Christopher Willard

Selling the Self

2011-04-23T09:44:00.004-06:00

Great readings by the Dickman twins(?) on Silliman's website today with an introduction by Kevin Young that one can watch here:
http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/
Thanks Emory University for allowing the Post.

But on to the most recent novel to cross my desk: Important Artifacts and Personal Property (etc, etc -- read title above) by Leanne Sharpton. It's a novel designed as an auction catalogue that I'd seen before but had sort of dismissed as actually being an auction catalogue. We unearth the two characters via their objects, and particularly funny is the reading, Queneau, Empson, Robbe-Grillet. If you don't know them, I urge you to pick them up for that beach read -- plots move at light speed. Where is ambiguity in the age of documentation? Great job Leanne!!

Noticed: The Preparation of the Novel, lecture notes by Barthes.

Da Vinci?

2011-04-23T09:31:00.004-06:00

Lots of announcements in the news as to whether a new Da Vinci Drawing has been discovered. I don't personally believe this is a da Vinci. The marks are all wrong, the lighting is not his, it looks like something drawing by a student or a right hander. Too much emphasis on features...something about it smells like a more contemporary copy.

"Who has snagged the comma of the mouth?" -- Sina Queyras

2010-12-23T22:18:00.001-07:00

flARf alARm and flARf wARning

2010-12-23T10:29:00.004-07:00

FLARF IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK IT IS NOR IS IT NOT WHAT YOU THINK IT IS NOR IS IT NOT WHAT YOU DON'T THINK IT IS NOR IS IT NOT WHAT YOU DON'T THINK

YOU ARE DIRECTED TO MAKE APPROPRIATE ADJUSTMENTS

2010-12-05T22:27:00.003-07:00

Artist June Hills has been at it again, asking artists to draw a tree. I found out she posted this thing I made a while ago for her. Artists may recognize the man and what happened to him -- it's the product of inside jokes going back a few years. You can see her art and this project here. Way to go June !!

Creative Writing Programs (the cultural and critical problems)

2010-10-18T09:57:00.004-06:00

Elif Batuman has written a wonderful review of Mark McGurl's The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing for London Review of Books, perhaps mistitled Get a Real Degree. (I'm not sure how long it will be on line.) She points out a number of issues raised by our addiction to MFA programs in creative writing. For example, she reflects McGurl's grouping of MFA prose into three groups: technomodernism (Barth, Pynchon) high cultural pluralism (Morrison, Cisneros) and lower-middle-class modernism (Carver, Oates). Next she describes the exasperating quality of most writing programs, "oversophistication combined with an air of autodidactism". It's not that history is critical, but what happens when we create books like the new car market, releasing shiny covered but basically the same objects three times a year?

Batuman also zeros in on a key contradiction of our literary culture. I'll sum it up briefly: the writer disaffiliates with the nation, including self and history, to affiliate with art, in other words, students must learn how to write appropriately (the rules of art) in a high literary style but the other described as someone from Africa, Asia, someone Native American, the formerly enslaved, etc. is asked to write what he or she knows and experienced, in other words, feel free to ignore the rules of art because your story is so fascinating. Apparently North American readers find it rather sharp to appreciate the culture of such others through their books. This should be on the list of Stuff White People Like. Most recent case in point is the New York Times' review of Dinaw Mengetsu's How to Read Air, where the headline reads "A Novelist's Voice, Both Exotic and Midwestern" commenting on the fact, evidently, that Mengetsu lived all but the first two years of his life in the USA after his family moved from Ethiopia. I feel like I'm shooting fish in a barrel and I'd let it rest except it is ongoing as North America shifts it's voracious appetite for consuming the cultures of the world through novels, we went from India to China and are now in a desperate search for the next big, small other.

Batuman's review is really worth reading, reminding us of McGurl's premise that any convincing interpretation of the literary works themselves, from this point forward, has to take the influence of creative writing programs into account.

2010-10-11T12:04:00.002-06:00

The magazine Numero Cinq has hosted the first Novel-in-a-Box context for a novel/short story inspired by Augusto Monterroso's short story, "When he woke up the dinosaur was still there."

I collaborated with east coast writer Julie Marden and we were lucky enough to win!

You can read the story we wrote here.

Thanks to Douglas Glover and Julie Marden and everyone at Numero Cinq !! And be sure to check out the magazine for lots of great reading.

Coincidentally enough I'm nearly done Glover's book The South Will Rise at Noon.

2010-09-27T18:32:00.003-06:00

A sign on the door, "The message was: NU MISH BOOT ZUP KO. Gibberish but high-quality gibberish."

So we get to the climax of DeLillo's White Noise. Yes it sounds like Nabokov's HH stating, "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style." Ah the inadequacy of words and letters.

But how to resist. I sent the DeLillo text straight to the anagram maker. There were quite a few. Ouzo was a popular word. The one I like is:

Book Mouth Unzips

This relates to the reading subject and the theme that has brought Jack to the motel behind Iron City. Self referentiality is always nice for what's described as a postmodern book.

What's white and black and noisy all over?

2010-09-26T12:01:00.003-06:00

Only one answer of course.

Here he is.
If you don't know who this is, head over HERE and read about the annotation done by the American-Statesman, along with notes by the author himself.

Bad Books Galore, which for once is good!

2010-09-26T07:56:00.002-06:00

http://awfullibrarybooks.net/

We spend enough time searching out good new books. Try this site for the worst of the worst.

Here you can see, for example, the basic reader series Pam's Hot Tub.

TIMELAND : Alberta Biennial 2010

2010-05-30T09:02:00.003-06:00

The Alberta Biennial, TIMELAND, is up and running !

Richard Rhodes, Curator, did an outstanding job of selecting artists from across Alberta to fit his vision. Read his essay in the catalog to see what I mean. The staff at the AGA were really great at every step of the way. Thanks everyone!!

I'll be posting a couple images before long of the work I created, a 16x20 foot wall that optically pulsates sort of like the detail of an earlier painting above.

2010-04-23T06:41:00.004-06:00

"Well, to tell you the truth, I am lying again. I have never played such childish literary games. But I intend to do so as soon as I can."

So writes Heriberto Yepez on his blog.
He speaks of the lies of fiction, strategy, and the problem of Modernism and translation. Take a look.

I'm reminded of a quote by Louise Gluck in the preface to Richard Siken's book Crush, "We live in a period of great polarities: in art, in public policy, in morality. In poetry, art seems, at one extreme, rhymed good manners, and at the other, chaos. The great task has been to infuse clarity with the passionate ferment of the inchoate, the chaotic." How do I get that on a coffee cup to bring to meetings? If you've not read Siken, you have a wonderful discovery ahead of you.

I've been wondering lately, are we becoming less willing to engage the nameless and the murky? Are we becoming dependent upon categorization and resolution?

I finally got my hands on Huidobro and am taking the parachute ride (wondering about Dickey's drop from an airplane). This is a photo of Huidobro by Hans Arp. The photo of James Dickey is him playing the sheriff in Deliverance.

Erin Moure's My Beloved Wager

2010-02-26T20:40:00.004-07:00

I'm half way through, lots of notes, lots of quotes.

Here's one she provides by Shklovsky:

"the role of art is to kill pessimism."

Top Ten Poets (at least for me) in 2009

2009-12-26T20:52:00.002-07:00

I should be writing, and not doing this. And I hate lists, but how to resist? Here is my addition to the end of year lists; these are the poets who have spent the most time rattling around in my head. First they kept me up and then invaded my dreams. The books were not necessarily published this year. They are in no particular order.

1.) Patricia Young. Here Come the Moonbathers. Sensuous, raw, looping, fascinating, what words, what words.
2.) Norman Dubie. Selected and New Poems. A minimal Baroque genius. A story teller. Stunningly beautiful.
3.) Patrick Lane. Go Leaving Strange. A terrible genius who loves delicate flowers and delicate pain.
4.) Adam Sol. Jeremiah, Ohio. Playful, deep, masterful with the long poem and poetic story.
5.) Mahmoud Darwish. The Butterfly's Burden. Such longing, such delicacy.
6.) Zbigniew Herbert. Collected Works. Humanity reflected in all its disorderliness. Brilliant works.
7.) Lisa Robertson, The Weather. A storm of the heart and mind. Repetition like candy.
8.) John Ashbery. The System. You may not know what's happening but something sure is happening. That's really the point.
9.) Lucie Brock-Brodio. The Master Letters. The densest of the dense. Imagination goes leaping across wide chasms.
10.) Etel Adnan. The Indian Never had a Horse. Melancholic, sharp, mystical.

2009-12-21T16:55:00.002-07:00

Happy Holidays Artists and Readers !!

Infrarealist Musings and Other Poetry

2009-12-12T09:06:00.002-07:00

Two of the shorter short stories in the world are the known Hemingway: "For sale, baby shoes, never worn." (which he facetiously called his greatest work) and the Dinosaur by Augusto Monterroso, which goes: "When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there." Christmas stocking stuffers.

I don't feel like reviewing a book today but I will mention a few tidbits I've come across. Roberto Bolano: The Last Interview is an interesting if unfulfilling read. I wanted more intro with wider and deeper discussion. The first interview is great, the last that appeared in Playboy is terrible. I can't fully recommend anyone buying it.

I've gone back into Wallace Stevens. It's so great and subtle. There's even a Yale lecture in two parts on line, one presented by Langdon Hammer, and another by Marie Borroff the classics scholar. They're worth listening to on a snowy afternoon, especially if you like building snowmen -- Stevens said people should enjoy poetry the way a child enjoys snow.

I also came across the notebooks of Robert Frost, a thick book edited by Robert Faggen. It sparkles with thought and the little I've read has been pretty incredible. His work is stricter in every way than I would tend to head, but I grew up with this stuff and he was, for a while, in my neck of the woods.

Finally, and this is sort of off topic, I discovered Matthew Heard's article "What Should We Do with PostProcess Theory?" which is great. PostProcess theory considers that writing is not a skill to be learned, rather it's something to be exercised as a hermeneutic activity by "entering into specific dialogue" with other people and their interpretive strategies. Whats so wonderful about this article is that Heard speaks about tangible ways to utilize such a methodology in the classroom.

On Santa's naughty list: Those Idiotic Xmas Lists of the year's Notable Books.

Poem

2009-11-26T20:06:00.000-07:00

You can find a recent poem by me HERE at Branta Magazine.
Enjoy.

Oh,ooo say can you read?

2009-11-21T21:31:00.002-07:00

If so, and you want that just so terrific book of short stories, The Granta Book of American Short Story is just that book. No I don't still think it's 1992. There have been attempts at putting together anthologies since, of various success. What makes this book so good is the careful selection by Richard Ford. Certainly I share his full-of-words vision, at least when I'm not heading toward literary Minimalism. Read Mary Robison and then Barry Hannah to get the blood pumping. We need reprinted volumes of their short stories.

What really caught my eye tonight was a slick little forward in Existere by Delan Hamasoor (vol.29,1). Delan says that the novel has become, in today's society, a novelty. The Editor goes on to say that a poem online does not have the substantiality it does on the page. Poems "demand separation from the clangourous [sic] din of pop culture." Hear, hear.

2009-11-19T20:49:00.002-07:00

I'd love to have been on the jury of the Victoria Butler Book Prize this year. Patrick Lane's Red Dog Red Dog was up against Patricia Young's Here Come the Moonbathers. Is there something in the water of Victoria? Fortunately I do not have to do anything but enjoy both.

This past month I've been winding my way through Moonbathers. Wrong verb, but no verb will encapsulate this experience. Airstream was a stunner for nailing imagery, a gun found in the sand starts off one story. Think intensification and reification. Moonbathers is like getting beaten up by a delicious bully, in slow motion. Every movement is exquisite, every slam feels so brutally satisfying. This is, in my opinion, by far her best collection of work.

I think of the book as having three parts. The first consists of repeating line poems (not as in a ghazal however). In this regard, they recollect for me the poems that Stephen Watson based upon the oral tales of the /Xam Bushmen. Young's poems move forward while revisiting previous stanzas. The sense when reading is one of filmic looping combined with solid images:

A man in high boots strides over the grass.
Slap of a cricket bat, wood against pig haunch.
A dog runs the edge of the field,
the crow riding its back like a small black queen.

Slap of a cricket bat, wood against pig haunch.
And everyone's cheering like it's afternoon football.
The crow riding the dog's back is a small black queen.
My cousin turns to me and we kiss like movie stars.

Simile turns metaphor, repetitions are intensified or broadened. Such historical reflections, such miraculous invention.

The second part contains miscellaneous poems without the repetition or any particular formal unification. Changes of pace are provided by a couple of longer poems and a few that shift to prose. One poem opens in a Ted Hughesian manner:

Mice are haunted by beauty but have no time for it.

We think back to the start of Ted's: Mice are funny little creatures/you nearly don't see them

Oh but this is Patricia Young, subtle, sharp thaumaturge who will break arms and eyes with a single thought. Her mice are not such trembling nibblers. She continues:

Too busy gorging and shitting and eluding/capture or death. Smart little buggers,/
and cute too, though non-discriminating./There's nothing they won't sink their pointy//teeth into, including shoe polish and soap. /Your average mouse spends its high-octane/life shuffling off this mortal coil.

The final kickers to the book are a response to Affonso Roman DeSant'Anna's Letter to the Dead -- this is Young's letter from the dead, and a peaen to poetry and giving up poetry. They're worth memorizing. You may ask, what do the dead say? They say brilliant things evidently. Here are a few:

We manage fine without digestive tracts, pornography.

We like our indifference toward winning or losing,/our extreme position on fossil fuels.

No need for sledgehammers or private detectives.

It seems like a decent enough place. In Praise of Poetry contains it's own zingers:

It began to spit rain./Out of nowhere an undertaker appeared./It was a poetic moment

An ironic moment too, evidently, and a cliche moment, and a playful moment. She writes a haiku about it, rhymes a few five syllable words and quits. It all becomes so wonderfully hermeneutic and full of what Gadamer would define as serious play. And finally:

I quit cold turkey but I was hardly the first or most original.

Ok, I'm not one who craves personal meetings with writers, (although I would have liked to meet Anthony Burgess...or not) but if I had a list of those I'd like to meet, Young would top it. Do I momentarily idolize? Maybe, but read Moonbathers and you'll understand why.

2009-11-15T13:30:00.003-07:00

Can'tLit: Fearless Fiction from Broken Pencil Magazine is now out. I have a story in it titled Little White Squirel Angel.

Writer Alison Potstra says: It's "about a reality-show addicted obese woman, written in 'whitetrash' vernacular [that] makes a funny, yet disturbing comment on American culture."

It's now in bookstores. Do you have your copy?

Thriller in the Mist

2009-11-13T08:57:00.002-07:00

Artist Josh Azzarella has taken Michael Jackson's Thriller, has digitally deleted all the people, and leaves us with a video showing only the background to ambient music. It's odd and interesting. Check it out now because I'm betting it won't be on the net very long. http://www.thefunkof40000years.com/

in between the sheets

2009-11-02T21:29:00.003-07:00

an unfortunate reading of in between the sheets by Ian McEwan.

There's a point, I guess, that writers reach where whatever they cough into a hankie is taken as green gold. Do we believe reviewers are goggle eyed over fame or do we believe they're a breed of mucus-lickers? Oh but wait, a careful reading of the review blurbs shows no mention of THIS book. Of course not because four of the seven stories rise to mundane. The remaining three are way undercooked. One of the four could be three pages but it runs on for twenty like a hideous shaggy dog story. I'm guessing the author doesn't like to do much revision, but being another codified brit badboy and probably self-canonized genius, I suppose he doesn't feel the need. Final rating: beckoning beds sometimes contain bugs. Back away.

On a positive note -- If you like theory like I do, try out this: The Poetics of Prose $4.48 used at Amazon. Tzvetan Todorov is one of the major theorists along with Shklovsky and he's worth every penny of that four forty eight. He writes, "Yet like every science, linguistics often proceeds by reduction and simplification of its object in order to manipulate it more readily..." Todorov takes on formalism and its antecedents, he examines the topology of detective fiction as a means later to discuss genre and its problems more generally, he discusses the quest and secret of narrative and digs into the ghosts of Henry James in a way that makes me want to rush right out and get a collection. Perhaps his chapter "How to Read?" is less than satisfying in 2009 (the book is from 1977) but like most terrific literary theorists, there is much for adoration and speculation.

The Joke's on...

2009-10-27T07:52:00.005-06:00

The earliest joke was supposedly a 1900 BCE Sumarian one liner, something like: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial - a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Jokes pepper contemporary literature, Amy Hempel frequently seems to have skimmed the internet for the latest to stick in a short story -- each time I read one I imagine Gordon Lish screaming.

The latest incantation of joke-lit is The Book of Jokes by Nick Currie, aka Momus, aka What-ever -- some self described Brit songwriter who is trying awfully, awfully hard to be the new Brit bad boy. Take offensive, dirty jokes and create a narrative from them. The idea is brilliant. No wonder Dalkey published it. Note I said the "idea." The writing is shoddy. Why did Dalkey publish it? Here's a joke by Dorothy Parker...this is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force. Yukity Yuk Yuk. I guess rude boys retain a good deal of currency in Britain (thinking of Self, Welsh, and that other curly haired singer? Actor? Comedian? Russell Brand who was all over the papers last time I visited.) Enjoy the concept, skip the book -- it lacks both punch and line. Thank you, you've been a great audience.

Separated at Birth?

Death Sentence

2009-10-11T20:50:00.004-06:00

Here is perhaps the worst sentence I've come across in a very long time. This one from a book titled Novels of the Contemporary Extreme by Jean-Michel Ganteau.

"The mixture of anadiplosis, anaphora, and quasi-epanalepsis, underlined by the powerful use of epizeuxis and the correlative hammering of the spondee, such rhetorical and prosodic concentration provides a hyperbolical acoustic image of revenge."

And he ain't kidding.

What am I reading right now? Wonderful poems by Patricia Young published as Here come the Moonbathers and I've just started Kahlo: The World Split Open by Linda Frank.

Nobel Prize Winner Herta Muller

2009-10-08T22:19:00.004-06:00

Herta Mueller has won the Nobel Prize for Literature -- Not a lot of her work has been published in English. She's the twelfth woman to win, and get this, the daughter of a Waffen-SS soldier in WWII. Don't worry she's been a low key but outspoken activist. If you're interested for winning you get about $1.4 million. PhD question: how many Nobel Prize books seem to have been chosen in order to make a political statement?

You can read the first chapter of her newest novel Everything I Own I Carry With Me here.

Check out the other articles on that site too, pretty interesting material.

Cross about the Crossword (Calgary Sun Censorship?)

2009-09-26T13:34:00.003-06:00

I was doing Saturday's New York Times Crossword puzzle in the Calgary Sun (Each paper runs the Times puzzle and I buy the paper to do it based on which paper costs less on any given day.) Both papers run what I call the "idiot puzzle" in addition to the Times puzzle. I noticed yesterday's answers to the idiot puzzle had been replaced by a brown square that said inside it,

"Solution to yesterday's crossword unavailable due to language that may be offensive to some. We apologize for the inconvenience."

Well, of course I had to dig out yesterday's paper and do it, thinking as I rummaged the recycling whether I could send in my objection to "FROZEN" or "ALBUQUERQUE" as found in today's puzzle and thus get the answers censored.

So you're wondering what they censored.

There were two that someone could possible find offensive.
15 Across -- "A malicious woman with a fierce temper" Answer: HARPY
Dictionary.com says, "2.(lowercase) a scolding, nagging, bad-tempered woman; shrew."
50 Down -- "An American Indian woman" Answer: SQUAW
Dictionary .com says, "1. Often Offensive. a North American Indian woman, esp. a wife.
2. Slang: Disparaging and Offensive.
a. a wife.
b. any woman or girl."

In the former, a slangy derogation, or as my dictionary of slang says, used in the 1970's to mean a lesbian. Out here in redneck land the idea of a lesbian could be offensive and the idea that any lesbian might live in Alberta would probably be terrifying to some.

