Pióro

The Globe and Mail has a contest that has caught my attention. They run part of a recent novel for five days and on the last day readers are invited to submit reviews. This routine will go on for six weeks. At the end of each week, ten reviews are drawn and the winners each get $100 gift certificates for books. As if this wasn’t exciting enough, there’s a grand prize of $5000, just for books.

I spent a good half hour yesterday planning what books I’d buy with five grand. I’d start with all those big reference books that you should have, but are too expensive. Then Martha mentioned the full, 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary. That’s $2000 right there. The contest rules say something about “some restrictions apply.” I’ll worry about those when the time comes.

A closer reading of the rules revealed that the actual review is not that important. Winners are chosen purely through the draw. I’m not really encouraged to write more than “It was neat,” and choose a star rating for the novel excerpt. But since I have those literary leanings, I did actually write a review. Not my finest though. I’m more worried about the skill-testing math question that winners’ of the draw have to answer unaided and correctly. There’s a time limit too.

The review itself follows.
Read the rest of this entry…

Elif called last night to say that Pebbled has been accepted into the Stratford-Upon-Avon International Digital Film Festival. That’s right. Her work is going to the Bard’s hometown. My voice, which is the only part of me in the film, will float into the Stratford air and I’ve still never visited the place. I wonder if my English BA will get revoked?

The festival’s web site doesn’t have any schedule information yet, but it does contain an interesting little fact. It is the first annual Stratford-Upon-Avon International Digital Film Festival. Elif’s debut film at Stratford’s inaugural film fest—for a student of drama, it’s quite fitting.

(Pebble stones?)

An art project can have a life of its own, especially when Elif is behind it.

Two years ago, when Martha and I were marooned in Whitby, Elif called me and said, “Matt, we’re doing something for the Station Gallery.” Out of nowhere, Elif approached the head of the gallery and said that she was a dancer and she and her writer friend were wondering if their were any opportunities for performing at the gallery. The director said we could perform as part of the gallery’s anniversary festivities.

“So, Matt. Are you in?”

From there we developed a performance-art piece called Suburban Metre and Motion, which involved the reading of a long poem by yours truly combined with dancing/movement by Elif. It all went rather well in such a parochial little place.

From that one performance, Elif has been expanding the piece. Last autumn, Mike and I were recruited as cameramen for the film version of the piece. Afterwards, Elif found an editor and composer and then she had a four minute movie. The film, called Pebbled, not only draws on the same themes as the performance piece, but remains just as edgy. I’m not the only one who sees its merit either. Yesterday, DC Shorts, a short-film festival in Washington DC, announced that Pebbled will be a part of this year’s line-up.

Here in Toronto, Elif and Kat have been busy preparing Pebbled for performance at the fringe Festival of Independent Dance Artists (fFIDA) in August. This version is not going to feature Elif or me. Instead, Elif plans to have five dancers and video projection. I’m very excited.

In honour of all this activity and in order to make sure Pebbled gets the attention it deserves, I’ve created a new category here at Pióro. It’s called The Hype. More shall come.

I got a very gentle rejection letter today, but it still contained a shock. The editor who responded to my query made a language-usage no-no.

Now, I have no intent of needlessly flaming this editor. I am the vengeful type, but she was very conscientious in her reply, leaving me no reason to get snarky. Still, the usage mistake, by an editor no less, made me cringe.

Before I delve into the mistake, I must make an appeal to those of you who think that pointing out usage mistakes is only something done by petty people who want to show everyone else how smart they are. You may be right, but I think there is more to it than a chance for me to push up my glasses at someone. While I think language is flexible and should be played with and explored, as in the case of hip-hop lyrics or concrete poetry, I also see it as a very fine tool. This tool can offer a lot of precision, especially English with its huge vocabulary. Like any instrument that is not used carefully, language can get blunted. Consider this then a kindly act of linguistic maintenance.

The editor’s mistake centred on the words “compose” and “comprise.” You can say “his poker-hand was composed of three kings and a pair of jacks” or “his poker-hand comprised three kings and a pair of jacks.” You can’t say “his poker-hand was comprised of three kings and a pair of jacks.” “Comprise” means “to embrace” and you can’t “embrace of” something.

Esoteric? Hardly. I think the “I shall/I will” issue is much more of a usage dinosaur, but maybe that should be left for some other time.

Dear Scream Literary Festival,

Thank you for wasting my time. I know artsy types are usually late and start times are flexible. That’s why I arrived at the Metalogos reading half an hour after the posted start time of 5pm. The nice lady at the door then said that the performances by Paul Dutton, Nobuo Kubota, W. Mark Sutherland and Darren Wershler-Henry wouldn’t be for another hour and a half. Since some homeless dude was hogging the wine, I vowed to be as cavalier about the works of textual art as you were with my time.

