February 19, 2007

And the winner in the weird cross-over category is (envelope, please) ...

Harlequin and Nascar!

January 25, 2007

WTF

FYI: there's a nu b%k ot dats ritN Ntirely as txt msgs. un4tunatly -- or 4tun8ly, depending on yr POV -- itz n Finnish.
gt d tale hre.
fnd ot WTF I'm sAyn hre.

January 10, 2007

Students reading

In my intro. course I asked the students to suggest novels for our final reading. The results were surprising, pleasantly so: some old chestnuts, to be sure, as well as some best-sellers, but also quite a few new novels, some of which I didn't know. Not as many books by women as I would have liked (I added a couple of ringers to the list: guess which two) but that gives me something to work on.

I suppose this is a risky venture; one of my colleagues did the same thing some time ago and ended up having to teach Anne Rice. Don't get me wrong: I have read most of the vampire books myself; I teach genre fiction; I research street literature. And I think almost any novel has something to tell us, even if it is only a cautionary tale. But I still hope to hell they don't select The Da Vinci Code!

December 20, 2006

Underrated writers

A list for 2006 has been posted at Syntax of Things. Was surprised to see Iain Banks on the list; didn't know his books were difficult to come by in the U.S.; here in Canada they are available. Elizabeth Hand and Jeff Noon are also listed, also excellent, but less widely read (at least in Noon's case, over here).

Many on the list are so underrated that I have never heard of them. Or perhaps it's that they're still alive and kicking.

December 4, 2006

Long day

driving up to Fredericton in the rain and back again in the snow, after two meetings and my final grad class (and a great class it was), and now the ever-popular Jinker Boy wants needs me to put him to bed, so I can't post at length. But two things: found an interesting blog, Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie (what it says), at Thinkery. And, on C18-L, saw a link to an article from The Observer: "Diaries reveal passions at the court of King George" by Vanessa Thorpe:

Mary Hamilton is being called 'the female Pepys' for her illuminating record of royal life at the end of the 18th century. Now a battle is being fought to save it for the nation.

I already have a soft spot for her, as I have written on the ballad "Mary Hamilton." Though this Mary Hamilton had a better end, I'm sure.

November 28, 2006

OMG!

The New York Times list of the 100 most notable books of the year is out, and I have not read a single one. Though I do have a copy of The Keep, waiting for some spare time. Via Foreword.

November 25, 2006

A Memory Meme

from Kate's Book Blog, via Booklust:

1. How old were you when you learned to read and who taught you?

Six, I suppose. We learnt in Grade 1 and my teacher, Mrs. Price, was a kind woman who liked me. I had been away one day and the next, when I was back, Mrs. Price called on me to stand up and read from our book — Mr. Whiskers¹. I stalled at the word "jump" and someone whispered it and I remember that I was filled with an immense feeling of happiness as the random letters coalesced right in front of my eyes into a known and knowable word: jump.

2. Did you own any books as a child? If so, what's the first one that you remember owning? If not, do you recall any of the first titles that you borrowed from the library?

I had a small set of Nancy Drew, some Trixie Belden, Sue Barton, Student Nurse², and the Five Find-Outers and Buster the Dog. I think my first book was an edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. I also loved the whole coloured collection of fairy tales, and The Secret Garden.

3. What's the first book that you bought with your own money?
Gosh. Probably a comic book. I didn't buy books much; I went to the school library, and later, to the public library every week.

4. Were you a re-reader as a child? If so, which book did you re-read most often?
I was a compulsive reader, a walking-down-the-street-reading reader, a reader-of-cereal-boxes-if-nothing-else-was-on-offer reader. I read my Nancy Drews and my comics over and over.

5. What's the first adult book that captured your interest and how old were you when you read it?
I think I was eleven or twelve. It was a gothic romance by Victoria Holt which belonged to my mother. I remember how surprised I was to discover that I could read it effortlessly; I had thought, somehow, that adult books were different in some clear and irrevocable way from children's. Thus began a great debate between my parents: should I be allowed to read the James Bonds my father kept in a cardboard box under the cellar stairs? (my father and I won, and I read them all).

6. Are there children's books that you passed by as a child that you have learned to love as an adult? Which ones?
I was a DC fan. Now I like Marvel much better.

¹ I tried and tried to find Mr. Whiskers on the internets, to no avail. The books were well-used back then; perhaps none have survived. Anyone, have you seen Mr. Whiskers: a pale pink book with a kitten on the front? Not the hopped up version from 1970, but the original gently coloured one? Reward.

² I doubt I will ever forget the thrill of reading about Sue Barton's emergency appendectomy at the hands of handsome Dr. Whatsisname.

Update: I found Mr. Whiskers! Extremely small, it is true. But Mr. Whiskers nonetheless ($49.99 worth of him). Oh Mr. Whiskers, let us never be parted again.

November 24, 2006

Fun with books

Michele Regenold gives advice to celebrities who write children's books (via Shaken & Stirred).

David Rose, the enterprising advertising director of the London Review of Books, has compiled They Call Me Naughty Lola: Personal Ads from the London Review of Books. I like this one: "I wrote this ad to prove I'm not gay. Man, 29. Not gay. Absolutely not." Via Maud, who likes them too.

And for those with some time, the Literature Map: type in the name of an author and see which other authors are read by the same people. Extremely weak in the 18thc, and some weird choices come up. But fun nonetheless. Via Ellen Moody on C18-L. Or, try the LibraryThing Unsuggester, via Jim, the other half of the bookish Moody couple, also on C18-L.

Or this: a list of book lists, via Conversational Reading.

And then there is this: mapping and annotating an image. Ben Vershbow mapped W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" onto Breughel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." The possibilities are endless.

Or, hell, cut up your books and check out the Jane Eyre fan videos at The Midnight Bell.

November 23, 2006

Foran on Richler

It has been announced that Charles Foran is to write a new biography of Mordecai Richler. Forgive me for crowing, but because this is so rare for me I must: I knew about the project months ago from Foran himself, who asked me to keep it under my hat. He is a wonderful writer and passionate about his subject so I will likely read it, though I am not a big fan of Richler's. Oh, and M. G. Vassanji is also doing a biography of Richler, though on a more modest scale. Some sort of zeitgeist thing, no doubt.

October 15, 2006

Books for the ages

I have a wonderful student who is working on an Honours thesis on George Orwell, and Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of the books he is treating. Much of that novel is etched in my memory — as I imagine it is in the memories of most people who know it — but it has been, after all, literally decades since I last read it so I am in the middle of doing so again. I was reluctant to begin — it becomes such a painful experience — but have now become caught up again and so don't have to take that deep breath before picking it up. But why is that? Is it just the remembered discomfort, or are there certain books, certain types of books, suited to readers of specific age-groups? I would detour many miles to avoid some of the writers or movements I couldn't get enough of at one point in my life: have not read much in the existentialist or the decadent vein in a very long time, for instance.

I don't mean to imply that because one reads these sorts of texts when one is young, that they are necessarily jejune. Some of them are, certainly, but not Orwell. Perhaps the dynamic is something quite different: perhaps as we get older we can no longer stomach certain sorts of visions, certain sorts of truths. Or perhaps, we lose our tolerance for earnestness, for certainty (even the crushing certainty that there is no certainty).

Maybe one only needs one's nose rubbed in something so many times.

Bonus links:

Newspeak Dictionary
Online etext of Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four Comic: lots on this site. And the comic looks good.
Nineteen Eighty-Four onstage
Wikipedia has an extensive entry
Guardian / Penguin Modern Classics photo competition winner and runner-up
The Leistungskurs-Englisch interpret chapter 8

October 11, 2006

Old words

Koran, Hambourg, 1694

Some of these links have been hanging fire some time, and others are fresher:

On handwriting: How to Read 18th Century British-American Writing and The Manuscripts of George de Benneville and Abraham Wagner (via Jim Chevalier on C18-L).

Images of books: Torah, Bible, Koran: Books of the Word Exhibit: texte en Français (also via Jim Chevalier on C18-L).

Letters: Electronic Enlightenment: "a new and exciting academic resource providing full critical editions of complete correspondences of major and minor figures of the 18th century."

Beautiful images of Ireland and cooking, in two amazing posts at BibliOdyssey.

Alchemy, the alphabet, and allegory, all at Giornale Nuovo.

Altered books.

Celebrating Women Writers!: "a website that lists information about and books by women authors. As part of The Celebration of Women Writers, I publish online editions of out-of-copyright books by women authors. This blog is used to announce new online editions of books being published by The Celebration of Women Writers."

Schreber's Fantastic Beasts: "In 1774 Johann Christian Dan Schreber authored a multivolume set of books entitled Die Saugthiere in Abbildungen nach der Natur mit Beschreibungen. Focusing on mammals of the world, these books were lavishly illustrated with 755 hand-colored plates. There was a slight problem though: in most instances the artists had never seen the animals they were rendering onto paper. Explorers would return from their travels and describe the animals in question to the artists. The end result was that some of the drawings, though representing real animals, looked more like they had come from someone's nightmares." (Via Plep).

October 7, 2006

Halloween Meme for Thanksgiving

David Shrigley, "Pumpkin"

from Sassymonkey:

1. What is your favourite work of horror fiction?
Dracula. There is so much to say about it. And it's so civilized.

2. What is your favorite work of science fiction/fantasy?
Couldn't possibly answer this. Samuel R. Delany's Stars in my Pockets Like Grains of Sand? Kathleen Ann Goonan's Queen City Jazz? Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep? I like scope.

3. Who is your favourite monster?
In the sense of most sympathetic? Frankenstein.
In the sense of most effective? The trailer for Wolf Creek scared me something that rhymes with witless.

4. What horror movie gives you the most chills?
I don't tend to watch too many. That one where Karen Black was being stalked by the fetish doll was pretty frightening.

5. Freddy versus Jason?
They would both go out together. At least, I hope so.

6. What is your favourite Halloween treat?
Rockets.

7. Ghosts or goblins?
In the sense of most scary? Goblins have teeth.

8. What is your scariest encounter with the paranormal?
The time I was at a job interview and one of the committee members said, over dinner, in a tone that brooked no disagreement, "well, we're all spiritual, aren't we?"

9. Do you believe in ghosts?
Sure. We all carry whole ghost towns around with us.

10. Favorite Halloween costume?
The time I went as a Vulcan, complete with ears, wig, and robe, and someone asked me if I was supposed to be Yoda.

September 28, 2006

The Lorenzo Reading Series

is already underway. Wonderful writers. Anyone in the area, come on down.

Books, boeken, livres, Bücher, libri, livros, libros

Hans Christian Andersen's Christine's Picture Book: an online digitization of a scrapbook (via The Midnight Bell).

Early Printed Books on the Web: Siân Echard's useful links

Codices Electronici Sangallenses (via Mirabilis)

Index of Medieaval Medical Images via Catalogue Annie

NYPL Digital Gallery: "access to over 480,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more."

Shopiere offers some links to the work of Lothar Meggendorfer, a 19th German artist who made some of the most elaborate pop-up books ever made, on the recommendation of Maurice Sendek.

A Psalter found in a Bog. And it may change U.S. foreign policy.

And visit BibliOdyssey, a beautiful blog that I just discovered. And where there is a recent post on friendship albums.

September 10, 2006

It's over nine hundred pages

but I think, as they say, we can turn that into a plus. So come on down to the first book event at The Long Eighteenth.

David Mazella writes:

I'm happy to report that we've confirmed Michael McKeon's participation in our first Collective Reading, for October 3-5. Carrie and I will prepare responses to post on the first and second days of discussion, and I'm hoping to get at least one or two more guest respondents for the event. Michael has graciously agreed to respond to our discussion, and is looking forward to this opportunity to discuss his new book, The Secret History of Domesticity (Johns Hopkins, 2006). Thanks once again to Kathy Alexander at JHUP for helping us set this up.

We are planning to make this a regular feature on this blog, so that we can spotlight important new books in eighteenth-century studies.

Since we still have slots available, if you'd like to be one of our guest respondents, please contact me offlist at dmazella at uh dot edu. And please continue to write in with suggestions for other books to read this year.

August 19, 2006

So what can you say about a book

which begins, "Louie pulled off his bra and threw it down upon the casket"?

No, it's not by Laurel Hamilton.

I am a few chapters in and enjoying it; there is some nice writing. Much too early to tell much else. Will report back.

August 11, 2006

BBTI

Old news to many I am sure but I just discovered The British Book Trade Index, a project of the U of Birmingham which "aims to include brief biographical and trade details of all those who worked in the English and Welsh book trades up to 1851."

August 8, 2006

WARNING: Book meme

via Another Damned Medievalist. No, she didn't tag me, but I'm sure that was just an oversight.

1. One book that changed your life?

Doris Lessing's Martha Quest series. And her Four-Gated City. I read them in the same year and they run together for me.

2. One book you have read more than once?

God, are we all going to say Persuasion?

3. One book you would want on a desert island?

Oh, oh! I know: The Diary of Samuel Pepys.

4. One book that made you laugh?

Tristram Shandy.

5. One book that made you cry?

Following ADM's lead: the first? probably Francis Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess.

And more recently, Tristram Shandy.

6. One book you wish had been written?

Machiavelli's The Princess.

7. One book you wish had never been written?

Well, a couple of obvious choices come to mind, but really, if they hadn't been written, someone would have had to invent them. And it's hard to wish for books to disappear, no matter what they are (I except chick lit., motivational books, and anything by L. Ron Hubbard). Books don't kill people, people kill people. Or something.

8. One book you are currently reading?

The Well Known Troublemaker by Fidelis Morgan.

9. One book you have been meaning to read?

The Clutter-Busting Handbook: Clean It Up, Clear It Out, and Keep Your Life Clutter-Free by Rita Emmett. Really. It's on the back of the toilet tank, reproaching me. Under a pile of New York Times Magazines and Sudoko books.

10. Now tag five people:

No. The others would get jealous.

August 5, 2006

Texts

Domesday Book online (via Cronaca):

As of today, Domesday Book, the oldest public record held at The National Archives, is brought into the 21st century through Domesday Online, the organisation´s latest digitisation project.

The website, provided by The National Archives' DocumentsOnline service, also contains useful information about the history of this 920-year-old document. It was commissioned in 1085 by William I who conquered England after the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Sobering thought for the day: two per cent of those surveyed in a Guardian poll thought that the Domesday Book was Dan Brown's latest novel (via Shopiere).

Classic Illustrated Zoologies and Related Works, 1550-1900 at the NYPL Digital Gallery, and images from Il Bestiario Barocco: The Feather Book by Dionisio Minaggio, digitalised by McGill (via Plep).

Joan of Arc Primary Sources posted online by the Historical Academy for Joan of Arc Studies. But don't visit just yet; this was posted on Metafilter and with all the hits they must be getting, their bandwidth is maxed out.

Mister Aitch writes:

I WRITE in praise of miscellaneity, and in particular of assortment and variousness in books; of motley volumes; of mixed-up, impure works which nevertheless accord with the mess & disorder of nature, of life.

Unedited version of On the Road to be published (via random Walks). Geez, I thought the one I read was the unedited version.

July 20, 2006

The Book of Ballads by Charles Vess

Charles Vess originally published The Book of Ballads with Greenman Press; it was reissued by Tor Books (who need to redo their website from the ground up, or at least add a search function and full catalogue) with additional material.

The book is a series of the old ballads, retold by various luminaries such as Charles de Lint, Sharyn McCrumb, and Neil Gaiman, and all illustrated by Charles Vess.

The book is beautifully produced, and the artwork to swoon for. The females are all statuesque and scantily clad, but there are enough strapping men to balance the scales a little. And it is delightful to see the old ballads given fresh life in a new medium, in this case graphic stories. In fact, I am inclined to think that the value of this exposure supercedes any quibbles.

But, we live to quibble.

Part of the interest of the traditional ballads is their sparsity. The narratives are streamlined, polished like stones over the centuries to the point where the elisions make their own poetry. Characters' motives are rarely explained; narratives are in the third person; dialogue is minimal. Time and space collapse down to the essence. Much is unexplained, perhaps lost; perhaps it was never there. Then there are the multiple versions of even the more obscure ballads, complicating any single reading.

Much ink has been spilt over these issues, and the academic in me would dearly like to have known why a particular version was chosen over another. But in fact the question may hardly be relevant as none of the retellings stay true to any original. Of course each version is a retelling and each performance is a recreation, and these writers are certainly not obligated to stick to a set text, particularly with such a mutable form. But I do wonder why they all, to a writer, felt the need to fill in various bits of backstory or explanation. The haunting questions posed by these narratives are part of their appeal; to have someone nail down any one of the many possibilities, no matter how imaginative, is to risk making them prosaic.

Another interesting tendency of these writers is their apparent need to justify or explain the actions of the characters. Traditional ballad characters are capable of breathtaking acts of violence and cruelty, seemingly as a matter of course; many seem amoral. Barbara Allen spurns a young man because she can, yet in this retelling she is softened. The identity of the False Knight upon the Road is unexplained, yet here it is hinted at. No doubt the writers wanted to make the ballads more accessible, less inexplicable, and that no doubt suits many contemporary readers, particularly those unfamiliar with the form. But I missed the glorious unconcern, the proud lack of any impulse to explain or justify, that is so common in these narratives.

All of which is not to say this is a failure, because it is not. I enjoyed it immensely and think that there is much here for any fan of graphic novels or the fantastic. And there is certainly much here for any lover of the old ballads. These stories may not be how I might have retold these narratives, but they are all valid visions in a genre in which there are no single sources or versions. And they are proof that ballads are still a vibrant form after all this time.

July 16, 2006

The Meq by Steve Cash, and boycotting sequels

It did not start out as a conscious policy, but I seem to be on the verge of boycotting multivolume novels. I am already boycotting sequels but now I don't even want to dip into the first of a series. Not good old-fashioned triple deckers, you understand, but contemporary books that are would-be franchises in the guise of novels.

Have read two of the aforesaid species of book recently and enjoyed elements of each. One, Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Pashazade, I wrote about here; the other is Steve Cash's The Meq. But while there is much that is innovative in each book I have not bought Cash's sequel, nor either of Grimwood's, and doubt I will. Re. the latter: despite there being, as Paul Di Filippo writes, a dearth of sf set in the Muslim world, despite having a soft spot for George Alec Effinger's Marid Audran novels, and despite having enjoyed the first of the set, when my hand hovered over the next in the series it dithered but ultimately ended up back in my pocket, empty. There were one or two things that irritated about the first novel, as I wrote earlier, but it was more than that, I think. The love/hate relationship between the protagonist and the girl can be put up with for the duration of one novel, but dragged out over two or three, and probably unresolved even then — who knows how long this series might go? — well, the thought is not to be born. Especially as it gave me a flashback to the irksome ménage à trois in Tanys Huff's Victory Nelson series.

Ditto for The Meq, in spades.

Oh sure, it's interesting, the idea of a species of beings who do not age physically past the age of twelve, yet are essentially immortal. That is, until they meet their one true love, at which point they can decide to age together normally. And the historical setting — 19thc America — is initially a draw, except for all the name dropping (T.S. Eliot as a bike-riding child?). In fact, it was the photograph of the old port on the cover that drew me to the book in the first place.

But I am irritated by the — jargon alert — heteronormative notion of "one true love." Who knows, perhaps there are some gay true lovers in the sequel, but this is doubtful given the emphasis on family and tribe in the first. And even if ten per cent of the Meq were gay, the idea of soul mates or true loves is too jejune to be countenanced.

On a similar theme, the idea of immortals or near-immortals in prepubescent or barely pubescent bodies is perverse. It was perverse when Anne Rice did it and it is perverse here; even more perverse, as Anne Rice did it on purpose. Not to mention the truly evil subplot involving a real, not a centuries old, child.

And another thing: I hate books that present "tribes" of characters who band together against the baddies or the mundanes. Books where characters for little reason and with less knowledge join up in life or death skirmishes out of some spurious instant loyalty. Or books that so ill explain the basis for such loyalty, such tribalism, that it seems spurious. Notice to would-be authors: the unwashed reading masses are not so pathetic that they will be seduced by the promise of being "in the club," even at several removes (and if they are, shame on you for pandering).

