Frantic, I’ve-Got-a-Plane-to-Catch Jottings

Posted 28 June, 2007 in Jottings | No comments

• Robert Ludlum may be dead, but Jason Bourne lives on.
• Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, has been nominated for the James Tait Black Memorial prize. One of these days, I’ll get around to reading it, I swear.
• Patricia comments on a blogger who started an online petition to get the CBC to include a regular joe — specifically, him — amongst the celebrities on the 2008 Canada Reads panel. I’m not sure how I feel about this. Regular readers of this site will be aware of my feeling that literary criticism isn’t a dilletante’s game and not every opinion is deserving of equal weight, but Canada Reads isn’t really literary criticism, it’s showbiz. And besides, I’m not sure that Jim Cuddy or Steven Page are any more qualified to discuss the merits or drawbacks of Canadian fiction than is the average Canadian plucked off the street.
• Sheila Parr’s thoughts on creativity.
• A mostly negative review of Tina Brown’s new biography of Princess Diana, which was commissioned by The Spectator, then shitcanned for reasons that remain unclear, has cropped up in the Guardian.
• Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker. (via Whitlock.)
• I’m off to Vancouver for the long weekend — kind of a working mini-vacation — so posts may be sporadic until I return. I’ll try to find an Internet connection when I’m out west, but I make no promises. In the meantime, stay well, and we’ll see ya on the flipside.

R.I.P. William Hutt

Posted 27 June, 2007 in Obituaries | 3 comments

A great Canadian actor, dead at eighty-seven.

Vive la Différence!

Posted 27 June, 2007 in Literary Criticism | No comments

Modern Matriarch on the perils of writing her first sex scene:

After I posted my sex scene at Editred for my peers to critique (I have a couple faithful readers who have been work-shopping this first novel with me), I realized there was no mention of breasts or throbbing members. Well what kind of sex scene is that, I thought. There was, of course, caressing, undressing, and the ultimate climax, but I suddenly began to feel like I had still managed to skirt the issue.

She goes on to differentiate between erotica and pornography; the former, according to Audre Lorde, is “a source of power and information,” while the latter “represents the suppression of true feeling.”

But notice — yet again — the absence of any kind of definition about what constitutes erotica as opposed to what constitutes pornography. How do we tell the two apart? Does it simply have to do with the presence or absence of heaving breasts and throbbing members? Or is this just a bit too vague and narrow to be at all, ahem, satisfying?

I once tried my hand at an erotic short story. As research I read as much erotica as I could find, from Anne Rice to the Marquis de Sade. As I was reading, I commented to one of my women friends that it was a difficult genre to pin down, because its variety and scope were so broad. She looked at me the way one does when forced to explain something that should be patently obvious and said, “That’s because there are as many varieties of sexual experience as there are individuals having sex.”

Which is one of the reasons I get fairly agitated when I read critiques that suppose a kind of Manichean separation between erotica and pornography. This assumes that everyone is working from the same definitions of these terms, which is patently and provably false. One woman’s pornography is another woman’s erotica. (I know several women who find de Sade’s work erotic, whereas others find it reprehensible.) It’s simply impossible to come up with a definition of pornography that will encompass all tendencies and predilections.

Can we not just admit that different people are turned on by different things, and that may or may not include descriptions of heaving breasts and throbbing members? It’s not necessary, and may even be retrograde and reductive, to impose artificial and restrictive labels on the full range of human sexual experience, which is, after all, one of the most mysterious and powerful forces available to us (and therefore one of the perfect subjects for treatment in fiction). Why is this so difficult for some writers to accept?

New(ish) Reviews Online

Posted 25 June, 2007 in Book Reviews | No comments

You can read my review of Dana Vachon’s Mergers & Acquisitions, from the June 24, 2007 issue of the Edmonton Journal, here. My review of Barry Callaghan’s short-story collection Between Trains, from the June 2007 issue of Quill & Quire, is online here. In case you’re interested.

