When someone says to me, Oh, that book changed my life, I’m tempted to say in return, You need to read more books. Alone, no book is terribly important. For me, books only gain significance as they fall into conversation with other books or as they enlarge the space available for conversation with the wider world. There is no book, only books. I think of my reading as the spinning of a mental web. Some books act as nodes, drawing together threads from all directions. Some books anchor the mental structure to the physical world. Still other books flail like stray threads on the wind. Maybe I will attach the free end to my web, or maybe I’ll cut it loose.
I make it a habit to write notes about what I read. It helps me to understand or to reinforce what the author is trying to communicate. It also serves as a reassurance: my brain still works. Sometimes, my notes turn into full-fledged meditations or reviews and I post them. Other times, they are stray thoughts or random observations. In the past, I have been inconsistent in my practice. And then came Covid. I decided I could afford the time to write more fully. But this decision happened only half way through the year. So, there are gaps in my notes. My silence should not be construed as a negative comment on a particular book, but rather a lack of discipline on my part. Maybe in 2021 I will write more fully about my reading. In the meantime:
1. Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies, Jim Schnabel (New York: Dell, 1997)
This book provided source material for The Men Who Stare At Goats. It offers a straight forward account of the U.S. Military’s psychic spying programs—who did what when and how they behaved—without trying to evaluate the why of what they were doing, no effort to understand how so many people could get sucked into a program that was fundamentally idiotic. The reader is left to draw their own conclusions about motivations at play, and needs—both personal and political—these programs satisfied.
One of the things that contributed to their widespread adoption is that they were packaged in the language of science/reason (much like homeopathy) along with an arcane array of acronyms (AAA). The military has a hard on for AAA’s. I call it the cult of modernism, and one can see it playing out in other areas of contemporary living. Self-driving cars, for example. The science ideologues insist it’s only a couple years away. But skeptics tell us this assertion rests on what is essentially magical thinking. Ditto for AI. These programs are a success, of course, but mostly because the parameters for defining success are determined by the outcomes and not by reference to independent criteria.
If you are concerned that the U.S. is becoming fucked up in the age of Trump, this book provides evidence that being fucked up is baked in. Trump just stirred the pot a little.
2. The Optimist’s Daughter, Eudora Welty (New York: Random House, 1972)
3. Late Essays 2006-2017, J.M. Coetzee (London: Vintage, 2017)
Reading Coetzee’s essays felt to me a bit like crawling inside a hermetically sealed environment. A writer writes about other writers writing. A prefer the essays of Geoff Dyer. While Dyer is perfectly capable of being a writer who writes about writers writing, more often than not, he seeds his thoughts with the work of people from other media—film or photography of jazz—and that enriches his work.
4. The Voyeur’s Motel, Gay Talese (New York: Grove Press, 2016)
File this under “What The Fuck?” In 1980, a man contacted Talese by way of an anonymous letter advising that he had important information which would be a valuable supplement to any study of American sexuality. The man owned a motel and had designed an attic space above several of his rooms where he could sit undetected and observe the sexual proclivities of his customers. He had compiled detailed notes and regarded what he was doing as not so much a perverted obsession as a scientific quest for knowledge. He thought he was working in the spirit of Alfred Kinsey.
Talese met with the man, Gerald Foos, but explained that, as a matter of journalistic ethics, he couldn’t touch any of this with a ten foot pole unless the man was willing to go public and attach his name to his observations. At that time, Foos was still a relatively young man and concerned about the negative consequences of a public disclosure, so nothing came of it. Then, 35 years later, Foos contacted Talese and said he was ready to come forward. As a man in his 80’s, he had nothing to lose.
In the intervening years, Foos had gotten a divorce and had acquired a new motel where he continued his old habit. As with his first wife, he used his second wife as an accomplice in his project. She assigned rooms based on her estimation of the likelihood that the occupants would perform. Sometimes she joined her husband in his observation area, but more often not. Foos never recorded his customers; he only maintained detailed notes.
One day I would love to do a blog post on this because there is so much here that allows for reflection on the street photographer’s practice and ethic. Another time, perhaps.
5. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott (Project Gutenberg, 1880)
Part of my motivation for reading Little Women is that my wife and I went last weekend to see the film and I was curious about the novel. Before either seeing the film or reading the novel, I had listened to a feminist friend go on at length about a specific passage where Jo is divulging to her mother, Mrs. March, the fact that she is overcome by anger and fears that one day it might get the best of her. Mrs. March answers:
I’ve been trying to cure [my anger] for forty years, and have only succeeded in controlling it. I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo; but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so.
I can’t recall how explicit my friend was in drawing her point but, at the very least, I was expected to infer from this that the anger is a direct response to the state of affairs for women in Civil War-era America. I do think Little Women warrants a feminist reading. I do think Alcott’s portrayal of women amply illustrates a state of affairs in which women have little or no agency except as allowed by the men to which they attach themselves. And I do think a woman who found herself in this state of affairs would have cause to be angry. However, in its context, Mrs. March’s words appear to address the narrower concern of a personal character flaw. Is it legitimate to read 20th century second wave feminist concerns backwards in time and impute them to characters in a 19th century novel?
This reminds me of an argument I got into with a feminist classmate when I was studying at Emmanuel College at Victoria University, U. of T. During a New Testament exegesis class, she was dashing the word “Lord” upon the rocks of her feminist analysis, using phrases like “patriarchy” which the word “Lord” implies. I challenged her. The word Lord comes to us courtesy of Jacobean translators working in the early 17th century. At that time, the word “Lord” would suggest notions of a late medieval feudal form of social organization which would, indeed, smack of patriarchy. But the word they were translating was κύριος from 1st century Koine Greek and would predate all of that historic baggage. The woman was free, if she liked, to apply her feminist critique to the translators (I think even that is dubious), but not to the authors of the original text. I was criticized as anti-feminist. But I answered that my criticisms had nothing to do with the content of the woman’s feminist concerns, but rather with the sloppy historicity of her approach. It is not legitimate to impute to people of an earlier age habits of thought and vocabularies that were unavailable to them.
Looking to Little Women, the most we can say of Louisa May Alcott is that her portrayal reproduces issues which would subsequently motivate women to seek greater agency and autonomy. We cannot say that, for that reason, Louisa May Alcott was a feminist, or worse, that some of her characters were feminists. They may have had the impulse, but not the vocabulary and, in a way, the lack of vocabulary may have contributed to their oppressive conditions.
Issues of feminism aside, I found the reading experience odd, as I do most times I read a Victorian novel. (Strictly speaking, Little Women isn’t Victorian since it’s American, but it’s of the same era and reflects a similar sensibility.) I struggle to account for this oddness. In the past, I’ve chalked it up to my aversion to cloying sentimentality. For example, when I read Robert Elsmere, it felt like I was holding the book in one hand and spooning white sugar into my mouth with the other. I’ve also found the Victorian insistence on moral instruction mildly annoying. Didacticism infantilizes the relationship with the reader. But what struck me more than these when reading Little Women is the utter absence of irony.
Sensibilities change over time. Sentimentality and didacticism were matters of taste that appealed to Victorian reading audiences. The movement through time that finds me adrift in the 21st century while reading a fixed point in the 19th century is a matter of historical perspective. But irony may be less a matter of taste than of strategic positioning. In that respect, it may be more geographic than historic.
In The Global Soul, Pico Iyer observes that Toronto has a keenly developed sense of irony. Not all places share this habit, as frequently illustrated by American tourists who are often tone deaf to this. I’m not sure why irony is so important to communication in Toronto. It is, however, an embedded part of my native speech habit, and that fact may compound the feeling of oddness I get when I listen with my mind’s ear to the conversations that pass amongst the March women.
6. My Early Years, Adrienne von Speyr, ed. Hans Urs von Balthasar, trans. Mary Emily Hamilton and Dennis D. Martin (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995)
I read this as research for my Life in the Margins novel-in-progress, although simply reading it as the account of a young Swiss woman struggling to become a physician in the early 20th century is rewarding in its own right. A few thoughts:
1) I am fascinated by Adrienne von Speyr‘s visions of St. Ignatius, the first of which she recounts here:
As I climbed the steps that went alongside a sort of lumberyard, a man was coming down the steps toward me. He was short and rather old, and he had a slight limp. He took my hand, and at first I was really frightened, but I began to look at him. He said, “I thought you would come with me; don’t you want to?” I said with a kind of fear (was it good to say No to a poor person?): “No, Sir, but merry Christmas.” He let go of my hand immediately; I thought he looked a little sad. I continued on my way, and throughout the days that followed I said to myself: “Perhaps I should have said Yes, but I really had to say No.
