Down in the depths
February 4, 2013 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
A tweet from August C. Bourré (@FishSauce) earlier today sent me on a hunt for the review I wrote of Warren Ellis’s debut novel, Crooked Little Vein, which was one of the pieces that got lost when I accidentally overwrote TSR’s files back in 2009. The book is nasty fun, and I’m looking forward to reading Ellis’s new novel, Gun Machine, if I ever manage to get a spare weekend.
The following review was originally published on January 2, 2008.
***
Crooked Little Vein. Warren Ellis; $27.95 cloth 978-0-06-072393-4, 280 pp., William Morrow
“I opened my eyes to see the rat taking a piss in my coffee mug.”
That is the opening line of Crooked Little Vein, the debut novel by acclaimed graphic novelist Warren Ellis. If that line in any way offends, repulses, or otherwise unnerves you, you’d be well advised to give this novel a very wide berth, because in the pantheon of outrageous perversity that unfolds over the following 280 pages, that’s about as effete and as tasteful as things get. If, however, you have a taste for the macabre – if you laughed out loud at the little dogs being inadvertently murdered in A Fish Called Wanda, or if you set aside American Psycho because it wasn’t edgy enough – this short novel, which reads like what would have resulted if Hieronymous Bosch had written The Da Vinci Code, might be for you.
The story – such as it is – centres on one Michael McGill, a luckless private investigator whose last case involved a group of men engaged in amorous relations with a flock of ostriches. McGill is hired by the U.S. President’s chief of staff to track down a book, an alternate Constitution complete with twenty-three “Invisible Amendments,” which “is reputedly bound in the skin of the extraterrestrial entity that plagued Benjamin Franklin’s ass over six nights in Paris during his European travels,” and “is weighted with meteor fragments. The design is such that the sound of the book being opened onto a table has infrasonic content, too low for human hearing. The book briefly vibrates at eighteen hertz, which is the resonant frequency of the human eyeball.”
Still with me?
Not that this admittedly outlandish premise matters much, really. Crooked Little Vein is nominally a hard-boiled detective story modelled on Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, but the mystery story is just an excuse for Ellis to provide us with an increasingly deranged series of set-pieces featuring the denizens of the “American cultural underworld” that McGill encounters on his trek to find the missing volume. What follows is a kind of picaresque on acid involving saline-infused testicles, philosophical serial killers, and a cocaine-addled millionaire who takes advice from a talking teddy bear. Ellis is clearly operating in the Jerry Stahl mode of literary provocation, and he takes evident glee in dreaming up his outrageous and polymorphously perverse scenarios.
What is surprising is not the book’s compulsivity: this is a novel that dares you to look away, to stop reading, and it comes out of the gate at full speed. If you make it past the first chapter, you’re likely not going to stop, and the spiralling depravity of events ensures that a willing reader is propelled forward on an ever-increasing current of narrative energy.
No, what is surprising is that there is a moral centre to the story; the author actually manages to score a number of rhetorical points while constantly upping the gross-out ante. Ellis is interested in what defines the cultural mainstream of our society as against what exists at the margins. In a world where serial killers are more popular than rock stars in the mass psyche and large-scale Internet sex sites catering to every kind of fetish or paraphilia are patronized by soccer moms and librarians, is it even possible to speak of margins any more? If so, where are they, and to what extremes does a person have to go (or sink) to find them?
These are pressing questions, and Ellis deals with them head on. He throws an unforgiving, incandescent light on a society that has passed – almost without our realizing it – through the looking glass. Even in a cultural landscape that resembles a funhouse mirror, there are moral lines to be drawn, and Ellis is adept at locating them, while always remaining non-judgmental of those outsiders who enjoy more alternative or esoteric, yet essentially harmless, pursuits.
There is fun to be had here, for sure, but beyond and beneath the fun there is also a serious artist asking some probing questions about the way our culture is constructed in the early years of the 21st century. Crooked Little Vein could never be mistaken for great literature, but as a quick, dirty, entertaining diversion it is to be recommended. That it also asks some provocative questions is just the icing on Ellis’s perverse little cake.
Jane Austen, computer algorithms, and the enduring importance of the literary expert
February 1, 2013 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
To the literary critic’s toolbox, which includes concepts such as mimesis, irony, and the unreliable narrator, it might soon be necessary to add stylometry and culturomics. The former refers to a quantitative analysis of a writer’s vocabulary, syntax, and lexicon, and the latter refers to a similar quantitative analysis undertaken in the area of the humanities. What is significant about both is that they are handled by a computer running sophisticated algorithms like the kind used by Google or Amazon.
