Carousel (or, Rather, [arouse|)
05.15.04My Tom York Award winning story "A Story With No Title Whatever" has been picked up for publication in issue 16 of Carousel, a literary journal that I much admire.
Posted by August at 12:16 PM | Comments (2)
The Globe and Mail
05.15.04My review of Rising to A Tension appears in today's Globe and Mail.
Posted by August at 12:13 PM | Comments (1)
Continued Downtime
04.06.04It looks as though, for financial reasons, I'm going to continue to be offline until the end of April. Look for lots of updates in May.
Posted by August at 10:24 PM | Comments (1)
Downtime
03.02.04Due to a conflict with Ma Bell, I won't have regular Internet access for at least another week. In the meantime, expect silence.
Posted by August at 02:40 PM | Comments (0)
Culture Police
02.25.04Doesn't Stephen Henighan have anything better to do? Coming from Geist I wouldn't necessarily take it at face value; but because it's Henighan, well, let's just say he means it.
I really liked When Words Deny the World, but after corresponding with him, his prescriptive Canadian-ness is starting to get irritating.
Posted by August at 10:18 PM | Comments (0)
The Linking Fiasco
02.23.04Could people new to the Internet please stop telling us shit we already know?
I mean, good lord, courtesy links are nothing new, and they aren't a requirement. To get upset about them is just plain childish. Welcome to the Internet. Despite what AOL might have told you, it's not a very friendly place. In fact, the best communities around are often openly hostile. Get used to it.
Posted by August at 03:02 PM | Comments (0)
Naomi Wolf vs. Harold Bloom
02.23.04I've been waiting to blog about this until Naomi Wolf's essay was actually released, so I could make a meaningful statement about her accusations rather than speculating blindly.
Wolf's accusation takes centre stage in the media, but the majority of the article focuses on the climate at Yale. The problem is that, despite Wolf's insistence that she is not out to vilify Bloom, her writing is not clear enough to establish whether the plethora of anecdoatal evidence is meant to support her point about Yale, or her case against Bloom.
And aside from her own accusation against Bloom, very nearly everything she says in unverifiable rumour, or unverifiable hearsay. I'm not saying she's wrong in her accusation, or in her portrait of Yale. What I am saying is that I don't have enough information to judge either way, and Wolf's essay doesn't lend her any credibility. Even if her accusation against Bloom is true, she comes across as using it, not because of any damage done to her, but because it will get her essay extra attention. True or not, she brought the issue to the court of public opinion, and here her credibility matters, and is influenced not only by what she says, but how she says it.
If I were forced to choose a side, I would choose Bloom's, mostly because he is an old man whose work I respect, whereas Wolf's politics and mine disagree violently. That being said, I will not say that Bloom is innocent, or that he is guilty. I simply don't know enough.
Posted by August at 02:48 PM | Comments (1)
CanLit and the Jealousy Problem
02.22.04You may not have known. Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Anne Carson "are writers of such inferior quality that in a truly literate society they would be recognized as a national embarrassment." Atwood, Ondaatje and Carson are "a drone, an entrepreneur and a cipher respectively." Anil's Ghost is "cloyingly 'lyrical,' " Oryx and Crake is "saplessly cerebral." The English Patient, The Blind Assassin and Yann Martel's Life of Pi are "among the most boring, uninflected and monochromatic novels ever written and published in this country." Alastair Macleod's No Great Mischief is "a one-note Celtic threnody steeped in banal and portentous sentiment."
Fraser Sutherland reviews David Solway's Director's Cut, a new title from Porcupine's Quill (the same house that released Henighan's When Words Deny the World), and is astonished to find that some people dislike the pop stars of CanLit (scandalous!). He also falls into the predictable defence of Atwood and company: less popular writers are simply jealous.
These anathemas, and a few imprimaturs, appear in the essays of Director's Cut, its author a self-described "hometown Savonarola committing most of contemporary Canadian literature to the bonfire of the inanities." David Solway anticipates, one imagines hopefully, that his cannonades will attract return fire. But he misses one likely riposte: that he's harvesting sour grapes about others' celebrity.
This tired old saw is brought out so often I'm beginning to think that even fans of Atwood and Ondaatje aren't capable of identifying anything good in their writing. Henighan was right: it has become impossible to critique any moderatly famous Canadian writer without being accused of jealousy. I don't agree with all of Solway's Dale Peck-style criticisms, but to dismiss him as simply jealous is absurd. He probably is jealous. Hell, I'm jealous. But that doesn't mean he isn't right.
Posted by August at 12:47 PM | Comments (3)
The Friends of Margaret Atwood Award
02.22.04The CBC has published a brief collection of quotations in praise of the Giller Prize.
I wonder what Stephen Henighan would have to say about that?
Posted by August at 12:27 PM | Comments (0)
Canada Reads
02.22.04For several years now the CBC has been running a competition called Canada Reads, in which a group of panelists (musicians, politicians, filmmakers, and occasionally, writers) decide which book Canadians should read. I've been avoiding it like the plague, afraid that, tongue in cheek though it is, the competition would fall victim to CanLit navel gazing.
And it has, at least twice. This year the winner was Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Last Crossing, which I haven't read yet. Vanderhaeghe is a minor CanLit celebrity at the moment, which may explain his success. If this book is anything at all like his The Englishman's Boy, then it's a good, inoffensive read, but certainly not a powerhouse. Richler's book should have mopped the floor with The Last Crossing, but alas old Mordecai was always a far cry from "inoffensive".
The first year Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion took the prize (is there a prize?), and I have the dubious honour of having read that book twice. My friend Jon commented, upon first reading it, that "it's good, but it sucks", which may not sound like particularly intelligent criticism, but is in fact right on the money. Ondaatje's prose is lovely and poetic, but for the most part that's all it is. His characters are flat, his dialogue is terrible, and his complete inability to give his narratives any sort of structure is ridiculously annoying. I have said in other places that in literary fiction language matters more than anything else, and I will stand by that, but it does not mean that the other elements of prose fiction do not matter at all; Ondaatje, as evidenced by In the Skin of a Lion, would not agree. The circular nature of the book might be reminiscent of Finnegan's Wake to some, but it struck me as more of an O'Henry shaggy dog story. It may also be an attempt at structure, but again it doesn't succeed. Michael Ondaatje is like Margaret Atwood; he made a repuation early in his career, and his ability (as an excellent poet) to craft solid metaphors has allowed him to mask the fact that his prose fictions are essentially empty shells.
My opinion of this whole Canada Reads nonsense was very nearly changed by Zsuzsi Gartner's essay on the process, which I think captured the nature of the competition better than the winning books do. I'll be keeping a closer eye on the competition next year.
You can read Vanderhaeghe's reaction here.
Posted by August at 12:09 PM | Comments (0)