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The vacuum cleaner wasn’t working. After three weeks on the road, Harlan wanted to clean out the van, get rid of the stray potato chips and gas station receipts and pea gravel tracked in from motel parking lots. He wanted to give the van a real going-over. But when he ran the nozzle across the upholstery, nothing happened. The vacuum cleaner roared the way vacuum cleaners are supposed to roar, but all the suck was gone out of it. Harlan turned off the machine and, popping it open, saw that the bag was full. He went inside where he found Lisa pulling things from the medicine cabinet and dumping them into the sink.

I first encountered the name, Pico Iyer, last year while reading Geoff Dyer’s latest book, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. Dyer refers to him while writing about the nowhereness of hotels and airports, locales that have become emblematic of the global era. To my chagrin, I discovered that Iyer’s is not a new voice; he has been publishing books for more than twenty-five years. How had I overlooked him? Months later, I stumbled across Iyer’s The Global Soul in a used bookstore on Johnson St. in Victoria, a locale that is emphatically not emblematic of the global era. Now that the world seems all abuzz with Pico Iyer—essays in the New York Times and a new book released this month—I think it’s worth visiting his earlier work.

Futurist is not the first word that comes to mind when describing Julian Barnes. However, after reading Staring at the Sun, published in 1987, one wonders if he might not have enjoyed a fertile alternate career as a science fiction writer. The novel starts as a straight-up realistic account of a woman named Jean Serjeant born in the 1920′s, conventional parents, an eccentric Uncle Leslie of whom she is very fond, a flyer named Tommy Prosser who is grounded and billeted at the Serjeant house during the war, a stale marriage to a policeman named Michael, a timid son named Gregory. As the novel progresses, it promises a poignant reflection on life, mortality and the miracle of the ordinary … until we reach the final section and discover that Jean is now a hundred years old, which means that the novel’s present is sometime after 2020. From a 1987 point of view, the world enjoys as yet undreamt-of developments, including something that sounds a lot like Google.

While walking my dog, I passed a box of books by the curbside. As is my habit, I paused to scan the titles and three caught my attention, not because I want to read them, but because my heart goes out to anyone who needs to. All three concern bereavement for the death of an infant. I looked up from the box to the solid brick face of the house behind the box. As is typical in suburbia, I don’t know the occupants of this house and can’t remember ever having seen them. I looked down the street, past a hundred other houses just like this one, and I wondered at all the private pain and grief these brick walls must hide. Then I wondered: What does it mean that these books have been discarded? Have the parents “gotten past” the grieving and no longer need the books? Or have the books have given them no support? Or maybe they’ve moved on to a whole new list of titles.

Early last year, I had posted a photo of a neighbour’s lawn done with astro turf. The grass is indeed greener on the other side of the fence, even in winter. However, he has put out a real Christmas tree for the chipper this year. I would have thought a man who has an astro turf lawn would use a fake tree for Christmas. For people who like labels, I offer this as an example of situational irony.

Thanks a shitload, Karen Armstrong.
I mean, I’m happy for your diagnosis
and all. I mean, not knowing is worse
than floating in medical limbo.

During the Christmas holidays, I had my comeuppance. I had to face my family and confess that I had lost my iPhone. Two weeks earlier, while moving my daughter home from university for the holidays, she lost her Blackberry. She hadn’t even owned it for a month and it vanished in the parking lot of a Tim Horton’s. Oh the lectures I gave! The haranguing I did! I told her, we might as well burn hundred dollar bills for fun. I told her, we might as well treat the telcos as registered charities and give them our money. And then, in one of those karmic twists that makes my life look a late-night reality TV rerun, I found myself standing before my daughter, head bowed, hearing my own words chimed back at me. To be fair, my daughter felt badly for me. She knew that, as hard as I had been on her, I was ten times as hard on myself.