A recent New York Times article points to the way these computer algorithms were employed to determine that Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott are the two most influential writers of the 19th century. The study, undertaken by Matthew L. Jockers, found that Austen and Scott “had the greatest effect on other authors, in terms of writing style and themes.” To some extent, it is unsurprising that the authors of romantic social comedy on the one hand and mass-appeal adventure stories on the other should be influential: these are still the kinds of novels that dominate bestseller lists today. (It is important to note that when people talk about their affection for Jane Austen, it is usually Pride and Prejudice they’re thinking of, not Northanger Abbey.)
Here’s the NYT on Jockers’ project:
He based his conclusion on an analysis of 3,592 works published from 1780 to 1900. It was a lot of digging, and a computer did it.
The study, which involved statistical parsing and aggregation of thousands of novels, made other striking observations. For example, Austen’s works cluster tightly together in style and theme, while those of George Eliot (a.k.a. Mary Ann Evans) range more broadly, and more closely resemble the patterns of male writers. Using similar criteria, Harriet Beecher Stowe was 20 years ahead of her time, said Mr. Jockers, whose research will soon be published in a book, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History (University of Illinois Press).
While not claiming to know what “the patterns of male writers” means precisely, this is interesting information, “an intriguing sign that Big Data technology is steadily pushing beyond the Internet industry and scientific research into seemingly foreign fields like the social sciences and the humanities.” It is probably overstating the case, however, to compare (as the NYT goes on to do) a statistical algorithmic literary analysis to the impact of the microscope or the telescope.
In any literary endeavour, statistics will only get you part way. Human beings are still needed to effect a more nuanced investigation into literary history and the traditions that inform it, something the NYT article points out: “Quantitative tools in the humanities and the social sciences, as in other fields, are most powerful when they are controlled by an intelligent human. Experts with deep knowledge of a subject are needed to ask the right questions and to recognize the shortcomings of statistical models.”
While unarguably true, this is not good news in a world that seems to devalue the role of “experts with deep knowledge of a subject.” In an editor’s note in The Walrus, John Macfarlane bemoans exactly this problem, noting that in the digital age, expert analysis has been forced to take a back seat to popular opinion:
A people’s choice award was once a consolation prize for not winning something more estimable, like an Oscar or an Emmy, but in the age of Facebook and Twitter popularity rules.
This egalitarian impulse is the cultural assertion of the neo-liberal belief – itself increasingly popular – that the market should determine nearly anything. But more alarming is the flip side: a growing disrespect for knowledge and expertise. In contemporary North America, one person’s opinion is as good as the next, no matter how uninformed.
Popularity is paramount, as Macfarlane notes, and frequently in matters that don’t carry a whole lot of substance or import. More people in 2013 are likely to vote for the winner of So You Think You Can Dance? than are likely to vote in a federal election. And when people who do vote are asked what quality most attracts them in a potential leader, the answer is frequently, “The person I’d most like to have a beer with.” While conviviality and approachability are certainly admirable traits, it is devoutly to be hoped that substantial intellect and sober judgment would be more desirable attributes.
There isn’t much in the current culture to bolster such hope, however, and certainly not in the literary sphere. Substantial book review sections are shrinking or disappearing for want of readers, who would rather give a quick thumbs up or thumbs down to a book on Goodreads than work through 1,500 words of carefully crafted analysis by a knowledgeable critic like James Wood or Rohan Maitzen. While computers are busy counting the number of times authors use certain words, and making quantitative judgments about their relative influence as a result, it would be good if we did not forget the importance of having human experts capable of parsing the data and placing it into a broader, deeper context.
A walk on the wild side: the hard-boiled world of Lawrence Block
January 19, 2013 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
A Drop of the Hard Stuff. Lawrence Block; $16.50 paper 978-0-316-12731-8, 340 pp., Mulholland Books
Getting Off. Lawrence Block; $17.95 paper 978-0-85768-582-7, 336 pp., Hard Case Crime
In any survey of American hard-boiled crime fiction, certain names naturally stand out. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, of course. James M. Cain. Jim Thompson. James Ellroy. Lawrence Block does not have quite the same literary cachet, although as a craftsperson, he can write circles around most of the hacks in the business. But for my money, Block’s series of novels featuring former New York City cop, unlicensed private investigator, and recovering alcoholic Matthew Scudder are among the best – and most consistently strong – in the genre. They are undeniably dark books – they make the NYC of Law & Order look like a playground – and tinged with a plaintive melancholy that gets more and more pronounced as the series progresses.
And these are inescapably series novels: they are best read in order, and as a piece. Characters recur, disappear and reappear over the course of several books, and the shadow of Scudder’s memory grows longer and more nuanced with each successive entry.
That said, Block’s latest Scudder mystery, 2011′s A Drop of the Hard Stuff, is something of an outlier, in that it operates more as a standalone than certain other series installments and, although it is chronological in order, it flashes back to an earlier period in Scudder’s life, just after he quit drinking.