As for the latter, no mention of the clue itself. "North American Indian" has probably been replaced by "First Nation" or "Aboriginal" or "Native American" or "Native Canadian" or "Indigenous Peoples" depending who you ask I don't think "American Indian" has been around for a long time.
For more info look at the Wiki article that begins:
"Squaw is a spelling of an eastern Algonquian First nation morpheme, meaning "woman," that appears in numerous Algonquian dialects variously spelled as squa, skwa, esqua, sqeh, skwe, que, kwa, ikwe, etc." And, check out: The Sociolinguistics of the S-Word by William Bright, University of Colorado.

Upcoming Readings

2009-09-24T20:18:00.002-06:00

Hey all,
Here are my upcoming readings:

October 1, Paragraph Books, Montreal, 7:00 PM.

October 4, LitLive, Sky Dragon Centre, Hamilton, 7:30 PM.

I hope to see some of you there!!

Some extra curricular reading and listening

2009-09-23T07:36:00.002-06:00

Pick up the literary magazine Third Wednesday, published out of Michigan:

I have a poem in the Summer 2009 issue. Thanks Third Wednesday!

If this week is seeming long, check out poet John Giorno on YouTube. It's the perfect tonic. Crank the speakers at work and enjoy.

The system was breaking down and a half bent nail.

2009-09-20T17:26:00.004-06:00

We are reading Ashbery in class but I won't report on it here (student privacy etc, etc.) I can, however, vouch for this: "The system was breaking down...Who has seen the wind? Yet it was precisely this that these enterprising but deluded young people were asking themselves. They were correct in assuming that the whole question of behavior in life has to be rethought each second;"

The book that really surprised me lately was failure by Philip Schultz. Here's a wonderful book of poems by a former Pulitzer winner that -- I'll use a bit of his own ideas here -- like leaves glow in the sun, and fall and could be raked up or could set one meditating on life. You know when someone says, "you're staaaring"? Yeah. He writes, "I could take a walk with my wife and try/ to explain the ghosts I can't stop speaking to./ Or I could read all those books piling up/ about the end of understanding.../ Meanwhile, it's such a beautiful morning,/ the changing colors, the hypnotic light." This excerpt gives the flavor of the best ones here.

Interesting that both poets are engaged in recollections, in the pointillist smattering of memory over their consciousness. Everything's a pretext for digression, feeling, evaluation. Life as a montage.

Along the River that Flows Uphill: From the Orinoco to the Amazon

2009-09-20T17:24:00.002-06:00

I've reviewed this book for Bookpleasures.com run by Norm Goldman. He should be posting it soon. Check out his website here!

2009-08-31T09:27:00.001-06:00

I came across this book at the U of C library yesterday...not quite sure when I'll ever have enough time to read it. Seriously?

Half a Yellow Soap Opera

2009-08-29T08:40:00.002-06:00

I finally got through Half a Yellow Sun by Adichie. The book started off with a bang, slogged through pages of smarmy soap opera, and ended with war and a whimper. The first third is pretty special. Nice tight sentences and two story lines (as though she based it on Tolstoy's structure for AK. The development of Ugwu and the other characters was quick, as Adichie ignored reasons why things happened, presenting instead the progression of events and character responses.

Here's why the book lost its bubble. She tried to forefront the Biafran war and make it an impetus for character action...I knew little, I still know little. The presentation was sparse, rambling and I remain totally confused. It caused the characters to jump towns repeatedly. Then the small constellation of main characters slept with each other and the entire plot crashed in on itself, only to be picked up in some sentimental way near the end. In fact, the coincidences and Dei ex machina (pluralized) were so stunning and frequent that the book became the Nigerian version of Days of our Lives. I lose interest when things just keep happening without little overall meaning when events are merely a device to get characters sharing feelings or to add more pages. I really began wishing I were reading Coetzee.

Ugwu, the servant and main character for most of the book suddenly, when war came, became an empty vessel, he just went to war, didn't think or feel like he had earlier, he raped without worry. This bothered me for two huge reasons: first the author allowed her character to internally become someone else with no articulated reason (her lack of reasons now became a detriment); second it seemed to play on a myth that the Black Man has no discrete inner self, but is the result of exterior forces. I recall Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who speaks for whom, and a whole host of myth and racial stereotypes in the arts along this line. It's reinforced by Adichie's selective omnipresent narrator's voice that becomes an exterior, Colonial, voice describing the Black Man while denying his voice. I found it somewhat shocking. Then there is the entire class issue that Adichie is conflicted with. Her main characters are outrageously rich but they don't seem to perceive their class in any particular way; they waffle between having a this consciousness and not, which is odd because they are supposed to be political thinkers.

So what to do? I recommend you read about a third and realize that's all that's necessary. I'll reading more of her work, and if I had to place money, I'd bet she's really more of a short story writer than a novelist.

Elephant Dung

2009-08-15T08:47:00.004-06:00

Once I thought romance was in the air, but it was only the smell wafting over from the elephant cages.

The old man Jacob joins a failing circus, he is the third leg of a dull love triangle with Marlena. He marries her, eventually, but then she just disappears from the book. I think he and the author forgot she'd been a character. It's always funny when you're thumbing backwards and forwards through a book trying to find out why a character never again appears.

Someone tossed some people off a train trestle! Shh. This secret could ruin the circus! The circus, as we learn, is already ruined so I guess my telling won't matter. At the end of the book Jacob (think old man/elephant who never forgets -- that's called metaphor 101) sneaks from the old folks home into the circus. Ahh, the sitcom trained tear drop falls from the audience of trained chimpanzees. Sign flashing "cry now." I'd just like to mention that elephants are relatively incontinent, just a point the author might want to expand upon as she develops the metaphor in her rewrite. Huh? That thing was published?

What a reeking, stinking, fly buzzing piece of crap. Elephantine crap. I want my damn admission ticket back and I want someone to clean off my shoes. Thankfully I didn't buy this paperback and I swear to you I read the entire thing in under twenty minutes. You don't need more time than that to fully grasp the third-grade maudlin plot and writing that's as enjoyable as getting your chest waxed -- slowly. BUT, you say, "I loved Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman and couldn't get enough of BJ and the Bear." Yeah, forget what I said, you'll love this book in the intimate way you love toilet paper that offers the little bit of extra plush. Sorry to ruin your day but Princess Diana died.

HERE'S WHERE IT GETS REALLY ODD. I watched, the other night on TV, a movie titled The Greatest Show on Earth directed by Cecil B. DeMille. (The book uses the more plodding phrase Most Spectacular Show on Earth.) This was one of many uncanny parallels. I like that, "the many uncanny." A train carrying the the circus was central to the plot, a love triangle ensued but two got together at the end. A big secret functioned as undertow (in the movie it is Jimmy Stewart playing a doctor/murderer -- yes I wrote it that way on purpose -- hiding as Buttons the clown), and a bad guy tries to ruin the circus, it's Agustus the Trainer in the book and it's Klaus the Trainer in the movie, note the Germanic name similarity as well as "a" and "u" reflection. Both are killed in the ensuing panic at the climax of the book.

Too many similarities for me to trust the inventiveness of this "author." Here's something interesting: An ANAGRAM for "Water for Elephants" is "Renew a Father's Plot."

Review from Winnipeg Free Press

2009-08-11T21:23:00.000-06:00

Take a shot... don't deny yourself

By: Reviewed by Rory Runnells

Sundre, by Christopher Willard

Esplanade Books/Vehicule Press, 127 pages, $17

EXTRAORDINARY is too mild a word for Sundre. But in a sense the novel offers its own best insight into its richness when one of its narrators, Sandra, describes her daughter's birth: "There was originality in her birth in the way that perfect originality is found in the usual if only you take the time to look."

This second literary novel by Christopher Willard, an American-born visual artist living in Alberta, lets us discover that perfect originality in this saga of Avery and Sandra, living with their two sons and daughter on a farm outside Sundre, a small town south of Edmonton.

The story, told alternately by Sandra and Avery, is a potent, grave, moving chronicle of their lives. Stylistically it is a communion (there is no other word for it) of the poetic and the dramatic narrative.

It's as if Annie Proulx in her Wisconsin stories (of which Brokeback Mountain is the most famous) met Prairie playwrights like Maureen Hunter (in her play Footprints on the Moon), or Saskatchewan playwright and fiction writer Connie Gault, (in her play Sky), to produce an interweaving series of measured monologues rich with emotion.

Specifically, Sandra is the poet (mostly), while Avery is the storyteller (mostly). The novel is told in a mixing of memory and immediacy with Avery stoic, melancholy and emotionally searching, and Sandra flowing, imagistic and edging towards silence since words, cast against the power of the land, become inadequate.

Children are born, grow, have crises, go off to Toronto, like the daughter, Sheryn-Lee, or stay and die in a stupid car crash, like Dode, the older son, or come out of the same crash broken in spirit, like Dusty, the younger son, and driver, who had been sent back to fetch a guitar on the demand of his often disapproving father.

Funerals are attended. The community moves on, as does time. Sandra retreats into religion, Avery works. Then Sandra can't swallow: "She never spoke of it aloud. Never the word. She acted as though she didn't know. She knew."

She is treated unsuccessfully and slowly fades away until she makes a demand that Avery shoot her. Avery is helpless ("She couldn't swallow. What are a man's hands to do with that?") but his central belief is that there is determination and accident.

Take control or nature will. Only then do we fully grasp the opening of the book when he "shoots" her picture, while they both recklessly lean out from the Rosedale Suspension Bridge, is the image we need to hang onto, just as they must to the bridge, and each other.

They are suspended, and so is the reader between that determination and accident. The novel leads to where it has been going and where we as readers may not want to go.

The opening melts into the end. The story opens with Avery's almost jocular remark, "I didn't want to take a shot but I couldn't deny this woman."

He doesn't, and the novel ends with time and memory from the bridge closed as the couple let go of their world. Sandra knows only: "what we are cannot be said."

She, or maybe it is Avery, for at this point, they, like their memories are becoming one, we sense, notes "there was the most absolutely singular quality of light that morning."

The novel doesn't ask sympathy for their decision, let alone for their lives. Willard doesn't miss a step. He presents the "perfect originality" of the ordinary lives of this couple, and asks no quarter.

Rory Runnells is the artistic director of the Manitoba Association of Playwrights and fiction editor for Prairie Fire.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 9, 2009 B9

Writer's Block

2009-08-06T08:43:00.002-06:00

Writers Block, a quick search of google brings up.....frig google who cares. When it hits one person that person feels devastated who then questions his or her abilities, motivation, and current project. Days and weeks are wasted in a cycle of self hatred and outrageous expectations. Here are a few tips I've found through my own practice and through teaching that may be of use in preventing and getting out of writer's block.

10 TIPS FOR PREVENTING WRITER'S BLOCK
1.) Work every day. Writing makes you want to write more. It doesn't matter what you write, just sit down and start on whatever interests you. Read the first chapter of Twyla Tharp's book The Creative Habit (it's online and it's not worth buying the whole thing). She echos this attitude. Ten minutes a day is a good start.
2.) There has never been a child prodigy in writing. Talent in writing is learned through experience and hard work. Recent brain studies show that younger people are deathly focused on one thing, while older people have a broader view with more associations -- just what writers need! Don't email me with names of kids who published like that dragon boy. It's crappy writing.
3.) Work on more than one project at once. Putting all ones commas in one basket means when the writing does not flow the whole process shuts down.
4.) Write when you can and when you have to. My own writing times change, sometimes I'm up early whipping out words, other times it's half the night. Go with the flow as much as possible. But, don't allow yourself not to write.
5.) Reward yourself. Promise if you write you will get a glass of juice or more coffee or a candy bar. It's probably primal brain stuff but it's amazing how well it works.
6.) Keep reading. Read what you like and also read to challenge yourself. John Metcalf says he reads poetry when writing prose. Reading expands your horizon. Reading gives you ideas and makes you want to write.
7.) Give up all those self help writing books and magazines. They make you feel worthless and they suggest little tricks will make your stuff brilliant but which don't really work in practice. Instead read real literary magazines and good books, learn from them. Read bad books too, once in a while, to see where the train really derails. The goal is for you to develop your own critical/analytical abilities.
8.) If your writer's block persists, seriously ask yourself if you want to write. Writing is terribly hard and just plain terrible. There's little fun, we do it alone. It even sucks when we're on a roll. But still we keep at it. If you don't get off on this type of self chosen torture, maybe you need to create in a different way. Other people my see their block related to larger life issues. They may require therapy to move past something or they may need medication for chemical depression. None of these are sins, they are levels of acceptance and awareness.
9.) Friends are friends, readers of drafts are readers. Don't mix them up. Get the best writer you can to read your work to offer feedback on the drafts. Friends don't have the knowledge and experience for this but they'll want to see their name first in the credits.
10.) Writing groups can be useful but they're mostly great levelers. Members offer uninformed opinions, they tend to shy away from extremes, they play it safe, the tone suffers from ugly group dynamics. You need a dynamic group leader who recognizes these issues, whose expertise is in motivating each person on their own track, and who supports your experimentation, who in fact helps you learn to contextualize and defend your experiments in light of group norms.

TEN TIPS FOR BREAKING A WRITER'S BLOCK
When a writers block hits, it's as though the world has closed up. For some writers the block can last months. The following tricks will help break the block.
1.) Recognize if you've been working particularly hard that you may need a complete break. Richard Ford takes a year off after publishing a book before he jumps into a new project. Take the time, don't read, don't write. Or read and don't write. Try naked bowling.
2.) Clean your work area and make a decision that you will begin to write.
3.) Sit down and free write for a certain amount of time, no excuses. Read Peter Elbow's books on free writing if you don't know what I mean. Do not judge your writing at this point. The goal is to write.
4.) Stop working on the big project for a while, allow many others to start in the form of notes. This means...
5.) Stop judging your work for a while. I think most blocks come from either a fear of not succeeding or of being over critical about what we are doing. The goal is to find freedom and joy in the process again. If you're worried about keeping your critical skills sharp write a review of another writer's work, or read some non fiction. Clive James has some nice critical essays in this regard.
6.) Stop rushing toward closure. Writers ruin their process by pressuring themselves to wrap up a project. Allow it to sit and ferment, to change and grow. The operative word is "allow". If you have a deadline, a class, for example, you may end up with a slightly ragged work, but if you've been steadily working and allowing it to grow, you will find more depth enters the work. Vladimir Horowitz, great pianist, made tons of faux notes while playing at Carnegie Hall, but the energy and interpretation more than carried the day.
7.) Turn off the negative thoughts. Sounds trite but when I talk to writers suffering from a block they describe themselves and their work extremely negatively saying things like: I can't do this, my work is terrible, even telling everyone they have writer's block. It becomes sort of self perpetuating. Stop worrying.
8.) Remember that Hemingway said all first drafts are shit. One of the greatest writers in the world. If he believes this we should too. In otherwords, take the pressure off yourself to make anything good.
9.) Allow your voice to be. What I mean is sometimes blocks come because we're trying to write "good" stuff or "literary" stuff when what we really need to be doing is just telling our story the way we need to tell it with our own voice. It may be an odd voice or one that most people don't like. So what.
10.) Write first, revise later. Don't mix this up unless your Anthony Burgess. Write as much and as fast as you can, have fun, play games, experiment. Do not judge. Only judge at a later point when the entire draft is done and you get into revision mode. To mix these up is a a recipe for writer's block.

Rarefied Literature Deserving to be Read

2009-08-04T12:01:00.003-06:00

I took stock of my reading list/pile/heap and realized a good deal of my interest lies with metafiction. The latest book has been The Death of the Novel and Other Stories by Ronald Sukenick, 1932-2004. The link takes you to a google book where you can read some of it. This is one of those books that prompts me to think about all sorts of things related to style, structure, storytelling, and writing in general. Apparently half the book is a transcription of conversations that were tape recorded, not my favorite parts, and the rest more conventionally structured prose. The latter should be required reading.

Sukenick says he wants to write a story with infolding and outfolding, and he achieves it. Stories move forward in a highly educated stream of consciousness but then they loop back around, revisiting threads and following tangents. What I like best in today's climate is how he really redefines a story in a hypernarrative form -- nearest in intent and style are, in my recent memory, works by Metcalf and Michaels, and a short work by Acker in Biting the Error. If editors want to get an idea what a story can be -- they keep asking for stories that take risks -- they'd do well to read this book.

The Birds is a hilarious end to the book and it includes one of the funnier little quips I've read in a while. I'll try to remember it exactly: Q. What is the defining characteristic of the Bald Eagle? A. Its balls.

Fearless Fiction Anthology

2009-07-25T16:03:00.003-06:00

I'll be in the anthology titled Can't Lit: Fearless Fiction from Broken Pencil Magazine due out soon, ECW Press, Richard Rosenbaum, Editor.

If all the stories are as fun as mine, it will be a great late summer/fall read !!

The award goes to......

2009-07-16T14:04:00.003-06:00

Do you find yourself saying what's the worst book I've read all year? I do. I actually go out of my way to read a promisingly bad one each summer. This summer's brilliant title is Starvation Camp by an author who has been a "full-time professional writer since 1969. He has written more than fifty novels." Well quantity does not equal quality, to cite an outdated saw that suddenly presents relevancy.

The story concerns a Mountie whose friends are killed. The remainder of the book has him chasing the culprits across Alaska and down to California. A chase is a plot, right? (I do like the movie Duel). Starvation has little to do with the book, except the murders evidently killed roadhouse owners for food.

The book opens with McQuestion (yes his name in the book -- one of those names you cough over ten times because you can't believe the author chose it)sensing trouble. He jumps off his dogsled and rushes to the door where he removes his snowshoes. Pretty interesting how he wears snowshoes while dogsledding. Bill Pronzini writes, "The feeling of wrongness crawled on McQuestion's neck like a stinging brule fly." The Brule is a river in Wisconsin and Minnesota, if you didn't know. I'm not sure they have their own fly. This feeling of wrongness stems from the fact Molly Malone (taken from the popular song and used by Beckett) has not left her "night lantern" burning. I'd like to see her "day lantern." Inside he finds a "bowl of applesauce made from dried apples". Recipe anyone? After he leaves the crime scene, he heads into the swirling snow, he uses the word "whipping" where the northern lights are shining. His match goes out and "McQuestion said, Christ! in a thick, choked voice."

You can always get, from one of these oil pan liners some useful wisdom sooner or later; I do wish to pass it along for the edification of all gentle readers. Page 10: "Liquor didn't mix with sorrow and hate, either." Shhh, don't tell anyone else.

Along the way we meet "Three-Inch White". Nice name but how did he get it? And we learn that "Only a damn-fool cheechako lets his beard grow in Yukon winter." That has to be because razors grow on fir trees. A cheechako means tenderfoot or newcomer in Alaskan slang. Quiz time: Do you know what this sentence start means when you read it?: "He tamped out the dottle..." At least he did it before the verse in McQuestion's head started "repeating itself over and over." McQuestion rushes onward, page after page, but the criminals mush just as well. "Damn Ravenhill and his trail savvy." At times the tension really mounts: "The only mishap he suffered was a twisted ankle on the eighteenth day, when he broke a snowshoe harness on an ice hummock. It was a minor sprain -- and he had an extra pair of showshoes on the sledge." Whew! I was quite worried there for a millisecond or less. McQuestion presses onward. "He was sweating inside his clothing from the exertion of the climb." Don't you just hate it when you stop sweating outside of your clothing? Once in California he gets directions. "The policeman said it was over a mile away...and told him how to get there by streetcar." Wow a whole mile, you mean a twelve minute walk? It took him just under a half an hour by streetcar.

Don't worry readers, I slogged onward, chapter after chapter, in pursuit of the ending until I found him setting up characters for his next book, the fifty first? According to the back of the book this author has been called "Stunning". Read it and prepare to have the feeling of stunness crawl up your neck. It won't be pleasant.

Sundre Review by Devon Code

2009-06-28T13:46:00.005-06:00

Devon Code has written a review for Quill & Quire. It's clear to me that he really understood the book. Thanks Devon, I look forward to reading some of your work now !! Here's what he wrote:

Canadian Notes and Queries, WTF??

