Here is my question: why does the gumball machine on the North American edition look like its wearing a kippah? Is it a Jewish gumball machine? Does it dispense kosher gumballs? Why?

In an interview with the Guardian, Keret describes himself as more a Jewish writer than an Israeli writer. Maybe the cover artist sensed that.

Regardless of his self-assessment, I think Keret is a highly political writer. But instead of writing stories about the external world he inhabits, the world of competing forces and money and people struggling over beliefs, he writes stories about the interior world we inhabit. It’s an absurd and contradictory world, made moreso by the absurd and contradictory world we have built for ourselves out there where it’s real. Politics leaks into our dreams and twists them into goo.

By way of illustration, consider Keret’s longest story, Surprise Party. We can read it in a straight-forward (literal) way, as the story of a woman named Pnina who throws a surprise party for her successful husband, Avner Katzman. Only three people show up: a bank manager, an insurance agent, and Avner’s dentist. They talk to Pnina for a while, but it’s clear Avner isn’t going to show. Avner calls, but hangs up before Pnina gets a chance to speak to him. It seems things haven’t been going well for Avner which is why Pnina threw the party in the first place. The three guests join Pnina on a car ride to Avner’s office to make sure he’s okay. On the way, the insurance agent muses: “The truth is that he’s not worried about Avner killing himself, because his life insurance policy doesn’t cover suicide.” When they get to the office building, Avner has already left. The security guard tells them that Avner asked for help cocking his gun. Two of the men go home, leaving Pnina alone in a car with the bank manager. He makes a move on her and she slaps him in the face. The last time she slapped somebody in the face, it was Avner, and he was being as much of a dick then as the bank manager is now. The story ends on an indeterminate note with the insurance agent wondering to himself if things worked out for Avner. We have no idea.

After a first reading, the story seems unsatisfactory. But what if we read it differently? What if we read Pnina as Israel? She’s supported by shallow self-interested pricks. That could quite aptly describe Israel’s relationship with the UK, the US, and Canada. Canada could be the morbid insurance agent with the Band-Aid on his nose. I’m not suggesting that Keret would endorse such an interpretation. But it’s worth considering. I mean, why the hell not? We can think of it like this: the infected world of politics leaches into our consciousness and infects the world of our ordinary thoughts and the ordinary stories those thoughts would otherwise tell.

Below are links to Keretphernalia:

Etgar Keret’s website

The Guardian interview

Writers & Company (CBC) – Eleanor Wachtel’s interview

Open Source Radio Interview

3 Stories: Bottle, Pipe, Asthma Attack

Unzipping

Fatso

Willem Dafoe reads “Mystique”

No related posts.

My speculative brain has been sitting well back from the kerfuffle wondering if the rise of ebooks and the struggle between publishers and their online vendors might be viewed through the lens of disaster capitalism. Naomi Klein describes disaster capitalism in The Shock Doctrine. The thesis is fairly straightforward. Disasters erase existing structures and provide opportunities for capital to swoop in (often in the name of aid) and impose exploitative structures upon a helpless population.

Klein’s book is a litany of disasters exploited by Western capital. One example she offers is the tsunami of December 26 2004 which destroyed coastal regions of Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka. Klein focuses on the experience of local fisherman at Arugam Bay on the east coast of Sri Lanka. The fisherman had lived and worked on the beach there, but were always in conflict with local hotels. Although plans had been drawn up to develop the beaches for five-star hotels and eco-tourist resorts, local resistance had stalled things … until a giant wave swept everything away. Here’s what Klein writes:

Regaining Sri Lanka [a "World Bank-approved shock therapy program"] was rejected first through a wave of militant strikes and street protests, then, decisively, at the polls. In April 2004, Sri Lankans defied all the foreign experts and their local partners and voted in a coalition of centre-leftists and self-identified Marxists who vowed to scrap the entire Regaining Sri Lanka plan. … For those dreaming of building a plutonomy playground, it was a major setback: 2004 was supposed to have been Year One of the new investor-friendly, privatized Sri Lanka; now all bets were off.

Eight months after those fateful elections, the tsunami hit. Among those mourning the demise of Regaining Sri Lanka, the significance of the event was understood immediately. The newly elected government would need billions from foreign creditors to reconstruct the homes, roads, schools and railways destroyed in the storm—and those creditors knew well that when faced with devastating crisis, even the most committed economic nationalists suddenly become flexible.

Can the same model be applied to publishing?

The comparison isn’t exact, but here goes:

1. The struggle between Amazon, Apple, and the Big 6 U.S. publishers is a red herring. They all represent capital. Each of the big 6 is a subsidiary of a big media giant. For them, the struggle is between retailers and wholesalers and who will get a bigger slice of the pie. This is like the Sri Lankan government negotiating with Western hotel chains.

