So of course when I sit down to write a poem, that's pretty much all that comes out. Even worse: most of the time my poetry winds up being about women I've loved, or almost loved, or who loved me, or might have loved me, whether I want it to be or not. I make a conscious choice to write about, say, a tree, and by the end I'm writing about how ACYL broke my heart. Some of my fiction winds up that way too, but there mostly I know how to excise that nonsense and get on with the job at hand. In verse? Not a chance. It's not that these are inherently bad subjects to write about, it's just that Jesus Christ, man, get a fucking grip already.

I'm also fascinated by structure, so I write a lot of sonnets (well, a lot in terms of a percentage of the poetry I write; I don't write a lot of poetry anymore) and so on. I've even developed my own version based on the Sapphic stanza, because I am in love with Anne Carson's book If Not, Winter. And yet my sonnets don't develop ideas smoothly, if they develop them at all, my haiku don't crystallize, and my imagery doesn't cohere.

It's especially frustrating because years at university taught me how to write, and write well, about poetry, at least in an academic context. (I'm a fiction specialist because I like it more, but I actually wrote more about poetry while a student, mostly because you could say more about fewer words.) So I know, on an intellectual level, what elements tend to go in poems that I really like. I know how ideas are supposed to develop in specific structures. I know about different forms and line, and how spacing and emphasis and feet and so on affect readings. And then I sit down and write juvenile nonsense that is full of clichés.

I also struggle with trying to separate feelings I've had and want to express from the events they are entangled with. That, at least, is a problem I know that better writers than me struggle with, because I've read enough to know that what may resonate for me as a huge betrayal or a huge moment of triumph might just be trite or pointless or dull to you. And that's okay, because we're talking about stuff that's experiential. But as I see it, my job when I write fiction or poetry (as opposed to criticism or blog posts) is not, absolutely not, to validate or legitimize my feelings and experiences to an audience. I mean, on the one hand, fuck those guys, I don't need them to validate anything. And on the other hand, who the hell am I? No audience has any obligation to care about my feelings or experiences. No, my job is to try my best to bridge the gap between what I understand and feel into something they understand and feel. And hopefully there will be some overlap, and we'll understand and feel some of the same things, and that will be awesome. But getting them to understand and feel anything is a victory, really. But because I have a really hard time separating my experiences, feelings, and understanding—because those are different things, even though they have complex relationships with each other—then I can't really untangle them when I try to bridge that gap. So if I'm trying to get across the feeling of betrayal, I really only have the mechanics of a certain kind of experience to rely on, because to me, the feeling and the experience are one and the same.

So here is a terrible poem. I wrote it today, and there are a lot of things I hate about it. It falls into some (but thankfully not all) of the traps I've mentioned above, but because I wrote it, I think there's something in there that needs to get out, and not just onto a page where only I can read it.

Sonnet for a Complicated Friendship

Fortune authorized me to seek you out.
"Go forth," it said, or words to that effect.
I joined OKCupid and set about
Meeting people, being less circumspect.

But of course I didn't find you there. Fate
Has never made us lovers; our doom lies
Elsewhere, in other arms, with other hates
Germinating behind some other eyes.

We met at a company party. Your
Almost-drunk chatter about anal sex
May have been defensive, may have been for
Fun, but all I saw was the reflex,

A vulnerability too long borne.
You saw, too, where I was broken and worn.

I've taken on a new job in northern Saskatchewan, where I will potentially be without regular Internet access three weeks out of every month, for non-business related things, anyway. The job is set to last about two years, so vestige.org will be quiet for most of that time. I'm going to try and update once a month or so, mostly with quick personal notes or nature photos and stuff (there will be lots of nature to photograph), just to let everyone know I'm alive and still reading, but the silence that has become usual around these parts is probably going to continue.

The job is a good opportunity, for a whole bunch of reasons, but some things will have to go by the board to make it work. This is one of them. I'm not shutting down, but expect an extended hiatus.

You know how every Philip K. Dick book blows your mind? If you watch some of the filmed version of his work, like Minority Report or that trippy rotoscoped take on A Scanner Darkly you would be forgiven for imagining Dick's work as pulpy and unrefined, accompanied by the slightly paranoid low-rent philosophy that comes with its own sour-smelling cloud of smoke and a really bad case of the munchies. And there really is that element to it. But Dick is also probably the most phenomenologically sophisticated writer since Proust (no, really), and the fact that he wrote slapdash pulp like Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said and straight up crunchy, acid-trip weirdness like VALIS in addition to triumphs like The Man in the High Castle does nothing to change that. There is a moment in every Dick novel—every last one—where it backs your brain into a corner and says "I'm just going to stand here while you freak the fuck out. Don't worry, it's a perfectly normal response. Let me know when you're finished and then we can talk about it." If you walk away from a Dick novel without having had that experience, I'm pretty sure you did something wrong, or your copy is broken or whatever, because that's sort of the whole point of them.

Anyway, I'm not even 150 pages into Ryan Boudinot's Blueprints of the Afterlife and I've already had that experience a couple times. It's that kind of book. I'm not even sure what it's about yet, to be honest. There's a lot of satire, and a lot more humour in it than Dick could ever manage (not that I blame him, given that he was pretty much the platonic ideal of the divinely inspired genius who also happens to be a complete nutjob). There are excellent takedowns of mass media and corporate boosterism for their very own hoi polloi (by which I mean Hotel and Restaurant Management Olympics for dishwashers like Woo-jin from the opening chapter, not the sitcom-grade retreats for misunderstood actuarials who have a two-car in the 'burbs and a Xanax habit). There are some genuinely interesting ideas about urban design, biotech and bioethics, and some next-level weirdness that masquerades as the supernatural but that I'm pretty sure is actually an application of a pretty hardcore principal of particle physics and how it shapes reality and what that means for the limits of our perception. I'm seriously not even halfway through the book, and that's all in there, and it's all blowing my grey matter out the back of my skull.

It also reminds me of Andrew Kaufmans' Waterproof Bible, only without the gentle optimism, or any of William Gibson's pre-Pattern Recognition novels, without the rigid application of realism (by which I mean the rules of Gibson's reality are pretty clear, and he doesn't break them; I'm not sure either could be said about Boudinot).

So yeah, my #FridayReads is Blueprints of the Afterlife, by Ryan Boudinot.

I'm also not a huge fan of the pseudo-chatty prose style (reminiscent of what I have called the "Canadian Indie Style" in the past, with shades Jim Munroe and of course Cory Doctorow, who is thanked in the acknowledgements); it always winds up feeling like a first draft, unfinished. And the 'Heathen' nickname got under my skin. It struck me as the sort of nickname someone who desperately wants to be cool would give themselves, and the fact that it caught on so readily with nearly all the other characters (despite the lady-protests-too-much reaction from Heather, the character it was applied to) makes me think the reader was supposed to think it was cool too, rather than what it was (obvious, clumsy, and so on-the-nose it hurts).

The premise, of the blog that takes on a life of its own, was interesting, and Channer got a lot of the little details right. But she also missed one of the cardinal rules of using that sort of device: if you're going to include art/poetry/etc that's meant to inspire, or be beautiful, or what have you, you need to either to be really goddamn good at pulling that sort of thing off yourself, or you need to hang a lampshade on it. The blog posts were occasionally clever, but usually too generic to be convincing, and there were no lampshades in sight.

Despite those problems, the characters were emotionally real, if a little melodramatic at times, and easy to care about. The things I mentioned above just made it impossible for me to get lost in it, and I wound up reading it with my 'editor' and 'critic' hats on, rather than just my 'reader' hat, which is how I prefer to read books I'm not actually being paid to write about.

The unnamed narrator of Lockpick is a pretty intense guy. Like all of us, he's got expectations about the world, about what he thinks it is and what it should be, but none of them match up to what it really is, in ways that are both good and bad, and he seems to be tearing himself apart trying to figure out who he is and how he fits into it all. He's got a lot of rage and fear built up inside him, and a lot of the tools he's turned to help him understand himself aren't necessarily equipped to do that in the way he thinks they are. He's right, for example, that "tolerant" can be a profoundly condescending word, and that us straight folks can be completely oblivious about our privilege, but the theoretical language he's learned to talk about these problems only provides, er, problematic rules for dealing with those issues, alternating between being vague and crunchy on the one hand, and absolutist on the other. (It was a fun coincidence that a great little parody site called Is This Feminist? emerged as I was reading Lockpick, because it so expertly satirized what happens when a set of tools developed to open up the world to new ways of seeing becomes, at certain times and under certain circumstances, a rigid ideology all its own.)

What he really needs is a way to understand himself, to connect with who he is so he can figure out who he wants to be. But how can you figure that out if all the touchstones we've ever known are just constructs? That's actually been one of the primary arguments against the whole collection of isms that make up postmodernism—when taken to their logical extreme, so many of them have the potential to devolve into nihilism, because they refuse to admit there's any reality at all that we can agree upon. One of the central questions he keeps coming back to, is: if gender is just a construct, why isn't he attracted to women? Look, I'm a straight white male, the Easy Mode of life, to paraphrase John Scalzi, but does that mean I understand everything about who I am or what I like or whatever language you want to use to talk about identity and sexuality? Fuck no. That shit is slippery.

I'm losing track of what I want to say. Let's try this again.

The blurbs on the back of the book are right: there's a lot of anger and fear and tenderness and a tremendous amount of humour in Lockpick, but at its heart I see sets of contradictory ideas spinning around each other throwing off sparks. I see the joy of community conflicting with the limitations of relying on one to stabilize your identity. I see the conflict between understanding social constructs and how they shape (or warp) us, seeing the logic in basing both social theory and one's political stance on that knowledge, and wanting to touch and understand something real and unencumbered by all that baggage—and even the need for it—deep at the core of one's self. And yet how that knowledge forces you to reject that such a thing can even exist. I see a character feeling trapped by things he can't control and reaching out for things he can, only to find that most of those things are outside his control as well, not really understanding the best most of us ever get to do is pretend, for a little while, like we have some. In a lot of ways I see Lockpick as a sister text to Nelly Arcan's amazing Exit.