Jottings

Posted 25 June, 2007 in Jottings | No comments

• A jury has decided that Laura Albert, who wrote under the name JT Leroy and created a fictional back story for this nonexistent author, is guilty of fraud. Fine, I suppose; she didn’t just write under a nom de plume, she actively promoted “JT Leroy” and his story — teenage runaway street prostitute with AIDS — as authentic, and duped a number of people, including Winona Ryder, Gus Van Sant, and Mary Gaitskill, into believing that Leroy was a real person. What I don’t understand is how Antidote International Films, Inc. can sue to recoup the royalty payments on Leroy’s novel Sarah, which it optioned before the truth about the book’s authorship came to light. True, the novel was promoted as being semi-autobiographical, which is a problem if the autobiography of the author is a complete fabrication. However, Albert is not James Frey: she never tried to pass the book off as anything other than a novel. And the novel still remains. Antidote should not be able to demand royalty payments back simply because the book turned out to be written pseudonymously.
• Penguin is planning to serialize parts of Michael Winter’s new novel, The Architects Are Here, on Facebook. Again, fine, except they’re claiming that it’s the first Facebook serialization of a novel ever, which, love the folks at Penguin though I do, is plain wrong. Brad Kelln, who has published psychological thrillers with Insomniac Press and is now under contract with ECW, has been serializing a new novel on the popular social networking site for the past few months. (If you’re on Facebook, you can find his novel under the group “I am aware Dr. Brad Kelln writes books.”)
• Barbara Gowdy’s Helpless is reviewed in the Guardian. Joanna Briscoe says that the book, about a pedophile, is “more reminiscent of Stephen King than of Nabokov” and that “[t]here’s a strange sense here that Gowdy has both held back and stepped too far.” I still haven’t got around to this one, but I’m glad to see Gowdy getting exposure internationally.
• Edward Gorey was a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Now why doesn’t that come as a surprise? (via Maud.)
• Moonlight Ambulette on pairing art books and music.
• Courtney Solomon sounds like one sick puppy.
• Zachariah Wells on unsolicited submissions to literary journals: “Picked up Books in Canada today. In it, an essay by John Barton called “Where Have All the Poets Gone?”, lamenting the small number of poetry submissions he gets at The Malahat Review. He seems dismayed and a little puzzled by the whole thing. Which makes me think of a farmer who, after years of planting potatoes in the spring and ploughing in the fall, wonders why his once-rich field now yields such a paltry crop.”

Degrees of Reliability

Posted 22 June, 2007 in Book Reviews | 5 comments

Works discussed: Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl. Penguin Books, 516 pp., $18.50 tpb, ISBN: 978-0-14-311212-9.

Poppy Shakespeare, by Clare Allan. Anchor Canada, 344 pp., $19.95 tpb, ISBN: 978-0-385-66215-4.

It is instructive to read Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Clare Allan’s Poppy Shakespeare back-to-back, since they illuminate each other in a number of ways. Each is a first novel, each features a female protagonist, and each is told in the first person, employing that particular narrative device adored and misunderstood in roughly equal measure: the unreliable narrator.

In both books, the narrator — Blue van Meer in Pessl’s case, N. in Allan’s — is something of a naif, or at least someone from whom the complete story, in all its implications, is withheld. Blue is a sixteen-year-old high-school student desperately trying to gain acceptance from the Bluebloods, the ostentatiously in-crowd at the St. Gallway School, which she attends; N. is a psychiatric patient at the Dorothy Fish, a London day hospital. Especially for those who consider adolescence to be a kind of psychosis, it should be obvious that both of these characters have the deck of understanding stacked against them.

In capable hands the unreliable narrator can be used to subvert conventional tropes of genre storytelling (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), to create an ironic distance between the narrator and the reader (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), or to call into question the very process of storytelling itself (The Sound and the Fury). In less capable hands, this device becomes little more than a dodge, a trick, or a clever ploy on the part of the writer to pull the wool over the reader’s eyes for no greater purpose than the big reveal at the end when the writer can throw back the curtain and smugly say, “Gotcha.” (See, among numerous other examples, Gautam Malkani’s overpraised Londonstani, or pretty much anything by Chuck Palahniuk.)