Von Balthasar, who edits this memoir, points to subsequent appearances in which von Speyr, now converted to Catholicism, recognizes St. Ignatius for who he is. Apparently, von Balthasar treats this more fully in his introduction to von Speyr. So that must be next on my list of research readings. I come to the story as a cynical Protestant inclined to treat any mystical account with skepticism. My knee-jerk response is to apply a psycho-sexual gloss on the whole matter.
2) Early on—even before her encounter with St. Ignatius—von Speyr offers us a moment of gender slipperiness which plays neatly into one of the recurring concerns of my novel’s protagonist. She writes:
My first clear memories do not go back very far. They are memories of two disappointments. One day, I must have been about three years old, I was sitting astride my toy bear, a big plush bear with stout legs on wheels, and I had put on a pair of trousers; I was convinced that I’d transformed myself, that I was now a boy, and I was singing at the top of my lungs: “My name is Adrien! My name is Adrien!” My father would have none of this game and explained to me that I was still a girl; not even my tears could make him change his mind.
This slipperiness is not without precedent. In the Passion of Felicity and Perpetua, there is a phrase in which one of them—Felicity, I believe—became as a man. It would be fun to include this account in my compendium of F to M transformations which vex my protagonist.
3) On a couple occasions, von Speyr complains about being forced (by good manners) to drink bad wine. I can utterly relate. She is a woman after my own heart.
7. Reproduction, Ian Williams (Toronto: Random House, 2019)
Winner of the 2019 Giller Prize. Not sure how I feel about it. I don’t feel compelled to write anything. No sparks. Could the wrong book have won the prize?
8. Five Days Gone: The Mystery of my Mother’s Disappearance as a Child, Laura Cumming (New York: Scribner, 2019)
9. Grand Union, Zadie Smith (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019)
I will have to reread this. The stories are demanding and dense. I was prompted to buy the collection after listening to Eleanor Wachtel interview Zadie Smith on Writer’s and Company. I will have to listen again, as it might offer some clues on how to think about the stories.
10. After Babel: Aspect of language & translation, George Steiner (Oxford University Press, 1975)
13. My Unwritten Books, George Steiner (New York: New Directions, 2008)
Steiner describes seven books he could have, but didn’t, write—a nice little supplement to his After Babel. Cf. Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk (77. Below).
12. The Plague, Albert Camus, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage, 1991)
13. White Noise, Don DeLillo (New York: Penguin Books, 1984)
14. Selected Poetry, John Clare, ed. by Norman Gale (Project Gutenberg)
These poems lie in the public domain as John Clare died in 1864. It’s hard to believe that these poems are contemporaneous with those of Walt Whitman. They are standard Victorian fare—sentimental verging on sickly sweet, cloying, treacly. They are well composed but emphatically not modern and emphatically not to my taste. Nevertheless, I read them to prepare myself for a novel by Adam Foulds who imagines Clare’s life in an asylum in Epping Forest.
15. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (New York: Penguin, 1987)
16. The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells (Project Gutenberg, 1897)
17. Scrapper, Matt Bell (New York: Soho Press, 2015)
18. Moon of the Crusted Snow, Waubgeshig Rice (Toronto: ECW Press, 2018)
19. The Last Thing He Wanted, Joan Didion
20. The Children of Men, P.D. James
21. Little Dogs, Michael Crummey
22. Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel DeFoe (Project Gutenberg, 1722)
23. Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2014)
24. The Innocents, Michael Crummey (Toronto: Doubleday, 2019)
25. The Kings and Their Gods: The Pathology of Power, Daniel Berrigan (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008)
A mishna on the two Books of Kings that was originally written as a prophetic reflection on the Bush administration, the endless wars the U.S. has waged since Korea and, more generally, the culture of death that lies at the heart of Late Capitalism. It has occurred to me that Berrigan’s words can be applied with even greater force to Trump’s government, or whatever vestiges are left of a government once he gets through with it. And so I read a section from Kings, then the corresponding section from Berrigan, the next section from Kings, then back to Berrigan, and so on.
My wife laughs at me when I tell her what I’m reading. Here we are, raised into a mainstream Protestant denomination, but lapsed, now, mostly secular. I’ve come up with a joke to describe my personal situation: somebody asks me if I’m an atheist and I answer “Yes, I’m religious, not spiritual.” I’m not sure whether my joke pokes fun at mainstream religion for being a species of atheism masquerading as a spiritual tradition, or the “spiritual but not religious” movement for being banal. To my mind, both deserve some gentle ribbing. However, I think I go a little further than that, embracing a paradoxical—or downright contradictory—position wherein I both believe and don’t believe. In today’s world, the paradoxical strikes me as an entirely tenable position.
I think it goes without saying that the scriptural texts of my faith tradition can not now nor could they ever be read as epistemology. Those that try are called fundamentalists and the effort makes them look foolish. The main thrust of scriptural texts, what they seek to foster in our lives, is wisdom. However, it isn’t the wisdom conveyed through didactic writings but something more expansive than that—not the product of individual set-pieces like the account of Ahab and Jezebel, but the feeling you get when prostrating yourself before the whole Biblical sweep, from the beginning to the end of time. It affirms that even the grandest claims in this world, whether they come from Jeff Bezos or Donald Trump, come to nothing.
26. Swing Time, Zadie Smith (New York: Penguin, 2016)
27. All My Puny Sorrows, Miriam Toews (Toronto: Knopf, 2014)
A sister recounts how, despite everyone’s best efforts, they fail to prevent her gifted piano prodigy older sister from committing suicide. A good novel, but I have no particular thoughts about how it fits within the larger vista of my personal reading. See David Bergen, below.
28. Land To Light On, Dionne Brand
Part of the motivation for reading this—poetry by a black lesbian—is to engage myself with experience which is as far as possible from my own, a corollary of the call to decolonize one’s book shelf. One should decolonize one’s experience, too. Dionne Brand’s poetry has an opacity to it. Like wading through a murky pond rather than diving into the crystalline waters of the blue grotto in Tobermory. Murky waters are intimidating because you can’t really see what lies below the surface. The unseen and therefore unknown has a hold on the imagination. Poisons it. No. That’s not right. The unseen is not the source of the poison. It is the imagination already infected with bias, like an infected wound that turns septic. But murky waters are murky precisely because they are the most second.
There are some things in the poetry which are accessible even to a lunkhead like me. The newcomer from the Caribbean shocked breathless by the Canadian winter. Northrop Frye once spoke of the Canadian north, its wilderness, as the grounding mythos of Canadian literature. Brand might agree, but not in the way Frye intended. He was offering an observation that could be described as a mythology of Ur-Whiteness. The snow is white. The occupying power is white. The analytic structure by which we are meant to understand all of this is provided by white intellectuals. Even Frye’s shock of hair was white. But in Brand’s hands, the Canadian north is something else. It is hostile and unwelcoming. At first, this is conveyed by the weather itself, but is underscored later in the volume by a scene in which a cop pulls the car over on a winter road and asks the Black driver and passengers where they’re from.
However, there are other poetic moments that escape me altogether. It’s not as if she’s engaging in coded speech (though how would I know?), speaking in terms only accessible to those who share her experience, sort of the opposite of the fascist dog-whistle. It’s more like I’m autistic and lack the basic capacity to understand things which ought otherwise to be obvious on their face. White autism?
29. The Image of Whiteness, Daniel Blight (London: SPBH Editions and Art on the Underground, 2019)
30. On Color, David Scott Kastan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018)
31. The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power, Desmond Cole (Toronto: Doubleday, 2020)
This book could be held up as a strong rebuttal to premier Doug Ford’s little “We’re nothing like the U.S.” speech. It could also be held up as supporting material for the call to defund the police. It is a long litany of police abuse and abuse by authority directed conspicuously at Black bodies.
Allegations of abuse are always addressed on a case-by-case basis. But in the age of pandemic viruses, we might invite epidemiologists to examine the data, such as it is (one of the abuses is failure to gather data) and would note a strong association between Toronto policing and Black suffering. Maybe they would also note compromised health associated with elevated anxiety caused by perpetual fear and mistrust of the police.
The book is a cross-section of racism in Canada, mostly Toronto, in 2017, Canada’s 150th anniversary. Cole proceeds month by month, one chapter per month, recounting moments of egregious racism mostly swept under the carpet by an overbearing denialism. We (whites) are so bound up in a Canadian mythology of our innate benevolence that, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, we have become masters of micro- and passive aggressions.
