The Pangborn Defence

There are times, as a publisher (as I am sure is also the case with writers and their books) when I begin to worry that the books we are publishing have little life beyond the short window of buzz (& some, despite our best efforts, don't even manage buzz, but are effectively (or at least seemingly) stillborn) we're able to build around them at publication.

So I always find it gratifying when there's a google alert for an older book and it's not merely another eBay bookseller listing a review copy of the title for pennies on the dollar.  Such was the case this weekend, when what might be the most intelligent review we've received for Norm Sibum's 2008 The Pangborn Defence was brought to our attention.  It leaves reason to hope many of our older books are still finding their way in the world, one reader at a time.

Here a taste of the review, from www.gordsellar.com:

...what I find different in this book is its worldliness — not in the sense of that boring old divide between the sacred and the secular, so much as in its responsivity to the world. Sibum seems to have provided his own answer to the question, “What does it take to get poets to shake their fists at power?” His answer seems to be: The Bush Administration.

Well, not that alone. Reality TV; the rise of capitalist globalization; but also, one senses, the creeping on of the years, the visible collapse one witness less in one’s own life than in the lives of one’s friends and enemies, as their hair grays and their marriages collapse and their bad habits continue on into the shadow years.

....

There is disgust and rage in these pages, but a salutary one: The influence of Pound on Sibum’s work was apparent to me in The November Propertius mainly for his juxtaposition of the ancient and mythical with the quotidian world of waitresses and drunk pals, as well as in his treatment of language; here, though, he has gone further, he has made his work overtly, unapologetically political.

With The Cantos, that move was in many ways disastrous, but I dare to think it is less so with The Pangborn Defence. Happily, though Sibum has brought his poet’s tatty shoes to the streetcorner and mounted a soapbox, we find to our relief that he has come out not in praise of the Mussolinis of our day, but rather to condemn them; and the weary, unhopeful tendency here gives way, just often enough, to rage that that feels pent up, that one gets at least this much: one is not alone, in one’s own horror and disgust at how the century began.

Worldliness, a salutary disgust and rage (along with various beauties): Gord gets it absolutely right.

Read the full review here.  

The Soft Explosions of Life

Jim Bartley reviews Amy Jones' What Boys Like in today's Globe:

There are prose styles that create a convincing world – the minimum expectation from a work of fiction – while offering the bonus pleasure of observing the author's prowess with language. We can gladly accept the show-off factor, provided it enhances the overall experience.

Then there is prose that operates more purely, a quietly expressive vehicle, while the expert word-wrangling remains veiled. The artistry hides itself. Amy Jones excels at the prose of invisible labour. In the best of this debut collection, her writing reads like understanding – as if there's no gap between the words and what they make you perceive. The top 10 of these 15 tales would make a book that is close to perfect.

In A Good Girl, we meet Alex, 32. He’s a waiter and friends with Yousef, 45, his boss. They drink after hours, play music, talk about getting laid, take reckless jaunts out of Halifax Harbour on Yousef's boat. One night, Alex leaves his wallet in a bar, which leads to him spending a rum-soaked night with Leah, 18. Next day, on hearing the news, Yousef grabs Alex’s face between his hands and crows, “You're my fucking hero” – and we instantly see what anchors their friendship. How ordinary this scenario would be if the players were all nondescriptly thirtysomething. Jones loads her exposition with intrigue.

In the first four pages, these three already feel like people you’ve come to know and size up over a boozy weekend at a friend’s cottage. A large part of it is the dialogue. It’s as tight and precise as it can be without being telegraphic. While the characters are sniping and equivocating with their arch, as-if-I-care one-liners, we’re adding up the snippets that reveal inner selves and form the big picture. When Leah says, “I'm going to be a hair model,” it's the capstone on all we’ve been made to guess about her. When Alex says, “Too soon,” it distills the rivalrous camaraderie he shares with Yousef. When the tale ends with a one-word reply – Leah, at a costume party, saying, “Myself” – there’s a delicious moment of suspension before you feel the rush of meanings hit head and heart at the same time.

How to Survive Summer in the City presents a pubescent girl at the mercy of her alcoholic single mother. Again, dialogue leads the way, pulling us expertly into the sad dance of a mother's neglect, her child cast as ongoing babysitter.