Meanwhile, the villagers on the beach, that’s you and me, i.e. the 99.99% of people who write for peanuts, have no voice in the arrangements which shape the future of book publishing. Nor do the readers, the millions of ordinary people like you and me who depend on the intellectual and emotional food that books provide.

2. Then along comes a disaster: piracy. Arrrrgh! In the shift to digital reading, books become infinitely replicable which has the potential to reduce a book’s value to zero. All those 99.99% of writers who already make nothing should panic, because they’re about to make even less than nothing.

I’m willing to argue that piracy is an imaginary threat, but that belongs to another post. For now, all I want to do is draft the outline of a thesis—disaster capitalism in publishing—which I can develop more fully at my leisure. For now, let’s assume that the economic consequences of piracy are: 1) grossly overstated; 2) have no negative (and oftentimes positive) impact upon 99.99% of writers. Real or imagined, what matters is how the disaster gets exploited.

3. As in the case of the tsunami, here, capital enjoys the endorsement of an international organization run on neocon principles of deregulation and “free” trade –WIPO. You can visit them at their web site, but they have only favourable things to say about themselves.

4. The post-disaster plan is DRM—digital rights management—locking files so that their use is restricted to authorized devices. This, in turn, locks the consumer into an endless cycle of purchasing disposable electronics: buy reader A to read format A; vendor comes out with format B which is even better than format A but can’t fully be appreciated without reader B; buy reader B to read format B; vendor comes out with format C …

You buy Kindle which reads a proprietary format and, effectively, you’re in bed for life with Amazon. The more books (which are really licenses) you buy in .mobi format (now superseded by its KF8 format), the more you have invested in the hardware that supports that format. (Yes, I know there are apps to read Kindle books on other devices, but Amazon retains control and always has the option of pulling the plug on its apps.)

5. The luxury hotels move in, the investors make their millions, the government gets its cut, and the locals (that’s you and me) either work as bellhops and cleaners or they clear out.

Except that something strange is happening.

It looks like some of the hotel chains are willing to work with the locals.

Some of the Big 6 publishers may drop DRM. This is strategic, of course. It’s a way to fight back at Amazon’s monopoly and the Justice Department’s refusal to do anything about it. But it has the incidental effect of acknowledging the only people who matter in this conflict—the readers. They’re tired of stories about piracy as an excuse to filch money from them.

Related posts:

1. A Book-Publishing Venture from Dostoevsky
2. Smashwords, Mark Coker and the Gears of Big Publishing
3. Publishing is Religion

Using Jesus’ Son as our paradigm, we meet:

• a rain-soaked hitchhiker picked up by a man with a young family who veers into an oncoming car;

• a pill-popping hospital orderly who pulls a knife from the eye of a man who’s been stabbed by his wife

• a recovering addict, part-time worker at an old folks home, who spends his off hours spying on an Amish couple, hoping to catch them having sex;

and so on.

We get passages like this:

The man hanging out of the wrecked car was still alive as I passed, and I stopped, grown a little more used to the idea now of how really badly broken he was, and made sure there was nothing I could do. He was snoring loudly and rudely. His blood bubbled out of his mouth with every breath. He wouldn’t be taking many more. I knew that, but he didn’t, and therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.

And like this:

Everybody had a different idea about exactly how to approach the problem of removing the knife from Terrence Weber’s brain. But when Georgie came in from prepping the patient—from shaving the patient’s eyebrow and disinfecting the area around the wound, and so on—he seemed to be holding the hunting knife in his left hand.

The talk just dropped off a cliff.

“Where,” the doctor asked finally, “did you get that?”

Nobody said one thing more, not for quite a long time.

After a while, one of the I.C.U. nurses said, “Your shoelace is untied.” Georgie laid the knife on a chart and bent down to fix his shoe.

I have my doubts about dirty realism. Not about Denis Johnson’s writing, which I love. My doubts have more to do with the idea of realism. Like the hitchhiker, I can’t tell what is real. I don’t think violence (or altered states of consciousness induced by drugs and trauma) makes the world more really real. The fact that it appears as text in stories should be proof enough of its artifice. The words mediate reality. And nowadays most words betray an awareness of their mediating role, which makes the artifice even more obvious.

Even if we assume that violence makes things more really real, I’m not convinced that the violence of an overdose and a knife in the eye is the violence most of us knows. The violence most of us knows comes from glowing screens. It pecks us to death at keyboards. Do you want real violence? Do you want the dirty truth? Consider how I came to own Jesus’ Son in the first place.