32. The Origin of Waves, Austin Clarke (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997)
This novel has been sitting unread on my shelf for years. In a way, I’m glad I waited until I had moved into my current neighbourhood since the narrator lives nearby. He has a daily routine of walking along Asquith past the Toronto Reference Library then down Yonge Street to the lakeshore and back again, almost as if he were a street photographer out to pound the pavement. Had I read this years ago, I wouldn’t have been as intimately familiar with its setting as I am now.
During a snow storm, the narrator is on his usual walk when he bumps into an old friend at the intersection of Queen and Yonge. They haven’t seen one another in maybe 50 years, back when they were boys playing on the beach in the Barbados. They decide to go to a bar north of Queen Street and do some catching up and there they stay until closing time and beyond, drinking themselves into a slurry oblivion and smoking Montecristos.
The conversation begins as a pissing contest. John (not the narrator) is the more aggressive raconteur, determined to prove to his old friend that he has had a successful life. Three ex-wives and now a common-law wife. Ten children. Living first in Paris, then Germany, then Rome. Now practising psychiatry in North Carolina. The narrator’s account is more modest. He never married, although he fell in love with a younger Chinese woman named Lang who died three months after they met. Now he rattles around alone in his Rosedale home. As the conversation progresses, the narrator confesses that, while he had a successful career, he no longer works. He suffered an injury which forced him to quit, not a physical injury, but an injury all the same. There was a law suit. Now he spends his days walking from his house to Yonge Street then down Yonge Street to the lakeshore and back again.
Perhaps because the narrator is more modest in his account, even vulnerable, and perhaps because the two men have consumed a lot of alcohol, John revises his own story. He’s never been married. He’s lived in Paris and Germany, but the children weren’t his. As for Rome, he spent two weeks there once. He does work in North Carolina, but not as a psychiatrist. He manages an office where other people practise psychiatry. He has one child, a son, who is very ill and at Sick Kids hospital in surgery even as they speak. John couldn’t bear to wait in the hospital, so he went for a walk in the snowstorm which is why the narrator bumped into him.
The two men part company in the early hours of the morning, John, to the hospital to learn if his son has survived his surgery, the narrator, to his empty home, both warmed, if at all, by memories of their childhood on a beach in the Barbados.
See The Polished Hoe, below.
33. White Fragility: Why it’s so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, Robin DiAngelo (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018)
The premise is straight-forward but needs repeating again and again and again. When white people confront allegations of racism, they take it personally. We have been conditioned to think of racism as intentional speech or acts committed by bad people. Indeed, such people exist and the acts they perpetrate are real. But the portrayal and sharing of such acts has been reduced to a genre which stands for all racism. It probably began with horrific images and film clips during the civil rights movement. It has its present day correlate in posts to social media of entitled Karens calling the police because they feel threatened by bird watchers in Central Park. Apart from sociopaths who, presumably, don’t care, most people do not want to be associated with such behaviour. When white people are told they are being racist, they automatically assume that it is this sort of intentional behaviour that is at issue and so respond with denial. Haven’t got a racist bone in my body. Some of my best friends are Black. But I’m Canadian. That sort of thing.
However, most racist behaviour is the result of unintentional acts by good people. We are the beneficiaries of a system that was rigged from the get-go to favour the interests of white people. Despite our best intentions, racism is inscribed in our acts as we are raised to adult consciousness within our inherently racist milieu. Antiracist work involves bringing to light racist patterns of thought and behaviour, then working to dismantle the structures that produce and perpetuate them.
34. Most Of What Follow Is True, Michael Crummey (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2019)
This chapbook is the 2018 instalment of the Kreisel Lecture sponsored by the University of Alberta. The lecture addresses the fact that all fiction has some stake in the real world. How much is a reader entitled to assume? How much (accuracy) is the writer obliged to deliver. Personally, I would have begun by questioning the central premise, asking, like Magritte, if the pipe is a pipe. How important is faithful representation to the enterprise? What is lost when we insist on it? What is added?
35. The Polished Hoe, Austin Clarke (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2003)
Along with The Origin of Waves, this has been sitting on my shelf for ages. What has taken me so long? This is a large work and, like all my favourite large works before it, what sets it apart is the way it revels in language. In fact, without the obvious pleasure Clarke takes and gives through language, the novel would be unsustainable. What little plot can be summarized as follows: a woman kills a man; she gives a statement to the police sergeant; woman and sergeant have a shared history which is not immediately apparent; the room bristles with sexual tension; like all good tragedy, the woman accepts responsibility for her actions and meets her fate.
There is little of plot and little of information either, only one startling revelation in the whole 462 pages. If I were a great critic looking for a unique word to describe this reading experience, I would call The Polished Hoe an imaginarium—a place in language where minds go to flourish.
The other matter of importance in the novel is race or, more specifically, the English management of Black slavery in the Barbados. The novel is set at a time when the slaves have been emancipated but nobody is free. Black women continue to occupy the very worst position anyone can occupy in a social order. Englishmen own the Plantation, a white-passing Black man runs the Plantation, and the Black women are the chief source of labour when they aren’t on their backs serving as sexual toys and breeding more labour. Within this context, the sergeant’s affection for the accused is problematic. How can anyone raised within this system not be tainted by it? How would it ever be possible for the sergeant to express love for this Black woman without it being tinged with violence?
36. So You Want To Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo (New York: Seal Press, 2019)
37. The Lonely City, Olivia Laing (New York: Picador, 2016)
In style, Laing’s writing reminds me of Geoff Dyer, aleatory, a wandering curious mind, and highly satisfying. Far superior to the rest of the non-fiction I’ve been reading lately which presents as high school polemicism: state the point, support the point, either with anecdotes or argument from analogy, then conclude by reiterating the point and, since this is publishing in the age of Twitter, lace it all with moral outrage. Laing’s is a gentler touch, more soulful or confessional, that appeals to more numinous qualities. If anything, it argues by example: people would do well to devote themselves to the task of self-understanding and let me demonstrate what that might look like. Along the way she investigates the work fo certain New York artists, most notably Andy Warhol and David Wojnarowicz, not to pursue any thesis but to reveal them as human beings very much engaged in the very task Laing has set for herself. This culminates in some of the most stirring pages I have ever read about what art is for and why we need it. Worth revisiting from time to time.
38. Theory, Dionne Brand (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2018)
A short novel, opaque, dense, challenging. The intellectual narrator, who approaches life as a theoretical construct to be analysed, recalls three love affairs. Love, of course, does not readily submit itself to analysis. Nor do the loves. Brand plays with a tension between mind and embodiment. Interestingly, embodiment here has a soulful spirited quality. Meanwhile mind, at least as the seat of reason, is cold and distinctly unwise. Brand presents a fine inversion of the usual trope.
39. The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead (Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2019)
The only other Whitehead novel I’ve read is The Intuitionist. It was an allegorical novel. The Nickel Boys is a straight-up narrative, about as far as you can get from an allegorical novel. In a way, it’s heartening to see an author use such distinctive approaches. It assures us that Whitehead has depth and interest and doubles will continue to surprise.
Based on a factual account, The Nickel Boys tells the story of inmates at a boys correctional facility in the Florida panhandle during the rise of the civil rights movement. While the facility handled both white and Black boys and was cruel to both, it was uniquely cruel to Black boys in the way it replicated the master/slave relationship complete with whippings and sometimes death.
Reading it as a Canadian who lives 1500 km from the story’s setting, I nevertheless hear in it uncanny echoes of our residential school system. It is worth reading alongside First Nations works that document these abuses. See, for example Mangilaluk’s Highway, by Nadim Roberts in the Oh Canada issue of Granta.
40. Immigrant City, David Bezmozgis (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2019)
Another 2019 Governor General’s Award nominee, along with Ian Williams and Michael Crummey (see above). These stories are enjoyable and well-crafted but I am underwhelmed. Perhaps my expectations have been skewed by the GG nomination. In tone, the stories remind me of the Jiri Kajane anthology, Winter In Tirane (there is no Jiri Kajane; he was a hoax perpetrated by two American creative writing grads): many of the stories are occasioned by a character’s side hustle or slightly “off” transaction. Entertaining, but they don’t challenge me or invite me to return later for a visit the way, say, Etgar Keret’s stories do.
