May 05, 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 07, 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 07, 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 05, 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 07, 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 05, 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 04, 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 01, 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 09, 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 07, 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 07, 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 09, 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 02, 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 05, 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 04, 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 02, 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.

Requisite links:

HarperCollins.
McGoogan answers the critics.

June 17, 2004

Getting the jump on Sharon

with Thursday cat blogging.

Pile 'o cat links (from Burningbird).

Library Cats: click on the map to discover the library cats in various regions. Only one listed for New Brunswick: come on, people! (from Foreword, a wonderful — and attractive — site about book design and related matters).

June 15, 2004

Some bookish stuff

wood s lot has some links about the passing of Canadian publishing legend Jack McClelland (here's the CBC story).

More on comics, something practical this time: From James Sime: "Listen up, Mr. and Mrs. Comic Industry Professional, your comic book covers are killing your books" (via Bookslut).

Making rejection public: Everyone Who's Anyone, Gerard Jones' site, and Deb Central, a new site from Deb Schwarz, both chock full of rejection letters and cheeky responses (via MoorishGirl). These two are clearly on a roll.

The Official Eric Carle Web Site (via Plep).

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.

4000 Years of Miniature Books (also via Plep).

AbeCedarium: An Exhibit of Alphabet Books (via Plep).

OneZeroZero: A Virtual Library of English Canadian Small Press and Atlantic-Poetry Pages (via wood s lot).

June 14, 2004

Spare the rod

Years ago I visited the Osborne Collection, when it was still on University Ave., with my 18thc women writers graduate seminar. I won't soon forget the story of the little girl who wanted the pretty coloured vase instead of sensible shoes: her mother bought her the vase, which turned out to be plain glass filled with coloured water, and she wore her too-small shoes, full of holes, all through that winter. Bet she learnt her lesson. Surprised Gorey missed it.

moleskinerie links to a wonderful website, Victorian Children's Activities: a digital collection of pieces from the Osborne Collection that showcases pop-ups, theatres, and other movable books.

June 12, 2004

Increments

Along the same lines as the Diary of Samuel Pepys, one can now read The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci one page at a time through an RSS feed, courtesy of Matt Webb (thanks, wood s lot). And weren't there some people working their way through Proust? (though damned if I can find the link and I know I bookmarked it). Then there is the Latin fellow, though he is translating rather than just reading.

I have blogrolled Pepys but have not found it satisfying to read him in such small doses. Apparently, though, this way of organizing reading works for some. Any other projects out there like these? Anyone reading along with Pepys or any of the others? (Anyone got a link to the Proustians?)

What other texts would work? Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, perhaps. Anyone's diaries: Virginia Woolf's, Anaïs Nin's (which I have read, by the way. All of them, at much too young an age). Though neither of these is public demain. Letters, too. I think it would only work for me if I was doing it with at least one other, so we could discuss as we went. Otherwise, I'd just plow on ahead.

June 11, 2004

c18th

Count the phallic symbols!¹

"In about 1622, an album of etchings by the French graphic artist Jacques Callot (1592-1635) was published, under the title Balli di Sfessania…" So begins the latest post at Giornale Nuovo. And — bonus! — a link to Spectacles du Grand Siècle (en français).

Or are you strictly an anglophone? Then you may be interested in the Britannica First Edition Replica Set, wherein can be found "the sum total of human knowledge in 1768" for $195 (US) (via Stephany Aulenback).

My own modest contribution to an encyclopedia has just wafted out over the ether. Yes, my entry on Eliza Haywood is finally out of my hair, and yours. Oh, I love crossing things off the list!

¹ Winner receives two pounds of saltpetre.

June 10, 2004

Oryx and Crake II

Finished reading Oryx and Crake last night (first mentioned (here).

Atwood took a risk, writing in the voice of Jimmy/Snowman, the PR hack/last man on earth whose story it is. She can juggle voices with ease, as she did in Alias Grace, but since she is juggling in that novel there is space for the poetry of Grace's imagination, in contrast to her conscious voice which offers a stricter kind of beauty in its limitation. In Oryx and Crake there is the one voice, though it changes as the character's name and situation change, and Snowman's narrative offers its own hallucinatory poetry. (Was just talking to a colleague about Atwood; he said that he found her refusal to allow the reader to sympathize with her characters, offputting. That is something I like about her, I replied: her lack of sentiment.)

Picky caveats to get out of the way: Atwood's neologisms ("wolvog" for a wolf/dog hybrid, for example, or "AnooYoo" as the name of a company that offers rejuvenation products) are frequently jarring, even awkward. Atwood may hate Madison Ave. with the rest of us, but surely she can't deny that they are good at what they do.

More importantly, the resolution of the plot relies too much on the actions of individuals. This was no doubt Atwood's intent: to create characters who are impelled to disrupt the mass consensus under which they live. Nevertheless, that is not how things work, no matter what the Biography channel would have us believe. This needn't stop even the most resolute historical materialist from enjoying the novel, however, and not just because of its indictment of global capitalism. As Lorrie Moore wrote in The New Yorker:

a dystopian novel is not intended as a literal forecast, or even necessarily as a logical extension of our current world. It is simply, and not so simply, a bad dream of our present time, an exquisitely designed horror show in which things are changed from what we do know to a dream version of what we don’t.

Atwood presents such a (pick one) i) bleak ii) clear-sighted vision of the near future in order to ask some basic questions about humanity's right to continued existence. In my sf classes we often discuss dystopian novels that posit a clear argument for just what is wrong with us, as a species. Octavia Butler in the Xenogenesis series argues that it is the combination of intelligence and hierarchy that lead to our self-destruction; Sheri Tepper, in The Gate to Woman's Country and elsewhere, seems to argue it is — to be blunt — testosterone. And so on. This novel could be added to the list, though I don't know that Atwood's explanation for humanity's implosion could be summed up quite so succinctly. Hierarchy and sexual possessiveness, however, are on the list, not to mention a heavy dose of Victor Frankenstein-style hubris, updated with the theme of genetic modification.

The character of Oryx is puzzling. Sold by her parents when young, she worked in the sex trade for most of her life. A beautiful, enigmatic stereotype, or a critique of Jimmy's voyeurism and desire to control her? I would argue the latter — after all, while Oryx seems naive, she makes her own choices and is not dissuaded from them — though Atwood straddles the line.

I think that I will have to read this again, but upon first glance it doesn't seem as strong as her best work (I would include Alias Grace here). It falls down as science fiction — it is more a parable with science-fictional trappings, for, as John Clute points out, Atwood's vision of technological and cultural trends is both static and retro. In a strange twist Oryx and Crake is speculative fiction that is possibly less appealing to the usual readers of the genre, than to a more general audience. But still very much worth reading.

List 'o links:

Atwood on how she is not writing science fiction.
John Clute agrees that no, she's really not writing science fiction, at least not as it's been written since 1970.
Linda Richards loves it and compares Atwood's writing to cilantro.
Joan Smith of The Observer concludes, "In the end, Oryx and Crake is a parable, an imaginative text for the anti-globalisation movement that does not quite work as a novel."
Gazillion other reviews
Slashdot discussion.
Video of Atwood reading from Oryx and Crake.
Interview with Atwood (May 2003).
The Atwood Society's Bibliography of Margaret Atwood.
Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Update (11/6/04): Since I posted this I have been trying to articulate just what I found unconvincing about the novel, and I think it is the disjunction between the breadth of the wider action (decimation of entire human population) and the limited scope of the characters: the only characters that are at all individuated are the title characters, the narrator, the narrator's parents, and Crake's stepfather. So not only do individual actions have irreversible global consequences, but individual actions in isolation.

Unless the whole narrative is some solipsistic hallucination.

(?)

June 07, 2004

Oryx and Crake

Have just now begun reading Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. I am horrified by the future she envisions, but I can't put it down. How does she make it bearable to read? Flashbacks and shocks of humour. But as I said, I've barely begun. (I know, I know, it came out last year.)

McClelland and Stewart.
Random House (US).
Macmillan (UK).
Atwood's home page.

June 05, 2004

Bedlam II

Recently finished reading Greg Hollingshead's forthcoming novel, Bedlam (previously mentioned here). I enjoyed it immensely.

Am deciding about whether or not to put it on my prose narrative before 1800 course next fall. On the plus side: it's a compelling read, but more importantly, Hollingshead is giving a reading in Saint John and the class could attend. On the negative side: the reading is early in October so I will have had little time to develop a context; the students will have read Bedlam before they have read much from the period itself; and reading a contemporary novel might throw off their reading of 18th-century texts. On balance, though, I think that the chance to hear — and possibly interact with — a living, breathing author overrides other considerations. And I will have a month to set the stage.

Links:

Artist Rod Dickinson's construction of James Tilly Matthews' Air Loom

Mike Jay's The Air Loom Gang (Bantam Press, 2003)

John Haslam's Illustrations of Madness:  Exhibiting a Singular Case of Insanity, and a No Less Remarkable Difference in Medical Opinion:  Developing the Nature of Assailment, and the Manner of Working Events; with a Description of the Tortures Experienced by Bomb-bursting, Lobster-cracking, and Lengthening the Brain (London: Rivingtons, 1810) (facsimile.)

Roy Porter's facsimile edition, with introduction, of Haslan's text.

June 03, 2004

Poaching

culture, poaching links...

Hand knit superhero costumes that look like grandpa's longjohns, embroidery samplers featuring comic book vignettes, beaded trading cards: it's all here (via Boing Boing).

