Alex Boyd's Blog, page 14

Arc Poetry Annual 2011

The new Arc Poetry Annual looks fascinating, and the good folks at Open Book Toronto have featured interviews with no less than three contributors: David O'Meara, Aislinn Hunter and Ruth Roach Pierson.

Speaking of interviews, expect an update to Northern Poetry Review in the coming weeks — the first all-interview update, with four different interviews.

Paper Problems

"Heaven!" the man announced to me, blissfully gazing around at the books, piled row on row to form a kind of sky. He's certain that to be surrounded by books and work in a bookstore is as dreamy as sitting on your own personal cloud. Well, yes and no. After spending three years as a bookseller when I was in my twenties, I can safely say that the heaven of bookselling has its share of little demons.

In a 1936 essay called Bookshop Memories, George Orwell complains about the customer who "doesn't remember the title or author's name or what the book was about but she does remember that it had a red cover." The fact that I can relate to that so many decades later is amusing but also a little worrying. Orwell was struck by "the rarity of really bookish people," explaining "our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten percent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one." True, it's difficult to help those people who've "read everything by Tom Clancy" and want another author "just like him." It strikes me as admitting that you want to read the same book repeatedly. I tried to get customers to take a step up, and once felt satisfied to convince a teenager to skip from John Grisham to Arthur Conan Doyle. But I was often frustrated at directing people to Danielle Steele when they could be setting their sights higher. Orwell mentions that authors like Hemingway are not the big sellers, but that many go home with "Ethel M. Dell." I've never heard of Dell, which suggests that there's always an author as popular as they are vacuous and transient. It's difficult is to recommend something when an author's books are all the same to you. Orwell is right to point out that sometimes "a bookseller has to tell lies about books."

People appeared to have an aversion to short stories. Orwell suggests people avoid them, but blames it on a lazy desire to spend energy on one concept only, wanting to luxuriate in it for a while. I didn't make a habit of asking for their reasons, but had people tell me that they "don't read short stories" or that they want something they "can sink their teeth into." This could help explain the general lack of interest in poetry as well. It seems the shorter the format, the more there's a perception of work involved. Orwell also states that "Dickens is one of those authors whom people are 'always meaning to' read, and, like the Bible, he is widely known at second hand." One of the sad experiences I had as a bookseller involved helping a woman who wanted Great Expectations. She didn't, however, want the book by Dickens but insisted on taking the novel based on the screenplay for a new film, which I will never understand. We sold 5 a month of the Dickens book before the release of that film, and 60 a month for a while afterwards, meaning not everyone went for the novel based on the screenplay, though it's unfortunate that it takes a film to galvanize interest in such a readable, enjoyable novel.

Language experts should spend time in bookstores, not for the books but for the speech patterns of customers. A percentage of people avoid complete sentences like the plague, little realizing that any time saved is often lost in the confusion that follows. People walking up and saying "Schlink" barely get across that they want The Reader, by Bernard Schlink. It's tempting to blurt out a nonsensical reply and pretend the whole thing is a word association game. I watched a businessman approach an employee and say "Business books?"  When she didn't quite hear and asked him to repeat it, he began flapping the arms of his suit like an alarmed penguin, saying "Business books! Business books!"  Had the man actually formed a question it might have helped. On the other end of the scale, some people tell you a story to ask you a question, explaining they were in the store "last Tuesday afternoon, about three, with my mother…"

Orwell mentions the "vague-minded" customer, and I think of the people who ask that I practically take them by the hand to the book they want.  I've been asked why our fiction and non-fiction isn't together, and why you have to go "all the way down to the first floor to pay," as though the customer planned to pay on the third floor and then leap out a window. Or, why there aren't scientists to help you in the science section (as well as, presumably, doctors in the medical section and so on). Anybody in retail is paid too little to be patient with whatever vague or spiteful person walks in off the street.  Forget the year of military service some countries make you do, everyone should be forced to work in retail. And listen up, authors: if you're going to arrive spontaneously to sign copies of your books, remember to turn on the politeness, because you're dealing with the people that will sell them after you're gone.