To effect this, Block employs a framing strategy that opens with the now long-sober Scudder sitting in a bar chatting with his friend (and series regular) Mick Ballou. (Though Scudder is sober, the milieu in which he operates is saturated with booze; he still frequents his old stomping grounds to meet contacts and glean information, although he restricts his intake to club soda and coffee.) Their discussion turns reflective, and Scudder begins to reminisce about a kid he knew in school, Jack Ellery. Scudder and Ellery had grown up together in the Bronx, but their paths diverged in later years, the former becoming an NYC cop and the latter turning to a life of petty crime. The first of four times Scudder encounters Ellery as an adult is behind a one-way mirror; Ellery has been arrested for robbery and put in a line-up, but the cops are forced to let him go when the witness flubs the ID. The last time Scudder sees Ellery, his erstwhile schoolmate is on a slab in the morgue.
Scudder had run into Ellery at an AA meeting, after which Ellery had confided that he was having difficulty with the program’s ninth step, making amends to those he had wronged. As a not-terribly-successful career criminal, Ellery had run afoul of numerous people, at least one of whom still held a grudge: the third time Scudder and Ellery encounter each other, the latter’s face has been beaten to a pulp.
After Ellery’s death, his sponsor, Greg Stillman, approaches Scudder and asks for help. Stillman is a self-confessed “Step Nazi” – a sponsor who demands rigid adherence to the steps toward recovery – and is wracked with guilt over the thought that Ellery was killed while trying to make amends to someone in his past. The list Ellery compiled of the people he had wronged (in accordance with Step Eight of the twelve) has five names on it: these become the five principal suspects in his demise.
Scudder’s investigation takes him on a tour of some of the seedier sections of New York, and the flashback method of storytelling allows Block to draw contrasts between the city as it was in the 1980s and the way it is now. (One of the great joys of the Matthew Scudder books is watching the city grow and evolve alongside the protagonist. Hell’s Kitchen becomes Clinton, but the name change doesn’t prove to be the prophylactic against crime city planners might have hoped for.) The part of New York that Scudder frequents – its decrepit church basements and dive bars, its walk-ups and cop shops – has always been as much of a character as any of the humans in Block’s novels; the author and his detective inhabit a locale that lives and breathes and seethes and changes. The Scudder novels may not be approved by the New York City tourist board, but they provide a provocative and uneasy glimpse into the dark side of the city that never sleeps.
One of the dangers of the series has always been that Scudder’s sobriety teeters on the edge of becoming formulaic, and there are moments in A Drop of the Hard Stuff when the narrative tilts over that edge. Writers as diverse as Nick Tosches and James Frey have pointed out that by insisting on attendance at a minimum of one meeting per day in the first year sober, encouraging recovering alcoholics to admit powerlessness over their disease and devote themselves to the program in perpetuity, AA merely replaces one addiction with another. And like any addiction, on one level, the repetition of meetings, confessions, handing out chips, and reflection about the difficulties of staying sober can become somewhat monotonous. A Drop of the Hard Stuff takes place toward the end of Scudder’s first year without drink, and Block does a good job of dramatizing the temptations to stray from the path of sobriety, and the dangers involved in giving in. But over the course of more than 300 pages, the endless cycle of meetings does become a bit wearisome.
Block is a staggeringly prolific author who has been writing the Scudder series since 1975. In 1994, he was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. It would be unsurprising if, after all that time and all those books, he didn’t begin to repeat himself, even occasionally. Despite A Drop of the Hard Stuff‘s plot, which takes a spare whodunnit formula and turns it inside out, and an ending that subverts the reader’s expectations quite neatly, there is the sense that much of this territory has been trod in earlier series installments. Newcomers to the series might enjoy the book more as a standalone introduction, though those of us who have missed Scudder are likely glad just to have him back, if not at the very top of his game.
In any event, A Drop of the Hard Stuff stands head and shoulders above Getting Off, the other novel Block published in 2011, this one under Hard Case Crime’s imprint of hard-boiled and pulp thrillers. Written under the pseudonym Jill Emerson and subtitled A Novel of Sex and Violence, Getting Off is deliberately, almost defiantly, in the pulp mode. The book chimes with the Scudder novel in numerous ways, many of them more noticeable if the two are read back-to-back. In both novels, characters use the overly twee phrase “di dah di dah di dah” as a kind of verbal placeholder. And both novels feature a central character checking names off a list.
In this case, the character was born Katherine Anne Tolliver, but has gone by so many different aliases in adulthood she has lost track of them all. Katherine has a pattern when it comes to men: she picks up anonymous strangers in bars, has sex with them, then kills them and moves on, often stealing whatever money her victim has in his wallet. She does this, we come to understand, as a means of expunging the memory of her father, who sexually abused her as a child and adolescent. Five men have managed to walk away from sexual encounters with her; when she realizes the psychic scars this leaves her with, she determines to track them down and finish the job.