Joey told me that he likes We All Got It Coming better than Lockpick (maybe just because he wrote it more recently), and at first I was ready to agree with him. Lockpick is far more bold and aggressive, and funnier, too, but in We All Got It Coming it feels like Comeau has a few more things figured out about how to do this whole novel thing. His writing is less brash, but more confident. He will, to be metaphorical for a moment, slap you across the face with his cock if he thinks it's necessary, but he's no longer doing it just because he can. Arthur, the narrator of the second book, doesn't have all his shit together either, but he hasn't let it make him manic and desperate. He's going to go through some bad shit because of it, and he's not always going to know what to do when it happens, but he's not going to punch a stranger in the stomach because of an ideology he hasn't fully assimilated or slash someone's tires because he's afraid of connecting with someone who is shattering his expectations. Arthur is less fun than the unnamed narrator in Lockpick, but he's more complex, and an easier narrator to spend time with. I understand and even identify with the man with no name, but half the time I just wanted to get the hell away from him. He and I are different in so many ways, but the darkness and rage in him looks and awful lot like the darkness and rage in me. And I don't imagine I'm the only reader to feel that.

Like the blurb from Maximum Rocknroll says on the back, you can put this on the Gay Literature shelf if building canons is your thing, and it has certainly earned a pretty solid spot there, but it belongs on a whole bunch of other shelves too, and I damn well better see copies on those shelves the next time I go to check.

But now this: Dan Harmon is no longer going to be Community's showrunner. I never even bothered to learn his actual title. It's probably Executive Producer; it usually is with these things. The announcement says he will be staying on as a Consulting Producer, which appears to be network code for being paid to stay home and keep his mouth shut.

Given how integral Harmon is to Community—even people who acknowledge that he's a poor manager or otherwise have conflicts with him call him the "soul" of the show—it's hard to imagine the show maintaining its unique spirit and consistently high levels of quality and innovation without him at the helm. Despite the new showrunners coming on board (David Guarascio and Moses Port) having a history of doing reasonably good work, none of that work has been on the same level as Harmon's on Community, and it's easy to imagine how this could actually turn out worse than if they'd simply canceled the show, especially given how strong the Season 3 finale turned out to be.

The rumour right now seems to be that Sony was responsible for Harmon leaving, refusing to renew his contract and signing on the new showrunners without even so much as telling him. It may not be true, but given how much of a clusterfuck Sony has become as a company generally, it wouldn't be at all surprising, and either way it stinks of bad faith.

That's not to say that Harmon is a saint in all this, but he's produced the finest thirty minute comedy American television has seen in more than a decade, more despite Sony's involvement rather than because of it. The Russo brothers are gone, and so are Neil Goldman and Garrett Donovan (off to run their own show), and just tonight writer/producer Chris McKenna, responsible for some of the best writing of the season, has announced that he's leaving as well. McKenna has struck a deal with Universal, but Todd VanDerWerff (in the comments section of tonight's AV Club article) thinks there's a good chance he's leaving in solidarity with Harmon.

There are jokes about this being the Darkest Timeline, and I've already heard talk of the fanbase rallying around Harmon to get him reinstated. The thing is, none of that's going to work. Sony and NBC have signed contracts, things are being arranged, and people's jobs are on the line. Not just Harmon's and Guarascio's and Port's, or even the cast's, but all those men and women behind the scenes who make the lights come on and the sets look nice and the jokes funny. Their families need them to have jobs, and as much as I believe Harmon is essential to seeing Community through its natural run (despite retweeting #sixseasonsandamovie a billion times, I think the show really only has four good years in it), I don't see how fan activism will result in a positive outcome. Even if we could somehow get Harmon his job back, the bridges it would burn for him and some of the others involved could poison the well for them for years. Or maybe even permanently.

At this point I don't really know what to think. I'm emotional in a way I never expected I would be over a television series. I plan to spend some of the summer writing about the three amazing seasons we already have, and frankly I need time to think, and more information, before I make any serious predictions about what's in store for Season 4. But right now I see almost no reason for optimism

Section 1.0: Introduction

In this essay I will explore the role of biographemes in A.S. Byatt's novel The Biographer's Tale. The novel is narrated by a frustrated graduate student, named Phineas G. Nanson, who gives up the study of literature in a post-modern context to write the biography of Scholes Destry-Scholes, himself a fictional biographer. Nanson learns that Destry-Scholes, as well as having written the biography of the fictional Sir Elmer Bole, had also begun to write biographies (or at least compile notes toward biographies) of Henrik Ibsen, a famous playwright; Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin and a remarkable scientist in his own right; and Carl Linnaeus, father of modern taxonomy. Many of the notes unearthed by Nanson are biographemes; some are letters transcribed onto note cards (the transcriptions quoted in full within the text of the novel), others are places, and there are still more biographemes peppered throughout the novel. This essay will deal primarily with Destry-Scholes' three famous subjects, the passages from letters Nanson unearths in Destry-Scholes' notes, and at least one forged passage from an authentic biographematic essay. The biographemes offer at least two distinct readings of the novel, a realist¹ reading, and a post-structuralist reading. The biographemes also create a kind of ethical tension in the novel. I will discuss how the biographemes facilitate each of the two readings, and I will also discuss some of the ethical implications of Byatt's use of biographemes.

Linda Hutcheon defines "biographemes," a term coined by Roland Barthes, as "units of biography and history" (85), and to that I would add the implied phrase, "within a text," since in both the context of Hutcheon's book and my own study of A.S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale, biographemes appear within literary texts. In order for a "unit" to be a biographeme, it must appear not only in a literary work, but must have a corresponding unit in history, or in contemporary reality. The word "units" is rather vague; it includes, but is not limited to, the following: the names of real people, alive or dead, famous or otherwise; real place names; and most importantly, real documents (in whole or in part) and artifacts.

The Biographer's Tale abounds with biographemes. Some of the most obvious are the names of Francis Galton², Henrik Ibsen³, Charles Darwin⁴ and Carl Linnaeus⁵. All four of them are historical people with varying degrees of fame. There is no question that these four were real people. As such Galton, Ibsen, and Linnaeus qualify as biographemes, as do their works, some of which are mentioned, and occasionally quoted from or drawn on, in the novel.

There are also other, less obvious biographemes present in the text. Letters to the periodical Nature, for example, are cited. The first, from Charles Darwin, was published on April 27^th, 1871, and appears almost in its entirety on pages 158 through 160 of The Biographer's Tale. A second letter, this time from Francis Galton, was originally published on May 4^th, 1871. Byatt quotes from it on pages 160 and 161 of her novel. The letters are authentic, and are therefore also biographemes. A comparison of copies of the original letters to those found in The Biographer's Tale reveals that Byatt did not quote either letter in full, but that they do exist outside the novel.

Finally, we have a rather interesting case. Byatt cites passages from an essay called "Free-Will—Observations and Inferences" from an 1884 issue of Mind. The essay is the work of Francis Galton, and does, in fact, exist. The article then qualifies as a biographeme. What makes this case interesting is that while the article itself exists, the passage that Byatt quotes does not, at least not in that essay. Since I have been unable to verify the existence of such a passage independent of the novel, I cannot consider the passage itself a biographeme. The forged passage from the essay, and the essay biographeme itself represent possibly the clearest example of biographemes tying the novel to the reader's world in a convincing way. I will explore the implications of this passage in greater detail later in the essay.

The biographemes play a pivotal role in The Biographer's Tale, and actually a dual, paradoxical role. First, they provide Byatt with an effective way to tie the novel to real life. In chapter two of his book On Literature, J. Hillis Miller suggests that ties to reality are a fundamental feature of literary works (24-45). Such ties can also increase the illusion of realism. Critics like Christien Franken⁶ and Kathleen Coyne Kelly⁷ have in their own work identified the quest for a kind of realism as one of the driving forces behind Byatt's work.

The second role could be best described as a post-modern, or perhaps post-structuralist role. The biographemes, by being incomplete, potentially fake, and otherwise fragmented, raise questions of how narratives, particularly historical narratives, and identities, are constructed. Both Franken and Kelly have also found in Byatt's work a need to explore such issues, creating a kind of tension. The biographemes act as agents for both of the potentially conflicting ideologies of realism and post-structuralism. By acting as agents for both ideologies, the biographemes relieve much of the tension in The Biographer's Tale, and allow conflicting readings to exist side by side.

Other questions are raised by these "units of history," which are not related to the formal concerns of narrative. They are questions of ethics; should Byatt include these dead men and their works in her fiction? The question cannot be ignored, as it raises the issue of how identities are formed and valued. Many critics, Franken and Kelly included, do not address the issue at all however, suggesting, just as Guy Gavriel Kay⁸ does, that such practices are taken for granted. The ethical dilemma involved, a hot topic for Kay and seemingly a moot point for Franken and others, is another area of tension in Byatt's novel. By using biographemes in the way she does (most of the time very clearly delineating what is real and what is not), Byatt very nearly side steps the question of how ethical it is to use biographemes.

Section 2.0: The Biographeme as a Realist Device

Before I discuss how biographemes lend themselves to a traditional realist reading of The Biographer's Tale, I should give a brief explanation of what I mean when I use the term "realism." Realism, in the literary context, is literature connected with life and reality (or perhaps I should say what most of us would, for reasons of practicality, agree to call reality) in obvious, and more importantly coherent, ways. J. Hillis Miller has, in his book On Literature, suggested that all literary works are "virtual realities," (33) and the reader "become[s] a disembodied observer within that reality" (24), a statement I think holds true especially for realist fiction. It may not be literally true that the reader enters another world, but the metaphor is evocative enough to be useful. The metaphor implies that the work in question must be coherent and recognizable enough for the reader to understand what is being described as a world.

