Ladies and gentlemen: Your nominees for the 2010 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction: UPDATED
February 8, 2010 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
My last-minute prediction: the winner will be a middle-aged white dude.
UPDATE: I was right. It’s the white dude on the far left.
(Photo by Laura Godfrey.)
“I wouldn’t recommend sex, drugs, or insanity for everyone, but they’ve always worked for me”
February 5, 2010 by Steven W. Beattie · 3 Comments
Courtesy of Life: a picture gallery of famous literary drunks and drug addicts. How come it doesn’t surprise me that Ayn Rand was a speed freak?
P.S. Three guesses who was responsible for the quote in this post’s title. (And, no: it wasn’t me.)
The problem of sustained reading in a distracted society
February 3, 2010 by Steven W. Beattie · 3 Comments
This past weekend, yr. humble correspondent finished reading Under the Dome by Stephen King. The endeavour took approximately 30 days to complete. While a novel of 1,072 pages is by no means a minor undertaking, 30 days to read a single book seems – to an inveterate reader such as myself – excessive. True, I completed two other, shorter books for review in the interim, but for the most part, my reading time in the month of January was devoted to a single book.
One reason for this is that I read the book in snippets – short gulps here and there whenever I could fit them in – rather than setting aside blocks of time to read, say, 100 pages or so. True, I have a day job that cuts into my reading time, and it’s clearly important to maintain a life outside the confines of a book’s covers, lest one become a kind of anti-social hermit. Still, it’s not as though my life is so back-breakingly full that I couldn’t find a quiet hour or two for sustained reading each day. Indeed, if I were to add up all the time spent staring at various screens in the month of January, the total would probably have been sufficient to allow me to finish a book of 1,000+ pages in 10 days or so.
It wasn’t always this way. I remember a time, not so long ago, when blocks of several hours per day could easily be found to read for pleasure. What has changed? In a word: distraction. The Internet, social media, reality television, and 24-hour-a-day celebrity culture have increased easy access to all manner of distraction, and distraction is anathema to sustained reading. Reading requires concentration and active engagement, qualities that are in short supply in today’s hyperlinked, attention-deficit society.
Alan Bissett, writing on the Guardian’s Books Blog (yes, I recognize the irony), makes the same point, and extends it to include a value judgment:
So besieged are we by the entertainment industry that we are being stimulated only in certain directions. The sound of fizz is everywhere. Sustained concentration on the printed word, whether in-depth argument or fictional narrative, creates a particular cerebral event which visual-dependent media cannot. The assault upon this has meant the very theft of our thinking space.
This argument has been made before, notably in a 2008 article by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. Carr points out that although we are engaging with the written word more than ever before, the way we are doing so is changing:
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking – perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
This is no small matter. Skimming an online news article for tidbits of information or the next interesting hyperlink on which to click does little to develop the kind of complex thinking skills that are necessary to engage in a sustained analysis or argument, nor does it allow for an acceptance of ambiguity or nuance.
Jakob Nielson, an influential figure in “web usability,” provides statistics to support this shift in the way people read online: “People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In research on how people read websites we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word by word.” All of which might be fine in an online environment, but the same kind of reading habits have begun to bleed into our offline lives. Don’t believe me? Then you haven’t picked up the print edition of The Globe and Mail recently. If you had, you’d surely have noticed that the news articles are getting shorter, and are frequently displaced by verbal graphics, “charticles,” and bulleted lists. All perfect fodder for people who want their information provided to them quickly and cleanly, without requiring the reader to chew over intricate concepts or bedeviling subject matter.
Neil Postman was certainly ahead of his time when, in his 1985 work Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, he surveyed the media landscape and noticed the deleterious effect that television was having on our political culture. It was a brilliant time-waster, to be sure, but Postman also realized that the ubiquitous home entertainment device was destroying rational argument and civic awareness. In his foreword, he juxtaposes the visions of two authors, George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley in Brave New World:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
Huxley – who, while nailing our “almost infinite appetite for distractions,” could hardly have foreseen American Idol, Twitter, or Perez Hilton – was also far ahead of his time.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to read a book.