A few years ago, my wife and I were driving north on Highway 400 when we pulled into the Cookstown outlet mall. Tamiko said we needed new pillows. The old ones were worn out from killing our dog had lost their fluffiness. While Tamiko went to a linen and bedding store, I slipped into one of those discount book clearance stores. A hard-covered copy of Jesus’ Son had been remaindered there. My heart was moved with pity. I chose to rescue this book (and by extension, its author) from this indignity of accountants and shipping clerks. I took it home and set it on a shelf where it could be loved and admired and taken out for a walk from time to time.

Do you want another example of real violence? Denis Johnson’s latest novel, Train Dreams, didn’t win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The violence isn’t in not winning. The violence is in the Pulitzer committee’s indecision. Nobody won. Despite a field of worthy contenders, the award selection committee refused to make a choice. Bureaucrats have inflicted an indignity against those on the short list, and on the long list too. It is the violence of the glowing screen and the hunt-and-peck typist. It is the violence of a numb mind, worse than any drug fog. It is the violence of oxygen deprivation. It is adjudication by the plastic-bag-over-the-head method.

No related posts.

On April 13^th, with the approach of the Titanic centenary, or at least the centenary of its destruction, I saw this on the Globe & Mail twitter feed: Why the Titanic has captivated people for a century http://bit.ly/IBcB23

I retweeted with this: Because they’re trapped inside? Duh

It seems obvious to me.

A more serious answer would be that it stands as a cautionary tale that is almost classical in its mythic pull on our psyches. Or something like that. Arrogant men claimed the ship was unsinkable, and they were punished for their hubris. Some might call it Karma. Except for the fact that 1,500 mostly innocent people lost their lives for this hubris. If Karma is simple justice, then maybe the gods aren’t so just. But forgive me; I’m mixing my myths.

I once met a survivor of the Titanic. For a couple years, an elderly man worked as a part-time custodian at the church my family attended when I was a boy. One Sunday, we arrived early, and I stood by while my dad chatted him up and gradually got it out of him that he had been a kid my age when grown-ups put him on a lifeboat and said their good-byes.

When I was a kid, I could be an arrogant prick, at least in the privacy of my own thoughts. I remember thinking two things while the old man spoke:

1) I bet he’s lying. Not a wholly irrational thought. After all, anybody of a certain age could lie about such a thing. I could tell a wildly elaborate story about being in Manhattan on 9/11 and who could say otherwise? In fact, I bet a lot of people have placed themselves near ground zero that day when, in fact, they were picking their teeth in Kansas or wiping their asses in California.

2) Assuming he did survive the Titanic, don’t you think he should have been destined for greater things than pushing a broom? I mean, didn’t he survive for a reason? Didn’t his survival signify a higher purpose? Wasn’t it part of a bigger plan? Ending your days pushing a broom seems so … so mundane after surviving the most famous maritime disaster in history.

Ah yes, I’m no stranger to hubris.

Speaking of Karma, last week I participated in a Buddhist initiation rite. (Don’t ask. I have no answer.) It was an all-day affair and the leader, whom I first encountered through her book, digressed from time to time to tell us stories. When she was speaking of Karma, she paused to tell us the story of a cat. She said it happened to her aunt, but really it’s an urban legend probably as old as the Titanic itself. The story goes like this:

My aunt was driving her car to meet friends for lunch when a cat leapt from the curb. She slammed on the brakes but it was too late; she had struck and killed the cat. There were young children playing on the other side of the road. My aunt didn’t want them to be upset at the sight of a dead cat, so she rummaged through her trunk and found a Holt Renfrew bag that a friend had given her for something or other. She scooped the cat into the bag and shut the bag in the trunk of her car.

Arriving at the restaurant, my aunt was afraid that the cat might start to stink in the trunk. The front of the car was in the shade, so she took the bag from the trunk and set it on the hood where it was cooler. She met her friends inside the restaurant and took her seat by the window. From there, she watched as a Jaguar pulled into the parking space beside her car and a fashionably appointed lady got out. The lady noted the Holt Refrew bag on the hood, and looking from side to side, scooped up the bag and carried it with her into the restaurant.

My aunt watched the lady order her lunch. As the lady waited, she took up the bag from beneath the table and peered inside. The lady fainted at the sight of the dead cat and the waiters were unable to revive her. They called an ambulance and as the paramedics loaded her stretcher into the back, one of the waiters ran outside with the Holt Renfrew bag held high. The paramedics stuffed the bag inside with the lady before they shut the doors and drove off.

Karma.

Once our leader was finished telling her story she said: “If only it was that simple.”

Karma isn’t really about justice, any more than the Titanic is a story about hubris. Innocent people died in the water. Without parents, children grew up to spend their lives pushing brooms.

No related posts.