Byatt has always been interested in realism as a literary form. In the introductory essay from On Histories and Stories she wrote that "[I] described myself in the early days as a "self-conscious realist"" (4). She is not just interested in realism by itself, however. She is interested in tradition as well. She comments on her interest in tradition in the same passage quoted from above. She writes:

I found myself wanting to write tales and stories, having described myself in the early days as a 'self-conscious realist,' and slowly came to see that the alternative tradition of the literary tale, or fairy tale, and the related anecdote was on of the things that made it possible to talk meaningfully about European literature. (Histories 4)

Byatt obviously sees herself as part of a tradition, even if only peripherally. Her reference to the "alternative tradition" of the fairy tale suggests that it is a rather old tradition. There is a possibility, based on the above quotation, that she sees herself as part of a greater European literary tradition, but critics such as Christien Franken have other ideas, linking her to the influential English critic F.R. Leavis⁹.

F.R. Leavis appears regularly in criticism of Byatt's work, in her own On Histories and Stories as well as in an interview with her conducted by Philip Hensher for The Paris Review. Franken and other critics see Byatt's work as connected to the tradition represented by F.R. Leavis. Franken writes:

Like Leavis she thinks that Literature is a way of living which contains more life, more thoughts and feelings, than a life spent not reading. This collapse of life into literature may seem escapist, exempting one from the trouble of everyday life. In A.S. Byatt's critical work, however, it has exactly the opposite effect. (10)

On the surface this may seem like a comment on Byatt's beliefs about how to live a meaningful life rather than how she sees her own work, but the point Franken makes is that in the Leavisite tradition there is no such separation. She acknowledges, according to Franken, that her work is in some respects linked to her life. She is looking for a mode of writing stable enough to have a fulfilling and emotional impact on her life. It is impossible to know for certain what sort of impact, but in Philip Hensher's interview for The Paris Review, Byatt implies that some of her writing may be therapeutic in nature. In the interview she talks about how the death of her son Charles affected her writing, and about avoiding certain subjects as a result. She says,

After Charles's death, I also came slowly to value comedy, because I began to see that tragedy and terror are things for the young, to whom nothing dreadful has happened, that there are things that are almost unwriteable [...]. I suddenly thought, Why the hell not have happy endings? Everybody knows they're artificial. Why not have this pleasure, as one has the pleasure of rhyme, as one has the pleasure of color? Once I'd worked through Still Life it took me away from heavy subjects and heavy events. My novels know that these things happen. (72-73)

Byatt's realization of the value of comedy as a literary form, and her decision to include it, particularly in the form of the happy ending, seems a way of working through grief and other emotions that came with the death of her son. Byatt changed her perspective on her own literary production as the result of a personal tragedy; as such her life and her literature are linked. Byatt's comments on the artificiality of happy endings are also interesting. Happy endings may indeed be artificial, but they are also fairly coherent and recognizable (in the interview she gives William Shakespeare and Jane Austen as examples (73)), and are thus consistent with my definition of realism.

Biographemes, which can be, and are, used to reinforce the illusion of realism, are also seen as symptomatic of the changing way fiction writers as a whole link reality and fiction. Fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay quotes Jonathan Dee on the practice of using biographemes, specifically using real historical people as characters, in his essay, "Privacy and the Ethics of Literature." He explains that, "Dee describes the phenomenon as a change in the way "fiction writers imagine their relation to the world"" (51). It is through their work that writers "imagine their relation to the world," and as a result their work must be connected on some level with that world. Such a connection is certainly part of the definition of realism I proposed above. The connection also fits with Byatt's own changing interests as a realist writer, such as her movement away from tragedy because of her son's death, and her concurrent interest in tradition.

Section 2.1: Realism and Specific Biographemes

Now that Byatt's predilection for realism has been explored, as well as the role of biographemes in realism, I can begin to discuss the specific biographemes found in The Biographer's Tale. I will begin with some of the more obvious biographemes and how they tie the novel to the realist tradition. The best place to start would be with the names mentioned several pages above, Linnaeus, Galton, and Ibsen. These names are biographemes in the most obvious sense imaginable, being simply the names of historical figures, as explained in the introductory section. Their names appear quite regularly through approximately the last two-thirds of the novel,¹⁰ so I will not point to any specific instances, but it is important to note why they are there. Byatt juxtaposes real figures alongside the fictional Sir Elmer Bole as subjects for the work of her fictional biographer, Scholes Destry-Scholes. By doing so she situates her fictional characters, most importantly Destry-Scholes, and her narrator, Nanson, in a world that contains (or rather, contained) the same figures as the world the reader lives in.

Next I'd like to deal with the letters to Nature. The letters, transcribed, presumably onto file cards, by Scholes Destry-Scholes, appear between pages 158 and 161 of The Biographer's Tale, and represent, to Byatt's narrator at least, a significant find, since they point out the direction Destry-Scholes was planning to take with his unfinished work. They are also significant because Nanson was searching for something of Destry-Scholes' life in his work, and there is a third card (unfortunately for Nanson, not written by Destry-Scholes, but rather by the very real Karl Pearson¹¹) which comments on the cards containing the transcribed letters. Nanson, thinking of Destry-Scholes hard at work, tells the reader, "I like to think that he had stopped to record his admiration for his subject and to state his sense of "a biographer's duty"" (Biographer 163). Byatt's frustration with post-structuralist theory and her desire for a mode of writing connected with life are represented through Nanson's own frustrations. Early on in the novel Nanson wants to embrace the world of "things" (Biographer 2) rather than the world of theory. He sarcastically claims that postmodern theorists do not live in the same world he does. Byatt writes, "I had avoided the trap of talking about "reality" and "unreality" for I knew very well that postmodernist literary theory could be described as a reality. People lived in it" (4). Postmodernism is not connected with Nanson's life the way that he wants his work to be. He wants things. Critic Kathleen Coyne Kelly writes that, "we have no absolute way of determining when the narrator is expressing an opinion that Byatt expects us to attribute to herself" (90). That is true, but I do not think it would be too great a leap to attribute Nanson's frustration to Byatt. Nanson's resistance to post-modern thought appears several times in the novel. Later in The Biographer's Tale Nanson expresses a more specific dislike of post-modern theory. Byatt writes,

Feminism was one of the secondary reasons I had given up post-structuralist theory. There is an (almost) irresistible urge to distort or misrepresent or ignore or overemphasize facts and items of information, in feminist theory. It is also not really possible to say so. (121)

If Byatt and Nanson are both in search of ties to life in their work, the letters, as biographemes, are exactly what they need. They are real, and they are things. On April 27^th, 1871 a periodical called Nature published a letter from Charles Darwin, and Nanson finds a slightly abridged copy among Destry-Scholes' things. Also, on May 4^th of the same year, Nature published a letter from Francis Galton, and Nanson finds a similarly abridged copy of this letter. Both letters are real; copies, obtained via microfilm, sit on my desk as I type this. The tie to life exists. It exists for Nanson, even if it wasn't through Destry-Scholes (although that is somewhat appropriate, since Destry-Scholes is fictional), and it exists for Byatt, and the reader as well. Interested parties could easily obtain copies of the letters. Their existence forges a link between our world and the world of the novel, and heightens the illusion of realism.

Section 2.2: The Forged Biographeme

Before I conclude my exploration of biographemes and the realist aspect of The Biographer's Tale, there is one biographeme to be examined that is especially interesting, as it is at the same time both more complicated and more clear in its action than any of the others. On page 231 of The Biographer's Tale, Byatt claims to cite a passage from one of Francis Galton's Mind essays on one of Destry-Scholes' file cards. The essay exists. It is called "Free-Will—Observations and Inferences," and was indeed published in Volume IX of Mind, pages 406-13, in 1884. The citation is a biographeme, but the passage is not. It does not appear anywhere in the essay. This particular forged passage alongside an authentic biographeme is perhaps the clearest example of how biographemes, by tying a work to the world of the reader, can heighten the effect of realist fiction. The passage is not obviously a fake, and during my research I was surprised to learn that it was, particularly given that Nanson not only finds, in his own research, that the passage is real, but also finds a reference to it in Pearson's work. Byatt writes,

Destry-Scholes can never have imagined me when he left this amorphous dossier. I suppose the only reader he can have imagined was himself, and he must have had a photographic memory, quite extraordinarily well-trained, to know his way around all this. I was quite pleased with my running-down, in indexes, of the previous citation, which took time. I then found that I could have found it in Pearson [...]. (231)

Most readers would have taken Byatt at her word, given that the essay was cited so precisely, and that so many other authentic biographemes appear elsewhere in the novel. There are at least four on the first page alone. So skillful was fiction blended with biographemes that I too believed the passage on the file card to be real, a legitimate biographeme. It was only through a thorough investigation that I found out the truth, and few readers would do the necessary archival research to determine the passage's authenticity.

Section 2.3: Concluding Remarks on Realism

There are other reasons, some only peripherally related to biographemes, why The Biographer's Tale might be read as a realist novel, and some of them need to be examined. First and foremost, it is fairly linear. It has a beginning, middle, and end, with a consistent narrator, Phineas G. Nanson, throughout. More importantly, there are hints, particularly at the beginning, that the novel is to be read as a realist work. Between virtual lists of biographemes, when Nanson first begins to read Destry-Scholes' biography of the fictional Sir Elmer Bole, the reader gets a rather significant clue. Nanson tells the reader,

[...] as I progressed, the reading became compulsive, the mental dominance of both Bole and Destry-Scholes more and more complete. I do not pretend to have discovered even a quarter of the riches of that great book on that first gulping and greedy reading. Destry-Scholes had, among all the others, the primitive virtue of telling a rattling good yarn, and I was hooked. And he had that other primitive virtue, the capacity to make up a world in every corner of which his reader would wish to linger, to look, to learn. (8)

Nanson and A.S. Byatt could, from Destry-Scholes' book, both get what they want: "things," and a realist narrative linked to life and the world, or at the very least one of J. Hillis Miller's "virtual realities" (Miller 33). Destry-Scholes' work doesn't exist, but Byatt's does, and the passage above is a signal to the reader that he will find all of those things in The Biographer's Tale.

