Debating CanLit

Calgary Herald columnist Naomi Lakritz (whom you might remember from Quillblog past) weighs in on that story about Canadians being unable to name their own authors. Her drive-by attack on Carol Shields doesn’t exactly raise the literary-criticism bar, but much of what she has to say generally is fair enough:

That’s another thing about the aura around CanLit – you’re not really supposed to admit that you don’t like some of the authors’ works.

[...]

[I]f people aren’t even reading these authors, then no debate as to their merits is possible, and the illusion – or rather, the requirement – that everyone should swoon over a book simply because its author is Canadian, continues unchecked.

It’s unclear where exactly the problem or remedy is supposed to lie here – if “people aren’t even reading these authors,” then how much unwarranted swooning is really going on? – but it’s hard to argue with the general sentiment that debate is good.

And at one point in reading Lakritz’s column, Quillblog couldn’t help chipping in a spontaneous “amen”:

Adrian Stein, of Books in Canada magazine, calls the results of the poll “dreadful but not surprising.”

He claims that it’s hard “for any country to maintain a literary culture when the vehicles that support this expression are disappearing, one by one,” and says Canadian Heritage itself doesn’t grasp the importance of book reviews.

That sounds like a thinly disguised plea for more money to shore up the magazine….

Bellow’s regrets

Slate’s political columnist Timothy Noah takes umbrage with author and book editor Adam Bellow’s response to a two-year-old column about the Coulter-ization of conservative-leaning books in the U.S. Bellow, who edited two of the books cited in the column, hits back in a piece in the summer issue of World Affairs. But it’s not quite the riposte it might have been – while shrugging off Noah’s criticisms that the current crop of conservative tomes borrow too liberally (pun intended) from right-wing commentator Ann Coulter’s shrill style, Bellow also concedes that the contemporary conservative dialogue ain’t what it used to be.

Granted, Bellow’s piece is about more than just Noah’s column, but regardless, it seems Noah comes out on top in this battle of wits:

Whether Bellow will go to hell for publishing either work is not a question that interests me. I’ve interviewed him by phone a couple of times—we’ve never met face to face—and I found him congenial and intelligent. (Also—full disclosure—when I first started writing this column, he sent a complimentary “if you ever want to write a book” note.) Unlike [...] Bellow, I experience no distress when I contemplate conservatism’s intellectual bankruptcy. Not my religion, and therefore not my problem. But I’m not too fine a person to enjoy Bellow’s torment and vacillation in reaction to something I wrote. Yup, it sucks to be a conservative today. Have a Maalox on me, pal.

More hating on the Kindle

Criticism of Amazon’s new e-reader continues to fly, and the latest comes from a high-profile source: star American book designer Chip Kidd. In an entry on the design blog A Brief Message, Kidd writes:

I’ve been asked to comment on what effect I think [the Kindle] will have, if any, on book design as we know it. Here goes.

None.

Alas, Kidd’s complaints aren’t really Kindle-specific, and have a distinct same-old-same-old feel:

What no one seems to get through their thick skulls, even after untold millions of dollars have been wasted on the concept: PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO READ BOOKS ON A SCREEN. Why is that so hard for someone as obviously smart as Jeff Bezos to accept?

Far more damning, in Quillblog’s opinion, are criticisms like this one. Mobile-device commentator James Kendrick doesn’t dismiss out of hand the very idea of an e-reader; instead, he focuses directly on the Kindle’s design flaws. Which do sound pretty alarming.

Dave Hickey makes a Believer out of Sheila Heti

There’s a great interview in the Dec/Nov issue of The Believer with notorious author and art critic Dave Hickey conducted by Toronto’s Sheila Heti.

The conversation ranges from the true nature of art, the role of criticism, Hickey’s current place in the art world, etc. – not the most thrilling-sounding stuff, but as James Wolcott writes on his blog, the interview is fun to read because Hickey “sounds like an actual human being talking, not a filtration device preening with little soundbites.”

For example, Hickey characterizes the whole notion of Fine Arts degrees as “training sissies for teaching jobs” and an efffort “to create an intellectual and pedagogical justification for the most frivolous activity in Western culture.”

Here are Hickey’s thoughts on arts in academia and government arts funding, a contentious topic this side of the border:

DH: I don’t think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists. Some good artists in their maturity – like me – will take a job at a university and continue to produce because they have trained themselves to produce. But the university environment is not a productive environment. It’s oppressive.

