How (not) to land a literary agent
October 31, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
Ladies and gentlemen, yr. humble correspondent has had a miserable week. Still reading the Giller list, etc., etc., and as a result, you may have noticed a certain sparseness of posting around these parts. But, the calendar flips over to a new month tomorrow, we gain an hour’s sleep, and perhaps all will seem different in the morning.
In the meantime, I’ll refer you to one of the few things that has given me a laugh over the last little while, U.K. literary agent Daisy Frost’s list of 10 things to avoid doing as a prospective client:
- Don’t email me two three or four times a week saying “I have changed a section in one of the chapters – I have attached it – please substitute the pages in the copy you are reading and then alter the main character’s name from George to Jenny and please note I am thinking about changing the setting from Louisiana in 1830 to Solihull in the present day.”
James Frey and Michael Musto confirm what hundreds of editors already knew
October 29, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
Why Leah McLaren is smarter than me
October 28, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 2 Comments
It’s award season in book world. Short lists for the Triple Crown of Canadian literature – the Governor-General, the Giller and the Roger’s Writer’s Trust – have all been announced and the jury selections pored over like tea leaves in a mug. Ah, the comforting brew of Canadian literary culture. High in antioxidants, low in caffeine.
Like everyone else, I have followed the coverage and pondered the obvious: When exactly did Douglas Coupland find time to write another novel? Who does Annabel Lyon’s hair? Is Margaret Atwood pissed?
One thing I have not wondered, however, is which of the anointed books to add to my shelf, worthy efforts though I’m sure they are. You read that right: This fall, I won’t be reading any of the books that are nominated for Canadian literary prizes. And I don’t feel guilty about it either.
The “sadistic misogyny” of crime fiction: UPDATED
October 26, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 11 Comments
I posted about this one over on Quillblog, but I thought it bore repeating here, since it’s a subject that has concerned me personally for quite some time. Jessica Mann, the British novelist and, until very recently, crime fiction reviewer for the Literary Review, has told the Guardian that she will no longer review genre works because of what she sees as their “sadistic misogyny”:
“Each psychopath is more sadistic than the last and his victims’ sufferings are described in detail that becomes ever more explicit, as young women are imprisoned, bound, gagged, strung up or tied down, raped, sliced, burned, blinded, beaten, eaten, starved, suffocated, stabbed, boiled or buried alive,” she said.
“Authors must be free to write and publishers to publish. But critics must be free to say they have had enough. So however many more outpourings of sadistic misogyny are crammed on to the bandwagon, no more of them will be reviewed by me,” said Mann, who has written her own bestselling series of crime novels and a non-fiction book about female crime writers.
Some may see Mann’s stance as overly marmish; I tend to think she has a point that is at least worthy of consideration. When the psychotic serial killer Buffalo Bill used his female victims’ skins to make himself a woman’s suit in the thriller The Silence of the Lambs, the culture appeared to have reached a kind of ne plus ultra where such material was concerned; almost two decades later, Thomas Harris’s book and Jonathan Demme’s film adaptation appear almost quaint.
In her book, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, Inga Muscio points out that one in every eight Hollywood movies features a rape scene. Prime-time television crime dramas such as Law & Order: Special Victims’ Unit and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation regularly contain plots involving the sexual degradation and exploitation of women. And let’s not even get into films like Captivity (when Clive Barker called horror fiction the last refuge of the chauvinist, I’m sure he couldn’t even conceive of something so execrable). Throughout our culture, the sexual debasement of women seems to be an acceptable subject for entertainment. (And here I make a distinction between books and films that use such subject matter as fodder for titillation, and those like Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible, which try to take a more serious look at such material.)
Val McDermid, a crime writer who has been responsible for her share of violent plotlines, blames market forces for the increasing acceptability of extreme material in popular fiction: “There has been a general desensitisation among readers, who are upping the ante by demanding ever more sensationalist and gratuitous plotlines.” Certainly, in a culture that tolerates as entertainment such torture porn fare as the Hostel and Saw movies, there is an ever-escalating tendency to try to outdo what has come before; it is now incumbent upon writers and filmmakers to push the envelope ever further just to provide the same jolt of adrenaline for their audiences.