Section 3.0: The Post-Structuralist Biographeme

A.S. Byatt is not just concerned with realism, or with tradition. She is also an author of her time, and as much as she may resist post-structural ideas, she cannot escape them. In The Biographer's Tale she also takes advantage of biographemes to explore post-structuralist ideas such as the fragmentation of knowledge, the fragmented nature of subjectivity, and the way in which narratives are constructed. That Byatt would be interested in both post-structuralism as well as realism might seem like a paradox, and it is. It is also a source of tension in Byatt's work, as Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Christien Franken have both noted, although Franken refers to the tension as "feminist ambivalence," (Franken 20), a label with which I do not agree. As I wrote above, I do not believe it unreasonable to attribute Nanson's hostility toward feminism to Byatt herself, particularly since her narrator, and most of the important supporting characters, are all male.

Byatt has expressed an interest in post-structuralist thought in much the same way as she expressed an interest in ideas of tradition and realism. Philip Hensher, in The Paris Review, quotes her as saying,

I don't know of a system that I believe in. I do feel a compulsion to respect people who build systems, because it's obviously a human thing. I don't see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do. They think it's a form of sanity in an insane world, but I'm not sure it is. [...] The one thing I really don't like is narcissism. I don't like writers sitting there admiring themselves for being so clever. I suppose what one ought to think about is what one does love in postmodernism. If you asked me what I wished I'd written, I would say Borges's Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. That is a completely pointless postmodernist structure of total beauty which nevertheless has a profound point. (69)

Most of this seems to be about what Byatt doesn't like such as narcissism, and pointless and excessive joking. It is interesting that it is a "completely pointless postmodernist structure" in which she admires the beauty; post-structuralist play is not what she is rebelling against, but rather the way in which such play is often approached, and the extremes to which it is taken. Borges' "Pierre Menard" may seem extreme to some, given that in the story Borges ruminates on how much of a work is the result of the author, how much is a result of society, and so on, but the techniques are fairly straightforward; a reader who is not careful may mistake it for a work of non-fiction. A more extreme work might be Saul Steinberg's "Country Noises," in which the noises one hears in the countryside are rendered through a combination of labels and typographic ornaments. Such pieces, while interesting on many levels, might be considered "excessive joking." The two words near the end of Byatt's comments, "total beauty," speak volumes. What Byatt does seem to like is beauty. Not only is she interested in beauty; the work must have a point, a purpose beyond play. Byatt is not specific about what that "point" might be, but that she requires one at all indicates that her interest in post-structuralist ideas is not as strong as her interest in realism.

Perhaps the most obvious example of biographemes playing a post-structuralist role appears when Nanson begins to meditate on his relationship with his subject, Destry-Scholes, and the artifacts he has found. Byatt writes,

There was also the question, beyond the shoebox, of the three fictive fragments of biography, where the biographer had quite deliberately woven his own lies and inventions into the dense texture of collected facts. Was this a wry comment on the hopeless nature of the project of biographical accuracy, or was it just a wild and whimsical kicking-over of the traces? I seemed to understand that the imaginary narrative has sprung out of the scholarly one, and that the compulsion to invent was in some way related to my own sense that in constructing this narrative I have had to insert facts about myself, [...] my feelings, and now my interpretations. [...]. They slipped in and out of focus, on a multiplicity of scales, from the minute to the vast. [...]. Was the composite Destry-Scholes? Was it, since I had had to arrange and rearrange, Phineas G. Nanson? (Biographer 236-237)

This is an extremely post-structuralist revelation, but it is here combined with a more Leavisite mode—Nanson is not simply meditating, he is having an epiphany. He is realizing that his own life is part of a text, and that it shapes the story he is trying to construct of Destry-Scholes, blurring the boundaries between the two identities. Nanson has come to realize that everything he thinks he knows about Destry-Scholes comes from himself and his perspective; this is the very core of many post-structuralist modes (including the feminist mode which Nanson despises, since it is based on the politics of identity). But the passage also opens up speculation about how much of The Biographer's Tale is actually about Byatt herself. I think that much of Nanson's own concerns with literary theory, and with projecting his life onto Destry-Scholes, is in fact Byatt projecting her own anxieties on to Nanson. Kathleen Coyne Kelly calls Byatt's novels "both autobiographical and not at the same time" (Kelly 15). That is an excellent way to describe them. It is impossible determine for certain how much of Nanson is Byatt any more than Nanson can assess how accurately the information he uncovers represents Destry-Scholes. There is ultimately no solution to this problem. Even asking Byatt herself would only reveal so much. She may be unwilling, and even more likely, unable, to reveal all the information necessary. No matter how much information is available, it is impossible to paint an accurate picture of a human being, and even more difficult to determine how much of that individual is transferred to her art.

Along the same lines, it is interesting to note that Nanson ties in his autobiographical narrative with his "need to invent" (Biographer 237). It raises questions about the formation of Nanson's identity. He is always second-guessing himself and his style (e.g. "Can I perpetrate a phrase like that?" (Biographer 250)), and in my first reading I found it added to his credibility, but upon rereading the novel I find it does quite the opposite. It has become increasingly difficult to trust Nanson, not as a narrator who is out to trick the reader, but as one who, by deliberately drawing attention to what he perceives as inadequacies in his style, also draws attention to the fact that he is constructing a narrative out of fragments, just as he's trying to construct Destry-Scholes' narrative out of fragments. The only real difference is that Nanson is able to supply more fragments from his own story than from Destry-Scholes' story, and can arrange them in a way that makes a kind of sense. Byatt is drawing our attention to the fact that a narrative is simply the best arrangement of the right number of facts. That is not only the case for biography, but also for Byatt's novels. As readers we cannot trust Nanson as a narrator because he is picking and choosing what he tells us, and we cannot trust Byatt for exactly the same reason.

None of the biographemes in the novel are complete, placing an emphasis on Nanson's inability as a human being to know anything for sure, an idea now accepted by scholarship, but still resisted by some. Byatt writes,

"Facts," said Ormerod Goode. "Facts." He meditated. "The richness," he said, "the surprise, the shining solidity of a world full of glittering facts like planets in an empty heaven, declaring here is matter, and there is vacancy—every established fact illuminates the world. True scholarship once aspired to add its modest light to that illumination. To clear a few cobwebs. No more." (Biographer 4)

There is sadness in the tone of this passage, and a certain sense of loss, but it is not a false sense of loss, as The Biographer's Tale illustrates. Goode (Nanson's advisor) cannot even keep a grip on his metaphor. It falls apart, beginning with solid planets and ending with incorporeal light. Despite all the biographemes, and all the supposed facts discovered about Scholes Destry-Scholes, the world is not illuminated, and no cobwebs are cleared. No matter how much Nanson or the reader knows, there will always be more to know before a complete picture will emerge. Even Nanson himself sees the passage quoted above from pages 236-237 of The Biographer's Tale as possibly "a comment on the hopeless nature of the project of biographical accuracy" (236).

Here the letters from Nature are a wonderful example. The first letter, from Charles Darwin, published on April 27^th, 1871, is quoted very nearly in full (Biographer 158-160), but is also almost completely without context. In order for the contents of the letter to be properly understood, the reader must first be familiar with "a paper, read March 30^th, 1871, before the Royal Society" (Biographer 158), the contents of which are the reason for Darwin writing the letter to begin with. The paper deals with Galton's experiments on blood transfusions between rabbits; he was trying to determine how Pangenesis (the development of an animal's characteristics through the transmission of "gemmules," an idea similar to modern knowledge about DNA) works (Biographer 158-161). It is also not clear what use Destry-Scholes planned on making of the letter. Another biographeme, quoted (although not in full) adds more to the story. Galton's response, published in Nature on May 4^th of 1871 (Biographer 160-161), sheds some light on the paper Darwin made reference to, but again does not tell the whole story, nor does it, in itself, clear away the cobwebs around what use Destry-Scholes might make of those letters.

Section 4.0: Ethics and Biographemes

Questions of ethics are of particular importance in The Biographer's Tale. The novel is rife with questions about how far a biographer can and should go in terms of taking liberties with narrative, and less directly (but more importantly), how far an author can and should go when using biographemes.

Author Guy Gavriel Kay believes that many authors go much too far using biographemes, although he does not use the term. In the spring 2001 issue of Queen's Quarterly, Kay's essay, "Privacy and the Ethics of Literature" appeared. In the essay Kay discusses the use of a specific kind of biographeme, real people, in literary works. Kay comes right to the point:

Here's the Calgary Herald reviewing Johnson's Colony: "Johnson's story weaves fact and fiction, and while I have no idea how factual the novel is, I don't care. It's a hell of a good read." The New York Times on Oates' Blonde: "If a novel can't deliver Monroe's beauty ... it can, better than any film, give us her interior world."

