness, their unwavering commitment to me in my time of need. Maybe, also, it had to do with my dawning awareness that, as my book collection grew, so did the wealth of ideas that availed themselves to my gnawing need for intellectual growth.

Ideas and intellectual growth: this was to be the theme that pervaded my existence for the many years that followed, and indeed, follows me right up to this very minute. Oh, how I craved them! Oh, how I lacked them! I crave them still. Do I lack them still? I suspect that I do. But in my active pursuit of them, I edify myself, and that should make a difference. It seems strange to me now, when I think back to a time when I did not undertake endeavours intended to bolster my intelligence. This is completely at odds with an otherwise bookish lifestyle. Yet there was a co-existing singlemindedness that did not allow for the presence of alternate points of view. Having said that, I realize that it makes no sense at all, yet that is the way that it was. My intent was to change that.

The plan to change involved a return to university. I applied to library school on a lark. I was accepted, and then I moved to the city, and then I went ahead and got myself another degree. Four more letters to follow my name. It changed me forever. The previous craving alluded to will simply not abate. I am compelled to pursue any manner of written word as an addict might pursue the substance of his downfall. My personal downfall is language: words are my drug of choice.

Amidst my word-induced reverie, real life intervenes. It can be mind-numbing. Most of the time, I am surrounded by individuals who live without words, indeed without art. I feel very little kinship with these people. I once believed that living in a big city would not change me, but now I firmly believe that it has: it has shown me a world that was previously unheard of, unknown. It is a world of art, a world of ideas, a world of intellectual growth, and above all else, a world of words. This is where I reside.

2006-02-26T20:25:00.000-05:00

Thoughts on To a Young Friend Charged With Possession of the Classics

The prose of William H. Gass is capable of evoking many emotions, the most notable of which is pure joy. This man has such an unbridled passion for the written word and such a keen understanding of its raw power when executed effectively, that one cannot help but to become overwhelmed and a little weak in the knees when confronted with unintentionally self-referential observations like this:

"Thinking produces its own endorphins, and encountering a fine thought is as thrilling as the sight of the bluebird, partly because both have been threatened with extinction."

Weak in the knees may seem like an exaggerated response to such an ostensibly benign grouping of words, but this is precisely the effect elicited in my particular case. No alcohol was consumed to facilitate the process. It is the ability of Gass to evoke what it means to experience the persistently elusive 'moment of clarity'. The capability of a precise grouping of words to achieve this desired effect is admittedly a notion that I have never before considered to be as true as it rings here. But Gass is right: the thrill is undeniable, and it can be attributed to a chosen few words put in splendid order by a thriving mind. It cannot be found while sitting in the local Starbucks, listening to menopausal women discuss the South Beach Diet, nor can it be found while riding on the streetcar tucked in beside a surly unkempt troglodyte. Edification cannot be found in either place. It can, though, be readily accessible: it is as close as the volume that lies against one's side within the shoulder bag that you take everywhere. Gass has something further to say on the matter:

"It is we who must do [books] honor by searching for our truth there, by taking their heart as our heart, by refusing to let our mind flag so that we close their covers together, and spend our future forgetting them, denying the mind's best moments."

It is advice to be heeded and acted upon forthwith, and never to be stopped.

2006-02-04T19:50:00.000-05:00

PHEW! CANADIAN WRITERS ARE PERPETUATING THE CHICK-LIT GENRE!

I'm trying hard to believe that Leah McLaren is not Toronto's latest literary darling, but try as I might, the evidence is pointing to the contrary. No less than three separate occasions forced me to come face to face with some aspect of Leah today. First, her predictably egomaniacal column in the Style section of the Globe, in which today she solicits her first novel with a sufficiently ennui-ridden excerpt. Later, my literary sensibilities are affronted while making my way into Book City in the Annex, the reason for which is an entire display window devoted to the above mentioned book. I stop dead in my tracks, despite prolonged and uncomfortable exposure to the inclement weather. A part of me wants to smash that window and destroy that display for no good reason, aside from, 'It was not supposed to be this way!'. Okay, so I get past my initial furor of shock and disdain, make my way into the shop, and re-emerge some time later, glad to have discovered and claimed this, this, and this, but also glad to have completely avoided any further evidence of Leah. Except, when I am about to descend onto the rain-swept windscape of Bloor Street, trying to get my affairs in order before embarking on an expedited journey to the subway, who do I see on the cover of Frank magazine but she once more. The only saving grace is that she is undoubtedly being ridiculed in the latter.

I have not quite figured out why the whole matter enrages me so, whether it is some sick form of jealousy, or else just displeasure at the prospect of one more mediocre book to sift through while searching out the real gems on the remainder table in approximately six months time.

2006-01-31T15:40:00.000-05:00

LIMNING THE DROSS

Having recently come across an interview with the intriguing architectural critic Deyan Sudjic in the most recent issue of Dwell magazine, I have become curious about his book, The Edifice Complex, which is an examination of the way in which the wealthy and powerful manifest their wealth and power through architectural pursuits. In the interview (not available online), Sudjic makes an interesting albeit obvious statement about the essential drive and need of the architect to build; it is even more interesting to consider that they will do so as the willing servant of the über-being that can facilitate the process, whether they happen to possess more money than scruples or not. I can only imagine that the architect's integrity is compromised as a result, though at what point will the architect step away and decline further involvement, if at all? Is it possible that the vision of the architect becomes inconsequential and thwarted by the vision of the financier? I shudder to think of the outcomes that arise from this presumably common dynamic.

So the rich and powerful build monuments to showcase their financial girth and to bolster their already hefty egos? Michiko Kakutani doesn't seem to think this is such a groundbreaking idea, or that Sudjic has done an effective job in elucidating the phenomenon concisely, but rather calls the book "a fat, overstuffed jumble of the obvious and the fascinating, the tired and the intriguing". She also characterizes the book as being rife with dross, so much so that she, in effect, had to sift through the mess "surrounding its nuggets of insight". I daresay that 'limning' may have been a more appropriate word there. At any rate, I'm not going to let Michiko's review scare me away. Sudjic's credentials tell the tale, while Michiko's are less than stellar. As soon as I can, I'm going to get myself down to DM Books, where the book in question is on sale for $5.99! Sad that it's already being remaindered, but glad that it works to my advantage!

2006-01-31T11:33:00.000-05:00

READING V. WRITING

A short while back, I began a new blog, a fictional blog that was to revolve around the life of a new resident at a European sanatorium. I promptly deleted 'At The Sanatorium' after realizing that it felt all too contrived, not to mention unoriginal. I had been playing with the idea for quite some time before acting upon it, only to immediately notice that I was effectively stealing an idea, and doing so in a most unpersuasive manner. The innovator of the idea, one Thomas Mann, could be heard turning in his Swiss grave as I unsuccessfully attempted to describe the impressions made upon the new resident as (s)he acclimatized to the new and strange surroundings. After the second post, I could not bring myself to continue with the pretense that I was creating something unique.

As a person that surrounds myself with any and all fashion of the written word on a daily basis, it is very difficult not to be influenced by what I read. As a person that also aspires to contribute to the creation of the written word, this influence does not bode well for the cultivation of original thought. I have always had great difficulty in trying to keeping the two separate, so much so that I would deliberately attempt to not read anything prior to and during a planned spell of writing. It was always one or the other of the two in the past, but now I am aware that a lack of the ability to read essentially renders me an empty vessel. Despite my middle age, constant reading is vital to my ongoing development. Pair this with a predisposition to impression, and the result is a distinct lack of innovative thought as it relates to the seed of an 'idea' that should ingrain itself in one's mind as a random and solitary process. The outcome does not amount to much: very little writing ensues. I would like the opposite to be true, but I would rather be able to read than to write and not read. I am not sure if the situation can be altered; I suspect that my essential make-up precludes the possibility.

2006-01-27T21:09:00.000-05:00

LOGAN MOUNTSTUART IS MY DAD

By virtue of the fact that Oprah Winfrey orchestrated a public hanging on her most banal of shows, I am now a huge James Frey fan, despite never having read a single word that he's written. I have been half following the whole sordid affair, and am fully aware that Frey embellished details of his not-so-sordid life. Frankly, the fictional memoir is really not such a scandalous genre. Admittedly, he mislead his audience, but let's not forget that there is a certain type of individual that is predisposed to this sort of behaviour: the conventional term for such an individual is 'fiction writer'. To be honest, up until The Smoking Gun website reported on Frey's outing, I was under the impression that the book was a novel, only because I am accustomed to Winfrey choosing such works for her worthless book-of-the-month club. This latest incident seems to have given Winfrey the opportunity to show her subjects that she has the power to make a writer, or to break a writer. I only hope that being tarred and feathered by the evil Ms. Winfrey will inspire Frey to retaliate by penning a new memoir relating to his most recent adventures; the horrors recounted therein will vary from those found in 'A Million Little Pieces': they will be true. On second thought, he better market it as fiction so he doesn't get his ass sued by the mighty O.

2006-01-17T20:20:00.000-05:00

THINK TWICE

The polls tell us that we are about to do as our neighbours to the south have done: that is to say, we are about to vote in the wrong man for the job. I can only conjecture that prospective voters are rejecting their own ideologies in exchange for some hollow and vapid promises made by someone who "always believes he is the smartest person in the room" (Source: The Globe and Mail). What's not so smart is Harper's intent to renege on Canada's involvement in the Kyoto Protocol. Not only is it not smart, it's completely stupid and ignorant. Has he not heard that the ice road in the northern environs of his home province won't freeze properly because of warmer than normal temperatures? After reading Bill McKibben's piece in NYRB, I am convinced that this is not an isolated incident. This is the shape of things to come, and it seems like it's being ignored even more than before. What will it take to push environmental policy-making to the top of political agendas, in Canada and the U.S. both? Probably not even another record-breaking hurricane season.

A last-ditch effort to sidestep the impending doom is being spearheaded by the Think Twice Coalition, which is "a newly formed coalition of social advocacy and citizens' organizations wanting to express their concern about the implications for Canadian social programs and equality rights of a potential Conservative victory in the upcoming federal election".

Follow the 'Spread the Word' and 'Show Your Support' links from the Think Twice homepage.

2005-05-15T12:21:00.000-04:00

OVERWHELMED, UNDERWHELMED

It's almost time for my once-a-month posting, but I thought I'd throw caution to the wind and pipe up a little early. But what am I piping up about, I ask myself as I type with no plan or intent to elucidate things literary here today. The current situation precludes that: reading and writing are pretty much antithetical to the Zeitgeist of the moment. I blame my work, which has traditionally had this mind-numbing effect on my being. I tried to escape once, but got sucked back into the vortex through no one else's fault but my own. I am accustomed to a certain lifestyle that is maintained by a certain income, and that is my downfall. At the same time, there is nothing I would rather do with my life than write. For the time being, it is an unrealized dream. And so it shall remain, as I officially write the last post of this blog, just as firmly ambivalent as I was when I started a year or so ago, irreconcilability intact.

Goodbye.

2005-04-17T09:36:00.000-04:00

BIG CITY BOY AT HEART

Call me an amateur, but I had no idea that The Castle was a work in progress when Franz Kafka bit it in 1924. Hence my surprise when arriving at the last page, the last sentence of which dangles annoyingly out of reach of any manner of resolution. I had been hoping that K. might come to his senses, and skip town at his earliest convenience, without any hindrance from one parasitic townsperson or another, but not before turning around at the limits of town to flip the bird to one and all.

Then I have to wonder, wherever K. came from, was it any better than the place he finds himself now? Was it worse? What made him leave? Was it all about the land surveying job? Or was he running away from a life more fruitless and more aimless than the dysfunctional one he has eked out for himself so quickly in the town that lies in the shadow of the castle? Perhaps his new life brings a level of excitement and intrigue previously unknown to him: a new land, a new job, a new love, and not least of all, being the most talked about guy in town. A real bad boy with a penchant for breaking rules and getting into trouble at every turn. No wonder Frieda and Olga and Pepi find him so irresistable.