Tom Bernard has a spot-on review in which he unpacks, with considerably more patience than I have, just what irritates about this novel. And here is T. M. Wagner, who makes some of the same points.

But why must all multivolume novels suffer for the sins of one or two, the reader might ask. It has become increasingly clear to me, I reply, that multivolume novels are not novels, individually or in the aggregate. Individually they of course are not complete and so the reading experience is unsatisfying, not just in terms of plot elements but in terms of structure. In the aggregate they are not a single reading experience; they are baggy, blowsy, and neither one thing nor the other.

To be fair, Grimwood's novel commits far fewer sins than Cash's. Nor is it a multivolume novel per se, but rather a series, like a standard mystery series of separate narratives with the same sleuth and a cumulative backstory. Both formats, however, are prone to some of the same malaises.

Stepping away from the books themselves, there is the question of refusing to support cynical, restrictive, and rapacious publishing practices. Let's hear it for the standalone sff novel! (It says much that we even have that term in the lexicon, "standalone.")

And if it needs to be said, there is a clear distinction between one narrative stretched across two or more books and a series of loosely linked narratives which share a world such as Iain M. Banks' Culture novels or China Miéville's New Crobuzon novels.

Re. the former: as I said some time ago, life is just too short.

July 2, 2006

Candide by Voltaire

Reading Theo Cuffe's very good translation of Candide. Worth it for Chris Ware's cover alone.

Not sure what to make of the following information on Amazon:

Customers who bought this item also bought

• The Portable Dorothy Parker
• Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen
• Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
• The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

Because Candide is witty, fantastic, satiric, socially aware, and pragmatic? Or are these lists just Dada, or chicken guts?

Anyway, a deft translation and a beautiful edition. Two thumbs up, if the Inquisition and its thumbscrews don't get here first.

June 27, 2006

The Stories of English by David Crystal

Originally noticed this book because of its cover (another proverb bites the dust) which features a wonderful drawing by James Gillray, and have been dipping into it at intervals ever since. Such desultory reading tactics often result in a book never being finished, but in this case it works because the material is so overflowing with detail that long digestion is desirable, and the overarching narrative — the chronological development of the various varieties of English, the "stories" of the title — is ingrained so the storyline can never be lost between readings. My reading has been so desultory that I am just now emerging from the Middle Ages, bloody but unbowed and ready for the heady changes of the Renaissance. But I think I might make an effort to focus so that I might at least be through the 18thc before classes start. Moderns be damned; who need ye?

Crystal's "English" is protean; it includes without prejudice all dialects and varieties and recognizes the living nature of the language. This approach should not be so novel at this point but in many respects it still is. Not that I should be so smug, though I doubt I am the only reader to stumble across her own prejudices while reading.

Crystal's authorial voice is delightful: erudite, learned, yet light and humourous, never ponderous. Quite a task, to write about the entire language. How on earth to present ones own narrative voice? His choice is to take us with him and lead us without seeming to, an arm about our shoulders, and it works beautifully.

The book is organized chronologically but with "interludes" in which Crystal pursues some of many possible side roads. The chapters proper are heavily peppered with asides and diversions; these, however, are clearly demarcated and never detract from the overall direction.

Highly recommended for literary scholars and historians of almost any stripe, and for serious readers more generally.

April 23, 2006

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

This is the kind of book where you know that if an eligible male character meets an unattached female character, they inevitably will fall in love. The young heroine goes to Oxford, is handed over to some unprepossessing undergraduate to be given a tour, and falls in love before they finish walking through the first building. The "fit tab A into slot B" school of character development.

And the writing is lumpy. Kelly link said, "I stopped reading The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova because she used the adverb "warily" over and over and over again, sometimes on the same page." That about sums up my response to her writing, too. Except for the not finishing the book part.

Further, it does very little to advance the Dracula legend. The vampires are all singularly, er, bloodless.

Which is not to say that the novel doesn't have some interest, because it does. The aura of extended frustration, the ennui the characters feel as, year after year, their quest cuts them off from the rest of humanity, is well done. And any novel so focused on books, libraries, and universities must have some appeal. Finally it abounds — overflows, in fact — with esoteric historical detail, and presents a compelling picture of Eastern Europe. I am now filled with a burning desire to tour the various castles and monasteries precariously balanced on mountaintops in Hungary and Roumania.

But I will take a book by some other writer to read on the plane.

April 21, 2006

Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

Kelly Link writes beautiful stories. Seemingly weightless structures, seriously fey, each a self-contained little world. The website calls it "kitchen-sink magical realism," which is as good a phrase as any. Particularly exceptional — though they are all good — are "The Fairy Handbag," "The Hortlak," "Catskin" and "Lull." But really, they are all good. If I have one reservation, it is that the whimsical metafictional touches become a little too much of a trade-mark, at least when taken in the aggregate. But that is a minor caveat to an otherwise unreserved recommendation. But don't take my word for it; read for yourself, at no cost and in the privacy of your own home. Link's work is unusually accessible as she is committed to the idea of the free flow of information:

Links to Link:

Kelly Link stories online, including "The Fairy Handbag," included in Magic for Beginners

"Lull," also included in Magic for Beginners

And as I mentioned sometime ago, Link's first collection, Stranger Things Happen, is available for free download under a CC licence.

Link's homepage

Link edits Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, an interesting zine that publishes interesting writers like Nalo Hopkinson, and she reads for the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror.

And be sure to explore the Small Beer Press site. They are generous with excerpts: five of the twenty stories from Link's edited collection, Trampoline, are available, including "Eight-Legged Story" by Maureen McHugh; and here is a chapter from Kate Wilhelm's Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers' Workshop: "Can Writing Be Taught?" (short answer: yes).

Interviews:

Stephany Aulenback's metainterview: lots of material about the writing process. Link: "The more that you understand something, the less resonance and weight that thing has for you."

Gwenda Bond's interview: lots about small-press publishing and what she is reading. Link: "At heart, I'm still a bookseller, or maybe a book pimp?"

Interview by Lynne Jamneck for Strange Horizons: "Listen, everything is weird. There's no such thing as normal."
On being asked whether electronic media will replace hard-copy books: "Oh good grief, I don't know. I'm much more worried about the upcoming election than I am about publishing."
Advice to aspiring writers: "Get rid of Solitaire on your computer."

An Interview with Kelly Link by The Slush God: "Q. What are the limitations of SF? A. I have no idea."

Matthew Cheney writes about Link's "Stone Animals." I like his assessment, but the story got under my skin a bit too much. Not that that's a bad thing.

Interview at one story about "The Great Divorce" (in this collection).

Wikipedia: basic bio.; links to interviews.

See also Interstitial Arts: Artist Without Borders.

And you know, she just seems nice.

April 16, 2006

Quote of the day:

"I realized I would rather starve in Marrakesh than be a millionaire in Alberta" (Juan Goytisolo on having turned down a tenured position in Edmonton. Read the whole article: "The Anti-Orientalist" by Fernanda Eberstadt in the NYTimes).

The Jade Peony by Wayson Choy

This is a beautifully written, nuanced, moving book. Emotional without being at all sentimental. And a fascinating look at an underrepresented corner of history: Vancouver's Chinatown in the early decades of the twentieth century. Particularly fascinating are the literal translations of many Chinese terms and the descriptions of the plethora of Chinese dialects and their different social uses.

The novel focuses on one family, the Chens, and their wider community. The narrative is divided into three sections, each from the perspective of a different sibling: Jook-Liang, the only sister; Jung-Sum, the second (and adopted) brother; and Sek-Lung, the youngest brother. This has always seemed a risky ploy — building interest in a character, only to abandon them — but it was good enough for Faulkner and it works well here. One may wonder why only three of the four Chen children are treated but then one learns that Choy recently published another novel, All That Matters, this time from the perspective of the eldest son, Kiam-Kim (I have it here on my desk, and will report back). Choy has also published a memoir of his own childhood, Paper Shadows (not yet on my desk).

Although the author of short stories, a veteran of creative writing programmes, and a teacher of English, Choy did not begin to write his novels until he was fifty-two. Which I for one find heartening. I mentioned in an earlier post that he recently made a keynote address at a conference I attended. His speaking style is, unsurprisingly, much like his writing: adept, subtle, wry, and humane. He was introduced by a young man who had once attended a workshop Choy gave for queer Asian writers. He is a writer who has made, and continues to make, a difference in the world, though those out there who think that art should be somehow sealed off in an impervious aesthetic nugget to be brought out for the contemplation of the deserving, never fear: the sheer artistry and insight of Choy's writing can stand alone. (Whether it should is another question).

Choy's keynote address stressed the value — no, the imperative — of building bridges between people, between communities. He proudly identified himself as a "banana" — an Asian person strongly influenced by white culture — and described people in such positions of "neither this nor that" as being important bridges. (This led to the listing, with considerable audience participation, of other such descriptions: "oreos," "apples," and one I hadn't heard: "coconuts": white-identified Hawaiians. Choy then went on to tell the wonderful story of an old Scottish man he met once who addressed him in Mandarin and told him of his childhood in China, the son of missionary parents, raised by an amah, and sent to local schools. The Chinese called him an "egg.")

The Jade Peony is one such bridge. In it Choy explores racism, gender politics, and violence, all with a deft touch and deep understanding. It is a deeply humane book, deeply engaged, and finely written. I have already eagerly lent my copy to a friend, and look forward to reading All That Matters.

March 14, 2006

Claire's Head by Catherine Bush

(Originally published in The New Brunswick Reader, March 11, 2006)

Claire's Head is a novel that catches up with the reader. Or perhaps, the reader finally catches up with it. One might be forgiven for wondering, initially, if there would be much here to interest anyone who does not have migraines — in a nutshell, the novel is about Claire, a migraineur who seeks her missing sister and fellow sufferer, Rachel — but that suspicion rapidly fades. The several fruitless journeys, the false starts, coalesce into an archetypal journey towards, not revelation, exactly, nor anything as banal as "growth." Perhaps "towards" is the wrong word, implying as it does some sort of final destination; say, rather, "through." Claire journeys through and out the other side.

There are three sisters in this novel, all coming to terms with the sudden death of their parents in a bizarre accident, all making choices about their lives: where to live, what to work at, whether to have partners or children. Overlaying these common questions Claire and Rachel must also come to terms with their headaches. Bush's portrait of the cautious migraineur who will not leave the house without her stash of pain medication is masterful, as is her evocation of the altered states induced both by those drugs and by migraines themselves. Some readers will no doubt find themselves comparing their own medications and regimes to those of the characters. ("Zomig, eh? I haven't tried that yet. No, acupuncture didn't work for me, either. What she says about tryptophan is worth looking into; must make a note …") These medications, these regimes, for the migraineur are not about a cure, but about preventing and managing — or at least trying to take the edge off — pain.

Pain is practically a character in this novel: the place and function of pain in ones life; the solipsism of pain. The seeking of relief from pain; the ways in which pain can shape other choices. And, most perceptively, the ways in which pain can be integral to our perceptions of the world, and to who we are.

Claire is a cartographer. It is work she enjoys and it reflects the way in which she makes sense of the world and keeps chaos at bay: she is always aware of her location and her orientation; she has an excellent sense of direction; she only needs to study a map for awhile when visiting a new place and can then with confidence put it away in her purse; she counts steps and calculates distances. She maps locations just as she maps the course of her headaches. Bush's narrative reflects this exactitude; a reader, so inclined, could comfortably follow Claire's several journeys by placing coloured pins on a map. This is not abstract knowledge: Bush evokes the sights, and even more importantly to a migraineur, the sounds and smells, of all her locations. A strong sense of place is crucial in a novel with such a kaleidoscope of settings: Toronto, New York, Montreal, Amsterdam, Tuscany, Las Vegas, and finally Mexico. It is a credit to Bush's artistry that each and every one of these locations becomes tangible, particularly at the last: ironically Claire, who once lived in the safety of an apartment upstairs from her married sister, by the end of the novel enters a quasi-mythic landscape of which she is less certain, and certainly less in control.

There is not a whiff of humour in this novel: that, and the characters in their rarified world of globe-trotting funded by their parents' insurance money and their single-minded quest for relief, create a very real danger of limitation. But Bush is too good a writer to fall into that trap and her scope imperceptibly expands so that even though we end as we began, in Claire's head, the implications of her journey ripple outwards.

This beautifully written novel will certainly speak to migraineurs. But more broadly, it will resonate with anyone dealing with chronic pain, or indeed pain more generally. And that includes us all.

(Catherine Bush, UNB Writer-in-Residence, will be in Saint John March 13-24. In my office, in fact.)

February 26, 2006

Pashazade by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

The first of a trilogy, published first in 2001 in the UK. Which is good, because it means they're available. A compelling read, in an interesting future. Here from the publisher:

It's a twenty-first century hauntingly familiar—and yet startlingly different from our own. Here the United States brokered a deal that ended World War I, and the Ottoman Empire never collapsed. And lording it over all sits the complex, seductive, and bloodthirsty North African metropolis of El Iskandryia.

There is an obvious comparison here to George Alec Effinger's wonderful Marid Audran novels, a connection that prompted me to pick up Pashazade in the first place. Cyberpunk, set in the Middle East, noirish elements: what's not to love? One reviewer feels that Grimwood's novels are slightly less bleak than Effinger's: a reasonable assessment. Lots of death and mayhem, of course, but the hero lives to see another day. The focus on his process of self-discovery is the antithesis of existential. Not to mention the presence of a cute kid, or the unresolved love/hate relationship with the beautiful Zara which looks set to continue a thorn in Raf's side for the next several instalments.

Victoria Strauss has a few caveats (scroll down) about the sf/alternate history elements with which I largely agree, but I also agree that these elements don't detract much from the novel. There are, however, a few too many dragon ladies and bad mothers — very irritating, the whole Cruella DeVille/mommy dearest thing — but then I just may be being cranky.

This novel is a compulsive read, but there are some clichés — clichés, not genre elements — that detract from its being what it promises. Not that there is anything wrong with clichés, in their place, but the mixture of cliché and substance means irritating flashes of banality in an otherwise highly original novel.

A rich and readable novel with an enigmatic hero, part hard-boiled and part cyberpunk, moving through an intricately realized, exotic world, Islamic yet separate from the realities of contemporary Middle-Eastern politics.

Further reading:

Chapter One, courtesy of The Guardian.
Grimwood's site.
Paul Di Filippo's review for Science Fiction.

February 24, 2006

Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined ed. by Buchanan and Hudock

"He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune"
(Francis Bacon, Essays)

In their introduction to Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined Andrea Buchanan and Amy Hudock make the convincing argument that literature about motherhood has generally been undervalued; that it is a sub-group of women's literature that gets little respect from men or many women. Anthologies such as this one and the Literary Mama website, where these pieces were first published, are attempts to fill a gap and redress a need.

The quote from Bacon, above, may not be entirely pertinent here, as it is addressed to men and seems to admonish them that if they want to achieve "great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief" they had better remain single. Would-be nuclear physicists or bank robbers, take heed. But then again, the tension between mothering and outside work/life/identity is a constant theme in this collection, so perhaps it applies after all. And even if it was not Bacon's intended meaning, I have always found the term "hostages to fortune" to be resonant of the particular anxiety of being a parent.

Even more graphically — though it doesn't roll off the tongue in quite the same way as Bacon's words — and I can't remember where I read or heard it, but — someone wrote that having a child was like having your heart removed from your body and watching it walk around.

Which is all to say, don't read this book in a public place or you may end up sobbing in a cubicle in the washroom at your local diner but quickly stifling it when someone else comes in, someone who thinks they are alone and so shuts off the lights when they leave, which would leave you sitting in the dark but not enough in control of your voice to call out, "Hey lady, I'm in here!" and so you would have to find your own way to the light switch in pitch black, and you might bang your head. Which would improve neither your state of mind nor your appearance.

To be fair, this might not happen to every reader. And please don't be alarmed at the sobbing part. I certainly don't mean to give the impression that all, or even most, of the pieces collected here are tragic. A couple are; a couple may break your heart. But almost all of them share, in one way or another, in the sense of how the world becomes a much more threatening place once we have birthed a child. In the sense of how happiness is revealed as so much more fragile than we had thought, back when our hearts were safely inside our bodies and not tottering around on two very small legs.

There are some tragic stories here. There is, in fact, a whole section about illness and loss which contains some wrenching writing (Megeen Mulholland's "Miscarriage of an English Teacher," Phyllis Capello's "Hospital Quartet," and Heidi Raykeil's "Johnny" are particularly powerful). But I wasn't even there yet when I embarrassed myself at the diner; I was reading something more quotidian, something about the small, incremental losses that inevitably happen as a child grows up and away: Linda Lee Crosfield's "Packing the Car," maybe, or garrie keyman's "Son of a Bitch."

There are other clusters of texts that caught me up, as well. Short of revealing too much on a blog that some of my students read, let's just say that some of the pieces in "Sex, Fertility, and the Body" resonated, and leave it at that.

The texts in the section "Mothers, Fathers, Parents" were mainly about being a child rather than having one. Two of the pieces, Sybil Lockhart's "Grey" and Liz Abrams-Morley's "Mitzraim," describe caring for parents with Alzheimer's or dementia. That is my own situation, and I found both pieces oddly comforting.

I don't want to imply that these writings are only interesting in a therapeutic way; they are, after all, published in an anthology called Literary Mama. The editors are claiming a place for narratives of motherhood within, rather than separate from, literary writing. And I think that is precisely the point here: I and many other parents have read all sorts of resource books. I, and many other parents, are educated parents who try to approach our roles thoughtfully. And yet no amount of such reading can come close to producing the frisson after frisson of recognition provided by this anthology.

Sarah Pinto's "Third Month" opens the collection. Since I began in alarm, I will end on a note of hope and anticipation by quoting from it:

This is what if feels like
from the heart of a barrage of everything.

And what should smell of time
and the sweeter side of impermanence
is a vertigo of stopped seconds.
My amazement stands ready for use
like a regiment tired of weekend drills.

Hope and anticipation. But carefully armed, for all that.

February 19, 2006

House on Fire by Charles Foran

I have become an immense fan of Charles Foran's. I wholeheartedly enjoyed his more recent novel Carolan's Farewell and bought the earlier House on Fire on the strength of it. It did not disappoint. Which is interesting, because these are two very different books. Looking over Foran's career, one suspects that he changes tack with almost every new project. Not to say that there are not congruencies: a certain air of narrative detachment in the midst of living breathing evocations of the physical world, for one. A painful interest in the graceful and not-so-graceful aging of men. And a firmly grounded sense of history, this despite one novel being set in 18thc Ireland and the other in "Gyatso," a thinly disguised Tibet (for a [clunky] synopsis go to the publisher's page).

A further similarity: Carolan's Farewell has an interesting structure. The main character, the focus of the first section, suddenly moves off-stage for the balance of the novel. House on Fire has a prologue featuring an unnamed character, presumably Esther, the wife of the main character, Dominic Wilson. Wilson is the centre of the next, and largest, section, and then there is an interlude: the short story which spurs Wilson to make the trip to Gyatso in the first place, to visit the author. The final section alternates between Wilson and Esther. These complicated structures, with their seeming abandonment of the main characters and their shifts in perspective, create distance, a calm space from which to reflect on the characters.

Dominic Wilson is a rich white Canadian businessman, on the cusp of forty and apparently having a mid-life crisis. If you are like me you will probably want to read no further, but that would be a mistake. There is nothing maudlin or self-absorbed about this novel; it is its distinct departure from all the clichés this description evokes that provides much of its fascination. For one thing, Wilson is having said crisis in the middle of an occupied country. His hapless actions have repercussions in the real world. For another, Esther, his long-suffering wife, is nothing of the sort: she is a sharp-tongued former maid, a Filipina with an uncompromising analysis of the position of her compatriots and of the stereotypes about Asian women. In other words, this is no solipsistic character from Updike or Roth. Esther is no absent wife. And this is no safe suburb.

There is a tension throughout the text between history and the individual, a tension that Foran plays with, and takes risks with. Occupied Tibet is a bedraggled, unhappy place. Yet this is Gyatso, not Tibet, and so how much can be taken at face value? West-coast dabblers seeking enlightenment are the targets of satiric gibes and yet Wilson — not to give too much away — comes to partake of this very rhetoric and it becomes real. Except when it's violent and unpleasant, or metaphoric. And it gets very metaphoric. Literally hallucinatory. Beautiful, lyrical, mythic. All smoothly coexisting with the dirt and blood of politics and history.