Might we pause to consider these remarks? Shouldn't we care what is real and what is made up? And shouldn't we ask what has happened when someone suggests that a novel gives us the inner world of a real person? This is nonsense, and it is pervasive. (54)

Guy Gavriel Kay does not believe that authors should take liberties with real people. Kay sees it both as misrepresentation, and an invasion of privacy based on a sense of entitlement. He writes,

what we can see in all of these works—and countless inferior ones—is an expanded perception of entitlement [...]. We writers like to wrap ourselves in the cloak of liberty, defenders of free speech and the individual voice against the tyranny of state or fashion. What happens when we shift the mental perspective—as I suggest that we do—and consider ourselves as tools of tyrant fashion, instruments against individuals, not defenders of them. This, I begin to suspect, is what might be happening when so many important writers embrace this co-opting of real lives. Instead of challenging or querying, those who anchor their fictions in the lives of the real may be subscribing to the erosion of the private that I see as a defining component of our society. (54-5)

That this argument comes from a fantasy author is perhaps significant. As J. Hillis Miller suggested, anchoring fiction, and particularly realist fiction, to life is an important part of creating a stable, coherent world for the reader. It is not readily apparent where, even for Kay, the line should be drawn between what is acceptable use of biographemes, and what is not. Kay obviously has difficulty with the thought of using real people as the basis for fiction, but even he recognizes that restricting fiction's access to history would hamstring it. He is simply calling for perhaps a more reverent approach to it. He writes,

Do we want to forbid such speech and writing? Not, I trust and hope, beyond the present laws of libel, hate literature, and other legal remedies, and perhaps not even as far as we currently go. But should we not reflect carefully upon what we might be losing when these fictions—and the worldview that underlies them—become normative? (53)

Caution in such matters is an excellent approach; there is no easy answer to any of the ethical questions, posed either by Kay, or in The Biographer's Tale. I had the good fortune recently to attend a lecture given by Kay at the University of Waterloo, at which time he suggested two of many possible ways of dealing with history and biography through fiction.

The first, which was his approach as a writer, was to use history (although not biographemes) as the basis for fantastic fiction. Rather than use real historical people and places, he suggested, authors might choose to use them as a basis for fictional characters and places, set in fictional worlds. He held up his own Tigana as an example, a novel in which renaissance Italy is the basis for a society that exists on a planet so different from ours that it has two moons. In such a fiction, he claimed, history could be used as flavour. That presents problems as well. If history is used simply as "flavour," does that not run the risk of relegating all history to the role of "flavour," and if so, is that not making light of the very thing Kay says we must protect? Where does reverence and respect for the past, and for real people, fit in the context of "flavour"?

The second method he suggested for dealing with history relates directly to biographemes, and seems to be the method Byatt employs in The Biographer's Tale. According to Kay, Sir Walter Scott once suggested that it was acceptable for writers to use real people in their work provided they were not used as point-of-view characters. They had to be peripheral, so that writers could avoid putting words in their mouths. This is exactly what Byatt does, allowing real documents to speak for her biographematic figures rather than inventing thoughts for them to have, or words for them to say. In fact, when her fictional character Scholes Destry-Scholes does fake documents, such as the three fragments found on pages 37-95, they are very quickly revealed as fake. Only five pages after the documents are quoted in full, Ormerod Goode tells Nanson, "[t]here is something shifty about all that shamanistic stuff in the Linnaeus document" (103). Nanson examines the documents and determines that Destry-Scholes was writing them himself, exploring his own "need to invent" (Biographer 237). Byatt is pointedly acknowledging the problem of putting words into the mouths of her biographematic characters, and by doing so she nearly sidesteps the ethical issue completely. Instead, we are left with the forged passage from the essay in Mind. Rather than revealing it as the fake it is, Nanson verifies its authenticity from no less than two sources. The false passage actually brings up the issue I am discussing. Byatt writes, in the voice of Victorian scientist Francis Galton,

Although philosophers may have written to show the impossibility of discovering what goes on in the minds of others, I maintain an opposite opinion. I do not see why the report of a person on his own mind should not be as intelligible and trustworthy as that of a traveller upon a new country, whose landscapes and inhabitants are of a different type to any which we ourselves have seen. It appears to me that inquiry into the mental constitution of other people is a most fertile field for exploration, especially as there is much in the facts adduced here, as well as elsewhere, to show that original differences in mental constitution are permanent, and that they are strongly hereditary. (Biographer 231)

That a passage on the possibility of knowing someone else's mind was forged strikes me as being particularly significant. If I were to read this passage in a completely straightforward way, I might believe that Byatt was suggesting that her forged documents were in some way true to the historical people who exist on the periphery of her story. That particular reading does not go deep enough. There is the phrase "as intelligible and trustworthy as that of a traveller upon a new country, whose landscape and inhabitants are of a different type to any which we ourselves have seen" to consider. In a contemporary context this remark is very ironic. Such a traveller would be very untrustworthy to contemporary readers, since neither he, nor the reader, could have any chance of understanding what had been seen or experienced in that new country. That this passage would be forged may be an indication that Byatt herself is uncomfortable working directly with biographematic characters, even in the indirect way suggested by Guy Gavriel Kay. In the novel Nanson is exploring biography for the first time, and is "a traveller upon a new country," telling the reader about his experiences in a new intellectual space. If the contemporary reader finds it ironic to be asked to trust such a traveller, should he also find it ironic that Byatt asks him to trust Nanson?

Many critics, such as Kathleen Coyle Kelly, and Christien Franken, seem to take Byatt's use of biographematic figures for granted in exactly the way Kay suggests readers and authors should not. Their criticisms focus on issues such as gender and hidden autobiographical elements, ignoring completely overt biographemes and their ethical implications. Linda Hutcheon, in whose book I found the term "biographeme," is equally silent on the subject of ethics. She takes for granted, even as long ago as 1988, that biographematic figures are fair game for literature. Silent acceptance seems to be the rule, with Guy Gavriel Kay's self-conscious caution the exception.

Section 5.0: Conclusions

Acting almost like a hinge on which The Biographer's Tale swings, biographemes play out several roles, including the role of relieving the tension between the two most obvious, and contradictory, readings. They serve, as J. Hillis Miller would agree, to relate literary works to the real world, as the reader knows it, providing a connective tissue for the reader to enter the "virtual reality" of the text. The sheer volume of biographemes, the coherent, mostly linear narrative, and the consistent if unsure narrative voice work together to create a solid and fairly traditional example of realist fiction. Byatt's clever use of historical figures such as Henrik Ibsen and Francis Galton to situate Nanson and her other fictional characters, most notably Scholes Destry-Scholes, in the reader's world reinforces the illusion of realism. Likewise the quotations from Darwin and Galton's letters to Nature help to create a coherent, realistic world in which characters like Sir Elmer Bole can move. Even the one inauthentic biographeme, the forged passage from a real essay in Mind (an authentic biographeme), work to make a realist reading of The Biographer's Tale the obvious dominant one. Byatt's own comments about her life and her work also suggest that ties between life and literature are important to understanding her work.

In another possible reading, along post-structuralist lines, the biographemes cause the reader to question how narratives are formed, as Nanson grapples with his own limitations both as a biographer and as a narrator. As the novel progresses and Nanson tries to explore the life of Scholes Destry-Scholes the fragmentary, and often fictitious (within the context of the novel's internal world), information uncovered leads only to more questions about the accuracy of even the best biography, or the best narrative. Nanson becomes difficult to trust as a narrator because of his own discoveries about how little he knows about Destry-Scholes, and about how little it is possible to know.

The two readings, contradictory though they are, are both possible because biographemes play a dual role as agents for both systems. They relieve the tension that results from Byatt's conflicting interests; her interest in uniting her work to her life, possibly at times for therapeutic reasons, and her interest in being a writer of her time, one who cannot ignore post-structuralist thought.

The Biographer's Tale also brings up ethical considerations, specifically dealing with the use of history and historical figures as material for fiction. Most critics, from Christien Franken and Kathleen Coyne Kelly, to Linda Hutcheon and J. Hillis Miller are silent on the issue, suggesting that the practice of using biographemes and biographematic figures as fictional material is acceptable. Only fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay seems to be willing to offer (reluctant) resistance, although his alternatives lead to as many questions as they do answers. Where biographemes relieved the tension between the dominant realist reading of the novel, and the less obvious but equally important post-structuralist reading, here they do not, leaving a kind of ethical tension firmly in place.

Notes

¹Definitions of "realism" are many and varied; for the sake of clarity I will provide my own definition in the next section of this essay.

²Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), "a British scientist and cousin of Charles Darwin, became known for his research in meteorology, heredity, and anthropology" (Ruston).

³Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) "is recognized as the father of modern drama" (Wilkins). His plays include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, and A Doll's House.

⁴ Charles Darwin (1809-1882) "was a British naturalist who became famous for his theories on evolution" (Coyne). Darwin also wrote On the Origin of Species, and his work had a significant impact on both scientific and religious thought (Coyne).

⁵Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) "established the modern scientific method of naming plants and animals" (Merchant).

⁶Author of A.S. Byatt: Art, Authorship, Creativity, a study of Byatt's work published in 2001.

⁷Author of A.S. Byatt, a 1996 study of Byatt's work.

⁸In his essay "Privacy and the Ethics of Literature."

⁹Leavis (1895-1978), author of The Great Tradition, "argued that literature not only was a product of but also helped to produce the culture of its time" (Richter).

¹⁰From about page 96.

¹¹Karl Pearson (1857-1936) was a British scientist who "helped develop the science of statistics," and "was noted for applying his statistical methods to biological data" (Dauben). He also wrote the important Grammar of Science (1892), and in the acknowledgements section of The Biographer's Tale, Byatt cites his four-volume work, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, as one of her sources (264).

Works Cited and Consulted

Borges, Jorge Luis. "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." Collected Fictions. Andrew Hurley, trans. New York: Penguin, 1999. 88-95.

Byatt, A.S. Interview with Philip Hensher. "A.S. Byatt: The Art of Fiction CLXVIII." The Paris Review. 159 (Fall 2001): 38-77.

---. Introduction. On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

---. On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

---. The Biographer's Tale. London: Vintage, 2001.

Coyne, Jerry A. "Darwin, Charles Robert." World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia. CD-ROM. 2001 ed. Chicago: World Book, 2001.

Darwin, Charles. Letter. Nature. III (November 1870-April 1871): 502-503.

Dauben, Joseph W. "Pearson, Karl." World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia. CD-ROM. 2001 ed. Chicago: World Book, 2001.