While neither Pessl nor Allan is in the camp that includes Twain, Faulkner, and (for the purposes of this discussion) Christie, neither is as egregious in their misuse of narrative pyrotechnics as Malkani or Palahniuk, although Pessl comes closer to being too clever by half, but this ultimately might have to do with a surfeit of ambition rather than a deliberate attempt to be cute or to prove how smart she is.

Blue’s story begins as a coming-of-age tale. Following the death of her mother, Blue takes to the road with her father, Gareth, a once-esteemed political science professor who has more recently been relegated to a series of positions at bottom-tier schools, “the schools no one had ever heard of, sometimes not even the students enrolled in them.” The two travel from school to school, from city to city, Blue constantly attempting to integrate herself into a new environment while her father occupies himself by engaging in a succession of short-lived affairs with local women, whom Blue comes to refer to as “June Bugs”: “Dad’s romances could last anywhere between a platypus egg incubation (19-21 days) and a squirrel pregnancy (24-45 days).”

Following an incident in Howard, Louisiana, involving Blue and a gunshot Spanish gardener named Andreo Verduga, Gareth decides to settle with his daughter in the town of Stockton, North Carolina. There, Blue encounters Hannah Schneider, who teaches a film course at St. Gallway. Hannah takes an immediate shine to Blue and attempts to integrate her, over the objections of the other group members, into the Bluebloods, a snooty clique of five students that meets once a week at the teacher’s home for dinner.

So far, so good, and Pessl does a fairly decent job of melding a distaff Holden Caulfield with characters plucked from The O.C. Unfortunately, on page 311, the story takes a dramatic left turn, becoming a kind of ad-hoc whodunit, with Blue forced into the role of Nancy Drew. This is where her inability to comprehend events around her becomes significant, and significantly distressing for the reader. Several new plot points are introduced in the latter stages of the book, leading up to the big reveal at the end, but none of this is particularly effective, and feels totally at odds with what has gone before.

But the overwhelming problem with the book’s final section — which is impossible to discuss in any substantive way without giving away the key secret embedded in the plot — is that it ends up as little more than a fancy parlour trick: an instance of a clever author saying “Gotcha” to her reader. Nor is it entirely clear that any of the nettlesome questions in Pessl’s labyrinthine plot are resolved at the end. The book closes with a “Final Exam” that asks readers to answer questions based on the characters and situations in the preceding pages. Pessl has said in interviews that all of the information necessary to answer the Final Exam questions is in the book, but this, too, smacks of authorial coyness.

It is possible that Pessl was attempting to achieve what Henry James referred to as “gradations and suppositions of effect” in her narrative, but the result is too self-conscious, too precious to be entirely satisfying.

Poppy Shakespeare, by contrast, is less self-conscious in its approach, and the narrative pyrotechnics are more fully wedded to the story. As with Special Topics, there is a psychic distance between the narrator and the reader, but unlike Pessl’s book, this never feels artificial or show-offy; it is a natural product of N.’s character and her circumstances.

N. is a “dribbler” — her word for a patient at the Dorthy Fish day hospital, where she has spent the last thirteen years. In N.’s conception, the Dorothy Fish “was the best of both worlds: you was getting the help but you done what the fuck you wanted.” The patients in the Dorothy Fish survive under the aegis of The Ministry for the Advancement of the Deranged (MAD), which provides them with MAD money, offered in “twenty-seven rates, from High High High to Low Low Low” and allocated based on the severity of a patient’s illness: “the madder you was, the higher the rate they give you.”

MAD money was like religion ‘cept bigger. MAD money was every religion all added together and timesed by itself and bigger than that as well. Sniffs gone to college to study MAD money and come home knowing less than they did when they gone. People spent their whole lives studying just one single rate. I knew all about it ’cause years before, when I was still on the wards, this student come round doing research for a thesis he was writing on Middle High Middle. And not even all of Middle High Middle, he was focusing just on the second ‘Middle’ he said, ‘for reasons of space’.