The Heinz Nixdorf Museum: "From cuneiform to computers." Think stone tablets and computers that fill whole rooms (via Boing Boing. Who have the resources). On a related note, Liz Lawley contemplates adding to the landfill.

Elizabeth Gaskell's home open to tourists (from MoorishGirl). I've been to Chawton and Dylan Thomas's boathouse, have walked through Bloomsbury, and will be going to Haworth in July as part of a conference. Now to get up to Manchester ...

More on gendering robots, from the new, refurbished ms.musings.

Also from msmusings: WisCon, and seven women sf writers talk about rewriting a masculine tradition. This from Patricia Wrede: "Size does matter."

Perhaps I have misjudged Eliot all these years (from Rake's Progress).

The Shatnerian keeps up with his home town.

Vintage tobacco ads (and related products such as "Slug-a-Bug insect killer for use around children, food, pets!") and before and after trade card ephemera (from Beautiful Stuff [and here]).

"Corpi, Murakami, and Contemporary Hardboiled Fiction" by Cathy Stebly, about using hard-boiled fiction to examine the past (from wood s lot).

"Studies in Narrative: Science Fiction and Fantasy": twenty lectures that overview both genres, available as MP3 downloads from The University of Minnesota (from Beautiful Stuff).

Index to the biographies and writings of members of the Frankfurt School and The Charles Booth Online Archive (both from Plep).

May 28, 2004

The author/the work

Jessa Crispin posts the following:

Acclaimed children's writer William Mayne has admitted to sexually abusing children forty years ago after accusations started to build. Now parents and bookshops are trying to decide what to do about the books.

According to Catherine Bennett in The Guardian, there is already a growing reaction (booksellers deciding not to stock; publishers "postponing" planned editions).

Will anyone, having read [the] details, want to read stories by Mayne again? Or want their children to read them? Even if they are innocent as can be, his stories for younger readers, about a bobbed, big-eyed seven-year-old called Netta, can hardly escape being contaminated by the interest we now understand he took in eight-year-olds. Then again, a book cannot be judged by its author. Lewis Carroll's pictures of naked girls do not stop us reading Alice. Eric Gill's carvings weren't shrouded after the revelations of incest and bestiality. Michael Jackson's albums are still on sale. Mayne's achievement of 60 or so titles, written over half a century, remains what it was when Philip Pullman admired "the rare and intense quality" of his work; when a panel led by Anne Fine awarded him the 1993 Guardian Children's Fiction Award, and when the TLS described him as "the most original good writer for young people in our time."

Though Michael Jackson's may not have been the best name to invoke, Bennett gamely continues,

If his crimes did justify the purging of every Mayne title from public display, this would be a precedent, surely, for reconsidering the position of all sorts of authors, from William Burroughs, (killed his wife) and Jeffrey Archer, (sentenced for perjury) and Malory (rape) not to mention a reassessment of the claims of numerous misfits and demi-creeps ...

then adds provocatively,

Arguably, if the best children's writing emerges from a special, unusually powerful connection with childhood — sometimes through a personal inability to leave it behind — then the best children's authors are always likely to include the significantly messed up. It almost amounts to a qualification.

She goes on to argue that his books are a "good" result of his interest in children, but qualifies her defence by noting a tendency in the books to "echo, for an adult reader, Mayne's real efforts to establish private complicities and relations with children behind the backs of their families."

This discussion resonates with a discussion some weeks back about Orson Scott Card (here, here, and here), and the possibility of separating a writer's work from their other actions. In Mayne's case, I suspect, fewer will defend that divide quite so vehemently.

Me? I haven't seen a Woody Allen film since his thing with Soon-Yi went public.

Update (1:11am): Coincidentally, The Rake's Progress affirms that yes, a "bad man" can be a good poet, in a post called "Find me a well-adjusted poet and I'll show you a Hallmark employee." In reference to Philip Larkin, though, who just seems to have been cranky.

May 26, 2004

Some links

Feministing has a post about Cindy Sherman, Photographer extraordinaire, and links to some other feminist artists (Yay Guerrilla Girls!).

The Ex-Classics Web Site takes on the needful task of reproducing texts formerly influential, now out of print, such as the Newgate Calendar with its tales of crime and depravity.

Million Book Project (via Maud).

Two very funny links from Boing Boing: Donald and Mickey insinuated into various canonical works of art, and famous nudes with clothing on.

This is doing the rounds. Reminds me of those little videos of Dave Pogue on the Macworld CDs. Do those guys go to some speech school somewhere?

Common Errors in English and How to Recognize Plagiarism (both via Palimpsest).

The Power of Woe, The Power of Life. Images of women in prints from the Renaissance to the present (from Plep).

Amnesty International’s annual report for 2004 now out (via Crooked Timber):

Around the world, more than a billion people's lives were ruined by extreme poverty and social injustice while governments continued to spend freely on arms.

May 22, 2004

Gender resources

Mary Robinson's "A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination": A Hypertext Edition (via wood s lot).

African American Women Writers of the 19th-Century.

The History of Rape: A Bibliography compiled by Stefan Blaschke (via wood s lot).

E-books by Women Writers, from Louisa May Alcott to Zitkala-S.

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility: Women and Computing.

Renaissance Women Online.

The Center for Women and Change: Women's Resources.

Women Online Worldwide.

"Trashing the Hallmark card mom" by Katy Read at Salon, with links to various mothers' organizations (via feministing.com).

May 21, 2004

Borges as he was meant to be read

"The Book of Sand." A hypertext/puzzle, written by Jorge Luis Borges. Maximus Clarke writes, of the project:

Welcome! This web site contains, in eight randomly numbered pages, the text of Jorge Luis Borges' story "The Book of Sand" (as translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni), with pictures and animations based on old engravings and photographs....

The Book of Sand site is a hypertext, with a nonlinear structure and dynamic images.... But the site is also a puzzle — because only you, the reader, can decide in what order to view the pages. Borges' original story provides an authoritative ordering of the text, but that authority has been removed from this version.

Postmodern critics are fond of saying that the reader imposes his or her own order upon the text; here at least this literary idea has been made a literal truth. But here there is also a chance to rediscover the original unity intended by the author....

In closing, it is strange how many of Borges' stories seem like prophetic references to the dense, mazelike, abstract universe of the World Wide Web.

(Via Plep).

May 20, 2004

Sexism in literary reviews

The Literary Saloon has been having an introspective look at gender bias in its review practices here, here, and here. I applaud their honesty, though they ruin the effect by commenting,

Looking at the piles of books around us most likely to get reviewed next it also doesn't look very promising — a few women's names peek out, but only a few. So it doesn't look like this will be chick-lit central anytime soon.

"Chick-lit central"?!?

( The NY Times Book Review, my bookish periodical of choice, had the best record of the journals they looked at, with 30% of their reviews treating books by women.)

May 19, 2004

Bedlam

I was lucky enough to be given bound proofs of Greg Hollingshead's forthcoming novel, Bedlam. Isn't it a marvellous cover? Hollingshead is coming to Saint John in the fall as part of our annual Lorenzo Society Reading Series, and I am wondering whether or not to put the novel on my "Prose Narrative Before 1800" course. It might be interesting to discuss a contemporary text that seeks to represent the period we are studying, and it would be wonderful for them to be able to attend a reading and ask questions of a real, live author.

Here is what he writes about the novel:

Bedlam is a novel based on the true story of James Tilly Matthews, an inmate of Bethlem Hospital at Moorfields in London during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Although delusional, Matthews is in for political reasons, and his wife Margaret spends ten years trying to get him out. Her primary opponent, the author of an eloquent description of his condition (the first extended account of a paranoid system in English), is the author and apothecary John Haslam, a man compromised by defending an imprisonment he has been given no reason for, of a patient who he knows would be better off released. Bedlam is told in the voices of these three characters.

The British social historian Roy Porter has told this story most thoroughly in his 1988 edition of Haslam's book concerning Matthews, Illustrations of Madness (1810). While exercising some fictional licence, I am doing my best to be faithful to the characters, their voices, their experiences, and the times.

Homepage.
HarperCollins Interview on Bedlam.
Working the Airloom: on writing historical fiction.
Interview (Nov. 03).
Audio of Hollingshead reading from The Roaring Girl, winner of the 1995 Governor General's Award for Fiction.

May 18, 2004

The snack that smiles back, and other book news

Three posts on politics and literature at The Reading Experience.

Collecting bizarre books (via Mirabilis).

From Giornale Nuovo: a suit of books (playing cards with images of books rather than hearts or spades) by Jost Amma, published in 1588.

Pepperidge Farm is suing St. Martin's over the cover of Tom Perrotta's new novel, Little Children, which features two goldfish crackers (The Literary Salon).

The Little Prince tattoo (from Maud).

Nobel prize laureate Wole Soyinka tear-gassed and arrested (via Bookslut and The Literary Salon).

May 16, 2004

Well worth a look

At wood s lot: Adrian Rich, the People's Park, Brian Eno, Aleister Crowley, and lots of politics.

Reading Miéville and Gibson

Finished China Miéville's The Scar some days ago. He is marvellous at world-construction; in a sense, the plot does not even matter, which is ironic given that his plots are very much his focus. No happy ending, but not tragic either, unlike Perdido Street Station (okay, okay, the problem was resolved but the fate of one of the characters was practically unbearable). Miéville's younger than I am, so I look forward to many years of reading his rich and convoluted novels and watching his writing mature. He's wonderful now, so what could lie ahead?