In memoriam: J.D. Salinger, 1919–2010
January 28, 2010 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
Jerome David Salinger, one of the most important postwar American novelists, had died at the age of 91. The author of the novel Franny and Zooey, the novellas Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour – An Introduction, and the classic short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Salinger’s literary legacy rests on a single volume: the 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, which has become a kind of standard-bearer for teenage disaffection and rebellion.
He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1961, but became increasingly famous for his reclusive nature, refusing to be interviewed by the press or to be photographed. Following the announcement of the author’s demise, humourist John Hodgman Twittered: “I prefer to think JD Salinger has just decided to become extra reclusive.”
Although in later years his mythology may have outweighed his output, it’s difficult to quarrel with the impact The Catcher in the Rye had on American letters. The iconic American publisher Robert Giroux, in a 2000 interview with George Plimpton for The Paris Review, talks about meeting Salinger and trying to sign The Catcher in the Rye:
The receptionist said, “There’s a Mr. Salinger out here who wants to see you.” I said, “Salinger? Pierre Salinger?” She said, “No, he says it’s Jerome Salinger, Jerry Salinger.” He was six feet two or three, pitch-black hair, very black eyes, looked a little like Hamlet. He was sort of shy. He said, “I can’t publish a book of short stories because I’ve almost finished this novel, and the novel has to come first.” I smiled and said, “You should be sitting here at my desk. You’re a born publisher because it’s true – short stories don’t sell as well as novels.” Then he said, “Bill Shawn has recommended you, and I’d like you to publish my novel.” I said, “What novel?” He said, “Oh, it isn’t finished. It’s about a kid in New York during the Christmas holidays.” I said, “Listen, you’ve made a contract, let’s shake hands.” So we shook hands on it. About a year later, I was in the Oyster Bar eating oyster stew, reading something, and somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around, and it was Jerry Salinger. He said, “I didn’t want to disturb you, Bob, but I have wonderful news. I just finished the draft of my novel. I’ve just come from Bill Shawn’s. The New Yorker is going to devote an entire issue to it.” After he’d left, I thought, Oh, my God, it’s going to be like the publication of John Hersey’s Hiroshima.
But it never appeared, and the New Yorker thing apparently fell through. A year later a messenger delivered the manuscript of The Catcher in the Rye to the office. It came from the Harold Ober Agency. I read it and, of course, I was absolutely riveted. I thought how lucky I was that this incredible book had come into my hands. I wrote a rave report and I turned it over to Eugene Reynal, my new boss.
Reynal found the character of Holden Caulfield “disturbing,” and the company’s eventual decision not to publish the book led to Giroux resigning from Harcourt, Brace.
In a rare interview in 1974, Salinger said that there was a “marvellous peace in not publishing.” He continued: “Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”
Finally I sat down on this bench, where it wasn’t so goddam dark. Boy, I was still shivering like a bastard, and the back of my hair, even though I had my hunting hat on, was sort of full of little hunks of ice. That worried me. I thought probably I’d get pneumonia and die. I started picturing millions of jerks coming to my funeral and all. My grandfather from Detroit, that keeps calling out the numbers of the streets when you ride on the goddam bus with him, and my aunts – I have about fifty aunts – and all my lousy cousins. What a mob’d be there. They all came when Allie died, the whole goddam stupid bunch of them. I have this one stupid aunt with halitosis that kept saying how peaceful he looked lying there, D.B. told me. I wasn’t there. I was still in the hospital. I had to go to the hospital and all after I hurt my hand. Anyway, I kept worrying that I was getting pneumonia, with all those hunks of ice in my hair, and that I was going to die. I felt sorry as hell for my mother and father. Especially my mother, because she still isn’t over my brother Allie yet. I kept picturing her not knowing what to do with all my suits and athletic equipment and all. The only good thing, I knew she wouldn’t let old Phoebe come to my goddam funeral because she was only a little kid. That was the only good part. Then I thought about the whole bunch of them sticking me in a goddam cemetery and all, with my name on this tombstone and all. Surrounded by dead guys. Boy, when you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.