In light of all that, maybe he'll stick around. But he should forget about the castle: he's had enough experience with it, even while kept at an arm's length, to know that it will remain impenetrable. He should find a job out of town and commute. The town is evidently not ready for the land surveyor, as they seem to have an aversion toward the progress that his profession represents. The city would be a more apt place for K. to hang his hat and set up his tripod. Eventually, he might even save enough money to move to that city, where everyone will probably just leave him alone and not give another thought to his comings and goings. A little anonymity could do him a world of good.

But in the meantime, K.'s got a few more forbidden thresholds to cross, a few more crucial appointments to miss, and a few more hollow townsfolk to irritate with his perplexing behaviour.

I think I need to take a break from Kafka now...on to a different and decidedly more lighthearted brand of literature.

2005-03-23T21:55:00.000-05:00

THE SLOW READER

Today is the one month anniversary of my last blog post. That should be a clear indicator of the current state of my creative spirit: literary inertia precludes any sort of illuminating insight into the written word. These days, the written word in question is the book that just doesn't want to be read. I am struggling to get through Kafka's The Castle, not because it is difficult [which it isn't], and not because it is boring [which it isn't], but because I just don't have the wherewithal to finish. It has become a task so challenging that it is on par with the task that K. must accomplish in his endeavour to carry out his duties among the multitude of distractions and obstacles that waylay him in ye olde Castletown.

Distractions remain the biggest problem. Turning off the on switch of my ever-racing mind might be one way, albeit an ironic one, to address the problem, but how to do that? Especially in light of the fact that I don't really know if I've used the concept of irony in the proper context in that last sentence. Ever since reading the appendix of Eggers' Heartbreaking Work..., I just don't know anymore. I can't avoid the irony conundrum forever, though, that much is certain.

See, a perfect example of a distraction of my own creation that removes me from the immediacy of the problem. This blog entry is also a distraction. I could be doing much more worthwhile things, like reading. Distraction compounded upon distraction, ad infinitum.

This is hardly a new problem. Some have suggested that the answer lies in slowing down. In another ironic twist, I want to be able to slow down so I can read faster. Until I can do that, I will be running as if in a dream and getting nowhere at all.

The road to the castle wears ever on...

2005-02-23T12:54:00.000-05:00

ISHIGURO-ESQUE

I had almost forgotten how critically ill-received Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled was until reading the lengthy profile of the writer in the Guardian. In this case, the cited naysayer is James Wood, who characterizes the 1995 novel as having "invented its own category of badness". He contrasts this with its follow-up, When We Were Orphans, which is redeemed by having "invented its own category of goodness". Here, I cannot ignore the urge to comment on Wood's uncanny ability to so aptly turn a phrase. Hold on...oh good...that urge has passed.

The Unconsoled remains the first and only Ishiguro work that I have read, and it stands out in my mind as one of my favourite books as well. I refrain from reading other Ishiguro works because I feel they will somehow not match up and ultimately disappoint. I can't pinpoint my enduring affinity to The Unconsoled, and find it puzzling that I do given my repeated tendency to close the book abruptly after having read a particularly exasperating passage. The thing is, it does leave you "baffled and occasionally angry" (as Nicholas Wroe describes its critical reception in the Guardian profile). It also leaves you feeling vaguely uncomfortable, which seems to stem from the familiarity it conjures as you proceed through the dream-like sequences that prevent Ryder, the pianist and protagonist, from accomplishing what he knows he must accomplish, but cannot. Barriers and obstacles abound: we have all experienced the angst and frustration that Ryder does, and those night-time bouts of anxiety that ensue can surely stay with us as we make the transition to our waking life.

This doesn't exactly create valid grounds for appreciation of a novel, but it does serve as a clue: insecurities manifested in real life may originate from those manifested in dreams [wherein the impossible and the real reside together i.e. impossible scenario plus real anxiety], and vice versa. This must be why a Kafkaesque work like The Unconsoled is so oddly compelling: we are responding to a universality that is at once familiar and repellant.

In his review for The New Republic, Wood claims that in attempting to decipher the dream within the novel, one may fall short in doing so with all of its inherent indecipherability and consequent meaninglessness. Fine, so it's difficult to strike a balance between writing a novel and explicating a dream within the novel, but Ishiguro doesn't distinguish between the two: the reader is asked to accept what defies explanation, and it is not a difficult order to fill, because we do it every single surreal day of our lives.

Dreams come true in heaven all the time.
Baby, how on earth

-Ron Sexsmith

2005-02-19T20:16:00.000-05:00

GORGEOUS MISTAKE

Another blog recently discussed the phenomenon of "too many books". Too many books isn't really a problem in my mind. Not when you have come to terms with the fact that most of these books are extraneous to one's focal interest. Imagine, if you will, a trip to your favourite local bookshop. Your preconceived notions about what matters to you in terms of literature will allow you to walk on past the tripe and zero in on what I guess to be the remaining one per cent of monographs up for sale. Granted, one per cent of a shitload of books still works out to be a shitload of books. But this is a shitload of books that matter. Should you be so inclined to put forth a few dollars in order to supplement your prized collection, you will have supported a living or dead author who was published during a time when the competition for publication wasn't as fierce as it is now, as in right-this-very-minute now.

Writers with so-called literary integrity, of course, are fully aware of the publishing industry's tendency to supplant their endeavours with less edifying works that are earmarked to make more money. This is why literary integrity is folly. But it remains the folly of those individuals who are convinced that they cannot live without the written word. Once in a while, one will slip through the cracks and achieve success [which in this context equates with publication]. But more often, they won't. Writers of a certain caliber will continue to write, but only because they have to, only because they can't not write. They write not to contribute to the world of "too many books", but to contribute to the canon that has brought them to the position they find themselves in today. If the product is to remain at the bottom of a desk drawer, its only fate to moulder away until time immemorial, then so be it. What has mattered is the exercise that leads to the resulting words. Ergo, the words are what matter.

Does this mean that a life spent in pursuit of writing has been a mistake? Yes, a gorgeous mistake.

And now, here, where I am writing still, still in this chair, hammering type like tacks into the page, speaking without a listening ear, whose eye do I hope to catch and charm and fill with tears and understanding, if not my own, my own ordinary, unforgiving and unfeeling eye?

-William H. Gass, The Tunnel

2005-02-12T11:39:00.000-05:00

HESSE'S STEPPENWOLF

There is no doubt in my mind that Hermann Hesse is writing about himself when he is writing about the Steppenwolf. The main character, Harry Haller, even shares the same initials. Hesse describes an individual who insists upon stripping down the why and how of his life to two diametric opposites. Assuming it is a given that Hesse can recognize that the life of a man consists of so many more aspects than just bourgeois man and lone wolf of the steppes, why can he not transcend the limited scope of awareness that is obviously the basis for his own world view? He has recognized this dual nature in himself, and Steppenwolf is a testament to this recognition. Hermann Hesse was no happier in his life than was Harry Haller. In fact, biographical information indicates a man of extreme sickly and unhappy circumstance, having spent much of it in a sanatorium in Switzerland.

Can knowing one's true nature lead to the much coveted and elusive state of happiness that humans strive toward? If one is to take Hesse's situation as an example, this is clearly not the case.

I come away from the experience of reading Steppenwolf wholly dissatisfied. I am not sure whether it is because I find the portrayal of H.H. as an essentially shallow being so disappointing, or alternately, because I know that such a portrayal is quite representative of most beings in this life, which illustrates how hopeless it seems to even consider transcending ordinary life, when what makes it most ordinary takes up all available time. What I take away from it most of all is the realization that a being's nature is truly multiplex. Some aspects of one's personality are old, toughened, wizened. Others are so fresh as though to have recently emerged from the womb. It is all of these separate components that make up the whole of the individual, and according to the chess player in the latter part of the story, this individual can be infinitely re-combined or re-arranged to result in different circumstances. It has everything to do with the choices one makes, given the options available. That's the oversimplified bottom line.

2005-02-02T23:51:00.000-05:00

ONE YEAR

One year ago, I lamented to a literary icon that my inherently dual relationship with literature was causing me angst. Of course, the letter was all a put-on, but the motive for its creation was genuine. So, in a year's time, has anything changed?

Well, yes, in a way... What's changed is that the situation has become worse. The gap widens between daily life and literature's place therein, as perception and meaning become thwarted by the banal and the commonplace. Very soon I will be able to squash my desired thinking self between my thumb and forefinger. Take that, you pesky gray matter!

This is all starting to sound very boring and loathsome, so I had better stop now. What I had better do instead is go to bed so I can be all fresh tomorrow in order to make my contribution to society, responsible plebe that I am.

Stasis wins out over flux once more.

2005-01-22T21:36:00.000-05:00

BENEVOLENT GERMOPHOBE

Margaret Atwood on her silly remote book-signing machine: "The only difference between the author-at-a-distance and the author-in-the-flesh would be that no author's DNA would get onto the book, and no reader's germs would get onto the author." Did Atwood ever consider that she, too, is leaving her germs on the unsuspecting reader's copy of her book?

From this elitist nonsense, we are supposed to believe her when she says that "[her] intentions are purely benevolent"? In other words, she has the best interest of her readers in mind , and does not stand to gain anything in the process, except more time at home. And the money that she will make from selling the machines to other authors. More like 'benevolence bounces off of you and comes right back over to me'.

Very amusing are the three separate references made to mini-bars and the contents therein; these lead me to believe that her aversion to overpriced snack food might be her main impetus for inventing the Unotchit.

1) "This will mean a lot less angst, inconvenience, starvation, sitting in airports and eating out of minibars."

2) "Think of the plane-trips avoided, the beer nuts left uneaten in the hotel minibar..."

3) "As I...was whizzing around the United States on yet another demented book tour, getting up at four in the morning to catch planes, doing two cities a day, eating the Pringle food object out of the mini-bar at night as I crawled around on the hotel room floor..."

And with this image in mind, I shall stop, leaving us all to wonder what would motivate Ms. Atwood to commune with all those hotel room floor germs...perhaps looking for the beer nut that got away?

2005-01-10T10:13:00.000-05:00

UNCONTROLLED VOCABULARY

Won't the library world be thrilled with the newish designation of "folksonomy" being bandied about on the internet? This is presumably taken to mean a taxonomy for the people, which is further taken to mean that the formerly archaisch undertaking of designing a classification scheme is being stolen from that dying breed known as the classificationists, having been adopted by metadata punks who have stumbled upon an at once utilitarian and complex practice older than Ranganathan himself.

From what I can gather, a folksonomy seems to be a faceted classification scheme that puts regular folks in charge of assigning keywords to describe web-based materials. Here you have a gazillion different users putting forth their two cents on the aboutness of a particular website. How is it kept all in check? Or doesn't it have to be kept in check when considering a nearly infinite domain like the internet? Whatever the case may be, the obscure world of classification theory has been infiltrated by outsiders. But the stronghold has not yet been completely compromised, as proven by a quick search through the pertinent library indexes: 'folksonom*' returned zero hits [searches on Proquest and Web of Science returned the same results]. I suspect that this brand of 'classification theory lite' will have to prove itself first.

2005-01-09T15:34:00.000-05:00

ELFRIEDE JELINEK WILL LOVE THIS IDEA

I'm sure that Margaret Atwood's worldwide fanbase will be happy to learn that she finds them to be a nuisance. How else to explain the absurd plan to implement the use of a "remote book signing machine" that will preclude the phenomenon of travelling far and wide to perform this menial and detestable task. Having ostensibly succumbed to Weltschmerz, she seems also to have forgotten the pride and honour that she is sure to have felt on her very first book tour, wherever and whenever that might have been.

