If not now, when?

Reader review/Booker correlation or not?

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:33:00 +0000

Yesterday someone tweeted it would be interesting to see whether the Booker Prize went to the novel with the most reader reviews (using the Guardian Books as the reader review source). I think this is rather unfair, since it's a British publication and Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending was the hands-down winner on that site (only four of the six shortlist nominees this year are UK authors; the other two are Canadians).

So as the 2011 Booker is about to be announced, I thought I'd use another reader review site (Goodreads) and we'll just if there's a correlation or not. Here are the stats:

The Sisters Brothers - 4685 reviews
Jamrach's Menagerie - 2046 reviews
The Sense of an Ending - 1862 reviews
Pigeon English - 1730 reviews
Snowdrops - 1013 reviews
Half-Blood Blues - 581 reviews

Update: And The Guardian called it!

This just in via Twitter:

ManBookerPrize Man Booker Prize

The winner of the 2011 #manbookerprize is Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending!

Every year is the year of the short story

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 21:00:00 +0000

2011 is not only the Year of the Entrepreneur, it's also the Year of the Short Story, I've belatedly realized.

Who cares if the year is three-quarters done - both themes are worthy of celebration. I'm working on a volunteer project in my community to celebrate the former.

But as a bit of a boost for the latter, here are some wonderful short story collections I'd like to share with you (bonus: three of these writers were actually discovered by me in 2011). I'm taking their injunctions seriously, and have not only written this post, but am hoping the hashtag #yoss will take off on Twitter.

Sarah Selecky and her marvellous collection, This Cake is For the Party. I was late to this particular party. Now I don't want to leave (i.e. I'm reluctant to return it to the library. I am upset the title story got cut.) I find her writing process fascinating. I can't wait for more of her work.

Julie Booker's phenomenal Up Up Up. Julie does some interesting things with the short story form in this book - and was roundly criticized by one reviewer for writing short stories that were too - short. Aritha Van Herk and I had an excellent snicker over that one at the writing workshop I attended (and she was teaching) in Fernie this summer. In fact the whole class had a good laugh about it. And yes, I was name-dropping there. Deal with it.

Jessica Westhead's And Also Sharks. She and another female Canadian writer seem to be reversing a tradition in Canadian publishing of producing a volume of short stories and then going on to write novels, something that's never made to sense to me, given there really are more novel-lovers out there than short story-lovers (at least in terms of buying books). But that brings me to a point I was going to make anyway - I'm told this is not the case in the UK, where no publisher will consider bringing out a volume of your short stories unless you've already produced three or four successful novels.

That info is courtesy of Hari Kunzru, whose own collection of short stories, Noise, I'm dying to read. As a treat, here's his story "The Culture House."

The amazing Robin Black collection, If I Loved You I Would Tell You This, was released in paperback in 2011 as well. On Shakespeare's birthday, no less. If you haven't read it - it you must.

And while I certainly haven't succeeded in buying - or in reading - every single edition of Best American Short Stories, whether you think you're not a short story fan or know that you are, it's always a wonderful starting place to discover American writers from whom you're going to be hearing a lot more in decades to come, as well as ones you should already have been reading. The combination of a series editor working in conjunction with an annual guest editor makes this a consistently astonishing collection. In fact, I'm feeling a little faint with book lust as I notice the guest editor of the 2011 edition is Geraldine Brooks.

I'm now dying to get my hands on a copy of Robert Boswell's The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards. Came across a review of it (somewhere) recently and while I no longer remember what they said about him (and it), I know it was enough to make me write it down so I'd remember to beg, borrow, or buy a copy. As if the title alone weren't enough....

For (slightly) longer reviews of books I've read and rated, you can find me on Goodreads.

Cormorant Books kindly provided me with a copy of And Also Sharks, a lovely surprise because I was expecting a copy of Michael V. Smith's Progress and the other was a bonus treat.

House of Anansi sent me a copy of Up Up Up - out of the blue, as is their wont. Don't stop!

Fear, loathing and frustration on Writers in a Digital Age Panel at Fernie Writers' Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 21:56:00 +0000

The final panel session of the 2011 Fernie Writers' Conference (held at the Arts Station after the last of the student/workshop participant readings on July 23, 2011) was 'Writers in a Digital Age' and was supposed to be a discussion about whether eBooks will change the way we write and writers and social media.

Panel participants were Dave Margoshes, writer and poet, moderator (DM); Angie Abdou, writer (AA); Warren Cariou, writer (WC); and Robyn Reed, Acquiring Editor of Freehand Books (RR).

After a brief introduction of the panel and the topic by Dave Margoshes, each member of the panel was asked to speak. Please note: I'm not an automaton. While I take good notes, these are not direct quotes but rather paraphrases. If you feel I've misrepresented what you said, please get in touch with me and I'll be happy to correct.

AA: We were also going to talk about authors and social media. In terms of ebooks, let's talk first about pricing – they're about $6. But instead of authors getting royalties of 10% for paper books – which means if your book sells for $20 you get about $2 per book – royalty rates for ebooks are much higher – 50%.

In terms of social media – a lot of authors are stomping their feet and saying, 'we don't want to promote our books.' In fact, at the recent Saskatchewan Festival of Words, one well known science fiction writer said he believes in a division of labour: he writes the books; it's the publisher's job to edit and promote them. But the demand for writers to get involved with social media seems to be coming from readers, who want a more active relationship with authors these days. This means there's a lot of potential for engagement via social media, but it's time consuming. [Actually, from everything I hear and see, the demand for authors to get involved in social media is coming from publishers, most of whom don't understand social media themselves and show little desire to learn. There are some doing an amazing job. From what I see, it's less than 10% of those who've plunged into social media willy nilly. And writers have started doing their own marketing and promotion because they've finally realized it's the only way they're going to be able to sell their books, because publishers actually seem to be worse at promotion and marketing than they used to be. Again, there are exceptions to this sweeping statement. Readers have certainly responded very positively to authors who engage well - and more - with them. Whether we were demanding it or not I'm not so sure.]

WC: For the last year I've read ebooks almost exclusively on my iPad and have exclusively bought ebooks. It provides 'a kind of freedom from the encumbrance of the physical weight of books.' This has already changed the way I read. 'There's a cornucopia of books available at the touch of a finger,' and ebooks also give you the 'ability to carry around your entire library.' Those are the ebook pluses. The negatives, if reading on an iPad, include reading on the same device on which you can check your email, which can lead to 'distracted reading.' There's also a lack of connoisseurship factor and perhaps a lack of authenticity due to the sheer availability of texts. He mentioned an article he'd read, written by a musician re the digitization of music and that this had led to songs becoming increasingly trivial. A publisher acts as some guarantee of quality. [See my comments at end of the post on this topic - it ain't necessarily so in the 21st Century. But hear hear for Warren immersing himself in this new delivery system!]

RR: Ebooks are primarily about reproducing rather than producing, that is, they're usually not originals. Available through Kobo, iBooks, Barnes and Noble, and through publishers' own web sites. She said she was concerned about losing the integrity of design in the transition to ebook process, since some ereaders allow people to choose their own fonts and 'paper' colour. The design process needs to be valued. She then talked about how the role of the writer has changed in the digital age – authors are now a brand and need logos and social media platforms. She said the way we choose what to read has changed and authors have to think about how their online presence changes the way we buy books.

DM: We've talked about how ebooks and social media change how we read, buy and sell books. But we haven't yet talked about whether ebooks will change how we write. Does technological change have an effect on how we write?

RR: Talked about Nicholas Carr's writing about the digital age and said that if you want to find a specific book, you just have to Google it. Carr writes about whether the medium [I'm more likely to consider it a delivery mechanism than a medium, but never mind] changes the way we read or write. We tend to scan when reading digitally and words on a screen are more readily digestible.

AA: Hyperlinks and video included in ebooks will change the way we read.

DM: That's already changed on blogs.

AA: Heard of a piece via Sandra Birdsell about how the typewriter would be the death of writing. [In other words, quality concerns always accompany technological change.]

WC: Word processing did affect the way people wrote – writing multiple drafts becomes naturalized. I tell my creative writing students to try writing without a computer for a change. But it's hard to tell how ebooks will affect writing.

DM: The proliferation of self publishing due to ebooks is scary. There have always been vanity presses that 'don't have professional standards.' Ebooks have really blossomed. I was curious about the ebook self-publishing phenomenon and bought one of Amanda Hocking's books [although he couldn't remember her name] and it was crap. [I don't think Dave Margoshes is part of Amanda Hocking's target market in even her wildest dreams. I really wish he'd bought an ebook by an author he knew and/or actually wanted to read so he could better assess what I think of as an alternative book delivery system. I also wish he'd read a book that had been written by someone other than - you know - a teenager. Conventional wisdom still says poets mature early, prose writers later on, yes?]

AA: The science fiction author at the Festival of Words who advocated continuance of 'division of labour' was RJ Sawyer, who seemed to think author self promotion success stories were all hearsay. She cited the example of Terry Fallis, whose podcasts and self-publishing ventures led to winning the Stephen Leacock medal and to a traditional publishing deal for his two novels.

WC: From a reader perspective, readers can be intrigued by authors [who are self promoting].

The session was then opened up to the audience, with first comment/question coming from Aritha Van Herk. I'll identify the questioners/commenters when I can, but since the event was open to the public, I didn't know everyone in the room.

Aritha Van Herk: Really it's the editors who will be the new arbiters of quality. Editing is the key part of the publishing process, and if a self-published book is edited by someone you trust, you'll invest money to buy it. Sadly there are very few editors being trained or paid.

AA: We're talking about substantive editing here, not copy editing, by the way.

RR: We've entered a different phase in the creative writing process – accessibility is the issue. Printed books take a minimum of eight to 12 months to produce – ebooks can take far less time.

Andreas Schroeder asked, but will ebooks change the way writers write? That was the original question, yes? Will they change writerly decisions? Will interaction with readers lead to choice of one ending rather than another? [Apologies to Andreas here – my cryptic notes read something like 'enc. cmd. response' but as I recall, this is what he was getting at.]

DM: The film world has been using audience market research for years.

AA: Some aspiring writers are being encouraged to get onto Twitter long before their books are even published, since there's often a two-year lag between manuscript sale and the book's appearance. My advice is to start using social media in the time between final edits and actual appearance of the book. But sometimes I feel like I spend all my time doing Facebook updates. [I disagree with this advice, actually, for a variety of reasons, chief amongst which is that there is no 'one size fits all' strategy for either social media or for marketing books. In my experience, already-established authors can afford to wait to engage with social media because their following will grow very quickly - they're already household words, the publication of a new book still drives backlist sales, and the effect of public relations and marketing is cumulative. New or lesser known authors need to engage early and in different ways with social media. I would also put Facebook at the very bottom of the list of any social media efforts an author is making. The demographics that Facebook provides can't be easily used by authors trying to sell books because there just aren't any stats available on who buys which books based on age or gender – all the data you get is going to be anecdotal and from live sales in actual bookstores – good luck gathering that information. Furthermore, I don't think readers flock to Facebook. It might well be useful to target books with regional appeal only. But publishers who've used Facebook ads say they've had far greater success using Goodreads ads. And you're looking at a built-in platform with more than 5 million readers on Goodreads. I'm not sure what you're looking at on Facebook – the great unwashed?]

RR: Social media can distract from writing efforts and can lead to abuse of social media platforms. [See my comment above. My biggest pet peeve with publishers these days is their insistence that authors establish a social media platform and presence when they themselves have not done so. No wonder publishers think readers don't buy books based on a publisher's brand – most of them don't even seem to understand the concept of branding. They've obviously never seen me at the Hurt Penguin or the Virago sales, where I buy bagsful of books by authors of whom I've never heard, based on my faith in the publisher's brand. Remember the Vintage Contemporary Classics series that was introduced in the 1980s? I bought most of that line too. Of course, McClelland & Stewart's New Canadian Library was a triumph of anti-branding that was reminscent of Soviet-era 'art': they managed to make every novel in the series look like a colonial yawn that could substitute for a sleeping pill.]

WC: What about the current bestseller Go the F*** to Sleep? [whose success was fuelled by an unintentional viral marketing campaign – see article here.

DM: Will enhanced ebooks include reviews, for instance?

RR: Publishers are giving 25% royalties for ebooks, not 50%, due to lower production costs - 50% royalties would just destroy publishers. Ebooks are edited carefully as well (when produced by traditional publishers] but ease of distribution leads to streamlining of the production process and how quickly books can be produced.

Alison Calder then demanded that the panel talk about 'the book' and talk about writing, not about marketing, selling, or producing books. She seemed a little upset.

WC (who is Alison Calder's husband): We value the book.

AA: I try not to push my obsessions onto my creative writing students, but rather to help them achieve their goals.

Tom: On the subject of writing and social media – we're facing a difficulty – the absence of readers of books. Creative writing students now think they should write, and other people should read.

AA: It's the reality TV generation.

Tom Wayman: Is there any hope that there are still/will continue to be people who read critically and carefully?

RR: I'm worried about ereaders leading to skimming rather than actual reading, especially for the young adult market (those aged 14-19). All the writing aimed at that market seems to be about vampires, and narcissism on the writing front has been enhanced by blogging.

Gordon Sombrowski (who was in my workshop and whose first book of short stories will be published by Oolichan Books this fall): Skimmed reading leads to skimmed writing – we need to read critically.

RR: But there are still good educators who are teaching people to read critically.

WC to Tom Wayman: There's the danger people are not engaging as deeply with the text when reading online or on ereaders. But this allows other ways of approaching a text, especially for things like sound poetry, which is enhanced by the technological potential of being read online. Sound poetry like that produced by bpnichol demands to be heard, not just read. [Fairly substantial paraphrasing going on here.]

Sid Marty talked about James Keelaghan's songwriting course – he doesn't accept musicians into his course unless they already know at least 80 songs. How to translate that to creative writing classes and not let people who don't read into them. 'If people don't read, they don't know how bad their writing is.'

A member of the audience who identified himself as a software developer working on iPod, iPad and iPhone software said that there is always resistance and fear in the existing marketplace when technological change occurs, and that he was hearing a lot of fear from the panel and from audience members – the notion of music self-publishing led to fear that a 'sea of rubbish' would be created and distributed by 'bedroom artists.' He also talked about the gaming market: games used to sell for $40, but are now selling for $2.99 per game. But, he said, the quality of the games hasn't diminished with the price cut – what's fuelled the price cuts is the fact that so many more people are buying and playing games [i.e. economies of scale have kicked in as market base has increased exponentially]. Ebooks and self publishing means there can be zero friction between you, the author, and your audience – but you need to find the right price, and it is not going to be $20. App developers are selling a lot more apps for a lot less to a lot more people.

I'm not sure when I made my comments, but I did want to challenge some of the things the panel had said. I said I was glad Angie had brought up the higher royalty rates for ebooks and she replied that some publishers were offering only 7% royalty rates now – while 10% was standard and it could rise to 12% or 15%, overall the royalty rate was decreasing rather than increasing. I talked about the fact that ebooks are ephemeral and that the larger publishers are completely missing the boat by pricing them far too highly. I said that while opinions re the 'sweet spot' ebook price point ranged from 99 cents to $6.99, larger publishers were shooting themselves in the foot by pricing ebooks at anything higher than the price of a mass market paperback because these are ephemeral objects, not tangible ones (and that most of the larger publishers in Canada and the US seemed oblivious to this]. I also talked about how Harper Collins in the US has essentially announced that by allowing only 26 'lends' of its ebooks, it's transformed the transaction from a purchase to a rental.

DM: I'm glad someone mentioned fear. We're afraid not only of ebooks but of all technological change. He asked Robyn Read if some publishers were angry about ebooks.

RR: I was at a conference recently where I hoped everyone would be excited about ebooks, but instead everyone was scared. We resent software. We comment on blogs etc. but we don't comment fairly. We're living in the age of snark – and it changes the way some people write.

Another audience member said the discussion reminded him of the way the introduction of the printing press was received - as well as radio and television. 'A story is still a story.' There's no reason to fear new technology. What we're missing now is acceptance of the fact that the role of traditional publishers will become even more important – and that that was also the role of traditional (rather than etail) bookstores.

AA: To play devil's advocate: has writing today become not about good writing, but rather about celebrity?

WC: Poetry writing is very strong in Canada. But it has never been a money maker.

AA: Does poetry work on ebooks?

RR: Fear is necessary.

Another audience member suggested that the panel wasn't giving readers enough credit – that the inclusion of many classic novels free on ereaders and available online through Google Books was leading to an increase in reading the classics by young readers.

That was a lovely note on which to end, and whoever the young woman who raised that point was – thank you.

A few thoughts of my own that I wasn't able to express during the panel discussion (in addition to those appearing in square brackets after the panel members' remarks):

No one talked about the sheer volume of books being published these days or about the fact that publishing a million books per year will inevitably lead to a crisis for bricks and mortar retailers, who simply cannot afford to rent larger and larger spaces every year – it's just not realistic.
Aritha Van Herk was really the only commenter who rang an alarm bell that needs to be rung at five-minute intervals: publication by a traditional publisher no longer represents (if it ever has) any guarantee of quality whatsoever if there are no longer any editors working at publishing companies. And there are, indeed, fewer and fewer skilled editors working at traditional publishing companies.
No one talked about the horror stories of books being rushed into publication to meet imagined or real market demand without any editing whatsoever. And I can certainly attest to the fact that this does, indeed, happen, and not to first-time authors either.
And there was a certain irony in hearing so many poets in particular at the conference expressing fear and loathing of all self-publishing and not really distinguishing between vanity press publishing and self-publishing that involves actual substantive editing and is, in many ways, one response to a publishing model that everyone seems to agree was handicapped to begin with in small markets and is becoming increasingly enfeebled and confused as time goes on. What about all those little poetry chapbooks, chaps? Did all those poems benefit from editing before you started selling them at your readings and on your web sites? Until you can all say yes to that, I'm thinking, hold back on sweeping dismissals of everything that's self published. And don't assume that just because one of the big Canadian publishers put their stamp of approval on the self published novels they picked up to make a quick buck that they actually assigned an editor to work on it. Because I'm pretty sure, in the case of one author mentioned in this post, that that really didn't happen.
Not to be TOO bitchy, but I found it rather irritating that the word 'curation' wasn't once mentioned by the panel - Warren Cariou came closest to it when he talked about lack of connoisseurship and market research. I cannot imagine a similar panel of US or UK authors and publishers who would not have focused on this concept in a panel on authors in a digital age.

Resources:

Here's a good article I found today that supports my contention that your social media efforts have to start earlier rather than later and gives you some idea of where you should focus your efforts.

Here's an article I wish I - and the panel members - had read.

And apparently there's a UK psychologist named David Galbraith who's working on the way writing influences creativity, so he might be a resource to answer the question none of us could answer, whether ebooks will affect the way we write.