If this premise is in any way offensive to a reader’s sensibilities, that reader is advised to give this novel a wide berth. Block plays with the pulp convention of the femme fatale, but pushes it into territory James M. Cain and Jim Thompson could never have dreamt of. There is an instance of phone sex coupled with necrophilia, and one of Katherine’s marks turns out to be a veteran of the Iraq war who was horribly injured by a roadside bomb while on duty. There is something almost commendable about Block’s willingness to push his scenario to its extreme outer reaches, but the sense of discomfort is heightened by the book’s pulp nature: the sensationalism in the novel is an end in itself, which renders the entire enterprise creepy and squirm-inducing at best.
This is particularly true for the sex, which is plentiful and explicit. It is not, however, particularly well handled. Erotica and horror are the two most difficult genres for an author to pull off, because if either is done badly, it becomes unintentionally funny. There is a lot of unintentional laughter in Getting Off, particularly with regard to Katherine’s phone conversations with Rita, a woman she encountered as a landlord during one of her brief stays, and has since developed an attraction to. Their dialogues, which involve everything from mutual masturbation to threesomes to butt plugs to sex with Mormons, are highly self-conscious and absurd, and almost succeed in stopping the book in its tracks.
On one hand, it’s hard not to admire Block’s willingness to wallow in the depths of the pulp mode, to begin with the tropes and conventions of the lurid paperbacks that used to be stocked on wire spin-racks in drugstores in the 1940s and ’50s, then to inject them with liberal doses of explicit sex and violence. (Anyone liable to slag Block for trying to cash in on the E.L. James-inspired clamour for all things naughty should note that Block’s novel appeared the year before Fifty Shades of Grey became a publishing phenomenon.) But the book is too bloated and the sex too ill-handled for it to appear as anything more than a minor work in the career of one of America’s best living crime novelists.
New reviews online: Spencer Gordon, Carol Shaben Terence Dickinson, and Cary Fagan
January 3, 2013 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
Kicking off 2013, I’ve got a quartet of new Quill & Quire reviews online, including a fabulously rare review of a novel for children.
First up is a stellar debut story collection from Spencer Gordon. If you haven’t already checked this one out, I’d strongly urge you to do so.
Gordon demonstrates a refreshing willingness to test the plasticity of language and structure. “Frankie + Hilary + Romeo + Abigail + Helen: An Intermission,” which reads like a mash-up of David Foster Wallace and American Psycho–vintage Bret Easton Ellis, is an interrogation of boredom in the context of a society that has become so enthralled by the notion of celebrity that a mere litany of irrelevant facts about people in the public eye can be thought to carry some kind of deeper meaning.
This is not to suggest Gordon is incapable of being straightforward when it suits him. Two of the most emotionally affecting stories in the collection – “Wide and Blue and Empty,” about a mother’s attempt to connect with her grown son, and “Last Words,” about a man in his sixties trying to come to terms with the squandered potential of his life in the wake of a cancer diagnosis – are perfectly traditional short stories, rendered all the more potent for their lack of stylistic pyrotechnics.
Next is a Jon Krakauer-esque non-fiction book about the 1984 plane crash that killed the leader of the provincial opposition in Alberta, and the four men who survived.
On the night of Oct. 19, 1984, Wapiti 402, a 10-seat Piper Navajo Chieftain twin-engine aircraft bound for the town of Grande Prairie, crashed in the wilderness of Northern Alberta, killing six passengers, including Grant Notley, the leader of the provincial opposition NDP. Four people survived: Erik Vogel, the pilot; RCMP constable Scott Deschamps; Paul Archambault, the prisoner Deschamps was escorting from Kamloops to Grande Prairie on an outstanding warrant; and Larry Shaben, minister for housing and utilities in the Alberta provincial government. The four men spent a harrowing night fighting the elements and struggling to stay alive while waiting to be rescued.
National Magazine Award winner Carol Shaben – Larry’s daughter – reconstructs the events leading up to the crash, the night on the mountain, and the way the survivors’ lives were changed as a result.
Third is a gorgeously illustrated book of photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, accompanied by fascinating text about the various celestial bodies and galaxies.
Terence Dickinson, the editor of SkyNews magazine and author of NightWatch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe, has compiled a visually breathtaking array of Hubble’s images in an extraordinary new volume.
Accessible but never condescending, Dickinson’s text describes the makeup of celestial objects from brown dwarfs to blue supergiants, and cogently explains Hubble’s major breakthroughs (such as allowing scientists to determine with greater accuracy the rate at which the universe is expanding).
And finally, the first book in a new series for young readers, written by the indefatigable Cary Fagan.
There are no clear-cut villains in this novel: the school bully reveals unexpected dimensions, as does the young magician, Franklin, whose resistance to accepting Sullivan as a member of the group turns out to be born of jealousy. Even Mistress Melville, the most frankly malevolent of the troupe, helps Sullivan find a hook for his juggling act (albeit out of selfish motives).