41. The Man in the Red Coat, Julian Barnes (Toronto: Random House, 2019)
The Man in the Red Coat is a wonderful meander through the Belle Epoch with special attention to Samuel Jean de Pozzi, a womanizing gynaecologist (not really) who seems to pop up wherever literary dandies are fighting duels and need a surgeon to repair a perforated bowel. I don’t think I’ll review the book, but will incorporate some observations into a piece I had been writing, but never posted, about dandyism. Pozzi is not a dandy; he does not qualify. For one thing, he’s heterosexual. However, he frequently finds himself in the company of dandies, as perhaps first defined by Baudelaire, men like Oscar Wilde and Pozzi’s lifelong friend, Count Robert de Montequiou. I had first drawn on comments by Roland Barthes for my discussion of dandyism, but Barnes’ portraits may offer me more precision in my own comments. To do a proper job of it, I may have to go to the source of Baudelaire’s “definition.”
One matter that I wonder about: Barnes is fairly rigid in his account of dandyism (one must be rich, for example). As a mode of living, dandyism had pretty much run its course by the time the Belle Epoch drew to a close. I’m more inclined to think it’s an attitude of flamboyant style that need not be pinned, like a dead butterfly, to a defined class and age. I think of my piano teacher, freshly arrived in Toronto after completing an undergraduate degree at a small town university. Although penniless, he engaged in extravagant shopping sprees at shops like Harry Rosen, occupying sales staff for hours as he tried on clothes, then leaving without purchasing anything, feigning dissatisfaction.
Then there’s the tale of Sarah Bernhardt’s leg. In 1906, during a performance of Tosca (the play, not the opera), she flung herself from the battlements on cue only to discover on the way down that the stage hands hadn’t put the mattress in the right place. The injury and consequent pain was so intolerable that Ms. Bernhardt decided to have the leg amputated and begged her friend, Dr. Pozzi, to perform the operation. He declined as this was not his area of expertise, but was close at hand while his recommended alternative did the deed. The leg was immediately placed in a preservative solution. There as apocryphal story that P.T. Barnum offered a substantial sum for her leg and she is supposed to have answered: “Which leg?” Barnes dismisses this account: P.T. Barnum had been dead 24 years at the time of the amputation. Nevertheless, a preserved leg did surface at a French hospital in 2008 which was reputed to have been Sarah Bernhardt’s amputated leg. Unfortunately, it was a right leg and records indicate the Bernhardt had her left leg amputated. The question “Which leg?” seems relevant again.
42. I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, Austin Channing Brown (New York: Convergent Books, 2018)
A relatively short, easy read to supplement other readings on race. I read it on the recommendation of a friend who had compared it to Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. For him, as a person of colour, the book by the white author didn’t ring true. DiAngelo’s rationale is that responsibility shouldn’t fall to people of colour to educate white people. While that may be true, there are more reasons to write a book than education. Two of those reasons come out in Brown’s book. One is testimony or witnessing. No white writer can ever do that. The other is the venting of righteous anger which, again, no white writer can ever do.
As a personal aside, and as a purely stylistic observation, I far prefer the nonfiction writing of Teju Cole, or Geoff Dyer, or Pico Iyer, or Julian Barnes, or Olivia Laing, perhaps because they are more curious and open-ended in their explorations, less polemical and didactic. That, I think, is one of the ironies of didacticism in writing about race, or about feminism or sexuality or any other matter that engages us in concerns of social justice: by its very nature, didacticism is hierarchical, patronizing, and intellectually colonizing. It is not enough simply to say what you mean; your writing must embody it.
43. Intimations, Zadie Smith (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2020)
44. Slightly Out Of Focus, Robert Capa (Auckland: Pickle Partners Publishing, 2015)
This is Robert Capa’s memoir of his photojournalist/war correspondent career from the Spanish Civil War to the end of World War II. I read it as a supplement to the book of Martha Gellhorn’s letters, getting a feel for the press during that era. Hemingway gets a few mentions—was drunk with a man who ran his car into a water tank necessitating 48 stitches in his head. Martha Gellhorn gets no mention.
The memoir includes the account of his photos from Omaha Beach on D-Day:
Seven days later, I learned that the pictures I had taken on “Easy Red” were the best of the invasion. But the excited darkroom assistant, while drying the negatives, had turned on too much heat and the emulsions had melted and run down before the eyes of the London office. Out of one hundred and six pictures in all, only eight were salvaged. The captions under the heat-blurred pictures read that Capa’s hands were badly shaking.
I have read an article suggesting that the Capa Foundation (i.e. Capa’s brother) has embellished this story somewhat and that there is a tiny does of bullshit somewhere between Capa’s telling and the Foundation’s retelling. In any event, there are eleven, not eight, surviving photos, and the problem probably had to do with the fact that, as he admitted, his camera jammed, and not with the developing.
In fact, there’s a lot in Cape that is bullshit. He is a bit of a drunk, a raconteur, maybe a bit of a grifter, who was fortunate to have a talent for taking good photos. Even then, he opens the book with the famous shot of the soldier falling as he’s been hit, a one in a million shot which subsequent sleuthing has demonstrated was probably staged.
As I learned from the Lenny Bruce memoir I read and the end of last year, if you’re after something approximating the truth, you have to read around the memoir. The only truth you get from a memoir is the voice and the sense of personality it conveys, and even that can be a put up job.
45. Your, for probably always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love & War, Janet Somerville (Richmond Hill: Firefly, 2019)
46. Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955)
47. Brick 105
It seemed the issue was centred around grief, death, loss—personal, but in dialogue with the grief, death, and loss we are experiencing in this particular cultural moment of late capitalism, global social media, and climate crisis, when we know the changes we have wrought cannot be undone. However, the issue feels odd for its timing. Clearly it had been planned before Covid-19 landed on the shores of North America and was executed before anyone understood this was a pandemic. Obviously Covid-19 is not mentioned in any of the pieces, but looms over the whole issue and gets read back into it. Strangely, it is perhaps the most relevant work on the pandemic I’ve read to date even though it was never intended to address this situation.
48. A Beginner’s Guide to Japan, Pico Iyer (New York: Vintage Books, 2019)
A relatively easy read, although one should never confuse easy for simple. It is what a photo album would look like if someone had removed all the pictures. What remains is a series of terse, epigrammatic captions and we are left to imagine for ourselves what the pictures might have looked like. The epigrammatic style is reminiscent of Oscar Wilde. This is not accidental. Apparently, when Japan opened to the West in the Victorian era, the Japanese literati were quite fond of Wilde and that fondness was reciprocated. Rather than epigrammatic, one might say that Iyer’s writing here embodies the aesthetic of kanso. In a picture, kanso is the skill of removing from the frame everything which does not belong to it. Its presence would diminish the image. A similar skill can be applied to a paragraph. And in Iyer there are many such paragraphs.
49. Scarborough, Catherine Hernandez (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017)
50. As Long as the Rivers Flow, James Bartleman (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2011)
I have mixed feelings about the novel. Given our current conversation around race and the need to hear voices from the margins, it strikes all the right notes. It makes visible the words, attitudes, assumptions, behaviours that for years have gone unaddressed and it illustrates how these things impact the lives of real people. It also illustrates the complex nature of causation in establishing the often unpredictable connections between actions and their consequences. This lends support to the current assertion fo the #BLM movement that racism isn’t so much a matter of individuals intentionally behaving like assholes as it is a matter of large swaths of society inheriting advantages conferred on them by people in the past who entered into exploitative relationships with other groups without turning their minds to—or even caring about—the consequences of their choices. Novels are ideal for exposing racism as a structural issue because they give the writer scope both in space and time to track early unthinking decisions to their later painful effects.
The problem I have with this novel is that it is told in the voice of an omniscient narrator. That is an early authorial decision that necessarily produces consequences for the novel’s characters (and readers). An omniscient narrator knows the heart and mind, history and future of each character. Here, Bartleman knows Father Antoine, the abusive priest at the residential school on the shore of James Bay. He knows Martha, the six year old girl from Cat Lake First Nation reserve who is forced to leave her family for the residential school where she falls prey to Father Antoine’s predatory habits. He knows Spider, Martha’s son who is taken by Children’s Aid and adopted out to a white family in Southern Ontario. He knows the punk culture of Toronto in the early 90’s. He knows the Catholic Church culture of Quebec City two decades later. And so on. The reason I view this as a problem is that it invests the narrator with a paternal quality that potentially undermines the efforts to decolonize First Nations, to disentangle their stories from those of the white settlers. I cannot say that this is definitively the case; I raise it as a question.
