Pióro

For some reason, I have this image of Russell Smith at a public talk advising that you shouldn’t read the back-cover of a book to find out if you’d like it, but to read the first few pages. In the absence of my own reviewer’s copy, I’ve done something similar: a first-chapter critique. Each week the Globe and Mail posts the first chapter of one of the books reviewed in its book section. Before reading this week’s review of Douglas Coupland’s Terry, I decided to review the first chapter, which is a short nugget of an introduction.

The Terry of the title is the unequivocal Canadian hero, Terry Fox. Coupland’s interest in the Marathon of Hope runner is an outgrowth of his two Souvenir of Canada collections, which, along with Terry, are explorations for Canadians into “our nation, our home and our soul.” These explorations are different from those of, say, the Confederation Poets, who immortalised rocks and pines and lakes and stuff, or the Expo 67 nationalism of the sixties and seventies. Coupland’s routes are through design and commercialism and, image and media.

Coupland’s opening chapter elegantly captures Fox’s effect on the Canadian consciousness with glimpses at archived letters and cards sent to the runner during his marathon. They range from sad confessions, “Leenane from Victoria has breast cancer and is worried that soon she’ll be too weak to drive, so she won’t be able to get her daughter to her violin lessons on time,” and slightly delusional declarations, “Helen, from Toronto had five children who all left home decades ago. Terry, I think of you as the son who never left.” It may be harsh to characterise Helen’s feelings as delusional, but she’s making quite the imaginative leap: the man running across Canada on her TV is the one child who didn’t move away.

Coupland is sympathetic to Helen’s delusion. His Canadian soul searching, through objects and images, including that of Terry Fox, requires an imaginative leap similar to that of the lonely mother. A mind must jump from the parts—stubby bottles, plastic table-hockey figures and a curly-haired man running down a highway with one prosthetic leg—to a whole nation’s soul. Both delusions can be dangerous, but those of Helen and Coupland seem benign. Helen simply wants to express the strong feelings brought out by a courageous runner and Coupland wants to capture his feelings for his country.

Read the first chapter of Terry.

Read the John Burns’ review of Terry.

Everybody knows Jesus helped win the 2004 U.S. election for Bush. Last November, I had no idea—like most of my Daily Show watching demographic—how conflated church and state really is in the States. I wanted to know more. As the first anthropologists were intrigued by economic systems or matrilineal kinship, I was curious about these evangelical Christians who had incredible political clout.

Ian Brown of The Globe and Mail shares this curiosity. The last of his features on the evangelical U.S. wrapped up this weekend. What struck me was not only the size of some of the “churches”—arenas that can hold 20 000—but the level of sincerity held by parishioners that doesn’t seem like it should belong to adults.

Filled with visions of mega-churches and twelve-step program religion, I found myself at Catholic mass this Easter. I’m not even an official “twice a year” Catholic. I was in church out of anthropological curiosity.

If churches like the Willow Creek Community Church are the Wal-Marts of modern Christianity, then my parent’s humble church is a Home Hardware. The little church feels the influence of the big ones—sermons have that twelve-step feel, hymns favour sunny guitars to the ominous organ. Yet, this “little guy” is still far removed from the Church-Marts. You can see it in the faces of the congregation.

In the Whitby church, the parishioners didn’t look rapturous, nor bored. No one raised up his or her hands to pray, but everyone observed the right moves. A person’s attention would vary from attentive to lost in some other thoughts. From many, there was the sense that they were at mass out of a sense of duty.

I’m sure some may see ‘duty’ as a baser motivation than ‘faith,’ but the former is one that I can identify with more readily. The nature of duties are more open to debate than the closed circle of faith. Where faith is a source for inner strength, duty isn’t always so pleasant and, as some faces showed, it can be a drag. Duty can switch-hit for the religious and secular-humanist camps more so than faith. The fatalism of duty, while less comforting, is far less triumphal, and therefore safer.

So much from still faces.