There are no doubt people who will suggest that Mann is making a mountain out of a molehill; that scenes of violence toward women in fiction have no demonstrated effect on people’s attitudes in the real world, and this might indeed be true. But the ubiquity of such material in our popular culture should at least give one pause for thought, it seems to me. Here in Canada, we base our obscenity laws on the rather vague metric of “community standards”; what kind of community standards are we promulgating if we agree that scenes of the most explicit sadism, misogyny, and degradation are acceptable fodder for entertainment? Am I being too prudish? Or is the slope really as slippery as it appears?
UPDATE: The original article from the Guardian‘s website, upon which this post was based, has been updated with the following notice:
This article was amended on Tuesday 27 October 2009. We previously said that one of the country’s leading crime writers and critics “is refusing to review new books” but that should have been “is refusing to review some violent new books.” This has been corrected.
Scotiabank Giller Prize 2009, Book 2
October 24, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 1 Comment
The Bishop’s Man. Linden MacIntyre; Random House Canada, $32.00 cloth, 410 pp., 978-0-307-3570-9.
Previous Giller wins/noms: None
Other awards: Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-fiction, Evelyn Richardson Prize for Non-fiction (Causeway: A Passage from Innocence)
CBA Libris Award (The Long Stretch, nominee)
From the publisher: “From an award-winning writer and one of Canada’s foremost broadcast journalists, comes a deeply wise and moving novel that explores the guilty minds and spiritual evasions of Catholic priests.”
From reviews: “Some readers might find MacIntyre’s frequent timeshifting a distraction, but by and large the author handles the various decades of his tale deftly. And as a native Cape Bretoner himself, he brings the region and its residents vividly to life. MacIntyre’s examination of a troubled priest’s life will earn the attention of Catholics and non-Catholics alike.” – Nicholas Pashley, National Post
“In his latest novel, The Bishop’s Man, Linden MacIntyre tackles the disturbing topic of sexual abuse of children, a subject easily given to theses and tirades, lectures and judgments, all thinly veiled as fiction. MacIntyre, his engrossing tale told through the eyes and experiences of Father Duncan MacAskill, sidesteps these pitfalls to deliver a serious examination of the theme with the page-turning energy of a thriller.” – Frank Macdonald, The Globe and Mail
“In Father MacAskill, MacIntyre gives us a Christian anti-hero, a man of faith who is first of all a man, in a story that meshes humour and down-home charm with the raw underbelly of human imperfection.” – Angela Narth, Winnipeg Free Press
My reaction: Father Duncan MacAskill is called names like the Exorcist and the Purificator because of his particular function, which is to make problems disappear. Specifically, Father MacAskill serves at the pleasure of his bishop to relocate priests who have been accused of sexually abusing young boys. But when the bishop learns that “damned insinuating lawyers” have been asking questions about how such matters have been handled and suggesting that MacAskill has been complicit in a cover-up, the bishop decides to get the priest out of the way until matters blow over. So MacAskill is reassigned to the Cape Breton parish of Creignish, a stone’s throw from where he grew up on the Long Stretch Road.
MacIntyre has set himself an undeniably ambitious task. He’s dealing with heavy thematic material, and the collision between MacAskill’s sense of guilt over what he increasingly comes to see as his complicity in the crimes of the church and his fraught personal history in the land of his childhood is borne out over a complex structure that weaves back and forth in time and travels from small-town Cape Breton to Toronto and Honduras.
The best parts of The Bishop’s Man involve MacAskill’s existential crisis, arising from his “instinct for guilt,” whereby he attempts to negotiate a moral path without sacrificing either his fidelity to his church or his essential humanity. In his job, MacAskill has been privy to every manner of rationalization and excuse for morally reprehensible conduct (the bishop resolutely refuses to refer to boys molested at the hands of priests as “victims”), but it is to MacIntyre’s credit that the character himself never loses his essential humanity. MacAskill’s interior monologues are potent and moving:
You want it to be true. You find comfort in the eyes, reassurance from the heavy hand that he has laid upon your shoulder, the sombre voice that speaks of collegiality, of character. He has been a mentor. He has been an exemplar. He is what you, in your pious dreaming, wanted to become. Revered, respected by lay and ministry alike. A priest who is also a Man. And thus you are reassured, all too easily. You agree, eventually: some time away will be restorative. And your bishop is prescient: it was in Honduras that your mission first came into focus; you saw, among the poor, the human fate as our Redeemer saw it, etched in lines upon the faces. I could see my mission in their eyes, the hope I represented. The bishop said I’d see the living faith the way it used to be. And he was absolutely right.