Nor is Fagan content to restrict himself to a single register. Young readers may giggle at the two police officers named Spoonitch and Forka, but will likely miss the joke in the fact that Mintz father and son are named Gilbert and Sullivan.
Laughter in the dark
January 2, 2013 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
Dead Funny: Telling Jokes in Hitler’s Germany. Rudolph Herzog, Jefferson Chase, trans.; $16.95 paper 978-1-61219-130-0, 250 pp., Melville House Publishing
“A guy goes to the dentist, who says, ‘Open your mouth, please.’ The guy answers, ‘No way. I don’t even know you.’”
It is difficult to imagine how dangerous it was to tell that joke – so seemingly innocuous from a 2013 perspective – to a German audience during the years the Third Reich held power. The cabaret performer responsible for the quip, Werner Finck, had every reason to be wary of the Nazis’ “cultural inspectors,” having already spent six weeks in the Esterwegen concentration camp as a result of his public performances. Following his release, the popular German comedian and actor found work at the Cabaret of Comedians in Berlin, an establishment run by a man “known for toeing the party line,” but was forced to temper his act to ensure that his political humour was not overly explicit; his audiences became adept at reading between the lines of Finck’s comedy, and the performer himself referred to working at “half throttle.”
By 1939, the relatively liberal attitude the Nazis adopted toward critical humour during their early years in power (at least prior to the Reichstag fire in February of 1933) had disappeared, and Joseph Goebbels, who headed the Ministry of Propaganda, was on the verge of cracking down hard on transgressors. As Rudolph Herzog writes in his intriguing book: “Goebbels, determined not to be flouted again by his rival Göring, was preparing a renewed attack on Finck within the General Staff. ‘Political jokes will be eradicated, ripped out by the very roots,’ Goebbels noted in his diary.”
Humour, of course, has various registers and uses: it can be harmless or cutting; it can be employed to let off steam or to underscore hypocrisy and cupidity. It did not help matters that the Nazis’ response to humour they found too critical or subversive was applied so arbitrarily: punishment ran the gamut from imprisonment in Dachau to – in extreme cases – execution. Finck was lucky as a result of his fame and the timely intercession of an actress who was also an erstwhile consort of Hermann Göring. Others did not fare so well. Erich Ohser, who was responsible for satirical political cartoons depicting, among other things, “a man out for a walk in the snow urinating in the form of a swastika,” was arrested for making seditious remarks to a friend; Ohser committed suicide, and his friend was sentenced to death.
Herzog, the son of noted documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog, details the diverse ways various levels of society employed humour in the Third Reich, from professional cabaret performers to ordinary citizens to the government itself, with its officially sanctioned propaganda cinema that served, in part, to foment anti-Jewish sentiment. The Nazi campaign against the Jews, Herzog argues, was aided by the kind of anti-Semitic banter that was allowed to spread like wildfire throughout German society: “There were even jokes that laughed at anti-Jewish violence, and these were told not just by hardcore Nazi party supporters, but also by hordes of willing opportunists and March violets.”
On the other side of the coin, Herzog points out that persecuted Jewish Europeans also engaged in humour – although of an understandably darker, more mordant variety – as a coping mechanism. The author records a scathing joke about unequal food rations under the Nazis: “Our occupiers know a lot about nutrition. They’ve scientifically determined that Germans need 2,500 calories a day to survive, while Poles require only 600 and Jews just 150.”
The final section of Herzog’s book addresses what is arguably the most distressing question in the context of humour and the Nazis: is it ever permissible to laugh about the Holocaust? Guilt over Nazi atrocities is pervasive in German society even today, but Herzog points out that anti-Semitism persisted even after the war was over. He quotes the three “unwritten rules” about depictions of the Holocaust attributed to American scholar Terrence Des Pres:
- The Holocaust shall be represented, in its totality, as a unique event, as a special case and kingdom of its own, above or below or apart from history.
- Representations of the Holocaust shall be as accurate and faithful as possible to the facts and conditions of the event, without change or manipulation for any reason – artistic reasons included.
- The Holocaust shall be approached as a solemn or even sacred event with seriousness admitting no response that might obscure its enormity or dishonor its dead.
“But by the end of the 1960s,” Herzog writes, “the American comedian-director Mel Brooks would break all the rules – written and unwritten – of historical piety.” It is possible that Brooks managed to get away with his 1968 farce, The Producers, complete with its comedic centrepiece, the fictional Broadway musical Springtime for Hitler, because the director was himself Jewish. Elsewhere in his book, Herzog points to movies shot outside Germany during the Third Reich – Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be – as comedic works that successfully satirized Nazi fascism and its attendant persecution of European Jews, and he is complimentary toward the Oscar-winning 1997 Roberto Benigni film La Vita e Bella. Interestingly, he ignores any mention of the notorious unreleased Jerry Lewis vehicle The Day the Clown Cried.