The Canterbury Trail Mountains

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 23:13:00 +0000

The Canterbury Trail Mountains, originally uploaded by The River Thief.

Since the WiFi at the Fernie Alpine Resort is rather spotty (at least for me and my iPod it is), I wasn’t able to live tweet the panel session of the Fernie Writers’ Conference I attended this afternoon and thought I’d blog about it instead.

Because there’s another event this evening and I have an assignment due tomorrow morning at 11AM, this is going to be a quick and dirty blog post, with hyperlinks added later.

Panel topic was, Can Creative Writing Be Taught? Panel consisted of Alison Calder (AC), Aritha Van Herk (AVH), and Andreas Schroeder (AS), with Peter Oliva (PO) moderating.

PO began the session by quoting Michael Ondaatje, who apparently once said that he’d heard a writer’s research was like panniers. He didn’t know what a pannier was, so looked it up and learned it was either containers in which you could put things or the framework that held up a Victorian woman’s dress. But by the time he’d learned this he was at least a third of the way through writing The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and it didn’t really matter much.

PO posed the first question to the panel: are creative writing programs and workshops therefore designed to create the framework for the pannier contents.

Marina Endicott piped up, ‘What about the student with nothing in their panniers – or, alternatively – with bloated panniers?’

AC said to some extent creative writing programs involve a redistribution of the wealth of the pannier contents, involving a certain amount of trading. (This immediately put me in mind of the quilter’s stash and the trading of not only small quantities of fabric but of the peer learning process that goes on when you quilt with others – the solutions proffered by other quilters are often both far more creative and far more practical than anything you’ve been able to come up with yourself. You’ll see a minor panel theme is textile-based.)

AVH said Michael Ondaatje can use anything and make it work, but that the gathering process teaches you both constraint and restraint.

PO then asked whether the panel had any teaching creative writing horror stories and told one himself. He’d had a student in his class whose work was very promising and he encouraged him to pursue a career as a writer. He subsequently discovered his student was in the Guinness Book of World Records as the person who could play the most musical instruments – 115 in all. He was horrified to learn that to fund his writing career his student had begun selling off his instruments, saying he was tired of playing in smoky bars anyway. This happened just as smoking bans in bars started to go into effect. We didn’t learn whether the student became anywhere near as successful as a writer as he had been a musician.

AS told the story of a female student who – like those people who have as many surgeries as possible (I couldn’t help but think of Elizabeth Taylor) – had workshopped the same manuscript for more than 20 years, attending workshops and classes with some of Canada’s most distinguished writers. It was in great shape after 20 years of editing, but when he had the presumption to make a suggestion about how it could be improved, she said, ‘Well! Mordecai Richler didn’t say that was necessary.’

AVH said she’d a female student who submitted three 500-page manuscripts, which she diligently read and commented on, providing feedback on all three. ‘Huh,’ replied the student, ‘that’s what last year’s writer-in-residence said too.’ But of course she hadn’t made a single change to any of her submissions in the intervening year.

Dave Margoshes began the audience participation portion, saying that you don’t teach talent or imagination in a creative writing course, but you do teach craft and an appreciation of the revision process. While Jack Kerouac talked disdainfully of rejecting everything that smacked of being ‘crafty or revised’ he was really talking about the contrived.

PO said you don’t hear about Kerouac’s notebooks, and implied that the notion that his final published was written as a single long stream-of-consciousness teletype was a myth and that there was a process, which undoubtedly involved rereading, selection and editing, whether self-editing or by an actual editor prior to publication.

AS said he doesn’t believe in one-draft wonders, and that they’re the exception, not the rule.

Marina Endicott talked about private tutors and learning from reading, which isn’t a part of creative writing course work. She also said that actors don’t expect to be successful based solely on their talent or skill without undergoing training, and asked why anyone would think it would – or should – be different for writers.

AS said there’s a notion that taking a creative writing degree program or workshop has, to some extent, the same taint as athletes on steroids, but in fact plays are usually written then workshopped, making them collaborative endeavours involving feedback from directors, producers, and actors. He also talked about the story that circulated about Jerzy Kozinski’s first novel, The Painted Bird: some say Max Perkins’ (Kozinski’s editor) contributed 95 per cent of that novel with his extensive rewrites of what amounted to a first draft.

AC said all writing is essentially a collaborative process involving friends, family, first readers, and editors.

AVH said even though some people can stand on their toes they don’t become ballerinas without training, training, training, and more training. Creative writing programs teach ways of using language, and, more important, teach people to get out of their comfort zones so they can make use of ‘all the muscles we use when writing – not just one’s biceps.’

She then asked if there was a book in all of us.

AC said, there may be a story in all of us, but not necessarily a book. Let’s face it – some people are boring.

PO told the story of Margaret Atwood on a cruise ship. She encountered a doctor who told her he was thinking of becoming a writer. Yes, she said, I’m thinking of becoming a brain surgeon myself. Angie Abdou suggested this story was somewhat apocryphal and that she’d heard the writer was Margaret Laurence. Someone else said they’d once been asked, ‘So are all Canadian authors named Margaret?’

AC said that in order to get out of her own comfort zone and get away from the well-worn paths she usually travels as a poet, she’d started working collaboratively. This forces her to – if she finds herself writing about elephants yet again – ask herself the question, ‘would this work better if it was about a turtle rather than an elephant?’

AVH said you have, as a writer, to look for what will discomfit you most.

AS said that while creative writing programs aren’t therapy sessions, they can indeed force people out of their comfort zones (the implication being that this a good thing in terms of creativity).

AC said that it was always a good idea to work outside your genre and try something new – if you’re a poet, take a prose workshop; if you write non-fiction, try taking a poetry course.

AS said in UBC’s MFA creative writing program you have to take classes/workshops in a minimum of three different genres.

PO talked about the vast increase in the number of MA programs in creative writing that currently exist.

AVH said this was especially true in the US, where the number of creative writing programs - many of them online - has increased from about 300 to 1200 in the last 30 years or so. Of course, she said, a fair bit of this amounts to nothing more than ‘tuition harvesting’ on the part of post-secondary institutions. (I found this a refreshing cynical admission.)

Angie Abdou asked a question of her own, followed by another posed to her on Twitter. Angie’s question was, ‘If you’re thinking of taking a creative writing program, what’s the one piece of advice you’d give a potential student?’ And then passed on the question from Twitter, which was, ‘why are students being pushed into MFA programs in creative writing – which primarily teach you how to teach, when there are no jobs available teaching creative writing, rather than MA programs which would teach you how to write?’

AVH said you need to look closely at every program and think about what your goals are. It isn’t easy to get the information you need, but you need to look long and hard at the faculty, and not just who’s listed on the masthead, since they may well not be doing any of the teaching. She cited the example of an author named Malcolm who’s listed as being one of the instructors in a UK creative writing degree program – and he’s basically window dressing. Marina Endicott knew who she was talking about but we’ll have to fill in the blanks re the writer’s last name (and that of the university) when we remember who it is (if you know, please let me know via a comment – it might save one of us waking up at 3AM shouting the guy’s name).

AS said the lack of positions available for teachers of creative writing was directly related to lifting age of retirement requirements for profs, and that Baby Boomers can now continue to work till they’re 90 at universities. The point of the UBC program is to prepare students for a career as a writer, not to prepare people to teach creative writing. And UBC’s program is unique among creative writing programs in Canada in that there are no course work requirements, it’s all workshops. He also said that UBC used to hire on CVs only, but that degrees held have assumed greater importance and that a recent dean wanted everyone teaching in the creative writing to have PhDs. There’s been a temporary reprieve on this issue, but degree requirements to teach creative writing continue to edge up and an MFA is the rock-bottom requirement.

He also said fact finding was a difficult process and that the one thing every student contemplating taking a creative writing degree program should avoid was a program where the teachers were intent on creating disciples.

AC said she’d finally remembered a student horror story. She said every year, when she asks if there are any questions, someone will ask ‘how do I get an agent?’ As a poet, she says, she wouldn’t have the faintest idea. And that as a beginning writer, this is putting the cart before the horse (ok I’m editorializing a bit there, she didn’t actually say that, but it’s what she meant). ‘You don’t need an agent,’ she said, ‘you need to learn how to write!’

AVH said creative writing programs always focus on working on craft, never on the business aspects of a writing career. (From my perspective as someone who tries to help authors market their work, and that of many agents, publishers, and booksellers, I’m betting this is something we’d like to see addressed in creative writing programs taken by adults, but never mind….)

PO quoted Roberto Bolano, who said, ‘short story writers should be brave’ and Mark Twain, who said, ‘a tale should accomplish something and arrive somewhere.’

AVH said her one rule in her creative writing classes is, ‘no guns, no killing – let your characters live’ – you don’t just to get them kill them off by shooting them or having them killed by a bus when stepping off a curve.

A workshop participant asked what was the one thing students should bring to a creative writing program.

AVH said her favourite students are those who know how to celebrate the local, and said Andrew Wedderburn had been in her class. One of the other students told Andrew he couldn’t write a book set in and about Airdrie, AB, ‘because no one’s ever heard of Airdrie.’ His novel The Milk Chicken Mom is now being published. And it’s set in Airdrie. (Obviously no one said this to Dianne Warren before she wrote Cool Water, or Angie Abdou before writing The Canterbury Trail.)

AS said that when he’s reading manuscript submissions for admission to the UBC program, he doesn’t give a damn how good the writing is – what he looks for is a lively imagination, because this is something he can’t teach or transmit, and without it good writing doesn’t really matter.

AC said she looks for what’s produced as a result of assigned exercises, that the students she gets excited about are those whose imagery is striking and original and that direct her to look at things in new ways.

I then asked my devil’s advocate question regarding training and academic qualifications for those who teach creative writing. Surely, I said, there’s some merit in having someone teaching actually know how to teach (although an MA, an MFA and/or a PhD are certainly no guarantee of a good teacher). Writing workshops 30 years ago were often treated by authors hired on the basis of their CVs (i.e. the work they’d produced as writers) as paid vacations, and that I’d taken two, taught by well known Canadian authors, who had absolutely no plan at all. At the second one two of us had read and I had happened to bring with me a copy of John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, and to compensate for the instructor’s lack of a plan, we’d done several of the group and individual exercises he’d provided.

PO said he likes to teach using the Socratic dialogue model, teaching his students how to critique and how to learn distance – that teaching creative writing involves direction given by a good teacher.

AS said that teaching creative writing can be done very badly and that there’s often a closed loop system in play, where classes are highly scripted and there are no surprises and no challenges. This doesn’t work for everyone, and when it doesn’t, sometimes a one:one tutorial system works. He also said they can’t always make an exception for the students who aren’t benefiting from the workshop approach, which was a shame because young writers are very vulnerable.

PO then quoted some (highly questionable) statistics on writers’ lifespans. Poets and fiction writers tend to live much shorter lives than non-fiction writers. We’d all like to see the source of those stats, I think.

At this point we were a good half hour over our allotted time, so I didn’t get to ask my final question: If you were choosing a creative writing program, which would you rather take, the one John Gardner taught at SUNY Binghamton (taught by an obviously very dedicated instructor at an institution that doesn’t have an amazing reputation for creating successful writers), or one taught by Raymond Carver (who seemed to have been, one way or the other, barely there) at the Iowa Writers Workshop, which has an astonishing track record of producing successful writers?

On the Outside, Looking Like a Writer in Desperate Need of an Editor

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 20:48:00 +0000

This week I took a detour from my usual reading after seeing a rather surprising Tweetstorm regarding Walrus Magazine's review of Rupinder Gill's memoir, On the Outside Looking Indian.

The Tweetstorm centred on Emily Landau's audacity in writing a negative review and the question was asked, 'couldn't they have found a brown girl to review it?' I didn't get into it. My question would have been, Why should they have? And my snarkier comment would have been, Here we go again with yet another version of the appropriation of voice argument. Frankly I'm fed up with this nonsense when attempting to evaluate writing. I doubt very much Rupinder Gill's intended audience is other 'brown girls' in the same way I doubt very much that Joseph Boyden writes for other people of aboriginal ancestry (he's certainly not sufficiently First Nations to make it in that category, and in fact, like Louise Erdrich, suffers from some pretty ugly reverse racism from First Nations folks).

Wary as I am of Walrus Magazine's lit crit and reviews, based as they are on a desire to be provocative rather than fair and reflecting a sensibility that is peculiarly 416-Toronto while thumbing its nose at the 905 area code and the majority of Canadians, and having found another, diametrically opposed review of OtOLI, I decided I was going to have to read it for myself and make up my own mind.

Luckily the library had it and it was a quick read. It was also a bewildering read on many levels.

Gill is the second child in a family of four girls and one boy (the youngest). Growing up in Kitchener Waterloo, she was isolated within her own family, as there isn't a significant IndoCanadian presence in the area. (Take a look at the demographics - IndoCanadians aren't even listed - there are barely any Italians in K-W!) And the book is both a memoir of her childhood spent in front of a television set and of her 31st year, in which she attempts not so much to recreate her childhood, but to overcome its legacy by finally doing some of the things she wished she'd done as a child. To some extent this book should really be compared with Eat, Pray, Love I think - except for the fact that Gill's year of living goal-mindedly was self-funded and - well - I refuse to finish reading Eat, Pray, Love.

Among the many things Gill's childhood lacked: summer camp, sleepovers, dating, and dog ownership. The child of first-generation Punjabi immigrants, Gill's parents wouldn't let her - or her sisters - do many of the things we think of as classically Canadian. As a WASP who's old enough to be Gill's mother, I have to begin my quibbling here though. Yes I had a dog. Yes I went to summer camp for four years in a row. Yes I learned to swim there. Yes I've been to a grand total of two sleepovers and I remember one of them. Yes I was allowed to date in high school - although I didn't do it much (nor did many of the other kids who attended my academic high school - we were busy with music lessons, student council, demonstrating against the war in Vietnam and nuclear testing, orchestra, theatre, sports, etc.). What I wasn't allowed to do was watch unlimited quantities of television - au contraire. I wasn't even allowed to read for pleasure until and unless my homework was done. And I certainly had household chores - by the time I was in high school I was responsible for doing all the dishes, cleaning the bathroom once a week and both vacuuming the living room and sponging down all the furniture (the pets, a cat and a dog were officially mine, therefore the responsibility for feeding them and for cleaning up after them was also mine).

And so, the year she turns 30, Gill takes tap dancing lessons, investigates dog ownership and decides she's better off as a dog aunt (after one of her sisters does eventually acquire a dog), quits her job as a TV publicist, attends a week-long summer day camp as a counsellor, spends two months in New York where she takes some swimming lessons, and goes to Disney World. More important, she comes to some sort of understanding of and reconciliation with her childhood and her parents, whose strictness regarding appropriate activities for a good Sikh girl chafed so much when she was growing up.

So this book's premise is just fine. Whether you accept Julian Barnes' character's dictum in England, England that over the age of 25 you're no longer allowed to blame your parents for anything or not, Gill's desire to live purposefully rather than whinily is to be applauded.

But then there's the book itself, and Gill's writing skills. For someone who in high school was voted 'most likely to become a stand-up comic,' Gill's writing indicates she needs either one hell of a good editor or a writing partner. From the book's first page: 'In Indian adolescence you never break free of the rules. You cook, clean, babysit, clean, get good grades, clean, be silent, clean, and don't challenge your parents in any way -- especially while cleaning.' That paragraph could work vocally, but timing's everything in comedy, and with the flat delivery of print, it doesn't quite cut it. There are repeated 'jokes' about IndoCanadian facial hair - from the 'hibernating slug' that is her eyebrows (have you ever seen a photo or a self portrait of Frida Kahlo, Rupinder?) to the 'sideburns' she artfully arranges her hair to hide.

Then there are the earnest segments, as when Gill's asked for - and been denied - a three-month leave of absence from her job and decides to quit instead.

'On Monday morning I walked into my boss's office and said the two words I have been agonizing over for the past week: "I quit." As they came out of my mouth it was as if I was having an out-of-body-experience. I couldn't believe it, but it was done. I offered more than a month's notice. I would stay until the end of August and then I would be cast out into the world, jobless, clueless, and full of hope and excitement. I was. In fact, I could not wait.'

There are myriad examples of Gill's awkward prose similar to the one above, but for me the failure to use contractions ('I could not wait' as opposed to 'I couldn't wait') is indicative of someone who's neither a naturally good writer nor someone who's been properly edited. During her swimming lessons she stays 'under the water' rather than 'under water.' 'The second I would extend an arm' - 'Zoe splashed a downpour onto my face' - 'I needed to get everything in line for a chance to return to NYC once again, and not just as a visitor.' This is prose written not in dialect but just badly.

The issues Gill raises are important ones. I've been fascinated by the immigrant experience and by the pressures on first-generation Canadians, caught between two worlds and two cultures, for decades now. The whole 'vertical mosaic vs melting pot' (Canada's approach to multiculturalism vs the US's) notion was first articulated just as I was entering university and embracing my own young adult freedom. She's not unthoughtful, and she's not silly. But oh did this book need to be sent back for a rewrite and very very carefully line edited. I'm very glad her 'second childhood' changed her life. I hope she succeeds in her goal of writing for television. However, since my taste runs more to gritty, dark, cerebral television dramas (or so Netflix tells me), I won't be salivating at the prospect of watching a show written by someone who grew up on a steady diet of Welcome Back Kotter and Three's Company without gagging. I'll be sticking with The Wire and Mad Men, thank you very much, and continuing to give Hot in Cleveland a miss.

Oh and by the way - for an absolutely phenomenal interview with David Simon, creator of The Wire, and someone who's committed to pushing the boundaries of television - take a look at this.

Music Mondays for an ESL class - Alberta

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 13:28:00 +0000

Ian Tyson Four Strong Winds lyrics

Valentines, feminists and fathers

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 18:58:00 +0000

You make me laugh, originally uploaded by The River Thief.

It's hard to believe it's been 20 years since my father died. This photo was taken when he was about the same age I am now, so I suppose it's an appropriate one to use for this post.

This version of the photo (which was, I believe, taken by cousin Douglas Ward), is cropped. In the photo my father is standing, looking down at my mother.

They had recently moved from Ottawa, my mother's home town, to Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, a village of about 3000 people 40 miles from Halifax.

My dad had been working for the federal government for quite some time, and despite a year-long French immersion course, it seemed unlikely he would ever be certified bilingual. Without that certification it was unlikely he'd ever get another promotion. I'm not so sure he really cared about that, but my mother certainly did. So when a unilingual English job came up in Halifax, he applied for and got it.

My parents rented an apartment in Dartmouth for the first year they were in Nova Scotia. It was the first time in a very long time they'd been tenants, and they couldn't seem to grasp the idea of paying rent or of sharing a building. They were on an emergency route, and were frequently awakened in the middle of the night by ambulances howling as they tore past the apartment building. Then there was the woman upstairs, who came home long after they'd gone to bed and would drop one of her shoes on the floor of her bedroom, waking them up. They'd wait in vain for her to drop the other shoe so they could go back to sleep.

