Have you heard the one about how hunters in helicopters
chase wild jokes across the flats? How they rifle
feathered darts into the herd, then sling
the groggy fallen off to urban zoos
— and how limp each witty punchline gets
once penned?
Out of context, unable to fend,
a joke makes no sense, just heaps of crap
for some kid to point a dripping milkshake at
and laugh, while his pregnant mother rolls her eyes.
Let me throw you a banana:
this joke has longed for death so long
it isn’t even funny. (more…)
Hunters and gatherers used to grumble that written language had given birth to craziness, and that craziness would grow up to be a culture that forgets everything it hears.
Now that cellphones have become so tiny you can clip one to your ear. You can stroll and chat with business contacts worlds away, hands-free. Today, a dozen brokers cluster like hungry mallards around my hot dog cart, each well-dressed multitasker talking to itself in the sun.
One of them, abusing my mustard container, announces to the open air that we should all expect to switch careers twelve times or more before we retire or die. The reason is the market or something. (more…)
When we fixed the grackle’s wing
and dabbed the grit from his cuts, we found
bits of shattered beak in the grass. It was fall,
orange foliage brittle — he had tumbled
through a rose bush after walloping the glass.
That night from his shoebox bed
he sang of flowing water and of a flightless
aquatic child who craves the summer air:
‘Afraid of submersion, it tries to swim.
It struggles for the moon
and brings us pain …’
His cuts began to stink.
Within five days the glands on his neck
ballooned into sick orange cysts. Mom made us move him
from Eric’s dresser to the shed. She was sorry, said
‘He’s going to a better place,’ but the grackle disagreed.
‘Each better place is next to nothing,’ he sang.
‘The difference is both hard and clear.’ (more…)
Follow the high road, take the low.
What can it matter? When your card
is dealt, some jerk in a stiff smock
will hammer your coffin lid shut. Hell,
as far as time can tell, our names
get scratched into planks and planted
in a willow’s shade to weather
forever, as though we were saints —
not deadbeats on shoulderless roads.
Come. Saddle up. Let’s scoot.
For we have miles to ride
before we sleep
beneath a heaven dark and deep
as hell, as far as I can see. (more…)
If humans were more like plants,
a bee might make a pitstop at your crotch
to sprout a family tree you never planned for.
‘We weathered the Cold War and missed the last
fun bus to summer’ — that’s what some people say,
older folks mostly. I bet in her case, your mother
could picture that winter baby till her main squeeze
choked, pulling out at the last minute. Today your dad
steps to the window, taps a pair of metal tongs
and points across the lawn. Sporting your shades,
a knee-high terra cotta squirrel smiles back discreetly,
frozen in the bold volcanic shadow of the barbecue
like the ghost of true baroque furniture at Versailles. (more…)
An electronic conversation with Toronto poet and playwright Adam Seelig
New Star BooksPage one of Every Day in the Morning (slow)Poet and playwright Adam Seelig has created an ambitious new curiosity, Every Day in the Morning (slow) (New Star Books, 2010). Told in a visually and grammatically adventurous “drop poem” style, the book is equal parts novella, dramatic monologue, and audacious poetry trick. Superficially, it’s the story of a sad-sack young composer named Sam, but its true concern is more style than substance, more verve than narrative. Over the course of this recent electronic chat, Seelig talked about slow’s eccentricities and its essence, both as a formal experiment and a story.
Jacob McArthur Mooney Hi, Adam. Thanks for taking some time to discuss the book. This is likely to be more of a conversation about style than a conversation about substance. Surely, one thing becomes the other after a while, and the spacious, occasionally bland, monologue that is the novel’s substance does the text a lot of favours by getting out of the way and letting the style of slow take over. However, writers love their substance, too. So, just to get it out of the way before we talk about other things, where does the A-to-B plot line of your narrator’s day factor in the gestalt of the book? In other words, how much am I supposed to care about Sam’s musical career? Or, is he primarily an excuse for a voice, a narrator willing to be self-reflective and tangential enough to make full use of the layout you’ve chosen?
