I’ve been reading Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary for my Contemporary British Literature class, and have come to two conclusions. The novel is actually quite well-written and, despite my better judgement, I find it to be very amusing. Bridget Jones is a raging alcoholic, and by page 198, still doesn’t know it. So, quality of the writing and humour aside, how did this fictional lush become a symbol of contemporary womanhood?
I should have posted about this on the fourth, when it happened, but I’ve been having difficulty organizing my thoughts. I think everything’s straight in my mind now. I met Guy Gavriel Kay recently when he was guest lecturer for a Forms of Fantasy class here at UW. The lecture was meant to be on the tools of the fantasy writer, and to a certain extent it was, but he spent most of the lecture discussing his book, Tigana. I had not read the book (and I still haven’t finished it), but I did have a question in mind. Since it’s well-known that Kay’s books are thinly veiled historical fictions, I asked him to comment on the ethics of using historical facts as source material for literature. I was rewarded with a long and confident answer. Kay once gave a lecture (later printed in issue 108 of Queen’s Quarterly—you can… Continue Reading
Christine Hamm, one of the fine contributors to the first issue of Wooden Fish, has launched a new online literary journal called Thirteen Feet. Her attitude toward the project is excellent, and while her poetics are not my poetics (I like Shakespeare and Eliot, she doesn’t; she likes Gertrude Stein, I don’t), I encourage you all to submit your work. Projects like this deserve to succeed. I know I’ll be submitting as soon as I have something suitable ready.
Author and former editor of Broken Pencil Hal Niedzviecki gave a reading on campus this afternoon. Professor Gary Draper, who organizes the Canada Council-funded readings, had a class to teach, and could not meet Niedzviecki at the front entrance. Since I was loitering about doing not much of anything, Professor Draper asked if I would meet Niedzviecki and show him around/keep him amused for twenty minutes or so before the reading. St. Jerome’s, the associate college where the reading was held, is pretty dull as far as buildings go, so there wasn’t much to see. The three of us (Niedzviecki brought a friend) talked about reading habits, current affairs on campus, and Concrete Forest, the anthology of fiction by young Canadian authors Niedzviecki edited a few years ago. He was very polite, funny, and all around seemed like a really nice guy. He was also an excellent reader and a… Continue Reading
The fine folks at McSweeney’s are soon to be publishing another journal, this one monthly, called The Believer. The journal will consist, so far as I know, entirely of book reviews. I’d like to subscribe, but can’t afford it right now. The most exciting thing about this new publication is its editorial staff: Dave Eggers isn’t on it. It will be interesting to see a publication under the McSweeney’s imprint take a different editorial direction (not that there haven’t been good “guest edited” issues of their flagship periodical).
Last night UW‘s English Society held a Bawdy House at the Walper Pub in Kitchener. It was the first reading I’ve attended in which I’ve actually read rather than simply been read to. I read two poems, “Jessica” and “A Portrait of the Poet’s Birthing-Bed,” and a newly completed short story called “Love in the Age of Insecurity,” which was very much in keeping with the spirit of the Bawdy House, and went over quite well. The audience laughed in all the right places, and gave me a very flattering amount of applause and post-reading kudos. I hope to attend more of these in the future.
I was told today that I am an idealist (well, when it comes to literature). I had no idea that I was giving people that impression. I’ve never thought of myself as an idealist at all. I think I’m in some ways a cynic. I don’t believe in publishing the work of marginalized writers just because they’re marginalized, because I don’t think that benefits anyone, the writers least of all. I believe that feminism stopped being a positive influence on society well over a decade ago. I don’t think writers from any nation show enough guts. There are not enough élitist writers out there expressing unpopular opinions. Literature is declining because writers are afraid to say that some people are better than others (I’m not talking about racism or similar nonsense; I’m talking, ultimately, about the fact that not all literature is created equal; Robertson Davies is a better writer… Continue Reading
I’ve not read much of Stephen Henighan’s work, just a few things in The New Quarterly, and I’ve generally found his work to be thoughtful, if unimpressive. His latest book, When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing, however, is certainly better than “unimpressive”. I particularly enjoyed the essay, “The Truth About Appropriation of Voice”. In it he articulates a number of ideas that I have been trying to express in one form or another in my own work, with varying degrees of success. My favourite passage follows an assessment of Timothy Findley’s Headhunter, but that is not the essay’s primary subject matter: The rampant essentialism embodied in Findley’s advocacy of ‘appropriation of voice’ underlines the central contradiction implicit in the notion’s adoption by the literary establishment. In terms of literary history, ‘appropriation of voice’ is a concept properly belonging to the 1830s. In order to believe in… Continue Reading
Today I received a letter from Saint Paul’s United College informing me that my story, “A Story With No Title Whatever”, won this past year’s Tom York Memorial Short Story Writing Award. I will be given a cash award of $300 at the Scholarship and Awards Community Dinner, on February 26th. As you can well imagine, I am very pleased, and will most likely be insufferably full of myself for the next several days.
Linda Hutcheon’s book, The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction, introduced readers and critics to the concept of historiographic metafiction (or at least gave the concept a name). The concept, and to a lesser extent, the book, has been very helpful in terms of my own work as a critic, but I can’t help but think that Hutcheon’s major talent lies in stating the obvious. And as many of her comments stem from her readings of postmodern writers and critics, I can’t help but think that many of these people either grossly underestimate pre-modern literature, or have never read any of it. From the preface to Hutcheon’s book: As a cultural practice that has actually been defined, in part, by the impact of feminism, postmodernism is of particular interest to me as a woman too. As both a reader and teacher I have been influenced by what feminist… Continue Reading