Bartleman himself gives some force to this question in a scene where Martha, now trying to make her way in the big city, finds herself at a dinner party in Forest Hill. She has entered into a relationship with a professor who hosts the dinner party essentially to put her on display for the amusement of his colleagues. Professors of literature solicit her views on literary and cultural concerns. What does she think fo the poetry of Douglas Scott Campbell? Does she not think the paintings of Morriseau resemble the early work of Picasso? The questions seem almost deliberately designed to expose her ignorance. She feels embarrassed and inadequate. Yet how could she answer their questions, living as she does in a different culture, a different thought-world? In a scene verging on satire, Bartleman shows how a strict southern intellectualism can be poisonous when it asserts its authority at the expense of others. Implicitly, the scene poses the question: what is art for? More particularly, what is Bartleman’s art for? Possible answers run the gamut from Art for the sake of art at one extreme to Art as propaganda at the other. Between these two are gentler accounts of art like Art as a tool to promote empathy and Art as a call for social justice. It is among these gentler accounts that Bartleman situates himself.
Even so, why resort to an omniscient voice? It forces him to run his head against an epistemological wall: he is not a god; he is limited by his own situatedness. As much as he would wish to, he cannot enter into the experiences of ten different people and offer up those experiences in ten different voices. What we have instead is one voice, the narrator’s, offering an account unified by the terms specific to a single thought-world. Whether the narrator is a fictional character within the novel or a stand-in for Bartleman himself is a conversation for another time.
We can go one further and ask Bartleman why he chose the novel as the vehicle for his decolonizing project. After all, the novel has nurtured a set of conventions, including the omniscient narrator, that are distinctively white and Western European. At the same time, the novel is rooted in a storytelling impulse that is probably central to virtually every culture that has ever arisen on the planet. There is nothing unique in it to which white culture can lay claim as distinctively its own.
I wonder if maybe the decolonization of the novel has less to do with what lies between its covers and more to do with the covers themselves, how they are used to turn a story into a commodity, how it is packaged and marketed, how it exploits consumer desire to make a sale. Maybe, at its simplest, a decolonized novel is one without a price tag on its cover.
51. Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, Olivia Laing (London: Norton, 2020)
52. Sequence, A.F. Moritz (Toronto: Anansi, 2015)
I have a fuller discussion of this in the works. You’ll just have to wait.
53. Raisin Wine: A Boyhood in a Different Muskoka, James Bartleman (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2007)
Raisin Wine is a breezy read. As memoir, it is interesting for the fact that Bartleman writes in the 3rd person and almost never uses proper names. He is “the boy” and the other people around “the boy” are identified by their relationship to him. By delivering the narrative in this way, it almost novelizes the account. James Bartleman is mixed race, mother is Chippewa and father is white. Both parents had limited education and formal training. The father had ridden the rails as a hobo in the early depression years and, after settling down with the mother in Port Carling, Muskoka, he cobbled together a meagre income as a casual labourer. Although not a hard core drunk, he was an amiable alcoholic with a fondness for home-brewed raisin wine, hence the book’s title. It is an episodic account of the early days of Muskoka cottage country, the difficult life of ordinary people, and the harsh treatment of First Nations people at the hands of the Canadian government. Despite this, Bartleman’s account is free of rancour, instead, overwhelmingly offered with a sense of gratitude.
54. Girl Meets Boy, Ali Smith (Toronto: Vintage, 2007)
This is a queer(ish) novel about two sisters who live in Inverness, which is Ali Smith’s hometown. The older, Midge (Imogen), is the more conventional, more “serious”, sister. She likes men and holds down a job as a creative with a corporation called Pure which has Amazon-like aspirations but, for the time being, preoccupies itself with cornering the bottled water market in the UK and France. Midge has gotten her younger sister, Anthea, a job at Pure, also as a creative. Anthea feels less compunction to treat the job seriously, habitually showing up late, airing her skepticism about her employer’s mission, and expressing interest in a kilt-wearing vandal who defaces Pure’s billboards with environmental activist messaging. It is unclear whether the vandal, whose name is Robin, is a boyish girl or a girlish boy. To Anthea, it makes little difference.
It is fitting that water serves as the backdrop to this story. Fluidity, whether of gender or of basic human need, is important in Ali Smith’s world. There is the nice image of trying to grasp water in the fist. It cannot be done, of course, and it provides a useful comment upon our efforts to contain gender.
The greatest fluidity belongs not to the story’s characters but to the narrative voice which assumes different perspectives as we pass from one chapter to the next. This is reflected in the chapter titles: I, You, Us, them, all together now. More pointedly, this is reflected in the writing which exhibits a playful instability.
Read Girl Meets Boy as an antidote to anything written by J.K. Rowling, especially her terf tweets. This is infinitely better and more thoughtful writing. Fuck J.K. Rowling. Not literally, of course.
55. – 56. Microbe Hunters Then And Now
Microbe Hunters, Paul de Kruif (New York: Harcourt, 1926)
Soap and Water & Common Sense: The Definitive Guide to Viruses, Bacteria, Parasites, and Disease, Dr. Bonnie Henry (Toronto: Anansi, 2009)
57. How To Be Both, Ali Smith (New York: Anchor Books, 2014)
58. Elmer Iseler, Choral Visionary, Walter Pitman (Toronto: Dundern Press, 2008)
It’s an odd feeling to read a thoroughly local book. I’m surprised at the number of people mentioned whom I know or am acquainted with and at all the intersecting connections. In generational terms, Elmer Iseler falls somewhere between my parents and grandparents. Yet many of his supporters were more my parents’ age. And his successors in the choral community—like Robert Cooper—fall between my parents and me. As a consequence, many of Iseler’s supporters have redirected their largesse to Cooper and so, with my involvement in the Orpheus Choir of Toronto, I recognize many of the names Pitman mentions and see how these people were instrumental in the early days, what many people now tend to think of as the golden age of choral art in Canada.
But there are other connections, too. There’s a photo of Iseler with Vern and Frieda Heinrichs at their (former) home on Elm Avenue where Robert Pritchard, then president of U. of T. presented Iseler with some honour or other (the Heinrichs had scurried to arrange certain recognitions because they knew he was dying of brain cancer). I took Torts from Pritchard when he was Dean of the Faculty of Law. And again: I went to a shindig at the Elm Avenue address to mark Bob Cooper’s 10th anniversary with Orpheus. I went with my camera and photographed various luminaries mentioned in the book, including Derek Holman, the composer, who died just last year.
Another point of connection is the fact that Iseler started his career as a high school music teacher, heading the music department of Northview Secondary School when it first opened. My wife played viola in the Northview orchestra. By then, of course, Iseler had discovered that he could make a living conducting choirs and quit his day job.
But my most interesting connection relates to the collapse of the Festival Singers in 1978/9. As is typical of choirs, the Board of the Festival Singers was struggling to source funds and urged Iseler to do more “accessible” music, like show tunes and pop shite. Iseler told them what they could do with their accessible music so they fired him. Perhaps the Board didn’t fully appreciate how closely aligned the Festival Singers was with Elmer Iseler himself. Now, we would talk about it in terms of branding. They fired him and in short order the Festival Singers went bankrupt. Iseler decided he didn’t ever want to go through such a thing again so he formed the Elmer Iseler Singers. If the group bore his name, its Board would be under no illusions who was in charge. From the ruins of the Festival Singers, Iseler was able to recruit roughly half the singers to his new venture. What the book doesn’t deal with is what happened to the other half of the Festival Singers.
At that time, I was 15 and working on my ARCT under the guidance of Alan Coffin, organist and choir director of Eastminster United Church on the Danforth. Alan was a larger-than-life figure who fancied himself an impresario. At the time, anything I knew about choral music I knew because of my connection to Alan. (For example, the book includes a photo of the Canadian premiere of the African Sanctus at Metropolitan United Church; Alan dragged me to that concert, thinking I needed to expand my musical experience beyond the narrow scope of a keyboard.) Alan took advantage of the Festival Singers debacle to snatch up some of the suddenly unemployed musicians with the promise of good paying gigs. Their first gig was singing jingles for Speedy Muffler radio commercials. However, the recording studio wouldn’t let him in without proof of their union membership. Alan was young and inexperienced. He was an artist. He had no idea how practical things worked. In any event, he scrambled to incorporate them and get union cards, but it cost more than they earned on the gig.