In sum, Dead Funny is a fascinating examination of an aspect of German history that is often overlooked. Herzog debunks the myth that humour was absent altogether under the Third Reich, and in so doing also explodes the notion that the German people were ignorant of the crimes being committed by Hitler and his cronies. For cultural enthusiasts and students of the Second World War, the book provides a disturbing glimpse into life under the Nazi regime, and the bitter comedy that simultaneously helped foster and sabotage it.
Nicole Dixon review, holiday party guests
December 15, 2012 by Steven W. Beattie · 1 Comment
My review of Nicole Dixon’s short-story collection, High-Water Mark, is online at the National Post‘s Afterword blog. The review has already come in for criticism on Twitter as a result of my invocation of what the poet Jacob McArthur Mooney feels is a hoary CanLit cliché.
Both reviews I read in @npbooks today had openers that paraphrase to “unlike the usual boring canlit, this book is cool” #strawmancriticism
– Jake(@VoxPopulist) December 14, 2012
Here’s the offending paragraph:
Dixon is uninterested in the kind of lyrical historical romance that was, for some time, the default CanLit setting. Her stories are abrasive and direct, marrying a fierce intelligence with a febrile style that refuses to shy away from profanity or explicit sex. There is a toughness to these stories that testifies to a refreshing honesty, a refusal on Dixon’s part to paper over the more nettlesome aspects of her material, opting rather to face it head-on in all its painful messiness. High-Water Mark is kitchen-sink realism filtered through a storm-tossed East Coast sensibility. And it is chock full of allusiveness and implication.
Twitter controversy aside, I thought Dixon’s book was a bit of alright.
In other news, Toronto-based poet Sachiko Murakami, this month’s writer in residence at Open Book: Toronto, asked me to choose a guest list for an imaginary literary holiday party. You can see my response, along with those of poets David McGimpsey and Alessandro Porco, on the Open Book site.
New reviews online: Annabel Lyon, Shelley A. Leedahl, Nina Bunjevac
December 11, 2012 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
Three new Quill reviews are now online, one each of a novel, a story collection, and a work of graphica. Guess which one I liked best?
The novel is the sequel to Annabel Lyon’s enormously successful 2009 book, The Golden Mean.
The Sweet Girl returns readers to the world of ancient Greece that served as the setting for Lyon’s previous novel, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Award winner The Golden Mean. When Alexander the Great, once his student, dies, Aritstotle and his family are forced to flee the city for the garrison town of Chalcis. When Aristotle himself dies, Pythias is left on her own to find a place in a world that does not accommodate her independence, and seems intent on corrupting her.
The novel presents a detailed and carefully wrought milieu that feels at once true to its time and startling in the ways it resonates with our modern world. Pythias’s experiences are never far removed from the matter of her gender, and it is telling that the only place her wit is permitted to flourish is in the ad hoc brothel where she provides sexual services to prominent town citizens.
The collection is the new release from Shelley A. Leedahl.
When cracking open a new collection of short fiction, it’s not encouraging to discover the following sentence fewer than 10 pages in: “Playing cards trumped all else in our family.” This kind of affected punning is frequently a sign of desperation on the part of a writer; for a reader, encountering this sentence so early on results in a sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach. Fortunately, this instance of self-conscious prose is not entirely indicative of the stories in B.C. writer Shelley A. Leedahl’s 10th book.
The dozen stories in Listen, Honey centre on relationships – familial and romantic – most of which are decidedly dysfunctional. In “The Song of the Dog,” a couple tries to replace their beloved deceased canine (improbably named Elton John), resulting in friction when the new pet turns out to be a “holy terror.” The high-school senior in “Rabun County” simultaneously negotiates a romantic relationship with one of her teachers and the implications of her mentally challenged sister’s unwanted pregnancy. And in the title story, a wayward son listens to a succession of voicemail messages left by his lonely and inconsolable mother.
And the work of graphica is a startling collection of comics from Toronto resident Nina Bunjevac.
Bunjevac’s narratives explore displacement and urban ennui, with a distinctly Eastern European sensibility (the author credits Serbian filmmaker Dusan Makavejev as an influence). In “Opportunity Presents Itself,” a Balkan woman is brought to America by her venal uncle. Hoping for a new life, what she finds is closer to hell on earth. In the collection’s centrepiece, a character named Zorka Petrovic (who resembles a female version of R. Crumb’s Fritz the Cat), becomes pregnant with a male stripper’s child. Her abject loneliness and longing for some form of basic companionship is heartbreaking.