Adam Seelig Your questions all point to the core of the book: music. Music does not mean anything — it is that thing in itself. So with slow — the form forms the subject, and the subject informs. Its matter is its matter.
slow unfolds in the space of Sam’s morning, specifically the very first part of his morning. He gets up, walks past piano, enters bathroom, lathers face, picks up razor, turns on light above mirror, and shaves. This is related in the third person in the first few pages until we enter Sam’s reflective and meandering mind (which oscillates between first person and second person). One-hundred-and-fifty-pages later, however long that may be, we (mostly) come out of Sam’s internal monologue to watch him put down razor, walk past piano again, and stand for a moment in the sun shining through the window. The End.
This morning space definitely influences Sam’s thought process throughout the book. His thoughts flow from that middle place of consciousness between night’s sleep and day’s first cup of coffee, that place where the solitary mind wanders, reflects, and gathers. (more…)
Charles Foran, winner of the Charles Taylor Prize, on writing Mordecai
© James LaheyWinner of the Charles Taylor Prize, a finalist for British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, and placement on numerous book-of-2010 lists — there are reasons why Charles Foran’s Mordecai: The Life & Times has earned so much attention since coming out last October. To be sure, it’s smartly written, well researched, and is at the centre of a recent wave of Richler revival projects, including the star-studded screen adaptation of Barney’s Version. At 725 pages, Mordecai is more than comprehensive; it delivers often on its promise (made implicit by its size and unprecedented access) to dish dirt on Canada’s favourite literary bad boy. But these are bookjacket-y accolades— great reasons to gift the thing, not necessarily to make space on your own nightstand. They’re not what critics are digging most about the book, or what makes it an original.
Foran has published nine books, four of which are novels, and is a gifted raconteur above all. Earlier, we chatted over coffee about what it was like turning an unbelievable life into an honest story.
“It was a monumental task,” he said and meant literally. “We sort of trimmed a small book out. I filed it at 310,000 words and change, and it ran at 245,000. While cutting, however, we were also adding details, and enriching scenes. It was a dance. But the book was always very big.”
That last part only sounds like an apology. It’s actually just leftovers from a conversation the writer had and resolved with his inner editor. “There’s an argument to be made for the size,” Foran continued, “to do with writing a book that is commensurate with [Richler’s] life and his talent. The idea of producing a small, cautious book about Mordecai Richler just seemed so wrong.” And taking into account the raw facts of Richler’s life, maybe impossible; by nineteen, he was living off loans, quaffing “pints” of Bordeaux in the Paris of Sartre and Camus, and making himself a regular in Ibiza’s brothels. All this and more before even a taste of literary success. (more…)
An interview with Tom Rachman, author of The Imperfectionists
Random HouseFrom the embers of an industry in flames, Tom Rachman gleaned inspiration for one of the most highly regarded novels of 2010. The Imperfectionists follows the private and professional lives of a group of American expats working at an unnamed international newspaper in Rome. Their individual stories converge into a meticulously crafted kaleidoscope of shifting perspective and insight that also serves as an elegy for the traditional newspaper.
The Walrus Blog recently spoke with the London-born, Vancouver-raised author about newspapers, the expatriate experience, and his novel (now out in paperback).
Emily Landau You were a journalist for a number of years, working in a number of overseas locations. How did journalism inform your fiction writing?
Tom Rachman [It was] the years of having worked with words and having tried throughout to distill complex situations into brief, concise sentences; of working on story structure and finding ways to draw in a reader. As a professional, you have to be conscious of always having a readership. I suppose there’s the concern that if you want to do creative writing, something like journalism will dampen your creativity, but I tend to think that any additional skill you can learn is just an extra skill. It doesn’t hamper you. (more…)
Novelist Nicolas Dickner on writing, culture, and doom prophecies
© Antoine TanguayLast year’s Canada Reads had a fairly impressive slate of finalists, including Douglas Coupland (Generation X), Ann-Marie MacDonald (Fall on Your Knees), Wayson Choy (The Jade Peony), and Marina Endicott (Good to a Fault). But it was a dark horse out of Quebec that took the prize: Nicolas Dickner’s Nikolski, a whimsical, picaresque tale of three young people navigating identity and destiny in Montreal, originally published in 2007.