As far as the proposed invention being "a democratising device, which could help authors who were not stars [unlike Atwood], and often missed out on signing tours", this is just a transparent excuse to distract her adoring readers from the fact she has outgrown their usefulness, and plans to live out the rest of her years comfortably, albeit curmudgeonly, in her Annex home in Toronto, in which one room will no doubt be newly designated as the autograph-signing-room. I hope she feels quite silly as she sits primed to write some falsely cheerful inscription to a person with whom she will never come face to face.

2005-01-06T16:01:00.000-05:00

NYPL SPECIAL COLLECTIONS PRESENTS...

I was in Gotham Book Mart in midtown Manhattan when I heard that Susan Sontag died. An employee shouted it to another employee clear across the store. I think I must have let out a gasp after hearing it, my immediate thought being that the loss of such an important intellectual icon would hit the city hard. Not too much later, while struggling to maintain a semblance of solipsistic aloofness in Times Square, the news flashed by on the ABC news ticker, with nary a sideways glance from the hordes of determined tourists in attendance. Had a sideways glance been effected, the response would have surely been negligible. Susan who?

Today I read that Sontag kept a collection of some 15,000 books in her Chelsea apartment. Oh, if only to be the bequeathed of what is undoubtedly a diverse and distinctive personal library. Whomever that fortunate recipient might be would be wise to curate the collection and make it accessible to those with an interest in material that has contributed to the edification of a great mind. It would be a remarkable addition to New York literary culture, and it would also pay homage to Sontag's position that form overshadows content. However, it is possible that Sontag would be fiercely opposed to such an idea, assuming that she held her books as dearly as one's own children, perhaps not wanting to surrender her private realm to the public one. I understand this: book collections are intensely personal things, and when I think ahead to the necessity of drawing up a last will and testament, I still have no answer for what is to become of my own collection of the written word.

To that person, I ask you this: Are you a worthy recipient? Will you respect the provenance of each volume or will you relegate the lot of them to some tawdry lawn sale? Will you intersperse them with your own collection [because you must, must, must also be a collector] or will you keep them separate, made distinct by some fashion of an ex libris or another [though my own diligence should dictate that I affix an ex libris plate or stamp to each before I exeunt]? Will they receive the honour of being housed in shelves, or will they be shamed into hiding inside mouldering cardboard boxes in a nether region of your dwelling? Will you sell them to a secondhand bookstore, or will you keep them as a reminder of me?

Susan, I'm sure you chose well.

2005-01-01T20:03:00.000-05:00

WAVERING AMBIVALENCE

A blank notebook, like a new year, is fresh and clean with no mistakes. Also like a new year, the notebook, along with its fairweather friend, the pen, enables one to reflect on the past, as well as look ahead to the future [though in the case of the new year, I suspect the tendency is toward the latter, with the hope that what is to come improves upon what has passed].

So when words are finally put to a pristine blank page, do they chronicle days past, or do they hint at a future as yet unknown? If we are talking about a writer of non-fiction, the most basic manifestation of which is the journal-keeper, then the past is arguably the more widely explored tense. If we are talking about a writer of fiction, the question becomes less straightforward. The answer seems to depend heavily upon genre. A writer of historical fiction obviously looks to the past. But what about the writer of contemporary fiction? Under the assumption that they rely upon autobiographical tidbits, it might be said that the resulting work chronicles the past and/or the present. So when does the future come into play? If writers of fiction practice their craft in earnest, they run the risk of inventing things that have not yet come to pass, and when we think of things that have not yet come to pass, we think of the future. Do writers, then, carry that power? Can their deft manipulation of words be more edifying than previously imagined?

A character in Paul Auster's Oracle Night opines that "sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about...not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future."

I like to think that words are that powerful, and can be wielded as such by a capable writer. With this in mind, I can now embrace the new year, with the knowledge that I can shape it to my will. My tools will be words.

2004-11-07T18:08:00.000-05:00

WHAT IS THE WORD?

Before the uncontrolled proliferation of the Internet, and my subsequent susceptibility to the ad infinitum contents therein, I was always pleasantly surprised when I could find answers to questions that arose in my mind by referring to books in my own personal library. My little reference collection, sadly, stands largely untouched: the particles of dust that tickle their surfaces are the exception. It is now Google that I run to in times of informational need.

All of this came to mind as I read a passage from Matthew Battles' Library, in which he refers to Harvard's Widener Library:

"In the stacks of the library, I have the distinct impression that its millions of volumes may indeed contain the entirety of human experience: that they make not a model for but a model of the universe. Fluttering down the foot-worn marble stairs that drop into the building's bowels, descending through layer after layer of pungent books, I am often struck by the sense that everything happening outside must have its printed counterpart somewhere in the stacks."

With this model in mind, it stands to reason that a personal library represents the sphere of awareness that constitutes the universe of one individual. That would explain why any question that was deemed of personal import could be answered with the works at hand. We surround ourselves with things, in this case books, that matter to us and speak to us. Should our curiosity lure us to terra incognita, there is always the mother ship to rely upon.

Battles also posits that there is a certain danger involved in suggesting that the mysteries of the universe can be elucidated through the library model. If all the permutations and combinations of scrolls, papyri, incunabula, manuscripts, books, newspapers, and periodicals can lead us to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, we may be driven mad as the volume of information, whether that be manifest in physical or virtual format, exponentially multiplies. Perhaps then, Battles notes, "if the world can be compressed into a library, then why not into a single book--why not into a single word?"

How about a number?

2004-10-30T14:04:00.000-04:00

REAL DIRTY

While contemplating whether to re-subscribe to Granta [mainly because of the tempting free 25th anniversary issue], I discovered this Raymond Carver piece from the magazine's fourth issue.

Carver is not a pleasure to read: his prose is at once repellant and riveting. He evokes the less savoury details of an existence spent trying to keep the misery at bay and not succeeding. It used to be pegged as dirty realism, though I suspect that the adjective is no longer necessary.

Vitamins is brilliant because it turns the popular notion that 'vitamins are good for you' into something more akin to 'vitamins won't do shit, and life will always suck'. I think my job as a licensed pill pusher may be in jeopardy if I start saying this to customers; discouraging the sickly plebe from buying products is generally frowned upon by management. And drug companies.

2004-10-30T13:12:00.000-04:00

LEST WE FORGET THE BOOK

Volume One of The History of the Book in Canada is now available. And as if a hard copy of the History of the Book in Canada wasn't monumental enough, there is also an online searchable database hosted by Dalhousie University.

And for those with interests pertaining to the history of the book in places other than Canada, there is a list of resources here.

2004-10-20T14:17:00.000-04:00

PERFECT WEATHER FOR A LITERARY FESTIVAL

Today begins the International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront in Toronto. As co-incidence would have it (or more accurately, strategic planning), David Mitchell and Alan Hollinghurst are reading together [along with David Bezmozgis and Jakob Ejersbo]. With a little foresight of my own, I have procured tickets for this, the literary hot ticket of the moment, and am quite pleased with myself as a result.

And not to be forgotten, the Vancouver International Readers and Writers Festival is also going on at Granville Island (Oct. 19-24). My fondest memories of this yearly event include having hot soup in the market on a grey and rainy October afternoon, attending readings by Jane Urquhart and Nino Ricci at the Arts Club and Revue Theatre, and finally, sitting across from Robertson Davies, that year's keynote speaker, at YVR, both of us waiting for our flight back to Toronto. Sadly, that was to be Davies last appearance at the Vancouver Festival, as he passed away a couple of months later. The question still remains, did he or didn't he live on Sussex Avenue?

2004-10-11T10:12:00.000-04:00

FUTURE PROVENANCE UNKNOWN

The situation has become grave. I am now purchasing books because their covers are nice. Browsing in the local Book City, I spotted a softcover edition of Ronan Bennett's Havoc, In Its Third Year, and knew that I had to have it, even though the plot synopsis on the back cover didn't convince me that I had to have it for other more legitimate reasons. Here we have a classic example of a bibliophilic penchant for the book as a physical object. The book in question brings to mind the books encountered at the Fisher library for the duration of an exacting course in analytical bibliography, and to which the aforementioned bibliophilic penchant can alone be attributed. How else to explain the overwhelming urge to measure the serif typeface on the cover? Imagine my disappointment upon opening the book to discover the absence of chain lines on the paper.

I would never have admitted it in the past, but the discipline of analytical bibliography has insidiously stayed with me and haunts me every time I walk into a library or a bookstore. A book, wherever its physicality might be found, lures me as much for its form as it does for its content, and the prospect of resting the book in its designated place on the bookshelf holds as much delight as retrieving that book and delving into the amassed words that avail themselves within. It should be mentioned that the latter activity occurs with less frequency as the years pass, a fact that leaves me at once remorseful and resigned to the knowledge that it is impossible for me to read the many volumes that I have accumulated and will continue to accumulate until I'm stopped dead in my tracks. The books, however, will live on, as they tend to do, perhaps left in the library of the house in which I eventually plan to live, or perhaps left for the enjoyment of someone with one type of bibliophilic penchant or another.

2004-09-30T21:47:00.000-04:00

SUB-PAR SUB-GENRE

Having just learned about Christian chick lit, I can only imagine what tripe it must be. My suspicions were confirmed after a quick search with the above string of terms, returning a multitude of titles that fall under this category, much like the heroine of a Christian chick lit novel falls under the heaving body of her perfect, god-fearing man, screaming, 'Jesus, oh Jesus!'.

Or is that an inaccurate representation of a typical work of Christian chick lit? A fun twist on this genre might have the heroine unable to fall in love with a mere mortal of a man because she is just too much in love with the Almighty, and is saving herself for him. Only problem is, He doesn't go in for the whole plastic persona that heavily characterizes the typical chick lit heroine [i.e. obsession with shoes, smoothies, and soy lattes]. She can often be heard saying, 'He doesn't even know that I exist!' with baleful woe. But of course, he does know that she exists, because of a small talent that allows Him to know all and see all simultaneously. In light of that, He knows about her little crush, and thinks it might be a good idea to keep this information from Mary M.

I'm guessing that this is not the way things might unfold in a typical sampling of Christian chick lit. Instead, I think the heroine might be, er, hellbent on finding a husband with steadfast Christian beliefs, good moral fiber, and an upstanding profession that allows the money to keep rolling in. If he enjoys drinking smoothies, all the better.

How boring! By my reckoning, there doesn't seem to be much of a difference between the genre of chick lit and the sub-genre of Christian chick lit. The insertion of random pointed words like 'faith', 'God', 'church', 'stigmata', and 'fish' might make the difference, but so what? I know chick lit is offensive, but is it really necessary to differentiate it from the usual brand of vacuosity by churchifying it?

Yes, I suppose that it is. Of course, I fully realize that this is an extension of Christian fiction being a genre of fiction in general, and a quick browse through a local Christian bookstore's online database indicates that it is no small offshoot at that. Admittedly, this is not news, but it is startling all the same. It must mean that there is some great demand for it, which must further mean that its readers are satisfied with a product that is essentially a ripoff of the original genre from whence it was born. As a genre of fiction, 'Christian lit' is about as authentic as a Cabbage Patch doll lying in the manger of a nativity scene.

Yet at the same time, I feel inexplicably comforted in the knowledge that I have a plentiful source of inspiration should I ever decide to stop reading real literature.

2004-09-25T21:42:00.000-04:00

MY BRAIN IS A GLASS THAT IS HALF EMPTY

For a very long time, I have had difficulty in reconciling the overtly similar yet covertly disparate activities of reading and writing. Despite their obvious connectedness, I still manage to convince myself that they are mutually exclusive to one another, and that their concurrence precludes any fruitful and substantive outcome, by which I mean, any writing endeavour undertaken while in the throes of reading is bound to be coloured by the prose at hand, the result of which is an inauthentic and tainted voice.

I no longer believe this exaggerated position to have any validity: this is the result of a directly proportional relationship that has emerged between my age and my reading interests, rendering me greedy and insatiable in the face of endless possibilities afforded by the availability of reading material that I deem to be worth my while. I can voluntarily drown myself in the abundant wit, intelligence, and insight of countless others who have succeeded in marching a few steps further than I.