– The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
Lemon Hound surveys the critical landscape
January 27, 2010 by Steven W. Beattie · 5 Comments
The poet Sina Queyras is conducting an ongoing series of interviews about the practice of reviewing and criticism for her website, Lemon Hound. The people she’s interviewed so far – including Michael Turner, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Christian Bök, Michael Bryson, and Marjorie Perloff – come from a variety of backgrounds and approaches, and the diverse opinions about critical practices that they espouse make for fascinating reading.
Yr. humble correspondent is currently featured on the site. The process of answering Queyras’s questions has provided an opportunity for me to clarify certain ideas and theories of criticism in my own mind, and to actively engage with aspects of the current reviewing climate.
From the interview:
LH: Critical work is increasingly unpaid work; will you continue to do this work despite the trend? Do you see this trend reversing, or changing course?
SB: The very fact that I blog about books – without remuneration and on my own time – should answer this question. Having said that, the fact that professional reviewers are not paid even close to what they are worth is a situation that needs to be redressed. It’s all well and good for enthusiasts who want to share their love of a particular book to fire up the Internet and bang out fifty words, but this is not remotely connected to the practice of criticism. Much of the discourse around books that we see online is the digital equivalent of a coffee klatch; it has as much to do with professional criticism as a game of pick-up basketball has to do with the NBA. There is some very good, thoughtful, careful writing to be found online. There is also a glut of careless, ill-considered, illogical, and badly written book chat that passes itself off as legitimate criticism. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that experienced critics – those connoisseurs who have devoted a lifetime to the reading and study of literature – are not able to make a living wage off of their writing. This simultaneously devalues their output and injures the literary culture at large, since a vibrant literary culture requires a vibrant critical culture in order to thrive. In the absence of incisive criticism – criticism, not cheerleading – a culture will become complacent, will stagnate, and eventually shrivel.
For Robbie Burns Night
January 25, 2010 by Steven W. Beattie · 1 Comment
Scotch Drink
by Robert Burns
Gie him strong drink until he wink,
That’s sinking in despair;
An’ liquor guid to fire his bluid,
That’s prest wi’ grief and care:
There let him bouse, an’ deep carouse,
Wi’ bumpers flowing o’er,
Till he forgets his loves or debts,
An’ minds his griefs no more.
Solomon’s Proverbs, xxxi. 6, 7.
Let other poets raise a fracas
‘Bout vines, an’ wines, an’ drucken Bacchus,
An’ crabbed names an’ stories wrack us,
An’ grate our lug:
I sing the juice Scotch bear can mak us,
In glass or jug.
O thou, my muse! guid auld Scotch drink!
Whether thro’ wimplin worms thou jink,
Or, richly brown, ream owre the brink,
In glorious faem,
Inspire me, till I lisp an’ wink,
To sing thy name!
Let husky wheat the haughs adorn,
An’ aits set up their awnie horn,
An’ pease and beans, at e’en or morn,
Perfume the plain:
Leeze me on thee, John Barleycorn,
Thou king o’ grain!
On thee aft Scotland chows her cood,
In souple scones, the wale o’ food!
Or tumbling in the boiling flood
Wi’ kail an’ beef;
But when thou pours thy strong heart’s blood,
There thou shines chief.
Food fills the wame, an’ keeps us leevin;
Tho’ life’s a gift no worth receivin,
When heavy-dragg’d wi’ pine an’ grievin;
But, oil’d by thee,
The wheels o’ life gae down-hill, scrievin,
Wi’ rattlin glee.
Thou clears the head o’ doited Lear;
Thou cheers the heart o’ drooping Care;
Thou strings the nerves o’ Labour sair,
At’s weary toil;
Though ev’n brightens dark Despair
Wi’ gloomy smile.