In retrospect, this was not nothing. What Alan had incorporated was Canada’s first official gay male chorus so, even though it was expensive, it made history. Another of their gigs also paid no money: they sang in what would later be remembered as Toronto’s first Pride Parade back in the days before politicians and financial institutions clamoured for a chance to march. In any event, I remember Alan telling how he went to an event and there was Elmer Iseler, recently fired from the Festival Singers, making dagger eyes at Alan for swooping in like a vulture and picking the bones clean.
Although Iseler may have wanted to avoid another choral debacle, he got one anyway courtesy of the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir. Facing the same pressures all choirs face, the TMC Board decided in 1997 to ease Iseler out. It’s not clear whether they knew he was ill when they initiated the process, but they certainly knew it by the time they were done. Perhaps recognizing that Iseler no longer had the energy to represent his own interests, Vern Heinrichs intervened as an advocate to negotiate a gentler exit. Pitman captures well the divisions that ran through the Toronto choral community and perhaps persists to this day. Some thought it was just business. Others thought: here is a man who almost single-handedly vaulted the Canadian choral scene from its provincial backwaters to the international stage and now that he is ill, the best he gets from the organization he took with him on that journey is a kick in the nuts.
Then there is the last chapter, in which Pitman recounts the details of Iseler’s funeral, the various luminaries present from the choral world, what was said and what was sung. It seems a prescient account. Twenty years later, my wife and I were invited to sing at Walter Pitman’s funeral.
The book is boosterism. Pitman comes to it with an uncritical, almost naive, eye. Iseler is the most this and the finest that. It’s left for us, as readers, to recognize how the choral community, not just in Toronto, but virtually everywhere, is chock full of intense personalities that inevitably engage in back-biting and eviscerations, and then to read this recognition back into the text.
There are other things the book alludes to that deserve more elaboration. One is the decline in government support for choral music in particular but in all arts generally. This is true notwithstanding the fact that we have witnessed an explosion in interest. When Iseler began his career, there were only three community choirs in Toronto. How there are 80 and that number seems to grow each year. This seems to mirror another seemingly contradictory development. While, as a society, we have witnessed a desacralization of the spaces where choral music happens—an increased diversity in choristers and corresponding rejection of sacred texts in choral music—we have witnessed a renewed embrace of the choral form. It’s as if people have collectively agreed that they are done with mainstream Christian religious expression…except for this one bit of liturgy that they want to salvage from the wreckage and repurpose. As with institutional religion, choirs as institutions need to get over themselves or else they will die. People aren’t interested in choirs as formal structures; they are interested in choirs as an opportunity for a vital experience like none other.
59. – 62. Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet
Autumn, Ali Smith (Toronto: Penguin, 2016)
Winter, Ali Smith (Toronto: Penguin, 2017)
Spring, Ali Smith (Toronto: Penguin, 2019)
Summer, Ali Smith (Toronto: Penguin, 2020)
63. The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1968)
64. American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism, Henry Giroux (San Francisco: City Lights, 2018)
65. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hong (New York: One World, 2020)
A Korean/Canadian friend recommended this book in response to Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility which he thought did not ring true. I have mixed feelings about DiAngelo’s book. It may be a useful expression of allyship that encourages white people to readjust entrenched habits of thought. That seems like a good idea. But maybe not just now. Maybe what we need at this historical moment is space for voices to speak from within their lived experience. I think that’s why my friend recommended Hong’s book: it feels more authentic because Hong writes from within her own experience and makes herself vulnerable to the reader in a way that is impossible for DiAngelo.
Hong describes minor feelings as “the radicalized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.” These are the feelings that are the target of gaslighting. Can’t you take a joke? You’re being overly sensitive. It’s no big deal. Get over yourself. Hong distinguishes minor feelings from the feelings sparked by great upheavals (growing up in L.A.’s K-town, she remembers the Rodney King riots and the way Korean Americans got dragged into the fray) and overt racism. It’s easy to find examples of this sort of thing littering social media: it’s the sort of behaviour that sparks outrage, and outrage is everywhere. It’s much harder to detect the microaggressions that seem baked into the structures of our social institutions. But they still provoke feelings and still need to be acknowledged and addressed.
Surveying all the race-related books I’ve read this year, Minor Feelings is the only book I’ve encountered thus far that is emphatically not polemical. Most proceed by stating a proposition, then marshalling evidence to support the proposition. Most of that evidence is anecdotal, some of it is personal, occasionally it is statistical or draws on academic studies. All of it draws to a silent QED. I’m right; you’re wrong. Cathy Park Hong is a poet. I don’t think she could write a polemic of her life depended on it. That, by the way, is a compliment. It makes for a better book.
One of the issues Hong comes at obliquely is how tightly circumscribed is the language around race talk. The more linguistically claustrophobic a radicalized group feels, the more diminished the tools at its disposal to express feelings, record injustices, and articulate aspirations. When this happens, it’s an extraordinary gift to find a poet in your midst. Hong devotes an entire chapter to “Bad” English, or how communities take expressions that would send a white English teacher into conniptions and repurpose them to meet their own needs. She works to break open language so that she can better bring to light the interiority of her experience.
66. Too Much and Never Enough: How my Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, Mary L. Trump (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020)
An epigraph to this book might be Tolstoy’s opening line to Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Or the title to the Douglas Coupland novel: “All families are psychotic.”
Mary Trump’s book merely provides more evidence to support the suspicions of anyone who has even a shred of “people sense.” Donald Trump probably suffers from more than one mental health disorder. For a couple reasons, Mary Trump can’t identify them. First, because she is a clinical psychologist, she is constrained by professional ethics. Second, Donald Trump would never submit to the battery of test that would be required to make a diagnosis. So, instead of offering a clinical psychologist’s conclusion, she presents a narrative and leaves it for the reader to decide just how fucked up Donald Trump really is.
In a way, Donald Trump is a pitiable creature. From his earliest years, when he was too young to understand what was happening to him, he was the subject of his father Fred’s experiment, constantly receiving positive reinforcement for anti-social behaviour and outright cruelty, and always at the expense of his own siblings. This makes Fred something of a monster, and it suggests—although Mary Trump doesn’t explore this—that Donald Trump is replicating with his own 5 children the cutthroat environment into which Fred threw his 5 children.
I suspect Donald Trump rewards behaviour that most closely mirrors his own sociopathy. Barron is young and it’s too soon to say how he might respond to his father’s manipulations (or whether his mother adequately shields him from them). For now, in my humble estimation, the main contender is Ivanka, not for anything she is or has done in her own right, but for her marriage to a humourless, affectless, dead-eyed imbecile. If ever there was a marriage to curry daddy’s approval, this is it.
When Mary Trump draws her attention to the presidency, everything resolves to a few simple admonitions:
- Trump’s motivations can be reduced to one thing: the need for his father’s approval;
- those who recognize this motivation and can play to it find Trump easy to manipulate;
- Trump is not terribly bright and has no personal insight;
- he has no idea how other people work, ascribing to them only those motivations which fall within his own narrow emotional experience;
- there are no strategies, no grand plans, no long game;
- Trump is utterly incompetent and ill-equipped to address the needs of a nation beset by Covid-19.
67. The Winter’s Tale, William Shakespeare from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (Glenview: Scott, Foresman & Company, 1980)
I read The Winter’s Tale as a supplement to Ali Smith’s novel, Summer. By rights, I should read all the Shakespearian romances—Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest—as each is referenced in one of the books of Smith’s seasonal quartet.
It was odd revisiting The Winter’s Tale. It wasn’t until Act V that I remembered having read it before as a freshman in Northrop Frye’s Shakespeare class, which I took before I was ready for it because Frye seemed ancient to me and I was afraid if I put off taking his class, he’d die on me and then I’d be SOL. The line that triggered my recollection was “O, she’s warm!” when Leontes touches the statue of Hermione and finds that it has come to life. Alexander Leggatt made much of this moment. He co-taught the course with Frye and was also on the editorial advisory board of the Complete Works edition we used.
I remember the course being a Shakespeare factory. Frye’s reputation drew arts students to the class the way a flame draws moths. We’d flap our way by the hundreds to lectures alternating between Frye and Leggatt, then we’d get passed off to a bevy of grad students for our weekly tutorials. My assigned tutor was a South African girl who seemed older at the time but, in retrospect, I realize was no older than her mid-twenties. Although she was whip smart, she was no more ready to teach Shakespeare than I was ready to read it.