Franken, Christien. A.S. Byatt: Art, Authorship, Creativity. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Galton, Francis. "Free-Will—Observations and Inferences." Mind. 9.35 (July 1884): 406-413.

---. Letter. Nature. IV (April-October 1871): 5-6.

Henighan, Stephen. "The Terrible Truth About "Appropriation of Voice."" When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing. Erin: The Porcupine's Quill, 2002.

Hutcheon, Linda. "The Postmodern Challenge to Boundaries." The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction. Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 1988. 78-106.

Kay, Guy Gavriel. "Privacy and the Ethics of Literature." Queen's Quarterly. 108.1 (Spring 2001): 47-55.

Kay, Guy Gavriel. "The Tools of Fantasy." Lecture. University of Waterloo, Waterloo. 4 March. 2003.

Kelly, Kathleen Coyne. A.S. Byatt. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996.

Merchant, Carolyn. "Linnaeus, Carolus." World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia. CD-ROM. 2001 ed. Chicago: World Book, 2001.

Middeke, Martin, and Werner Huber, eds. Biofictions: The Rewriting of Romantic Lives in Contemporary Fiction and Drama. Rochester: Camden House, 1999.

Miller, J. Hillis. On Literature. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Richter, David H. "Leavis, F.R." World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia. CD-ROM. 2001 ed. Chicago: World Book, 2001.

Rushton, Alan R. "Galton, Sir Francis." World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia. CD-ROM. 2001 ed. Chicago: World Book, 2001.

Steinberg, Saul. "Country Noises." Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. 3 (Late Summer, Early Fall1999): 136.

Wilkins, Frederick C. "Ibsen, Henrik." World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia. CD-ROM. 2001 ed. Chicago: World Book, 2001.

Viktor Frankl, founder of the Viennese school of existential psychotherapy called "logotherapy," wrote that

happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to "be happy." Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.

There is just such an existential void at the core of Exit (Paradis, clef en main, 2009, ably translated by David Scott Hamilton), Nelly Arcan's final novel. Antoinette Beauchamp, who narrates from her hospital bed—left paraplegic after a failed suicide attempt involving a guillotine—has spent her entire life unhappy, dominated by a superficial mother, teased at school, and close to no one but an uncle called Léon, the son of a suicide, himself possessed by a powerful desire to die. Her uncle eventually succeeds in ending his life with the help of Paradis, clef en main, a shadowy company devoted to aiding those determined to commit suicide. As a parting gift, Léon arranges for Antoinette's own assisted suicide to be paid for, should she ever want it.

It's little wonder Antoinette is dissatisfied with life; she has never had a reason to be happy. But Arcan blasts many of the usual assumptions about why people kill themselves. Antoinette has pain in her past, as we all do, but nothing unusual or extreme, and there is no acute trauma causing her death wish. Antoinette is not a coward, afraid of life, and though dominated by her mother, she is not weak. Neither is she particularly selfish, as is often remarked of suicides. Arcan was not a writer to allow easy assumptions to take root, and Antoinette's voice is sophisticated enough to represent suicide as an emotionally and philosophically complex idea.

Antoinette's suicidal ideation is abstract, existential, tied not to events but to the weight and solidity of life itself, which she sees as "a grey brick wall, a view offered to an absence of opening, the lack of a horizon." This wall has no explanation: "I have never known why. No one has ever been able to tell me why." Pain, or even events that cause pain, would be a different thing from Antoinette's depression, because that would carry meaning, and it's that very lack of meaning that oppresses her.

It is to Arcan's credit that Exit doesn't collapse under the weight of Antoinette's angst and frustration. She is actually quite a charming narrator, and at times the novel takes on a quality of the absurd as she relates the surreal cloak-and-dagger escapades she endures to engage the services of Paradis, clef en main. When Antoinette is told how the company was founded, Arcan layers it with a satire of medicine's obsession with the health of the body at the expense of what is best for the soul in a way that's reminiscent of Robertson Davies, though considerably darker. The tone of Exit moves smoothly across a spectrum rather than being a balancing act between extremes, never getting bogged down or letting the reader get too comfortable with any one way of looking at or feeling about Antoinette's longing for death.

Arcan's first novel, Whore (2004, published in French in 2001 as Putain), an intense pseudo-stream of consciousness narrative about a Montréal prostitute calling herself Cynthia, was semi-autobiographical, and leaned heavily on an antagonistic relationship between the narrator and her distant mother. Antoinette and her mother have a similar relationship in Exit, which would in itself be enough to lure readers and critics into speculating about the relationship between the author's life and her work. It would be difficult to say anything at all about Exit without noting that Arcan took her own life only days after completing the manuscript. It seems insufficient to name it a tragedy, as it surely was for those close to her, just as it was also a great loss for Canadian letters. But the manner of her death, as Marianne Ackerman noted on a Montréal website called The Rover, was not inconsistent with either her art or her own search for meaning as she had articulated it elsewhere. Ackerman quotes a column of Arcan's in which she wrote,

Life belongs to the person who lives it. And if it's true that suicide is a terrible legacy that should absolutely be prevented from happening, it's also true that not wanting to make the people around you suffer is no good reason, at least in the long term, to live.

Unlike her creator, Antoinette chooses to live. What she doesn't do, ever, is suggest it's not a choice she has the right to make. What Antoinette takes, and what Ackerman (rightly, I believe) suggests Arcan took back, is control over her choices. Exit is a powerful, at times beautiful, rumination on how limited that control can be, on how we go about looking for meaning, and the complexities of where we find it, whether in big things, like reconciliation with a dying mother, or small ones, like the responsibility of caring for a kitten. It isn't always happiness, but it is something, and as Viktor Frankl wrote, "he who has a why to live for, can bear almost any how."

As I said recently in my post on Nick Tosches' Country, one of the great joys of good music writing is that you can enjoy it without necessarily being a fan of the subject matter. As Rob would be the first to tell you, if you were to draw a Venn diagram of our tastes, outside of the literary world there would be very little overlap. (The Grateful Dead, Rob? Really?) I can't claim to be a Tramp, or even a particular fan of Bruce Springsteen, though I don't dislike his music by any stretch. He just happens to fall at the intersection of a couple of musical styles and techniques I don't connect with easily (bar band rock, big band/ensemble rock, '80s pop, and rock 'n' roll featuring a saxophone), so at best I'm a casual listener. I'm at least ten years younger than Rob, so to me The Boss only figures in my consciousness as an '80s pop act who put out a few good songs around the time I was starting grade school. I think before reading Walk Like A Man, the only Springsteen songs in my whole collection were "Streets of Philadelphia," from the Philadelphia soundtrack, and a live cover of "Merry Christmas Baby," from 1987's A Very Special Christmas multi-artist anthology. To give you an idea of how significant that is, my mp3 collection currently contains 31,156 songs on 2,692 albums by 1,494 artists, for a total running time of 81 days, 15 hours, 18 minutes and 53 seconds. That does not include my physical CD collection, which runs in excess of 500 discs, last I checked. But: as I'm writing this, I'm listening to Rob's mix-tape from the book (including a high-quality, audio-only version of the performance of "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" from the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, recorded on July 8, 1978), and it's been on repeat all day.

Walk Like A Man is a strange beast. It's part Springsteen biography, part memoir, and part love-letter, both to Springsteen and to Rob's younger self. The strangest part is that it doesn't just work, it makes perfect sense. I'm actually a little pissed at Rob for thinking of the structure first. The book opens with a short, context-providing biography of Springsteen that I found incredibly useful, though I think it exaggerates his importance as an artist, albeit only by a tiny bit. It then goes into that beautiful mix-tape structure, explaining first the significance of the song (and the particular version of it Rob is referencing) in Springsteen's catalogue, and then how it figures in his own life. Rob is a pretty friendly, open, and candid guy when you hang out with him, and reading the memoir portions of these chapters has almost exactly the same feel as sitting across the table from him over a pint (or in my case, a whisky sour). He's not self-aggrandizing, and rather upfront about his failings, and often not the hero in his own stories. But he's not unnecessarily hard on himself either, and if I didn't know Rob already, I'd want to after reading Walk Like A Man.

Though clearly not as experienced a professional music writer as some others (at first I worried it may have been a bad idea to read this immediately after veteran Tosches' Country), his passion for Springsteen's music and for being a Tramp is evident on every page, and it's infectious, more than making up for his lack of experience in the genre. Walk Like A Man even convinced me to track down a copy of Nebraska (1982), an album that, based on Rob's descriptions, seems like something I might connect with a little better than his more well-known albums. True passion for art never excludes, it always allows for a way in, and that's a big part of what Rob offers here: a way in, to Springsteen's music, and to himself.

I've never really had the same kind of obsession with an artist that Rob has for Springsteen (and to a lesser extent, The Hold Steady), though I've come close, with Led Zeppelin and The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. My main obstacle seems to have been timing. John Bonham died just over a year after I was born, and JSBX rarely tours in Canada, and pretty much never at all-ages venues, meaning I didn't have a chance to see them live until I was in my early 20s, and by then they were just starting to enter a pretty serious artistic decline, which a decade later they still haven't climbed out of. (Plus I grew up in a town that, while slightly bigger than Agassiz, was considerably more isolated, and traveling to shows, especially in the US, could easily cost a month and a half of my salary as a teenaged kitchen supervisor at the local A&W.) The closest I've come to that kind of obsession that I was able to actually indulge, in fact, is with a TV series called Community, but that doesn't lend itself to the same kind of pilgrimage-type behaviour. However I could easily see myself putting together a similar set of memories and musical exegeses with songs from a variety of artists, and I think that's why this book really works, despite being hard to pin down conceptually in a traditional sense; because as Rob says in his introduction: "The term 'mix-tape' is a bit of an anachronism, but the spirit behind it isn't." It's hard to describe that spirit when it's been reshaped into something like a book, but it's something I think we all recognize and understand when we see it, regardless of the form.