This is not to suggest that there weren't kind people, but as much as they're appreciated, memories of considerate people wash away quickly. There is no heavier ink than bitterness.  Orwell doesn't actually mention the hostility of customers, but I believe this is partly because he worked in a local, independent bookshop rather than a larger chain where I found people were sometimes offended at any lack of convenience. It was more or less expected that we'd have any title, or could get it in "a couple of days." A man asked me why it took weeks to get a book from England when he could fly there "in four hours," and I had to explain in polite terms that because he was going to buy a forty dollar book didn't mean someone rushed out to buy a six hundred dollar plane ticket.

When my store opened it was one of the first large-format stores in downtown Toronto, inviting people to browse and sit and drink coffee. At first, people seemed to think it must be some kind of library and sometimes asked if they could buy the books. But people became quickly accustomed to the indulgence, adopting the idea we should provide everything. I was so used to the anger that was ignited as soon as I said our 2-6 week estimate for a special order (we hadn't changed how fast publishers would ship a book) that I almost felt we were educating the city one outburst at a time. Yes, we had a wider selection than smaller bookstores, but couldn't summon a book in an ambulance if we didn't have it.

At large-format bookstores the rules can be bent so that if you want to abuse the system you can come every day and stay for hours on end.  I've found bookmarks in some books. The man I called Tom Clancy (because he looked like the author), eventually took to tipping a garbage can over so that he had something elevated for his feet. A woman once verbally blasted a co-worker of mine because one of her favourite authors ended up split between two bookcases. While I was at the special orders desk one quiet morning, a man came along and scooped up my paperwork and then gave the pages back slowly, one at a time, while asking me questions like "Do you think I'm crazy?"  Orwell explains "In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.  In the end, one gets to know these people almost at a glance." The difference then, is that now invite them to hang around.

Orwell explains his frustration with the various sidelines his bookstore had, and I often wished our large-format store concentrated on being a good bookstore and didn't bother with magazines, audiocassettes, compact discs, cards and candles. Nothing made me look more incompetent than to be caught by a customer in the multimedia section. People failed to recognize that one person isn't familiar with a forty thousand square foot store. Sometimes the greater your diversity, the weaker you are at each of those things, and you can't be as selective about staff when you need an army. When Maya Angelou visited our store, asking a cashier "Do you have the works of Maya Angelou?" the cashier replied, "Who's she?"

We didn't suffer (as Orwell did) from keeping the store cold to prevent the display windows from fogging up. We did, however, have the air-conditioning woman, who cornered staff to complain about how cold it was (we didn't agree), and slept in a chair, sometimes cutting her own hair. Orwell mentions that a bluebottle loves to crawl up onto a book and die, and while I can't relate to that, I did leave the store dizzy from paint fumes hanging around in a bad air-circulation system.

Orwell undoubtedly worked alongside the owner, especially if the novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying is any indication, but I rarely met head office people. They only appeared, and we were expected to know who they were. Once, one of them poked me in the back without introducing herself to say, "Can you go help that person?" I could never imagine what head-office people did to deserve real salaries that we didn't. We were the faces that represented the company in public, and we were the ones forced to read the titles of the erotic books to the creepy old blind man, the staff scattering like mice whenever he arrived.

Today I prefer to shop at independent stores, though I don't think it's fair to be disdainful about every aspect of large-format stores. It may have been a head-on collision between those who only cared about books and those who only cared about business — and both are shortsighted for various reasons — but I did make many real and lasting friends from among my coworkers, and there were many pleasant customers who recognized I'm a person and wanted to chat about books. It has been said before, but the biggest problem with large-format stores, in my view, is the tendency to hurt small publishers with large orders (that are expensive for publishers to produce) followed by large returns. This could be helped with a small-press section in large-format stores – one that potentially ordered small amounts and had a non-return policy. I think Orwell would agree smaller presses are frequently the first stop for later, bestselling authors.  And he might agree that whatever the size of the store, bookselling is bookselling: the tune changes, but the dance remains the same.