Except that the quote doesn’t come from George Orwell; it comes from Gordon Comstock. Who is Gordon Comstock? you ask. Gordon Comstock is the main character of Keep The Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell’s third novel. Reading the quote in the context of the novel in which it appears, I find it impossible to attribute it to George Orwell. In fact, Orwell may be saying something quite different than what appears on the face of the quote. Here is the passage in which the swill-bucket comment appears:

The interesting thing about the New Albion was that it was so completely modern in spirit.  There was hardly a soul in the firm who was not perfectly well aware that publicity—advertising—is the dirtiest ramp that capitalism has yet produced.  In the red lead firm there had still lingered certain notions of commercial honour and usefulness.  But such things would have been laughed at in the New Albion.  Most of the employees were the hard-boiled, Americanized, go-getting type to whom nothing in the world is sacred, except money.  They had their cynical code worked out.  The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket.  And yet beneath their cynicism there was the final naivete, the blind worship of the money-god.  Gordon studied them unobtrusively.  As before, he did his work passably well and his fellow-employees looked down on him.  Nothing had changed in his inner mind.  He still despised and repudiated the money-code. Somehow, sooner or later, he was going to escape from it; even now, after his first fiasco, he still plotted to escape.  He was IN the money world, but not OF it.

The first thing to note is that the quote is an instance of free indirect speech, a narrative strategy that James Wood elucidates in How Fiction Works. It’s the literary equivalent of a tromp l’oeil. It surreptitiously draws us into the character’s consciousness while tricking us into believing that we are still reading the narrator’s voice. But even if this trick hadn’t happened, it would still be difficult to argue that Orwell and the narrator share the same mind.

The second thing to note is how the quote fits into the larger novel. Keep The Aspidistra Flying tells the story of an impoverished poet, Gordon Comstock, who lives in London between the two world wars. While nations threaten to make war on one another, Comstock vows to wage a private war against money. Hence the swill-bucket comment. With his war on money, Gordon reminds me of many young idealists I met at the Toronto Occupy demonstrations.

Gordon Comstock has a dead-end job as a clerk in a book shop that earns him £2 a week, a sister who loans him money to make ends meet, and a girlfriend who loves him in spite of himself. There is also a friend named Ravelston, upper class with an income of £2,000 a year who slums it on £800 a year and runs a socialist literary magazine called the Antichrist. The awkward encounters between Comstock and Ravelston reveal all sorts of insights into matters of money, class, and education. Everything goes to shit for Comstock when he sells a poem to an American journal and finds himself with £10 in his pocket. He hasn’t a clue what to do with money now that he has some. He takes his girlfriend and Ravelston to a restaurant he can’t afford, goes on a drunk, drags Ravelston to a whorehouse, and wakes up the next morning in a holding cell. He sinks and sinks, resisting a standing job offer at the New Albion, an advertising agency, all for the sake of his principles.

Orwell is subtle enough not to tell the reader what to think. Instead, we must observe for ourselves what Comstock’s situation reveals and draw our own conclusions. Comstock adheres to a rigid code, his money-code, and it threatens to destroy him. It is as destructive as the capitalism he rails against. The problem, it seems, is not money or not-money, or socialism or capitalism or any other ism, but a blind and unyielding adherence to principle.

Living your life—call it doing ethics if you like—is not about living in accordance with a strict code. You’re only ever doing ethics when you work to reconcile yourself to your necessary departures from a strict code. Comstock gets his girlfriend pregnant and that changes everything. It forces him to look beyond the narcissism of a principled life to the conflicting concerns of competing needs.

I return to the quote—advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket—and I agree with the statement (as I believe Orwell probably did, too), but it is far from the last word on the matter. I don’t think I’ll be quoting it anymore, except maybe as a conversation-starter.

Related posts:

1. Advertising and Conspicuous Consumption
2. Walmart, Advertising and Feminism

Growing up in my good Christian household, whenever we prayed together around the harvest table and the word sexuality popped up (as it always did), it meant something vague and abstract, much like love and peace and Santa Claus. Most of the online dictionary definitions bear this out. Sexuality is a general term that encompasses a multiplicity of human experiences, from the mechanics of reproduction and the sense of a gendered identity to the expression of love and a totalizing ontological perception of one’s self as a body. Warning against sexuality is almost as meaningless as warning against being.

I thank the powers that be for these warnings, but I have more important things to worry about, like protecting my beleaguered mind from air-headed voice-overs by people who don’t know how to use their native language.

No related posts.