2009-06-18T11:39:00.005-06:00

The new issue of CNQ (Canadian Notes & Queries) just arrived. It’s full of some terrific reading: ponder Steven W. Beattie’s “Fuck Books: Some Thoughts on Canned Lit” and then read David Mason’s love affair with books. There’s more and I’ve not read it all – I would like to respond to some of what I’ve already read. I was really beginning to like this magazine.

Then I came across a hideously ridiculous article that is making me seriously question the editorial judgment behind the magazine. It’s one thing to rant a bit about the current state of affairs as Beattie does. Has Canadian literature become embodied by a “persistent and virulent strain in CanLit” that “rely for their force and effect upon prose of heightened poeticisms and lyrical trills…”? It goes on. Yes and no. Beattie rakes Fugitive Pieces across the coals, with good reason. On the other hand Red Dog Red Dog by Patrick Lane is one such novel relying on heightened poetic language and frankly the fact it didn’t win every award in Canada including the Booker is a bit of a disgrace. It is truly one of the most magnificently written novels I’ve read in years. It’s quite another thing to run poorly written, poorly considered, rambling verbiage that wastes 13 pages.
I’m talking about the long masturbatory hortatory harangue by Ron Shuebrook that reads like one of Hilton Kramer’s rants in his garbage magazine The New Criterion.
Let me preface. I was in a meeting the other day discussing a grant and one person said, “everyone knows what makes a really good work of art.” I was the first to jump all over this statement and others in the room followed suit.

Ron Shuebrook would probably defend the statement. His position seems to be that great art is Western Art of the best white male European tradition and that today’s artists are falling prey to contemporary influences -- subtext, why can’t they just learn what they’re supposed to learn, why can’t they go back to being serious and creating the good stuff. He calls these contemporary influences “disturbing factors.” For Shuebrook the lineage of great contemporary art began with Cezanne and went through Matisse, Marsden Hartley to Diebenkorn, including Motherwell when he feels like it. It’s a hackneyed saw, one that was promoted by many art schools last century, to their detriment. I might even guess the Art Student’s League in New York still believes and teaches some version not far from this, having moved a bit up from the position that all art must be done in ochre, like Rembrandt.
Shuebrook is just another old white male trying to defend a Modernist position that for too long in the art world remained unquestioned. This was exactly the position more than one of my instructors took while I was an undergraduate student in 1978. I believe they all have fallen prey to what might be called the historicity syndrome, the works’ inclusion in history makes them great. Others would call it succumbing to marketing. Proponents believe that quality is embedded in these works in some unique way that fits for all people and can be taught, including the fact their students will never learn it as well as they know it.

Shuebrook is so full of himself the article makes for a tough slog. He says, “Having now produced thousands of works, I have come to recognize in my sustained practices that I have had no desire to have my own art replace the accomplished art of others.” This is pretty much meaningless, no art replaces that of others. What I think he means is that he’s great but merely wants to hang along side those artists of history he considers great, not to replace them on the walls. And I guess he wants to let us know he’s done thousands of works. Hell, I interviewed one artist who did hundreds of thousands of works so is Shuebrook lazy?

He continues, “Rather I have been more interested in building my own critical contributions on an intellectual and psychological foundation of historical art and pictorial knowledge and understanding.” He has this in italics. Many things are going on here. He assumes there is some shared and accepted body of knowledge when it comes to art and especially serious/great art. He can’t see he’s promoting a privileged, colonial, outdated position that it might hardly deserve notice except it is still found throughout art schools and it appears in this contemporary magazine. Hey Ron, wake up. There is no one way of knowing. People are diverse. Art is diverse. Nobody has the authority any more to say there is one set of criteria related to genuineness or quality or whatever you want to call it that could possibly fit for all works of art and especially for all peoples.

Secondly the quote suggests Shuebrook works under what we call the fallacy of intention. Well, I meant to do XYZ is not good enough when the work does something else. Beginning artists all do this, well I meant my work to say XYZ. The answer usually is that it’s actually doing ABC. They learn over time to be more perceptive critics of their own work. In the real world if you pinch someone’s behind and are brought up on harassment charges, you can’t say, I meant to do …add your reason here. It is not an excuse.

Next Shuebrook goes onto discuss “great western traditions of painting that have set the highest standards of aesthetic accomplishment.” Could he please write down exactly what these are and for whom? Oh yes, no need. It’s been done in many How-To books, How to Paint Like Old Masters; How to Compose a Painting etc. He’s just moved from realism to abstraction but the agenda is the same. These are no longer relevant to anyone except hacks. Shuebrook continues to denounce that younger artists are not much interested in serious art and great works, they merely follow the path of superficiality, smug ignorance, and self-delusion. Has that pissed off most of you younger artists yet? Write Shuebrook and maybe he’ll let you study with him to learn the CORRECT way to paint.
After a while Shuebrook’s not-too-deep rants get exceedingly tedious. I’m still on page one of the article by the way. Contemporary trends are disturbing for “knowledgeable observers and mature artists of integrity” like Shuebrook. He just doesn’t stop.

How many artists across the globe would he be disenfranchising with this narrow minded dogma? And then at the start of page two he sort of admits his reality, “Although my assertions may seem to be coloured by a generational nostalgia for an ideal time of widespread cultural awareness, balanced analysis, and professional standards…”. Yep, it’s his own past seen through rose colored bifocals. Guess what, it wasn’t like that even then. He’s ignored countless movements back then that challenged forcefully everything he believes in. Earlier this year I put together a list of art movements since 1955 and counted have been over a hundred. And I readily acknowledge this list excludes most of the world who was creating art during this time, often with very different knowledge bases and sets of evaluative criteria.

Shuebrook goes on for another few pages lamenting the decline of serious, great art while name dropping as many artists as he can that he either studied with or looked at the art of as a means of trying to, I guess, insert himself into a history that has excluded him. In all my years in New York I never heard of this guy. Yeah, many artists try this strategy but to think it’s a truly workable strategy is a bit irrational. He drops names of artists I knew and studied with too; so he liked Jack Youngerman. Well get this, I studied with Jack at grad school. He was brilliant, witty, smart as a whip, generous, and he supported me by seeing to the heart of my endeavours. He wanted artists to find their true voice, and here’s something Shuebrook won’t like hearing, Youngerman wanted our works to look new, to be of the present and not look as though situated in the past.

Shuebrooks own paintings are a sad pastiche of other artist’s figured-out styles, at least the ones featured with this article. As artists we know this, we fault artists for merely rehashing other peoples’ styles because we know it means they never discovered their own voice. Combine the lines of Brice Marden or those like the drawings of Diebenkorn with the flat areas Matisse, use black from Motherwell, think Hans Hofmann had the last word on plasticity, dip into the paint handling of David Row and that’s about it. His works look dated. In art if it looks dated it is dated. If it looks dated and is not ironic then we worry. Here’s a hint: the 1950’s took place over sixty years ago? Time to move on. Shuebrooks paintings look overly composed, styled, mannered, and predetermined. They are safe to the point of boredom. I can’t image this guy taking any chances without first seeing the effect in an art book or magazine.

Equally offensive is Shuebrooks continued use of some vague idea around perceptual engagement as though this makes up for all else. I suspect this follows some Ab Ex mandate that says the only content of art should be the formal elements. He writes, “I also have come to believe that authentic meaning can only be achieved through the viewer’s perceptual engagement with the actual work of art.” He doesn’t do it but I will: Apologies to all the visually impaired people in the world who may experience art in a way that’s not perceptual and to all other artists who know art can be/mean many different things including the non perceptual. As an artist keenly interested in perceptual phenomena, I have no real idea of what Shuebrook is attempting to say. This is because it sounds good. It’s a buzz word. Ah yes, visual art must be perceptual to carry meaning. Again the viewpoint is narrow, outdated, wrong, and really quite annoying. His final backing his position up with Hannah Arendt, she died in 1975, again shows he’s really out of touch with the reality of contemporary art and thought. Enjoy your little pompous self-created throne, and don’t forget to flush when you’re done.

All this said, I have to question why CNQ thought such backwards thinking and rambling naval gazing was fit for its magazine. If they want to continue such features, I can put them in touch with hundreds other such artists living bitter lives in which they continually justify their never having been seen as great (they don’t seem to see the contradiction in being bitter and justifying). I beg you please, no more of this crap.

first MOUNTAIN

2009-06-14T08:04:00.002-06:00

first MOUNTAIN

by Paulette Dubé

What is worth noticing?

It depends on who’s noticing, what’s their particular lens, and where are they looking.

True enough, this comment could be said about any poet and yet the new poems of Paulette Dubé seem to forefront the first steps on the Buddhist noble eightfold path: right mindfulness, right concentration, right view. A stick taps the chime, a note sounds, the sound overtakes, reverberations fill the room, fading becomes focus.

first MOUNTAIN is a collection of such moments. First MOUNTAIN is also a book of 183 poems, a half a year’s days that chronicle one spring to the next in a small town not far from Jasper in the Rocky Mountains. The year begins with the shining light of a “basket moon” and leaves flexing “sturdy nutmeg arms”. Days ticking onward through three seasons until we one more reach the spring(ing) “first crocus/ courageous outrageous flower/ furred to brave snow streaked land”. Over this year a house was built, a knuckle skinned, animals arrived, animals died, a day was named, we learned a recipe for cough syrup. Days heap upon us, to use Lisa Robertson’s phrase. They do in small ways. Events are exposed with clarity: Owl eats a nectarine, a raven arrives on a fence, a last bee flies “around me round/ and round, seamless”.

One hundred-thirteenth day:

memories permit

us to speak on things our heart

tends to in the night

When I was younger and had more time, my dreams included reaching a master level in chess (I soon learned the disadvantage of not starting young in order to hardwire synapses in a chessy sort of way). I improved the most by solving chess problems from Laszlo Polgar’s Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations, and Games. Yes, his daughter Judit is now a top GM. I reached about the halfway point of first MOUNTAIN when I began to really be bothered by a feeling I couldn’t quiet put my finger on, it was this: the poems reminded me reminded of doing chess puzzles. The brevity, the tight construction of each poem, the reoccurring elements, the personal yet slightly disengaged viewpoint, the required focus, and the clues suggesting a path of engagement were all similar.

The starting point for Dubé is the perceived, which she then modifies with both a sense of a larger entity and the interior dialogue with repetition triggering resonance. Here’s an example:

Sixtieth day:

hold the first creek ice in your hand

it is enough, if you worry about glaciers

smell the ice on your wrist as it melts

it is enough

Animals abound throughout, each named like those of Milne. Magpie is a frequent visitor. Squirrel appears. Crow is a common characters, but not quite the trickster as in Native mythology, never embodying the somber mythological tones of Ted Hughes but more as duende/child of a larger living world. Water is seen as essence and Creator rules the unseen. In these poetic oblations each thing seems to have a purpose in a teleological world, yet, although named cleanly, the quiddity of animals and nature is more ephemeral than we first realize. She writes:

through a door some see as a fork in the tree

miracles take on the height two eagles can scale

For me this is the theme of the works in this collection. In many instances such as this Dubé provides the Japanese koan for our contemplation. I’m reminded of Gert Jonke who in Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique has an artist who suspends between two trees a painting of nature, which is fully indistinguishable from nature. A simulacrum may also be a framing device.

Playing counterpoint to such metaphysical musings are poetic games, most notably are couplets, a touch of concrete poetry, or this, “Crow, Raven, Owl of Night” -- ringing a Blakean bell. Other poems offer aphoristic advice, “a thorn of experience is worth a wilderness of warning” or “a trail is born/if it is taken” or “to closely step in the tracks of another/makes the path easier/but less your own”.

The year passes, too slowly, too quickly. By this I mean we read a few at a time and when we reach the end of the book we long for more. Outside my window a box of baby chickadees squeak rhythmically every couple minutes as their parents return with food. The day is cloudy and cool. I’m beginning to adjust to the world on Dubé’s terms. The poems forced me to settle down and begin to accept the natural world as described at the author’s speed. Think of walking through the woods where the ground is covered with irregular spots of sunlight. Each poem is a patch of that light, brilliant in on its own and in context, delicate and viewable, beautiful as an element of the whole. And like most excellent poetry it provides the impetus for spiraling ideas. Sound the chime.

Read

Reflect.

Ponder.

Repeat.

SUNDRE hits Bestseller List, again !!

2009-06-09T20:44:00.002-06:00

Sundre on Calgary bestseller list for the second week in a row!

It's on the list with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Good to a Fault, B is for Beer.

For those of you who've read it, thanks. I look forward to sharing it with more people at readings and festivals.

Reading for Restless Nights

2009-05-25T21:20:00.002-06:00

Restless Nights
by
Dino Buzzati

Buzzati was a journalist, painter, writer of novels and short stories. His following has always been greater on the continent than in the UK or North America, some say due to late translations. Located for most of his life in Milan, Buzzati blended a journalistic style (sort of in this book) with the fantastic fiction you'd expect from Barthelme and Calvino. I suppose the goal was to ground tales in tropes of reality (there's a good one). Restless Nights consists of about 30 stories. Here we discover prisoners who must face the people of the town to plead for release (none have ever been granted) or who tell the real story of the Eiffel Tower. A girl jumps from a tall building and chats with people on her way down, eventually passing the lower floors as an old woman. I tended to read much of these tales as metaphors for the writing process, and indeed his The Scriveners is about the Lord's (as in ruler of the kingdom) scriveners who eventually are summoned by a red light. When that happens they must write non stop, or as near to that ideal as possible, for the remainder of their lives. Buzzati was a mediocre painter too, you can view some of his work here. These are surrealistic works for the most part, sort of de Chirico meets Art Brut.

Ex voto - Le formiche mentali, 1970

Here's the work of his that I like best, ants crawling through the brain. The stories are quick, fantastic, and worth a read.

Sundre Tops Bestseller List !

2009-05-20T09:18:00.000-06:00

Pages On Kensington's Bestseller List (May 17, 2009)

Original Edition Fiction and Poetry

1. Sundre - Christopher Willard

2. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - Jane Austen, Seth Grahame-Smith

3. Come Thou Tortoise - Jessica Grant

4. B is for Beer - Tom Robbins

5. Pygmy - Chuck Palahniuk

6. Stone's Fall - Iain Pears

7. Listening: The Last Poems of Margaret Avison - Margaret Avison

8. Book of Clouds - Chloe Aridjis

9. The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters

10. The Disappeared - Kim Echlin

Pages Reading (W)rap-up

2009-05-15T07:54:00.002-06:00

A HUGE THANKS to everyone who showed up for the reading. What a pleasure it was to see lots of friends and colleagues, both from ACAD and the literary world. I hope everyone enjoyed hearing a portion of the book. When I read that last line it was like the end of a symphony where a palpable note hung in the air.

I'd gone back and forth on what part to read and as I gauged the reaction of you I knew I made a decent choice. I'm truly beholden many people; in particular I can't wait to give the people at Vehicule Press props in person, which will probably happen in the fall.

Later today is the reading in Sundre (the town). It's their 100th birthday this year, which I didn't know when I began this project at least two years ago. It looks like a beautiful day and it should be fun.

2009-05-06T19:21:00.005-06:00

Véhicule Press is pleased to invite you to the launch of

Sundre
by Christopher Willard

Wednesday, May 13, 7:30 pm

Pages Kensington, Calgary

Friday, May 15, at 3:00 pm

1135 Kensington Road NW, Calgary
403.283.6655

Sundre Museum
211 - 1st. Ave. SW,Sundre
403.638.3233

An unsettling secret joins husband and wife as they sift through layers of recollection in a quest to find comfort, philosophical acceptance, and ultimately forgiveness.

Set on a family farm in Sundre, Alberta during the late 1960s, at a time of transition when farming was shifting away from tradition, Sundre is a haunting meditation on the limits of love and mercy, on the natural and the unnatural.

Told in a tone that is as dignified as it is unsettling, Sundre builds to a foreboding and fundamental revelation in a mood reminiscent of Sam Shepard’s best drama. Sundre is an homage to a way of life bygone and to lasting hard-earned truths.

Praise for Sundre:

“An affectionate elegy for a gone time, laced with strands of old-fashioned prairie wisdom in the face of life's sad turns.” –Robert Coover

“Christopher Willard writes with a razor blade, cutting language to the quick. His sharp-edged minimalist style strips this farm family saga to its bare essentials turning Prairie Gothic into Prairie Post-postmodern.” –Dave Margoshes

"Christopher Willard's Sundre is an elegaic tone poem full of humour and longing, a paean to family lore and the enduring power of storytelling." --Adam Sol

Christopher Willard is a writer and visual artist. His art appears in collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His novel, Garbage Head, was published by Esplanade Books in 2005. He lives in Calgary.

Sundre is in the Esplanade Books fiction imprint of Véhicule Press.

For more information contact:
Maya Assouad, Marketing Manager, Véhicule Press
marketing@vehiculepress.com, (514) 844-6073
www.vehiculepress.com

UPCOMING READINGS

2009-04-26T19:49:00.002-06:00

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)

2009-04-13T20:05:00.002-06:00

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.)

2009-04-11T09:14:00.002-06:00

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

2009-04-10T17:07:00.002-06:00

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.

Discovery is a tough pill

2009-03-22T21:36:00.003-06:00

You know when you suddenly come upon something and you hit your head and say, where the frick was I? Yep, this has happened. I might have found this earlier had I really paid attention to the author list at the back of my Schlovsky book. So I was in Lethbridge recently visiting the U of L art department and watching a presentation by artist Laurel Smith on her Ornaminimalism work. And afterward I spent some time in the library where I discovered The Review of Contemporary Fiction. What a great little journal this is, tri quarterly and focused on writers whose works resist convention and easy categorization. I now have a whole new list of names to look up. Sometimes too you know you're on to something when your research loops back around to a book you really like, in this case it's Biting the Error, a book of narrative explorations in multiple essays published by Coach House Books. And the other side to this is the Review is published by the Dalkey Archives, University of Illinois, which put out the Schlovsky. So this is a short post of some brilliant little things, art and writing. Oh yes, I did really hit my head, walked into a fricken door jam in the middle of two doors as I was oogling at the brutalist architecture. Now I strut my stuff with a lump and a cut.

Upcoming Exhibition

2009-02-21T22:07:00.002-07:00

March 7, Herringer Kiss Gallery
2-5 pm, artist in attendance.

We are all Axolotls?

2009-02-07T10:14:00.002-07:00

Have you read Julio Cortazar? Should we read him? Should and if you her me him they was reading him and she he they we wrote about it? (As yet another car full of girls pulls up out front).

He's an amazing writer, pomo, deep, continually setting the reader up for the surprise that then spins into levels of depth. We clue in he's setting up reverberations from the start, from syntactic to narrative and then to a wonderful blend. If you've ever seen the movie Blowup and you've wondered why the guy spends so much time walking and driving around and then you decided this was in part the true point of the story, then you'll begin to get Cortazar. Lit classes go nuts on Axolotl and there's plenty to read on the net. I want to briefly talk about Blowup.

I first saw it as a movie, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni; originally hailed as a masterpiece, IMDB now says few will defend it but they cater to teenager pulp. The film is strange and wonderful. It lingers for years after seeing it, and that's a sign of a great film. The movie is not strictly based on the story but it does capture the ennui and introspection that runs through the story. Seriously, check it out. The story is gorgeous too, parts of it are on the net, but why read half when you could read all of it. As mentioned Cortazar's stories often start out without the narrative thread, or with one thread spins to another. You'll be doing yourself a disservice to read only part. Then here's something to broaden the fun...check out Keren Cytter's film on Ubu Web titled Les Ruissellements du Diable (2008). It's her take on the same story, you can watch it on line. She does a good job visually capturing a spark of his writing.

In my own world I'm still going through the galleys. It's funny having one's head back in a book completed months ago, for the most part when one wants to move forward to a new voice and idea. In response I've been gathering, sponge mind, hours at the library writing short, partial ideas, researching and reading as much as possible with no defined goal. I want things to germinate and be generative. And I'm working hard on the next body of paintings that has to be shown in a month, which is exhausting in its own way. Less brain burn, perhaps, but the concentration is the same.

Who Said It?

2009-01-25T19:02:00.002-07:00

Who said this?