Until recently, I insisted that my inability to put forth any prose of my own was the result of an inaccurate impression that there was nothing left to say, as everything had/has already been quite capably said by others. Now it is my belief that I must take in as much as I can in the short time allotted to me in this life, if I am to understand all that I want to understand [it is ironic to note that, socratically speaking, I am also aware that the more I know, the more I realize that I know nothing]. In light of this realization, there is no time left for writing.

Sadly, there is also no time left for reading. If reading precludes the ability to write, then the daily rigamarole of life precludes the ability to read. My brain wastes, and along with it, the jubilation that comes with reading something enlightening fizzles out.

Still, the promise of a time to read that may avail itself holds much excitement. The same can be said for the promise of a time to write. Two different promises: one will undoubtedly be broken.

2004-09-12T13:09:00.000-04:00

EX LIBRIS

I would be remiss if I didn't link to the newly launched website for the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. You'll notice the subtle presence of a man overlooking the mezzanine, silently keeping reverent watch over the collection. That's library director and bibliomane extraordinaire Richard Landon, whom I believe may very well die in this library, likely with a smile on his face and a cigar in his pocket. I could die happy here too.

Don't forget to send an e-postcard to your favourite bibliophile.

2004-09-12T11:33:00.000-04:00

MUSIC FOR A SUNDAY MORNING

Summer's hastening on
I'm trying to get a feeling from the city
But I've been unfaithful
I've been travelling abroad
We've got a fantasy affair
We didn't get wet, we didn't dare
Our aspirations, are wrapped up in books
Our inclinations are hidden in looks

--Belle & Sebastian, Dear Catastrophe Waitress

Alas, it is so true. Summer wanes, but not for lack of heat. The calendar in my apartment rests at August, not because I forget to change it, but because I don't want to. At the same time, I love September and everything that it brings with it: fresh apples, cool nights, the snapping and rustling sounds that twigs and leaves make underfoot while walking through woods, and the sky, the sky, the sky...

But lets not forget about the books. Those fresh books that the new school year necessitates, whether they be a weighty textbook, a blank hardback lab book, or a $4 pocket edition of Kafka's Metamorphosis.

I think I have been imagining that this autumn finds me back in school, having bought a superlative Semikolon; Tagesbuch [at the equally superlative Essence du Papier]. In addition to that, I have purchased no less than six books in the past week, which now adorn the table in my living room, arranged in a fashion that passes for neat but is ultimately less desirable than their desired destination: a third bookcase that I don't have and that I don't have room for even if I did have it. Oh, and I can't forget the fabulous bright orange book bag that I splurged on yesterday. Now I'm all set to go back to school. All I really need now is the Montblanc Franz Kafka pen and I'll be set. Well, I guess I need to be enrolled in a course or two for that to be the case.

2004-09-09T20:18:00.000-04:00

Die alte Heimat

Hugo Hamilton says that the German are a lonely people. When they are abroad, he says they tend to forget where they come from and long to be invisible. In their attempt to exorcise their collective demons, they deny their heritage and essentially became homeless people, intellectually and otherwise. Oh, and they have guilt. They have so much guilt, of which they are reminded repeatedly.

At the end of it all, Hamilton hints that there is no German identity, which belies everything that has preceded his sad conclusion. The German are ashamed, guilty, and remorseful; this is their identity.

I was very close to showing this article to my parents, who happen to be German, but two reasons prevented this from happening:

1) Not wanting to raise their ire on a peaceful and otherwise guilt-free, remorseless summer evening, and

2) Their pending departure to a German club wherein they would meet their German friends, who collectively form a German choir that sings German songs, after which they would eat German food and drink German beer. Jawohl!

I sort of understand where Hamilton is coming from, but find his predisposition to generalizations at once exaggerated and distressing. I don't like that he uses Bernhard Schlink's The Reader as an example of the identity-less German psyche, which is also a work that heavily features so-called 'second generation' guilt in a post-war Germany. Why no mention of Sebald or Grass? Not every German that dares to speak forthrightly is shaking in his boots.

I realize that I probably don't completely get what Germans are living through and have lived through since the middle of the twentieth century. I am merely the Canadian offspring of immigrants who left a country called Deutschland forty-eight years ago. But I do get this: they feel no guilt and no shame, and of that I am proud.

2004-09-07T20:53:00.000-04:00

ROCK BOTTOM

If you want to understand the truly banal nature of the weblog, just keep clicking on the Next Blog button up there and to the right. I've spent the last ten minutes doing just that and am convinced that everyone has something to say while saying nothing at all. Me included. Only a matter of time before this here netritus disappears altogether. Need to make some space available for some other blowhole with an empty voice.

Ergo, silence.

2004-09-01T20:52:00.000-04:00

OSTENSIBLY JUST ABOUT BEVERAGES

I got my first taste of chick-lit today as I was reading over the shoulder of a wannabe fashionista on the streetcar ride home. It was a Sophie Kinsella book whose cover matched the reader's handbag [I've always been fastidious in matching sock colours/elements to shirt colours, but now must I match the colour of my book to my clothing as well?].

After sampling a few passages before and after re-shifting between sardine-like bodies, I really couldn't ascertain what all the fuss is about. It's essentially mindless drivel, along with lots of, er, banal conversations, and plenty of references to mango smoothies and coffee beverages. If I had been able to read along some more, I'm quite sure that the obligatory crantini reference would have also arisen.

2004-08-29T21:29:00.000-04:00

AND THEREIN LIES THE PROBLEM

Jeffrey Simpson has hit the nail right on the head with his uncommon look at the overabundance of self-indulgent hooey [not to be confused with hoo-ha] being published in a widespread and ongoing manner, wittily presented as a snappy repartée between he and his 'Uncle Fred of Gabriola Island'. While using the 'autobiography-cum-memoir' as a vehicle for his cheeky piece, Simpson learns from Uncle Fred that the 'look-at-me!' syndrome is present in other forms of media [e.g. journalism, television], and that "20 per cent of all non-fiction books this fall are by people writing about themselves". Quite a remarkable albeit believable statistic, that.

The key word that Simpson throws aptly about is banality, of which there is no shortage in light of all this logorrhoea. Günther Grass once wisely remarked that "the sheer volume of information dissolves the information. We are unable to take it all in". This conclusion suggests that we are able to take in some of the information. Yet with the present day glut of so-called information in its many incarnations, this sentiment needs to be updated: what dissolves the information is banality. It would follow, then, that we are still unable to take it all in, but what exactly is it that we are taking in? Whatever it is, I suspect that it is less edifying than it is dubious.

2004-08-27T08:41:00.000-04:00

METROSEXUALS NEED READING MATERIAL TOO

When I saw this link on Arts Journal, I half suspected that Russell Smith might be behind it; he makes explicit the nuances that characterize the awful genre known as 'dick-lit'. I'm guessing that Smith doesn't include his own earlier works in this sub-par sub-category of, er, literature, despite both having a decidedly dick-lit-ish quality, with more emphasis on the whole problem of urban angst and less emphasis on the inherent emptiness of a life spent in singledom. At any rate, it is obvious that Smith holds much disdain for a genre that scoughs at everything that I presume he covets in his own urban quest for self-actualization.

2004-08-22T09:52:00.000-04:00

WARM AND DUMB AND FUZZY LIKE A BROWN BUNNY

Vincent Gallo is a Republican because, if at a show to view Dennis Hopper's photographs, Richard Nixon would be more sensitive to them than Bill Clinton.

That is a fantastic reason to re-elect GWB. If I was an American, this argument would sway my vote.

2004-08-16T10:31:00.000-04:00

APATHY SETS IN, THEN MAKES WAY FOR ENNUI

There will be silence for a time, which will persist as long as I maintain the present inability to read any manner of written word. I attribute it to the tedium of work and everything that goes along with that. Sigh.

2004-08-08T23:47:00.000-04:00

AN IDLE IDYLL

All is not lost while blankly staring at a wall. Indeed, it is my duty as a Cartesian dualist to sit still, or even better, lie still, and do nothing, according to this engaging extract from Tom Hodgkinson's How To Be Idle. Add the element of thought to the equation and you're as good as any philosopher. [NB: Tom Hodgkinson is also the editor of The Idler, a presumably delightful magazine which I'm quite sure is not available in my neck of the woods]

Speaking of dualities, why is it that I am thrilled on the one hand to have learned of another fantastic book that I must own, while on the other I am frustrated and at a loss for 1)physical space to store said book, and 2) actual time to read said book. And then there's the whole matter of me saying that I'm going to read less and write more. Maybe I should just put a moratorium on reading and writing both and instead watch TV all the time.

2004-08-08T22:00:00.000-04:00

LET'S HOPE THAT ANY OF LEON WIESELTIER'S PUBLISHED WORKS FAIL THE DOUBLE FOLD TEST IN YEARS TO COME

I would have much preferred Michiko to limn the hell out of Baker's Checkpoint, as opposed to Wieseltier's pretentious piece of shite. He should stick to penning manifestos and coddling his darling ingenue of a critic.

I am now proceeding to remove the NYTBR link from the sidebar, as I said I might a while back. They are failing to impress.

2004-08-04T19:03:00.000-04:00

GREAT SCOT!

This is an older piece of writing that was salvaged from a defunct and experimental website of yore; I was inspired to re-post it because it re-kindled feelings of awe and admiration for an altogether fantastic storyteller. Here begins a mini-essay on the inimitable work of Alasdair Gray:

My original discovery of the incomparable Alasdair Gray came to pass by way of a piece written by Will Self, whose commentary on Gray served as an introduction to a collection of essays paying tribute to the Scottish writer. At the time, I had never heard of Alasdair Gray, but quickly decided that anyone whom Will Self cited as a major influence was worth a closer look.

I knew I had stumbled upon something special when I stood before the Gray canon on the thirteenth floor of Robarts library. Not only were the titles quirky and enticing, the books possessed a physicality that clearly indicated its creator was an artist whose work encompassed both words and images. Their outsides were decoratively gilded, while their insides featured whimsical marginal illustrations, in addition to intricate full-page drawings with a decidedly surreal feel to them. The one I eventually chose to read first, ‘Poor Things’, proffered the following advice on its front and back covers: ‘Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.’ During these times of global maelstrom, such a recommendation is perceived as a sentiment of optimism, but also as something to lament, since we most definitely do not live in the early days of a better nation, nor does Gray. Yet it is certain that Gray's earnest and somber words are a personal conviction in addition to being a life's mantra (otherwise, why would they be emblazoned on the front and back covers of his creations?).

In addition to the remarkable physical details of Gray’s books, there are also the unusual titles to consider, the most notable of which, in my mind, remains ‘Something Leather’. The ‘something leather’ in question turns out to be an article of clothing that is custom made for a woman whose style of dress is tasteful, albeit conservative. Originally looking for a long leather skirt, she comes away with something altogether different, and it changes her previously staid and predictable life; the seamstresses who construct it also change her life. Indeed, the many characters, whose disparate lives eventually intertwine, affect each other in unexpectedly profound ways. As well, the everyman and everywoman types that we meet as the story unfolds are as familiar to us as friends, neighbours, and family members within our own commonplace and dysfunctional lives.

And then there is Lanark. Lanark: A Life in Four Books is irrational literature at its fantastical best. For Lanark and his juvenile counterpart, Duncan Thaw, nothing comes easy, and obstacles to love and happiness abound. Mostly, the search for meaning in their lives is fruitless and confounding. Though the effort may be hapless, it is far from being hopeless. Indeed, Thaw has every confidence that he will stumble upon the ‘key’ to the meaning of everything, and all within the confines of ordinary, everyday life, “to be found on a night walk through the streets, printed on a scrap of paper blown out of the rubble of a bombed factory, or whispered in a dark street by someone leaning suddenly out of a window.”