Birth and revelation, death and ultimate destruction. These have been bred into the DNA of Matt Bell’s slender collection, Cataclysm Baby, twenty-six delicious tales (one for each letter of the alphabet) about fathers and the more-often-than-not grotesque children they bring into a dying world. There are children covered in fur, and others, in mounds of fatty flesh. Some possess a canny clairvoyance while others forage like simians through the overhead trees. And one, the daughter of the “Y” chapter, comes into the world as a “puff of womb-air, this gasp of baby-breath.” But the fathers of these dystopian scenarios haven’t time for coddling nor the resources to buy things from Toys R Us. The demands of mere survival turn them into cold and sometimes brutal caregivers. They give away their children for the hope of a chance of a better life. They hurl children from a cliff when they can no longer hide the deformities. And, in a nasty twist on The Most Dangerous Game, a father gives his son fifty yards before he opens fire.

Bell draws on Biblical/mythical sources and contemporary dystopian writing in equal measure. This is no surprise given his epigraphs, quotes from both the Genesis flood story and Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic odyssey. We peel away the layers of Bell’s tales and find traces of the encounter between Abraham and Isaac. In “Justina, Justine, Justise” we meet three blind sisters, “my three little furies, my three furious daughters” who punish their father for his infidelity. Other stories evoke P.D. James’ Children of Men. In “Greyson, Griffin, Guillermo” the father laments his randy red-headed sons, his “one-note issue”, who impregnate all the women in the village but can breed only boys. With a sometime preoccupation with floods and a penchant for ritual and liturgical language, several of the stories suggest Margaret Atwood’s latest novels. We see this most clearly in “Quella, Quirida, Quintessa” with an Untethering ceremony where the parents release the cable from their daughter’s ankle and allow her to float away.

While it seems natural to read these tales as allegories of parenthood—cue R.E.M.—nevertheless I can’t help but give them a literal gloss. The horror of these tales is that, in some places within our wretched world, parents do give up their children for the hope of a chance of a better life. And with recent revisions to climate change forecasts, we may be well on our way to a world from Bell’s pages.

If I were to offer Cataclysm Baby like a wine pairing, I would recommend it as, say, a full-bodied merlot, dark, but with a smooth finish, well-suited to accompany a meal of Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted On The Voyage and a plate of Year of the Flood on the side.

Buy Cataclysm Baby (due for release on April 15^th)

Read my review of Matt Bell’s previous short story collection, How They Were Found.

Matt Bell’s web site.

Related posts:

1. Review: How They Were Found, by Matt Bell
2. Review: Charactered Pieces, by Caleb J. Ross
3. Review: Six Metres of Pavement, by Farzana Doctor

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes about the 10,000 hour rule. In short: one of the ingredients of success is that you find the opportunity to spend at least 10,000 hours honing the basic skills you need in your chosen area of expertise. Doing some simple math, I realize that I reached the 10,000 hour threshold for piano performance when I was in high school. My failure to become a concert pianist was not for lack of effort. There were other factors stacked against me, not least of which is that I didn’t want to be a concert pianist. But the experience of practising and reaching a goal gave me a first-hand illustration of Gladwell’s point: a cornerstone of success is practice AND THERE ARE NO SHORT CUTS.

The same is true for writing. The blogosphere/twitterverse/whatever is overflowing with the promise of short cuts. Virtually everybody has a yearning for self-expression, a feeling which probably arises from an underlying need to be understood. And everywhere there are people promising easy methods to satisfy that need. It’s exploitative. It’s unscrupulous.

There is only one way to be a good writer: write and write and write and write. And most of that writing should go straight into the garbage. It is like doing scales. Nobody wants to listen to a concert of scales any more than they want to read a novel of practice exercises.

Anybody who says ebook technology coupled with cut-and-paste content-culling tools will make you a good writer is a liar and cheat. Roll up your sleeves. You’ve got a lot of hard work ahead of you.

Related posts:

1. Writing advice from Bo Catlett (Elmore Leonard)

• Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey – in the tree house me and my best friend built in a maple tree that stood on the property line between our two yards.

• George Orwell, Coming Up For Air – in a cabin in Parry Sound, with the same best friend, when he tried to get me to join a cult with him.

• Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe – sitting on the steps in the back hallway of Eastminster United Church (Toronto) waiting for an organ lesson, and also on the subway.

• Margaret Atwood, Surfacing – on the cold hard floor beside my locker at Newtonbrook Secondary High School, while nurturing a crush on a girl who never knew.

• Franz Kafka, The Penal Colony – while working as a ride operator at Canada’s Wonderland in the summer after high school. The book title reflected my opinion of the job. I also read The Epic of Gilgamesh. I don’t know why.

• Iris Murdoch, The Sandcastle – in the basement of Old Vic (If you’ve seen The Paper Chase, staring Timothy Bottoms, Lindsay Wager & John Houseman, there’s a scene where they pass one another in a tunnel. I read several books seated around the corner from the entrance to that tunnel.)

• Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference – in a basement apartment near Pape & Danforth, Toronto, the first place my wife & I lived, and where most of my reading choices were aimed at evading the reading requirements for a law degree. I also read Spike Milligan’s Puckoon there, and for the same reason.

• Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient – in the psychiatric ward of Scarborough Grace Hospital. After several rounds of ECT treatments, I identified with the man who didn’t know who he was.

• Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus – while drinking beer on the deck I built all by myself and under which a raccoon died, forcing me to pull it all apart to remove the carcass.

• Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion – I read this book naked on a rock on an island near Point au Baril (there is a photo floating around somewhere with the spine of the book – & its title – positioned appropriately by my nasty bits).

• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita – in the psychiatric ward of Sunnybrook Hospital, just to see what they would make of my reading choices.

• Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist – in the back seat of a van driving home from a trampoline competition in Ottawa. (I wasn’t in the competition; it was for our kids.)

• Roo Borson, Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida – in the emergency department of North York General Hospital waiting for my son to get his broken leg casted.

• Roland Barthes, Mythologies – on a flight from Toronto to Victoria on the way to my brother-in-law’s wedding.

• Martha Gellhorn, Liana – on a flight from Toronto to Glasgow (I read Conrad’s Nostromo, or most of it, on the return flight).

• Douglas Dunn, Elegies – in a pub by the Forth & Clyde canal where they served me a dish with pasta in it, which I ate despite my gluten intolerance, because I am Canadian and too polite to complain.

• Malcolm Gladwell, Blink – in my sister-in-law’s bathroom – (the reading occurred over several successive visits).

• Tomson Highway, Kiss of the Fur Queen – in a waiting room at Women’s College Hospital while my daughter was having knee surgery.

Related posts:

1. The Guardian’s 100 greatest non-fiction books
2. Graffiti: books
3. A Book I’ll Never Read

While I’m leery of making too much of the all-powerful governing metaphor, there is a correspondence between the idea of blueshifting and the feel of these poems. Blueshifting (the phenomenon) involves a passivity – it assumes an observer who sits and does nothing while stars approach or drift away. Blueshifting (the poetry chapbook) also involves a kind of passivity: “The world / wheels toward the inevitable.” The sun rises and sets. Time advances. Meanwhile we sit and watch it happen.

With poem titles like Making Time, Devolution, Entropy, Relativity, Dark Matter, and with an epigraph from Carl Sagan, and references to Mastodons, petroglyphs and quantum states, one might expect to find a collection of science-nerd poems. But science itself has changed (and maybe rescued poetry in the process). We don’t live in a deterministic universe of Newtonian mechanics. Yes, “The world / wheels toward the inevitable”. But we live in a universe of unobservable observations and strange attractions. The path to the inevitable is not fixed.

One twist in the path, which maybe defies scientific analysis even more than love, is humour. Kamins keeps the all-powerful governing metaphor at bay with a gentle sense of humour and genuine wit. Eggcorns, for example, is a funny poem of malapropisms. And Devolution inverts our expectations by sentimentalizing garbage and smog and expressing indignation at the threat of an encroaching nature. And my favourite of the collection – Headspace – lulls us into a saccharine state of mind, sitting next to grandmother, perhaps on a farm, learning how to make jams or preserves the old-fashioned way, until we discover that this is a case of “borrowed nostalgia” and our narrator is, in fact, in a classroom making it all up.

Could this be a comment on the way poetry gets made? In the sometimes vitriolic debate about the merit of MFA programs, maybe one side of the debate rests on a case of “borrowed nostalgia”, projecting the good old days when poetry was a rustic pleasure passed on to us by our grandparents. Maybe this is Kamins poking gentle fun at the whole debate. And with beautifully crafted poems in a tight, cohesive collection like this, we’ll grant her that indulgence.

Heather Kamins’ web site

Upper Rubber Boot Books

Related posts:

1. David Barker Writes Sappy Poetry
2. Poetry: Patient Frame, by Steven Heighton
3. Canada Gets New Lit Mag: Poetry Is Dead

Here is what Julian Barnes writes about the General Purposes Computer (GPC), a project begun in 1998 and released for public consumption in 2003:

The General Purposes Computer was begun in 1998 after a series of government enquiries. Previously, in the late eighties, there had been various pilot scheme which had sought to put the whole of human knowledge onto an easily accessible record. The Funlearn Project of 1991-92, with officially sponsored prizes and scholarships, had been the best known of these schemes; but its purity of principle had been impugned when it was linked to a government campaign to decrease the child-user percentage in state videogame parlours. Some had even accused Funlearn of didacticism.

Inevitably the early schemes had been book-oriented; they were attempts to create the ultimate, perfect library where “readers” (as they were still archaically known) could obtain access to the world’s accumulation of knowledge.