"All great novels are experimental."

Bugging the heck out of me that I'm not finding it via quick google.

John O'Hara on John O'Hara

2009-01-23T12:26:00.002-07:00

Writer, alcoholic, driver of a Rolls Royce, described as a "social commentator with a semi-snobbish point of view" avid reader of Who's Who, John O'Hara is presented in "An Artist in His Own Fault: John O'Hara on Writer's and Writing."

Here are words by and interviews with the American writer who believed he could publish anything and who generally considered himself one of America's greatest writers. He may have put Faulkner above of him, calling him America's only literary genius, but it's hard to tell if he really put the man ahead or was locking elbows.

In retrospect O'Hara seemed to believe in writing, not particularly in rewriting (as least as he said in interviews). We know he rewrote Appointment to Samarra. For more of his thoughts, check out this collection. It's not great and it feels outdated. Nonetheless, O'Hara is a man of tidbits and casual conversation. He read only old works like Doyle or Hemingway, he sold RTS having written only 25K words for $500 and a monthly stipend. He never missed a deadline. One gets the feeling he felt a rivalry with Fitzgerand and Ring Lardner. Here is one of his more process based points where he describes three aids in writing From the Terrace.

"I had an overall chart, placing the major characters, and those close to them, in time -- what they were doing when. Then there was a journal I kept called 'So Far,' in which I noted down the events I'd covered, and there was a notebook my wife kept with pages for each character and a record of his appearances where, and in what connection."

Most critics now see RTS and BUtterfield8 [sic] as his great books with all others dim by comparison.

Another interview: answers to questions from the Daily Princetonian, 1959:

Q. "Whom do you think is our greatest living writer?
A. "Mr. O'Hara: That word should be who, not whom. Nominative case."

Sundre is moving forward

2009-01-18T20:40:00.002-07:00

Yep, slow but steady, the galleys on their way to me soon, evidently. I am chomping at the bit to to see just what the layout and design will be. I've heard some real attention went into the book to make it something special.

The most I've seen has been the cover. And I was recently directed to an example of the font, but probably that's a secret at this point so I won't link to it now but I can say this, it's something new.

Other books to get me through this waiting period that I'm poking around in and may address sooner or later:
Barry Hannah Geronimo Rex
Anne Carson Decreation
Robert Haas Now & Then
The collected poems of Wallace Stevens

As John Metcalf said, novelists should read poetry. I tend to do that too. Further, when writing long works I tend to read short works, and vice versa.

Appointment in Samarra

2009-01-18T20:35:00.002-07:00

John O'Hara's little book, Appointment in Samarra is a wonderful weekend read if you want to get back to what Updike says is the real roaring twenties, beyond what Fitzgerald wrote. We visit the last days of Julian English who parties like it's 1930, which it is for some of the book. The pacing is wonderful, rushing ahead with a spark that even Dorothy Parker approved of. What struck me most was the absolutely brilliant third person voice that allowed the story to remain unencumbered. It's just so lacking today that this was like opening a door to a cold winter's day. Brisk, refreshing, it provided the ability to sit back and breathe.

As a counterpoint I'm reading Red Dog Red Dog -- Patrick Lane -- superlative work -- I'll get to it in a later post.

The Bigger the Better?

2008-12-12T14:56:00.002-07:00

Quick Review of
Fat Woman
by Leon Rooke

One of the biggies of Canadian Literature, Leon Rooke; since I'd never read him I just wrapped my arms around Fat Woman, a slim novel. This is a simple story, a woman has put on too much weight, her wedding ring is turning her finger purple and her arm is swelling. Her husband may or may not be in the process of getting fired from his job. She refused to see a doctor. At the beginning the husband is seen nailing up the bedroom window, at the end it is clear he means to lock her in to force a weight loss. It's a plot that probably won't make Oprah's list for more than one reason. The simplicty of the writing is wonderful. It's straightforward, spinning out of a literal her and now only a few times (which I appreciate but I know many people do not). Mostly it's grit-slang peppered with wonderful similes. We follow the Ella Mae throughout one day and as each small event happens her mind spins into stories about her past and her childhood. It's the story of Jack Sprat and his wife when Jack gets sick of her obesity. Or better, it's the white trash version of Mrs. Dalloway, which to think of it this way is quite humorous. Ella Mae swings thorugh moods as fast as she crams cookies into her mouth, justifying, lamenting, hoping, caterwauling, and generally trying to make things work. For a first novel this is pretty impressive. It may not be particularly deep but it's highly collequial and tons of fun. Try it: nothing ventured nothing gained.

Remember this

2008-12-07T19:02:00.002-07:00

The primary purpose of the work of art
is to provide rules within which a given meaning can operate.

Best Short Stories

2008-12-05T12:26:00.003-07:00

I was sent a short story by my friend Julie Marden, an up and coming writer and another by Bill Austin, another Calgary based writer. Both were really wonderful to read. It's great to see people forming style and voice.

That said I'm really here today to unequivocally tout the person I think is the best short story writer out there. Yeah, tough to say, problematic, probably wrong. Still I've been reading Joy Williams again, and you know there is something I must be missing. She's entirely straightforward but nothing thrills me. I'm beginning to question why she gets every MFA graduand gushing. So, the person not getting the press and who I think tops the list is Leonard Michaels, 1933-2003.

I've spoken of him before but I'm still reading him. Every time I pick up the book of his stories and read an old or new one, I just flip out. They are amazing pieces of writing: brilliant, sharp, speedy, unexpected, smart, and crafted to precision. They blow nearly everyone out of the water. End of short story. I can't laud him enough.

Reading them gets me thinking that maybe there are too many books on how to write short stories out there, that maybe this is why stories today are so conventional. Tackle a problem 3x, build to a moment of revelation, and so on, the rules have formed a norm. Frankly it gets dull.

Take my prescription: go out and buy the collected stories of Leonard Michaels, NOW. Sit down and read it. Read it again. Now think about why he has not changed the overall nature of short story writing.

There is some information about him on then net. Poke around at wikipedia and follow the links at the bottom of the page.

Cover Design

2008-11-29T16:21:00.000-07:00

Here's some terrific news, David Drummond has posted the cover design for my upcoming novella, link below. Check out all of his great cover designs while you're there.

http://daviddrummond.blogspot.com/

It finally hit me

2008-11-23T09:37:00.002-07:00

from Killing in the Name of by Rage Against the Machine:

Killing in the name of!
Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses
Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses
Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses
Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses
Huh!

Vague remembrance here. I think that's what Sol's line reminded me of. Rah Rah, anapest, anapest, anapest, Spondee! Not here, but it's a good cheer.

Ok, time to get working on the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle.

Jeremiah, Ohio by Adam Sol

2008-11-21T16:34:00.004-07:00

Having read a rave review, I read Adam Sol's Jeremiah, Ohio, a tale told as poetry published by Anansi Press. (the link is to a brief interview with Sol)

I really like it, but I like lexical play as much as anyone and Sol is a huge fan, bigger than I am probably. I'll get to that. Briefly the story concerns a Twinkie and other snacks seller who meets a sidewalk prognosticator and pontificator. Pop culture and the biblical mingle on a road trip that heads from Ohio to New York City.

There are some beautiful lines in here: "Being run out of town is not the same thing as being ignored." or "It was Ohio slate that maked his cheek." or "I gave his eyes to Iowa, his kidney/to an angry diabetic from Duluth." Sol is able to smack something unexpected to the paper, a result of thinking and watching, of mixing and matching. "We will be fresh from our convention. We will/preach and prove."

Each poem is titled, and Sol is not afraid to toss in all the tricks. Frost did one double line, well Sol does seven in one poem, sometimes changing one word.
"The end of a Sound is a river, this end of my mind one hair.
The end of a Sound is a river, this end of my mind one hair."
Apologies to everyone, but I really like that line. It reminds me of something, a song or chant or poem that is pretty well known although I cannot remember which one. Perhaps some reader will identify it? Just remembered, maybe, it's alot like "The bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain, to see what he could see." Similar too to "I went to the animal fair, the birds and the beasts were there." But Sol doesn't play with children's ditties in a straightforward way like Sylvia Legris does in Nerve Squall. It Feels good to identify something that way though.

I tried to read it straight through; he writes, "...yet will I urge, cajole, bluster and muster." Yes he does, non stop. Craftily crafting cadences that catch, or fetch, sometimes a stretch, to simply suit a sly six syllable sentence. Dean Drever, sculptor once created an aluminum baseball bat engraved with the words, "The only thing you'll ever understand." To me that's an accurate presentation of Sol's voice. He let's us know in through presentation and subtly directs us to the larger whole.

When the book shines, Sol notices that which passes us by. For example we see a list of typical signs one would see when travelling, Wal-Mart coming soon, Forget the Damned Dog -- Beware of Owner, and so on, which we are told beforehand, which in a way is sad, that they are all five syllables. How fun it would have been to leave this hanging until later and then be surprised by it so we reconsider.

Sol loves his alliteration, assonances, and rhymes. He plays games with syllables all over the place, 15 drop down the page to a line of one syllable.

This is all in your face writing/prophecy. Think of Billy the Kid by Ondaatje for an example that works similarily but with a different palette of colors.

I highly recommend the book. It's fun, it's fresh, its a grabber. As Sol writes, "May the words of my mouth/and the declamations of my fury/tear holes in the outerwear of the people.//Let them feel the hot gust." And we will because Sol tosses words at us with the cocksure bravado of Ozmandias. Truly this is the one book worth taking a long look at, you won't regret it.

Weirdest Book Titles

2008-10-30T16:14:00.003-06:00

Apparently someone is compiling a list of weirdest book titles. Frankly I think Ken Sparling's
"Dad says he saw you at the mall" should be there, or really what I always mis-think the title is when I try to remember it: "I think I saw your mother at the mall."

So in honor of this, the 100th post on this site, here's the list for your enjoyment.

1978: Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice (University of Tokyo Press)
1979: The Madam as Entrepreneur: Career Management in House Prostitution (Transaction Press)
1980: The Joy of Chickens (Prentice Hall)
1981: Last Chance at Love: Terminal Romances
1982: Population and Other Problems (China National Publications)
1983: The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling (MIR)
1984: The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History and Its Role in the World Today (Constable)
1985: Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Power: How to Increase the Other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts (Westwood Publishing Co)
1986: Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality (Brunner/Mazel)
1987: No Award

1988: Versailles: The View From Sweden University of Chicago Press)
1989: How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art (Ten Speed Press)
1990: Lesbian Sadomasochism Safety Manual (Lace Publications)
1991: No Award
1992: How to Avoid Huge Ships (Cornwell Maritime Press)
1993: American Bottom Archaeology (University of Illinois Press)
1994: Highlights in the History of Concrete (British Cement Association)
1995: Reusing Old Graves (Shaw & Son)
1996: Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers (Hellenic Philatelic Society)
1997: The Joy of Sex: Pocket Edition (Mitchell Beazley)
1998: Development in Dairy Cow Breeding and Management: and New Opportunities to Widen the Uses of Straw (Nuffield Farming Scholarship Trust)
1999: Weeds in a Changing World (British Crop Protection Council)
2000: High Performance Stiffened Structures (Professional Engineering Publishing)

Thoughts on Criticism and some reading

2008-10-23T15:12:00.003-06:00

I've not been word-herding as much as I wish lately but I've been reading more.

I'd like digress for a bit and point out that while I am highly opinionated (according to some students and friends) I do try to be fair and my opinions are often changed by a persuasive argument. And I don't dish it out without expecting people to come at me with a similar honed and critical eye.

Whenever I write something that is less than rave, yeah I feel immense degrees of guilt because I know how hard it is to create. Period.

Now I think back to Elysium and say, well, was it really as bad as I made it sound? I believe the parts that I picked on were, yes. But there were some better parts too, the story about the bread was one of the best in the book I think, and while I still don't fully agree with the writing itself in that one, it does begin to hold together and the idea is more considered than others. Would it be good news if I said the stories are average in terms of what I've read out there from Canada, perhaps so -- once the typos are all fixed. Go back and read my Atlantic Monthly reviews and you'll see I rant up and down about their generic quality.

I believe it's an editor's JOB is to protect writers by pointing out and giving writers feedback early so that errors like unclear writing or typos don't make it into the final published work. What I wrote should not have been written by me, rather it should have been the comments by an editor who gave the author time to tune it up.

I also struggle against competing interests when writing reviews. On one hand I detest the lack of an ability to handle criticism and strong opinions by Canadians (at least that's what friends have told me Canadians suffer from). So I think I come on a bit strong because of that. On the other hand, I'm much more careful when providing feedback to students because I recognize their fragility and talent, and I have entered into a longterm contract/peer relationship with them. This personalization and the ongoing self evaluation required when I teach definitely causes me to try and forsee possible outcomes of any criticism before it is voiced. It's different when reviewing a writer I've never met.

Criticism stings in any form, with our without sugar. Yet while I may come on strong, I really do care about what I read and the writers behind the books. This is why I attempt to be so completely honest.

I know I wouldn't have grown as an artist without brutal honesty on the parts of those who had way more experience than I had at the time. This too is why when I do critique, I work at providing feedback that is as clear as possible with exact evidence to back up what I believe. This way it's not some vague generalizing that isn't helpful.

The absolute worst books don't get my time for even a review stating some negative points. One of these is Markio Tamaki's bok titled Fake Id. It's simply juvenile rambling and really quite dull. I read about half and let it drop from my hands. It wasn't worth the effort to throw it.

Now for two little gems. I polished off Foe by Coetzee. (the link is to another blog with a synopsis.) The story starts out with a woman shipwrecked on an island, already inhabited by a bearded man and his mute helper Friday. They get rescued and then Foe dies. The story changes voice here in a way that is absolutely beautiful. The shift of tone and pace threw me for a loop but unlike David Mitchell, it was entirely a related poetic shift that took my breath away. My sense of this gorgeous tale is that it starts out flat-footedly, a simple tale. Then it spins into a second reading, making us reconsider the first part, and then this spins a third time to make us revise all that happened before. Don't be fooled by the simplicity of the beginning, it's a ruse to get us hooked into some deep issues surrounding gender, power, freedom, slavery, and colonialism -- welcome to the world of Coetzee. Kicking in at around 40K or 60K words, if I remember correctly, the book can be polished off in one or two evenings. It's really a wonderful and haunting read.

The second novella I've just finished is another little stunner, this one at about 30 K words by John Metcalf. Did the guy ever stop? Private Parts is a tale of a boy who is obsessed with sex, in a way, who over three sections matures and has his own family. You'd think it was autobiographical according to the tone. Again it's simple, proving what a scholar of Metcalf (whose name I forget, either John Rollins or Barry Cameron probably) said -- the novella as a form sits between prose and poetry, an idea which I completely agree with. As a whole it's straightforward but it's seductive. I kept wanting to say, 'are you kidding me, are you really getting away with this voice' and then suddenly I'd realize that I'd read two more pages, completely sucked into the dreamworld. What sparked me to pull a few books out by him was his short story in The New Quarterly Salon des Refuses issue in which he went nuts on Alberta saying it's the sort of place where hotels have bottle openers on the bedboards. I'll never shake that one.

Elysium Review, Part 2

2008-10-19T21:33:00.003-06:00

Part two of my review of Elysium by Pamela Stewart, published by Anvil Press, Vancouver.

Part one of my review is found on this same blog. This review is part of a wonderful idea called Mini Book Expo.

Elysium is a collection of short stories centered on themes of death and loss, bad lives and bad sex. Unfortunately the troubles suffered by all the characters are made shallow by the many typos (see my first review of the book) and by what I can only describe as unexamined writing. If you want the down and dirty here is my opinion: Piss poor writing, cheap storytelling, grammatical problems, gluts of cliche phrases, shoddy editing, lack of fact checking. You know how you see cars with "New Driver" on a card in the back window? This book should have a sign that says, "New Writer" posted on the back. I can't stress enough how much this book irritated me for it's complete lack of refinement. That Anvil Press published this is a crime. It makes it seem they care very little about publishing -- I hope they soon prove me wrong.

I wanted to like this book, I really did. But, I took issue with many aspects of the writing, from poorly constructed sentences and misplaced commas to the fact everyone speaks with exactly the same voice to twists that are gratuitous and cheap. I'll work my way through them with a few examples, but let me first say that the desire to write a book is commendable. The effort required is outstanding. So why would someone take to press, and why would a publisher undertake a book that is so obviously flawed? I won't account for the market, but perhaps one reason may be attributed to what the author writes about her history: she studied with Barbara Gowdy at Ryerson and she is a member of the Saskatchewan Writers' Guild [sic]. The guild does not put an apostrophe into their name -- let this be an indication of the sloppiness that follows in these stories.

Stewart's first trick is to combine partial sentences with complete sentences. Is this called ellipsis or anapodoton? Maybe someone can help me with this. With this problem. Not only of the word. But of how much. How much. I can take. Before. I quit. Reading.
You get the point. It's without discernable reason, without structural beauty, apparently applied at random. There are many authors who use this with expertise but not Stewart. At other times she sounds like she's read too much Stephen King by using the partial sentences to repeat a point for emphasis. It's ugly and cheap. Really cheap.

She states on the back of the book that she is a "literary proctologist" and that her writing "often looks into places that people generally don't want to look." Why then does she continually use cliches as though she's never even cursorily looked? Couches are red velvet, women have sexual hangups, people finish every drop, things happen, they shed a big fat tear when things are really stressful at work. A true perceiver would have seen the details and would have caught these cliches in editing the book. They are a sign of a writer without experience.

No matter what the story and no matter who the character, the people all talk the same. They speak in the same voice, use the same words and sentence length. This is a sign of a beginning writer. And they use "fuck" all the time when mad. I counted up in one story the number of times the character used the word to punctuate. It wasn't pretty.

Passive verbs abound. No wait, I'll do it in her style. Is it that there are many verbs that are passive and this is a problem?

Let us now move to her insight as she plumbs the depths of the human psyche as people respond to events at the edges of human existence. "I spent the next twenty minutes asking everything I could think of: why did God take my mother, allow the Holocaust, pain, suffering, disease, winding my way through a history of the world's misery." This is about as deep as it gets, about as deep as skimming Google results or polling a third grade class.

Stewart lacks an ability, I believe, to pause and step outside her story to view it with an objective eye. Again this is the sign of a beginning writer. Did she cry when writing them because she felt so much? In "Red means Stop" the two characters are described as "he" and "his brother" but she begins to switch the characters so we get absolutely confused. We end up not knowing who speaks, an frankly we stop caring. Here is an example:

He gave her money too. To get her off his back.
"I'm the man of the house now," he said.
His brother told him he did this to stop their mother from bringing a new man into the house.
"The last thing we need is some guy thinking he's in charge."
His brother's car was off limits to him, except for that one day.

Later in the same story one of them is holding a knife against "the nape of his brother's neck"." Three sentences later he pushes the knife in and watches the blood "drain from his brother's penis." Either this is vague or he cut the penis, which evidently extends from the boy's neck.

On the same page we see her loose Stephen King style hard at work: "He knew he didn't want to find out. Not now, not like this. Maybe not ever." The difference is King usually ends chapters on such notes.

This is what I mean by a seasoned writer being able to step outside and see the stories functioning as they realy are, not as the writer thinks they are.

In "A New Day" we see more vague writing with my comments: "Instead (no comma here) Sherri woke up with a hangover. Lit a smoke, (vague double meaning word here) took a deep drag (cliche) had a coughing fit, (cliche) slugged down (cliche) a bottle of beer after making sure there were no butts in it (how exactly do you do this, especially when the desire is to slug) and started again." (started what again?) (dull sentences breaking Gordon Lish's rule to write the most shining sentence ever written. If she slugged down the beer it would be empty. Can't do that again except with a new one. Did she check again for butts? Did she wake up with a hangover again?

In "All Day Breakfast" her lack of care with stories even gets her to contradict herself. "I know what they do to the food here, and I make sure it doesn't happen to his. Not that we're negligent, but when you're preparing large quantities of food anything can happen. A fly lands in pancake batter and no one notices. Things like that." But she, evidently does notice, and she prevents it. But how can she prevent it if "no one" which I assume includes her, notices.