This interior struggle recalls Doestoevsky, and the tension it carries makes portions of The Bishop’s Man read with intensity and a kind of existential terror.
But the book is overlong (at 400 pages, it’s easily the longest of the five Giller shortlisted titles), and the priest’s moral dilemma is so compelling that the more personal sections of the book seem relatively pallid by comparison. The material dealing with Father MacAskill’s sister Effie, his best friend Sextus Gillis, and Sextus’s father, John, was covered in MacIntyre’s first novel, and its recapitulation here is unnecessary and only serves to draw attention away from more dramatically provocative material.
As an existential thriller, The Bishop’s Man works well, but it unfortunately suffers from a bit too much fat on its thematic bones.
A new world
October 22, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 8 Comments
Thank God for the Huffington Post (or HuffPo, for those overly enamoured of insufferable abbreviations). Just when I thought there was nothing capable of elevating me out of my Giller-induced lethargy, along comes James Rainey of the Los Angeles Times with a profile of Amy Hertz, editor of the Huffington Post’s new books section. Hertz is an Internet evangelist, a “fairly typical book geek,” and editor-at-large for Dutton Books, a division of Penguin Group.
If this were a movie, the soothing music playing in the background would now get abruptly cut off by the grating sound of a record needle skipping over vinyl.
Let me repeat that: the new editor of the Huffington Post’s books section is also an editor-at-large with a major international publisher. In terms of conflict of interest, that’s somewhat akin to Stephen Harper appointing Rob Nicholson to the Supreme Court of Canada. And what’s most interesting about Hertz’s new position is how little difference anyone (Hertz included) seems to think it makes. Rainey writes:
This sort of two-timing (and the potential for conflicts of interest) might have been big news once in the media world. But the shock waves wrought by technological change now wash over us so quickly and continuously, we scarcely stop to note them.
Indeed, Rainey claims that when he broached the subject of conflict, Hertz appeared surprised that it would even come up. “‘Am I going to be spending all of my time on Penguin Books? The answer is no,’ she said.” Oh well, then, nothing at all to worry about. I’m sure we can also assume that Penguin books won’t get treated with kid gloves by Huffington Post reviewers and critics.
Well, actually, we can assume that, because Hertz doesn’t really like reviewers, or reviews. In a post dated October 12, Hertz wrote:
This is NOT a book review section. Let me say that again, because I know about 72,000 publicists just plotzed because they have no idea what to do other than ask for a review. Huffington Post Books is not a review – there’s a reason those sections in newspapers are dropping like flies. Book reviews tend to be conversation enders, and when you’re living in the age of engagement, a time when people are looking for conversation starters, that stance gets you nowhere.
She also told the LA Times‘s Rainey that she dislikes “arcane and ponderous” essays, a strange admission from the new books editor of a website that has just made a deal to partner with the New York Review of Books.
Nor does she see a problem with asking writers to donate their content to the Huffington Post for free. She refused to engage Rainey on the issue, saying, “I’m not going to answer that question one way or another. I just don’t think it’s a useful question to ask at this point. It’s a new world.” (A colleague of mine pointed out that any time someone replies that a question is not useful to ask, its usefulness is practically guaranteed.)
So, to recap: the new books editor at the Huffington Post disdains reviews and essays about books, has a breathtaking conflict of interest in executing her duties, and sees no problem in fleecing writers for content. It’s a new world, indeed.
The sombreness of the long-distance reader
October 21, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 13 Comments
In her book The Solitary Vice: Against Reading, Mikita Brottman points to all the various campaigns that have been launched recently to make reading appear fun, then asks why, if reading is so much fun to begin with, people have to work so hard and spend so much money to promote its pleasures to a reluctant public. In North America, publishers, libraries, and governments invest much time and effort (not to mention dollars) on campaigns with names like “Get Caught Reading,” “Live with Books,” and “Books Change Lives.” Each year, the CBC holds an annual week-long “battle of the books” – Canada Reads – which pits five works of CanLit in a Survivor-style elimination contest featuring celebrity panellists. And Scotiabank Giller Prize founder Jack Rabinovitch repeatedly reiterates that for the price of a dinner in Toronto, readers can buy all five Giller shortlisted books. Pace Brottman, the juries have all spoken, and they are unanimous: reading is an enjoyable, enlightening, and engrossing activity.