Almost two years ago, The Guardian published 10 Rules of Writing from Elmore Leonard. Leonard is famous for his allergy to adverbs and his advice in The Guardian includes the usual harangue. But Leonard goes further and issues a fatwa against the word “suddenly” and against adverbs that specifically modify dialogue words like “said”.

and by “Like” I mean “Like” as in feel great affection or affinity for, as opposed to “Like” as in click an up-turned thumb on a Facebook page.

Anna Rabinowitz, whose poetry I have reviewed here and here, has collaborated with composer, Stefan Weisman, to create what they describe as an “experimental opera – theatre work” called Darkling which they have released as a two-CD recording from Albany Records. The libretto draws upon a book-length poem of the same name which Rabinowitz published ten years ago, which in turn is built (as an acrostic) upon the poem by Thomas Hardy, A Darkling Thrush.

I bookended 2011 with two large novels. In January, I read Witz, by Joshua Cohen, a sprawling brilliant novel which I would set on my shelf beside the likes of Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest. In December, I read 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami, also a sprawling novel which at least one critic has likened to War and Peace and Infinite Jest. I had decided to read it on the strength of another review in The Millions, a rave of a review if ever there was one, by Kevin Hartnett, which concludes with: When life wears us down, great fiction gives us back our human shape. Oh great, I said to myself, I’ll sit myself down with this behemoth of a novel and submit to a transformative experience.

Every year begins with certain literary rituals. The first is to pay homage to Public Domain Day – the acknowledgment of literary works which have passed into the Public Domain and therefore are no longer subject to copyright law. Because copyright terms vary from country to country, one must be careful. In the U.S., for example, the Duke Law School’s Centre for Study of the Public Domain wryly notes: “Once again, we will have nothing to celebrate this January 1^st.” Thanks to the efforts of poor and starving artists like Sonny Bono, nothing new will pass into the U.S. Public Domain until 2019. I’m glad he smashed into a tree. He couldn’t sing anyways.

Below is perhaps the most sentimental short story I’ve ever written. It involves death, relationships, and all that stuff. I have also posted it on Smashwords in case you want to download a free copy for your ereader. Here is the short description I provided there: “When a novelist learns that he is dying, he resolves to write two final works as gifts to his children. He completes the first for his son in short order, but as he begins the second, he falters. His daughter must reconcile herself to the possibility that he might never finish his gift to her.”

Death Wishing is the debut novel from Laura Ellen Scott whose chapbook, Curio, I featured here earlier this year. It’s hard to know how to classify Death Wishing. Magic realism, perhaps, although it behaves much like science fiction, with a single wild premise producing conflict that drives the action, and characters who reveal themselves as they confront the conflict. See J.G. Ballard’s Drowned World for an example of the sci-fi paradigm. Here, the single wild premise is this: as people die, their final wish comes true. Cancer is a distant memory. Cats are now extinct. Elvis returns (was he ever gone?) Mothers grow a third eye in the back of their head. But this new phenomenon has its problems. Whatever mysterious power grants these wishes has a legalistic brain, reminding us of the old adage: be careful what you wish for. When a dying woman of generous intent wishes everyone could have a thousand dollars, people with millions of dollars are devastated at their loss.

Have you heard the news? Publishers Weekly reports that a Japanese insurance company purchased Toronto-based ebook seller, Kobo, for $315 million dollars. My initial response registered somewhere in the anger/betrayal range of the emotional spectrum. Rather than spend a lot of time bitching, I channeled that anger into a poem.reading underwater,
words burble and pop
in the light up there,
the bright crisp, while
kobo kobo kobo
the well-oiled pistons
of the juggernaut
metal leviathan
jaws wide, throat
ready to swallow
swim, you minnows,
you selfish
shelf-ish shell
fish, you inky
preoccupied
octopi, swim,
you albacore
and dolphins and
plankton, don’t
forget the plankton
kobo kobo kobo
with its sonar
and torpedoes dark
the underbelly hull
swim, for reading
is at a premium
now the looming mass
of capital slicks
over the deep, its
killing drops adrift
on the roiling swell and
seep into our scales
still it rumbles on
kobo kobo kobo
circling overhead
for another pass