Aft, clad in massy siller weed,
Wi’ gentles thou erects thy head;
Yet, humbly kind in time o’ need,
The poor man’s wine;
His weep drap pirratch, or his bread,
Thou kitchens fine.
Thou art the life o’ public haunts;
But thee, what were our fairs an’ rants?
Ev’n godly meetings o’ the saunts,
By thee inspir’d,
When gaping they besiege the tents,
Are doubly fir’d.
That merry night we get the corn in,
O sweetly, then, thou reams the horn in!
Or reekin on a New-year mornin
In cog or bicker,
An’ just a wee drap sp’ritual burn in,
An’ gusty sucker!
When Vulcan gies his bellys breath,
An’ ploughmen gather wi’ their graith,
O rare! to see thee fizz an’ freath
I’ th’ luggit caup!
Then Burnewin comes on like death
At ev’ry chap.
Nae mercy then, for airn or steel;
The brawnie, banie, ploughman chiel,
Brings hard owrehip, wi’ sturdy wheel,
The strong forehammer,
Till block an’ studdie ring an’ reel,
Wi’ dinsome clamour.
When skirling weanies see the light,
Though maks the gossips clatter bright,
How fumblin’ cuiffs their dearies slight;
Wae worth the name!
Nae howdie gets a social night,
Or plack frae them.
When neibors anger at a plea,
An’ just as wud as wud can be,
How easy can the barley brie
Cement the quarrel!
It’s aye the cheapest lawyer’s fee,
To taste the barrel.
Alake! that e’er my muse has reason,
To wyte her countrymen wi’ treason!
But mony daily weet their weason
Wi’ liquors nice,
An’ hardly, in a winter season,
E’er Spier her price.
Wae worth that brandy, burnin’ trash!
Fell source o’ mony a pain an’ brash!
Twins mony a poor, doylt, drucken hash,
O’ half his days;
An’ sends, beside, auld Scotland’s cash
To her warst faes.
Ye Scots, wha wish auld Scotland well!
Ye chief, to you my tale I tell,
Poor, plackless devils like mysel’!
It sets you ill,
Wi’ bitter, dearthfu’ wines to mell,
Or foreign gill.
May gravels round his blather wrench,
An’ gouts torment him, inch by inch,
What twists his gruntle wi’ a glunch
O’ sour disdain,
Out owre a glass o’ whisky-punch
Wi’ honest men!
O Whisky! soul o’ plays and pranks!
Accept a bardie’s gratfu’ thanks!
When wanting thee, what tuneless cranks
Are my poor verses!
Thou comes-they rattle in their ranks,
At ither’s arses!
Thee, Ferintosh! O sadly lost!
Scotland lament frae coast to coast!
Now colic grips, an’ barkin hoast
May kill us a’;
For loyal Forbes’ charter’d boast
Is ta’en awa!
Thae curst horse-leeches o’ th’ Excise,
Wha mak the whisky stills their prize!
Haud up thy han’, Deil! ance, twice, thrice!
There, seize the blinkers!
An’ bake them up in brunstane pies
For poor damn’d drinkers.
Fortune! if thou’ll but gie me still
Hale breeks, a scone, an’ whisky gill,
An’ rowth o’ rhyme to rave at will,
Tak a’ the rest,
An’ deal’t about as thy blind skill
Directs thee best.
One from the vaults: Carrie Snyder’s Hair Hat
January 25, 2010 by Steven W. Beattie · 4 Comments
Some of you may recall my feeling of déjà vu upon hearing the lineup for this year’s edition of Canada Reads. It seems I’m not the only one who found the list this year a tad uninspiring. Kerry Clare at Pickle Me This was so disappointed at the lack of unexpected choices on this year’s roster that she set up her own “shadow” program, which she’s calling Canada Reads 2010: Independently. She recruited five literary folks – including yr. humble correspondent – to offer competing suggestions for “book recommendations out of nowhere, books I’d never pick up otherwise, that challenge my sensibilities, and that I might just fall in love with.”