Years ago, maybe five, I set myself up for a productive failure. I started building my web-based literary empire. The venture taught me all I know now about programming for the web, about PHP, MySQL and JavaScript. I think I finished the empire two years ago, the code at least. I had spent so much time fussing with this line of code and that that I didn’t have any content for the thing. What’s a literary empire without anything literary? I would have to delay the launch until there was something to put in my glorious code. Then, of course, we went to Poland. Then, I realised that I didn’t like the code or the way the site worked (or would have worked if it was actually live). I had learned enough to see all my newbie mistakes. And still I had no content.

About four months ago, I decided to abandon the literary empire. I could fuss with the code forever, and for some reason, it’s easier to mess around with code than it is to focus on writing, so out with the code. I planned to focus on the existing pioro.net site, a much humbler endeavour. That would be that.

Then, in the course of some compulsive web surfing, I came across Wordpress, a blogging application. I was smitten. It had all the features I had worked into my old code, it had other things that I wanted. The kicker is the little blurb that runs at the bottom of the Wordpress pages: “Code is Poetry.” Any crew of programmers who can see the connection between well-written code and a sonnet are my kind of people.

Now pioro.net is all Wordpress. Goodbye, Blogger. The last three years have been good, but it’s time to move on. Though, on to what, who knows? I’m not exactly sure what direction pioro.net will be taking. At the moment, I envision a broadening and deepening of scope—maybe a fusion of the old Itchy Feet and the abandoned literary empire. I hope it will be my “Who’s Next” to what was a “Lifehouse.” We’ll see. I’m hesitant about grand pronouncements. Things have a way of changing on you. Some things get dropped.

I must thank the folks at Wordpress for designing such a fabulous app, which more and more people are finding out about. Thanks also to Michael Heilemann. I’ve used his Kubrick template as a means to work my own template into the Wordpress environment. Finally, as a tip to anyone trying to implement the new Wordpress, make sure you get these updates. They will save a lot of hair-pulling.

Stay tuned.

Traditional literary journals learn slowly, and The New Quarterly is one of them.

Often lit journals have web sites that are little more than poorly designed pamphlets. The largest frustration is that they give no samples of the writing they carry. This situation will lead any web surfer to ask, “What’s the point?” as there’s so much free stuff out there.

I know of only one lit mag, The Danforth Review, that really “gets” the web. Their site not only covers the traditional fields of fiction, and until recently, poetry, but it acts as a literary portal to other journals, articles and writerly resources.

The New Quarterly (TNQ), which is a fine publication with a good eye for quality Canadian writing, could have taken a few cues from The Danforth Review, but it didn’t. With the recent launch of it’s new site, the journal continues to wallow in e-pamphlet land. While the current-issue page contains some pull-quotes from works within, these teasers aren’t enough. Why not provide a whole story, or a few poems or some flash fiction? My suspicion is that TNQ policy is you can only see if you pay.

If it’s hard to sell a book in Canada, selling a literary journal is beyond difficult. When I ran a humble lit mag during my undergrad years, I would freak if I found someone had bought a copy from a local shop. While sales are precious, I have to question TNQ’s hoarding of content. Is holding out for sales more precious than making an author’s work available? Even if the editors feel that they can’t give new stuff out for free, why are they sitting on roughly 80 unavailable-to-the-public back issues? Is there a copyright thing I’m missing? Isn’t it more important simply to be read?

My advice then, to TNQ, is give me something from your current issue to read. Show me what you’ve published in the past. Make yourself relevant on the web.

Take German techno and mix unemployment. Take a Portuguese community centre and fade it into a club for Mods. Take a dance-floor and drop in a crowd of people who want to be there, young men who didn’t have to change before coming and women from backless tops to sweaters. Ladies’ choice. One woman looks like a Cossack before ditching the coat to dance and find her friends. The drinks, of course, obscene, but fresh unemployment outweighs guilt.

With DJ’s you have to know faces or tracks. Before the coat-check: Has anyone been up yet? Yeah, someone whose name I don’t catch. Then Jake Fairley will be on next. Cool. Thanks. The door-girl doesn’t check ID’s. The tickets are scanned, not ripped.

The first DJ we see then is Fairley. He starts off with the micro-house equivalent of “(Make Me Do) Anything You Want.”