One Last Thing melds the death of Kurt Cobain with a runaway teen and her sister’s refusal to chase after her one more time. Through the sister’s voice of desperation, Jones gives herself permission to stray onto the page. “I can't tell this story any more. Not like this.” She tests a more writerly tone: “We searched for you … a journey that was mapped out in the skin cells on the backs of our necks, steps ingrained in the muscular memory of our calves.” The authorial self-reference undermines the stark power of the tale, but the finale, putting us back into events, comes with a gratifying punch.

Miriam Beachwalker offers a seeking adolescent, sick of her carping mom and her own inertia. She will leave Halifax and reinvent herself. The farthest she gets is the beach, where she happens on a gay couple, sunning. Next day, Josh and Paul are back in the same spot. Miriam and Josh discover a rapport, and Miriam, being the needy party, over-invests in it. When the guys necessarily go missing, Miriam is left to write an involuntary love note in the sand, while her autistic little brother hurls himself along the shore with a kite. The piece wonderfully integrates plot, characters and imagery in a parable of inchoate longing.

A few tales feel hastily assembled, ramping up into unlikely dramas or coasting on quirk. Post Mortem inserts a car-crash decapitation in place of subtler violence; The Church of Latter-day Peaches overextends its tone of macabre whimsy.

Dead centre in the book is the quietly riveting, finally heart-battering Twelve Weeks. A young woman, possibly ill, returns to her father’s house after five years away. They don’t speak much. We gradually learn why. In the simplest sense (not to give an iota away), their problem is that they’ve both lived – and as we know, in life there are losses and regrets. Things change. Such easily known truths, but Amy Jones makes you know them like soft explosions at your core.

Death by Prose: RevengeLit # 4

by Wayne Clifford

It wasn’t that I’d caught him, most of the way through a party at Big Name’s place, with my wife, twice, once in the laundry room, once on the little balcony off the guestroom (it was a breezy summer evening, and in another moment, her black lacies would have flown from her big toe, some regrettable liberation’s flag!). It wasn’t that I’d caught him in the sack with my kid brother after that literary soiree at Three Named Poetess. Not even the incident with my wire-haired pointer, Grisham. No, it was that, after the quick-witted apologies and really clever excuses each time I caught him, his review in the Grub and Moil of my novel in alexandrines, The Cold-Footed Pastor of Gimli, (a passionate tale of Rosie, warm-everythinged and Irish-Cree, and the new-in-town Lutheran preacher, Yan, who was, well, cold-footed (I knew the novel had everything The Great Canadian One could ask for: Winter! Long, long winter! Mounties! Mounties mounting Mounties! Mounties mounting their horses with Tazerish abandon! Baptists! Lutherans! Seal-slaughter!)) was so heavy-handed, it landed like a clot of lead on the composing room floor. Or, more contemporaneously, a splat of weighty polysyllables too flabby to do a push-up between them.

I’d have revenge. I wrote a piece for the anthology he was editing. I knew he’d read it just for the pleasure of rejecting me, and, because it would be brought out by that press using as its mascot the fish-eating flightless bird of a continent no one owns nor wants to, I didn’t even care that the prose started out predictable and pedestrian. No! I mixed every metaphor I could manipulate! I punned pathetically! I advanced the plot academically, I narrated nuancelessly! And I inserted on the penultimate page a priceless paragraph, poetical, paradoxical and so startling with its freshness, that I knew, after the stretch of drivel I’d given him, his aesthetic sense would blow as surely as he’d blown my hound.

So that’s my story, dear reader. Death by prose. And I’ll pull a Mulroney if you ever mention it again.

No Comment: A Revenge-Lit Flash Fiction (#3)

by Shane Neilson

He looked good, chalked up, chalked off. He deserved it. He had been chalking up books for a few years, getting his start at an Open Mic and confirming his love for his own voice. But getting poetry into journals was a harder task than showing up early at readings, and poetry forced him to modulate his voice, and he wanted to hear his own voice. So he began writing reviews, finding that editors loved blood on the page. And he loved the blood of others on the page. He sometimes went back to the Open Mic, but randomly, to increase the terror, and he refused to read poetry, he read reviews, reviews of the books that were being read that night. The Open Mic organizers let him do it, because they were afraid of him, afraid that he would write reviews about them, and he would, and they knew he would, if they refused him. But his voice: he recorded a whole CD of his reviews, titled it Greatest Hits, and reviewed it himself in a local magazine, the only time –ever, it would turn out- he would uncork the word “masterpiece.” It was an odd voice, a wannabe Caper accent forced through a potato peeler, and it was completely out of sync with its own malice. It is this way I imagine him, stabbed in the back, his assailant refusing to identify himself or even preface his attack with the knowledge that he was about to die, blissfully composing his latest takedown on the way back from the Open Mic where the featured reader that evening, I hear, is smiling as he utters his most famous review, “No Comment.”