When Poppy Shakespeare, a new patient, arrives on the ward, N. is asked to guide her around, to show her the ropes and familiarize her with the hospital’s procedures and rules. Poppy arrives in “this little black suit, a lacy white blouse, black tights and snakeskin heels,” and N. initially mistakes her for a nurse.

As for Poppy herself, she is resolute in her assertion that she is not mentally unstable: ” ‘Let’s just get one thing straight,’ she said. ‘I Am Not A Nutter. There Is Nothing Whatever Wrong With My Head! Alright?’ She spelled out the words like I was foreign or stupid, tapping her head to make sure I got the point.” But Poppy’s attempts to prove that she is sane are stymied at every turn:

[S]he gone to see the doctors, said she didn’t need to be there and the doctors said it weren’t for her to judge. So she asked them to tell her why she was there and doctors said it weren’t for them to say. And she had to be prepared to help herself and shit, and nobody couldn’t do it for her.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, Poppy Shakespeare reads like a conflation of Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but Allan complicates her narrative by forcing the reader to view everything through N.’s distorted eyes. The objective truth of her narrative, to the extent that such a thing exists, operates outside her own skewed perception, and readers must come to it through a combination of close reading and intuiting the shifting ironic distance between what N. tells us and what is actually the case.

This is a tricky line to walk, and for the most part Allan acquits herself admirably. There are passages that ring false, as when N. relates Rosetta, another patient at the Dorothy Fish, relating a conversation amongst various staff members at the hospital. The educated cadences of the staff members’ speech are presented too perfectly, particularly at two removes. But, it is possible that N. is simply a great mimic, and that she has sufficient perspicacity to fill in the gaps of memory or other people’s faulty recollections. Allan has a bit of a built-in “get out of jail free” card in this respect: nevertheless, passages such as the one mentioned above don’t feel entirely authentic to me.

As with Special Topics, Allan’s novel has a big reveal at the end, but in this case the surprise is earned, whereas with Pessl it comes off as something of a cheat. The reason for this has to do in part with the different modes of the two books: Allan’s novel is a satire, whereas Pessl for the most part plays her story straight. The twists of Allan’s plot have an organic quality to them; they are inevitable consequences of the story rather than authorial constructs imposed from without.

This, finally, is what makes Poppy Shakespeare a superior fiction. It is a true exit author piece, which is what every first-person narration aspires to. Pessl’s authorial fingerprints, by contrast, are all over Special Topics in Calamity Physics. The former displays a narrative voice that is bracing and vibrant, while the latter is too precious for its own good.

How Do You Spell “Irony”? S-E-N-T-A-N-C-E.

Posted 16 June, 2007 in Uncategorized | 4 comments

Ian Brown has a long article in today’s Globe and Mail (pp. F1, F4-F5) about the declining vocabulary skills in today’s society. Fair enough, and some would say long overdue.

Brown quotes Harriet Brand, director of public relations for Princeton Review, as saying, “The reality is, God gave us spellcheck.” While the (dubious) merits of spellcheck over native ability are debatable, what is not debatable is that spellcheck only works if you use it.

Case in point:

The article is accompanied by hand-lettered graphic illustrations that are credited to Jason Logan. Several of these illustrations provide definitions of uncommon or unusual words. The first, in an orange square that resembles a post-it note, reads as follows: “ZEUGMA[:] N., A FIGURE OF SPEECH DENOTING THE JOINING OF TWO OR MORE PARTS OF A SENTANCE WITH A SHARED VERB OR NOUN.” (My emphasis.)

When you flip over to page F5, you encounter another hand-lettered, shaded square resembling a post-it. This one reads: “UNHOUSELED[:] ADJ., THE STATE OF A DYING SOUL THAT HAS NOT RECEIVED THE EUCHAREST.” (My emphasis.)