SH: It’s what?

DH: It’s not free. You cannot say what you want to. Let me explain. If I sell an article to Vanity Fair, they give me some money and we’re quits. I can take that money and spend it on heroin and Arab boys if I want to. But if I get the money I make from the university every year, that comes with a requirement that I not be a pedophile, that I not be a drug addict, that I not tell the truth, that I not say what I think about the president of the university. That’s what that money is. And if I take a job at a university and I’m a young person, I have six years in which I can’t express my opinion until I get tenure. Now, are you going to remember your opinions for six years? No!

SH: So if you eschew money from grants and from the government, then you’ve got to make money elsewhere–

DH: I wrote reviews of Porter Wagoner albums and squibs for titty magazines, but I fucking wrote them because I was trying to win and avoid all unavoidable compromises that presented me with the fantasies of comfort and security. I just like to write lucid prose. That’s my little thing. Why should it be easier for me than it was for Steve Tyler? Anyway, people don’t make literature, architecture, and art – the culture makes those things. We make books, buildings, and objects. We do our crummy little shit, and the culture assigns value to it, and I don’t think the culture needs government help.

How’s that for a Monday morning wake up call? Hickey also has some thoughts for those young or avant-garde writers and artists who feel they are not being given their due mainstream recognition:

The art world I came up into was very much like the jazz world I grew up in, which is to say, a relatively small thing. If you got to go see Miles Davis in a little bar on La Brea, that was great, and you didn’t sit around saying, “There was no coverage in the New York Times! Miles is not going to get any reviews!” You know what I’m saying?

Though Heti’s role in the interview is mostly to play straight (wo)man to Hickey, she does drop some hints about her own artistic future:

Increasingly I’m less interested in writing about fictional people, because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story. I just – I can’t do it.

Uh, tiresome? As Hickey himself says, right at the beginning of the interview, about the creation of art: “if you don’t like it and it’s not easy, you shouldn’t be doing it.”

Surviving the MFA

On the Dooney’s Cafe site, John Harris offers a survey of the career of Canadian author Robert Harlow, who was also the head of UBC’s creative writing program. The piece argues that too much exposure to academia can be bad for your artistic health:

It’s an ongoing experiment that might not be working out. With creative writing – with the New Criticism, even – we writer-profs may have gone too far. To me, Harlow’s career points at the dangers – prolonged artistic adolescence, permanent apprenticeship, and fascination with technique instead of with meaningful subject matter and messages. The result: AirBooks. But Harlow himself is a living illustration that the smart and brave can survive creative writing.

Craig Davidson: still fighting

You might remember a certain boxing match last fall between Craig Davidson, author of The Fighter, and poet Michael Knox. Well, Davidson’s book was just published in the U.S., and this week he fought again in New York City, battling American author Jonathan Ames, and is now the proud owner of an 0-2 record. Davidson’s account of his most recent match is prefaced by an odd and long-winded bout of soul-searching about the criticism he takes for these publicity efforts:

Nothing for me to get bent out of shape about, but I do sometimes. And not because I fared poorly—I didn’t win, I don’t think so, but I aquitted myself as well as my abilities, which are slim as far as they pertain to boxing I’ve discovered, are concerned—but … yeah, I guess just because some people tend to seek to trivialize and downgrade and castigate this particular endeavor, which, from my perspective, is not something I’ve wanted to do but something I’ve felt to have been necessary, strictly-speaking, both for the sake of the book, my publishers, and for the sake of myself 50 years down the road, wherever I may be, so that I can look back with the assurance I gave every shred of myself to this career when I could.

Well, we like it more than his last bout of soul-searching.

Update: Gawker has photos, and it looks like the fight was quite the side show.

We Scream for CanLit

This year’s Scream Literary Festival kicks off in Toronto tonight with a launch at the Gladstone Hotel, featuring poets Dennis Lee, Souvankham Thammavongsa, George Elliott Clarke, and Shapour Shahidi. Now in its 15th year, the festival has grown into a week-long program of events, leading up to next Monday night’s evening-long reading at High Park, featuring a 12-author lineup that includes Sean Dixon, Roy Miki, Priscila Uppal, and Zoe Whittall. Other events between now and then include a panel on science and poetry and another on the state of poetry criticism; a sold-out dinner reading with Christopher Dewdney; a Saturday-night gala at Hugh’s Room; and lots more.

