Could people new to the Internet please stop telling us shit we already know? I mean, good lord, courtesy links are nothing new, and they aren’t a requirement. To get upset about them is just plain childish. Welcome to the Internet. Despite what AOL might have told you, it’s not a very friendly place. In fact, the best communities around are often openly hostile. Get used to it.
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?
For several years now the CBC has been running a competition called Canada Reads, in which a group of panelists (musicians, politicians, filmmakers, and occasionally, writers) decide which book Canadians should read. I’ve been avoiding it like the plague, afraid that, tongue in cheek though it is, the competition would fall victim to CanLit navel gazing. And it has, at least twice. This year the winner was Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Last Crossing, which I haven’t read yet. Vanderhaeghe is a minor CanLit celebrity at the moment, which may explain his success. If this book is anything at all like his The Englishman’s Boy, then it’s a good, inoffensive read, but certainly not a powerhouse. Richler’s book should have mopped the floor with The Last Crossing, but alas old Mordecai was always a far cry from “inoffensive”. The first year Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion took the prize… Continue Reading
I just found out today via The New Quarterly (I still like the version of the site I did better) that the poetry category for the National Magazine Awards had been dropped, and then, not five minutes later, found out that it had been re-instated after a public outcry. Kudos to all those who raised their voices.
I’m hoping you folks can help me out. Recently I’ve been reading a number of blogs like Bookslut and The Elegant Variation. These are wondefully well-read and well-written, and I was hoping that you, my readers, might be able to point me in the direction of more. Perhaps from Canada? Canadian literature (and literary discussion) seems in such a sombre state lately (Mr. Barnes, Mr. Winter, this means you!) that I’m hoping to find something fun.
Today I ran across this essay for the second time (this time via Bookslut). In it Dale Peck, book reviewer/novelist, bitches and moans that contemporary writers do not write to please him, or indeed any other common reader (Peck, who has earned both his reputation and his salary by being kind of a professional asshole, identifies his tastes with those of the common reader), and that James Joyce is to blame. His argument is perhaps a bit more complex than that, but not very. Peck gets points for not insisting on a return to Victorian realism (even he can see where that road goes), but offers no real alternative to the contemporary novel. Presumably we are to take his novels as an example, but I have never read one, have never encountered anyone who has read one, and have never even encountered one in a book store. Even The Telegraph,… Continue Reading
The following is my proposal for a paper I will be writing shortly. I won’t bore you with my multi-page tentative bibliography. The question is: What is literature? Why write? To whom does one write? Why read? What is the significance of studying literature? Articulate your defence of literature in the context of our globalizing consumer culture. Papers are required to engange contemporary theories by making reference to such writers as Jeanette Winterson, Trinh T. Minh-ha, bell hooks, and Joseph Gold. And now my proposal: My paper will explore the issue of what motivates readers to read, and writers to write, rather than trying to determine the relevance of literature. To try and do so would be akin to demanding a Message in, or from, literature. As to that, I will let Robertson Davies speak for me, from his introduction to Fortune, My Foe & Eros at Breakfast: Canada was,… Continue Reading
Issue two of Wooden Fish is up! Go! Go! Go!