Before I had even finished The Scar I began William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, out not so long ago in paperback. A compulsive read. The protagonist, Cayce, is a "cool detector"; she is preternaturally attuned to logos, brands, and fashion, and works as a freelancer by evaluating marketing strategies for new products. The novel does a marvellous job eviscerating the mechanisms by which advertisers win hearts and minds. I enjoyed reading it, and I appreciate Gibson's particular talents. I recommend it. But all that being said, I am left — as I usually am with Gibson — with some nagging complaints.

Some years back a friend of mine said dismissively that he could easily tell which parts of The Difference Engine were written by Gibson, and which by Bruce Sterling, as Gibson was a far superior writer. Gibson is generally celebrated for his writing, but I have always felt that he frequently slides into overwriting, and this novel is no exception. Further, there is a certain clubbishness that is part of Gibson's popular appeal; his novels and stories give the impression of being closed texts that the reader cannot interpret without bringing some knowledge of [fill in cool subject here: the web; Prada; Tokyo department stores; post-Soviet Moscow, whatever]. Whether or not they are indeed closed is immaterial — though someone of my parents' generation would find them unreadable — but the impression they create, in readers, that they themselves are in the know about [fill in cool subject here], is gold for Gibson.

Another disconcerting element of this novel — this novel that I enjoyed immensely — is that it partakes of, hell it luxuriates in, what it criticizes: our heroine literally has phobic reactions to logos (Tommy Hilfiger is mentioned specifically as a simulacrum of a simulacrum of a simulacrum — heh heh, I own no Tommy our reader thinks, in self-congratulation), but throughout the entire narrative she lives the high life herself, at the expense of a creepy corporate Ubermensch so that she herself remains relatively untainted, and is as obsessed with material goods as the Donatella Versace-clone evil bitch she is up against. She removes all logos from her clothes with a little pair of nail scissors, but she does this with startling frequency. She shops, in other words, and her rarified criteria for acceptable material goods do not undercut consumer culture; rather, they set an even higher bar. Any nouveau riche cretin can buy Armani, but only someone with a honed aesthetic sense can transcend branding and aspire to the transhistorical chic of Cayce. Which, of course, is not transhistorical at all.

My final complaint about this novel — this novel that I enjoyed immensely, I reiterate — is the degeneration of the Ubercool heroine into a beleaguered damsel with the requisite probably–happy ending. And I don't think this reaction is just because I read it immediately after The Scar. It has "movie" written all over it. But, no part for Keanu Reeves.

May 14, 2004

Bridget Jones' feminine protection

Laura at Apt. 11D points towards a story about a new marketing campaign for "edgy" tampons (yikes!), but the ad looks like nothing so much as the cover of one of those ubiquitous chick lit novels.

Troy, eh?

The Elegant Variation has a series of helpful links in honour of the opening of Troy, including the five minute Iliad.

May 13, 2004

Book news

The Diamond Sutra, "the earliest printed book to bear a date," is on display at the British Library. Go to the exhibition site and explore the scroll via Shockwave (via That Rabbit Girl).

Library of Alexandria discovered: "the world's first major seat of learning" (via Household Opera).

Sow's ear from a silk purse department: clutch purses made from recycled books (via Maud).

The Strand independent bookstore in Manhattan goes from "8 miles of books" to "16 miles of books" (also from Maud).

May 12, 2004

Literary notes

Many of the texts up for Hugo award this years are available on-line (via Boing Boing).

Comic book artist Dame Darcy is working on a "darkly elegant" graphic version of Jane Eyre (from Maud).

Edward Champion posts a series of epistolary links.

Book of the best novellas of 2004 due out in June (via Notes from Coode Street).

Everyone is talking about Michel Thaler's The Train from Nowhere, a novel written entirely without verbs. That is not a typo.

The Laughter Lover, the oldest surviving joke book in the world, was compiled in the fourth or fifth century CE (from Beautiful Stuff).

May 08, 2004

The Scar by China Miéville

I have begun to luxuriate in The Scar, a treat I have been promising myself for some months (nine months, to be exact!). I try to avoid reviews if I know that I am going to read a book, but some always slip by. Rick Kleffel writes that

[Miéville]'s able to hand the reader just the right pieces of the puzzle, to ensure that the picture that's built up is bigger than the reader can quite contain, and bigger than the novel itself.

This is true for me. (And it's an accessible way of putting a larger point; so often my students are frustrated and turn off when they feel overwhelmed by a text. I think that I will try to address this head-on, next class.)

One reviewer called it a baroque and picaresque odyssey, and that seems apt. The aquatic city, Armada, is an exhilarating creation, combining elements of rum, sodomy and the lash and the library in Eco's Name of the Rose with various futuristic flourishes; I have included the cover from the UK edition here, because it is a more realistic evocation of the setting.

The heroine is a tough, competent babe. (All heroines written by men seem to be some version of this genus; do male writers ever write girly-girls? As protagonists, I mean. Can't think of many.)

Then there is the interesting question of which genre(s) Miéville writes.

Not too far in so will write more later.

SciFi Audio has clips from a reading, an interview, and good links.

The Complete Review gives it a B+.

BookSense interview.

Galactium.com reviews.

Official Pan Macmillan page.

May 07, 2004

Creation by Katherine Govier, again

I recently finished reading Govier's novel. There is a lot to be said for reading a text in fits and starts, in the cracks between the blocks that take up most of one's time. It can be frustrating, but it allows one to inhabit a novel in a way that a quick, devouring read does not. Creation is a modestly sized book, but it took me weeks to read. And just as well: it's not a drive-through novel.

Govier builds sympathy for her two main characters, John James Audubon and Henry Bayfield, even though Bayfield is, in Audubon's words, a prig, and Audubon himself is a self-absorbed black hole of an artist (with a juvenile approach to women, to boot). Or perhaps it's not sympathy, but understanding. Govier commits no violence to historical versimilitude —or very little — so the controlling narrative must of necessity keep the reader at a little distance.

I know next to nothing about Audubon and would be interested to hear from anyone who does, about just how "green" he really was. Govier's Audubon reaches no startling conclusions, but he is disgusted with the rape of the wilderness he witnesses, and he slowly comes to realize his own part in the certain extinction of nature. It is a violent book: "nature red in tooth and claw," but even more, "man against nature." The quotation marks are implied by the novel; Govier is at once a highly visual, sensual writer, but also a distant, considering one. It is a strong combination.

May 02, 2004

Chumps?

Beatrice.com links to Charles Bernstein's "Against National Poetry Month As Such" in a post that begins, "we all just got played for chumps." Everything Bernstein says is true and then some, but am I being naive in thinking that the "poem in your pocket" and the "poem on your blog" ideas were in fact a step away from the blandishments of the official campaign?

April 29, 2004

Children's books

A couple of days ago, E. at Reading to my Kid posted a list of children's books with the same instructions as the last book meme: bold the ones you have read. Below the fold I replicate her list, followed by additional titles that we like:

Update (30/4/04): Perhaps we're barking up the wrong tree with all these beautiful books; CNN reports, "'Poop fiction' big hit with kids." Inelegant link from Mark Sarvas.

Another update (6/5/04): milk factory joins the conversation. Be sure to read the comments for other book suggestions.

Millions of Cats, by Wanda Gag
Angus and the Ducks, by Marjorie Flack
Caps for Sale, by Esphyr Slobodkina
The Man Who Didn't Wash His Dishes, by Phyllis Krasilovsky
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, by Virginia Lee Burton
Babar, by Jean de Brunhoff
Madeline, by Ludwig Bemelmans
The Runaway Bunny, by Margaret Wise Brown
Green Eggs and Ham, by Dr. Seuss
Bread and Jam for Frances, by Russell Hoban, illus. Lillian Hoban
Harold and the Purple Crayon, by Crockett Johnson
A Hole is to Dig, by Ruth Krauss, illus. Maurice Sendak
In the Night Kitchen, by Maurice Sendak [amazing]
George and Martha, by James Marshall
Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, by William Steig
Harry the Dirty Dog, by Gene Zion, illus. Margaret Bloy Graham [check out the other Harry books, too]
Blueberries for Sal, by Robert McCloskey
Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present, by Charlotte Zolotow, illus. Maurice Sendak
Ira Sleeps Over, by Bernard Waber
A Color of His Own, by Leo Lionni [a rainbow message for those who pay attention to pronouns]
A Whistle for Willie, by Ezra Jack Keats
The Beast of Monsieur Racine, by Tomi Ungerer
Strega Nona, by Tomi De Paola [one of our favourites]
Eloise, by Kay Thompson, illus. Hilary Knight
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do You See? Bill Martin Jr., illus Eric Carle [Jinker boy also likes Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What do You Hear?]
Freight Train, by Donald Crews
Frog and Toad are Friends, by Arnold Lobel
Jamberry, by Bruce Degan
First Tomato, by Rosemary Wells
Hondo & Fabian, by Peter McCarty [Lovely soft pencil drawings]
My Friend Rabbit, by Eric Rohmann
Tuesday, by David Wiesner
Zin! Zin! Zin! A Violin, by Lloyd Moss, illus. Marjorie Priceman
Charlie Parker Played Be Bop, by Chris Rashka

And here are some titles that I would add:

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. Counting, colours, food, holes in the page: what's not to like? [View image]
Everyone Poops by Taro Gomi. Hilarious, earthy, matter-of-fact, and part of an excellent series about the body. [View image]. [This was on the list before I saw the CNN story.]
The Mole Sisters and the Moonlit Night by Roslyn Schwartz. And all the other Mole Sisters books; they're magic. [View image]
Doggies by Sandra Boynton. All of Boynton, in fact, though the following is also particularly good. [View image]
The Going-To-Bed Book by Sandra Boynton. "They rock, and rock, and rock, to sleep." [View image]
Good Night, Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann. Be sure to look at the expressions on the faces of the animals. [View image]
The Mitten: A Ukrainian Folktale by Jan Brett. A beautiful artist; amazingly detailed images. [View image]
The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear. Another intricately painted Jan Brett book. [View image]
The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. One of Keats' colourful urban tales. [View image]
Madlenka by Peter Sis. Wistful, evocative, fantastic story; intricate and beautiful art. See also Madlenka's Dog. [View image]
Beegu by Alexis Deacon. Baby's first sf. Wonderful story; wonderful art. [View image]
The Subway Mouse by Barbara Reid. Amazing plastercine art. [View image]
McDuff Moves in by Rosemary Wells & Susan Jeffers. First of this nostalgic series. [View image]
Gaspard and Lisa at the Museum by Anne Gutman & Georg Hallensleben. Part of a series. Witty; thick and colourful oil (?) paintings. [View image]
Cat and Canary by Michael Foreman. Magic tale of bird-friendly cat who flies over NYC.
Where's That Cat? by Stephane Poulin. Wonderful scenes of Montreal. See also Catch That Cat! [View image]

April 26, 2004

Some links

Poetry in your pocket (via Culture Cat).