Dickner’s latest novel, Apocalypse for Beginners, was released in Quebec last year and has recently been translated to English by Governor General’s Award–winning translator Lazer Lenderhendler. It is a cheeky, loving ode to the culture of fear that permeated the late ’80s and early ’90s. The book, which opens in the summer of 1989, tells the story of Hope Randall, a brittle, rational teen whose family has fallen under a mysterious curse — each Randall has the date of the apocalypse mystically revealed to them, and inevitably goes insane when the day comes and goes with little consequence. Hope and her friend Mickey scoff at the curse, passing their time in the basement of Mickey’s bungalow. But soon Hope finds herself haunted by a date of her own — July 17, 2001 — a revelation that sends her spiralling across continents and oceans.
In the wake of Apocalypse’s English release, Dickner stopped to chat about the new novel, Canada Reads, and the end of the world.
Emily Landau Before we discuss your new novel, I hope you can tell me about the experience of winning Canada Reads. How did it change things for you?
Nicolas Dickner We weren’t expecting it to be so big. We hear about Canada Reads in Quebec, but we do not know how much it reaches the audience in Canada, so we were pretty surprised to see how many readers were looking at the book. Usually we think of the basic life of a book being about three months, and after three months it doesn’t have the same exposure in the bookstores anymore. Nikolski had some attention, but not that much. It hadn’t worked out as we’d hoped. The book was basically invisible before Canada Reads — it really went from nothing to being noticed. (more…)
Literary translator Liedewy Hawke on the art of transforming French to English
Cormorant BooksIn everyday French, “Il faudrait commencer” means “One must begin.” A direct conversion to English, however, is insensitive to tone and context. “It’s too cerebral, it’s not poetic,” says Liedewy Hawke, the award-winning translator who encountered that phrase on the first line of High-Wire Summer, Louise Dupré’s 2009 collection of short stories. Hawke, having already translated two of the Quebec writer’s earlier books, spotted the problem. “One must begin,” she explains, would have been too stoic for Dupré’s dreamy, flowing style. “Is it going to be I, is it going to be you? Sometimes you just say people. So there’s your first choice. You have to capture the same feeling [as the author intended],” says the soft-spoken French-English specialist. Hawke ultimately decided to present Dupré’s original “Il faudrait commencer” as “You should begin” — and her English conversion of High-Wire Summer was ultimately nominated for this year’s Governor General’s Award for translation.
Hawke and I meet at an unassuming café in downtown Toronto. As we settle in, both half an hour early for our appointment together, my first (and lasting) impression of her is an aura of calm. Dressed in a white cable-knit sweater with wire-rimmed glasses that frame her blue-grey eyes, she smiles gently as she tells me about her craft — a necessary, if undervalued, contribution to the field of literature. The translator is a portal into the minds of writers who don’t always share their readers’ languages, as well as a custodian of those writers’ most cherished possessions. Sending a book out for translation, Hawke says, “is like sending your child to a foster mother.”