I hope that's not too cryptic. In some ways, it's a cryptic book. But the sense of place is so persuasive, and the two worlds are described so unsentimentally — dry, blindingly bright Tibet with its thin air and its occupiers as unhappy as its natives; the wet, unmerciful din of Hong Kong from the perspective of a former member of its underclass — that a little opacity, at least when it is as lyrical as this is, is almost a relief.

This is a book that shifts ones perceptions and stays with one. At one point one of the characters stands at a window, a literal threshold between two choices, two futures, two conceptions of the world. The novel itself feels like such a window.

Bonus Links:

Charles Foran's Homepage.
Review by Peter Gordon in The Asian Review of Books.

February 15, 2006

Street literature

Just read "Street Lit With Publishing Cred: From Prison to a Four-Book Deal" on the NYTimes site. For all my fascination with pre-20thc street literature, I have not thought much about any contemporary corollaries. There are some significant differences here: the writer profiled in the article is self-published, whereas in earlier periods there was a full and functioning apparatus, a parallel to the more genteel publishing industry. There is some interesting work to be done here tracing the shifts in street literature correlated to shifts in economic modes of production.

February 14, 2006

Havoc, in its Third Year by Ronan Bennett

Once I had begun I couldn't put this down. It was not just the central mystery of the death of an infant, though that is compelling enough. It was more the suspense of the looming disaster of the Civil War. Even though the outcome of that event is well known it is much to Bennett's credit that he evokes the uncertainty, the apocalyptic anxiety, the hysteria, of the preceding years. He also evokes the blood and grit of what sex and reproduction must have been like, though I can't help wondering whether or not the attitudes and practices of some of the characters are not perhaps more post- than pre-enlightenment. I am planning to lend my copy to a colleague who works on the 17th century and get her opinion, as really, I am not on solid ground here. Perhaps rural folk in Northern England were a more adventurous lot, and somewhat more liberal, than one might imagine, in sexual as well as other matters. Well, the Catholics, at any rate; the Puritans do not have the same élan.

As well as the aforementioned presumed infanticide, the wife of coroner John Brigge, the lead character, is brought to bed to deliver a child. We meet a midwife, wet-nurses, and a doctor. This aspect of the novel is fascinating, even though it is from the necessarily limited male perspective. In contrast to the warm, closed domestic space of Brigge's household, Bennett presents the rigours — okay, that's a euphemism: the tortures — of the criminal justice system in 17th-century England. It is here that Brigge first runs afoul of his Puritan colleagues, his fellow-governors of the town. Bennett's portrayal of rigid Puritanism is depressingly topical.

The language — both the dialogue and the narrative — gestures at being archaic without being coy, and the cold and dreary setting is nicely realized. Cold and dreary, but there are moments of bucolic contentment. Bennet's narrative undergoes on interesting shift over the course of the novel: it imperceptibly departs from the realism of its opening and enters the mythic by the end. Christopher Hill meets Gladiator.

And, not insignificantly, as least for this reader, the novel is beautifully produced with a handsome woodcut on the cover, a spare but attractive layout, and satisfyingly tactile paper.

Highly recommended; the acclaim this novel has received is not misplaced.

February 10, 2006

Literature Carnival, 6th Edition,

a bi-weekly event, is was up at Much Madness is Divinest Sense, but she seems to be having server problems. Bad server! I caught it during the short time it was up and there was lots of excellent reading, and not just because a review of mine was mentioned. Several posts caught my eye but I only saved links from two: Galleycat writes about author branding, now taught in MBA schools, and Book World asks the question, "How long does a book stay read?" Yoiks! Not only are there too many books to read, but the ones we do manage sometimes don't stay read!

Hope you are back amongst us soon, Much Madness.

February 9, 2006

Oh, and I've

been dipping into Rich French Women Don't Get Fat.

February 6, 2006

Find in a library

Here is something cool: a search engine that will locate a book, if it is there, in your local library. Perfect for the book blogger who is loath to support the big boys. Seen at clew's reviews.

December 13, 2005

Do you need

more to read? Check out the Underrated Writers Project at The Syntax of Things. They asked me to participate but I didn't get it together in time — seemed too much like work, I guess, and that's the last thing I want this month — and I'm not sure who I would have suggested, anyway. Oh, damn! Now I'm starting to think about it. Stop! Back to marking!

December 7, 2005

Bad book math

In an otherwise fluffy piece for the LA Times, staff writer Susan Salter Reynolds disturbs that deep river of anxiety felt by all readers at one time or another: that "so little time, so many books" anxiety that is at the bottom of the widespread irritation, yet perverse fascination, with the ubiquitous lists of "best," "most influential," or "must have read in order to be considered even basically literate" lists of books. Damn her, she even runs the numbers:

I read on average 50 pages per hour. That's around a book a day (life will intervene), 365 a year. If I squeeze out another 40 years, that's a mere 14,600 books, which simply will not do. For every classic you haven't read and should, there are at least five new books you'll want to read as well.

Epiphany: I just realized why I hate serials: in the sense of "world's visited," the longest multi-volume set can still only count as "one." Given that reading has now become a race that none of us can even think of finishing — or even completing the first lap — what nerve! what absolute cheek for any writer to think that we will waste precious hours on some interminable tale. Why, I have just now made a resolution to read only books of 300 pages or less; otherwise, I won't even make the book-a-day quota. Or even book a week.

I have not actually counted the books on my "to-read" shelf shelves, nor in the annex piles on the floor. Not to mention the many, many books that get shelved amongst other, mostly read, books. On one hand, to contemplate them gives me a certain satisfaction: should my house be hurled into space, like the house in Zathura, I would have sufficient reading material for light-years to come. But then I consider the fantasy piles behind those piles — other people's lists; my own lists, never written down (I have read Emma,¹ after all) but floating there, nonetheless — and that complacency turns to something approaching panic.

My mortality is never closer than when I make the mistake of thinking too clearly about the ratio of the ever-burgeoning number of books in the world, to the sliver of books I have read or am yet likely to read.

The Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major
The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written by Martin Seymour-Smith
Classics Revisited by Kenneth Rexroth
The 100 Most Influential Books Since the War, London's Times Literary Supplement
Gazillion other lists
Various lists and memes I have linked to from this blog.

¹ [Mr. Knightley to Mrs. Weston:] "Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. I have seen a great many lists of her drawing up at various times of books that she meant to read regularly through — and very good lists they were — very well chosen, and very neatly arranged — sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule. The list she drew up when only fourteen — I remember thinking it did her judgement so much credit that I preserved it some time; and I dare say she may have made out a very good list now." (I.5)

[cross-posted to The Valve]

November 29, 2005

It's A Boy!

As promised:

Flashback: I remember sitting in my uncle's house when I was thirteen, over in the UK with my family, and listening to my grandmother catalogue the various accidents and injuries her four sons had survived. There they all were, my father and his three brothers, laughing somewhat sheepishly, somewhat proudly, as they reminisced about the time that Bob shot Norman with a BB gun (or was it the other way around?), or the time my father pried the back off a watch and the spring shot through his palm and out again. Then there were all the fallings out of trees or off sheds. To make matters worse, this all took place at a time when sending for the doctor was expensive enough that it was never done lightly, and hospitals were where one went to die. My mother, one of three girls and mother of two more, was incredulous at this litany of casual mayhem. My sister and I felt that we were hearing of the most inexplicable shit-tossing rituals of a hitherto unknown sub-species of howler monkeys.

This all came rushing back to me as I read Andrea Buchanan's edited collection, It's A Boy! Particularly the later sections, about mothering older boys. This is a nice book, well-packaged and attractive. There are thirty contributions, arranged chronologically from texts about pregnancy, birth, and infancy, to the stages of childhood, to the final section about mothering teenage boys. All contributors seem to be American; all are authors or journalists, of a congenial liberal-ish mindset. There is good representation of issues of sexual orientation and gender variance, though a piece by a mother of a gay son would have been welcome.

Lots of "me too!" moments here. Is there any mother of a boy-child, for example, who did not experience some variation of the following scenario while laying on the couch having the ultrasound:

"Well, look at that! ...Get a load of that scrotum!" (Andrea Buchanan, 25)
"That's no finger" (Jody Mace, 29)
"I'd bet my house [it's a boy]" (Ona Gritz, 43)
"Penis!" (Caroline Leavitt, 50)

In my case, I had asked the technician not to tell me the sex of the foetus. Then I asked her if she could see enough to be able to tell.

Technician: OH, yeah!

Well, it didn't seem likely that she would say, "OH, yeah, get a load of that vulva!" so I decided to ask. And yes, I, too, "had male," as Jody Mace calls it.

Another motif: the misguided certainty one would have a girl, and the initial reactions to news of the enormous penis (see above). I was with my mother, and after the technician expressed her admiration for the JB's equipment and had left, she said to me, "You're disappointed, aren't you?" And I was; for a good twenty minutes of so I felt quite bereft. My little Lowry Eileen whom I could almost feel in my arms, named for a long-ago relative on my mother's side, and my favourite aunt, was not to be. But once I had assimilated the news, I rapidly grew reconciled, even happy. And have not looked back. I still mourn the fantasy Lowry, because she will never exist now and she had been such a part of my imagining for quite awhile — she still is — but she has nothing to do with JB. So like Faulkner Fox (95), I can answer him if he ever asks, "yes, I wish that I had had a girl. But I have never wished that you were a girl." I asked my father once, long ago, if he ever wished my sister and I had been boys, and he seemed so amused by the idea that I was instantly convinced and never doubted his answer. I had always taken his response to mean that no, he hadn't particularly wanted boys, but maybe he had. But that had nothing to do with us.

The last section, about mothering teenage boys, was almost unreadable for me. JB is still so small; I joke about it to friends, but I cannot bear the thought of him moving down to the basement in order to be as far away from us as possible. Of him avoiding us, and having smelly clothes, and sneaking dates into his room, and playing horrible music. Of course, most of these stories have a more upbeat cast to them, though I found Melanie Lynne Hauser's piece about the lost little boy inside the teenage hulk both painful and sentimental at the same time.

It is difficult to assess this collection as a literary critic. It is impossible for me to read it any other way than first and foremost as a mother. I honestly cannot say what a reader with a literary bent and no children, nor desire for them, would say. But I don't think it is for them, so it really doesn't matter. I did review a more self-consciously literary collection about birthing and mothering some time ago. This collection is a different beast, but moving and worthy in its own right. I laughed and I cried, heartily. Susan Ito's "Samuel," about her lost pregnancy, had me sobbing aloud as I lay reading it in the bathtub.

After reading these stories, I have been more attentive to JB, more willing to drop whatever I am doing if he wants my attention. More focused on gazing at him every chance I get, impressing him on the inside of my eyelids, and filing those pictures away. Of course, one can't file them away; I can hardly remember him as a baby without visual aids; the current him supersedes all earlier versions. (Thank the goddess for cameras.)

There is a companion volume, It's a Girl!, coming out soon, though I don't know if I'll read it. What do I know from girls?

______________________

Here is a partial list of the contributors to this blog tour (and what a cool idea!), as far as I can tell; I will update as I learn more. Some of these blogs I visit; lots are new to me:

Arch Words
Ashaland
A Vocational Duality
Baggage Carousel (posting 1/12/05)
Baldo
Been There
Blogging Baby
Boston Mommy
Crabby and loved by some
Driving in Heels (posting 29/11/05)
Dot Moms
Ann Douglas
Esperanza
Expat Mama (posting 30/11/05)
Fruitful
Katie Allison Granju
Half-Changed World
Jenny on the Spot
Jennifer Lauck
Mamazine
Midlife Mama
Modus Operandi
Mom Writes (posting 29/11/05)
Mommy Writer Blog
Mother In Chief
MUBAR
Not Quite Sure
Peter's Cross Station
Playground Revolution
Reading Writing Living
Refrigerator Door
Sharp Mama (posting 30/11/05)
Wendy Shepherd
So Close
The Mommy Blog
The Mommy Chronicles (posting 1/12/05)
The PopCulturephile
This Mom
This Woman's Work
Wet Feet
Wonder Mom

Andi Buchanan: Literary Mama
Mother Shock, and here, and here, and here.

The Introduction to It's a Boy!
An interview with Buchanan
Info about the Blog Book Tour

November 27, 2005

A couple of days

away from my participation in Andrea Buchanan's blog tour for her new edited collection, It's A Boy: women writers on raising sons. Obviously a subject dear to my heart. I was reading the book yesterday and the Jinker Boy came in.

Me: (holding up book) Look at this picture of a boy.
JB. (squinting) Is that me?
Me: No, he looks older than you.
JB: Is it B.? (his babysitter's son)
Me: No, he looks older than B., too.
JB: (thoughtfully) I think it's B.

Later that evening, he brought our hand weights to where I was sitting and thrilled me with his moves (his perspective)/terrified me that he was going to concuss himself (mine).

I wonder if, in a few years, he is going to ride his bike blindfolded, like one of the boys in the book.

November 20, 2005

And speaking of

The Little Professor, lust for paper, and electronic facsimiles, she recently linked to a Metafilter post on commonplace books. Some interesting links.

Lust for paper

Inspired by a post by Miriam Burnstein over at The Little Professor, and cross-posted to The Valve, about collecting 19thc books:

I don't think we talk enough about our love of paper. Paper, bindings: the physical experience of holding books and touching paper. And the addictive nature of book collecting is almost as visceral.

When I interviewed for my current job, I talked about work I was doing on print culture and street literature. I passed around a little pamphlet, an 18thc collection of songs. It sits inside a clear plastic envelop that screams noli me tangere, which is a dreadful shame as the paper is beautiful. Even 18thc street ephemera was printed on strong, thick paper, unlike the books The Little Professor describes. So on a whim I said, as it circulated, "Go ahead, slip your finger in. Touch it." At least one person looked revolted; perhaps my tone was more lascivious than was desirable, given the circumstances. At any rate, others must have shared my fetish, for here I am.

In my comment to Miriam B.'s post I mentioned Steetprint, developed at the University of Alberta and billed as

An online community dedicated to the public research, teaching, and sharing of formerly inaccessible texts and artifacts.... We also provide free software for creating your own digital collections. Our goal is to make formerly inaccessible and ephemeral texts and artifacts available to the widest possible audience, fulfilling the promise of the Internet and bringing information "back to the streets."

I have not looked too far into this myself — it's on my "To-do" list — but it seems most promising. And it might, somehow, tie into John Holbo's ideas for scholarly online community.

Is there a disconnect between lust for paper, and interest in on-line facsimiles? Not really, no: facsimiles are the only way most of us are going to see these texts. In fact, high resolution facsimiles (with workable interfaces) promote an appreciation for the materiality of texts in a way that plain-text transcriptions, as wonderful and useful as they are, cannot.

My only question is, given my admitted propensities, is looking at online facsimiles of texts the same as looking at porn?

[cross-posted to The Valve]

November 18, 2005

Anne Compton wins Governor General's Award for Poetry

I should have posted this a few days ago:

Anne Compton, a wonderful colleague who has long taught for the English discipline at UNBSJ, has just been awarded the Governor General's Award for poetry for her second collection, Processional. It is a beautiful book (one of the poems in the collections was previously mentioned here). For those of you outside Canada, the GG is our top literary award. It's VERY BIG. We can all say, we knew her when.

Opening the Island is her first collection.

Anne Compton
Photo by Mary Brodkorb

November 13, 2005

Literary podcasts

This might be just the thing for those long car trips in our vehicle-that-is-rapidly-becoming-an-old-beater with its broken tape deck (CD player? Please! However, I do have speakers for my iPod and they can sit right on the dash, as long as we don't brake or turn too sharply):

Just received a promotional email from LibriVox whose motto is “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain.� Ever obliging, I am passing on their info.:

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain in digital format, and we release the audio files back into the public domain (catalog and podcast). We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project. Our objective is to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet.

Then I noticed Ed Champion's master list of literary podcasts.

I was getting a little tired of listening to Sarah McLachlan over and over again.

November 4, 2005

Reading habits

I have been thinking, off and on, about my students' reactions to publishing and writing conventions. In an odd way, the 18thc is further away from their experience than the 16th, since hardly any of them has escaped the prescription of one Shakespearean play, per year of high school (no more, no less).

[Side note: A student in my women's writing class, a mature student, told us that hers had been an "experimental year": they had been taught no Shakespeare in high school. At any point. She did not think there were any more serial killers in her year, proportionately, than in the population at large (I asked), though whether that makes the experiment a failure or a success, I'm not sure.]

At any rate, as a rule they react badly to even their limited exposure to 18thc printing and publishing conventions. I say limited because of course practically any text they come across is heavily mediated by editors and modern publishing practice. And the more junior the student, the more they complain (or the less self-conscious they are about complaining). We read Robinson Crusoe in my introduction to prose class and there was practically a rebellion because of the lack of chapters. Students who had borrowed cheesy moth-eaten editions from the public library, with chapters added (and sometimes even named!), were at risk of being mugged by the students who had shelled out for the decent edition I ordered through the bookstore. Though there is one student, bless her, who said she didn't mind the lack of chapters at all. I asked her how she decided where to stop reading, and she said, "I just read to the bottom of the page I'm on and shut the book."

Also with Robinson Crusoe: I had one student who was unable to read past "viz" until he found out what it meant. So here I am, in the strange (for an English instructor) position of telling them to read more skimmingly; to try to figure things out contextually but not to worry overmuch if something doesn't make sense, at least, as long as it doesn't seem too significant. But no, one "viz" and they stop dead.

A senior student is being driven mad by capital letters in unexpected places. I assure her she will get acclimatized, but here it is November and she is still irritated, so perhaps not. And don't get them started on long sentences.

Not sure where I'm going with this. I suppose I'm just venting about their venting.

I hope I don't sound critical or impatient, because I'm not feeling that way. I am, however, bemused. I use these opportunities to launch into discussions of changes in print technologies and conventions. And I tell them to thank their lucky stars for modern editions and then tell them about the long "s" &c. Sometimes, though, it feels as though 90% of what I teach is context.

Good thing New Criticism is long gone.

See "18th Century Ligatures and Fonts" by David Manthey.

And some further reading:

Robinson Crusoe and The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe.
An extremely abridged children's version. With pictures and the added bonus of a Greek translation.
According to the Guardian, "600 barrels of loot found on Crusoe island" (26/9/05).
Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964): "Stranded on Mars with only a monkey as a companion, an astronaut must figure out how to find oxygen, water, and food on the lifeless planet." Defoe has a writing credit, and Adam West is in it. I'm sold.
Las Aventuras de Robinson Crusoe (1954). Directed by Luis Buñuel. Holy mother!
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (TV series, 1964). Listen to the theme music.
Robinson Crusoe, the game.
And did you know? February 1 is Robinson Crusoe Day.

October 10, 2005

Words

Amardeep Singh points toward this "Celebrity Read" campaign: Coolio holding a copy of Frankenstein? Or Orlando Bloom holding, predictably, The Lord of the Rings.

Also from Amardeep: "In Praise of 'Balderdash' (And other words for 'nonsense')."

Language Lab reports English-Teaching Robots (via The Mumpsimus).

Dylan Thomas audio: "Do not go gentle into that good night" (via PCL Linkdump).

October 2, 2005

Banned books

I have only read twenty-one of the American Library Association's 100 most frequently challenged books. I would be embarrassed, but, well, what the hell are most of these books, anyway?

(Seen at The Valve in a post by John Holbo, who nods to Washington Monthly.)

The list, and my picks, below the fold.

1. Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
2. Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
4. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
7. Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
8. Forever by Judy Blume
9. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
10. Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
11. Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
12. My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
13. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
14. The Giver by Lois Lowry
15. It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
16. Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
17. A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
18. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
19. Sex by Madonna
20. Earth’s Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel
21. The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
22. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
23. Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
24. Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
25. In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
26. The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard
27. The Witches by Roald Dahl
28. The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein
29. Anastasia Krupnik (Series) by Lois Lowry
30. The Goats by Brock Cole
31. Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane
32. Blubber by Judy Blume
33. Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
34. Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
35. We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
36. Final Exit by Derek Humphry
37. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
38. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
39. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
40. What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras
41. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
42. Beloved by Toni Morrison
43. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
44. The Pigman by Paul Zindel
45. Bumps in the Night by Harry Allard
46. Deenie by Judy Blume
47. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
48. Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden
49. The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar
50. Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat by Alvin Schwartz
51. A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
52. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
53. Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
54. Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
55. Cujo by Stephen King
56. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
57. The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
58. Boys and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
59. Ordinary People by Judith Guest
60. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
61. What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras
62. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
63. Crazy Lady by Jane Conly
64. Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
65. Fade by Robert Cormier
66. Guess What? by Mem Fox
67. The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
68. The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney
69. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
70. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
71. Native Son by Richard Wright
72. Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women’s Fantasies by Nancy Friday
73. Curses, Hexes and Spells by Daniel Cohen
74. Jack by A.M. Homes
75. Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
76. Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle
77. Carrie by Stephen King
78. Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume
79. On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
80. Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge
81. Family Secrets by Norma Klein
82. Mommy Laid An Egg by Babette Cole
83. The Dead Zone by Stephen King
84. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
85. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
86. Always Running by Luis Rodriguez
87. Private Parts by Howard Stern
88. Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford
89. Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
90. Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
91. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
92. Running Loose by Chris Crutcher
93. Sex Education by Jenny Davis
94. The Drowning of Stephen Jones by Bette Greene
95. Girls and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
96. How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
97. View from the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts
98. The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
99. The Terrorist by Caroline Cooney
100. Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier

In the Night Kitchen??? I guess those three chefs are kinda gay...

Books taking over

It is odd how some books shift the way one sees things, at least as long as one is reading them, while others, however excellent, remain contained within the covers. It is not a question of profundity, or artistry either. Something about world-building, I am guessing.

I am teaching Emma this week, and have been rereading it. I can't tell you how many Frank Churchills and, particularly, Harriet Smiths, I have run across in the past several days. But while this phenomenon can be irritating — really, one Harriet Smith is quite sufficient, and Frank begins to pall after a short time — it has provided an unseen benefit. There is someone who irks me (and there is no danger of that person recognizing themselves in this post even if they do stumble across it — which is one of the irksome things about them — so I am quite safe), and it just struck me, very forcibly, that they are none other than Mrs. Elton, in the flesh, living and breathing. And talking. Odd how this is helpful, but it is. Now I just have to think of them chasing after the barouche-landau. Out of breath, pins flying. Up, over the hill. Gone.

September 22, 2005

Just got home

from having dinner with Charles Foran and some colleagues, after his reading this evening. Wonderful conversation, wonderful company. And after such a good reading. I thought Carolan's Farewell would be particularly suited to hearing read aloud, and it was. Foran is a lively and nuanced reader. And most generous with his remarks, and with questioners.

And, there was a harpist.¹

I'm asking my intro. to prose students to choose a book from the reading series, attend the reading, and write a report. Saw one or two there this evening; I will be interested to hear their reactions. Some student papers last year indicated that the terrain of the literary reading is, to some, a closed space. Foran's reading was probably more welcoming than many and a good way to be introduced to the whole phenomenon; I wish I had seen more of my students there. Maybe they're waiting for Alberto Manguel.

(My review of Carolan's Farewell here.)

¹ Foran's novel is about Terrence Carolan, a blind harpist who lived in Ireland in the 18thc. Nice touch, having a harpist. And she played some of Carolan's compositions.

September 18, 2005

Cataloguing personal libraries

Another think on the "to-do" list: Ellen Moody, who I seem to be quoting a lot lately, writes that she has begun to catalogue her personal library online, with Library Thing. Sharon, The Little Professor and Language Hat are also new users. It sounds very useful, though as others have pointed out, it would benefit from drawing on an even wider field than Amazon.com and the Library of Congress, and to be of real use, it needs to recognize different editions. Though apparently one can add or amend items manually.

Anyway, it will be some time before I start playing with this.

Tim Spalding, the creator of Library Thing, also offers MothBoard, an interesting idea: transitory discussion boards for ephemeral topics or projects.

September 17, 2005

Review of Carolan’s Farewell by Charles Foran

(Originally published in The New Brunswick Reader, Sept. 17, 2005)

I will shortly make a few measured and analytical remarks about this novel, but first, forgive some burbling: this is a beautiful, beautiful book. A book to live in for awhile. We hear much of it, as the first of the two main parts of the narrative lies with Terence Carolan, a blind composer and harper who lived between 1670 and 1738. We hear what he hears, and cannot see what he cannot. The language used to describe the input from his remaining senses is by turns exultant and earthy. Very earthy: Carolan's aging and failing body, and its baser functions, take up much of his attention as he pushes himself to finish a punishing religious pilgrimage and then the final leg of what turns out to be his last of many journeys through Ireland.

Carolan is a complex and faulty character. Neglectful of the wife and children he loves, travelling the country to sing for his supper, drinking too much and not practising his music enough, and ludicrous in his unwieldy, disobedient body, he is also intuitive, kind, a fascinating case study of the artistic process, and very, very droll. It is only Foran's skill that reconciles us to his absence through much of the book.

The second half focuses on Owen Connor, Carolan's fictitious manservant and guide, at a time when he is largely separated from his master, who lies ill. The two part structure echoes events in the plot; the first section recounts the last part of Carolan's journey, and in the second, after a long period of frustrated inactivity, Connor repeats some of that journey alone. Our attention is deflected from Carolan, who comes to various realizations of his own, to Owen, who must now answer a different set of questions. In some senses his character is the more tragic of the two, in that Carolan seems to achieve a sort of peace, while Owen never seems to be comfortable except with the master he is loosing.

If I have any criticism of Charles Foran's lovely text — one critic calls it note-perfect and that seems right — it is of the way in which his characters betray evidence of sensibilities more modern than would have been likely. Carolan "comes to terms with grief" — or at least, he would have if he existed in a contemporary setting. Owen exhibits a sense of egalitarianism that would have been unusual in 1737. But Foran, who has a steady sense of historical detail, would surely not misstep here. And in fact, instead of giving us the contemporary characters in fancy dress of lesser historical novels, he does something more subtle: he translates, transcribes, eighteenth-century sensibilities so that they exist seamlessly, apparently without effort, in an unabashedly contemporary novel. The deftness with which he accomplishes this blending is remarkable. And even if it were not, the novel rushes over any quibbles with the sheer strength of its language. The dialogue between Carolan and Owen, all the dialogue, in fact, is so clearly realized, so telling and at times so funny, it would be worth a recommendation alone. I look forward to hearing Foran read; much of this novel should be spoken aloud.

And much of it should be pondered over. Carolan is a fully realized character, but he is also emblematic of an Ireland now long passed away. Connor is equally well-drawn, and equally representative: of the struggle of the lower and working classes for a sense of self-worth in the face of the inexorable barriers of class, and in particular of the displaced Irish during the upheavals of the 17th and 18th centuries. Foran's Ireland is a depopulated, shivering place that has fallen away, even while it is still beautiful. Ultimately this novel is about loss — personal, communal, national — and how individuals as well as whole peoples confront those losses. But putting it so bluntly does a disservice to the fineness of Foran's ear for language, the sure hand with which he has crafted his tale. I sit here writing this while listening to one of Carolan's airs on the internet. It is a light, balanced piece, with delicacy and humour, despite solemn undertones and an overlaying sadness. Much like this novel, in fact.

A number of Terrence Carolan's tunes are available online here and elsewhere. Charles Foran will be reading at UNBSJ on Sept. 22, and in Fredericton on Sept. 23.

September 11, 2005

Charles Foran's Carolan's Farewell

This is a wonderful, wonderful book. I am writing a review for the New Brunswick Reader, which I will post here after it first comes out there. Foran is coming to Saint John on Sept. 22 to open UNBSJ's Lorenzo Reading Series for 2005-2006. It should be an exciting reading; the language in the novel is so alive.

But — to my review.

July 30, 2005

Just finished

The Blind Assassin. The narrative threads all come together at the end like a slow motion film of a flower opening, in reverse. A little too definitive, perhaps. But nonetheless tragic, and cleanly done. Reading it is an oddly nostalgic experience, for this displaced Upper Canadian: odd in that Iris, the protagonist, was born fifty years or so before me, in quite different circumstances. But the visits to Simpson's in Toronto, the bars with their "ladies and escorts" entrances, the provincialism: I am quite vanquished by nostalgia for things just outside my personal knowledge, but only just.

And I am reminded of the vintage postcards of Hamilton, about which I blogged awhile back.

July 29, 2005

Writing age

I am four-fifths through Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin. Started to read it because I was working on Oryx and Crake and its genre categorization ("speculative fiction"? "scifi"?) and read of the sf novel-within-a-novel within The Blind Assassin. Didn't end up speaking about it when I spoke about O&C; didn't even finish it then but am enjoying it now. Enjoying it, even as premonitions of disaster gather over my head. Apart from anything else, it has me thinking about age, and specifically, about how age is represented in literature by the not-quite-so-old. Atwood's protagonist, 82, is looking back on her life, and the transition from the malleable teenager to her acid-tongued older self is oddly satisfying.

The Stone Angel was probably the first novel I ever read — or at least, that I remember reading — with an aged protagonist. Hagar Shirley, 90, was a marvel to me as an undergraduate; unbending, angry, and failing. Some years later I read Doris Lessing's The Diaries of Jane Somers. The protagonist is only middle-aged, but her life undergoes a seismic shift when she starts to look after an elderly woman.

The alert reader will notice that for the most part I am mentioning books by women, about older women. No doubt men write about old men, and perhaps some of you will be so good as to leave titles in the comments section. But I am a woman and am morbidly interested in women's aging, with the particular triumphs and indignities it entails. No doubt men have their own particular triumphs and indignities, which are theirs to explore. And no doubt there is an even longer longer list we all have in common. But I read more women writers than men, so there it is.

Why do writers create these characters? To bookend the narrative, obviously, and to provide sweep and perspective. But I wonder how representations of the aged have changed as we move toward a world in which an increasingly higher proportion of people are elderly, many more of whom are alone in the absence of extended families. The older person looking back on his or her past is a common narrative structure, but now these characters seem to be very old, and often vulnerable. Stephen King's The Green Mile, where the protagonist is abused by a sadistic worker at his nursing home, just came to mind. Are writers — and readers — interested in such characters because of anxieties about our own futures? Also obvious. And perhaps I am only thinking about this because my own parents are aging and failing, and now living in my house. In the same way that when I was pregnant, everywhere I looked I saw pregnant women. On the other hand, it makes intuitive sense that the collective attention of the boomer generation should be, more and more, at least glancing ahead.

Awhile ago I mentioned, in passing, that there seem to be a significant number of recent sf stories about aging, memory loss, and Alzheimer's. I never did follow up with the promised review of the 20th annual collection of the Year's Best Science Fiction (ed. Gardner Dozois), and, perhaps not coincidentally, just bought the 22nd annual collection today so am unlikely to get to the earlier book now. Each of these collections, while ostensibly a cross-section of good writing from any given year, seems to circle around a theme or set of themes. The other Miriam recently posted on the new volume, and she writes that many of the stories are dystopian, and deal with alien-ness. (One of her favourites is Benjamin Rosenbaum's "Start the Clock," which I liked as well). Well, two years ago the flavour of the moment was Alzheimer's, and two stories in particular have stayed with me: Maureen McHugh's "Presence," which posits a future in which Alzheimer's can be cured by regrowing the damaged parts of the brain, but the lost memories are irretrievable and the patient is essentially a new person (Matt Cheney reviews it here). Geoff Ryman's "V.A.O." is a heart-breaker, though I can't say much more without giving it away. I like Ryman so much that I even forgive him the deus ex machina denouement. Read them both. And The Blind Assassin.

July 27, 2005

Early women's writing in translation

Other Women's Voices: Translations of women's writing before 1700 (via wood s lot). Lots of interesting material for anyone teaching or otherwise interested in women's writing cross-culturally, from Sappho and earlier. I may use some of these texts in my writing by women course, though I tend to keep to texts written in English.

July 21, 2005

The Daughters of Freya

Just heard that there will be a group-reading of the email novel The Daughters of Freya, beginning Aug. 1. The authors are organizing the three week event in conjunction with ARGN.com, a website devoted to alternate reality gaming. ARGN.com will set up the forum for the online discussion. To join up (and get The Daughters of Freya at the reduced price of CN$4.79/US$3.99), go here.

I have posted about The Daughters of Freya a couple of times, here, and at more length here. In a nutshell, I found it an interesting project and was glad I read it. A group reading would add a whole other layer of interactivity. I hope someone like Jill Walker will write about it more intelligently than I just did.

June 30, 2005

Pull up an invisible chair

The Invisible Library:

a collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library's catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound.

A straightforward listing with little other information, but nevertheless interesting. And be sure to read of the Fortsas Catalogue, allegedly "the largest, and best, bibliohoax of all time."

(via Metafilter).

June 28, 2005

And more bragging

Just heard that the UNBSJ Bookstore has won a Libris Award: they are the Canadian Booksellers Association's Campus Bookseller of the Year.

I posted about our bookstore back when the shortlist was announced, and said what I wanted to say there. Let's hope that national recognition helps the Bookstore to continue doing what it does so well.

And let's hear it for independent bookstores everywhere.

June 13, 2005

Out by Natsuo Kirino

I'm not giving a lot away — unless you refuse to read back covers, that is — by saying that Natsuo Kirino's Out is about four women, co-workers on the night shift at a boxed lunch factory in Tokyo, who work together to cover up the evidence when one of them suddenly murders her ne'er-do-well husband.

This is a memorable book, in a good, but I'm betting also in a bad, way. It will linger. Kirino makes the mystery/thriller genre new. Although the one practically unchangeable feature of most genre fiction is that the protagonist will survive, one really cannot guess how things will end in Out (okay, I've seen D.O.A ; I said "practically"). This novel presents a series of surprises: no mean feat for such an over-determined genre, a genre in which many authors can only distinguish themselves by trying to top each other with increasing monstrosity. There is certainly monstrosity here, but it is the relative restraint with which Kirino serves it up, the utter lack of the baroque excesses of so many mystery/thriller/horror novels, that makes it so powerful. There are not scores of anonymous victims here; each victim is known, and lingered over, so that while there are fewer of them, they have a more powerful effect than do the double-digit corpses of many other novels. The violence is horrible because it is made real, and because it echoes.

Kirino goes beyond the requisite hard-boiled avoidance of sentiment. She hints at the types of narrative possibilities for which many readers grasp — perhaps, for example, our heroine will take up with so-and-so and escape safely to his homeland — only to have that very possibility picked up, examined, and discarded. Finally this book is about failure of human connection, about living and dying alone, about real existential angst, not the usual window-dressing.

Many reviewers have commented on the "battle of the sexes" theme, and it is indeed wickedly evident. The desperation of Yoshie Azuma, a widow working the night shift only to come home to change the diaper of her bedridden mother-in-law; the way in which Masako Katori, the main character, was thwarted and harassed in her previous workplace of twenty years; the ways in which women are categorized and evaluated, by men and by each other, for their looks; Masako's endgame with her masculine nemesis. But while the focus is on the four women, we come to know and sympathize with a number of male characters as well: Masako's disillusioned husband, stalled in his career; the achingly lonely Kazuo Miyamori, a Brazilian of Japanese descent in Japan on a work visa. Insouciant loan shark Akira Jumomji is almost likable, and, most shockingly of all, Kirino helps us to understand the twisted and damaged Mitsuyoshi Satake.

And the women characters are equally nuanced. While the initial description of the novel reminded me of De Stilte rond Christine M. (A Question of Silence, 1982), Kirino's sisterhood does not survive. Kuniko Jonouchi is venal and dangerously narcissistic (but no-one is one-dimensional, and we finally come to have sympathy for her as well). Yayoi Yamamoto proves shallow and wilfully blind. Yoshie, the "skipper" upon whom the others rely on the assembly line, is ground down by her life and ends up committing one of the most shocking actions in the novel, almost as a throwaway. Masako is admirable but cold, with the "tough" and "determined" characteristics usually reserved for males. Heterosexual, though her sexuality, like that of the lone bounty hunter or the hard-boiled dick, is largely repressed and controlled.

The true horror here is the way in which money — making it, lacking it, wanting it, losing it — is practically the sole determinant in the lives of all the characters. This edition offers a handy yen to dollar conversion guide at the beginning, and I doubt I am the only reader to make frequent use of it. The "Out" of the title represents the all-but-impossible goal of stepping outside numbing restrictions in a society that forces one to fly without a net.

Picky caveat: the translation at times seems more literal than literary; there are quite a number of inelegant phrases. In one sense, however, this is reassuring; one feels that one is getting a truer sense of what Kirino wrote than one would have had if translator Stephen Snyder had crafted more felicitous English at the expense of the original. And perversely, I don't mind being reminded that I am reading a translation. For one thing, it enforces some distance. Japan is, after all, another place.

Blurb-worthy conclusion: If you at all like noire, crime novels, mysteries, or police procedurals, don't read this novel. It will spoil you for the rest. Kirino presents a full and real world that kicks out the moorings of the one you are in. She takes genre conventions, makes them her own, then spits them out. She offers a maze full of surprises that ends with a subdued inevitability only evident after the fact. She gets under your skin without even seeming to try.

May 25, 2005

Something's missing, I thought...

What could it be? I know! I need another section in my sidebars. But what? And which sidebar? [Period of intense thinking. Walked the dog. Made a cheese sandwich. Waxed my upper lip.] I have it! A section on things bookish, with a Canadian slant. Eh? So far, only two items, but oh, that will change, my pretties. Especially when the word gets out that I agreed to post a link to The Walrus in exchange for a one year subscription. Ho ho! Line up to the left, boys!

This is the thin edge of the wedge, no doubt about it. I'll be down there on the strip with Belinda Stronach any day now. Well, maybe not the same section of the strip. But I'll be there.

May 19, 2005

I Am Legend

[cross-posted to the blog for my summer course]

Quite the cover, hey?

When I was a kid I read constantly. Sometimes I would read while I walked down the street. I still read constantly, but not quite so dangerously. Until today: I picked up Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954) as I hadn't read it and it is the novel on which The Omega Man, which we will be watching the first week of class [in my summer course], is based. I got the book from the library and took it to an appointment Uptown, to read in the waiting room. Driving back to campus, I found myself sitting at red lights sneaking a quick paragraph. (What would I have said if a cop had stopped me?)

Not sure what it is about this novel that has jerked me back into the past. It is an old paperback edition from 1964,¹ just like the yellowing books my father kept in the basement when I was growing up: Ian Fleming, Edgar Rice Burroughs, various Ace Doubles. Maybe the smell of the fragile paper has touched some atavistic memory and I am again that antisocial little bookworm. The book is certainly a throw-back in more ways than one: at a mere 122 pages, it would be considered a novella by current standards.

I haven't seen The Omega Man for a couple of years but I seem to remember the creatures more as zombies, à la Beneath the Planet of the Apes, rather than as vampires. They are certainly not very smart vampires; more like the shuffling creatures of old European legend than the silvery-tongued Count (or the silvery-haired Spike).

Anxiety, chain-smoking, binge-drinking, near madness: the immobile Heston only hints at these elements in the film; Robert Neville in the book is a much more credible portrait of the beleaguered man, alone. Also, I don't remember much back story in the film, whereas the deaths of Neville's wife and daughter figure pretty significantly in the novel, in a loaded, can't-talk-about-it sort of way. Matheson is masterful with the succinct yet telling psychological detail. It's a tightly-packed 122 pages.

Another element absent from the film, at least in such detail: Neville's compulsion to research into the plague. (And here I had thought that Dan Simmons had introduced the science-fictional — as opposed to the fantasy/horror/folkloric — vampire). But Neville is not, it is important to note, a scientist. And some of his experiments border on, or become, atrocities.