I suspect the reason I had forgotten about The Winter’s Tale is that I had been dismissive of Leontes. I didn’t understand how he could turn on Hermione; I didn’t accept that people could behave that way. When Othello turned on Desdemona, he had been manipulated by Iago. That made it explainable. But there is no Iago character in The Winter’s Tale. A switch flips inside Leontes and that is that. How could anybody be so irrational? It wasn’t possible. So said my 19 year old freshman self who promptly thrust the story out of his head.
Yet, in 2020, with Boris Johnson and Brexit and Donald Trump and MAGA, it is precisely this question which Ali Smith feels compelled to explore in her novel, Summer, which is why she draws on The Winter’s Tale. How do we account for random? How do we make sense of the contingent in our lives? This is akin to the religious question of theodicy—the problem of evil. A problem that is pressing in on us with greater force these days—the evil of tyrants, the evil of disease. Why is this happening to us?
The Winter’s Tale is a story of loss and restoration, separation and return, evil and forgiveness. While it might not provide an answer to the age-old question of theodicy, it does point the way. It is suggested by Paulina’s “It is required/You do awake your faith.” Which sounds disconcertingly Biblical, although Paulina doesn’t say faith in what. It is suggested, too, by the fact of forgiveness which draws the play to a close. In other words, the question why? is misconceived. We aren’t meant to make sense of things. Instead, we must look to things that are just as irrational as the evil that afflicts us. Things like faith. Faith that a better world is possible. And things like forgiveness. Never was there such an irrational act as forgiveness, and yet utterly essential if we are to know peace.
68. – 72. 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize Nominees
Polar Vortex, Shani Mootoo (Toronto: Book*hug, 2020)
The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2020)
Here the Dark, David Bergen (Windsor: Biblioasis, 2020)
Ridgerunner, Gil Adamson (Toronto: Anansi, 2020)
How to Pronounce Knife, Souvankham Thammavongsa (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2020)
73. Lapham’s Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 3 – “Epidemic”
This is a multi-disciplinary survey of literature about Epidemic, naturally drawing on arts and letters, but also on writings from other disciplines—history, anthropology, politics and, of course, epidemiology. If I were to reduce it all to a single insight, it would be this: epidemic is a recent human invention. It is intimately tied to the shift from nomadism to sedentism and agriculture which occurred after the last ice age. Today we occasionally hear people talk about how Covid-19 offers us an opportunity to engage in a global structural reset. However, that seems unrealistic. All it took to set us on this path of regularly recurring epidemics was a global population of 4 million human beings. A structural reset that would save us from epidemics is one that would return us to pre-neolithic population levels. Think of the savagery that such a reset implies!
74. Blindness, José Saramago, Giovanni Pontiero, trans. (New York: Harcourt, 1998).
I read Blindness for the obvious reason that it concerns a pandemic. Blindness is the symptom of a contagion that spreads to everyone—or almost everyone. Initially, authorities quarantine the infected in a decommissioned mental institution. There, social mores vanish. The mildly powerless treat the more powerless with savagery. For example, a gang steals all the food and institutes a sex-for-food extortion scam. They have no concern for human dignity. The victims of the scam avenge themselves by torching the gang’s quarters but, like the contagion, the fire spreads and burns down the entire structure. As the quarantined flee the mental institution, they pass a buffer zone beyond which soldiers had threatened to shoot people on sight. But the soldiers have also succumbed to the contagion and shooting “on sight” is now impossible. The inmates pass into the wider world where they discover that everyone is blind. The whole world has descended into a savagery that concerns itself solely with the satisfaction of basic needs, namely food and shelter.
We tend to interpret our world—including the books we read—through the lens of our immediate circumstances. For me, those circumstances are dominated by a lockdown in the midst of a global pandemic. And so I’m tempted to read Blindness as a cautionary tale about life during a pandemic, perhaps grafted to a William Golding pessimism about how we should characterize the human heart. But I need to acknowledge that the lens of my immediate circumstance is distorted and fleeting. Part of what makes Blindness a great novel is that it supports readings through other lenses.
If I did not read Blindness during a global pandemic, what lens would I use to view it? I think I would put a writerly lens to my eye, maybe a meta lens. I am inclined to read Blindness as a commentary on the nature of novels or, more generally, on the nature of all written communication. As a reader, I am blind. I cannot see what Saramago sees. Instead, I rely upon him—or upon his narrator—to apply all his art and honesty to encode in words his vision of the world as he understands it. In turn, when I read his words, I decode them and apply all my art and honesty in an imaginative reconstruction of the world he has encoded.
Even so, there is an emptiness at the heart of our exchange. He writes a novel. I read the novel. But our souls never meet. The words mediate nothing. Instead, they inscribe the traces of a fundamental unknowability at the heart of all such exchanges. It’s an account that flies in the face of John Donne’s poem: every man is an island, utterly alone unto himself. Reading through the lens of a global pandemic merely accentuates this message: like the victims of Saramago’s contagion, we live in isolation.
75. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, James C. Scott (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017)
I learned about this book from the last issue of Lapham’s Quarterly (see above) which reproduces a portion of the chapter that addresses the origins and consequences of epidemics in the earliest states. Despite what the conspiracy theorists might say, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a recent coronavirus mutation. It is zoonotic, meaning it transferred from an animal to human host. This probably happened at a wet market in Wuhan. This is not an unexpected nor a rare event but rather it conforms to a pattern that has played out since humans first began to congregate in populous centres while still living in proximity to livestock and cultivated grain crops. Scott makes several observations which should be of concern to us:
- In the grand sweep which is the history of the human species, the period in which we have resorted to sedentism and agrarianism (i.e. urbanization and farming) represents only 200 generations which, in evolutionary terms, is the blink of an eye.
- All zoonotic infectious diseases have arisen within these last 200 generations as a direct consequence of our shift to sedentism and agrarianism. This includes everything from the Bubonic plague to the Spanish flu, Ebola, SARS, HIV, salmonella, and West Nile virus.
- Like the zoonotic diseases, the epidemics they produce are an unintended consequence of “civilization”; the largest of the city states (Uruk) where such epidemics first took hold had a population of no more than 50,000 people on a planet with a total population of 5 million. That is all it took to set us on this path of regular recurrent epidemics. Scott doesn’t say as much, but implicit in his observation is the fact that if it could happen then, why do we suppose it wouldn’t happen when the global population has increased by 1,560 times those levels.
In fact, I would say it is delusional of us to suppose that new infectious diseases won’t appear on a regular basis.
However, epidemiology is not the principal focus of Scott’s book; it occupies only one chapter. His chief concern is to challenge the traditional narrative of how humans came to organize themselves in “crowded, sedentary communities packed with domesticated livestock and a handful of cereal grains, governed by the ancestors of what we now call states?” The traditional narrative is one of progress that sees humans transition incrementally from primitives to civilized peoples who raise great cities supported by far-reaching economies that enable health, leisure, and culture. The problem with the narrative is that it is supported only if you take a selective approach to the evidence. This is a variation on the “history is told by the winners” axiom. Cities become the sites of record-keeping, monuments, permanent structures with their attendant inscriptions, religious institutions with their own preoccupation with record-keeping and permanence.
However, the smooth transition from one mode of organization to another which supports a narrative of progress proves not to be so smooth. The chapter on epidemiology is just one of the illustrations why the traditional account may be wrong-headed. Another is the fact that sedentism and agrarianism arose at least four millennia before the rise of the first city state. So tenuous is the connection between sedentism and agrarianism on the one hand and the rise of states on the other that it is impossible to establish a causal relationship—a variation on another old axiom: association is not causation. The fact that two phenomena appear together 5,000 years ago should not be over-interpreted.
Scott concludes with a chapter on the relationship between states and their encircling barbarians. Here again we face the problem that history is told by the states and scholars have, in the past, been willing to accept uncritically their claims about the peoples who encircled them. However, Scott marshals evidence to suggest that the barbarian/civilization relationship was fluid; the boundaries were porous. In fact, the relationship may have been co-dependent. Barbarians may have facilitated much of the trade that supplied states with essential good and services (especially slaves). Conversely, states may have provided barbarians with necessary economic opportunities. The portrayal of barbarians as shaggy uncivilized peoples strikes me as a precursor to the modern-day anti-immigrant narrative—unruly, uneducated people who want to steal our jobs and our precious way of life.
76. Not Without Laughter, Langston Hughes (New York: Penguin Books, 2018 – originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1930)
Langston Hughes was a major figure of the Harlem renaissance, although it took him some time to track his way there from his birthplace in Kansas. Not Without Laughter is a coming-of-age account of a sensitive intelligent Black boy who starts life in a small Kansas town called Stanton. If this book had a sequel, we might see the boy make it to Harlem, but this novel takes him from childhood only to his teen years. From there, he may or may not make it to college depending on how his family falls on the matter.
