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.”

Telling the Canada Council where to go … next

Turning 50 is often the catalyst for reflection, re-examination, and the occasional mid-life crisis. Quillblog hopes the Canada Council for the Arts is nowhere near its mid-life point, but in its 50th anniversary year, the Council is working on a new strategic plan that will guide it from 2008-2011. It has opened the discussion up to the arts community and interested Canadians with a paper posted on its website. It is a government document, so it isn’t exactly scintillating reading, but it does ask important questions such as:

1. What do you believe the Council does best?

2. How important do you think a national arts council is, and why? In what ways would you like to see the Council be a “leader”?

3. Is there anything the Council does that it no longer needs to be doing or that could be done by others? If so, what is it and who should do it?

4. Is there an important environmental trend that should be added to the list in this paper? What is it? Why?

5. What are the two most important things the Council could do to improve its support of the arts?

6. Where should the Council be spending more of its resources? Where should it be spending less? (see Appendix B for facts on the Council’s funding)

Now is your chance to have your say, plead, vent, gripe, whine, or even offer constructive suggestions. The Council is accepting feedback from now until June 15 and will report back in July via the website.

Oprah brings the apocalypse

Oprah has just announced the latest selection for her book club, and it’s kinda weird: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Even at the best of times, McCarthy’s prose is rather lacking in daily-affirmation material, but The Road is especially dark. Here’s how author Denis Lehane describes the book in his Amazon.com review:

Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is.

Now here’s how Oprah describes it on her website:

Start reading Oprah’s newest book club selection! It’s the father-son journey you’ll never forget.

Isn’t this a little like describing The Shining as a sweet family comedy?

Revenge: the healing journey

Elvis Costello once said his work was mainly driven by “guilt and revenge.” That apparently goes for Michael Crichton, too, if you replace “guilt” with “environmental catastrophe denial.” As The New York Times reports, Crichton has apparently used his new novel, Next, to settle a score — in the most ham-fisted manner possible.

Earlier this year, Washington political columnist and Yale grad Michael Crowley wrote a piece in The New Republic criticizing Crichton’s attempts to influence public policy regarding the environment. And now, the newly published Next features a throwaway reference to a character named “Mick Crowley,” who just happens to be a Washington political columnist and Yale grad. Oh, and who also just happens to be awaiting trial for sexually assaulting a two-year-old. Oh, and who’s also, um, poorly endowed.

Well, maybe Crichton feels better now, anyway.

Crowley has written about the “literary hit and run” on the New Republic site, but you need a subscription to read it. The Times also has a recap.

Related links:
Click here for the New York Times piece
Click here for the New Republic piece

Harper’s bid for totalitarianism backfires

What’s the best way to sell a book? Recent events surrounding Mark Tushingham’s book, Hotter Than Hell, suggest that a little controversy can’t hurt. In Other Media linked last week to coverage of the Harper government’s apparent attempt to prevent the author, a scientist with Environment Canada, from speaking publicly about the book, a sci-fi novel set in the near-future in which the effects of global warming have prompted a war between the United States and Canada over water. Released five months ago to poor sales by Saint John firm DreamCatcher Publishing, Hotter Than Hell started flying off the shelves last week when Tushingham was sent a letter from the office of Environment Minister Rona Ambrose, ordering him not to attend an event promoting the book in his hometown of Ottawa.

The CBC reports: “Democratic or not, there’s no denying the ban has been great for business. More than a week after the incident, Margaris is still giving national interviews about it and has ordered a double-sized second printing to keep up with a sudden demand for the book….

Tushingham still isn’t talking about the book, but Margaris says she forgives the government for muzzling her author.

In fact, she says she might even send a thank you card for the publicity, once she catches up with all the back orders for the book.”

Related links:
Click here for the story from CBC.ca

Might is right

In what appears to be an attempt to keep a lid on the pot of global warming, Environment Minister Rona Ambrose has barred Mark Tushingham, a scientist for Environment Canada and the author of the sci-fi novel Hotter Than Hell, from speaking publicly about his book. Set in a proximal future in which global warming has caused certain parts of the world to be uninhabitably hot, the novel features a war between Canada and the U.S. over water resources.

Scheduled to speak in Ottawa about his book and the science behind it, Tushingham was stopped by an order from Ambrose’s office. “He got a directive from the department, cautioning him not to come to this meeting today,” his publisher Elizabeth Margaris of Saint John’s DreamCatcher Publishing tells the CBC. “So I guess we’re being stifled. This is incredible, I’ve never heard of such a thing.” Tushingham has also cancelled some promotional appearances on TV and radio.

The CBC reports: “A spokesperson for Ambrose said the speech was billed as coming from an Environment Canada scientist and even though his book is a work of fiction, he would appear to be speaking in an official capacity.”

Meanwhile, a recent story in The Globe and Mail sees Stephen Harper denying allegations that his government is planning to make cuts to Environment Canada programs. Strangely enough, the interview takes place in the newly revamped, world-class military training facility in Wainwright, Alberta. In the spirit of our government, In Other Media gives you permission to throw your hands up in disgust, or at the very least, to furrow your eyebrows.

Related links:
Click here for the CBC Arts piece
Click here for the Globe and Mail story

In Other Media gets emotional about climate change

Still riding high on a stellar talk delivered last night in Toronto by David Suzuki in which he both predicted imminent environmental collapse unless people change their ways right now and condemned the mainstream media’s failure to deem scientific evidence of this collapse as newsworthy, In Other Media was disconcerted to find that petroleum associations can indeed give prizes for journalism. The donor, in this case, is the American Association of Petroleum Geologists; the recipient is science fiction author Michael Crichton for his book State of Fear, a book that, according to The New York Times, “dismisses global warming as a largely imaginary threat embraced by malignant scientists for their own ends.”

The world’s leading scientists have been sounding climate change alarms for quite some time. In 1992, some 1,700 scientists, including the majority of Nobel laureates in the sciences, issued a document entitled World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity, which predicted disasters on many fronts, many caused by climate change. Malignant Nobel Prize-winners? Well, I guess it could happen.

Here’s what some malignant scientists had to say about Crichton’s award in the Times: “When the book was published in 2004, climate experts condemned it as dangerously divorced from reality…. The book is ‘demonstrably garbage,’ Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford climatologist, said in an interview yesterday. Petroleum geologists may like it, he said, but only because ‘they are ideologically connected to their product, which fills the gas tanks of Hummers.

“Daniel P. Schrag, a geochemist who directs the Harvard University Center for the Environment, called the award ‘a total embarrassment’ that he said ‘reflects the politics of the oil industry and a lack of professionalism’ on the association’s part.

“As for the book, he added, ‘I think it is unfortunate when somebody who has the audience that Crichton has shows such profound ignorance.”

For his part, Larry Nation of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, is actually quoted to have said of Crichton’s book, “It is fiction…. But it has the absolute ring of truth.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story from The New York Times
Click here for the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity

Virtual gold

An Associated Press story by Hillel Italie claims that there may be more money in small and niche publishing than people think. A new study by the Book Industry Study Group in the U.S. claims that smaller publishing companies (as well as self-published authors) are carving themselves a larger slice of the retail pie than was previously believed, mainly through the new sales opportunities available through online bookselling. Margo Baldwin, who runs Chelsea Green Publishers, a company that specializes in environmental and political titles, is unequivocal in her praise of the Internet. “The online retailers have significantly altered the industry,” she says, “because they allow small publishers to have their books alongside the books by the big publishers, at least in a virtual retail slot. Before that, if you couldn’t get into a traditional store, you had no distribution channel.”

Related links:
Read Hillel Italie’s article