The questions arrived as late as the after-dinner drinks. What are we going to see? Micro-house DJ’s. What’s that? Dance music for chin strokers.

We don’t know faces. Fairley’s set gets harder, faster. We put in earplugs. It’s good, really good for an opener. Imagine what Mayer will be like.

There’s lots of dancing and trips to the bathrooms. The basement halls to the bathrooms smell like Annex sewers with a natural gas leak. Two women do coke in a stall.

You have to know faces. Fairley stops and it’s not Fairley. It was Mayer. It must have been Mayer because the next DJ looks even less like the Mayer photo. The real Fairley plays a more intense set than the real Mayer. Everyone dances harder. He sings over his electronics.

It’s irrational, but there’s a bit of disappointment when you find out you weren’t dancing to who you thought you were dancing to. The dancing is still amazing.

I was nearly killed last Thursday. It’s happened before and it will probably happen again. But this time, I decided to get the police involved.

Despite being on a bike decked out in flashing lights and reflectors, I was nearly hit by a car last week. The driver made a left in front of me. I jammed on my breaks in time; he would have been too late with his. I definitely swore very loudly at him and then I definitely followed him for a block, reciting his license plate number. He parked outside of a school. I think he was late for his child’s performance in a Christmas recital.

While I was still shaking from the scare or from anger, I decided I would tell the police about this incident. I had heard something about reporting bad drivers. This guy, at the very least, deserved some kind of file. As soon as I got home, I called the non-emergency police number. Some woman transferred me, while I was mid-sentence in an explanation, to a helpful man, to whom I had to re-explain everything. He made the process of filing a driver complaint seem pretty straight forward. I could even go to any station to do so.

Today, I went to the 52 Division station. I explained to a woman behind a long counter that I was nearly hit by a careless driver and wanted to file a driver complaint.

“You mean a report?” she asked.

“Yes. Fine. A report then.”

She then had to ask a very large man about the details of such a report.

“It’s for that person over there,” she said to the large man as she pointed at me.

The large man nodded. He then walked to one of the desks behind the long counter. He sat, tapped the mouse, looked around and got up. He came out from behind the counter, on the left, walked behind me and then left through a door on the far right wall. I found myself blessed with some time to read the whiteboard of traffic fatalities for the year. As of today, the Toronto Police have only had two cyclist fatalities, one within 52 Division’s jurisdiction. While I was waiting, a man came in and asked if he could get a copy of the charges that have been pressed against him. He couldn’t.

The large man reappeared through the door. He passed me and went behind the counter.

“So, what do you want?” he asked.

I explained my situation.

“So, you were cut off,” was the large man’s précis. “Where did it happen?”

I was prepared for this. After all, I was once a security guard. I know the necessity of having clear documentation of an incident. Places and names—those are what the police need.

“Dupont and Palmerston.”

“Where’s that?”

His curtness and denseness were getting to me so I tailored my next response just for him.

“That’s north of here.”

The large man’s buddy threw him a bone.

“It’s Honest Ed’s country.”

The large man then explained that I’d have to go to 14 Division as the incident happened in their jurisdiction. I protested. The nice man on the phone had said I could file the complaint or report or whatever it was called at any station. The large man said they were very busy and it would take three hours. I’m not sure if he heard me thank him for his help as I was walking away when I did so.

At the 14 Division station, two women were ahead of me. An officer was explaining that they couldn’t travel with the police who had to pick up the women’s step-father and take him to the hospital. However, one of the women would have to present some papers to the police when they picked up the step-father.

“When will the police arrive?” asked the woman.

“I can’t say,” said the officer, “This will be put on a priority list. It depends.”

This situation made perfect sense to the officer, but not to the woman. She would be back, anxious for more clarification, before I would leave the station.

When I got an officer, he had to find out how one files the type of thing I wanted to report. It turns out that the thing is called a Traffic Violation Report.

I was seated across from the officer’s desk as he took down the details. It felt like something out of a cop show.

“So you were cut off?” the officer asked.

“Well, yes.”

“What do you want us to do?”