Oh yes, on the page previous her whole story is a fight about a vegetarian and her meat eating boyfriend. He eventually uses a lambskin condom, which is the setup to the whole punchline that is a book she picks up titled, "Raold Dahl's Lamb to Slaughter." Hilarious. Really hilarious, funniest thing I've seen in years. I hope you understand my cynicism. One: that is not a twist. Two: that is not witty. Three: that is just too adolescent for the story. Four: just because Dahl titles a book that, it doesn't make it resonate with meaning. Please, where is Hemingway's Merde detector when needed? I get the feeling she spends too much time watching tv.

Try on page 125 this grotesque series of prepositional phrases, "This was accomplished in court by holding a sardine sandwich that the court clerk had forgot in his locker for three days, up to her face." Painful stuff.

Or try this clunky sentence for style, "He is sure if it is meant to be they will work it out."

The ugliest sentence in the book must be this, "She dissolves in Marie's mind like wet tissue paper sitting at the bottom of an unflushed toilet."

Characters are named the same in different stories, (they are not the same character) titles are flat, the writing is dull and of the same tone and pacing. Tenses switch from present to past with randomness. I'm not sure about talent and writing, I suspect it's the same for most people, it requires lots and lots of hard work, hard study, tons of reading, and a huge amount of sensitivity. I don't see evidence of any this here and I don't encourage anyone to read this collection of poorly written work. Stewart writes on page 134, "It seems rote, and besides, it's just irritating." I couldn't agree more.

Elysium -- Review

2008-10-16T13:25:00.003-06:00

HIDEOUS FOR ALL THE WRONG REASONS
Elysium
by Pamela Stewart, Anvil Press, 2008

I've received a book of short stories by Pamela Stewart from Anvil Press, part of a wonderful blog idea found at Mini Book Expo for Bloggers. We literary bloggers agree to review the book upon receiving it. I've just finished it. I began with a short middle story, worked my way to the end, and then started back at the beginning.

Elysium is a collection of unrelated stories (don't be fooled by certain names reappearing in different stories, they are different people) where death is the theme of about half. The other plots center on the equally downhearted: people have recently died, sex is bad and getting worse, relationships are ending people are homeless. Still, Halloween is approaching and I approached the book with ghoulish delight.

Because my review is complex I'm writing it in two parts. This first one addresses a slew of frightful problems that should have been caught by the author or editor.

It really saddens me to see what could be a great independent publisher cranking out a work so full of mistakes. And I really don't understand. Is the writer so uncaring she doesn't check what she writes? Is the editor so blind s/he misses the errors? Is this a symptom of sloppiness or laziness that infects this author?

So, in this first part of the review I'm going to merely catalogue some of Elysium's mistakes as we ponder whether or not to trust anything the author has written. If they can't get the simple things right, how can we expect them to handle the complexities of writing?

-- a primary colour is not green. It is a secondary colour. Red, blue, and yellow are primary colors when it comes to paint, which is what I think she means even though she is talking about a streetlight.
-- "skoot" is spelled "scoot"
-- "complement" means a colour complement. The author means "compliment." Seriously, even a spell check will pick this up.
-- "Mea Culpa" does not have to be capitalized
-- "Dr. Suess" should be "Dr. Suess." Disgusting lack of checking here.
-- "Childrens' Aid" should be "Children's Aid"
-- "Gideon's Bible" should be "Gideons Bible"
-- Wilson Bently in Vermont is known by everyone as "Snowflake Bently." This shows she didn't understand the regional very well, nor did she fact check very thoroughly.
-- "one-night-stand" does not require the last hyphen
-- "jack-knifed" as what a semi does, requires no hypen
-- "Hudson Bay Blanket" should be "Hudson's Bay Blanket." Again, poor fact checking.
-- "meat-eater's" does not require a hypen
-- the plural of "Bichon Frise" is "Bichon Frises." The author left it singular because it appears she did not know how to pluralize it.
-- "Paul William's" has the name of "Paul Williams" so the apostrphe would be after the "s".
-- "Foccacia" bread should be "Focaccia." Here's a hint....DICTIONARY
-- Matthew 15:13 is mis-referenced. She means Matthew 15:24 or 15:34 depending on the version.
-- "Sam Kinnison" is really "Sam Kinison"
-- "Wikki Watchi" is really spelled "Weeki Wachee." Another hint...SEARCH ENGINE

I shall stop here with the understanding that this is more than enough to make my few but gentle readers shudder with disgust and horror.

In the second part of the review I will exhume the writing itself. Stay tuned.
--

Beckett

2008-10-01T20:59:00.002-06:00

I just read some Beckett this past week, Text is a good one, Joycean, short, tidy and tintintabulous, exactly what one needs to break the sone emitted by typ-lit. (pronounced tip lit, not as tipping point but as in typical.)

I've been thinking that too often artists think the answer is the answer.

We need to get beyond the neat and head to the messy. Better work comes when we don't press resolution. There is beauty in the unfinished.

I've pulled out the novel (really half of the novel I had been sending around. I'm turning this into it's own thing.) I've spent a good week or more every night a few hours, rewriting the beginning, rewriting the beginning...etc. I'm not bored yet. My goal is to really clarify the voice. What a delicate matter, what a brutish matter. One tickles with a swing of a hatchet. There is absolutely no mercy in figuring this voice out.

You know what really sucks, and here you will see life is for the living, that I was sending around a story titled DFW Interviews the Elusive One. It was a spoof on David Foster Wallace heading out to interview Bigfoot. Gonna be tough to send that one around now, not that it worries me but who would dare pick this one up?

C'est la vie, c'est la morte. So I get back to writing.

Onward and Downward

2008-09-28T09:06:00.002-06:00

There's an interview with Margaret Atwood today in the New York Times Magazine which is perhaps the most boring interview with a writer I've ever seen. She discusses household debt and national debt. I'm not kidding. Idea: What wood hast thou shat today which one namest gold?

Reading: What Stories Are: Narrative Theory and Interpretation, just for the fun of it. Thomas M. Leitch. Best quote so far: "The Primary purpose of the work of art is to provide rules within which a given meaning can operate."

Reading: Decided to read Will Self's fabulous book My Idea of Fun for the third time. It's the sort of book that should be read once ever year or two. Get it and tell me how you liked it.

19 Knives

2008-09-21T20:57:00.003-06:00

I've just finished 19 Knives, which this week is sort of a miracle since I've been working non stop with my editor the brilliant Andrew Steinmetz. He raises all sorts of questions and he and I seem to differ a good deal on how much we must offer the reader. Where I go gaga on Pynchon and Self I suspect Andrew would not. And that's good. It forces me to be real, real clear.

I want to review Jarman's book, but first I'm still shaking off the damp malaise caused by the suicide of David Foster Wallace. Tragic is all. Depression, chemical imbalance, it all must suck in the long term. Evidently he was on some very heavy medication and then had undergone electro-shock therapy. He was a spark of fun, observant, ballsy. The literary world has lost a diamond. McSweeneys is posting tributes, and a few of his articles are easily found on the net for those who want a taste.

Ok onto Mark Anthony Jarman. Preface, I picked up his newest recently, one of those books you see and your tongue falls out, and because you have no money you cut off your least favorite two fingers as collateral so you can take the book home that night. 19 Knives came out in 2000 and it blends slightly earier narrative form with the jumpier form he now embraces. It's fantastic stuff. The first in the book tells it all, "Guided by Voices" in which a man recounts stories about his friend, John Stark Lee. What is so wonderful about Jarman is how he throws in the universe when needed, and often when not needed and he cups his hands around the contradictions and like a potter forms them into a discursive form. Don't look for teleological plot advancement here -- and in this respect it's a huge antidote to formulaic/New Yorker types of stories.

What really sends me into a cheek chewing frenzy are his sentences. Try out these for size:
"Margaret Atwood says, Maybe my message is bleak because it needs to be bleak."
or
"Black payphone like a gun to my head I stand there, my feet disconnecting from the flat earth, getting air. The phone smells like vinegar and someone has said, I could falll for you in a big way."
or in Burn Man on a Texas Porch:
"Where are my lost eyebrows? Did they fly up, up, up, or drift down as delicate ash, floating like some unformed haiku on a winter lake? My eyebrows got the fuck out of Dodge. Flames went up and down me as they pleased; fire didn't have to obey pecking order or stop-work orders. Kids in pyjamas watched me burn like Guy Fawkes, watched me dwell in possibilities.

Yep. E pluribus unum. Almost every page, lines where rubber hits the tarmac, tears up the tarmac, rips the road asunder. There will be blood and guts and the spiked punch of freewriting.

If anything, Jarman makes a case for narration that does not conform. It's not idea driven, say as the work of Barthelme, nor is it as machine gun as Leonard Michaels, but it's there, spot on, tight in its looseness. He writes at one point, "You narrow the universe to one person, knowing you cannot, knowing there's a price for that." That, my dear readers, is a review of Jarman in a single sentence.

The Journey Prize Stories

2008-09-01T14:32:00.002-06:00

The Journey Prize Stories selected by Adderson, Bezmozgis, and Brand leave something to be desired. We may be looking at the most prestigious Canadian short story award (I sure wouldn't mind getting one) but in a way you'd be hard put to understand why these and not others are included. Caroline Adderson said she wouldn't mind giving medals to every writer who's work was submitted, "for actually caring about literature." I like that statement and give her a medal in return for her promotion of the hard work it takes to craft a decent short story. David Bezmozgis says these are "truly among the best I'd read in recent memory." Maybe he's not been reading that many short stories lately? Yes I know, it's called hyperbole for publicity. Still, I tend to agree with his choices more than I do Dionne Brand who selects as best the one's I'd cut first. Nonetheless, I agree with Brand's short introduction in part. She writes that "A short story today...has to summon the unused and ignored capacities for thought and emotion which mass media finds insufficient. To use an idea from the French philosopher Baudrillard, the short story must disrupt the circuitry of the hyperreal." Yeah, we can discuss the violence of the narrative, there's a real point here that unfortunately the stories don't embrace.

I've been, as I mentioned in the Atlantic reviews earlier in my blog, trying to accurately describe the generic style that is infecting so many stories these days. They strike me as influenced by Joy Williams, but without her overabundance of detail. The writers add information for who knows what reason, probably to suggest place, which becomes filigree on plots that sort of ramble all over the place until finally there is a bit of emotional reflection at the end. This, evidently, is supposed to somehow give us that twinkle of insight so common to New Yorker Stories. After a while doesn't it all become generic redundancy? They can do it too, well so what. Every artist can draw perfectly from photographs, and the first question we ask them in college is, 'now what?'

Do you remember Barthes, and bp nichols, and Leonard Michaels, and Amy Hempel, and even some of Atwood, or Hemingway or Trevor or so many others whobegan to redefine what literature and the short story could be? Have we forgotten or ignored these writers? Have the lessons of Barthelme really been lost?

I think we have a duty to push the art of the short story ahead into new territory. We should be taking risks with form, plot, characterization, language, and everything else you can think of. Who says we need a twist at the end, what rule requires us to textually speed up the last couple paragraphs to signal an ending? I like artist Sol Lewitt's quote: Rational judgements repeat rational judgements.

Yeah, we could easily get stuck.

Certainly anthologies as are found in this book reflect this conservative taste, or worse all the works submitted were even safer and these are the best available.

Ok briefly noted: Swimming in Zanzibar, Krista Foss: Her first piece of published fiction. Example: "They passed men in white cotton shirts walking alongside the road who let the downpour soak through to their skin, splash their cheeks and eyes as if it was air, as if it was not tangible." See my point...details that don't mean much, predictable words and images let alone our debate on the present infinitive.
Twelve Versions of Lech, Andrew Borkowski: One of the better stories although it seems his idea of the anti-velocitarians is based on Bolano's Visceral Realists. A boy admires an artist who is of a different generation and era. Memorable sentence "When you get down to nothing, that's when you got something." OZY, Craig Boyko: The other good story here. Three letter winner initials on a video game prompt discussion into identity. The best in the book, I think.

When I say better or good in reference to this collection, I mean potential. There's nothing here I'd hand out to classes as examples.

How Eunice Got Her Baby, Nicholas Ruddock: straightshooting, straightforward. The plot is interesting here. Probably third in the ranking. Respite, Pasha Malla: Struggles with a lot, doesn't quite nail it. Trying very very hard to make us feel. The main character is a writer is named Womack who lives with his girlfriend/partner. Check out this sentence. "The writer Womak used to live with a woman named Adriane whom he had that autumn begun to introduce to people as his partner..." Ooch. Begins to sound like the writer Womak used to live with was a woman... So we back track and read again and again until we get the point (we already know he's a writer so why repeat?) Then we move on to the even more convoluted. Stardust, Jean Van Loon: Is this a joke? A play on Carver? Man, wife, kids fishing find foot in river. Man and wife fight. "So Much Water so Close to Home" and so close to our memory. Ok, Altman's movie wasn't brilliant, but it was pretty darn good. Worst twist in the story, man gets blown up and the way it's done is how he cannot see the tank and he doesn't know that he'll soon be blown up. Yep, all future. Chilly Girl, Rebecca Rosenblum: I really wanted to like this best of all. Angela Carter wannabe. It typifies the problem of not pushing the idea far enough. It's soooo safe it's depressing. I wanted to see the cold girl cry crystal tears to eat ice cubes to warm up. No nothing so daring, and even this isn't very daring. The start is good, but then it all melts. I don't think this is a knocker of an end line, "She sat down and waited to see what would happen next." My Hungarian Sister, Patricia Robertson: Another try real hard story. Girl makes up imaginary pal. I think there is an award in Canada for literature that focuses on Hungarian history or Ukrainian history. This, with the bits of information, seems like it's in fulfillment of a project, or the award. Alice Petersen, After Summer: writer still in school working with Birdsell, evidently. Less a story, more of a ramble. Some nice word crunches at times. Yep potential. Nicole Dixon, High-Water Mark: Grrr, I hate it when something really quite unnecessary to the story at the end takes on mamouth significance for no reason except the author feels something was supposed perform that function. Here, the hat came back, the hat came back. The writing is a struggle to meld the realistic with metaphorical. For example, "Lauren's there, instead of Mom. 'She went in a helicopter.' I am made of rain. I got to my room to change." I like the idea but when combined with what people wouldn't say 'helicopter??' then it becomes too much like the idea taking over. The Curve of theEarth, Grand Buday: I've read this before, didn't find it thrilling then, don't find it thrilling now. It's so tell us everything, especially how everyone felt. There's so much told, I felt I didn't have to really read it because there was nothing I could offer. If it's explained that much what's the purpose of the reader?

Death Race

2008-08-31T21:34:00.002-06:00

Yeah, believe it or not I went. I chose to go. Temporary Insanity? Well, I like the cultish Death Race 2000 where Carradine plays Frankenstein. Sadly, everything that old movie had is lost in this one.

Review: It sucked. It really sucked. Negative Starts, no plot, that was expected, no acting, that was expected. It even sucked at what it should be able to do, which is sustain action.

What in 1975 was a race across country with lots of satire and some nudity has been dumbed down to a rated 14 video game. The racers are now in prison under the watchful eyes of the formulaic Miss Prissy Ice in Pants Suit (Maybe playing Hillary Clinton which just might cause rednecks to develop excema.) They now race a short track. No points, no fun, no humor. Everone a racial, gender, sexual inclination, age appropriate stereotype. The whole movie is taken way to seriously for anyone to have fun. Hey stupids, it's not reality or a future dystopia, it's supposed to be pure absurdist entertainment -- how could you have missed that?

Please suggest a new word for the sort of movies like LOTR or The 300 or this one where most of the movie is 5 cuts per second, bad filming, wobbling camera, non-stop booming dolby, mostly post production animation. A.D.D. Movimation?

Hey! I nearly got sick on that oversalted popcorn so it wasn't a total waste of an evening. Afterward I found the journey prize winning short stories to soothe the pain -- now half way through.

Atlantic Monthly Fiction , Part 2

2008-08-11T14:12:00.002-06:00

Now the second part of the reviews of the fiction. [If you've not read part one, click back and read that first -- pretty please.] Medicine first, then then one good response will tie this issue up.

Obituary, by Jessica Murphy Moo sort of sets the tone here, those who struggle against odds greater than themselves. There is much to like about Obituary in terms of plot but unfortunately it gets entirely lost in poor writing and no unique voice. In short stories more is less. You want, when writing, to let scenes create emotion that push the forward until it suddenly ends with the echo in our head. Moo, whose writing career seems to be just starting, overwrites nearly everything. She tells us then tells us again. She throws in sentences that make us want to drink an emetic. For example, "Living on a boat has made him aware that nothing in the word is ever static. Everything is moving, alive." No kidding dicky, really? ps. Don't look for more insight than this. Or, regarding a phone, "He lets it ring and ring..." yawn. Or, "For the next four days, he calls his son morning, noon, and night." Put aside the sheer idiomatic cliche of this, the way it's written suggest he calls his son that, "Hey morning noon and night, get over here." Moo really needs to find in herself what Hemingway called the shock-proof, shit detector. This story could have been half as long and be much better for it.

I admit I tried Stand by Me, by Wendell Berry, but I really hate this sort of backwoods, southern stuff. I did try, honest, but like a story about hockey, there's no possible way to get me involved. And it's all rambling telling us what everyone did and felt, sort of rule number one of the no no list of writing fiction.

Mark Fabiano has written We Are All Businessmen. Maybe so, but we sure are not all short story writers. This one really began the downward spiral for me into the land of complete cynicism. It's all about the language. I felt this is author never figured out what he is doing.

He develops a character who speaks English, either poorly or quite well depending on what part you read, who thinks, I guess, in his own language either quite poorly or quite well depending on what part you read. The language is so absolutely inconsistent that I struggled with wondering if this story was a complete joke, whether the text had skipped the editing process, or whether writer was just on magic mushrooms. To make matters even worse, the 16th line has what appears to be a major typo, "bank clarks" instead of "bank clerks" unless Fabiano means this as some sort of dialect, which I doubt but giving his inconsistency, who knows. I never could be sure what was accident and what was planned.

Sometimes the main character uses "a" and then other times he drops it. He writes, "...not even taking a sea bath" and then it's "This beach is not good for taking sea bath." Both are his thoughts, neither is spoken. Mr. Limited English, who in many places speaks like a second language learner then turns around and uses phrases like "I don't tout for the evil things..." which probably makes most readers rush for their dictionary. Or he constructs sentences like this, "Mr. Richard holds up a hand as he drinks the rest of his beer, as if to ask me to wait." I've worked with many second language learners and even taken a class on teaching esl. I can vouch for the fact they do not construct sentences in this manner. I'm still trying to paste most of my hair back to my skull.

The longer the story goes the more all the characters begin to speak like each other. If you want us to really believe your story we first have to trust you as a voice, and here, as in Moo's story a strong voice is thoroughly lacking.

But then, FINALLY:

A flash of lightning in the final story, Amritsar by Jess Row. Here is really a very strong story that kicks all the others in their dang sorry asses. Row's voice immediately booms out with a killer opening

"I don't like boats. For that matter, I don't like water, either, unless it's coming out of a tap or a hose. Where would I have learned to swim, in the hot dusty Punjab of my childhood?"

He comes from Chandigarh, which is a city designed by Corbusier into gridded concrete buildings. The Indians hated it. It denied them of their central meeting squares, for example. Early on he moves to Deli, and this little shift in location shows a shift from order to chaos. The idea functions as the theme which then circles as as issues of individual against society, or pacifist against violence are introduced. 911 happens but is not directly referred to paralleling itself against a 1919 massacre by Britain that killed 379 unarmed men, women, and children. The idea of order and chaos is further tested as the narrator, now a radiologist, moves to the American suburbs where his life once more becomes ordered, and finally into this comes violence, that chaotic element confronting his beliefs yet again.