My name is Steven, and I am a copy editor
November 27, 2012 by Steven W. Beattie · 7 Comments
I recently read a 400-page novel (no, I shan’t cop to which one) in which someone was referred to as grabbing “the reigns of power.” The misuse of the word “reigns” in this phrase bothered me inordinately. But I was equally bothered by the degree to which this mistake nagged at me. Here was a work of great ambition, published by a reputable house, and I found myself fixating on four words. Four words out of some 170,000 other, properly deployed and emotionally resonant words. I felt like Hazel Motes’s grandfather in Wise Blood, a preacher who travelled around “with Jesus hidden in his head like a stinger.” Except instead of Jesus, I had a picayune error in usage lodged in the back of my head.
It was certainly not the first time I’d experienced this feeling. More and more I’m noticing typos and syntactical errors cropping up in professionally edited books from major publishing houses. Misplaced modifiers proliferate the prose of otherwise competent writers, and instances of fuzzy lexical thinking scream out of works of fiction and non-fiction alike. One academic text I recently encountered contained so many errors in the footnotes I had to put the book aside or risk harming myself or others.
Nor is this tendency on my part restricted to professionally edited or published works. When I come across a sidewalk chalkboard with “2-for-1 martini’s” or “half-price nacho’s” written on it, I will surreptitiously erase the errant apostrophe. Walking down the street the other day, I saw a sign advertising the annual “Movember” drive to raise funds for prostate cancer research appended with the phrase, “Support prostate cancer.” I practically went into conniptions.
My name is Steven, and I am a copy editor.
It is no secret that copy editors spend extraordinary amounts of time obsessing over whether a semicolon should really be an em-dash or a period, sweating over agreements between subjects and objects in sentences, and muttering under their breath about the distinctions between “that” and “which,” “effect” and “affect,” “less” and “fewer.” What worries me is the degree to which one can get caught up in these technical matters, to the extent that the joy of reading is ultimately lost. (I was tempted to use the word “impacted” in that last sentence, but the copy editor in me vetoed it.)
So I was pleased to read Yuka Igarashi’s piece about copy-editing the latest issue of Granta, if only because it reassured me that while I may be crazy, at least I’m not alone. Igarashi writes, in part:
There is a danger to copy-editing. You start to read in a different way. You start to see the sentence as machinery. You focus on the gears and levers that connect words to one another; you hunt for the wayward semicolon, the unintentionally ambiguous phrase, the clunky repeated word. You even hope they appear, so you can kill them. You see them when they’re not even there, because you relish slashing your pen across the paper. It gets a little twisted.
As with any kind of technical knowledge or specialization, it is possible to take copy-editing too far, to be ruled by it, to not quite be able to shut it off when it ought to be shut off.
Igarashi goes on to suggest that the diligent care copy editors take with a text does not necessarily preclude an enjoyment of literature, and she’s probably right. But she is also right to point out that time spent professionally editing copy makes you read differently: it makes you more demanding, pickier, more willing to pounce on inconsistencies like the disparate use of the American “toward” and the British “towards” in a single text. These things appear to take on disproportionate weight, which makes the thud when they topple off the written edifice that much more pronounced.
Obviously, writers should take care to ensure that every single word they use is the best one, and is used correctly. However, we are all human, and we will all inadvertently substitute “reign” for “rein” once in a while. The copy editor in me will still get his back up, but I’m working on it. “Half-price nacho’s,” on the other hand, is indefensible.
Drinking the cultural Kool-Aid: Dwight Macdonald and the idea of midcult
November 6, 2012 by Steven W. Beattie · 1 Comment
Recently, I’ve been thinking a great deal about Dwight Macdonald’s idea of “midcult.” In Macdonald’s conception, midcult is the “bastard” of masscult, a phenomenon that rose out of the Industrial Revolution. Masscult is characterized by a diminution of taste and a concurrent commodification of artistic output that, in its appeal to an undifferentiated mass public, merely parodies (Macdonald’s word) actual culture. In its appeal to a kind of fuzzy notion of democracy, masscult denies the utility (or in many cases, even the existence) of discrimination or artistic value judgments, conflating artistic standards into a bland relativism that allows the same worth to both Earl Stanley Gardner and Edgar Allan Poe. In Macdonald’s words:
Masscult is a dynamic, revolutionary force, breaking down the old barriers of class, tradition, and taste, dissolving all cultural distinctions. It mixes, scrambles everything together, producing what might be called homogenized culture, after another American achievement, the homogenization process that distributes the globules of cream evenly throughout the milk instead of allowing them to float separately on top. The interesting difference is that whereas the cream is still in the homogenized milk, somehow it disappears from homogenized culture. For the process destroys all values, since value-judgments require discrimination, an ugly word in liberal-democratic America. Masscult is very, very democratic; it refuses to discriminate against or between anything or anybody. All is grist to its mill and all comes out finely ground indeed.*
The essential characteristic of high culture, for Macdonald, is individuality: there must be something unique in the artist’s vision that sets his or her work against the grain. By contrast, the essential condition of masscult is a lack of individuality. In order to appeal to a broad consumer public, masscult eradicates any stamp of idiosyncrasy or unfamiliarity, and ensures that its audience is never rendered uncomfortable or uncertain. Masscult reaffirms its recipients’ prejudices and soothes their minds with platitudes.