Find this shitty driver and bitch-slap him. Then, when you are done, you and your friend at 52 can sit on your batons’ and spin… or so my thoughts ran.

“Well, this is were I need some clarification,” I said, “I would like the driver to be aware that he was really careless and drove dangerously. I want it official. Is this the right process for that?”

“You want him charged?” asked the officer.

“No. No. More like a warning.”

“All right.”

The officer got down to typing in the details with his two index fingers.

After a bit, he paused and blurted, “You from the city, man?”

The question caught me way off-guard.

“I’ve been here a while. Why?” I said checking for straw behind my ears.

“You know, this kind of thing happens all the time.”

“Yes I know. It’s happened to me many times, but there’s got to more I can do about it than yelling at the guy’s tail-lights.”

“That’s what I do. Get some instant gratification.”

Educational. In so many ways.

I don’t know if I can totally fault the police for their condescension and unwillingness to help. They do have more pressing matters than a cyclist to was nearly killed/just cut off. This is the city and bad drivers are a fact of life. Really what can you do, except maybe find more creative ways for getting instant gratification?

Pierre Berton passed away earlier today.

A few weeks ago, I and my house-mates found ourselves in the odd position of trying to explain Pierre Berton to a German grad-student. I don’t remember what we said about Berton, whose works are on our parents’ books shelves and maybe some of our own, even if we haven’t read them. Talking about bow-ties, black-and-white TV shows vaguely remembered and certified Canadian subjects like the War of 1812, the Klondike and the railway just didn’t convey the institution that he was. We then had to try and tell the German grad-student why Berton’s televised joint-rolling lesson was insanely hilarious. Recreational drug use aside, Berton achieved a cool that not only appealed to CBC listening parents, but also literary hipsters like Russell Smith. (Since the Globe and Mail considers its back-catalogue so precious, you need to be an Insider to get at Smith’s article on Berton. Also, it’s nice to see that the National Post is able to use Berton’s death to keep its sniping feud with the CBC alive.)

Berton’s death marks the second passing this year of “an old man of Canadian letters.” Jack McClelland, who published a number of Berton’s books, died in June.

CanLit’s grandfathers are slipping away.

Of The Globe and Mail Books section Jay said, “I don’t read it, but I like the idea of it.” I too love the idea of it, but most of its fiction reviews are unreadable, which leads me to ask why this section of the paper is simply a flyer, a glorified ‘advertorial’ or skinny ‘magalog.’ Why isn’t it a place where the discussion of a work’s worth is interesting and engaging? I imagine the reason comes from somewhere in the economic sphere, the great leveller of intellectual ambition. How else would the section appeal to both serious readers and those who are excited by yet another book on the Franklin Expedition or the latest bunch of history books whose release fits nicely with the coming of a similarly-themed blockbuster?

Editorial and marketing interests aside, there’s also the skill of the reviewers. This past weekend’s Globe and Sunday Toronto Star have given us a nice test-case to examine how a review succeeds or fails. Each Books section contains a review of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. One review is good, and the other is terrible. My hope is that by looking at these pieces closely, the editors and writers at the Globe may gain some insight into the art of reviewing fiction.

One word of warning to sensitive book-reading Canadians: this piece you are reading will say critical things about one of our darling authors. This piece is not meant to be ‘mean’ or to exhibit ‘snark’. These criticisms are not an attack on the author’s skills as a fiction writer, as a Canadian citizen or as an ox. They also do not say anything about her skill as a driver or her demeanour at the book-signing table after a reading at Harbour Front. I’m looking at her abilities as a reviewer. That’s it.

For those international readers of this web site, I apologise for the previous paragraph. Enthusiasts of Canadian fiction, most of whom are writers or friends of writers, can be touchy.

Philip Marchand wrote his review for the Star and Catherine Bush wrote hers for the Globe. Both started their pieces very strongly: Marchand by writing how Robinson’s book provides a window into the rather perplexing Southern US and Bush by touching on the impact of Robinson’s first book and the odd 23-year gap between her second and current work. However, after three paragraphs, a readers eyes will start to blur over Bush’s words. Her review just gets boring.