The first book she read was Ray Smith’s Century, which was recommended by Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells. Since Kerry has set up her program as a competition, and given that I chose another book entirely for her to read, it’s probably not wise for me to admit this (although regular readers of this site will already be well aware of it), but I greatly admire Smith’s novel.
The second book Kerry tackled, selected for her by one Patricia Storms, is a collection of linked short stories by Carrie Snyder called Hair Hat. In my checkered past, when I was reviewing for the now-defunct Books in Canada, one of the books that fell into my lap was Hair Hat. My BiC review is reprinted below. I’d be interested to return to Snyder’s text and find out whether my reaction has changed at all; Kerry’s review gives me the opportunity to dig out my copy and do just that. In the meantime, here is my response circa 2004. (Hair Hat is not currently available in stores, but if either Kerry’s or my own review piques your interest, the author has copies of the book for sale through her website.)
***
Carrie Snyder’s volume of 11 stories is linked by the presence of a mysterious figure whose hair is sculpted into the shape of a hat. This nameless figure keeps cropping up – on a beach, in a donut shop, returning a lost wallet – but remains a peripheral figure, as though inhabiting the blurred edges of a photograph. Until, that is, the penultimate story in the collection, when the Hair Hat Man is brought front and centre.
Before becoming the focus of attention, he wanders aimlessly into and out of the lives of a seemingly disparate group of characters: a young girl consumed with guilt over her complicity in the drowning death of her best friend; a mother taking her two children on a day trip to the beach; a female graduate student who flirts openly at a bar in the presence of her boyfriend.
The connections between the characters are occasionally self-evident: the young girl with the drowned friend in the opening story, “Yellow Cherries,” reappears in “Comfort,” which tells the same story from the point of view of the girl’s Aunt Lucy. When the Hair Hat Man shows up at Lucy’s farm, he recognizes the girl as his daughter’s best friend in school; the two girls appear together in the collection’s final story, “Chosen.”
But there are less readily apparent connections running throughout Hair Hat. Absence dominates these stories: the characters in Snyder’s collection are all, in one way or another, missing something. The young girl in “Yellow Cherries” is haunted by the absence of her dead friend. The mother in “Tumbleweed” suspects her husband of being unfaithful, but engages in a program of avoidance and denial, and the husband himself remains absent throughout, never actually appearing in the story. The daughter in “The Apartment” loses her wallet, and in “Third Dog,” the titular canine, symbolic of a kind of malevolent destiny, hovers over the entire story, but never appears in it. The central absence in the collection afflicts the Hair Hat Man himself – it is no accident that the story in which he finally appears in the foreground is titled “Missing.” The way these characters deal with loss – both physical and spiritual – provides the thread that weaves these stories together, lending them a subtle thematic cohesion.
Hair Hat is not, however, simply a collection of short fiction thematically unified by a concern with absence and loss or an examination of the specific responses and repercussions these states have on a particular group of characters. The book is avowedly a collection of linked stories, and it is the very linking device – the presence of the Hair Hat Man himself – that ultimately sinks the collection.
Unlike Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are?, Margaret Laurence’s A Bird in the House, or Michael Winter’s One Last Good Look – linked story collections which are actually variations on the traditional Bildungsroman – Snyder’s stories are yoked together in a way that is highly artificial and intrusive. Snyder’s preferred mode of storytelling is mimetic naturalism of the “kitchen sink” variety, but the eccentrically coiffed interloper who keeps reappearing seems for most of the book’s duration like a cartoonish figure; he feels out of place and is distracting for the reader. Even when we are finally made privy to the Hair Hat Man’s story, his essential ludicrousness is inescapable. The longing and loss that his story insists on is overwhelmed by the reader’s curiosity about how he sleeps and what kind of styling mousse he uses.