Tracking kids with Lego writstbands (via slashdot).

Zombies are the new Republicans (via the chutry experiment).

A woman who says her iPod is better than her boyfriend (via Cult of Mac).

Screensaver mimics airplane window (via Cult of Mac).

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: a punctuation game (via forty.something. And no, you may not know my score.)

La Gringa asks, "What would Joan Jett do?" (W.W.J.J.D.?)

Book meme

This is either really new or really old. From The Little Professor, via a long list before.

Bold all the titles you have read (list below the fold).

Update (28/4/04): The Little Professor offers an alternate list. Unlike the one posted here, this one contains some sf (Orson Scott Card alert!), children's literature, and Canadians, but fewer pre-20thc texts.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua — Things Fall Apart
Agee, James — A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane — Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James — Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel — Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul — The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte — Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily — Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert — The Stranger
Cather, Willa — Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey — The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton — The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate — The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph — Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore — The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen — The Red Badge of Courage
Dante — Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel — Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel — Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles — A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor — Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick — Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore — An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre — The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George — The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph — Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo — Selected Essays
Faulkner, William — As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William — The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry — Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott — The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave — Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox — The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von — Faust
Golding, William — Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas — Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel — The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph — Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest — A Farewell to Arms
Homer — The Iliad
Homer — The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor — The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale — Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous — Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik — A Doll's House
James, Henry — The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry — The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James — A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz — The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong — The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper — To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair — Babbitt
London, Jack — The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas — The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García — One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman — Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman — Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur — The Crucible
Morrison, Toni — Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery — A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene — Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George — Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris — Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia — The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan — Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel — Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas — The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria — All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond — Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry — Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. — The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William — Hamlet
Shakespeare, William — Macbeth
Shakespeare, William — A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William — Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard — Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary — Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon — Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander — One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles — Antigone
Sophocles — Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John — The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis — Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher — Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan — Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William — Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David — Walden
Tolstoy, Leo — War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan — Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark — The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire — Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. — Slaughterhouse—Five
Walker, Alice — The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith — The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora — Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt — Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar — The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee — The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia — To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard — Native Son

Pretty standard list of the "classics," with a heavy American focus and little c18th. But what are ya gonna do?

April 23, 2004

It's that time of year

The fun continues at zigzackly. Come on; post here, or post there, or both. You know you wanna.

To get you started (these are posted at zigzackly):

Withering Heights: The king of the killer review gets his comeuppance on the moors.
Bride and Prejudice: Lizzie gets married in Chapter One. Darcy doesn't like the look of the vicar. A very short novella.
As I Lay Dyeing: Experimental account of relaxed hairdresser.
Kiss Me Mate: Musical rendering of coming-out story in Elizabethan England.
BEING, BEING: Frolicksome '60s comedy about existentialists swapping theories and airhostesses while flying around the world.

In other news, I proctored my last exam of the term this morning, sat through two meetings this afternoon, am only now getting over the cold from hell, and will do anything to put off looking at that pile of marking for just a little while longer.

Just two more:

King Solomon's Mine: What really goes on among those dashing adventurers.

The Badwoman in the Attic: Gilbert and Gubar recant.

Update (24/4/04): The Little Professor and la gringa join in the fun.

April 20, 2004

New game!

Kitabkhana, through a very circuitous route, posts a new game: change one letter in a book title and get a whole new story:

My entries:

Spamela: Young girl of modest background rises to fame and fortune by selling generic Viagra on the internet.

The Dairy of Samuel Pepys: The comprehensive manual for dairy farmers.

Sensei and Sensibility: After her sister is seduced by a rake, a young woman journeys to a monastery to learn martial arts before seeking revenge.

Greet Expectations: The story of a young man who goes to Edinburgh in order to better himself.

Addendum (4:36):

Evilina; or, a young vampire's entry into the world.

Okay, that's less funny. How about

Brash: J.G. Ballard's cheeky tale of the Greater London transportation system.

You can no doubt tell I am trawling my bookshelves.

April 16, 2004

Creation by Katherine Govier

Last year Katherine Govier read at UNBSJ as part of the excellent annual Lorenzo Society reading series. I went, enjoyed her reading immensely, and so bought a copy of Creation. I have just in the past few days begun to read it, in between bouts of marking, and the writing is beautiful. Can't stop thinking about Victor Frankenstein, though, meeting up with the almost equally obsessed Robert Walton out on the ice. At the beginning of Creation — a fiction that fills a gap in the records of the life of John James Audubon — the driven Audubon meets Captain Bayfield of the Royal Navy off the shores of Labrador where the former has gone to find birds for his Great Work.

When I began the novel I didn't realise that Govier is also the author of Between Men, a novel I read many years ago and still remember clearly, it was so horrific. It counterpoises the story of an academic in the 1980s with that of a Native woman whose mysterious death in the previous century she is investigating. I believe that the second story is factual; Govier is another novelist who works with historical material. She also wrote Fables of Brunswick Avenue; just looking at the cover fills me with nostalgia as I lived in that neighbourhood for years.

She is a powerful writer and builds an atmosphere in Creation from the first page. I will report back.

[Side-note: Govier was also Coordinator of the Writers in Electronic Residence program.]

Pulp

From "The New Republic Online":

What Is Pulps? The criticism of literature has always been one of the fundamental tasks of The New Republic, but there is a difference between the criticism of literature and the criticism of books. Not all books are literature. Yet it is a fundamental fact of American life that large numbers of Americans read books that are not literature. Even if some of those books do not warrant literary examination, they certainly warrant cultural examination. A nation's highest and lowest notions of itself may be found in its amusements. Thinking about America's popular books is a way of thinking about America. In the 1950s and 1960s, critics such as Robert Warshow and Mary McCarthy and Dwight Macdonald taught by example how, and why, intellectual seriousness may be brought to bear upon things that are not intellectually serious; and, in recent decades, with mixed results, the discipline of cultural studies was established on this premise. The aim of this feature of TNR Online will be to toil in the same vineyards, though rather more snappily. Pulps will regularly visit the best-seller list and linger over thrillers, romances, fiction, non-fiction, and even (as The New York Times puts it) "advice, how-to, and miscellaneous" books, as documents of our time, for the purpose of a brief but undoubtedly penetrating exercise in cultural anthropology. After all, influential ideas have a way of turning up in the strangest places. A warning: Pulps will give away the books' plots. Critics have a way of spoiling all the fun.

Well I'm glad that someone is confident of their ability to separate the literary wheat from the chaff. Is anyone else envisioning reviewers typing with one hand while holding their noses with the other?

(From Maud Newton via Cup of Chica.)

Addendum (4:59pm): Check out Beatrice.com for a clear critique of the first Pulps review, posted yesterday. Doesn't sound good.

What would Richardson think?

Stephany Aulenback points towards Eric Brown's Digital Epistolary Novel, Intimacies (beware seizure-inducing intro). The plot:

Two young professionals "meet" through a mis-sent e-mail. They become "attracted" in cyber-space and tentatively agree to a "real" meeting. A brutal assault follows. The obvious suspect is the e-mail partner, but one person is unconvinced. A series of surprises and revelations follows — all delivered in digital form, all entirely possible, and all representing ways we now learn of events in our world where virtual reality constantly fights its counterpart.

Brown, "a former English professor who teaches executives how to write," says in a NYTimes interview that the plot is based on Pamela, but it sounds more like a modern-day, hyper violent Clarissa, at least from the description above. Not to mention the photograph of the mascara-stained woman on the site.

Politics and art

The discussion is spreading. Maud Newton writes, very reasonably,

I wouldn't necessarily avoid a writer's work based on his or her politics — and I wouldn't "boycott" a book or call for anyone else to do so because an author's beliefs are offensive to me personally. But absent some independent reason for believing that the book would resonate for me, I might be less likely to pick it up.¹

The comments section of my own original post has also become quite interesting.

Edward Champion agrees with Jessa Crispin that art and politics are separate. Kitabkhana is in accord; he writes that authors are not their books. Champion writes that when he tried to think of "great art" that is political,

The only immediate examples that came to my head were Elizabeth Gaskell, Arthur Miller, and Margaret Atwood. But even in these offerings, the politics is relatively subdued, more subject to a reader's individual impressions. It's a far more subtle thing for Atwood to point out the politics of gender in Cat's Eye by showing us how girls are reluctant to touch bugs in a university building, implying that 1940s society carried an unspoken stigma that an entomologist's line was verboeten to women.