The bulk of Bush’s review is plot synopsis for the sake of plot synopsis. Any hint of critical engagement with Robinson’s work is brought out in stock ‘reviewer’ phrases like “curious inversion,” “profound subtlety” and “vividly brought to life.” (Thankfully, the phrase “deceptively simple” is absent.) The review is devoid of any examples of Robinson’s writing. Bush seems to forget that in a review, like in a novel or newspaper article, the reader’s attention is something earned and not given.

Marchand, ever conscious of the reader’s attention, executes a bit of a ‘bait-and-switch’ in his article. At the beginning he entices the reader with the idea of “book as window into the Southern soul” only to renege, albeit tactfully, later on. His out some with the statement that the main character of the novel “doesn’t have to wrestle with the questions of gay marriage, abortion rights and stem cell research.” The book is, after all, set in 1955. The ploy, though, works and can be forgiven because Marchand delivers in other areas. He presents the reader with the pedigree of Gilead as he compares it with Georges Bernanos The Diary of a Country Priest. Marchand’s exploration of plot and character are in the service of illustrating the ideas that the book gives rise to. The review also has examples of Robinson’s writing, which, I would think, is what any reader wants to see.

Now that both reviews have a passed briefly under the microscope, I hope that current and budding reviewers have some lessons that they can take with them. Again, I hope the strong criticism laid upon Bush’s piece was not too much for her admirers and the cause of Canadian letters. With all of us now looking forward to future Books sections, I pronounce this review of reviews over.

A day after Wayson Choy—who I thought was a shoo-in—found out he’d have to be content with only the “2004 Giller Shortlist” stickers on his book, I saw in him in the local Book City book store. The trooper was there signing books. And who should come in after for her own book signing? None other than the Queen of CanLit, Peggy Atwood. The literary powerhouse comes in quite a humble, bent, old-lady frame. She also comes complete with a pretty, young handler who does things like go up to the Book City staff and announce that Margaret Atwood is here for her book signing.

“Margaret Atwood is here. Sorry we’re late, but I didn’t have a cell phone to call you to let you know,” said the handler.

“That’s OK. Wayson Choy is still signing his books,” said the Book City staffer.

“That’s fine. We’ll wait.”

“You can wait near the signing table if you want.”

“Right,” said the handler, not really committing to the suggestion or just not really listening. In Canadian-ese, her tone could have been interpreted as a passive aggressive “Uh, you’re kidding right?”

“I mean, that is, if it’s not a problem. She wouldn’t mind?” said the staffer.

“Oh, no. Not at all.”

“Oh, good. Because I thought there was something between—”

“No. No. Well, not that I know of.”

The handler’s laugh prompted a matching one from the staffer. Imagine. A literary spat between the two writers!

The authors met near the end of the fiction wall. Their attention was on the book tables, as if they were looking for bargins. Margaret had a small something with “Yoga” written on it in big letters. Wayson had a glossy coffee-table book entitled “Tools.”

After the initial “hello’s” were finished, they continued browsing their separate ways.

My ESL students are just average Canadians when it comes to the US election. The students have a knee-jerk support for Kerry even if they have never heard of him.

I started my conversation class with the question, “Who do you think will win the election today?” My students looked at me as if I was speaking a foreign language. I gave the background to my statement—US, election, voting—and then posed the question again. Then a student asked me who you could vote for if you didn’t want Bush to win. Once I taught everyone how to pronounce his name properly, Kerry was a shoo-in.

According to the following pole, two of the students would vote for Kerry and the third would vote for Bush. The Republican student soon admitted that he really preferred Kerry.

“I just said Bush because they said Ker… Kerr… the other guy,” he said.

Standard teenage compulsions are stronger than politics.

My conversation class has four fairly advanced students. Class turnout today was three students, which is high.

My other class is at a much lower level. I had to teach the word “election” before we could talk about it. Once they understood, one student said, “I hate Bush-ee.” He’s Korean and English speakers from that country add “ee” to the end of quite a few English words. The other two students in the class didn’t comment. Attendance was 100%.