Alex Boyd's Blog, page 15

Facebook for Writers: A Constitution in Ten Rules and One Appeal

Co-written with Jacob McArthur Mooney, as a facetious guide to Facebook.

1. Decide if your profile is a personal or professional one. If you're going to friend every other writer in the world, we don't want to hear about how much you enjoyed your eggs.

2. On that note, you don't need to friend everyone, and writers in another part of the continent will not race out to buy or review your book because you're friends on Facebook. Seriously, it's an epidemic. Be a person, not a computer virus. Friend the people you know, (and the people you'd like to know. Don't befriend people you know you'll never know, y'know?)

3. Do not complain about Facebook stealing all your writing time. This isn't really what's happening. Procrastinating writers existed before 2002. If it wasn't Facebook, it'd be something else. Don't steal others' Facebook time with reminders about writing.

4. Don't complain about Facebook in your Facebook status update. Even though you're a writer who stands for truth and wisdom in all things, you look stupid when you complain about FB's privacy settings from inside your profile. You've bought in. Deal with this. The only thing worse than acquiescing is acquiescing ironically.

5. Don't have fan pages and invite people to be a fan of you. High school is over, and we should all be working to keep it that way.  If someone had approached you decades ago to say someday you'll have a machine in your home, and you'll use it to try and get everyone you know to indicate they like you, you'd have said please go away and take your soul-destroying ideas with you.  (You'd have been in the right.)

6. Profiles are for people and groups are for publishers and bookstores. Some of us aren't comfortable being friends with anonymous entities (like Buzzard Wing Books, Alberta) that can look at all our photos.

7. If someone invites you to an event, and you don't want to go, hit the "Not Attending" button, not the "Ignore" button, and especially not the "Attending" button. Facebook offers you innumerable opportunities to be a passive-aggressive wimp. Don't overdo it. The "Maybe" attending button is a decent compromise, and notes are often appreciated if you're going to decline.

8. The following things are difficult to communicate through text, among others: sarcasm, tongue-in-cheekiness, and irony. Try to avoid these writerly tools around casual acquaintances as they may not be fully briefed on your staggering capacity for wit. When your bon mots crash against the sheer cliffs of others' literalness, it will not be their fault. It will be yours.

9. Never confuse the apparent popularity of something's Facebook presence with its actual popularity in the real world. Include yourself among these somethings. The following expressions are to be avoided: "This reading should have really been better attended, it got __ attendees on the FB invite." and "If every one of my FB friends just bought 2 copies of my book, each, I could sell out on Amazon."

10. If you feel another writer is using their profile as a personal soapbox to describe the mundane slog of their workaday lives instead of anything thoughtful about writing, and you want to call them on this, fair enough. But first, put yourself through the following test: copy and paste your last ten status updates to a word document. Now, scan through that document looking for references to your children or pets. How many did you find? Is it more than three? Yes? Okay, then shut up.

In closing, we all have writing in common, and we're all sensitive enough to be writers. This makes us a loose community of the easily offended. Avoid dropping and blocking people because they reviewed your book poorly, or didn't speak to you at an event, or anything else. It's counter-productive to polarize the writing subcultures, plus it's hurtful. We're not saying we're perfect people, and have never made mistakes, but let's be honest – we were supposed to be done with turning our backs on inconvenient people somewhere around grade school.

Happy Facebooking!

Still my favourite book trailer…

I don't exactly go hunting for them, but my favourite book trailer is still the one for the Sean Stanley novel Etcetera and Otherwise. This year, it was one of the Moby Award winners. Another of my favourites has Brad Meltzer making the best of some poor reviews in Everybody Still Hates Brad Meltzer.

One Question Interview: Fraser Sutherland

Fraser Sutherland is a much-travelled Nova Scotian now living in Toronto. His writing has appeared worldwide in magazines and anthologies and he has published fourteen books. His latest book of poems is The Philosophy Of As If.

These are remarkably thoughtful and articulate poems with a meditative quality. How much of your poetry is philosophy?

In a sense, all of it. For me, poetry is at bottom ontological, that is, it deals with the nature of being and, more narrowly, what it is to be alive. Using a language of its own, and in a focused way, it is engaged, if only implicitly, in what Aldous Huxley called "the perennial philosophy," an inquiry into the ground of being common to all cultures and all periods.

I don't mean that a poem is, or should be, an explicit metaphysical statement, or the writing of philosophy by other means. It shouldn't indulge in vapid moralizing or loose generalization. Just as paint is a painter's medium, words are a poet's, and the effective use of words will always tend toward specificity, not abstraction. But I do think that the motive power of what serious poets do is a yearning to come to terms with, or at least acknowledge, what exists beyond saying. Lines, phrases, words, even syllables are the means by which this is done, and they are physical items: they have weight and volume, drag and propulsion. If we hear a cello passage by Bach, what we intuit is the movement of the physical into the metaphysical and the opening of the immanent into the transcendent. These are only possible because of the friction of a bow against strings.