After just over a year of this, they decided they'd had enough, and started looking for a place in the country, a little hobby farm from which they could commute. After looking at only three houses, they decided to buy an old, unrenovated Victorian full of antiques in Shubenacadie. It came with close to an acre of land, but in a long narrow strip that included a railroad right of way, and was next door to one of the remaining farms in the village.

I'll spare you the saga of the renovations and of the foolishness of the purchase, except to say that the house (while boasting some truly lovely Douglas fir woodwork, particularly a cathedral-ceilinged living/dining room and some primary coloured stained glass windows), had absolutely no insulation, was heated by an oil stove in the kitchen - and that the commute to Halifax took close to an hour. Oh, and that their purchase coincided with the OPEC oil crisis. All of a sudden the house didn't seem like quite the bargain they'd initially thought.

None of this matters, though. I'm musing about the irony of a tweet from Alain de Botton that I saw shortly after logging on to Twitter this morning, which is so singularly a propos I have to wonder if he's reading my mind.

'Perhaps the most unambiguous victory of feminism has been to ensure that fathers properly nurture their children.'

When I try to explain to people that my father was my primary caregiver, I'm often met with blank stares and certainly with a profound lack of understanding. It's not just that he - born in 1926 - pitched in on diaper changing (although one of his favourite stories to tell was how he'd changed my diaper on the glass counter of a Buffalo department store display case and how helpful the sales girl had been in this endeavour - hard to imagine this happening now, isn't it? 'We have washrooms for this purpose, SIR.')

My earliest memories are of my father singing me to sleep when I was still in my cot. I was diagnosed as hyperactive as a child, although it may just have been the result of a gluten intolerance I outgrew by the time I was seven. Certainly I had trouble getting to sleep and terrible insomnia until I was close to 30. My dad's repertoire consisted of Baptist hymns and the occasional popular song. 'Little White Church in the Vale' was one of his specialities, as were 'You Are My Sunshine" and 'Beautiful Beautiful Blue Eyes.' If you don't recognize the latter or are having trouble Googling it, look up 'Beautiful Beautiful Brown Eyes' instead - my father changed the title of the song and its lyrics since I was a very blue-eyed, blonde haired child at the time. One night he forgot to change the lyrics (he must have been tired) and I was inconsolable. He never made that mistake again.

Having taken a year's maternity leave when I was first born, my mother had returned to work. Initially we lived in an eccentric flat on the top floor of my grandmother's house, and she looked after me during the day. My father would often come home for lunch even then. After we bought our own house, there was no daycare, and my mother stayed home for a couple of years to look after me. I have almost no memories of this time at all (which I find a little odd, since I was almost five), except for one fierce argument in the kitchen of our new house in the Ottawa suburb of Alta Vista. My mother was determined that I wear my winter coat to school. I was determined that I would not. (It was January - in Ottawa - what was I thinking? Probably, 'you're not the boss of me!'). I believe my mother won that round.

According to her, I drove her back to work. Certainly if there were more arguments as ferocious as the one about the winter coat, I see her point. But in truth, she had always considered herself a feminist and a career woman. Domesticity wasn't her thing. Neither was motherhood, although she tried, in her own way.

My mother's return to work just as I started Grade Two posed numerous problems relating to child care. Day cares didn't exist at the time. We lived only two blocks from my elementary school. School didn't start till 9AM - but both my parents had to be at work by 8:30. That problem was easily enough solved - I'd just stay at home for half an hour or so after they both left for work. I got home from school by four o'clock. My cousin Marsha, in high school at the time, was hired to babysit me after school. Getting dinner started was also part of her job. There were a couple of times Marsha had something she had to do after school. In those instances, my Aunt Pearl swung into action and took us all - my cousin Sandy and her houseful of foster children - to the movies (I'm still not so sure Lawrence of Arabia or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea were appropriate viewing for an eight year old, but never mind).

But because we lived so close to the school, they wouldn't let me take my lunch - I had to go home, and the school was adamant at the time - they were educators, not babysitters. So be it.

Eventually my parents came up with a solution. My father would come home to make me lunch every day. He'd already started making breakfast every day when my mother went back to work. He seemed to love the problem solving inherent in the timing of bacon, eggs, toast and coffee, and within a few weeks he had the whole thing sorted out. Lunch wasn't anywhere near as difficult a challenge - soup and sandwich doesn't require the same kind of precise timing as bacon and eggs.

When I got sick - and I had most of the usual childhood illnesses, perhaps more until I had my tonsils out the summer I was eight - my maternal grandmother was always there for us. 'Bring the baby over here, I'll look after her,' she'd say. When I got scarlet fever, her house had to be quarantined. I was isolated in the apartment upstairs, and everyone had to take penicillin. This was, I thought, suitably exciting and exotic.

I'm not sure why he first got involved with the bicycle safety workshops - whether that was preceded by his joining the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) or not. I know there'd been a child from my public school who'd been killed by a car because the Elmo the Safety Elephant flag was permanently lowered at my public school. But the bicycle safety workshops became an annual spring event, and my dad was always both the behind-the-scenes organizer and front and centre in delivering the workshops.

He initially got involved with the PTA because I was having trouble in school - not my grades, but with my grade two teacher. I'm not sure what the first warning sign was, but I do remember a fuss at the Christmas party over the teacher not believing something I'd said and demanding a letter from my parents to confirm I was telling the truth. When my father started digging into what was going on in the classroom, he was told by the principal that yes, they realized she was a bad teacher, but that she had so much seniority no one could touch her. Yes, I could be transferred to another class, but it would mean my leaving the accelerated program, which was the alternative to skipping a grade - we spent about seven months in each of grades one through four rather than 10, and sped through four years of school in three.

My father was enraged on my behalf. And he started digging into the issue. He joined the PTA. And he discovered at least half a dozen other children who were having trouble with our grade two teacher. Some of them had started bedwetting. Others had broken out in stress rashes. Some were having nightmares. A few were suddenly getting average or poor marks, even though they'd done significantly better in kindergarten and grade one.

Eventually grade two ended (although it was the beginning of grade three for me part-way through the year). My father stayed on the PTA. Eventually he became its president. Other than the bike safety workshops and reassuring other parents that their children weren't mentally ill, I'm not sure what he did there.

What I do know though is that the effort my father made during those five or six years was extraordinary. I don't know many men who'd be willing to step up to the plate to the extent he did. Between the breakfast and the lunch making (and supervision), the PTA meetings and driving my babysitter cousin home, he must have put in at least four hours a day devoted solely to my welfare and nurturing. Somehow he never made any of it seem like a chore. He never made me feel that he resented doing any of the things he did, that he'd rather be having lunch with a colleague or even just having a sandwich at his desk, just as he never made me feel he'd rather be watching TV, reading a book, or even enjoying adult companionship with my mother those nights he'd sing me to sleep. Most important, he never made my mother or me feel that what he was doing was 'women's work' or in any way unnatural - even though my mother was one of a grand total of only two 'working' mothers among my classmates.

After a series of cerebral hemorrhages in his early 60s, my father had severe anomia and became an expert at circumlocution. My mother and I would ask him what he'd had for lunch, and he'd say, 'A round thing on another one of those round things.' We were puzzled by this, but confident he'd eaten something. I decided to spend some time with him before he died, and moved back in with my parents when I was in my early thirties. It was difficult for all of us, but in some ways it was worth it. I'd taught myself how to cook after leaving home, and the brain damage my father had sustained had made him a lot less resistant to vegetarian cooking (his attitude when I'd cooked meatless meals before he got sick was, 'It's good, but there isn't any meat in it.'). I made him a curry once and he ate it with relish, saying, 'Oh, I like this - it has those little round animals we never used to eat before you came to stay with us.' I never open a can of chick peas to this day without thinking of their alternate name.

With only spotty occupational therapy, he wasn't comfortable using the phone after he got sick and never initiated calls. My mother would call me and put him on the phone. He'd forgotten the conventions of telephone conversation, and no longer knew he was supposed to say hello at the start of conversations and goodbye at the end. Instead he'd say, 'I love you.' I never minded.

There's something fitting about the fact that he died on Valentine's Day. If I'd ever needed an excuse to celebrate a made-up holiday that I find intensely hypocritical in an alternative way, his death gave me a permanent out. What I learned from my dad is that there's nothing passive or commercial about love. It's a noun, but it's also an active verb. It's something you show people 365 days a year, whether it's making the tea or shining someone's shoes for them or just being there for them, letting them know you're on their side and that they're not alone in the world. It's not about roses and diamonds and champagne.

Thank you for teaching me that, Dad.

Allan Frederick Seeley
May 21, 1926 to February 14, 1991

Canada Reads 2011 - Day Three, Final Round

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:27:00 +0000

As part of the Canada Reads format changes this year (again, more to come on the whole subject of Canada Reads itself and how it differed from previous years later), the debates were compressed into a three-day span, with a vote to eliminate the third book of the five happening early in the third show and then the final elimination vote happening towards the end of the hour.

Here's the recap:

After the surprising revelation that Debbie Travis had been unable to finish Terry Fallis' The Best Laid Plans on Tuesday's show, she came in for a lot of heat on Twitter. Frankly I felt sorry for her. If you dislike a book enough to not easily be able to finish it, you must really dislike it a lot. And if you've given 100 pages or more of it a try, even judging duties shouldn't mean you have to finish it. There were some really ugly tweets about Debbie. I found them rather sad. (Is now the time to mention that I'm still 13 pages from the end of Madame Bovary and have been since 1973? I tried to reread it recently because it was one of the books on the Kobo reader I'd bought and I just couldn't do it. I still hate that book, and I don't have to finish it to know why I hate it.) Anyway, like the conscientious new Canadian she is, Debbie got off Twitter fairly early yesterday afternoon, vowing to finish reading The Best Laid Plans (I could hear her thinking, 'even though it might kill me').

Ghomeshi introduced the final round of this year's Canada Reads as 'Canada's Annual Title Fight.' (There's a reason I'm emphasizing the way the show bills itself which won't become obvious till I do my 'What's Canada Reads All About?' post - which may not bear that exact title.) To save myself a little typing and italicization time, I'm going to use abbreviations this time around for both the panelists/host and the books themselves.

JG - Jian Ghomeshi
GL - Georges Laraque
DT - Debbie Travis
SQ - Sara Quin
AV - Ali Velshi
LC - Lorne Cardinal

TBLP - The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis
TBC - The Bone Cage by Angie Abdou
Unless is short enough to type and italicize
EC - Essex County by Jeff Lemire
TBH - The Birth House by Ami McKay

JG asked GL how he felt about the elimination of TBC on Tuesday's show. GL responded that he takes everything personally, plays to win and that he thought he'd finish third at the worst. He also said he'd a deal with Debbie (this apparently had been revealed on yesterday's show - somehow I missed that). That's ok though, said GL, 'I know her, I know where she works.'

DT said, 'It's not Survivor .... This is not about us. And this is not about the authors.... What we're looking for is the most gripping novel.'

GL pointed out that DT's having named Digger as her favourite character in a nominated book other than the one she was championing, her voting against it was surprising.

JG said GL's announcement Tuesday that he was going to throw his weight behind TBLP had never been done before on Canada Reads.

GL asked why it was so surprising/shocking that he'd support a book that might help with the electoral process. (Since he's the deputy leader of the Green Party, that does make sense.) And was it more shocking than the news Debbie hadn't finished the book?

DT said she wasn't an athlete, a politician, or a singer. She described herself as, 'An ordinary person who likes a good read. That's all I care about. It's not about us. These authors are fabulous. What's important about this competition is getting Canadians to read...and getting them talking about books.'

DT described the reaction to her confession about not having finished TBLP as 'furious.' JG implied she should have realized people would be furious with her, because 'people are invested in these books. The Q is: if you didn't finish TBLP, why did you vote against EC and TBC?'

DT said she'd finished TBLP last night. She obviously hadn't changed her mind about it, saying that she didn't feel '... connected to the characters, found it confusing.' She said TBH is very similar to TBLP – people are fed up with politics but it's a good book to get people interested in politics. TBH isn't about politics, it's about democracy, and that democracy starts at our kitchen tables and it starts with women.

JG then told SQ she'd gone from loser on day one to king maker on day two, as a result of her having to break a tie - her vote against TBC meant the book was eliminated. SQ said mom called her to fill her in on the Twitter response and that she'd asked her mom, 'Do I look mean on TV?' She said she 'has a hard time being completely honest about these books. It's tough.' (Which I found quite an odd statement, but I think it goes to the point I made previously about her not quite getting what strategy is, which means she can't come up with a good one.)

JG asked SG, 'Do you have a strategy going into this?' To which she replied that she was impressed by Debbie and Ali and just genuinely loves Unless.

JG then asked AV about the fact that GL had crossed the floor in political fashion after AV and TBLP had taken some beatings during Tuesday's show.

AV said TBLLP was a call to action, that he'd run into Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi in the CBC building and that there was an example of, 'It's pie in the sky, it's not going to happen.' thinking being wrong. "Naheed Nenshi is a brown Angus McClintock,' said AV. JG pointed out that Nenshi was a willing candidate, then described TBLP as a satirical take on Ottawa politics and asked AV, 'You're at one of your CNN dinner parties. Austin Cooper asks you about TBLP. What do you say?'

AV said he'd talk about the fact that it's a book whose subject is the fact that 'all people want is fairness in democracy ... people don't think they're heard by their elected officials. You have to vote and you have to be involved.'

JG asked LC what he thought about all the Canada Reads drama. LC replied, 'I think it's exciting' and said his girl set him up with Twitter two days ago so she's tweeting on his behalf. (I presume he meant his daughter, not his wife/girlfriend/significant other.) 'The authors are top notch all the way around.'

JG quoted the first sentence of Unless. 'It happens that I'm going through a period of great unhappiness and loss right now.' LC pointed out that Shields 'also writes with very dry humour and depth and complexity ... you're taken out of yourself ....' (Finally someone mentions the humour in Unless! Because those letters Reta wrote but didn't send to various members of parliament were some of the funniest things I've ever read.)

JG said there'd be two debates today – after the first there'd be a vote to eliminate one book. After the second debate another book would be eliminated, leaving us with the winner.

JG pointed out that panellists had barely mentioned TBH except for DT defending and asked, 'Why is that?'

LC replied, 'we should talk about it. It is just a regional novel and folklore just being retold. It's about a very specific group of people ... there's been a lot of talk about it being about the Halifax explosion but that's actually a very brief section of the book - we spend more time in Boston than in Halifax.'

JG asked, 'It's too east coast for you?'

LC replied that it's not a life he's ever lived – he's never had to fish for cod – 'it's hard for me, being a prairie boy, to identify with this, except for the isolation.'

GL said, 'It is a good story, but we're talking about the essential book ... this book empowers women .... (not, presumably, men). He also said if he hadn't had to read it, he would have stopped. JG asked if GL was saying TBH didn't speak to men. GL replied that TBH shows how men were 100 years ago – you know men were bad then – it's empowering to read that book (for women).

DT said, 'This is ridiculous – you're both completely wrong. It's not just about women – not all the men [in TBH} are pigs.' (Which is something GL had said in earlier debates - rapists and pigs.)

SQ pointed out that Hart Bigelow is good. (No one mentioned Dora's brother Charlie.)

DT said she'd spoken to Ami McKay and that as a result of reading TBH, women are going into the medical profession, becoming nurses and midwives because of it. 'It's a book about community and we learn from this book. It's about a 19-year-old woman who's inspirational.' Women will read it and say, 'Well she did it.' DT also said it's important, given the shortage of trained medical professionals we're currently experiencing, and SQ agreed with her.

JG then said to AV, 'You and I are men. I found this book very powerful.'

AV replied that he'd first enjoyed TBH because it was great storytelling and that he'd like to see it made into a movie. 'Dora Rare is everyman – this remarkable strong woman – not respected for her youth, her gender, or her profession ... but wins her race.'

JG then asked the panellists what didn't work for them.

SQ said she didn't feel invested, that she liked the story and that the book should be read by men and women, although she didn't feel as moved by it as by some of the other books.

JG said, 'We spoke about TBLP. When it comes to Unless – it was written in the early part of the decade - times have changed.' He asked if Unless wasn't a bit of a feminist polemic that no longer resonates.

LC replied that he didn't think times have changed for women, women still aren't included in our day to day lives or in Parliament, the voice of women is not being heard. 'This book contains that voice – she whispers in your ear.' (Have to say, I have a whole new appreciation of Lorne Cardinal as feminist male after listening to these debates - go Lorne!)

JG asked if Shields' voice wasn't too heavy handed?

LC disagreed.

SQ mentioned that all the remaining books could be considered feminist and said that no one had touched on the fact that TBLP has a very strong feminist storyline – Angus'd dead wife was a prominent feminist - and said, 'that's the most inspiring thing about what's left of the books.'

JG revealed the results of the online voting, which indicated TBLP should be eliminated, then TBC (which would have left Unless as the winner). Now it's time to point out one of the flaws of the online voting process - which LC said on Tuesday he didn't trust. Just for fun I thought I'd see how the online voting process worked. To my dismay, I was able to 'vote off' TBLP three times on Tuesday - for no particular reason. After three votes I figure I'd proved my point, that the online voting process was totally skewed and its only real value was its potential psych-out factor when the panellists were told of the results.

GL voted to eliminate Unless (now this was odd really, given what he'd said about TBH throughout the entire contest and about the way DT had voted to eliminate TBC the day before).

LC voted to eliminate TBH.

AV voted to eliminate Unless

SQ voted to eliminate TBH.

DT voted to eliminate TBLP (which she should perhaps have done yesterday?).

Since this produced a tie, JG turned to the Canada Reads rules, which states that the panellist who hasn't helped to create the tie has the deciding vote. At which point DT recast her vote to eliminate Unless rather than TBLP, thus leaving only TBLP and TBH in contention.

JG then talked about the publication history of TBLP. When Terry Fallis first wrote TBLP, the literary agents and publishers all ignored him – this book was initially self published. Fallis submitted it for the Stephen Leacock award and it won. A week later he had a publisher. This 'sets up a bit of a David and Goliath situation. TBH is the best known book that's on the table – it's already a bestseller – should it be taken into consideration that one of these books has become an indie publishing sensation?'

SQ said it was important to note, but how a book's sold in the past doesn't and shouldn't matter – we're not being told to pick a book that hasn't done well – we're picking something we think is essential.

JG reminded people that when Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage was up against Paul Quarrington's King Leary, there was a feeling that the Findley had had its due while King Leary (which was out of print at the time it was in contention) had won partly because it was felt it was a book that hadn't been appreciated sufficiently when it was first published.