Whoever said that politics could not be subtle? I think there is a straw man being set up here: when people hear the words "politics" and "art" together they think of the most heavy handed examples — Soviet "socialist realism" perhaps. I think that Mark Sarvas falls into the same trap in his thoughtful post.

I agree with Matthew Cheney here: all writing — all human endeavour — is political in one way or another. It could not be anything but, as we are all political creatures who exist in the world. The absolute disdain for politics of the aesthete is in itself a political choice. Of course, to a large extent when we are talking about artistic products, given our culture's continuing Romantic hangover, the inherent politics are not always overt or even conscious. But that does not mean that they are not there.

Rasputin at Sloganeering raises the economic question: every dollar you spend on a book in one of Card's endless series is a dollar that he in turn could be funnelling to political groups with whom you may violently disagree: " if you're a particularly sensitive sort, you can almost feel your money going Alliance for Marriage as soon as it leaves your hand." (Which doesn't preclude going the second-hand route, for the conscientious-but-curious.)

I want to be clear that I am not advocating boycotting Orson Scott Card — fat chance — or suggesting that I only read writers who share my particular brand of politics; as I commented about my earlier post, I would have precious little to read if that were the case. What I am saying is that I need reasons to read something, and if there is nothing on the plus side to weigh against a known negative, then I am unlikely to crack the cover. As I also commented earlier, life's too short. I used to finish any book I began, out of some sort of misplaced pride or sense of duty. No longer. And I'll never get all those hours back, either.

But at least I'm not a fantasy reader.

¹ Matthew Cheney responds to Maud's admission in the same post that she doesn't read much sf with a wonderful list of suggestions.

Correction (11:28pm): s1ngularity.net link currently not working; go to the main page and scroll down to April 14/04.

Update (17/4/04): Jessa Crispin has two more links on Card.

And in the right corner...

A piece of literary vitriol from a writers’ spat nearly two centuries old graced the walls of the National Library of Scotland yesterday.

An assault by Lord Byron on Sir Walter Scott in 1809 is the centrepiece of an exhibition of manuscripts from the John Murray archive that will run until 10 May. It faces, across the room, Scott’s gentlemanly response.

The library is gearing up to buy the publisher’s archive for Scotland for £33 million. The exhibition marks the latest effort to highlight the attractions of the unique literary treasure trove.

The exhibition includes the original manuscript of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

Byron penned the poem of over 1,000 lines after an unfavourable review of his Hours of Idleness in the Edinburgh Review of January 1808.

In it, he singled out Scott as a "prostituted muse and hireling bard" who dared to "foist his stale romance" on an unsuspecting public for "half-a-crown a line".

(Scott had once called Byron "the imp of fame" and "that young whelp, Lord Byron.")

Go to Scotsman.com for the whole story.

Via Mirabilis.ca.

Addendum (17/4/04): Edward Champion links to an article detailing plans to publish the unfinished novel Walter Scott was working on when he died. Reliquiae Trotcosienses: The Gabions of the Late Jonathan Oldbuck Esq of Monkbarns "came about after Scott was commissioned to write an account of Abbotsford’s collections museum items. However, instead of a guide book, he wrote a work of fiction in which he simultaneously mocked and exhibited his own bibliophilia and antiquarian knowledge."

I sense a new footnote coming to my Scott chapter.

April 15, 2004

Just one more PEEEEZZ!!

Just found two blogs by literary mums: Magnificent Octopus, which led me to Reading to my Kid. I immediately blogrolled both. (Now if either of you ladies had a comments feature, I could have complimented you on your own turf... )

April 12, 2004

High/Low

Two links on the relationship between "literary" and "popular" culture:

Mark Haddon on the differences between genre and literary fiction, in The Guardian. Via Maud Newton. Haddon sees a place for each:

Genre fiction says: 'Forget the gas bill. Forget the office politics. Pretend you're a spy. Pretend you're a courtesan. Pretend you're the owner of a crumbling gothic mansion on this worryingly foggy promontory.' Literary fiction says: 'Bad luck. You're stuck with who you are, just as these people are stuck with who they are. But use your imagination and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.'

Anne Applebaum sees an increase in the literary divide:

There are still a few "crossover'' writers, mostly writers of excellent popular books about American history, and one or two novelists. But my sense is that their numbers are shrinking, that there's almost no more middle ground. Popular culture now hates high culture so much that it campaigns aggressively against it. High culture now fears popular culture so much that it insulates itself deliberately from it.

Read the Washington Post article (sorry, registration required), or this freely accessible version. (From Crooked Timber via Arts and Letters Daily; Mercury News link from MoorishGirl).

Update (14/4/04): Read Matthew Cheney's post on Applebaum's piece. Cheney prefers the term "escapist" to "genre," and concludes, "Using such a taxonomy, there is no need to separate various forms of genre fiction from the stuff that just gets shelved under "fiction" in bookstores."

April 11, 2004

Proofers wanted

Boing Boing links to Distributed Proofreaders, who organize proof-reading of public domain books for Project Gutenberg. On April 6th Distributed Proofreaders posted it's 4,000th ebook, Aventures du Capitaine Hatteras by Jules Verne (en française).

April 09, 2004

Happy Easter to all, and to all, a good night

La Gringa has a scrumptious selection of links to strange and hilarious sites about marshmallow peeps. Go! Read!

My favourite peep, though, is still the one in

Addendum (11/4/04): Go to Boing Boing for a picture of "The Passion of the Peeps."

April 07, 2004

Gabriela Mistral

(1889-1957)

This via the always-interesting wood s lot: Ursula LeGuin translated a selection of the poetry of Gabriela Mistral, the only Latin American woman to have won the Nobel Prize for literature (in 1945). Mark Woods posts the following poem, one of several of which LeGuin includes both versions on her site, and I have reproduced it here because, well, it's been my reality too, for the last three years:

Song of Death

Old Woman Census-taker,
Death the Trickster,
when you’re going along,
don’t you meet my baby.

Sniffing at newborns,
smelling for the milk,
find salt, find cornmeal,
don’t find my milk.

Anti-Mother of the world,
People-Collector --
on the beaches and byways,
don’t meet that child.

The name he was baptized,
that flower he grows with,
forget it, Rememberer.
Lose it, Death.

Let wind and salt and sand
drive you crazy, mix you up
so you can’t tell
East from West,

or mother from child,
like fish in the sea.
And on the day, at the hour,
find only me.

from Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, Trans. Ursula LeGuin (2003)

Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month in the U.S.

But we can celebrate, too.

April 06, 2004

According to Bainbridge

Just finished According to Queeney (2001) by Beryl Bainbridge, a retelling of the relationship between Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale Piozzi. The novel is framed by a series of letters from Piozzi's daughter, Hester (Queeney) when adult, so her point of view dominates, but she is not alone: the bulk is told with a variety of shifting perspectives, though mainly Piozzi's and Johnson's. It is a cold, sad book. Piozzi is presented as selfish and violent with her children. Johnson's complicated relations with women and his physical decline are described in detail. One feels sympathy for the young Queeney, but the older Queeney of the framing letters is bitter and self-righteous. Bainbridge's writing is economical, and she rarely missteps, but I would agree with one (forgotten, sorry) reviewer who advised that only those already familiar with the Streatham circle should read the novel: in other words, that one should not judge Piozzi et al. by Bainbridge's portraits. A beautifully written but bleak, at times even macabre, set-piece, from the opening dissection to the final funeral. And remarkable for its reproduction of the turns of phrase, the modes of thought, of the period.

Addendum: Here is the Henry and Hester Thrale page of a comprehensive website about things Thrale, run by one David Thrale.

April 04, 2004

Two books

Wow, this has really taken off at Crooked Timber.

More (with the requisite Canadian content):

The Handmaid's Tale of Two Cities: It was the best ... no, it really just was the worst of times.

The Edible Woman in White: Sex, mystery, and the importance of good table manners.

The Stone Angel over America: Elderly Canadian woman starts out to revisit her life but gets confused.

Media tie-ins:

Survival: the series: Contestants are isolated in northern Ontario in order to expose the unpleasant dynamics of their interpersonal relationships, and to delve into their own psyches. Nobody wins.

Alias Grace: the series: Enigmatic, illiterate Irish maid dons a series of improbable size 2 disguises.

Negotiating with the Dawn of the Dead: In this sequel, no-one is left alive but literary critics.

Coming soon:

Three Blind Assassins.
Cat's Eye on a Hot Tin Roof.
Not Wanted on the Voyage of the Damned.
Such a Long Day's Journey Into Night.

April 03, 2004

Food for thought [wince!]

It's time for Books2Eat 2004, The Fifth International Edible Book Festival. At least fourteen countries are participating, with 45 separate events (two thirds of them in the U.S.). The Literary Salon seems a little embarrassed to even report it, but gamely suggests that the event might "get some of the participants thinking about the literary works as well." I think it is a populist form of book art — at times a little kitschy — but still a paean to the resonance of the book as a cultural icon. Some of the pieces celebrate the book as material object,

while others are more conceptual, or provide critical commentary:

Ancient Wisdom (detail) by Linda Aiello. Discovered 6 April 3002. Since a "book" hasn't been made in nearly 500 years, this is a monumental find. Many computer-related illnesses have transpired since the end of Solid Waste Act, 2506.

Of course, some are just dreadful puns. But that's fun too. In all cases, the artists are affirming the importance of the book, and reinforcing ideas of community and shared culture.