Translation is about making choices, whether they involve grammar, word choice or punctuation. French sentence structure often directly converts into more formal English, so literal translation can dilute or morph the author’s voice. “There’s the meaning and then there’s the feeling, the music, the emotion. You have to get the right register,” Hawke says. “When I [need to] translate a certain tone, I tend to go and find books in English that have that same tone. I jot down expressions and the syntax and so on.” Reading vocabulary books, newspapers, and synonym dictionaries in both languages helps her keep fresh expressions and terms in mind. For example, lower down that opening page of High-Wire Summer, she arrived at “les Iles les plus lontaines,” which literally translates to the “the fartherest islands.” She wrote it as “the ends of the earth.” (more…)
Granta’s study of Pakistan, a nation defined by its stresses, is a tome for the ages
Pakistan has never had a rosy history, but over the past decade it has been cast in an ever more frightening light. The flooding of the Indus River in 2010 brought to the world’s attention a nation that is ravaged by insurgency, constricted by a corrupt government, and left without the basic infrastructure that could have saved scores of lives from the deluge. But the Western mass media offered little more than a fleeting glimpse into the world of Pakistan’s people before its twenty-four-hour news stations quickly moved on. By contrast, the 112th issue of Granta — the UK literary journal which dates to 1889 — offers readers of journalism, fiction, and poetry a window into the terror and hope this troubled region faces, the difficulties of exile, and the scarred-but-enduring beauty of the arts in times of war.
One does not have to look far in the collection to see such scars. “The first year of Pakistan was marked by the staggering bloodletting that accompanied partition,” observes Jane Perlez in “Portrait of Jinnah,” a journalist’s survey of the region which introduces the measured chaos that follows. Kashmir, recognized by Salman Rushdie and others as a paradise on Earth, is reduced to rubble and terror by decades of war waged by foreign powers (“Kashmir’s Forever War,” Basharat Peer). Mohammed Hanif, penning fiction (“Butt & Bhatti”), unleashes a storm of gunshots, robberies, and tire fires after an altercation in a hospital hallway. Intizar Hussain, in his memoir “The House by the Gallows,” watches as public discourse degrades into mindless nationalism, and capital punishment becomes a spectator sport: “What an era General Zia had brought to Pakistan!” he writes, “The echoes of prayer and the roar of public hangings.”
The interaction between pieces is particularly noticeable where such transformations are concerned. While the emotional suffering in Nadeem Aslam’s “Leila in the Wilderness,” rooted in tradition, is drawn out over the course of a novella, Mohsin Hamid’s ”A Beheading” imagines the sudden and unexpected end of a life within only a few minutes’ worth of reading. The juxtaposition is meaningful: where moral lessons were once learned over the course of a life’s natural rhythms, they are now dished out at gunpoint or the gallows, by the state or terrorists, in a matter of moments. (more…)
An interview with the Canadian editor of the UK’s finest online literary magazine
Illustration from the Quebec issue of Five Dials by Julie DoucetBefore Twitter, before Facebook, before even e-mail, there was a great social networking tool known as the literary magazine. The great lit mags of the 20th century — The Dial, Partisan Review, The Paris Review, Granta — didn’t just publish wonderful poems, drawings, essays, and stories, they also gave writers and artists a social context for their work, a way of connecting with readers and like-minded creators. Many of these magazines were social in a more obvious sense as well. George Plimpton’s Paris Review was a famous hotbed for parties.
Like every other cultural institution in our current digital age, the lit mag is in a state of flux. On the downside, the older magazines, many of which are dependent upon sponsorship from academic institutions, are facing serious financial trouble as their patrons no longer see their value. But the same technological changes have given a platform to a new generation of lit mags, chief among them being Five Dials.
Published irregularly and edited by Craig Taylor, Five Dials manages to be both everywhere and nowhere at once. The magazine isn’t printed: it’s presented as a PDF file, which is then sent free to subscribers (more than 15,000 strong). Contributors have included Orhan Pamuk, Sheila Heti, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, and George Saunders.
As an old-style lover of the physical magazine (stapled, glued or stitched together), I was initially a bit skeptical of Five Dials — but once I started reading the back issues (all available for download here), I became an addict. It helped that the PDF format makes it easy to print off the works I wanted to keep permanently. Beautifully designed, cosmopolitan, lively, and alert to the world around us, Five Dials is the literary equivalent of a five-star restaurant that you can get into for free (or at the very most, the cost of spending a few hours at an internet café). (more…)
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