DT said TBH and TBLP 'should be the last two books in the running. It's the same story. An essential book has to grip you. Both of them are talking to Canadians about "we want change and how do we do change?”' She said TBH is a democratic book about grass roots' which once meant sitting around your backyard fence or the kitchen table and now means Twitter and blogging. 'Women talk – we're losing that – we're losing our communities. There's no difference in being around a kitchen on the East Coast than in downtown Toronto. If either book wins, it's great because it's created talk.' (Thus obliquely attacking LC's point about TBH being too regional a story, which sadly seemed to end up being the fatal blow.)

JG asked again, 'The self published story – does it mean something at this point?'

AV said, 'Only insofar as it relates to the story. Both books are about aspirations – about becoming empowered – both are essential. TBH is about the issues that women face ... but this book is about the current thing that affects us most in the world – the context is different but that context swings things in favour of TBLP.'

GL asked what would change if everyone read both books? If they read TBH, people would learn that things have changed. But in Canada people don't vote. If people read TBLP this will change Canada. 'That's my job, to encourage people to vote more. Not voting is a bigger problem.'

SQ said, 'That's very hopeful – to think these books would be read by young people today.' And admitted she made the graphic novel debate about youth vs age. And seemed to regret having done so. (Good move, since she gets her MOTHER to read Twitter reactions to her.)

AV said surveys show that of the young people who don't vote, their biggest issue is they don't know enough about the system. He said he was almost as interested in finding the Angus McClintocks in this country as in having TBLP win the Canada Reads contest - he'd like to find five people who say 'that's interesting.'

SQ said she liked TBLP, thought it was great.

AV asked her if she might run for office. SQ said no.

DT picked up on the 'find five people them' and suggested she'd be happy if her championing TBH lead to finding five people who'd go into nursing, midwifery or become doctors.

SQ agreed both books were inspiring – but not to high school students. (Another mysteriously irrelevant remark, I thought. Takes a while to get a book onto a high school syllabus and personally I'd prefer folks keep reading their Shakespeare, but that's just me.)

DT then asked AV, 'How's your book doing in the book clubs? TBH is one of the top books in the book clubs.'

GL replied, 'Yes but mostly it's women reading.'

AV mentioned that both TBLP's protagonists were surrounded by strong women. And that there was a third strong woman in the book

JG then mentioned that Valentine's Day was approaching and asked the panellists which of the two remaining books they'd recommend to someone they loved.

LC said he'd give TBLP to his brother who's running in the next federal election because its descriptions of political machinations were humourous and you need a sense of humour when you get into the House of Commons.

SQ said she'd give TBLP to her dad, who reads newspapers rather than books, but would probably like TBLP.

GL said he'd give TBLP as a Valentine's gift, because of Angus's letters to his dead wife.

AV and DT were then given a few moments to make the final pitches for the books they were championing.

AV said TBLP 'made people laugh, it made me laugh, it made people cry at the same time. It can inspire you. This can help you understand more about it [the political process]. People can effect change. People can change things for women, for immigrants, for themselves.'

DT said, 'I think change begins at home. [TBH is] about a young woman – our young people are very lost today – this is a book that says, you can make it, you can have a voice – TBH is a bestseller – this is a book you cannot put down, male, female and young people as well.'

JG announced the final vote 'to make a book a bestseller.'

AV: voted to eliminate TBH

DT: voted to eliminate TBLP

GL: voted to eliminate TBH

SQ: voted to eliminate TBH

TBLP wins Canada Reads 2011

LC: voted to eliminate TBH

JG said this was 'kind of a remarkable turnaround.'

AV said, 'I hope it moves the needle a little bit to get people involved in the democratic process. Everybody really got behind this – we really accomplished something this week.'

DT said, 'the idea of this is fantastic – everybody should go out and get both books – if a book can inspire us – if we get a new nurse out of TBH, if we get a new politician out of TBLP - we all win.'

SQ said both arguments were very strong – she went back and forth re both books and stopped thinking of the debate as in terms of what she herself would read – 'this turned almost into a job' - but that since the most essential book of the last decade criteria had been given, TBLP fit that criteria.

LC said Terry Fallis is a fantastic author, TBLP a fantastic book, that he has a penchant for humour (everyone laughed at this, although Corner Gas has never succeeded in making me laugh), that he thinks Canada has a penchant for humour as well – 'look at all the talent we've exported to the US!'

JG said he had Terry Fallis on the phone.

Fallis said, 'If I'm sounding a bit muffled it's because I'm curled on floor of my third-floor library in the fetal position breathing into a paper bag. I haven't touched down yet. I'm amazed and truly grateful.' Then he told AV he might just write his biography now, that he thought AV had done an amazing job defending TBLP, and was passionate but polite. He said AV had really presented the merits of the novel effectively, which was tough to do given it was up against such wonderful books.

AV said, 'you and the other authors did the heavy lifting. To you and the other authors – thank you for giving us such great stuff to work with.'

Terry Fallis will be interviewed by JG on Q tomorrow.

And that's it for Canada Reads 2011. Sort of. Except for the fact that it's provided all of us with a great deal of food for thought. Now excuse me, I'm just off to pick up my copy of TBLP before everyone else gets there ahead of me. Of course I'm middle aged and I do vote. But never mind - I want to read those love letters of Angus McClintock to his dead wife.

Canada Reads 2011 - Day Two, Round Two

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 19:26:00 +0000

After the reminder from Jian Ghomeshi that 'We're looking for the essential Canadian novel of the last decade,' he referred to Canada Reads as 'Canada's annual title fight.' I mention this because I think a lot of people are taking Canada Reads waaay too seriously (although more on this subject in subsequent posts, after the 2011 competition is over. But then I gather some folks watch those Idol shows too, as well as other televised abominations like So You Think You Can Dance? - you may think you can dance but it's quite obvious to me that you're deluded.).

Defenders of the four remaining nominated titles (The Best Laid Plans, The Birth House, The Bone Cage, and Unless) discussed the contest at the top of the show. 'This,' said Ali Velshi, is serious business.... I want to make the best case that I can, and the most relevant case that I can.'

Reflecting on the fact that Essex County was eliminated yesterday, Lorne Cardinal said, 'I was the heel, I just happened to be sitting in the number three [voting] spot.'

Ghomeshi mentioned again that Unless was trailing in the online poll on the first day of the contest. Lorne Cardinal said he was surprised, since Carol Shields is one of our premiere authors, and Unless is a literary gem. At this point Ghomeshi pointed out that Unless did not win the Pulitzer Prize, but that The Stone Diaries did. It was unclear from the conversation whether Lorne Cardinal had actually been confused about this or not, but it was nice to get it cleared up. 'She's still a Pulitzer-prize winning novelist though,' said Cardinal, which nicely covered his factual error – whether inadvertent or deliberate.

Georges Laraque appeared on the show wearing a T-shirt made by Angie Abdou with a photo of the two of them on it. He pointed out that she has the least funding support of all the books in the contest (presumably because The Bone Cage was published by NewWest Press, a small Western Canadian publisher, while the other books have the marketing muscle of Random House Canada, Harper Collins, and McClelland and Stewart behind them).

Today's show featured author descriptions of the novels, which was a pleasant change of pace, followed by 30-second defenses of the books. Terry Fallis said that The Best Laid Plans, which won the 2008 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, was 'the story of an accidental MP.' Ali Velshi declared the book is essential because we're all fed up with politics. 'This book is about making democracy work ... and it's as current today as it was when it was written.'

Ami McKay's clip described The Birth House as being about science at the turn of the 20th Century. 'Dora Rare...is destined to become the midwife for her community, but she's reluctant.' Debbie Travis went on to say, 'It's about a changing world ... it's about holding onto our traditions and embracing our future,' and about 'using our past for the benefits of today.'

Angie Abdou summed up The Bone Cage very succinctly by saying, 'The Olympics leaves its athletes' broken souls. The Bone Cage shows why.' Georges Laraque amplified this theme by saying it's a novel about 'what happens when a body fails' and that 'we all face failure.' He also reminded listeners that it's a 'story about love' (the love Sadie has for her grandmother).

A 2002 Carol Shields recording described Unless as 'The voice of a woman, a 44 year old mother with three daughters,' one of whom has become a derelict who lives on the street with a sign saying 'goodness' hung around her neck. 'This is the great loss that I'm speaking about.' Lorne Cardinal said Unless is a novel within a novel within a novel, written in the 'language of love, loss, laughter and hope,' full of 'transcending moments' and 'stellar' writing.

Ghomeshi's opening question for this round was, 'Which of these four remaining books is the best written?'

Velshi pointed out that, 'Well written can mean many different things to many different people' and said that to him, well written meant accessible. While Shields is the most accomplished writer, The Best Laid Plans is the most accessible of the four remaining novels in the competition. 'It's satire ...a little bit of humour and a little bit of sarcasm.... It's not a dark book, but it's about a very serious issue. It makes you laugh every two seconds.'

Debbie Travis pointed out that there's a big difference between an accessible book and an essential book. 'We're here for the essential book.' But she continued by saying The Birth House was the best written. 'A book is a fantasy, it's a world ... it's like watching a movie.... You're involved in this story, you look up from the book and say, 'oh, I'm not in 1917.''' She found Unless predictable. 'My book has a beginning, a middle and an end, and it draws you in.' (See below for more of Debbie Travis's thoughts on Unless – and for her confession re The Best Laid Plans.)

Georges Laraque came out swinging by stating, 'This contest is not about picking your favourite book.' 'Everybody has to relate to that story.' 'If you go with your personal choice, that's being very selfish.' 'Everybody knows people who are into sports.' He then said Shields' Larry's Party should have been the Canada Reads contender, not Unless. 'Unless was hard to get into ... the wording.' 'Our role is to get Canada to read more.' If Unless is selected ... 'they'll never read again.'

Sara Quin responded with, 'I totally disagree' and picked Unless as the best written of the four remaining books, describing the story as beautiful and moving. (Which of course has nothing to do with the way it's written, story being plot, not style, but never mind.) She also liked The Best Laid Plans for its entertainment value. 'You could pick up this book in an airport ... it's easy to read, it's a great story ... it's the quickest story ... it's the easiest read.' She then said, 'It's a bigger idea, a more universal issue,' a remark that didn't really become clear until later in the debate.

Lorne Cardinal of course stuck with Unless as the best written of the four novels, saying, 'Structure is key to understanding content.' He then immediately undercut the argument he may or may not have been trying to make re the structure of Unless by actually talking about how well the book is written: 'You can flip it open at any page and read it out of context, pick any page and read and it will jump out at you.'

Debbie Travis said Unless is 'beautifully written, but it's two books in one.' 'She writes about writing a book' and felt the 'story that's going on within the story is too introspective.' Which may have been a response to the red herring regarding structure introduced by Cardinal.

Cardinal responded by saying Unless is 'a novel that promotes thought and debate and that's the point of literature.'

Velshi then said Unless is 'not as easy a book to read' as The Best Laid Plans and if accessibility is what you're going for, it's not the most accessible but it 'does cause you to fire different synapses.'

Cardinal responded to Velshi's claim that Unless is not easy to read by saying, 'woman's voice is under-represented in our literature [sic] canon today,' that Shields was a victim of her own success and that her work is currently suffering from 'The Munro Principle' – she's already won a lot of awards. He then startled everyone by saying if Unless were taken off the table, he'd pick The Birth House (as best written? As most essential read? That wasn't quite clear).

Ghomeshi summarized this year's nominees as all being about loss: loss of a daughter (Unless), loss of career hope (Essex County), loss of mobility (The Bone Cage), 'The Birth House has all sorts of calamities, ' Angus in The Best Laid Plans loses his wife and writes to her after her death, then asked the panelists, 'Which book deals with loss most memorably?

Sara Quin said Unless, and talked about the scene where Reta drives around the block looking for her daughter, who's living on the streets, finally spots her and is happy because she sees her daughter's wearing gloves on a cold day.

Georges Laraque talked about Sadie losing her grandmother in The Bone Cage. 'She takes time to see her grandmother and it's killing her inside ... but she still needs to focus ... when she loses her mobility that totally kills you – it's heartbreaking – what is she going to do, how will it affect her spirit?' 'Nothing is guaranteed.'

Ghomeshi interjected, 'I found it an incredibly powerful meditation on loss when she loses her mobility.'

Sara Quin then talked about The Best Laid Plans' Angus writing letters to his wife after she was dead and how touching she found them. She then spoke about focus and drive and the parallel between being an athlete and being a musician. 'I hurt my finger and I can't even wash my hair properly,' she said, immediately followed by 'that was silly.' Since I'm already being accused in this blog of being anti Sara Quin, I'll just let that one go, shall I?

Cardinal spoke about Unless again. Shields, 'writes about loss, but she also writes about hope .... she writes about the fragility of our lives' and about '... a child discovering the world and their place in it.'

Debbie Travis pointed out loss was a theme in all five of the books. But, 'I don't think the writing of The Bone Cage and The Best Laid Plans can hold a candle to Unless.' And then, having answered the previous question about which book was the best written and having reluctantly named Unless this time, she said, 'What I hated about the book [Unless] ... was I was so not interested in her writing journey...' The real corker in today's debate came next, when Travis confessed she hadn't been able to get through The Best Laid Plans. She got angry with it – felt her time was worth more than this – didn't find it funny at all. In fact, she said, it was 'so unfunny I wanted to throw it away. I liked the Scottish guy. I'm not interested in Canadian politics.'

Velshi then pointed out that, 'Debbie is very very stuck on this idea, like many people, that they don't like politics.' His alternative interpretation is that The Best Laid Plans is a, 'a story about inspiration for change.' To which Debbie Travis replied that the inclusion of Angus' letters to his dead wife were an excuse for bad writing. 'You said be truthful.'

Ghomeshi returned to the conversation, saying that 'Unlike most CBC game shows – winning Canada Reads can actually be pretty lucrative' and claiming that it fuels book sales in the same way (although not to quite the same extent) as The Giller Prize. (Note: I'm working on another post on this subject for next week.) After winning Canada Reads, Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes sold half a million copies, said Ghomeshi.

The four remaining authors were asked what they'd do for their books' defenders if the book won the Canada Reads contest. Terry Fallis said he'd not only owe Ali Velshi big, he'd write him in as a character in his next novel. Ami McKay announced Debbie Travis would have to renovate her kitchen if she doesn't win. Angie Abdou vowed not only to do an Ironman contest, but to peel oranges for her defender. Anne Giardini, Carol Shields' daughter, said she'd buy Lorne Cardinal some Haida artist earrings.

'You can't talk about Canada any more without talking about how Canada has changed in the last few decades – it's incredibly diverse,' said Ghomeshi, then asked, 'Which of these books best speaks to Canadian society today?'

Cardinal said he wasn't sure, that each appeals to a cross section and some are very specific to certain audiences. The Bone Cage, he said, is about athletes – and then went on to describe the structure of the writing as 'a bit convenient.'

'If someone were to say, these are all "white books" what would you say?' Ghomeshi asked. To which Cardinal replied, 'Well, obviously they are.' He went on to talk about the appeal of Unless to women and the fact that it was written by a woman. 'It's ridiculous to think women haven't contributed to the literary form.' (I didn't quite follow this line of reasoning, as three of the five books nominated this year were written by women and focus on female protagonists, but never mind.)

Sara Quin agreed the novels weren't very diverse, but then explained her previous airport remark by saying there was 'a celebrity nature' to The Best Laid Plans and that there was something universal about it, as with all big best sellers – 'it's paced in a way that we've become used to expecting in books and films.'

Laraque defended The Bone Cage by saying, 'This is not just about sports. The Olympics aren't the point – it's the journey.' And then attacked Unless by saying it was hard to read. Velshi repeated that The Best Laid Plans is a call to action.

Ghomeshi updated listeners on the online polling and stated that while yesterday Unless was the book chosen for elimination, today it was The Bone Cage, with Unless following closely.

Debbie Travis said The Birth House is about community and 'the forever-changing roles of women and men.' It's 'so relevant today' and 'it's a novel you'll never forget.' (Presumably also one that doesn't inspire rage for its sheer unfunniness either.)

Cardinal said he didn't trust polls, that 'I can't apologize for excellent writing,' and that while The Best Laid Plans is 'great brain candy, it doesn't delve deeply.'

Laraque got the final word before voting began, saying, 'We have to talk about the book ... that inspires people to read.'

Voting results

Debbie Travis voted to eliminate The Bone Cage.
Georges Laraque voted to eliminate Unless.
Lorne Cardinal voted to eliminate The Bone Cage.
Ali Velshi voted to eliminate Unless.
Sarah Quin voted to eliminate The Bone Cage, breaking the tie.

Laraque's reaction was spontaneous but controlled: 'I'm so mad right now.' 'I'm speechless.' 'I'm in shock. That was not supposed to happen.' 'I don't understand it ... when I picked this book ... I picked a book that would make a difference.'

Ghomeshi described The Bone Cage as 'an outstanding, moving novel.'

Cardinal said, 'it's just about the writing' and that 'structurally Carol Shields is head and shoulders the best writer at this table.'

Travis said, 'I really looked at the writing of The Bone Cage ... this is an important book ... this is a book that should be read in schools ... but I don't think the writing is as good as Carol Shields'.'

Sara Quin said she 'thought it was the weakest of the books ... I felt like I needed to be consistent.'

It is interesting that The Best Laid Plans and The Birth House haven't had any votes against them to date. It's even more interesting to me that after confessing she found The Best Laid Plans too infuriating to finish, Debbie Travis voted to eliminate The Bone Cage. In the meantime, The Bone Cage defender Georges Laraque indicated he'd be supporting The Best Laid Plans until/unless it was eliminated.

Tomorrow: another book will be eliminated at the beginning of the show.

Canada Reads 2011 - Day One, Round One

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 19:32:00 +0000

I'm just going to assume, for the purposes of this post, that everyone reading it already knows about Canada Reads, that everyone knows it's the 10th anniversary of this annual Survivor crossed with American Idol contest, and that the format has changed slightly this year, with far more reader/general public involvement via social media, and that the task this year was to select the 'must-read novel of the first decade of the new millennium.'

This year's nominees are:

Terry Fallis' The Best Laid Plans, defended by Ali Velshi

Ami McKay's The Birth House, defended by Debbie Travis

Angie Abdou's The Bone Cage, defended by Georges Laraque

Jeff Lemire's Essex County, defended by Sara Quin

Carol Shields' Unless, defended by Lorne Cardinal

Here's my synopsis of what happened during the first round – when the defenders got to vote to eliminate one of the five books nominated.

