Sexy CanLit?

Sex in Canadian fiction is the angle of Peter Darbyshire’s review of Stephen Marche’s Raymond and Hannah on the CBC Arts website. In CanLit, Darbyshire laments, “sex is rarely a pleasurable event. Instead, it is often used as a metaphor for politics, identity, globalization, consumerism — almost everything but sex itself.” Marche’s book turns out to be no different, though Darbyshire’s review is still an admiring one in the end. “Erotic? No. Sexy? Yes. In a Canadian sort of way.”

In any case, readers may be more titillated by the sidebar Darbyshire’s come up with: “The 10 most memorable sex scenes in Canadian literature,” which include everything from Marian Engel’s notorious ursine love in The Bear to Barbara Gowdy’s tale of necrophilia and its discontents, “We So Seldom Look on Love.”

Related links:
Click here for the CBC Arts story on sex in CanLit

An academic scolding for Canada Reads

With the CBC’s fourth annual Canada Reads program set to kick off on Feb. 21, a recent editorial on the Canada Reads phenomenon in the scholarly journal Canadian Literature is well timed. And writer Laura Moss has some serious concerns about the program, to say the least.

For one, she argues that the broadcast debates are strictly superficial: “the level of discussion rarely goes beyond character development, plot, or emotional response to the texts.” Some readers might agree that a meaningful discussion of aesthetics is sorely lacking from the discussion, but Moss argues that the most egregious absence isn’t aesthetics but politics. “The championing of Sarah Binks [in 2003] ignored historical context: for example, no mention was made of the derogatory depiction of vanishing ‘Indians’ with gin bottles.” And in the following year, “(t)here was a notable dearth of discussion about First Nations peoples in [The] Last Crossing.”

Tp sum up, Moss writes that, “The Canada Reads project needs to recognize that although the program may be ‘just a game’ as senior producer Talin Vartanian told me, it is a game played with cultural, social, and economic consequences.”

(Thanks to Bookninja.com for the link.)

Related links:
Click here for Laura Moss’s editorial in Canadian Literature
Click here for the CBC’s Canada Reads homepage

Jack McClelland: in other people’s books

Here’s one of the more curious pieces to appear following Jack McClelland’s death last week: on the Bookninja.com site, Dana Cook — “a Toronto freelance editor, indexer and collector of literary encounters” — has compiled references to McClelland that appeared in half a dozen literary memoirs, by the likes of William Weintraub, Matt Cohen, and Phyllis Grosskurth. No mention, though, of the entire books that are devoted to McClelland, including James King’s biography Jack: A Life with Writers (Knopf Canada, 1999) and the Sam Solecki-edited Imagining Canadian Literature: The Selected Letters of Jack McClelland (Key Porter Books, 1998). Watch for Q&Q‘s own McClelland tribute in our August issue.

Related links:
Dana Cook’s Jack McClelland Remembered