Ezra Pound neatly divided poetic elements into melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia: sound, sight, sense. What I often get in much contemporary English poetry, whether American, British, or Canadian, is a lot of sight and sound, but not much sense. In the Jungian quaternity of psychological types – thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition – thinking comes in fourth. I don't find myself being made privy to an active intelligence, an energized mind at work. That cast of mind doesn't have to lend itself to intellectually oriented wit, satire, or comedy – though, as it happens, those qualities are scarce, too. Nor does this mind have to directly express ideas; it can operate through simile, metaphor, allusion, all the devices of irony.

One can admire, if not altogether approve of, a poet who merely exhibits finely honed perceptions, an exquisite sensibility, a vibrating sensitivity, a vigorous voice, or a wonderful capacity to carom words off each other, But in such cases there may be something missing: the feeling that the poet is ultimately reaching toward the universal and absolute. I don't mean to be doctrinaire or dogmatic: a simple imagist poem, an obscure poem or one with no apparent referentiality, a poem of unbridled emotion, an ostensibly anecdotal poem – all can have depth. But in them depth is harder to achieve. One doesn't like to think that a poem must be mindless.

NPR update: Suzanne Buffam interview, new reviews

Northern Poetry Review is updated with an interview with Suzanne Buffam, poems by Catherine Graham, from her new book Winterkill and new reviews of poetry books by Steve McOrmond, Tammy Armstrong and Michael Eden Reynolds.

The interview needs a minor correction, as the second question hasn't been reproduced properly, but I understand this will be fixed soon.

Best Canadian Essays 2010 launch

It only happens once a year, like Christmas. Hope to see you at the comfortable Dora Keogh pub after 8pm, Wed November 17th for an evening celebrating some of the most insightful and articulate articles of the year. Brief readings by Jason McBride, Carolyn Morris, and Danielle Groen.

The Untitled Work of Paul Shepard

A new Canadian romantic-comedy appears to include quite a sharp (and hilarious) parody of the poetry world.

Mary Shelley

L. J. Davis reviews a new biography of Mary Shelley and fairly quickly wanders from the life of Shelley (and whether of not it's a decent biography) into a history of science-fiction. His suggestion that Frankenstein is fairly dull surprises me. It's among the few nineteenth-century novels I've read more than once. At the same time, if you're going to write a review that wanders, making it as funny as paragraphs like this one justifies the trip:

"The history of science fiction usually begins here, with Frankenstein. The history is wrong. If we stretch our definition a bit, the world's first sci-fi author was a certain Lucian of Samosata, a Romanized Syrian whose two lunar-space operas, Icaromenippus and True History, by some incredible fluke escaped the torching of the Alexandrine Library by the Emperor Theodosius in 391. Writing in the second century, Lucian took his protagonists to the moon. There is, of course, a problem with this — the total lack of a delivery system — but in the hands of a true hack like Lucian all great problems are made small. In one case, his protagonist sprouts wings. In the other, he is conveyed lunar-ward by a waterspout. On the moon, we learn, the poor have wooden phalluses and the phalluses of the rich are made of ivory, which sounds perfectly plausible to me. After Lucian, the science-fiction business shuts down for 1,400 years."

Comments Invited

I have a love / hate relationship with online comments (or maybe I could say I'm fascinated / appalled). While I like the idea that people can comment on a news item, the immediacy of it means it's mainly drivel, even as the distance and anonymity can bring out our worst. Still, there are gems out there: an apparently Muslim man commented on the potential burning of the Koran on the 9/11 anniversary saying he wasn't going to allow himself to be caught up in it, and quoting the old saying "The clouds are not troubled by the barking of dogs."  I've written something that's not an essay or article, but a series of imagined comments on an imaginary article about Best Canadian Essays. And while it's obviously designed to help promote the book, I've also seen people read it and laugh a handful of times (and that was the idea, by the way). Read it on the Maisonneuve blog here.

Internet Wrek My Brain

Enough interesting (and somewhat alarming) ideas are bandied about in a review of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains that I'm forced to consider limiting my surfing time: "MRIs performed on people while they read books show that they use regions linked to language, memory, and vision; surfers call on prefrontal sites of decision making and problem solving."

Maybe with the extra reading time I'll check out Ideas that Matter. And you all know you can get reviews emailed to you through the Powells site, right? And while I have a lot on my plate, someone will start this service for Canadian books, right?

Internet Mak Me Dum

Enough interesting (and somewhat alarming) ideas are bandied about in a review of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains that I'm forced to consider limiting my surfing time: "MRIs performed on people while they read books show that they use regions linked to language, memory, and vision; surfers call on prefrontal sites of decision making and problem solving."

Maybe with the extra reading time I'll check out Ideas that Matter. And you all know you can get reviews emailed to you through the Powells site, right? And while I have a lot on my plate, someone will start this service for Canadian books, right?