John Metcalf on Negative Reviewing

Over at Nota Bene, Nigel Beale interviews John Metcalf on negative reviewing. Worth a listen.

Writing Lessons: RevengeLit#2

Tune in at revengelit.blogspot.com
to ensure that you don't miss a thing. Revenge stories by Nathaniel Moore, Shane Neilson, Wayne Clifford and others to follow shortly. A really, really good start to this! Thanks to everyone, and keep them coming!

Writing Lessons
by Lydia Ondrusek

Ivor Miskelson was a hated child.

Like a weed that sucks up repeated attacks of pesticide to become, finally, poisonous itself, he dealt with the rejection of his relatives and peers, raised himself from the garden plot, and became the grotesque focus of all eyes, unplanned impediment to the growth of everything around him.

Ivor Miskelson became a literary critic.

Read To Me, Miskelson’s television show, was a trainwreck. Millions tuned in every week to see if its host could, by a series of increasingly ugly jabs, again reduce a bestselling author to tears. He did not disappoint. Until Jonquil Esterhaus.

He questioned her lifestyle, laughed at her hat. She admitted her changing from writing children’s books to cozy mysteries could cripple the educational life of a generation. Her demeanor remained serene. After reading the teaparty scene from “I’m Afraid The Vicar Is Out,” she even kissed Miskelson during the closing music. Credits rolled with them deep in conversation, holding hands.

Police responded to a call from Esterhaus the next morning to find her in her bedroom, marking galleys. The late Mr. Miskelson sprawled fully dressed across her calico bedspread, dried spittle on his chin and an empty cup that looked like it had held cocoa clutched in stiff fingers.

“He said I was fascinating, that he wanted to see what I was working on next,” Esterhaus said to the detectives as people dealt with the body. She patted the galley of “The Coroner’s Cocoa.”

“So I showed him.”

The Case of Poe Ethic Justice: A Revenge-Lit Fiction

Simon Lacerous’ column “The Last Word” routinely excoriated literary works: if realistic, they lacked imagination; if fantastic, they lacked veracity; if existential, they lacked moral compass; if moralistic, they were fascist.

As he left his office one midnight dreary, he was confronted by a hooded figure carrying a stylus, a goose quill, a ballpoint, a laptop, and a scythe.

In a flash, Simon saw the error of his ways and shouted out this devious fiction: “When I woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, I found myself changed into a monstrous vermin. Surely that’s punishment enough?”

The hooded figure opened its cloak, revealing multivariate weaponry. It spoke in sepulchral tones: “If, sir, you were in fact changed into a cricket, I should employ this [it indicated a flyswatter] but I perceive you are a critic, indeed of the most slovenly, ambushing, and puling sort.”

“Perhaps so,” S.L. replied, quickly kneeling, “but I made less money than most writers. Oh, spare me, hooded figure!”

H.F. pursed its lips and extruded a large stick of playground chalk. Its robe swirling, it danced macabrely as it drew—on the alley’s tarmac and around the kneeling critic—the forensic figure of a victim.

“Lie here and don’t go outside the lines,” it ordered.

Simon complied.

H.F. pulled a kalashnikoff from its robe and riddled S.L. with a staccato series of very short bursts, creating umlauts, colons, diereses, ellipses, and, even, periods.

Police, seeing the corpse already with an outline, experienced brain seizures.

A second-story window opened and Annabel Lee, an intern with Marlowe, Poirot & Holmes (also a leggy dame with big headlights and a smart mouth on her) cried out, “Look, yuh lousy flatfeets, it’s obvious you should put out an APB for that punk Chu Aishen!”

THE END

Revenge-Lit: A Thought You Were Dead Flash Fiction Contest

“Who’s Been Murdering the Book Reviewers of Ontario?” – Globe & Mail

Who would want to kill a lowly book reviewer? Only about a thousand people Chellis could think of off hand. The police were in for some excruciating interviews. Cop: “I understand, sir, that you’re a writer.” Suspect: “Indeed, I am, and my talent was evident from my earliest years…” – from Terry Griggs’s Thought You Were Dead

* * *

Everybody Hates a Critic,

Some people hate them more than others.