Although Barnes envisions this knowledge archive as a government initiative instead of a private endeavor, he captures something of Google’s aspirations, including a debate which he frames as a dispute between proponents of “Total Knowledge” and “Correct Knowledge”. It presages a concept that Jeron Lanier identifies in You Are Not a Gadget as “cybernetic totalism”, an ideological stance adopted by Google and many technologists: machine intelligence will arise as a natural consequence of an accumulation of knowledge.

In Staring at the Sun, Gregory pays frequent visits to the GPC and consults it almost in the same way Athenians used to consult the Oracle of Delphi. But the process proves frustrating:

Gregory didn’t want examples. That was one of the troubles with GPC: it was so full of information it always tried to give you as much of it as possible; like some party bore, it wanted to drag you away from your own interests and boast of its knowledge instead.

That sounds like Amazon with its useless book recommendations, or the 200,000 different links returned by a Google search. And Google promises to become an even bigger “party bore” now that it will be incorporating “information” from Google+ in its Search Plus Your World. What I find most curious about reading these passages is that Barnes reflects upon these developments with a note of irony while we, who now live it, have, for the most part, lost our ironic detachment. It is what it is and we accept it in all its absurdity.

Related posts:

1. Squawking about Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
2. Love, Etc. by Julian Barnes
3. Google Street View Car Spotted in Toronto

1. The titles. Many of McGimpsey’s “chubby sonnets” should not be read without first pausing to savour the title. For example: “Song for Cardigans and Assholes.” Or “Death be not proud but, really, who could blame you? I mean, c’mon, you’re Death!” Or “Jesus loves you, but doesn’t love-love you; I mean He thinks you’re okay but He’s going through some things now and is not interested in something more meaningful.”

2. Canadians with gluten allergies (who have mourned their inability to drink beer during hockey games) can find solace in McGimpsey’s tender verse:

Certain despairs, like gluten allergies,
Should only (suspiciously) affect white
Middle class women or Canadians.

3. McGimpsey understands the cultural importance of Barnaby Jones like few poets speaking for our generation.

4. Novel titles. McGimpsey could have written a novel called “The English Patient Vs. Predator.” Sadly, he didn’t, but it would have made a great movie.

5. Cellphones and Facebook figure importantly in McGimpsey’s poems (although not as importantly as Barnaby Jones). “I paw my cellphone like a rosary” and “Before the iPhone arrived, we lived like pigs” or the confessional: “All those times I was ‘Maybe Attending,’ / I admit I wasn’t going to attend.” After I read those lines, I was seized by a fit of guilt and had to stop reading until I poured myself a drink.

6. His poems can be mined for writing advice. And why not? After all, David McGimpsey has a Ph.D. in English Literature and teaches at Concordia University. So, for example, in “Putting the ‘ah’ in ‘adjunct.’”, he offers us some shtick from Wayne C. Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction:

I wasn’t a full-time professor
But I still worked for the university.
I was a departmental mascot —
‘Skewy’ the Creative Writing Bee!

In that warm, itchy outfit for Skewy
I buzzed about the halls at big events.
I’d wave my arms and say, ‘Show, don’t tell,’
And, ‘Your craft will set the world abuzzzzzzzzzz!’

7. His poems can also be mined for aphorisms, although not the sort of aphorisms Zarathustra would cite from his cave on the mountain, more the sort of aphorisms that qualify as ‘gas-station wisdom’.  “Like all fine cuisine, airport celery soup / achieves balance.” “Hell is other people’s taste in music.” “Those who think you can’t run / away from your problems just haven’t tried.” “You can’t buy Wrangler jeans at Versailles.”

8. McGimpsey shows you what it’s like to be a middle-aged man on the run from the things middle-aged men are usually on the run from. Except that running has become acutely disappointing since every place looks like the place before. They all have box stores and cheap motels and tacos and Pepsi.

9. The cover, designed by Evan Munday, features what appears to be the rare and exotic Jackalope.

10. If you are ever wondering what McGimpsey is up to in this book, a hint is only a click away. See, for example, this interview from Maisonneuve which includes the following statement:

My affection for American pop culture is, I think, unambiguous and, I assume, has been enjoyable for my best readers. A few times I’ve seen how this accounts for a misreading of my poetry which I’m sure will trail me to the grave: that is, when a critic takes contemptuous displeasure in an American culture reference and imagines I must hate what they have been conditioned to hate and therefore assume my goal is satire (I couldn’t possibly be saying I watch Family Matters, could I?  I couldn’t really prefer Celine Dion to The Tragically Hip, could I?) and then wonder why my satires don’t seem to go far enough. I have no interest in apologizing for that or defending that as governing poetic conceit in the face of the myriad weepy grievances Canadian intellectuals have against the United States. After all, I do not write about American popular culture: I write about my life and American popular culture is the metaphoric vehicle through which the tenor of my life is moderated.