One Question Interview: Zach Wells

Zachariah Wells is a Canadian poet. He maintains the blog Career Limiting Moves in addition to reviewing and editing work and the publication of two full-length collections so far: Unsettled, a collection of poetry about Canada's Eastern Arctic, and more recently Track & Trace.

I've started reading your book Track & Trace and think "Cormorant," is a terrific poem. Would you agree with Rilke that poets mine their childhoods for some of the best stuff they do?

I'm glad you like "Cormorant." It was a very difficult poem for me. I know we're all supposed to pretend that we write a hundred drafts of our least little sonnet, but that's not at all typical for me. I'm usually a one-to-four-drafts-followed-by-tweaks-and-fiddles kind of writer, in large measure because I usually work on a poem in my head for quite a while before I sit down to paper or computer. Either the poem comes out in some kind of satisfactory manner or it doesn't, in which case it gets abandoned. I'm more likely to rewrite a poem from scratch some time after an earlier attempt than I am to revise it tirelessly. "Cormorant" was different, though. It went through I don't know how many drafts over a span of ten years or so, but however much I despaired of ever putting it to bed, I kept coming back. A few readers of the book have now singled it out as a favourite, which is a relief to me, having put so much into it. A strange protestant vestige in me feels that this poem has earned readers' respect more than any other I've written.

Anyway, to address your question. I'm loath to generalize about "poets" or essentialize "poetry," but I'd say that yes, for poets of a lyrical/narrative bent childhood is almost inevitably a rich vein to work. (I've been revisiting Elizabeth Bishop's work of late, and she's a classic case of someone who kept coming back to the first few years of her life in her poetry and fiction.) Lyric writing is all about the construction and representation of individual identity, so it's only natural that childhood would figure prominently in it: it's a time when all experiences are new and therefore more intense and significant, when the brain is developing rapidly, when the foundation myths of our lives are being laid. (Speaking of myth, my parents' lawyers require that I issue a standard "resemblance to actual events or persons living or dead" disclaimer whenever I read "Cormorant," since it involves the slaughter of protected species and my mother's on the board of the Prince Edward Island Nature Trust.) A number of the poems in Track & Trace, particularly early in the book, are set in the shallow valley in central PEI where I grew up. For the first several years of my life, that bucolic property and the hundreds of acres of fields and woods that border it were my world. I grow rather weary of the programmatic arguments that literature in rural settings doesn't reflect contemporary Canadian reality. A)Setting has nothing to do with whether a work of literature is any good. B)Says you, city kid. It certainly is reflective of my Canadian experience; as someone writing lyric poems rooted in particular places (some of which are cities), it would have been a strange omission indeed for me not to write about the place where I grew up. But then, I also write a lot of poems that are not directly related to my autobiography and I think some of these are among my strongest efforts, too.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I'm currently reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and forgot how much I enjoy the straightforward but compelling style of Conan Doyle. Not sure how else to describe it except to say the stories are ridiculously enjoyable (and for a great new contemporary BBC adaptation of the character, see Sherlock). Here's a description of a beggar from The Man With the Twisted Lip:

"Here it is that the creature takes his daily seat, cross-legged, with his tiny stock of matches on his lap, and as he is a piteous spectacle a small rain of charity descends into the greasy leather cap which lies upon the pavement before him. I have watched this fellow more than once, before ever I thought of making his professional acquaintance, and I have been surprised at the harvest which he has reaped in so short a time. His appearance, you see, is so remarkable that no one can pass him without observing him. A shock of orange hair, a pale face disfigured by a horrible scar, which, by its contraction, has turned up the outer edge of his upper lip, a bull-dog chin, and a pair of very penetrating dark eyes, which present a singular contrast to the colour of his hair, all mark him out from amid the common crowd of mendicants, and so, too, does his wit, for he is ever ready with a reply to any piece of chaff which may be thrown at him by the passers-by."