Rob's tapped into something special here, whether you're a Springsteen fan or not, and I regret waiting so long to read it.

There has been talk on Twitter and blogs and whatnot that 30 Rock was getting a 13 episode season for next year, which would be its last. That was confirmed today by TV By the Numbers, which in case you didn't know, is probably the most reliable venue for this kind of news. There was speculation (and I can't remember where I first saw it, but it may actually have been at TVBTN) that Community and some other sitcoms would be returning with similarly shortened orders. No announcement is planned on NBC's other sitcoms until Monday, though it doesn't look good for shows like Whitney (which is a guilty pleasure of mine).

The link-baiting idiots at something called Opposing Views, a site nobody had heard of until today, are reporting that rumour as fact for two sitcoms: Community, and Parks & Recreation. It's not a bad guess for Community, which—while being the best and most innovative comedy on TV in at least a decade—is a ratings underdog despite a recent post-hiatus uptick (even beating American Idol at least once). Besides, Dan Harmon would be Tweeting his ass off right now if that information had already been released. (And as of his most recent tweets he has no idea what these people are talking about.) As for Parks & Recreation: It's not a powerhouse, but is still one of NBC's few ratings winners right now, and nobody has suggested it's even potentially on the chopping block, making the rumour not only unlikely to be true, but bordering a little on the absurd. (I can't imagine they'd cancel it to bank on Matt Perry and Anne Heche.)

The lesson here? Cool your jets, and don't spread rumours. They might be true, but for right now your mourning is premature. Except for 30 Rock.

Country covers, or claims to cover, the darker, stranger bits of country music's history, but given that it was first published in 1977 and social norms have shifted a fair bit since then, a lot of what would have been strange and shocking at the time of the book's release now seems rather tame. Tosches has a gift for presenting the personalities of early country music (some big, some obscure) without judgement—or without much judgment, anyway—looking at them mostly in terms of their role in the development of the music and the industry. That Emmett Miller (one of the most obscure, but also most important musicians in the genre, even if only for the profound influence he wound up having on Hank Williams) built his career around minstrelsy isn't used by Tosches to diminish the quality of his songs (some of which are quite good) or the impact he had, as might be done if the book were written today. Instead Tosches is straightforward about it; yes it was racist, yes that means it's morally objectionable and we can't condone it, but it was a real thing that real people did, and it can't be ignored, so let's take a serious look at its place in country music history that can acknowledge the moral difficulties without everything being about those difficulties. It's a fine line to walk, but Tosches manages it. In fact, there is an entire chapter about the history and development of minstrelsy in country music (an interesting fact, that Tosches backs up with an impressive run-through of artists and their work, is that it was more popular in the north than the south, and most of the performers were themselves northerners) that pulls no punches when it comes to some of the racism that was a part of the scene at the time. (Tosches doesn't get much into contemporary music, so there's no examination of race issues in late '70s country; he does, however, add in the preface that he initially didn't want to write that chapter, but in hindsight sees it as one of the strongest and most important parts of the book.)

A special bit of fun for people like me is when Tosches traces the origins of a song, or a playing style, right back to the Seventeenth or Eighteenth Century (or in one memorable case, right back to Ancient Greece). It turns out—and this surprised me, though it makes sense in retrospect—that the slide/steel guitar technique originated in 19^th Century Hawaii.

Tosches has a tremendous gift for metaphor, which is all that much better because he likes to keep them simple, and the level or research and scholarship that went into Country is astonishing (even just the work done on Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Sun Records). I would have a hard time tracking down most of that information in this day and age, with access to the Internet and my superior Google kung-fu; I can't imagine having to do it in a time before the widespread use of cassette tapes and FAX machines. (I did find myself struggling a couple of times to fight against the atemporal view of pop culture encouraged by my heavy Internet usage; Tosches shows a fair bit of disdain for Johnny Cash in the book, but I had to remind myself that it was written at a time when Cash had for years been producing the worst work of his career, and he had yet to begin the genre-defying American Recordings series that would reinvigorate his work and cement his reputation as one of popular music's most powerful and respected artists.) Even if I hadn't loved the book I would have walked away with an enormous list of roots musicians and recordings to investigate.

I stumbled across Country because of a Twitter conversation I had quite a few months ago with William Gibson. We were discussing blues, and the country-rock group Drive-By Truckers, and I mentioned how it didn't strike me as his kind of music. He told me that, growing up in the South as he did, it was hard not to have a certain kind of relationship to it, and recommended I track down a copy of Country. It took forever—the Toronto Public Library only has a single reference copy—but was well worth the wait. It's some of the best music writing I've ever read, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in music of any kind, whether you're a country fan or not.

In "Maybe You Should Get Back There," Max lives with his girlfriend Nadia, and Chris, an old friend from school, and can't stop imagining that they are having, or want to have, an affair. He obsesses over the dynamics of their relationship, giving undue weight to casual conversations and comments, leading to circular reasoning and a trap of jealousy and paranoia that should look familiar to anyone with trust issues (whether their source is from a real betrayal, or something more internal). As the reader becomes more invested in Max's voice, he stops coming off as quite so unreasonable, and one starts to wonder—what if there really is something going on between Nadia and Chris? We're snapped out of it when Max takes significant action on little more than suspicion, but by then we've gone through a whole spectrum of emotions with him, and the story takes on extra shades of complexity. It's no longer just about Max's jealousy and selfishness, and the isolation they cause, but also about his inability to address his fears directly, and Chris and Nadia's complete unawareness of his deteriorating emotional state.

Some of the pieces in The Maladjusted are not so sophisticated; "Inertia" feels like something I've read a dozen times before, ripped straight from the CanLit Book of Themes for Urban Writers, while "A Feel For America," seems disjointed and unfinished.

I'm going to agree with Steven in his National Post review and say that the end of "That's Very Observant of You," one of my favourite stories in the collection, is unconvincing, but otherwise it's an astounding exploration of how anxiety can be crippling, not through big events and responsibilities, but rather the minutiae of daily life, and how liberating that can make small achievements feel. Despite the two stories being entirely different, I couldn't help but link it in my mind to Rebecca Rosenblum's wonderful "Route 99," from her debut collection, Once.

If I had one complaint about the book as a whole, it's that there were times I felt like I was reading the same story over and over again. Hayes is so invested in his core themes of alienation and disorder that there is often little room for anything else, and by the end of the sixteenth story, I was definitely ready to see something else from him.

I went to see catl with a friend of mine a little over a year ago. I had just heard With the Lord For Cowards You Will Find No Place, and events had arranged themselves so that they were doing a show at the Horseshoe at a time when I actually had the money to go. We sat through a couple of warm-up acts, one band so forgettable I can't even remember what kind of music they played, and another a slightly better than average dad-rock band, the sort of unit you expect Jim Belushi to front on his off days. Our conversation was not interrupted.

And then it was catl's turn.

I've been to some pretty epic live shows, from big stadium acts like the Rolling Stones, to tiny indie bands that tore up the joint but never managed to put out an album. I once reckoned that the best show I'd ever been to, as hard as it might be to believe, was Econoline Crush on the B-stage at Edgefest '97 in Winnipeg. They were a mediocre studio band at best, but their live act was a thing unto itself, alive, and a little bit on fire. I got kicked in the face twice during their set, and was nearly concussed as crowd-surfing filmmaker (and old friend) Karl Richter slammed into the back of my head. It was a throbbing mass of flesh and blood and noise. It was glorious, and far and away the best thing I'd ever seen on stage. Until I saw catl.

I didn't know it was possible to fill a space with that much sound, especially not from such tiny amps on such a tiny stage. It was like a fluid, swirling up from below, getting not just in your ears, but in your eyes and mouth and nose and down into your lungs, getting at your soul through capillaries as yet undiscovered by science.

Jamie Fleming was sitting up there with his guitar, rocking back and forth and nodding along with the rhythm, as righteous a shouter as any Toronto has ever produced. When my friend saw Sarah K. shaking at the keys like some sexy rock 'n' roll faith healer, little smoky jets of light erupting like fireworks from her sequined dress, she turned to me and said, I want to BE her. Johnny LaRue was somewhere in the back, steady-rolling and inscrutable. It was raw and dangerous and beautiful.

So that's their live show. What about this new album, Soon This Will All Be Gone?

The intro and outro (oh, how I miss the word "coda") are scratchy, tinny covers of the great Furry Lewis and Lead Belly. They frame the album perfectly; they are irreverent and playful without being disrespectful, or worse, ironic.

The album opens properly with "Gold Tooth Shine," which is the clear choice for a first single—well, they've released a video for it anyway; I don't think they do traditional singles—because aside from being a crapload of fun, it has a strong connection to their last album, and also showcases a lot of what's great about their new direction, like the killer dynamic between Jamie and Sarah K. on vocals, and a more full studio sound.

Most of Side A is original tracks, and make for a pretty good set of party tunes. There isn't a weak one in the bunch, but "Gotta Thing For You" is the stand-out cut of the side, deep and growly and right smack in that sweet groove where all good jump blues lives, with the hard-driving "Cinderblocks" not too far behind.

Side B is all covers but one, and contains my three favourite cuts, including "He'll Make A Way," which is probably the best thing on the whole album. It captures the band's versatility, lets everybody do their thing and shake loose a bit, but still digs way down deep to the emotional core of country blues. It's risky including a Robert Johnson cover on an album, because you're pretty much guaranteeing it will be the best song, unless of course you also include a Skip James cover, in which case even the Devil's own guitarist would have to settle for number two. But catl nails it, and makes it their own, which is in itself no mean feat.

"5 Miles," the lone original track on Side B, is notable for being the most foot-tapping, head-nodding song on the album, and I think it will also eventually be recognized as the the most memorable and fun of the uptempo numbers.