And some of the pieces are even low carb.

April 02, 2004

Try it, it's addictive

A very funny thread at the I Love Books message board about reading two books at once. Some good ones:

Heart of Darkness at Noon: English explorer misreads map, winds up in gulag.

The Remains of the Day of the Triffids: Ageing butler tours postwar England. Takes up gardening.

Gone with the Wind in the Willows: Thrills, romance, voles.

My contribution: Gulliver's Travels with my Aunt: Hapless fellow suffers the consequences when his Edwardian aunt insults the Brobdingnagians about their body odour.

Via Maud Newton.

Addendum (3/4/04): Ho ho, John Holbo at Crooked Timber has caught the bug. Be sure to read to the end for The Runaway Bunny Jury and Goodnight Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.

New (to me) blog/women's writing

Check out Notes in the Margin. How could I not blogroll a blog which quotes from Peter Høeg's Smila's Sense of Snow, one of my favourite books?:

You can learn something about your fellow human beings from what they write in the margin.

Some interesting links right up: an 86 years old woman self-publishes a novel about her life in the depression (23/3/04), and the Feminist Press has reissued three pulp novels by women (13/2/04).

From the Feminist Press: The suggestively named Dix Steele is an ex-airman, an isolated, tough-talking drifter.

Lynn is innocently flattered by what seems to be his fatherly interest in her, which includes invitations to stylish parties and to his spectacular country estate. But fatherly interest is not what David Dwight has in mind, and he usually gets what he wants.

The Girls in 3-B reveals in heart-breaking detail the hidden world of mid-century America, where women live on their own in seedy apartments, have premarital sex, get illegal abortions, yearn to be artists, experiment with drugs, and, if they are so inclined, discover a mannered, thriving lesbian underworld.

I can hardly wait.

University Presses R.I.P.

MoorishGirl has a post about the demise of various university presses, Northeastern University Press and University of Idaho Press among them. She links to an article in The Christian Science Monitor which ends,

Emphasizing the value of Northeastern's press, which specializes in regional history, criminal justice, and music, [journalism professor William] Kirtz says, "They weren't just books read by 12 anthropologists in Borneo."

United we stand.

March 24, 2004

Breathe deeply

and then sneeze. Some pretty pictures of illustrated MSS and books at wood s lot: be sure to check out the memento mori.

March 18, 2004

Literary links

Maud Newton links to John Leary's very funny "The Seven Basic Plots."

More on education in Georgia (see previous entry): an attempt to ban Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Good gravy, these three would be so far down my list... Link from MoorishGirl.

Ted Barlow at Crooked Timber links to "the homepage of the imaginary horror writer Garth Marenghi." Many gems like, "In total, he has written countless blood-curdling novels." Here is a quote from one of them, Slicer:

In a hazy cloud of blood-dumb pain, McGregor felt the blade work its way forwards, through the knot of his adam's apple and on towards the base of the chin. Then, slowly, it began to turn skywards. Och, no, he thought before the end, not ma brain... not ma brain... anything but ma brain...please don't slice ma brain... no, no... not the brain...och, no...

[The spousal unit is reading over my shoulder. "Good writing," is his comment. Of course, he is a sociologist.]

So, be sure to check out Garth Marenghi, a "writer at the peak of his own particular capabilities."

A late St. Paddy's Day offering

an Irish Folkore and Literature Quiz to which I am only linking because I scored 10/10 (after some inspired guesswork. Who is Darby O'Gill, anyway?).

Thanks to Maud Newton for the link.

March 16, 2004

Why didn't we think of that?

This from the redoubtable Maud Newton:

Yesterday [former academic] Paul Cavanagh won the U.K.'s Lit Idol contest — a sort of American Idol for writers — and will be represented by the Curtis Brown literary agency in negotiations for a publishing contract. The first chapter of his manuscript is available online.

Newton also links to a.k.a., a site listing "over 11,500 author pseudonyms, aliases, nicknames, working names, legal names, pen names, maiden names, and more." SF writers are well-represented on the list of writers with ten or more pseudonyms.

March 15, 2004

And another quiz

this time from the BBC, about first lines. I merely did well. Via Bookslut.

The Red Planet; publishing as quest; Heinlein

Via Maud Newton: Kim Stanley Robinson discusses the appeal of Mars, in the NYTimes,

and Viggo Mortensen publishes avant-garde books at Perceval Press. The name, according to Mortensen, is a reference to

Parsifal, the knight of the Arthurian legend who found the Castle of the Grail and saved the Fisher King.

On his way to achieve knighthood at King Arthur's Court, he and his knights choose to find their own paths. "If there was a trail," says Mortensen, "they wouldn't take it. They had to make their own ways. I wanted to provide that opportunity for artists."

Robert Heinlein's first novel, For Us, The Living, "lost and found," is now published "with terrible cover art," according to Jessa Crispin at Bookslut.

March 14, 2004

SF in the OED

Continuing in the tradition so lovingly described by Simon Winchester in The Professor and the Madman and The Meaning of Everything, the OED has called for volunteers to help amass citations for sf terms. Here is the website for the project, and here is an interesting graph indicating the dates of the origins of sf terms: notice the bump in critical terminology in the 1980s and 90s. Fandom came into its own in the 1950s and has stayed influential.

Jesse Sheidlower in the OED Newsletter writes that sf is an excellent candidate for this sort of web-based initiantive because,

The vocabulary is largely self-contained; SF terms tend to occur in SF and nowhere else, while, say, political language can be found anywhere and everywhere. The fans are particularly committed, often have linguistic interests, and are computer literate.

I would be interested to see if, and how often, sf terms have migrated into general use. I'm thinking of the influence of sf on technology, and would imagine a parallel dynamic in words themselves? For example, "morph," which Mark Lieberman notes has been traced to Mark Bourne's story "Being Human" (1993), is in wider use now.

Story from Language Log via Languagehat.

March 09, 2004

Adam Roberts' Salt

5/3/04/9:41pm

Awhile ago I posted about Adam Roberts' novel Stone. I have finally gotten around to reading another, Salt (2000), his first novel.

These would be wonderful texts to teach: subtle, yet with clear meaning that can be unpacked. The protagonist in Stone is a sociopath in a future where crime and mental illness are rare enough to be practically non-existent. In Salt, Roberts examines war. Several groups of colonists travel to a desert planet, one of which, the Alsists, is anarchic and another of which, the Senaarians, is a capitalist military patriarchy. These two groups are in conflict before they even reach their destination, and the aggression escalates in a way reminiscent of nothing so much as Swift's Big-endians and Little-endians, though there is no Gulliver to separate their warring fleets. The narrative is almost evenly split between two characters, Petja, a technician from among the anarchists who rotates into diplomatic duty at a crucial juncture, and Barlei, the Captain and later President of the Senaarians. Even when describing things as apparently uncontroversial as the differing technologies with which each group deals with the chlorine in the atmosphere, neither side can be civil:

[Barlei:] We would take a person, and sedate them, and under surgical conditions we would remove much of their sinuses and fill the space with a carefully grown filter .... [masks] were symbolic of our incapacity; they squashed against our faces ... Of course, the Alsists mocked our new technology .... Their propaganda satirized us: whenever the visuals were set in Senaar the people always had runny noses ... (41–42)

[Petja:] Our solution to the chlorine problem was a mini-mask. (43)

Initially, Petja seems infinitely more reasonable while Barlei is insufferable: a self-justifying, murderous prig. He unwittingly betrays himself and his beloved Senaar with every word, as when he disingenuously pretends not to understand economics while justifying Senaarian reliance on underpaid immigrant labour. He exemplifies, with his barely suppressed passion for his lieutenant, "the young, the beautiful, jean-Pierre" (221), the homoeroticism implicit in all–male institutions. Don't ask, don't tell even yourself. His description of aerial warfare is classic:

And so you press home the inevitability of the situation: that is one definition of war I suppose. You pull up toward the rear of one of the enemy, the acceleration weighing you against the back of your pilot's seat; and you fell the beautiful click as the weapons fix themselves, and the spiritual roar of them firing. Twin spires of light reaching through the darkness towards the blot of darkness, hidden in darkness, that is the enemy. Perhaps you close your eyes in prayer.

And there is light. And a tumbling of wreckage, falling to the endless levels of Salt below. (198)

The delicate balance between the elevated discourse of hysterical militarism, and sexual double-entendre, is masterful.

Barai would seem to be a straw man, but while he never becomes any more sympathetic (although he does become pathetic when jean-Pierre is killed in combat), Petja also looses the reader's sympathy, even before he discovers his enthusiasm for killing in the Alsist resistance. At one significant juncture he demonstrates an utter inability to empathize with others, and while this could be mistaken for a critique of solipsism in anarchists, his own people frequently disdain him for his "rigidist" tendencies. Anarchism, then, is not at fault, though it is, finally, unable to withstand the concerted onslaught of military capitalism. Petja is, however, more interesting, if less amusing than his counterpart: his language is concise yet poetic, and his descriptions of the stark salt landscape are sublime in an inhuman, disassociated way.

From the minimalist map at the front of the book, surely a comment on the rococo excesses of Tolkien and his imitators, to the actual numbers of combatants, scale is foregrounded. These are small communities, with small populations, and yet they waste themselves in war. It is a compact book, economically divided between the two narrators. It is about a bare desert world with only two significant bodies of water. Form follows function.