Two Generals, and Pride of Baghdad

I've appreciated a couple of graphic novels in the last year — Two Generals, a Second World War story of two Canadian soldiers and friends (who jokingly refer to themselves as the two generals) is both written and illustrated by Scott Chantler to tell the story of his grandfather and close friend, "lest such delicate personal lines be lost among the broader strokes of history." Chantler uses as many as nine panels on a page to keep a detailed story humming along, but sometimes pauses to include a two-page spread for greater impact. His illustrations feel quite warm rather than harshly cold and realistic, and while that serves to endear the reader to his characters and bring a human quality to the story, it also somehow manages to emphasize the bizarre nightmare of battle when it arrives. Personal details that survived the generations are woven neatly together with the larger events of history.

Pride of Baghdad takes a harder-edged and very realistic illustration style to the apparently true story of a pride of lions blown free of the Baghdad zoo during a 2003 American bombing raid. Written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Niko Henrichon, it's an even harsher story, given that the animals encounter indifference and hostility from other animals, and the reader knows all along that as soon as they encounter an army, the story will be over. Without even a subplot about the kinds of friendships people form to get through the experience, it's something closer to a howl of despair at the chaos and destruction.

Atlas of Remote Islands

Over at the National Post book blog, Philip Marchand has an enjoyable and thoughtful piece about books vs e-books. My feeling is that e-books might be useful for some titles but can't replace having traditional books for the authors I love most. And for some reason I love that books are low-tech. During a power failure, all you'd need is enough candlelight to read. Fixed in time, they also can't be updated and can become artifacts. My 1946 edition of Animal Farm has a bio for Orwell that speaks in the present tense: "George Orwell is an English critic, essayist, and novelist who writes regularly for The London Observer, The New Statesman and Nation…"

Speaking of books that make e-books seem like a pale imitation, The Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will is the prettiest damn book I've seen in quite some time, and came to my attention while being passed around and admired on Christmas day. As explained in this review, not only are the meticulously drawn maps quite beautiful, there's also background information on each of the islands.

Greenpeace End of 2010 video

Greenpeace has produced a fun, celebratory video after 2010 was a more hopeful year. Check it out by following this link, and please do consider becoming a member for a monthly donation of as little as $12, details on the same page. They still have a great deal they hope to accomplish. Happy new year! And happy new year to the little blue island we're all standing on.

Review: The Originals

I remember hearing the idea that the rise and continued popularity of video games is connected with current generations living under the shadow of nuclear annihilation.  The theory goes something like this: a generation that could have the rug pulled out from under it (at any time, no matter what they do) will eventually gravitate to games where you spend a certain amount of frantic energy before you're inevitably killed.  Of course, this is just an idea that happens to fit a couple of facts, and there is really no direct evidence to support the link.

But it's an interesting thought.  And depending on how much it worried me at any given time, I remember growing up with the feeling that an inhuman thing could pull the plug on my whole life and that of everyone I loved.  Game over.  Some of the memorable moments in The Originals, by L.E. Vollick, come along when the world spins out of control.  Here is the narrator, young "Magpie" Smith, relating a personal nightmare:

"It's when I'm watching her that it happens.  And I'm telling PK about how the room shatters with all this light.  I mean it's all falling apart.  We're being knocked into atoms quicker than I can blink, and it's so hot, I can feel the flesh slipping off my skin like it was a pair of rubber gloves.  The light – it just gobbles us whole.  And then there's nothing."

I found this passage powerful, but also noticed a few similarities to a moment later in the book, when Magpie is struggling with a bad night, and very real conflict among friends:

"Grime under my fingernails, pushed in further from me scratching at the table.  Everything spinning.  Could be the shrooms, or maybe the beer and tequila.  Everything melting inward, my hands suddenly stretching.  The table's slick, like the wood's been bawling, glistening with spilt pitchers."

The metaphor created here is the nuclear flash of personal upheaval, and only those who have never been told point blank that someone they love is dead or faced another trauma would argue that strong personal shocks can't feel like being hurled into a different world — a sudden extermination of the life you knew.

