Suffering Fools Badly: Career Limiting Moves reviewed in The Rover

A wonderful review of Zachariah Wells's witty and engaging essay collection Career Limiting Moves by Brian Campbell in The Rover. Here's a taste:

As we progress through the Essays and Reviews section, we discover in Wells a thorough reader and masterful critic. Poets he takes down a notch with his trenchant pen include perennial favourites Don MacKay (“His poems are fun, smart, easy to like. But like a stranger you meet on a train, I don’t think much about them afterwards”), Anne Simpson (“a tourist in the realms of human misery and suffering”), and Patrick Lane (“singing the sadsack song of his self-image”). But in all cases, he does indicate strengths of said poets, although I think his assessment of Simpson could have been more balanced. Lengthy essays that take up the cause of unjustly neglected poets like Peter Van Toorn and Peter Sanger, as well as an award-winning piece on Bruce Taylor, are standouts. The poets’ work is quoted fully enough that we gain direct experience of what these poets are like.

On the Stand (& in Your Mailbox): CNQ 84

After a range of delays, CNQ 84 has finally hit news-stands and mailboxes across the country.  And last Saturday the issue came in for some early love from James Adams over at the Globe & Mail:

I'd but the latest CNQ just for its cover, a fabulous gate-fold of more than a dozen Canadian superheroes, conceived and drawn by the inimitable Seth.  All hail the King of Kanuck Kartoonists! As ever, though, with CNQ, there's plenty of interesting stuff inside.

And is there ever! Adams highlights K.D. Miller's exceptional Growing Into Alice, Alex Good's look at Douglas Coupland and Aaron Gibreath's On Discovering CanLit, but he could just as well have highlighted Phil Marchand's Faith and Literature, or Patricia Robertson's Against Domesticated Literature, or Brian Busby's continuing Dusty Bookcase look at Basil King, or Devon Code on Alvin Shcwartz, or the first of a new column by David Mason called Secrets of the Book trade, or our own Tara (no stranger to Thirsty readers) Murphy's look at the 2011 Griffin Prize, or the North Wing take on Robertson Davies's Fifth Business, or Alex Boyd's poems, or Shaena Lambert's story Clams, or.... and I haven't even made it to the reviews yet!

And what James Adams could not tell you about in his Globe column is this issue's collectible, as it is not available on the news-stand. But you, dear Thirsty reader, could get it for free with your paid subscription to the journal.  This issue's collectible is a hand-bound chapbook of the title fable from Mike Barnes's forthcoming The Reasonable Ogre.  You'll be hearing a lot more about this book in the coming weeks and months, but this story will hopefully whet your appetite for more.  It's a lovely little production (though our attempt to produce the cover letterpress on the old platen press in the garage failed miserably.  Give me time, give me time.)

The website has been updated with some new content from the current issue for readers to test drive.  And there are more plans afoot there, as well, that should help bring CNQ well into the ... err....  20th century.  But all of that will keep for a time and for another post.

The Danforth Review interviews Douglas Glover

I must start with, what's up with the title?

The title of the book is also the title of one of the essays which is about writing sentences, especially paying attention to verbs.

I found a while ago that if I could circle all the instances of the verb to be on a page of student writing and connect them up in a spider diagram (copula spiders), then I could teach the student something concrete about improving the prose by showing him how to rewrite some of those sentences using active, interesting verbs.

I quote from some of letters to students (acerbic, comic). I think I actually manage to make writing sentences sound exciting.


For the rest of the interview, please go here.  

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.

Poking Fun at the Mystery Genre

from the Guelph Mercury

Thought You Were Dead

by Terry Griggs

(Biblioasis, 224 pages, $19.95 softcover)

Thought You Were Dead is a book that's surcharged with creative energy, crammed with a playful fullness of invention that seems at times a threat to its binding.

It is, primarily, a parody of the traditional village mystery. The location is the southern Ontario town of Farclas, promoted by its boosters as "Friendly, Safe, Fun! "

The hero is Chellis Beith, researcher and fact checker for an eccentric novelist named Athena Havlock. His anachronistic line of work (Ms. Havlock does not, apparently, go online) makes him both a good amateur detective -- he recognizes "God is in the details" -- as well as a facile conversationalist whose head is always full of facts and factoids, and the difference between the two. His synapses fire so quickly his head sounds like a bug zapper, and almost everyone's dialogue similarly sparks with zingers. Such nimble mental and verbal patter is native to noir, but not what you expect from your typical cosy.

Mystery and intrigue hit close to home when a book reviewer is murdered in a neighbouring town.

"Who would want to kill a lowly book reviewer?" Chellis sensibly asks. Then decides: "Only about a thousand people (he) could think of offhand."

Then Ms. H. mysteriously disappears. Is there a connection?

Chellis, assisted by ex-flame/domestic scientist Elaine, is on the case.

Traditional mystery buffs may feel a bit put out. Griggs, a Stratford writer, hasn't written a puzzle book that invites the reader to pick up clues and figure out whodunit.

Instead she has opted for a more general satire, not only of the mystery genre but the world of CanLit in general.