There are some brilliant pieces of writing here and I'll quote a couple, "Hate lacks imagination. Hate never made art, only dreary cliches." Or this, the narrator considering 911 and the racist responses to Indians living in America as he sits on the roof of his suburban house, replete with garage and steel refrigerator, surveying the cul-de-sac:

"Nobody was stirring, it seemed. At a time like this you would think people would come out of their houses and scream, or tear their clothes, or just weep and stare at televisions together, but we live in a suburb, of course, a place without a center -- no City Hall, no Boston Common, no village church. Nobody would know where to go. All this pain and anguish, and no place to put it."

It sounds like an ending but it's not and it gets even better. It's the longest story in the issue and it still feels short and tight. Sharp, unpredictable, deep, smart -- there's not much more you want in a short story and it's all here. Add to the reading list, other works by Jess Row. This one story makes the entire fiction issue worth every cent.

Atlantic Monthly Summer Fiction 2008 Part 1

2008-08-10T15:36:00.003-06:00

I've been reading my way through Atlantic Monthly's summer fiction issue, a treat that I look forward to as I do the New Yorker summer fiction issue, which currently sits on my desk completely untouched.

I'll get to that but right now I've read about half the AM; it's time for responses.

Overall the writing is fairly traditional fare. It's the sort of writing Richard Ford says he likes in the introduction to the Granta Book of the American Short Story. "I've always liked stories that make proportionately ample rather than slender use of language...." he writes. He likes stories that strive to be "literature." Maybe I should capitalize that? These authors fit the bill; they work hard at writing a literary story full of,f or lack of a better word, stuff. My tastes are a bit broader I guess, and I would prefer to read a wider stylistic range as well as more experimentation. After a while the reliance on details seems to blur into overwriting. Many times I wished I could have a break from the template and I recalled wonderful stories by Donald Barthelme or Patricia Young and I missed how fresh they seemed against all of this striving. Maybe this is a sad condition of today's movies where the cliche of thumping soundtrack and action at every moment has ruined hollywood output. Or, maybe it was the editor.

I didn't look at who exactly chose these stories, but a bunch of what I've read so far have a missing parent and they are about kids. I believe that we respond to works that fit our norm, so certainly I wonder if the editor making this decision has kids or issues with lost parents.

First the good.

Ann Patchett writes on traveling to do readings. Heartening to most writers is the fact she showed up for readings where five or fewer people were in attendance. I recall seeing Richard Ford, of all people, in Calgary, there must have been twenty people in the audience? Pathetic.
This sort of Jane Smiley reflection on the art of writing and all that surrounds it is in vogue right now. Well, I like it so keep it coming.

Aryn Kyle sticks with her forte, viewing the world through a child's eyes in a story titled Nine. The girl's mother has left, and she struggles with her father's dating, schooling, and an impending birthday. It's light but well written. What hit me hardest was just how much this recalled the style of Joy Williams in her story Train. In that one two girls on a train grapple with life and the goings on of adults. One is quick witted and verbose, the the other insightful. The insightful one cries the same as Tess in Kyle's cries, as an outlet against the frustrations of the uncontrollable and the loss. And like Williams, Kyle fills her writing with descriptions and nouns until the page is bursting. Well, Kyle did admit in the book club Q&A at the end of The God of Animals that she absolutely admired Joy Williams' writing. I could mention a couple of confusing paragraphs, a juxtaposition of lying against Honest Abe that goes nowhere, or the perhaps what I find to be a mistitled title, but I won't. This writing is fun and hot. Oh yeah, by the way it's not "chorus dancer" it's a member of the corps de ballet. Finally, just what was on the note Mrs. Muirhead passed to her husband?

Patient, Female is a story by Julie Schumacher about a woman, whose mother had died, whose father is close to death, and who works as the exam patient for those studying OBGYN. Hey, kudos for the idea although I should mention that every woman I've told the plot to said right off the bat, "oh that must have been a man who wrote it, some fantasy." I didn't get that from the work and I tried to imagine the woman being a guy who volunteers for proctology exams but I still don't feel that punch in the abdomen they seem to feel. Her's a wonderful example of her writing when the woman is at her father's house watching tv:

"Idiot," I say, my mouth full of rice. "She left the front door open." The camera lingers on the woman's breasts. I point toward the TV with my chopsticks. "She's standing there waiting to be strangled."
"It might not be strangling," my father says.

Whoop-dee-doo repartee like this makes the reading lots of fun and the story blows forward with a terrific impetus. It reminds me of Amy Hempel's work and there's even the characteristic Hempel joke, albeit a really old and dull one. Let it go. The mixing of the main character's reality and projections, of in-the-body and in-the-mind really works well for all but the end section. Her it suddenly seemed too contrived as the author tried to give a distant, wide angle view to all that occurred. I will reread and reconsider because I trust so much of the rest of the story. Or it could be that the author didn't quite know what to end with. That happens.

Those were the high notes so far and if you want to go about your day on a high, singing note, well, click out now. If you want the less than successful stories scroll onward. I'll try to keep the following if not sweet at least short.

Carmen Elcira: A (Love) Life by Cristina Henriquez is so much like a story by Roberto Bolano that appeared in The New Yorker I nearly choked. If I had to bet on who I believe influenced her.... We span years following the girl/woman's love interests. Would you predict both good and bad? How'd you guess? Do you think it might get somewhat reflective and melancholy at the end when she's older? Wow, do you have ESP? Still I can find sometimes make a silk purse from a sow's ear just as I can find the blemish on a pearl. A great little line: "...there are tender spots in every human heart that never disappear, no matter if the tenderness is caused by bruising or by love..." I'm not focusing on the writing, just the idea. Good one.

The Second Coming of Gray Badger by Carter Simms Benton is what happens when a young author tries very hard to write adult stories. It fits the conventions but the story is plodding, lacking energy and drive, predictable, introducing characters half way that sort of become the main protagonist or antagonist. Well I won't wail on it too much. Go to college, get a writing degree or skip the writing degree, at least write hard and read hard for quite a few years then we'll talk. And by the way, what the heck does "Edith grinned her little cherry-faced smile" mean? She grinned her smile? I bet his mother liked the story though, which is really all you want when you're young.

And Finally --

PREVIEW: next up is We Are All Businessmen with language so inconsistent you believe the story's full of grammatical errors and typos.

LAST THOUGHT: The visual art in the issue is an absolute embarrassment.

Capote

2008-08-10T08:14:00.002-06:00

I've just finished Truman Capote's Answered Prayers. The book is divided into three part as told to us by P.B. Jones, a drinking writer who lives at the Y. I won't discuss plot because I agree with the late Norman Mailer on this one, the writing is terrific but the plot is thin.

What makes this book so incredible is really the first section, Unspoiled Monsters. The voice of P.B. is strong. The book blasts through time and space with nervous energy and writing so sharp you want to poke a pencil into your brain. Every time he describes a character it's always with the unexpected detail that makes you pine for the next one. Even when characterizing a city he's at his best as with this excerpt:

"Tangier is a white piece of cubist sculpture displayed against a mountainside facing the Bay of Gibralter. One descends from the top of the mountain, through a middle-class suburb sprinkled with ugly Mediterranean villas, to the 'modern' town, a broiling miasma of overly wide boulevards, cement-colored high-rises, to the sleaky maze of the sea-coasted Casbah. Except for those present for presumably legitimate business purposes, virtually every foreign Tangerine is ensconced there for at least one, if not all, of four reasons: the easy availability of drugs, lustful adolescent prostitutes, tax loopholes, or because he is so undesirable, no place north of Port Said would let him out of the airport or off a ship. It is a dull town where all the essential risks have been removed."

It chokes down a good sized city's worth of information with full use of alliteration and assonance that tickle the tongue as the words twirl outward.

Here's his brief description of the young Elizabeth Taylor, again beautiful and bang on.

"...Taylor, nineteen and ravishing, sublimely fresh as a lilac after rain."

The book in general as I mentioned has three parts, the first is brilliant, the second is good, the third rambles as we basically eavesdrop onto conversations in a hoity toity restaurant. It's nearly skippable, that part. But let it go, you don' t need to hit the mark in every part to succeed in a work of art. Sometimes the bits make it all worthwhile.

It's also difficult for me to believe Capote didn't write this. Yeah, drunk, drunk, drunk, worried about losing his talent etc. An editor or amateur doesn't pull this stuff out of a hat with consistency that would fill the 96 pages of the first part.

Skip the idiotic critics all tripping over themselves to write the most eye-catching blurb. It's not x-rated or to replace a shelf of books. Believing that stuff will only toss your expectations in the wrong direction. Capote dissects life with a razor sharp knife and as he cuts he flashes the blade so reflections glint off everything. It's stunning and blinding. INSERT BIG SIGH HERE if only more writers today could stop sucking the seductive sap from the schmaltzy television plot tree and get on with the job of real writing.

Coincidence??

2008-08-02T19:32:00.002-06:00

Funny when you read something that triggers something else, like the way the Fat man of Lydia Millet's Everyone's Pretty is so much like the Fat man in Will Self's My Idea of Fun, which both are reminiscent of John Kennedy Toole's Ignatius in A Confederacy of Dunces.

Certainly it raises questions, one in particular being, are writers this influenced by what they read? I believe so.

The latest I've come across is best shown by example. Here's the celebrated opening to T.C. Boyle's Water Music:

At an age where most young Scotsmen were lifting skirts, plowing furrows and spreading seed, Mungo Park was displaying his bare buttocks to al-haj' Ali Ibn Fatoudi, Emir of Ludamar.

Now compare the passage to this line from Truman Capote's Answered Prayers:

"P.B. Jones? That tramp. No doubt he's peddling his ass to elderly Arab buggers in the souks of Marrakech"

I'll leave it up to readers to make their own decision on this one.

That Generic Style

2008-07-12T19:05:00.003-06:00

I've just finished "the art of racing in the rain" by Garth Stein.

In a word don't bother. On a scale of 1-10 about a 2.
The book's been getting a lot of hype. It must be the paltry plot because it sure isn't anything to do with the writing.
There's so much that I found just right of junk I almost don't know where to begin. First off, it's what I term a generic style of writing. No chances, no high points, no risk, just plodding plot, one nearly random event after another. It's like a virus where authors pretend they can write and that their audience is stupid. Then they tell us everything and tell us again to make sure we get it, then for good luck they tell us one more time.

Stein uses a dog to narrate his tale but the dog keeps switching between first person and third person omniscient. It watches what people do after they leave a room for example. It knows things that it could not possibly know. Stein jumps through hoops to get the dog to tell us about the court case which he wasn't ever allowed to see. Next Stein starts off chapters with racing details that he tries to make significant as analogy. But Stein is too enamored with catchphrases to make it work. He has a bunch that he tosses out over and over as though seeing them again adds depth to the work. Instead it comes off as Stephen King catchphrases, "They all float" for example without the resonance that King seems to nail down in his lightweight manner. Can we please ban the phrase "arms akimbo"? Following his use of cliches, he gets himself into a bit of a humorous position, "'Sir!' the cop barked." Heheh I doubt very much Stein caught this one.

Plot in a nutshell, Racer with dog, wife dies, accused falsely of rape, grandparents try to take daughter, from bad to worse until that oh so magical and predictable end where everything works out and we can give the end of sitcom AWWWW.

There is no depth to this writing. There are no risks. It seems he's attempting to emulate Dave Eggars, and then Coetzee and then Stephen King. He's trying so hard but he's an absolutely average writer in my opinion. So try his best he really needs to learn rigor and revision and he needs more time as a writer to find his voice, which really does not come through at all here. There was nothing in this book that took my breath away, and out of about 59 chapters only three I think were anything beyond generic and average, parts of the rant about monkeys taking thumbs from dogs, (very much seeming to be Gabe Hudson in tone) and parts of the crow chapter until it got third grade in style were mildly interesting.

Finally I hate books with errors like this. The dog can smell a day's worth of events but later can't tell chicken nuggets are rancid until basically stuffing one into his nose. He never smells crotches or butts, something all dogs do. The dog says he's colorblind but then later tells us about a navy blue dress and a linen colored carpet. A tv show title is wrong. The main guy feeds his daughter hot dogs and chicken nuggets (yes they keep reappearing as though Stein can't imagine any other food) but then worries her grandparents may not be buying organic.

I came away feeling run over and ripped off. Reading this book was like watching the entire Indy 500 run under caution. There was a race...in a way.

The 2nd Worst Book I've Read in Years

2008-06-22T17:48:00.000-06:00

Monday, June 16, 2008

2nd worst book I've read in years, Richard Laymon

Yes one would ask, why spend time reading what you are pretty sure will be absolute crap? Well ask any writer. We read anything. We read labels from soup cans, we read technical newspapers from local polytechs, some of us read palms (not me.)

So I've just finished the second worst book I've ever read in many years. This is Richard Laymon's The Cellar. He was listed by one website as being even better than Stephen King when it comes to Horror. First the preface: I like Stephen King for a few reasons. 1.) He's from Maine like me. 2.) He wrote a half decent book on the practice of writing, which if you've not read it, well please do. 3.) Parts of Hearts in Atlantis were really nicely written. There are times he spins positively literary and it's fun when that happens. True, his endings are often problematic and formulaic and the overall quality of his work has that cranked out feeling. But on the scale, he succeeds because he is good at what he does.

The Cellar by Richard Laymon makes King look positively literary in every respect. This book is downright terrible. One reviewer on Amazon.com said that it wasn't worth the paper it is printed on. I consider that an understatement.

Let me explain. He is a poor writer in every respect. I've had beginning students in writing classes who submit work like this stuff. It's choppy, no flow, patronizing, over detailed in all the wrong places, terrible constructions of sentences, and so on. To make a list would be a book on writing.

Secondly his characters are never developed and the little they are is later contradicted by their reactions. Examples: The main character, a woman, has a daughter who was raped by her former husband. The daughter acts like a seven year old and at times speaks like a Sex in the City 30 something. The husband leaves jail and kills the woman's sister. The woman finds out but amazingly, only about an hour later the trauma of this has passed so much that she can engage in a passionate moment with a man she met just the day before. She never considers her sister for the remainder of the book. The guy she met, named Jud is a mercenary of sorts, hired but justified killer, evidently. Call him Mr. Macho. Yet when the ex husband bursts into the hotel room and makes Mr. Macho place his hands on the wall he mutters something like Sweet Jesus he's going to kill us. (remember this is muttered.) Then he says, he's going to kill us. Then hysterically he screams, he's going to kill us! (exclamation point directing us to now understand he's no longer muttering, I guess.)

The beast in the cellar is really about five beasts who impregnate women and create more beasts. Throughout the book Laymon engages on what might be called disgusting sexual descriptions of Pedophilia, consenting adult affairs, and beast plus human encounters. To put it bluntly it's gross. We don't need the details to get the sense of what took place, and the fact Laymon spends time discussing each with detail raises questions about his goal, is it to tell a horror story or to write offensive pornography?

I've read some in this field, not a lot but enough to see that if Laymon is one of the best writers out there, then the state of horror is in very serious trouble. He's a terrible, terrible, terrible writer in every respect. I will never bother reading another of his works in any form and I'm posting this to save you from even cracking open the cover. If you're not fully convinced, check out his picture in the back of The Cellar, it shows him in his wonderful literary photo as a goofy looking guy framed by two larger than life alien puppet heads.

Be scared.....be very, very scared.

Books and Airplanes

2008-01-28T13:15:00.000-07:00

I was off to a couple places recently meaning I spent a good deal of time on airplanes. These are the places where I see more people reading books than anywhere else. Don't be too impressed yet. The majority of them, the books, are new and they, the readers, are about fifteen pages in.

I managed to knock off five books, two terrible reads and three pretty interesting reads. If I'm feeling a bit cynical today it's because I received a couple rejections lately that I was really hoping for. But such is the writing life. So on to the books.

The first was an attempt at broadening my knowledge of Canadian Literature, The Republic of Love by Carol Shields. What a bit of tomfoolery that is. It's really pulpy romance wrapped in a better cover and told with what I see as a strong voice. And I like her voice, it's everything else that really gets to me, from wooden characters, hairy dull men, hyper intuitive women, terrible if any plot, no regard for the play of language. It's not that it's as bad as Evanovich, but certainly this is not what I consider high literature. It's a pseudo stream of consciousness romp that gets completely bogged down in details. A character can hardly pick up a salt shaker without the author going into pages of the last time she used salt, why the ex husband of her old friend used too much or too little, and on and on until you just want to OD on the salt to get it over with. I'm sorry but in my opinion, based on that one book, Shields is mass market romance pawned off as literature. Hey look on the bright side, I tell myself, even Janet Evanovich gets rave reviews from the New York Times. It's all a system of payola.

Well, the second book was even worse. Unstuck: A Supportive and Practical Guide to Working Through Writer's Block. This has to be one of the worst writing books I've ever read. You can see my list on this blog for one or two others that share the cesspool. The problem with this book is it offers about nothing helpful. The author shares anecdotes about her own previous blocks and the blocks of others. But we learn nothing about what causes blocks or how to conquer them. She claims blocks come from past trauma where someone was critical about your work. I don't believe this since some great and famous authors also had writer's block at times. And she offers really about nothing that I found useful in helping writers get over blocks, she says work a little each day, don't try to do everything at once. My god, even my cat knows this stuff. So now it's time for fifty more pages of anecdotes and repeating basically what she already told us in anecdotes. My god it didn't end. The white paper flower on the cover is the most appropriate thing about the book, like when you take flowers to a funeral. Bury this one and run from the stink.

Now on to the decent books. Joan Didion in Play it as it Lays is a wonderful, if dated, read and stylistic investigation. It's like happy hour on speed, and the plot, well leave that out of it, but focus on Didion's terrific ear for tone and language. She really nails the way I expect many of these people speak. I can't say it's a work of genius, but it's good and worth borrowing from the library.

The short books continue with Mark Leyner's Et tu, Babe, a romp into the egomaniacal jizz-factory of the self obsessed writer, ML of course who flings his usual word crunches at us in typical form. Whoops, once in a while he uses a combo we've seen in another book, cracks in the flippant dam methinks. Still, Leyner is one of about three of us, Myself, Leyner (yeah he's second on the list and I say so and if you want to make something of it you come see me) and then Scott Bradfield who wrote Hot Animal Love, a book of stories. The last book was a great read in many respects. My absolute favorite stories in the book were the first about a poet duck, and then one about dogs writing personal ads, and finally a two part story about a dog named Dazzle. These four stories are worth every penny of this wonderful read.

I can't say I remember much about the airplanes, bad seats, bad air, bad company, cramped quarters, no food, rancid pretzels, but what a great excuse to do a lot of reading with knees to your nose and book in your face.

Holiday Reading Worth Reading

2007-12-10T10:25:00.000-07:00

Here are a few books to spark the imagination over the holidays, a time when perhaps we have time to read.

Bowl of Cherries
Millard Kaufman
This book gets the award for best cover and slip jacket design of the year. In this instance judge that and let it convince you. While Kaufman has written for Hollywood, this is his first novel, at the tender age of 90 which should give lots of hope to all those still-struggling writers. A man in prison in the Middle East awaits a death that will come when he is prodded to fall off the top of a building onto stakes. As he languishes in jail, he recounts his life. Now, you know me well enough to know that I'd never recommend a book solely on plot and what really whipped my frenzy on this one was the writing. It's brilliant, sparking, witty, and everything you could want from an Xmas read.

Artists rejoice! I mean visual artists this time. There's a book for you out there too:
Letters to a Young Artist
Art on Paper Magazine
Evidently the kind editors at the magazine faked a letter from a person saying he or she was recently out of art school, moving to NYC, and wondering how to make a go of it without selling out to commercial galleries. They sent the letter to many big name visual artists and received responses, with only one or two sniffing out the fact something felt wrong with the tone. Rilke be darned. The artists responded. Some responded with ego and a little help, others responded with lots of great advice. It's a small and quick read, but one that I'm seriously considering using for a class text as a flash point for discussions. It's a wonderful pocket book. It's wonderful. It says what needs to be said -- everything we learn over time, like painting is solitude, don't worry about market trends, we have more power than we believe we have, shake up the existing dialogues, be true to what you want. Can we ever read enough of this stuff? Artists are a small army with a big voice -- books like this are our odes.