Smith and her friends (all regulars at a club called The Underground) are the disenfranchised: "But all the sudden I'm bowled over by it, how sad it is that my mother didn't have any choices.  Then I'm sad for me – because suddenly I want some choices in my life too.  And I don't know where to get them."  As a way to emphasize our occasional helplessness against fate, nuclear or otherwise, Vollick chooses to ally the reader with the poorest kids in her microcosm of a neighbourhood.  This is not to say the novel suggests that rich kids are immune or non-existent, but the lack of choice our main characters face draws attention not just to worlds in peril but to the smaller scale: those overlooked and quietly eliminated.

Magpie and her friends turn to The Underground for sanctuary and community.  Throughout the novel the regulars (rule #1 is "Belong to the club, and the club will belong to you," rule #3 is "Don't fuck with the Regulars") begin to suffer a strain on the community.  Magpie merely reacts to events at first, then begins to take a more active role before finally reaching her own crisis point.  Maybe this is what Vollick is trying to say here: the idea that if we all face various personal, nuclear flashes, it's how we react to them, and what we carve out between them that means everything.  Vollick also grounds her novel, and social commentary, in some characters that are almost immediately real.  When Magpie's mother says, "I'm proud of you.  Even if you do look ridiculous," it's exactly the kind of well meaning yet backhanded compliment parents sometimes say.

On a purely personal level, I enjoyed some of the nostalgic touches to be found here.  It seemed at times that my generation was destined to go on hearing about youth in the sixties forever, so it's a pleasure to read a novel that casually refers to Battlestar Galactica or Poltergeist.  The casual references to a few elements from pop culture, while sounding a bit forced at times, also help ground the characters in reality.

The book could be a little shorter, and at times it spells out what it's trying to say a little too clearly.  Magpie describes another character as "like a baby bird, vulnerable and sweet and not tough enough," when readers are smart enough to know what she means just by "like a baby bird," without further explanation.  But these are minor complaints.  If you like your novels meaningful and carefully written — this is not to say poetic or overdone — Vollick is a writer to watch.  As the beginning of the twenty-first century turns threatening, she introduces here a grounded, very human novel, with people navigating daily life while governments rumble in the background like approaching storms.  It's also a reminder of the world mere mortals (who don't happen to have names like Ronald Reagan) struggled with when the Russians and Americans were at odds: the world the way it was a few life changing flashes ago.

Year in Review: 2010

The first thirteen entries in the One Question Interview series isn't a bad start. Northern Poetry Review is still Northern Poetry Review, and passed a five year anniversary in April.

As someone that read at the launch for the first issue of a stylish new magazine called Taddle Creek in 1997, it was nice, fitting and vaguely disturbing (considering thirteen years have passed) to have a poem in issue 25, published this month. If you haven't subscribed, follow the link.

Best Canadian Essays 2010 — the sequel is supposed to try and be better, right? Even more magazines are included, and again there's a lot of variety in the topics.

And I finally made it to London, to see some of the city and grab a coffee with Todd Swift (it was Paris last year, which inspired a polite rant about cities). Needless to say, London was impressive, and aside from the galleries and museums we drank at the Wheat Sheaf, where Orwell and Dylan Thomas drank. People stood in quiet reflection at the thought of these two great writers. Actually, people bumped around talking, swearing, texting each other and drinking. And I'm sure Orwell and Thomas wouldn't have wanted it any other way. Here's a photo with a bunch of Brits enjoying a Friday night and one Canadian writer unintentionally looking like he's standing at attention.

Meanwhile in Toronto, I can take the streetcar at rush hour and watch people push and squeeze just to get standing room, so it's a good thing our new mayor wants to immediately cancel Transit City — years in the planning stage, already underway and set to make huge improvements — in favour of going back to square one with ideas about subways, likely to be three times as expensive. Sound good? Let's be certain city councillors hear from us on this one, folks. We deserve a livable city, and an important first step was already happening.

Taddle Creek # 25

Over the years, I've loved the stylish mix of poetry, fiction, illustration and articles to be found in Taddle Creek, and I've been happy and honoured to have fiction and poetry published in the magazine.

Taddle Creek celebrates its twenty-fifth issue on Dec 8 in Toronto this month. Find out the details and check out the excellent new cover here.