One imagines Farclas to be somewhere in Alice Munro country, and when Chellis drives through "this dingier, ungroomed stretch of the province" with its immense fields sectioned into "deep squares of swishing yellow plant matter," he sees in its rundown streets the very source of its "literary gothic reputation."

And if this is the source of so much of our literary culture, at the other end retail receives no kinder treatment. One particularly acid scene has Chellis and Elaine going to the mall and visiting a big box bookstore furnished with shelves of books for Dummies and staff members who think Tolstoy is a Canadian author.

The structure is wobbly, with the story seeming to lose track of itself on occasion, perhaps from taking a bit too much delight in its own McGuffins.

But Chellis is a likable hero -- an orphan who is both cynical and gullible, as well as a slacker dedicated to his employer -- and the supporting cast are colourful diversions. The writing is relentless in its synaptic firing and the illustrations -- yes! illustrations! -- by Nick Craine help fill out a thoroughly enjoyable package.

Agatha Christie liked to refer to her own mysteries simply as "entertainments," a form to which Griggs shows herself a capable heir.

Alex Good is a Cambridge-area writer and producer of GoodReports.net, a website devoted to books.

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

On Blandness

Steven Beattie has an interesting post on blandness in Canadian Literature up on his blog, That Shakespherian Rag. Here's a taste:

I can hear the grumblings from the gatekeepers and the mandarins now: This is unconscionable! The lack of appreciation of our shared cultural heritage must not stand. We must do something to redress this situation, before we all devolve into something resembling savage beasts. Blame must be apportioned. Surely the schools are at fault for this distressing ignorance of Canadian writing; we need to advocate for measures such as the one instituted in B.C. last year, which made the study of Canadian authors mandatory in the province’s high schools. And if not the schools, then Facebook is to blame. Or iPods. Or the XBox. If you’re Yann Martel, you’ll rush to blame Stephen Harper. Atwood herself will suggest that things would be better under the Pequistes.

In fact, everybody will be so busy trying to find a culprit that the most salient question implied by the survey results will likely go unasked: Could it be that a significant percentage of Canadians can’t name a Canadian author because they don’t see any relevance in the vast majority of Canadian writing?

Now, before the Canada Council for the Arts burns me in effigy, let me admit that this is both deliberately provocative and somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I am well aware that our national literature is not monolithic, and that there are writers out there who are producing work that is relevant and interesting to a Canadian reader in 2009. Of course, most of these writers are published by small houses that don’t have the financial clout to compete with the marketing and advertising budgets of multinational branch plants such as Random House and HarperCollins. Without question, readers who were hard pressed to come up with Margaret Atwood when asked to name a Canadian writer would have stared in blank confusion if presented with the names Stacey May Fowles, Daniel Allen Cox, Rebecca Rosenblum, or Pasha Malla. This despite the fact that Fowles, Cox, Rosenblum, and Malla are currently publishing fiction that would probably have an exponentially greater impact on younger readers than would the work of such lauded CanLit mainstays as Michael Ondaatje, M.G. Vassanji, Anne Michaels, or Jane Urquhart.

Cutting Down our Tall Poppies

An article in the Republic of East Vancouver has just been published about Stephen Henighan and his latest collection, A Report on the Afterlife of Culture. You can read it here:

www.republic-news.org/archive/191-repub/191_sercombe.html

Here's a short excerpt:

A public intellectual on the cutting edge is lauded in most countries, but in Canada many literary types have not read Henighan or they bristle defensively at the name as though he doesn’t quite know how to behave around the Canlit table. Picture your favourite uncle who comes to Christmas dinner and pokes gentle fun at stuffy family habits.

Jailbreaks: 99 Canandian Sonnets

Pulled my own version of There and Back Again last night as I headed up the 401 for the Toronto launch of the Zach Wells edited Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets. As boring as the 401 between Windsor and Toronto may be, one is quite thankful for it at 4 AM. Too tired to do so tonight, but I should be able to post a fair number of photographs tomorrow. It was an excellent event, with some very fine readings.

In the meantime, Nathan Whitlock has posted an interview with Zach about the anthology on Open Book Toronto that can be found here:

www.openbooktoronto.com/nwhitlock/blog/interview_with_zachariah_wells_jailbreaks_99_canadian_sonnets

And Alex Good has reviewed the anthology in his usual thoughtful fashion on his website, which can be found here:

www.goodreports.net/reviews/jailbreaks.htm

A brief excerpt:

"It's refreshing to see an editor so engaged with his material. And while there are omissions and inclusions individual readers may disagree with, the result is a collection that successfully showcases remarkable variety within its narrow room."

Speaking of Alex Good, he's getting a lot of attention and praise for his fine, sharp and straight-talking piece Looking Backward, in the current edition of CNQ, seemingly on newstands everywhere. Quillblog, Bookninja, and That Shakespherian Rag, among others, are all atwitter. Though I think Susan Glickman put it best: "Alex Good is great!"

If you are unwilling to part with $7.95, you can read Good's essay for FREE -- a CNQ public service -- here:

www.notesandqueries.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=79&Itemid=48