"Get Outta My Car," a Hasil Adkins cover, is emerging as the obvious critical favourite, in no small part because they handle it like old hands, but also I think because it was an obvious direction for the band to go in, and doesn't offer the same remarkable surprises as a cut like "Cocaine," a slow-burning number that sees Sarah K. taking the lead on vocals. It was one of the best creative decisions the band could have made. She'll never win American Idol, but that sort of voice would work against her; it would be too polished, too sterile and insincere. Instead she's gentle and raw by turns, strong but never soft, belting out God's own motherfucking Truth like a blues singer should.

I really didn't think that catl could put out a record better than With the Lord For Cowards You Will Find No Place, which remains one of the finest blues-punk albums I've heard, and one of the best new blues albums since the Black Keys' Chulahoma (an album made up entirely of Junior Kimbrough covers), but Soon This Will All Be Gone has more than lived up to that challenge.

Here is where I post links, so you can follow the band on Twitter and buy the album.

Last year I reviewed two novels, Alex and the Ironic Gentleman, by Adrienne Kress, and Triptych, by J.M. Frey (both of which were excellent), and I have—sort of, in a very limited way—started to get to know both authors online and that, in turn, got me interested in a corner of the nerdy world that I haven't paid much attention to: steampunk. (Because they are clearly interested and involved in it, and one of the best parts of getting to know new people is getting exposed to new things.) I've read a few steampunk novels before, which I'll get to in a minute, so I put the call out for a list of books that might qualify as a kind of "Steampunk 101" reading program. I put together a list based on the recommendations I got (here's a post on Kress' blog that was particularly helpful), which I will be adding to as I discover what it is about the subgenre I do and do not like. I'll get to the list, but first, let's talk about how I'm coming into it.

The first steampunk novel I read was William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's 1990 collaboration, The Difference Engine, the title apparently responsible for bringing popular attention to the subgenre. It's the closest thing Gibson has to a "difficult" book, and to be honest I found it a struggle to get acclimatized both times that I read it (the last being a good seven years ago), and I remember almost nothing specific about it, except that it took a long time to get going, and then became quite good. I'll probably read it again soon, if for no other reason than because I find it a bit ridiculous that I remember so little.

The other two that I've read are Gordon Dahlquist's The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters and its first sequel, The Dark Volume. Dahlquist said (in an interview a few years ago with a Johnny Depp fansite, of all places) that he's working on a third book to round out the series, but given how enormous the advance was on the first two—two million dollars, according to Google—and how poorly they sold versus expectations, no third book appears to be forthcoming. The rumour mill seems to think that, essentially, because an acquisitions editor saw something good and went a little nuts with the advance, no one is going to touch book three. If that's true, and I want to emphasize the if, it's a crying shame, because Dahlquist's first two were fun as hell.

They follow a trio of protagonists, Miss Celeste Temple, Doctor Svenson, and Cardinal Chang, who on the surface could not be more different. Svenson is attached to a diplomatic mission, Miss Temple is a wealthy young woman (initially) in search of a respectably middle-class husband, and Cardinal Change (whose real name is never revealed; he's called Cardinal Chang because he wears red leather and has unusual scarring around his eyes), and unusually intelligent and skilled... well, I'm not sure what you'd call him; he's kind of a cross between a detective and an assassin. Imagine an even more violent, amoral Batman, but instead of living in a Twentieth Century mansion, he lives in one of Victorian London's rookeries.

Each chapter is from the (third person limited) point of view of one of the three protagonists, moves like a rocket, and then ends on a cliff-hanger, making them two of the most fast-paced books I've read in years, despite being 760 and 508 pages, respectively. Neither book pretends to be high art, but Dahlquist does an excellent job of not only giving each protagonist a unique voice, but an interesting and complex one—although as their interests converge and diverge, they do tend to work in unison a bit more than perhaps they should, becoming "the gang" a bit too easily.

But all that aside, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on with power relationships in the two books, and not just as a natural consequence of having three protagonists from different social classes. The plot is built on cascading layers (is that right? Maybe cascading through layers?) of control, or efforts to manipulate relationships in order to gain, maintain, or exert power, from the halls of government, to personal relationships (especially, in some really fucked up ways, power over women, although Miss Temple manages to turn that on its head—she starts out as a Damsel in Distress, but one with considerable pluck, and by the end is a force to be reckoned with). There's a kind of Eyes Wide Shut element to a lot of what goes on (although it gets considerably weirder, and there is some seriously hand-waving to explain some of the "science" as science), and while the books can be smutty in a fun way at times, it can also get kind of dark, which I'm told is not entirely usual for steampunk. Which is sort of odd to me, given how conflicted the Victorians were about sex. On the public face of things they were every bit as uptight as the stereotypes would suggest, but they were also obsessed with brothels to a pretty much unprecedented degree, and had a thriving child prostitution industry. It's not that the Victorians were "okay" with child abuse, it's more that so long as a) the child was of sufficiently low station, and b) somebody got paid for the child's, uh, services, it wouldn't have even occurred to most of them to think of it as abuse. That's splitting hairs, I know, but the Victorians were almost schizophrenic in their attitudes about children, and those attitudes were as much wrapped up in their ideas about class as they were in their ideas about morality. (If you want to read a novel that addresses this particular brand of Victorian hypocrisy directly, I suggest John MacLachlan Gray's excellent White Stone Day—and my fellow Downton Abbey fans should recognize that not only is this the world that Robert Crawley grew up in, it's also the social order the Lady Dowager wants so desperately to preserve.) Anyway, Dahlquist's two novel are almost fever-inducingly good.

So having read all of that (and then Peter Ackroyd's amazing psychogeography / psychohistory London: The Biography, which I think is a must-read for anyone who wants to write or read about London; it will profoundly enrich your other reading experiences, among other things), and having solicited my recommendations, I started my Steampunk 101 project with The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers. It's considered not only one of the foundational texts of the subgenre, but also one of the best. It's one of those protagonist-travels-in-to-another-realm/time fantasy novels, which, I have to tell you normally really fucking suck, I mean, hard. Think of The Fionavar Tapestry. It's a fish-out-of-water thing for sure, and it gives the reader somebody to connect with without a whole lot of work for the author (in fact the author would have to work pretty hard to screw that up) but it can also be used to give a character expert-level status they wouldn't normally possess, and otherwise Mary Sue the hell out of them (once again, see The Fionavar Tapestry for the mother of all examples). Before we go any further, I'm going to say that The Anubis Gates is the exception to the sucking thing. Oh yes, and you would not believe my surprise to find out that it was a fantasy novel, and not science fiction, as it was my understanding that steampunk was explicitly a cyberpunk offshoot, so I was expecting closely observed cultural details with particular focus on how technology fits into that whole mess. There was all sorts of cultural grime in the corners of the novel, but instead of technology, there was magic. Magic! Blew my goddamn mind. And now, as I look over my list, I see things like zombies. Well, okay.

The Anubis Gates wound up being a great deal of fun once you get past the sluggish, overblown prose of the first fifty pages (it was intended to be a dark and exciting opening, but it didn't quite work), and Powers did a remarkably good job interweaving non-heroic (or non-mythmaking, if you prefer) versions of several Romantic poets into a time-traveling adventure with some genuine swash-buckling. Powers does an interesting thing with a fictional poet named William Ashbless (who is in reality the consciousness of Brendan Doyle, our protagonist from 1983, trapped in the body of a guy named Brennan, also from the future), a character who also appears in a novel by James P. Blaylock, and publishes poems that have no author. Ancient Egyptian magic, gypsies, psychotic clowns, time-traveling academics, magical clones and a body-jumping magician who sprouts an insane amount of hair; how could you possibly resist?

Anyway, as my first foray into a serious introduction to steampunk was pretty successful, here's my list, which I expect to get longer, in no particular order (most of it comes from J.M. Frey and Adrienne Kress, but I also did some independent research):

• Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest (Dreadnought was the original recommendation, but Boneshaker is apparently the first in a loosely-connected set of a novels, and I like to read things in order)
• Mainspring, by Jay Lake
• Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld
• Soulless, by Gail Carriger
• The Drawing of the Dark, by Tim Powers

Most of that has passed, and I can once again listen to music while I read, although anything too heavy or uptempo, or with complicated lyrics I like to get lost in, is still a no-go. It's as though they occupy the same space in my brain as whatever it is I'm reading.

But anyway, I thought I'd give you a brief list of some albums I like to listen to when I read (my total "Reading" playlist is 1,983 songs, or approximately 6 days of continuous listening, so I won't be including it all), and if you like you can make suggestions for your own additions in the comments.

• Various Artists - In the Mood For Love Soundtrack
• Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton - What Is Free to a Good Home?
• Alpha - Pepper
• Various Artists - Cinematic: Classic Film Music Remixed
• Cliff Martinez - Solaris Soundtrack
• Kronos Quartet - Pieces of Africa
• Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Raising Sand
• Alexandre Desplat - Birth Soundtrack
• Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha
• Matt Sweeney & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Superwolf
• Esthero - We R In Need Of A Musical Revolution
• Headless Heroes - The Silence of Love
• José González - In Our Nature
• Barbara Morgenstern - Nichts Muss
• Masha Qrella - Unsolved Remains
• Massive Attack - Mezzanine
• Shugo Tokumaru - Night Piece
• Sparklehorse - Dark Night of the Soul
• True Widow - True Widow
• Warpaint - Exquisite Corpse
• The London Haydn Quartet - Haydn: String Quartets, Op. 20
• Auryn Quartet - String Quartets Op. 76, nos. 1 - 6 (Haydn)
• Hesperion XXI cond. Jordi Savall - Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805): Fandango, Sinfonie & Musica Notturna di Madrid
• Various Artists - Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World Soundtrack
• Vangelis - Blade Runner Soundtrack (Extended Bootleg Version)

Again, I'd love to hear your recommendations in the comments.