UPCOMING READINGS

It appears readings are being scheduled in Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal....watch for news.

As far as I'm aware, there are two in the works:

Pages, Kensington, Calgary May 13, 2009
and
Sundre, Alberta, May 14 in the evening.

I hope to see you there!

A Real Feast (so far)

For the second time I heard about the genius of Charles Baxter meaning the fluidity and naturalness of his language and dialogue is astounding. So, I pulled out of the reading pile a book I knew was hiding away, The Feast of Love, see image here. The cover is disgusting, schmaltzy, ugly, design-less, hollywood crap. It's downright offensive like chick-lit dropped in dog poo. All I wanted to do was rip the cover off before going any farther. Don't get me going. I'm sure whatever hollywouldn't did to it is nothing less than a massacring.

There's an introduction, which is required, but I want to talk about the first story. Yes I mean first chapter, but it's a lot like a story and some of these were written originally as stories. This certainly feels like one. You want a story that is as tight as a drum, try this. "Every relationship has at least one really good day." The narrator describes one in his past relationship. His girlfriend is terrified of dogs and so for a day's drive he takes her to the kennels of the ASPCA. She ends up naming them, saying these really are their names, and one by one the dogs all quiet. It says something about her and him, and wow what a slick little gem this story is. If you've not read it get out there and get reading. You can find the start of this on line here.
To borrow the line at the end of Carver's Cathedral, It's really something.

Open Book (enjoy some, skip the rest.)

Open Book: Essays from the Vermont College Postgraduate Writer's Conference. Ed. Fetherston and Weingarten. A conference publication apparently. These can be insidious little (or even big -- this book is 377 pages) things. Someone gets tapped to coordinate and a big decision looms: do we want this to be a series of great articles or an exact record of presentations.

This is a book of what I'm guessing are presentations, self-edited if the author feels like it, and merely included by the editors.

The strength is in some of the careful, in-depth consideration of poetry. There are line readings and general ruminations on meanings, works on Ashbery and Danto. And when such tough stuff gets to be too much, many essays on the writing of longer works are there to reward. I particularly liked some of Fetherston's ideas on process and how ideas/writing is like considering ripples on Lake Champlain, Mark Halliday's consideration of Alessandra Lynch's poem, Brett Lott's essay "Before we get started", and J. Allyn Rosser's tongue in cheek reading recommendations. He says, "Now you're going to pay your dues, suffer properly." Very nice.

Bad essays are just hideous. The worst was Michael Martone's thoughts on camouflage and toy soldiers. Its main problem was a lack of theme, he'd be nailed in a 101 class for not developing the overall structure and for tossing in as a central idea each new term he came across. I would expect the English teacher would know that: Jewelers use a "loupe" not a "lope", it's "aides-de-camp" not "aid-de-camps", a cockade is a folded ribbon, not a tall feather, the purpose of Cubist art was not "the dissolution of contours", the opposite of countershading is not chiaroscuro, the book is Robinson Crusoe, (I can forgive the art problems as outside his domain of knowledge) but how to forgive him for writing "Robison Crusoe." Shoddiness on the author's part should not have passed the muster of two editors.

You can skip about a third of the works in this odd little book, but that's a conference, isn't it. You walk out of about a third of the presenations for one reason or another, usually for discursive junk, too narrow a theme, arrogance parading as knowledge, ah you can make your own list. You know. By the way, this is how students feel about a good deal of what goes on in their classes, and they're right.

My overall observation is that the Vermont College, which appears to be working to promote their low residency MFA program in writing, should seriously consider the printed works that bear its name--readers like me consider it representative of their overall quality.

14 Stories by Stephen Dixon

If you believe what Llosa once wrote, that novels are ultimately about time, then I don't recommend you read 14 Stories by Stephen Dixon. If you like Abbott and Costello's skit Who's on First better than anything then you may find this book a knockout.

In the story Names the people in bar are named "The Guy Next to Me" and "Name?" and so on, you get the toasty (and toasting) picture. Another word could be "tedious" at least for seven pages. Typical is dialogue like this:
"Who stabbed who?" I say.
"Who stabbed who?" a man says."
"Who's responsible for all this?"
"I didn't see it."
"I did," a woman says.
"Who stabbed who?" I say.

In all the stories have a great deal of potential but they maintain a maniacal tone of non-sequitur combined with wall paper paste. I believe this can be great. Here I think the idea is ultimately stronger than the execution. Each begins to feel like a one liner, more discursive than tuned, without a real sense of pacing and movement over time. Each seems whipped off with little revision. If they're heavily crafted well, Dixon's sense of speed and story arc is radically different than my own.

The strongest stories are the eponymous first story about a sort of suicide (does he really die?) in wihch the related sound and bullet affects other people. The other, the second story, Milk is Very Good for You, is about a husband and wife who return home to the baby sitter where they engage in all sorts of sex while the kids keep begging for milk. The milk part gets very annoying -- is that really necessary to the story? After a while it all wears thin, we come to expect this from Dixon. The best parts of Milk... are where Dixon couches the actions in altered words, such as:

"She grubbed my menis and saying ic wouldn't take long and fitting my sips and dicking my beck and fear, didn't have much trouble urging me to slick ic in. I was on sop of her this time, my tody carried along by Jane's pervish hyrating covements..."

Summer is icumen in
Loudly sing cuckoo

Ultimately Dixon's stories and even this one fall flat. The jig is up way too early; the fun peters out. Listen to all of Gilbert Gottfried's Aristocrat's joke on YouTube and you'll see the tone Dixon creates. . It wouldn't surprise me if the joke even influenced the story.