So why do I feel so depressed at the moment?
I have now finished two of the five books shortlisted for this year’s Giller Prize, and am well into a third. (Relax: roundups are coming.) And my verdict at the midway point is as dispiriting as it is surprising: I don’t want to read any more. Not these books, nor anything else. The first three Giller contenders have managed to do something I never would have thought possible: robbed me of my delight in reading.
It’s not that the three books (okay, two and a half) I’ve read so far are badly written, or devoid of interest on the level of technique or story. But they all have one thing in common: whether it’s Linden MacIntyre’s sombre meditation on the horrors of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, Kim Echlin’s painful recapitulation of the Cambodian genocide, or Annabel Lyon’s ardent history lessons about life in ancient Macedon, the first three Giller contenders are defiantly serious, ponderous books about weighty subjects and heavy themes. And they are all devoid of one signal quality: joy.
Now, you will argue that sex abuse in the Catholic Church and the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge are not joyful subjects, and you would be absolutely right. However, I am reminded of John Updike’s comment about Nabokov: he “writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.” Nabokov, no doubt, treated some very dark subject matter in his fiction, but that never prevented him from delighting in the ecstasy of writing, which in turn bled over into the ecstasy of reading.
The enduring writers of the 19th and 20th centuries – Dostoevesky, Woolf, Beckett, O’Connor, Greene, Faulkner, Chekhov, and Joyce among them – all dealt with weighty subjects and posed difficult moral questions, but no matter how depressing their themes became, the experience of reading them was never itself depressing. In a similar vein, 21st century international writers like Saramago, Houellebecq, Murakami, Bolaño, and McCarthy have traced our modern, technologically obsessed malaise in a climate of post-9/11 anomic alienation without themselves becoming forces of alienation. The same cannot be said of the current Giller crop, at least three of which are sober, earnest, and seem intent on proving their literary and intellectual worth at the expense of a reader’s engagement.
What is a reader, looking for the highest achievement in Canadian writing and handed The Bishop’s Man, The Disappeared, and The Golden Mean, to do? Each book has merits, to be sure, but the cumulative effect of reading them is to inculcate the idea that our prestige fiction is portentous, plodding, and grim, filled with dirt and grime and death, and devoid of the vigour and verve that makes the best writing come alive. Any one of these books on its own might be tolerable. Together, they have put me off reading.
Scotiabank Giller Prize 2009, Book 1
October 18, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 1 Comment
The Disappeared. Kim Echlin; Hamish Hamilton Canada, $29.00 cloth, 242 pp., 978-0-670-06908-8.
Previous Giller wins/noms: None
Other awards: Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award (1997, nominee)
From the publisher: “From its first page, The Disappeared takes us into the land of kings and temples, fought over for generations. It reveals the forces that act on love everywhere: family, politics, forgetting. Universal in its questions about how to claim the past, how to honor our dead, and how to go on after those we love disappear, it is a story written in spare and rhythmic prose. The Disappeared is a remarkable consideration of language, truth, justice, and memory that speaks to the conscience of the world, and to love, even when those we love most are gone.”
From reviews: “The impossibility of closure after great crimes, no matter how many tribunals and truth-and-reconciliation commissions we may launch, is the subject of Toronto author Kim Echlin’s absorbing new novel, The Disappeared. Echlin, one of Canada’s finest prose stylists, approaches her subject with the delicacy and solemnity it deserves. In the end, though, it begs the question: Is a beautiful work of art, which The Disappeared certainly is, the appropriate response to a holocaust?” – Frank Moher, National Post
“The book, which can be read in a single sitting, builds toward a complex expression of annihilating loss and eternal love that is best experienced, in a sense, like the final act of a tragic play: as something inevitable and beyond the calculations of reason.” – Charles Foran, The Globe and Mail
“But at times the prose becomes overwrought and detracts from a deeper understanding of the Khmers’ experience. It’s almost a relief when Will, a gruff Canadian forensics expert, appears to help Anne in her search, muttering his hope ‘that our humanity might kick into a higher gear.’ This is an ambitious novel that almost, but not quite, reaches its goal.” – Julie Wheelwright, The Independent (U.K.)