Practically the first thing we are told is Neville's intense sexual frustration, his anger that the vampire women expose themselves to him to taunt him and draw him out. The sexuality in this text is very much of its time: uncomfortable and repressed. He is the adult version of the guy on a date begging the girl to have sex with him because sexual frustration can be physically damaging to men, doncha know? Neville, in his thirties, is like a tortured Catholic schoolboy who doesn't know what to do with his erection:

Did he have to start thinking about them [the vampire women] again? He tossed over on his stomach with a curse and pressed his face into the hot pillow. He lay there, breathing heavily, body writing slightly on the sheet. Let the morning come. His mind spoke the words it spoke every night. Dear God, let the morning come. (Ch. 1, 8)

His response to his frustration is sadistic. It conflates with his empirical science. The interesting thing, for me, is his complete awareness of the process:

The cross. He held one in his hand, gold and shiny in the morning sun. This, too, drove the vampires away.

Why? Was there a logical answer, something he could accept without slipping on banana skins of mysticism?

There was only one way to find out.

He took the woman from her bed, pretending not to notice the question posed in his mind: Why do you always experiment on women? He didn't care to admit that the inference had any validity. She just happened to be the first one he'd come across, that was all. What about the man in the living room, though? For God's sake! he flared back. I'm not going to rape the woman!

Crossing your fingers, Neville? Knocking on wood?

He ignored that, beginning to suspect his mind of harboring an alien. Once he might have termed it conscience. Now it was only an annoyance. Morality, after all, had fallen with society. He was his own ethic.
....

But he wouldn't let himself pass the afternoon near her. After binding her to a chair, he secluded himself in the garage and puttered around with the car. She was wearing a torn black dress and too much was visible as she breathed....

At six-thirty her eyes opened. ...

Then she saw the cross and she jerked her eyes from it with a sudden rattling gasp and her body twisted in the chair.

"Why are you afraid of it?" he asked, startled at the sound of his own voice after so long.

Her eyes, suddenly on him, made him shudder. The way they glowed, the way her tongue licked across her red lips as if it were a separate life in her mouth. The way she flexed her body as it trying to move it closer to him....

"The cross!" he snapped angrily.

He was on his feet, the glass falling and splashing across the rug. He grabbed the sting with tense fingers and swung the cross before her eyes. She flung her head away with a frightened snarl and recoiled into the chair.

"Look at it!" he yelled at her.

A sound of terror-stricken whining came from her. Her eyes moved wildly around the room, great white eyes with pupils like specks of soot.

He grabbed at her shoulder, then jerked his hand back. It was dribbling blood from raw teeth wounds.

His stomach muscles jerked in. The hand lashed out again, this time smashing her across the cheek and snapping her head to the side.

Ten minutes later he threw her body out the front door and slammed it again in their [the vampires'] faces. Then he stood there against the door breathing heavily. Faintly he heard through the soundproofing the sound of them fighting like jackals for the spoils. (Ch. 7, 38-39)

Ten minutes can be a long time.

Oh, and did I mention that he killed his wife?: "'I put her away again,' he said. 'I had to do the same thing to her I'd done to the others. My own wife.' There was a clicking in his throat" (Ch.18, 105).

The interesting thing here is his acute self-awareness; he is no macho movie hero, stomping over the bodies obliviously. I mean, he's not oblivious. A surly Robinson Crusoe, full of liquor, quick with his fists. Cold and unlikable (well who wouldn't be?), but familiar. Somehow noble. And in the end, an icon of rugged individualism, toppled by a hoard of mutated vampires, the next stage in human evolution and culture. Sort of like the commie hoards (remember, 1954). Ruth, the infected woman sent to spy on him, looks more like Honey at the end:

Her reddish hair was drawn back into a tight cluster behind her head and clipped there. She looked very clean-cut and self-possessed.... Her smile with the tight, forced smile of a woman who was trying to forgo being a woman in favor of her dedication. (Ch.21, 118, 119)

I regret not putting this on the course, but the book order has gone in and really, there is just so much to choose from. So many books; so little time. But read it if you have the chance.

Fun fact:

Apparently a planned remake of The Omega Man, to have starred Arnold Scwharznegger, has bogged down. We all dodged a bullet there.

Here are some reviews:

By Lisa DuMond
By J.C. Maçek III: "the Thinking Person's Vampire Story"
By Alan David Price
brothersjudd.com discuss the novel as political allegory. Scroll down for loads of links.

¹ Richard Matheson, I Am Legend. Montreal: Bantam, 1964.

May 15, 2005

Case Histories and genre

The Litblog Co-op has announced its first selection. Lizzie Skurnick is quite persuasive about why we should read it. I imagine that they will come in for some criticism for their choice — Little, Brown is hardly a small press — but let's hope the sniping doesn't drown out the discussion of the book. The comments so far are generally enthusiastic, and one is particularly interesting:

When a literary writer such as Atkinson takes on genre fiction, it's often with an immense amount of fanfare, chest-thumping and flag-planting: "I claim thee for literary fiction, you wretched little untamed genre!" And the results are anti-climactic. Atkinson made no such claim for her work. She has in fact, been open about her admiration for the form. And while it is common to say such books transcend the genre, I think "Case Histories" enlarged it. Defensive as I am about the crime genre, "Case Histories" showed me new possibilities; it was like seeing my hometown through the eyes of an astute, affectionate visitor. I hope she comes back.

The interrelationship of literature and genre is something I am thinking of a lot right now, for a panel discussion on Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake in which I am participating at the Academic Conference on Canadian SF and Fantasy in Toronto on June 4.

Oh, I suddenly feel overwhelmed. It may be awhile before I get to Case Histories.

May 5, 2005

Things I will post about soon, I promise

I am three-quarters of the way through Nalo Hopkinson's wonderful The Salt Roads. Read an excerpt, then get the book. A rich, peaty book, full of colours and smells. Hopkinson's writing is full-bodied/full of bodies/full of the body.

Recently finished The Year's Best Science Fiction Twenty-first Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois and have been meaning to blog about it before I forget it. Also want to say a few words about Conjunctions: 39, The New Wave Fabulists, which I read some time back (Nalo Hopkinson has a memorable story here, "Shift": identity, interracial dating, parent/child relationships, and Caliban's sister).

And saw Stage Beauty and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and have been meaning to comment.

Until then:

— Paul Di Filippo, Emerald City, and Jayme Lynn Blaschke on The Salt Roads
— Inside Liguria: The Old Salt Roads
— Route du Sel — Salt Road — Lou camin salié
— Salt Roads in Thailand
— Via Salarium — The Salt Trail of Turkey

— Interview with Stage Beauty Writer, Jeffrey Hatcher
— Samuel Pepys's diary entry on Edward Kynaston
— Stage Beauties: Stars of the Edwardian Stage

Ned Kynaston in 1660.

April 30, 2005

Dangerous books

Pseudo-Adrienne at Alas, a blog posts, via Bitch | (S)HITLIST, about an interesting study by a grad student that suggests a correlation between reading too many romantic stories, and being passive and hence susceptible to violence in relationships. Senior academics at the student's institution are making no claims: "Susan's work is an interesting study which is sure to spark debate, but further research is required in this area." But in various guises, this is an idea that has had real legs. I am doing a reading course this summer with one of our graduate students about the novel of female education in the eighteenth century. Inappropriate reading is a recurrent theme: I'm thinking Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote, in which the heroine's mind was turned by the reading of chivalric romances. An interesting preemptive defence against criticism: this is a moral novel, qualitatively different from those trashy novels. Eliza Haywood has a character, an older man, seduce a young girl by giving her ... yes, bad literature. And it works.

Bonus links:

Charlotte Ramsay Lennox
The Charlotte Lennox Page
Literary Encyclopedia: Lennox, Charlotte
The Life of Harriot Stuart by Charlotte Lennox

April 25, 2005

Does writing change anything?

asks Salman Rushdie. The answer is yes:

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced. We love relatively few books in our lives, and those books become parts of the way we see our lives; we read our lives through them, and their descriptions of the inner and outer worlds become mixed up with ours — they become ours.

[Last week we honored] the memory of Susan Sontag and Arthur Miller, great writers, intellectuals and truth-tellers. The old idea of the intellectual as the one who speaks truth to power is still an idea worth holding on to. Tyrants fear the truth of books because it's a truth that's in hock to nobody; it's a single artist's unfettered vision of the world. They fear it even more because it's incomplete, because the act of reading completes it, so that the book's truth is slightly different in each reader's different inner world, and these are the true revolutions of literature, these invisible, intimate communions of strangers, these tiny revolutions inside each reader's imagination; and the enemies of the imagination, politburos, ayatollahs, all the different goon squads of gods and power, want to shut these revolutions down, and can't. Not even the author of a book can know exactly what effect his book will have, but good books do have effects, and some of these effects are powerful, and all of them, thank goodness, are impossible to predict in advance.

Literature is a loose cannon. This is a very good thing.

(Link from Third Wave Agenda).

In his Herbert Read Memorial Lecture (Feb. 6, 1990), Rushdie said,

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way. The reason for ensuring that that privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want the absolute freedom to say and do whatever they please. It is that we, all of us, readers and writers and citizens and generals and goodmen, need that little, unimportant-looking room. We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to remember that it is necessary.

Rushdie is one writer who reconciles the political v. aesthetic schism. Or, at least, he sketches out a common vocabulary for us to talk about it.

[cross-posted to The Valve].

April 23, 2005

Our campus bookstore

has been nominated for a Libris Award by the Canadian Bookseller's Association in the category of "Campus Bookseller of the Year 2005." They are up against some big players — the UofT bookstore, which has won often enough, from the looks of it, and the University of Western Ontario bookstore, which has been nominated before. The criteria are:

To a university or college campus bookstore in recognition of excellence in book retailing. Based on the standard of store fitting; range of stock relative to store size; helpfulness and knowledge of staff; overall store atmosphere; customer service and new initiatives; buying judgement.

I have been to the UofT bookstore, and often, in many of its incarnations; I did my undergraduate degree there and lived in Toronto for twenty years. It is a fine bookstore. I'm sure that the bookstore at Western is also very fine. These are two large and well-endowed universities; they each need, and can support, an impressive bookstore.

At UNBSJ we have a small bookstore. A very small bookstore. But filled to the brim, with an astonishing variety of excellent books. Pat Joas, the manager, is a reader you see, a reader first, and her enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm of the rest of the staff, is evident in every tightly packed shelf, every pile of signed books by the authors who make up our reading series — in which the bookstore plays an integral role — and in the fact that though they are crying for space, they still manage to have a credible range of new and established books in a good range of academic fields, as well as in areas of general interest. And the children's books! You would think, in a store so pressed for space, that they would focus on required textbooks, some bestsellers by the cash register, sparkly pens, and the usual regalia. And these things are there, along with a very fine selection of children's books — real books, not licensed ones — and a marvellous array of novels, stories, and poetry. Yes, poetry, piles of it. And people buy it; we have a loyal following for the reading series and an enthusiastic core of student poets.

All of this is possible because our bookstore is independently run. It is not "managed"; it follows the books, not the bottom line. It is a rare and precious thing, as an earlier reader commented, particularly in this age of the megastore and the chains. Of rationalized campuses. I — we — feel very protective of it. I want it to win the award, but part of me is afraid that if it does, some marketing genius will notice its success — like the baleful eye of Mordor, turned on little Frodo — and decide that it can be EVEN BETTER if only it is "professionalized."

It could not be better. Bigger, yes. But not better.

[cross-posted to The Valve]

April 19, 2005

Online resources

DNA of Literature Project. The Paris Review is posting their interviews with authors, by decade. They are up to the 1970s, with the 80s due in June (via Maud, who posts highlights of the Joan Didion interview).

The Borgesian Cyclopaedia: "Being a Virtual Reference to the World of Jorge Luis Borges" (via Plep).

The Epic of Gilgamesh and Reading in the Islamic World (both via Mark Woods).

Publishers' Bindings Online, 1815 - 1930: "a digital collection of decorative bookbindings that strengthens a growing interest in this 'common' object - the book." Feast your eyes (via Bibi).

The Encyclopedia of Television "includes more than 1,000 original essays from more than 250 contributors and examines specific programs and people, historic moments and trends, major policy disputes and such topics as violence, tabloid television and the quiz show scandal. It also includes histories of major television networks as well as broadcasting systems around the world and is complemented by resource materials, photos and bibliographical information" (via Exclamation Mark).

Nest, that very funky shelter magazine "where high-style London and Paris interiors meet igloos and prison cells on equal terms," ceased publication last year but has plans to digitally archive its entire fabulous run (via things magazine, though one might be forgiven for missing it within a truly phenomenal link dump).

April 15, 2005

But I know what I like

I'm sure I'm not the only one to have become seriously irritated, at various points, with some of the discussions over [at The Valve] the past several days. I've felt the urge to respond; I've felt the urge to do anything but; I've wished this was turning into a blog with more people who shared my assumptions … like I said, I'm sure I'm not the only one. But I have discovered — and no, this isn't a new discovery or a particularly original one, but it is useful to be forcibly reminded now and then — that it is invigorating to be forced to articulate my position, even when I manage not to actually type it out in the comments.

So that is one thing.

The other is: the tone of this blog is different than my own. Obviously, because I am one of a large group, and there is a radically different set of commentators here (though one or two who also visit me. Well, one, maybe. Who comments sometimes, I mean). See, I've been feeling self-conscious about some of the bloggy things I sometimes do, like linking to funny stories, or posting comic book covers, or, god forbid, quizzes and memes. But then I realized something else, something quite interesting: while the What Kind of Quiz Taker Are You? quiz has a certain self-reflexive charm, some of the various book memes that have gone around have caused me to think about the books I like, and that in turn has led to my realizing that some of them have much in common. So, memes — one of those things people who don't mind others sneering at them post on slow news days, and generally with apologies — have proven useful, to me at least.

Some of you will remember the monster thread some time ago on Crooked Timber in response to a post from Harry Brighouse asking for suggestions for "two books you think every educated person should have read, published 1970 or later." I contributed some favourites, and then some more . Sometime later there were one or two book lists going around: one was to bold the books one had read. (Then, niche memes: same thing, for children's books, then for banned books). There was a quiz in The Independent: women, which books have changed your lives? (my answers here ). Then another meme: from which author(s) have you read more than ten books? Then another: which five books would you take to the proverbial desert island? From these various quizzes and lists, I have unwittingly compiled, by default, a sort of personal top ten. (Bear with me; I'm going somewhere with this and will in fact tie it in with various strands in previous discussions.)

So, here is a short list of some books that opened my head like a can, that had I not read them, at least, when I did, I would probably be different somehow. Here is a list of my own greats, books I would defend to the death (fair warning):

Doris Lessing, The Children of Violence series; The Four-Gated City
Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man
Samuel Delaney, Dhalgren; Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (in translation)

The alert reader will notice a theme here: these are all books with sweep. Some may not think that all these writers write very well; there was in fact a remark in the comments here, a few days ago, to that effect, about Lessing, which I choose to believe was a joke (don't disabuse me, please). But these are not perfect little jewels of books, these are not books one ponders like poems. These are books to delve into, to get lost in, to live in, for as long as one can. These are books that create full and complicated worlds that linger on, that become part of the reader's (this reader's) mental terrain. Something about range; something about one protagonist, moving across time and space, at times suffering from disassociation; something about the evocation, or creation, of somewhere — somewhere outside as well as inside the protagonist's skull — layered and real. These are social books. These are books that believe in history.

There, I told you I'd bring it around.

They are also densely imagined, intricately plotted, beautifully written (again, get thee behind me, Lessing-hater) behemoths of books. Like I said, they opened my head like a can; I read some of them more than twenty years ago and still remember scenes, pictures, words.

I love these books. They have become part of me. I love them in a visceral, primary sort of way. I would say that I appreciate them, but "appreciate" is such a colourless word. I appreciate someone opening the door for me; I love these books. I don't love them because they align quite nicely with my feminazi/pinko/poco theoretical perspective.

Yet, they do align with that theoretical perspective.

So, I'm not sure whether I'm defending the engagé reader from charges of being prescriptive, or proving … I dunno, something banal about the same.

[Cross-posted to The Valve].

April 10, 2005

Group blogs

Genevieve at you cried for night just posted about group blogs. As well as The Valve, there is another new bookish blog, the litblog co-op, with some of my favourite book-bloggers involved. The plan is for the participants, and whomever else, to read and blog about the same book: one chosen, every quarter, by the co-op. Check back on May 15th for the announcement of the first book.

Some other group (or dual) lit/book blogs:

400 Windmills: Reading Don Quixote
About Last Night
BookNinja
Chekhov's Mistress
Collected Miscellany
Foreword
identitytheory
Kitabkhana
The Literary Salon
Maud Newton, in practise if not in theory
The Millions
MobyLives
NewPages

(I'm sure I've missed some. Please let me know.)

No idea of the general ratio of single to dual or group blogs, but forming dyads or groups would seem to be a characteristic of bookish blogs.

In a similar vein, Daniel Green posts about litblogging communities and how they are trying to build the sorts of discussions the print media fail to foster.

April 7, 2005

Blogging and print publishing

I had started to draft a post about the manifest wrong-headedness of the idea that engagé critics are only interested in literature instrumentally, but got sidetracked by an article in the April issue of Quill and Quire, “Canada’s Magazine of Book News and Reviews,” for which I was interviewed: “Better marketing through blogs: Publishers ponder potential of opinionated online outlets” by Charles Mandel. (Not yet available online — the website still features articles from the Feb. issue — and anyway, one needs to be a paid subscriber. There is, however, a weblog).

Update (9/4/05): Sorry about the broken links. Damn curly quotes. Thanks, Melanie, for the heads up.

Mandel asked me if publishers sent me review copies, and I replied that generally, they did not. (Mandel seems to think that Canadian publishers are behind the times, here). Apparently I then said, about book-blogging, “It’s kind of more like a book club.” Now leaving aside the ticklish issue of whether or not an interviewer should clean up an interviewee’s verbal stumblings, I’m trying to remember what I said, and more to the point, what I meant. I was probably being modest about my own blog and ended up sounding as though I were minimizing everyone else’s as well. Sorry, everyone. And just before that pithy quote, Mandel paraphrases: “While Jones believes blogs may end up supplementing print reviews, she says many people just like to blog what they’re reading.”

I am not claiming here that Mandel misquoted me. I used to do media work; I knew the interview was to happen; I neglected to formulate some points ahead of time and made the mistakes of just chatting, and of not framing my remarks adequately. Well, face it, in this interview I sound like Diane Keaton in Reds:

Jack Reed (Warren Beatty): Louise is a writer. Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton, turning, interested): So what do you write about? Louise Bryant (Keaton, giggling and rolling eyes): Oh, everything! Goldman: (stares, then turns back to Beatty and continues previous conversation).

Or words to that effect.

For the record, what I think I said was that most people probably still rely on print reviews though that would likely change. And the majority of book blogs do function like book logs and/or reading clubs, though if I had had my wits about me I would have focused exclusively on the ones that don’t. The ones I read, in fact.

Several publishers are quoted as saying that, no, they haven’t gone after the "blog market” because they don’t see much economic potential, as of yet. Well, hell yes! That’s what most of us like about it. The blogosphere has its own economies of links and hits, of course, but they are refreshing separate from commerce. (Leaving aside the question of the elusive book-deal. And not all publishers are convinced: Mandel quotes Rolf Maurer of Vancouver’s New Star Books as saying that a "certain mental capacity" is required to frame an argument over a couple of hundred pages, the ability to write shorter pieces is no guarantee of said capacity, and people who have it, can be found in print. Somewhat tautological, but hey. Helen Reeves of Penguin Canada, on the other hand, is apparently looking at blogs as part of her search for “cutting-edge fiction and non-fiction,” but admits that most publishers prefer the quality control of going through agents.)

Apparently, then, the interests of most Canadian publishers are limited to this: blogs are cheap venues in which to advertise and they represent an interested niche market, so why not?

Again, I don’t want to sound like I’m going after Mandel. He is writing about the book business, for the main paper of the Canadian publishing industry, after all, and his article reflects that. But with some exceptions, it does not reflect much about what blogs are; it's much more about what they aren't. Though he does quote Alana Wilcox of Coach House Books describing how Ron Silliman blogged about Mark Truscott’s Said Like Reeds or Things: “It’s all about community, especially in the poetry world, and blogs are the perfect vehicle to communicate to a community, especially when poetry doesn’t get reviewed anywhere anymore.”