Sandy Jones is born to a poor Black family which, like most Black families in Stanton, makes its living at the back doors of white homes. Kansas may not be part of the Jim Crow south, but it might as well be. Sandy’s coming-of-age reads in part like yours or mine—shrugging for independence from his family, discovering the first hints of his own sexuality—but all of it is tainted by a racial awareness brought on by what we, today, might label micro-aggressions, along with overt words and deeds, and a general sense of impotence shrugged off with words like “that’s just the way it is.”
There are two major lines of conflict at play throughout the novel and we witness them as struggles between characters who touch Sandy’s life. The first is between hate and love. His aunt Harriet makes a declaration of hatred against the white folks who constantly wheedle her, wear her down, remind her how the world is lined up against her. Sandy’s grandmother, Hager, though a domineering force in his life, is nevertheless a warm person who insists on the way of love:
“I’s been livin’ a long time in yesterday, Sandy chile, an’ I knows there ain’t no room in de world fo’ nothin’ mo’n love. I knows, chile! Ever’thing there is but lovin’ leaves a rust on yo’ soul. An’ to love sho ‘nough, you got to have a spot in yo’ heart fo’ ever’body—great an’ small, white an’ black, an’ them what’s good an’ them what’s evil—‘cause love ain’t got no drowded-ut places where de good ones stays an’ de bad ones can’t come in. When it gets that way, then it ain’t love.”
The other related line of conflict runs between a straight-laced piety and joyous living. In piety’s account of life, even simple laughter is a sin. But given the title of the book and other nudges from Hughes, we are led to the view that life would be unbearable without at least a little fun. The spectrum of attitudes is refracted through the town’s geography with church as the site of a dull piety and the Bottoms, with its speakeasies and pool halls, as the site of a laughter that, not surprisingly, brings the races together in a way that piety can never do. The characters, too, are emblematic of those attitudes. Harriett seems solace in the Bottoms where she sings the blues. Because she has no place in the world of Hager’s piety, she has to sell her love for money to make ends meet. Sometimes she is joined there by her brother-in-law, Jimboy, Sandy’s father, who is singularly unmotivated but good on a guitar and loves to accompany Harriett.
At the other extreme sits Harriett’s sister, Tempy, who remains remote from the family until Hager dies, at which point she steps in to care for Sandy. Tempy has married well. She has property. She listens to opera recordings on her new Victrola. She has high hopes for Sandy. To put it crudely (but pretty much as Hughes would phrase it), she wants to squeeze the nigger out of the Negro, which she will accomplish by keeping Sandy away from the Bottoms and by sending him to a good college where he can study Latin. She hopes that when men like Jimboy get back from serving in the War, and boys like Sandy graduate from college, Blacks will demonstrate that they can be trusted and whites will accept them as equals. Here we sit, 90 years after the novel’s publication, and all Blacks have gotten for their waiting is George Floyd.
It’s important to note that Langston Hughes was a poet first. He was not a polemicist. He did not deploy his words like a blunt instrument. Instead, he trusted to the sensitivity of his readers. And so his narrative voice offers no grand speeches, draws no certain conclusions. Instead, it presents Sandy’s world for us to see and leaves it for us to makes sense of it.
77. The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos, Dionne Brand (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2018)
78. The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith (New York: Vintages Books, 1955)
I won’t say much about this novel because the story is so well known thanks to the film starring Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Good actors, faithful film, better novel. I love when it works out that way. What surprises me most is how fresh the writing seems even though the novel was published 65 years ago.
Although the protagonist is a psychopath whose violence is erotically charged, Highsmith avoids a couple of the pitfalls that would quickly date such a character. One pitfall is to describe behaviour in clinical terms , perhaps by introducing a character who is a psychiatrist who interprets the behaviour for the reader. We get this a lot on TV with shows like Law and Order: SVU and Criminal Minds. I guarantee that in 65 years, professional jargon will have changed so much that the characters on such shows will sound silly. Look today at early psychodramas, like Psycho and The Three Faces of Eve, and you’ll see what I mean. Instead, Highsmith simply offers the behaviour and leaves it for the reader to analyze.
Another related pitfall is the tendency to explicitly state the details of a character’s sexual identity. Again, Patricia Highsmith presents the character in all his ambiguity and confusion. We observe the behaviour, the speculation of other characters, but in the end we must draw our own conclusions. The other four Ripley novels are now on my 2021 reading list.
79. The Great Reset, Klaus Schwab & Thierry Malleret (Geneva: Forum Publishing, 2020)
80. The Honourable Schoolboy, John Le Carré (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1977)
I’ve always been skeptical of John Le Carré. I am biased against the genre. How can spy novels also be literary? Fifteen years ago, I read The Little Drummer Girl and posted a piece which placed my (confirmation) bias on display for everyone to see. I was preoccupied with minutiae and didn’t give Le Carré a fair shake, old boy. Earlier this year, I listened to an Eleanor Wachtel interview with John Le Carré and she quite admires him and I trust her. Maybe I should give him another look. Then he died on December 12th so I took up a copy of The Honourable Schoolboy, a first edition that’s been sitting on my shelf for years. Time for that second look.
Maybe I’ve mellowed. Maybe 15 years ago I was spoiling for a fight, looking for any excuse at all to slag a spy novelist who carries himself with some heft. Maybe, now, it’s time for me to set that aside and ask for forgiveness.
For a sprawling complex novel, the plot isn’t at all complicated. A British Intelligence operative sent to investigate a Hong Kong crime boss falls for the boss’s girl and threatens to scuttle the whole operation. The operation, of course, is far more complicated but I have no interest in laying out the details. That’s what Wikipedia is for. What interests me is answering the same question I posed when I read The Little Drummer Girl 15 years ago: is it any good? The challenge in answering such a question is that it is impossible without first addressing my own bias. Like a newbie at a twelve-step meeting, I have to open with my confession: “Hi, my name is Dave and I’m a postmodern. I used to think I was a modern like everyone else, but I kept having these weird episodes where I couldn’t remember anything from the night before but woke up to Critical Studies papers scattered all over the bedroom floor.”
Le Carré is a modern writer. More specifically, he falls within a subcategory first named by the critic and novelist, James Wood, called commercial realism. His writing is literary, whatever that means, but remains sufficiently within mainstream taste to move units. What fixes his writing within the mainstream is its realism. This is a quality which is difficult to define largely because it is illusory and is sustained by a contract between author and reader. Each will subscribe to the conventions of the genre (not the genre of spy novel but the broader genre of commercial realist novel) which magically vanish from view when one is totally immersed in the culture that produces them. Postmodern readers, like the irreligious who eschew baptism, refuse the immersion and so remain alive to the illusion. They see a rabbit when everyone else sees the old lady.
In creating this illusion (and fulfilling his contract with the reader), Le Carré deploys a couple tools with particular skill. One is the use of technical jargon. There’s nothing quite like it to make a novel seem realistic, and, when done badly, nothing quite like it to destroy the illusion. We want our legal thrillers to sound lawyerly. We want our science fiction to sound science-y. And, of course, we want our spy thrillers to bristle with the language of spy craft. Le Carré does this particularly well and we have the added assurance that, in his pre-novel days, he worked for MI5 and MI6 so he should know what he’s talking about.
Another tool is the proliferation of detail. It gives the narrative a granularity that distinguishes it from, say, allegory in a way that is analogous to the difference between a feature film and a Saturday morning cartoon. The detail doesn’t have to add anything to the story; all it has to do is add texture. So, for example, the spies share such at a long meeting:
They ate it upstairs, glumly, off plastic catering trays delivered by van. The partitions were too low, and Guillam’s custard flowed into his meat.
Perhaps the partitions are symbolic of spy branches or countries or perhaps nothing. Again:
The elder of the two men put out a hand and Smiley and Guillam each shook it, and it felt like dried bark.
Does the texture of an old man’s hand matter? Perhaps it does within the framework of this convention. But what about those who stand outside the framework? Or yet again:
In a black mood he drove to the so-called sanatorium where addicts enjoy their cold turkey, and there was great excitement because a man in a strait-jacket had succeeded in putting his own eyes out with his fingers…
Surplus detail, especially when it is accompanied by a hint of violence, produces an intimation of the really real. Even so, I stand apart. Like Dorothy, I’ve pulled aside the curtain and can never unsee the wizard and his levers.