Shhh! I'm Reading.

New Feature! Poem of the Week will go up each Wednesday and will feature a poem and ruminations thereon.

This week’s poem is really my guy’s pick. It was him that put me on to Billy Collins. Like a lot of the poetry I’m attached to, it’s hard to recall where or when exactly it embedded itself in my consciousness. The guy can’t really remember either but he thinks it might have been discussed on a books program on the CBC. Funny how you can hear something casually and it continues to reverberate in your mind for years afterward. Poetic shipping news as it were. The delight of Collins for me is in how he takes the banal, things we look at or partake in every day, and rewrites them as moments of wonderment. He gives the reader new eyes. “Marginalia” is a favorite not only because it’s bookish and very funny but also because it is humane and intimate; all qualities shared by books and reading now that I think of it. It’s also uncannily true. It will make you smile and say “yes!” “I did do that when I was reading at school!” Which, is exactly what the poem does. That feeling of simpatico you have when you realize that your reaction is mirrored in the language of the poem? Yeah, that’s why Billy Collins is awesome.  

Poem 2: “Marginalia”

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Read more

Is it possible to talk about Chad Harbach’s novel The Art of Fielding without addressing the significant advance or the panting anticipation leading up to the Fall season or the way that publishers fell all over themselves trying to sign him and then, how he went with Little Brown because they are David Foster Wallace’s publisher (reputedly for less money but who knows). Oh, and there’s the N+1 founder pedigree. More than one intelligent reviewer has called Harbach the “next Franzen” which I would find insulting if I were Chad Harbach. Not because Franzen isn’t a wonderful writer - I’d go to town on anyone who’d argue he isn’t - but because they really have nothing to do with one another. Have those reviewers read the book? Freedom is a different beast. Anyway, what matters is how strong a novel it is. And it’s a gladiator. I read all 500 odd pages in 2 breathless sittings. And while one friend to whom I leant my copy relented 350 pages in, just about every other soul on the planet who reads it finds it packed to the rafters with things to love. Here’s 5 things that have nothing to do with Jonathan Franzen that I loved about The Art of Fielding.

1. Moby Dick. 

Melville and Moby Dick are all over this book. And what I love about all the little references - both oblique and baldfaced - to Mr. Melville throughout is that they aren’t especially on the nose. I loved, for example, that the historical connection between the university and Melville was tenuous and fleeting at best: Guert finds a sketchy record of Melville having visited the region when he - Guert - is a young scholar and not only does it go a long way to paving the way for his eventual career as president of the college but it rebrands the school as a Melville landmark. The baseball team for which the prodigy Henry Skrimshander will eventually be scouted is renamed the Harpooners (the school is located on Lake Michigan which is an amusing geographic jibe in itself). But there are flourishes all throughout the novel and I found myself playing spot the Herman. I won’t deprive you of the sport by disclosing them all here.

2. Baseball say what?

It made me care about baseball which, Moneyball aside, was a surprise to me. Not only did it make me care about baseball but it made me care about baseball for 500 odd pages. Impressive. Obviously it’s about much more than just who’s on third and had to of been for the novel to work. Even so. Impressive.

3. Owen. And while we’re at it, Mike and Guert and Pella and Henry

I loved the characters in this book. Not just like, “they were really well written and fully formed” or some bullshit. No, I loved them like friends. There is pain and deep abiding love in unexpected places and jubilation aside shattering failure. And yet there’s nothing sentimental about the book at all. How does he do that? Remarkable. Owen is especially close to my heart but you’ll have to read the book to find out why. I know, cruel right?

4. University days. Le sigh.

There’s a fraternity - no, not that kind - of people, I know a few myself, who left college but left their hearts behind. I am one of those people. I still go back to the university bookstore down the way during back to school rush to buy books and pens and notebooks. It’s pretty embarrassing but it stops me from the more costly decision of quitting my job and becoming a permanent student…like Will Ferrell in Old School with less beer pong. The Art of Fielding captures that particularly collegiate feeling - tweed, fall leaves, inky new books, dusty lecture halls, libraries - better than anything else I’ve ever read. It hit me in my nerd happy place. 