As one weaves through the dismal, disheartening landscapes that Lanark and Thaw inhabit, hopelessness and hopefulness live side by side. Then, as one’s involvement deepens, it is with simultaneous alarm and comfort that the realization of aching familiarity comes to fruition: from ‘this is a world where I never wish to find myself’ to ‘this is a world where I find myself each and every day’ and finally, ‘this is my world’. There is always a small amount of comfort to be derived from the knowledge of the misery of others, because it tells us we are not alone in being doomed to live a life of hard-knocks. That is why Lanark, to me, represents an achievement in providing a revealing testimonial that approximates what it means to be human and to suffer when all one strives toward is living an authentic life, preferably in the company of a few good people, though many an obstacle may prevail, and the accelerated passage of time precludes that any satisfaction be derived from the here and the now. It is as Lanark laments, just before his [untimely] demise is alluded to: “I ought to have more love before I die. I’ve not had enough”.

What I haven’t had enough of is Alasdair Gray. He has made an indelible mark on my word-thirsty and idea-thirsty mind, having also made a mark on the literary world long before my discovery of the Scottish scribe. Not only does he speak for his nation in an eloquent and moving way, his themes and the way they play themselves out speak to any individual who has ever questioned their place and their fit in the world.

Alasdair Gray on the Web

"An Epistolary Interview, Mostly with Alasdair Gray", Centre for Book Culture

How Lanark Grew, as it appears in the Canongate Classic edition of Lanark

Founding Father of the Scottish Renaissance, The Guardian

Alasdair Gray at the Complete Review [reviews, links, bibliography, biography, etc.]

2004-08-01T23:59:00.000-04:00

YOU MUST WAKE UP

Can reading and writing be done simultaneously, or should one preclude the occurrence of the other? Is there a point at which reading stops and writing begins?

The type of writing to which I refer is not the type presented here, which is usually just an impromptu response to things happened upon during the course of a daily gathering of information: momentous gleanings that fascinate and edify. No, rather, it is the type of writing that elicits just such a response. But even that is not accurate. Eliciting a response is always a good thing, but in my case, it is not the desired outcome. It is the activity, and not the product of the activity, that I actively strive toward, and in order for the activity to become realized, certain other activities need to abate for a time. Reading for one, incessant procuring of information another.

A tall order for someone of my ilk. I predict that I won’t be able to pull it off. But I’ll try. The first day of the month is as good a day as any to return to the path that I left months, perhaps even years ago. I suspect that I was never really on the path, but that becomes a moot point in light of this brand new fresh itinerary that I’ve just devised here, right now. Alas, regular work and regular life will annoyingly get in the way, as they always do, but I shouldn’t let them weary me before I walk out the door and into the cool, starry night.

2004-07-30T21:09:00.000-04:00

THIS/THAT, continued

Makes a great coffee table book off which to snort lines: the Arch-drude has been garnering some attention over his monolithic book on megaliths in the anthropological world.

I wish I had a Globe & Mail column so I could write crap too: Russell Smith surely must have better ideas to work with, but instead opts to write about fictional characters' knowledge of plants in literature. Then again, if it's not about urban angst, he's pretty much out of his element. By the way, his latest effort, Muriella Pent, makes a great coffee table book off which to snort lines.

How empathetic, with emphasis on the pathetic: the TNR article outlining the capture of High Value Targets by Pakistan before the fall election has been updated in the wake of the capture of a Tanzanian Al Qaeda operative. Quite remarkable that it co-incided with John Kerry's day of nomination. Fat lot of good it did though, as the Democrats are ahead in the polls. Guess that means Bush will have to kick it up a notch with his heartwarming Compassion Across America campaign.

And Wagner wept: artistic license is one thing, but re-interpreting Wagnerian vision is quite another. People pay years in advance to see and hear something very specific in Bayreuth, and I'm pretty sure that doesn't include projected images of Osama Bin Laden inside the Festspielhaus. On an ironic note, fledgling director Christoph Schlingensief is dissatisfied with the lack of video technology capability inside the theater, a position which leaves me dumbfounded. Guess Wagner poured all of his money into sound and forgot all about the video end of things. And the whole racism allegation against tenor Endrik Wottrich seems like a ploy to gain more acceptance for the re-worked version of Parsifal. Is it really so surprising that comments pertaining to race were made considering that the original story unfolds in Europe, and not in Africa? And let's not forget that Wottrich might just be upholding Wagnerian tradition by voicing such opinions. Alas, all of the controversy seems to have died, along with a few scattered boos from the audience, leading me to believe that the brouhaha was about as contentious as Atom Egoyan's direction of Die Walküre for the Canadian Opera Company, which happened to be fantastic. Looking duly forward to François Girard's vision of Siegfried in January.

2004-07-25T21:47:00.000-04:00

CLOUD ATLAS: WORK OF FINE LITERARY CRAFTSMANSHIP, OR IMPORTANT SOCIAL NOVEL?

Every review that I've read of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas seems to focus on the structure of the novel and how well it works. Six distinct characters, each in a different time period (from the distant past to the distant future and back again in reverse chronological order), each connected to the other in a subtle and remarkable way. Granted, it's a clever device that he's successfully implemented, and the individual sections stand on their own but also maintain a cohesiveness when taken all together. In short, Mitchell's got it all happening with both form and function.

Yet it's the content that's left me thinking of little else since putting the book aside a week ago. From the discussion of the brutal slaying of the Moriori tribe in the Adam Ewing journal, to the implication of the danger of faulty nuclear reactors in the Luisa Rey mystery, followed by the disturbing account of the clone or 'fabricant' foodserver Sonmi~451 in the not-too-distant future, and finishing with a post-apocalyptic planet sporadically populated with genetically mutated humans, we are dealing with a lot of heavy topics. To bring up the subject of the format again, the progression through time sort of allows the reader to extrapolate to the situation we find ourselves in today, and to understand how we've arrived here: it all comes down to the need for power. I can think of a very timely non-literary example of a particularly power-hungry entity that renders the book's two futuristic scenarios less science fiction and more projected reality. By reading this book, I've been convinced that we're on the cusp of a vastly different and frightening era: one in which there is a real threat of losing our humanity.

Suddenly, I have a real and pressing need to know what's going on in underground biomolecular labs everywhere.

2004-07-21T20:02:00.000-04:00

THIS/THAT

Pass the madeleines, please: a lovely essay by Alberto Manguel on food and literature.

An idea whose time has come: meta-reality TV as realized by Annabel Lyon.

Refresh, then repeat: the random word page at Word Spy is buzzword-compliant. Not only that, it keeps one abreast of the Zeitgeist through the auspices of wordbursts. What a dandy tool!

Beyond dark and stormy: the winners and losers for the 2004 Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest have been announced, the stinking fruits of their prosaic toil disseminated...

Taking to the open road: Jonathan Raban and his daughter hop in the car and take a road trip down the Pacific coast [part I] [part II]

Would you prefer Ivory or Pears, Dick?: The New Yorker provides the entire extrapolated transcript of the Cheney/Leahy kerfuffle.

Man in a towel walks up to a bookcase: Ian Brown puts a positive spin on the gloomy doomy NEA report on the decline of reading in America, and does so while half-naked, all fresh and glistening from the shower, looking for inspiration as he shelf-browses his personal collection...now there's something I'd like to read more about.

2004-07-17T16:13:00.000-04:00

MY POST-HUMAN FUTURE IS SO BRIGHT FROM ALL THE RADIATION, I GOTTA WEAR SHADES

If you're in need of a good laugh, check out the opinion pieces over at BushCountry.org [link first seen at boing boing's guestblog]. My two favourites are entitled: Kerry: Homosexuality Not A Sin. God: It Is; and then there's the absurd Gay Marriage And Terrorist [the latter is worth reading if only to marvel, then snicker, at the author's complete lexical ineptitude and disregard for grammar]. If you don't feel like reading the whole vacuous argument, here is the best part:

Now, worst of all, we are granting them equal parity in the law with heterosexual couples. If that is not giving the green light to sin, then neither is Madonna dancing around in the near nude provocative.

That's throwing the word 'sin' about lightly, isn't it? I would call ignoring environmental decline and being in denial about 'climate change' a great deal more sinful [I won't even get into all of the other much more obvious type of sinning the U.S. government is currently committing at home and abroad]. I suppose that the Christian right neocons aren't affected by the environment, living in their plastic bubble and all. Let's see how their tune will change when their amber waves of grain give way to stark and fruitless deserts with Siberian temperatures. That's what will happen when the polar ice caps melt and thereby fuck up the Gulf Stream, leading to widespread shortage of food, penultimately to war, and ultimately to our slow and painful demise as a species. So go on shunning environmental policy, you fuck-ups in Washington, if it's a dead planet you're striving to rule.

Bill McKibben is the voice of reason on the whole convoluted matter; he has many important and frightening things to say, a few of which I've listed here: Crossing the Red Line [NYRB]; Worried? Us? [Granta 83: This Overheating World]; Bill McKibben on Staying Human [AlterNet interview].

It's interesting to note that BushCountry.org doesn't feature any articles on the environment. All that I could find was one silly rant against recycling. Yes, against. And they sure have nerve slapping a dot org suffix to their URL, when it should clearly be a dot com, what with all the crap they're selling.

I could continue with a rant about the evils of nucular [sic] proliferation, but that can wait till another time.

2004-07-16T15:09:00.000-04:00

GETTING PECKED TO DEATH

As far as I'm concerned, Dale Peck staged the whole Stanley Crouch confrontation, just to keep the ball rolling on his bad boy lit crit persona. What does Crouch get in return for bolstering the phenom that is Peck? Why, more publicity, of course. I can't keep track of all the Peck coverage anymore. I'm not even going to link to anything here today, because a) it's all become very boring, and 2) it's all become very boring. This is the last blog entry in which I will make any reference to "the troubled queen".

GOOD NEWS FOR THE SMALL PRESS

This just made my day: Coach House Press has been spared from the wrecking ball, and pending City Council approval, will become a fully designated heritage site in Toronto.

2004-07-14T22:49:00.000-04:00

THE GREATEST LESBIAN POET SINCE SAPPHO?

Well, Auden thought so about Rilke, but the title might have to go to a dub poet recently seen and heard at the Scream in High Park. The performed work in question was essentially a transformation of that Jill Sobule classic, I Kissed a Girl [somewhat akin to how Penn Jillette's Sock is a transformation of the detestable albeit venerable Ed the Sock]. I should be less critical. Alternately, I should reserve my disdain for even less worthwhile purposes.

Approaching the subject of Rilke, there is but one short line in Sonnets to Orpheus that elucidates his approach to the subject of life: "Transform matter into mind". I stared at these words for a goodly length of time before they just clicked for me. Of course, I did have some help. William H. Gass, in his essay, Transformations, does some elucidating of his own on the whole matter, making specific reference to the observation and subsequent perception of a dewdrop on the tip of a leaf:

Quantities...have been transformed into qualities. Rude substance has been sublimed. Now this energy shapes a scene on a screen of the Soul. [Rilke] preferred to think that the world was waiting to be realized in just this way, to become invisible - just as, to others, each of our realms of awareness is - invisible - although nothing is more vivid, solid, substantial, now, than the most melancholy of our experiences, for instance, the loneliness of a room rented by the week.

So what we have when we observe and perceive things is a tangible object that evolves to invisible energy charged with personal meaning, rendering it visible once more, only in a more internalized fashion. I'm sure I have oversimplified matters here, and I'm also sure that I don't fully understand what Gass refers to as 'ontological transformation', but I find my mind wandering back to the whole potential energy vs. kinetic energy analogy, only this time it is in reverse: the ontology is the kinetic object which when transformed eschews its origins and gains an alternate potential, depending upon the perspective of the observer. The resulting hybrid is bound to be volatile.

Perhaps it is just this type of volatility that separates good lesbian poets from great ones.