Also, I am providing a handy ratio for the works of art reviewed. The ratio shows how well a piece works without the help of its write-up in the nice little Metalogos pamphlet. For example, if a work gets a 10:0 that’s good because it’s all about art and not about the ideas behind the work (hence the zero part). I’d say anything from the 10:1 to 10:6 is good. From 10:7 to 10:10 the artist is starting to bug me because I don’t care that he’s read Derrida, Barthes, Lacan or Heidegger and that one/all these thinkers continue to give the artist nightmares/hard-ons. Once we get to 10:11 or 10:12, the write-up means more than the art does. The artist might as well just tell me about her idea over drinks with the homeless dude.

Let’s start with Christian Bök’s Bibliomechanics, a bunch of Rubik’s cubes with words on each cube. When stacked they make sentences, but only when read from left to right. The write-up says that the “reader can, theoretically, scramble each cube in order to produce an alternative permutation.” Whether the permutation reads as cogently as the one on display is a mystery. Maybe Bök will roll the cubes as part of his performance. I’ll never know. I was excited about this piece as I usually am with the schemas Bök cooks up for his literary explorations, like his very successful Eunoia. Bök may not be playing with the metaphorical tennis net that Frost was referring to, but the parameters that the Toronto writer sets for his works are impressive. The content of Bibliomechanics—in today’s permutation at least—left me cold. It seemed like your regular Dada/Futurist/Po-Mo stuff about violence, freedom and possibility. Rating 10:6.

Paul Dutton’s The Plastic Typewriter looks like something from the 70’s. Rating 10:9.

When I saw Nobuo Kubota’s piece with the phrases “being Being,” “I AM” and “IT IS” repeated, I was put right off. The title, which is God, Zen and Heidegger, clinched it. Oh, please! Rating 10:10.

Timeslide by Beth Learn is the first eight lines of Yeats’ “The Second Coming” translated into blocks. How one part of poem merits a block taller than another part is explained in the write-up. The “height variable” is determined by “the mean or average syllabic values per measure.” Since this cleared up nothing, I tried to puzzle out what was really going on with another gallery-goer. The man was more ambitious than I.

“Maybe we have to look at it phonetically,” he said.

“Sure,” I said. I understood the words he used but had no idea what he was talking about.

“Or maybe the tamberal,” he said losing me completely.

Rating 10:11. (I hope Beth Learn digs my rating ratios as I tried to make them as useful as her height variables.)

Sylvia Ptak offers Cypher Part 1 and Cypher Part 2, which could also be called, Honey, I blew up the letter and Honey, I shrunk the letter, respectively. Cypher Part 1 looks like a letter written in the most illegible cursive. Metallic filaments represent the “words.” Cypher Part 2 is where Cypher Part 1 got its start. Part 2 is a letter shrunk to the size of a business card; its writing is illegible cursive. These two pieces work. Hell, they work well. Don’t read the write-up. Rating 10:2.

Oh, look at the time. The reading has probably started by now. Hope it goes well.

Sincerely,

Matthew

Few in the crowd waiting for David Sedaris were actually wearing corduroy or denim. They sported lighter fabrics for their shorts and skirts. Fifteen minutes before Sedaris was scheduled to read, the available seating was filled up at the Bay/Bloor Indigo store. People leaked into the surrounding aisles. The two women next to me voiced my thoughts.

“We picked the worst section to stand in,” said one.

“For browsing?” ask the other.

“Yeah.”

We were in Ageing, surrounded by titles like On the Down Low and The Hardness Factor. I’m sure the material in these books could use a once-over by Sedaris’ wit.

“Are there going to be a lot of inside jokes?” wondered one woman.

“No, he’ll just be reading,” said the other.

Sedaris read “Turbulence,” which appeared recently in The New Yorker, followed by some naughty poems featuring dogs.

For his book tours, Sedaris likes to have some kind of a theme; the current one is public defecation. He has been collecting stories on this theme from people attending his readings. The stories he recounted brought more giggles than groans from the Indigo audience. He has mastered the balance of what to say and what to imply. His skill lets him cover subjects that most can’t touch without sounding like they were back in Grade 2. The proof is not just in the doo-doo topic of the tour, but also in such stories as “Put a Lid on It,” from his latest collection.

Even if you have read it in The New Yorker, you should download Sedaris’ reading of “Turbulence.” Then you can download his naughty doggie poems and ensuing banter. The recording got cut off near the end. Listeners are just missing Sedaris singing the praises of fellow writer, David Rakoff (Sedaris thinks Rakoff is really, really smart.) and giving a warm thank-you to the crowd.

[If the title of this post leaves you stratching your head, and you have Windows Media Player, watch this.]