Both Petja and Barei discuss "purity," though for Petja it is, at least initially, a stern, political standard of self-sufficient behaviour, while for Barjei it is tied to jingoism, nationalism, and a military ideal as exemplified by the manly, blushing jean-Pierre. Petja, too, comes to regard his time fighting and killing as somehow pure, only to be "diminished" and "greyed" by social contact (218). Both sides also come to similar conclusions about war, despite their disparate ways of framing it: Barai says,

This war has been the savour in our meat. Without it, life would have been the dull round of planting and reaping, of giving in marriage and giving birth, of growing and dying." (220)

[Petja:] Textualising these memories has had one curious effect. I have recalled the time before we made war. It has made me realise how war becomes a simple way of living, how it seems to provide all that a human needs as material and spiritual membrane, wrapped tightly around them, It is the reason to go on living; it is what to do, how to do it; it is how to arrange the priorities; it is the end of the day and the beginning of wisdom; it is the left hand and the right hand.

So for one character, war is a way to be with other men, while to the other is becomes the centrepiece of an arid philosophy. Not that they would seem to disagree. Roberts gives the last words, significantly, to a female character. And then, he undercuts even that.

This might be an effective novel for my gender and sf course: there are two societies with two very different sets of roles and expectations for women; there is the whole jean-Pierre hagiography (I see him in a static shot by Leni Riefenstahl, with the camera below him looking up, the light behind him); there is sexual violence ... for a novel with few women characters, it would be remarkably useful in the course.

Roberts on Roberts:

It seems to me, then, that Salt is a novel about depression, about a psychological state that finds its correlative in the bleak landscape of the world, about a killing division of affective commitment. But I could be wrong about that.

I think I'm on safer ground when I mention the political and ideological issues that the book rehearses; questions of political affiliation, of the negotiations between cultural and personal difference, of the relationship to (patriarchal) authority and of the limits of control. That the book is also a self-conscious exercise in intertextuality is, I hope, equally clear: it draws on Herbert's Dune and on Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed as well as Vladimir Nabokov's Bend Sinister and the poetry of Robert Browning. I hope, in saying this, that I am only saying what is obvious from the novel itself. It remains the bleakest of my books, but I continue to find an austere and strangely uplifting beauty in certain aspects of bleakness, so I say this with no suggestion of apology.

No apology needed. A compelling book, and recognized as such by its nomination for the Arthur C. Clarke award.

February 26, 2004

Canada reads, eh?

I don't know what I think of the Canada Reads project. I have not participated in it yet (side note: there is a yet-to-be-determined prize — probably a book from my "to read" shelf — for the reader who comes up with an accurate count of the messages in which yours truly admits to not having read something), and yet I like the idea of us all (!) having something in common to talk about. An old friend of mine once waxed lyrical about how she, temporarily in — I can't remember, let's say Whitehorse — always had lots to talk about to a friend in — hmmm — Gander, because they both listened to the CBC.

Before I get more sentimental, here, via Bookslut, is a link to a behind-the-scenes look at this year's panel.

And for those who want to play along, this year's book is The Last Crossing by Guy Vanderhaeg.

Beaten by a quiz

Maud was right. I should never have taken the book quiz to "identify my literary match." There is too much riding on it; best to stick to what type of coffee drink or flavour of breath mint I am. (Though I did have investment in the western feminist icon and the which author's fiction are you quizzes.) Anyway, I took the book quiz several times and like none of the results:

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maude Montgomery (puleese!)
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card is admittedly closer, but definitely not there yet.
Prufrock and Other Observations by T.S. Eliot. As if.
The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. Whatever.
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. Okay, well at least I've read it.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. This is where I gave up.

February 23, 2004

Blogging for tenure

As I am going up for tenure next year, this coming summer I will be revisiting the discussion that took place sometime ago on various sites — here, here, here, here, and here, for starters — about how weblogs can, or even should, count for academics going up for tenure and promotion. I have been discussing the whole issue with my Chair, who as a poet and playwright is sympathetic to claims of the worth of non-traditional writing. His advice is to put my argument in terms that the committee will understand (e.g. a blog is not peer-reviewed, but it is blogrolled and linked).

Just saw a link on Bookslut and while I initially chortled along with her, I then thought, well, these would be terms the most technophobic would understand. So. I've marked the link. How about a nice lavender, with curlicues?

February 21, 2004

Tristram Shandy; print

wood s lot links to a memorable post in maisonneuve about moveable type (the printing technology, not the weblog programme). I like the paragraph on Tristram Shandy, quoted in the referring post. I'll be teaching it next Sept., and will remember this:

The professor envies his students one thing: that this is their first reading of Tristram Shandy. The professor admits then to pitying himself and his students one thing: that the book is not being read in its original: meaning, the black, blank and marbled pages are all reproductions of the idea of the page, but never the actual page its significance begs it to be: meaning, Tristram Shandy no longer exists, and the only way to prolong its life was to transfer its significance into a simulacrum’s life.

February 16, 2004

Anonymous reviewing

Following up on the Amazon.com scandal, Henry Farrell posts about the pros and cons of anonymous reviewing, and concludes "the system works reasonably well in the general."

February 14, 2004

Two thumbs down

From The Little Professor: link to a NYT article (free, but reg. req.) about a scandal at Amazon.com: apparently the reader reviews are sometimes written by authors puffing their own books, or by their antagonists, taking them down a notch. The article goes on to mention famous authors who have reviewed themselves or their friends. (I think we can all be proud that it was the Amazon.ca site that caused the ruckus).

February 13, 2004

Booklovers alert

Via the fascinating mirabilis.ca: the world's largest book: $10,000, 133 lbs. But, it has pictures.

Valentines and cherubs

Two more from Maud Newton:

1. An on-line test of romantic literary knowledge, from The Guardian. No doubt because I am a dix–huitièmiste (the Age of Enlightenment and Reason, don't you know), my score sucked (6/10). Oh well.

2. A link to some eerie photographs by Loretta Lux. Be sure to scroll down and view the portfolio. Beautiful in themselves (and why are all these children so pensive?), and interesting because of the way they have been structured, with a somewhat classical, slightly surreal, painterliness. And for the ways in which, as Stephany Aulenback suggests in her post, they play with conventions of idealized childhood. It is this aspect of the photographs that makes them eerie, and at times uncomfortable. The boy with the ruff (Trolls 1, 2, and 3 on this page): just the barest of allusions to things unsavoury, but enough to unsettle.

And no doubt this is the parent in me speaking. I had a more jaundiced eye, once.

February 12, 2004

A couple of things...

My new

arrived today and I'm too excited mucking around with it to think straight, but here are a couple of things:

Brian Weatherson at Crooked Timber writes about gender neutral language and why it's okay to use "they" for the singular.

The Books Every Educated Person Should Read post is up to 216 comments and 8 follow-ups. People cannot resist lists. (Or offering advice.)

Maud Newton links to Based on the Book, a "compilation of over 950 book titles, short stories, and plays that have been made into motion pictures" using IMDB.

feministe has a lyrical post on, among other things, putting young children to bed.

February 11, 2004

LeGuin; Foucault

Two links from the inestimable Maud Newton:

First, from The Guardian, an online discussion with Ursula LeGuin in which she briefly touches on the Harry Potter books: "good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited." Of course, she mainly discusses her own work, but it's hard to resist dishing the dirt.

Second, a review, by Ed Halter in the Voice, of two new books which take exception to the Foucaldian notion of homosexuality as an invention of the nineteenth century, which ends with the evocative question,

Does the modern gay man or lesbian have that much in common with Hellenic boy-lovers, French libertines, or ancient Chinese scholars who carried on openly bisexual affairs? Ironically, because of their deep complexity, [Louis] Crompton's portraits [in Homosexuality and Civilization] could equally suggest that the only shared factors persisting across millennia are indeed acts and desires, not identities.

Addendum (5:09pm): Jessa Crispin at Bookslut also mentions the LeGuin piece.

February 10, 2004

Update

155

Books every educated person should read

There is a monster comment-a-thon (151 152 153 comments and counting) going on over at 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."

Former students in my science fiction classes: class of 2001: you will be horrified to learn that I suggested Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, and someone else actually seconded it. Classes of 2002 and 2003: you will be doubly horrified to learn that someone — not me — suggested J.G. Ballard's Crash. See, I told you they were good for you.

All I know is, I have a lot of reading to do.

February 08, 2004

What if LotR had been written by Jane Austen?

Here is a hilarious site, via Austen-tatious, where are gathered various spoofs of LotR channelled through the likes of Coleridge ("In Khazad-dûm did evil fall / And stately Aragorn despair"), the Beowulf poet ("A great shadow descended / Horrific winged creature with wicked rider"), John Donne ("Goe and catch a falling Ring / Get with child the Elven Queen,"), Robert Burns ("Wee timid, hungry, half-grown hobbit, / Living in hole like ony rabbit,"), John Keats ("O what can ail thee, Frodo lad, / Alone and palely loitering?"), and scads of others. Here is a taste:

e. e. cummings
by Hunter Green

precious) downward
my) the heat rises
O) the mountain rises

like a mouth the earth
swallows
greedily

a finger without its hand
a body without its soul
an evil without its power

bright sun on us both)
remembering(
bobbing forth and back)
my birthday(
he was greedy like the earth)
one life begins(
one life ends)
river like a mouth, cold, hot
ring like a mouth, devouring
consumed i must consume

(Sméagol?)

the ring (O
and the body (my
are consumed (precious

Helen Fielding was mentioned twice, much to my delighted surprise, but of course it wasn't Helen, sister of Henry, but that other Helen Fielding.

Most of the writers who are pastiched here are male, which I suppose is hardly surprising. Some of our students are (were?) thinking of putting on a public debate to discuss the proposition that the LotR is a misogynist text. Hope it goes forward.