It also denies any responsibility on the part of its audience. “As Clement Greenberg noted in ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch,’” Macdonald writes, “… the special aesthetic quality of Kitsch – a term which includes both Masscult and Midcult – is that it ‘predigests art for the spectator and spares him the effort, provides him with a shortcut to the pleasures of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in the genuine art’ because it includes the spectator’s reactions in the work itself instead of forcing him to make his own responses.” Greenberg’s assessment cannot be overstated in the context of today’s denuded literary environment: it is the precondition that separates, for instance, E.L. James’s repurposed fanfiction, Fifty Shades of Grey (a work of masscult if there ever was one), from Tamara Faith Berger’s novel Maidenhead.
For Macdonald, midcult is a more dangerous variant than masscult, because where the latter eradicates distinctions between high culture and kitsch, the former incorporates elements of high culture into products that are intended for mass consumption and are calculated to appease an undiscerning mass audience. By cloaking itself in a veneer of high culture, midcult allows its audience to pretend that what is being trafficked in is the authentic article, when in actuality it is anything but. More sophisticated than masscult, midcult is in fact little more than an elaborate confidence scam.
In these more advanced times, the danger to High Culture is not so much from Masscult as from a peculiar hybrid bred from the latter’s unnatural intercourse with the former. A whole middle culture has come into existence and it threatens to absorb both its parents. This intermediate form – let us call it Midcult – has the essential qualities of Masscult – the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity – but it decently covers them with a cultural figleaf. In Masscult the trick is plain – to please the crowd by any means. But Midcult has it both ways: it pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them.
The vast majority of what passes for great literature in our day is in fact midcult, produced and promoted by an amorphous mass incapable of telling the difference. Macdonald referred to “masscult” and “midcult” (rather than mass culture and mid culture) because he identified similarities between the way we consume cultural products and the way cults operate. In both cases, an act of brainwashing occurs, and in both cases, absolute fidelity to a set of unbending precepts is demanded. Midcult, like any other cult, demands conformity; any attempt to assert individuality will be met with repercussions (in the case of our current cultural environment, ostracism or – worse – indifference).
Macdonald recognizes the elitist nature of his arguments; he also recognizes that charges of elitism miss the point altogether. The creation of literature is essentially undemocratic because, as Martin Amis points out, the one thing that is not democratic is talent. Macdonald quotes T.S. Eliot, who demands that anyone in complete thrall to notions of egalitarianism “stop paying lip-service to culture.”
The push for easily digestible, readily accessible artistic products has, in the 21st century, reached a point of critical mass. In his essay, penned at roughly the halfway point of the previous century, Macdonald could not envision a reason why midcult “might not be stabilized as the norm of our culture.” The lack of genuine discernment and the mindless acceptance of ersatz culture for the real thing has brought us to the point where even educated, well-read people seem to prefer Jane Smiley to Jane Austen, James Patterson to James Ellroy.
“[B]ecause of the disintegrative effects of Masscult,” Macdonald writes, “… the standards are by no means generally accepted. The danger is that the values of Midcult, instead of being transitional – ‘the price of progress’ – may now themselves become a debased, permanent standard.” There is good reason to suggest they already have.
*Macdonald’s essay, “Masscult and Midcult,” which first appeared in the Partisan Review in 1960, applies itself specifically and insistently to the American cultural landscape; the U.S. has been so effective in exporting its masscult products in the intervening years that Macdonald’s arguments now seem at least as applicable north of the forty-ninth parallel.
Towards a kind of aesthetic mysticism
November 1, 2012 by Steven W. Beattie · 1 Comment
The writer’s art appears to seek a compensation for the hopelessness or meanness of existence. By some occult method, the writer has connected himself with the feelings and ideal conceptions of which few signs remain in ordinary existence. Some novelists, the naturalists, have staked everything on ordinary existence in their desire to keep their connection with the surrounding world. Many of these have turned themselves into recording instruments at best, and at worst they have sucked up to the crowd, disgustingly. But the majority of modern novelists have followed the standard of Flaubert, the aesthetic standard. The shock caused by the loss of faith, says Professor Heller in The Disinherited Mind, made Burckhardt adopt an aesthetic view of history. If he is right, a sharp sense of disappointment and aestheticism go together. Flaubert complained that the exterior world was “disgusting, enervating, corruptive, and brutalizing. … I am turning towards a kind of aesthetic mysticism,” he wrote.
– Saul Bellow, “The Sealed Treasure” (1960)