Some publishers have set up blogs for writers; some of those writers have kept them up. Most seem to peter out, or have a limited duration: Guy Gavriel Kay kept a blog on his recent tour to promote The Last Light of the Sun, but he closed it when the tour ended, citing the standard Gibsonesque argument. Anansi set up a "web blog" for Michael Winter when he toured last year, and he continues to post (though he seems to leave the technical side to others). Mandel goes on to discuss publishers who set up house blogs, and quotes one bemused marketer, from Random House, who complains of blogs in general, "Because they are fluid and changing, it's hard to figure out how to target them from a marketing perspective." Momma always said, be a moving target.

I suppose this post is by way of an apology to the blogosphere, for not better representing us, and the possibilities of what we do, when I had this chance.

And I bet I didn’t sweet-talk my way into getting many review copies sent my way, either.

But the truth of the matter is that I read a lot more about books online than in printed reviews, because I have found a cadre of bloggers who review books that interest me, and whose opinions of those books I have come to trust. And part of the reason I have come to trust them is that they are, or seem to be, disinterested participants in an intellectual exchange between like-minded people. They are not worried about their advertisers or their editors. They are not paid by the line (they are not paid at all). They are amateurs (amātor, lover, from amāre, to love).

In my utopia we would each work with our hands a couple of hours a day to meet our material needs. The rest of the time we would do what we loved, for its own sake, and for no external reward apart from the appreciation of others who shared our interests.

And beggars would ride, I guess.

Some links:

Author's Blogs Authors with Blogs at BookBlog Blogs and Weblogs by Speculative Fiction Writers Literary Ezines Maud Newton and Daniel Green on publishers using blogs as promotion. Well, that's enough.

(This post is cross-posted to The Valve.)

March 31, 2005

Drum roll!

Please get your little tushies over to The Valve: a literary organ, a new group blog set up by John Holbo of Crooked Timber and John and Belle fame. John's inaugural post, "Form Follows the Function of the Little Magazine," outlines some of his vision for the site.

It is going to be interesting. There is quite a range of ... everything — style, politics, you name it — among the contributors, and then of course there will be the comments, and later, various guest bloggers. All those voices, drawn together to engage in "intelligent, bloggy bookchat," to quote from John's post. Should be a lively conversation.

So drop on by. And not just because I am a contributor.

March 26, 2005

And I just went on South Beach

Bibi posts to a wonderful site about medieval and Renaissance food. Check out Gode Cookery, a large site with lots of links with intriguing names like A Tale of Two Tarts and Gentyll manly Cokere (from the manly Pepys).

Other tasty links:

Cressee, an Anglo-Norman recipe
Medieval and Anglo Saxon Recipes and Medieval European Recipes
Medieval Italian stew
Medieval and Renaissance Food Homepage
Recipes from Cariadoc's Miscellany
Monumenta Culinaria et Diaetetica Historica: Corpus of culinary & dietetic texts of Europe from the Middle Ages to 1800
The Medieval & Renaissance Cookery Webring Homepage
The Forme of Cury, A Roll Of Ancient English Cookery, Compiled, about A.D. 1390, by the Master-Cooks of King Richard II, Presented afterwards to Queen Elizabeth, by Edward Lord Stafford, and now in the Possession of Gustavus Brander, Esq. Illustrated with Notes, And a copious Index, or Glossary (facsimile)
The Renaissance at the Dinner Table
Sabina Welserin's cookbook (1553)
Food in Tudor England
Two fifteenth-century cookery-books
Jacobean Dinner Recipes
The Accomplisht Cook, or The Art & Mystery of Cookery (1685), and The Compleat Cook (1658): online facsimiles, Biblioteca de la Universitat de Barcelona.
Receipts of Pastry and Cookery For the Use of his Scholars?, by Ed. Kidder, 17-- (facsimile)
Lady Logie's Recipes
18th Century Cooking Equipment
Tallyrand's Culinary Fare: History of Cooking
Seeds for an 18th Century Historically Themed Garden
Jed Wentz's Favorite 18th Century recipes (Quince trifle, anyone?)
"Was death by fire common in Colonial kitchens?" (No.)
Three period restaurants at the fascinating Fortress Louisbourg, N.S. (we visited a few years back)
18thC Cuisine: a blog
Regency Collection: Recipes
Victorian Cake Recipes from Godey's Lady's Book (1860)

Update (12:19pm): Don't know how I could have forgotten to check with the unparallelled linker of things early-modern: Sharon has a great page of foodie links.

March 24, 2005

Life Mask by Emma Donoghue

Here is one description:

The bestselling author of Slammerkin turns her attention to the Beau Monde of late eighteenth-century England, turning the private drama of three celebrated Londoners into a robust, full-bodied portrait of a world, and lives, on the brink of revolution. The Honourable Mrs. Damer is a young widow of eccentric tastes, the only female sculptor of her time. The Earl of Derby, inventor of the horse race that bears his name, is the richest man in the House of Lords-and the ugliest. Miss Eliza Farren, born a nobody, now reigns as Queen of Comedy at Drury Lane Theatre.

In a time of looming war and terrorism, of glittering spectacle and financial disasters, the wealthy liberals of the Whig Party work to topple a tyrannical prime minister and a lunatic king. Their marriages and friendships stretch or break; political liaisons prove as dangerous as erotic ones.

A colleague lent me this novel, saying that she had enjoyed it. As she is a discriminating reader I looked forward to reading it, but when I did I was horrified to find that I was not enjoying it. The characters were flat, it was over-researched in a superficial way, and it seemed nothing more than an up-market lesbian bodice-ripper.

(Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

But since it had been lent to me by the aforementioned colleague, I did not follow my impulse to put it aside; instead, I persevered, complaining loudly to Joe all the while. And I'm glad I kept at it, because it grew into an interesting novel. I still think it wears its historical detail heavily — there are countless instances where we are told something for no apparent reason other than, it would seem, Donoghue had come across some titbit about late 18th-century waste management or powdered wigs or the Prince of Wales and could not forebear from sharing; instances that are all the more irritating because her primary method of offering such information is to have one character or another reflect, in a self-conscious and unnatural way, on waste management, etc.& — but even though the novel is guilty many times over of this, one of the most annoying faux pas possible in a historical novel, it still manages to evoke a sense of time and place almost in spite of itself.

And an interesting evolution occurs with the characters. Initially one-dimensional, the three main characters take on a sort of evocative opacity that is much more interesting. Eliza Farren, a "virtuous actress" in the style of her better-known contemporary, Sarah Siddons, seems designed to fulfill the role of object of desire and not much else. Her insistence on maintaining her reputation — a potentially rich, and vexed, topic — is largely unexamined. However, by the end of the text this no longer seems like a fault; Donoghue addresses the issue with an almost oblique suggestiveness that surprises. Well, at least, it surprised me as I had decided, somewhat prematurely, that Donoghue was heavy-handed. The other two main characters are likewise developed in subtle and interesting ways. Derby, with whom one might sympathize for his long, frustrating courtship of Farren, has a brutal streak. The scenes in which Damer is targeted for being a "Tommy" are harrowing, and her growing self-realisation is nicely done.

Donoghue is not a stylist, but this novel has other strengths that only increase as it progresses. And it is interesting on the politics of the period, and on English responses to revolution in France. Which is more or less what my colleague told me when she lent it to me, now that I think of it.

"Derby & Joan or the platonic lovers, a farce" by Robert Dighton, 1795

Bonus links:

"A Sapphick Epistle, from Jack Cavendish to the Honourable and most beautiful Mrs D****" (1778). Reproduced by Rictor Norton, Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook.

An interview with Emma Donoghue.

Life Masks is a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Lesbian Fiction for 2004 (winners to be announced June 2, 2005).

Anne Damer links.

"Anne Damer and Mary Berry in the Library at Little Strawberry Hill" (drawing).

March 23, 2005

Gender and publishing

News flash: some people are still dismissive of women writers. L. Robinson alerted me to the Guardian Unlimited story, "Women writers: dull, depressed and domestic."

Julia M. Klein's review of The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft by Robert S. Boynton asks where are the women journalists? (via Jessa Crispin).

"Literary Awards for Women Only: Orange Outdated?" (via Bookninja). Be sure to read George's take. And Hurree posted the longlist a few days back.

And yet another example of the second-class status of women writers.

March 21, 2005

Hard-boiled in Maine

Stephen King has written The Colorado Kid for Hard Case Crime:

The Colorado Kid tells the story of two veteran newspapermen and their investigation into the mysterious death of a man on an island off the coast of Maine. The book was written specifically for Hard Case Crime and has never previously been published.

Hard Case Crime brings you the best in hardboiled crime fiction, ranging from lost noir masterpieces to new novels by today's most powerful writers, featuring stunning original cover art in the grand pulp style.

Due out this coming October (via BoingBoing).

Bonus links:

Twists, Slugs and Roscoes: A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang
Hard Boiled School of Detective Fiction Dictionary of Slang Terms
"Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction" by William Marling
"Fatal Women in the Hard-Boiled Fifties" by Lee Horsley
The Thrilling Detective Web Site
"Rediscover 20th Century Fiction through this Vintage Library Free Email Series"
No Place for a Woman: The Family in Film Noir and Other Essays
Crime Jazz (via Life in the Present).
Hardboiled Heaven: covers and more.
Série Noire covers: tastefully minimal
Pulpworld.com

March 19, 2005

Book stick

Catalogue Annie has passed this on, a virtual baton for the stationary set:

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Oh, yes. One of the first was Jonny Quest. But I need the visuals: can't think of a character in a novel on whom I have had a bona fide crush. Maybe Captain Wentworth, a little, though I now have trouble separating him from Ciarán Hinds, on whom I do have a crush.

The last book you bought is:

iPods, iTunes & Music Online. So sue me.

The last book you read:

Life Mask by Emma Donoghue (and no, I haven't blogged it yet. And yes, I will.)

Five books you would take to a deserted island:

(NB. People seem to be defining "book" rather generously, but who am I to argue?)
• The Norton Anthology of English Literature (6 vols.)
• The Norton Anthology of World Literature (6 vols.)
• OK. Me and everyone else who does this quiz: Shakespeare's Complete Works
• The Diary of Samuel Pepys (10 vols.). Maybe I'd get through 'em if I had no interruptions.
• And oh, what the heck! Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.

Who are you going to pass this stick to and why?

Isabella because she likes books and has interesting things to say about them. And melinama, because she and I had the same results on this quiz.

Update (21/3/05): Marja-Leena posted the same meme, but she has some additional questions:

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451; which book do you want to be?

Hmm. My favourite novels tend to be long. No doubt there will be no shortage of volunteers for Jane Eyre or Austen. I think I would go with something earlier: it took us so long to rediscover many early women's texts, I would feel a certain obligation to take on one of them and keep it alive. Eliza Haywood's Betsy Thoughtless, perhaps.

What are you currently reading?

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, for class next week.
The Year's Best Science Fiction Twenty-first Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois (Editor).
How to Care for Aging Parents by Virginia Morris.

March 17, 2005

Poetry coffeehouse

this evening, part of IWW@UNBSJ. It was organized by two of our fabulous local poets, Heather Craig and Susie Bowers, who both read, along with Anne Compton, Robert Moore, and several others. The idea was to read poems by women who had been influencial, ones own poems, or both. Bob read three poems about Helen of Troy, including "Helen" by H.D. and Margaret Atwood's "Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing," then read his own poem about Helen, and another about Penelope, both from So Rarely in Our Skins. Anne read a wonderful poem, part of a group project with which she is involved: several poets were turned loose in the basement of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery and asked to choose a piece of art and then write about it. Anne chose "Victoria Kynaston" by Allan Ramsay (1749), above, and wrote a lovely poem from the perspective of the sitter. It reminded me of Browning's "My Last Duchess" in some ways — the portrait of a woman, the emphasis on her as object — but with the corrective of being from the woman's point of view.

(Now that I think of it, the two poems would be powerful, taught together.)

March 7, 2005

In the stacks

Wakefield Library, 1949

I have been thinking about online learning and how the campus itself is central and how I remember Robarts Library in Toronto in vivid detail but can hardly recall most of my undergraduate classes so if my degree had been online I would have missed most of it. I remember every library I've ever been in, I think, and certainly the early ones: the bookmobile that came to the parking lot of the bank around the corner from where I grew up; the public library on Concession St. in Hamilton, Ont., where my mother, with me in tow, loudly asked for a picture book about menstruation; the huge old Public Library downtown, with its vaulted ceilings and oak; the dusty little library at Ridge School, long since demolished; TerryBerry library, where my friend Chuck told me that Bill Moore had dumped me because it cost too much in bus tickets to keep up the relationship, and I read through all of Anaïs Nin; the windowless library at Westview Senior Public where I read through all the fairy tales: The Blue Fairy Book, The Violet Fairy Book, and all the others; the library at Westmount High, with the librarian with the laquered hair ... And more recently: the Victorianana of the main public library in Leeds; the beautiful library in Brooklyn Heights; the Bodliean; and a host of more modest libraries. We have a lovely public library in downtown Saint John, overlooking the harbour. Libraries are imbued with all we have experienced there; how can they help but be imprinted so strongly on our minds?

Library links:

Another link from the tireless Jim Chevalier, posted to C18-L: a no-frills database, Library History — The British Isles — to 1850: "information on over 27,000 libraries in the British Isles, ... based on over 1,200 published works" (though if you bookmark it, keep in mind, according to the front page, that it is due to relocate soon).

Boots Booklovers Library: 1898-1966. A couple of great photos.

Public Library History: "The history of rate supported public libraries in London 1850-1900."

"Relation of State to Public Library" by Melvil Dewey, 1898 (via The Dusty Bookshelf, a collection of articles dating from the beginning of librarianship as a profession.)

"The Order of Books": how Thomas Jefferson organized his library.

"Dramatised account of the meeting in Exeter Guildhall at which the Public Libraries Act was adopted, 6 May 1869."

"Not only suitable, but specially attractive" by Evelyn Kerslake: "looking back on 100 years of women in libraries."

"Mudie's Select Library and the Form of Victorian Fiction" by George P. Landow. Ads for Mudie's.

Libraries Today: "a web site for those who are interested in the history of Canadian libraries and librarians, especially in the province of Ontario."

Branch Libraries in the Bronx — Photographs 1905 - 1972.

Libraries: History of the Private, Royal, Imperial, Monastic and Public Libraries: exhibition; from the ancient world to the Renaissance.

"The Mysterious Fate of the Great Library of Alexandria."

Arms, Crests & Monograms: Libraries and Museums.

Library Cats Map: "Click on a region to see a list of library cats!" (Previously mentioned. But you can never have too many library cats.)

And finally, visit, if you dare, the three "Ghostcams" at Willard Library in Indiana. The basementcam is particularly creepy. And it crashed Firefox twice. I'd be careful if I were you.

March 5, 2005

Yet another book meme

From Nalo Hopkinson:

Here's a list (I'm told) of the top 110 banned books. Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you've partially read. Underline the ones you specifically want to read (at least some of). Read more. Convince others to read some.

(I did better with this list than many others; wonder what that means?)

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Qur'an
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (does the movie count?)
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius (again, it was a very good movie)
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Fer crying out loud: Little House on the Prairie??!?

February 24, 2005

Things to read

Sharon posts a slew of plaguey links. Of particular note: Natural and Political Observations Mentioned in a following Index, and made upon the Bills of Mortality by John Graunt, Citizen of London; The Dance of Death in Book Illustration by Marcia Collins.

Digital Dante (via Plep).

The Bathroom Diaries: toilets...bathrooms...dignity: "When Nature Calls, even intrepid travelers prefer a comfortable reply" (also via Plep).

February 22, 2005

And the Ia(i)ns have it

A meme from Natalie; the other Miriam has also played: list authors by whom you have read more than ten books:

(This could get embarrassing)

Margaret Atwood
Iain Banks
Greg Bear
Enid Blyton
Edgar Rice Burroughs
C.J. Cherryh
Len Deighton
Ian Fleming
William Gibson
Sue Grafton
Graham Greene
Tony Hillerman
P.D. James
"Carolyn Keene"
Stephen King
John Le Carré
Doris Lessing
James Michener
Anaïs Nin
Sarah Paretsky
Ian Rankin
Dorothy Sayers
Shakespeare
Sheri S. Tepper
Kurt Vonnegut
Tennessee Williams
Virginia Woolf

(I also like Ian R. MacLeod and Ian Watson, but haven't yet read ten by either of them.)

February 13, 2005

Thinking some more

about the interview with Edward P. Jones I listened to Friday. He talked about the importance of his mother in his life; he described her as someone who couldn't read or write, who had a hard life and worked hard. Eleanor Wachtel asked him what this woman would have thought of his novel, implying by her question, I think, that she might have found it alien. Jones answered literally: he said, well, it's out in a spoken-text version, so she would have been just fine. I thought that he was deftly deflecting the idea that his mother might not have understood or appreciated his work. And maybe he was. But the more I thought about it, the more I wonder if for him — a man who composed and carried around a novel in his head for a decade — that the "oral/print divide" is not quite so compelling, and that the black marks on the page don't have the same fetish-value as they do for many of us. Not sure where I'm going with this; he did, finally, write down his story and that is how he came to be interviewed by the CBC. I suppose one of the reasons I am so struck by this is because it serves as a refreshing antidote to the ritualistic obeisance that is generally paid to "writers' desks" — you've all seen the coffee-table books, calendars, and memes — writing implements and tools, writers' habits and superstitions. And I am speaking as someone with a moleskine tucked into her shoulder bag and a serious pen addiction. But I have rarely considered that these things might in fact be a detriment to productivity.

Addendum (14/2/05): Stephen Mitchelmore has a spookily pertinent post about using Moleskines at This Space (link from wood s lot).

Reading

Matthew Kirschenbaum continues his series of posts on the Technologies of Writing seminar he is attending. He discusses Don Quixote, and how revolutions in technologies of writing paradoxically spur innovation in older technologies. And, more beautiful graphics.

The playful antiquarian points towards a special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn with the evocative title "Handmade Literacies." She particularly recommends "Why I Like to Set Type by Hand" by master printer Barbara Henry:

Henry's essay reminded me of all the reasons why I love hand-press books — the poetic vocabulary of printing, the meditative nature of the process, and the connection to the history of printed word.

Full texts are available through Project Muse, if your library subscribes (ours does), but the abstracts can be read. There appear to be a lot of studies of children's literature in the mix.

February 12, 2005

I love CBC radio

Since the weather was crappy the trip to and from Fredericton yesterday took longer than usual; a good four hours of driving altogether. I listened to CBC Radio One all the way — didn't have a lot of choice really as the tape deck is broken, campus radio doesn't broadcast all that way, and commercial radio, well — I'll always remember something friend of mine said once, about a Madonna tape I was foolish enough to admit to playing while driving: "What if you were in a car accident and were pinned down but conscious, and the tape deck was playing on a loop?" — anyway, the CBC it was. And what a great evening! On the way up I listened to an interview with Neil Simon about Arthur Miller. Never mind that he barely knew him and the only reason they interviewed him was that they were both NYC playwrights: that was just fine. On the way back I really hit pay dirt: first, on Ideas, Greg Kelley looked at Dante's journey from Hell to Paradise in Part One of "Dante: Poet of the Impossible."

Then, Eleanor Wachtel interviewed African- American writer and MacArthur Fellow Edward P. Jones, who won a Pulitzer Prize for The Known World. His description of the way he wrote the novel was astonishing: he worked it out and kept it mainly in his head for ten years, at which point he left his day job and finally wrote it down. The novel is set in 19thc America and is about a free black who owned slaves; Jones also described how while he initially planned to do considerable research, he ended up inventing everything. So I was whisked away from white-knuckle driving and into a reverie about world-building in historical, or quasi-historical, fiction.

Bonus links:

An interview with Jones at Africana; one with Bella Stander; one at washingtonpost.com; another at identitytheory.com; and another at BookBrowse.
NPR story on Jones.

February 10, 2005

Beautiful books

Engravings from Italian graphic artist Giuseppe Maria Mitelli (1634-1718), at Giornale Nuovo.