Velshi mounted a spirited one-minute pitch for The Best Laid Plans, talking very quickly while mentioning the fact that it's a 'fast-moving political satire set in the Ottawa area' and as such, was an important book for all Canadians to read (since politics affects all of us, whether we vote or not). His pitch was serious but also humourous, and he got a big laugh when he said 'if you choose another book, it's like choosing the radish as a national vegetable.' Touching briefly on voter apathy (on the rise in inverse proportion to voters' ages), he described the novel as 'not only a call to action' but something that 'can actually work' to combat voter apathy.

Debbie Travis was no less eloquent in her advocacy of The Birth House, and she scored some real points for taking the novel out of its 'historical' context and placing it in a broader human and contemporary setting. 'It's about what really shapes society,' she said, set at a time when modern medicine, the emancipation of women, and the first of our two 'world' wars were all factors in Canadian society. Cleverly pre-empting potential attacks on The Birth House as a 'likely to appeal to women only' novel, she said it was about men's role in society and that it represents an examination of 'the best of tradition, the best of the future.' She nicely wrapped up her pitch by saying it's a particularly appropriate novel to read at a time when we're struggling to cope with the fact that any 'new technology changes us' as a society.

Georges Laraque came out swinging in the nicest possible way when he talked about The Bone Cage. It's a novel for 'kids, teens, adults, men and women' he said. (The only people left out were pre- and elementary schoolers and the multi-gendered.) Without alluding to the fact that Canada had recently hosted the winter Olympics, he focused on the book's universal themes and appeal. While it's a novel that does explain why Olympic athletes are so driven, he said, it's a really about the very human struggle to 'beat the odds.' 'Life is a battle – this is what this book is all about.'

Knowing that she was defending the contest's one graphic novel, Sara Quin made a fatal strategic error by choosing to tackle the subject of graphic novels head on, instead of talking about the book she was actually supposed to be promoting/defending. While she did mention that she'd chosen the book because of its 'haunting connection between characters' and said that the illustrations made you 'feel like you're in the book,' she also spent far too much of her initial one minute talking about how Essex County 'transcends the genre' of the graphic novel.

Last up was Lorne Cardinal, whose pitch for Carol Shields' Unless began with a mention of her Pulitzer Prize (which an earlier Shields' novel, The Stone Diaries, had won, but never mind). Cardinal focused on the universality of the book's theme – loss – and described it as 'a symphony for the eyes,' a novel that 'transcends words' through the multi-dimensionality of its characters. He implied the novel was a haunting work of fiction that lingers 'in our minds.'

At the end of this round, Jian Ghomeshi summed up the five novels' appeal, saying that going into day one of the Canada Reads live event, The Birth House and Unless had been categorized as novels primarily appealing to women, The Best Laid Plans as interesting to political junkies only, and Essex County to indie hipsters.

Laraque's response to this statement was to say, 'we want people to read more ... if we pick the wrong book, they'll never read again.' He then took a shot at The Birth House, saying most of the men in the book were 'pigs, rapists and warriors' (who wants to read about that?). Velshi attacked Essex County, saying it was like the iPad of books – to which Sara Quin hastily responded, 'we need young people to start reading books' and 'the iPad saved Apple.' Lorne Cardinal was more of an equal-opportunity attacker, saying that The Best Laid Plans 'could turn people off voting and reading' and describing Essex County as a book that represented 'the gateway to reading' rather than reading itself. Unless, he said, is a book that 'gets people thinking about things rather than things.' Oddly this actually made sense – what he was trying to say was that Unless gets people thinking about life and issues rather than material goods. Laraque returned to the attack on Essex County, asking whether it could be considered 'the essential novel' of the last decade. Quin said something, but Laraque trounced her soundly by saying, 'you say it's a novel, but Jeff calls it a cartoon.' Even though I'd already gathered from tweets that Essex County was going to be the first book eliminated, for me it was at this point in the program that I knew it was going down – and why. Poor offense on Quin's part and an even poorer defense? I knew Essex Country was history.

Ghomeshi then asked the panelists, 'Aside from the characters in your own book, which character resonated the most for you?'

For Velshi it was The Birth House's Dora, a character who embodied the contrast between 'modernity and tradition' and who had 'one foot in the old world, one foot in the new world.' Lorne Cardinal chose Jimmy LeBeuf from Essex County, a character whose 'best moment' – his one game in the NHL before a career-ending slam into the boards - had shaped and transformed the rest of his life. Oddly, at this point, Sara Quin piped up to deny there was a character named Jimmy in Essex County, and talked briefly about two other characters, Lou and Vince, before remembering Jimmy. Georges Laraque chose Angus from The Best Laid Plans, saying 'he has kind of my personality' – described by one reviewer as 'witty and charming.' Sara Quin picked Reta Winters from Unless, because she was a writer and a mother, and because she was moved to tears by the grief and longing in the book's passages that described Reta's missing her daughter. Debbie Travis chose Digger from The Bone Cage, saying 'it's a book about striving...and failure.' She said that as someone who wasn't a sports fan, she hadn't expected to like The Bone Cage, but that she was fascinated by Digger the wrestler. Knowing that failure 'is crippling in the end,' she was 'interested in the journey people take to be the best they can be.'

Ghomeshi then said that the least popular novel to date from the voting public was Unless, but that 'the nation awaits' the first panelist vote. And here are the results:

Georges Laraque
Voted to eliminate Essex County

Sara Quin
Voted to eliminate The Bone Cage

Debbie Travis
Voted to eliminate Essex County on the grounds that it did not meet the 'essential' reading criteria.

Lorne Cardinal
Voted to eliminate Essex County on the grounds that it isn't actually a novel, but is, rather, a collection of short stories.

Ali Velshi
Voted to eliminate Essex County.

At this point Sara Quin went on a bit of a subdued rant, saying the other panelists 'represent a demographic that isn't going to read this book' and that Essex County 'will capture a younger viewership' [sic] while the other novels represented choices that were 'more traditional and safe.' Which was a little odd and not terribly gracious.

Tomorrow: round two of Canada Reads.

For all the information you could want about Canada Reads, here's the official page. And if you don't mind hearing the news before you've had a chance to listen to the show yourself, follow the #CanadaReads hashtag on Twitter.

Update: See this review of Essex County if you want to get some sense of what the book's actually about - something that none of the Canada Reads panellists managed to convey during the three days of debates. Spelling of characters' names have been silently corrected in this post after reading the review. (February 9, 2011)

Here's the Canada Reads Day Two roundup. And here's the roundup for the third and final day.

Continual Christmas and all the best for 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 01:31:00 +0000

Just came across this again (had found it via flickr a couple of years ago). Whether one celebrates Christmas or not, the sentiment expressed here is bang on.

Let
No Pleasure tempt thee,
No Profit allure thee,
No Ambition corrupt thee,
No Example sway thee,
No Persuasion move thee,
to do any thing which thou
knowest to be evil;
so shalt thou always live jollily;
for a good Conscience
is a continual Christmas.

Benjamin Franklin,Ben Franklin's Wit and Wisdom, Peter Pauper Press

The Last Summer (of You & Me): Hemingway on estrogen

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 15:41:00 +0000

If Hemingway had decided to write a Harlequin romance, The Last Summer (of You & Me) would probably have been the result. Not having read The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants or any of Ann Brashares' other work (and not having realized this was her first foray into supposedly adult rather than young adult fiction), I was curious about this novel, and recently picked it up in a secondhand bookstore.

While some reviewers find Brashares a 'beautiful writer' I'm afraid I'm going to have to beg to differ. It's bad enough that she treads on territory so well worn as to be dangerously slippery (both the coming of age novel and the most fundamental of plots: boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back). She creates characters who manage to be simultaneously 'thin' in the E.M. Forster sense and unlikeable (unless you really have a penchant for young men and women who prefer to passively brood rather than, you know, get the therapy they so obviously need).

Alice and Riley are sisters; Paul is Riley's best friend. They've evolved a Fire Island code as children who spend their summers living next door to each other, vowing that nothing will ever change between them. Inevitably, change does happen, and these characters are singularly ill-suited to coping with it. One thing that doesn't change, however, is their passion for Rice Krispies. I was tempted to calculate the number of bowls of cereal poured and consumed in the course of this novel, but it's the kind of detail no one really needs to know. Someone must have told Ms Brashares that in order to develop characters you must know what they eat for breakfast. Her creative writing instructor must have left out the second half of that idea, which is that while the writer must know this, it is not necessary to communicate it. In fact, it's rarely a good idea to do so. Since I'm hoping those of you reading this review won't be reading the novel, I'll fill you in: the second most popular breakfast food in which these characters indulge (you know, when the cereal box is empty or they're feeling extremely daring) is bacon and egg sandwiches from the local store. All righty then - you needed to know that, didn't you?

Now for some passages for The Last Summer (of You & Me) to give you some idea of the quality of the writing, which I consider mesmerizingly bad.

'She was only twenty-one. A virgin until two weeks ago, and he wanted to attach himself to her physically, mentally, emotionally every minute of every day, for now and ever. Of course it was too much. He was right to be suspicious of himself. He'd know that when he finally opened up to her, he would blast out like a fire hose, destroying everything in his path: every spark, every tender thing.'

Is it just me, or did you too burst out laughing when you got to the phrase 'blast out like a fire hose'? (I'm sparing you the sex scenes which precede this passage - you're welcome.)

'And though she rarely saw Paul wearing layers and walking in winter light, she began to suspect that the similarity between this man and Paul did not stop with his walk. She looked at the man's hand, the one that wasn't involved with the blond woman's arm, and she knew the hand. She knew the fingers. Her body, badly attached as it was, would have whimpered if she hadn't caught it in time. Her breath shuddered. Her heart mismanaged its work of beating.'

Hmmm. Women are blonde, men are blond. What was it to which her body was badly attached - I seem to have missed that. Oh yes - because it's not there. Body whimpering - there's an indelible image. Isn't there a TV series called The Ghost Whimperer?

'He wished he hadn't let himself have that thought. He knew it was a trick. He knew it at the time, but he'd done it anyway. He'd spent his life girding himself against that very trick, and he'd gone right ahead and fallen for it.... A part of him wanted her to call on the phone just so he could tell her off properly. He imagined she would try that emasculating strategy of wanting to be friends again. She'd already ripped him apart; he wasn't going to let her pick through the bits to see which ones she still wanted. He wouldn't give her the opportunity to assuage her guilt by being friends with him. But anyway, he didn't get to tell her off because she didn't call.'

Ahem. Fiction editor asleep at the wheel here? At this point I've completely forgotten what the tricky thought (outlined in the paragraph immediately preceding this one) was: oh yes, that rather than sell his Fire Island summer home, he should keep it for Alice. But wait, the house has only recently been signed over to Paul. And yet he's been thinking he should keep it for Alice his entire life? Now I'm confused.

'There was a familiar feeling he knew he could feel right now. It opened in front of him like a hallway, beckoning him to walk down it. He could resent her for her beauty. He could feel threatened by her again. He could be threatened by the fact that Alice had already won the adoration of two little girls who now lived in his house. His path in life was not exactly original. Who could live next to Alice and not fall in love with her? And she, being so easily loved, did she really need his, too? What could she want with it? What did he have to offer?'

His hot bod, obviously, as we learn a few pages later:

'He looked impatient for her return. He grabbed her up as soon as she'd tiptoed back into the room and with ardent determination, he finished the job of undressing her. He lay her on the couch and made love to her with a solemn face and a joyful body.'

I'm pretty sure he laid her on the couch and then got laid, but why quibble about grammar when you have phrases like 'ardent determination' and 'a solemn face and a joyful body' to savage?

Apparently Warner Bros. has bought the movie rights to this novel and it looks like it's scheduled for release sometime in 2011. I'm not surprised the script has already had to be rewritten twice. Making silk purses out of sow's ears isn't an easy task. Still, the movie might be worth watching just for the sake of the soundtrack. Personally I'm dying to hear the score that'll accompany those solemn face/joyful body sex scenes.

Words of wisdom from Eleanor Catton's The Rehearsal

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:50:00 +0000

What a fabulous first novel Eleanor Catton's The Rehearsal is - pushing the boundaries of fiction in a way few have done. I think The Guardian's review sums it up far more insightfully than I ever could, but this passage made my blood run cold.

The saxophone teacher, in whom many of the girls from the private school at which the 'sex scandal' takes place confide, must, of course, deal with the girls' parents as well as she decides which pupils to accept or reject. It's the least favourite part of her job. But this scathing and deadly assessment of the mothers' aspirations was one of the best passages in the novel:

'"I am never quite sure," the saxophone teacher says, "what is truly meant when the mothers ay, I want my daughter to experience what was denied to me.

'"In my experience the most forceful and aggressive mothers are always the least inspired, the most unmusical of souls, all of them profoundly unsuccessful women who wear their daughter's image on their breast like a medal, like a bright deflection from their own unshining selves. When these mothers say, I want her to fully experience everything that was denied to me, what they rightly mean is, I want her to fully appreciate everything that was denied to me. What they rightly mean is, The paucity of my life will only be thrown into relief if my daughter has everything. On its own, my life is ordinary and worthless and nothing. But if my daughter is rich in experience and rich in opportunity, then people will come to pity me: the smallness of my life and my options will not be incapacity; it will be sacrifice. I will be pitied more, and respected more, if I raise a daughter who is everything that I am not."

'The saxophone teacher runs her tongue over her teeth. She says, "The successful mothers--musical women, literate women, content and brimful women, women who were denied nothing, women whose parents paid for lessons when they were girls--the successful mothers are the least forceful, always. They do not need to oversee, or wield, or pick a fight on their daughter's behalf. They are complete in themselves. They are complete, and so they demand completeness in everyone else. They can stand back and see their daughters as something set apart, as something whole and therefore untouchable."'

The Rehearsal is published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart. Buy, beg, or borrow a copy - it's well worth the read. If Catton can produce this kind of work at age 25 (before she even graduates from the Iowa Writers' Workshop MFA program), what will she be doing at 30? 40? 50? Stand aside, Yann Martel - you ain't seen or produced nothin' yet that can hold a candle to this young woman.

Quotable women - Fay Weldon and Mary Gaitskill

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 16:23:00 +0000

No time for a full-length review of Fay Weldon's 2005 novel She May Not Leave (Atlantic Monthly Press). Pick up a copy of the remaindered hardcover for a song while you can. At first I thought it wasn't as delightfully acerbic as her previous work, but I changed my mind about that as got closer to the novel's climax and Weldon's trademark (at least I hope she's trademarked it) denouement, in which she gives a plot twist so definitive you're completely bowled over. I think one of the things I like best about Weldon's writing - in addition, of course, to the fact that she is the most pragmatic and realistic feminist I've ever encountered via the printed page - is that she really doesn't telegraph what's to come. She's sly. There are hints. But the story has sufficient propulsion that you note significant details without pondering them too much.

Anyway, two great passages/lines from She May Not Leave:

'"It's in the nature of women to report the bad behaviour of men to other women: he did this, then he said that, I can't stand it a minute longer. They don't expect to be taken seriously."

Serena agrees that it is certainly safer to report one's wrongs to other women than to men. She tells me how recently she was sounding off about Cranmer to a male friend and months later when she saw him again he said "thank God, you two are still together - I thought you were splitting up", and she couldn't even remember what the quarrel had been about, except that she had been very angry at the time. What woman ever can remember?'

And then there's the priceless (and oh so true) line: 'Anger is a great cure for fear.'

I started out well with Mary Gaitskill, reading (and loving) her first two books, Bad Behaviour and Two Girls, Fat and Thin. And then I don't know what happened - somehow I missed Because They Wanted To and Veronica. I'll have to catch up, because I believe she's one of the most important contemporary writers around. Don't Cry, her 2009 collection of short stories, leapt out at me from the library shelves though, and I snapped it up immediately. In some ways Gaitskill could be viewed as Fay Weldon's American granddaughter (I wonder what they'd both think of that notion?). 'Mirror Ball' is one of the more fanciful stories in this collection, but it deals with a subject that has long preoccupied Weldon: the soul-stealing effects of trying to be a heterosexual woman in a world that demands you be a feminist. 'The Agonized Face' tackles some of the issues of female solidarity, ground Weldon's trod many times, especially in her amazing story "Alopecia" (from Watching Me, Watching You).

The passage that really struck me from this collection was from another story though, 'Folk Song' - perhaps because I've got to know so many scientists recently on Twitter, and have watched the skeptic movement in the UK in particular adopt a very hostile and divisive stance - to homeopathy, to alternative medicine, and to those who still have faith - guaranteed to polarize opinion, couched in terms of ridicule I think is ultimately counter-productive. The scientists and skeptics for whom I have the most respect are those who admit that scientific research has an amoral aspect at its very heart - and this passage sums up that notion so very neatly:

'Yet with science, anything is possible. With science, rats have been tortured by electroshock each time they press a lever to get a food pellet. Rabbits have been injected with cancerous cells and then divided into control groups, one of which was petted and the other not, in order to investigate the role of affection in healing. Scientists do these experiments because they want to help. They want to alleviate physical suffering; they want to eradicate depression. To achieve their goal, they will take everything apart and put it back together a different way. They want heaven and they will go to hell to get there.'

Dangerously good: a review of Carole Enahoro's Doing Dangerously Well

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 19:37:00 +0000

The jacket blurb describes Carole Enahoro's debut novel, Doing Dangerously Well, beautifully: 'An irresistibly dark comedy about disaster capitalism, cutthroat office politics, vicious sibling rivalry, hapless do-gooderism and the corporatization of water...'

When the Kainji Dam in Nigeria – yet another miracle of engineering built in the 1960s – bursts, more than a million Nigerians are killed, hydroelectric supply is threatened, and the collateral damage is incalculable as water-borne disease and water shortages sweep across the country. (Interesting to note how very brief the Wikipedia entry on this dam is, and of course, to note that it's only ever operated at two thirds capacity, with only eight of 12 turbines installed. Ahem.) Even more interesting is this 1999 report on the condition of the Kainji Dam – including the priceless comment that rather than repair the dam to avoid catastrophe, Nigeria has chosen to build more dams instead.

With the failure of the dam providing the opportunity for disaster capitalism (surely as old a concept and as inevitable a practise as war, crop failure, flash floods and plagues of locusts themselves), the scene is set for Enahoro to introduce the other elements: office politics, sibling rivalry, do-gooderism and the debate re resource exploitation versus fundamental human rights.

She does so skillfully, setting up two parallel tracks of sibling rivalry that continue throughout the novel. The Glass sisters (no relation or homage to Salinger's Glass family), Barbara and Mary, couldn't be more different – although they're both brittle in their very different ways. Mary – the 'successful' daughter – is a member of middle management at TransAqua Corp., where she specializes in water rights acquisition. As Associate Director of Sales, she's buttoned down (to put it mildly), a wearer of 'air hostess' suits, verging on the anorexic, and eaten alive by the stress of trying to outdo – and replace - her boss. Barbara's a 'soft skills' facilitator eking out a living building solidarity among groups, making herself obnoxious by being disruptive in her yoga classes, and concocting ever more garish 'Third Worlder' outfits (you know the type: hat from Tibet, jacket from Guatemala, skirt from India, earrings from Nepal, necklace from Bolivia). 'Though a committed vegetarian whenever possible, Barbara had a soft spot for Rare Heritage, a well-meaning group who preserved breeds that farming giants had made almost extinct. As humane farmers, she supported them philosophically and therefore continued to slog along with them, despite their lack of solidarity.'