5. Beginning again…and Mickey Rourke.

There’s that terrifying moment when you finish school and you realize that no one can or will tell you where to go next. And if you’re an athlete and your life was consumed by being the best at that but maybe you’re not good enough to keep being that or maybe your body isn’t good enough to keep being that, what do you do? Worse yet if you’re a college athletic prodigy. There’s such beautiful agony in those moments of profound uncertainty. More beauty than in any philosophical assertions for my money. In Mike Schwartz, there’s a bit of Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler. A bit of every fading athlete you’ve probably known. But as much of any one of us that has reached a point where what has been done no longer makes sense but the path forward makes even less. That’s why sport has such universal resonance and it’s also why a voluminous book about baseball will appeal to just about everyone.

(photo by Ryan Michael Mills)

While I was reading Barbara Demick’s incredible book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, more than one person sauntered past my desk, had their curiosity peaked by the cover and then proclaimed “wow, that looks like heavy going reading.” When I would respond with something like “oh no, it’s riveting!” they would invariably give me the incredulous stink face. Like this. Aside from the concern I have that otherwise clever publishing people are choosing their reading material based on its degree of cheeriness, it makes me sad that they might miss out on Demick’s book for fear that they’re in for a lot of foreign policy talk about nuclear armament (dear policy wonks: I agree that the above is also very important). Demick’s book is about so much more than that.

To begin with, it’s an incredibly human book. It’s about family, love of all kinds, and the space for either in a country where the government defines every aspect of your life. In that, it isn’t a new story. And that’s a genius maneuver on Demick’s part because it salvages the North Korean story from the outer alien margins and allows those of us in completely different - read: more privileged circumstances - to connect with her subjects. 

Demick takes the reader beyond the staged civility of Pyongyang and deep inside the famine ravaged rural regions of the country. It’s a harrowing study of a country’s people whose regime has a maniacal obsession with presenting a face of stability and abundance, where dissent of any kind can get you carted off to the gulag and where in 1998, anywhere from 600,000 and 2 million people had died of famine. There’s this well known NASA satellite photo of North Korea at night. That’s North Korea at the top; a country without internet or television other than the state propaganda channels that delivers such riveting programming as Kim Jong-il inspecting a rubber boot factory.

It’s an incredible story and there’s no one better to deliver it than Demick. She’s incredibly empathetic and her reportage is crystalline and informed by countless interviews with people who have managed to escape and lived to tell their story. The thing that really elevates this book is it’s author’s willingness to let her subjects’ voices assume their rightful place in the foreground. Demick lends them the stage their regime deprived them off. Oh, and there’s a certain Mrs. Song who may well become your hero. She’s as great a character and as tough a survivor as you’ll find in any book, cheery or hard going.

(photo via the very marvelous blog http://kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com/)

New Feature! Poem of the Week will go up each Wednesday and will feature a poem and ruminations thereon.

As a literature major, I read a lot of poetry at school. Some of it I loved and a lot of it I read solely to fulfill the draconian course requirements of my undergraduate program. It was of that sort that leant heavily toward Wordsworth and Coleridge and in which the Modernists, let alone contemporary poets, were relegated to a dusky corner of the department to be salvaged only by brave sessional instructors and renegade critical theory profs. After a year abroad at a progressive liberal arts college in the UK, where tenured prof’s taught courses on Baraka and Ginsberg, I returned home having had one of those cute college awakenings that are an essential part of forming your literary identity.

My fondness for poetry was rekindled but my English department wasn’t really down with Ferlinghetti or Kathleen Jamie or Carol Ann Duffy and so I had nowhere to really direct my reading energies. And so my love of poetry fizzled once more. One prof plotted Keats’ poems on a line graph where the X axis equalled style and the Y axis equalled expertise; it was as though he’d watched that scene in Dead Poets Society and completely missed the point (much as he was completely missing the point of reading Keats). Here’s what I think of Mr. J. Evans Pritchard!