[See the Complete Review for a rather elucidatory review of Reading Rilke by William H. Gass]

2004-07-12T23:48:00.000-04:00

THE IDEA OF TRAVEL

There are times when the urge to travel becomes an all-consuming preoccupation, the outcome of which is the quasi-earnest planning of some improbable excursion. This mindset is usually accompanied by the intermittent perusal of that shelf in the bookcase devoted to travel literature, wherein I am likely to find some description of the locale I have set my mind upon to visit.

Whether the wanderlust is borne of a true wish to visit the particular locale or merely the result of a yearning to escape depends upon the individual, though I am leaning toward the latter, mainly because the episode usually begins with a vague yearning to simply be away, and that encompasses anywhere. Indeed, one can feel 'away' even within the confines of one's own city, but that is juxtaposed by being hurtled back into one's own space when the day draws to a close. In this regard, the necessity of distance becomes important: being far away brings anonymity and precludes responsibility. However, more baggage is usually brought along than one needs or wishes to be weighed down with: these are the worldly concerns that cannot simply be left at home. Alain de Botton puts it most eloquently:

It seems we may best be able to inhabit a place when we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there. [Taken from The Art of Travel]

Armchair travel is admittedly more practical, but it also less satisfying. If anything at all, it is frustrating, because the more I read about a certain place, the more I want to physically be there.

So what is left if personal constraints preclude travelling in the physical sense? Armchair travel is out, because it invariably strengthens the yearning to be away. Alas, the idea of travel will have to suffice.

2004-07-09T00:40:00.000-04:00

"AND THIS IS NOT A DAINTY WORLD"*

Perusing my stack of Granta magazines, I happened upon Issue No. 8, entitled 'Dirty Realism: New Writing From America'. I'm not sure of the origin of this genre [i.e. who first coined the phrase], but its poster boy appears to have been Raymond Carver. The reason for using the past tense here is twofold: Carver is dead, ostensibly the result of living the rough and tumble life of a typical dirty realist; the other reason is that the genre is dead, but that's just my opinion.

If the purpose of dirty realism was anything, it was to portray the seedy underbelly of multiform lives lived in America. I'm not sure why Granta, a UK publication, decided that this type of writing was a decidedly American phenomenon. Though I have nothing to back this up, I suspect that writing about the more unsavoury elements of various subcultures in society was going on in other countries too. The genre, wherever it originated, however it was perpetuated, had to have been a product of the times: it was the eighties, man. If someone wasn't getting high, they were probably having meaningless sex [in a pre-HIV world], and if they were doing both simultaneously, it was bestseller material, to be sure [think McInerney]. Reeks more of dirty realism-lite to me [i.e. dirty realism is neither dirty nor realistic: discuss].

I suppose that the essence of dirty realism was meant to be this: life isn't pretty, in fact, it's pretty ugly, and it'll probably get uglier. The future will tell, and it has...

And that's why the genre is dead. This kind of writing is no longer interesting or innovative. It is merely commonplace. Walking out your front door in the morning is a dirty enough prospect.

*Taken from Julian Cope's Peggy Suicide album.

2004-07-07T01:06:00.000-04:00

OVINE SPONGIFORM ENCEPHALOPATHY*

The fourth section of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas reads like a lost chapter from Martin Amis's The Information. I'm not sure whether to be aghast at the sheer gall of Mitchell to steal from The Amis in such a blatant fashion, or to wonder if he is intentionally taking liberties for reasons that are to become apparent once all the disparate sections of the book start to meld and provide further insight. I'm going to lean toward the presumption that it is an intentional device, if only to give the benefit of the doubt to Mitchell, whose latest offering is at once confusing and enthralling. However, it becomes less confusing after peeking at the cataloguing-in-publication data, where one can see that the assigned subject headings are 'Fate & Fatalism--Fiction' and 'Reincarnation--Fiction'. Mysterious no more, I am suddenly positive that all of these separate lives and times will lose their disconnected nature if I persevere.

I must admit that the book had me in its clutches by the second chapter, wherein the letter-writing protagonist stumbles upon the century-old journal of the first chapter's protagonist. For reasons unknown, this kind of stuff makes me weak in the knees. It must have something to do with the private nature of letters and journals, and how their potentially sensitive content is suddenly revealed, along with any secrets that we may also hope to find.

Speaking of secrets, I won't reveal any more arising from this book, unless you insist, in which case I can direct you to A.S. Byatt's review at The Guardian.

*O.S.E., not to be confused with B.S.E., is the scientific name applied to the syndrome wherein creatures of the ovine** persuasion begin to unthinkingly behave as other ovines do, resulting in little original thought.

**Thanks to The Amis for an introduction to this multilaterally capable and fine word.

2004-07-04T23:18:00.000-04:00

ROAD TO NOWHERE

If I didn't know better, I would swear that this is a Nat Tate piece. Puts me in mind of Tate's Bridge series. Alas, it belongs to Leipzig artist David Schnell, currently exhibiting at the Galerie EIGEN+ART in Berlin. Love how stark and startling it is. All of his work seems to be in this vein.

2004-07-04T20:28:00.000-04:00

LITERARY WELLBEING

Well, I missed Kafka's birthday. As always, I was completely wrapped up in my own pervading sense of Weltschmerz [arguably a good way of celebrating the occasion]. Came across that most famous of letters to Oskar Pollak [at wood s lot], in which Kafka vehemently posits that "a book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us". That is decidedly different from a book that melts the frozen sea within us. Such a book is likely to be one that also makes us happy, which is obviously something that Kafka deemed an affront to his own literary sensibilities: if there was not a painful blow to the head involved while reading a book, there was little hope for any ensuing lucidity.

In my own reading experience, such blows to the head, with the resultant 'moments of clarity', have been effected by the author's perceived sensibilities matching my own [unarticulated susceptibilities to impression suddenly articulated], a phenomenon that not only leaves me feeling all sated with wisdom and ready to conquer the world anew, but also leaves me feeling, er, happy. Yes, happy. Now Kafka's position on the matter of books making us happy is that "we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves".

No books at all? That would not be a happy world in which to live. Must I go and make the 'book as a physical object' argument again? And writing books ourselves? Franz: it's kind of you to modestly include yourself in this scenario, but we all know what a mess that would be, especially if it meant that we were all running around writing our own self-help manuals and living memoirs, all just searching for a little cathartic happiness in the process.

The question is begged: what kind of books knock us upside the head and make us weep with recognition? Do the types of books being published today even carry the potential of making such an impact? Perhaps the question I'm really asking is this: does chick lit change lives, or does it merely kill brain cells slowly and insidiously? More importantly, has it caused Kafka to roll over in his grave yet?

2004-06-30T19:14:00.000-04:00

CRITICAL MORASS

Somehow, I have this vision of Dale Peck removing his belt and putting another notch on it every time he discovers he's been mentioned in another journalistic treatment describing his essentially snarky ways. I'm beginning to loathe this word, snark. In the beginning, by which I mean last year, when Heidi Julavits made the word popular in her Believer magazine manifesto [a word that is completely inappropriate here, yet nevertheless the noun that has been applied to the journalistic treatment that got the ball rolling on the whole snark brouhaha, presumably because her own book got a bad review], snark was perceived to be the antithesis of puff, the latter being the type of nonsense found on dust jackets and back covers, something akin to: "a compulsively gripping page-turner... you won't want it to end!" As an endlessly naive individual, my first reaction is to believe this tripe when I read it. Hence, a trip to the cash register, dropping at least twenty dollars in the process. I'm a prime example of how the book publisher's marketing strategy is supposed to work. Bottom line is this: puff is plentiful, people tend to believe it, and it sells books. So why lament its demise when it fluorishes, indeed, when it thrives?

[Note to self: determine whether there is a difference between puff and polite literary criticism]

It's a shame that snark has come to represent any brand of literary criticism that is less than glowing. Really, did we need another word to replace the more meaningful and descriptive word, criticism?

2004-06-26T20:44:00.000-04:00

E_p = mhg

Apparently, a person who loves books and a person who questions what they read are two entirely different breeds. That is to say, people who read voraciously do so to compensate for their own inherent emptyheadedness, whereas other people who read selectively do not unquestioningly forge through the prose they are reading willy-nilly, not accepting everything they confront at face value. This mutual exclusivity doesn't really make sense to me. One problem is that Nehring makes no differentiation between a physical object and a mental process, namely books and reading, respectively. Further, she doesn't elaborate on the type of books that these so-called "book lovers" are reading, only making reference to a Hemingway novella, and current non-fiction relating to extreme behaviour and neo-conservatism [perhaps one and the same?]. Granted, there is nothing edifying about any of these, but it is also not fair to suggest that "book lovers" read anything and everything. And who are these "book lovers" anyway? Are they the middle-aged woman riding on the subway reading the dog-eared, mass-market paperback, or are they the dishevelled twentysomething at the local pub trying to finish Ulysses by Bloomsday? And while I'm asking unanswerable questions, is the "book lover" and the bibliophile one and the same?

While it may seem like a foregone conclusion that the book's sole purpose is that it be read, it is arguably the book's physicality that renders the bibliophile weak in the knees when in the vicinity of a bookstore or library. As a person who practices book idolatry on a regular basis, the potential that any given volume on a shelf holds is often more valuable than what is eventually found within when the book is finally relieved from its verticality. But this is of no consequence to the book lover. Sometimes it is just enough to sit in a comfortable chair next to a coveted, filled-to-capacity bookcase, and simply take in the view: books of different heights, different widths, different colours, different genres, all with different sentimental attachments...

Perhaps I am missing the point. Nehring's bottom line seems to be that it is better to read with a critical mind than to substitute the content of a book for one's own sorely lacking grey matter. But what hope is there for those of us who don't have the capacity to form an opinion and just salivate like a Pavlovian dog whenever the new bestseller lists are released? Indeed, what hope is there for those other few of us who find the potential energy of a book more enticing than its kinetic energy? I'm struck dumb just thinking about it.

2004-06-19T14:55:00.000-04:00

IF IT DOESN'T HURT THE BEAGLES IN CAGES AT THE INDIANAPOLIS LILLY PLANT, IT MUST BE FINE

I've noticed a sharp increase in the general public consumption of olanzapine of late. Indeed, just last week, I could be heard saying this while filling prescriptions at work:

What's up with all the Zyprexa scripts?

Actually, it might have been more along the lines of this:

Everyone and their dog is getting Zyprexa these days.

Well, it would seem I am not alone in my wonderment at this phenomenon [I just hope my wonderment won't be misinterpreted as psychosis]. An article in the British Medical Journal is addressing this very problem, and don't doubt that it is a problem. The manufacturer of said molecule, Eli Lilly, seems to have cornered the market on antipsychotics [or if that is too jarring a word, mood stabilizers] with its costly mind-numbing product, ostensibly a direct result of the Texas Medication Algorithm Project, which puts Zyprexa as first-line therapy in the treatment of mental illness. What about all of the other similarly classed drugs that are available as cheaper generics? The answer to that is they don't contribute as heavily to the Bush administration as does Lilly. As a result of all this heavy financial backing, the establishment of Bush's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health ensured that the above-named algorithm placed Zyprexa as the clear prescribing choice for mental illness. The scary commission also recommends increased screening for mental illness, which has the plastic Lilly reps pushing their wares on physicians not just in Texas, but all over the country, even north of the border, and indeed, all over the planet. The bottom line is this: people who don't need this drug are being told that they do. Alas, I suspect that this is just the beginning of the dumbing-down agenda... once it is in full swing, most everyone will be too [legally] stoned to worry about anything.

2004-06-15T22:49:00.000-04:00

MANN ON SPACE AND TIME

Ever since learning that The Magic Mountain was a favourite book of both Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, I have been intent on picking up a copy. Today I did just that. Delving into the weighty tome while sitting on a bench by the lake, I imagined Hannah and Martin sitting on a similar bench somewhere in Marburg, reading passages to one another, trying hard to concentrate on the words and not the voice uttering the words. Terribly seductive, that.