I had a terrible introduction to Henry James. I had to work with him on an undergrad short-story assignment. Each student in the class, after calling out a few random numbers, got a sentence from the prof’s pile of books. Everyone was to take the sentence and use it as the start of his or her short story. I had the misfortune of getting an anaconda exceeding 250 words taken right from somewhere in the middle of The Ambassadors.

I tried to find a way out of the tangle of subordinate clauses (and sub-subordinate clauses) and semicolons. The sentence was clear, but who, other than James himself, could keep up that heavy, stately style. I entertained the idea of throwing the Jamesian behemoth between two quotes and starting the following paragraph with “And with that Jane closed her copy of The Ambassadors and went on to something more interesting than reading Henry James.” Cheek, though, wouldn’t help my grade. Instead, I did another kind of violence to the CN train of a sentence; I put periods where the semi-colon were. Not quite instant Hemmingway, but definitely more manageable. I then proceed to write a terribly mediocre story.

Of late, I have had to learn about the novella form. The reason why will remain a closely guarded secret for now; however, the studies can go public. A few writers, including John Gardner, have cited James’ “The Turn of the Screw” as one of the premier examples of the novella. For Gardner, the story’s focus on a single stream of action is exactly how a novella should be written. Fine. Seven years have passed since I had to write like Henry James. Maybe I was ready to at least read him.

The “single stream of action” is impressive. James focuses, almost microscopically, on a governess and her new job taking care of a pair of the most angelic children ever. Into this story, James mixes in ghosts and hysteria. Everything moves along with well managed suspense. Yet even with all these features I wasn’t carried away by the story. I blame those massive and lumbering sentences. Often, like with verse, the meaning of James’ sentences aren’t clear until the very end. Other times, they aren’t clear at all, which struck me as a bit of a rip off. On the surface, James’ long lines seem to be of the same ilk as, say, Jonathan Swift’s—English filtered through Latin to produce well-balanced chains of words and clauses. However, James’ constructions are murky numbers that lack the satirist’s precision. The only defence I can come up with for James’ style is that it is meant to heighten the mystery surrounding the events and demonstrate the questionable state of the governess’ mind. So, fine, I’ll tolerate the cloyingly rich prose as it serves some higher purpose. I might even read some more Henry James, in another seven years.

Umberto Eco stoked interest in his new novel tonight at his appearance at the Harbourfront Centre. Throughout his reading from his new novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, his interview and the audience questions, he was charming, gracious and outright hilarious. The reading was 66% English and 33% Italian. The part read in Italian was from the latter half of the novel and was delivered at such a speed that only the fully-fluent could follow, but even they didn’t catch everything as Eco didn’t pause for laughter. During the question period, Eco admitted that the difference between reading or speaking in English verses Italian is the same as the difference between swimming and walking: the latter is just quicker and more effective that the former.

The interview had one frustration, the interviewer. David Gilmour’s questions often teetered towards antagonistic. He also felt the need to repeat some of Eco comments like a poor ESL teacher correcting a student. However, nothing could take away from Eco’s eloquence.

Before leaving the stage, Eco offered up the Italian copy of The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana from which he read. The only fair way to do give it away was to throw it into the audience. The reaction was like the bouquet toss at a wedding, complete with some shrieks.

Below are incredibly rough recordings of the event. Turn down the volume for the applause, but crank it up for Eco and co.

Umberto Eco’s reading from his novel (5.6 megs).
Umberto Eco’s interview by David Gilmour (7.8 megs).
Umberto Eco’s Q&A session (4 megs).

Daniel Green writes a good post on the continued legitimisation of self-publishing. His discussion reminded me of Jim Munroe’s evangelising of the practice since his departure from HarperCollins in 2000. On Munroe’s site is a good economic argument for self-publishing. (Munro calls it “indie-publishing,” but his brand of indie-publishing is quite close to Green’s self-publishing. The line between the two, which depends on the writer’s involvement in the publishing process, is a blurry one.)

And it’s sunny and it’s dusty and the trees won’t have leaves until it rains. Traffic flows like the last drawn out task before the weekend. Avoid, tinker, avoid.

Broken glass lies in bp nichol’s concrete letters. At a nearby loading bay, a man dips his moustache into his coffee. None of this is in the university’s brochures.

Two city workers merry-go-round a man-hole, their monkey wrenches augering a metal shaft down at Avenue and Dupont. They walk away from the open hole.

Molson Street shows no sign of beer, nor house fronts, only alley entrances and garage doors.

At Yonge, a rig is turning left. A city-worn man offers up a newspaper, which the driver declines.

An hour and a half later, all the drivers are aiming for home. The tone of the traffic turns, so I leave.