And then finally, in my last year at school I found a prof who was a total poetry badass. His lectures were like jazz riffs, he talked about the Ramones and the Sex Pistols as valid poetic forms and he awarded rare poetry collections for well written essays. I nerded out hard in that class and I credit my love of Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon and Anne Carson and Simon Armitage to it.

A good number of people are happy enough to leave poetry behind once they leave school. An equal number have managed to avoid it entirely thus far in life. Poetry is not going to be the thing that saves the publishing business. I can empathize. Poetry is difficult to penetrate and conjures up schoolhouse associations of memorizing the first stanza of Paradise Lost (yep, I had to do that too…”Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree” still makes me twitch). There is rhyming sometimes which still seems kind of Dr. Seussy to my ears. I’d rather just read Dr. Suess. There usually isn’t a narrative and you have to read poems a few times before they unfurl their genius. It all seems like a lot of work. I will confess that a collection of poems isn’t the first thing I reach for when I need something new to read. My poetry shelves are dusty too. And that’s part of why I thought I’d start this weekly feature. To get my poems down off the shelf and rediscover them and to send me hunting for treasures. Maybe you’ll find there are little embers in you for poetry after all.

This first one is the one that started me thinking maybe poetry could be different. I love how human, how direct it is. How banal and yet discomfortingly psycho-sexual. 

Poem 1: Simon Armitage, “Very Simply Topping Up the Brake Fluid”

Yes, love, that’s why the warning light comes on. Don’t

panic. Fetch some universal brake fluid

and a five-eighths screwdriver from your toolkit

then prop the bonnet open. Go on, it won’t / 

eat you. Now, without slicing through the fan-belt

try and slide the sharp end of the screwdriver

under the lid and push the spade connector

through its bed, go on, that’s it. Now you’re all right / 

to unscrew, no, clockwise, you see it’s Russian

love, back to front, that’s it. You see, it’s empty.

Now, gently with your hand and I mean gently,

try and create a bit of space by pushing / 

the float-chamber sideways so there’s room to pour,

gently does it, that’s it. Try not to spill it, it’s

corrosive: rusts, you know, and fill it till it’s

level with the notch on the clutch reservoir. / 

Lovely. There’s some Swarfega in the office

if you want a wash and some soft roll above 

the cistern for, you know. Oh don’t mind him, love,

he doesn’t bite. Come here and sit down Prince. Prince! / 

Now, where’s that bloody alternator? Managed?

Oh any time, love. I’ll not charge you for that

because it’s nothing of a job. If you want

us again we’re in the book. Tell your husband.

Recently, I leant a friend a copy of Chad Harbach’s Art of Fielding (which is amazing and I highly recommend by the way). He made it through 350 of its 500 odd pages and then gave it back saying “I loved it up until that point but the characters just got so pathetic so I stopped.” What the fuck is that about? This is a perfectly intelligent individual whose tastes are cultivated and whose literary sensibility I have the highest regard for but really? After 350 pages you’re packing it in? I don’t have it in me to quit after that kind of investment. It would send me on a sneaky shame spiral. I’d be asking myself “what kind of weak willed person are you?” I’d be having a psychological tug-of-war with myself. Anyway, that was all before I bought Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84. And I think maybe I get it now. There is an empty spot on my bookshelf that calls to me in a consoling voice saying “give in, why struggle, just put me back and enjoy how pretty my dust jacket is.” I’ve heard it called the world’s most disastrous masterpiece. Indeed. Alternately, literature’s most beautiful failure. There are the typically boring Murakami characters (I mean that in the most complimentary way; the alluringly dull characters are the chief reason to read a Murakami novel) and then there is the shoulder pad swaddled assassin who is ballzy and self-sufficient on the one hand but laments the size of her cleavage on the other (huh?). Oh and there are elves or little people or something. But tally ho! I will finish the bloody thing even if it means I have to suffer the little people and the cleave talk and the annoying teenage literary prodigy.

