Literature

I’m a bit behind on this one, but thanks to The Elegant Variation for the link. Dale Peck, everyone’s favourite professional asshole, has been interviewed by one of the (ugh) Book Babes. I’m really not sure what to say about this. When I read Peck’s “last negative review” in Maisonneuve I was impressed by the lengths he would go to destroy a fellow writer (am I alone in thinking that literature is not a competition?), but I was even more impressed by the fact that his genuine love of literature came through on every page. This Q and A… makes him look a little sneaky, to be honest. When he says things like: One of the problems with the discussion around my work is that it is somehow deemed disingenuous when I say that I really think of the opinions I express in my reviews as solely my opinions and… Continue Reading →

Having never heard of James Wood, I can’t really say much about many of the comments made in this New York Observer review of his latest collection of essays, but statements like the following make me wonder if the reviewer (Adam Begley, the books editor) has actually sat down and read any academic criticism, or if he’s just parroting the popular trend of denigrating academics: Literary criticism needn’t go down like medicine. This is not the bitter pill of theory, that cocktail of mixed motives and obfuscation practiced in the academy. There’s not a drop of jargon here, and never the sense that turf is being measured out and defended. On the contrary: Mr. Wood is recklessly committed to literature (if he weren’t so flexible, I’d be tempted to call him a fanatic), and brave enough to risk ridicule by pushing every thought to the limit. Caution doesn’t enter into… Continue Reading →

When I first started to take literature seriously, somewhere in mid-high school, I read about a book called Ulysses. There were stories of it being banned, of it being the hardest book in the English language. When I went to university to study literature I eventually realized that I would have to deal with this heavily-contested, opaque work of genius. I was terrified. So about a year and a half ago, I sat down and read Ulysses for the first time, and it changed the way I look at literature. All the things he did! In Joyce’s Ulysses you will find an artist with no fear, an artist who truly trusts in his own skill, unwilling to sacrifice his art for ignorance. The book is a glittering jewel, containing nearly everything that makes literature truly worth reading, but transforming it. Ulysses is not a text, it is a work, and… Continue Reading →

Doesn’t Stephen Henighan have anything better to do? Coming from Geist I wouldn’t necessarily take it at face value; but because it’s Henighan, well, let’s just say he means it. I really liked When Words Deny the World, but after corresponding with him, his prescriptive Canadian-ness is starting to get irritating.

I’ve been waiting to blog about this until Naomi Wolf’s essay was actually released, so I could make a meaningful statement about her accusations rather than speculating blindly. Wolf’s accusation takes centre stage in the media, but the majority of the article focuses on the climate at Yale. The problem is that, despite Wolf’s insistence that she is not out to vilify Bloom, her writing is not clear enough to establish whether the plethora of anecdoatal evidence is meant to support her point about Yale, or her case against Bloom. And aside from her own accusation against Bloom, very nearly everything she says in unverifiable rumour, or unverifiable hearsay. I’m not saying she’s wrong in her accusation, or in her portrait of Yale. What I am saying is that I don’t have enough information to judge either way, and Wolf’s essay doesn’t lend her any credibility. Even if her accusation… Continue Reading →

You may not have known. Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Anne Carson “are writers of such inferior quality that in a truly literate society they would be recognized as a national embarrassment.” Atwood, Ondaatje and Carson are “a drone, an entrepreneur and a cipher respectively.” Anil’s Ghost is “cloyingly ‘lyrical,’ ” Oryx and Crake is “saplessly cerebral.” The English Patient, The Blind Assassin and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi are “among the most boring, uninflected and monochromatic novels ever written and published in this country.” Alastair Macleod’s No Great Mischief is “a one-note Celtic threnody steeped in banal and portentous sentiment.” Fraser Sutherland reviews David Solway’s Director’s Cut, a new title from Porcupine’s Quill (the same house that released Henighan’s When Words Deny the World), and is astonished to find that some people dislike the pop stars of CanLit (scandalous!). He also falls into the predictable defence of… Continue Reading →

The CBC has published a brief collection of quotations in praise of the Giller Prize. I wonder what Stephen Henighan would have to say about that?