The seasoned writer (pun intended) will have to rush out to get
How to Write
Richard Rhodes
now an ebook for $11.95 for those who can read books that way. The subtitle is, Advice and Reflections and as it says, this is not a book that is about how to write, although there are many salient points about that job. It is full of reflections and as I read, there was something in this book that crept up on me like some sort of Buddhist meaning, not looked for, not particularly wanted, but whole soul invasive. It is powerful stuff, maybe because his process and my process are so similar so it fits my norms. He describes writing a few of his books without flinching from the terrible moments. He makes me feel the my process is one that is both natural and supported. He speaks like a valued mentor, and in this fact, he writes a book quite unlike most books on writing out there.

Finally, here's a book you can say you're buying for a kid when actually you want it for yourself
The Watchmen
Alan Moore and David Gibbons
Website annotating every panel for the completely obsessive here.

First off, this is NOT one of the 100 greatest novels written in the English language as Time Magazine said. Maybe the publisher and Time are both under the aegis of the same company. At any rate, that sort of hype stinks like yesterdays press agent. Now preface my next comments with this warning: I am not fond of superhero cartoons. I like graphic novels but mostly when the story spins into the very weird arty area. Think of Richard Pettibone's limited edition comix in this regard or the great Terminal City. Now that I've clarified my bias on the subject note that I'm recommending this book. It revolves around washed up superheros with lots of interesting references to other works and the past (it takes place in the Nixon era) and it has enough metacritical dialogues to keep it interesting. The writing is a bit rambling and sloppy but hey it's a graphic novel. Just enjoy it.

New Paintings

2007-09-08T09:47:00.000-06:00

It's been a busy summer composed of reading and painting. Great books I've read recently: The End of Alice by AM Homes, The Tetherballs of Bougainville by Mark Leyner, Right Livelihoods by Rick Moody, all spectacular pieces of writing.

But the main reason for this post is to show you new paintings, each polymer on Plexiglas.

Contemporary Literature

2007-05-26T06:49:00.001-06:00

Julian Gough has written a nice little article lamenting the fact that humor has disappeared from contemporary literature. He asks, "Why is it so worthy and dull? Why is it so anxious? Why is it so bloody boring?" Certainly not all of it, but since Oprah the themes of overcoming the pain of childhood certainly seems in vogue. But why? We're a prospering North America. We like humorous movies. Could it be that we suffer from what I call the Picasso Syndrome, the rich collecting paintings where the poor are the subject matter. Or is it as Jane Smiley said, that humor is different for everyone, thus harder to generically win approval. What one finds funny the next finds offensive. Well, if you've read my work, you know I enjoy humor and wit in art. It's a form of discrimination combined with sardonic spice. Remember, he who laughs last thinks slowest.

So Yaan Martel is sending Harper books by dead white authors in his campaign to "make suggestions to his stillness," whatever that means. Two questions: Does Bush lite even read? Does mailing books forgive Martel from ripping off Moacyr Scliar's Max and the Cats for his Life of Pi? Funniest in that old story is how Martel never admitted it until forced to eat crow, then the publisher, I guess to help quell the uproar, added an addendum to the books.

And finally the newspapers are chopping critics, both literature and art, left and right. Write your local newspapers. The last thing anyone wants for the arts is papers that run on newswire publicity pieces, or who only have one arts writer who generally writes about his or her friends. If you want to read on all aspects of literary criticism, check out Critical Mass the blog about all things critical and bookish.

Water over the Dam

2007-04-04T22:00:00.000-06:00

So teaching and writing have been eating up a good deal of time. Sadly though, writing is a process of second guesses and head knocking. It's difficulty piled upon doubt, or vice versa, and the thing gains form but then slips away just as easily -- and what are we left with, a vague impression of having done something that is undeniably beyond our ability to judge. It's terrifying really.

I've been reading a good deal, the books come like tides. The Neap will bring a bunch that are altogether horrible. I'm beginning to be seriously appalled by the number of poorly written books that I come into contact with. I recently read two by Japanese authors, and yes there was a translation issue, but still, they were full of misapplied motives, cliche situations and words, absolutely humorless and predictable situations. I guess the word is Mundane. But unfortunately it gets even worse. Some of these books are published in Canada by Canadian authors whose first language is English. My beginning writing students with no background in stringing together words do better jobs. And some of these are published by big houses. Again I won't mention names, because the world up here is small. (Maybe someday I'll get the guts to name them. Take my course, I'll tell you all.) When it comes to reviews of these books, nobody dares call a spade a spade; the reviewers of at least one major paper seem to be paid off to write descriptions and to avoid any criticism, so the poor public gets suckered into throwing good money after bad words.

When I think I've finally seen it all, along comes a new batch of absolute crap, typos on every other page, inconsistencies in the story, bad fact checking, bad imagining, really every error of writing possible, and I'm begin generous in giving them at least nice paper and a full color jacket.

Just how do these people get published? How do their pieces of crap get past editors and publishers? My cat could do a better job. Please someone fill me in. Or maybe I'm available for reading proof copies at say one thousand a page? If it's really that great a book this is small price to pay for a decent copy of immortality.

Some Great Reading

2007-02-15T09:52:00.000-07:00

I've been reading some absolutely brilliant books lately -- a refreshing relief too. The unfortunate part is none of them are particularly new. Lets look.

The Floating Opera by John Barth. I understand this was his first, and the editors/publishers asked him to change the ending. He did and got panned for the ending. So now this edition is back to his original version. The thing you notice right off the bat is the strong authority of the narrator's voice. (one wonders if JK Poole read this work before or while writing Confederacy of Dunces because there is a strong similarity to the voice and character.) The book is fresh from the get-go, and it doesn't stop running for a long time. A great scene in the book: when the main character gives a rich man $5,000 (we're talking mid-century money here) as a gift. It fits with the idea of bestowing indebtedness, it's a fun ride as the rich man attempts to weasel his way out of it.

I just finished Carlos Baker's Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, which I find much like Andrew Field's The Life and Art of VN. There are some insights and some great dissection of the work. I don't agree with it all, but who would. Still, the ideas are great for sparking the brain.

If you want to hear from the writer himself then pick up a copy of The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 1. I've made it through Dorothy Parker, Hemingway, and Capote. Tidbits: Capote only wrote while reclining on a sofa. Hemingway did two handwritten drafts and then a typewritten draft. Parker said there is a real difference between a wit and a wisecrack. I'm a sucker for this sort of stuff and I find these interviews really fascinating, and that's coming from someone who pretty much hates all celebrities. I don't idolize writers either -- but knowing their work is so damn difficult, I will empathize with their attempts to provide us a view into their lives.

Finally I picked up two thick volumes of writings by John Simon, one on theater and one on film. If you don't know John Simon, you're missing out on a real treat. He was theater critic in NYC for the New York Magazine before the spineless people there fired him. Word on the street was that they no longer liked his negativity. And armies of people in NYC were also happy he was gone because of his critical reviews. But this shows the idiocy and shallow mindedness of the public and the magazine. Those who are great critics do not hate art or life or theater. In fact, they love with a passion. What they cannot tolerate is half baked ideas and fools. Unfortunately for the arts, these two things (yes things) abound in most forms of art. And if the critic points out a problem, well they call him or her negative and call for the sack.
I recall a Pinter play where a woman was supposed to be single, but she wore a wedding ring the entire play. Whoops.

It's true Simon was opinionated, but who cares when he was so smart. He spoke five languages, held three consecutive degrees from Harvard. When it came to theater he was dead on. (I think his reviews of film are less convincing and witty -- and I think he was probably lured by the theatricality and sensaround quality of film. And I don't trust him as much there -- he liked ET while panning Fanny and Alexander. He was unable to get past the sappy sucker punch of the first to ponder on why audiences were shedding tears over a plastic puppet. But at his best he was a knife and he was a pedestal. If he hated a play he said it. If he liked it he said that too. He was in many ways like Harold Bloom, cut of the genius tree but without holding quite the narrow view of Bloom. Simon took on all comers and all forms.

The quips in the reviews are Dorothy Parker redux. About one play he wrote the result was what you get by a playwright who took a one-night course and who should have slept in. And, nobody else dared write a line like, "Barbara Streisand's nose towers like a ziggurat of meat." They're great things to read, little essays in themselves.

Reading Anything Good?

2007-01-07T16:33:00.000-07:00

I've been finding a wealth of reading -- and here are the first of a few recommendations:

1.) Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel, by Jane Smiley. Honestly I had no idea who she was. I have since learned she wrote a narrow volume on the life of Dickens where she said all his books except one were covered (h'mm). And she won some awards, and her books look sort of oprah-ish, but maybe that's the designer's fault. At any rate, this books first parts are terrific -- I now own a copy ( due to a coffee spill on what was the library's) and I'm happy to have it. What she writes on literature and on the creation of literature is smack on. It got me thinking of the recent (?) trend of demystifying the process of writing the novel. I've since seen Ford (at a reading) Smiley (here) and Pamuk (New Yorker article) all talk about writing as a sit down job. Ride the wave? I understand why, I think. Our age of everyone's special and can do anything they want, god forbid we talk of talent. Buy me a beer, I'll ramble to ya.

2.) Mystery and Manners, Flannery O'Connor's wonderful book on raising peacocks and on writing. Quote of the month comes from her, "Many a bestseller could have been prevented by a good teacher." She says, and remember this is a fairlly old book, that our youth are raised with an undying love for the slick and adolescent in literature. I skipped the five or so chapters that related religion to literature -- I gave up religious fanaticism long ago.

3.) Snow by Maxence Fermine -- short and sweet. Or is that sweet and short, kicking in at about 12,000 words, easily read over a coffee, and it provides the sacchrin. But when it's good it's good. A young poet hooked on haiku and on snow. I like the succinctness of the work. Evidently it sold a good 40,000 copies in France (this is translated).

4.) Just began A Confederacy of Dunces, Toole's posthumous legacy. Wow, and wow again, after slogging through endless crap this book is a true knockout. I'm actually surprised Garbage Head wasn't compared to it, but then they never read ACofD did they. Toole attended Columbia and then taught at Hunter -- I think I taught there later than he did though.

Needless to day the holidays did nothing to reduce the piles of unread books, oh well, when James Dickey died he was surrounded by 18,000 books in his house.

Ozark Fun and Horror

2006-12-09T10:34:00.000-07:00

I just finished James Dickey's Deliverance (yes the book they based the movie upon.) I'd never read Dickey, and now have a fair amount of respect for his writing. It's a good book, with the theme flowing through like the river cuts the county. Man tries to control nature, to impose his mark, but nature is stronger, breaking man's back, his leg, his spirit. It takes a day or so to breeze through, and some parts are a bit long like the climb up the rocks, nevertheless it's worth the time. Compare it to the movie too, one exposes the other. They play Wildwood Flower in the book, Duelling Banjos in the movie, the book has more pre-story and more police-work at the end. Mainly the story flows quickly, sharply, with good words, with strong details, with force.

The other southern book i've started is Bastard Out of North Carolina by Dorothy Allison. (Also made into a movie) I really don't get this type of book. I'm nearly fifty pages in. Anny meets Fanny who talks about Granny who asks about Lanny who meets Bananny. Then Lanny sees Granny who asks about Glen who talks about Anny because she knows Ben, who talks about Len and Wren. Fifty pages. Fifty. So far there is not a drop of plot. It's like someone's diary of the last all-family reunion. You know the scene, you meet 200 relatives you never knew you had and you forget them as quickly as you met them. Afterward you ask yourself what prompted you to attend the damn thing. In that event plot doesn't matter either -- was there meaning in the fact you got the hot dog first and the soda second? This book is like that, we meet so many useless people we don't know who to worry about. Every plot detail seems arbitrary and eventually irrelevant. It sure is a current style, though. Finally it might not be so god-awful if the details were consistent, but when the big deal in one chapter is the courthouse burning to the ground (they all celebrate) and two chapters later they go to the courthouse, well it's sloppiness at its best. Likewise, one spring day has thunderstorms, rolling clouds (ok that's consistent) but then it has a moon with a halo (typical of fall, not of spring) and a sunset that shimmers blue (they do not shimmer blue -- read Minnaert Light and Color in the Outdoors.) Finally the story is narrated by a 7ish year old girl who has a vocabulary and memory like an educated adult. I think of this book and then I think of a masterpiece like Middlemarch or even Middlesex and ask myself, how did literature get to such a debased point?

Richard Ford Reading

2006-11-29T10:07:00.000-07:00

Pages Books and the Calgary Public Library last night hosted a reading by Richard Ford. He read from The Lay of the Land, the third book in the Frank Bascombe series. Even with bitter cold of minus a few hundred, a good crowd showed up wearing everything from seal fur knee-warmers to coal fired hats.

First off, kudos to the Library and to Pages -- the reading was the hottest event in town.

The book continues Bascombe's internal external dialogues, this one with what seems like more humorous musings on his life -- a life ratcheted up emotionally by the sudden return of his wife's ex. Well I won't dwell on the story -- Ford as a nice reading voice, much like that of Garrison Keillor in many respects, treating the text as his voice, as though he's sitting by a wood stove spinning the tale.

I give him credit for two important points during his talk. He said that while he usually doesn't tell people to take a page from other countries' histories, Canadians should take a page from American history -- that Bush is not what America wants or needs, and that Harper's middle name is also Bush. Chalk one up for Ford.

Secondly. He was asked about getting the details into the fiction, how does he do it, did he live through similar events. His answer: He shared some things with his character, for example they were both children once, he once lived in New Jersey. But beyond that not much. He said inventing such details is his job. He also dispelled the myth of the driven artist saying writing is a choice. There is nothing forcing writers to tell a story, forcing them to get out a book. Rather it's all choice and hard work and sometimes because of that one gets lucky. I absolutely agree here, and try to do the same in teaching -- hard work, asking the right questions, being critical, and choosing to stick with the craft over a long period of time is the key.

He responded to a question about regionalist writing with disgust. He said people everywhere are about the same, that he could take dialogue from the south where he grew up and place it into the mouths of people from Montana and it worked perfectly. His thesis: the whoop-dee-doo positioning that a certain type of writing comes from certain place is highly overrated and mostly wrong.

Great lessons for writers, great reading for readers.

18th Century ideas of the novel

2006-11-16T17:11:00.000-07:00

How was the novel perceived by many in the 18th Century in England:

Sir anthony Absolute, in Richard Sheridan's 'The Rivals,' says the circulating library is, "an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge." The Evangelical Magazine called novels, "instruments of abomination and ruin." People who enjoyed them had minds that were contaminated and unfit for serious study, or for the "delightful exercises and enjoyments of religion." Laurence Sterne's 'Sentimental Journey' was thought to lead innocents (at least by Vicesimus Knox) to "disease, fancy, madness, suicide, and a gibbet."

Well there you are, we're all doomed. Funny too how the the US religious fanatics, right wing, and current administration continue to describe books and libraries in the same light. That in itself is an extremely sorry statement.

What's on the reading list for those who want something special? Try out Airstream by Patricia Young. Her short stories were the absolute best out of the hundreds I've recently read. Wow. She has a wonderful sensitivity to words, a beautiful economy, she says twenty things with ten words. Simply amazing writing. Why wasn't she on the Giller shortlist?

Giller Prize

2006-11-08T10:37:00.000-07:00

This is one reason why it's so great to be in Canada. Where else in the world do we have a major televesion station with the guts to broadcast writing awards? CTV deserves much praise for the show last night. Yes it was over-produced with fancy cuts etc. but hey, I was a sucker for the synopses and I absolutely loved watching the writers sign their books. If tv is going to bring the general public into books and book awards, this is the way. I won't go so far as to say "thrilling" but it was compelling viewing -- and it beat the pants off any of those Oscar shows.

Now, as if we didn't have enough to read we're going to have to add another few books to the pile !! That's good, right?

Worser and Worserer

2006-10-23T14:11:00.000-06:00

It's getting bad.
On the Greg something or rather show I flipped to this morning after waking up one guy said something like:

"In a relationship you have to be compatible and see eye to eye because when you see eye to eye, uh, you are compatible." Great circular logic, buddy. Good job.

I'm amazed how often I see this type of reasoning.

I just came across this on the JWA Financial Group, Inc. website out of Dallas Texas. (I have no idea who they are because I was searching for articles on dictating cultural taste.) The funny bit is bold:

"Over the next decade, the tulip became a popular but expensive item in Dutch gardens. These flowers were stricken with a non-fatal virus known as mosaic. The virus caused the tulip petals to develop colored stripes which led to wild speculation in tulip bulbs. Popular taste dictated that the more bazaar the bulb, the greater the cost."

Makes you want to run right down and invest, right?

An Odd Writing World

2006-10-23T09:13:00.000-06:00

So get this, a woman is taking a creative writing class, the teacher (Jim Crace) notices she has a bit of talent, and so she submits her novel to a publishing house. Voila, Diane Setterfield has sold her first book for L800,000 and an additional million over in the States.

I don't know how it works in Canada (although I bet it's the same) but in the States you cannot copyright a book title. Marley and Me, number one on the New York Times non-fiction best seller list, has the same title as the one Bob Marley's manager wrote. Better yet there was a time about three years ago when three best sellers within a two year period all had the same title. Harry Potter anyone?

Finally, David Lipsky in a New York Times review writes, "Halfway through my second reading of Elena Ferrante's 'Troubling Love' -- 70 more pages to go in seamy Naples -- I tore the book down the middle. It's the first time a novel ever made me get physical, and it was the first good mood I'd been in for weeks."

Admit it, there's something refreshing in a reviewer who can finally say such a thing.

And it gets better. A web search found this from the same reviewer: "It's a smelly book. (...) Troubling Love is soggy with tears -- and the blank mood that follows a good long cry -- but you can't isolate the source of the weeping. (...) Ferrante is fascinated by the moments when a personality -- like a wire stretched too far from its power source -- shorts and corrodes." - David Lipsky, The New York Times Book Review

Short but Much Too Long

2006-10-20T11:30:00.001-06:00

It's beginning to seem Amazon.whatevers are beginning to conveniently delete reviews that are not positive. I'm betting they'll say this was always their policy. But the great thing about Amazon's review system was that we could get a variety of opinions, and if the work was terrible we found out beforehand. This will only hurt Amazon. If people believe they are skewing reviews only to the positive then we won't trust them any more and will do our book buying elsewhere.

Can I ask a rhetorical question? Are people really that afraid of honesty?

I just read three books of short stories. Final tally: Two bad, One good. First up: Greetings from the Vodka Sea -- the title as well as the idea for that story is imaginative. Think of it, a sea of vodka at a hidden resort. Well, nothing in this book stands up to the inventive title. The stories ramble and the writing is sloppy. It's the same with Princes in Waiting, another pretty much dull and average-constructed collection of stories. There's so little life in both these books. And one author has no clue how to construct sentences. He throws in comma after comma, creating sentences that are so unendingly similar and oddly fashioned that I eventually gave up the slogging. And, yes I know. They'll probably be like Joyce Carol Oates and hold a grudge and make sure I never get a break from any commitee or granting group they sit on.

Can I ask a rhetorical question? Are writers really that afraid of opinions?

Now comes Darryl Whetter's A Sharp Tooth in the Fur. He's up and down, the first couple of stories continued twice as long as I think they should have -- I am one for clarity and brevity in a story. But I persisted, having read a good review a couple of years ago in the New York Times -- if my memory serves me correctly.

Kermit is Smut is a good one however, a druggie teacher confronts the day.
Here for example:

"Class, Auster still hasn't begun, we need to talk about love. Love reminds us how life is a gamble we other wise wouldn't make.
Every day he sees how small their teeth are.

This is Whetter at his finest, positioning the collequial description next to the exquisitely observed detail. It's true sometimes the details are incorrect: No matter these are middle school kids whose teeth are already adult teeth that often appear too big for their mouths or point aimlessly beyond their lips. And it's the Knight that jumps across a chessboard, not the Bishop. Yet, we will give him extra credit for going after the the original details. What I found to be his best story is Enormous Sky White (which I would retitle to something a bit more resonating were I writing it.) A young man plants seeds in the North while his girlfrield visits Paris -- seed planting takes a variety of forms and that story alone makes the book worth its cover price.