I finally picked up Daniel Clowes’ Ice Haven this week because he is a genius and basically the best comic writer around (maybe along with Jeff Lemire). In Ice Haven, there is this little kid named Charles who is like me but a boy and I dunno, 8 or something. Charles and I should be BFF’s. Also, there’s a comic book critic named Harry Naybors (ha!), a married couple who are PI’s, Leopold and Loeb and Jon Benet Ramsay’s ransom note. It’s hilarious and suburban and weird in that wonderful Clowes way. Like Ghost World but more entertaining.

I can’t seem to let New Orleans go. I dream about this certain redfish dish at Bayona. I should probably just move there. In the meantime, Tom Piazza keeps me company. I read Why New Orleans Matters while I was in NOLA (as only the most dorky, Commander’s Palace frequenting tourist would). And of course, there’s Treme, on which he’s a regular writer. Lately I’ve been deep in his collection of essays on music and America and life and yes, New Orleans, Devil Sent the Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America. I am learning things I didn’t realize I wanted to know about Jimmy Martin. I’m buying expensive box sets of blues records by people like Charley Patton and Son House. My bank account wants a word with Tom Piazza.

Top of my list of best bibliophilic events in Toronto are the wine and cheese nights Nicholas Hoare Books puts on with its eponymous owner who, clad in bow-tie and brass buttoned blazer, whizzes through a dangerous number of book recommendations; pithy anecdotes and witty asides included. Nicholas Hoare is a British gentleman who has family ties to people like Allen Lane and has an intimate knowledge of myriad country piles; all of which would be sort of insufferable if he wasn’t such a lark. In reference to a children’s book about caterpillars, he observes with delight “and the little ‘pillies ate the denrobiums!” Ha! Without fail, I discover a truckload of titles I’d never heard of but which, on account of Sir Hoare’s enthusiasm, are suddenly essential. My favorite kind of bibliophilic encounter. It was here that I picked up Joshua Knelman’s Hot Art and Calvin Trillin’s Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin. I also nabbed a copy of Nobel winner Tomas Tranströmer’s Selected Poems: 1954-1986 which I’d been searching for all over town.  

Oh, and one more. I squirreled up a copy of Petrograd at The Beguiling over the weekend. It’s about Rasputin and some spies and is full of Tyler Crook’s gorgeous inky illustrations. Fun!

(art by Daniel Clowes via Hey Oscar Wilde!)

I’m a big fat J.G. Ballard fan. To pilfer a Rob Gordon expression, Crash is in my all time top 5. If you don’t like that book, I don’t know, I’m not sure we can be friends. We read Empire of the Sun last month at my book club. I was like, yay!, we’re reading Ballard! People are gonna love this shit! Nope. We score books on a 10 point scale for kicks. Ballard had to work hard for a 6.4 (we are very precise, our club coordinator has a background in finance). Wee Jim was viewed as lacking in humanity, a cold lifeless little wench who didn’t give two pops about his long lost family and seemed content to diddle about on his bicycle, ogling ladies outside his demographic. The punches to the face of the pilot amidst the throes of death were a problem for folks too. As the great George R.R. Martin once said, “pfui!” Ballard’s novel is, in my estimation (and what else matters really?), a brilliant study of the collision of humanity and technology. I think, in many ways, that has been Ballard’s preoccupation throughout much of his work; perhaps most obviously in Crash. It’s a sustained meditation on the borderlands between the human body and machine. And World War 2, if you’re a novelist interested in the dehumanizing effects of industrialization, is the definitive event. That Ballard had a personal connection to the material seems beside the point.  Anyway, this is the great thing about participating in a book club: fiery dissent, irreconcilable differences, intellectual smackdowns. I still love Ballard. Deal with it.

I waited for a very long time for the paperback of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest to come out. Literally years. I’m not cheap, I just think that shiny silver foil cover they went with for the hardcover is horrendous. Seriously, who approved that? If you look at it head on, it has the effect of looking into one of those shoddy rest stop mirrors. You know the ones I mean? Fine for smoothing fly-aways but you wouldn’t want to rely on them for tasks requiring precision; applying liquid eyeliner for example. Unfortunately for me, someone is stuck on that design like dirty bubble gum on the bottom of a shoe. I ran out on the PB drop date to pick up a copy hoping they’d gone with something in the neighborhood of the previous two entries in the series. Nope. Hello again, my ugly silver friend.