In her role as a facilitator, Barbara hopes to bring the group closer together by getting them to do a bold exercise: write down something shocking (not related to farming or animals) that no one knows about them. The results:

I enjoy the switch of the lash on my bare buttocks.
I had sex with a contortionist.
I went to Mexico for a holiday – viva México!
I once had sex with my brother for a dare.
I suffer from paranoid schizophrenia and once tried to kill my teacher.
I am a vegan.

Meanwhile, back in Nigeria, Ogbe Kolo, the Minister of Natural Resources, successfully manipulates the American ambassador to Nigeria via Mary Glass, the army and the media to ensure a successful coup: 'On the preferred date for coups in Nigeria, that is to say the first day of January, Ogbe Kolo acceded to the presidency. Citizens greeted each other with the customary salutation for the New Year: “Happy New Coup.”' Kolo isn't primarily interested in the power of the presidency – he just wants to ensure that as president he can sign away the water rights to and rename the Niger River so he can make a killing on the transaction. Kolo has a dark secret though: his sibling rivalry was so intense he pushed his (sweeter, smarter, better looking) fraternal twin brother into a swimming pool – and then calmly watched him drown.

Devastated by the loss of his entire family in the flooding, Femi Jegede, one of Nigeria's great orators and activists, possessing 'wit and style, backed by strong legal training' who could 'make pounded yam of the most logical argument' and with 'the one gift that makes even the listless adjust their clothing in anticipation ... a beautiful man, with skin as soft as Guinness beer and gentle, transcendent eyes...a very qualitative guy' makes a slow recovery. Eventually he mobilizes himself and the countryside to sabotage the repairs to the Kainji Dam, aided and abetted by Barbara Glass, who's decided she's had enough of having her parents throw her sister Mary's success in her face at every family gathering and has joined an Ottawa-based NGO called Drop of Life, stolen her sister's blueprints for the rebuilding of the Kainji Dam, and headed for Nigeria to foment opposition to the plan.

The scenes of Barbara Glass in Nigeria and the dialogue between Barbara and Femi are some of the most hilarious in the novel, with Barbara spouting Taoist syllogisms and mangling Nigerian pidgin while Femi must surely be contemplating sticking knitting needles in his ear so he no longer has to listen to her.

This is an immensely complicated novel in many ways, with a reasonably large cast of characters, not one of whom plays the straight man role. Its plot is both intricate and intriguing. If you think of Joseph Heller's Something Happened crossed with Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and a dash of William Boyd's A Good Man in Africa you begin to get an inkling of its scope. But then you also have to think of films like The Gods Must be Crazy and the amazing documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell and throw them into the mix to get some idea of what Enahoro has achieved with this novel.

It's a brilliant debut – the kind of first novel that leaves you waiting eagerly to discover what Enahoro's going to do next. Whatever it is, I think you're guaranteed it's going to be interesting.

For another (rather churlish and poorly informed, I thought) take on the novel, see this review in the Winnipeg Free Press (ignore the typos in the proper names of the dam and the activist).

And for more info on the Kainji Dam, here's a short documentary:

Disclaimer: I received a review copy of Doing Dangerously Well from Random House Canada.

Solar: Ian McEwan's new novel proves he's still one to watch

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 22:55:00 +0000

From the moment I was first introduced to Ian McEwan’s work back in the early 1980s by my friend Stephanie Ortenzi, I’ve considered him not only one to watch, but one to champion. As one of a handful of British writers whose work I always read and almost always buy (Graham Swift, Julian Barnes and William Boyd are the others on the list), a new Ian McEwan novel is always something to celebrate. So I've been waiting very impatiently for Solar's release for almost a year, since a Brazilian journalist doing a PhD in science communications first told me it was in the works. When I tweeted that I'd read it, my former boss was too impatient to wait for my review and demanded the 140-character version. He's probably already bought it and read it by now, though, since it's been at least three days.

It’s almost time to go back and re-read early McEwan, because he’s not the writer he used to be. That’s actually a neutral/positive statement, not a condemnation. Around the time The Child In Time was published (1987), I saw a televised interview with him in which he described his early work as being ‘dark and inaccessible’ and said that he wanted to change that. He certainly succeeded (that novel won the Whitbread Novel Award). Amsterdam won the Booker Prize, Atonement was shortlisted for the Booker in 2001, and its 2007 film adaptation was nominated for an Academy Award (although I think you’ll be hard pressed to find many who loved the book and also loved the film, again based on an admittedly small and highly subjective sampling).

Atonement was not, however, the first McEwan novel filmed; Andrew Birkin directed The Cement Garden from the 1978 McEwan work of the same name in 2003. If you read either the novel or the film’s descriptions in the links I’ve provided, you’ll notice how often the words ‘dark’ and ‘murky’ are used. Freud would have had a field day with McEwan’s early works, in which both sensuality and sexuality were simultaneously subterranean and omnipresent. They left you with a vague and disconcerting sense of unease, a feeling that you hadn’t quite understood what he meant but you didn’t really want to delve deeper because it might hurt you at a shockingly profound level of your being. Or at least that’s how I felt – it was mesmerizing but somehow dangerous. Reading early McEwan made me feel like a rather nastily atavistic voyeur, as if I’d been unable to resist reading a trusted friend’s diary, inadvertently ended up peeping through a keyhole, or unintentionally eavesdropped on a conversation with overtones so sinister as to negate all of the guilty pleasures of gossip.

His later work continues to provoke this sense of unease in some, although I’m not sure why. Either I’m acclimatized to it by now, no longer convinced voyeurism is as creepy as I once thought it was, or the nature of his work really has changed in a rather fundamental way.

Certainly in the novels from The Child in Time to On Chesil Beach, McEwan has steadfastly employed a single plot device that’s both valid and fascinating: a single chance but determining moment that alters the course of his characters’ existence irremediably. There’s nothing new about this kind of ‘right place, wrong time’ plot device – and in fact, in Atonement, the discovery of the note that fatally alters the course of two of the main characters’ lives (or does it? because there is an alternate ending) isn’t that dissimilar from the note Angel Clare doesn’t find in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. By On Chesil Beach, however, this plot device had been stretched beyond the breaking point, and that novel was so slight as to be almost negligible, because it was frankly implausible.

So it was obviously time for another change of course (since McEwan is not an Anita Brookner, and has never been content to rewrite the same the novel till he gets it right – and then continue to rewrite its ghostly imitations ever after – and I say that not to be mean to Brookner, whose Hotel du Lac is one of the most perfect short novels I have ever read, almost on par with The Great Gatsby).

Solar is a novel whose central character is a ‘fat, lying bastard of a physicist…a philandering, greedy, rather deceitful sort of man,’ as McEwan himself says in the Little Atoms podcast interview. This is a bit of an understatement – Michael Beard, who wins a Nobel Prize early in his scientific career for what becomes known as the Beard-Einstein Conflation, is a remarkably – an astonishingly – an intrinsically – almost a pathologically deceitful sort of man. It doesn’t really matter whether he’s stealing a colleague’s work, a fellow traveller’s potato chips, cheating on one or another of his five (serially married) wives, or hastily boning up on Milton to impress the first woman he marries, morally Michael Beard has no centre whatsoever – or rather his centre shifts constantly at the whims of his childishly greedy convenience.

And he’s greedy about everything: food, women, money, honours, his own creature comforts. He’s always late – for meetings, conferences, dinners, work. And yet somehow the world is being mean to him when, having overslept, he has to start his day without coffee. Or give a speech before he’s made serious inroads into the smoked salmon sandwiches.

The central paradox of this novel is that Michael Beard is a totally unappealing character by the time we meet him at age 50 – and frankly it’s hard to imagine that there ever was anything appealing about him at all. The beautiful mind in the physics/math sense he may once have possessed is never on display in the novel, and there’s a suggestion that he was a bit of a default, compromise Nobel winner, that his selection as the prize recipient was a highly political choice designed not to upset other candidates who could only be mollified if none of the top contenders for the prize that year won. There are one or two scientists in the novel who buoy him up from time to time and insist that the Beard-Einstein Conflation was – and remains – both a scientifically elegant and significant piece of work. But they’re few and far between. And yet – and yet – somehow he manages to attract not only five wives, but, during the course of his fifth marriage, an astonishing additional 11 lovers in less than five years, not all of which are one-night stands.

While Beard grows older (naturally), fatter (considerably), and balder (slightly) over the course of the novel's nine-year span, his emotional growth is pegged at one ahead, two back. When he's finally trapped into reproduction, he provides for his offspring financially but he still can't quite commit to being faithful to the mother of his child. Nor can he bring himself to abandon the flat of his own that, after several years of his occupation, is undoubtedly a health hazard not only to himself, but probably to all his neighbours as well.

In a pre-publication interview about his new novel, McEwan stated categorically that he hates ‘the comic novel’ and that he finds them strenuous, like being held down and tickled. (It's not clear whether he means he hates reading them or writing them.) The comic elements in Solar are necessary, he says, ‘because the subject matter is climate change. It's so colossal, it's so serious, it's so morally weighted that it could kill a novel, it could drown it, it could melt it - whichever climate change image you want,’ if there weren’t comic elements in the novel. He was only two-thirds of the way through writing the novel at that point, however, and while I’m not suggesting his stance on the comic novel has changed, I do think Solar is, in fact, a comic novel. You can’t write a novel in which the central character is, essentially, a buffoon, and also position him as a hero or his actions as heroic. Certainly Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman is a comic novel - and yet it's a serious work of fiction. Don't go by the Wikipedia definition of comic novel either - or if you do, prepare to be astonished to see Evelyn Waugh listed as a 'comic novelist' - Wikipedia is aware that he also wrote Brideshead Revisited, yes?

The comic element of Solar with the greatest public appeal (from what I’ve seen to date in reviews and on the internet) is the frozen penis scene, in which Beard is whisked away to a near-Arctic expedition, the lone scientist locked up on an ice-bound ship for a week with a group of artists. Having overslept, Beard leaves the hotel without having had coffee, and somehow having failed to use the bathroom in his rush to catch up the rest of his party heading for the ice-bound ship. During the course of the jostling, several-hour-long snowmobile ride, he’s forced to stop to pee, gets his willy stuck to the zipper of his outdoor gear, and – well – it continues from there, with the angst of his need to pee during the first half of the trip being replaced by the fear throughout the second half that his penis is frozen solid. The culmination of this scene is an understated tube of lip gloss, if you can believe it. As a non-penis owner this segment of the book didn’t really work for me as either realism or comedy, I’m afraid. After all, if you're the kind of man whose wife's lover slaps you rather than punching you, how important can the literal manifestation of your masculinity really be?

An earlier scene in the novel, when Beard is still living with wife number five, knows she's having an affair and is trying to make her jealous, is far funnier than the frozen willy scene.

Far more effective than both, however, is the scene on the train, where Beard, several years later, is rushing to make a speech at a conference. His flight's been delayed, he hasn't eaten (or rather, he hasn't eaten what he wanted to eat), and having grabbed a bag of salt and vinegar chips/crisps at the airport, he becomes convinced his travelling companion on the train from the airport is stealing his treat. Some excerpts from that scene:

‘Right before him on the table, shimmering through his barely parted lashes, were the salt and vinegar crisps… He pulled himself up in his seat and leaned forward, elbows on the table, hands propping his chin for several reflective seconds, gaze fixed on the gaudy wrapper, silver, red and blue, with cartoon animals cavorting below a Union Jack. So childish of him, this infatuation, so weak, so harmful, a microcosm of all past errors and folly, of that impatient way he had of having to have what he wanted instantly. He took the bag in both hands and pulled its neck apart… He lifted clear a single crisp between forefinger and thumb, replaced the bag on the table, and sat back. He was a man to take his pleasures seriously. The trick was to set the fragment on the centre of the tongue and, after a moment’s spreading sensation, push the potato up hard to shatter against the roof of the mouth. His theory was that the rigid irregular surface caused tiny abrasions in the soft flesh into which salt and chemicals poured, creating a mild and distinctive pleasure-pain…. Inevitably the second crisp was less piquant, less surprising, less penetrating than the first, and it was precisely this shortfall, this sensual disappointment, that prompted the need, familiar to drug addicts, to increase the dose. He would eat two crisps at once.’

The scene continues to a broadly comic climax, and Beard realizes he’s made a fool of himself. Ill-prepared to speak at the conference, he decides to include the crisps anecdote at the end of his speech. And this – at almost precisely the midpoint of the novel – is where things get interesting. Earlier, when one of the artists on the ice-bound ship is talking and makes a basic scientific mistake, Beard has sprung up and corrected him at great length, thus earning the admiration of all the artists on board (he’s the only scientist, and has been engaging with them as little as possible). In contrast to that scene, after his speech on climate change and the artificial photosynthesis solution to energy generation Beard is promoting (and has patented), Mellon, a lecturer in urban studies and folklore, interested in ‘the forms of narrative that climate science has generated … an epic story … with a million authors’ approaches Beard. Mellon – who in Beard’s opinion has a ‘squiffy view of reality’ - asks him where came across the story of the crisps. Beard replies that it’s just happened to him on the train, to which Mellon replies, ‘Come now, Professor Beard. We’re all grown-ups here,’ and proceeds to tell him Beard’s story is a well known tale with many variations (although not yet one involving crisps), included in novels by Jeffrey Archer, Roald Dahl and Douglas Adams amongst others, called ‘The Urban Thief.’

This scene ends shortly after this, but it’s significant, not only because of the juxtaposition of the contrasting reactions of the artist:scientist and scientist:folklorist it sets up. It underscores earlier scenes on the ship when the group – all but Beard almost tragically impaired by their individual and collective guilt about how we’ve wrecked our planet and yet passionately committed not so much to creating a solution but at least to lamenting their grief at the impasse by means of their art – can neither keep the room in which their Arctic outdoor gear is stored organized nor resist the impulse to steal each other’s boots and mittens. In that situation, Beard is the lone voice in the wilderness, trying to tidy the room, observing the rules, carefully placing his own gear on the peg assigned to him.

This is yet another fascinating McEwan novel, a welcome and substantial meal after the insubstantiality (dare I say it? the bag of crisps) of On Chesil Beach, and yet another direction for his work. May he have many more – novels and directions.

For some other reviews of Solar, see The Guardian, The Vancouver Sun, and The Daily Mail. And for a delightful interview with McEwan by Adam Rutherford, download the Little Atoms podcast, in which members of the science community embrace an artist as if he were one of their own. You do, of course, have to let the artist have the last word, however. As McEwan says in that interview, 'I have no interest in science, I'm just intellectually curious....In five years' time I'll know a fraction of what I know now' about climate change science.

Nobody's muse: a review of Louise Erdrich's Shadow Tag

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:01:00 +0000

In 1985, Canada's Minister of Justice John Crosbie ignited a controversy in the House of Commons when he told Liberal MP Sheila Copps to 'quiten down, baby.' Her retort, that she was 'nobody's baby,' became so inextricably linked with her political persona that she used it as the title of her autobiography, which, sadly, seems to be out of print.

Irene America, the iconic protagonist of Louise Erdrich's latest novel, Shadow Tag, would have done well to borrow a little of Ms Copps' feistiness at an earlier age. By the time we encounter her, she's been married to Gil for a decade and a half and is only now picking up the pieces of her abandoned PhD thesis on 19thC 'painter of Native Americana George Catlin.' Gil himself has irritatingly been referred to as a 'Native Edward Hopper' and his work really has only one subject: Irene America 'in all of her incarnations--thin and virginal, a girl, then womanly, pregnant, naked, demurely posed or frankly pornographic.' He is that rarity in North America, an artist capable of supporting a family with his income from painting. As the novel opens, however, Gil is floundering artistically, 'His paintings were hiding from him because Irene was hiding something. He could see it in the opacity of her eyes, the insolence of her flesh, the impatient weariness of her body when she let down her guard. She'd ceased to love him. Her gaze was an airless void.'

The real pornography contained within this novel is not the way Gil paints Irene or the descriptions of the sexual, physical and alcohol abuse in which they both indulge but in his maniacal desire to possess her, to know her, to breathe her living essence as if she were oxygen and he was on life support. Erdrich does a superb job of creating an atmosphere so overwhelmingly smothering that it is absolutely intolerable. It's a good thing she does, because without it she would have written a novel in which both main characters are so hopelessly and disgustingly co-dependent that it might have been unreadable as opposed to just painfully believable. It's possible to muster a modicum of sympathy for and empathy with Irene America though, enough that one can initially forgive her for her treachery, because it's easy to understand how truly mind-bending life with a man like Gil can be.

So initially you're with Irene when, after discovering Gil has been reading her diary, she decides to use the diary as a weapon against him. She starts constructing entries solely for his consumption, paragraphs and pages designed to drive him over the edge - of sexual jealousy and insecurity, of sanity, of alcoholism - while resuming her real journal writing in another volume she stashes in a bank safety deposit box.

As the novel continues, however, and the collateral damage experienced primarily by Gil and Irene's three children becomes apparent (not to mention the increasing nausea one experiences at the damage the two of them inflict on each other), it becomes increasingly difficult to do anything but shake your head in horror. When Irene finally tells Gil she wants a divorce, after a short round of surrealistic marriage counselling (some of the best scenes in the novel), it's impossible to believe that even physical and emotional separation will do much to change the dynamics between this pair. They're opposite sides of the same coin - and this coin has spent most of its life on the railroad tracks being repeatedly run over by self-propelled freight trains.

Gil's initial response to Irene's request for a divorce is to throw a huge surprise party for her. But of course in Gil's ever-more-twisted emotional world, he can't just throw her a party, he has to arrange for Irene's half sister to not only keep her away from the house until the party's due to start, but also has to conscript the half sister to spy on Irene so he can confirm his suspicions that Irene is having an affair.

Of course you can't blame Gil for thinking this, since Irene makes a point of creating journal entries in which she manufactures other lovers and provides convincing details to back up her claim at their first marriage counselling session that Gil isn't, in fact, the father of any of 'their' three children.