Laying out the welcome mat for author Stephen Harper

In an article posted on workopolis.com, author Susan Swan welcomes Stephen Harper to the world of publishing by offering him a few tips for his upcoming book on the history of hockey.

Swan uses Harper’s “day job” as prime minister to segue into criticisms of the government’s slashing of funding for cultural programs abroad and comments about the difficulties and limitations of obtaining grants and literary prizes.

You mentioned that the research for your book has slowed down since you became our 22nd prime minister. Naturally, I wasn’t surprised, and I thought of suggesting that you try for Ontario’s $1,500 emerging writers’ grant and hire your own researcher. Like all emerging writers in Ontario, you are entitled to apply, although this modest start-up will barely cover a researcher’s fee for any more than a month. Nor will it help much to offset some of your moving costs, Mr. Prime Minister, if, God forbid, you lose your day job in another election.

…

Alas, the funding that once helped Canadian writers reach their world audiences has vanished. Thanks to you slashing $11.8-million from our cultural programs abroad, 30 years of support has gone overnight. Alas again, our cultural diplomats who were once employed to promote our culture abroad now have no way to publicize anything, let alone our writing. And knowing the stock you place in short-term results, these hard-working folks may soon be out of a job altogether.

As covered in Q&Q Omni today, The Writer’s Union of Canada, of which Swan is vice-chair, held a demonstration on Parliament Hill yesterday to draw attention to the financial and cultural contributions the arts make to Canada.

David Sedaris and a million little chuckles

There’s a minor scandal brewing for American funnyman David Sedaris. Last month in a New Republic piece, Alex Heard called out Sedaris on embellishments and fabrications in several of his non-fiction humour pieces. Most of these instances were minor, and Sedaris himself admits to them, citing storyteller’s licence. Still, writes Heard, there’s something wrong here: “No, I’m not equating him with Frey or Blair or Glass…. most of his crimes are petty, making him a nonfiction juvenile delinquent rather than a frogwalk-worthy felon. Still, his work is marketed as nonfiction, and there’s a simple rule associated with that: Don’t make things up.”

Heard goes on to add, “I imagine Sedaris’s defenders would argue that, since it’s just humor, none of this is a big deal.” Which, as Jack Shafer shows in an excellent piece on Slate, is pretty much what happened. After surveying the various defences of Sedaris that media commentators have been quick to offer, Shafer efficiently demolishes the leave-him-alone argument:

Sedaris and company want to erect a penumbra that shields humorists from criticism when they blend fiction into their nonfiction but still insist on calling it nonfiction. The logic behind this is difficult to follow. If writing fiction is the license Sedaris and other nonfiction humorists need to get at “larger truths,” why limit this exemption to humorists? Let reporters covering city hall, war, and business to embellish and exaggerate so they can capture “larger truths,” too.

And as Daniel Radosh notes on his blog, big-time famous writers like Sedaris seem to be granted a little more leeway than their more obscure colleagues. Radosh reminds readers of the case of Rodney Rothman, a young writer who was banned from The New Yorker in disgrace for some embellishments and exaggerations that in retrospect don’t sound any different from the ones Sedaris blithely cops to. (But don’t feel too bad for Rothman – he went on to write a book, and to work on the late, great TV show Undeclared.)

Canadian books communicate real good

In an entry on his Macleans blog from earlier this month, Brian Bethune laments the lapses of grammar in a number of recent Canadian books, using the multiple mistakes found in the Giller-nominated DeNiro’s Game by Rawi Hage as an example. He also references mistakes in Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, and Rodrigo Bascunan and Christian Pearce’s Enter the Babylon System. Proving that the issue is not limited to one poor editing team, Bethune’s three examples are published by different companies: House of Anansi, Penguin Canada, and Random House Canada respectively. (It should be noted that Bethune would have read Wikinomics and Babylon System from advance reading copies, so his criticisms may be premature.)

While Quillblog agrees with Bethune’s assertion that grammar matters, many general readers may just say that they know what the authors mean. The line between the relaxed grammar of conversation and formal grammar of the printed word is blurring. As far as Bethune’s distinction between the sliding scale of grammatical correctness for fiction and non-fiction, Quillblog would like to argue for the emotional impact of non-fiction texts. The power of a book on climate change, AIDS, or American foreign policy, to name a few hot topic examples, may be based on grammatically sound, clearly communicated statistics, but meaning and emotion outweigh any dangling modifier.