“The Disappeared is ultimately a love story, which means that things don’t turn out well. Anne returns to Montreal where she is implored ‘for love’s sake’ to tell her story ‘before there’s nothing left.’ This sequence, shot through with heartache and loss, should serve as the cathartic apotheosis of the book. Sadly, it is betrayed by the sentimentality of what has gone before.” – Steven W. Beattie, Quill & Quire
My reaction: The final excerpt above is meant somewhat tongue-in-cheek, although not altogether. I’ve now read The Disappeared three times, trying this last time to understand what I’m missing in it that everyone else apparently sees. It is often the case that a person’s attitude toward a book will change with subsequent readings, because a second or third exposure to a book allows for a deeper understanding of the underlying structure. Whereas the initial reading is a journey of discovery, following the trajectory of the story to learn “what happens,” subsequent readings provide an opportunity to more closely scrutinize a novel’s texture, its patterns of metaphor, and language. Strange, then, that I should come away from a third reading of the text feeling pretty much exactly the same way I did when I read the book the first time.
There are distancing effects in Echlin’s novel – the predominant mode of narration, which favours the second person “you,” as though the book were a letter addressed to the protagonist’s absent lover; the fact that the entire story is told in flashback from a distance of 30 years – which perhaps prevent a complete engagement with the story. Very little is dramatized directly; Echlin’s preferred mode is one of bald recapitulation:
You got up then and took your chapei from the corner of the room and unwrapped it. You sat on the bed cross legged and you lay the instrument across your lap and plucked the two strings. You sang an old folk song about yearning for the time of the monsoon winds, oan samlanh, yearning to go to the festival with your love, wearing a new phamuong, oh dear one, going together to the festival with your love.
The spareness and incantatory rhythms have been noted approvingly by numerous critics; my own feeling is that this mode of narration frequently becomes tedious:
I did not believe and yet I knelt with the others and watched the smoke of the incense twist toward the roof. I did not want to leave. I had nowhere to go. I wanted comfort. The end of the rains. I did not believe and yet I was there.
But all of these technical concerns are subordinate to the evident sentimentality of the writing, from the obvious reference to “the call of a vulture” during one of the protagonist’s final interviews with a Cambodian government official to the overheated language used to describe the lovers’ attraction to one another: “That night, I knelt face down on the bed, knees spread, and I gave myself to your love”; “We pledged ourselves to each other with our bodies”; “I received your touch, you received my relief as if we were giving agonized birth to each other.” Such overwought passages denude the story of a great deal of its power; language more appropriate to a Harlequin romance sits uneasily alongside descriptions of one of the worst genocides in modern history.
The Disappeared is unquestionably an ambitious book, but it nevertheless failed to connect with me. But, who knows? Maybe I’ll have a different experience the fourth time around.
Another delegation heard from
October 14, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 5 Comments
We’re drowning in literary awards here in the Great White North. First the Scotiabank Giller, then the Rogers Writers’ Trust, now the Governor General’s Literary Awards, which announced their shortlists today in Toronto. Only one book made it onto all three lists: Annabel Lyon’s first novel The Golden Mean. The moral here? You can write as many solid, urban stories as you want: it’s when you write that piece of historical fiction that the prizes will come a-callin’. And how fucking depressing is that?
Here are the fiction, non-fiction, and poetry lists in full:
FICTION:
- Michael Crummey, Galore (Doubleday Canada)
- Annabel Lyon, The Golden Mean (Random House Canada)
- Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness (McClelland & Stewart)
- Kate Pullinger, Mistress of Nothing (McArthur & Company)
- Deborah Willis, Vanishing and Other Stories (Penguin Canada)
NON-FICTION:
- Randall Hansen, Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-1945 (Doubleday Canada)
- Trevor Herriot, Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds (HarperCollins Canada)
- Eric Margolis, American Raj: Liberation or Domination? (Key Porter Books)
- Eric Siblin, The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece (House of Anansi Press)
- M.G. Vassanji, A Place Within: Rediscovering India (Doubleday Canada)
POETRY:
- David W. McFadden, Be Calm, Honey (Mansfield Press)
- Philip Kevin Paul, Little Hunger (Nightwood Editions)
- Sina Queyras, Expressway (Coach House Books)
- Carmine Starnino, This Way Out (Gaspereau Press)
- David Zieroth, The Fly in Autumn (Harbour Publishing)
The seasoned observer will note that the GG fiction list is, like the Giller and Writers’ Trust shortlists, an Atwood-free zone, leaving The Year of the Flood shut out of this fall’s major awards, both here and across the pond (Atwood, a former Booker winner, was absent from that list as well).