In a piece about the declining linguistic standards in our society.

I. Shit. You. Not.

An Interesting Conundrum

Posted 15 June, 2007 in Uncategorized | No comments

If a film company options the rights to a roman à clef novel, and the author of that novel turns out to be fictitious, can the film company demand the option payments back? Antidote International Films Inc., which optioned JT Leroy’s novel, Sarah, thinks so, and is suing to recoup the money.

An Afterthought

Posted 15 June, 2007 in Music | 2 comments

I’ve now got ZZ Top’s Eliminator on the disc player, and it occurs to me that the video for “Legs” is what What Not to Wear would be like, if the folks at What Not to Wear had even a scintilla of a sense of humour.

Overrated Albums

Posted 15 June, 2007 in Music | No comments

As I’m writing this, I’ve got Who’s Next on the stereo. For me, that’s one of those timeless albums, one of those few (oh, so very few) albums that doesn’t have a single dud track on it, that sounds just as vibrant and essential today as it did when it was first released in 1971. (Or, so I assume, since that was also the year I was born, and I wasn’t yet a Who fan, to the best of my memory.) Everything about that album seems right: the extended synth intro to “Baba O’Reilly” that opens it; Roger Daltrey’s anguished howl of anger on “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (which, with it’s cynical imprecation to “Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss” could well be the perfect anthem for our times); and — especially — Keith Moon’s ferocious drumming.

I’ve written about essential albums before (on the old site, here and here); Who’s Next more than qualifies, as do Bone Machine by Tom Waits, Sticky Fingers by the Stones, and London Calling by The Clash.

Then there are those albums that don’t see the inside of the CD player that often, but on those occasions that I do drag them out, I’m almost startled by the revelation, “Fuck, this is a really good record.” This category would include Elvis Costello’s severely underrated Mighty Like a Rose, Mae Moore’s lambent Bohemia, and Lloyd Cole’s playfully anti-romantic opus Don’t Get Weird on Me, Babe.

Then there are those albums that everyone considers timeless classics, essentials of the canon, that I just plain don’t get. You know the ones I’m talking about: perennials on those “Best Rock ‘n’ Roll Records of All Time” lists; overproduced monstrosities like Bat Out of Hell, cartoonish pseudo-aggressiveness like Never Mind the Bollocks by the Sex Pistols — the Monkees of punk rock — and practically anything by Led Zeppelin. (I always get in trouble for this one, but as far as I’m concerned they are the most overrated band in rock history: “Whole Lotta Love” is a pretty decent rock song, but “Kashmir” is boring and repetitive, and the only reason for “Stairway to Heaven” even to exist is because it’s a six-minute slow(ish) song that gives horny teenagers at high school dances an excuse to cop a feel.)

Fortunately, the folks at the Guardian feel the same way, and have commissioned some expert musicians to cut the knees out from some giants of the rock pantheon. Albums that come under fire include heavy hitters like Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, which Billy Childish calls “middle-of-the-road rock music for plumbers”; Dark Side of the Moon, which Tjinder Singh of Cornershop says is “a bloated concept album that made punk necessary”; and Meat Is Murder, which Jackie McKeown of 1990s likens to “being stuck in a lift with a Manchester University Socialist Workers’ Party convention.”

Also falling victim (finally!) to the Guardian’s tender mercies is The Neon Bible by Arcade Fire, the inexplicably popular Canadian collective, which Greer Gartside of Scritti Politti rightly points out is “solidly unattractive, texturally nasty, a bit harmonically and melodically dull, bombastic and melodramatic, and the rhythms are pedestrian.”

But the Guardian piece is worth reading, if for no other reason, thanks to Ian Rankin’s extended takedown of The Velvet Underground and Nico, which is strident, hilarious, and long overdue. Rankin says that Nico “sings English the way I sing German,” and that’s one of the more complimentary remarks he makes. Great stuff for anyone who, as Rankin suggests, enjoys seeing sacred cows turned into hamburger.

(Thanks to AA for pointing me toward this article.)