I didn't have to read many passages before becoming thoroughly enthralled. While the translation is admittedly a far cry from Mann's original [a position that is based purely on presumption, and somewhat coloured by my own background], there are truths therein that make me close the book in haste, in case they should escape, by which I mean, in case I should forget them by hurrying on to subsequent passages. To wit:

Space, like time, gives birth to forgetfulness, but does so by removing an individual from all relationships and placing him in a free and pristine state--indeed, in but a moment it can turn a pedant and philistine into something like a vagabond. Time, they say, is water from the river Lethe, but alien air is a similar drink; and if its effects are less profound, it works all the more quickly.

I have felt this, usually while travelling, but lately also in a professional capacity. Being away from one's regular space, then travelling through more space, only to arrive at an altogether different space, is something that we do every day, and may seem like nothing out of the ordinary, but it affords one the opportunity to leave things behind, become baggage-free, maybe even live a double life. I suspect that Mann is referring more plainly to his main character, Hans Castorp, in his journey from a staid and predictable life in Hamburg to a liberating and eye-opening experience at a sanatorium in the Alps. The question arises, for Hans and for anyone else that cares to ponder the issue, do we know ourselves more when we are in our accustomed environments, or do we know ourselves more when we are alone and in a foreign place, forced to re-assess our mindsets, attitudes, beliefs, while at the same time realizing there is a great likelihood that these bear no relevance to the new situation? The next logical question, then, is this: which is the preferred situation?

2004-06-13T21:18:00.000-04:00

BIOGRAPHIES, MOSTLY

Stephen Spender's biographer: "Snark bounces off of me, right back onto you!" [link first seen at A&L daily]

Even sickly miserablists have a shot at literary greatness: This brings the number of biographical works on Kafka up to eighty-two [statistic based on UTL catalogue search using "biography" and "Kafka" as subject headings].

Just in time for Bloomsday: a new biography of James Joyce, which, when combined with the 1000+ pages of Ulysses, results in 1200 or so pages that will remain unread during my lifetime. However, reading one page every day may be more my speed.

A right swindler the Great Brain was... but all swindling aside, his many schemes and adventures kept me captivated as a serial fan of the series. In fact, I think my formative years were heavily influenced by the whole Great Brain ethos [can any Great Brain aficionado honestly say they didn't wish they were as cunning and crafty as John D. Fitzgerald's über-child?] On the whole, my appreciation of these books is not as profound as that of the family who decided to go on a Great Brain camping pilgimage in Utah [link first seen at boing boing].

2004-06-09T17:13:00.000-04:00

BODICE-RIPPING PHILOSOPHY

When I first started reading Elzbieta Ettinger's account of the Martin Heidegger/Hannah Arendt affair, I couldn't have been more enthralled by it all. What's not intriguing about an illicit and enduring tryst between Germany's foremost modern philosopher/Nazi ideologue and his adoring, much younger Jewish student, herself an emerging and important mind of the times? There's something about forbidden love that is infinitely spellbinding, especially when it deals with intellectual intercourse as much as it deals with physical need. Ettinger does a good job of portraying both of these aspects of the legendary love affair, but she also makes melodrama out of it in a quick and tiring fashion. Too, she portrays each 'character' [an appropriate term here, as it becomes clear that she deems herself a knowing narrator with insights into the raison d'etre of both parties, in addition to that of a few other key players, including Elfride Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Heinrich Bleucher] in an unfavourable light: Heidegger as a lying, conniving, selfish type, and Arendt as an obsessed, self-doubting hanger-on who just can't get over him already. Whether this is an accurate portrayal, I am not sure, as I have no deeper knowledge of Arendt, Heidegger, or of the Arendt/Heidegger complex, but I suspect that the more telling version of the story may be elucidated by the recently published volume of translated correspondence between the two. At least in epistolary format a reader can take away things in context [depending upon the quality of the translation, of course], as opposed to misinterpreting selectively parsed quotes that meet the intentions and specifications of the author's raison d'écrire.

Still, it could be worse, like an attempt to fictionalize the whole affair and turn it into a romance novel. Oh, wait, that's been done...

2004-06-06T18:11:00.000-04:00

ENTER DAVE THE NEXT

First there was Foster Wallace. Then it was Sedaris. Subsequently, Eggers. Briefly, it was Rakoff. Of course, the order presented here is entirely arbitrary. Don't feel offended if I didn't mention your favourite Dave first. I drop these names merely to make the point that The Four Daves have morphed into Five. It's David Bezmozgis who has most recently made the cut and is destined for literary greatness, or so we are supposed to believe. This belief is shallowly affirmed by the author's stunning photograph, as shown in the Quill & Quire profile on Bezmozgis [which reminds me of the Franzen author shot that left so many of us drooling when The Corrections hit the scene].

His first offering is a collection of stories, titled Natasha and Other Stories, three of which have appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, and Zoetrope. [An aside: after reading this sampling of Bezmozgis' work, I am reminded of my friend Susan M.'s writing, which focuses on the perspective of Serbian and Croatian immigrants and their families, with Hamilton, Ontario as the backdrop. No online content, but a sampling of her work can be found here in print format].

Moral of the story: struggling Canadian writers need only to get an agent in New York and they'll be on their way to relative literary stardom. Oh, and I suppose some talent might help on that front too. Now, can anyone tell me whatever happened to David Rakoff?

2004-06-06T11:31:00.000-04:00

"LEAVE THE DAMN MANURE PILE ALONE SO THE FLOWERS CAN GROW!"

That's what Stan Bevington, founder of Coach House Press, has to say about the possibility of levelling the lovely coach house on bpNichol lane, only to make way for another residence for U of T students [albeit a more affordable co-op residence]. These weeks are crucial ones for the publishing house, the outcome of which may be the first-time-ever signing of a lease which puts CHP at the mercy of landlord Campus Co-operative Residence Inc. Then, only a matter of time before the handing over of the key takes place [plus the handing over of the padlock, as the case may be]. This will a lamentable loss, should this come to pass. Having been inside the charmingly rickety yet abundantly productive publishing house only once, it left with me the impression that the art and history of bookmaking was in full force and appreciation here. A true hidden gem in the heart of downtown Toronto. I'm sure I'm not the only one who, when given the option, chose to walk along bpNichol lane in the effort to eventually reach Bloor Street, albeit in a roundabout fashion, if only to pause and read the engraved poem on the street, if only to peek through the dusty windows to catch a glimpse of the presses in motion, feeling the ground beneath your feet tremble with the vibration, if only to marvel at the fresh piles of books leaning precariously in whatever available space left, the fruit of some local author's literary toiling. Alas, all of that might become a fleeting memory, replaced with fresh architecture whose windows display a line of empty beer bottles. [Source: The Globe and Mail]

2004-06-05T17:52:00.000-04:00

WOMAN WALKS INTO A COFFEE SHOP WITH AN IRONING BOARD...

Can there be any swifter way to ruin the relaxing ambience of a Saturday morning outing revolving around a large steaming cup of coffee and a really good book, similarly steamy and altogether absorbing. Answer: No, there couldn't, especially after said woman deposits (n+1) plastic bags with assorted merchandise and aforementioned ironing board right next to me, only to seize my table as I prepare to suddenly leave, but not before blocking me in with her body and her bags both. Humph. When I finally cleared her barrier-laden presence, what stood before me but one of those itinerant mothers with her ridiculous SUV stroller, shockingly replete with shocks and P185/60 R14 tires. Queen Street East should follow the example of Queen Street West establishments and ban such sizable strollers from crossing the thresholds of their businesses [in addition to ironing boards]. Alas, this will never be the case in bobo land. I live among bobos [or is that boboes?]. Surely that doesn't make me one? Replace that humph with a sigh.

2004-05-25T16:49:00.000-04:00

BEATING A DEAD HORSE, REVIVING IT, THEN PUTTING A FLUFFY PILLOW UNDER ITS HEAD

The New Republic is just a little bit behind the times: they [re]address the Heidi Julavits manifesto on snark that The Believer magazine ran in their inaugural issue more than a year ago. Besides re-hashing some of the major points that Julavits raises in said "manifesto", Ruth Franklin opts for a generous helping of snark herself, in her assessment of the McSweeney's offshoot publication, getting all adjectival on us with words like asinine, masturbatory, annoying... And then there's this perplexing statement:

"What The Believer offers is essentially a book club, and no one goes to a book club to talk seriously about books. It's a gathering for fans, and while there's nothing edifying about fandom, there are worse things than books to be a fan of."

Don't even get me started on the fact that she ends a sentence with "of" [akin to what I've just done myself].

And there are worse things than books to be a fan of: bad books [i.e. the kind that are reviewed in TNR's charmingly quirky online feature called PULPS [tagline: a review of what America is really reading.]]. Also absolutely nothing edifying about this either. Might it have anything to do with the fact that the reviewer of this particular offering of "pulp" is also an editor at Reader's Digest? Enough said? One would expect that a TNR reviewer might find the hallowed middle ground between snark and puff, but instead, all we get is this:

"I love the fact that one of the patients who is killed--the primary murder--experienced a massive head injury... I love the fact that this patient, Gavin, is the catalyst of our story. I love..."

Egads, could this review be any more dreadful? Perhaps I shouldn't analyze it too rigorously, and just accept that it might be the Reader's Digest editor's intention to be banal. But it could be livened up with a few more exclamation marks. Then I might actually believe that it's "a genuinely engaging tale!"

Give it up, TNR, and please stick to your own patented brand of snark in the Peckish and Woodsian tradition.

NB: Better hurry on the above TNR links: their precious online content doesn't remain freely available for long!

2004-05-24T19:19:00.000-04:00

OUTRAGED BY THE OUTRAGE CAUSED BY THE OUTRAGEOUS IMAGES

Rummy's getting all meta on us again, which seems to be his m.o. whenever he has no answers to explain the latest unknown unknowns [i.e. all the bloody time]. Rather than banning digital imaging devices, how about admitting to guilt and wrongdoing instead of trying to sweep it all under the carpet? According to Susan Sontag, that's not such an easy thing... indeed, the onslaught of dirt will be unstoppable. [link first seen at maud]

ME AND NABOKOV BOTH

Speaking of m.o.'s, I think cryptomnesia might be mine [link first seen at maud]. There's not an original thought in my head, and I freely admit to exploiting the ideas of others, hence my reluctance to pursue any manner of a lengthy writing endeavour: I fear it might be some twisted hybrid of prose that attempts, then fails, to emulate the stylistics of Amis, Gray, Self, Sebald, and Kafka all at once. Now that would be a waking nightmare.

WHERE YOU GO, THERE WILL I GO TOO*

Lucrezia de Domizio Durini is passionate about the life and art and vision of Joseph Beuys. That is more than evident in her biography of the late German artist. But it is also evident through her actions: the money procured from the gallery sale of $7M worth of personally owned Beuysian art, photography, and ephemera will be put towards the construction of the Difesa della Natura [Defense of Nature] gallery in Italy, one of many projects that Beuys initiated during his lifetime.

*taken from German poet Justinus Kerner, and incorporated into the Beuysian action, Eurasia.

2004-05-15T10:34:00.000-04:00

LESS SELF-ABSORBED AND INSENSITIVE, BUT NOT BY MUCH

The Literary Saloon observes that The Guardian Review is the last remaining source of solid literary coverage, and I have to agree. Especially after the quickest perusal ever of this week's NYT Sunday Book Review, whose coverage is at once paltry and lacklustre [and seems to becoming more so as each week passes]. Reading it used to be one of my favourite Saturday morning activities. Might as well remove that link from my sidebar. Well, maybe not quite yet. I'll give it one more chance to redeem itself. Maybe even two.

Everything, including the kitchen sink, plus doughnuts: more Vonnegut, who is living proof of the adage, with age comes wisdom. He knows he's old, he knows he's wise, but it is evident that he wants to be neither, completely vexed that he must witness all the madness in his twilight years when he'd much rather be laughing at all the hijinks from wherever it is that one goes after one expires.