A big shout-out goes to TSR faves Sina Queyras and Carmine Starnino, both of whom nabbed nominations in the poetry category. The GGs will be handed out at a ceremony winners will be announced in Montreal on November 17.
Yann Martel sends Stephen Harper his own book, then disappears into his own navel
October 14, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
For those of you unfamiliar with Yann Martel’s ongoing project, What Is Stephen Harper Reading?, a quick recap: The Booker Prize-winning author of The Life of Pi, feeling slighted because our Prime Minister apparently wasn’t sufficiently fawning when Martel and a group of other artists appeared in the House of Commons to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Canada Council for the Arts in March 2007, decided to send Harper one book every two weeks for the duration of his tenure as Prime Minister. Each book is inscribed by Martel and accompanied by a note of explication. “The purpose,” Martel writes, “was and is to remind Stephen Harper of the life-shaping marvel contained within books.”
That quote comes from the introduction to the newly published book What Is Stephen Harper Reading? Yann Martel’s Recommended Reading for a Prime Minister and Book Lovers of All Stripes. The book, which is a collection of the letters Martel sent to Harper between April 2007 and May 2009 (and thus, an incomplete record of his “ongoing” project: can a sequel be far behind?), is a print version of material that is already available, for free, online.
Give Martel credit for this much: to this point, the books he has chosen for his “lonely book club” have been interesting and eclectic: The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Waiting for Godot, and The Bluest Eye are all represented. But, in an act of unbridled solipsism, Martel felt it necessary to send Harper a different title to remind him “of the life-shaping marvel contained within books” – Martel’s own. That’s right: book number 66 is none other than What Is Stephen Harper Reading? by Yann Martel.
Martel justifies the move this way:
There’s safety in being published in book form. Who knows what might happen to the letters I sent you? I print an extra copy of each before mailing it to you, and the originals are I hope gathering in an archive box, but these physical traces are subject to the erosion of time or might simply be lost. As for the website which bears public witness to our book club, despite the easy access anyone has to it on a computer, it too is ephemeral. Though a website may appear on a limitless number of screens at the same moment, its underlying support is far more limited: just a virtual memory somewhere that, despite all the safeguards and backups, could be compromised and its contents destroyed.
Now, I obviously agree with Martel that books are practically sacred objects (I fetishize books just as much as the next guy), containing within them material that is both intellectually and, yes, even spiritually edifying. The problem with Martel’s project lies in its evident narcissism. It began with a grudge* and has reached its current apogee with an instance of blatant self-promotion. If there was any doubt about this, Martel’s gives the game away in his accompanying letter, which includes a mention of Harper’s response to journalist Chantal Hébert, who sent the PM a copy of Brian Lee Crowley’s book Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada’s Founding Values (the title of which Martel gets wrong in his letter, incidentally). Hearing that Harper wrote back to Hébert (something he has not done for Martel) and told her that he read Crowley’s book, Martel responds:
Well, I don’t have to ask what she has that I don’t. I know the answer: I haven’t sent you a single book on economic or political theory, or, for that matter, much non-fiction of any sort. Good of you to have read Fearful Symmetry. I’m not familiar with it. I hope you liked it. But is there any space on your reading list for a novel, a play or a poem?
The patronizing tone not only masks an apparent petulance, but probably underscores for Harper the notion that artists are a whiny, entitled bunch who need not be bothered with, except as annoyances. Which, needless to say, is precisely the wrong message to be sending to our leader at this precarious point in our country’s artistic development.
*From Martel’s introduction to the book edition of What Is Stephen Harper Reading? (Vol. 1):
The moment had come. The Minister for Canadian Heritage, Bev Oda at the time, rose to her feet, acknowledged our presence and began to speak. We artists stood up, not for ourselves but for the Canada Council and what it represents. The Minister did not speak for long. In fact, she had barely started, we thought, when she finished and sat down. There was a flutter of applause and then MPs turned to other matters. We were still standing, incredulous. That was it? Fifty years of building Canada’s dazzling and varied culture, done with in less than five minutes? I remember the poet Nicole Brossard laughed and shook her head as she sat down. I couldn’t quite laugh.