A Few Articles

2006-10-13T11:25:00.000-06:00

Atlantic Monthly's Fiction Issue 2006 has run an essay by Francine Prose where she asks whether learning to write can be taught. (The essay is not available on line). She relates her own experience in taking classes ultimately saying, "But that class, as helpful as it was, is not where I learned to write." What is the key, according to Prose? Read. Her statement echoes Chomsky's, Read widely and read well." When we think to the past there were not graduate programs in writing -- writers learned to write by trying and by reading -- somehow there is hope in that recollection.

When I teach contemporary art classes the question of bad art is nearly always the first question. And why not? The lines of good and bad have been erased thanks to post-structuralist activites, Postmodernism, deconstruction, and pluralism. I empathize with the students who know what they like, but who also feel they have no foundation for determing what is half-decent. Roger Scruton has provided a terrific article titled Kitsch and the Modern Predicament in City Journal, evidently from the Manhattan Institute that takes on this question. Now I know many will say I enjoy it because he's as harsh as I am but note I also respect art that directly confronts norms of goodness and badness, as so much contemporary art does. He gives a brief overview of kitsch and Modernism and then begins to dissect what makes kitsch tick. "Kitsch is pretense," he writes. It is the "...un-wanted hand on the knee. Kitsch is not just pretending; it is asking you to join in the game. In real kitsch, what is being faked cannot be faked. Hence the pretense must be mutual, complicitous, knowing." The quote that sticks is, "The opposite of kitsch is not sophistication but innocence." You've got to read this one.

Speaking of Kitsch, yesterday I came upon a great little essay by Jeffrey Louis Decker titled Saint Oprah. It's availble on line through LION and Project MUSE but you need a login through your local academic library. It's also in the Spring 2006 issue of Modern Fiction Studies if you can find that one. In it he discusses Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture by Eva Illouz and Oprah, Celebrity and the Formation of Self by Sherryl Wilson. Decker's essay is basically a review of the four books that dig into Oprah's mega-corporation whose purpose is to promote middle class norms as they relate to personal accountability and virtuous uplift. We've heard many people say her novel selections sell, but are they good... again the question arises. He says Oprah's book club made middlebrow practices relevant again but backs up his thought with a quote by Kathleen Rooney. "[N]either Winfrey nor her readers seemed permitted to remark critically on the selections, or to advance beyond any but they most immature, advertisement-like, unconditionally loving responses to every single novel they encountered."

It seems to me criticism is definitely headed in that direction -- a thought I consider terrifying.

Now for something completely different, check out this fabulous piece of art titled Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor.

Review of a few Books on Writing

2006-09-19T09:02:00.000-06:00

A brief review of a few books on writing. They symbol ** means I highly recommend having on the home bookshelf.

** 1.) ON BECOMING A NOVELIST -- JOHN GARDNER
Terrific book and one I'm partial too since first reading it back in the 80's. Talks about faith and keeping at it. It's a good motivational book. There is also a great chapter on the authoratitive voice that discusses Melville with wonderful clarity.

2.) THE ART OF FICTION -- JOHN GARDNER
If you liked the shorter one then you might continue with this. Gardner is a Modernist novelist par excellence and he discusses much of what makes up the novel as he understood it. He discusses plot in terms of the usual Fichtean progression, and makes a case for the sound and rhythm of the language. You may find it a bit pedantic for your tastes but Gardner was a great writer who influenced many.

** 3.) THE SOUND ON THE PAGE -- BEN YAGODA
Yagoda is a journalist so he approaches writing from that perspective. Still the emphasis is upon discovering and cultivating a distinct authoritative voice. Yes it's just that important. Now that Modernism is officially over, we realize we can once more talk about style in art. Yagoda says, "That the how is more important and revealing than the what goes without saying..." You may disagree at first but let him explain, which he does so by quoting Flaubert, "From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things...." A definite keeper.

** 4.) MASTER CLASS IN FICTION WRITING -- ADAM SEXTON
Sexton uses many examples from master writings of the past to illustrate points on story structure, characterization, plot, point of view and style/voice. He makes the case the best writing is descriptive writing. This is like a book of artistic styles and processes and its an area not covered by many other writing books.

** 5.) WRITING FICTION -- GOTHAM WRITER'S WORKSHOP
A general, all purpose book covering characters, dialogue, point of view, voice, setting, pacing. Much to learn here, and it's written in a down-to-earth manner that keeps you interested. Examples from great writers illustrate each topic, which is always nice to have.

** 6.) SELF-EDITING FOR FICTION WRITERS -- RENNI BROWNE AND DAVE KING
Any book that helps writers gain another degree of objectivity in regard to their own works deserves a place on my shelf. As Hemingway said, "All first drafts are shit." It's true. Writing is revision. And more revision. And more revision. We must be clear as to our habits and faults in terms of point of view, dialogue, proportion -- yes they are all in this book. It's short and sweet.

7.) SCENE & STRUCTURE -- JACK M. BICKHAM
This author has published more than 80 novels in his lifetime blah blah blah. It's not quantity but quality. There are a number of books in this series and while they're interesting because they dig into the topic, they're not necessities. I view them much as I do chess books on specific openings. At a certain point you want to learn more about the specific line so you head to a book on it.

8.) ON WRITING -- STEPHEN KING
This is a good book, believe it or not. Half is biography (which is easy to skip) but the rest concerns the craft of constructing a piece of writing. After reading this I said to myself, "hey this king guy actually might be able to put out a decent novel!" Well we've yet to see it (although Hearts in Atlantis had its sparkling moments.) No need to own this one but it is a must read.

9.) FROM WHERE YOU DREAM -- ROBERT OLEN BUTLER
The book is basically transcriptions of a series of lectures in which the author beats us over the head with one idea: Make it concrete and super-descriptive. There are some anecdotes in the back where Mr. Pulitzer Prize Winner flings his sage wisdom onto the loose thinking/writing minds of students -- basically he tells them how to do it, but the how is his way. It got tedious. Still, parts are good to read.

10.) THE ART AND CRAFT OF NOVEL WRITING -- OAKLEY HALL
The fact this is a writer's digest book is a tip off. Lots of practical advice but how much do you dare trust it. Take it for what it is. The nice part is there are lots of quotes by writers.

11.) THE FAITH OF A WRITER -- JOYCE CAROL OATES
In her own I'm so full of myself style Oates attempts to tell us about writing - the problem is she's a mediocre writer so how much can we trust. The book needed a good editor and it repeats in places. Yet for all my complaints, it's worth reading.

12.) WRITING WITHOUT TEACHERS -- PETER ELBOW
When I saw this was the book used for a creative writing class at Harvard, and then that it was published in the 1970's I had to find it. The main premise is do lots and lots of free-writing before even thinking of putting the work into any sort of final form. It's all stuff we know, tap into the subconscious, let the mind freely wander -- and I admit it's easier for some than for others to do this. It's one approach and one that often provides some terrific material. But once you know the technique you don't really require the book. His own writing and personal freewriting examples are tough to slog through.

13.) LAWRENCE BLOCK ON WRITING -- LAWRENCE BLOCK
He's a genre writer and much of what he offers is just outdated or inappropriate for constructing a novel that aspires to be more than formulaic. Skip it.

14.) WORD PAINTING -- A GUIDE TO WRITING MORE DESCRIPTIVELY -- REBECCA MCCLANAHAN
Weak, unconsidered, cliche ridden, mundane, obvious, repetitive. How are those for descriptors? She repeats the most obvious and then repeats and repeats. Some facts are just plain wrong. It's one long writer's magazine article saying, "Use the word carmine rather than red." Yawn. Don't just skip but burn. Terrible terrible book.

15.) WRITING DOWN THE BONES -- NATALIE GOLDBERG
Jsut when you thought it couldn't get any worse. This and her other books are horrific.
This is a book less about writing and more about the author's anecdotes. She rambles on about various subjects, evading the point, missing the point, contradicting herself, offering little of substance. Her writing is just plain bad. One sentence reads, "So much depends on it because poems are small moments of enlightenment -- at that moment the wheelbarrow just as it was woke Williams up and was everything." Barely sensible and tougher to read. At another point her sentence construction causes a desk to dance with a bride's mother. There is so little practical advice in this book beyond simplistic third-grader help as to render the book nearly useless. Lastly she seems to think great writing is not important. Better, she says, that one write lots and lots and lots -- she fills a spiral notebook each month. So what. It's quantity not quality for her and this book is proof that good writing is important, a lesson she has yet to learn. Useless, terrible, poorly written book. I wouldn't line a cat box with this one for fear of hurting the cat.

READING THIS SUNDAY

2006-09-18T17:40:00.000-06:00

I'll be reading at Word on the Street this coming Sunday at 2:00 pm.

Word on the street is a large-scale celebratin of literacy and the printed word and everyone's invited to come have fun.

Please check out the link to Word on the Street and come say hello.

What I can't tell you.

2006-09-16T15:21:00.000-06:00

I've been reading a good deal over the past month and a newish book you might want to read is ManBug by George Ilsley. It's certainly a shake-up of normal literature but really worth the few bux. (He's the author of Random Acts of Hatred, 2004). Here is a link you can check out.

Unfortunately I can' t tell you most of what I've read recently. I'd like to, I want to, but I don't dare.

Ah, you ask why. I'll tell you. These are books by Canadian writers. They are writers who I believe are giving Canadian writing a nasty, foul name.

I'm complaining about two issues. The first is the number of errors that fill their pages: capitalization problems, misspellings, inconsistencies. Examples, in the book I just threw down in disgust last night after reaching the last page, and one I might add by a major Canadian author, I found often in paragraphs nearly next to each other Volkswagen beetle and Beetle, tee shirt and tee-shirt, dia de las muertas (which should be dia de los muertos), Led Zepellin instead of the correct Led Zeppelin. We wish to trust our writers, and we know there are such things as a dictionary and the internet. So just how can so many errors get through? Where is the editor and proofreader? My suspicion is that bigger publishing houses have fired them all, or they are so afraid of the more major author's ego that they don't dare touch anything.

My second beef is the lack of quality in the writing. We're talking hideous, horrifyingly bad writing here, with dependant clauses all over the place, with sentences ending with the same adverb over and over, with three or four sentences that should be combined, or even those repeating the same material two paragraphs later. I cannot help but consider this highly suspect, and my guess is the authors neither cared nor revised nor reread. And I would guess that IF they asked readers to lookk their work over, the readers were afraid to comment. Hey I know we all make mistakes, that's one of the beauties of the novel, it's big, dangerous, tottering on the edge of blowing apart. But to be able to easily critique the book in terms of a 101 writing class -- well I just don't see the excuse. There should be no excuse. Art is not about tossing slop onto a page or a canvas and saying it's done. It's about revising and crafting and making it clear.

And so I won't tell you what I've been reading, only because these books are written by Canadian authors (some I might add have been sponsored by Canada Council and have received rave reviews by the Toronto Globe -- which I'm beginning to suspect is paid off by publishing houses because any reviewer that read these books would have to be blind not to see such problems.) So call me chicken. Call me unwilling to piss off members of the writing community here. No, I won't do it publically. Come to my class and I'll gladly tell you.

Momentous Day

2006-08-20T23:00:00.000-06:00

Yes a big thrill.

No it wasn't the fact that the full New York Times Sunday crossword was again completed in record time -- for the sixth week in a row I think. It's childish, I know but I do feel proud of being able to polish that off. And I remember first showing up to NYC and not even being able to do the easy Monday puzzle.

No, the thrill came from printing out a new draft of the novel. (The earlier revised drafts are piled to over a foot high on the shelf.) But this time it means I'm getting closer to a more final version that I can send around to a few readers and then publishers. Now a big read-through and a couple of inserts and then I'll see just where it stands.

But I took a break over the early evening and went to Chapters where I saw that Elizabeth McCracken's book In The Giant's House is out, finally. I first saw her work the Granta where her voice was as warm and seductive as baking bread. It will go onto my reading list.

I also came home with A Clockwork Orange, since I didn't have it on the shelf and it's really one of the required. (No Norton version of this one yet -- wouldn't that be a joy). I'll be reading that again soon.

Now I've reached the point where every time I turn around someone else is touching upon a theme of my new novel. Life does that. When I finally burn out I watch whatever movie is on to unwind. Late last night it was Sex and Lucia, a terrific Spanish movie with Paz Vega. (A writer theme) and recently The Talented Mr. Ripley (whoops, what did they do to the ending? It was like a guest who stayed way too long. Terrible ending.) But this movie touched on identity and Italy -- although the theme waffled between that and the intent bound with evil, and whether people can exist unethically, and so on until I stopped looking. Then a friend dropped by in early evening and talked about a movie she'd seen regarding a writer in Italy. (As you can guess a small part of my novel revolves around a writer and Italy.)

So I have felt a bit haunted by all of this. Nevermind. Tomorrow I get a fresh can of whup-ass start on this hard-copy draft. Not much can beat that optimism.

Plagiarism: A Rant

2006-08-14T09:32:00.000-06:00

I skimmed recently five books on plagiarism and did a bit of net looking just now and it only confirms my opinion: Plagiarism is the result of bad teaching.

Let me explain by first giving a definition (although very problematic) of plagiarism. The University of Indiana presents this:

"To avoid plagiarism, you must give credit whenever you use

another person’s idea, opinion, or theory;
any facts, statistics, graphs, drawings—any pieces of information—that are not common knowledge;
quotations of another person’s actual spoken or written words; or
paraphrase of another person’s spoken or written words."

The main problem I have is the first. Two families hate each other, the kids fall in love. What am I talking about Romeo and Juliet or West Side Story? Ideas cannot be copyrighted. Thus there is no need to credit the idea of the story in either case. Furthermore opinions are often general, and it would be useless for a student to find someone who prior to their paper stated a similar opinion. I agree with the rest of the definition.

The real problem though comes from teachers who assign papers like, "Write an overview of Optical Art in Europe" or "Describe how Magic Realists were influenced by Swift." The typical university student has absolutely nothing to draw upon for these papers except what the teacher presented in class or outside source material such as the net or books. Therefore, there is absolutely now way in which a student can fulfill this assignment without using other people's material. In this case they should credit every single paragraph of the paper, excepting the one where a student states an opinion about the material such as "I hate this," or "I think this is good." Allowing students the leeway to rewrite without credit is to allow semantic games with the definition of plagiarism. Oh, if I can find it on Wikipedia then I'll penalize the student but if the ideas are somewhat rewritten (although from my notes and texts) I'll give an A. You can't blame the students for this one -- they know nothing of the subject being assigned. Thus I think we must come to view the typical research paper as outdated, a dinosaur of the past that should and must be revised. This practice is wrong. It's bad scholarship. It sends a misleading message to our future scholars.

What is the solution? One is to teach students how to correctly and fully credit other sources, which will mean most every section of the paper. Another is to assign papers where a student can learn to write but is not forced to draw from source material. An example would be, if in high school, "Should schools have gym classes?" It's an area where every student will have an opinion as well as personal knowledge they can draw upon. They are not forced to head to the net. On the college level an example might be, "What art is better, Optical Art or Symbolist Art." While they might have to lean upon source materials to discover the aspects of eacy style, again the majority of the paper cannot come from those sources. A third solution would be to provide student with handouts and the paper can only cite the handouts -- nothing else. This way there is no danger of plagiarism from sources the professor is unable to trace. And it will be clear just what failings the student has in correctly citing material.

The Short and the Quick

2006-08-04T13:07:00.000-06:00

Which is nothing short and nowhere near quick. It's called writing, yes that unruly sport. It's been a series of at least 14 hour days -- required, needed, desired. To quote a line in Hoban, "It goes."

I just whipped off two biographies of J.D. Salinger -- those of Hamilton and Alexander. Therein lies the quick because such things, while taking their authors years to complete, never take much time to buzz through. And reading them is like cheap sex in the bushes behind a meatpacking plant. There's something so dirty about them. Based on what I know, Salinger is merely weird in many respects. It appears he had a predilection for younger women with bob cuts and even travelled to California to meet a sitcom actress he developed a crush on. They had to escort him out. And so he writes on the Glass family -- never my favorite works and I tend to side with the Times reviewer who knocked that particular group of works. And recluses today, whether visual artists or writers are always somewhat odd. There's a bit of denial of the world combined with a male machismo that reeks of old-world Modernism in the worst sense. And all along, for his reclusiveness, Sallinger certainly appeared to play the media in order to keep his books going -- the problem is not so much his toying but that he did it so badly. Picasso or Hemingway or Nabokov were much better at the game. One thing the both books didn't really point out is although there are claims he worked in a cell-studio a quarter a mile from the house for hours each day, any time someone went to the door of his house he was there to answer it or in the case of one stalker, watching TV. Well, he was born in 1919 and it won't be long before as Capote said, he makes his death legal. Then we'll know whether he really wrote and if so what it was he wrote. I'm guessing, if it's more of the Glass saga that the world will be entirely disappointed. On the other hand, go read Ring Lardner if you have not. A great writer there (mentioned in Catcher).

I have also read a couple excellent things -- The Bat Tattoo by Hoban, worth a persue and it's stuck with me the past week more than any other thing I've recently read.

And I came across thanks, to the London Times, Angela Carter whose The Bloody Chamber is a virtuoso Baroque work that makes one want to start anew with the descriptions and similes. I'll be excited to read more of her.

I also note how Jeanette Winterson seems to be modelling her style on Carter who died in 1992. Likewise I began reading Everyone's Pretty by Lydia Millet and it seemed so much as though she were referencing Will Self that I had to put it aside. In her case it was more the use of his Fat Controller, albeit with a different name, that bothered me. Oh I'm sure they'll all deny it just as Mr. Ripoff denied stealing Scliar's plot of Max and the Cats. Well I'll continue to shake my head a bit as I return to writing.

It's been forever

2006-07-04T12:09:00.000-06:00

What has literature become?
It's been creeping up on me -- the traps that haunt contemporary writing. A few of my bugaboos are:

1.) Writers who try to novels as movies. Words, words, words! We should dream of the beauty of words. What have we if we reduce the song of alliteration and the snare of friccatives to what amounts to de-literatured plot? Notice I'm not talking style here.

2.) Soft or hard-porn as literature. I just don't see the WOW quality of literature that is merely and, I mean merely, a rehashing of letters one might find in Hustler magazine. You know the main guy -- he just published a new book which for reasons beyond my comprehension are loved by critics. Personally I think the critics are dirty, horny, lonely old men who don't dare buy porn and this gives them the excuse.

3.) Essays that are not well thought out or written. Aren't these both the key ingredients of the essay? You know who (hint: she wrote for the NY Times for years) wrote a book of essays with a sappy intro about 9/11 and some terrrible pieces that were rehashings of pop-culture ideas existing since the 1980's and earlier. Did you know kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtrya?! Can you imagine some girls want to model their body on Barbie?! Ug. It's like watching commercials over and over. I'm doubly amazed how some upper West-side people about crap their khaki's in admiration of her.

Quote of the week: "Brad Pitt's testes are the new Mother Theresa." I forget where I read that one but I like it.

The last couple of weeks were non-stop writing and my reading was generally related, lots of research. (I'm the sort of writer who if I mention a particular place or idea, I have to start digging deeply -- it's the former archives experience in me. The last thing I want is to miss a critical point -- so even though I don't use the majority of what I find, I will often discover one salient tidbit.)

So the writing, rewriting, re rewriting has created long evenings. (which in part is why I don't spend much time revising these posts -- craft what should be crafted and let the rest sit.)

Put on some streaming ambient music and a ten hour stint is around the corner. It's good, it's bad, it's non-stop -- how to describe the process. You do it. You keep doing it. You force yourself to do it. You cut and add, chop and invent. Eventually you coax it into something better (hopefully) than it was at first, a process tempered by the writer's continual self-doubt. But I'm really on track for getting exactly what I want by the end of August, and that's a manuscript that will be in a form where I can begin to send it out.

Books I'm really looking forward to this coming week or so include Stories by Gogol, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, more of Sylvia Legris and her stunning poetry, Interviews with American Women Writers, if nobody speaks of remarkable things -- by jon mcgregor, and Monkey by Michael Boyce (which I meant to read weeks ago.)