In this era of proliferating creative commons cribbed jackets and business books that look like the evil spawn of PowerPoint and Photoshop, the work that Steidl is doing seems utterly holy. Gereon Wetzel and Joerg Adolph’s film about Gerhard Steidl’s church of print, How to Make a Book with Steidl, is equally marvelous. I caught it at HotDocs last year but keep an eye out for it on DVD soon. Steidl works with Ed Ruscha, Robert Frank, Jeff Wall, Joel Sternfeld, Karl Lagerfeld…the list goes on. The film is a rare insight into the process of collaboration, the philosophical tête-à-tête, between publisher and artist. It’s an ode to fine craftsmanship and book porn of the highest order. 

The bibliophile’s love affair avec le livre is sadomasochistic and insatiable: the reader can not get enough, buys more than she would physically be able to read in a lifetime, fetishizes over bindings and jackets, pads her grocery budget with book purchases (wait, maybe that’s just me). That is to say, book lovers pray at the church of print, not that of DRM protected files (though those are nice in their own way but for very different reasons). If I were a church going soul I’d be inclined to draw an analogy between Madras Press and communion. That’s probably not necessary but there is something of the holy about the project, something precious. You need to be checking them out right now.

The Newton, Massachusetts operation publishes texts that might otherwise fall through the publishing cracks. Neither full novella length nor part of a tidy short story collection, these works are ugly duckling, found art wonders. With their uber sexy design and deliciously plum author roster, the revolving 4 title series are serious fetish properties. Did I mention the proceeds go to charities? I started with Ken Kalfus’ Three Stories and Aimee Bender’s The Third Elevator. You can check out their full list here.

I bought my copy of Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang on the day the embargo tape was peeled from the boxes. In practice this meant that I had to beg the stock chick to go and rummage in the Harper Collins shipment in the receiving room / store basement. I should really send them a thank you card now that I think about it. Not every book slinger would be willing to do that for you. Why weren’t they on the shelf yet if the pub date had dropped you ask? The staff couldn’t keep up; or so Sally at my local tells me as she returns, puffed, from her subterranean expedition. It’s so sought after, it should come wrapped in gold foil like a Willy Wonka bar. And if one more person calls it the “most talked about book of 2011…” Anyway, it’s been out for a while now so if you don’t have it yet, rest assured you no longer have to embarass yourself with such rummage requests.

But is it any good you wonder? The evil, jealous part of me wishes I could say “no! boo! totally overrated!” but alas, it’s totally fabulous. Damn you Kevin Wilson and your prodigous talent. Damn you.

Tonally, it’s somewhere between The Royal Tenenbaums and a celebrity train wreck…if smart celebrities had train wrecks. Imagine Tilda Swinton went on an Adderall bender and flashed a bunch of extras on set…that kind of thing. In other words, it’s a riot but a riot that has you caring deeply for its characters. The magic of the book lies in the strain of wistful melancholia coursing through scenes that in less adept hands might come off as arch or silly. It is playful and silly in places to be sure - there is a very amusing incident involving a chicken shack that comes to mind - but Wilson is attuned enough to the human heart, gently ringing that low discordant bell every now and then, to bring it back to the personal and the familiar. 

It concerns a pair of performance artists who coopt their children as oft unwilling participants in their elaborate art pranks. Child A and Child B as they are so credited in these cerebral stunts, grow up, well, a bit maladjusted. Annie is a successful actor with an awards nom until it all falls apart. Buster is a writer who’s second novel isn’t nearly as good as the first and finds himself a hired hack for a men’s magazine called Potent - ahem, try saying that name twice without snorting coffee out your nose - looking head long, literally, down the barrel of a potato gun. Both return to their childhood home looking for refuge from a world which seems to have spat them out of the funhouse. Except of course, you can’t go home…especially when your childhood home is itself a kind of surrealist bigtop. 