It is clear that the author intends the Hair Hat Man’s unorthodox appearance to act as a catalyst of sorts for the other characters in the book, a means of dragging them out of the ordinariness of their lives and forcing their situations into sharper relief. Here is Lucy’s reaction to the Hair Hat Man in “Comfort”: “His presence, his hair hat, were uncalled for, an accident, a misfortune, a blemish on an otherwise clean, calculated day that should have held nothing but the ordinary reminders and warnings.” But even this feels forced and heavy handed, and is insufficient to make the character seem like anything other than an artificial authorial imposition binding together stories that would have been better left discrete.
Paul Quarrington dies
January 21, 2010 by Steven W. Beattie · 2 Comments
It seems like there’s been nothing but bad news round these parts lately. As most of you will already have heard, Canadian novelist, musician, and all around great guy Paul Quarrington succumbed to lung cancer early this morning. Quarrington was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer in May 2009. A statement on his website reads, in part, “His brave journey ended on January 21, 2010. He passed peacefully at home in Toronto in the early hours surrounded by friends and family. It is comforting to know that he didn’t suffer; he was calm and quiet holding hands with those who were closest to him.”
Quarrington was the author of Whale Music, a widely popular novel about a washed-up rock-n-roller, which won the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language Fiction in 1989. His novel Galveston was shortlisted for the 2004 Giller Prize, and King Leary won the 1987 Stephen Leacock Award. That novel was out of print in 2008, when fellow musician Dave Bidini chose it as his pick for the Canada Reads competition on CBC. Quarrington’s novel went on to win the prize, beating out books such as Not Wanted on the Voyage by Timothy Findley and From the Fifteenth District by Mavis Gallant.
Bidini paid tribute to Quarrington on the National Post’s Afterword blog earlier today:
His books – as well as his plays, films, and songs – found the strange in the normal, and the normal in the strange, whether he was writing about infirm and salt-tongued hockey players, drug-addled rock stars, baseball playing circus freaks, or lost Hollywood misfits. Even better than that, he was a gentle lion who strolled about the artscape belying whatever impetuousness or ill-humour one expects in a genius.
Other tributes poured in as the day went on, from friends, colleagues, and people who barely knew the writer, but felt touched by his fiction and his outgoing, irresistible personality. Julie Wilson, who found out by accident that she lives in a house that Quarrington once inhabited with his family, wrote:
Years later, I picked up some extra cash working at The Old Nick on the Danforth. One day, the owner said, “You work in publishing. Do you know Paul Quarrington? That’s his kid sitting at the bar.” What would I say? “Hey, I think I might sleep where you once ‘played Barbies,’ or maybe, I don’t know, thought about stuff.” But then a few years after that, I sat guarding a broad sheet at an Al Purdy tribute at the Dora Keogh. In he walked. He placed his hand on the plastic. Hey, he said. Hey, I croaked. “You know, this really isn’t a big deal. But, the thing is, I live in your old house, and I read your Take One, and, well, it’s just a small world.” He was a nice guy. So, maybe I did know Paul, because that’s all we hear. He’s a nice guy. What else would you want to know?
That’s pretty much all you hear, in fact: what a nice guy he was. And it’s true. I didn’t know him well – I only met him in person on a handful of occasions – but I always found him to be gracious, generous, and accepting. And funny. He possessed a quality that is fabulously rare among humans these days, a quality that bookseller Ben McNally hit on the head in his comment on The Afterword: “He never took himself too seriously but he always took everybody else seriously.”
I’m also quoted in The Afterword’s roundup, and I’ll take the liberty of reprinting my thoughts here, if only because I’m still a bit too emotional to come up with something more profound:
The last time I saw Paul was at the Gladstone Hotel in September, prior to an event I was doing with Ray Robertson. He told us about watching a clip from what I think was Russia’s Got Talent, which featured a woman who told stories in sand: literally. She stood on a large piece of glass and swept the sand around to create a sequence of images that, in aggregate, told a story. Paul was delighted with this and his glee was positively infectious. He also talked about going on tour with his band, and his current writing projects. When I suggested that first-person narration is the hardest kind to pull off, he disagreed – gently, but firmly, as was his wont.