February 06, 2004

A couple of book links

Two links via Maud Newton:

Pop-up and Movable Books from the University of North Texas: A collection of fabulous old books.

(Do you like pop-up books? I do, and Little Bump loves them. And he is finally at an age when he can restrain himself from ripping them to shreds. He particularly loves Jan Pieñkowski's Monster Pops. Last summer I bought him a copy of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz illustrated by Robert Sabuda, but that's still on the high shelf.

Second link: Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe is out, both on paper and electronically. This is the second novel Doctorow has released both ways; his first, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003) is also available on-line and from fine bookstores everywhere. Doctorow writes,

[H]ere is the book as a non-physical artifact. A file. A bunch of text, slithery bits that can cross the world in an instant, using the Internet, a tool designed to copy things very quickly from one place to another; and using personal computers, tools designed to slice, dice and rearrange collections of bits. These tools demand that their users copy and slice and dice — rip, mix and burn! — and that's what I'm hoping you will do with this.

What does this mean, though, alongside the safety of the fixed book version? Though I suppose one could slice and dice that as well.

January 31, 2004

Book art

Someone sent me an invitation to a show by an artist called Doug Beube, called "Palimpsest" (in Toronto, next week, so I guess I won't be going). But if the name hadn't caught my attention, the photograph would have: an amazing sculpture called "Twisted Meanings" made by distorting a Webster's Dictionary into an almost glacial formation. I went on Google to see if I could find a digital photo of the piece. No luck, but I did find other amazing images of pieces by Beube:

“Twisted Disaster," 2002, book

“Borough (Brooklyn, New York, white and yellow page sold together),” 2002, found books/wood stands, 9 x 9 x 7”

Why is the idea of the book as compelling as the book itself? I suppose because the image of a book, or a real, but unread book, has infinite potential. It could be that book: the one you want to live in or the one that changes the way you look at where you do live. And then there is the book itself, the material object. A well made book is art, no-one can deny, but even mass-produced pocketbooks have that evocative pulpy-ink smell, that promise, when you first open them.

It may seem almost perverse to be sitting here at my keyboard fetishizing books. Certainly there is much generalized anxiety floating out there about the demise of the book/reading/culture, etc. During my last job interview (the successful one), while expounding upon "my research," I passed around a little 18thc chapbook in a cellophane slipcase. I said, as it went from hand to hand, “Go ahead, slip your finger in and touch it.” One member of the committee looked horrified, as if I had offered sexual favours to all and sundry right there against the lectern, but others chuckled and who knows? one or two fingers may have slid against that old rag paper. As long as we still have the impulse to touch (and face it, until storage media becomes more reliable for the long term), books are safe. Listen to Umberto Eco.

Here is a piece about Beube from the Brooklyn Artists Alliance, and an interview in Umbrella.

Beube is one of a number of book artists (here, here, and here).

January 03, 2004

Chindi

Finished Jack McDevitt's Chindi (begun here). Won't be reading any more of his; the science was interesting, but not enough to hold this artsy reader's attention, and I liked the idea of a huge alien ship that travelled for millions of years and collected artifacts from different worlds. But the characters left me cold, and there was too much wish–fulfillment for my taste—not that I don’t like some wish–fulfillment narratives, but I don’t like them when they pretend to be something else.

And I was ticked by the mention of the “Canadian Alps” in the epilogue.

Didn’t turn out to have much of an “Xmas reading binge” after all, and term is starting in two days. Oh well, I can look forward to a summer reading binge.

December 28, 2003

Jack McDevitt's Chindi

A couple of chapters into Jack McDevitt's Chindi (I have inadvertently begun in the middle of a series: The Engines of God and Deepsix precede it, and there is a sequel, Omega). Locus liked it, which is often good enough for me. It is not the sort of thing I have been reading much of lately: good old–fashioned hard sf with cardboard characters having stereotypical relationships—starting with the protagonist, Captain Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins [!]—but with an interesting enough premise that I haven't minded too much, at least so far. Hutch is going after a possible alien radio transmission. The Philadelphia Inquirer, according to the back cover, called it "an exciting tale of alien archaeology." How could I not read it?

Had begun Sheri Tepper's The Visitor (see here for an earlier post on Tepper), but it rapidly felt claustrophobic: some sort of Cinderella scenario with a beleaguered little girl and a wicked stepmother. And organ theft! Wasn't in the mood.

December 24, 2003

True History of the Kelly Gang

Finished reading Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang (previously mentioned here and here). He does wonderful things with language. I suppose he "cheats," in the sense that he is only imitating someone barely literate, but it is a smooth cheat. And I know from reading the papers of international students, for example, that people not used to using a language often write unintended poetry.

I really enjoyed it. A book to live in for awhile.

December 19, 2003

Poetry is hazardous to your health

I read this on someone's blog awhile back but neglected to note it, and then saw it again more recently, and so offer it here as a caution to all with poetic aspirations: "Death Stalks Poets: Verse Writers Die Younger Than Other Writers."

This is you:

This is you on poetry:

And then this:

Just say no!

The Death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis (reproduced on the very handy Poets' Graves site).

[Thoughts expressed in this post do not in any respect reflect the official position of the UNBSJ English discipline.]

December 13, 2003

Down under

One quarter of the way through History of the Kelly Gang (mentioned previously), and when I'm not laughing I have a lump in my throat. (Have spoken with other parents about this sea change since spawning Alex: how we can't watch certain episodes of L&O:SVU any more; how the scene of the boy screaming "Mommy!" as Julianne Moore drives away to commit suicide in The Hours is virtually unbearable.) At points, the novel reminds me of nothing so much as Angela's Ashes. Of course, I'm still reading about Kelly's childhood; I understand his adult career diverges significantly from that of Frank McCourt.

(Apropos of L&O:SVU, did anyone else hear the CBC radio spoof awhile back, "Law and Order:SUV." You know, they can follow the criminals anywhere...)

December 11, 2003

Ryman's 253

Re. the previous quick mention of Geoff Ryman: his story in the collection, “Have Not Have,” is linked to a novel, Air, not yet released. And attentive readers—you know who you are—may remember an abortive attempt to read Ryman’s Was last summer; abortive not because it wasn’t good, but because it was too good. You may want to check out his strangely moving interactive "novel for the Internet about London Underground in seven cars and a crash," 253. Some like it, some don't; some are aghast that it was later published in print, while Ryman himself acknowledges the difficulties of reading and writing a novel online. I first read it in print and find the original web version quite a different experience: less sober, somehow. The only problem I find with projects like this (are there many?) is that I have the compulsive fear that I am missing something. Perhaps I should learn to read "like a sociologist" and not "like an English person": a reference to an ongoing debate Joe and I have; he thinks I am a plodder who cedes control because I read from page one through to the end, in order, while I think he is feckless and wilful for flipping through books and reading as the spirit—of Horkheimer? Adorno? Which is the spirit that sociologists recognize?— moves him.

Read until you drop

Picking up on the previous entry about the nineteenth volume of Gardner's Dozois's series, The Year's Best Science Fiction (2001): finished it a few days back. It seemed to get stronger the further I got into it. Canadian Geoff Ryman—and if you haven’t read anything of his yet, you should—explores one of the last bastions of the pre–information age. Robert Reed’s “Raven Dream” is sad and evocative; Carolyn Ives Gilman’s “The Real Thing” is one of the most disturbing in the collection, despite being light and comic, because it postulates a future that is already here, where useful information costs a prohibitive premium because

[t]rue memes are actually at a competitive disadvantage.... [b]ecause ... the world doesn’t work in a memorable or interesting way. That's why fiction is so much more satisfying than truth: it caters to our brains, and what they want. Reality needs to be productized in order to be convincing. (418)

The excellent Maureen McHugh’s “Interview: On Any Give Day” is inventive—it reproduces a “National Public Internet” documentary about disaffected youth preyed upon by unnaturally youthful rejuvenated boomers. Jim Grimsley’s “Into the Greenwood” is a sad and creepy tale of inter-species abuse. Brenda W. Clough’s “May Be Some Time” is really fun: scientists in the future retrieve and rejuvenate the gangrenous, dying body of Titus Oates, the member of Robert Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition who walked off into a blizzard in order to give the rest of the group a chance.

Lot’s of “fish out of water” scenarios, but well done, with a deft feeling for an Edwardian of Oates’s class and inclinations: “In all his wide travels, he had never heard such red-blooded invective from the lips of a female. A hard–bitten cavalry trooper could say no better. [Titus was t]orn between admiration and horror” (558). Apparently this is the beginning of a novel; something to watch for.

British writers are well–represented in the collection: eight out of twenty-six stories. Charles Stross’s Sterlingesque future where the free flow of information is the worst threat to capitalism is only marred by a cheesy S&M subplot. Alastair Reynolds continues building the intriguing world of the Cojoiners in “Glacial.” Ian MacLeod, whose “New Light on the Drake Equation” I mentioned previously, creates a fascinating world in “Isabel of the Fall,” a far–future, high–tech, society with a strangely medieval culture, wasted on a story of two grotesquely tortured women (shades of Catherine of Alexandria, et al.).

Nevertheless, I don’t know if he has written more of this world, but if so, I hope I come across it. At least, as long as it isn’t full of yet more inventive ways for women to die. Simon Ings’s “Russian Vine,” Paul Mcauley’s “The Two Dicks,” Chris Beckett’s “Marcher,” and Ken MacLeod’s “The Human Front” all share a characteristic bleak view and a refreshing take–no–prisoners approach to non–British readers.