Terry Griggs’s new comic-noir biblio-mystery Thought You Were Dead kicks, err, off with a literary critic found under a hedge with a knife in his head, and literary revenge plays an increasingly important role as the novel unfolds. The literary world, and especially the Canadian literary world, can be a small, spiteful – and occasionally murderous – place. Character assassinations abound, books are regularly murdered in the (shrinking) book pages across our fair land, while others are smothered with damningly faint praise. More than a few knives, even if thankfully metaphorical, have been buried hilt deep in authorial backs.

Do you bear the scars of CanLit’s internecine wars? Have you spent a small fortune on postage and only have a drawerful of rejection slips to show for it? Has the world been slow to recognize your evident talent? Then, dear reader, this contest is for you.

To celebrate the launch of Terry Griggs’s Thought You Were Dead, Biblioasis and Seen Reading are teaming up to help you unleash the murder we know is in your heart with our Revenge-Lit contest. Pen a flash fiction of 250 words or so (though, in truth, no one is likely to count them) on the (fictional) literary critic whose body once filled the chalk outline and what he did to get there and send it by June 12th to revengelit@gmail.com. The best of the entries will be published as they are received at RevengeLit.blogspot.com. The winning entry will:

1) Receive a one hundred dollar cash prize

2) Be published in a forthcoming issue of CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries

3) A Biblioasis press catalogue of in-print trade titles (approx. 40 books, retail value approx. $1000.00)

Entries to be judged by Dan Wells, Julie Wilson and Terry Griggs.

For further information, or to read the entries as they come in, check out www.revengelit.blogspot.com.

So That's How It Works...

In today's Globe, Russell Smith (shameless plug for Russell's shameless Diana: A Diary in the Second Person(this is a publisher blog after all) writes on how book marketing gets personal, and, well, unethical, on Amazon.

Now at first, in the nineties, most of my colleagues would have been embarrassed to say that this free-for-all disturbed them. They would have dismissed amateur book ratings on the Internet as insignificant. Surely one good review in The Globe and Mail and another one in Quill and Quire and one interview on the CBC were going to be far more influential as advertising than this nonsense from nobodies who can't spell? And we certainly didn't want to be known to be planting reviews from our friends with the crass and ego-driven idea of boosting the ratings, or worse, writing reviews of our own books ourselves. I remember being disgusted by the idea.

This turned out to be embarrassingly naive. It is hard to measure empirically the effect on sales of bookstores' star ratings, but we have all started to have the feeling that the star-ratings – the first thing you see, really, when you look up a book that you are thinking of buying – are actually far more influential than the reviews written by professionals in newspapers. Everyone in the publishing industry now agrees that newspaper reviews are less influential than they have ever been. The amateur reviews are for the most part so idiotic, so ideologically driven or otherwise missing the point, that to receive a low star-rating from them – particularly if one has had excellent reviews from professionals – has started to become offensive and maddening. So, if the star-ratings are so easy to manipulate, then we had better get started manipulating them.

And so now everybody does. You can't post multiple reviews any more (although most of the ones posted for devious purposes before 2005 are still up there, wreaking havoc), and Amazon now requires that you have made a purchase to contribute a review. But there is nothing embarrassing any more about sending out a mass e-mail – to people you know have purchased something at Amazon – asking for help. In fact, marketing consultants suggest that authors launch concerted campaigns to raise their star-ratings on book sites, by sending out review copies of their book to 300 friends and asking that they, in return, post a one-line five-star review on Amazon. You might even send out some sample lines of your glowing review yourself, to make it easier for your friends. Obviously the authors with the greatest resources available to mount such a campaign – such as the ability to hire a PR firm to do it – will be the ones with the most glowing reviews.

For the whole article go here.

No Sacrifice Too Great

Sunday's Toronto Star carried a farewell by Philip Marchand, who is changing beats at the Star, from book reviewer to film critic. He'll be missed. The best book reviewer in the country for nearly 20 years, you could count on Marchand to give you an honest appraisal of the books he was reviewing. "Be just to a book, by all means," Marchand writes, "is the credo of a book reviewer, but more important, be just to the reader." Too few seem capable of doing this, or understanding it when they see it.

One of Marchand's last pieces of book criticism, it would seem, appears in the current issue of CNQ. His 'The Problem with Alice Munro' is worth a gander, and has already generated some interesting reader response. Marchand would have it, I'm certain, no other way.

Marchand's entire farewell can be found here: www.thestar.com/article/291298