Nowhere man

In the latest issue of The Walrus, Charles Foran reports on Noah Richler’s radio series, A Literary Atlas of Canada, which aired this past spring on CBC (and is coming out in book form next spring, courtesy of McClelland & Stewart). Richler travelled the country, chit-chatting with various authors about the role of landscape and place in their work in an effort to identify the unifying myth of Canadian literature.

Richler doesn’t get off to a good start with Wayne Johnston, who says, “It is extremely difficult and probably pointless to find a unifying idea or concept or even tradition.” Richler presses on. First, he tries out “nowhere,” as in the middle-of-nowhere, the bush, off the map. But Margaret Atwood, whom Richler describes as a purveyor of the “garrison mentality,” nixes that idea. “There isn’t really any nowhere,” she says. “There are only other people who think a place is nowhere.” Other adventures include 10 seconds of dead air while Rohinton Mistry thinks hard about the effect Canada has had on his novels.

Foran, for his part, supports the notion that the “most obvious quality shared among books by Canadians is a certain value system,” a “Canadian geography of values,” rather than Richler’s conception of a literary landscape. But Foran gives Atwood the final word. “Canada may be defined,” she says, “as the place where one is free to make up Canada.”

Related links:
Click on the link for Charles Foran’s piece in The Walrus

Literary texts

The Book Standard website reports that Dot Mobile, which offers mobile-phone services to all students in universities in the U.K., plans to launch a program in January in which students are sent text messages of abbreviated summaries and first lines of literary classics for £20 a month.

Professor John Sutherland of University College London, who helped develop the program, doffed the white gloves to defend it against literary purists. “Whilst some may argue that [Charles] Dickens is really too big a morsel to be swallowed by text, the ‘Great Inimitable’ himself began working life as a shorthand writer,” he said in a press release. “He would, I suspect, have approved of the brevity if nothing else.”

Think you’re so smart? Identify the novel that opens with the following:

IfURlyWnt2HrBoutIt,Da1stFingUlProbWnt2NoIsWherIWsBorn&
WotMyLousyChldhdWsLyk&HwMyRentsWerOcupyd&AlB4TheyHdMe
&AlThtDaveCopafieldKindaCrp,BtIDnFeelLykGoinIntaItIfUWannaNoDaTruf

[Answer: J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye]

Related links:
Click on the link to read The Book Standard story

Hard sell

The Book Standard website has an interview with Duke University Islamic-studies professor Bruce Lawrence, whose book Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden (Verso) hit U.S. book shelves yesterday. Lawrence says that he was initially reluctant to take on the project because he “didn’t want my epitaph to read, ‘Here lies the person who introduced Osama bin Laden to English-speaking readers.’”

However, he quickly became engrossed in the 42 translated proclamations, which, he believes, reveal that bin Laden’s real weapon of mass destruction is his poetry: “I wasn’t quite prepared for him to be literarily engaging…. Of course, he’s an engineer and a terrorist and a polemicist, but he’s also a poet. And that, along with his ascetic demeanor — the guy who dresses humbly, lives in a cave, doesn’t have meals in five-star restaurants — gives him a great emotional appeal he wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

Lest readers lose perspective, Lawrence notes that the speeches also show what he’s being trying to tell his students all along — that bin Laden’s a “lousy social theorist.”

Related links:
Click here for the Book Standard item on the Bin Laden book