I admit, sometimes I get a burr stuck up my ass and rant about how the American elephant is going to roll over and smush my cultural mouse. Reading Li’l Bastard is like taking a laxative, unsticking my burr, reminding me to loosen up a little bit. Have some fun.

Follow @DaveMcGimpsey on twitter.

Buy the book from @coachhousebooks.

Related posts:

1. A Lesson in Humiliation from David Bezmozgis
2. David Barker Writes Sappy Poetry
3. Did Doris Lessing Influence David Foster Wallace?

That’s not entirely true. Stories seem to fall into patterns all their own. Like sentences, they have a native syntax that determines outcomes quite apart from facts and logic. In a sense, all stories write themselves. I think that’s why we can detect patterns in our own writing that belong to things that have gone before. In my “murder in the cathedral” I see a storied heritage. I don’t trace my plot back to T.S. Eliot’s fictionalized account of the very real assassination of Thomas Becket. Instead, I trace it to Yukio Mishima’s Temple of the Golden Pavilion which itself was inspired by the very real 1950 arson of a Kyoto reliquary called Kinkaku-ji. Mishima told the story from the point of view of the arsonist, Mizoguchi, a Buddhist acolyte, and he provides a careful exposition of the young man’s deteriorating mental health.

I find surprising similarities between Mishima’s story and the adaptation I have made of my particular facts. The similarities suggest to me that I have been unconsciously influenced by Mishima. First, there is the priest, Dosen, whom Mizoguchi has seen with a geisha. Second, there is the friendship with Kashiwagi. This friendship follows a type that appears throughout literature (and life for that matter) – the co-dependent relationship between a dominant personality and a passive subordinate narrator. This may appear so often in literature because writers tend to assume the role of passive observer to other people’s actions. Mishima himself uses this type elsewhere. For example, in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, the son, Noboru, plays subordinate to The Chief who leads a gang of boys and goads them to acts of violence. Implicit in the type, and perhaps more obvious in Mishima’s works, is a homoerotic connection between the dominant and the subordinate. The completion of violence produces a sexual release.

In my account, the custodian kills the prostitute, not because it produces a sexual release in relation to the woman he is killing, but because he perceives her as an obstacle in his relationship with the priest. The act of killing her removes the obstacle and any sexual release is then transferred to the priest.

Time for me to stop yakking about it and get back to writing.

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When the crisis had blown over, I did what I always do when I’m trying to understand something that puzzles me deeply. I holed myself up with a pen and pad of paper and started to write. The result (which you may have encountered in previous posts on this blog) is a serialized novel called Hogtown. Since completing the final chapter, I’ve polished things up a bit. I thought it would be fitting to release the shiny new issue just as the Occupy Movement starts up on the site of last year’s G20 protests. I thought it would be fitting, too, to offer it for free.

I get tired of the capitalist hustle that turns everything into a resource for sale to some distant market, a machine greased by advertising and credit. Fuck it. My mind does not produce intellectual capital. And, at least in the modest space of my blog, YOU are not a consumer of that capital. And so, while I dedicate this latest novel to the protesters of the Occupy Movement, it is for everyone. It is a gift. It is an act of protest.  Download and enjoy it as an ebook in a variety of formats from Smashwords.

Here’s the extended description I’ve posted there:

Hogtown is the story of a nameless girl from a small southwestern Ontario farm community. Now she works as an articling student at a respectably conservative law firm in downtown Toronto. Be nice. Don’t ask awkward questions. Look your best. Work hard. These are the rules she tries to live by. But the rules don’t help when her boss asks her to do research for clients – two police officers – charged with raping a sex trade worker. On the eve of the G20 Summit, news breaks of the victim’s suicide, but no one notices. All eyes are on the world leaders as they breeze into town. No one has time to bother with the local tragedy of a non-person. Enraged and confused, the articling student takes to the streets with other protesters. There, her detachment evaporates as she witnesses first-hand the abuses that power can inflict on the vulnerable. Even then, she believes she can walk away with a neat collection of intellectual nuggets while avoiding the messiness of taking a stand, getting arrested, detained, beaten up. And then, thanks to the police, her turn comes.

The title of the book comes from a nickname for Toronto which arose more than a century ago when Sir Joseph Flavelle, one of the city’s preeminent capitalists, began importing hogs, slaughtering them in Toronto, and exporting the produce throughout the Commonwealth. Conveniently, the name also reminds us of the thousands of police and paramilitary personnel who locked down Toronto’s downtown core at the end of June, 2010, and committed the largest mass arrest in Canadian history.

Related posts:

1. Where is the Church in the Occupy Movement?
2. Occupy Wall Street – But Keep It Simple
3. Occupy Toronto – Day One

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