Speaking of death, the William H. Gass review of Stanley Elkin's The Living End in the May issue of Harper's has inspired me to search for a few relevant Gass and Elkin links on the interweb:

Gass: Centre for Book Culture; The Scriptorium at The Modern Word; NYRB

Elkin: Centre for Book Culture; Reading Stanley Elkin by Rick Moody.

2004-05-08T18:58:00.000-04:00

THE DRAMA OF EVERYDAY LIFE IS EASILY FORGOTTEN

Yesterday, as I was immobilized in gridlock, I was livid that I was being inconvenienced in such a grievous manner. Today, it occurred to me that there are a million such moments to be endured, but they are all of a fleeting nature, and nobody but one's lonely self knows about them. Are these moments inconsequential, or do they all compound to form some sort of mental and/or emotional version of an atherosclerotic plaque? Do they make us miserable for all our days to come, or do they just pass so that we can laugh at our silly selves later for being so impatient, so petty, so whatever...

Has anyone written about this topic? Is this even a topic, or is it just a mundane meandering of the mind, as mundane as the moments that constitute the daily grind of no one in particular and everyone all at the same time?

2004-05-07T20:16:00.000-04:00

A PSEUDO-LOBOTOMY IS A VOLUNTARY PROCEDURE

The end of nine straight days of work can mean only one thing [surprisingly, it's not the alcohol that manages to dumb me down, it's the work: hence, the lack of posts].

Not sure why, but this little Vonnegutian gem popped into my head despite it being as old as the hills. So funny.

Again, not sure why [see what I mean about dumbing down], but I have a hankering to read something good and incomprehensible... something heavy, physically and otherwise. At first I was leaning toward trying Mann's Doktor Faustus again, but then decided that this would be the more likely candidate. Now all I have to do is get me down to Robarts Library. Hopefully, it will fix some of the mental damage incurred during the last couple of weeks. Alas, my plan to read Ulysses before Bloomsday now seems like an impossible task...

And here I thought that former Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish was a character in an Alasdair Gray book [via wood s lot]. What's even more absurd is that I thought his nickname was Jock.

I wonder if this can be translated into CB slang?

For anyone with an interest in applying for tickets to attend the 2006 COC performance of The Ring Cycle can find the application here. You need to bring a résumé outlining your Wagnerian opera experience to the interview. There is also a written exam component on which you must score at least seventy percent to be considered as a potential candidate.

2004-04-21T14:11:00.000-04:00

MISC.

Wilco's latest, A Ghost is Born, is freely listenable on the jukebox over at wilcoworld.net

Pop philosopher Mark Kingwell is playing Cupid over at the ROM

Gehry v. Koolhaas in Seattle: first the EMP, now the SPL [looks like it might be difficult to find a cozy corner to read in: too many sharp corners and edges]

Dave Eggers recommends The Tenants of Moonbloom by Edward Lewis Wallant [not sure why, but Eggers' description brings Alasdair Gray's Something Leather to mind... but the copy I read didn't have this racy cover]

Favourite bawdy & blasphemous paragraph of the day:

"More arresting still is Auden's "Chorale", a Berlin-period poem in German that celebrates the cock and balls and blow-jobs of his tough German boyfriend Gert Meyer in slangy Berlin street-demotic to the tune of the Lutheran hymn that forms the chorale in Bach's St Matthew Passion." [Source: Guardian Review]

2004-04-18T16:51:00.000-04:00

INTRA-DAY

WAKING... late, a bit hungover
BREWING... a bodum of strong coffee
THINKING... about Siegmund, Sieglinde, Wotan, and Brünnhilde, and their deepest of sorrowful woes
THANKING... ArT for sharing the epic experience
READING... the latest offering of social unrealism from Martin Amis
LISTENING... to Kate Bush sing about angels encircling her in a ring of fire [a recurring theme, it would seem]
LOOKING UP... definitions of words that I don't know [catamite, tocsin, rebarbative, jocose, bowdlerize]
OPENING... another bottle of wine, though I really have no business doing so on a Sunday night. Do I have a problem?
DREADING... the next fork in the road, which points west and takes me down its path bright and early on Monday morning [tomorrow!]. Right, on to the wine, then...

2004-04-16T17:56:00.000-04:00

I'LL TAKE POLITICAL RHETORIC FOR $1000, ALEX

This quote from Alasdair Gray's 1982, Janine struck me as being particularly timely:

"I am certainly alcoholic, but not a drunkard. I never stagger or stammer, self-control is perfect, the work is not affected. It's well-paid work, I needed an education to get it, but now I can do what is needed and even answer questions without thinking. Most work today can be done like that. If you lobotomised half the nation it would carry on as usual. The politicians do our thinking for us. No they don't."

Yes, that's right, no, they don't. Major politicians, especially. They have a whole staff of lobotomised individuals working under them. And when they're not close at hand, all the politician has to do is wear a goofy smile and repeatedly utter the same response to a host of different pointed questions.

The question to that answer is, obviously, 'What is staying the course?'

2004-04-16T13:02:00.000-04:00

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE LEITMOTIF

Been reading Phil Goulding's A Ticket to the Opera in preparation for tomorrow night's COC performance of Wagner's Die Walküre. He offers up a number of tips on how Wagner neophytes might approach wrapping their heads around the mythology of Der Ring des Nibelungen. There are seven available options, including The Spineless Option [do nothing], The Easy Option [listen in advance but don't analyze], The Flawed Option [attend a performance or listen to a recording with no advance preparation], The Leitmotif Detective Option [study in advance the at least 140 leitmotifs present in the Ring], The Couch Option [try to figure out what Wagner 'is really saying'], and The Little Engine That Could Option [read, study, and listen until you think you get it, and then do it all over again, because it's likely that you don't really get it]. Of all of these, I think my approach, sadly, will be The Easy Option, though I will try to get in some studying in tonight. I think I can, I think I can...

2004-04-15T21:23:00.000-04:00

META-WARRANT

With regard to all this talk of a literary divide, Thomas Frank's essay in the April issue of Harper's sheds some light on the topic [or perhaps it's the geo-political map of the US that he refers to that sheds the light]: blue-staters [Democrats], it would seem, read literature, while red-staters [Republicans] don't. What do red-staters read, if anything? According to The New Republic, it's pulp. While TNR fully admits that pulp has no literary warrant, it does have cultural warrant. But not enough cultural warrant to warrant having this new feature [appropriately called Pulps] run in the hard copy of the magazine. Anthropologically, this lack of physicality might pose a problem down the line, but perhaps I'm missing the point. Perhaps it's just an amusing little online-only feature for the plebes that don't want to shell out the coin required for access to full online content.

2004-04-02T20:09:00.000-05:00

BEING MARTIN AMIS

Russell Smith is trying a new genre: the ever-popular post-colonial comedy. The sheer aplomb of Smith and his unsubtle self-promotion, not to mention his shameless penchant for namedropping, is rather off-putting [...and then there was the moment when I forgot that it wasn't Leah McLaren's article that I was reading...].

I guess he's worried that the new book will suffer the same fate as the last one: a slow and painful death on the remainders table at Indigo.

What upsets me the most, however, is the comparison drawn between Smith's latest and Martin Amis's The Information. I suspect that Smith himself wrote this blurb, only because he drops Amis's name in his Globe & Mail article too. This is no co-incidence. If he fancies himself a scribe in the Amisian tradition, let him do so. But alas, he will never be Martin Amis.

2004-04-02T19:29:00.000-05:00

THINGS I LOVE ABOUT SPRAWL

Or should I say, things I love about driving in sprawl at night after a particularly heinous shift in a corner of the city diametrically opposite to my own [in many more ways than just one], when rush hour has ended and traffic is moving and I absolutely own the road... I can't say it any better than the Mekons do in Enter the Lists:

(Coming over the brow, swooping down onto the city. The traffic is well spaced and moving at a smooth pace. The city is spread before Me, white and pink in the winter sun. I shall enter this beautiful city and grasp its center like My lover's corded veins and tendons. Later, at night, the city lies glittering. Thrown over the river valley, breathless, as I bear down on it. This is My city and I pass into it with the rush of wind and the sound of quiet thunder. A bar, a cube of light, throb gently as I park My car and , triggering the electronic locks and alarm, I move across the shining tarmac to the noise and warmth. My breath is pluming in the bitter cold then the heat of the bar enfolds Me ardently as I push through the throng to My table. I am there and I know it will be good tonight. My list is endless.)

That about sums it up. And co-incidentally, my list is endless too.

2004-04-02T12:23:00.000-05:00

a lower-case kind of guy

Have spent the morning re-discovering the marvellous hayden. Perfect music to match the rainy gray April weather. Overtly sad lyrics, yet strangely uplifting all the same. He's about to follow up 2002's skyscraper national park with elk-lake serenade, which is being released domestically on May 11 under the Hardwood Records label. He's also touring with Sarah Harmer [who incidentally makes a really brief cameo in the delightful carried away video], set to appear at the Winter Garden Theatre on April 26 & 27.

Hayden also has a Hollywood connection: he recorded the title track for the 1996 film, Tree's Lounge, and co-directed the video with Steve Buscemi. That's just one year after lamenting that "things are as bad as they seem" [perhaps still my favourite hayden song]:

What do I do this for?
Got to get out some more
Go down to the grocery store
Meet someone I'll adore

And on that note, I think I will go down to the grocery store.

2004-03-31T18:25:00.000-05:00

THE OCCIDENTAL TOURIST

I had a Kafka moment at work yesterday. Well, rather longer than a moment, actually: the whole eight hour shift was rather Kafka-esque, featuring heavily one in[s]ane question after another. Interestingly, this real life bout of surrealism was foreshadowed by the few pages that I read on the streetcar on my way there: there's a brilliant scene in Amerika that finds its protagonist, Karl Rossmann, observing the intricate workings of the information desk at The Hotel Occidental. What is essentially described is a library reference desk set up in the lobby of an uber-busy New York hotel. Those individuals providing information are the so-called under-porters, each of which is accompanied by a boy that fetches various sources of written information at the request of the very exacting under-porter. If the wrong resource is retrieved, the item is simply backhanded onto the floor. In this particularly busy information sector, time is of the essence:

These two providers of information... had always at least ten enquiring faces before them in the window opening. Among these ten, who were continually changing, there was often a perfect babel of tongues, as if each were an emissary from a different country. There were always several making enquiries at the same time, while others again carried on a conversation with each other...

While I am neither a librarian nor a hotel employee, the situation I found myself in had my co-worker serving a long line-up of individuals at the 'drop-off' counter, and me serving another long line-up of individuals at the 'pick-up' counter. Question upon question upon question precluded any possibility of actual work getting done. Why are people so inquisitive? Why can't they rely upon search engines and consumer health websites a little more often? And does it look like I know where the ant-traps are kept?

I suspect that tomorrow's dreaded shift will also have a literary connection: Dante's Inferno. These days hell finds itself in the environs of that hotbed of brewing violence, North York.

2004-03-21T13:27:00.000-05:00

IT AIN'T GONNA BE PUTTING PFIZER OR LILLY OUT OF BUSINESS ANY TIME SOON

In theory, philosophical counselling is a good idea, though I'm not sure Lou Marinoff's approach to it is exactly the way to go about things. It seems as though the interdisciplinary approach of marrying the fields of philosophy and psychology is more sensible. Indeed, the latter pre-dates Marinoff's A.P.P.A. [which interestingly uses dot.edu as a suffix, as opposed to the A.S.P.C.P's dot.org]. Just the idea that a three day workshop qualifies someone to be a certified philosophical counsellor takes away from the legitimacy of this burgeoning field.

It would be nice to see doctors begin to prescribe therapeutic regimens of philosophical counselling instead of grabbing for the pen and pad to write a prescription for Paxil. People's problem's don't always stem from imbalance of neurotransmitters, but rather, from trying to reconcile earthly concerns with a personal ethos, and failing.

But that doesn't stop me from occasionally thinking, maybe drugs are the answer...