Mark Woods reminds us that it was recently the birthday of Richard Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).

The Cinderella Project, The Little Red Riding Hood Project and The Jack and the Beanstalk Project (links from The Secret Library). Also, the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection (also from The Secret Library).

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) — "one of the most puzzling, enigmatic and fascinating books ever conceived" — in an online facsimile (link from Rashomon).

Elizabethan English and Anna-Marie Ferguson's illustrations to Le Morte d'Arthur (links via Plep).

February 7, 2005

Our wonderful campus bookstore

is having a sale this week and I picked up a book I had been eyeing — fingering, even — for a little while now: Thomas Wharton's beautifully produced The Logogryph: a bibliography of imaginary books, compact in its handsome little slipcase. Apart from its sheer loveliness, the description reminded me of "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges, a story I read ages ago and have never forgotten:

In a small town in the mountains, a young boy is given a suitcase filled with battered old books. So begins a lifelong pursuit of the elusive creature known as the logogryph. Describing imaginary books and alternate realities, Wharton explores the mysterious alchemy called reading, and along the way summons a cast of characters that includes duelling margin scribblers, a dislodged protagonist, and an unforgettable family that becomes one man's mythology.

"Duelling margin scribblers." I can hardly wait.

Just as importantly,

This book is a Smyth-sewn paperback with a jacket and full sleeve. The text was typeset by Andrew Steeves in Caslon types and printed on Rolland Zephyr Laid paper. The jacket was printed letterpress. The inside features illustrations by Wesley Bates.

And what serendipity to also find, at the same sale, a copy of In the Stacks: short stories about libraries and librarians edited by Michael Cart, which includes "The Library of Babel" as well as stories by Italo Calvino, Ursula LeGuin, Alice Munro, and a host of other luminaries.

Wharton wrote the marvellous — in both senses — Salamander, about an eighteenth-century printer who attempts to print an infinite book. A memorable, wonderful novel.

February 5, 2005

Due Preparations for the Plague

I plead illness as excuse for my earlier harsh words about Janette Turner Hospital's Due Preparations for the Plague. I finished it today (and as a sidenote: if you think a book will make you cry, you could do worse than to read it in the bath). It is painful to read, as I said, but well worth it. It's beautifully done, the way she folds the philosophic and the literary into the thriller. Or perhaps it's the other way around.

In a nutshell, the novel is about the aftermath of a plane hijacking in 1987. One of the main characters was a child who, along with other children on board, was released by the hijackers. The other main character lost his mother in the attack. What could be the apparatus of a routine espionage story, however, is read within a framework of literary plague narratives: Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), as well as his little-known Due Preparations for the Plague, as Well for Soul as Body (1722), as well as Albert Camus' The Plague (1947) and Boccaccio's The Decameron (Hospital is trained as a medievalist). It is from Boccaccio, who wrote of ten people who hide themselves away to avoid the plague and pass the time by telling stories, that she takes the central motif of the ten hostages locked in a bunker filled with lethal gas.

Apparently most of the novel was already written before 9/11, so Hospital has clearly tapped into the zeitgeist. The indictment of realpolitik is harrowing; by midpoint one is quite hopeless. Ultimately, however, Hospital sidesteps the political — or at any rate, deemphasizes it — in order to focus on the philosophical. How can one prepare for death? How can one live, knowing that nothing is certain? The epigram from Camus provides a frame for the novel:

To state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.

Pestilence literally, in the sense of sarin and other biochemical weapons, but also more metaphorically, as a way of characterizing terrorism. At times she wanders close to Joseph Heller country — and this is where I like her best — as when she offers the lectures of a forcibly-retired spymeister to his class of the hand-picked "happy few":

All that we do has already been dreamed of and foretold. From Sodom and Gomorrah to Nagasaki, we walk with alchemists and gods. We make firestorms from air, and we walk through the fire unharmed. We are Zeus of the thunderbolts, and we are the decontamination and survival experts. We may not yet have learned to make a heaven-on-earth—though we strive to keep this planet safe for those who indulge in the idea of heaven—but we are specialists in making that other world spoken of in the Gospel of Mark, a place where the worm dieth not, and their fire is not quenched. (227)

(We are later told that he is yanked from the classroom because of his inappropriate lectures.)

As I read I wondered how Hospital was going to finish; a happy ending, of any kind, would have felt like a sop. But to offer no respite from the bleakness — well, I would have just washed down the drain with the bathwater and put an end to it. She treads a fine line here, and I do think that she pulls back from the fuller implications of all that went before. But then, she might be modelling survival for us, mightn't she?

I'm glad I read this. It was harrowing, though, and I will look over carefully any of her other work I come across, before I commit.

And it might just do for my sf course this summer.

February 4, 2005

I have a cold

and I'm feeling very sorry for myself. I started to read a novel described as a thriller in order to take my mind off the tap that is my nose, but I don't like either of the main characters. In fact, reading about them is painful. So instead, I offer some links:

The CNN Health Library advises the following: "To stop your runny nose, try the following: Blow your nose." The U.S. Food and Drug Administration — perhaps they have the same consultants? — helpfully advises, "Try to Avoid Getting a Cold."
A site with the alarming name Wrong Diagnosis says that there are 32 possible causes for a stuffy nose. In related news, "Airborne Fungus May Cause Chronic Stuffy Nose."
More cheerfully, "Sex stops a runny nose." Now if I could just find someone who likes a woman with a tissue wadded up each nostril...
Oh well, there are always Runny Nose Gifts.
But is there a cure? Seems that Echinacea is overrated. Perhaps garlic? red wine? warm and cold showers? super duper cold killing soup or sucking on a lemon? a gentle cup of Chamomile tea? Or ... bread?

But wait: "Stuffy Nose Remedies." I came upon this and looked no further:

Ingredients: 1/3 Cup Jalepeno Pepper Juice
2 Tablespoons Chili Powder
A big glob of Horse raddish
A pich of Salt
Butter USED SEPERATLEY
Instructions: Add all the Ingredients (EXCEPT THE BUTTER) in a small to medium sized sauce pan and Fill the rest with water. Let it come to a rolling boil. Put the pan on the table make a tent over your face with a Towel and inhale deeply untill the steam is gone. The smear Butter inbetween your eyes and let it sit for 5 minutes. It smells absolutley wretched but it not only clears out your sinuses at that time but it will keep them clear for a few hours to come. Trust me on this one people. I have been a certified hippie for 31 years.

I'm off to the kitchen. Catch you later.

February 1, 2005

Do you think she used

a stunt double?: click here to see Margaret Atwood giving tips about hockey. Heads up from the other Paul Martin (the one who teaches Can. Lit. in Vermont).

Now I know that I am the only Canadian who can't skate.

Update (2/2/05): A student of mine just posted a killer page on Margaret Atwood.

January 26, 2005

Bits and pieces

"You know you're living in 2005 when you accidentally enter your password on the microwave." And nineteen more (via Old Schooler).

New York Times Link Generator gives you weblog-safe links, and there is a bookmarklet (via Bibi).

More webby-introspection: Disturbing Auctions. I wish I'd had the Tartan Doll for the Robbie Burns night party I went to on Saturday (also via Bibi).

Akbar and Jeff are real! (from BoingBoing).

Lip balm for the literati. Choose from ShakeSpearmint, Brontë Berry, Alcott Apricot, or PoeMegranate (from the Catalogue Blog). Come on, they're not even trying! Steinbeck Grape. Milton Pippin, Granny Smith, and Golden Delicious. You could base a whole line on Jeanette Winterson alone.

Drawings of aliens by children (via Life in the Present).

Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women: group blog which highlights cool (and some not-so-cool: Rhinoplasty glasses?) gadgets.

A collection of recent comments and posts on writing by hand, at Moleskinerie. Which led to a couple of interesting sites: Future of the Book and Visiting the Well.

Ballads & Broadsides and Last Words (also via Life in the Present). Madame de Pompadour's were apparently, "Wait a second." Lope Felix de Vega Carpio (1562-1635) got a little cranky: "All right, then, I'll say it, Dante makes me sick." My favourite is Civil War General John Sedgwick (1813-1864): "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist--."

January 12, 2005

Something old

The Scrap Album: Victorian Greeting Cards, Valentines, and Scraps (via Plep).

Check for the History Carnival tomorrow.

There is a thread at C18-L about monstrous births.

Watercolours of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) (featured at Giornale Nuovo).

Misteraitch has started a new weblog at which he is reproducing the essays of Isaac D’Israeli from his Curiosities of Literature, a wide-ranging work full of excellent advice, such as the following:

AMONG the Jesuits it was a standing rule of the order, that after an application to study for two hours, the mind of the student should be unbent by some relaxation, however trifling.

He also warns,

THE literary treasures of antiquity have suffered from the malice of men, as well as that of time. It is remarkable that conquerors, in the moment of victory, or in the unsparing devastation of their rage, have not been satisfied with destroying men, but have even carried their vengeance to books.

Though Misteraitch has rescued him from such a fate.

This is quite an inspiring project. I wonder if I have anything that is otherwise unavailable; one or two things, I think. Think how much we could add to the common pool if we all followed Misteraitch's lead.

December 28, 2004

Susan Sontag R.I.P.

Ed Champion posts some good links.

Maud quotes from Scott McLemee.

Some discussion at Crooked Timber.

And Kip's post is nice.

Update (29/12/04): Mark Woods offers one of his link-rich posts.

Never seen a bandwagon I didn't jump on

Amazon.com is in disgrace among progressive lit-bloggers; I assume that Amazon.ca, to which I usually link, is more or less the same company. If anyone knows of any reason why they should get a reprise, speak now or ... well, speak later. In the meantime, I will find other links for books. I wish there was a Canadian equivalent to Powels or Booksense; it seems only marginally better than linking to Amazon to link to Chapters. Maybe I will just link to the publishers, and (tacitly) encourage any interested readers to order books through their local independent bookstore, should they be lucky enough to have one. I try to give most of my own business to our university bookstore: it is independently run, by wonderful people who read and love books themselves. A resource we need to appreciate and protect.

December 15, 2004

More chickens

Two more for the pile:

Read an excerpt of Joe Haldeman's Guardian in Conjunctions: 39, The New Wave Fabulists and quite liked it so thought I'd look for the book, though perhaps I should have done some research as Publisher's Weekly called it an "odd and unsatisfying pastiche." But others liked it. I don't think I've ever read a novel by Haldeman before. I'll let you know.

Also picked up The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks, which will be just what the doctor ordered I have no doubt. The reviews are mixed, but even "merely very good" Banks is quite a ride.

And as I have finished one class and practically finished another, I might even start reading some time soon.

December 14, 2004

Excellent!

The NYT reports that Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database:

Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.

I imagine it will be some time before any of the more esoteric offerings are available. Prioritizing the texts will be an interesting exercise in canon formation. I wonder who will make the list, and according to what guidelines?

Update (10:59am): The BBC report gives a little more detail about the types of texts being considered:

Users will only have access to extracts and bibliographies of copyrighted works.

The New York library is allowing Google to include a small portion of books no longer covered by copyright.

Thousands of Oxford's rare books will be made available online

Harvard is limiting its participation to 40,000 books, while Oxford wants Google to scan books originally published in the 19th Century and held in the Bodleian Library.

A spokeswoman for Oxford University said the digitised books would include novels, poetry, political tracts and art books.

"Important works that are out of print or only available in a few libraries around the world will be made available to everyone," she said.

About one million books will be scanned by Google, less than 15% of the total collection held in the Bodleian.

"We hope that Oxford's contribution to this project will be of scholarly use, as well as general interest, to people around the world," said Reg Carr, director of Oxford University Library Services.

The story has a small illustration of Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market

(Heads up from C18-L, and Claire, respectively).

And Claire links to a thoughtful post by Muninn.

December 9, 2004

Weird new poll

According to a Radio 4 poll, reports the Guardian, Pride and Prejudice is the book that has "spoken to" women "on a personal level; it may have changed the way" women look at themselves, or simply made us "happy to be a woman." Don't worry: the story presents lots of criticism. Julie Burchill is reported to have said, "I can't see why Pride and Prejudice would make one feel proud to be a woman. If the question was, which book makes you proud to wear an empire line dress, then I could understand it." Touché.

Also rans: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, The Women's Room by Marilyn French, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Good to see so many people remember their English courses.

Burchill is also quoted as saying, "I think if people had been hooked up to lie detectors the winner would have been Jackie Collins."

December 7, 2004

Counting my chickens

Here is my holiday reading list, and growing. I am taking bets on how many I actually get through.

Must finish Conjunctions: 39, The New Wave Fabulists, a wonderful book lent me by a wonderful grad student.

Must also finish Women in the Canadian academic tundra: Challenging the chill, which has been sitting in the bathroom for weeks.

Then must read Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. [I chose the black cover]. Neil Gaiman, Charles Palliser and Kip Manley all like it.

Gardner, Dozois, ed., The Year's Best Science Fiction: "More than 300,000 words of Fantastic Fiction"!

I picked up a Tony Hillerman novel, but I can't find it in the rubbish. It may be this one.

Janette Turner Hospital, Due Preparations for the Plague. How can I not read a book by someone The Guardian calls “The Australian Margaret Atwood"?

Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water. "Comic and disturbingly accurate," says Kirkus Reviews.

Rita McBride & Glen Rubsamen, eds., Futureways: "a unique collaboration between the Whitney Museum of American Art, Printed Matter, Inc., and ArsenalAdvance. Futureways is a faux science fiction “novel”; each chapter is written by a different contributor, all of whom create fantastic stories that simultaneously work within and outside the genre." I'll let you know.

Ian Rankin, Fleshmarket Close. Though I have to say, I'll be really cranky if I don't like it.

This pile of books, out in plain sight (except for the Hillerman), is not to be confused with my shelf of unread books, neatly tucked away and ready for browsing, nor for all the unread books that are on the regular shelves.

If I was trapped on a desert island, I would want to take my house.

Links loosely related

under the category of "creepy":

The Wilkie Collins Website (thanks to Plep).

Maud has an interesting post on Terry Eagleton's review, in The London Review of Books, of a new biography of Bram Stoker and the idea that Irish writers have historically rejected realism as a form, in Yeat's words, "for grocers and English vulgarians." Stoker practices what Eagleton calls "Protestant Gothic"; if anyone else had said it I would have dismissed it out of hand as an oxymoron.

China Mieville tells the Guardian, "I'm in this business for the monsters" (via Weirdwriter).

Skeletons of cartoon characters (from Boing Boing and picked up by No Fancy Name, Mirabilis, Bibi, Life in the Present, and anyone else who is a little twisted).

Ensor vs Khnopff at Giornale Nuovo. Scroll down for sweet-looking skeletons.

And finally, why I am not going to be an underwear model anytime soon.

November 27, 2004

SF links

Noosphere, a French SF site. John Holbo gives the low-down. En Français, bien sur, mais il y'a beaucoups des images.

More from Holbo: a thoughtful post on education, sf, and learning to read from comic books. He links to Matt Cheney's post on teaching Neil Gaiman's American Gods. I learnt to read from comics. And my dad read them after I was through. He was so disappointed the day I spent my allowance on a romance instead of a superhero comic, that I never did it again. And today I am an sf-reading feminist with a doctorate in English. So it worked out well.

Matt Cheney points towards some speculative poets, and offers seasonal shopping tips. And be sure to read his post, "Artsy, Shallow Lesbian Erotica that's Not from the '50s!," about some sophisticationally-challenged responses to "Time's Swell" by Victoria Somogyi and Kathleen Chamberlain. An atmospheric story, written before the two authors had met in person.

Call for submissions: So Fey: Queer Faery Fiction (Haworth Press), featuring gay, lesbian, bi and trans-themed stories (via FutureTense).

And, since Buy Nothing Day is over, here are some links to kitschy toys, sf and otherwise, from web zen's cool holiday shopping guide.

Well I'm back

An interesting evening: a reading and the ballet. I generally have to work hard to convince myself to go out again once I am home, and after a long week it was difficult to go back into the cold and leave a warm house, a pre-schooler getting ready for his bath, and a soft bed. But I did, and am glad.

Beth Powning reads well. I haven't read The Hatbox Letters but from the two excerpts I heard, it is, at least in part, an intensely nuanced exploration of loss and loneliness. In other words, although I recognize the artistry, I doubt I will read it any time soon.

There is an interesting congruence between Powning's novel —

When Kate Harding, recently widowed, receives nine antique hatboxes — family letters, diaries, and memorabilia — from Hartford, Connecticut, she finds herself drawn back to the childhood summers she spent in Shepton, her grandparents’ Connecticut house.

and the ballet, Les Portes Tournantes, in which there are also documents from the past in the form of "a mysterious black book."

It appears that this evening was my time for dabbling: first a reading from a book I likely won't read, and then the first ballet I've seen in well over a decade. The first Act failed to draw me in, though the second did, despite my reservations about the narrative as some sort of wish-fulfilment story for children of divorced parents, and my discomfort with the theme of two mothers who leave their children. Boy children. (Wonder what my little sprout is doing? Is he upset that I went out? Why am I here watching a narrative about abandonment since to do so required me to temporarily abandon my son? And of course, when I got home I found that he had had a fine evening with his father, played for ages, and went easily to sleep. So.)

One thing I found interesting about the performance was the consistent focus on other forms of artistic production: one character is a painter, and paintings are a significant part of the set. Another is a musician; a "string quartet" dances their performance with their instruments. The artist's mother, danced by the magnificent Evelina Sushko, was a pianist who accompanied silent films in Cambellton, N.B. Textual documents — the mother's unmailed letters — are central. And of course the ballet itself is based upon Jacques Savoie's 1985 novel.

But much of this is still dabbling. The fact of the matter is that I could not bring myself to care very much for any of these characters, Powning's or the dancers' (with the exception of Sushko's solo in which she gives up her infant son. Yeah, there's a theme here). I was irritated with Powning's widowed Kate; she seemed so solipsistic, so bogged down — or even luxuriating in — in the minutia of her existence. (Big caveat: yes I know I only heard two small sections.) Jaded? Cold? Tired? Insensitive? Overwhelmed? In denial??? You be the judge.

Turned on the ignition in the car afterward and was blasted with some screaming metal on the campus radio, flipped to the "Golden Oldies" station but it was even more maudlin than usual, so settled on the CBC. And caught the tail end of the last in this year's Massey Lecture series, A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright:

Each time history repeats itself, so it's said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water — the very elements of life.

The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? can it be consolidated or sustained? and what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future?

In A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we recognize the experiment's inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.

Finally, some perspective. There will be no readings, no ballet, after the apocalypse. But on the plus side: no critics, either.

Globe and Mail review of the ballet.
Part one of the Massey Lectures is available on audio.
A Short History of Progress available from Anansi Press.
Interview with Ronald Wright. And another.
Wright's novels, A Scientific Romance and Henderson's Spear.
Civilization is a Pyramid Scheme: The Maya's ruined temples reveal a frightening message for us all, says archaeologist Ronald Wright (originally published in the Globe & Mail 08/05/2000).

November 22, 2004

Victoriana

The writings of Charles Darwin on the web: "The most complete collection of Darwin's work ever published- with original page numbers, illustrations etc." (via Plep).

H. G. Wells online: etexts of The Invisible Man, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Time Machine, A Short History of the World, and The War of the Worlds (via Plep).

A Web Site Devoted to Anthony Trollope and His Contemporaries (via Plep).

The Sarah Bernhardt Pages: listings of plays, films and recordings; bibliography; photos and more (via Plep).

The W.T. Stead Resource Site: "the internet's most extensive website on the life and career of Victorian England's most sensational newspaper editor" (via Plep).

Victorian Detective Fiction ~ An Introduction.

Hand Shadows To Be Thrown Upon The Wall by Henry Bursill (via web zen).

Etexts: Ms Austen & Co., Mr. Holmes, [Other] Mystery, Horror, Sci-Fi, and more.

Bibliographic resources on the mid-Victorian novel: excellent links.

Voice of the Shuttle Victorian Resources.

Victorian Resources on the WWW.

November 7, 2004

Beautiful books

Have you seen the British Libraries Turning the Pages, digitalized books that you can "read" by, well, turning the pages? They have Jane Austen's History of England (thanks, Catalogue Blog) and Elizabeth Blackwell's A Curious Herbal, George III's copy, no less.