In June, I had a chance to see the Porkbelly Futures perform and they were on fire: it was as if Paul had made a conscious decision to defy the diagnosis he’d been given. It’s not that he didn’t acknowledge his illness – on the contrary, he was dead straight about it with anyone who asked – but it really did seem to be the least important thing in his life. That was just the way he was: defiant in the face of adversity, playful, and determined to fully embrace life. That quality shone through in his life and in his writing.
When I read his novels, it’s this vivacity that shines through most clearly: the ribald humour, the liveliness of the prose, the complete engagement with the quotidian matters of living. While Paul will be sorely missed, he has bequeathed us a literary legacy that I have no doubt will endure. And I’m pretty sure of this: wherever he is now, there’s one kick-ass jam session going on.
Rock on, good man. With any luck, I’ll see you down the road.
Vancouver’s Duthie Books to close
January 19, 2010 by Steven W. Beattie · 15 Comments
In what is becoming a depressingly familiar cycle, the iconic Vancouver indie Duthie Books has announced that it will close its last remaining location on 4th Ave. in Kitsilano, citing untenable competition from a combination of big box stores, Amazon, and e-readers.
Facing pressure from online bookseller Amazon and multi-national chains such as Chapters, owner Cathy Duthie Legate has decided to pack it in and close the last of eight locations on Fourth Avenue in Kitsilano.
The family-owned chain was founded in 1957 by Bill Duthie.
“I’m just not making it, so I’m going to close it down,” said Duthie Legate. “We are going to start our regular sale January 28, but it will be better, of course, with discounts of 40, 60 then 80 percent and I hope to have all the books out of here by the end of February.”
“Then I will tear down the store,” she said.
So, yet another independent falls victim to the price gouging online sellers, the tech evangelists, and the blockbuster mentality of the big box stores. And what really annoys me is that one day in the not-too-distant future, when the indies have vanished entirely, taking with them the most conscientious, knowledgeable, and dedicated booksellers in the business, all the people currently singing the praises of new technology and easier access to information will have no fucking idea what it is we’ve lost.
Canadian literary icon P.K. Page dies: UPDATED
January 14, 2010 by Steven W. Beattie · 3 Comments
Canada has lost a literary giant. The renowned poet P.K. Page died today at the age of 93, according to the Victoria Times-Colonist. The “grand dame of Canadian letters,” Page came to Canada from her native England in 1919. A member companion of the Order of Canada, Page won the Governor General’s Award for her 1954 collection The Metal and the Flower, and she also won two National Magazine Awards, the B.C. Book Prizes Hubert Evans Award for Non-Fiction, the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award, and the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence.
Her 2003 collection Planet Earth was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. (The book was also ranked ninth on Amazon.ca’s list of 50 Canadian Essential Books. The Griffin Poetry Prize website features an archived video of Page reading from that collection.
In a 2006 Times-Colonist article, Page displayed a defiant insouciance about her passing, saying that she hoped she died before humanity irrevocably ruined planet Earth:
“We absolutely seem to ignore [global warming], don’t we? I’m not too sure it isn’t too late,” she said.
“People are blind. It isn’t convenient for them to face it. It means they’d have to make vast changes in their lives … Civilizations have died from their own stupidity before. Look at the Easter Islanders. And we’ll do it. I may be gone before that, I hope. Oh God, I hope. I’m too old already.”
UPDATE: I had to share one anecdote from the Quill & Quire obituary, because I think it’s just about the coolest thing I’ve heard in ages. It involves Page and her one of her publishers, Tim Inkster of The Porcupine’s Quill.
Inkster last heard from Page on Wednesday afternoon, several hours before she was reported to have died. Apparently, an interior designer in Vancouver had used one of the poems from Coal and Roses in a custom-made wallpaper pattern without seeking permission from the author. To thank Inkster for resolving the issue, Page personally called the LCBO manager in a nearby town and had him hand deliver a six-pack of Heineken to Inkster’s home.
Honestly, the woman exuded class (and, apparently, good taste in beer).