This is unexpectedly bleak territory for Erdrich. There is little humour in this novel, and the little there is falls into the bitter, twisted, and black category. It's a departure for her as a novelist, and it's worth celebrating for that. Her portrait of the dissolution of not only a marriage but of both its partners as swiftly and surely as a Kleenex in a torrential downpour, is compelling and tragic, and this time it's not mitigated by the hyperbolic humour and magic realism of my favourite of her novels, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. In writing this review, I realize I've managed to miss Erdrich's previous novel, The Plague of Doves, which sounds almost as bleak as this one. The difference is that Erdrich's not writing a mythical or historical narrative in Shadow Tag - she's written a contemporary and realistic book that ventures into territory occupied by a long tradition of American prose writers stretching from Henry James and Edith Wharton to Richard Ford, via John Cheever, Raymond Carver, and Russell Banks. I couldn't be more delighted to see her stretching, growing and flexing her literary muscle. How many profoundly important books can one woman write? With any luck, we're nowhere near the answer to that question.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:10:00 +0000

Hertfordshire, you say? The area has far greater significance for me now as I know someone who lives there, but it has been of interest to me since it was the setting for, you know, Pride and Prejudice: The Original (But No Longer the One and Only) by the long-dead but never to be forgotten 18th Century author, Jane Austen.

A prequel to the runaway 2009 bestseller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahme-Smith, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls is written by Steve Hockensmith, for whom this is a departure. As he says on his blog (where he worries fans of his debut novel, Holmes on the Range, may wonder at the lack of cowboys - and, presumably - detectives - in his latest novel):

Potential new readers, meet loyal old readers. I think you'll find you have a lot in common. Beyond a fondness for the word "frakkin'," I mean. You like historical novels. You like funny novels. You like novels with a touch of the macabre. You like Raisinets, Air Supply and long walks in the park.

Where will all this end? It's one thing for Kurosawa to rewrite Lear and film it as Ran - there are cultural translation issues that make it appropriate to do so. But is reworking Jane Austen for the Buffy crowd really such a great idea? Will it satisfy either Buffy/Twilight fans or tried and true Austen fans? Or will there be (more) swooning from the pressure of corsets drawn too tight? (Actually, corsets were a Victorian thing, not a Regency thing - the one character who wears one in Dawn of the Dreadfuls is male - and it's called a truss. Reshaping and restraining blubber is still its chief purpose, however.)

Luckily, Dawn of the Dreadfuls actually has merit as a novel, although I was startled to discover this. It's not that I expected to hate it - I was intensely curious about it and leapt at the chance to get my hands on an advance review copy (ARC) when Raincoast Books, its Canadian distributor, offered them to bloggers via Twitter and the Raincoast blog. (The actual publisher is the quirky Quirk Books and its Quirk Classics series.) I just thought it would be an amusing read-in-one-sitting novel, like Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones' Diary and Melissa Bank's The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing.

In fact, Dawn of the Dreadfuls isn't as funny as I expected it would be (although there are definitely scenes that will translate to high comedic humour when/if it's filmed - as long as you aren't quite as terrified of zombies as I am - I barely made it through Night of the Living Dead once and don't care to repeat the experience - and ask my cousin how I used to awaken the entire household when we used to watch a 1960s TV show that featured zombies in the middle of the night - of course in that series zombie-killing methodology involved filling their mouths with salt and sewing them shut, and it was the needle through cartilage bit that always got to me, having been taught to sew buttons back on at age three).

The story begins about two weeks before Elizabeth Bennet, second-eldest of the five Longbourn-inhabiting Bennet daughters, is due to 'come out' in society at a local Meryton ball. Eldest sister Jane is already 'out' and has attracted the attention of Lord Lumpley, Netherfield-inhabiting baron (and libertine, according to middle Bennet sister Kitty, whose approach to life is highly analytical and academic in nature - this doesn't mean she's wrong, though). At the funeral of the local pharmacist, however, Meryton residents discover the scourge of the 'dreadfuls' (it's not polite to refer to them as zombies') isn't, in fact, over, despite the great battles of 30 years earlier (known as The Troubles). Relaxation of the burial laws means corpses have been buried in recent years with their heads still attached - and when you encounter one dreadful, it's only a matter of time before you meet a whole lot more of them.

Mr. Bennet was involved in the battles to defeat the dreadfuls 30 years earlier. They were defeated only as a result of intensive training in 'the dreadful arts' and as part of his training, Mr. Bennet has vowed to raise his children as warriors in the Shaolin way. Naturally, as the father of five girls married to Mrs. Bennet, who prevails in domestic matters through sheer volubility, he's broken his vow, and must now scramble to get his daughters trained so they can defend themselves and help put an end to the dreadfuls' scourge. 'Now far too belatedly, we begin your training. It will not be easy. You will be sorely tested. You will cry and bleed. You will face the derision, probably even the condemnation, of your community. Yet you will persevere on behalf of the very souls who now find you so ridiculous...for the dreadful scourge has returned, and once more warriors must walk the green fields of England!'

As the five Bennet girls embark on the path of the warrior, they encounter a variety of men. There is, of course, their 'master' Geoffrey Hawksworth, imported to train them in the warrior arts. There is the single-minded Lord Lumpley, who's managed to come up with a singularly effective method of disposing of the maidens he's ravished when they prove inconvenient (defined as no longer virginal or inconveniently pregnant while unsuitable for marriage), and who begins his days kicking gin bottles and maids out of his capacious (presumably four-poster) bed. There is the handsome but excessively proper Lt. Tindall, who struggles with his admiration for Jane while deploring her newly acquired prowess with the katana as she wields it to separate zombies from their heads. There is the quintessential absent-minded professor, Dr. Keckilpenny, whose inattention to detail and determinedly academic approach is in sharp contrast to Master Hawksworth's single-minded focus on practicalities.

Interestingly, Dawn of the Dreadfuls poses the question some of us have been asking ever since we first read Pride and Prejudice: how on earth did Mr. and Mrs. Bennet ever end up married to each other? Glimmers of an answer appear in the character of Capt. Cannon, who has lost all his limbs during The Troubles and is now wheeled around in a cart by two soldiers appropriately named Right Limb and Left Limb.

For me, Dawn of the Dreadfuls works because it manages to be sufficiently entertaining while actually conveying a substantive message or two, chief of which is, fathers form feminists by insisting they not be restricted by convention. Which is a message we don't hear often enough - although an earlier post on this blog took at look at how another popular (although less literary) series told an earlier generation of young women they could be whatever they wanted to be, avuncular pats on the head notwithstanding. And for more on Jane Austen's relevance to 21st Century women, there's this post.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls will be released to the (hopefully) suspecting public on March 23, 2010. Readers also have a chance to win one of 50 Quirk Classics Prize Packs - details on the contest here.

Olympic curmudgeonry

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:16:00 +0000

Potential readers of this post, I celebrate you. If you'd like to make a mosaic of your Twitter followers, click here.

Let me start by saying that I don’t get spectator sports and I don’t really understand why anyone would want to be an Olympic athlete. Let me continue by saying my heart sank when I heard Vancouver had won the 2010 Winter Olympics. Let me finish this portion of my post by saying one of the reasons I left BC in 2009 was because I don’t want to live in an Olympic host venue.

My worst fears have been confirmed, and the 2010 Olympics aren’t even over. So far we have had:

one Georgian luge athlete killed.
Two female Canadian luge athletes bitching about the fact that the course was changed (to make it safer for all) after the death of the Norwegian, thus impairing their performance.
Allegations that we have been stingy with the training time we’ve allowed other athletes at the facilities we’ve constructed.
As of Tuesday, February 16, 2010, CBC News reported that 28,000 ticket holders have been told they can’t use their standing room only tickets at Cypress Mountain for two days in a row because it’s unsafe – and there may be more cancellations of these tickets as more warm weather is expected this week.
Horrendous lineups for concession stands and washrooms, also at Cypress.
Delays, delays, delays and postponements due to weather. There’s a reason Whistler is no longer part of the FIS circuit – uncertain weather conditions, making it an unsuitable venue.
Delays due to malfunctioning equipment at the Richmond Oval. Malfunctioning equipment at the Richmond Oval, which was one of the first new facilities finished for the 2010 Winter Olympics. We’ve been building skating rinks for how many years in this country? And somehow we can’t find rink maintenance machines that don’t ruin the ice and don't break down? Never fear, Calgary is now shipping its Zamboni by flatbed truck to the Richmond Oval, because theirs works.

The weather delays have caused serious problems for ticket holders who are now unable to get transportation to Whistler. Some people have had to leave town without seeing the events for which they bought tickets well over a year ago in an expensive lottery.

And then there’s the coverage by CTV, who outbid CBC for the right to be the official broadcaster. Not having watched much Olympic coverage in the past, perhaps I’m not in a position to judge. I’ve been astonished to discover that CTV isn’t interested in interviewing the gold medal winners at the Olympics – merely the Canadian participants, regardless of where they’ve placed in competition. I’ve also been astonished to discover that they’re showing snowboarding events three times in a single day (without benefit of a time stamp indicating that, contrary to what the announcer says, this is NOT a live event). Due to the delays at the Richmond Oval, CTV arbitrarily decided it wasn’t going to broadcast the pairs figure skating live program in its entirety and would stick to the speed skating events instead. The announcement was made long after it was possible to arrange to view on TSN at a friend’s house. I contemplated going to a bar to watch. And then I had to laugh at myself. What are the chances of getting to watch pairs figure skating at a sports bar? Yeah, right. Dream on.

As for the CTV web site: I have to download some Microsoft product in order to view archived footage on the site. And Chrome, the browser I use, isn’t mentioned as being compatible with the software. Oh – and only the gold and silver medal-winning pairs figure skating performances are up on the site.

And then there’s the truly inane filler. Saturday night (Feb. 13) CTV aired a piece on Whistler’s most eligible bachelor. Who wasn’t an athlete. Or an Olympian. Or even available – he’s having his first child with his partner. What does this have to do with the Olympics? Meanwhile, I watched three hours of CTV coverage Monday night (Feb. 15, 2010, from 11:30PM to 2:30AM) in an attempt to see some clips – or even hear the announcement – of who had won the pairs figure skating gold medal. Not one mention that the event had even taken place. Now I’m mad. Now I don’t just want to make sure CTV never gets the right to broadcast the Olympics again – I want their license to broadcast anything yanked.

CTV seems too lazy or too inept to even run a chart of events held and medals won as part of its news broadcasts – something the CBC excels at doing. Hire a computer graphics person and make use of them, CTV.

Let me make my position crystal clear here: if the Olympics are a competition amongst the world’s best athletes, patriotic boosterism is sadly misguided. And yet that’s what we’re getting. When I finally got to watch to the men’s short figure skating program Tuesday night, I was thrilled to see Canadians holding Canadian flags and cheering for American and Czech skaters who gave great, clean performances – and a Canadian journalist interviewing the Russian skater who’s leading after the short program. Finally – a celebration of the world’s best! I’m also glad a panel on CBC Radio One in Calgary this morning publicly decried the ‘own the podium’ mantra of the – well, I don’t know where it comes from – surely not the Canadian Olympic Committee? I certainly hope not. ‘Earn the podium’ is what it’s all about. Peter Mansbridge said last night on CBC TV news, 'Downtown [Vancouver] is a flowing river of patriotism.’ I think every Canadian should visit Vancouver if they get the chance. I think we should support our athletes too. Along with our writers, our scientists, our actors, our farmers, our intellectuals and our innovators. Let’s not break our arms patting ourselves on the back though.

For a brilliant suggestion on how to reduce the carbon footprint of the Olympics and perhaps help the events get back to the fundamentals of what they’re supposed to be about, read Jonathan Hiskes of Grist’s great article on greening the Olympics. Because winning the Olympics shouldn’t be what it takes to effect infrastructure improvements in our major urban centres, whether it’s transportation upgrades, badly needed facilities, or affordable housing.

Update: and for another perspective on what's going wrong, see The Guardian's Lawrence Donegan's round-up of coverage. Just ignore that bit about what you learn your first day in PR school - he's wrong on that front.

A war of attrition and punitive regulation

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:21:00 +0000

Thomas Pawlick's The War in the Country is an important book, despite its flaws. In fact, it's an inspiring book, and I find myself compelled to blog about it.

I also find myself wanting to follow his suggestion that more urbanites should join the National Farmers Union (if they're Canadians). Associate membership is only $50 per year.

The Globe and Mail's reviewer didn't much care for the book, and there's no doubt it's flawed - perhaps even deeply flawed. If I, as an editor, had seen this book as a draft, my advice to Pawlick would have been to come back to me with a second draft in which he extrapolated more from his Eastern Ontario rural base (Belleville to Ottawa, basically), paraphrased his conversations and actually told the story himself rather than quoting the individuals he interviewed at such great length, while providing some real figures on how the war in the country is going on everywhere rather than leave readers with the impression that it's happening primarily in Eastern Ontario. An appendix with that information would have been nice.

But essentially this is nitpicking. I heard Pawlick interviewed on CBC radio's The Current and was interested enough by what he said to look for The War in the Country. One of the reasons I recently relocated to Lethbridge, AB, was because of what a friend said to me about the city (pop. approx 85,000): "It's the centre of a farming community, not an oil and gas exploration and development community."

It's not that I don't think we need energy as well as food - it's just that, of the two, food is more important. The Inuit have survived without central heating for centuries, after all, and if we had to, us non-Inuit could too, with or without technical fibres.

In the last couple of years, the world's population balance has tipped from predominantly rural to predominantly urban, and much of the focus of Pawlick's book is the disconnect we experience with the food we eat. He points out that most people are now two generations removed from ancestors who actually tilled the fields or raised livestock. What's truly scary about this is that most urban dwellers don't have the faintest idea where - or how - the food they eat is produced.

There are, of course, exceptions. Local farmers' markets are in vogue, and some of them are huge. I used to love, in the early 90s, wandering through Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto during the summer and just browsing through the wondrous things on offer at the farmers' market there, returning at lunchtime or after work to make some purchases. The 100-mile diet and the (buy) and eat local movements have driven awareness of what we're putting on our plates and in our mouths. I'm encouraged to hear people in large cities like Calgary say things like, 'you know, I don't want to eat fresh peaches in January - I think that's wrong.'

There's lots of information in Pawlick's book that should make you stop and think: statistics on how the actual nutritional content of meat in particular has declined; an explanation that makes sense of the fact that when you eat an animal raised on corn, you are basically eating corn - whether you want to or not; an analysis of factory farming and the quota system, both of which represent serious barriers to the survival of small farmers - and the fact that invariably, smaller farms truly are more productive, more efficient, and far more eco-friendly than larger ones. That shouldn't really have been a surprise to me - when I visited a privately managed woodlot in Wisconsin a few years ago I realized that of course someone who has to make the income from the trees he's harvesting last at least his own lifetime is going to be a better steward of the forest than a multinational who can afford to move on to the next stand after clear cutting this one.

But perhaps the single most chilling feature of The War in the Country is Pawlick's description of the way the relentless drive to factory farming and the onerous regulations imposed on small farmers is driving not only them out of business, but is also killing small businesses in towns that have traditionally serviced rural areas. And he's right - it's hard not to believe it isn't the result of deliberate implementation of federal and provincial government policies concocted as a result of lobbying by agribusinesses. The question is - what are we going to do about it?

When heartbreak surfaces: Lisa Moore's February

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:07:00 +0000

Daughter, sister, lover, wife, mother, widow, grandmother, lover, wife – the phases of female life cycle rapidly in Lisa Moore’s February, the story of Helen O’Mara, whose husband Cal is killed when the offshore oil rig Ocean Ranger sinks off the coast of Newfoundland in 1982, leaving her with three children, pregnant with their fourth.

The novel weaves back and forth in time between 2008 and the late 1970s, from the time Helen first met and married Cal to her current life as a grandmother of two, running a dressmaking business and having finally achieved peace of a sort. There is still gnawing grief over what could have been, anger at the fact that she was denied closure since her husband’s body was never recovered, and a yearning for what could have been in an alternate universe, a universe in which men don’t leave home to take dangerous jobs to support their growing families, a world where unemployment isn’t systemic and the struggle to survive emotionally and economically doesn’t always seem epic.

Several years ago (I think it was in July 2002) I attended an amazing seminar that was part of Simon Fraser University’s Summer Publishing Workshop. Six authors and six critics formed the panel, talking mainly about the trend to – and redefinition of - historical fiction as a genre. No longer merely bodice rippers or period romance novels, authors like Wayne Johnston, Michael Crummey, Guy Vanderhaeghe and Jack Hodgins had all recently published works of historical fiction.

That seminar was my introduction to Lisa Moore and her work. She told a charming story about the response she’d received to her second collection of short stories, Open. She said that one of the stories in the collection dealt with a philandering husband. And that after Open was published, her own husband had been upbraided on more than one occasion at the mall in St. John’s, Nfld., for being unfaithful to her, by readers who couldn’t – or wouldn’t – believe that art wasn’t thinly disguised life with only the names changed. So I leapt at the chance to read February when House of Anansi offered advance review copies (publication date is June 27, 2009) on Twitter.

Moore is a force to be reckoned with on the literary scene – a writer who has by no means reached the peak of her literary abilities and who continues to grow from book to book. I hear echoes of many other women writers in her work: A.S. Byatt, Fay Weldon, Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields (Republic of Love and Unless), Anita Brookner, the two Janes (Hamilton and Smiley), a touch of Sue Miller (The Good Mother) and, if not Sylvia Plath, then certainly Anne Sexton. This passage immediately reminded me of Sexton’s poem “Clothes,” and its inimitable line about being still ‘sixteen in the pants.’

She watches Barry’s thumb press the caulking into the crack and she thinks again the thing every adult woman thinks of herself—that she is still her sixteen-year-old self.

It is not a thought. Helen becomes sixteen; she is sixteen: the shyness and wonder. It comes over her briefly. And then it is gone. She is forty-nine, fifty, she is fifty-two. Fifty-six. The world has betrayed her, arthritis in her wrists.

How deeply she craves to be touched. Because what follows not being touched, Helen has discovered, is more of the same—not being touched. And what follows a lack of touching is the dirtiest secret of all, the most profane: forgetting to want it.

You forget, she thinks. You forget so deeply, desire is obliterated. A profound and altering chill befalls.

The only cure is to chant: I want, I want.

I also see Moore writing in very much the same vein as Roddy Doyle in his Barrytown Trilogy (The Snapper, The Van, The Commitments). One of the responses to her first novel, Alligator, was surprise that St. John’s was portrayed as a metropolis with its share of grit, including vandalism, eco-terrorism, and infiltration by the Russian mafia rather than the happenstance capital of a province that specializes in quaint. More than anything, Moore’s Helen O’Mara is a woman who endures. In the face of blinding, unexpected grief, she concludes her role is to be there for her children – and that part of being there means teaching them that life is tough. By the time she’s a grandparent, after the sheer routine of 25 years of getting on with it, putting one foot in front of the other whether she wants to or not – her style has changed, and she finds herself wanting to indulge and pamper her grandchildren.