And this rather shockingly titled book, Goodbye Gutenberg, does indeed look beautiful (link via Matt Kirschenbaum, apparently no relation). Perhaps I will ask for it for the holidays, along with this, which was supposed to be on sale — according to a poster to C18-L — but no longer seems to be.

Rare Books Exhibition — The Restoration 1660-1700 (via Plep).

Albrecht Dürer woodcuts and engravings (via Plep).

October 27, 2004

If someone in a beret

comes up to you and murmurs "Thou still unravished bride of quietness," don't hit them, because poetry is good for you (former link via Maude; latter via Watermark).

October 26, 2004

Book exhibits

Plep highlights a series of wonderful virtual exhibits on the Monash University Library site (Australia): sf magazines and comics, yellowbacks (popular books from the second half of the 19th century, simply bound in boards, with highly-coloured graphics on the covers), and English Literature to 1800, including Poems by the most deservedly admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, the matchless Orinda: to which is added Monsieur Corneille's Pompey & Horace, tragedies, with several other translations out of French. (London : Printed by J.M. for H. Herringman, at the sign of the Blew Anchor in the Lower Walk of the New Exchange, 1667).

October 21, 2004

Digital epistolary novels

Jill Walker posts about The Daughters of Freya, a mystery story sent to readers via daily email messages for three weeks, and reminds us of her list of other email narratives. One can sign up for the first three emails for free (the whole thing is C$9.99). Here is the first paragraph of the first email:

Dear Samantha:

Karen and I need your help. Six months ago Lisa dropped out of Berkeley and joined a cult in Marin County north of San Francisco. This isn't like the moonies or hari krishna or any other cult you've ever heard of. I wish it was. Believe it or not, Lisa is running around having sex with strangers out of some crackpot belief that this is going to lead to world peace.

Hmm. This could go very bad, very quickly. To sign up or not to sign up...

Being a transplanted New Brunswicker

(though they told me when I moved to "this interesting colony" that you aren't really from here for three generations) this caught my eye when I noticed it in Plep. Imagine my delight, then, when you read the author's name and I tell you that my maternal grandmother's name was Frances E. Bevan.

I may even read it.

Sketches and Tales

Illustrative of

Life in the Backwoods

of

New Brunswick,

North America,

Gleaned from actual observation and experience during a residence of seven years in that interesting colony.
By Mrs. F. Beavan.

"Son of the Isles! talk not to me,
Of the old world's pride and luxury!
Tho' gilded bower and fancy cot,
Grace not each wild concession lot;
Tho' rude our hut, and coarse our cheer,
The wealth the world can give is here."

London: George Routledge, 36, Soho Square, 1845.

October 19, 2004

Bedlam III

Just got back from dinner with Greg Hollingshead and various people from our uni. Greg read this evening as part of the Lorenzo Reading Series, and was kind enough to visit my Prose Narrative Before 1800 class this afternoon to discuss his novel Bedlam (previously mentioned here and here). I'm too tired to post much now — all those links were exhausting — other than to say that Greg is a charming man, his reading enriched the text, the classroom visit was a success, and the tortellini at dinner was a little rubbery.

October 17, 2004

Seeing texts

The people at TextArc have made it possible to visualize the reading of a text:

A TextArc is a visual represention of a text—the entire text (twice!) on a single page. A funny combination of an index, concordance, and summary; it uses the viewer's eye to help uncover meaning.

One of their featured examples is Alice in Wonderland. Watching is hypnotic, though when I tried to turn the sound on, Safari hung up. I tried it with Gilman's Herland, with not much better luck (the site is linked to the Project Gutenberg library). Not for the RAM-challenged, or even the merely-RAM-comfortable. But pretty cool. Link from Thinking with my fingers.

October 15, 2004

Dust-free archives

Bookninja posts a link that might interest any archivists out there (and you know who you are): the British Library is planning to archive the email "of the nation's top authors and scientists," though there is the ongoing problem of technological obsolescence. The BL is appealing to the general public for access to old computers; maybe I should tell them about those two Performas in the basement.

Bookbindings at the the University of Glasgow (link from Plep) and the British Library.

Women's Travel Writing, 1830–1930 (also from Plep).

Amanda writes, "There really is an archive for everything" as she points towards the Deliberately Concealed Garments Project: Clothing found hidden in buildings: "A research project based at the Textile Conservation Centre, University of Southampton exploring instances of and the practice of concealing garments in the fabric of buildings." This is so cool! Link from Household Opera.

October 10, 2004

Blow Fly by Patricia Cornwell

A couple of years back, on the recommendation of a colleague from History, I read a Patricia Cornwall novel, I can't remember which one. She (my colleague) said that she loved Cornwall's stuff, particularly the way in which she depicted Kay Scarpetta, her main character, as a professional woman. So I went on a bit of a reading jag and have read, I think, just about all of the Scarpetta novels. And yes, I could appreciate what my friend saw in her, but with each novel I felt a growing unease, and not just because of the gut-churning descriptions of autopsies — I am a big fan of C.S.I., after all. No, it was Scarpetta herself: she seemed increasingly humourless, increasingly reactionary living in her gated Virginia community, increasingly isolated and paranoid. This was all awhile ago and mostly forgotten as I picked up the newest paperback at the supermarket. Reading the first chapter it all came flooding back: the rarified Scarpetta literally sick because she has two glasses of wine from (shudder) a carton; Scarpetta the object of veneration from an equally driven, equally humourless young woman at a seminar she is giving (sidebar: you know all those unintentionally hilarious books/tv shows/movies that scream "Homoeroticism!" in neon letters three feet high that everyone but the oblivious heroes can see half a mile off? Well the Scarpetta novels are the only place I have ever seen this dynamic transposed, otherwise unaltered, onto female characters. Something on another planet than sisterhood. Something Kirk, Spock and Bones would recognize. Something closeted and Republican. But I digress.)

Blow Fly is not well written, and it is too full of convoluted loops begun in previous novels to be of much interest to new readers. But what is really irritating me is the way in which Scarpetta seems more than ever to be, in a blatant, where-the-hell-is-the-editor sort of way, an avatar for Cornwall herself. It is not just that the descriptions of the petite, mature, blond, blue-eyed Scarpetta could refer equally well to Cornwall's author photo (see above), though that cannot fail to impress when reading the description, early in the novel, of Jay, the serial killer de jour, looking down on his next victim, tied up and naked: .

Her wide, panicked eyes shine in the dark. In daylight, they are blue, a deep, beautiful blue. She painfully screws them shut as Jay caresses her with the beam of the flashlight, starting with her mature, pretty face, all the way down to her red painted toenails. She is blonde, probably in her early- to mid-forties, but looks younger than that, petite but curvaceous.

This woman has been chosen because she reminds Jay of Scarpetta, whom he hates. Scarpetta, the avatar of Cornwall. This is disconcerting. Almost as disconcerting is the way that Cornwall practically forces the reader/viewer to scrutinize her own appearance in the first place. One senses that the reader could very easily share in the disdain with which characters outside the inner circle are described, that diminishing circle of the select, battling back to back as the hordes of serial killers, corrupt politicians, soul-crushing bureaucrats, and people who drink wine from boxes close in.

This is not the story of a professional woman battling for respect in a "man's world"; it is a skewed, solipsistic vision of personal aggrievement.

So will I finish it? Of course I will. And then I will feel the same queasy aftertaste that I now remember from all the others. So who's caught in some weird, unhealthy feedback loop now? Huh?

Though it does strike me, sixty pages in, that Scarpetta has not been much in evidence. Perhaps Cornwall is tired of her too.

And all grousing aside: it's either Cornwall or that growing pile of marking.

September 29, 2004

Banned books

Watermark has a great, linky post on Banned Books Week.

My colleagues and I did a course not quite four years ago called Banned Books, and each of the six of us taught a two-week block. I did Aphra Behn (not banned in the usual sense, but banished from the canon for a century and a half). We taught it on overload and not everyone liked teaching a snippet to a largely unknown group so we never repeated the experiment, though I thought it was a great model. A books-into-films course could be taught the same way, or, well, anything with a lot of breadth. Maybe we'll do it again sometime.

September 21, 2004

Life-changing books

Isabella posts about the same story I linked to in a smart-alecky way, a couple of days ago: the story about women listing books that changed their lives. She has some trouble coming up with such watershed books, though she does manage to find a few. I wonder, after reading her post, if it is not the books themselves that are so memorable but rather our state of mind when we read them. That is not to say that these books — in my case, Doris Lessing's Martha Quest series, some Anaïs Nin (okay, that's embarrassing), Graham Greene, Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet — I could go on, but since a some of what I'm dredging up is difficult to confess to, I will stop now — it is not to say that they are not wonderful, but rather, that we read them at a significant juncture. I doubt I could stomach much Durrell or Nin today, though Lessing and Greene are still in the pantheon. I read the books mentioned here sometime between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four: the decade in which my mind was a sponge, life seemed without limits, and any world-weariness I evinced was a complete pose. That was also the decade in which my thoughts and my tastes were unformed and I could genuinely try anything. And the decade in which I had endless energy and little to keep me from my books. The decade in which I got my real education; since then, it has just been fine-tuning. Okay, I overstate. But that state of seemingly being open to anything is long over; now, I try to keep the flood out, try to pick and choose carefully. Now I am proud of my hard-won ability to winnow, to cull, to reject. Now I have solid preconceptions and knee-jerk reactions. Or, more charitably, have developed my tastes. Or both.

Others?

Günter Grass' The Flounder
Kate Millett's Flying
Lots more Doris Lessing, particularly The Golden Notebook
Charlotte Brontë's Villette
Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man
Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary
Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children
Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed
Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady
Some Jorge Luis Borges

Most of these, I think, I would still be gripped by were I to read them again. All fine books, but by no means the only fine books I have read. What makes them stand out is the intensity with which I remember reading them, and that is a product of when I read them. And interestingly, only three listed here (Brontë, Flaubert, and James) were part of coursework (and the same course, come to think of it); the rest I found on my own or had recommended to me by others in my circle. Which begs some interesting questions about what we are doing with our students.

Were this books life-changing? I don't know. But my life was changing when I read them.

September 18, 2004

Monkey on my bookbag

Newsflash: women read widely (from Notes in the Margin, Sept. 18/04). And Jessa Crispin proves it.

Dab a bit of your favourite book behind your ears (via Kitabkhana).

Jan’s Nobel Project: follow along as Jan reads at least one book written by each recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Literature Abuse, with the helpful section "What to do if you suspect your child is becoming an English major" (via That Rabbit Girl).

Favourite author photos thread (via Bookslut).

Too much? Here are two links from Bookninja that should make you feel better: online Cliff’s notes so you can keep up with Jan, and the security of knowing that reviewers often don’t read the books they review.

September 10, 2004

The Bard Online

Digitised Shakespeare quartos from the British Library. Beautiful. And here is the beginning of a monologue I did for drama class many many moons ago, in quite a petulant tone of voice, I seem to remember (Via Boing Boing).

September 9, 2004

I don't have

time to Get Things Done (via Boing Boing); perhaps I should start just reading the first lines of novels (via Crooked Timber) then throwing most of them against the wall. That should free up some time for filing.

September 2, 2004

Winchester's Outposts

Picked up Simon Winchester's Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire, because I had enjoyed The Professor and the Madman. And now that I have begun the book proper I think that I probably will find it worth reading. But the introduction he wrote for the new edition is cringe-making for a rabidly PC armchair radical like me. The world certainly has changed since he first published it in 1985, but I for one would rather he had let the past speak for itself rather than twist himself around with statements like

This is ... quite simply, one final and genial look around an Empire that had much to commend it; and in the stories of its vestiges and relics I hope that some of you, despite the ideologically troublesome principles involved in doing so, may yet discern aspects of its existence that it is possible to enjoy discovering or remembering, to admire, and even, with the benefit of time and hindsight, and to a degree, to respect.

Odds and sods:

Trying to stay afloat: Winchester on Pitcairn Island in Salon.
Winchester's homepage.
Commonwealth North's program A Conversation with Simon Winchester.
An interview, and another.
I have to say, I like this cover better.

And what to make of someone who is quoted as saying, "I find [writing] too easy — and that, in all seriousness, makes it difficult."

August 29, 2004

Mark Haddon's Curious Incident

I enjoyed this novel even though I felt that it fell off by the end. I thought I knew where it was going and indeed, it got there, but half-way through, not at the finish: a pleasant surprise. Unfortunately the rest of the narrative, particularly the conclusion, felt a tad sentimental, and by that time some of Haddon's tricks were getting stale, too.

It's a funny and a clever book, nicely produced, and I enjoyed the metafictional elements. But somehow these came to feel at odds with the latter part of the narrative, and the whole didn't gel.

It niggles that the protagonist, an autistic youth named Christopher, went to what were for him significant extremes of bravery by the end. Yes it's a positive message — that people with differing abilities and situations can grow, change, be heroic. But I'm reminded of the Sigourney Weaver character in Copycat, and that harrowing finale where she overcomes her severe agoraphobia to battle the killer on an open roof. (Or, hell, Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark). Haddon's novel is not so melodramatic, obviously, but it could be construed as a little bit Hollywood. If Dustin Hoffman were considerably younger ... Oh, wait ...

All that being said, Christopher is a character who will live with most readers a long time, and perhaps that's enough.

I might have read it too quickly. Or maybe I was just disappointed that it wasn't really a mystery. Though I suppose Monk covers some similar territory.

August 27, 2004

Go ask Alice

Lauren's Alice in Wonderland Page: collection of illustrations (from Bookninja [08/23/04]).

Dakota Fanning might be in new Alice film from Spielberg (from Stephany at Maud's).

Alice is big in Japan.

Alice for sale.

The Lewis Carroll Society.

Lewis Carroll Academic Information.

More Alice links.

Pop-up Alice.

Flash Alice (from Boing Boing).

Alice in Wonderland Theme Park.

Alice photo-montage.

Alice In Wonderland and the Shroud of Turin.

Go to Wonderland yourself or send a loved one.

And what would life be without Quizilla? Which Alice in Wonderland Character are you? (link from Sharon. Who is of course also the Chesire Cat.)

[I misplaced a link to a site featuring wierd and creepy photos of a Japanese Alice and her cohorts in a stiff, formal garden setting; it was linked recently on someone's blog. I'd love for anyone who recalls it to leave a comment. Even if the comment begins, "That what 'Add Bookmark' is for, bubblebrain!"]

Update (30/8/04): Thanks to Vernica for the elusive creepy Alice link: Alice in Wonderland staged by Japanese cosplayers (link from Boing Boing). And check out her The Playful Antiquarian for more examples of "Carroll-mania."

July 31, 2004

Parodies

A few days ago The Little Professor posted a link to the fifth annual Faux Faulkner and Imitation Hemingway Contests contest. I particularly like the Faulkner-writes-Piglet entry:

“Yes,” Piglet said, “Yes.” And will be: more tracks and even more after them, unhurried and without increment, save the increment of there always being two more: following, leading, a doomed and final charge of Hefalumps, moving through land that was always theirs and beyond which they will, can know nothing: “I’m getting very hungry,” said Pooh.

And Tom Runnacles at Crooked Timber notes that the UK government treats its citizens like bears of little brain.

July 5, 2004

Gilman

Some great links about Charlotte Perkins Gilman and nineteenth-century women writers in general at wood s lot.

Here is my student's site from the sf course last fall.

July 4, 2004

Bharati Mukherjee's The Holder of the World

Picked this up because Desirable Daughters was so readable. Not very far in yet but am enjoying it immensely. Two streams: bizarre juxtaposition of woman in 17thc New England with a contemporary woman who does "assets research" (seeks out items for rich clients). And an interesting take on time travel: the careful reconstruction of the past through the meticulous build-up of data.

July 2, 2004

Publishing

Canadian publishing in better relative shape than we think (from Nalo Hopkinson).

June 26, 2004

Nancy Drew

covers over the years, and more! (via Foreword).

June 25, 2004

Gender links

The Dominion posts a link to Kate Bornstein’s Gender Aptitude Test. Something for my Gender Studies class in Sept.

Check out Christine's posts at ms.musings about the HUGE class action suit against Wal-Mart.

Sarah Bakewell reviews Norma Clarke’s The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (via Cup of Chicha). I will order this for our library, pronto; at first glance it seems to be an updated, indepth analysis of some of the same dynamics Gayle Tuchman and Nina Fortin looked at years ago with regards to the 19th-century, but with earlier writers.

June 24, 2004

Bharati Mukherjee's Desirable Daughters

is wonderful. I will post more when I have finished. Except to say that I like Mukherjee's writing, and I like Margaret Atwood's, and neither is particularly warm. Zero sentiment. The examined life. Relationships dissected. If this sounds good, dive in! Plus, it's a beautiful book:

June 23, 2004

Misc. links

[click for larger view]

"Young Feminists Take on the Family," the newest edition of webjournal The Scholar & Feminist Online published by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, came out today (via Feministing).

The June issue of The Internet Review of Science Fiction is also posted. Highlights: "Feminist SF: Futures for Humankind" by Cynthia Ward, "Science Fiction and the Paradox of Genre" by Matthew Cheney, and an interview about SETI (registration required; free until the end of the month).

SETI@Home has released new client software (via Slashdot). No gui interface for the Mac OS yet, though.

Space Art Through the Ages, including the graphic, above (via Plep). I suspect that some of these artists might be bemused by their company.

American Needlework in the 18th Century and Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate in Colonial America, both at the Met (via Plep).

Kelly Culture: reconstructing Ned Kelly (also via Plep): of particular interest to readers of The True History of the Kelly Gang (mentioned here, here, and here).

Stuff found in used books (via Bookslut; also noted by Household Opera).

June 22, 2004

Caxon, Shakespeare, and Children's lit.

Priceless Caxton book goes on show for first time. Book written by Benedictine monk in 1360 and printed by William Caxton in 1482 (via Mirabilis).

William Caxton stamps commemorating the 500th anniversary of printing in 1976.

Printing in England from William Caxton to Christopher Barker — An Exhibition: University of Glasgow, November 1976 — April 1977.

Caxton's Chaucer: compare the 1476 and 1483 editions held in the British Library.

18th and 19th Century Shakespearean Illustrations (via Plep).

Shakespeare Illustrated "explores nineteenth-century paintings, criticism and productions of Shakespeare's plays and their influences on one another."

How Shakespeare Prepared Manuscripts.

Intermingling illustration and text: hyper-illuminated criticism of Shakespeare's Works.

Alice and Beyond: English Children's Books (via Plep).

The Children's Literature Web Guide.

Authors & Illustrators on the Web.

Fairrosa Cyber Library of Children's Literature.

June 21, 2004

Choosing a novel

for my upcoming introduction to gender studies course.¹ I had thought of Morrison's Beloved, of course, but it's been done to death and I wanted to do something Canadian. I want something accessible, that treats gender and race issues, by a contemporary author. One of my colleagues recommended I look at

Anita Rau Badami's The Hero's Walk and Tamarind Mem,
Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night, and
Bharati Mukherjee's Desirable Daughters.

I think that I will go with Tamarind Mem. The Hero's Walk is set entirely in India, and I wanted to be able to talk about cross-cultural experience. Desirable Daughters fits the bill and I look forward to reading it myself, but I think it might not be entirely accessible to a lower level class of non-English majors, and Cereus Blooms at Night is wrenching, even just skimming through (it is for that reason that I thought of, and discarded, Ann Marie MacDonald's Fall On Your Knees: it is simply too daunting to think of reading it again, even though I know students love it.) But there is still time to drive the staff at the bookstore crazy by changing my order, so if anyone has any other suggestions, please don't hesitate to send them on.

¹ Issues of Gender (ed. Ellen G. Friedman and Jennifer D. Marshall) is the main course text.

June 20, 2004

Ken McGoogan's Ancient Mariner

Have just begun Ken McGoogan's Ancient Mariner: The Amazing Adventures of Samuel Hearne, the Sailor Who Walked to the Arctic Ocean (2003). He read here at the university last year; he was a real storyteller and looked quite the frontiersman in his fringed buckskin.

Now maybe I should stop mucking about with this blog and go and actually read.