Therein lies the genius of Wilson’s novel. While he’s concocted a fanciful tale of a loony artist clan that is winning in its oddities, much of the familial drama feels painfully familiar. The book explores questions around what constitutes art, the slippery nature between truth and fiction and the role of storytelling in both. But it also looks at the family baggage we all carry around with us and whether it is possible to truly strike out and forge a new narrative. 

(illustration by Julie Morstad)

It’s great to be back after an extended hiatus. I feel like a soldier on leave from the front lines. The war in question being the annual back to school rush or, if you want to sound like a true publishing geek, BTS.

For those of you not familiar, I should probably mention that I work in academic publishing. For me, the first couple of weeks of September have long lost their sepia toned collegiate charm and taken on a kind of 9th circle patina. I do warm up stretches and front load on caffeine. And then, somewhere around the moment when I’m coordinating an airlift of a course adoption from the Canadian mainland to St. John’s while simultaneously on the phone to a printer offering up my first born if they’ll deliver my book in 1 week instead of the estimated 6 before finally stopping off at Toronto’s largest university bookstore, rolling up my sleeves and helping to shelve all those textbooks that were ordered a month late I’ll realize with a bit of nostalgia dipped melancholy that back to school is synonymous with work now. It’s war and I’m in the shit as they say.

Once I’ve picked the crumpled heap of my now flu addled body, around about the beginning of October, I’ll pack myself off to some appropriately collegiate town - Boston perhaps? - and fully indulge in the Fall leaves and blazer swaddled coziness of academia. I might even brave a university bookstore. But until then, it’s steady as she blows, stay frosty. 

Ordinarily, orders begin in earnest at the beginning of July, pick up steam as we head into August and then taper toward the end of Summer. There’s always a last minute blitz with orders from sessional professors who have only just been assigned courses. We call it the TBA scramble which suggests a kind of musical chairs cheeriness it doesn’t actually possess. This year though, the bulk of ordering was weighted heavily toward the tail end of the Summer and the first few weeks of September. Bookstores were still calling me up at the start of this week to follow up on orders placed mere hours prior. Prof’s were following up to beg for help because their bookstore hadn’t yet placed an order. Deep backlist was, as is usual, a matter of crises management - no one having expected that 500 copy order of that Anglo-Saxon language primer. But aside from the usual mayhem, it was clear early on that some overarching trends in scholarly publishing were at play. Scratch the surface and it was apparent that many of the same issues that have been talked to death in trade publishing were seeping into the academic market having taken on a few textbook specific barnacles.

There was a lot of “order low, top up” late happening which suggested college bookstores were holding out on their initial buy-ins for economic reasons and perhaps to see how their fledgling textbook rental programs and annual used buy-ins would fare. Textbook rentals are, for all but a few stores in Canada, an uncharted frontier and remain a space of experimentation. It seems likely that stores held back on traditional print orders as they waited to see how many students would take advantage of their rental program. The digital space as well has become both a source of panic for buyers who worry that students will go out and find digital versions of texts to skirt the high cost of textbooks; even when they aren’t clear on where students are going to find such resources there’s still the knee jerk yelp of “e-books!” Add to that, the see-saw between some prof’s penchants for boutique custom options and an ongoing war between stores and Canadian copyright legislators over fair use and licensing tariffs. Yet other stores are flirting with POD programs to greater and lesser success; settling for roughshod reproductions in order that they can make difficult to source books readily available. Stories filled the national media of raids on illegal reproduction facilities flanking universities across the country. The Globe ran a story that seemed oddly laudatory of enterprising students who were sourcing “international editions” (read: the textbook equivalent of a knock off Gucci purse) as a cost cutting measure. The business of scholarly publishing is not a matter of print the book, sell the book anymore. It hasn’t been for some time. There’s a bit of a wild west spirit about it these days. Not necessarily a bad thing. It’s become about delivering solutions. An industry shift that puts the onus on service and publishers should take heed because one things is constant: students aren’t going to wait for us to figure it out.