Moore was interviewed briefly on Canada AM this morning. During the interview she spoke of how little had been written about the sinking of the Ocean Ranger, what a closed and unknowable environment it was, particularly to women. There were no women working on the rig that was declared ‘unsinkable’ and few visits from anyone not working on the rig were allowed due to the potential for industrial espionage. Not many of the bodies were recovered, and the lack of closure that resulted means the event is still alive for Newfoundlanders who lost loved ones. “The heartbreak comes to the surface,” when it’s mentioned, Moore said.

As long ago as Open, Moore’s verbal dexterity was evident. (“A woman with a toddler in a convenience store during a hold-up. I am an obdurate subplot, stubbornly present. How did I get here?” from “Natural Parents.”)

She’s only getting better, as you can see from this passage from February:

England looked like England rolling past the tinted windows. It was lush and green and there was a field of sheep. It was as if Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence had written down exactly what they’d seen and it had all stayed that way, or as if everybody here had read those books and made the landscape look like it was in the novels. There were trees and hedges and stone walls and sheep. The sheep, scattered here and there on the green hills, were an authentic touch.

Moore’s an author who never disappoints and February is no exception. My only regret is that we’ll probably have to wait another year or two for her next novel.

Restaging the Two Cultures test

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:52:00 +0000

I'm rushing so don't have time to go into a lot of detail, but at Dr. Andrew Maynard's request, I've created a 'competing' poll in the leadup to the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures lecture originally delivered in 1959. For some background on the importance of this work, here you go.

Andrew has created a poll of his own on his site. Here's mine:

What is the single most common correct usage of the semi-colon in English?(online surveys)

Marie Curie 2.0: the greatest woman scientist in history

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 07:02:00 +0000

The year was 2009; the month, March; the place, Cyberspace.

Men and women, blue eyed, blond haired or dark eyed, dark haired (or any combination of three of the above) worked in taut silence (or while listening to their iPods) to fulfill the pledge they'd made to blog about a woman in technology as a tribute to Ada Lovelace.

Ada Lovelace Day, the brainchild of Suw Charman-Anderson, is a truly successful viral campaign, launched, from what I could see, almost entirely on Twitter with blog back-up. I'm blown away by this engraving of Ada done by Jake von Slatt - surely he doesn't need to blog, having already created a piece of art?

For a relatively accurate account of Marie Curie's life, the Wikipedia article does well enough. I don't think it captures the romanticism of her life, her heroism, or what must have been her passion. I cannot imagine the kind of dedication it would take to win not one, but two Nobel Prizes, in two different disciplines.

The parody in the first paragraph of the Monday, July 16, 1934, Time obit entitled 'Death of Mme Curie' wasn't meant to be disrespectful. Marie Curie 2.0 could exist - may even exist, although hopefully she's learned to minimize risk in this iteration. MC2.0 would be considered both a homewrecker and a cougar, it seems, since the original had conducted an affair of about a year's duration with physicist Paul Langevin, an ex-student of her late husband.

I don't remember that part of the story from the Greer Garson/Walter Pidgeon film Madame Curie.

Nor do I remember the speech she delivered in the film, 'expressing her belief that science is the path to a better world.' But I know that she was one of my heroines, and that her courage and tenacity paved the way for women like me, who chose briefly to work in the field of nuclear energy and had no fear because of the work begun by Dr. Curie.

While you may quibble (I certainly do) with some of the overly romantic wording of the Wikipedia entry for Marie Skłodowska Curie ('Maria had found a new love, a partner and scientific collaborator that she could depend on.'), it's hard to quibble with this statement: 'She was ahead of her time, emancipated [and] independent.... Albert Einstein is supposed to have remarked that she was probably the only person who was not corrupted by the fame that she had won.'

Not your usual blog post - help Ben Goldacre fight ignorant talk radio

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:10:00 +0000

It's highly unlikely that the readers of If Not Now, When? have been following the furore set off when British doctor Ben Goldacre posted the talk radio show episode in which an irresponsible and seemingly not very bright female British broadcaster ranted at great length about the 'dangers' of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccination, citing a study by another doctor that was never credible in the first place, in my view, since it seems to have only surveyed 12 children, and has been further discredited to the point of 10 out of 12 others involved with the 'study' removing their name from it while the doctor who made the claims now admits he fudged the so-called data. What his motivation as a doctor for so doing could have been I am not sure (it doesn't seem to fit into the 'do no harm' category, does it, or have I been watching too many episodes of House?), although it seems he was funded to do so by an anti-vaccination group. (The original Ben Goldacre post linked to above seems rather messed up, not sure what's going on there, but here's a link to the Times Online article about the issue.)

What I am sure of is this. The benefits of vaccination in this instance far outweigh the risks. I am lucky that I only ever had one of those three childhood diseases, measles. In the late 50s and early 60s these were commonly called the 'red measles' as opposed to the slightly less severe form known as the "German measles" (rubella). What I can tell you is that spending two weeks in a darkened room running a high fever and itching like mad was no fun, forbidden to read and in a household that wasn't about to make exceptions for strictly regulated TV watching just because its offspring was sick. At the time, it was believed that one's eyesight could be damaged if one tried to read while sick with the measles, not sure if that's true or not.

It was an uncomfortable and boring two weeks. I wasn't sick enough to just sleep, and there was no excitement as a result of coughing up blood clots the size of quarters as there was later when I had scarlet fever, or of a whole household having to be quarantined, which at least had the effect of making me feel like a VIP (albeit a very feverish VIP who could no longer babble at will because her throat was so sore). The other thing I'll tell you is that even though I may not have had my 'share' of childhood diseases, having avoided getting mumps and the German measles, until I finally had my tonsils removed the summer I was eight, I was missing up to six weeks' school a year. I realize tonsillectomy is another 'hot button' issue - but given that at age 53 I get a virus maybe once every four years and perhaps one cold in 10 to which I'm exposed, in my case getting rid of those tonsils was the right thing to do. And no, I don't take the benefit of having an extremely sturdy immune system for granted - I'm grateful for whatever it is I'm doing right and for my good genes each and every day. And no, I don't get flu shots (because 'flu' is a catchall term for a whole bunch of different viruses, and usually the shots are prepared far in advance of the strains of flu actually making the rounds and are therefore not as effective as they could/should be - comparing annual flu vaccines to the MMR vaccine is, however, a case of comparing apples to pears - similar but different).

I find it very strange in a world that so readily accepts an outright ban on peanut products being brought into schools because a small proportion of children (one per cent!) suffer from an allergy that resistance to a vaccination that has clinically proven to control outbreaks of diseases mistakenly labelled 'childhood diseases' (since there is nothing 'childish' about the consequences that can result from measles, mumps, and rubella, including retardation and sterility) is so entrenched. Many of you have never known anyone who contracted smallpox - or polio. Here's a list of some people of whom you may have heard who suffered from polio, having had the misfortune to be born just before the vaccine came into widespread use. Included on that list are Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Ian Dury. My maternal grandmother (born in 1896) 'didn't believe' in the smallpox vaccine. If she were still alive I would ask her if she had changed her mind after she and two of her children contracted a mild dose of smallpox. I had assumed the scars on my uncle's face were from acne, but in fact they were smallpox scars.

So if you're in the UK, get on the phone and on the email trail as Dr. Ben suggests (I know it's a long blog post). And if you're not, please educate yourself about what the word 'endemic' means. We have bigger issues to deal with, as world citizens, than this nonsense of the ignorant being given platforms to spout their dangerous psycho babble and their wealthy corporate media backers launching law suits over 'intellectual property infringement' when the informed try to set the record straight.

Update: While I think it would be wonderful to live in a country where the media aren't all owned by a single company, it's hard for me to tell if Melanie Phillips of The Spectator actually has some valid points to make, or if her motivation is merely to take on The Times. Witch hunt is pretty strong language, under the circumstances.

Disclosure: I am allergic to peanuts myself; it's the one food allergy I've had my entire life.

Metro Vancouver needs to get a grip on the snow

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:18:00 +0000

Tipperary Tomb and snow, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2007.

Let me make myself perfectly clear: I love snow. It is, in fact, one of the things I miss most about Ontario. But as Kirk LaPointe, managing editor of the Vancouver Sun, said on Twitter last night, he moved to Vancouver to get away from this kind of weather nonsense. (He's now wondering if he should start applying for newspaper jobs in Hawaii.) Last year, when we had snow in late November, early December, I was out in Tipperary Park in New Westminster rejoicing in it and taking photos. This year, however, has been unseasonably cold and snowy, and Metro Vancouver has failed abysmally to deal with this combination.

Let's not forget, folks, that we're hosting the Winter Olympics in 2010. If this sort of weather system prevails next year and if the Vancouver Airport (with its grand total of two runways) is closed as often as it has been this year, there are going to be a lot of very angry people who've paid a lot of money for tickets reflecting internationally on our inability to get it together. There may even be some athletes who don't get to compete. (I have no worries about the Jamaican bobsled team; they'll undoubtedly be happily ensconced in Pemberton for the entire winter once again, ensuring they'll take the gold – and more power to them.)

I’m going to leave aside the issue of civic amalgamation for the moment – that’s a whole other series of blog posts. I’m hoping the economic downturn will make it abundantly clear that it’s ludicrous for Metro Vancouver to continue with its mayoral and civic redundancies, and ensure that at some point in the very near future we no longer have separate cities of Vancouver, Richmond, Burnaby, New Westminster, and Surrey (not to mention the insanity of having both a City of North Vancouver and a District of North Vancouver). Metro Vancouver needs to get with the always initially unpopular program of regional amalgamation in the same way Ottawa and Toronto did many years ago, consolidate its services and service deliveries, and put a lot of politicians and bureaucrats out to pasture.

So let’s look at some of the facts – and some of the responses to unusual weather.

Fact: Coastal British Columbia has, at points this fall and winter, had more snow dumped on it than any other part of Canada.

Fact: We don’t have a lot of snowplows, and we don’t usually need them.

Fact: The unusually hilly terrain of the Metro Vancouver area creates unique challenges not only for drivers (whose cars may or may not be equipped with snow tires), but also for public transit. I’ve got one friend who was kicked off a bus yesterday because it couldn’t make it up the hill. One of the family cars is snowed in and the other’s been towed. It’s a long, wet and slushy slog to the grocery store. I’ve got another friend with mobility challenges (she’s not supposed to walk more than three blocks without her cane) who’s started getting off the bus a mile from her house because it’s not worth the stress of worrying about whether the packed bus is going to make it up the hill or just slide gently back down it. She's also religiously shovelling the snow in front of her house in accordance with civic regulations. What's the city doing for her? Well, not a whole lot - she's starting to get cabin fever from having been snowed in for so long, and is strategically plotting when folks can visit her based on parking regulations, because her street hasn't been plowed in a month.

Fact: This means, when we get unusual weather systems, we’ve got an emergency on our hands. A crisis, even.

The brilliant mayor of Burnaby, Derek Corrigan, shot his mouth off on New Year’s Eve in an interview with CBC Online. I was so angry I drafted (but didn't send) this email to him in response to his pronouncement that we should all adjust our expectations regarding snow removal:

'You don’t even mention shoveling, but seem to think that professional snow removal and salt are the answers to the gridlock that’s resulted from all the snow that has accumulated in the Metro Vancouver area over the past month. Perhaps you’re aware, as I am, that there isn’t a snow shovel to be had for love or money in this area until approximately January 9, 2009. Yesterday I drove to the Rona store in Burnaby to try to buy one and then called four different Canadian Tire stores on my return home to see if they had any. I have seen hundreds of cars blocked in by snow plows in Burnaby and New West. Perhaps you should consider outreach to some of the hardware stores as part of your community education and awareness program. The ice accumulates as a result of plowing. By shoveling it out and onto the streets, much of it would have melted by now if we could get our hands on snow shovels. Instead, I am witnessing people doing extremely foolhardy things in attempts to free their vehicles, and, while I am more than willing to help out with snow removal, I am unable to do so. Is there any particular reason hardware stores can’t use couriers to get a supply of snow shovels to the places they’re most needed? Victoria and Vancouver Island have had more snow than any other place in the entire country this year to date, and while a cold winter was, indeed, predicted, I don’t recall seeing you quoted in October or November advising folks to invest in salt, shovels, or snow tires. You were, of course, busy getting re-elected during those months. And you still don’t seem to think that shoveling is part of the solution.
While I understand – and agree – that greater investment in plowing equipment doesn’t make a lot of sense, perhaps cities in the Metro Vancouver area should instead come to a standing agreement with the army to help out in unusual circumstances such as those we’re experiencing this winter. I have had very grave doubts about both the wisdom of Vancouver’s seeking to host the 2010 Olympics and its ability to do so; with an attitude like yours I’m now convinced they will be a complete and utter disaster if heavy snowfall occurs in January or February of 2010. When the athletes can’t land at the Vancouver airport, we can just divert them to Calgary so they can use the facilities Calgary already has and let them participate in the ‘unOlympics.’
Judging from the (to date) 73 negative comments posted, I am not alone in being annoyed by your confrontational attitude rather than problem-solving approach. I guess we’re both glad I live in New Westminster rather than Burnaby. [Within hours of my drafting this email the comments were up to 96, and they were all negative.]
Perhaps you should adjust your expectations regarding re-election. I'll be moving to Burnaby to ensure I can vote for ANYONE BUT YOU.'

Then there was the brilliance of advice from Murray Wightman, City of Vancouver's manager of street operations, ‘do a rain dance.’

This was the point at which I saw red. Having been away at Christmas time, it didn’t occur to me to stock up on food that would rot while I was away. Obviously I made a huge mistake there. I’d happily stay home and pray for rain, if it weren’t for the fact that I need to make the occasional foray out for food. And if it weren’t for the fact that the people who deliver food to the grocery stores and sell the food to those able to get out, need to be able to do their jobs and get to work in order to do so.

Today I did venture out. I saw a mixture of heartwarming and ludicrous sights.

First, I noticed that the New Westminster Chamber of Commerce, which occupies a corner lot on Queens Avenue and Sixth Street, had shoveled its walkway – but not the sidewalks surrounding the building. You should be evicted from the premises for this misdemeanour, not merely fined. Second, on the block between Seventh and Sixth on Queens Avenue, only one townhouse homeowner had bothered to shovel the sidewalk in front of their house. Again – shame on you. Civic by-laws state that you must shovel your walk and have it clear by 10AM. You should not only be fined, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

Things improved once I got to the bus stop. I saw many pickup trucks without municipal logos filling their truck beds with snow to haul it away. I thought perhaps the City of New Westminster had hired contract labour to aid in badly needed snow removal, especially the spots where four-foot tall snow- and icepacks have been created by plowing. (This is causing absolute chaos because it means there’s no place left on the street to park in front of stores that sell those quaint things like fresh fruits and vegetables – I’m about ready to kill for a head of red romaine and a cucumber about now.) But after I spoke to Blair Fryer, Communications Manager for the City of New Westminster, it seems these were just Good Samaritans. It was a reassuring conversation, by the way: New West has a clear list of completely understandable priorities for clearing roads (starting with hospitals and schools), has seven snow plows that have been in constant use since this weather system began, and has fitted three additional municipal vehicles with plows and pressed them into service to clear the sidewalks.

Oh, and the first thing you see on the City of New Westminster's web site these days is a link to snow removal - an explanation of how the snow is impacting garbage pick-up - and the number to call if you're having a snow-removal related problem. That's what's called being proactive. The City of Burnaby's priorities seem to be a little whacked: yes, main arterial roads are important. But clearing a path to the hospitals, not all of which are on those main arterial roads, might be an idea too, no? And there's no invitation to call. And the City of Vancouver also features important info on garbage collection and snow removal on its home page - although by providing a nameless corporate communications phone number after you've clicked on a link listed as 'road clearing' rather than 'snow removal' you might conclude they don't really want you to call.

Here’s a little info, by the way, on the rate at which snow and ice melt. Please note: the kind of rain you’d need to melt a hard-packed four foot by four foot snowpack is the kind of deluge that will make you wish you’d built an ark. Get real, folks, a little rain is not going to solve this problem any time soon. The snow needs to be either hauled away or broken up with shovels and thrown out onto the streets to melt. Otherwise the parking and driving problems are going to persist for weeks.

Then there was the police car that parked in the laneway by the TD Bank at 6th and 6th. I saw two officers get out of the car and proceed at a pace that was both leisurely and gingerly (through the slush) towards the building that houses the bank, a London Drugs, and a Starbucks. They left their amber lights flashing, but I have a funny feeling they weren’t entering the building on official business. I could be wrong, of course. What was the result of this? Well, all the cars that tried to turn into the lane to access the parking lot were unable to get down the lane. So instead they did U-turns in the middle of the street. Luckily the little old lady in her motorized scooter shooting up the middle of the street into the oncoming traffic hadn’t yet arrived on the scene, or she would have been squashed like a bug. A third police offer came out of the Blenz on the corner and looked askance at the parked police car, so I’m thinking this was a bit of a no no. Especially since there was a parking space available on the actual street. Maybe use a little common sense before you park illegally when it isn’t an emergency.

Finally, Gregor Robertson, Vancouver’s new mayor, has taken charge of communications on this issue, and today has asked for suggestions on how the city should deal with snow removal.

So here are a few:

See above email to Derek Corrigan re availability of snow shovels. You need to get local merchants organized to deliver them to folks who need them. I don’t ever again want to see a grown man and two seven-year-old boys shoveling out a car that’s been buried under two weeks’ worth of snow while they were away over the festive season with tiny plastic beach shovels.
Hire a streets manager from a part of the province that actually knows how to deal with snow removal – or from out of province. And then media train him so he doesn’t make the whole city look foolish.
Consult with places like Owen Sound, Ontario, which is extremely hilly, and six years ago was pioneering a road coating that would melt snow as it falls, thus obviating the need for plowing and salt distribution. You can’t sell an Ontario car for love or money in British Columbia because rumour has it that they’re all rusted out from the amount of salt used in Ontario. Get over yourselves: Ontarians want their cars to last just as long as British Columbians do, and have been working hard to minimize the amount of salt used on roads.
Synchronize the budgets for parking offenses and snow removal, and use the revenues from the former to subsidize the latter. I can’t help but be offended at the fact that my car was towed when the streets were dry because my bumper cast a shadow on the six-foot-wide crosswalk, but the cars that drove into snowbanks at Christmas time and angle parked in loading zones were allowed to stay there for up to 96 hours.
Tap into the Good Samaritan in all of us by making it possible for us to help. I actually like shoveling snow. If I could actually get my car to the Home Hardware at Graveley and Commercial Drive that has a stash of snow shovels, I’d be helping out. But I’m not taking two buses uphill the entire way and a Skytrain that may or may not be working in order to do so.
Finally, post a list of food delivery services on city web sites. If you’re asking us to stay home, accept that sooner or later we’re going to need to replenish our food supplies. There ARE grocery delivery services. Remind us we can use them rather than endanger our lives.